“…comes bob-bob-bobbin’ along…along!”
Whenever I’ve thought of Cindy Williams, I’ve thought of The Conversation. Her character, Ann, and Frederic Forrest‘s Mark, her lover or husband or whatever, strolling around San Francisco’s Union Square, bugged and haunted and up to something pretty bad. I’ll always think of her in this context…her finest moment.
Honest confession: I’ve never seen a single episode of Laverne and Shirley.
Speaking as a onetime friend and promotional colleague of Robert Englund, the livewire, ready-for-anything actor who played Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I’ve always slightly regretted how Englund wasn’t more fully appreciated for his witty, snap-crackle, quasi-Rennaissance Man personality.
Just as the Frankenstein monster image always seemed to diminish or at least darken the classy gentleman aspect of Boris Karloff, there’s always been a lot more to Englund than that red-and-green sweater and those long razor fingers.
Which isn’t to say that Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, a forthcoming doc about Englund, won’t be worth a watch. Pic will have a brief theatrical run in late spring before the streaming launch on June 6th.
“Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15:
“I’m recalling my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).
“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.
The below image was captured yesterday morning (dawn) during a balloon ride over the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. You can disagree and that’s fine, but it immediately struck me as being in the same aesthetic realm as Freddie Young‘s work on Lawrence of Arabia (’62).
We all understand that first-class Blurays of 1950s big-studio features that were captured on large-format celluloid (VistaVision, Cameras 65, Technirama, Super Panavision, etc.) are glorious eye candy.
Last night I was in heaven as I savored the just-right compositions in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), which was shot by Ellsworth Fredricks in Technirama (35mm film run horizontally at 8-perf, or the same as VistaVision). 1080p resolution is great but 4K UHD is better, etc. My God, the fine threads in those Air Force uniforms, Marlon Brando‘s gistening brown hair, the naturally luminous Kyoto exteriors, etc.
But where are those other 4K large-format titles? Why are we still waiting for a 4K UHD Bluray of John Ford‘s The Searchers, which was one of the first Blurays on the market (released on 10.31.06) but which desperately needs to be remastered and 4K’ed and generally brought uo to to speed. Ditto Ben-Hur, shot in Camera 65 and expensively and immaculately transferred to Bluray 11 years ago, but no 4K upgrade on the horizon. Ditto North by Northwest, also shot in VistaVision but not even a promise of a 4K version.
Nobody’s in a hurry, dragging our feet, we’ll get there when we get there, etc.
You can therefore understand my initial excitement when I discovered a claim on Home Theatre Forum, posted on 9.25.22 by a Danish film buff named Kevin Oppegaard (aka “titch” on HTF), that he’d seen “a beautiful, absolutely flawless 4K DCP…if Warner Bros. ever decides to release this on 4K UHD, there will be much rejoicing.”
And yet Oppegard, I’ve been told, is apparently full of shit. A guy who’s reliably in the know informs that Warner Home Entertainment’s DCP of The Searchers is only 2K, and represents the work done 16 years ago.
Somewhere in the Copenhagen area, Kevin Oppegard has just put on a pair of dark sunglassas and a lumpy fishing hat, and is shuffling off into the crowd.
Also not to be trusted is a website claim by Seattle’s Grand Illusion theatre, stating that a “new 4K restoration” was screened a year ago (2.3.22). The same insider informs that WHE’s DCP of North by Northwest is 4K, but if the Grand Illusion presentation really was a true 4K finish (as the web page implies), it would not be of sufficient quality for a 4K UHD release.
The Searchers and North by Northwest are candidates, of course, for eventual 4K UHD release, but there’s nothing to spill at the present time.
I’m not saying that the argument put forward by the “get Andrea Riseborough and her supporters” crowd (Variety‘s Clayton Davis, Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Till director Chinonye Chukwu) ever had any real traction, but for a day or so the anti-Riseborough contingent made some noise and seemed to generate an “uh-oh” atmosphere.
But I think it’s fair to say now that their side in this debate (i.e., the wokester position) is weakening as we speak and they’re basically adopting a rope-a-dope stance. Reasonable, fair-minded human beings are standing against them and their vague allusions to some kind of conniving, elitist, white-person, anti-equity cabal…that’s all going away, I’m afraid. I can feel it.
Director Rod Lurie put it nicely earlier today on Facebook:
If a world–famous movie theatre is being discussed and some mild-mannered fellow asks where it’s located, you don’t play games like Facebook’s WT Solley did the other day. You man up and say it, plain and straight. You certainly don’t pussyfoot around by not mentioning the name of the city or the reason it became a famous venue to begin with.
