Having acted like how he usually does, and having the reputation that he does, I'm not surprised that Ellison's script never got produced.
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Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes and other SciFi Classics
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Having acted like how he usually does, and having the reputation that he does, I'm not surprised that Ellison's script never got produced.
I also enjoyed Jules Verne's The Journey to the Center of the Earth, but was disappointed with the films so far. Honestly, I can hardly remember one. The story is by itself captivating enough.
Doc Emmett Brown also loves Jules Verne.....
As to the Back to the Future movies, the second one, playing in Marty's future, is my least favorite. Hey, we have 2015 this year, we are in the future. Well, not yet, but soon. We have to wait until October 21st.
Doc Emmett Brown also loves Jules Verne.....
As to the Back to the Future movies, the second one, playing in Marty's future, is my least favorite. Hey, we have 2015 this year, we are in the future. Well, not yet, but soon. We have to wait until October 21st.
Pardon me while I order a dehydrated pizza on my enormous wall-mounted video phone...
To be fair, the world is full of unproduced screenplays and ambitious movie projects that died in Development Hell for one reason or another. There's nothing at all shocking or incriminating about the fact that a proposed big-budget SF movie never made it into production, and absolutely no reason to assume that Ellison's personality had anything to do with it.
Movie projects fall through all the time. Just off the top of my head, I'm sure we all remember:
Brian DePalma's epic movie version of THE DEMOLISHED MAN.
Oliver Stone's PLANET OF THE APES.
James Cameron's SPIDER-MAN
Bryan Singer's LOGAN'S RUN
Ridley Scott's I AM LEGEND
George Miller's JUSTICE LEAGUE movie.
Wolfgang Petersen's BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN
These were all announced with great fanfare at various points. Some of them even made it into pre-production before the studio pulled the plug because of budget concerns, "creative differences," rights issues, or whatever.
Honestly, it seems unfair to imply that it must be Ellison's fault that his version of I, ROBOT never got filmed.
The Black Hole always cracks me up. It's Maximilian Schell...trapped in Maximilian's shell.(And don't even try to tell me that was a coincidence...)
I'm a slow one. I just got that.
I think they weren't shot very well. It wasn't a fault of the miniatures, which were huge for the time.
That works as a daytime shot.
That reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 short story "Dial F for Frankenstein," in which an interconnected global telephone network becomes sentient and evil. Hasn't happened yet . . . has it?
Come on, who could forget the 1959 movie with James Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl, some big Icelandic dude and a pet duck? Of course, the duck had all the best lines.
The LR miniatures themselves were great. There were, however, several factors that contributed to making them "look like models" on screen.
- The water in the pools and ponds was moving and sloshing around in ways that made it possible to perceive that you were looking at scale models.
- The camera's depth of field, or rather the lack thereof in scale, created the perception that models were being used. In particular, the foreground was often badly out of focus, such as in the approach to the City Domes from the outside.
- The camera movement and tilt was sometimes awkward and jerky. They seemed to be trying to make it as if the camera was looking down from a helicopter or airplane flying over, but when the camera made sudden moves inconsistent with that, the illusion was broken, and again it looked like a model. The approach to the City Domes from the outside is again a big offender here. They do alright for a bit, and then, wham, the illusion is destroyed.
I can simply remember newer versions, lacking the love for detail. Maybe I have seen that version of yours. If so, it's been long ago. 1959 sounds good. I love old movies as a rule.
There are a lot of old movies produced in the former GDR. They had a film studio called DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft; publicly owned film studio GDR). They produced fairy tailes by the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm Hauff, and many Russian fairy tailes. I love those old movies. I have fond childhood memories. TV shows for kids nowadays aren't what they used to be.
Unfortunately, old movies (with Jules Verne themes), aren't re-run on a regular basis.
I can hardly remember Captain Nemo....
Channeling my inner nitpicker, wasn't it a goose?
Bullshit. Many kid's movies are just like they used to be, and many have the same innocence as in past years (albeit with a modern sensibility, like Frozen and he Princess and the Frog.)
That's what (at least here in North America) channels like TCM are for, as well as having films on DVD.
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"It's only a model!"
"Shh!"
"On second thought, let's not go to the Domed City. It is a silly place."
We could probably work a song and dance in there!
"We're men of the Domed City / we view the aged with pity /
We revel well at Carrousel / we surf the Circuit for titty...."
We revel well at Carrousel / we surf the Circuit for titty...."
Bullshit. Many kid's movies are just like they used to be, and many have the same innocence as in past years (albeit with a modern sensibility, like Frozen and The Frog Princess.)
That's what (at least here in North America) channels like TCM are for, as well as having films on DVD.[/QUOTE]
It's not always just innocence, it's also charm. Let's not argue about kids movies here. We have obviously different opinions on this, that's alright. My observation may have been too generalized. It was related mostly to kids movies made in Germany or Europe.
You can't know that. I have bad experiences with defective DVDs. They were expensive, and they are unplayable now...
We have channels that show older movies, too. I simply have to look up the program in the tv paper, or online, as it is.
I'm just trying to remember the book. There was neither a duck, nor a goose nor a female accompanying Prof. Lidenbrock and Axel. As to the film: I looked it up, they always refer to Gertrud as duck, whyever.
I stand corrected. Quack!
That sounds awesome! Sort of a precursor to the WWW trilogy, where the Internet becomes sentient. I read the first novel, and have no desire to tackle the others.
Clarke has a short story called The 9 Billion Names of God in which a group of monks buy a state of the art computer to print out a list of all possible words in the belief that once they find all of the names of God, the world will end. The funny thing about the computer, and most computers in 50s/60s scifi is they are just like computers of the day, but more powerful. In this story, it was controlled by a dummy terminal, and printed the results on a futuristic typewriter (which was how you used a computer before monitors).
In a James Blish story from the same book, Richard Strauss is resurrected in the future by programming him into a host body, similar to Dollhouse. He laments that in the future popular music is made by splicing random tapes together. Most scifi stories from that time period predicted that in the future we'd still be using magnetic tape for data storage and music. Thankfully, we do not.
