Savant's new reviews today are
Some readers might want to take another look at the Savant review of House on Haunted Hill -- it's been revised with emails from a helpful pair of readers who remember the details of William Castle's EMERGO gimmick.
The sad news about director Robert Wise's passing made me remember the two times I bumped into him. One was as a fan at the 1975 Filmex Science Fiction marathon, then held at the Century City Plitt theaters. He came to speak at a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I asked him if it was true that Century City was built on the old 20th Fox backlot, and he said yes, most of it. The grassy area where the saucer landed was supposed to be on the mall in Washington DC, but they set it up only a short distance from where we were standing, getting ready to watch the movie.
The second time was four years later and I had my back to Wise most of the time. It was on Star Trek - The Motion Picture, where I'd landed several weeks of editorial work during a deadline crunch. Wise had come to Douglas Trumbull's special effects facility to see what was going on, and hung out in the editorial shack while waiting for me to splice together the day's first dailies for a group screening. These 70mm dailies invariably came late and I rushed to assemble them so that the 14 cameramen working on triple-time pay could get on with their day's work. Making things worse was the fact that on many dark shots of swirling smoke or starfields, finding the frame line was next to impossible, especially with one's supervisor asking three times a minute if it was ready yet.
In that instance, Wise was more like an army general than a director. All the effects men stayed clear of him and it was easily understood that conversation was out of the question. By that point live action filming had been over for the better part of a year. Since he'd probably been dispatched to see for himself why things were going so slowly, nobody was making jokes.
That contrasted with the friendly fellow my producers interviewed for two separate documentaries on West Side Story. I never came to those tapings but one could tell from the last one in 2001 that the fine director was winding down.
I have always hoped that someday Wise would clean out his garage and say, "Well, whaddaya know, there's that original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons I snuck out of RKO in 1942."
--- An email update: Savant's email is changing to [email protected] -- please change your address books! Thanks, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at September 16, 2005 08:10 PM