Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals...
...Moral Order. It is supposed to rescue traditional standards from their assault by wayward modernism. The boy's father (Ugo Tognazzi) is a homosexual. But not just any ordinary homosexual. He is the owner of the nightclub whose name-it means "Birds of a Feather"-gives the film its title. The club features drag queens, notably Zaza (Michel Serrault), Dad's lover of 20 years. Zaza is so into his role that now, having reached a certain age, he is giving a first-rate impersonation of a menopausal hysteric...
...what really makes the picture work, beyond the expert playing of Tognazzi and Serrault and the deft construction of the plot (adapted from a classically well-built French stage farce), is the attitudes - or, rather, lack of attitudes - of all concerned. The film accepts the gays as generously as it accepts the girl's rectitudinous parents. Though the gays must make eccentric adjustments to the exigencies of living, their behavior is viewed as no more unusual than the quirks everyone develops to get through the day as pleasantly as possible. Given a little good will...
According to the plot of the $1.8 million film, which will probably air early next year, two young couples who climb mountains on weekends are caught in an avalanche. One of the men is killed, and the three survivors are trapped on a tiny ledge, with nothing but frigid air and a glacier beneath them. An Army helicopter spots them, but when it angles down for a rescue, it bangs into the side of the mountain and crashes to the ice below...
...film the exploding helicopter, the hardest shot of all, the shell of a Viet Nam-vintage Huey chopper was filled with explosives and hoisted aloft on a 220-ft. cable by a larger Chinook. Then it was hung by cables attached to the rock itself. Either the cables were not fastened tightly enough, however, or a rock sliced them apart, because the Huey fell to the ground and exploded before cameras could...