Boone Hudgins

The extended version was way better. Actually, it's excellent. It's the biggest turnaround I've ever had with a movie, I think.

Occasionally people initial their first name when they usually go by their middle name. Literally nobody calls me by my first name, but I starting signing M. Boone Hudgins when I started getting asked if I was using a family member's credit card, etc. I figure it's the name I'd use professionally because it takes from the "nicknamey" quality of the name Boone.

That's a common misconception. I think she had five demons in her which were expelled.

A couple of nearby stories deal with prostitutes, including the one who cleans Jesus' feet with her hair and extremely expensive spices, which Judas objects to because of the expense. He showed the makings of a producer.

It was seven demons. And you're confusing the story of the woman that washed Jesus' feet with her hair and tears, and Mary the sister of Lazarus who anointed Jesus' feet with oils before his death. Bible stories get mixed together all the time, however.

This illustrates the disdain that he seems to hold for properly qualified, experienced crew. What Director on their first Hollywood film, with a relatively decent budget and name actors, would decide that 1. Operating steadicam was a valuable use of their time, and 2. That they were in any way qualified to do so.

 

How many other steadicam ops get work on features after a two day course?

 

Rodriguez seems to be obsessed with self-aggrandisement.

 

Stanley Kubrick was something of a control freak as well, but he never tried to take credit for other people's work.

I don't think it's disdain, I just think he likes the idea of doing everything he can himself. Even if he's not doing all the operating, there's probably still some pride involved in doing it. Whether or not that pride involves giving himself a credit for it, that's his business. Especially if he also credits his other operators. It seems like he's interested in a rough look that comes from one guy doing everything, and that's what he's getting. Personally, I thought he was a better director and editor when he was trying to do less, but that's my problem.

And, didn't Stanley Kubrick try to take Dalton Trumbo's writing credit for Spartacus?

Can someone post an example of this, or point out a movie that shows this? I'd think if you shot close to wide open, the effect of three-blade iris wouldn't be as pronounced.

Brazil, Time Bandits, and Raging Bull are good examples.

I like the three blade aperture look.

I saw what appeared to be a large grid over some shots that were shot on the Genesis. Some shots had that digital shutter smear, too. But I forgot about it after a while.

Apple has the trailer up. It looks really good. Didn't particularly notice it was video until the second time around.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/thequiet/hd/

Of all the high-end digital cameras (D-20, Dalsa, Viper) ONLY the Genesis has that problem...

That's interesting (and good) to hear. I thought a couple of times during the movie that I'd be more excited about seeing something shot with the D-20 on the big screen...maybe with anamorphic lenses.

I'm hoping somebody's going to be working on that here soon...

The film print I saw was not that great, but that aside it looked fairly good, I thought. I noticed the noise in some of the shadows, but it wasn't really that bothersome. Only a few things made it look noticably like video, like one shot had some digital-looking posterized clouds, and there were quite a few strange-looking vertical flares. I thought only lower-end video cameras had that vertical flare, but it seems to be a common mark of video chips.

Do the T2.1s have the same sharpness dropoff as the T1.3s wide open?

In the January '04 issue of American Cinematographer, Lance Acord says he usually rated the 5263 at 1,200 ISO, but that he was able to underexpose the midtones two stops for night scenes.

Strangely enough WXGA monitors, 1280x768, are 16x10, or 1.66:1. I don't get that.

Well, it's the fact that it's a grid of circles reflected in the eye that looks odd to me. Maybe when you're caught up in the action and not paying attention, you could mistake it for bright cloud cover reflected in the eye or something. Or just not care at all.

As far as Jack Black goes, he has played serious roles before. Not that big of deal.

The full trailer is out in HD at Apple, and it looks a lot better than the teaser. Although it was odd to look into people's eyes and see space lights reflected when they're supposed to be outside. Does this happen a lot and I just never noticed?

Even with a lot of diffusion, and apparently S4s, the trailer still looks pretty sharp. In HD anyway. I like the look though. It seems very true to the period, though I can't quite explain why.

Michael Chapman played a doorman in House of D. He was in two scenes, I believe, and had quite a few lines.

An aside about The Great Gatsby...

 

Boone noted that this is a great novella that has yet to be made, despite two attempts, into a successful film. He blames it on the scripts and casting. My personal view is that the people who have tried to make this book into a film made a more fundamental error. Fitzgerald did not use the plot of The Great Gatsby to write a story about Gatsby and Daisy. If he had, it could be made into a film, but it would also be a completely different book. For example, I don't think that it is stretching things too far to suggest that Fitzgerald, had he chosen to focus on Gatsby, might have wound up with a book that was a precursor to The Godfather. Perhaps because Fitzgerald was a far better and more subtle writer than Mario Puzo, that is not what he did. The Great Gatsby is about the narrator, Nick, and Gatsby and Daisy are just supporting characters. It is one thing to write a novel in which the narrator is the central character, and in which everything that happens of importance happens in his head - it is done all the time - but it is another matter to translate such a book onto the screen. What you wind up with is a film in which the central character becomes a secondary character and the secondary characters become primary. That is exactly what happened in the two film versions of The Great Gatsby, and it is the fundamental reason why they failed. I think that there are other reasons - it has always struck me as downright stupid, except as a way to make a buck, to take a masterpiece of a novel, expressed solely in words, and try to turn it into a 90 minute film - but pursuing that thought would result in an even longer digression.

I wouldn't say those are exactly the reasons I didn't like either film, though I do believe the acting in both versions was pretty poor, save Sam Waterston, and possibly Bruce Dern. I'd say both movies fail because they don't understand the book; they missed the point. I do believe it's possible to make a good adaption, but it would take a lot of work. That little book took years to write, you can't bang out a script as good in a few months.

Ultimately it was a shell of the book in every way, even visually, in both examples. I was even kind of annoyed by Douglas Slocombe's photography in the '74 film.

There were four attempts of The Great Gatsby. Two are impossible to find, though.

I'm not sure why this has become an argument. We're not saying anything all that different. We all agree that good films need good roots, and a film is rooted in the story. All I said is don't underestimate filmmaking as a whole. You cannot ride on a great idea, or you get some of the garbage that we've both brought up. Somehow this all turned into me saying that films don't need stories at all, which doesn't make any sense at all; films are stories. No story, no film. So of course I didn't say that. Just that you can't rely on just the initial story to carry you through the filmmaking process.

As for Catwoman and Elektra, I didn't watch either of them. I have no idea how good or bad the "story" was, they just both looked like overblown wastes of movies. Horrible on most every level; where they took the great comic book stories and turned them into soulless money-making ventures and failed oppurtunities to try and come out with something people would consider "cool." (ie, the McG method of filmmaking) Which saddens me a little bit, at least concerning Catwoman, because I'm a big fan of Thierry Arbogast.

I just want to make it clear that I do not believe that story isn't important. You can look at anything I write and see that writing is important to me. But it never ends at the story; the story is the beginning. The story is the acorn, and the completed film is the sprawling oak. Great writing, great directing, great cinematography, great sound design, great editing, and the like, should be able to all come together to make a great film. It's at that point that one aspect of filmmaking becomes as important as another.

A good script is the best place to start, no doubt, but you can't underestimate the hands it goes through before it gets to the screen. A cinematographer or editor or actor can be a storyteller, even if he had nothing to do with the writing of the script, because the masses don't go buy the screenplay, they go watch the movie. I very much like that Kurosawa quote (a man that most likely forgot more about filmmaking than I'll ever know), because it reminds you that a great script with a mediocre director (and more) cannot produce that masterpiece.

Now after all this talk, I feel as though I have to go out and actually be great. Dang.

I never said that "acting is king." In fact, I believe the movie is king. Whatever best serves the movie is important, and that's usually more than one thing. "Good story" is subjective anyway. Your script can have perfect structure, the most satisfying ending, every scene a classic, and the most beautifully eloquent dialog ever printed, but that may not work with the tone of the movie. If you read the script to Seven and say, "This is amazing; this is the best comedy I've ever read," great story, but great for the movie? Sure, story is crucial, but so are visuals, otherwise we may as well be reading or listening to the radio (both of which are great media, but have different needs). The idea isn't that great direction can cover bad storytelling, but that it's entirely possible for them both to be top notch, so why not try for that? Why sacrifice direction for story when you can have both. It is possible. And you only have to look Mr. Frisch's list to see a group of directors that have done well as visual storytellers, few supposed "bad eggs" notwithstanding. And by the term visual storytellers, I mean people who can tell a story visually, not concentrating on the visuals to tell the whole stories.

An example of a good story turned bad movie recently would be Suspect Zero. The original screenplay was very well received by some that read it, but it had all of these ideas tacked on to it that just made it silly. What started out as a very tight procedural thriller suddenly had all of these "twists" thrown into the mix in an attempt to make a better story, but it didn't work. It was good because it was simple, but it became overwrought in its cleverness because "it was a better story." At this point, one has to ask the question, what is this nondescript word "story" referring to? Is it the script? Is it the concept? Is it the hook (that piece of the movie that fits in the tagline?) Plenty of unwatchable movies have had an interesting plot gimmick, and plenty of good writers have turned out some pretty horrible stuff--and it's usually not their fault--and it's not always an attempt to serve the visuals.

One only has to read the book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen by John Gregory Dunne to learn how a very interesting story about Jessica Savitch was turned into the movie Up Close and Personal, which was not a great movie from a writing, directing, or acting standpoint.

And the biggest upset of all is The Great Gatsby, which I believe to be one of the greatest stories written, but has been turned into at least two flaccid, worthless movies. The 70s version apparently even had a nice script written by Francis Ford Coppola, and was fairly close to the novel admittedly, but was directed with no visual flair (and way too many wannabe literary visual symbolism) by Jack Clayton, and was acted flat and off-key by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. A great story that has yet to become a great movie after 80+ years.

Story is only a piece of the puzzle like everything else. It's important, but it all adds up. A movie with a great script, but bad actors, flat direction, no visual continuity, and bad splices, would it be watchable? And besides, great scripts are ruined by directors with no vision all the time.

I posted it on a free photo site, photobucket.com, and then used the IMG tag to get it on here.

More like this:

Since even words on the screen had the streaking effect, I'm guessing it might have been done in post.

There was a small piece of the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan that was step printed to slow the action down, if I'm remembering right. Tom Hanks' character froze and was looking around him, and everything slowed down.

That stuff was all step printing, was it not? Shoot at 3 or 6 frames per second, then slow it down to 24 frames in post?