Looks like the folks at Warner Bros. are serious about taking the S.S. Minnow out for another three-hour tour. Or, at least, a two-hour one. Yes, the word out of Burbank is that the next iconic TV series to make it to the big screen will be Gilligan’s Island.

The comedy series, which debuted on CBS in 1964, only lasted three seasons but its 98 half-hour episodes have been running ever since. A mix of the silly and the surreal, Gilligan’s Island told story of seven castaways who were caught in a storm on a cruise out of Hawaii and wound up stranded on an “uncharted desert isle” somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

The castaways included (from left to right in the photo above) The Professor (Russell Johnson), Kansas farm girl Mary Ann (Dawn Wells), Minnow First Mate Gilligan, Hollywood actress Ginger Grant (Tina Louise), millionaire Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus) and his wife, Lovey (Natalie Schafer) and the Minnow’s captain, The Skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.)

Gilligan’s Island’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, will executive produce the big screen comedy, with Charles Roven (Get Smart) and Richard Suckle (Yours, Mine and Ours) joining him as producers. No writer or director has been announced.

And, of course, no cast. That means it’s time to play…Cyclops Central’s Cast Gilligan’s Castaways Game! The rules are simple: Beat the house. My cast list is below. If you think you can do better, email me your list. I’ll go through all the entries and the best single list (in my subjective opinion) will win something cool and TV-related from the Cyclops Central Prize Closet. In the case of a tie, you’ll be asked to guess which three of the seven actors listed below that I’ve worked with. You’ve got ten days (until March 14, 2010) to get your list in.

Here we go…

WITH GILLIGAN: The Minnow’s First Mate was sincere, eager to please, inept and paranoid. From his work on Rushmore to Bored to Death, those sound like the core attributes of the Jason Schwartzman character catalog.

THE SKIPPER, TOO: Big, blustery and a bit of a bully. That could describe The Skipper and…Tony Soprano. I think James Gandolfini has the range to pull off this role and make it his own.

THE MILLIONAIRE AND HIS WIFE: Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. He’s a few years older than Jim Backus and she’s a few years younger than Natalie Schaeffer when they took the roles of Thurston Howell III and Lovey, but it hardly matters. The real-life husband and wife are classy and funny and would bring a rich dimension to the demented rich.

THE MOVIE STAR: The character of Ginger Grant recalled Cold War-era sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Christina Hendricks plays the similarly sexy and symbolic Joan Holloway on the Cold War-era Mad Men. Let’s get this one done, people!

THE PROFESSOR: He’s brilliant, brooding and clueless to the fact that he’s the best-looking guy trapped on a island with a couple of real hotties like Ginger and Mary Ann. This role plays to Paul Rudd’s strength: Being funny without doing much of anything.

AND MARY ANN:  Born in the Ukraine and moving to Los Angeles when she was seven, Mila Kunis knows what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land. That make Mila the perfect choice to play the most famous farm girl since Dorothy. That, and adorableness.

And there it is, the Gilligan’s Island cast list to beat. Have at it and good luck.

Back in the dim, dark days before home video, Netflix, DVRs, on-demand and streaming, movies fans had only two places to look to view and study older, out-of-circulation films.

Place Number One was late night television. Before the midnight TV landscape was crowded with a half-dozen white guys sitting behind desks, there were branded movie showcases with names like The Million Dollar Movie, The Great Entertainment, Chiller Theatre, The Movie Loft, Classic Horror, Science Fiction Theater, Comedy Classics and Creature Double Feature.

If you were in the mood to watch James Cagney, Boris Karloff, Judy Holliday, Abbott & Costello,  Godzilla, Maria Montez or Klaatu do their thing, you stayed up late and you watched.

And Place Number Two for old movies? Well, if you were lucky enough to live in a city big enough to support a couple of major colleges and/or universities, then you probably had the option of venturing out from the house and down to the local repertory cinema.

We had a great rep cinema in the town where I attended college. They ran double features and changed their bill every two or three days. Inside of a week, you could drop by the cinema three different nights and see The Marx Brothers starring A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races; two film directed by Bob Fosse, Lenny and All That Jazz; or Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers paired with George Romero’s also-a-vampire-movie, Martin.

I was a film student at the time. If I wasn’t in class screening Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. or Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou or Orson Welles in F for Fake, then I was down at the rep cinema, popcorn in hand, catching a double feature of Woody Allen or Michael Powell or Brian De Palma.It was pure, unadulterated movie geek heaven.

Fast forward. Digital technology (your DVDs and DVRs and online streaming) emerges and virtually wipes out the nation’s repertory cinemas. Who needs to schlep across town to see Richard Rush’s brilliant The Stunt Man on the big screen when you could simply have Netflix or Amazon or DirectTV deliver to your home? Only a movie maniac.

Enter Quentin Tarantino, movie maniac.

The news broke this week that the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds recently purchased The New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles’s Fairfax district.

Formerly a vaudeville house, a mob nightclub and a porn theater, The New Beverly Cinema opened on May of 1978 as a two-fer repertory cinema. In the 32 years since the New Bev ran its first Marlon Brando double feature, hundreds of film students and novice filmmakers have flocked to the theater. One of them was Quentin Tarantino, who started visiting the New Bev just a couple of years after the place opened.

And so, when the financially-strapped New Beverly Cinema was recently threatened with closure, Tarantino swooped in and bought place to ensure that the New Bev, its programmers and its audiences would always have a home.

The full story (recounted by Vanity Fair) is here. The official site of the New Bev is here.

Check ‘em out. And if you live or regularly visit Los Angeles, think about dropping by The New Beverly Cinema to check out whatever double-bill happens to be playing. If Quentin Tarantino chooses to exert some influence over the programming, the results could be fascinating.

“In science-fiction films, the monster
should always be bigger than the leading lady…”
Roger Corman

You’ve got to love Roger Corman. In his career as a filmmaker, Roger’s produced 388 movies and TV shows. He’s directed 56 films. And he’s not done yet.

The World Wide Webbie thing has been ablaze the past couple of days with the big news that Roger Corman is about to launch his next production:

SHARKTOPUS!

That’s right. Half-shark, half-octopus, all terror.

Hot of the heels of Asylum Home Entertainment’s DVD original Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus (Number 8 on Yahoo’s Top 10 Most Viewed Trailers of 2009), SyFy’s Director of Original Movies Karen O’Hara has decided that the world is ready for a shark/octopus hybrid to stalk the seven seas.

Several Internet sites have claimed that Roger Corman himself will be directing Sharktopus. You might want to take that with a huge hunk of sea-salt. Mr. Corman is 84 years old and has not directed a movie in 20 years (1990’s Frankenstein Unbound). I say he’ll be handing the megaphone and the hip-waders to someone else.

But Mr. Corman will be producing and that’s good news. He’s had lots of experience bringing water-dwelling monsters to the screen, with his Supergator (2007), Dinocroc (2004), Humanoids from the Deep (1996), Piranha (1995) and The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957).

Roger’s a legend in business, having mentored young filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, James Cameron and John Sayles as well as hiring unknown actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone and Charles Bronson.

I don’t think Sharktopus will be Roger Corman’s greatest contribution to the history of cinema, but I’ll be watching SyFy for my first sighting of it just the same.

It’s well documented that, in the days when George Lucas was just beginning his film career, he was interested in making small, personal films. And he was also interested in employing new technology to make new, experimental forms of cinema.

We got his small, personal film in the form of American Graffiti. And his pioneering efforts on the techno geek front led to the Star Wars franchise.

To many, George Lucas has been an inspiration.

Now there’s a new filmmaker on the horizon. He’s made a small, personal film and he’s harnessed the techno geek playground called the Internet to get it made.

And it’s called The People vs. George Lucas.

The filmmaker is Alexandre O. Philippe. He was a fan of Lucas’ space opera, but like a lot of Star Wars fans, he didn’t like what Lucas had been doing with the franchise.

Those fans beef about all the changes Lucas has made to the original Star Wars trilogy as new technologies have emerged. They beef about the talky, boring second trilogy. They beef about Jar Jar Binks. They beef that Lucas himself has pimped out his characters and his vision for everything from toys to games to collectibles to apparel and home furnishings.

Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe decided to harness that fanboy rage and turn into the cinematic indictment that is The People vs. George Lucas.

Back in 2007, Philippe launched a website to announce his film project and make an open call for fan contributions. What he got back was over 700 pieces of media, including webcam rants, fanedits of Star Wars movies, TV shows and commercials, comedy sketches, puppet skits, 3D and claymation animation, kids’ drawings, digital shorts and old school Super-8 films.

Philippe combined all of that homegrown material with his own doc-style interviews with dozens of Lucas colleagues, critics and consumers to amass a whopping 600 hours of footage, spread out over 14 terabytes’ worth of drive space.

All of that material has now been whittled down into a finished film and Alexandre O. Philippe’s The People vs. George Lucas will make its debut as a Spotlight Premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, running from March 12th to March 21st. You can check out all the details at the SXSW2010 website.

As for an advance look at The People vs. George Lucas, there are a numbers of different trailers floating out there in cyberspace. The one below is my favorite.

I wonder what George Lucas thinks about this?

If you’re a fan of The Three Stooges and you’re going to be in Los Angeles on Wednesday, February 10, you might want to be part of festivities that’ll be happening at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on that evening.

It’s a night of knucklehead history as Stooges fan and researcher Jim Pauley hosts Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations, Then and Now, a presentation exploring the work that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard produced on location in and around Los Angeles.

Also on the program that night will be Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker’s photographic presentation, Columbia Studios History. Columbia, of course, was the home studio of The Three Stooges for nearly thirty years.

Additionally, four actual Three Stooge shorts will be screened: Three Little Beers (where the boys wreak havoc at Los Angeles’ Rancho Park Golf Club); An Ache In Every Stake (where the Stooges attempt to deliver ice via a steep, 147-step staircase in Silver Lake); Movie Maniacs (the boys sneak into a movie studio where they are mistaken for three new executives who are due to take over the facility) and Pop Goes The Easel (where the unemployed Stooges are mistaken for thieves and are chased down a Los Angeles street and into an art school).

What makes the Stooges short Pop Goes The Easel especially interesting is that it features two little girls playing hopscotch on the city sidewalk. These would be Larry Fine’s daughter, Phyllis, and Moe Howard’s daughter, Joan.

The grown-up Joan Howard Maurer is something of a Stooge expert herself, having written or co-written The Three Stooges Scrapbook, Curly: An Illustrated Biography of the Superstooge and The Three Stooges Book of Scripts. Joan will appear at the Museum Three Stooges presentation as a Special Guest.

The Hollywood Heritage Museum is located at 2100 North Highland Avenue, in the fabled Lasky-DeMille Barn, located across the street from the Hollywood Bowl. Admission is $5.00 for Hollywood Heritage Members and $10.00 for non-members. The parking will be free and refreshments will be on hand, but The Hollywood Heritage Museum has a capacity of only 110 persons, so reservations are encouraged. For more information on Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations, Then and Now, call (323) 874-2276 or click here.

Look for me there. I’ll be guy in the Shemp shirt.

Tags: Curly Howard, Larry Fine, Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, The Three Stooges
Posted in Newsroom

Ryan Gallagher and his fellow cinephiles Travis George and Rudie Obias over at their The Criterion Cast report that Netflix has added at least 35 Criterion Collection titles to its streaming Watch Instantly feature.

Back in the early days of home video, when movie studios were dumping low-quality, pan-and-scan versions of their movies on the growing VHS marketplace, The Criterion Collection video company took the high road, leading the way in creating special editions of films.

Criterion took a great deal of pride and, more importantly, care in releasing movies with the correct aspect ratio preserved, filmmaker commentary tracks, missing scenes recovery and hours of film restoration to present definitive versions of cinema classics, all on laserdisc.

Eventually, Criterion migrated their library of titles to DVD and Blu-Ray. Two years ago, The Criterion Collection began offering video-on-demand downloading services for their films in association with The Auteurs.

Criterion has now teamed up with Netflix and whether you’re looking to experience Fritz Lang’s M, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien or Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters for the first of fiftieth time, they’re all just a click away with, we are told, more to come.

This is nothing but good news for cinema fans.

Tags: Fritz Lang, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Schrader
Posted in Newsroom, Screening Room

Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall, the publishers of the extremely terrific British film magazine Cinema Retro are putting together a movie location road trip that sounds like it could be a blast for anyone interested in action/adventure films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Running from April 23 to May 1 of 2010, the Movie Magic Tour is intended to celebrate the British film industry’s contribution to genre picture making by paying visits to some of its most famous locations. Here’s just some of what the Cinema Retro guys are promising for genre cinema fans:

An exclusive tour of Pinewood Studios and its famous 007 stage. This celebrity-stocked event will feature a variety of actors from the various James Bond films and a gourmet dinner fit for 997 himself at the exclusive golf club where Goldfinger was filmed.

A visit to the Portmeirion resort in Wales, the exterior filming location for The Village, where Patrick McGoohan’s character was imprisoned in the mysterious TV spy series, The Prisoner.

A night at the legendary 15th century mansion where Robert Wise’s 1963 classic horror film, The Haunting, was filmed.

A screening of MGM’s groundbreaking wide-screen epic, How the West was Won, in all its original, three-projector 1962 Cinerama glory.

A private cruise down the Thames River to the village where John Sturges’ World War II men-on-a-mission adventure, The Eagle Has Landed, was filmed.

A formal presentation of Cinema Retro’s Lifetime Achievement Award to the legendary Sir Christopher Lee (Dracula, Fu Manchu, The Man With The Golden Gun).

And, as they say, there’s much more. The festivities kick off in London at the Henry VIII Hotel on Friday, April 23. For more information on both the Movie Magic Tour and Cinema Retro, click here.  And tell ‘em Cyclops Central sent you!

For movie fans lucky enough to live in Southern California, there’s no end to the film societies, screenings and lecture series devoted to All Things Cinema.

One example would be the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s sporadic series, The Movie That Inspired Me, wherein working directors, writers, actors and other filmmakers screen and talk about films that have influenced their life and inspired their creativity. The Movie That Inspired Me is hosted by the Film & Television Archive’s Honorary Chairman and series curator Curtis Hanson (director of L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile).

This Friday (January 22), Hanson’s guest will be director Kathryn Bigelow, whose most recent film, The Hurt Locker, was one of the best reviewed American films of 2009, just the latest in a career making innovative films like Near Dark, Blue Steel, Point Break and Strange Days.

For Friday evening’s film screening and discussion, Bigelow has selected 1969’s The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah.

The story is a simple one: In the weeks prior to World War I, a band of aging Western outlaws led by Pike Bishop (William Holden) attempt to rob a Texas bank, with the idea of using the money for retirement. When the robbery goes wrong, this wild bunch runs to Mexico with Bishop’s reformed ex-partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) on their trail. There they meet a violent Mexican general who wants them to rob a U.S. train carrying arms. They take the mission, but it leads to a violent final battle in which their lawless pasts finally catch up to them.

Teamed with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, film editor Louis Lombardo and a cast that included Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and other familiar Western faces, Sam Peckinpah ushered in a new style of cinematic violence that blew up Hollywood’s romantic notion of the Old West even as it rejuvenated the Western genre.

The Wild Bunch was shot in 81 days, on a budget of six million dollars. The climatic gun battle sequence itself took 12 days to stage and shoot. The film is reportedly made up of roughly 3000 edits in about 138 minutes of action. John Wayne may have complained that The Wild Bunch shattered the myth of the Old West, but in 2007, the American Film Institute ranked Peckinpah’s masterpiece as the #79 Greatest Movie of All Time.

I’m sure all of that and more will be discussed this Friday night when, thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Kathryn Bigelow and Curtis Hanson deconstruct the most famous of all deconstructionist Westerns, The Wild Bunch.

For tickets and info, go here.

Film editing is not as discussed as much as it should be. Go into the cinema section of any bookstore and you’ll find far more studies and biographies of directors, cinematographers and screenwriters than you will about motion pictures editors.

That’s a shame, because the ability to edit picture and sound, to manipulate time and change performances is what the art of the cinema really is all about. You can write a script, you can film performers acting out that script, but you don’t start constructing the movie until you start cutting. Or, to quote filmmaker Garry Marshall: “Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie.”

That said, let’s hear it for Bobbie O’Steen, author of the new book The Invisible Cut: How Editor Make Movie Magic and Carol Littleton, editor of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Wyatt Earp and The Manchurian Candidate, among over 30 other films. The pair will be appearing live Sunday, January 10 at The Billy Wilder Theater on Wilshire Boulevard in a program co-presented by The UCLA Film & Television Archive and American Cinema Editors.

O’Steen and Littlejohn will present a screening of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 modern noir classic, Body Heat (which Littlejohn edited) and discuss the craft and art of film editing.

Projected frame grabs from Body Heat will highlight the editorial choices made on that movie and Bobbie O’Steen will conduct an interview with Carol Littlejohn that will, we are promised, “cover such broad-ranging topics as gendered perspectives, and the role of editing at a time of evolving production and storytelling paradigms.”

Don’t let that scare you. It’s going to be fascinating.

The big show starts at 7:00pm, with tickets running a mere ten bucks a piece. For more information, click here.

In the meantime, some favorite books on film editing include: When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum (editor of Annie Hall and six Woody Allen films), In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch (Jarhead, The Wolfman) and The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. All are available at Amazon.

If you’re a fan of The Twilight Saga series of books and movies and you’re going to be anywhere in the vicinity of downtown Miami this weekend, you might want to consider dropping by the Hilton for The Official Twilight Convention.

That’s right, its three, fun-packed full days of vampire chic and werewolf geek with all kinds of events like panels, trivia challenges, auctions, videos, costume contests and makeovers (makeovers!?) Also planned are lots and lots of autograph and photo opportunities for fans to cozy up to Twilight stars like Michael Welch, Peter Facinelli, Bronson Pelletier and Kiowa Gordon, all of whom seemed pleased to endorse and represent the product.

What’s that? You say that throwing money at Summit Entertainment (the movie producers) and Creation Entertainment (the convention producers) for the opportunity to hole up inside a dark convention hall for three days sounds like blast, but you can’t get to Miami?

Have no fear, fearless vampire lover. The Official Twilight Convention is no rare and special thing that appears once and then vanishes like some object of fantasy.

No, Summit and Creation will be setting up this pre-fabricated, pre-packaged, pre-produced fan “experience” as 25 individual Twilight “conventions”, all between now and December in cities from Atlanta to Anaheim, from Vancouver to Honolulu, from Chicago to Salt Lake City (Mormons love vampires!), from Portland to Parsippany. (That’s in New Jersey, people!)

For more info on The Official Twilight Convention, go here.

And before you email me to ask, no, I won’t be attending. I shall be hard at work putting together plans for The Official Cyclops Central Convention. So start saving your money now. Those hotel rooms in New Jersey don’t come cheap.