(Mark Cerulli, Paul C. Rosen and movie poster designer Dan Chapman (who did many famous posters including The Rock, Basic Instinct, Bad Boys and more) on the Red Carpet.)
CR
scribe and friend Mark Cerulli produced and directed a documentary feature devoted
to 101 year-old graphic designer Joe Caroff, who created numerous iconic film
and TV logos including the legendary 007 gun logo.
Last week the film was awarded Best
Documentary Short at the prestigious Beverly Hills Film Festival.Aside from Joe’s film work, By Design also
tells the story of his remarkable life – living through the Great Depression,
fighting in WWII and becoming a design force in the Madmen Era.
It’s currently streaming on HBOMax and Mark
and producer/editor Paul C. Rosen are looking for an international
distributor.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The
Shining is one of the most written about, most celebrated, most loved, most
hated, and most misunderstood motion pictures in the history of the medium. Its
hypnotic effect is undeniable, and countless books and articles have been
written in many languages about its purported hidden meanings and the on-set
difficulties that were encountered by the cast and crew on the nearly year-long
shooting schedule. One of the film’s biggest fans, film director Lee Unkrich
and caretaker of http://www.theoverlookhotel.com,
teamed with the late great author J.W. Rinzler on the ultimate book on the
making of the film: a 2,200-page tome from Taschen appropriately entitled Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining, now available on the company website, just in time
for Jack Nicholson’s 86th birthday. Cinema Retro recently spoke with
Mr. Unkrich about the new book, twelve years in the making, and how it came
about.
Todd Garbarini: How did you first hear about Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining?
Lee Unkrich: Honestly, I had no awareness of it
until my mom took me to see it. I had no knowledge or understanding of who
Stanley Kubrick was. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and I may have seen it at the
Randall Park Mall. I was 13 and I remember liking it. A few days after I saw
the movie, my mom was driving me to summer camp, and we stopped at a gas
station. They had a rack of paperback books, and they had the movie tie-in edition
of Stephen King’s novel. It had Saul Bass’s yellow and black poster art on the
front. I bought it, and I ended up reading it voraciously all summer at camp
and beyond. I still have the copy to this day. I think I realized right away
that the book was different in a lot of ways than the movie, but for me, it was
more of an extension of the film. We got a Betamax at some point, and I had to
wait until The Shining came out on video to see it again. I loved both
the movie and the book. In the middle of the paperback, there was a collection of
black and white film stills from the movie. One of the photos was from a scene
that I didn’t remember. It was a shot of Wendy cooking in the kitchen,
presumably making the breakfast that she then takes up to Jack who is just
waking up. I saw that and I started thinking, wow, if that was a scene that was
shot and cut, were there others?
TG: I saw The Shining on ABC-TV in May
1983 and became obsessed with it, too, watching it on home video shortly
afterwards. When we went to Florida on vacation in July, I found a used copy of
the movie tie-in, and saw the photo of Wendy that you mentioned and wondered
what happened to the scene.
LU: Somewhere roughly around the same
time, I read that there had been a hospital epilogue that Kubrick had cut out
of the film after its limited release. Between those two things, I just started
really becoming obsessed with trying to get my hands on a screenplay or any
more information about the film. I would say that the idea of trying to track
down ostensibly more of the movie that I loved was the beginning of this
obsession that built and grew and morphed over the subsequent decades. It was
the fact that I couldn’t find anything, frustratingly, because Kubrick held
such tight reins over it all. I’d get little tidbits here and there. I found a
few crumbs, but it honestly wasn’t until TheStanley Kubrick Archives
book by Allison Castle was published by Taschen in 2005 that I had my first
glimpse into the fact that there was a lot more material that existed in
Kubrick’s own archives. Then subsequently his family established the Kubrick
Archive after he passed away. It was when I was on a press tour for Toy
Story 3 that I managed to visit the archive for the first time and really
got to dive in deep for the first time and get answers to the questions I’d had
for decades.
TG: Did The Shining scare you when
you saw it?
LU: I don’t think so. It didn’t give me
nightmares or anything like that, and I’m an only child. My parents both
worked, so I was a latchkey kid. I was home alone a lot. I had a vivid
imagination. I liked reading scary things. I liked scaring myself, but then
that would extend into bad scaring where I’d be alone and think someone was in
the house, or a statue that we had was alive, or all kinds of crazy stuff. My
parents fought a lot. They ended up divorcing by the time I was nine, so I knew
what it was like to be the child of an unstable marriage. All of that, there
were just so many elements to the movie, coupled with its tone and its
uncanniness, and how it gets under your skin, that I think it just really
wormed its way into me in a way and just never left.
TG: Your new book looks beautiful and vast
in scope, covering intimate aspects of the film’s production. It’s a book that could
never have been published without the inclusion of the Kubrick family. How
involved were they?
LU: They were very involved, and they were
amazing. What I had that was the most helpful was Stanley’s daughter, Vivian, who
made the documentary on the making of The Shining that has been
available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra High Definition. She sat Jack and
everyone down for interviews around the time the film was completed and I got
my hands on the transcripts and those full interviews, including Jack’s, which
is like a two-hour interview. That’s the most helpful because he’d just made
the movie. He’s young and he remembers everything. I would have loved to have
met Jack, of course. I know fully that the book itself wasn’t harmed in any way
because he wasn’t involved. It’s just full of him through and through but very
thoroughly. We sent him a few copies of the book that just got to his house within
the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to hearing his thoughts about it.
(Photo courtesy of Lee Unkrich.)
TG: Did you talk to Steven Spielberg about The
Shining? I know he said he wasn’t crazy about the film the first time he
saw it because he felt that Jack was nuts from the word go.
LU: Yes, we spoke multiple times and he wrote
the foreword. Kubrick was mostly interested in Steven because he was fascinated
with how Steven had made such a huge blockbuster in Jaws. He was just
constantly peppering him with questions about Jaws and the marketing. If
Stanley was talking to you, usually it was because you had some information
that he wanted, and that was true for Spielberg as well.
TG: Did you speak at length with Leon
Vitali (Stanley Kubrick’s personal assistant)?
LU: I did, yes. I spent a lot of time with
Leon. He was extremely helpful to me at many junctures throughout the making of
the book. I was, of course, devastated when he died suddenly last summer, that
he never got to see the finished book because he was really honestly the person
I probably wanted to see it the most. He was just a very sweet, kind man. He
had a very complicated relationship with Stanley, but it was loving. I just had
enormous respect for him and how he just essentially gave his life over in many
ways to Stanley. Then even in the decades after Stanley’s death, he did
everything he could to fight the fight and make sure that everything was
presented and handled in a way that Stanley would’ve wanted. Sitting down with
Leon, especially in showing him photos, because I had hundreds that nobody had
seen before, many of them I got from the Danny Lloyd family, it would instantly
bring up stories that he probably never would’ve summoned or remembered.
TG: I’ve seen the film well over fifty
times, and yet I’m still seeing things that I never noticed!
LU: I know! It’s because we’re in this
digital age now where people can do frame grabs and overlay them. If you look
at the Colorado lounge set throughout that movie, practically every scene,
there are major differences from one scene to the next in terms of how the
furniture is laid out, where lamps are, for example. It’s because Stanley didn’t
care about continuity because he knew nobody would notice. What he did care
about were individual compositions. If a lamp in the background was coming out
of someone’s shoulder in a weird way, he’d say, “Get the lamp out of there.” He
didn’t care.
(Photo: Taschen)
TG: What did you stumble across that you
had absolutely no idea about, that was revelatory to you?
LU: I saw lots of stuff in the Kubrick
Archive that made me think, “What the hell is this?” An example of that would
be, I found all these outtake frames, most of which are reproduced in the book.
These are actual compositions, frames from set-ups, from shots and scenes that
Kubrick shot that aren’t in the finished film. A lot of them I could figure out
from drafts of the screenplay and shooting scripts, shot logs, all that I could
figure out. Like the scrapbook, for instance. It used to play a big part in the
movie (as it does in the novel). You can see it on Jack’s desk while he’s
typing. No reference is made to it in the finished film, but there were lots of
scenes about it. There was a whole scene where he found it. There were scenes
of him becoming obsessed with it. There was a scene of him showing it to Wendy.
There was a scene of him going back and looking at it again after he saw the
old woman in room 237. There was a lot of stuff having to do with that. I saw
all those frames, and I was able to figure out what they were. Then there were
other things as well. One in particular, where I never found any reference to
it anywhere, nor did I speak to anyone who remembered it. That was when Jack is
wandering around the hotel with writer’s block where he’s throwing the tennis
ball. He ends up in the lobby of the hotel, and he wanders over to the maze
model. There’s a model of the hedge maze in the lobby. He looks down at it, and
Kubrick cuts to this weird shot that’s almost like the maze in Jack’s mind. It’s
like a maze that’s far bigger and more elaborate than the model sitting on the
table in front of him. As you know, he slowly zooms in on that, and you see a
tiny little Wendy and Danny walking around in the center of the maze. I found
some footage of that same oversized maze model that had been completely
redressed to be encrusted with snow. Sitting in the middle of it was a tiny
frozen Jack. I found both the head and the tail of that shot. It was a slow
zoom. I’m presuming it was a slow zoom-out from frozen Jack. I’m guessing that
Kubrick had an idea and intended, possibly after the shot of him frozen in the
snow, that he would cut to this God’s eye view of the maze and Jack frozen in
it, and just slowly zoom out to reveal him just getting lost in this endless
labyrinth before then presumably dissolving through to the hospital epilogue. I
talked to Les Tomkins, the man who built that maze model, but he had no memory
of the snowy version.
TG: How many people did you interview for
the book?
LU: Seventy-two. I spoke with Kelvin Pike
at his house, and he has the coffee table from room 237 in his living room. When
I was over at Jan Harlan’s
(Kubrick’s brother-in-law) house, Jan has a guest bedroom in the bathroom. He
did a renovation right around the time they finished The Shining, and so
the bathtub in his guest bathroom is the bathtub from room 237.
TG: That’s arguably cinema’s most famous
(and peculiar) bathroom.
LU: I talked a lot with (assistant editor) Gordon Stainforth
who was very helpful to me with the things that he was able to be helpful with,
which is Vivian’s documentary and the cutting of music on The Shining,
which he ended up doing most of. I met Greg
MacGillivray a few times (whose company shot the
opening in Montana). He ended up providing a lot of photographs as well for the
book. He had a big archive. He went to visit the set twice, and Stanley allowed
him to take photos. He had a whole bunch of photos from the second unit shoot,
the helicopter stuff at the beginning of the movie. He graciously gave me
access to his entire library of mostly slides. Some black and white negatives.
It was mostly color slides. Greg is one of two people I spoke to who I really
am convinced has a photographic memory. Vivian was very friendly. I spent two
whole days with her down in Florida, but she was very selective about what she
would talk about. She gave me an amazing artifact, this continuity script that
the script supervisor, Joan Randall, had given her at the end of production. I
was shocked that she’d entrusted me with it. She popped it in the mail, and it showed
up at my office at Pixar. I opened it, and I just about died because it was
this amazing working screenplay with notes all over it, and fragments of paper
right out of Stanley’s typewriter on the set, taped in, and continuity
Polaroids. It was amazing. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, it’s such a shame
that no one is going to get to see this in its entirety.” But, as it worked
out, as we figured out what this collector’s edition of the book was going to
be, I ended up pitching the idea of doing an exact facsimile of this script and
Taschen went forward with it after Vivian gave us approval. Everyone who buys
this collector’s edition gets this. Other than it not having actual photos
taped and glued into it, it’s an exact replica of that screenplay.
TG: Nice! I read that Vivian had shot
roughly 45 to 50 hours on the set during principal photography.
LU: That’s exactly what it is. Yes, 50
hours.
TG: She keeps that close to her vest. She’s
not releasing it. Did you see any of this footage beyond the widely available 30-minute
documentary?
LU: No. There were little clippings,
16-millimeter clippings of it in the archive, all of which I scanned and used
as stills in the book. Jan used some bits of it in his film Stanley Kubrick
– A Life in Pictures. There are some bits from The Shining that are
not in Vivian’s documentary. The family defers to Vivian on that footage
because it was her film. Ultimately, I think Warner Brothers probably owns it,
but in terms of the relationship with the family and the estate, everyone
defers to Vivian, and she just is very adamant about no one ever seeing it.
TG: I know that a lot of viewers probably
felt that Stanley really worked over Shelley Duvall on this film.
LU: Exactly, and nothing could be further
from the truth. Was it a difficult shoot? Yes. Did Shelley have to summon
hysteria and cry on a daily basis sometimes for a big stretch of the last part
of the production? Yes. Was she abused? No, I don’t believe she was abused.
When I talk about this, I really try not to have my own opinion, even though I
do have my own opinion based on everyone I’ve talked to. At the end of the day,
I think that the only person who can really speak on the subject is Shelley. I
have interviews with Shelley, and I spent a whole day with her. We talked about
this, and Shelley remembers Stanley warmly. Shelley is proud of her work on
that film. Shelley will say, “Yes, it was difficult. Yes, it was taxing.” It
was a taxing role and she knew what she was getting into in terms of what the
role demanded, and she took the part. She’s proud of her work.
TG: I am eagerly looking forward to seeing
this book. It looks astonishing. Thank you for all your hard work and
dedication for making this a reality.
LU: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining limited edition collector's edition (1,000) is
available for purchase from Taschen.Click here.
(Lee Unkrich's credits as film director include Coco, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3 and as co-director of Finding Nemo.)
Ok,
its opening weekend was, um, anemic and it seems critics’ long wooden stakes
have been out for "Renfield", but as a longtime fan of the thirsty count in all
his cinematic forms, I found the film to be a highly enjoyable cinematic homage.
Over
the decades, an elite group of actors have donned the black cape – Bela Lugosi,
John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance (in Dan Curtis’ 1974 made-for), Gary
Oldman, Claes Bang (in the BBC’s 2020 mini-series) and now Nicolas Cage joins
the unholy brotherhood. Cage, a skilled and still underrated actor despite
winning a Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, has an absolute blast as
Dracula. Director Chris McKay, working from a script by Ryan Ridley, created a
canvas of vivid colors and over the top action set in modern-day New Orleans. Their
Count does all the things we’ve learned to expect from a vampire – turn into
bats, vaporize into dust, drink blood (in a martini glass) and embody pure
evil.The filmmakers paid attention to
the details – a vampire must be welcomed into a house and there’s a shot of
Dracula stepping over a “welcome” mat.As
every horror fan knows, vampires are allergic to sun so they included an
intense sequence where Dracula is burned to a crisp by daylight – echoes of
Christopher Lee’s crumbling demise in Horror of Dracula 64 years earlier.There is also a clever tribute to Lugosi’s
Dracula where the Count and Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) faithfully recreate
several scenes from the 1931 original.
Hoult,
so good as the starstruck foodie in "The Menu", is terrific in the title role as the
vampire’s lackey who seems slightly bewildered by his long servitude and now wants
to break free from his boss from hell.The production team spared no expense on visuals – Dracula swoops across
the screen, throws people across rooms and severs limbs (as did Renfield, who
drew his superpowers from eating bugs). Rapper/comedian Awkwafina plays a gutsy
beat cop who becomes Renfield’s love interest – although their chemistry is
weak at best and their relationship never really goes anywhere.But the marquee draw here is Cage as Dracula
and he totally eats the role up - snarling, threatening, slashing and oozing an
oily charm.
Deep
thinking isn’t needed for "Renfield", instead it’s a bloody rollercoaster ride
that’s exactly what a shell-shocked, post-Covid audience needs – laughs, gore
and cinema’s most iconic monster, played with real gusto by an actor who isn’t
afraid to have fun and let it rip.Grab
your garlic – or martini glass full of tomato juice and enjoy!
The
1957 romantic comedy, The Prince and the Showgirl has likely received
more press about what went on behind the scenes and the notorious animosity
that existed between the two stars, Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier. The
latter was also producer and director of the picture, although the production
company was the first title made by the newly-formed Marilyn Monroe
Productions. The 2011 picture (was it that long ago?), My Week with Marilyn,
featuring Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh, depicted the stormy relationship
between Monroe and Olivier and how Monroe behaved rather, well, erratically and
irrationally toward her director/co-star, other actors, the cinematographer,
the costumer, and nearly everyone else on the set. The actress even brought
something of a “support coach” with her every day in the form of Paula
Strasberg, who, with her husband Lee, ran the Actors Studio.
Unless
one had actually seen the real movie, The Prince and the Showgirl,
one came away from My Week with Marilyn with the impression that Monroe
was a mess, that Olivier hated her guts, and that the movie they made was a
disaster.
The
Prince and the Showgirl is actually a charming, well-acted, funny, and
touching piece of work. This reviewer is happy to say that Marilyn Monroe is marvelous
in the role of Elsie Marina, a chorus line showgirl of a musical playing in
London’s West End in 1911, when the picture takes place. Monroe displays impressive
comic timing and wit, does a pratfall or two with aplomb, and categorially
holds her own against the likes of renowned thespian Olivier. He, too, is quite
winning, even though his accent as a “Carpathian” prince regent (from the
Balkans) sometimes causes one’s eyebrows to rise. But make no mistake—this
movie belongs to Monroe, and this reviewer would easily cite her performance
here ranked in her top five.
Funny
how the bad rep of a movie and its making clouds what one really sees on the
screen.
Granted,
The Prince and the Showgirl was received with lukewarm praise upon its
release. The BAFTAs honored it with several nominations, including Actor,
“Foreign” Actress, Screenplay, and British Film. It received no Academy Award
nominations. The film did very well in the UK, likely due to Olivier’s presence.
Perhaps the picture’s indifferent reception in the USA was due to its rather
slow pace, length (a few minutes under two hours), and the fact that the story
takes place mostly in static one-room sequences of the Carpathian Embassy.
That’s not surprising, because the movie is based on a stage play, The
Sleeping Prince, by Terrence Rattigan, who also penned the screenplay.
Perhaps Rattigan adhered too closely to the conventions of the stage. All of
these things are indeed flaws in the motion picture.
Still…
this is a worthwhile romantic comedy on the strength of the two leads,
especially Monroe’s luminous performance. Not only does she look fantastic, as
always, but she truly does light up the screen with charisma, warmth, and
delight. Other standouts in the cast would include Richard Wattis, who nearly
steals the movie as the frustrated foreign office suit who is charged with
keeping the prince happy during his stay in London, Sybil Thorndike as the
prince’s dowdy but often frank mother-in-law, and Jeremy Spenser as the
prince’s son, King Nicolas, who to this reviewer resembles what Quentin
Tarantino might have looked like at the age of sixteen.
The
Warner Archive has released a region-free, beautifully rendered, restored presentation of
the feature film in high definition. That 1950s-era Technicolor pops out, and
the costumes are undeniably gorgeous. Unfortunately, the only supplement on the
disk is the theatrical trailer.
The
Prince and the Showgirl is enthusiastically recommended for fans of Marilyn
Monroe. Fans of Olivier, who does what he can when someone so appealing is
sharing the screen with him, will find it interesting. For this reviewer’s
money, The Prince and the Showgirl is far more enjoyable than My Week
with Marilyn, which now seems to be a rather sordid coda to this romantic
comedy bauble.
Click hereto order from the Cinema Retro Movie Store.
Fran Simeoni has been a
well-known name in the world of classic and cult film releasing for a long time
thanks to his years at Arrow Video, but in 2022 he set out on his own with a
new label called Radiance Films (https://www.radiancefilms.co.uk/).
Cinema Retro caught up with him to talk about his reasons for starting
Radiance and their future plans.
Cinema Retro- Can
you tell us why you started Radiance?
Fran – I worked
for Arrow for 12 years. That's where I really learned the business side, but I
got to the point where I wanted to do things that were more in line with my own
interests. It was also about change of pace and a change of scenery as much as
anything, really. What I wanted to do with Radiance was to have my cake and eat
it, essentially, so I left Arrow on a Friday and started working again on Monday.
I had a big list, because you're constantly looking for titles. There are
always things that I'd like to see that I had previously looked into. These
things are always kind of going round and round, so I had loads I could draw on.
Radiance came out of the gates really, really quick, a little bit faster than I
anticipated.
Cinema Retro - Considering
you've been going for less than a year, you've already got quite an big number
of releases either out or announced.
Fran - I
wasn't starting from scratch. I had a lot of things that I knew I could do and
was drawing on relationships that I've had for years and years, so it was it
was not difficult for me to get titles. The challenge for me is doing
everything that's involved in getting them out. It's all the restoration work,
the authoring, creating the extras and stuff. That's what is time consuming.
Cinema Retro –
Let's talk about the Japanese film Big Time Gambling Boss (1968): Could
you just talk me through the process of identifying the title, finding out
where the rights are, the restoration, all that kind of thing?
Fran - Before
I started at Arrow I would basically just find out about films by reading about
them. So that really is the basis for finding lots of things even in a
professional capacity. And I think what happens is it's very easy when you're
sort of indoctrinated into the industry, is to do things by just talking to
people who sell films and do it that way. So in a way, you're kind of working
from their agenda in that they have restored something, and they want to push
that. They're showing at a festival or they've got a screening. If they haven't
got an agenda for a film, and Big Time Gambling Boss was on nobody's
agenda, then it's really difficult to find a film like that. So that and many
of the films do really come from my agenda and that is my reading about them. Big
Time Gambling Boss goes back probably about ten years to when I first read
about it when I was working on the Arrow boxset Battles Against Honour and Humanity.
It came up because we reprinted an article about the Yakuza films and it's
mentioned in there and it went to the back of my mind. I never did anything
about it because it was really difficult to see. Eventually I did find a way to
see it and I knew it was owned by Toei so I just went there and asked, “Have
you got this film? Is it in HD when you restored it?” etc. And from there it's
easy.
Cinema Retro - And
then how do you persuade the consumer at the other end that this is a film that
they're going to want to buy?
Fran - Yeah,
that's the big challenge. I want to be as distinctive as possible because the
boutique label market is an incredibly knowledgeable crowd. We’re at a point
now where the market is so mature that you can take bigger risks. We've got all
the classics, so then we're always adding new great directors. I think if
people are already fans with one thing and then you explain it in terms that
they can have a leaping off point: “So this is a Yakuza film.” You've got
things to cling on to. I think if you have those access points, people are
going to go for it. The trick, of course, is to not overplay your hand. You
don't want to go out and say this is a masterpiece and then people watch it and
think “It’s okay!” I do have some Japanese films coming out which aren't
masterpieces, but they're a hell of a good time.
Cinema Retro - The
phrase ‘Big Time Gambling Boss’ could be on your business card.
Fran - Yeah,
it does feel like that sometimes.
Cinema Retro –
Another example is something like Walking the Edge (1985), where you've
partnered up with Fun City Editions. That's kind of a different approach to
doing the whole thing from scratch.
Fran - I
began to license Married to the Mob (1988) and Cutter’s Way (1981)
and I ended up speaking to Fun City because I knew they were doing them and I
said, “There's no point me doing everything you've done. What's the point in me
doing the same extras as you, with just a slightly different cover?” I like their
stuff and I think they're great films. I explained this to Fun City, and some
of the other labels and said, “Why don't we just partner? I can be your conduit
and you can do what you're doing in more than one territory.” It's been
well-received so far. It's still early days, but that's the idea. We're up to
five labels now. I mean, it just remains to be seen how it's going to go but
the signs are good.
Cinema Retro - One
of the things that you've announced that you've got coming up soon is the ‘Cosa
Nostra’ box set, the collection of three Damiano Damiani films. Was that one of
your projects from the beginning?
Fran - Yes,
that's one of mine. That kind of political filmmaking is really fascinating to
me. I love that era of Italian filmmaking.
Cinema Retro - So
what was it about those films that that made you want to create your first box
set?
Fran - I
had acquired a few Damiani films and these three, as I was working on them and
researching them, it just occurred to me that they have this thematic link of
the Mafia and I just thought that was so fascinating because Damiani went back
to this sort of theme over and over again. When you
have them side by side, they become more interesting. Damiani was somebody
who's never really been given his due. No one has looked at Damiani and said, “What
a stylish director.” He didn't do avant-garde, he didn't do arthouse, he was
sort of squarely in the middle, and I think that's what didn't allow anyone to come
around and say this guy should be celebrated. When you look at all his films,
particularly when you have them side by side, you do get a very strong sense of
him being an auteur and his visual sense becomes much more apparent the more
you look at it. His whole inner ethos behind his films, civic investigation
essentially, is really fascinating. The way in which he does some of those
things is as good as someone like Francesco Rosi or Elio Petri. You had Rosi at
the much more political end and then Petri becomes slightly more baroque, and
then Damiani came after that going more towards genre. And then after Damiani
you have all the poliziotteschi that everyone's familiar with. So that
kind of trajectory is fascinating in itself, I think.
Cinema Retro - And
of course, Franco Nero! It helps that you can have him on the box cover because
he's very marketable to cult film fans.
Fran - Yeah,
absolutely. He is a great asset, obviously. My worry always with everything
that I do, because of where my interests lie, is that I don't want to get stuck
in the cracks, because sometimes some of the films I focus on are too arthouse
for genre fans and too genre for arthouse fans, and these films are a bit like
that. They become increasingly genre as you progress through the set, and
Franco Nero is brilliant in it, particularly in The Case is Closed: Forget It
(1971) in which his performance is one of his best. We have a profile of him in
the book and he's had an amazing career.
Cinema Retro –
What have you got coming up for Radiance?
Fran - We've
got The Bride Wore Black (1968), the François Truffaut film, which is a
lot of fun.
Cinema Retro –
That's interesting as, like you said, it’s got that arthouse versus genre idea,
because when people think Truffaut, they think French New Wave, but then at the
same time, it's got the crime thing going on.
Fran - It’s
François Truffaut's Kill Bill (2003). It's a lot of fun as a film and
it's not a film he was very fond of. He basically made it because he needed to
do something commercial but if you look at the biggest hits of the New Wave,
they were very crime influenced or genre influenced. Just look at À bout de
souffle (1960), with its meditation on Bogart and crime films and so on. So
this for me is just an extension of that, essentially, but it's very much its
own thing. It's as close to Hollywood movies as you get from that period in
France. And it's a lot of fun! Jeanne Moreau is good in it, it's got a great
cast and inexplicably it’s never been out on Blu-ray in the U.K. I had a lot of
fun putting together the extras. And then we have Yakuza Graveyard
(1976), which is one of Kinji Fukasaku's best films, I think. This is an
interesting counterpoint to Big Time Gambling Boss, because that is a
much more traditional, more reserved Yakuza film and then Yakuza Graveyard
is the complete opposite! It's frenetic, it's completely bombastic, and its
violence and visuals are just a lot of fun. I do feel like I'm doing a lot of
crime films. I don't actually want to only do crime films! But I do have a
passion for crime films and this is a great one. It's basically about a corrupt
ex-cop and his dealings with the Yakuza and he falls in love with the Yakuza
wife, played by Meiko Kaji. It was really fascinating to dig into this film
because there is a theme going on with Japanese films of the time and their
treatment of Koreans and treatment of Koreans in the films themselves. It's
difficult to understand as an outsider but we were able to dig into that in the
booklet, which is really fascinating. I love the kind of educational aspect of
this work and it's there if people want it as an extra. I think some people
just watch the film and move on, but it is fascinating when you have this throughline
between all the films. I think the tight curation that we have really helps us.
I think if you're constantly going back to Radiance releases, you’d be watching
The Sunday Woman (1975) from us next month. You’d think “Oh, I really like
that actor, he's quite cool,” and then you'll get the ‘Cosa Nostra’ box set and
the same actor pops up in a completely different role. And then you sort of
start to get a sense of these character actors that you might not really know so
that's a lot of fun as well.
Cinema Retro - Boutique
label collectors and fans are probably the most educated of all the film fans
because so much is targeted at them. There are all these books and obviously
all the releases now have booklets and extras and commentary tracks, and people
can become so invested and know absolutely everything.
Fran - Fans
know more than you do and point things out that you've got wrong. I mean, the
fans always know more than me for sure, because it's me versus 3000 people away.
The fans are always going to win out and that does create pressure in the job. You
do have to be really thorough! The way I manage that is by always trying to
hire the absolute best people for the booklets and the commentary tracks. That
can be a challenge at times if it’s a film no one has ever seen before, but
it's a fun one.
Thank you to Fran Simeoni at
Radiance Films. You can find out about all their current and future releases at
https://www.radiancefilms.co.uk/
Dragonslayer was one of the many films that I
looked forward to seeing as part of Hollywood’s roster of movies during the
glorious summer of 1981 that was owned by Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the
Lost Ark. I distinctly remember seeing trailers for Peter Hyams’s Outland,
Desmond Davis’s Clash of the Titans, John Carpenter’s Escape from New
York, and Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery and wanting to see
them all, though I was only halfway successful. The 3-D gimmick resurgence from
the 1950s kicked off with the R-rated Comin’ at Ya by Ferdinando Baldi
and would continue for another few years. In those days, I subscribed to the
notion that I had to have the tie-in paperback novelization of the film that I
wanted to see. I am reminded of Woody Allen’s Isaac Davis in his 1979 film Manhattan
bemoaning novelizations of movies as
being another contemporary American phenomenon that is truly moronic. I
disagree. Novelizations are often based upon the earliest drafts of a film’s
screenplay and can therefore differ enormously from a finished film upon which
it is based, making the novelization an interesting companion to a beloved
film. I had the novelization of Dragonslayer. I read it forty-two years
ago and while I barely remember it, I recall there being differences.
I
saw Dragonslayer on Thursday, July 9, 1981 with my father and my best
friend at the time. Bruce Springsteen was playing at the then-Brendan Byrne
Arena in New Jersey that night and I recall hearing the disc jockey talking
about it on the radio after we saw the film. The film that I saw was an
adventurous tale that takes place in the center of England in the Sixth Century
A.D. An enormous 400-year-old dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative, is holding the kingdom
of Urland in a grip of deadly fear. In continuing efforts to assuage the
dragon’s wrath and leave the villagers alone, King Casiodorus (Peter Eyre) holds
a lottery twice a year containing the names of young female virgins who are
sacrificed to Vermithrax in exchange for peace in Urland. This scenario does
not sit well with Urland. An elderly sorcerer, Ulrich of Cragganmore (Sir Ralph
Richardson), possesses a magical amulet and is visited by a young man named
Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) who implores him for help to destroy the dragon. Tyrian
(John Hallam), the Captain of the King’s Royal Guard, challenges and kills Ulrich,
placing Ulrich’s apprentice Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol in his first film
role) as the one to defeat the dragon. Hesitant, Galen is convinced to make the
trek to Urland after Ulrich’s amulet selects him as his successor. During a
brief respite, he joins Valerian in the lake while swimming, much to the
latter’s consternation who, it turns out in a brief but explicit revelation of
very obviously non-male anatomy, is exposed as a female traveling incognito to
avoid the lottery. Once in Urland, Galen takes action that causes him to
believe that he has sealed off the entrance to the dragon’s lair, however the
King believes otherwise and imprisons Galen while confiscating his amulet. Galen
has a brief conversation with Princess Elspeth (Chloe Salaman) and tells her
that the lottery has been fixed and her name deliberately withheld from the
commonfolk. Shocked by this revelation, the Princess fixes the lottery so that
only her name is included, sealing her fate to being tossed into the
dragon’s lair. Even in Medieval times, money talks. This leads to much conflict
in the kingdom and a showdown between our intrepid hero and the feared dragon
at the hands of the titular spear.
There
was a slew of sword and sorcery films in the early 1980’s, among them Albert
Pyun’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian
(1982), Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster (1982), Jack Hill’s Sorceress
(1982), Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, all in 1982, with Peter Yates’s Krull
(the film that Columbia invested in while passing on Steven Spielberg’s E.T.
The Extra-Terrestrial) and Giacomo’s Battiato’s Hearts and Armour
coming out the following year. Dragonslayer, filmed on location in England,
Scotland, and Wales, was released on Friday, June 26, 1981, two months after
John Boorman’s Excalibur and two weeks after Desmond Davis’s Clash of
the Titans. It has so much going for it that even author George R.R.
Martin, the author of the novels upon which HBO’s Game of Thrones is
based, proclaimed that Vermithrax is the best dragon ever seen in a film. This
is a view shared by film director Guillermo del Toro, whose enthusiasm for the
film compelled him to enlist Dragonslayerdirector Matthew Robbins writing talents on four films. There
is much to admire here. Mr. MacNicol is wonderful in his first major screen
role as a reluctant apprentice who becomes the kingdom’s only hope to defeat
the dragon, with shades of Luke Skywalker going head-to-head with the Empire’s
almighty Death Star in George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). Ian McDiarmid,
best known as Palpatine in the Star Wars saga, appears briefly as
Brother Jacopus, and the late Caitlin Clarke does an admirable job of appearing
like a male (to avoid being placed in the lottery) at the film’s start. Composer
Alex North provides a sinister score, much of it culled together from the
original music that he wrote for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) but was rejected by Mr. Kubrick in favor of the classical music he used
as temp tracks. However, the real star here is the dragon as brought to life by
the magicians of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), brought to glorious life by
members of the team responsible for Star Wars. After forty- two years,
the film is finally being represented properly on home video in both standard
Blu-ray and 4K Ultra High Definition and the results make previous home video representations
of the film pale in comparison.
The
film comes with a wonderful audio commentary with director Robbins and film
director Guillermo Del Toro who enthusiastically waxes nostalgic and extolls
the virtues of the film, in particular the intercutting of the Go Motion technology
that introduces blur into stop-motion action to create realism to match the
shots of the mechanical dragon. Mr. Del Toro is a huge admirer of this film and
rightly lauds the effects team for creating the de facto standard by which all
future films of this ilk are measured. In addition to the commentary, the
following extras round out the set:
The
Slayer of All Dragons is
the overall title of five smaller high-definition-lensed pieces that can be
watched consecutively for a total documentary viewing of 63:24 in total which
contains brand new interviews with those involved in the film’s special
effects, in particular Phil Tippet, Dennis Muren, and Brian Johnson. First up
is Welcome to Cragganmore (11:08) which takes a look at the effects work
done for Star Wars in the parking lot of the Van Nuys, CA warehouse
where ILM originally began, in addition to the creation of Dragonslayer from
screenplay to screen. A Long Way to Urland (9:21) is a look at the
film’s cinematography, production design, and ornate costumes as the principal
photography began in the summer of 1980 in England. Vermithrax Pejorative
(17:48) is the name of both the dragon and this piece that looks at the star of
the film and the incredible amount of blood, sweat and toil that went into
creating this creature. Truly impressive and feels like the issue of Cinefex
Magazine #6 from October 1981 come to life. Into the Lake of Fire (13:34)
illustrates how issues encountered during production required quick thinking
and problem solving in order for production to continue. The Final Battle
(13:45) is about just that – the final battle between the dragon and Ulrich,
all accomplished in front of a blue screen.
An
interesting section of screen tests (15:42) illustrates why Ms. Clarke and Sir
Ralph were the correct choices. The requisite original theatrical trailer
(1:58) is also included.
I
am so thrilled and thankful to Paramount for restoring and making this gorgeous
package available and for the wonderful memories I have of initially seeing the
film.