WIP Wednesday

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What have you been working on this week, Eerie fans? Now's the time to spread the word about any fannish treats you've got cooking: a line of dialogue from an upcoming fic, linework for your latest art piece, the yarn colours for a new toy. Let us know in the comments!

Photo Five Challenge

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Dash X cosplay by Cytrouille Juice

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il faut vraiment que je coiffe mieux cette perruque

Parenting made simple on Imgur

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I lolled.

Want to send Jason Marsden some fanmail?

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Check his Instagram for the mailing address. Also, he will totaly sign stuff and post it back to you which is awesome!

‘Twin Peaks’ Revival Takes Top Honors in 2018 Home Media Awards

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Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series, from Paramount Home Media Distribution and CBS Home Entertainment, earned the top prize in the eighth annual Home Media Awards, which honor the best home video releases of 2017, taking Title of the Year and TV on Disc of the Year.

Blu-ray Disc of the Year went to Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s Dunkirk.

Winners were chosen by a panel of judges in conjunction with an online consumer vote for eligible titles submitted for consideration by studios and distributors.

CinemaRetro reviews Joe Dante's Matinee

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Though we’re only a few months into 2018, I’m already dead certain that Shout! Factory’s brand new Blu-ray edition of Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993) will be regarded as one of the most generous, lovingly produced and expansive reissues of the year. This remarkable set offers nearly three hours of beautifully constructed bonus materials to supplement the actual feature’s ninety-nine minute running time. In case you’re wondering, the short answer is, “Yes.” It’s officially now time to retire your treasured Laserdisc copy of Matinee as well as the now-rendered-totally-inconsequential bare bones DVD issued by Universal in 2010.

Matinee is an undeniably warm and wonderful film, an affectionate but quirky Valentine. In a series of amazing supplemental features included with this set, several key members of the film’s creative team suggest the movie was, in essence, director Joe Dante’s (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins) very personal love letter to the art of the B-movie. Critically praised, but not commercially successful upon its release in early winter of 1993, Shout! Factory has added this title to its “Shout Select” catalogue designed to “shine a light” on “unheralded gems.” This film is certainly one such deserved jewel, but Matinee Director of Photography John Hora appears less dreamy eyed than some when offering his own honest post-assessment.

Cognizant that the Hollywood industry was just that, an industry, it was Hora’s contention that regardless of the immaculate staging and wonderful storytelling of Dante’s very personal film, he suggested the director would need to pursue a more traditional career path following the indulgence of Matinee. The age of making films for what Hora would describe – perhaps too dismissively - as a “specialized audience,” had passed. Making more marketplace films for consumption by a more general public of cinemagoers would be the only guarantor of future employment.

If Hora offered a tough in-hindsight assessment, it was not an unreasonable one. Dante himself would recall that no one, neither early on at Warner Bros. nor later at Universal, were particularly optimistic about the film’s potential as box office dynamite. Acknowledging the project as a labor-of-love, Dante accepted his tribute to the “B-movie” magic of days long gone might best be realized as an independent film project. When Dante’s early investors reneged on their promises of bankrolling the production, the director was forced to negotiate directly with the juggernaut that was Universal Studios for financing. In Dante’s own recollection, Universal’s accountants emerged shakily from the board room giving the eccentric project a nervous, wary blessing. It was a rare industry moment, the director would concede with a sigh, when “Passion won over reason.”

In hindsight Dante mused that Universal’s green lighting of Matinee was to “my everlasting gratitude, their everlasting regret.” The film is undeniably brilliant cinema and most assuredly a wonderful time capsule piece; but it was in design and intent an indie film, one not likely destined for blockbuster status. Dante’s original idea was to bring the film out in limited release in art house cinemas. He hoped positive word-to-mouth might help create a buzz, and was confident that this film – one designed for cineastes in mind - would be met with favorable critical appraisal. But in 1993 Universal was a corporate titanic that dropped their films into blanketing nationwide release for a quick return on investment. Sadly, Matinee was too insular a film to appeal to a mass audience, finishing a disappointing sixth even in its first week or release.

Originally in development at Warner Bros., writer Jerico Stone’s original screenplay of Matinee – which Dante described as a “fantasy” concerning nostalgic friends who congregate one night at a haunted neighborhood theater - would differ wildly from the final product. Though Stone, billed simply as “Jerico,” would share on-screen credit along with screenwriter Charlie Haas for the original story, he would, much aggrieved, later litigate unsuccessfully against the Writer’s Guild for screenplay credit. In any event, Warner Bros. would eventually pass on Stone’s early unmarketable treatment, as would several other studios. Undeterred, Dante chose to bring in fellow New Jersey “Monster Kid” and writer Ed Naha (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) to take a whack at the script. It was Naha who wove in the un-credited idea of a beloved TV-horror film host (ala WCAU and WABC’s Zacherley) coming to visit a neighborhood bijou to promote the latest offering of low-budget cinematic horror.

It was an interesting idea, and one that certainly changed the dynamic of the scenario. Regardless, the script was still considered weak and things didn’t really begin to gel until Dante commissioned Haas (the screenwriter of Dante’s Gremlins 2) for yet another re-write. It was Haas who fashioned the film’s provocative Cold War Cuban Missile Crisis back-story. He would also replace Naha’s idea of “visiting TV horror-host” scenario with an even more colorful character: an entrepreneurial, self-promoting, cigar-chomping independent film maverick – one very much in the style of the very real William Castle (1914-1977). Castle was a producer-director (often regarded as the “poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock”) that cult-filmmaker John Waters revered as the famed “grifter who made public relations an art form and turned himself into his own biggest star.”

Though Castle is usually referenced as the most obvious figure that actor John Goodman’s Lawrence Woolsey’s character is based upon, the lively schlock filmmaker didn’t actually make any of the atom-age, mutated bug-monster movies so endearingly celebrated in Matinee. Dante concedes this, acknowledging the most memorable sci-fi films of the 1950s were the works of such directors as Jack Arnold and Bert I. Gordon – films that would mostly pre-date the 1962 scenario of Matinee. The difference between the former pair of mostly invisible behind-the-scenes directors and the irrepressible William Castle was the latter’s prominent public profile and his art of Ballyhoo; this was the man, of course, who brought “Percepto,” “Emergo,” Illusion-o,” “Fright Breaks,” “Punishment Polls,” Ghost-Viewers, Death-by Fright insurance policies, flying skeletons, and tingling seat buzzers to America’s neighborhood movie houses. And, yes, we’re a better country for it.

Goodman, just off his contract as the burly husband in the TV series Roseanne, was Dante’s first and only choice to play the wheeling-and-dealing, fast-talking Woolsey. Goodman, for his part, is absolutely wonderful in the role, having needed very little coaching to get into character. Before production was to commence, Dante compiled a reel of Castle’s wild and wooly trailers to demonstrate the often outlandish and brash “Castle style” of film promotion to Goodman. To everyone’s surprise, the actor was already very conversant with Castle’s career, the filmmaker who in his good-natured but braggadocio manner promised to “Scare the Pants off America.” Goodman understood intuitively how to approach the role, and captures Castle’s larger-than-life persona perfectly. He shines every time he appears on screen.

The film itself is set during the third week of October 1962. The broadcast of the lighthearted antics on The Art Link letter Show on NBC-TV (a Universal property, of course) is interrupted by a grim-voiced address by President Kennedy, addressing the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba - and the subsequent U.S. decision to counter with a naval blockade. With Cuba only a mere hundred or so miles from the southern coastline of Florida, the news sends shockwaves throughout Key West. As troops and anti-ballistic missiles converge on Key West’s Smathers Beach to protect America’s southern shoreline, panicked residents raid grocery stores for provisions and schools institute their wholly ineffective civil defense drills – such as suggesting students gather in school hallways to “duck and cover”.

One student, Sondra (Canadian actress Lisa Jakub) described by Dante as a “Joan Baez type,” Ban-the-Bomb offspring of pre-hippie-post-Beat parents, protests this ineffectual civil defense charade. Movie-monster obsessed loner and rootless Navy brat Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) is immediately smitten with this bright and attractive young classmate. They say that everything is grist for the writer’s mill, and while I don’t wish to speculate, there’s some indication that several moments captured in Matinee are at least semi-autobiographical to Dante’s own life experiences. In a 1990 interview published in the compendium Famous Monsters Chronicles, Dante recalled to sci-fi film historian Bill Warren that one of his earliest memories was “being on the way to grammar school when a little girl told me we could be dead in seconds because the Russians could drop a bomb on us.”

Trying their best to remain buoyant in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, every young person in town congregates the following Saturday at Key West’s weather-beaten Strand theater to be entertained and distracted by the atomic horrors promised by Lawrence Woolsey’s new science-fiction film Mant! (Half-man! Half-Ant! All Terror!). Woolsey and his girlfriend and beleaguered leading lady and girlfriend (Cathy Moriarty) are in town not only to test market his new film but to showcase its potential to the cigar-chomping Mr. Spector (Jesse White), an interested distributor. A large portion of Matinee takes place in the lobbies, balcony, side rooms and cellars of the local bijou – a self-contained world where, in one sense or another, everyone is safe from the true horrors unfolding in the outside world.

A true masterstroke of Matinee is Mant!, the aforementioned film-within-the-film. Styled like a vintage B & W 1950s sci-fi offering from American International Pictures, Dante brought in some very identifiable veteran players from that era to convey authenticity. Among these was the professorial Robert Cornthwaite, who made a splash playing know-it-all doctors in such classics as Howard Hawk’s The Thing from Another World (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953). Kevin McCarthy, the unforgettable fugitive on the run from the pod people in Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), plays a uniformed General trying to coax the Mant! from the side of a Chicago skyscraper. William Schallert, a very familiar face on television screens and an occasional B-film actor with such titles as Port Sinister (1953) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) to his credit, perfectly captures the spirit of a mad dentist who accidentally creates the Mant via an otherwise routine oral X-Ray having gone terribly awry. The ever dependable Dick Miller, a veteran of so many Roger Corman horror and sci-fi films of the 1950s and 1960s, does double duty here; he’s both a soldier in a Mant! crowd scene as well as one of two shills employed by the irrepressible Woolsey to drum up business. The second shill is another famous east-coaster, director-actor John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus 7, Matewan).

The desire to capture the sight and sound of those original 1950’s “atom age” shockers is abetted by Dante’s masterful use of musical cues from that era. Though the film proper would be evocatively scored by Jerry Goldsmith, it was decided that the Mant! sequences would make use of original themes found on the scores of such films as The Deadly Mantis, Tarantula!, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mole People, and It Came From Outer Space – amongst others. One of the LPs in the personal record library of film editor Marshall Harvey was Dick Jacobs and his Orchestra performing Themes from Horror Movies in Ghoulish High-Fidelity (Coral 757240). I can tell you from experience that this particular LP was an object of fetishistic desire, an item coveted by every twelve-year old boy perusing the Captain Company adverts in the rear of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. In a brilliant move, the filmmakers secured the rights to the Jacobs’ orchestrations of the works of such composers as Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein, William Lava and Henry Mancini to compliment the otherwise original Goldsmith soundtrack.

One will cheat themselves should they choose not to delve deep into this set’s menu of abundant supplemental materials. It’s of particular interest to see how the juxtaposition of one technician’s memories of the Matinee project contrasts wildly from another’s. Production Designer Steven Legler beams with justifiable pride regarding his soundstage mount of the interior of the Key West Strand Theater circa 1962. Having first worked with Dante as a member of the art department on The Howling, Legler’s concept theatre, as it should, appears not as a big city golden movie palace. It’s a modest, neighborhood bijou with over-hanging balcony, an unassuming cinema unadorned but for dullish wallpaper of brown mustard-yellow, threadbare carpets, seat cushions of faded red and sturdy cedar banisters. Legler’s attention-to-detail matches only that of helmsman Dante who obsessively decorates and reconstructs movie theater lobbies with vintage one-sheet posters and modest middle-class homes with period bric-a-brac.

For his part, Legler recalls scouring through the pages of vintage magazines and books to best replicate an unassuming movie house of 1962. The marquee built for the faux Key West Strand is gloriously unassuming and authentic in presentation: a bit dingy and weathered, but with a beckoning neon glow. Legler was so keen on conveying a sense of realism, that he was insistent about having a downward sloped floor built – an artistic choice perhaps, but one both financially and technically imprudent. It looks marvelous on screen, but DOP John Hora relates that Legler’s too-authentic replication of an actual movie house caused all sorts of technical difficulties for the camera crew. Though built on Universal’s brand-new soundstage in Orlando, Legler’s boxy design allowed for no breakaway walls to allow for unimpeded camera movements. Additionally, while the sunshine Key West locations bring an undeniable atmosphere to the film, Hora recalls that shooting on-site in Florida was something of a nightmare. As weather and natural light conditions were prone to sudden change, properly illuminating outdoors scenes was, at best, difficult and inconsistent.

Film editor Marshall Harvey also recalled the travails of shooting feature films in the Sunshine State. Though Universal had built several soundstages on site, the company was more deeply invested in the very profitable amusement park surrounding it. Orlando was, to put it mildly, simply not a media center ala Los Angeles or New York. The soundstages of Orlando were of bare bone construction. There were no on-site lumber supplies, no wardrobe or set dressing facilities, no prop storages, no camera departments or lighting barracks on site to utilize. Harvey recalled Universal Orlando was effectively barely a production studio at all. Most of the so-called “soundstages” were rented out to various local businesses for the purposes of meetings and events – not for the purposes of movie-making.

There were other unforeseen problems caused by shooting on location in Florida. In the interest of visual authenticity, the self-contained movie-within-the movie Mant! was to be shot – as it would have been in the silver age of 1950’s sci-fi - on black and white 35mm film stock. This wouldn’t have been a problem ordinarily, but since Florida had no laboratories capable of processing B&W film, all of the day’s rushes had to be first sent to New York City and couriered back for screening, thus causing delays. The stories shared here are both interesting and compelling, but ultimately the final product of the company’s efforts and labor are all that matter… and the resulting film is positively enchanting.

Shout! Factory’s amazing and lovingly assembled “Collector’s Edition” Blu Ray of Matinee is presented in 1080p High-Definition widescreen with an aspect ratio of 1:85:1 and in DTS-HD Audio Stereo. The set includes an absolutely mind-boggling and generous array of special features and supplements that total nearly three hours in bonus content: Master of the Matinee: Joe Dante, The Leading Lady: an Interview with Cathy Moriarty, Mantastic!: the Making of a Mant (featuring Jim McPherson and Mant! actor Mark McCracken), Out of the Bunker: an Interview with Actress Lisa Jakub, Making a Monster Theatre: an Interview with Production Designer Steven Legler, The Monster Mix: an Interview with Editor Marshall Harvey, Lights! Camera! Reunion!: an Interview with Director of Photography John Hora, Mant! The Full Length Version of the Film with Introduction by Joe Dante, and Paranoia in Ant Vision: Joe Dante Discusses the Making of the Film. Simply stated, this remarkable set is a film geeks dream. Fans of the film will have, presumably, already added this remarkable “Collector’s Edition” of Matinee to their home video collection. Those who have not yet discovered the timeless charm of Joe Dante’s most personal film will find they’ve been richly rewarded in doing so.