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| Marcus Wolland performing The Magnificent Welles at Seattle’s Straight-Edge Theatrics. |
Live Theater Meets Home Theater with StageDirect
The latest from StageDirect, a Portland, OR-based company that films fringe theater for VHS and DVD release, The Magnificent Welles depicts an impassioned Orson Welles as he struggles in vain (long distance over the phone from his hotel room in Brazil) with studio eggheads for final cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.Like other StageDirect videos such as Straight (a comedy about gay-straight conversion therapy) and The Haint (a Southern Gothic ghost story), The Magnificent Welles is a one-man show performed with the kind of nuance that only a writer/performer could give. And the story is interesting enough, too, even for those who already know that Welles was a “frustrated genius,” painfully unappreciated during his own lifetime.
StageDirect is a noble idea. The company has ingeniously attached itself to the niche audience that the American independent cinema, in telling stories that the big-time studios wouldn’t touch with any foot pole, has laboriously etched out for itself over the years. And it’s even a well-researched idea. The company is clearly marketing itself to DVD target audiences of film buffs with disposable income. Though the theater is just more powerful live—plain and simple—The Magnificent Welles, Straight and The Haint aren’t stories that you’d find at your local cineplex, and the performances are really fantastic.
I’d rather have seen these shows in the theater, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Considering how fringe theater struggles to stay afloat these days, maybe that’s the point. For more information, visit StageDirect.com. —Belinda Baldwin
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| Pure Imagination is a pastiche of facts, figures and fun... |
The Golden Ticket
If you’ve ever craved a scrumdidilyumptious bar, steered clear of those with the name Slugworth, wondered why Grandpas Joe and George and Grandmas Josephina and Georgina sleep in the same bed, hummed a few bars of "I’ve Got a Golden Ticket," licked your own wallpaper to see what flavor it might yield or explained how to counteract the effects of a fizzy lifting drink, then Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ($29.95; St. Martin’s Press) is the book you’ve been waiting more than 30 years for.
Written by Mel Stuart, director of the 1971 cult/family
classic, and Entertainment Weekly contributor Josh Young,
the book is to Wonka fans what the Chocolate River was to
Augustus Gloop—absolute indulgence. The book provides a photographic
exploration of both the hardcore details of the making of the film
(from pre-production to post),
as well as the movie’s aftermath and rise to its iconic state
in pop culture history. With exclusive interviews, bits of trivia
and relatively unknown facts about the production (including the
logic behind the Oompa-Loompas’ orange face/green hair appearance), Pure Imagination is a pastiche of facts, figures and fun
for diehard fans of the film and newfound admirers alike. —Jennifer
M. Wood
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The Orphanage Shoots for Film Look on a Digital Budget
Every moviemaker considering a DV shoot inevitably asks The Question: How do I make my video look more like film? Whether you’re a new moviemaker or, say, Cameron Crowe, it can be an agonizing dilemma.
Has The Orphanage discovered The Answer? Founded by three Industrial Light & Magic alumni, The Orphanage, a California-based digital production company, has made a name for itself providing post-production for everything from a Cher music video to Crowe’s Vanilla Sky.
Their famed post-processing solution for video is now available as a plug-in set for Adobe After Effects. Called, appropriately, Magic Bullet Suite 1.0, it is available exclusively from Toolfarm.com.
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Magic Bullet works like this: first, it de-interlaces video from 60 interlaced frames to the standard 24 frames per second rate. In the process, it reduces “artifacts” in the digital image, improving color and image quality.
Next, in the “Look Suite,” users can select from 15 different presets to simulate different film “looks,” or create their own look with effects sliders. The looks range from “Basic” to “Epic,” which simulates the early Technicolor films, to “Bleach Bypass,” which would work for those who are looking to mimic the look of a movie like Three Kings.
From there, the plug-ins enable users to create optical effects like fades and dissolves, crop their footage to different film and TV aspect ratios and check their footage against NTSC broadcast standards.
Magic Bullet is available in two versions: SD ($995), which supports video resolutions up to 720x486 NTSC; and HD ($1,995), which has no resolution limit. With all these tools, all you’ll need is a good story—which is the simple part, right? —Jason Mann
A New Way to Network: TalentMatch.com
It’s a bad day to be an agent. Or so TalentMatch.com would have us believe. The new Website, an Internet-dating-meets-industry-networking venture from the folks who brought you Kiss.com, bills itself as one-stop shopping for everyone from the lowliest amateur actor to a repeat guest of the Tonight Show to an award-winning director. The site offers a detailed biography of each artist and industry rep, complete with video and audio files, resume and contact information. In theory, the site enables artists from all over the world to meet and collaborate with each other using Internet technology. But does it work?
First, the basics. TalentMatch provides three main categories of membership: Talent, Industry and Fan. Once inside, TalentMatch allows each user to search for any kind of artist or industry representative by type, number of years of experience, number of professional gigs—even by distance from a particular zip code.
The practical application of this site for moviemakers remains to be seen, as the value of the technology to moviemakers will be directly proportional to the number of moviemakers using it. If in short order there are hundreds—or thousands—of DPs, directors and actors to choose from, the increased talent pool will mean success. But only time will tell if the notoriously skeptical and very independent film industry seriously embraces a new tool for collaboration. —Jason Mann
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Terror, Titillation and Killer Art
The Art of Noir
The Posters and Graphics from the Classic Period of Film Noir
By Eddie Muller
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York, 2002
338 color illustrations, 271pp, $50.00
Sex and violence. greed, depravity and fear. duplicity, sado-masochism and death. and sex. did i mention sex? The best film noirs had it all—all the titillation the dark side of your imagination could handle. But to prove it, producers had to first get you into the theater. The way they enticed you to see these pulp masterpieces was to create a secondary piece of art—a dust jacket, of sorts—a poster that packed a knock-out punch so economical that it could pulverize any possible resistance to paying the price of a ticket with a single glance. That’s a tall order—more difficult, perhaps, than creating a trailer. But the creators of these posters knew their mission, and as this gorgeous coffee-table volume proves in spades, they delivered more often than not,.
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| Let’s face it, film noirs have always been horror movies for adults. |
Let’s face it, film noirs have always been horror movies for adults. The only difference is that usually the supernatural motif that stimulates the minds of youth (who still believe anything is possible) is removed in favor of those all-consuming preoccupations with the pursuit of money and sex. But all the other basic elements of horror reveal themselves throughout this incredible large-format collection of posters, lobby cards and other promotional material from the noir era. The darkness, the mystery; the blood and terror are present on every page. No wonder this timeless stuff is still so fascinating to us.
Not only does it arouse our reptilian brain stems, it also reminds us of our youth. The posters in The Art of Noir are not only cool, they’re warm, fuzzy ambassadors of nostalgia, as well.
Eddie Muller, who has written other books on noir and is probably as close to being an expert on the subject as anyone, could have gone into the backstory of the artwork deeper than he has, but that would be stretching to find an unsatisfying aspect of this book. Muller has put together an incredible collection of noir graphic material worthy of any movie lover’s home library.
If you can’t afford the pricey original posters, this volume may be as close as you’re going to come to assembling your own display of classic killer art. —Tim Rhys
Bravo for Primera
You’re almost there. You’ve agonized over dialogue and camera angles. You’ve slaved over Final Cut for hours. You’re finally ready to get your movie out to the one audience you know will love it (or at least pretend to love it): your friends and family. But how can you distribute it?
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On plain old VHS tape? But then your gorgeous action shots would be a fuzzy mess. Over the Web, in condensed blips? The way you worked to fix the color in post, that just might kill you. No, you need to output to DVD to protect your sanity, let alone impress anyone other than your mother.
Primera Technology would love to help. With a Bravo Disc Publisher, their new automated DVD burner/printer, you can burn and label up to 25 DVDs at a time. The machine contains a 4x DVD burner that burns either DVD-R or DVD-RW media, and it also burns CDs at 48x! The ink-jet label printer can maintain a resolution of up to 2,400 dpi, providing “stunning graphics, photos and text,” according to Primera’s Website. Best of all, the system is totally hands-free—just start burning and go get lunch!
The machine is a great addition for anyone looking to produce small runs of CDs or DVDs from home, and at $2,495 for the DVD version (a CD-only Bravo is $1,995), it is significantly cheaper than many duplicators.
In theory, the Bravo is an excellent tool for an independent moviemaker, especially one who has limited or infrequent DVD distribution needs. Whether it works well enough to displace online DVD publishing services or high-volume processing houses remains to be seen, but its ease of use and low cost are undeniable.
The Bravo requires FireWire and either Windows 2000/XP or Mac OSX, and comes with disc burning and label design software. —Jason Mann