paul
Posts 244
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5/25/2007 9:30 AM
posted awhile ago
FilmCouch #21
Appropriation: Originality is overrated. Filmmakers taking footage from another film and adapting it into a new movie--Orson Welles (F for Fake), Werner Herzog (The Wild Blue Yonder) and Roger Corman (Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women)--are they inspired or just desperate?
In the spirit of appropriation, email a sentence into filmcouch@spout.com. Kevin and Paul will incorporate it ever so naturally into next week's show. The first person to identify the appropriated sentence wins a Spout track jacket from American Apparel (valued at $50).
Download FilmCouch #21 or subscribe in the iTunes store (search for "filmcouch" or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday.
  
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joem18b
Posts 553
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5/25/2007 8:38 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
Maybe it's not quite appropriation, but as I listened I was thinking about "What's Up, Tiger Lily."
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porcupine
Posts 73
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5/27/2007 12:57 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
What's Up Tiger Lily is perfect! I can't believe I didn't think of that! I saw that movie at a friend's house late one night in high school. It was one of those surreal movie viewing experiences where the next day we were all like, "did we really just see that?" Man that is a funny movie. So this leads into a question I wanted to pose: what other movies that use someone else's footage did we miss? What's Up Tiger Lily is a really good example, we should have talked about it in the show.
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joem18b
Posts 553
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5/27/2007 2:06 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
 porcupine: So this leads into a question I wanted to pose: what other movies that use someone else's footage did we miss?
I'm thinking of all those 40s and 50s war movies with the U.S. footage of dogfights, Corsairs crashing on carrier decks, etc.
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joem18b
Posts 553
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5/27/2007 8:51 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
Porcupine, I notice that you leave the comma out of What's Up Tiger Lily, which is the way Woody wanted it but not what he got? I see that your graphic has no comma but its label does. IMDB uses the comma, but maybe they're just too staid to leave it out?
What about Hollywood Boulevard (1976)? Joe Dante and Alan Arkush were in their twenties and bet Roger Corman they could make a movie more cheaply than he did. They wrapped it in 10 days for 10K, mostly using film from his movies. Excellent commentary on the dvd.
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porcupine
Posts 73
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5/29/2007 9:56 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
Wow, what a great story about Hollywood Boulevard, I have not seen it. Betting Corman that you can make a movie cheaper than him is like trying to beat the devil at his own game.
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joem18b
Posts 553
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5/29/2007 1:41 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
The old serials would frequently reuse footage. A burning building, train wreck, someone going over the falls would just show up again in another action sequence. Also , to remind the audience of plot points, sometimes an earlier scene was just stuck in again. (Reminds me of those horrible Lost episodes that were just rerun scenes.)
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Risselada
Posts 1235
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5/30/2007 12:35 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
What about The Godfather Trilogy? I mean it's the same director and the same story, but it's reedited together in a new way. Didn't Coppola do this with Apocalypse Now Redux as well? I haven't seen either of these, but what is the deal?
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joem18b
Posts 553
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5/30/2007 5:00 PM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
(Just tried making my first movie link and Firefox crashed. Maybe I need to turn on popups or something...) You undoubtedly know more about these things than I do, but since we seem to have a lot of privacy here, I feel comfortable just sitting here on the film couch and responding to your question with a question. Wouldn't film appropriation be apples to the oranges of a director's reediting? In one case taking somebody else's film and repurposing it for a totally different film, as opposed to cutting some existing film and adding film that was shot for the movie but not included at first. A viewer's IMDB comment about the Trilogy version: "And it's still missing about 20 more minutes (deleted from the theatrical versions) of great footage from the broadcast of "A Novel for Television" (or the retitled "Godfather Saga") that combined 1 & 2. ...why take out scenes that were in the theatrical release. Every version has some scenes that the others don't have. I think I'll wait till all the footage that the viewing public has been exposed to is all included in the film from beginning to end because all that footage is great cinema. For once, it'd be nice to sit back and enjoy the entire story without your concentration being interrupted by missing scenes (you know exists) that causes gaps in the narrative." I was watching Alien last night and Ridley Scott said that he had had 25 years to watch the film and for this version he tried to fix all the problems that he had noticed in that time.
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paul
Posts 244
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5/31/2007 9:03 AM
posted awhile ago
Re: FilmCouch #21
joem18b: "...For once, it'd be nice to sit back and enjoy the entire story without your concentration being interrupted by missing scenes (you know exists) that causes gaps in the narrative."
Appropration is different from reediting because it's editing a new movie out of a preexisting film shot for a different purpose. The GI Joe PSAs repurposed a few years ago are a hysterical example. But the point made above made me think of the Criterion box set for Mr. Arkadin, an Orson Welles picture hacked into a bunch of different versions that showed all over the world. This box set includes three different versions of the film, including what two editors and Welles scholars pieced together into the "Comprehensive Version." The documentary of how they tried to assemble this picture 20 years after Welles died is worth the price of the box set.
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