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The killer is given away in..the movie poster.
Anyway, Universal knew what and who they had in Spielberg and honestly ...who ELSE could have fought the elements and won. Also..Spielberg made the movie harder to make IN ORDER to make it better: actually shooting at sea all the time(less one scene in a swimming pool at night - the head pop scene). Location shooting at Martha's Vineyard all the time -- no returns to California beaches.
In my opinion Spielberg was such a force of nature, a master showman and business operator they wisely put their faith in him.
Turned out to be a good choice!
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There are a lot of "urban legends" about how Spielberg became -- first -- an "in house Universal TV director" and, later, a bigtime movie director, like: "He snuck onto the lot on a daily basis and took an empty desk in an office." But his award winning short film "Amblin'" seemed to get his foot into the door in a professional way, Sid Sheinberg (second in command to Big Boss Lew Wasserman) definitely saw the talent, and the very young Spielberg(who looked even younger) got at least three Universal TV assignments that made "minor key TV history":
Night Gallery (1969) -- directing one of three segments in the TV pilot, and directing Grand Dame Joan Crawford, who approved him to direct and later sang his praises.
Duel (1971) A "less than 90 minute" TV Movie of the Week that PLAYED like one long action sequence: truck chases car, psycho driver chases neurotic regular guy. "Duel" eschewed trying to do lots of dialogue scenes, like a movie -- it was like "the crop duster scene in North by Northwest done as a full length movie."
The first Columbo series episode(1971.) There had been TV movies in 1968 and 1970 of Columbo, but when it "went to series in 1971," it opened with a Spielberg-directed episode with a lot of style.
Hitchcock rather inspired all three of those TV events -- he inspired EVERYBODY in those days, and Hitchcock inspired the suspense sequences in Jaws(Hitchocck's "Vertigo zoom-dolly dizzy POV" is used on Chief Brody reacting to the Kintner boy being attacked...)
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roger1 wrote: "Maybe this accounts for a famous story written somewhere that Universal brass flew "a woman" (Universal staffer? Professional hooker?) out to the Martha's Vineyard location to "placate" the harried and exhausted Spielberg and to keep him happy about his job. This has been documented, never confirmed by Spielberg(who was single at the time.)"
From Peter Biskind's book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls"
"A female friend of a friend was brought out from L.A. for recreational sex. She slept with him, and left".
My best guess is Margot Kidder was the female friend who sent her friend to sleep with Spielberg.
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This entire story is a reminder that while in Hollywood, MeToo sexual harrassment is a real thing SOMETIMES, there is also a long history of nubile women WILLINGLY giving themselves up for sex for professional reasons.
This woman -- "a friend of a friend"(and a woman friend if it was Kidder) - was quite willing to fly to Martha's Vineyard JUST to have sex with Spielberg that one time and then flew back. Sounds almost like a "professional" to me, but it was the 70's and free love was the thing and...Hollywood.
I've also read that Spielberg and wealthy filmmakers would peruse "model portfolio books" to pick women to date, just call them up and tell them who you are and -- many times if not always -- you get a date with a model.
Stars would also call agents to get actresses phone numbers -- that's how Cary Grant got wife Number Four -- he saw Dyan Cannon in a bikini on a TV show. Michael Caine saw HIS wife to be on a TV commercial, called HER agent. Reversibly, Jamie Lee Curtis saw Christopher Guest as a recurring player on SNL and called HIS agent.
It gets hard to separate the predatory from the romantic in Hollywood, but both exist. With lust as the currency for both.
As for Megalopolis, it sounds like ol' Francis has self-written , yes, an "artistic faceplant" of a movie, but I want to see it. We'll not see his like again, he's right there alongside Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas from the 70's Golden Age. (Remember when Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas showed up at the Oscars to give the Best Director Oscar? It would have been embarrassing if Scorsese did NOT win for The Departed, but the lock was in. Lucas was a good sport about the joke aimed towards him -- HE would never win Best Director.)
It'll be fun to see Dustin Hoffman on screen again-- monster though he may be, I kinda think ALL of them are, what's it to us? I grew up on The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Marathon Man, Tootsie... And I always enjoy Aubrey Plaza. Part of her stardom is "schtick" (cool deadpan chick) but she's pretty with personality, and a great reader of lines. A winning combination.
Coppola evidently here joins those who are cautioning us that America shall "soon"(this decade? this century?) fall like the Roman Empire. Its being said so much lately I'm just sort of chilling out and waiting for the final announcement, y'know? After all, I've been told the world can blow up nuclear since I was a kid...and with our two Presidential candidates calling each other out like pro wrestlers...I think the Empire's already falling, anyway. Suppose they gave an Empire collapse and nobody came?
And I went to Francis Coppola's winery a time or two. I hear he sold it at one location and moved it to another. I've not been to the new one.
The OLD winery had a room with a smattering of Coppola movie props. All I remember is the desk from The Godfather and the blood red armor worn by Gary Oldman as Dracula.
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And:
I saw Francis Coppola once in person. He sat on the floor seats at an NBA basketball game I attended. He was introduced to great applause and we watched him watch the entire game. My side of this is no more important than those nameless youths shown in the audience on those Actor's Studio shows with a star BUT...Coppola goes on the list of directors I have seen and on the much shorter list of directors I have seen who made MONUMENTAL films. (That would include Hitchcock, Capra, Ford, Minelli.) I have never seen Spielberg or Scorsese or Tarantino. Among the 70s crowd, I did a seminar with Bob Rafelson(Five Easy Pieces) and with Paul Schrader. I saw Peter Bogdanovich twice(MEETING him the first time and shaking his hand) . I have been to seminars with screenwriters Robert Towne(Chinatown) and Ernest Lehman(North by Northwest -- of which Lehman said "How did you folks like that Mount Rushmore scene? ...I think it goes on too long." Hey, says YOU.
And just three months ago, I watched Paul Thomas Anderson at work. Its all fun if non-consequential.
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Astaire and Clark(oh, mostly their doubles) visit: The Statue of Liberty(Saboteur), Mount Rushmore(North by Northwest), The Golden Gate Bridge(Vertigo) and....the School House from The Birds(The Birds.)
Its that "Birds" reference that tells you that Coppola was using his Finian's Rainbow opening sequence as a gentle homage to Hitch before settling down to his musical.
I saw Finian's Rainbow first run, in a great big new Dome movie theater, reserved seat. That's how they showed musicals in those days. I liked it very much, I remembered the name Francis Ford Coppola for future use, and I NOTICED his youthful, hip approach to the material(his assistant on Finian's Rainbow was a fellow named George Lucas...)
I own the DVD. For what its worth, I found Roger Eberts 1968 review of Finian's Rainbow and he wrote "this is the best of the current musicals."
For what its worth, "Finian's Rainbow" is next in line after The Godfather as my favorite Francis Coppola film.
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I always like to throw in a Francis Coppola movie I really LOVE -- with memories of seeing it first run -- even as it gets bundled together with the "mastodon big budget musicals of the late 60s" so despised by Quentin Tarantino and others.
Three of are great personal memories to me: Hello, Dolly(with Streisand and My Man Walter Matthau --and my grandmother's favorite movie at the time); Paint Your Wagon(famously starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood! But most of the songs were NEW ones with hip macho sensibilities, and the Oregon scenery was fab) and..Finian's Rainbow.
Francis Coppola does a charming documentary on the Finian's Rainbow that opens with him SINGING the opening of one of the charming songs from the movie("How Are Things in Glocca Mora"?) Yes, Coppola SINGS! And he says that he took Finian's Rainbow to honor his father, a musical composer/conductor.
As Coppola says, "the movie has too much book"(ie plot and dialogue) but those songs ARE charmers and very very sexy when sung by Petulia Clark(a favorite of mine, I saw her live on stage in the 90s and my crush was intact.) Fred Astaire is pretty cool in it. A TV actor named Don Francks coulda been a star based on this, and his DUET with Petulia(That Old Devil Moon) is even MORE sexy and well directed by Coppola.
..but directed by Coppola on a green grassy soundstage set left over from the inferior Camelot of the year before.
As Coppola says, Warners made Finian's Rainbow mainly on the backlot and quite cheap. Its hard to tell, though. And Warners DID grant Coppola's request to open the movie with music and credits set to Fred Astaire and Petulia Clark(as father and daughter) crossing America from Ireland over, under and past a series of American landmarks , four from Hitchocck movies:
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I'm a bit down on Godfather II, and one reason is this.
As I young person, I went into The Godfather in some dread. It was THREE HOURS and -- based on things like David Lean movies -- I was expecting some "boring costume epic" in certain ways. But NO, that movie MOVED. With the long set up exposition of the opening wedding scene, the movie then went on to a delicious meal of a story, with murders as punctuation (The Godfather joined Psycho as a movie largely ABOUT violent murders as entertainment -- there were just a lot MORE of them in The Godfather.)
But...when Coppola made "Godfather II" with the leash off...damn(I remember thinking) he went and MADE one of those long David Lean type movies, the very thing that "The Godfather rejected."
Honestly. The entire Robert DeNiro part was ALREADY in the novel of The Godfather, but was REMOVED from the movie. Because: David Lean.
And: The "newly written part" (Michael Corleone fails where Vito Corleone succeeded ...in business and with family) was sort of , well , sort of predictable and Michael was very sullen and inward. (Marlon Brando and James Caan were SORELY missed.)
I have found that NY Times critic Vincent Canby shared my view in his 1974 review, so I'm not alone. Also: Godfather II earned half of The Godfather so AUDIENCES noticed the slow down.
That said, there IS a lot to like in Godfather II, what happens to Fredo IS tragic but...Coppola pretty much detached from Hollywood from that point on.
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I just headed to IMDb to look up Coppola's directing career...the movies..and it looks like one has to go BACK to 1997 (The Rainmaker) and 1996(Jack) to find Coppola making movies with distribution that people saw. (I will assume that Coppola did those two movies back to back because he needed the money -- maybe to finance his winery in Napa/Sonoma Valley California?) Since "The Rainmaker" -- all experimental films.
Between Apocalypse Now and Jack:
One From the Heart(a big experiment that didn't pan out)
The Outsiders (from one Young Adult novel)
Rumble Fish (from another Young Adult novel)
The Cotton Club( "The anti-Godfather -- though James Remar, Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne were fun as gangsters)
Captain EO (A Disneyland Michael Jackson 3D production -- I saw it live, it was cool)
Peggy Sue Got Married
Gardens of Stone (A Vietnam-themed film, Coppola's son visited him during production in DC and was killed in a speedboat accident; the boat was driven by one of Ryan O'Neal's sons.)
Tucker (About a rebellious...car maker; analogy received.)
New York Stories(one segment, Woody Allen and Scorsese did others)
Bram Stoker's Dracula (A LOT of creative fun, I thought, the climax battle was exciting and VERY different for a
Dracula movie -- and I could live with Keanu Reeves.)
and...
Jack
The Rainmaker
and...
..all experimental since then.
That's a long time.
But it actually reads like a pretty standard director's list. Some out of personal interest(The Outsiders and Rumble Fish) some for hire(Peggy Sue, The Rainmaker, Jack) but always, always ALWAYS anchored by the two real claims to Coppola's fame:
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II
...and I say this: Coppola said he only took The Godfather to launch for a career in experimental film and The Godfather II STARTS that experimental period.
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he shouldve put Spacey in this too
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Maybe in his next movie. It could become a "goodwill project":
"Kevin Spacey, Will Smith, and Johnny Depp in Francis Coppola's......"
As for Coppola, his has always been one of the strangest of Hollywood careers. In some ways his career PEAKED with the first two Godfathers, back to back, Best Pictures both. The Conversation was well reviewed but a flop. Apocalypse Now started filming in 1976 and was released in 1979 and will always strike me as "a work in progress" (like Close Encounters, it now has multiple versions, pick one, please.)
And after Apocalypse Now? Coppola was always announcing some innovation in technology or distiribution and seemd to mix oddball projects with standard stuff. I LOVE these three of his movies after Apocalypse Now: Tucker: A Man and His Dreams(with good guy Jeff Bridges ruined by corrupt Senator LLOYD Bridges); Dracula(for its wacky technical prowess and a bang-up action sequence battle rescue at Dracula's castle that has one Western gunslinger on board to fight the vampires); and The Rainmaker, an all-star John Grisham law movie that could have easily been filmed by Sydney Pollack, no clue to Coppola as director at all. (The best star in it was a briefly used Mickey Rourke as a cool, crooked, but oddly decent lawyer.)
I found The Cotton Club to be "the anti-Godfather" (Richard Gere never really could carry a movie like a true star IMHO) and Peggy Sue Got Married, after a GREAT start (with our 1980's heroine going "back to the future" to Psycho year 1960 - no mention made), it just sort of fell apart. I never saw the one where Robin Williams was a "boy man." ("Jack.")
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There may be in fact as many ''swing for the fences' movies made now as were made back in the supposed hey-day of risk-taking, '60s-'70s.
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With regard to three "commercial" filmmakers in the 70s, there was a pattern to WHY they made their big swing for the fences movies -- even when two out of three of them were NOT "deep think art films" at all.
Coppola with The Godfather; Spielberg with Jaws; John Landis with Animal House -- all three were put on very tight budgets and schedules(even for intended blockbusters The Godfather and Jaws); supervised down to the nickels, dimes, and minutes by studio personnel, and in one case, very much at risk of being fired (Coppola., maybe Spielberg too but he had studio allies.)
When each of those men got blockbusters that made them and the studios rich, they were "taken off the leash" by studios and went nuts on budget and schedules. It took awhile for Coppola to go nuts -- after Godfather II and The Conversation, Apocalype Now took months(years?) to film. After Jaws, Spielberg leaped into the costly back to back Close Encounters of the Third Kind(a hit) and 1941(not a hit) And John Landis went over budget and schedule on The Blues Brothers(which came out 6 months after 1941 and was jokingly called 1942 by some.)
It was as if all three directors were like "OK, you worked me like a supervised slave the first time but I'm going to spend all the time and money I want THIS time."
Spielberg corrected(big time) for 1941 with Raiders and ET (the second best one-two summer movie punch after NXNW and Psycho, to me). John Landis came back with the modest "American Werewolf in London"(a good movie) and then crashed for all time with the fatal helicopter crash on the "Twilight Zone" set.
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--- and before that there were things like the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas and Malick's Tree of Life and art-film-world things like von Trier's Nymphomaniac, Wim Wenders' Until The End of the World, Noe's Enter The Void, and Sion Sono's Love Exposure (and maybe Suicide Club too - Sono's got a penchant for big statements).
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Well, "Mainstream Man" has seen NOT ONE of those movies -- I again bow to your "cinematic bona fides" swanstep -- and I hear that Cloud Atlas has Tom Hanks in it. (Sidebar: rather like these directors who fade in older age, Tom Hanks seems to be always working these days but to no effect -- Martin Short introduced Hanks at some ecent event with "Oh, look, Tom Hanks is here -- you remember... he was a star in the 1990s." True! Also, sorry but, evidently due to a diabetes'-fighting health regimen...Hanks looks rather strange in his older age. Not like an actor you'd want to LOOK at in admiration anymore. I get to be catty. He gets to be a multimillionaire. Fair trade.)
I DID however see "The Fall Guy" last week on urging of others and...well...I can't remember it right now.
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Anyhow, I'm continually struck by the number of highly risky, uncommercial, high probability of artistic faceplant 'magnum opus' movies that still actually get made.
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"artistic faceplant" -- HAH! I love that phrase. Its like these directors(especially if they try to WRITE their films too) just seem to go for broke, embarrassment be damned, financial wounds to studios be damned and -- unfortunately much of the time -- the finished movies are hardly classics. TRUE classics seem to come out of nowhere "The Matrix" comes to mind.
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In just the last year or two we've had Beau is Afraid and Babylon,
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Saw the latter only (Babylon) and while I WAS impressed by its sweeping scope and "History of Silent Hollywood" focus -- I was NOT impressed by the constant flow of bodily fluids(man, woman, and elephant alike) on the screen and I could only believe that we were witnessing the director's fetish on screen. (How sadly often have I felt that some directors use a big hit to get the money and the budget to make ANOTHER movie solely to impose their fetishes on audiences -- Hitchcock was guilty with Frenzy and QT with almost every movie he made -- and I"m not just talking about the foot thing, which I now thing he does like "Hitchocck's cameos." The Babylon director seems to dig on disgust.)
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Hitchcock never made any movies like this,
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You raise a point, swanstep, which I have often thought about in my years of Hitchcock fanship and study.
My comparison point is Orson Welles.
Welles made ONE great big giant all-time-worshiped classic of cinematic legerdemain -- Citizen Kane - and then spent the rest of his career making movies that (a) rarely got made for the American movie system; (b) often got re-edited BY the American studio system(The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil) and (c) often couldn't get the proper financing to be made with the necessary budgets.
Hitchcock never quite made ONE all-time-worshiped classic of cinematic legerdemain -- instead, he made a LOT of movies(usually with modest budgets and small scale stories) and sort of ended up making ONE megamovie that was ALL his movies. Stitching together the setpieces from The 39 Steps to Rebecca to Spellbound to Rope to Strangers on a Train to Rear Window to Man 2(Albert Hall!) to Vertigo to North by Northwest to Psycho to The Birds to Frenzy...ONE great big decades long megaproject.
And unlike Welles(and later, William Friedkin) , Hitchcock TOTALLY respected the studio money men. Eva Marie Saint said that Hitchcock stopped filming on the North by Northwest set to "greet and praise the money men" and in more than one interview, Hitchcock said: "I am very conscious of the fact that I have been given the money to make my films and I must try to earn that money back for my backers, and make a profit."
Welles at least struggled on for decades making movies after Citizen Kane. It would seem that Greed ended Von Stroheim's career and "Heaven's Gate" severely crippled that of Michael Cimino(though though he did land a few directing assignments after that, his legitimate "Deer Hunter" Oscars gave him continuing cred.)
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A little more on Harryhausen and Talos:
I think Harryhausen knew how much he had "hit the sweet spot of terror" with the statue coming to life in Jason and the Argonauts...and when he got to "come back in the 70's" to make a few more films(all in the Sinbad series before one last Greek legends film)...he kept trying more scenes of blank-faced statues coming to life. They were CLOSE to Talos, but not close enough. Two of them were female: a wooden woman at the bow of a ship -- "she" tears loose from the wooden bow and starts attacking men on board; AND a multi-armed Goddess with a sword in the hand of each arm...swinging her bladed arms like a Cuisinart to slice up Sinbad's men.
But they weren't Talos.
Nice to see another Talos fan here.
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We are legion...especially from our childhoods.
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The 'head turn' certainly freaked me out as a kid,
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His immobile face was SCARY, and his musculature (very Schwarzenegger-like) made him seem scarier.
I'm a Hitchcock buff and the head turn is an example of a French term used often in Hitchcock movies called "the frisson"(a French term?) ...the moment when something happens that raises the hairs on our neck and starts a suspense set piece.
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and the stop-motion only added to his 'creakiness.'
Harryhausen said the irony with animating Talos was "I have to make his movements LESS smooth , when my usual problem is overcoming the jerkiness."
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I seem to remember the Colossus of Rhodes statue being the inspiration for the scene where Talos stands legs apart over the Argo.
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Yep. THAT was scary in a different way. The Argonauts thought they were home clear, sailing out to sea, Talos nowhere in sight and then...he appears in FRONT of them stands above them and -- they CANT STOP THE BOAT and they float right into doom. No brakes. More nightmare stuff.
I thought Colussus of Rhodes (a 1961 movie) would be like that, but it wasn't. It was just a statue there. Trivia: Colussus of Rhodes was directed by Sergio Leone...
---If only Hercules hadn't such a penchant for very large brooch pins :)
Ha! Hercules was cast with an interesting actor who usally appeared in suits and ties and military uniforms: Nigel Green. He was in no way a muscleman like Steve Reeves or Arnold. He was simply a tall, strapping , well built man with a lot of charisma.
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Perhaps, although the on-set stuff hasn't yet been corroborated by any on-set cast member accounts- the claims were actually made in a magazine article.
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And, come to think of it, the rumors are about things that happened on set AFTER he hired the other outcasts.
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It's unclear the frequency and severity, even if true. His support of Salva is uncomfortable and shows bad judgment, and Salva was convicted after all.
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Hollywood and NYC people often get caught being compassionate for the wrong people.
Decades ago, a lot of celebs supported the release of a convicted killer who had written a book about his prison experience called "In the Belly of the Beast." The celebs said he was great writer, a true talent who deserved release. He got released early. Shortly after being released, he got into an argument with a waiter in a restaurant, stabbed the waiter to death...and went right back to prison. The celebs didnt support him after that.
I read somewhere that the bad stories on Coppola may be from studios angry with his usual rebellious ways and attempts to break with studio distribution. I have no idea.