Word: spielbergisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boundary between science and science fiction -- in that twilight area where the imaginative sleuthing of paleontology meets the storytelling craft of filmmaking -- lies Jurassic Park. The technicians working with director Steven Spielberg on the film version of Michael Crichton's best seller spared no effort or expense to make the story's dinosaurs as accurate as current knowledge permitted. Dinosaur fans from youth, they cared about getting it right. But on a movie screen, footnotes are not allowed. "We were trying to be credible," co-producer Kathleen Kennedy says. "But we were also making a movie...
...they took a little artistic license. Velociraptor, as described in the literature and in Crichton's novel, was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villains, the Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast...
...think tank of techno-wizards can produce and $65 million can buy. "There's no way a museum could afford what we did," says Winston. "We created the most accurate dinosaurs ever." Top paleontologists who consulted on the film agree. In most cases, says Colorado paleontologist Robert Bakker, "Spielberg made the aesthetic choice that real dinosaurs are more exciting than made-up dinosaurs...
...Spielberg may have designs on both roles: he made the movie, and even donated $25,000 to the Dinosaur Society. (In return the society renamed the oldest known ankylosaur "Jurassosaurus nedegoapeferkimorum "; part of the second word is an acronym of the surnames of the film's cast.) Now he is marketing it. His outfit, Amblin Entertainment, and Universal Pictures, the film's distributor, have signed deals with more than 100 companies (including Kenner, Sega and Milton Bradley) to peddle more than 1,000 Jurassic Park products, from action figures and video games to calendars and candy. If your kids aren...
...special effects -- the puppeteers, modelmakers and computer mavens -- working closely with enthusiastic experts. Phil Tippett, an animator and longtime dinosaur buff, would whisper admonitions after nearly every take: "The head would never move like that," or "The claw wouldn't extend that far." He was the chief enforcer of Spielberg's dictum: that the dinosaurs be animals, not monsters...