Isegoria

Pixar’s Toy Story almost didn’t happen. From Pixar tells story behind ‘Toy Story’:

Disney, which was bankrolling the project, peppered the young animators with notes and suggestions. The story was too juvenile, the higher-ups said, and the characters had to be edgier. Afraid to trust themselves, Lasseter and his crew tried to follow all the directions.

It was, nearly everyone agrees, a train wreck. Disney hated the movie and the idea — and shut it down.

‘Yeah that was fun,” jokes Pete Docter, who was nominated for Oscars for ‘Toy Story” and ‘Monsters, Inc.” ‘And it happened right around Christmas, too.”

Lasseter recalls that he ‘begged” for two weeks to fix things. The animators went back, took out all of Disney’s suggestions and made the movie they wanted to make in the first place.

And, naturally, when they screened the new version, Disney execs loved it. There’s your corporate minds at work: First they screw it up and hate it, and then don’t even realize that they’re watching what they hated in the first place.

But if Lasseter’s last-second fixes hadn’t worked, there would be no Pixar campus, first in Richmond, and now in Emeryville today, or a potential expansion with building permits available through 2012. Nor would the Bay Area be known as the epicenter of computer animation. It was one of those behind-the-scenes moments that dramatically changes the culture of a community.

(Hat tip to GeekPress.)

In this interview, movie production designer William Stout explains his brief work on A Princess of Mars, which never came to fruition:

And before I forget, in regards to John Carter of Mars — it’s already been made into a movie; a really successful one. So why do we need to make another? That film’s called Return of the Jedi. Princess Leia is dressed as Deja Thoris throughout the film; you’ve got Martian fliers as ERB described them; the main characters sword fight throughout the movie. If you look at it, it’s the essence of John Carter. So if you make a John Carter movie, your audience, who are mostly unaware of the Burroughs books, is going to think you’re ripping off a Star Wars film.

This story illustrates why Hollywood adaptations often fall flat:

So I’m happily humming away on this and from the other room I hear McTiernan say, “Virginia. Does John Carter have to be from Virginia? Why can’t he be from Alaska? Alaska’s much more butch — and we wouldn’t have to deal with those touchy race issues.” I set down the pencil and walk into the next room and say, “John, John. There are really great reasons why John Carter is from Virginia. He was a Captain in the Civil War, but he fought on the wrong side — the South. And he lost. He didn’t own slaves; he was a warrior his entire life. This was a very personal crisis. He was unsuccessful in the defense of his culture. He didn’t know how to deal with it, so he did what a lot of people do when they’re faced with failure. He tried to escape. He went West, where, while trying to just be alone and mine for gold, he’s engulfed in another warrior situation. Americans there are fighting the Indians. Then, he ends up on Mars in the midst of a huge, worldwide Civil War. He is back to Square One but now he’s in a world he was born for. The more he tries to run away from himself the more he finds he has to confront himself. So you have this incredibly rich character, history and past to deal with, which, if he’s from Alaska, you completely lose.” That was my pitch to keep John Carter a Virginian captain in the Confederacy.

The other day, I caught the tail end of an NPR “Fresh Air” interview, and I couldn’t immediately tell who was being interviewed, but he mentioned dealing with Tourette’s and Asperger’s (which he pronounced Asperjer’s). When Terry Gross mentioned that he co-wrote The Blues Brothers, it dawned on me that she was interviewing Dan Aykroyd:

After soaring to fame with Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd built a solid film career. But he’s still capitalizing on his early hit, The Blues Brothers (now available in a 25th-anniversary DVD).

From Electronica From the 1920′s, Ready for Sampling:

Not two weeks before the fateful stock market crash of 1929, Joseph Schillinger, newly arrived on these shores from Russia, put the finishing touches on a short concerto with the outré title ‘First Airphonic Suite.’ A month later, as the country reeled in the wake of Black Thursday, the work caused a sensation at its New York premiere.

The buzz came not from the piece itself — which, perhaps mirroring the composer’s migration, begins à la Borodin and ends up like “Rhapsody in Blue” — but from its electrified soloist, Lev Theremin, the inventor and namesake of the featured instrument.

The reviewer for The New York Times, Olin Downes, described the contraption as “a sort of a box on a tripod, with antennae,” and so it is today. Theremin, Downes wrote, “moved his hands and fingers in mystic passes in the air, and a tone like a purified and magnified saxophone soared through the atmosphere and through the very loudest fortissimo.”

Theramin lived a fascinating life:

Theremin had one of the 20th century’s most astonishing careers, wonderfully documented in Albert Glinsky’s book “Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage.” A kind of phosphorescent Zelig, he demonstrated his instrument for everyone from Lenin (who adored it) to George Bernard Shaw (who said he had heard better noises on a comb covered with tissue paper).

Theremin worked as a Soviet spy in New York while hobnobbing with the upper classes, was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag and later designed ingenious bugs for the KGB. (One was placed in the beak of the eagle in the Great Seal at the United States Embassy in Moscow.) He emerged 15 years ago in his 90′s as the grand old man of electronic music to claim awards and honors. This last bit of his career is beautifully recorded in Steven M. Martin’s film “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey.” He died at 97 in 1993.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

The American Film Institute has announced its AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes:

NPR has posted an interview with Caped Creator Bob Kane from March 23, 1990:

In his autobiography, Batman and Me, Kane tells how he came up with the idea for the caped crusader, and what influence he had on the TV series and previous Batman movies. Kane drew Batman from its inception in 1939 to the late 60s. DC Comic still publishes Batman. The new movie Batman Begins has just hit theaters nationwide.

GeekPress pointed me to the James Bond Film Flowchart and the Opening Sequence Flowchart.

Boing Boing links to a gallery of Weird Tales covers:

Weird Tales is one of the original pulp magazines, where Howard’s Conan and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos found their original home. Its lurid covers were even better than the fiction. Here’s a gallery of Weird Tales covers spanning 1923-1943 — endless clicky fun.