CUNNING STUNTS, (no Spoonerism intended), A CUNNING STUNT MASTER, ROCK AND ROLL, AND THOSE WILD AND WACKY DAYS OF ‘OZPLOITATION’ MOVIES THAT WERE ” NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD”…
July 27, 2009
Here’s the opening scene from a screenplay for a World War II movie…
EXTERIOR CLIFF TOP SUNDOWN
Superimpose title: CRETE, GREEK ISLANDS, 1941.
A Messerschmitt strafes an Australian Army truck as it hurtles up a steep wooded incline towards the cliff edge 200 yards away.
The bullets strike the gas tank and the back of the truck explodes in a fiery cloud.
The driver, a gallant Australian Warrant Officer, an army pack slung round his neck, dives from the vehicle. In the same shot, the truck smashes into a tree, exploding again many times from multiple angles.
The AWO picks up the precious pack. It contains the ‘Macguffin’, the secret key to Allied victory in World War II. He must get it to the commando waiting in a Zodiac, riding the waves at the base of the cliff ahead. He quickly scales a tree to avoid detection by the pursuing Germans.
A Wehrmacht motorcyclist and a machine gunner in the side car pause beside a tree, scanning for their target. AWO drops down out of the tree, chops and kicks them out of their seats, then guns the bike up towards the cliff, smashing through bushes.
Platoons of German infantry are rushing up the cliff in pursuit, their schmeissers blazing.
Bullets chew up the nearby ground as the AWO lays down the bike to skid to a halt inches from the cliff, where his abseiling rope is tethered ready for the final stage of his escape. He snaps the rope into the karabina on his body belt with a single loop and positions himself for his slide down the cliff.
Suddenly, a German soldier with a flamethrower runs out of the bushes. A cloud of napalm hits the AWO in the back, lighting up his army greatcoat as he freefalls 300 feet down the rope.
The plume of flame is huge, but the air rush keeps the flames from spreading onto his skin as he reaches a velocity of thirty miles an hour, with the rocky shore below fast approaching. Grabbing the rope with padded gloves, he decelerates just in time.
Wham! Still a hard landing. AWO shakes off the pain, sheds the blazing overcoat then takes the precious pack to the water‘s edge. Just a few feet away, the getaway Zodiac is riding the current, piloted by a lone commando.
As AWO prepares to jump, a shark’s fin slowly cuts through the water between him and the waiting vessel…
OK, so jumping the shark is a little over the top, even for me…
But I offer this amalgam of favorite WWII action clichés as being representative of the range of challenges, creative and industrial, that a director of action movies faces. Precision driving, leaping from a blazing vehicle, martial arts combat, extreme motorcycling, abseiling while a human torch–these are many chapters in the stuntman’s handbook. To realize them all on the screen would normally require the director to select a team of stuntmen, each a specialist. And each one would have to be a passable double for the hero.
On the other hand, you could just hire Grant Page. He’d even fight the shark for you.
You can see a lot of Grant’s work on display in the imminent Magnet release NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, opening in various theatres across the USA on Friday July 31st.
It’s a Furiously Fast mordantly Funny Fantastic 100 minutes. Quadruple F’s on my dial don’t come every week.
It’s about big screen movies, so try to catch it on the big screen It rocks. Click here for the trailer:
For Los Angelino gluttons for genre punishment, you could try a Grant Page Friday Night Double.
First go to the Nu Art on Santa Monica. See NQH. Its writer director Mark Hartley will be on hand for Q & A at the 7:30 and 10:00 PM screenings on both July 31st and August 1st.
Here’s Mark and I having WAY too much of a good time at last year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin. Then, it’s hard not to have a good time at Fantastic Fest.
Then you could hop across town to the New Beverly Cinema on Beverly Blvd. and attend the Midnight Show of STUNT ROCK, my tribute to stuntmen in general and Grant Page in particular.
Regrettably I will not be there. I’ll be in Tasmania getting ready to shoot my next epic.
However Grant’s STUNT ROCK co-star Margi Gerard (AKA Margaret Trenchard-Smith Ph.D) will introduce a sparkling brand new 35 mm scope print. Click on the DVD sleeve for the trailer.
Enjoy!
Bicycles, Testicles, and French Nicole Kidman…
July 20, 2009
Bicycles, Testicles, and French Nicole Kidman…the rush of speed on the senses, the power of the pedal on the environment. Movie trivia from the genre trenches.
Is an homage a rip off or a celebration? I prefer to think of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery. All genre directors try their hand at a range of standard set piece sequences on widely differing budgets, with varying degrees of success. If the result is still engaging an audience on DVD and Cable channels 26 years later, that’s gratifying, but a genre director really gets his rocks off when one of HIS films gets imitated!
Remember my Nicole Kidman starrer BMX BANDITS, in which I had a go at comedy bicycle chase scenes. (It did not hurt to have future Academy Award winner John Seale behind the camera either.)
As a warm-up, here’s a BMX BANDITS trivia collectible: Nicole’s first scene in the film is taken from a French language print.
It kinda plays better in French, don’t you think? Did the actress in the Paris dubbing studio know she was French-voicing a future Academy Award-winning star? Did she do Nicole’s voice in other French releases? Did it grow into a good living? I wonder about things like that. How often does one of the invisibles of our celebrity obsessed trade become the recipient of windfall good fortune? Over to you, French Showbiz researchers.
OK. Now take a look at this. A 30 second Australian TV commercial for BMX BANDITS that played Christmas 1983. The film was such fun to make. Perhaps it shows.
Please note the 2 year old kid at the end. We’ll get back to him in a moment.
They even imitated the costume design. Good for them! I wish I had included a martial arts fight in my building site chase sequence.
Now, back to the kid in the picture, with that expression on his face of uninhibited joy as the bikes fly past him down the escalator… He actually said “BMX Wow!” when we shot it. (For the TV spot they dubbed in a girl‘s voice for clarity) Well, that’s my son Eric, and 26 years later his enthusiasm for bikes is unabated. Here he is, doing some flatland. His bike will ride into shot after 12 seconds. Click this pic:
Eric has a license but does not want a car. He bikes to work, in order to reduce his carbon footprint. I am proud to have a son who follows through on his principles. It’s one thing to talk the talk, it’s another to pedal 9 miles each way and save on all that carbon monoxide. We should all seriously think about using bikes for our short range travel. Walking’s good too.
The Dutch city of Groningen sets a great example by creating a bike friendly environment. Their view is that cycling is the life blood of the city, and have prioritized urban planning accordingly. Look at the space saving in this bike parking lot.
Bicycles and pedestrians rule the medieval-era city hub, cruising along on car-free dedicated pathways and short cuts. People also commute on bikes in large numbers from suburban housing spread out around the city to downtown jobs, via a ring-and-spoke network of paths. Population 185,000. A recent survey counted 150,000 bike trips per day.
Bicycling is also good for your health. For those in the LA area, I recommend WHEEL WORLD in Culver City as the best place for a reliable purchase. Ask for Eric.
My son introduced me to some real life footage of bike messengers racing through the streets of New York. Check out this video. The audio has been removed for copyright reasons, just jog forward to 50 seconds. I think it will pique your interest.
Those guys (and gals) have big brass balls.
If you are in the mood for more, this time with musical accompaniment, here’s one of Lucas Brunelle’s hair raising adventures in urban traffic across the world.
Now there’s a Stunt Rocker!
Guess what? There was even a bicycle film festival in San Francisco….
http://www.bicyclefilmfestival.com/
BOB MITCHELL (1912-2009)
July 8, 2009
Another Silent Movie artist has passed. I watched him accompany Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin among others at the Silent Movie Theater, now the home of The Cinefamily, a great place to hang out if you are a movie omnivore. Cinefamily have posted a touching memorial on their website, which eloquently expresses Bob Mitchell’s talent and his value to the history of Cinema:
Cinefamily,
I have sad news. Our organist, Bob Mitchell, has passed on at the age of 96. I did not know Mr. Mitchell well, but I did have the pleasure of seeing him play many times over the past year and a half. Mr. Mitchell, who started playing at the Pasadena Playhouse at the age of only 12 years old, had actually played for silent films in the ’20s. It was a pleasure and a privilege to witness someone who wasn’t just a master at his craft, but was a human portal to another time. There will be wonderful silent musicians continuing the tradition of live, improvised accompaniment, but there was a certain unforgeable authenticity that comes from not simply recreating another time, but being of it. Bob’s entire musical background and earliest memories lent a texture to his performance that was quite unique; his musical quotations, his sense of humour, his reference points were all of the era. He knew and remembered the songs and themes that were contemporaneous with the films he accompanied, and would weave them into the scores at natural points. If you were watching William Hart’s silent western Tumbleweeds — sure enough, he would play the hit song “Tumbleweeds” as the credits rolled.
It is short notice, but tomorrow, before our screening of Greta Garbo’s Love, we will have a short memorial for Bob.
