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 readingFour years ago, Scottish environmentalists took on Trump
With all the hot air swirling about Donald Trump in the past week, now because of his debate performance, we often forget that he was a blowhard in business before he was a blowhard in politics. He’s received flak for some of his higher-profile real-estate projects, many of which involve taking over historic spaces like […]
Continue readingSee Vulture’s 2-minute primer on the bottle episode, then watch a few
Bottle episodes have long served as a staple of nearly every TV production – whether for creative or budgetary reasons – but many television fans might not be familiar with the concept. To avoid stealing their thunder, we’ll just recommend that you watch Vulture’s terrific, short primer on the history of bottle episodes and why […]
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 readingIn honor of Rowdy Roddy Piper, a look back on They Live from Slavoj Zizek
Rowdy Roddy Piper’s death last Friday leaves a very unusual hole in the film world. Though he made occasional guest appearances in TV shows and movies – usually either playing himself or a similarly hard-knuckled character – Piper is best known even beyond his wrestling career as the star of They Live (HU DVD 9020), […]
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 readingNew Acquisitions – July 2015
Last month we promised more regular updates about our new acquisitions, and… well, we didn’t have a whole lot coming in for a few weeks. But we do now! We got a motley assortment of new titles in July, and to avoid going for the obvious bigger names (nothing against Thor), let’s spotlight a few […]
Continue reading75 years later, celebrating Bugs Bunny – and looking at his contentious history
Today marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bugs Bunny, Warner Bros.’s de facto cartoon mascot and a symbol of the golden age of animation (and maybe LeBron James’s future co-star?). Though Bugs is an immediately recognizable icon today, it took hundreds of theatrical animated shorts and countless years of Saturday morning television shows to get there. […]
Continue readingWatch the suddenly-very-relevant Soy Cuba on the big screen
The normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba this week opens some obvious doors – some are surely counting down the days until legal cigar imports – but it also offers an appropriate moment to revisit cultural history we may have ignored intentionally or otherwise. Post-revolutionary Cuban films are sometimes left out of […]
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 […]
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