News Introducing Fact Trek

^^^As I said, "cursory". I spent more time looking at books to see if "____ of the Gun" was commonplace there...it wasn't.

 

Again, "common" is the least important part of the point I was making. Or rather, I was using "common" in the sense of familiar to the public, rather than numerically frequent. I'm sorry I phrased it misleadingly. I just meant I suspected it already existed as a title formula to some extent before Hour of the Gun, and it did. (And of course that would include prose as well as film and television, since many film/TV titles are influenced by prose titles.)

 

Today we posted about Chek[h]ov's Guns. (link)

 

Always one of my fave episodes.

 

And today we're beginning a days-long look at the episode's production design and its antecedents. (LINK)



The lettering on that sign look a bit... familiar?

 

HA HA, that's amazing!

 

Even more amazing...

...and we'll get into that tomorrow!

 

No idea. Background players are not listed on the production documents we've seen.

 

Today: Red Skies, Red Garters



An excerpt...

What StarTrek and Lost In Space’s respective Western episodes' looks appear to be aping is the Oscar™ nominated Best Production Design for the musical western Red Garters (1954), which featured abstracted sets and bold sky colors.

The look is so close one can imagine Kirk and the boys stepping in to watch Calaveras Kate (Rosemary Clooney: George’s aunt) belting out this number there…and Scotty making a fool of himself after some hootch and being thrown out a window.​

A bunch of pix and more over in the twitter feed. (link)

 

Fascinating. Quite a discovery.

I think Red Garters and the "limbo sets" of Lost in Space and Batman were probably all drawing on earlier traditions of theatrical set design. But the decision to use theatrical staging in film/TV is a distinctive one, so I agree it's quite plausible that this was an influence on "West of Mars" and "Spectre." Particularly in the latter case, as it was a Paramount film.

Come to think of it, I wonder if this could've been an influence as well:



Also nice to see Rosemary Clooney getting some attention, as she was from my neck of the woods, and her kid brother Nick (George's father) was my favorite local news anchor when I was young, and an acquaintance of my father.

 

Brave design for a movie musical. Movies were trying all sorts of things in the mid 50s (In Cinemascope!) to compete with the boob tube.

 

We cover the design more in the linked Tweet thread. And tomorrow we're going to go deeper into abstracted and nonrealism, all of this "Spectre" stuff wrapping up Friday.

We have a HUGE blog post we'll publish next week which covers the same material as the Tweets and Facebook posts but with more detail and some extra topics.

As to Gerald McBoing Boing and UPA more broadly speaking, that stuff was sure in the air postwar. And Frank Tashlin—who had directed some really innovative and cinematic cartoons at Warner Bros. and Columbia (notably The Fox and the Grapes in 1941, which basically is the mitochondrial DNA of the blackout gags and structure of Chuck Jones' Road Runner cartoons starting 6 years later)—had moved to live action and had some involvement in the scripting of Red Garters, so that might account for some of the more cartoonish humor in the film (if you have Amazon Prime it's there).

There's a really nice 3-part video on UPA on YouTube. Here's the trailer:

 

Oh, it makes sense that Tashlin was involved in the film's look.

 

This reminds me of the dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1943).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_ballet

Comparison of a musical production's (1998 Royal National Theatre Cast's) with the 1955 film's:

 

He was involved in the script. I don't know that he had any influence on the production design. It's been tough finding a lot of info on the film, even in old newspaper searches. The trades are the next step.


Buddy Ebsen hoofin'!

We'll be discussing dream/stage sequences on our tweets today (Thursday) with a really fun clip.

 

And directed "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" which has Majel Barrett!

 

From today's posts...

Yellow Sky (1948) was in no way abstract or surreal, and it’s been suggested that John Florea’s Life Magazine spread on this film—which posed the cast against bold colored backdrops with things like a teller window floating in the air or a bar floor rail but no bar—may have inspired Red Garters‘ abstracted settings.


Minimalist sets were nothing new even then of course. They were a common stage convention and also utilized in film fantasy sequences, and not in the film’s broader setting. Here’s a striking example from 1953’s The Band Wagon.
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Jump to 4:47 for a subway, 6:44 for the suggestion of a skyline and a fire escape on a nonexistent building, and, most notably, 7:30 for the club, the most “Spectre”al set.

(There was a takedown of the shorter clip we'd planned to post, so hopefully this one sticks since it's by TCM!)​

 

It looks like that video has been blocked on Youtube.
Here's one posted by Turner Classic Movies. Is it the same scene?



Kor

 

Yeah...I just changed the link to the same one you shared. It had worked fine until just this morning!

I'm gay but man I cannot take my eyes off Cyd Charisse in the club dance scene. She's mesmerizing, and almost spider-like.

 

And she's Nana Visitor's aunt!