Movie Special effects were tricky some 20 odd years ago. Some may say the FX were better, but those folks are only half right. Simpler is a better description. Simpler is usually the best way to solve any problem. That’s just how it works.
Reading an interview with Zach Galligan I learned just how complicated the GREMLINS 2 gremlins really were:
And when he[Rick Baker] came in, some of the stuff he did with some of the Gremlins in Gremlins 2, at the time, it was absolutely jaw dropping. I mean, with the intelligent Gremlin, the brain Gremlin, that was voiced by Tony Randall, he came up with this system that works with the voice. And once you have the tapes, you had this thing where the computer was attached to all of the wires.
So this combination of pulling on the wires would create this facial expression that mimicked the letter E. And this pulling on the wires would do the letter G, all the way through the alphabet. And they’d get the voice, would phonetically transpose everything by computer for the facial expressions, and there’d be a two and a half second delay. So you would play the tape, it would go through this incredible computerised thing, and the Gremlin would sit there and would be talking, and it would be about two and a half seconds behind. Then, all you had to do was move the tape up two and a half seconds and it fit perfectly. So when you played the tape back, it looked like the thing was talking. And remember, he did that in 1989, way before the Internet, and way before computer programs were sophisticated. It was on another level.
You should have seen – when he demonstrated that thing, everyone was stood around like it was some kind of magical invention. It was unbelievable. It was an incredibly high level of sophistication.
—Zach Galligan
The Den of Geek interview made mention of a 23 year old movie called NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. A movie which looks like a thing worth watching. Too bad it was treated so shoddy back in the day.
Here I am doing a movie with Saturday Night Live people, with Lorne Michaels producing it, and Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and even John Belushi was going to be in it, until he passed away about a month before we were going to start shooting it.
So here I am the lead, with all this stuff going on. And then I did the movie, and it turned out very differently, I mean. It’s very artistic and offbeat, and interesting: it’s peculiar and dreamlike, it’s just not a commercial movie. As a result, MGM just had no idea how to market it.
—Zach Galligan
He goes on to say that some time after that the studio wrote it off as a tax loss. This meant no DVD. Yet they dols it to Turner Broadcasting and they have been showing it in Europe where a Dutch kid saw it and wrote a book about it called Nothing Lasts Forver.
Screenings have been held the last few years around the USA and it’s getting good reviews. 23 years later, a movie finds its audience.
Now how do I get my hands on it?
*schemes. plots.*
Looks like I got my Quote of the year(so far):
“…the difference is that people in Los Angeles are interested in success, people in New York are interested in achievement. There’s a very big difference. The people in New York want to achieve something, the people in LA they just want to achieve success.”
Sure it’s a broad statement. But as a person on the outside looking in, that’s how it appears to work.
(Den of Geek Galligan interview: part 1 & 2)
…
No Comments | In: Movies | | #
