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Yes he did. The Guardian had an article that interviewed him about how he really was in the right place at the right time to get in on the ground floor of music video with M's 'Pop Muzik':
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jun/05/m-how-we-made-pop-muzik-bowies
Yep, that's a famous one. That song was a big hit worldwide. There was, however, a much more expansive song and music video homage to Psycho around the same time (early '80s) that sadly wasn't much of a hit and was little seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zthChjUe1II
I'm pretty sure that the 'creepy mansion' location used in the video both for interiors and exteriors is Ettington Park (which is now a hotel) which was the location used for exteriors in The Haunting (1963). That location won't have come cheap, reflecting that the band in question, Landscape, were given quite a bit of 'push' at the time. Their flashy video was directed by Brian Grant who was one of the top dudes at the time. He did stuff like the video for Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical' and he directed what is still one of the best music videos ever for Peter Gabriel's 'Shock the Monkey':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo
<blockquote>Virginia Madsen</blockquote>I never thought much about Madsen back in the day - she was a beauty alright but (a) she never quite got a signature role (Lunch's Dune could have been it but that movie flopped etc., and Cabrini Green-horror, Candyman 1992 was pretty great as was The Hot Shot but I, like most people, didn't see them until much later), and (b) her basic willowy blonde, big hair look was close to Nancy Allen, Sharon Stone, Nancy Travis - in certain shots Madsen can look almost identical to each of them and I suspect that that was a problem for her. Madsen, interestingly, has really got a boost from the recent Dune and especially Dune Part 2. Florence Pugh now plays the Princess Irulan/Narrator character that Madsen played, and book fans aren't happy... Irulan in the books is an idealized tall blonde aristocratic beauty supposedly capable of turning male characters to jello whereas Pugh is short, gal-next-door-ish, and is left mostly invisible/hidden behind chain-mail veils. Paul's decision to marry her comes across as *pure* political convenience rather than a properly mixed decision - I'm marrying the hottest chick in the galaxy, not so bad!
I quite like the more-grunged up, more-pure-politics Dune series myself and Pugh fits well with that, but Madsen is the better book-casting for sure (shades of Reacher book fans never accepting Tom Cruise as Reacher).
<blockquote>A glance at Hopper's IMDb list of 70's movies -- as actor OR director -- after "The Last Movie" -- finds him struggling -- in my mind - until he finally came back on screen in "Apocalypse Now"</blockquote>Yep, that's what I noticed too - most of the '70s were a complete write-off for Dennis. I'm guessing that he had a big pile of Easy Rider money to live off during that time.
Hopper's first direction since The Last Movie was in 1980 with Out of the Blue, which gave Linda Manz her second big role after Days of Heaven. The opening scene of that movie has become a bit legendary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qjq6PRjXQg
and has been sampled in, what in my view is some of the best music and music video of the '90s, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E86gWQs-ios
I've only seen OOTB once - it was a true bleakfest and hard watch, but was evidently well-shot and -directed - and I really need to see it again. OOTB has plenty of famous and non-famous fans these days and now frequently appears on lots of people's Best of the '80s lists. Probably more people have seen it since its blu-ray restoration appeared in the mid-2010s than saw it in the thirty years after its initial release.
It's funny, when I think about a Strangers on a Train remake I think of the story's Highsmith roots and that in turn makes me think of her Ripley tales and their recent semi-successful reinvention as Saltburn. I'd say that that case encourages the thought that Highsmith's stuff *can* be successfully updated. The whole project, however, strikes me as a bit beneath Fincher and you'd think he could find himself a better project than that.
Relatedly, the Robert Downey Jr Vertigo remake seems to have been greenlit by Paramount;
https://deadline.com/2023/03/vertigo-remake-robert-downey-jr-steven-knight-alfred-hitchcock-james-stewart-paramount-pictures-davis-entertainment-team-downey-1235308636/
It's an RDJ passion-project and he and his wife will be producing so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Paramount regards this as a strategic move to lock in RDJ long-term for other, mostly more commercial projects. I'm sure that Paramount is well aware that remaking or even sequelizing venerable masterpieces (they made The Two Jakes) is normally a fool's errand and a pretty thankless task.
<blockquote>Well, Dennis Hopper got buried by...Michael Eisner?</blockquote>If so then he didn't stay buried for long. Blue Velvet (for which Hopper told Lynch,'I am Frank Booth') put Hopper back on the map big time and not just as a madman although that would be his strong suit throughout the '90s in stuff like Speed, Waterworld, True Romance, etc..
Blue Velvet was accompanied by acclaimed turns in River's Edge, Hoosiers (w. Hackman), etc.. and he quickly directed (for mid-major studio Orion) the topical and semi-successful but now largely forgotten Colors (1988) w/ Duvall and Sean Penn playing cops trying (and of course failing) to sort out warring gangs in LA.
In 1990, Hopper starred in Flashback, a very broad comedy about decadal change w/ Kiefer Sutherland as an FBI straight-man escorting Hopper's burned-out '60s radical. Hijinks ensue. Hopper hams it up a lot, e.g., 'It takes more than going down to your local video store and renting Easy Rider to become a rebel' and 'Once we get outta the 80's, the 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's.' Haw haw. Both lines were used in the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO8ivMSn_eY
Also in 1990, Dennis directed (again for Orion) The Hot Spot, a pretty good, mostly forgotten, erotic, twisty southern/sunny noir w/ Don Johnson, Jennifer Connolly, Virginia Madsen etc..
In sum, Hopper had his mojo back by the second half of the '80s and my sense is that he worked pretty much exactly as much as he wanted ever after from there, albeit it's most fairly disposable, paycheck stuff after the '90s. I believe that for his artistic kicks Hopper concentrated on his rather successful painting career for his last decade or so. I'd bet that he was principally just very thankful that he didn't kill himself or anyone else in his wild years:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/iggy-pop-david-bowie-dennis-hopper-cocaine/
Hopper and Bowie would later appear together in Basquiat (1996) as an art impresario and Warhol respectively
https://noideasbutinthings.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/basquiat2.jpg
and, hey, it's currently on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFfcqK_S36o
Both Bowie and Hopper were deeply into their painting and art-collecting at this time so this was fortuitous casting to say the least.
<blockquote>Meanwhile, "Easy Rider" looks like a late 60's movie often DID look: gritty, realistic "semi-documentary" in style and very loose in plot and structure. Not terribly well acted by amateurs in certain scenes, either.</blockquote>I first saw Easy Rider on VHS around 1987. I gap-filled a lot of '70 and '60s movies around then (on VHS). So, for example, I remember seeing The Graduate and Chinatown and ER all for the first time within a week or two. I remember ER seeming *very* amateurish compared to those other films, especially acting-wise. Everyone who watched with me was thrilled when Jack Nicholson showed up but bummed, and felt the film went downhill, when he left the story. Roughly I remember losing interest in the film after Jack's departure then suddenly being shocked awake by the out-of-nowhere downer ending (none of us knew that *that* was coming whereas I guess that that ending would have quickly become common knowledge during its original run). I remember Hippy Jokes and jibes in the discussion after the movie.
QT has had a lot to say about ER, e.g. here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt0W8HS9wVY
opining, for example, that ER is strangely sensitive to the time in which it's viewed so that it looked dated in the 1980s, not dated at all in the '90s and so on. I watched ER again about a decade ago and it definitely seemed better than I'd remembered it being. E.g.. the amateurish acting aside from Nicholson no longer bugged me much at all. So my own personal evolution on ER fits QT's model.
Voice as an aspect of stardom probably isn't considered nearly enough, so bravo to the effort in this thread. I have a very minor contribution to make with a small Psycho connection.
In the year of Psycho, 1960, the biggest selling pop-hit in the US (#1 for a then record 9 weeks) was Percy Faith’s “Theme From A Summer Place“. You all know it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSsiS-v6_6M
This is *still* the biggest instrumental hit that there has ever been on the US charts and it's in the top 25 biggest US hits ever. It's impossible, from a Psycho perspective, to not hear Herrmann's strings as directly attacking the signature string-piece of its time.
Well, I finally got around to watching the hit film Faith's tune came from, A Summer Place (1959) dir. by Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, 3-10 to Yuma). The biggest name in the film is arguably Grease-punchline Sandra Dee followed by her object of lust Troy Donahue, but it's the two fathers of the teens who really jump out. Richard Egan playing Dee's character's liberal father is a somewhat generic big handsome dad-dude for the time but he's also got a great sonorous voice that makes the pretty corny dialogue almost poetic. Donahue's dissolute dad is played by Arthur Kennedy who most of us know as the reporter-figure in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - again he's got a *great* voice that makes average dialogue sing (and he's a good physical actor too, really taking over many of his scenes).
A Summer Place (1959) is a solid film with a famous theme and two great voices (which we'd kill for today) to get us though its more eye-roll-inducing scenes. Worth a look, in part because it's good to listen to. (One slight problem with ASP, typical for the time, see also NbNW, is that its supposedly east coast scenes are all filmed in California as the coastal mountains in the backgrounds give away.)
<blockquote>Andie MacDowell, who got one of the "lucky" careers in Hollywood for a time, to me. No real personality, not a very good actress, an ex-model(natch) but not a sexy one -- and yet, she ends up in "Groundhog's Day" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and other major films.</blockquote>MacDowell had an incredible run of good-to-excellent movies from 1989-1994 - Sex Lies and Videotape, Green Card, then one after the other: Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, Four Weddings. But no one ever gave her much of the credit for those successes and then her hot streak cooled off after 1994 which seemed to confirm the sceptics' suspicions. Lots of people seemed to really enjoy snarking at her. For example, her line about 'not noticing it raining' at the end of Four Weddings appeared on lots of 'worst lines ever' lists notwithstanding that an almost identical slightly silly line from Gene Kelley in Singin' In the Rain is beloved.
John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) used Point Reyes; East of Eden (1955) used Mendocino (which is up near Fort Bragg) to great effect both its rich bits and its down and out bits. But I've never seen Morro Beach or Crescent City or Point Arena in a film...
Hell, back in the day when I was trying very half-heartedly to do a bit of screenwriting I thought the easiest thing to do was channel NbNW and 'connect the dots' between a bunch of nifty locations. Obviously underfilmed locations seemed to be all around me. It seemed crazy to me that no thriller had used the Crazy Horse Monument or The Grand Coulee Dam or The Columbia River Gorge or The strange German village, Leavenworth, up in the Cascade mountains near Seattle, and so on. Unfortunately Ernest Lehman's talent eluded me.
<blockquote>One of them(the same one?) has a stand-alone "lesbian road movie" about to come out with that pretty yet weird looking young lady from OATIH (Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell) in it.</blockquote>Qualley is pretty alright but she keeps getting miscast as 'overtly sexy' which she is not. This came through most clearly in Fosse/Verdon where she played one of the sexiest gals ever, Ann Reinking. Qualley has some ballet training but Fosse's women, and especially Reinking, all failed out of Ballet-school and went into Broadway/jazz-dance because they were too curvy/sexy. Qualley's Reinking was ultra-skinny, schoolgirl-ish, not at all Fosse's type. I think QT made the same mistake in OUATIH - Pussycat was supposed to be a dangerous, real sexual temptress (Colleen Camp back in the day perhaps) but with Qualley she came across as a waify schoolgirl/streetkid that would never in a million years have tempted Cliff.
<blockquote>The Location of the film is interesting: filming began last week in Eureka, California.... I've been to Eureka a few times. It is a city next to the ocean and surrounded by redwoods...and yet the city itself is rather financially depressed and rundown. The seaside visuals are dark and gray... Much of the timber industry that settled Eureka is gone.... The whole town smells like marijuana. Its a contact high city. The split between temporary collegians and financially downtrodden townies is palpable.</blockquote>Great info.! I'm always up for a new or at least rarely used location. Think of what being set in Bloomington Indiana with *its* town vs gown issues gave to Breaking Away (1979), and having driven the coastal highway all the way down from Oregon to LA I'm really partial to the windswept emptiness of a lot of the very northern CA coast period. The US has so many great locations just aching to be used in films really. Go PTA.
<blockquote>You can find Willem Dafoe way back in 1985's "To Live and Die in LA"</blockquote>I first encountered Dafoe in Platoon, where, wonky face not withstanding, he was the Christ-like, good officer (Elias - a very Biblical sounding name) guiding Charlie Sheen's character, as opposed to Tom Berenger's, more macho, Devil-figure, bad officer (Barnes). Berenger's face is more normal than Dafoe's but it still reads as conflicted/depressed/damaged and the like, which is too heavy, too much baggage for most leading man roles. Dafoe has certainly had the much better, broader career - the odd villain role for sure but mostly not, often picking up on his surprising radiating-good side. I didn't see Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977) until much later (it's always been and remains a difficult movie to see for some reason) but it contains Berenger's fateful first movie role: he plays Diane Keaton's character's horrifying last date. Oliver Stone must have seen this and realized Berenger could be downright scary enough to play Barnes.
A forthcoming film that I'm intrigued by is Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu (w. Willem Dafoe), which is due in December. Eggers has showed a lot of talent for uncanny period recreation in the The Witch and The Lighthouse and The Northmen. Dafoe has already played the vampire in Nosferatu once before (getting an Osc Nom for it), in the now largely forgotten Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Shadow starred Malkovich as Murnau trying to make his Nosferatu in 1921 (rather inticipating all the 'Making of Psycho, Godfather, etc' vehicles that have arriived since) only with the gag that his lead actor, Max Shreck (Dafoe) turns out to be a real vampire who kills and feeds upon much of the cast. [Some Jewish groups objected to the premise for more or less complicated reasons to do with the real Shreck being a Jew who later collaborated with the Nazis and the Nazis sometimes depicted Jews as vampires, etc.]
Werner Herzog also did a fabulous remake of Nosferatu in 1979 (with one of the greatest soundtracks ever and a never paler Isabelle Adjani) watchable on youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF3ZwXEG45M
In sum, Eggers has a lot of prior art to dig himself out from under in his new version. If anyone can do it he can, but maybe nobody can! Count me intrigued.
Kubrick's script (including all of Kubrick's budget estimates!) is widely available online, so you can read it and decide for yourself what you think about Kubrick's approach. A couple of things that even a cursory read of the script reveals are that Kubrick's Napoleon had a lot of fairly academic voiceover but relatively little action (battles are mostly just a shot or two of the aftermath paired with a page of two of voiceover explaining what the battle meant). I suspect that *had* Kubrick filmed his script, it would have driven a lot of people bananas and received very mixed reviews on release (much as Barry Lyndon and every Kubrick film after that did), only for the overdesignedness and visual meticulousness which Kubrick would have embued the material with to reward multiple viewings and build acclaim over time.
<blockquote.>All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.</blockquote>I respond allergically to this sort of idea. For one thing, when this idea comes up in Hollywood films or on Oscar night it reeks of self-importance (and think of its converse - if something isn't answered (or even addressed) in any Hollywood film then it's not really one of life's important riddles - isn't it just crazy to believe that a rigidly profit- and market-driven big commercial enterprise driven by formula after formula would magically cover *everything* that's important to human beings?).
For another thing, and setting aside the movie business's cloying self-regard, the idea that movies have all the answers is in the same genre as lots of other ideas that are pure wish-fulfillment, e.g., 'All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten', and of course lots of people will tell you that some particular book - The Bible or The Koran etc. - or some particular, easily masterable subject or topic - Baseball or Poker or Arbitrage or Science Fiction or '80s movies in particular or even just Glengarry Glen Ross by itself - has all the answers *they* need. People *really* wish their lives and the world were simpler that they in fact are. People often *do* feel overwhelmed, and this leads them to be drawn to various councils of simplicity. Simplifications, approximations, idealizations, modeling x as a better-understood y... all these steps *can* be useful, but have to taken very carefully if what you are running up against, as you almost always are, is a complex world (with lots of novel, poorly understood, or even irreducibly chaotic features).
Fargo Season 5 is getting some good reviews. Interestingly, a new season of True Detective is out now too (Season 3?) w/ Jodie Foster. It's getting good/'a return to season 1 form'-type reviews too. So prestige TV is delivering people their thriller fixes right now.
It occurs to me that the Arbogast-type predicament where an investigator hits the jackpot for their investigation but doesn't grasp that they have until it's too late (or could be) must actually be pretty common. Zodiac (2007) has a great tense scene where Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Greysmith character who suspects that the Zodiac may have drawn the posters for a particular rep. cinema and so left his handwriting there. Greysmith ends up in the creepy basement of the owner of the cinema while they look for old posters only to find out there that the owner drew all the posters. Nothing ends up happening and Greysmith sprints out of there. It can seem like a fanciful case but surely lots of investigations of crimes must have moments like this, where you think you're in a neutral, investigatory space and then you seem to learn something that if all your other background theories are correct makes your current environment very dangerous indeed. Of course your background theories are probably wrong but you'll still be pretty freaked out, be unable to take the risk that you're right and have to beat a fast retreat.
It's doing incredibly well. It shows that there's still a lot of goodwill towards the whole idea of Willie Wonka and the world Roald Dahl created. And it's a credit to the director Paul King too. Parents and aware kids alike evidently think he's a safe pair of hands after the Paddington movies, and the trailers for Wonka even looked a little like Paddington 3 with Hugh Grant back etc.. Solid film made by the right, trusted people makes bank and makes it look easy. Everyone's happy.
The dynamte screenplay of May December is a first script original piece by Samy Burch. She discusses her story here:
https://www.indiewire.com/awards/consider-this/samy-burch-may-december-interview-1234931909/
It's currently picked to get an Oscar nom but not a win. That said, it's good enough to win I think and she's got a good story (emerging from the casting dept), and the Acad. has a track record of honoring young female writers: S. Coppola, Diablo Cody, Emerald Fennell, Sarah Polley.
One interesting fact about Burch (not mentioned in the article) is that she has another script in production and in fact the film's finished: Coyote vs Acme. This now notorious $70 million animated film was finished and tested well but a Warner Bros exec. decided not to release it! Controversy exploded - and the exec has, I believe been fired, and the release is back on. Anyhow, Burch is having quite the beginning to a newfound screenwriting career.
(Cont'd)Elordi is just OK in his role - he's required to be tall and beautiful and rich but isn't especially winning or charming beyond that. That's part of Fennell's cutting point: Felix doesn't have to be anything or do anything to be constantly slavered over by everyone. It probably never had a chance to be a star-making role for Elordi for that reason.
There's a glaring error in Fennell's script about dates w.r.t. Felix's mom played by Rosamund Pike. It's funny dialogue so you have to be a bit retentive to notice the problem as it were, through the laughter. I wrote about it at Saltburn's noticeboard here:
https://moviechat.org/tt17351924/Saltburn/65929081a2c8ce4954fee8de/A-small-but-irritating-problem-about-dates