filmmaking

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George Lucas’s movie – the first for his own company Lucasfilm – American Graffiti was released fifty years ago tomorrow.  It premiered at a film festival and was followed with wide release soon after.  If you’ve never seen American Graffiti you really should do yourself a favor and watch it.  It’s a film spanning the course of a single night, in the lives of a group of friends who are spending the final hours of summer break in 1962.  I don’t know if “plot” is the right word to describe this movie as having.  But it’s a mighty monument to a way of youth that isn’t there anymore.  American Graffiti has a solid cast and a soundtrack that is just as much part of the film as those appearing in it.

Well, I thought that for the occasion we would go WAY back into The Knight Shift’s archives, to when ...

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The legend of Popcorn Sutton lives on!  Thirteen years after he tragically left us, Sutton is definitely not forgotten.  The “last of the old time moonshiners” has been the basis of many an Internet meme and last month was the now-annual Popcorn Sutton Jam in east Tennessee.  The man was the subject of a recent book packed with photos.  And word has it that his original recipe likker is selling well… legally of course.

For a number of years, North Carolina filmmaker Neal Hutcheson produced a series of documentaries for PBS featuring Popcorn.  Two months ago he posted onto YouTube a 2022 remaster of The Last One, which at the time was about Popcorn Sutton’s alleged final brew of moonshine.  It’s well worth a watch if you’re at all a fan of Popcorn or have an interest in Appalachian culture.  It also boasts some awesome music!

 

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It really does seem like just yesterday when we were slathering that fake blood all over Chad’s legs, and making a springtime drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway look like blizzard in the Colorado mountains.  And turning a cousin’s living room into Skywalker Ranch.  So much happened since then and yet, our cast and crew became a family that has endured.  More than endured even.  And for that, I’m thankful that this project got seen through to the end.

Yes, it has indeed been fifteen years since the release of Forcery: that Star Wars fanfilm parody of the Stephen King movie Misery.  I’d wanted it to be ready before Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith but it didn’t quite make it.  Still, it was late May of 2005 when it was first unloaded onto the Internet and about a year or so later it was “serialized” ...

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Just a wild idea that popped into mind while thinking about yesterday’s horrid news about the revival of Twin Peaks:

If David Lynch won’t be returning to helm the new Twin Peaks, then he should be allowed to direct one of the new stand-alone Star Wars movies.

I’m serious.

It’s been thirty years.  He’s ready.

It almost happened anyway, with Return of the Jedi.  Apparently Lynch was George Lucas’ top choice to direct the third Star Wars film.  But Lynch wanted to take the movie into… well, a different direction.  One that veered away from the vision of the saga’s creator.  By all accounts the two filmmakers shook hands and each went their way: Lucas to pick Richard Marquand to direct Jedi.  And Lynch would soon after direct the sci-fi epic Dune, based on the novel by Frank Herbert.

That was more than thirty years ...

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I don’t know how else to put it, but there are some things that happened at Dad’s funeral that despite the occasion were an amazing delight.  And I truly believe that Dad would have had no small measure of pride if he could somehow know that this celebration of his life brought so many wonderful people together to celebrate not only his own life, but also of the most precious things in all our lives.

During the service I spoke a few words about Dad and since the other ministers were sharing stories from his life, I did likewise and related some tales of how forgiving and relenting – even if he didn’t understand what the heck I was doing – of the many stunts that I pulled during the life that we shared.  One of them was during the filming of Forcery: my first (and Lord willing still ...

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Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried, Holocaust, movies, 1972
Jerry’s Kids, circa 1972:
You won’t hear “You’ll Never Walk Alone” the same way again…

It might be the cinematic coup of the decade: a seven minutes-long clip of behind-the-scenes footage from The Day the Clown Cried has been posted to YouTube.

Perhaps the most infamous movie never released, The Day the Clown Cried is the 1972 film directed, co-written and starring Jerry Lewis which ended up in a legal mess about ownership rights which kept it from being finished and distributed.  That was more than forty years ago.  Maybe it was for the best.

What was The Day the Clown Cried about?  Here’s the synopsis as I first heard it: “Jerry Lewis is a clown in a Nazi concentration camp”.  Lewis was playing a washed-up German clown named Helmut Dork (?!) who gets drunk one night and bad-mouths Hitler in earshot of some Nazi officers.  Dork gets sent to ...

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An awful lot of the homegrown cinema lately seems to have more heart and soul than most of the big studio productions.  These two fan-created films are some of the best that I’ve seen lately.

First up, it’s a sequel to the original Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?”.  “Pilgrim of Eternity” has Michael Forest reprising his role as Apollo from the 1967 episode.  The script was written by Jack Treviño (who wrote the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes “Little Green Men” and “Indiscretion”).  Christopher Doohan – son of James Doohan – plays Scotty and Marina Sirtis herself is the voice of the Enterprise computer.  And not being content with just one Apollo, “Pilgrim of Eternity” also has Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica‘s Lee Adama) as a redshirt security officer!




And then we have this: Arkham Rising.  Set during the events of The Dark ...

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BioShock Infinite has been out for over a month. It’s a game I haven’t played an I’m not inclined to either. Why? Because in this blogger’s opinion it’s not a true BioShock game.

For me, the BioShock mythos will always be focused on Rapture: that city beneath the waves of the North Atlantic, not a brightly-lit metropolis floating Lord-knows-where in the sky. The first BioShock game was and remains the most intellectual and even enlightening video game I have ever enjoyed. It’s difficult even calling it a “video game”.  From what I’ve heard, BioShock Infinite‘s world of Columbia is a beauty to behold and has a degree of moral choice… but in the end it doesn’t leave as strong an impression as Rapture.

I’ll say it again: BioShock is high-brow literature of a whole new kind that hasn’t been seen before. And its sequel BioShock 2 did a pretty ...

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Unfortunately it’s something fan-made and… eeeeeaaaaaAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE THIS MOVIE MAKE IT REAL SERIOUSLY MAKE IT REAL REAL REAL!!!

Bill Watterson should let us chip into a Kickstarter and get this produced! Make $50 million the goal and it will reach it in less than a day…




Props to GrittyReboots for the great work!  And thanks goes to Billy Cripe for finding this 🙂...

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In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became President after the assassination of William McKinley. The Wright Brothers were still experimenting with gliders and motorized propellers. Tsar Nicholas II reigned in Russia and the British Empire mourned the passing of Queen Victoria. A child named Walt Disney was born in Chicago. Guglielmo Marconi used his newly-invented radio to send the first trans-Atlantic signal.

Meanwhile in England, a photographer named Edward Turner was experimenting with color negatives and the recent advent of motion pictures. Among other things Turner recorded footage of his three children, Hyde Park, and traffic in London.

More than a century later and after exhaustive research, it is now being reported that Edward Turner’s film is the oldest color motion picture that has ever been found.

Wanna see it? Of course ya do!

The palette of the macaw is particularly striking. But after watching the soldiers marching and the Union Jack ...

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