Tag Archives: Star Wars

The ‘Star Wars’ Movie You Won’t Be Seeing Next Year

December 3, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV 1 Comment

Star Wars fans are like Democrats. Hope springs eternal for another movie that’ll recapture the magic many of us experienced seeing the original film (Franklin Roosevelt) more than 37 years ago but, time and again, these hopes are senselessly dashed, from Return of the Jedi (Walter Mondale) to The Phantom Menace (Al Gore). And now they’re pinning their hopes on (what they perceive) as a visionary director, JJ Abrams (Barack Obama) to clean up the catastrophic mess left behind by George Lucas (George W. Bush). And just as the country remains fiercely divided about Obama’s legacy, with many of his supporters wanting so much to believe the state of the union has improved under his watch, so too will Abrams’s followers strain to find something good to say about his vision of Star Wars, regardless of how the film really turns out. Meanwhile others (Republican pundits) are already finding fault with absolutely everything in the new movie’s trailer, a full year before its official release.

It’s preordained that Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) will make a boatload of money, probably a billion dollars, even if it’s no damn good. It also seems likely that it will be at least a bit better than the woebegone prequel trilogy of the late 1990s-early 2000s, if only because it won’t be subjected to Lucas’s meddling mitts. But will it be any good? Like the Mel Brooks song, hope for the best, expect the worst.

Here’s why: Few seem to grasp, even now, even probably Abrams, the reasons the original Star Wars became the pop cultural icon it did. The other reason is that the movie marketplace has changed so dramatically since 1977 as to render another film like it highly improbable if not impossible.

When Star Wars was brand-new, I was a young lad of 11-12 years old and vividly recall the impact that first film had on ordinary, unsuspecting moviegoers. And it wasn’t just in terms of its startling and varied orgy of special effects, though they undeniably played a role. No, it was everything, the combined strengths of its ingenious synthesis of cinematic influences, the direction, cinematography, music, performances – everything, all accidentally perfectly timed for an audience primed for such an immensely joyful, even cathartic, movie-watching experience. It was a rare example (The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca being two others) of the accidental masterpiece, a movie that could easily have been terrible, but that, luck on its side, miraculously, perfectly fell into place at exactly the right time. You can also visit https://real-movies123.com/

Simply put, audiences were completely unprepared for what they saw. Remember, this was long before the Internet, cable television, the ability to watch movies anywhere at one’s convenience, and a time when pre-release hype was limited to little featurettes that occasionally ran as filler after network prime-time movie airings, or a star plugging his new movie on The Tonight Show. Star Wars appeared as if out of nowhere.

Few saw it opening day, as it opened on a mere 32 screens — 32 screens! — unimaginable in today’s economy. I probably first saw it in June, in a packed theater of film-goers only vaguely aware of the growing buzz, spurred by news reports of long lines on both coasts and ecstatic audience reaction. During those early months – and I personally experienced the film around 15 times during 1977, including once at a drive-in – audiences literally, audibly gasped. They responded with spontaneous laughter, applause, even cheers. It remained in theaters four out of the next five years.

The new Star Wars movie will likely open on at least 5,000 screens and, of course, already, a year before it’s out, fans are scrutinizing scads of photos being leaked across the Internet, and literally every last shot of that teaser trailer. I don’t envy Abrams. Movies shouldn’t be subject to such intense scrutiny before they’re even finished. It would have better to keep everything under wraps until opening day but that’s impossible in this day and age; that Disney’s publicity people want to exert at least some control over the flow of leaked material is probably understandable.

But the new Star Wars won’t be made for me and it won’t be made for you, either. With a projected $200 million budget (about 20 times the cost of the original) it can’t help but cater to the broadest possible worldwide audience, and that means taking few chances or “pleasing the fans.” The first movie was so memorable because it was the first movie – everything was new. Everything since involves characters and a universe we’re now all intimately familiar.

Abrams and cinematographer Daniel Mindel are to be commended for stating publicly they want to minimize the use of CGI and instead film on real locations and utilize scale models as the original trilogy but not the prequels had. Whether this comes to pass is unknown though these good intentions do not seem borne out in the trailer. Regardless, I’d like to see Abrams go significantly further than that.

Would should be a cardinal rule for anyone making a remake or sequel to such films is an intensive study of what made the original so appealing in the first place. This is not to say the filmmakers are obliged to copy those elements or to bend to the demands and expectations of fans of such pictures. But it only makes sense to clearly understand what worked the first time around and to build on that success, or to consciously move in different directions for valid reasons, and even sometimes to subvert what worked before into a work entirely new. Any of these approaches are fraught with peril: Lucas tried second-guessing audience expectations in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (1983) and the results were movies with both good and terrible ideas. By the time he got around to the prequels he decided to fashion them into precisely and down to the last detail exactly what he thought they should be, all other core creative input be damned. Those movies pleased so few because either even he didn’t understand why Star Wars was so embraced. Or maybe he subconsciously wanted to aesthetically dismantle all that he had built. Maybe he was only interested in making money.

But, even earlier, other than some strong story developments in Empire (negated somewhat by several supremely bad choices elsewhere), none of the Star Wars sequels to date have lived up to their potential. Partly this was Lucas’s obsession with raising the bar in terms of the visual effects with each film and implementing CGI technology. Most of the truly bad ideas in the original sequels were his.

The new Star Wars would be better with less, a less frenetic, more deliberate pace and, most important of all, an intelligent, adult, and humanist approach to its story and characters. The first film had between 300-380 special effects shots, compared to around 2,000 in each of the prequel films. Some CGI-filled movies today have closer to 3,000, resembling video games more than movies. What the new Star Wars movie should do but probably won’t is dramatically deemphasize the visual effects. I long to see long stretches of real, unenhanced location work backgrounding character-driven scenes. A few major set pieces, as with the original picture, would be far more dramatic, especially if the screenplay carefully and intelligently laid the groundwork for (and reestablishes) characters and a story its audience can truly embrace.

But I just don’t see that sort of thing in Abrams’s filmography. His Star Trek (2009) probably had more effects shots during its first ten minutes than the entire original Star Wars. I don’t have data about the average shot length in Abrams’s Star Trek movies versus the original Star Wars, but I’d expect the total number of shots of all kinds to dwarf any of the original films.

Star Wars came along at a time when Hollywood-made and foreign films tended to be downbeat and pessimistic: think A Clockwork Orange, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Network, Nashville, etc. As important as its special effects, more so even, was that Star Wars provided escapist entertainment when such movies were comparatively rare. Today, virtually all Hollywood-produced movies are high-concept, superficial escapism. Just as Star Wars movies are no longer light years ahead of industry standards in terms of their special effects, so too is it no longer an entertainment anomaly generally. Audiences have become more sophisticated in terms of their awareness of movie technology, and in tandem have also become much more jaded, even afraid to feel. The spontaneous, unselfconscious euphoria audiences felt as the end credits of the original Star Wars rolled during the summer of 1977 is hard to imagine today. Indeed, readers too young to have seen Star Wars when it was new might find the very idea of that last sentence perplexing. But it’s also exactly what Star Wars fans have been positively craving to experience again for decades.

The new movie brings back the original trilogy’s stars: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. Probably there will be a lot of smart-alecky dialogue about them being too old for this sort of space-swashbuckling (one can already anticipate the catch-phrases), something akin to the jokey, obvious lines found in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), made when Ford was 65. But wouldn’t it be something if the new Star Wars script could find a way to humanistically reflect some of the concerns and interests these favorite characters might be experiencing and feeling in their late-middle age? (Well, Harrison’s now 72. Han Solo’s “autumn years,” perhaps?) The new Star Wars is primarily, perhaps unavoidably targeting 18-24 year olds who don’t have the patience for such contemplation, but what about the millions of original Star Wars fans, primarily moviegoers now in their late-40s to late-60s? The first film was such a resounding success partly because it appealed to such a broad audience spectrum: theaters weren’t just crammed with kids, but middle-aged and senior citizens who rarely went to the movies, many of whom had probably never seen a science fiction-fantasy film in their life. Not before or since have I seen a phenomenon like it: a movie that practically everyone, all age groups, races, tastes, etc. had to see at least once, a movie that nearly everyone enjoyed immensely.

Why can’t we have that again?

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Blu-ray Review: “Sorcerer” (1977)

April 22, 2014 Glenn Erickson Leave a comment

William Friedkin names 1977′s Sorcerer as his favorite among his movies. That’s possibly because he put so much blood and sweat into the show, with a grueling, disaster-plagued shoot in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, as well as Israel, Paris, New Jersey and New Mexico. Impressed by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic The Wages of Fear, Friedkin embarked on a costly remake. In many ways it’s a beautiful show, but it lacks its director’s double-whammy of powerful filmmaking plus incredibly lucky timing. When his The French Connection became a hit in 1971, audiences were seemingly primed for a gritty & profane cop show with thrilling action scenes. In addition to its brilliant marketing campaign, 1973 The Exorcist showed Friedkin willing to pull out all the stops for a horror story that literally brutalized the audience.

Commercially speaking, Sorcerer had big problems. The title led everyone to believe it had something to do with the supernatural, like his previous film. Roy Scheider was the only known actor in Friedkin’s excellent cast. Unrelentingly dark and pessimistic, the movie arrived in the wake of the big Spring release Star Wars, when no other film seemed to exist. As Friedkin himself explains, Sorcerer played exactly one week at Mann’s Chinese before being dropped in favor of a return of George Lucas’s film.

Most critics clobbered Sorcerer as a complete misfire. I saw it on Independence Day (in a packed Westwood theater, I must say) and felt unfulfilled by Friedkin’s suspense-challenged narrative and humorless characters. But how does it play today?

Friedkin and his screenwriter Walon Green open up Georges Arnaud’s novel La salaire de peur by showing how four men came to flee their home countries and end up trapped in a South American oil outpost. Paid assassin Nilo (Francisco Rabal) and Palestinian bomber Kassem (Amidou) flee retribution for their crimes. Caught embezzling funds, French gentleman Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) runs to escape public humiliation and a long prison sentence. Finally, getaway driver Jackie Scanlon (Roy Schieder) takes his one-way trip to nowhere after a botched robbery of Mob money in New Jersey.

As in the Clouzot movie, these four and many other foreigners are struck in a wretched shack town outside an oil company outpost in a South American dictatorship. They haven’t enough money to leave the isolated location and can’t get jobs. They also lack legitimate passports. Their chance comes when rebels blow up an oil well, which must be extinguished with high explosives. The only supplies are too volatile to move by legal means, so the oil company manager Corlette (Ramon Bieri) puts out a call for experienced drivers to transport the unstable cargo 218 miles over ridiculously rugged roads. Three of our renegades make the cut, and the fourth earns his spot through murder. Yet the job is a suicide mission: the oil company is sending two trucks in the belief that at least one won’t make it.

Sorcerer looks great and contains impressive action scenes. The first time I saw the traffic accident in New Jersey I was genuinely jolted. The riot over the burned corpses in the village is also pretty strong stuff; in 1975 it seemed shockingly obvious that the mob would direct its anger at the innocent soldiers and truck drivers. In many ways Friedkin’s jungle trek improves on the first film. The rain-soaked tropical locations are more realistic than the dry mountains in the South of France (?) where Clouzot filmed. The four men endure a worse trip in this picture, that’s for sure.

The most remarkable scene is of course the near-absurd river crossing on a wind-tossed cable bridge that barely has enough wood remaining to support the trucks. The trucks inch their way across, splintering what support planks still remain and at times tilting dangerously. Friedkin judges this scene beautifully. It looks so real that we believe it could actually be done… well, we believe it long enough for the scene to work. Friedkin also can’t be faulted for not sticking to his ‘vision’: the crew tried for weeks to make the scene work in the Dominican Republic, and then had to start over in Mexico. Sorcerer ended up so costly that Friedkin knew it would have to be a big success not to cripple his directing career.

On this truly handsome Blu-ray Sorcerer is a pleasure to watch just for its audacity and spectacular set pieces. But as a fully realized entertainment it misses the mark. Friedkin insists that the show is not a remake, yet it obviously is. The story particulars and what happens to the characters are largely the same. Friedkin and writer Green succeed in making their characters unlikeable, but the actors seem to be fighting that effort. We have naturally positive feelings toward Roy Scheider’s Scanlon, even when he roots for the other truck to blow up, so that his take-home salary will double. Likewise, we want to like the other three crooks- turned suicide drivers. The terrorist bomber’s expertise with explosives comes in handy at one point, and even the loathsome assassin Nilo has the right skill for the moment when he and Scanlon are waylaid by murderous bandits.

Friedkin refuses to give any of his adventurers a sense of humor. He apparently doesn’t want to dampen the tension, but little tension develops if we can’t identify with the characters enough to invest in their survival. That doesn’t happen here. Friedkin concentrates on his precise angles and cutting, and short-changes the human factor. Because Sorcerer is so much like The Wages of Fear we can’t help noticing that nothing that happens is as tense as in the first film. The people are credible but very thin — in the final couple of scenes Scanlon and Nilo’s acting seems to be provided by a makeup job that gives their faces a blood-drained ghost quality. Friedkin’s spooky mood and cynical throwaway finish fall very flat. We admire Sorcerer but aren’t particularly engaged by it.

Roy Scheider is well cast but isn’t given enough to build a full screen personality for Scanlon. Bruno Cremer should have been a bigger star, as he’s excellent; he has a tough face that would have looked great in a Melville-style crime picture. Here Cremer at least gets to show with his expressive eyes what he’s lost: a chateau, a fancy wife, fine cuisine. Amidou is the film’s concession to youth, even though he was 41 at the time of filming. When his Kassem almost falls through the cable bridge, we think that he might get run over, just like Charles Vanel in the original.

Francisco Rabal’s ruthless hired killer is the most mysterious and least probed character, the one that breaks down in fear yet marshals his killer instincts to save the day for Scanlon. Friedkin wanted Rabal to play Frog One in The French Connection but was saved by a providential screw-up: he confused Rabal with his fellow Spanish actor Fernando Rey, who got the part. Rey’s magical performance opposite Gene Hackman provided the chemistry that made French Connection connect big-time with audiences. In Sorcerer no such chemistry is permitted.

Less important but still relevant is the fact that Friedkin’s remake lacks the original’s sense of political outrage, and replaces it with a dull pessimism. The original film carries a fierce anger against an economic system that dispossesses the Third World and places profits above human lives. The Sorcerer just accepts those conditions as a given. ‘Terrorists’ get the blame for the oil disaster.

Viewers may not know what a great actor Francisco Rabal was. A favorite of Luis Buñuel, he played his share of weird creeps but also embodied the movies’ most interesting religious figure, Nazarín. He played Che Guevara and Francisco Goya (twice), and was also the perverted Euro-horror movie director Máximo Espejo in Pedro Almodóvar’s ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!).

Sorcerer is yet another Blu-ray release of this year to carry a music score by Tangerine Dream. In this regard William Friedkin displayed a good ear — 1977 was before Thief, Dead Kids and Risky Business.

Warner Home Video’s Blu-ray of Sorcerer is a stunning transfer, with 5.1 audio, of William Friedkin’s impressive production. After years of low-grade video presentations the color and sharpness of this encoding really stick out. Only one shot seemed bogus, an aerial angle of the jungle in which the greenery leaps out with a blast of oversaturated chroma. But Friedkin hasn’t indulged in any color experiments and the transfer overall is stunning. The bridge sequence in particular looks terrific, half obscured by curtains of pouring rain. It’s unforgettable.

There are no video extras on this presentation. In the fancy illustrated color souvenir book packaging we instead get an adapted chapter on the making of the picture from Friedkin’s book The Friedkin Connection. The director gives an exciting account of the perils of the shoot. From editing the extras for To Live and Die in L.A., I remember hearing that editor and co-producer Bud S. Smith amassed a wealth of film materials from the shoot for the express purpose of making a “Burden of Dreams”- style documentary, or at least a long-form featurette. If Sorcerer had been considered a bigger picture, it might have been possible for such a show to be made.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Sorcerer Blu-ray rates:

Movie: Very Good

Video: Excellent

Sound: Excellent

Warner Home Video

1977 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date April 22, 2014 /

Starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, Amidou, Ramon Bieri, Peter Capell, Karl John, Fredrick Ledebur, Joe Spinell.

Cinematography Dick Bush, John M. Stephens

Film Editor Bud Smith, Robert K. Lambert

Production Design John Box

Original Music Tangerine Dream

Written by Walon Green from a novel by Georges Arnaud

Produced and Directed by William Friedkin

Supplements: color illustrated souvenir book with William Friedkin essay.

Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly?
YES; Subtitles: English, Spanish, French

Packaging: 1 Blu-ray disc in plastic holder in book-style packaging

Reviewed: April 19, 2014

Life-Changing Movies

Godzilla, Luke Skywalker, Norman Bates and Me

February 8, 2014 Gary Teetzel Leave a comment

In a lifetime of watching and loving movies, there are many films that have moved me to the degree that they influenced how I view the world. The films that went so far as to change the direction of my life are far fewer in number. Among this select group I would include the films from my childhood and teen years that first sparked my interest in cinema. All movie fans have memories of special movie-watching experiences from their youth, episodes that transformed motion pictures from a casual diversion to a hobby—or even an obsession. In my case, three films in particular would resonate with me at different ages and help shape my future passion for and appreciation of film. Aside from watching films, playing games on sites like 온라인 카지노 is also a great way to spend your free time.

The earliest of these films I saw when I was about five. While watching some children’s programming on TV, an advertisement came on for a film to be shown late that night concerning, the announcer proclaimed, a prehistoric monster attacking Tokyo. I was already crazy about dinosaurs, but had never seen a dinosaur movie. Since dinosaurs were extinct, the notion that there might be a movie showing me a living, breathing dinosaur had never entered by mind, yet now an advertisement showed me glimpses of what was clearly a dinosaur’s foot and tail. Gobsmacked as I had never been before in my young life, I ran to my parents to beg them to let me stay up and let me see the dinosaur movie—the only way to see it in those pre-DVR, pre-videocassette days. They compromised: I would have to go to bed at my regular bedtime, but they would wake me up at 11:00 PM and let me watch the movie.

The film, of course, was Godzilla, King of the Monsters s impact stayed with me: I was hooked on monster and dinosaur movies. As soon as I was old enough to read I would scour the TV listings for anything with a dinosaur, giant lizard, giant bug or giant ape. At eight I discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which taught me that there was a vast and varied treasure trove of fantastic cinema out there just waiting for me to discover. It also showed me that I was not alone: there were other boys and girls out there with the same unconventional hobby. Well before internet chat boards allowed fans to share their enthusiasm online, Famous Monsters created a sense of a fan community. Looking back, I can only wonder if my parents still would have allowed me to stay up late that Saturday night if they had known that a black-and-white Japanese monster movie would ignite a lifelong passion for movies in general and fantastic cinema in particular.

I was 11 when the next film to have a major impact on me was released. In the early spring of 1977 a Scholastic magazine mentioned an upcoming science fiction movie starring no one I had heard of save Peter Cushing, who, thanks to Famous Monsters, I knew mostly appeared in inexpensive British horror films. The accompanying photo, showing two armored figures and what looked like some pink gas, did not impress. I decided this was probably some cheap kiddie matinee fare and promptly forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, my father brought home an issue of Time saw the film with her classmates and gushed with excitement about the wondrous sites to be seen. Ordinarily, she had no interest whatsoever in fantasy or science fiction, so this really had to be something special. That settled it: I had to see this Star Wars thing, whatever it was.

Like countless children of my generation, the film struck me like a bolt of lightning; to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, I felt as if I had “taken [my] first step into a larger world.” Its impact was multifold. First, it introduced me to the genre of the space opera and led me to explore science fiction beyond the narrow realm of the monster movie. This, in turn, led to me discovering science fiction literature. George Lucas’ frequent citing of Akira Kurosawa and specifically The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin, 1958) as an influence helped spark a curiosity about foreign cinema. (An interest in Japanese cinema in particular was a natural outgrowth from my days watching Godzilla and his brethren.) The then-revolutionary special effects held a special fascination. Seeking information on how they were accomplished led me to Cinfantastique magazine and their special double issue on Star Wars. My technical understanding of film grew by leaps and bounds, and in Cinefantastique I was introduced to a far more mature level of film writing than was to be found in the pun-filled pages of Famous Monsters.

The next film experience to change my life came a couple of years later, when I was 13 or so. I found myself at home alone one Saturday night, so I decided to tune in to Canadian television to catch a classic I had never seen: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I was well aware of the its reputation as one of the most frightening films of all time; I knew of the famous shower scene; I even knew the twist ending, thanks to having seen it on, of all things, the short-lived movie-themed game show Don Adams’ Screen Test. None of that prepared me for the 109 minutes that followed. From the moment Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane made off with $40,000 in stolen money, I was on the edge of my seat. I kept expecting commercials to give me a break from the tension, but, to my considerable frustration, the CBC had decided to air the film uninterrupted. When Janet Leigh disrobed to get into the shower, I couldn’t stand the suspense and quickly turned the dial (yes, the TV still had a dial at the time) for a break of a second or two, then turned it back. This was repeated a few times until the scene was over. By the end of the film I was both exhausted and exhilarated. This had been unlike any film I had seen before.

Star Wars and the monster films of my youth had been exciting spectacles, but Psycho was more emotionally engaging. I knew that it was more than just the writing and acting; I knew that Hitchcock’s camerawork and editing had played a large role in provoking my reactions. But how had he done it? Why had I been caught up in this film so much more than others? I felt as if I had witnessed an elegantly executed magic trick, and I wanted to know the secret.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered Francois Truffaut’s famous Hitchcock interview book in a local bookstore. Pouring through it in the middle of the store, I finally began to grasp the artistry of filmmaking. This wasn’t photographing stories, as I had naively thought as a child; this was using the technology of film for creative expression and eliciting responses from the audience. My way of looking at film was changed forever that day. When I later got a copy of the book as a gift it became, in essence, my first film textbook, and I eagerly sought out Hitchcock’s films to further my studies. Monster films and Star Wars may have made me love movies, but it was Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock that made me appreciate them as art. The Master of Suspense’s theories of filmmaking revealed a wide world of exciting creative possibilities, and it wasn’t long before I began to long to somehow be a part of that world. It seemed unlikely; in suburban Michigan, where I grew up, the dream of working in the movies seemed as remote and exotic as becoming an astronaut. Still, when it came time to declare a major at the University of Michigan, I didn’t hesitate to opt for Film & Video Studies (admittedly I made it a duel major with English; the pragmatic Midwesterner in me wanted a backup plan). I never became the next Hitchcock, or even the next Ed Wood, but I did succeed in carving out a rewarding career in the motion picture industry. I’m privileged to be able to work in the field I love, and it would not have been possible without the passion ignited by the films of my youth and brought to maturity by Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho.

Gary Teetzel lives in Los Angeles, where he has worked in motion picture publicity, film & video servicing and film remastering/restoration. He has reviewed DVDs for the Turner Classic Movies website and been a guest writer at DVD Savant and Sci-Fi Japan.

Feature Articles

Special Report: The Decline of Physical Media and the Rise of Illegal Torrents

February 4, 2014 Stephen Bowie and Stuart Galbraith IV 4 Comments

Almost one year ago Stephen Bowie and Stuart Galbraith IV, on their respective blogs, began debating the aesthetic issues of watching movies via streaming video versus physical media like DVD and Blu-ray. That conversation, which you can read HERE and HERE, happily prompted a lot of good dialogue all over the Net where how one watches film is nearly as important as what one watches.

And, now, the conversation continues with a chat focusing on the subjects of bootleg videos and illegal torrents, as well as the related but fiendishly complex issue of once copyright protected movies gradually lapsing into the public domain, and whether this is good or bad for consumers.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Let’s start with the issue of buying bootleg videos. I think we’re pretty much on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, as well as the related notion of downloading/streaming movies officially unavailable.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, first of all, buying a bootleg is something I’m a lot less inclined to do than possessing a bootleg.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪How do you mean?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Because that does mean there’s a middleman who isn’t a rights holder but is making a profit anyway. I’ll only fill that person’s pockets if I’m pretty desperate to see something. I couldn’t do what I do, as a TV historian, without being heavily reliant on non-commercially released copies of shows. ‪Isn’t that also true of Japanese films for you? Let’s say there’s a private torrent site that contains a whole bunch of fan-subtitled Japanese films that you can’t purchase legally. Would you or would you not avail yourself of those? Would it make a difference if it was for “work” vs. pleasure viewing?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think needing access to movies/TV shows as a researcher is an entirely different issue. When, for instance, I was writing my Kurosawa/Mifune book, many of their films, particularly Mifune’s, weren’t available through normal channels. I ended up buying Hong Kong DVDs, for instance, Japanese DVDs sans English subtitles, and in some cases rented bootleg VHS tapes from Japanese rental stores in LA’s Little Tokyo and elsewhere. I’d rather fend for myself accessing what I’d need through rental shops here in Japan and, when necessary, going through official channels and viewing those titles I’d need to see through archives. ‪What I’d like to address is from the perspective of the ordinary consumer fed up that, for instance, Disney won’t release Song of the South, which has opened an underground market for that title.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Okay. And your response to that, from the consumer’s viewpoint, is what? “I guess I’m SOL then” and that’s the end of it?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Well, first off I believe Disney will get around to Song of the South eventually. The mighty dollar supersedes political correctness any day. Over time labels have gotten around these issues with (for my money, overly PC disclaimers and warnings), driven by legal concerns more than anything else.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪But that’s sidestepping the issue a bit. Are you arguing that someone curious about Song of the South would be wrong to avail him/herself of a pirated copy?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪From a historical and artistic perspective, it absolutely should be released. Besides, my argument with regards to that film is that Uncle Remus is smarter and wiser than all the white people in that movie. It’s no better or worse than a hundred other Hollywood movies from the 1940s, and certainly the racial stereotypes are far more offensive in Gone with the Wind.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Still doesn’t answer my question, though.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪No. I myself have a copy that was given to me as a gift. I haven’t watched it, partly because the picture quality isn’t where I want it to be. However, of the handful of bootlegs I have, all I’d gladly replace with legitimately purchased copies when and if those become available. But I don’t think that’s the case with those who rely on torrent sites for 50-100% of what they watch.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Right. That’s closer to the way I feel. My own primary concern about bootlegs is aesthetic — I’d rather wait and see if a remastered copy comes out somewhere. I even dumped TCM, finally, after deciding that even a recording straight off the air didn’t pass my quality check. Most of those were piling up unwatched in the hope of a legit release.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪With regards to your SOL comment, I think part of the problem is that many folks today want instant gratification. Old fogey me, I remember if you wanted to watch, say, Touch of Evil, what you did was buy TV Guide every week and hope, pray, that sometime over the next 6-9 months one of the 6-7 VHF and UHF channels would air it, and hopefully not at 3:00 am! For me the current state of home video is an embarrassment of riches. It’s positively amazing that so many obscure titles are easily accessible. Sure, there are a bunch I’d love to watch RIGHT NOW that are presently unavailable, but I have no doubt a good percentage of those will turn up sometime over the next year or two. I don’t mind waiting. A good measurement of that is DVD Savant’s Wish List. It was huge 10 years ago, but something like 80% of those titles are now available in some form.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪And I know collectors who yell at me for not having taped, say, The Wackiest Ship in the Army when it ran on CBN in 1984. The fact that my age was in the single digits at the time doesn’t buy me much sympathy.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Even those folks who have been complaining for years about George Lucas’s suppression of the first theatrical versions of the original Star Wars trilogy probably won’t have much longer to wait, now that he’s been bought out by Disney.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Or: I spend 20 years and a lot of money hunting down some rare TV show, and now it’s on YouTube. Any tool who wants can see it in three seconds. It’s infuriating, but that doesn’t have much bearing on the state of things now.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Another thing: I’d bet many of those loudest bellyachers probably have a huge stack of unwatched DVDs and Blu-rays stacked up, gathering dust. Why not look at those while you’re waiting?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Look, I agree with that in general: Like you, I’ve had so much stuff to watch during the DVD era that for the most part (aside from my area of specialty, which is a big exception), I haven’t needed to go outside the proper channels to find stuff to watch.But: One reason I felt like this was a natural extension of our conversation last year is that the shift from physical media to streaming changes this equation.‪ If the market is tilting away from the possibility of a consumer legally purchasing (as opposed to streaming / “renting”) a copy of a movie, does that alter the ethics of bootlegging?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think that shift hasn’t so far stopped the flow of new and interesting releases, for one thing. Sure, if DVD and Blu-ray and all other physical media came to a full stop, that might change the rules. But that hasn’t happened. DVD and Blu-ray have been “dead” for several years, supposedly. I don’t see that now or in the immediate future. What I do think bootlegging and torrents are doing is having some, probably unmeasurable, impact on marginal titles. If everyone who wants a copy has one on their hard-drive already, what’s the point in releasing it to Blu-ray, DVD, or as a MOD?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I’ll bet they are cannibalizing the same niche audience that small indie home video labels need. Which is a problem. Well, then, take it as a hypothetical, or look at some of the isolated instances where it’s true now. For instance, Criterion’s Hulu channel. Even if that’s not a dumping ground for films they don’t plan on releasing on disc (which it seems to be), it’ll take them 20 years to get to all of them. And while I can stream those if I want to (which I don’t), in Japan, you can’t. Don’t you feel the impulse to have someone make copies of those rare Japanese films? Would you ever feel justified in doing so?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Well, I found ways around accessing the U.S. version of Hulu while still paying for the service. But if I couldn’t, probably, no, I wouldn’t ask somebody to burn a BD-R for me just because I want to see something. For research purposes, probably yes. I suppose the bigger question is: By dumping titles they’ve licensed on Hulu, is Criterion damaging the financial incentive to eventually release those titles to DVD and/or Blu-ray?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪That’s a good question. Yes, I suspect that Criterion starting that Hulu channel was a tacit admission that most of those films wouldn’t get a disc release, and so they wouldn’t be cutting into that revenue. But I do see a lot of people on movie forums talking about streaming a film to see if they like it and then if they do, buying a copy. For me that’s backwards — I’ll always seek out the best copy possible for a first viewing, even if it means blind-buying a Blu-ray of a movie I might hate. But it may be that for others streaming and disc purchases aren’t mutually exclusive.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪As the author of a recent piece here on WCP bemoaning the lack of Jacques Rivette titles on home video, would you pay money to obtain those unreleased titles as bootlegs or torrents, and if so would you then re-purchase them should they come to DVD or Blu-ray?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪It’s true that Milestone and a few other small labels have publicly said they’ve dropped plans to release films for which they have the rights because they’ve already been heavily pirated. So that’s not completely immeasurable. It’s really frustrating but, at the same time, still sort of an isolated example. I mean, I’m not going to download a Lionel Rogosin film now because Milestone is working on his stuff, and it’s probably reasonable to wait on almost anything that could come out via Warner Archive. But a ’30s Paramount title? I wouldn’t counsel anyone to hold their breath on that. ‪Would I purchase the unavailable Rivette titles from a bootlegger now? No. But, that’s what I was getting at earlier — I wouldn’t have to. These days it happens anonymously on the Internet rather than via one-on-one contact, but I could essentially “trade” for custom-subtitled rips of French DVDs. I’m not in a huge hurry to do that, but I would also have no compunction about it. For instance: I recently borrowed a gigantic set of Portuguese DVDs of Manoel de Oliveira’s films from a friend. There were three or four Oliveiras I hadn’t that weren’t in the set or weren’t subtitled so, yes, I did indeed acquire non-commercial copies of those so that I could drop them in chronologically.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Technology-unsavvy me asks, “What exactly are you trading?” in terms of technology? And how do you make each other’s needs known?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I don’t want to give away too many trade secrets (and I don’t know many, because I’ve only dipped a toe into this world), but essentially there are private, invitation-only websites where cinephiles upload rare stuff that others can then download as a digital file. In some cases the standards of commercial unavailability, and image quality, are quite high.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Hmm. This sounds like the 21st century version of secretive hoarders of 35mm prints in the old days! In any case I’m guessing we’re talking about numbers too tiny to have any major impact on even the niche catalog marketplace.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Exactly. Also, I believe you mentioned a kind of pool where you and some others commissioned subtitles for rare Japanese films, 20 years ago? Perhaps you can say more about that, but custom-subtitling is one of the factors that drives this underground community, and I think it’s one of the things that makes it ethically defensible.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Yes, well. Around the time I was researching and writing about Japanese fantasy films – this being something like 22 years ago – none of the original Japanese-language versions of these films were available in the U.S. officially. Local TV markets had stopped running them, and the only licensed versions were panned-and-scanned, dubbed into English, and often heavily recut from their original versions. Gradually some of the films became available on VHS by people who’d obviously obtained Japanese laserdisc versions (for the most part) and then had them subtitled privately. Eventually I learned the main dealer doing this was making so much money that he was able to fly First Class to Tokyo several times a year (a $5,000 ride) on all the dough he was making. Fans didn’t care. They just wanted to see the movies. I, however, got to know many of the original filmmakers – directors, screenwriters, composers, actors, etc. – people who’d normally be entitled to royalties from their studios had these movies been legitimately licensed. Clearly this guy was getting rich while the people who actually made those movies got nothing. There was a time before that when I was invited in to a small, private group (mostly fellow researchers) that would all chip in to have these movies privately subtitled. In that case most or all of us already purchased the Japanese laserdisc of the titles in question, so this was, to my mind, merely a self-financed supplement to that experience.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, I started to say that I don’t care if some douchebag gets rich if the end result is wider availability for the art; it’s incidental. Then the second part of your comment makes that seem heartless! But at the time, you have to admit, English-language licensing of those films had to seem extremely unlikely. I can only counter with my own experience, is that often people who made TV in the 50s and 60s ask me, “How did you see that?” And only one or two have then gotten annoyed that I had a copy of some never-released show that they helped to create; dozens, however, have asked me to send them one, because they didn’t have it themselves.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪That’s the thing: Back in the early 1990s it seemed very unlikely that any Japanese fantasy films would ever be released in the west in their original form, except maybe the 1954 Gojira. Nor did I think I’d ever get the chance to see any of the original Cinerama travelogues from the 1950s unless I trekked several hundred miles to John Harvey’s custom-built Cinerama theater in Dayton, Ohio. Now, of course, virtually everything is available, on its way, or under consideration.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Dave Kehr would kick you out of Movieland for writing that! There was more available on 16mm in 1975 than there is on DVD now! Don’t you know that?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I do think Kehr may be right about classical Hollywood films on 16mm in the ’70s, but that gap, if true, is certainly narrowing. Also, to rent (not buy) a 16mm print from a distributor was comparatively expensive, anywhere from, say, $40-$200, just to rent a print for a couple of days. ‪I do want to address a related issue, the fact that we may be entering a new age in which classic films from the 1930s may fall into public domain, most famously Disney’s early cartoon shorts, but also everything from King Kong and All Quiet on the Western Front to Warner Bros. gangster movies and Fred Astaire musicals, etc. Some argue this is a good thing, that it will free-up long unreleased titles. What do you think?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪First off, I think you’ll see new legislation that extends corporate copyrights before huge swaths of sound films start going PD. That’s one reason why I’m provisionally pro-piracy in some circumstances: because big corporations (not the artists who work for them) have been writing US copyright law in recent years. But, generally, no, I think we’ve seen that public domain status does no favors for a medium as technically complex as cinema (or television). ‪I don’t pretend to have all the details figured out, but I’ve always said that the only way to pry the gems loose from the studio vaults is to create some kind of tax incentive for making that stuff commercially available. Obviously a non-starter in the current anti-NEA, anti-arts political climate (although who knows, maybe the corporate handout aspect would have some traction).

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Exactly. As someone who’s worked with home video departments in various capacities, I’m aware of exactly how expensive it is to store and maintain film elements, to create a new video master, etc. If, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs suddenly became available from any and every PD outfit for five bucks, Disney would have zero incentive to ever remaster it again. I’d hate to live in a 2040 world where everyone was watching movies all mastered before 2014. As for private funding, to some extent that’s been happening for years. Hugh Hefner has facilitated the restoration of many films through his projects at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and elsewhere. And as much as people gripe about DVD-R programs, it’s an avenue in which studios have found a way (well, some have, MGM’s is DOA) to make obscure, extremely niche titles that probably sell a couple hundred units cost-effective.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪There are a lot of Universal TV shows trapped in that kind of limbo now: The existing tape masters burned in the vault fire a few years ago, and no licensee is ever going to be able to afford to retransfer from the negatives. So your only shot at seeing BJ and the Bear at this point is old syndicated broadcasts posted on YouTube, basically. No, I’m very schizoid when it comes to the studios: If they’re taking good care of stuff and releasing it commercially, I’m their best friend. If they’re neglecting it, fuck ‘em: I’ll “steal” it.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Of course, with TV there’s the problem of volume. It’s easier for Warner Bros. or Sony to remaster an hour-long Buck Jones Western and market it to hard-core B-Western fans with a $19.98 SRP than it is to take a chance on a 30-year-old TV show with 150 50-minute episodes.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Yes. Although many distributors have found a way to do that on DVD, and in fact I think Time-Life and Shout! may have realized that “complete series” box sets are in some cases more marketable than a slow trickle of the same series. However, that may also explain how you and I are coming from different places here. As a TV guy, it’s always been up to me to acquire what I want to see, either by recording reruns or from collectors. Only in the last 10 years has it been possible to buy more than a handful of old TV shows.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Clearly, also, emerging computer technologies are making previously prohibitive projects, like the reconstruction of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World possible. Twenty years ago the same work might easily have cost ten times what they were able to bring that title in for.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪There, you see the kind of thing this demon technology can spawn? Shudder.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Yes, and also content-starved media like Hulu I’m sure is driving TV (and film) availability like never before. The damnedest TV shows seem to be turning up on Hulu.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Actually, I’m mildly surprised that streaming hasn’t liberated more old shows. Researching my David E. Kelley piece, for instance, I found that only early seasons of The Practice, Picket Fences, and Chicago Hope were on Hulu; presumably, only what had been remastered for potential DVD releases (most of which didn’t materialize). Warner streams a few shows (e.g., Hawaiian Eye) where they can’t clear music rights for whole season disc releases, and some recent shows that didn’t get a disc release (like Rubicon) will show up on Amazon or Netflix. But I’ve yet to see a motherlode that didn’t also appear on DVD.‪ I don’t think, in other words, that streaming is really driving that side of the home video business … which may be a good thing. I don’t know.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪As a resident of Manhattan, I want to ask you about the bootleg scene in NYC and how that’s changed, and also if you ever checked “specialty” dealers in, say, Spanish or Chinese neighborhoods.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I’ve done a little bit of that, but because ethnic video stores are targeting native speakers, there’s a limit on how much I can infiltrate them. I used to live in a neighborhood with some Indian video stores, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the DVDs in there. You may remember that I came to you for help when I found a cheap, very well-stocked Japanese video store in midtown. ‪In that case, I ended up printing out box art from Amazon Japan and other websites in order to find some of the few Japanese DVDs that had English subtitles. And I did find most of the Juzo Itami and Hiroshi Shimizu films that aren’t available here. But … once I started renting, I realized that most (though not all) of the rental copies had been replaced with bootlegged copies! So, even though Japan is not one of the countries we generally associate with video piracy, there you have it.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I find places like that fascinating. In Los Angeles I used to frequent Hong Kong and Chinese places recommended by Hong Kong cinephile Jeff Briggs, partly for those movies but also because they sometimes sold LDs or VCDs (and, later, DVDs) of obscure Japanese movies. There was a time, for instance, where the only way to see some of Kurosawa’s early films with English subtitles was via Hong Kong DVDs and VCDs.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, at one point I counted, and I have directly ordered DVDs from over 15 different countries!

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think generally immigrant neighborhoods of all nationalities tend to do this, less so classic films and more often tapes of ordinary network prime time shows shipped to the States for homesick emigrants.‪

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪That’s interesting. That Japanese store did have a lot of JP (and Korean) TV shows, and many US films & TV shows, which would’ve been cheaper for me to rent there than from a regular video store … if they’d been the real thing! And understand, my objection to those bootlegs was aesthetic as well as moral, because they’d been compressed from dual to single layer in most cases. Fortunately the Itami discs were the originals, for some reason.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ There was a time when in, say, Times Square, you could openly buy bootleg copies of the very latest movies, as in within a day of their theatrical premiere and even before, usually taped by a guy sitting in a theater with a camcorder. (Seinfeld did an episode all about this.) Does that sort of thing still exist today?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I was thinking about that — yes, I still see the guys on the sidewalk with the blankets full of $5 pirated DVDs, though not as often. And I’m assuming they’re downloading those off the internet, not infiltrating a theater with a camcorder. Backing up one medium: When 35mm gave way to DCP, it took out the key ingredient in the experience of going to movie theaters for me. Yes, you still have the size and the shared audience experience … but I realized that what mattered most to me was that photochemical quality of celluloid. Without that, I lost the motivation to go to the cinema, and shifted most of that viewing to my home theater….

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Same here….‎ ‪So, onto my last point: What’s the scene going to be like five years from now? Will torrents and downloads, legal and illegal, kill DVD and Blu-ray for good?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪It’s not quite as dire, but in the same way, I feel like I would at least partially reject streaming video if it were to supplant physical media as the dominant delivery mode for home video. And what follows from that, naturally, is what do I do next? That has caused me to adjust my thinking about piracy somewhat.‪ Not because I feel entitled to free stuff (which is why many people download movies illegally) but because I do feel entitled to keep a movie in perpetuity if I purchase it, and to own a physical copy. Or am I not entitled to that, ethically? What do you think?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪So then, almost bringing this full circle, yours is predominately cautious measure while I see no immediate end to this party, content that new DVD and Blu-ray titles will continue to flow in the foreseeable future, maybe not in exactly the way we’d like it all the time, but with enough new interesting stuff to keep me more than busy for the time being.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I don’t think I really have a prediction as to how fast things will change, but I think it’s clear that (1) there’s less demand for physical media, and that DVD & Blu-ray are evolving into a boutique market (like vinyl); and that (2) the rental market was a “bubble” that’s almost gone, and the future of consuming movies will mainly be a choice between buying or stealing. So, again, I ask it directly: If the choices are between streaming legally and acquiring a superior copy of it extralegally, what would you choose? In that future, would you censure cinephiles for congregating around private torrent sites?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think I’ve always been pretty clear on this point: As long as physical media exists for me that trumps even legal streaming, let alone poor quality bootlegs. I think where we disagree is about the speed and certainty about it going away for the most part or completely. Should it go away completely then, I suppose, all bets are off. It may come to that eventually but not, I don’t believe, anytime in the next five or six years.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Yes, I think that’s true in terms of the time frame. It’s even possible that I should be more worried about being able to buy another plasma TV when the time comes than about finding discs to watch on it.

We at World Cinema Paradise value your opinion. What do you think? Join in on this discussion by leaving your comments below….

Title: ABSENT MINDED PROFESSOR, THE ¥ Pers: MacMURRAY, FRED ¥ Year: 1960 ¥ Dir: STEVENSON, ROBERT ¥ Ref: !AB001AF ¥ Credit: [ WALT DISNEY / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]

Feature Articles

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Other Flying Cars of Cinema

January 30, 2014 Anthony Balducci 1 Comment

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), a children’s film about a family that comes into possession of a magical flying car, was released on Blu-ray on January 21. This has inspired me to examine the history of flying cars in films.

Man has long dreamed of traveling in his very own personal flying conveyance. For traveling you need to check all the travel information, For more details visit to Absolute Back Packers website. During traveling you need a best hotel to stay, Hotel blog provide you the information about hotels food, refreshment and their similar service. Epic poems produced in India during the late Antiquity described flying chariots, also known as “sun chariots.” Folk tales depicted men riding magic horses into the sky. Samuel Brunt’s 1727 novel A Voyage to Cacklogallinia depicted a character ascending to the moon in a palanquin held aloft by human-sized birds.

Still, without question, the most popular personal flying device was the flying carpet. The flying carpet were part of adventurous fairy tales that once delighted the inhabitants of the Parthian Empire. This conveyance was originally depicted as a weapon of war. A folk story from 130 BC involves a Parthian king, Phraates II, who rides a cloth or carpet to the Seleucid Empire to battle rival king Antiochus VII. Phraates promptly destroys Antiochus by raining fire and lightning down upon him. He celebrates his victory by riding the carpet over cheering crowds. A similar story appeared in 260 AD. This time, Persia’s King Shapur I uses a magic carpet to surprise Roman emperor Valerian. Shapur pulls Valerian onto the carpet and flies him to a Persian camp. Flying carpets figured into many other war stories. A Thirteenth Century folk tale spotlighted a squad of Toranian archers carried aloft by flying carpets to lay siege to an enemy castle.

In 2004, Pakistani author Azhar Abidi received acclaim for his mock scholarly essay The Secret History of the Flying Carpet, which alleged to feature quotes from recently unearthed ancient scrolls. He described a menacing warrior flying his carpet over an open-air marketplace. He wrote, “On a pleasant evening, when the suk was bustling with people, and the veiled ladies from Georgia had just disembarked from their litters and were being escorted to the silk merchant, a madman appeared from behind a dome and swooped down at them. The flier was a giant of a man with a magnificent black beard and long hair trailing in the wind behind him. He was wearing a loincloth, his eyes were a luminous green, an eagle was flying by his side, and he was laughing madly. The women saw this apparition heading towards them and froze with terror as he tore away his loincloth and started urinating in their upturned faces.” While soaring over Washington D.C. in his Flubbermobile, Fred MacMurray never tried to urinate on the National Science Foundation for denying him a research grant. But we’ll get back to him later.

The flying carpet became an international sensation when it was featured in the Middle Eastern folk tale “The Three Brothers,” which was included in the famous Arabian Nights book. The flying carpet is largely associated with another Arabian Nights tale, “Aladdin and The Magic Lamp,” but that story did not originally include a flying carpet. It did, however, include a flying bed. Aladdin is upset to learn that his beloved has married the son of the Grand Vizier. He commands his genie to “bring hither the bride and bridegroom.” The genie transports the newlyweds across the city atop their marital bed. That was somewhat risqué for a story that is now widely enjoyed by children.

Jules Verne was a flying car pioneer. In his 1870 novel All Around the Moon (1870), Verne described three men embarking on a journey to the moon in a flying car. He wrote, “The three travelers approached the mouth of the enormous cannon, seated themselves in the flying car, and once more took leave for the last time of the vast throng standing in silence around them. The windlass creaked, the car started, and the three daring men disappeared in the yawning gulf.”

Verne’s 1904 novel Master of the World features the Terror, an invention capable of many transformations. It could function as a boat, car or aircraft. This machine, which possessed wings that folded out from its sides, was able to “dart through space with a speed probably superior to that of the largest birds.” Verne, too, envisioned a flying car being solely produced for the purpose of war.

Illustration of The Terror by Georges Roux

Filmmakers initially saw flying cars as something funny. The earliest film known to feature a flying car was a 1906 British comedy called The ‘?’ Motorist, in which a speed freak motorist escapes a police officer by driving up the side of a building and flying into outer space.

The 1923 Mack Sennett comedy Skylarking featured a car that is lifted high into the sky by a hot air balloon.

The inventor (Harry Gribbon) proudly stands alongside his hot air balloon car.

Of course, the intrepid stuntmen of early Hollywood did not need special effects to make a car take flight.

An establishing shot of a futuristic city is not complete without flying cars. This matter is well addressed by the following quote from the TV Tropes website: “Perhaps the earliest example in film would be the small personal airplanes seen flitting amongst the buildings in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1927]. They may not have looked like cars, but they seemed to fill the same function. This was probably also the Trope Maker for the whole ‘throw in some flying cars zipping between giant buildings to establish that we’re in The Future’ thing, and it remains popular to this day.”

The Ub Iwerks cartoon Happy Days (1936) features a car that levitates high into the sky when its owner puts too much air in its tires. The cartoon can be found on YouTube.

The flying car became a long overdue sensation with The Absent Minded Professor (1961). Professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray), the professor of the title, accidentally invents flying rubber, or “Flubber,” which he uses to make his Model T fly. This is a impressive juxtaposition of past technology and future technology. The film’s special effects supervisors, Robert A. Mattey and Eustace Lycett, were so masterful in their use of miniatures and screen matte effects that they were nominated for an Academy Award.

The Absent Minded Professor excited a flying car trend. Later that same year, moviegoers who bought an admission ticket to Invasion of Neptune Men (1961) saw a superhero known as Space Chief fly around in a rocket-propelled car to battle an invading army from outer space. Soon, flying cars were abound on television.

The French film Fantômas se déchaîne (1965) climaxes with arch villain Fantomas escaping in a Citroën DS that uses retractable wings to convert into an airplane. This invention and others in the film were no doubt influenced by the popular gadgets featured in the James Bond films.

The Citroën DS, which was known for its aerodynamic futuristic body design, lent itself well to this scene and is largely the reason that this flying car has remained an iconic movie prop for the last fifty years.

The car was recently featured in a short comedy film in which Fantomas is shown in grease-stained red overalls struggling to repair his flying car.

The flying car was a well-worn concept by the time that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came along. The car, which possessed the same abilities as The Terror vehicle, did not at first seem to offer the slightest novelty, but it was eventually revealed that the car was endowed with independent intelligence and was able to respond efficiently to threats with a variety of devices. That was, admittedly, a new twist.

The car was designed by famous production designer Ken Adam, who is best known for his work on the early James Bond films and Dr. Strangelove (1964), and cartoonist and sculptor Frederick Rowland Emett. A clear effort was made to make this flying car more fanciful than MacMurray’s flying Model T. The designers took advantage of the fact that, while The Absent Minded Professor was a black-and-white film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was to be filmed in Technicolor. The car’s wheels and upholstery were made an eye-catching crimson red. Prominent were the car’s wavy-edged wings, across which were painted red and yellow stripes. Other trappings included flotation devices and propellers that were deployed as needed. Surprisingly, though, the car does not appear much in the film and the traveling matte effects are embarrassingly inferior to Mattey and Lycett’s effects in The Absent Minded Professor. This is a particular disappointment because the special effects were supervised by the well-respected John Stears, who had won an Academy Award for his work on Thunderball (1965) and later won his second Academy Award for his work on Star Wars (1977).

John Burningham’s illustrations for Ian Fleming’s original novel depict a much plainer design for the car.

The flying car allowed another villain to escape capture in a James Bond spy adventure, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). This scene was as much about the future of marketing as it was about the future of travel. American Motors Corporation (AMC) furnished the production with 15 vehicles for the purpose of product placement. Inspired by an actual flying car prototype, special effects director Derek Meddings attached wings and a flight tail to a gold-colored AMC Matador coupe. Bond later learns that the flying car traveled 200 miles before landing, but the actual machine was only able to fly for 1,640 feet. John Stears had to build a remote-controlled scale model for the aerial scenes.

The prototype that inspired this creation did not fare well. The inventor later crashed his flying car and died.

Star Wars (1977) and its sequels featured a variety of personal flying vehicles, including a flying car called an airspeeder.

The flying car was taken to the next level with the Spinners from Blade Runner (1982). The Spinner was agile. It could take off vertically, hover, and use jet propulsion to cruise through the sky. Syd Mead, an industrial designer who began his career at Ford Motor Company, came up with the design for the vehicle.

The actual three-dimensional cars were built by automotive designer Gene Winfield. Winfield chose to build the Spinner on a Volkswagen chassis because the Volkswagen was designed with its engine in the rear and this allowed him to be extravagant in his arrangement of the vehicle’s front hood.

Repo Man (1984) unveiled a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu that could fly.

In The Last Starfighter (1984), a teenage boy is befriended by an old man, who whisks him away from his home in a flying car. The “Star Car,” as this vehicle was called, was designed based on the DeLorean automobile.

Elements of The Last Starfighter turned up the following year in Back to the Future (1985), in which an old man whisks a teenage boy away from his home in a flying car. The car in Back to the Future, which chiefly serves as a time machine, was also based on the DeLorean automobile. The car took its most remarkable innovation from the landing gear design of a plane. The car had the ability to drive normally on terrestrial byways, but it could fold its tires into its undercarriage once it took flight.

Hidden out of view were the cranes and cables used to lift the car and create the illusion that it was flying.

Winfield, who designed and constructed the Star Car, was hired to build a flying DeLorean for Back to the Future Part II (1989). Winfield had worked for John DeLorean at one time and he admired the man for his design innovations. He made molds off a DeLorean, which he then used to construct a 700-pound fiberglass model.

Winfield brought in his past creations to dress the sets meant to represent the 2015 version of Hill Valley. These vehicles included the Star Car from The Last Starfighter, a Spinner from Blade Runner, 6000SUX from Robocop (1987), and Bubbletop from Sleeper (1973).

Sitting in the driveway of a quiet suburban home was a Spinner that had been garishly repainted yellow and green.

The Star Car makes a cameo appearance in the downtown area. The car can be clearly seen on the far left side of this screen capture.

A scene in which the car lands during a rain storm demonstrates a clear Blade Runner influence.

Mel Brooks spoofed the flying car trend by introducing a flying Winnebago in Spaceballs (1987).

Later that same year, the Doctor Who series presented a flying bus in the episode “Delta And The Bannermen.” This helped heavy load vehicles to take flight in legitimate science fiction films.

The Star Wars universe is currently filled with hovertrucks. The Fhloston Paradise, a 2,000-foot-long luxury cruise ship that sails above the Earth, was featured in The Fifth Element (1997).

Still, a more memorable scene from The Fifth Element shows a squadron of flying cars tangled up in a police chase through a futuristic New York. The five-minute scene, which consisted of more than 70 shots, was a masterful blend of miniatures, CGI elements and digital matte paintings.

Mark Stetson, visual effects supervisor, admitted that they replicated many elements of the Spinner cars from Blade Runner, but an effort was made to give the film a very different look than the earlier film. Stetson said, “The flying cars are a lot more whimsical, and the city is set in broad daylight. The film is rooted in a much more utopian vision of the future than Blade Runner, which virtually defined the post-apocalyptic look of futuristic films for more than a decade.” Effects cinematographer Bill Neil admitted that he was shocked when the director, Luc Besson, insisted that the sequence occur in broad daylight. Neil said, “Miniatures are often saved by the fact that you don’t see much of them, but this whole sequence took place late in the day, and it had to hold up to scrutiny.”

This flying food truck reflected the filmmaker’s whimsical vision for The Fifth Element.

Children were never more thrilled when a flying car showed up in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002).

The producers of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) partnered with the Chrysler Group for the big-screen debut of the comic book heroes’ flying car, The Fantasticar. The car was designed with a great deal of input from the Chrysler Group’s chief stylist, Trevor Creed. The vehicle was a big step up from The Terror, which could “dart through space with a speed probably superior to that of the largest birds.” It could travel at 550 miles per hour, ascend to 30,000 feet, soar across the globe on autopilot, and split into three independent sections. The car, which was built on top of a Dodge Charger, featured the Dodge logo on front and back.

In 2009, Russian film company Bazelevs Productions had tremendous success with Black Lightning, a superhero film about a college student who fights crime with a flying car. Universal is currently developing an English-language remake.

Government contractor Stark Industries displays a flying car prototype in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).

Chrysler returned to the flying car business after pouring a large amount of marketing dollars into Total Recall (2012). Patrick Tatopoulos, the film’s production designer, said that he had to consult with Chrysler every day on design matters. He admitted that they sometimes had an issue with their design choices and they needed to make changes to “make them happy.”

Total Recall (2012)

The film’s hover cars were mounted on a rig, which included a go cart attached to the bottom. The rigs carried the cars at high speeds beneath the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto and throughout an unused Canadian air base at Borden. Visual effects supervisor Adrian de Wet said, “We let rip with the cars. . . We drove the cars around at 40-50 miles an hour, allowing them to smash into each other. We wrote off a few cars, smashed a few cameras – all that kind of stuff.” Of course, the rigs were digitally removed in post-production.

The flying cars keep coming with no end in sight.

flying cars - Russell T Davies’s 2012 show Wizards vs Aliens

Wizards vs. Aliens (2012)

You can no longer watch a movie about the future without seeing flying cars. But this isn’t presented as a cliché. Filmmakers see the mass-produced flying car as an inevitability and believe that leaving it out of a futuristic cityscape would be like leaving an refrigerator out of a scene set in a modern kitchen.

This is a functioning flying car named the I-TEC Maverick.

I have less faith on the subject. So, for now, I will continue to consider the agile, swooping flying car as something that I can enjoy only by watching a good fantasy film.

You can read about flying cars on television by visiting my blog at http://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/.

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