Category: Film

The Return of MST3K

Posted on By Wil

I was twenty years-old the first time I saw MST3K. I was sitting on the couch with a friend of mine, looking for something to watch on a Sunday morning, when she stopped on some crappy old horror movie.

"What’s this?" I said.

"You’ve never seen this before?"

"No," I said, "That’s why I asked ‘what’s this.’"

"It’s a show about this guy who is trapped in space with robots, and is forced to watch horrible movies. So he and the robots talk back to the screen."

It reminded me of this show I first watched on KDOC here in Los Angeles when I was a freshman in high school, called Mad Movies. I became a fan for life in a matter of minutes, and developed a list of favorites just as fast: Manos, the Hands of Fate, Rocketship XM and Lost Continent are a few that come instantly to mind.

MST3K’s Joel Hodgson once said, "We don’t ask ourselves, ‘will anyone get this?’ We tell each other, ‘the right people will get this.’" I was inspired by that philosophy, and when I wrote sketch comedy or did improv (both pursuits inspired by MST3K and the British Whose Line?) I used it, and I still use it today, even when I’m not writing comedy.

So now that there’s some context for how much I love MST3K, you’ll understand how excited I was when I saw that most of the original crew has reunited for Cinematic Titanic, which I believe can be safely called The Return of MST3K:

Cinematic Titanic is a feature length movie riffing show and is an
artist owned and operated venture created by Joel Hodgson, the creator
of the Peabody award-winning Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Cinematic
Titanic features the original cast and writers of MST3K, which is
Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow), and J. Elvis Weinstein
(Tom Servo). Filling out the ensemble is Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester)
and Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank).

While this is exciting to me as a fan, it’s also inspiring and validating to me as a creative person who lives on the Long Tail. Instead of waiting for a network to give them the opportunity to bring their show to viewers, they’re distributing the show on DVD themselves. Between this and Riff Trax, we Misties have a lot to celebrate these days.
 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some rock climbing to do.

MY PRECIOUS!

Posted on By Wil

I just saw, via Propeller, that Peter Jackson has signed on to produce The Hobbit.

Director Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc said on Tuesday they have agreed to make two movies based on the book “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien, ending months of legal wrangling.

Jackson, the director of the smash hit “Lord of the Rings” movies, and producer Fran Walsh will executive produce both a “Hobbit” movie and a sequel, but no decision has been made about who will direct the films, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, co-chairmen and co-CEOs of New Line told Reuters.

The good news is, it’s going to take two whole films to contain its awesomeness. The (potential) bad news is, he won’t be directing. That’s offset by the (potential) good news that it will make its way into theaters before 2011.

King Kong showed that Peter Jackson isn’t infallible, but it’s clear that he loves and respects Tolkien’s work, so I’m sure I’m not the only geek who would be willing to wait until 2011 or 2012 if that’s what it takes to get someone who loves it as much as we do behind the camera. I mean, we’ve waited for decades for this; what’s a few more years to get it right?

Can media conglomerates afford to pay the writers?

Posted on By Wil

As someone who hopes to be in the WGA one day, and as a current SAG member (and former member of the Board of Directors) I am in complete and total solidarity with the Writer’s Guild. It’s quite heartening to me, also,  to see that so many people refuse to be fooled by the lies that the six companies who control all of the media have been trying to spread.

The AMPTP has been successful (and helped by the news media they own) in spreading FUD about the things the writers are asking for. This post at United Hollywood puts some important numbers into perspective:

"But can the corporations really afford to pay you what you’re asking for?"

Let’s
set aside for the moment the issue of what the congloms say in their
press releases to us (which is basically "There’s no money! Ever! And
if there was, we spent it all on other projects that lost money so it’s
gone! Forever! We’re broke! We’re having to rent our yachts!") and focus on some hard numbers thoughtfully provided by Jonathan Handel on the Huffington Post yesterday.

He
writes an excellent (I think) and even-handed analysis that takes into
account the effect pattern bargaining will have in calculating real
numbers of what we’re asking for, and what it will cost the companies,
individually, to pay us.

It comes, by his calculation, to $125 million per conglomerate per year — if we got every single thing we’re asking for.

That, by the way, is less than the $140 million Disney spent to fire Michael Ovitz for 15 months of work.

Also, Carson Daly is still an epic douche.

Also, also:

And finally, a meager contribution from the actor half of me:

Speechless

oh my fucking god pictures from the set of watchmen

Posted on By Wil

Who_watches_the_watchmen
Apparently, I’m the last Watchmen geek on the planet to hear that Zack Snyder is keeping a rarely-updated blog during the film’s production.

I discovered the blog on a good day, though, because today he posted some pictures from the set that gave me a serious geekgasm.

I have a lot of hope for this film, though I seriously doubt it’s possible to make it into anything less than 12 hours long and truly do the book justice, because Zack Snyder managed to turn 300 into something not only watchable, but something that was a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. When I saw these pictures this morning — especially the ones that are almost 1:1 recreations of panels in the book — I upgraded my condition from guarded to cautiously optimistic.

However, I am putting the studio on notice: if you pull any studiofuckery with Watchmen, you will see a rampaging horde of geek rage that will make The Phantom Menace look like a Fred Thompson campaign rally.