Probably one of the more famous astronauts in pop culture given the movie Apollo 13. As someone who grew up near NASA that is one of my favorite films.
I recommend "A Man on the Moon" for anyone interested in that era.
I'm Jewish, so all my Christmas's growing up were kinda the same. Sleep in, have brunch, wander over to my neighbor's house around noon to see what kind of loot they got and help them play with their new toys. Sometimes we'd go out for Chinese food and a movie.
But my favorite was Christmas 1999. My girlfriend was out of town with her family and there was no reason to go home to mine, so I was alone (my roommates were with their families too). I decided to go to the movies in Emeryville.
I was going to see Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, and Man on the Moon. The timing lined up perfectly to see all three. About 50 other people were there to do the same thing. When it was time to go in for the first movie, a staff member came out and told us that it would start about 30 minutes late. This would of course cause us to miss all the other movies.
About 30 people stepped forward at the same time and asked to speak to the manager. :). We explained to him that it would throw our whole schedule off. Since it was Christmas, he was kind enough to adjust the schedule so that we could all see all three movies.
I remember when NASA Rd 1 in Clear Lake for renamed "John Glenn Parkway" for a few months due to his flight on the shuttle back in the day.
The space program is just one of those amazing moments in US history to read about. A Man on the Moon was a good book for it, and there are some others in the top tier.
It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. These guys were top notch.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
I don't think that's it exactly. It's very hard to put a finger on. He was often baby-faced as in this interview, but he was a vicious prankster under the hood.
He once surprised an audience by refusing to do any act other than reading aloud The Great Gatsby. After seven minutes (!), the last 4 of which saw him being heckled relentlessly, he asked the audience if they wanted him to play a record instead (presumably many thought he was going to do his Mighty Mouse - one of his most famous routines), and of course they cheered. However, he had already had a vinyl pressed of him reading the The Great Gatsby - picking up right where he had left off.
He continued to read the entire novel as the auditorium emptied over the course of the next 2 hours. He was already a mega star at this point, and finished reading the novel to an almost empty house.
edit: Actually, I'm not sure that this clip is from the same event at which he read the entire novel; this one might be where he just did the first 8 minutes of it on SNL (which is also insane).
second edit: You know, now I'm questioning whether he ever did read the entire book to an audience - I have found a website which claims he didn't, but that his publicist just spread a rumor that he did in order to put the audience on edge before the SNL thing. Perhaps I'm confusing it with the depiction in Man on the Moon, in which he does.
> Should I go watch Taxi/Man on the Moon?
Oh yeah. Man on the Moon is a great film; some of Jim Carrey's best work.
> What is quintessential Kaufman?
In my opinion, Tony Clifton. Absolute brilliance.
He was a terrible lounge singer who went to "meet the audience" during his set. He picked on a single person and horribly abused them - throwing their dinner away, pouring water on their head, making fun of their ethnicity, etc, until the audience was enraged.
However, this single person was always a plant - often his brother or his long time writing partner, Bob Zmuda.
Also, his commitment to character was extreme: by all accounts, Andy never, ever smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol (though he did say that cannabis and LSD had been influences on his thinking).
However, as Tony Clifton, he actually drank and smoked to excess. It's bizarre to see. I can't think of another performer who actually changed something so crucial about his diet just for the purposes of being in character.
Another tidbit. Toward the end you hear mission control say "30 seconds." That's how much fuel is left[1]. Those guys had steel spines.
If you can't get enough of this stuff, I highly recommend "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin[2], as well as the HBO mini-series produced by Tom Hanks and based largely on that book, "From the Earth to the Moon"[3]. "Failure Is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz[4] (flight director on Apollo 11 and 13, among other things) is also a good read.
Your entire blog post can be summed in a single interaction that took place in the movie, "Man on the Moon." A comedic biographical look at Andy Kaufman's Life.
"Don't you want your people to have a modern interesting show?"
"No I want people, I can't sell drinks to an empty room. You're in show business, show BUSINESS. If there is no business, there is no show."
While its slightly apples and oranges. Its something a decent number of Designers and would be Artists have to learn at some point. No business, no show.
> Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.
That's etler's point: you seem to be disagreeing and correcting, but all you are doing is restating what he said. The idea is that "clearly" (and we now have this said twice): this is not just a blind crop, this is a crop that took into account something that Netflix wouldn't know (who is speaking), so it is thereby an unjustifiable stretch to believe that Netflix is modifying the movies themselves (which is the premise that etler was responding to, if you re-read mullingitover's comment).
Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.
Overlooked in the outrage expressed is that movies are shot knowing that cropping will occur, and the scenes are often viewed with the cinematographer & director marking out which parts of the frame will be preserved for various formats. In the scene where Carrey is cropped out, he may very well have been positioned in the full frame such that if/when cropped to 16:9 he simply would not appear, rather than awkwardly have just his arm show while sensibly trying to preserve enough of the speaker within the frame.
http://library.creativecow.net/carlin_paul/35mm-evolution/5 describes a variant of this, presenting and addressing (as a deliberate process!) a little-discussed variant: the 2.39:1 and 16:9 versions may be the ones in fact guilty of cutting off part of the scene, with the 4:3 frame containing the whole scene, and the others preserving the full width but dropping top & bottom portions to make them fit the narrowed frames.
I thought etler was saying that the Man on the Moon crop wasn't pan-and-scan at all. It was just a complete lopping off of the entire left portion of the film that didn't fit the aspect ratio.
Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right. I also doubt Netflix either has a smart algorithm that can figure out the focus of the scene, or hires a bunch of people to choose the right focal point for every movie. They probably ask for movies from their providers in 16:9 format and they show whatever they get. They could ask for both formats and give users the choice, but I'm guessing there might be extra licensing costs to get both, and the majority of their users aren't cinephiles, and they just want their movies to fill the screen.
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Probably one of the more famous astronauts in pop culture given the movie Apollo 13. As someone who grew up near NASA that is one of my favorite films.
I recommend "A Man on the Moon" for anyone interested in that era.
Rest in Peace! Time to read up on him again.
I'm Jewish, so all my Christmas's growing up were kinda the same. Sleep in, have brunch, wander over to my neighbor's house around noon to see what kind of loot they got and help them play with their new toys. Sometimes we'd go out for Chinese food and a movie.
But my favorite was Christmas 1999. My girlfriend was out of town with her family and there was no reason to go home to mine, so I was alone (my roommates were with their families too). I decided to go to the movies in Emeryville.
I was going to see Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, and Man on the Moon. The timing lined up perfectly to see all three. About 50 other people were there to do the same thing. When it was time to go in for the first movie, a staff member came out and told us that it would start about 30 minutes late. This would of course cause us to miss all the other movies.
About 30 people stepped forward at the same time and asked to speak to the manager. :). We explained to him that it would throw our whole schedule off. Since it was Christmas, he was kind enough to adjust the schedule so that we could all see all three movies.
That was a great day.
I remember when NASA Rd 1 in Clear Lake for renamed "John Glenn Parkway" for a few months due to his flight on the shuttle back in the day.
The space program is just one of those amazing moments in US history to read about. A Man on the Moon was a good book for it, and there are some others in the top tier.
It's wild to know the movie Apollo 13 is closer now to the events than to the present. These guys were top notch.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
> Was it that he was avant-garde for the time?
I don't think that's it exactly. It's very hard to put a finger on. He was often baby-faced as in this interview, but he was a vicious prankster under the hood.
He once surprised an audience by refusing to do any act other than reading aloud The Great Gatsby. After seven minutes (!), the last 4 of which saw him being heckled relentlessly, he asked the audience if they wanted him to play a record instead (presumably many thought he was going to do his Mighty Mouse - one of his most famous routines), and of course they cheered. However, he had already had a vinyl pressed of him reading the The Great Gatsby - picking up right where he had left off.
He continued to read the entire novel as the auditorium emptied over the course of the next 2 hours. He was already a mega star at this point, and finished reading the novel to an almost empty house.
(The first part of this was captured on video, here: http://www.teachertube.com/video/andy-kaufman-reads-gatsby-167287).
edit: Actually, I'm not sure that this clip is from the same event at which he read the entire novel; this one might be where he just did the first 8 minutes of it on SNL (which is also insane).
second edit: You know, now I'm questioning whether he ever did read the entire book to an audience - I have found a website which claims he didn't, but that his publicist just spread a rumor that he did in order to put the audience on edge before the SNL thing. Perhaps I'm confusing it with the depiction in Man on the Moon, in which he does.
> Should I go watch Taxi/Man on the Moon?
Oh yeah. Man on the Moon is a great film; some of Jim Carrey's best work.
> What is quintessential Kaufman?
In my opinion, Tony Clifton. Absolute brilliance.
He was a terrible lounge singer who went to "meet the audience" during his set. He picked on a single person and horribly abused them - throwing their dinner away, pouring water on their head, making fun of their ethnicity, etc, until the audience was enraged.
However, this single person was always a plant - often his brother or his long time writing partner, Bob Zmuda.
Also, his commitment to character was extreme: by all accounts, Andy never, ever smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol (though he did say that cannabis and LSD had been influences on his thinking).
However, as Tony Clifton, he actually drank and smoked to excess. It's bizarre to see. I can't think of another performer who actually changed something so crucial about his diet just for the purposes of being in character.
It's stuff like this that made Andy so memorable.
you'll here mention. Ugh, "hear."
Another tidbit. Toward the end you hear mission control say "30 seconds." That's how much fuel is left[1]. Those guys had steel spines.
If you can't get enough of this stuff, I highly recommend "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin[2], as well as the HBO mini-series produced by Tom Hanks and based largely on that book, "From the Earth to the Moon"[3]. "Failure Is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz[4] (flight director on Apollo 11 and 13, among other things) is also a good read.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11_audio.html
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Man-Moon-Voyages-Apollo-Astronauts/dp/014311235X
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Moon-Four-Disc-Collectors/dp/0783114222
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp/1439148813
Your entire blog post can be summed in a single interaction that took place in the movie, "Man on the Moon." A comedic biographical look at Andy Kaufman's Life.
"Don't you want your people to have a modern interesting show?"
"No I want people, I can't sell drinks to an empty room. You're in show business, show BUSINESS. If there is no business, there is no show."
While its slightly apples and oranges. Its something a decent number of Designers and would be Artists have to learn at some point. No business, no show.
> Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.
That's etler's point: you seem to be disagreeing and correcting, but all you are doing is restating what he said. The idea is that "clearly" (and we now have this said twice): this is not just a blind crop, this is a crop that took into account something that Netflix wouldn't know (who is speaking), so it is thereby an unjustifiable stretch to believe that Netflix is modifying the movies themselves (which is the premise that etler was responding to, if you re-read mullingitover's comment).
Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly anchored to the right because the focus of the scene is the guy on the right talking, and since the quiet guy on the left has nothing to contribute to a cropped frame but half a head or so, the sensible (if uninspiring) solution is to show just the one guy talking.
Overlooked in the outrage expressed is that movies are shot knowing that cropping will occur, and the scenes are often viewed with the cinematographer & director marking out which parts of the frame will be preserved for various formats. In the scene where Carrey is cropped out, he may very well have been positioned in the full frame such that if/when cropped to 16:9 he simply would not appear, rather than awkwardly have just his arm show while sensibly trying to preserve enough of the speaker within the frame.
http://library.creativecow.net/carlin_paul/35mm-evolution/5 describes a variant of this, presenting and addressing (as a deliberate process!) a little-discussed variant: the 2.39:1 and 16:9 versions may be the ones in fact guilty of cutting off part of the scene, with the 4:3 frame containing the whole scene, and the others preserving the full width but dropping top & bottom portions to make them fit the narrowed frames.
I thought etler was saying that the Man on the Moon crop wasn't pan-and-scan at all. It was just a complete lopping off of the entire left portion of the film that didn't fit the aspect ratio.
Look at the Man on the Moon crop. It's clearly not just cropping off the sides. It's anchored to the right. I also doubt Netflix either has a smart algorithm that can figure out the focus of the scene, or hires a bunch of people to choose the right focal point for every movie. They probably ask for movies from their providers in 16:9 format and they show whatever they get. They could ask for both formats and give users the choice, but I'm guessing there might be extra licensing costs to get both, and the majority of their users aren't cinephiles, and they just want their movies to fill the screen.