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mind the walrus posted:"Bashki defends Lord of the Rings" sounds so much better than whatever the actual article must be. Was his version hated on release? I imagine that people were angry with the fact the story just kind of ends at the battle of Helm's Deep.
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Mar 14, 2021 15:25
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:...H. R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist artist who designed the beast... says of the alien, "...Once seen, it will never be forgotten. It will remain with peo- ple who have seen it, perhaps in their dreams or nightmares, for a long, long time. Perhaps for all time. I even dream about the alien myself— so much that I'm often frightened of going to sleep." Before Giger's awesome statements can be dis- missed as exaggeration, it would be wise to view his previous work. Well, credit where credit's due.
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Mar 14, 2021 16:29
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mind the walrus posted:"Bashki defends Lord of the Rings" sounds so much better than whatever the actual article must be. Was his version hated on release? Lot of people were upset it was called "The Lord of the Rings" when it fact, it ended after the battle of Helm's Deep. Bashki wanted to put "Part One" on the picture, but the studio refused to.
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Mar 14, 2021 17:41
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Just in case some folks don't know, here's a reminder that I've been putting up free links that anyone and everyone can click on to go directly to the issues posted with full access to each and every page in a hi-res, user-friendly interface! And, like, nobody has to speculate on what an issue might say as though it were being locked away in some hidden vault that only your humble OP can open. We can all, in fact, find the answers ourselves with our very own fingertips. In a matter of moments! It is quite easy! And from what I gather it is in no way hard. . ....anyhow, here's what the Bashki piece said. https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-019/page/n37 ---------------------------------------- Indeed, Bakshi's uninhibited approach to feature-length animation has been the source of constant controversy for over a decade. The X-rated antics found in Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin earned him as much disdain as praise, and his only previous excursion into traditional fantasy, Wizards, successfully offended the more puritanical element of screen sorcery buffs. Bakshi's been labeled both a genius and a hack, a savior and a muckraker. And now he finds him- self bringing to the screen what is probably the most controversial fantasy production in the history of motion pic- tures. . . The Lord of the Rings. In its many fan circles, Tolkien's trilogy is considered nothing short of sacred. First published stateside in the early 50s and becoming solid cult items a decade later, the books are regarded as everything from top-notch excursions in- to epic mythos to transcendental alle- gories of mystical proportions. ..."I think that's probably what Disney came up against and dropped it. United Artists picked it up and spent over $800,000 in development before I finally got to it. Stanley Kubrick and John Boorman were supposed to try it along the way. But can you imagine what it would be like to try to bring Tolkien to the screen in live action? Also, they ap- parently tried to take the three books and make one big movie out of it, and that's- an impossibility. You can't break Tol- kien's sprawling storyline down into one picture without being convoluted. I've made one picture out of the first book and a little bit of the second. I'm going to do a part two film picking up where this leaves off." Once Bakshi announced his plans for filming, he was greeted with a critical reaction that left him dumbfounded. "There's no question about it," he mar- vels. "I felt real pressure from the first day I made it known that I was going to make this movie because I knew everyone was waiting to see what I was going to do with it. It made it tougher to do the film. Being a Tolkien fan is one thing, but realizing that there are millions of other Tolkien fans out there was a feeling to- tally new to me.
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Mar 14, 2021 21:44
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TBH their interface sucks. Anyway, here it is.    
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Mar 14, 2021 21:49
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Tulip posted:Well, credit where credit's due. Yep, I can imagine reading that back in the day as an unsuspecting moviegoer and just going "pffft, get outta here with all that hype and PR talk," but of course in hindsight it's almost chill-inducing knowing that HR Giger and Dan O'Bannon and co. are in fact not loving around. Unkempt posted:TBH their interface sucks. Anyway, here it is. Heh, thanks. For the record, I don't actually mind, I found the whole thing amusing and I enjoy being a smartass from time to time (a dumbass sometimes, too!). SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 14, 2021 |
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Mar 14, 2021 21:49
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More from Starlog No. 23SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Issue 23, June 1979: https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-023 Shots fired!!  ---------------------------------------- David Prowse speaks!  STARLOG: We hear that they've cooked up a new villian for The Empire Strikes Back, who ap- peared in the Star Wars TV special. PROWSE: Yes, he's a character called Boba Fett. I know little about it. I went to dinner with the people from Kenner Toys in L.A. and this guy tunred up. The character goes around dressed up as Boba Fett, an intergalactic bounty huner. They're promoting him prior to filming so that by the time the film comes out, people will want to see what he does. I've heard a rumor that he's going to do away with Han Solo. Or, at least, he's after Solo. ...STARLOG: Is Boba Fett going to be a major character? PROWSE: he's going to be a very major character. He'll be my assistant. STARLOG: Have they signed you up for any of the future Star Wars sequels? PROWSE: They've offered me Star Wars II and ///. As you probably know, Star Wars I, II and /// are actually the fourth, fifth and sixth in the Empire's chronology. And then they're going back to do the first three. I'll do the fifth and sixth, but I'll probably miss the first because they'll be going back in Empire history. Then I'll, likely do the second and third. So I could be Star Warsing for the next. . . 10 years? STARLOG: Will the first film show us the young Darth Vader? PROWSE: No, I think two and three will. They might show Vader as he really was and I may get to be seen without my mask. Of course, having played the character in a mask, if they kill me off, I can return as another character. They're talking about unmasking me in the next one, but you'll probably only see either the back of my head or my face hidden by breathing tubes. STARLOG: And the face is disfigured? PROWSE: Yes.
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Mar 14, 2021 22:19
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Issue 23 has a quite a bit of interesting stuff, actually. https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-023/page/n55/mode/1up "Blacks in Science Fiction Film" tries to account every instance a black person has appeared in a sci-fi movie up to that point (1979): actors, extras, and voices alike. As you might imagine, it's a depressingly short list. A section within this article does the same for TV. It's half a page long and something like 40% of the entries are from Star Trek. 
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Mar 14, 2021 22:31
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Speaking of a director defending his work in a magazine, one of Starlog's most famous moments was when none other James Cameron himself personally wrote in to the magazine to respond to reader mail about Aliens from a previous issue. Issue 125, December 1987: https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-125/mode/1up  Answers About "ALIENS" by JAMES CAMERON / Illustrated by PHIL FOGLIO As the writer and director of ALIENS, I naturally prefer the sort of cogent criticism contained in Lisa Snyder's letter (STARLOG #116) stating "ALIENS is perfect!" However, since there were 11 other letters in the same issue con- taining complaints of flaws in logic, ac- curacy and asethetic [sic] execution, I thought I would take this opportunity to reply en masse. I will take them in the order they were printed. First, Peter Briggs, who seems otherwise to be a fairly well-researched stu-dent of ALIEN, points out incorrectly that "LV-426 was a ringed planet." The unnam-ed planetoid harboring the alien derelict ship, to which I gave the designation LV-426, was in fact a moon of a ringed gas giant, Which was occasionally glimpsed in the sky in ALIEN. The gas giant does not appear in ALIENS because the exterior scenes on LV-426 have an unbroken cloud cover or overcast, and the space scenes are handled in a cursory manner, advancing the story without dwelling on the wonders of in- terstellar travel...  ...Briggs' next beef is with the Alien Queen, and for several reasons. His contention is that she destroys the original intention of the missing scene in ALIEN. This is perfectly correct, but I find it somewhat irrelevant since as an audience member and as a film- maker creating a sequel, I can really only be responsible to those elements which actually appeared in the first film and not to its "in- tentions." ALIEN screenwriter Dan O'Ban- non's proposed life cycle, as completed in the unseen scene, would have been too restricting for me as a storyteller and I would assume that few fans of ALIENS would be willing to trade the final cat-fight between the moms for a point of technical accuracy that only a microscopic percentage of ALIEN fans might be aware of. --------------------------------------- The whole thing really demands to be read, scans below. And the direct link if you want to copy-paste (it's also been transcribed by a number of blogs over the years, if you'd rather): https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-125/page/n33/mode/1up   
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Mar 14, 2021 23:16
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James Cameron is breathtakingly petty and willing to fight over his poo poo at any moment and I kind-of love it.
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Mar 14, 2021 23:36
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For the life of me I cannot understand how Harlan Ellison never received the Ken McElroy treatment. The man was absolutely toxic, and fandom in general and many of his fellow authors and creators in particular just seemed to treat it like a charming quirk.
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Mar 15, 2021 06:32
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Lemniscate Blue posted:For the life of me I cannot understand how Harlan Ellison never received the Ken McElroy treatment. The man was absolutely toxic, and fandom in general and many of his fellow authors and creators in particular just seemed to treat it like a charming quirk. The majority of what he did was yell at other people in public and then brag about how much he pissed them off. Because most of what he did was in public and he was completely unapologetic about it, most of the American methods of social opprobrium basically don't work. He never backed down so you couldn't just bully him, and he never said he was kind or compassionate or anything other than provocative so there's not much room to call him out for hypocrisy.
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Mar 15, 2021 15:52
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It also must have generated some form of revenue/attention that was deemed worth the social costs, because most people who do that just find themselves quietly uninvited and no one returning their calls. We're still talking about it half a century later, so I guess that answers that.
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Mar 16, 2021 07:03
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I remember reading at different times that both Philip K. Dick and Steven Spielberg said that even though Ellison would rant and rave angrily about them (I forget exactly what works of theirs he disliked enough to gripe about them, though), they couldn't help but love him anyway because he did it in such a way that endeared him to them. I imagine it was the same for a lot of others. Even Starlog, who included him in some anniversary issue with a two-part interview where he straight up told them "I am very suspicious of whores" and said that they were basically the science fiction magazine version of "The Tonight Show", where they never put in any articles with an opinion that might challenge or offend someone. 
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Mar 30, 2021 06:03
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