Odds & Ends
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Disney Saves Those Who Save Themselves
I haven't written in detail about the Disney corporation for a long time now, for a very simple reason: it's just kind of depressing. That last time I touched on it was briefly when Joe Grant died (see here), but the only detailed post I wrote was way back in 2003, when Roy E. Disney had just resigned from his post with the company. That was before I wrote this column as a blog (and well before it started appearing at In Film), making it fiddly to link back to that post (if you really want, go here and scroll down), so I'll reproduce part of what I wrote then:
I have no inside knowledge of the studio, so have no idea how effective Roy E. was as a board member. But even if his role was purely ceremonial, the symbolism of what's occurred is bad enough. Roy E. Disney is Walt Disney's nephew, and the son of studio co-founder Roy Disney. Given the elder Roy's much larger then generally understood role in the studio's operation (he ran the business end until after Walt's death, and the studio was initially the "Disney Brothers" studio), Roy E. represented a direct, tangible link to the heritage of the company, which has always been its greatest asset. It's long been easy - and largely accurate - to disparage Disney as just another soulless media conglomerate, but Roy E. was still there as a human link to the glory days of the thirties when Walt blazed his trails. (Sure Roy E. was just a kid at the time, but we're talking symbolism here). Roy E Disney, with fellow former board member Stanley Gold, left to start the SaveDisney website. For about eighteen months it ran a watch on the Disney Studio, and particularly its CEO, Michael Eisner. The success of this campaign is arguable. Eisner is now on the way out (having announced an early departure from the CEO role), but Disney animation still looks sick. The traditional animation units that produced the films of Disney's late 80s / early 90s revival have been disbanded, with the focus of Disney's Feature Animation division shifting to computer animation. (Apparently, Dinosaur was the shining beacon that showed how the company should proceed). And the studio is still no closer to reaching some kind of reconciliation with its spiritual successor, Pixar, even continuing to pursue an ersatz Toy Story 3 without Pixar's involvement. (Instead of John Lasseter, the creative genius behind Pixar's success, they're using the guy who made Lion King 3). As recently as May, Roy E. Disney and Gold were launching a lawsuit against the Disney corporation, alleging that there had been fraudulent dealings in their search for a new CEO. (You can see their own press material on that suit here). But early in July, suddenly all was okay again. Here's the message Roy E. posted on Save Disney: First of all, please accept my most sincere thanks for your faith and trust in us, and for sticking with us through thick and thin during this campaign. You have been our biggest help in the tough times, and the good times... and there is no way to say "thank-you" any more sincerely than I do now. And here you were thinking the purpose of SaveDisney might be to save Disney. Oh, but wait, there's more:
...somehow my cynical side can't shake the feeling that the end of this campaign had less to do with "saving Disney" and more to do with making Roy happy. (If you know the facts to be otherwise, I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but from an outside vantage point, it's hard to assess the situation any other way.) Roy's unwillingness to divulge details about the specific steps they are taking to turn the studio around doesn't inspire any faith in the matter. Disney fans and supporters threw an incredible amount of support behind the SaveDisney campaign; don't they at the very least deserve an explanation of what their efforts have achieved? Indeed. A surrender by SaveDisney was probably inevitable, but this is a sell-out. (You can read Jim Hill's assessment of the lead-up to this deal here: Hill's site is great for keeping track of Disney news, as long as you can deal with the fact that he is transparently writing the "insider emails" on the site himself.) When Roy left, I considered him importnat as a spiritual link with the company's heritage. But now that he's back on board, I feel a bit differently. You can't just buy back the heritage of a company by offering someone a consulting gig. Disney (the corporation) need to start actively living up to their legacy, rather than buying it back in a corporate manouvre. As for results: well, on 25 July Cartoon Brew broke the news that DisneyToons Studio Australia will close after 17 years, as soon as they finish work on - and the bile rises in my throat just mentioning the project - Cinderalla 3. Even the parochial Australian media has made little mention of this studio over the years, probably because Disney themselves have always kept it pretty quiet. It labored away on the cheap sequels to the "real" Disney features produced by the feature animation unit: things like the Peter Pan sequel Return to Neverland. These films were, of course, part of Disney's problem. I'm sure they looked great on the balance sheets (they were cheap to make and produced solid sales), but they led to an insidious erosion of the Disney brand. Once Disney no longer stood for a higher order of animation, it lost the whole advantage it had in the animation market. So once upon a time I would have believed the closure of the Australian studio was a good step for Disney. But now that the "real" units producing the A-list hand drawn features are gone (the last of those films was Home on the Range), the Australian studio was the last refuge of hand-drawn Disney animation of any quality. Bambi 2 should never have been made, but from all reports the studio did a pretty good job on it. It's a good example of the way a talented group of people can emerge from an unpromising environment. In a perfect world, someone would have given them the chance to do their own thing, and prove their abilities on an original feature that didn't cheapen one of the classics. Instead, the artists will be laid off and replaced with another animation studio somewhere where labor is cheaper. It's not exactly a fairytale ending. Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Saturday, July 09, 2005
Sixteen Years and Counting
Ain't It Cool News are carrying a small item that links over to The Indy Experience, which in turn links to an interview with Kathleen Kennedy at Now Playing Magazine. Kennedy, for those who don't recall, has been one of Steven Spielberg's chief lieutenants (usually as producer) since as long ago as E.T., and she provides the latest, most reliable update on Indiana Jones IV, which is now to be set in the late 1940s:
This is the rumour that simply doesn't die: Indy IV has been speculated on by fanboys since before there were movie rumour webpages on which the speculating could occur. I'm an enormous fan of the series: the first two are amongst the greatest action/adventure films ever made, and the disappointing third film is still well above average for this kind of film. The Indiana Jones films are showcases for Spielberg's immense talents as a director of action, and they feature a kind of action filmmaking that we don't seem much these days: sequences based around rhythm, rather than speed. What I mean by that is that most action directors these days (Michael Bay and his ilk) base their action on sheer kineticism: the thrill is the rush of speed and movement. This is done not only through the all-pervasive fast cutting, but also with shaky camerawork, close shots, and by filling the frame with lots of very fast moving objects (such as cars, fighter jets or Jackie Chan). With a few exceptions (such as the rollercoaster minecar sequence in Temple of Doom) the Indy pictures don't do this. Instead, the action sequences in the Indiana Jonesfilms are played out more like elaborate comedy routines, unfolding through complex progressions of cause and effect. To take an example from Raiders of the Lost Ark: Jones tries to get on a plane, so the pilot tries to shoot him, so Marion knocks him out, so the pilot slumps on the controls, so the plane rotates on the landing field, so the wing knocks a cap off the petrol tanker, so now the plane's about to blow up...and so on. Spielberg stages and cuts these sequences in a manner that emphasies the way each event in the sequence falls into place. The cutting is generally not especially fast, and there are a lot of wider shots to setup the way parts of the space relate to each other. Other directors don't often film their sequences like this, as pulling the camera back and using long shots makes it much harder to cheat the staging of a scene: if your shots are close and quick, you can put the elements together in the editing room. For example, have a look at this shot from the aforementioned sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark:  Spielberg is staging a fairly complex piece of foreground action here: the plane is rotating, and Jones is busting Marion out of the cockpit. The "ticking clock" here - there is almost always a ticking clock of some sort in the Indiana Jones action sequences - is the flame in the background, which is running right to left towards the fuel tanker, after which it will run towards the plane and cause it to explode. (Adding to the complexity of the shot is the way that the moving flame is only just staying visible in front of the cockpit as it rotates.) Synchronising foreground and background action in this shot must have been hellishly complicated, and it would have been much simpler to just keep intercutting shots of the flames and the action on the plane, as occurs elsewhere in the sequence. But Spielberg understands the value gained from a moment like this: it reorientates the audience and makes the action either side of the side of the shot more intelligible and therefore more exciting. (In the DVD commentary for Return of the Jedi, George Lucas notes that the sail-barge sequence in that film tries to reproduce the effect of the Raider's flying wing sequence, but doesn't manage to match it: Lucas is openly envious of Spielberg's skill with setpieces like this, and rightly so.) While most modern action films could benefit from more of these establishing shots, they are particularly crucial in the Indiana Jones movies. The action sequences in these films are like that old boardgame Mousetrap, with the ludicrously elaborate mechanism that triggers the trap through a complex chain reaction: the pleasure is in watching the way one thing leads to another. Shooting the sequences with clarity is therefore vital. This is also why the rhythm of the sequences is so important: they allow the cascading series of events to unfold in an almost musical way. (Even in a simple moment like the fistfight between Jones and the bald guy at the start of the flying wing sequence, note the way that they exchange punches in a deliberate, slow way that corresponds with the measured beats of the editing). In the under-appreciated Temple of Doom, Spielberg took this machine-like construction about as far as anyone ever has, setting up the temple as a giant playground of tunnels, walkways, flying foxes, pulleys, conveyer belts, ladders, waterwheels, and minecarts, and then linking his action sequences together so that the conclusion of one provides the setup for the next. Done well (and nobody does this kind of thing like Spielberg) these sequences are exhilarating in their sheer audacity. Spielberg's projects since haven't really given him the chance to do this kind of thing: the action sequences in a film such as Minority Report are mere throwaways compared to the gigantic setpieces of the Indiana Jones films. So part of me would love to to see him return to the series. Spielberg's form lately is much more solid than it was when he made Last Crusade: that film was made during an uncertain period in his career that saw such uneven-to-poor efforts as The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Always, and Hook, while Indy IV would follow a string of much better work that includes Minority Report, A.I., Catch Me if You Can, and War of the Worlds. Spielberg also seems to have more respect for 1980s techniques (shooting on film, physical effects) than George Lucas: one imagines he is less likely to go crazy with the computers than Lucas did on the Star Wars prequels, and is therefore more likely to get a result that feels like the originals. But there are so many lingering doubts. While Last Crusade isn't a particularly strong film, it is consciously constructed as the last film in the series, from the gratuitous "origin" prologue to its "ride into the sunset" finale. A new film made now, sixteen years later, would likely seem like an awkward coda, hanging off the end of the earlier films and diminishing them in much the same way The Godfather: Part Three sullies parts one and two. (I've always thought Back to the Future fans were foolish to hanker after a part IV of that series for the same reason). And there's the issue of screenwriters. Various writers, including M. Night Shyamalan, Frank Darabont (who got his start on the Young Indiana Jones TV show) and Tom Stoppard (who was also rumoured to have contributed to Lucas' Revenge of the Sith) have been connected with the project, but as noted above, it is currently in the hands of Jeff Nathanson. Nathanson has contributed to two of Spielberg's recent films (Catch Me If You Can and Terminal), but his resume also includes several fairly middling scripts such as the Rush Hour films and Speed 2: Cruise Control. He is a considerable step down from the screenwriters of the first two Indy films: Raiders was written by Lawrence Kasdan (who also co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) and Temple of Doom was written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who wrote American Graffiti and provided a crucial polish to Star Wars). Kasdan, Huyck and Katz were therefore instrumental in the early careers of Lucas and Spielberg: they were the screenwriters who mastered the tricky resuscitation of old serials that the directors were after in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Today's action films consistently struggle to match the finesse with which these screenplays achieved their goal, and it's difficult to see Nathanson recapturing that magic. And finally, there is the last point, which seems cruel to make, but which can't be avoided: Harrison Ford. This is Harrison Ford in a screencap from Temple of Doom, when he was at his most physically imposing:  And this is Ford now: I mean, I love Ford in this role, and the costume will no doubt help, but it's still kind of hard to imagine, isn't it? Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Thursday, July 07, 2005
Sort of FixedI have arduously rebuilt a new template to try and get the R&R page back on-line. It's about 90% there - I'll try and iron out the last kinks and ugly little problems over the coming days.
Thanks for your patience. Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Monday, July 04, 2005
Now I Look Like I Fit InSorry that this page has moved back to one of the bog-standard blogpsot templates: I couldn't deal with their broken template any more. I will try to get more of a Cinepohobia look to it ASAP.
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