Hacker Cinema
The Movies That Made Us
2019 · TV series · documentary · 3 seasons
Created by Brian Volk-Weiss, 0
These blockbusters brought us together and gave us the time of our lives. Meet the actors, directors and industry insiders who made them happen.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
I think The Movies That Made Us on Netflix is great. The general premise is exploring a classic film and the arduous journey to make it happen. The films and their directors are household names now but at the time they really had to push to make it happen with some directors being complete unknowns. Sometimes they were basically establishing their genres as with Toy Story and Halloween. With others, like Elf, they were using techniques like forced perspective and stop motion animation when they were under tremendous pressure to use CGI. I think it's a really great illustration of how the obvious classics were, at one stage, a long shot like everything else.
The episode about the Halloween movie from the Netflix series movies that made us. Those guys were all unknowns working in a network of established players that wouldn't take to them. Not tech but those guys embody the entrepreneurial spirit.
One example where it shows that the actor doesn't just provide a face, but, well,the acting, is back to the Future. Originally they had wanted to cast Michael J Fox, but he wasn't available. So they picked a different actor. And that actor didn't get that the movie was supposed to be fun. They shot several weeks with this actor who was turning the movie into something very serious, being terrified by being transplanted into the past, and finding it tragic to come back to a present where everything is different.
Theres a good documentary about this [1], that talks about replacing that actor, and when Fox comes on set and delivers the first line filmed ("You put a time machine... In a DeLorean?!"), it's hilarious, night and day difference.
[1] season 2, episode 1 of movies that made us www.netflix.com/us/title/80990849