its a freaking gladiator movie

Patrick Downing's odyssey constructing and de-constructing a gladiator movie "If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and satisfied, surely it is I. For I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used the phrase 'butchered to make a Roman holiday.' I am the only free white man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression." Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (XXVII) The offending line is from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (IV.141).

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

The Longest Yard (1974) starring Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, and Ed Lauter Directed by Robert Aldrich Written by Tracy Keenan Wynn Okay, on one hand you have got girdiron gladiators, but on the other you have this crazy piece of cinema: Misfit felons, asshole prison guards, a motherfuckering sadistic warden, a 'do-it or die' game of pigskin, Texas! -- it's freaking anarchy, and it's freaking entertainment gold. And concerning the re-make, two words: Burt Reynolds. I'm sorry but Adam Sandler is not Burt Reynolds. And Chris Rock has nothing on the killer bit-part of the warden's secretary played by Bernadette Peters. And Robert Aldrich is a legend, if only for 'The Dirty Dozen' among a host of other classics he helmed.

Damn.

Also, what kind of poster is THIS?! Double damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

You wonder if back in the day when gladiators were just sandal wearing dudes in leather unders that their overseers ever made them do anything as dramatic as Russian Roulette? Like spin the sword. Sure, I get that forcing folks into an arena against their will to stab the shit out of strangers (and possibly friends) was pretty effing tough. But the psychological impact of dragging out the inevitable is pretty damn mean. And dramatic. Interesting factoid:

In writing, the term "Russian Roulette" was first used in an eponymous 1937 short story by Georges Surdez:

'Did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?' ... With the Russian army in Romania, around 1917, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, put a single bullet in the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger.

It is claimed, that this practice was widely known in Russia in the early 19th century. However, there is only one written source before 19th century: in Mikhail Lermontov's 1840 "The Fatalist", one of five novellas comprising his A Hero of Our Time, a minor character survives a version of Russian roulette. Makes you think, don't it. And then--

Sometimes, you've just gotta laugh. Damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

Are YOU safe from GLADIATORS?!

So, like everyone else out there, you're just an everyday ordinary person doing their everyday ordinary stuff.

Little do you realize just how freaking close you are--

--TO THIS!

Because YOU are not safe from GLADIATORS. And the GOVERNMENT and the PAPISTS and the TERRORISTS and the MEDIA and BIG PHARMA and the OIL INDUSTRY and HOLLYWOOD and the GAYS do not want YOU to KNOW the TRUTH! That freaking gladiators are freaking real and they are out there chopping the heads off your CHILDREN in order to entertain emotionless, under-sexed, stimulation JUNKIES on the INTERNET! What can you do to protect yourselves and your loved ones? Together we MUST-- Stay VIGILANT. Stay PARANOID. Stay SAFE.

Damn.

[cinephiliabeyond]

Too Much Johnson, Orson Welles’ long-lost film/theater project, is now available online, courtesy of The Dissolve: “The hour-long workprint of Welles’ Too Much Johnson has had a few public screenings since the announcement of its rediscovery and restoration last year. And as of today—literally, as of just a few hours ago—Too Much Johnson is being made available for free streaming and download at the National Film Preservation Foundation website. The fully restored 66-minute work print can be found here, while an attempt to cut the footage into a shorter form more like what Welles might’ve intended can be found here.”

Too Much Johnson was the second film movie Orson Welles ever made. He edited it himself on a Moviola machine in his room at the St. Regis Hotel. The first film he ever made was an eight-minute short called The Hearts of Age (watch it on YouTube here) that he shot in 1934 when he was just 19 years old. The third was his masterpiece Citizen Kane, so film scholars have long been intrigued by the elusive Too Much Johnson as the first movie Welles made for the paying public (even though the paying public never saw it) three years before Kane.

In 2008, a surviving print was discovered in the warehouse of a shipping company in Pordenone, a city in the northeast Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It had apparently been abandoned there in the 1970s. The finders were staffers with Cinemazero, a cultural organization that together with Cineteca del Friuli runs Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a silent film festival that draws scholars, critics and fans of the genre to Pordenone every Fall. Cinemazero staffers realized they had found a pearl of great cinematic price.

Here’s Welles biographer and actor Simon Callow on why the rediscovery of this little film is so significant:

It was filming these sequences that first made [Welles] fall in love with film; here he began to discover the possibilities not only of shooting but of editing. It will tell us an enormous amount about his visual sensibility and indeed about his theatrical instincts; at last we can really get a sense of what this recklessly inventive production for the Mercury Theatre might actually have been like had the film been used.

Cinemazero sent the film to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where experts in film preservation spent years stabilizing, cleaning, restoring the footage so it could be copied to modern film and screened for the public for the first time. —Too Much Johnson found in Italy

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[a1robotcompany]

Nothing says AMERICA like dudes in tight onesies groping each other to the max. Also, ultra-fit women sex-fighting each other. Also, the dudes are sex-fighting. And they are all muscular.

U to the S to the motherfucking A!

Damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

This is a dream I had.

[cinephiliabeyond]

Micro-budget filmmaking 101: sketches of DIY camera rigs used by Sam Raimi and company for the original The Evil Dead, courtesy of Deep Fried Movies.

Raimi is interviewed behind a wall of posters for Evil Dead 2 in this piece which offers a nice retropective of his pre-Darkman work (Jonathan Ross casually mentions that Raimi currently has a few projects in development with Universal). Numerous clips from his early super-8 shorts are shown in addition to choice scenes from the super-8 Evil Dead promo Within The Woods, a film which Raimi presented to prospective investors as proof of his filmmaking abilities. Also included is a visit to the set of Scott Spiegel’s Night Crew (aka Intruder) where Sam is seen playing a cameo role of a doomed butcher. The production nightmares of Raimi’s big-budget sophmore effort Crimewave are discussed and the film ends a short segment on Evil Dead 2 where Raimi seems unsure of whether Ash will re-appear in another film again.

Dear every screenwriter, read this: Sam Raimi’s screenplay for The Evil Dead  aka Book Of The Dead, with the back & front cover images as drawn by Tom Sullivan [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers.

For more film related items throughout the day, follow Cinephilia & Beyond on Twitter. Get Cinephilia & Beyond in your inbox by signing in. You can also follow our RSS feed. Please use our Google Custom Search for better results. If you enjoy Cinephilia & Beyond, please consider making a small donation to keep it going:

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[diy]

Recycled Hard Drive Instrument - Electric Waste Orchestra

Creating unconventional musical instruments from outdated computer parts and other e-waste

In the hubbub of Moogfest, we serendipitously ran into a guy wearing purple 3D-printed eyeglasses and holding something that looked like a keytar. Upon closer inspection, and with the house lights turned up, it turned out to be a musical instrument made from outdated computer parts. Colten Jackson wasn’t a speaker at the festival, but a passionate musician who made the trek to Asheville from Champaign, IL, to spread the word about his educational side project, Electric Waste Orchestra. Jackson reuses e-waste to make music in unconventional ways—for example, in this video he transformed six hard-drives and a number pad into a musical instrument (with help from Arduino hardware and Pure Data software) and jams along with a modular synthesizer. (Read more)

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

True story. One night I had a crazy dream that Dennis Leary and Ice-T were chasing me through the inner-city trying to kill me and my brother. It like all crazy dreams felt real as all hell, stupidly intense, and as close to what you might call a nightmare as you could while featuring a wicked comic and a just as wicked rapper, because they were relentless and bad-ass and scary as shit. It ended in a crazy sewer right out of Stephen King's "It" where the writing was on the wall and it was "this-is-it-kill-or-be-killed-what-are-we-gonna-do-bro?" and then--I woke up. I literally felt like I'd gone through some kind of ultra-maniacal wrong side of the freaking tracks Ironman. I made a conscience decision to cease eating three hot dogs right before I went to bed (years later I would renege on that decision with similar whack-a-mole dreams like the one where Christopher Nolan has to re-enter the job market and goes for a job interview with some chubby guy from HR who has no clue). "ah ye who never learn ye lessons of old". Oh yeah, this was in 1992. Damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

"Outland" (1982) Starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, and Frances Sterhagen plus the always lovable James B. Sikking* Written and Directed by Peter Hyams I got to thinking that another take on the kill or be killed forced to fight scenario was when the honest, dude-good gets in over his head in some armpit of a place and is forced into a life-or-death confrontation with murderous SOB's who really don't care who or what they have to kill. And the dude-good just wants to get back to his family or comfortable apartment or whatever. And perhaps he's also a lawperson. And also, Sean "the fuck" Connery Which, of course, brings us to my favourite example of the myriad of these types of films, "Outland", where obviously the rough and tumble two-bit burg is actually on Io. You know, Jupiter's coolest moon (knowledge note: Jupiter has fifty moons, but the Galilean ones are generally accepted to be the best). And it happens to feature Sean "the fuck" Connery. A great movie, with pretty good special effects for its time (and a title sequence unabashedly, and senselessly, aped from "Alien"), except that it's interesting to note that in the future when we have the ability to mine a moon millions of kilometres away the weapon of choice is the sawed-off shotgun. It does look cool, especially if you put a telescopic sight on it, which one chap does, and in using it, IT COSTS HIM HIS LIFE! Because Mister Sean "the fuck" Connery realized how dumb it was and made that chump pay by enacting a bat-shit crazy plan to get said chump to blast a hole in the installation's greenhouse and get his dumb-ass sucked into the infinitely cold black of space. How cool is that? Damn.

*

[cinephiliabeyond]

Visually stunning, with perfect music, really impressive acting by both Breaking Bad  star Mark Margolis and young Aaron Himelstein and equally powerful and painful storytelling, Joshua Caldwell's Dig  is a phenomenal example of fine filmmaking in short film production. Set in Breaking Bad  environment, this story is a joy to behold and ends up leaving you wanting more.

Dig  is a short film about a young, Jewish Holocaust survivor who, twenty years following his exodus from Europe, sees the Nazi responsible for his family’s death, kidnaps him, and orders him to dig his own grave.

Starring Emmy Nominee Mark Margolis (Breaking Bad) and Aaron Himelstein, Executive Produced by Anthony E. Zuiker (creator of CSI), shot by award winning cinematographer Paul Niccolls and scored by Bill Brown (CSI:NY) the film had it’s world premiere at the 2011 LA Shorts Fest.

It was also an Official Selection of the 2011 Carmel Art & Film Festival, NewFilmmakers LA Series; the 2012 Durango Independent Film Festival, Beverly Hills Film Festival, Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, Dances With Films, HollyShorts Film Festival, Action on Film International Film Festival; and won the Silver Screen Award (Short Film competition) at the Nevada Film Festival.

In 2013, Caldwell wrote and directed his debut feature film Layover. Made for only $6000 the film was shot on a Canon 5D and stars Nathalie Fay, Karl E. Landler, Bella Dayne and Hal Ozsan. Layover  World Premiered at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival on May 30, 2014 to a sell out crowd.

At the beginning of 2013, inspired by seeing several articles about Ed Burns making sub-$10,000 films, I set out to do the same. It had taken me a while to get there. I spent a lot of time and energy developing and writing projects that required other people to give me money and a greenlight, instead of creating a project I could do on my own terms. It took me lifting my head up, looking around and saying, “I have everything I need to make a movie for very little money: access to cameras, actors, crew, post-services. So why am I not doing it?”

So, I took an idea that I had floating around in my head about a girl stuck on a layover in L.A., developed out the story and wrote the script. Then, with my producing partner Travis Oberlander, we raised a little bit of money from a family friend (enough to pay the cast, rent a few locations, and food), cast the film with actor friends whom I knew spoke French, borrowed a Canon 5D, set the schedule and over the course of five weekends, shot the film, and then spent another eight months or so editing (off and on). The entire film was made for $6000. That’s right. —How to Maximize Production Value on a Minuscule Budget by Joshua Caldwell

Contact Meydenbauer Entertainment Hollywood Bound and Down Follow Joshua Caldwell on Twitter

For more film related items throughout the day, follow Cinephilia & Beyond on Twitter. Get Cinephilia & Beyond in your inbox by signing in. You can also follow our RSS feed. Please use our Google Custom Search for better results. If you enjoy Cinephilia & Beyond, please consider making a small donation to keep it going:

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[cinephiliabeyond]

Rest in peace, dear, beautiful, brilliant Robin Williams. Terry Gilliam, who directed Williams in The Fisher King, posted a tribute on Facebook, writing: “Robin Williams, the most astonishingly funny, brilliant, profound and silly miracle of mind and spirit, has left the planet. He was a giant heart, a fireball friend, a wondrous gift from the gods. Now the selfish bastards have taken him back. Fuck ‘em!” Jeff Bridges, who co-starred in The Fisher King  with the late actor: “Such a brilliant human being. I feel Robin coming in now. ‘Get on with it, Bridges! On with the show!’”

A wonderful and fascinating scene-by-scene audio commentary by director Terry Gilliam, available only on now-obsolete LaserDisc. There’s so many levels to a Gilliam picture and it’s fascinating to have him open the layers of creativity [mp3].

Dear every screenwriter, read this: Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay for The Fisher King  [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers.

For more film related items throughout the day, follow Cinephilia & Beyond on Twitter. Get Cinephilia & Beyond in your inbox by signing in. You can also follow our RSS feed. Please use our Google Custom Search for better results. If you enjoy Cinephilia & Beyond, please consider making a small donation to keep it going:

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[iammakingagladiatormovie]

"The Most Dangerous Game" (1932) Starring Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, and Leslie Banks Written by James Ashmore Creelman Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack

The only way you could improve this movie would be to up the tanned man factor and cast Ice-T or Stone Cold Steve Austin or Jean-Claude Van Damme or Arnold Swarzenegger or even Bas Rutten in the role of the most dangerous part of the most dangerous game. Take it to the limit.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

Sometimes y'all be like "life's so boring" and then by jiminy if a freaking game-changer doesn't just come along and say "yello". I mean, this chap's real-life tale is the most compelling thing I  have ever read. Just imagine, if you win the death match tournament you have your choice: 100 million dollars or a WISH to be granted by this guy - 

Some kind of a magical version of Orlando Bloom. Damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

Dude be dream creepin'.

Damn.

[iammakingagladiatormovie]

"Kill or be Killed" aka "Karate Killer" aka "Karate Olympiad" (1976) Starring James Ryan, Charlotte Michelle, and Norman Coombes Written by C.F. Beyers-Boshoff Directed by Ivan Hall

This movie is truly amazing. A must watch, seriously (which you can because the embedded video is the full freaking version. Watch it and be prepared to shit blackbelts for a week). Besides having truly bonafide awesome karate battles, it not only checks all the boxes, it freaking invents the effing list. To the death karate tournament at the deranged Nazi commanders castle in the middle of the desert - check Karate dwarf whose best friend is a puppet - check Dude head butts guitar then beats up piano - check Dude takes off shirt, beats up wild dogs, then makes sweet love to his woman in the moonlit desert - check Dude and his woman make a desert sailboat out of a Volkswagen Bug then sail it across the desert singing opera to each other - check Japanese karate master named Miyagi that looks like Woody Allen and has a thirst for diamonds - check Karate dude who weird whistles - check Shirtless to shirted dudes ratio of approximately 13,500 to 1 - check Dudes with long flowing hair - supercheck Psychedelic guitar soundtrack - check Nazi commander conceiving whole crazy tournament of death as a revenge plot just to get an apology because he lost in the '38 Olympics to a Japanese dude - check Also, it has a surreal Maurice Binder inspired title sequence but instead of beautiful naked women having the credits projected on them it has semi-nude dudes doing karate (speaking of Maurice Binder, the site "Art of the Title" is a must visit). I cannot overstate it,  this movie is amazing. So much so, they made a sequel. Damn.