Test Your Imaginative Faculties

Dear reader the above image is trying to tell a story. Try sharping your creativity and see if you can think of a good story which matches the above image.

TRIVIA QUESTION

What movie script did Quentin Tarantino sell in order to finance Reservoir Dogs?

Quentin sold the script for True Romance to Warner Bros. for the WGA minimum at the time of $50,000. He used the proceeds of that sale to finance his first full-length feature Reservoir Dogs.

Starring a veritable who's who in Hollywood including Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, James Gandolfini, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken and Samuel L. Jackson, the movie also featured Jack Black's film debut, but his role was cut from the final film.

True Romance is one half of a larger script written by Tarantino and Roger Avary. The discarded half was later turned into the feature length film Natural Born Killers. Tom Sizemore, who celebrates his birthday today, played a cop in both movies and lost out to Steve Buscemi for the role of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs
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Patricia Arquette's character of Alabama is mentioned briefly in one of Mr. White's flashback scenes in Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino's original intention was to have Alabama join up with Mr. White and live a life of crime.

ERRORS AND OMISSIONS INSURANCE

E & O insurance is insurance that will be required for the film separate from the standard insurance for accidents, shooting days, etc. The purpose of this insurance is to assure your investors that they will be protected in case the production is sued for slander or improper use of a copyright.

Some examples of what Errors and Omissions concerns can be found in "Too Many Locations", "Specific Music" and "Uniforms, official Vehicles".

Basically you have to keep in mind that if you use a brand name, feature a still (or moving) photograph, a celebrity's name or likeness, or virtually anything in your script that you have not invented specifically for the film, the producer will be required by the insurance company to get written permission from the company or individual to use it. On the other hand, the insurer may judge that such use will not infringe on any copyright, etc., and therefore permission would not be necessary.

If for example you write a scene that has "Nancy" reading a National Geographic magazine, the producer will need the written permission from National Geographic, and might also need written permission from the photographer. The permission could take weeks or even months. For whatever reason, they may not grant permission, and if they don't, but it is vital that "Nancy" be reading a magazine about geography, then the art department will have to mock up a magazine cover, which will take more time and money.

The Exorcist

The story may seem bland and simple on the surface but there is much more going on inside than just a hidden ghost. Instead it presented to an audience that had grown up in a modern society that their worst fears still had a place. The era for many people was between the modernism of the sexual revolution and the conservatism of a more religious observant past. One part of the population had written off the devil as an embarrassing myth or boggey man, the other part still believe him to be real. The entire first half of this film follows that dilemma before concluding that it is in fact a devil inside her.

The battle that followed was for something that most of society still believed in at that time. It was a battle for the soul of the victim and the fear of the rescuers losing theirs. Most partically the self doubting priest. Note the ending. And if someone as holy as a priest can be dragged in by a devil what hope does the rest of us?

Anyway the fear of eternal damnation is a primal fear and perhaps even an escapable thought. The presentation of a devil that wants the soul only to defile it and torture it is shown by the way it defiles and tortures the victims body.In every way it is horror of the imagination and psychology more than the visual.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini is usually remembered as one of the most important of the directors who emerged in the second wave of Italian postwar cinema in the early 1960s but, within Italy itself, Pasolini was always much more than just a distinctive and innovative filmmaker. By the time he came to make his first film, Accattone, in 1961, he had already published numerous collections of poetry, two highly-acclaimed novels, had collaborated widely in cultural-literary journals and firmly established himself as one of Italy's leading writer-intellectuals.

In the 15 years that followed, before being brutally murdered in 1975 — and always inspired by what he himself called "a desperate vitality" and a "love of Reality" — he made a dozen feature films and half a dozen shorts, wrote, translated and sometimes directed theatrical works, published several further collections of poetry, two volumes of critical essays, painted some 40 canvases and, through his numerous articles in journals and his caustic columns in daily newspapers, became the loudest dissenting voice in Italian political and cultural debate.

Intensely passionate and iconoclastic, often paradoxical and contradictory, Pasolini was almost certainly, as Zygmunt Baranski has written in a recent critical reappraisal, Italy's major post-war intellectual.

So is noir a genre or a style?

Depends on your own philosophy. If you think movies are defined by their themes, then you probably think of noir as a genre. If you define films by their visual look and tone, then to you noir is definitely a style. Here's my take: If a private eye is hired by an old geezer to prove his wife's cheating on him and the shamus discovers long-buried family secrets and solves a couple of murders before returning to his lonely office - that's detective fiction. If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer's wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double-crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force - I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR.