Tagarchief: George Lucas

Apple TV Special: Mr. Scorsese

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Mr. Scorsese is a five episode film portrait about one of the greatest film directors of all time now playing on Apple TV. It’s the most extensive documentary ever shot about the Italian American cinematic master, featuring interviews with a.o. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Daniel Day Lewis. Reason enough for me to subscribe to Apple TV. An additional benefit of the subscription is that Marty’s latest film – Killers of the Flower Moon – is also available on the channel.

Scorsese is a very sympathetic guy; I have seen many interviews with him before, logical since he’s my favorite filmmaker, but in this series, you really get to know the man. He grew up in Little Italy and later Manhattan. He was very asthmatic as a child and he couldn’t play outside. There is this shot in GoodFellas where a young Henry Hill is staring out of the window observing the wiseguys outside. That’s Marty right there.

Movie theaters had air conditioning, so that’s where young Martin wanted to be as much as possible. He could breath there, and the movies formed his mind. At home he watched old Italian films with his family. He started making extensive storyboards which his father thought wasn’t very manly. Marty learned of the mobsters who controlled much of the economic activity in his neighbourhood. His father had a good job in the garment industry, which was worked out by the mob. He told young Marty: “Don’t ever let them do you a favor. They’re nothing but bloodsuckers.”

The young Scorsese initially wanted to become a priest, but that path wasn’t for him. Neither were the streets. Literature wasn’t part of his culture either, but a priest encouraged him and his friends to look beyond what they knew; to go to college, to read, learn, and explore. He attended a talk about film school and heard a professor speak passionately about cinema. That was the moment he knew what he wanted to do.

At New York film school he met Thelma Schoonmaker, his future editor. She recalls seeing his student work and knowing immediately that “he had it.” His student film It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964) won the award for Best Student Film. In 1967 he made his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, starring Harvey Keitel.

Scorsese married young, but his first marriage collapsed quickly because his mind went more and more to making movies. He went to Hollywood to further his career and met an amazing assortment of talent there: Coppola, Schrader, Spielberg, Lucas and De Palma, known collectively as the ‘Movie Brats’. They were given this name because they were the first generation of formally trained filmmakers to unite film knowledge with artistic ambition.

In the early seventies, King of the B-movies Roger Corman gave Scorsese the chance to direct a movie. This became Boxcar Bertha (1972), a Bonnie and Clyde-style crime movie. His artistic friends hated it. Marty thought it was a good practice in shooting on budget and shooting on time, but his friends thought he had betrayed himself as an artist.

John Cassavetes had seen his feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door and advised him to make more personal movies like that. About Boxcar Bertha he said: “You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit. Don’t do that again.” Scorsese showed him his Mean Streets screenplay and Cassavetes told him to go find a lead actor to star in it. Then he met De Niro who was from the same neighbourhood.

Mean Streets was based on people and experiences from his neighborhood and people fell in love with it, because it felt completely authentic. That makes sense, because it was real. Now, Marty got more opportunities. With his next film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), he showed he could also direct women. Ellen Burstyn won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her lead role.

Although Scorsese gained recognition, this period also marked the start of heavy drug use. Film remained his way of working through deep inner turmoil. Drawn to darker characters, he was captivated by Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver. He and De Niro set out to portray a loner like Travis Bickle without turning him into a caricature. Travis is isolated in almost every frame. Taxi Driver (1976) was a huge critical success and won the Palme d’Or.

Everybody praised it. It hit a nerve and showed a true understanding of the American unconscious. A lone man who commits atrocities, like the snipers who killed politicians at that time. Travis has a saviour complex: he wants to save the girls and kill the bad guys. The final scene was too violent for the sensors, so Scorsese changed the colour of the blood to dark, rusty brown or brownish-pink rather than bright red. Daniel Day Lewis was hypnotized by the film and went to see it five or six times. It was the first time he saw Bob (De Niro) act, which was a big thing for him.

After the success of Taxi Driver, he made the costly musical failure New York, New York (1977). His second marriage also fell apart and what started then was a period of self destructive behavior. He started doing lots of drugs and tried to find his cinematic muse again. He almost died – and part of him wanted to because he didn’t know how to create anymore. De Niro had a big part in getting him back on his feet. They went to Sint Maarten where they worked on the script for their next masterpiece: Raging Bull (1980).

Thelma Schoonmaker explains the film’s shooting and editing, and the documentary allows you to rediscover the beauty of its black-and-white imagery. It’s a true work of art. Scorsese had found his muse again, and also his third wife: the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

After Raging Bull he wanted to do Gangs of New York and The Last Temptation of Christ. The scripts were there, but the movies were too expensive to make at that time. He did another project with De Niro, The King of Comedy (1982), which flopped. Scorsese’s career was now once again in a bad state. “He was done for in Hollywood”, they told him.

He made a comeback with After Hours (1985), an odd ball comedy shot on a low budget. Key to the film, Scorsese explains, was the collaboration with Director of Photography Michael Ballhaus, who would later shoot GoodFellas. In 1985, he married for the fourth time, this time with Barbara De Fina, who would produce a number of his movies, including Casino.

The re-established Scorsese followed up After Hours with The Color of Money (1986), a pool hall movie starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, and a sequel to The Hustler (1961). The movie did well, so now Scorsese could finally make his beloved project The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He made the film to “get to know Christ better”, he explains.

The budget was tight, so he could only do two takes of every shot during the difficult shoot in Morocco. It was very tough, he says. Even tougher was the reception of the film: people were very upset. It was banned in Rome, Israel, and India – and someone set off a bomb during a screening in Paris. Blockbuster didn’t carry the film. Marty needed FBI protection for the second time (he had gotten threats after Taxi Driver and had needed protection then as well).

While working on The Color of Money, Scorsese read Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, the true story of mobster Henry Hill and his life within the Lucchese crime family. Pileggi and Scorsese had both grown up in the same neighborhood and collaborated on the screenplay for GoodFellas. Scorsese had the film fully mapped out in his head – frame by frame, song by song. The result is pure montage, weightless and electric. Scorsese created a new cinematic language for this movie. “It has this crazy energy”, says Spielberg. “Like a runaway train.”

Previews strangely enough saw a lot of walk-outs. Executives wanted him to cut out the last twenty minutes, which is the whole cocaine sequence. Marty stood up to them and saved the movie. God bless him.

After GoodFellas, Scorsese worked with De Niro again in Cape Fear (1991), a successful remake of the 1962 thriller – and in 1995 they made another mob masterpiece with Casino. It’s about mob guys who were given paradise with Las Vegas – but they got kicked out of paradise because they are so evil. The movie has a unique structure like GoodFellas, but it takes it one step further.

In between, he explored another closed society with The Age of Innocence (1993), his first collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s about a man imprisoned by the culture he belongs to, and a great love doomed to remain unconsummated.

In 1997, he returned to another genre he loved to do: the spiritual film. Kundun (1997) is about the Dalai Lama in Tibet. There were no actors in that country, so he had to get all these performances out of non-actors. The film was panned-down as dull. Then came Bringing Out the Dead, a loose follow-up to Taxi Driver, but it was still born at the box office.

Scorsese was dead again, but then who came knocking? Leonardo DiCaprio was now Hollywood’s new golden boy, a guaranteed name for box office success – and a movie star with resources to invest in the projects he chose to star in. Now, Scorsese finally got the opportunity to make his long awaited dream: Gangs of New York (2002).

The film reconstructs 1860s New York in massive sets built in Rome. This was the Five Points neighbourhood, which was dominated by gangs. Scorsese calls it science fiction in reverse. George Lucas came to visit the sets and said that “this is the last time sets like this will ever be built”.

The film has an uncanny reverence to today’s political violence, with the natives who can be seen as the proud boys of that time. People who claim to be the only true Americans and are prepared to use savage violence on immigrants.

Fortunately, the very expensive film – that was produced by Harvey Weinstein – did well at the box office.

He continued to work with DiCaprio, first on The Aviator (2004), a biopic about Howard Hughes, a man obsessed with filmmaking and aviation. The film received 11 Oscar nominations, and then it dawned on the film community that Scorsese never won an Oscar. But, even though The Aviator won in nearly every category, it lost the director award to Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby.

But two years later, they made it up by giving him the Oscar for The Departed (2006), another gangster film. It was awarded to him by his old friends George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola – a bittersweet moment. In 2010, he made another film with DiCaprio, Shutter Island. And to complete the streak with Leo, he made The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), a commentary on how excessive and moralless capitalism has overtaken our society.

Marty once again portrays the dark side of human nature in all its forms, including terrible domestic violence. Scorsese has often been accused of glorifying bad behavior, but another way to see his work is that he refuses to sanitize human nature. The Wolf of Wall Street was a massive success, tapping directly into post-financial-crisis anger.

The documentary concludes with The Irishman (2019) and early footage from Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). We also see Scorsese at home, caring for his fifth and final wife, Helen Schermerhorn Morris, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. It’s deeply moving to see the great filmmaker in this intimate setting.

Steven Spielberg provides the perfect closing tribute for this must-see documentary about the legendary director: “There is only one Marty Scorsese. He is a cornerstone of this art form. There is nobody like him and there will never be anybody like him again.”

Indeed.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

BBC documentary (2003) by Kenneth Bowser, based on the book by Peter Biskind. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood tells the story of Hollywood in the 1960s, a time when the studio system was in crisis. Their films had become increasingly irrelevant.

The problem was that movies were run by studios rather than directors, and the studios had lost touch with what audiences wanted to see. Then a new generation of filmmakers emerged who reconnected with viewers. Directors such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Robert Altman, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Bogdanovich.

“In 1963 the studio system collapsed”, says Bogdanovich. “It was over.” After the disaster of Cleopatra (1963, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian), the Fox lot was shut down. It became a ghost town. Television took over. The old moviegoers died off, and American films grew more and more meaningless.

Meanwhile, art theaters screening foreign films were doing very well. Many of the new generation of filmmakers learned the language of cinema from auteurs like Fellini, Godard, and Truffaut.

Outside the studio system, Roger Corman played a pivotal role in training young filmmakers to make low-budget B-movies that performed well at the box office. Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and Francis Ford Coppola all started under Corman. They succeeded by targeting the youth who flocked to the thousands of drive-in theaters across the country, audiences that loved horror and action. Corman also had a knack for choosing hot topics: Hells Angels were in the news, so he made The Wild Angels (1966, Roger Corman). LSD was trendy, so he made The Trip (1967, Roger Corman) based on a screenplay by Jack Nicholson.

In Hollywood, directors proved just how out of touch the studios were. Executives hated Bonnie and Clyde, but young people loved it. Studios had to adapt. Paramount, in deep trouble, was taken over by Gulf & Western, led by the eccentric Austrian Charlie Bluhdorn. He brought in the now-legendary Bob Evans as a producer, who helped turn the studio around. How? By giving directors more creative control. Like he did with Polanski, who made Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.

At Columbia, Bert Schneider also trusted and empowered directors, resulting in massive hits, most notably Easy Rider, released in 1969. The drug-fueled chaos of director Dennis Hopper and his team is visible on screen. It was a great film, and audiences loved it. It was the kind of movie that never would have been made under the old studio system. The same goes for Midnight Cowboy by John Schlesinger, also released in 1969 – an outstanding film. That same year saw The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah, which pushed violent realism to a whole new level.

The 1970s began, and the director’s era was in full swing. Peter Bogdanovich released The Last Picture Show in 1971, a film rich in emotional depth and sexual content, more than audiences were used to at the time. Dennis Hopper tried to follow up on Easy Rider with The Last Movie, but botched the edit due to his drug use and constant partying. “I had final cut, but I cut my own throat,” he says in the documentary.

In 1972, Paramount released The Godfather in 4,000 theaters simultaneously, a massively successful strategy. The history of that production was recently chronicled in the excellent miniseries The Offer. Coppola had now become one of the greats. He used his influence to bring George Lucas back to Hollywood, where he made the wildly successful American Graffiti in 1973 – a film studios didn’t understand, but youth audiences loved. That same year marked the rise of another major talent: Martin Scorsese, whose Mean Streets won over critics and audiences alike with its originality and authenticity.

But 1973 belonged to Warner Bros., which released The Exorcist by William Friedkin. Using the same wide-release strategy as The Godfather, it became a huge box office hit. It was Friedkin’s second success after The French Connection, cementing his status as one of the untouchable directors of the time.

By now, the auteurs had taken over Hollywood. This led to artistic triumphs like Chinatown (1974). But the young directors hadn’t forgotten Corman’s trick of attracting young audiences. In 1975, Spielberg released Jaws, a film that redefined what success looked like in Hollywood. Corman said: “When I saw Jaws I thought: these guys know what I’m doing, and they have the money and talent and skills to do it better.” George Lucas took it even further with Star Wars in 1977. The age of the blockbuster had arrived.

It had taken a decade, but Hollywood was back on its feet. Expensive B-movies like Alien, Superman, and their sequels became the new studio model. For about ten years, directors ruled. That era came to an end in the late ’70s, but it was a glorious decade that produced countless classics – films still regarded today as some of the greatest ever made.

It’s Official: The Acolyte is Disney’s First Real Star Wars Failure

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

In recent years, Disney has released one Star Wars series after the other. Most were pretty good with especially The Mandalorian and Andor getting rave reviews. The latest is The Acolyte, of which the first two episodes were released on June 5 on Disney Plus.

If you ask the critics, the series is a successful addition to the SW universe. If you ask the fans you get quite a different view. At IMDb, the show is currently rated with a painful 3,4 and most of the 1.5 K user reviews are extremely negative. A sample of the comments: ‘Jar Jar Binks was a museum masterpiece next to this’, ‘this is laughably bad writing & direction’ and ‘the worst Star Wars project since the Holiday Special.’ Autch.

I am aware of the fact that Star Wars fans are notoriously difficult to please. Many of the prequels and sequels were also harshly criticized when they first came out, although since the Disney takeover of Lucas Film, the prequel films by George Lucas’ have risen somewhat in popularity again .

After viewing the first five episodes of The Acolyte, I have to say I am with the fans on this one though. Judging the series on the basis of plot, characters, acting, action and atmosphere, I find it to be a pretty terrible show. Yes, the fifth episode indeed contains some excellent lightsabre action, but because the writing is so weak, the showdowns lose almost all of their potential impact.

The Acolyte is the first series to venture outside of the Skywalker era. It takes place about a hundred years before the rise of the Empire in the peaceful High Republic era. The story revolves around a female force user who is killing off Jedi’s. Her twin sister is accused of the crime, but after her innocence is proven, she joins the Jedi in order to track down her sister and we learn of their family tragedy that caused her sister to crave for revenge. We also learn that she is guided by a dark master, whose appearance is very Sith-like.

The main point thematically, seems to be that the Jedi themselves can be an oppressive force, which in this case has resulted in the rise of evil. The problem is that the characters and their motivations are not one bit convincing. It is also problematic that this feels like another rise of the Sith story for which we have no need. Lucas has done this already in the prequels, and in my opinion he did a fine job, although certainly not flawless.

The show really gets embarrassing in episode 3 when the Witches are introduced: a new group of force users. The dialogues make George Lucas seem like a William Shakespeare. Things don’t improve in the following episodes. Were there no question marks with the producers when they read the scripts? What is it that convinced them to invest 180 million dollars (!) in this show? It’s mind boggling.

I am not gonna finish it after watching episode 5. It is now revealed who the bad guy is and frankly, I thought this was a terrible choice as well. I am not curious to find out what Sol is hiding nor do I care to find out how the relationship between the twin sisters is gonna develop. I am still interested in new Star Wars series by Disney, but The Acolyte is pretty much a disaster as far as I’m concerned. I can only hope that Disney will learn from this costly mistake.

Light & Magic: The Making of Cinema Magic

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Special effects have always been a huge part of movies. From King Kong (1933), to the Ray Harryhousen films with the brilliant stop-motion effects, to the stunning 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Movies offer viewers the chance to see things that cannot be seen any other way. The six-part Disney Plus documentary Light & Magic tells the story of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) that played an enormous part in the evolution of visual effects in Hollywood movies. The company was founded by George Lucas when he was working on his first Star Wars movie in 1977. He visited every optical effects company in the industry, but found none that could deliver what he had in mind.

2001: A Space Odyssey had really pushed the boundaries in what could be achieved in visual effects, but the movie was slow. Lucas wanted to create speed and energy. He wanted to see dog flights in space. He met a special effects man called John Dykstra, who was part of a small community of special effects people. He hired him to set up the team of model makers, storyboard artists and camera and light people at the newly founded ILM.

The first two episodes show the extremely challenging process of getting the first Star Wars film made. Thousands of elements had to be combined into extremely complicated shots. There were many desperate moments, but the end result was amazing and audiences and industry experts were blown away. Nobody but the people at ILM could have done it back then. It inspired many directors to also push the envelope in special effects the following years and decades, like James Cameron: “I went home, and said to my wife; ‘I quit my job. You have to pay the bills for a while, cause I’m gonna make a film’.”

The third episode is about ILM’s challenge to create a worthy sequel: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). This classical space opera had even more complicated special effects to accomplish. Like always with sequels, the scale was much larger than the first movie. The team also got other assignments than Star Wars, namely Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Dragonslayer (1981) and ET: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Movies that were nominated for or won Academy Awards for their amazing visual effects.

Lucas also got interested in computers and he hired Ed Catmull to digitize processes. The computer team made the impressive terraforming sequence in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn (1982) and this can be seen as the beginning of computer generated effects in movies. This inspired Lucas and the ILM people to get into it. Catmull’s division (Pixar) was later sold to Steve Jobs and they turned it into a cartoon company.

The next major project was Return of the Jedi (1983), the most complex movie in terms of visual effects ever conceived. “It was not a fun movie to make”, says one of the team members. But the result surely was fun to watch. Each of the 900 visual effects shots was a triumph for the ILM team. It was followed up by a number of other eighties classics: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), The Goonies (1985) and Back to the Future (1985). Each new project had its own challenges, and the attitude at ILM always was: ‘let’s do something that’s never been done before.’

In episode 5 titled ‘Morphing’, the computer era is really about to take off. The first successful computer effect was the water creature in James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989). Now that film could be translated into pixels that could be manipulated, anything became possible. But the industry needed a proof of concept and the 90 seconds sequence in The Abyss was just that. But as always with new technology, there is resentment at first. They called digital ‘the dark side’. Digital wasn’t yet seen as the main thing, but as an addition to old school effects. The model shop remained the central place in ILM’s laboratory.

Then one day, James Cameron called and he wanted to do something way bigger than The Abyss. He pitched them: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). A liquid metal man was a huge leap from a water snake. The team had only nine months to create the T-1000. They first had to capture actor Robert Patrick in data. They filmed his muscles and how he moved. Once they had him digital, they combined all special effects with the right lighting, so it all seems to be part of the same world. The end result was stunning. One ILM guy recalls the T-1000 walking through the bars in the mental institution; an impossible shot. This was truly groundbreaking stuff.

The following year, another major movie would truly signal the end of traditional special effects. They had planned to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) with advanced stop motion animation. Spielberg hired the best guys in the business. Stan Winston would design the creatures and Phil Tippett would animate them. He also hired Michael Lantieri, a practical effects genius and Dennis Muren, a visual effects wizard. The team had already built the dinosaurs, and Light & Magic gives us a few images of what the Velociraptors looked like with stop-motion. They’re certainly impressive, but since we are now used to digital effects, the unrealness becomes an issue. Once they did a successful test with a digital T-Rex running through a landscape everybody knew: visual effects will never be the same again. “I feel extinct”, said Tippett, and Spielberg used that line in the movie.

So 1993 was the year of the big breakthrough of digital effects, and they would be used for many successful movies in the nineties, like The Mask (1994), Forrest Gump (1994), Jumanji (1995) and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999). The documentary series ends with the final innovation that the visionary George Lucas had anticipated all along. The tv-series The Mandalorian (2019) is shot entirely in a round set called ‘The Volume’. This is ILM’s replacement for the green-screen. It uses a massive, curved LED screen to create photorealistic backdrops, circumventing the need for outdoor locations or extensive physical sets. Due to this innovation, The Mandalorian is able to deliver Star Wars effects on a tv-schedule and budget. ILM, which had started with a group of creative designers in a warehouse at Van Nuys, is still pushing the boundaries in creating cinema magic today, now also for the small screen.