Fans of Herge’s scrappy comic hero Tintin have had to imagine what the young journalist sounded like while saving the day over and again.

Jamie Bell not only supplies the main character’s voice in “The Adventures of Tintin,” Steven Spielberg’s animated adaptation of the Belgian comics hero, he also provides the movement via motion-capture technology.

Who better than the erstwhile Billy Elliot to make Tintin spring to life?

The young British actor confesses his first virtual acting assignment caught him flat footed.

“I thought that it would be genuinely challenging and difficult, and I’d have to change my approach … even how I would work within that medium,” the classically trained dancer tells Big Hollywood. “It turns out that it’s exactly the same.”

It helped that he had the premier motion capture actor by his side during the shoot.

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“It is a story, and science fiction is only the pretext. I wouldn‘t even know how to define SF…I think it’s the genre where you can deal with and imagine unhuman characters, but in my book my apes are men, there is no doubt. I believe it was triggered by a visit to the zoo where I watched the gorillas. I was impressed by their human-like expressions. It led me to dwell upon and imagine relationships between humans and apes.” — Pierre Boulle.

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Fast-talking producer Arthur P. Jacobs had been looking for a King Kong like story to bring to the screen when he found the next best thing, French writer Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La planète des singes, or Monkey Planet, later renamed Planet of the Apes.  Early in the project’s development Jacobs came up with a dazzling inspiration. Unlike the book, which mostly took place in an alien world, what if the main character was on Earth the whole time and both he and the audience didn’t know it?  Jacobs took the story idea to the creator of TV’s The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling.  A former Purple Heart recipient who had been wounded in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the very anti-war Serling wrote an extremely serious, almost humorless screenplay set in a simian city that resembled 1950s New York and initially proved far too expensive for any Hollywood Studio to produce.

“Imagination… its limits are only those of the mind itself.” – Rod Serling

After making the rounds and being soundly rejected by Hollywood executives,  the ever-hustling Jacobs approached the forty-two year old former John Charles Carter, who upon deciding to become an actor had renamed himself after his mother, Lila Charlton, and his stepfather Chet Heston.  By that time a well-established movie star, Charlton Heston was going through a political metamorphis.  A lifelong Democrat, Heston had been shooting the historical drama, The Warlord, on location in Northern California in 1964 (the film was released in 1965).  Each morning on his drive to work the Lyndon Johnson supporting Heston passed by a campaign billboard that pictured GOP nominee Barry Goldwater with the caption, “In your heart you know he’s right.”  One day, it simply hit Heston that the sign was true, Goldwater was right!  Heston still voted for Johnson in 1964 but was on his way to becoming a well-known champion of conservative causes.  Although he later called Jacobs “a slippery character” Heston was intrigued by the Apes script and committed to the project almost immediately with the suggestion that Warlord director Franklin J. Schaffner be added the creative team.  Not only did he smell a hit, but Heston also felt Apes could make a powerful statement about the flawed nature of man.

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Tags: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

The knowledge that I’m now old enough to have my youth remade is too depressing to offer much insight here. Has it really been 27 years since the winter of 1984 when the original came out? And yet somehow, after over a quarter century later, the soundtrack is still seared in my memory as a never-ending playlist loop of Kenny Loggins demanding I get footloose.

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This looks ridiculous. Story-ridiculous, special effects-ridiculous. Give me “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” any day. To mine eyes, all this expensive, modern CGI looks less convincing than the masks, costumes, and make-up we saw in the original “Apes” franchise, including the later films which had been victims of larger and larger budget cuts with each new chapter. 

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Reality demonstrates that people act on their basest needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs says that basic needs are things like food, shelter, safety, and security.  If one progresses up the scale, needs like love, belonging, esteem, and respect become important.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Hollywood is a competitive place to live and work.  People who live and work there know that it might be the most competitive place to live in the entire world.  The drive to succeed, to find an edge that propels you to the next level can be very compelling for those who are weak.  Of those who crave the sort of attention that might compel them into the snake pit that is Hollywood, psychologists could agree that components in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are lacking in key areas such as confidence, friendship, and even morality.  All of these mid-level needs should be met for healthy development of creativity, intellect, problem solving, and other high-level needs.  Maslow might reason that in the desperate setting of Hollywood, the underdevelopment of needs like morality, confidence, respect of self and from others might lead to the malformative finding of one’s self at the top of the triangle, with many of the more basic needs still lacking.  In Abraham Maslow’s terms, this is a recipe for disaster of philosophical incorporation. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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