Stupid Question ™
May 9, 2005
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: Where did the fake name Alan Smithee come from for directors of bad movies?
—Scott and Doug, Columbus, Ohio
A: Originally “Allen Smithee,” this pseudonym has become a kind of Hollywood in-joke for directors who are embarrassed—or simply don’t care—about their work. But it began as a serious solution to a union problem.
It goes back to the Richard Widmark/Lena Horne Western (you can see where its problems began) “Death of a Gunfighter,” which began lensing in 1967 under the direction of Robert Totten.
Totten was predominantly known—well, not for anything. But he had experience directing the TV series “Gunsmoke.” The studio, not liking his work, quickly yanked him from the project.
He was replaced by the great action director Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). Siegel did his job, but he wasn’t very happy with the mishmash, either.
When the movie finally hit theaters two years later, egos and embarrassments led to neither director wanting his name on the movie. It being unheard of for a movie to be released anonymously, this was a problem.
The Directors Guild of America, the trade union that sets rules on this sort of thing, at first wasn’t having any of it. But finally, it decided to establish an official fake name to shelter unsatisfied directors (especially those unsatisfied due to forces beyond their control).
The general approach was to create a name that was unobtrusive, yet wouldn’t be confused with any innocent director.
I haven’t found any records of how “Allen” was selected. “Smithee” began as the mega-discreet “Smith,” until it was realized there would eventually be some innocent Allen Smith out there would get saddled with “Death of a Gunfighter.” And so the extra “E”s were added on the theory nobody would ever have that name.
The Allen Smithee deception worked, and Hollywood lore now includes the reviews of “Death of a Gunfighter” that praised Smithee for his deft direction.
Nobody would mistake the name for real today. The name, which has curiously morphed into “Alan Smithee,” is often self-consciously used by directors of straight-to-video dreck and similar movies that are simply bad out of the box, not the result of some kind of tampering.
And the joke really came out of the closet (or would have, if anyone had seen such a wretched movie) with the 1997 satire “Burn Hollywood Burn,” about a “real” Alan Smithee who comes to Hollywood, wants to remove his name from an awful film and finds out the pseudonym is his real name.
The Directors Guild is less uptight these days, and has less control over various filmmaking outlets, so other pseudonyms are used, with none being standard.
The Internet Movie Database has an amusing faux biography of Alan Smithee, including a shooting-down of the theory that the name came from an anagram for “The Alias Men.” Naturally, the biography is credited to “Alan Smithee.”
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
March 29, 2008
March 28, 2008
Monsters With Outstretched Arms
Stupid Question ™
April 24, 2003
By John Ruch
© 2003
Q: Why do Frankenstein’s monster, zombies and mummies all walk with their arms stretched out in front of them?
—Devon
A: The obvious answer would be that it makes the monsters look menacing, as if reaching out for new victims.
But the monsters are typically shown shambling around like that even when there’s no one to threaten.
In the original movies that established these monsters, they never walked around like that, though they occasionally reached out for people. (Sara Karloff, daughter and estate manager of the late “Frankenstein” star Boris, told me she had no idea where the image came from.) The outstretched arms are a caricature created by cartoons and commercial illustrators.
There’s a striking similarity to the way sleepwalkers are caricatured in cartoons and commercials—arms held rigidly out, hands hanging limp—which is also of mysterious origin. Real-life sleepwalkers hold their arms normally.
I talked to sleep disorder experts Dr. Jean Matheson of Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dr. Neil Kavey of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center’s Sleep Disorders Center in New York.
Both suggested that the sleepwalker caricature may come from the misunderstanding that sleepwalkers can’t see and have to feel their way around.
Kavey noted some conventionalized posture was inevitable, because it’s otherwise not clear in fiction that the walker is asleep (a fact that can be hard to notice in reality, too).
The posture might also have a factual basis in a still-popular hypnotism act in which the subject is ordered to hold an arm straight out while some strong guy attempts (and always fails) to pull it down.
In any case, the monster/sleepwalker similarity is not only in posture but in theme. The classic film depictions of Frankenstein’s monster and zombies were directly inspired by the groundbreaking German film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919), which involved a murderous, hypnotized sleepwalker.
Death and sleep are often connected in literature and psychology. And, like “Caligari’s” sleepwalker, all the classic movie monsters you name are also quasi-mindless creatures under the direction of a more-conscious keeper. (Vampires, which move at normal speed and are fully conscious, are never depicted with permanently outstretched arms.)
“White Zombie” (1932), the very first zombie movie, is about an evil voodoo zombie-maker who is also a hypnotist; the script for “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943) describes zombie movement as like “walking in a deep sleep.”
I don’t think the outstretched-arm caricature was invented deliberately.
The rigidity of the arms and their constantly outstretched pose was probably borrowed, unconsciously, from conventional depictions of sleepwalkers, who are thematically very similar to shambling undead movie monsters.
April 24, 2003
By John Ruch
© 2003
Q: Why do Frankenstein’s monster, zombies and mummies all walk with their arms stretched out in front of them?
—Devon
A: The obvious answer would be that it makes the monsters look menacing, as if reaching out for new victims.
But the monsters are typically shown shambling around like that even when there’s no one to threaten.
In the original movies that established these monsters, they never walked around like that, though they occasionally reached out for people. (Sara Karloff, daughter and estate manager of the late “Frankenstein” star Boris, told me she had no idea where the image came from.) The outstretched arms are a caricature created by cartoons and commercial illustrators.
There’s a striking similarity to the way sleepwalkers are caricatured in cartoons and commercials—arms held rigidly out, hands hanging limp—which is also of mysterious origin. Real-life sleepwalkers hold their arms normally.
I talked to sleep disorder experts Dr. Jean Matheson of Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dr. Neil Kavey of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center’s Sleep Disorders Center in New York.
Both suggested that the sleepwalker caricature may come from the misunderstanding that sleepwalkers can’t see and have to feel their way around.
Kavey noted some conventionalized posture was inevitable, because it’s otherwise not clear in fiction that the walker is asleep (a fact that can be hard to notice in reality, too).
The posture might also have a factual basis in a still-popular hypnotism act in which the subject is ordered to hold an arm straight out while some strong guy attempts (and always fails) to pull it down.
In any case, the monster/sleepwalker similarity is not only in posture but in theme. The classic film depictions of Frankenstein’s monster and zombies were directly inspired by the groundbreaking German film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919), which involved a murderous, hypnotized sleepwalker.
Death and sleep are often connected in literature and psychology. And, like “Caligari’s” sleepwalker, all the classic movie monsters you name are also quasi-mindless creatures under the direction of a more-conscious keeper. (Vampires, which move at normal speed and are fully conscious, are never depicted with permanently outstretched arms.)
“White Zombie” (1932), the very first zombie movie, is about an evil voodoo zombie-maker who is also a hypnotist; the script for “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943) describes zombie movement as like “walking in a deep sleep.”
I don’t think the outstretched-arm caricature was invented deliberately.
The rigidity of the arms and their constantly outstretched pose was probably borrowed, unconsciously, from conventional depictions of sleepwalkers, who are thematically very similar to shambling undead movie monsters.
Movie Popularity Measurement
Stupid Question ™
Sept. 5, 2002
By John Ruch
© 2002
Q: Why is movie popularity measured in dollars earned instead of tickets sold?
—D.R.
A: Since the movie is the product being sold, not the ticket, the bottom line in dollars is all anyone cares about. (Even the theaters are making their money on concessions, not tickets.)
Ticket prices vary, of course, so the number of tickets sold would be a slightly more accurate way of gauging a film’s popularity than its gross income, at least over a span of decades. (Contemporary films compete on similar enough terms that the difference would be negligible.)
But by any standard, movie accounting is a Byzantine and in some cases corrupt practice that provides little ground for judging a film’s cultural significance. Of the top 10 films on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films, only one (“Gone with the Wind”) is among the top 50 highest grossers.
Public focus on top-grossing films only arose in the 1970s, with “The Godfather’s” slow climb to record-breaking success and “Jaws’” innovation of immediate nationwide release resulting in smash numbers. Back then, with a depressed economy, low movie attendance and more restricted distribution, big grosses did link frequently to quality.
Public knowledge of weekly box office reports—and their abuse in “No. 1 movie in America!” ad campaigns—came about only in the booming 1990s, when many quick-buck films had little to boast of except the exorbitant amount of money they made opening week before everybody got wise. Today the No. 1 film often makes around $30 million—hardly a mandate—and slips down the chart after only a week.
The top-grossing lists you see are always only “domestic” (US and Canadian) grosses of American films (thus, no James Bond). That’s because worldwide grosses, which are almost solely self-reported by the studios, are considered too shady to be reported by respectable authorities.
More respectable accounting is done here (though even here the accounting was secretive and shady until the 1970s) by the Exhibitor Relations Company, which combines studio reports with theater receipt reports. Still, there have been scandals about studios doctoring reports to inch their films to No. 1 Studio accounting often makes Enron look ethical.
If you want to measure popularity, cable TV viewership and video rental/sales stats would add more significant information than a ticket-sale count.
For example, “Pretty Woman” has the 62nd-highest box office of all time, but it’s the No. 1 video rental.
Ticket sales also might tell you more about moviegoing itself than about any given film. Movie theaters in the 1940s drew something like 90 million people a week, which has never been equaled, but there are no top grossers from that era.
On the other side of the same coin, 34 of the top 50 grossers came out within the past five years. This is likely an artifact of a booming economy, wide distribution, higher ticket prices and a marketing focus on opening-week attendance rather than a ringing endorsement of, say, “Rush Hour 2.”
Sept. 5, 2002
By John Ruch
© 2002
Q: Why is movie popularity measured in dollars earned instead of tickets sold?
—D.R.
A: Since the movie is the product being sold, not the ticket, the bottom line in dollars is all anyone cares about. (Even the theaters are making their money on concessions, not tickets.)
Ticket prices vary, of course, so the number of tickets sold would be a slightly more accurate way of gauging a film’s popularity than its gross income, at least over a span of decades. (Contemporary films compete on similar enough terms that the difference would be negligible.)
But by any standard, movie accounting is a Byzantine and in some cases corrupt practice that provides little ground for judging a film’s cultural significance. Of the top 10 films on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films, only one (“Gone with the Wind”) is among the top 50 highest grossers.
Public focus on top-grossing films only arose in the 1970s, with “The Godfather’s” slow climb to record-breaking success and “Jaws’” innovation of immediate nationwide release resulting in smash numbers. Back then, with a depressed economy, low movie attendance and more restricted distribution, big grosses did link frequently to quality.
Public knowledge of weekly box office reports—and their abuse in “No. 1 movie in America!” ad campaigns—came about only in the booming 1990s, when many quick-buck films had little to boast of except the exorbitant amount of money they made opening week before everybody got wise. Today the No. 1 film often makes around $30 million—hardly a mandate—and slips down the chart after only a week.
The top-grossing lists you see are always only “domestic” (US and Canadian) grosses of American films (thus, no James Bond). That’s because worldwide grosses, which are almost solely self-reported by the studios, are considered too shady to be reported by respectable authorities.
More respectable accounting is done here (though even here the accounting was secretive and shady until the 1970s) by the Exhibitor Relations Company, which combines studio reports with theater receipt reports. Still, there have been scandals about studios doctoring reports to inch their films to No. 1 Studio accounting often makes Enron look ethical.
If you want to measure popularity, cable TV viewership and video rental/sales stats would add more significant information than a ticket-sale count.
For example, “Pretty Woman” has the 62nd-highest box office of all time, but it’s the No. 1 video rental.
Ticket sales also might tell you more about moviegoing itself than about any given film. Movie theaters in the 1940s drew something like 90 million people a week, which has never been equaled, but there are no top grossers from that era.
On the other side of the same coin, 34 of the top 50 grossers came out within the past five years. This is likely an artifact of a booming economy, wide distribution, higher ticket prices and a marketing focus on opening-week attendance rather than a ringing endorsement of, say, “Rush Hour 2.”
March 27, 2008
"Grease" Censorship
Stupid Question ™
Oct. 26, 2000
By John Ruch
© 2000
Q: In the malt-shop scene of the movie “Grease,” there’s a painting on the wall that is blurred out. Why?
—Jason White
A: The blurry mystery picture appears about 42 minutes into the 1978 hit musical, in the first scene set in the Frosty Palace restaurant.
It’s not easy to miss—about 8 feet long and 3 feet high in a silver frame, it serves as a backdrop for Olivia Newton-John and her boyfriend as they eat ice cream.
The blurring was obviously done with special effects—it bobbles unevenly around the actors’ heads.
Despite the blurring, I could make out four people sitting around something on a table—something pinkish and phallic-looking, actually—with what is surely a red circular Coca-Cola logo in the lower left corner.
It’s not the only image altered in that scene. Later, a floating gray box blocks something on the menu board hanging over the counter. During a fast camera movement earlier in the scene, the menu board can be glimpsed unaltered, with something red and white where the gray box would later appear.
Red and white are Coke’s logo colors. But if Coke was being censored out of “Grease,” why does a red cooler bearing a Coke logo appear unaltered in the very same scene?
Nothing to do but go straight to the horse’s mouth: “Grease” director Randal Kleiser.
Kleiser told me the images were indeed Coke logos (though he couldn’t recall the actual content of the framed picture), which were censored because of a product-placement deal “Grease” producer Allan Carr had made with Pepsi. (You’ll notice a Pepsi ad in the film’s opening animated sequence.)
“Carr had made a promotional deal with Pepsi for tie-ins when the movie was released, but neglected to tell the set decorator,” Kleiser told me. “It wasn’t until he saw dailies [a review of each day’s raw footage] that he was aware the set had been filled with Coke products. He went ballistic.”
Kleiser had to either re-shoot the scenes without Coke products or use special effects to cover them up.
The logos were blocked out with an optical printer, a device that projects one piece of film (in this case, only a gray or blurry box) onto another piece of film to produce a combined image. It seems the large picture was only made blurry because a gray box would’ve been too obvious.
Kleiser called the results “very crude-looking,” adding, “I’m surprised more people didn’t notice it.”
And what about that unaltered Coke cooler in the very same scene? “That was impossible to cover with 1978 technology,” Kleiser said. “We just had to hope that Pepsi didn’t complain. They didn’t.”
The logos were blocked on the original release prints, and on the home video version made from them. The product-placement deal had expired by the time of “Grease’s” 20th anniversary re-release in 1998, and the film could have been shown unaltered—if the original print hadn’t been lost. The only surviving prints are censored.
Oct. 26, 2000
By John Ruch
© 2000
Q: In the malt-shop scene of the movie “Grease,” there’s a painting on the wall that is blurred out. Why?
—Jason White
A: The blurry mystery picture appears about 42 minutes into the 1978 hit musical, in the first scene set in the Frosty Palace restaurant.
It’s not easy to miss—about 8 feet long and 3 feet high in a silver frame, it serves as a backdrop for Olivia Newton-John and her boyfriend as they eat ice cream.
The blurring was obviously done with special effects—it bobbles unevenly around the actors’ heads.
Despite the blurring, I could make out four people sitting around something on a table—something pinkish and phallic-looking, actually—with what is surely a red circular Coca-Cola logo in the lower left corner.
It’s not the only image altered in that scene. Later, a floating gray box blocks something on the menu board hanging over the counter. During a fast camera movement earlier in the scene, the menu board can be glimpsed unaltered, with something red and white where the gray box would later appear.
Red and white are Coke’s logo colors. But if Coke was being censored out of “Grease,” why does a red cooler bearing a Coke logo appear unaltered in the very same scene?
Nothing to do but go straight to the horse’s mouth: “Grease” director Randal Kleiser.
Kleiser told me the images were indeed Coke logos (though he couldn’t recall the actual content of the framed picture), which were censored because of a product-placement deal “Grease” producer Allan Carr had made with Pepsi. (You’ll notice a Pepsi ad in the film’s opening animated sequence.)
“Carr had made a promotional deal with Pepsi for tie-ins when the movie was released, but neglected to tell the set decorator,” Kleiser told me. “It wasn’t until he saw dailies [a review of each day’s raw footage] that he was aware the set had been filled with Coke products. He went ballistic.”
Kleiser had to either re-shoot the scenes without Coke products or use special effects to cover them up.
The logos were blocked out with an optical printer, a device that projects one piece of film (in this case, only a gray or blurry box) onto another piece of film to produce a combined image. It seems the large picture was only made blurry because a gray box would’ve been too obvious.
Kleiser called the results “very crude-looking,” adding, “I’m surprised more people didn’t notice it.”
And what about that unaltered Coke cooler in the very same scene? “That was impossible to cover with 1978 technology,” Kleiser said. “We just had to hope that Pepsi didn’t complain. They didn’t.”
The logos were blocked on the original release prints, and on the home video version made from them. The product-placement deal had expired by the time of “Grease’s” 20th anniversary re-release in 1998, and the film could have been shown unaltered—if the original print hadn’t been lost. The only surviving prints are censored.
Grauman's Chinese Theatre Star Prints
Stupid Question ™
Oct. 19, 2000
By John Ruch
© 2000
Q: Do they ever replace the old movie-star footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with new ones? If so, what happens to the old ones?
—Mark Hill
A: Sid Grauman’s spectacular Chinese Theatre, at 6925 Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood, opened in 1927 with a great publicity stunt: movie stars imprinting their hands, feet and signatures in cement flagstones laid in the theater’s front courtyard.
It’s now Mann’s Chinese Theatre, and the “Forecourt of the Stars” has now hosted 180 print ceremonies. They’ve honored 194 people, six fictional characters, three animals, two film techniques, a TV show, a movie, a city and the theater itself. Besides prints, there are several commemorative plaques and two time capsules.
Besides “stars,” there have also been prints of producers, directors, a gossip columnist, the theater owner’s wife and mother, and a set of quintuplets.
Despite some easy calls (who the heck was Freddie Bartholomew?), the theater does not replace old stars’ prints with new ones. Indeed, Forecourt space is now relatively slim, and ceremonies are less common. (The last was more than a year ago.) However, there is a history of sometimes sinister print disappearances.
The first test prints were made by Grauman, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the sidewalk in front of the theater. (All later had “official” prints in the Forecourt.) These were torn up and stolen by a workman during 1950s construction. They remain in private ownership—except Talmadge’s which is lost.
Charlie Chaplin placed his prints in 1928. Theater managers either destroyed them or cemented them over in the early 1950s, when Chaplin was the target of anti-Communist witch hunts. They claimed that almost daily vandalism of the prints forced the removal.
Flash-in-the-pan Edmund Purdom’s prints also quietly disappeared in 1954. As a blatant PR stunt, he got his prints after only his second starring role. There was public outcry and his prints were covered late one night. Yul Brynner’s prints are now on the spot.
There was similar controversy over Ali McGraw, whose 1972 ceremony drew public protests. Two men even tried—and failed—to cement over her prints.
The only prints ever moved are those of Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, which were covered by a new box office built in the mid-1930s. Public protest led to their relocation in the 1940s.
A block honoring Mickey Rooney and another honoring the Dionne Quintuplets with star Jean Hersholt both began crumbling soon after being laid. Hersholt got a replacement block in 1949, and so did Rooney in 1986. The quintuplets didn’t.
Some prints today are also disintegrating, especially those of Carmen Miranda. But the theater says no replacements are planned.
Most blocks have remained amazingly durable, and were built with emergency removal in mind.
Oct. 19, 2000
By John Ruch
© 2000
Q: Do they ever replace the old movie-star footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with new ones? If so, what happens to the old ones?
—Mark Hill
A: Sid Grauman’s spectacular Chinese Theatre, at 6925 Hollywood Blvd. in Hollywood, opened in 1927 with a great publicity stunt: movie stars imprinting their hands, feet and signatures in cement flagstones laid in the theater’s front courtyard.
It’s now Mann’s Chinese Theatre, and the “Forecourt of the Stars” has now hosted 180 print ceremonies. They’ve honored 194 people, six fictional characters, three animals, two film techniques, a TV show, a movie, a city and the theater itself. Besides prints, there are several commemorative plaques and two time capsules.
Besides “stars,” there have also been prints of producers, directors, a gossip columnist, the theater owner’s wife and mother, and a set of quintuplets.
Despite some easy calls (who the heck was Freddie Bartholomew?), the theater does not replace old stars’ prints with new ones. Indeed, Forecourt space is now relatively slim, and ceremonies are less common. (The last was more than a year ago.) However, there is a history of sometimes sinister print disappearances.
The first test prints were made by Grauman, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the sidewalk in front of the theater. (All later had “official” prints in the Forecourt.) These were torn up and stolen by a workman during 1950s construction. They remain in private ownership—except Talmadge’s which is lost.
Charlie Chaplin placed his prints in 1928. Theater managers either destroyed them or cemented them over in the early 1950s, when Chaplin was the target of anti-Communist witch hunts. They claimed that almost daily vandalism of the prints forced the removal.
Flash-in-the-pan Edmund Purdom’s prints also quietly disappeared in 1954. As a blatant PR stunt, he got his prints after only his second starring role. There was public outcry and his prints were covered late one night. Yul Brynner’s prints are now on the spot.
There was similar controversy over Ali McGraw, whose 1972 ceremony drew public protests. Two men even tried—and failed—to cement over her prints.
The only prints ever moved are those of Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, which were covered by a new box office built in the mid-1930s. Public protest led to their relocation in the 1940s.
A block honoring Mickey Rooney and another honoring the Dionne Quintuplets with star Jean Hersholt both began crumbling soon after being laid. Hersholt got a replacement block in 1949, and so did Rooney in 1986. The quintuplets didn’t.
Some prints today are also disintegrating, especially those of Carmen Miranda. But the theater says no replacements are planned.
Most blocks have remained amazingly durable, and were built with emergency removal in mind.