Now Screening - What Are You Watching Right Now?

[struth]

The Front Page, 1974.. pure class from billy wilder..






The opening scene showing the newspaper being printed was shot at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner's print room. It had one of the last fully operational old style printing presses still in use.

[struth]

Forbidden Planet, 1956...






First mainstream film to have the music performed entirely by electronic instruments.

This film marked one of the first times a science-fiction project had received a large budget. The genre had rarely been taken seriously by studio executives, and sci-fi films generally received the most meager of budgets. The critical success of this film convinced many in the film industry that well-funded science-fiction projects could be successful. Film historian Ben Mankiewicz has claimed that this film's success made future big-budget science-fiction films possible.

[walpurgis]

Forbidden Planet, 1956

All time classic. Love that movie!

[Barry]

All time classic. Love that movie!

Well it was (loosely) based on a rather good play written in the early 17th century.

[struth]

Well it was (loosely) based on a rather good play written in the early 17th century.

The Tempest?

[Barry]

The Tempest?

Yes.

[struth]

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, 2006.






(at around 2h) The scene when Jack Sparrow calls Davy Jones "fish face", and sings to them "I got a jar of dirt", was unscripted and improvised by Johnny Depp, most of the reactions of the rest of the characters are real.

The dice game that Will Turner plays with Davy Jones is called Liar's Dice, a gambling game where each player has to make consecutively higher bids based upon how many of each die they claim are on the table (two threes, four fives, etc.), until a player is called a liar, in which case, all the dice are shown, and it's seen if the bid is correct. Normally, a player only loses a die when caught in a lie, and is not out of the game until he has lost all of his dice.

[struth]

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, 2007.







The most expensive film ever made (at the time), not adjusted for inflation. The budget ran to $300 million. That's more than the budget of all three Lord of the Rings films combined.

The green flash is a real, but very rare, optical phenomenon during sunrise or sunset, that is best observed at sea. It is caused by the refraction of light in the atmosphere, amplified by a mirage.

A real-life council of pirates existed at one time. The Brethren of the Coast was a loose coalition of pirates and buccaneers, active in the 17th and 18th centuries in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. They had a base on the island of Tortuga, off the coast of Haiti, and in Port Royal, Jamaica. The Brethren were originally French Huguenots and British Protestants, but their ranks were joined by other adventurers of various nationalities, including Spaniards and Africans.

[struth]

Kelly's Heroes, 1970...






During filming in Yugoslavia in 1969, Donald Sutherland (Oddball) received word, via co-star Clint Eastwood (Lieutenant Kelly), that his then-wife Shirley Douglas was arrested: she had tried to buy--using a personal check--hand grenades from an undercover FBI agent for the Black Panthers. Sutherland recounts this story often, mentioning that when Eastwood got to the part about the personal check, he laughed so hard that he fell to his knees and Sutherland had to help him up. Eastwood then put his arm around Sutherland, walked him down the hill that overlooked the Yugoslavian countryside, and assured his friend of his complete support with his predicament. Sutherland and Douglas, who are the parents of Kiefer Sutherland and twin sister Rachel Sutherland, divorced in 1970.

The three Tiger I tanks used were actually ex-Soviet Army T-34 tanks, converted in great detail by specialists of the Yugoslavian Army. They are not the same ones used in a previous movie, The Battle of Neretva (1969), which were much less well done. The care taken to make the T-34s look like Tiger tanks was notable, most period World War II movies used unmodified modern tanks as their vehicles, with minimal effort to change their appearances, often no more than painting the tanks with gray or yellow with distinctive German crosses. Oddball's (Donald Sutherland's) Shermans are Yugoslavian Army M4A3E4 Shermans (post-war U.S. upgraded to 76mm in original 75mm turret).

[struth]

the true story behind the film can be read here.. well some of it lol...

https://www.military.com/history/sto...ys-heroes.html