Word: filming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Yates, whose best previous work has been in action films like Bullitt, here demonstrates a very nice light touch, as well as a gift for getting full documentary value out of his lo cation. There are a few moments when the picture's easygoing pace turns into wobbliness, but these are insignificant compared with its many moments of shrewd insight into the lives of amusingly shaded but very recognizable human beings. This is the kind of small, star less film that big studios sometimes do not know what to do with. Audiences should have no such difficulty. They...
...film long ago became his obsession, and less than a month before its official premiere, Francis Coppola has only now stopped agonizing over how it will all turn out. After three years, $30 million, a typhoon named Olga and a shared Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm for Best Picture, Director Coppola still struggled to find an ending for his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now. Should Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) hack Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) to death and then emerge from the colonel's hideout? Or should Willard kill Kurtz, sail down the river and then order...
Apocalypse Now becomes one more film afflicted with the disease of the terminal. Movies with two endings, or no endings, or three endings, or appended endings are as much a part of Hollywood history as Schwab's Drugstore or Hedda's hats. New closings tend to be happier than old ones, with boy getting girl after all, or star surviving rather than perishing. In Apache (1954), Burt Lancaster was first killed, then allowed to live on. What's Up Doc? (1972) initially ended with a bittersweet goodbye between Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand...
When the ending of a film is altered late in production, the change-Coppola notwithstanding-is usually made in the hope of raising box office receipts. Alterations often come after a preview audience has seen the movie and filled out questionnaires, which are studied by Hollywood executives with the same kind of eager dread White House aides must feel when they pore over the latest Gallup. Even the best and most independent directors find audience reaction helpful: Stanley Kubrick first filmed a wild custard-pie fight between the Americans and the Soviets as a final scene for Dr. Strangelove...
...Kind, Steven Spielberg cut only the background song, When You Wish Upon a Star, from the final spacecraft scene, but that small snip changed the mood of the story. "I felt the song was going to be perceived as wistful thinking," says the director today. "The audience perceived the film as a current event." Spielberg may return the song to the soundtrack in what must surely be the most extraordinary case of film tinkering ever: he is readying a revised version of Close Encounters, one of the top ten grossers of all time, for release next spring. Besides trimming sequences...