In 1990, a film enthusiast named Mike Vraney founded Something Weird Video, a distributor of hard-to-find, sensationalist movies. This included everything from violent exploitation movies to budget Westerns and found footage. Something Weird became a touchstone for the rougher, risky side of film history, and filmmakers including Paul Thomas Anderson and Drive‘s Nicolas Winding Refn […]
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Clap in a circle to mourn the end (?) of fake birthday songs
After a court decision last night, movie and television characters might finally be able to sing “Happy Birthday to You.” The Summy Company contested for decades that it owned the copyright to the universally recognized birthday song and charged productions $10,000 to include its melody and lyrics. No one really wanted to pay all that […]
Continue readingThe insatiable film appetite of Jimmy Carter
Since Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, presidents have enjoyed the privilege of watching seemingly any film they wanted at any time. In the century since – and especially since FDR installated of a formal White House movie theater – we’ve heard stories about Eisenhower’s love for Westerns or Clinton’s private screening of Independence […]
Continue readingThe Flintstones was the ultimate warning about cohesive writing
The second season of HBO’s True Detective has not received kind reviews, but in defense of its creative ambition, it is the singular product of creator Nic Pizzolatto. He has almost exclusive writing credit for the series, and for better or worse, it undeniably carries his signature. That’s a rarity in commercial film and television […]
Continue readingWe might see The Day the Clown Cried in 2025
A year and a half ago, now-removed footage from Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried surfaced online for the first time. For those unacquainted with the legend, The Day the Clown Cried was a Holocaust melodrama about a clown sent to a concentration camp. The film was never released and has acquired an apocalyptically […]
Continue readingA tribute to analog computers in film
Continuing this week’s accidental theme of production design, we came across a terrific article summarizing the history of analog technology in science fiction films. Minority Report‘s gesture-controlled holographic interfaces and touchscreens changed the popular idea of a futuristic interface, but before that, the future in film looked a lot like the 70s: toggle switches, dials, […]
Continue readingProduction design in an HD world
For all the brouhaha about greenscreen effects changing filmmaking, props, costumes, and sets still matter. Production design continues to be vital to even the most effects-heavy movies: just ask the craftspeople who hand-made all the chainmail armor for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, embedded above. But as high-definition cameras, Blu-rays, and auto-smoothing televisions produce […]
Continue readingHow Hollywood’s color correctors are playing with your emotions
We’ve talked about the color correction process in the past and how a once-cosmetic technique has become a fundamental part of the film production process. Total control of a film’s color range and palette allows filmmakers to tailor create visually resplendent works and sometimes to ignore other steps in the process. But the colors their […]
Continue readingComing soon: the most epic slapstick of the silent era
Dr. Strangelove nearly ended with an extended war room pie fight, but Kubrick eventually deemed the idea as too ridiculous for his otherwise subtler satire. The footage was never released, but it might have been one of the greatest on-screen pie fights in history. Pie tossing has been a staple of vaudevillian slapstick since the […]
Continue readingA glimpse behind the Library of Congress’s film preservation vaults
You may be familiar with the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress group that annually selects significant American films to maintain in perpetuity. That’s only a fraction of the over one million video recordings held by the Library of Congress, but all undergo a rigorous preservation process. For the first time that we’ve seen, […]
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