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Downtown Toontown

Published 16th January 2024

Film

MAROON: Look, Valiant. His wife’s poison, but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker. I want you to follow her. Get me a couple of nice juicy pictures I can wise the rabbit up with.
VALIANT: Forget it. I don’t work Toontown.
MAROON: What’s wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown.
VALIANT: Then get Joe to do the job, ’cause I ain’t going.
MAROON: Whoa, feller. You don’t wanna go to Toontown, you don’t have to go to Toontown. Nobody said you had to go to Toontown anyway.

– Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

It’s odd how some deleted scenes seem to take on a life of their own. Some are happily released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, but never end up being discussed much, no matter how interesting. The really obscure ones never even made the leap from LaserDisc. And yet other examples become… is “well-known” an exaggeration? Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who does more than scrape the surface of a film, you’ll learn about them fairly quickly.

I fancy that Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s “Pig Head” sequence is more well-known than the average deleted scene. Here’s the short version. After Valiant has hidden Roger at the Terminal Bar, the deleted section has him going back to the Ink and Paint Club to go snooping for Marvin Acme’s will. Here, he’s knocked out by Bongo the Gorilla (in a return appearance), and menaced by Judge Doom and the Weasels. They eventually dump him in Toontown, he gets a pig’s head tooned onto his own in a nasty bit of gang violence, and he ends up washing it off in the shower.1

Here we rejoin the theatrical cut, with Eddie back at his office, and Jessica’s famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” scene. Originally, Eddie was meant to be stepping out the shower having just washed his toon head off; instead, the filmmakers dub the sound of a flushing toilet to hide the cut scene. It mostly works, although if you stop and think about it for a moment, you might wonder why Eddie takes his shirt off to go for a dump.

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  1. This, at least, is what was shot. As scripted, there was even more missing at this point, including the funeral of Marvin Acme, and a deleted scene with Eddie wearing the pig’s head on the Red Car. This stuff is interesting and well worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this post. ↩

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“The Most Disgusting Thing I’ve Ever Seen”

Published 23rd November 2023

Film

“The finished movie we see on the screen is often far different from the director’s original conception. The Cutting Room Floor is the intriguing study of the wounds, bruises, Band-Aids, and sometimes miracle remedies that can often improve a film… or destroy it.”

— Back page blurb for The Cutting Room Floor

“Trust me!”

— Rudy Russo, Used Cars

Determining cause and effect when it comes to teenage reading is a tricky thing. Did Laurent Bouzereau’s The Cutting Room Floor (Citadel Press, 1994) inspire my interest in deleted and alternate scenes in film and television? Or was I obsessed with them before picking up the book, which is why I grabbed it from the shelf in the first place?

I think there is a healthy dose of the former in this case, which makes it a very special book for me. Regardless, it’s a wonderful piece of work, and one which I find myself returning to again and again every few years. These days, with a combination of DVD extras and the right websites, much of this information is easier to access than it used to be. But back in 1994, especially for poor sods like me who hadn’t got a hope of getting a LaserDisc player, books like this were how you found out about this stuff.

There are so many tales of cut material which I first read about in that book, and stuck in my head immediately. The different edits of Basic Instinct for one; the attempted rescue of Exorcist II: The Heretic for another. But for sheer childish fun, you can’t beat the following tale about Used Cars, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s satirical black comedy.1

Bob Gale: “The only thing that got cut out of Used Cars never got to preview. It was something that the studio insisted that we change in the scene when the car salesmen do a commercial at a football game wearing Groucho Marx glasses. The propman on the film had found these glasses that instead of having a fake nose had a penis for it. We thought that was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen, and we thought to ourselves, you know, these car salesmen, that’s exactly the kind of things they would do. So we shot the scene with these glasses. When we sent the dailies to Columbia Pictures, I got this call from the head of production just ripping me apart for putting these pornographic images in the movie. How could we possibly do this? Had we lost our minds? This has gone beyond the grounds of taste. I got my head handed to me on a platter about this.

Columbia was outraged about this scene. I kept telling them to wait until they saw the scene cut together. I got on an airplane [the movie was shot in Phoenix] and screened the scene for Columbia. Frank Price [the head of the studio at the time], who by the way I have absolute admiration and respect for, turned around and said, ‘It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. You have to redo this.’ And so we reshot the scene with normal Groucho glasses. However, if you have access to the videotape or the laserdisc and you single-frame through the sequence, you’ll see there is still one shot in that sequence where one of the guys is wearing a set of dick-nose glasses. In fact, an actual image of that was in one of the TV spots. It was one of the laughs that we had on the TV censors! It was only a few frames, but it was on national television.”

This tale stuck in my head, long before I ever watched Used Cars. And when did I finally get round to watching Used Cars? Erm, last month. Hey, it only took nearly two decades. There are other films listed in that book that I still haven’t got round to yet.

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  1. Although with character names like “Roy L. Fuchs”, it’s as much Carry On as anything else. ↩

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Creatures of Flesh and Blood

Published 31st October 2023

Film

I’d like to quote to you one of my favourite pieces of criticism about animation. Scrub that, it’s one of my favourite pieces of criticism full stop. It’s from Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (Oxford University Press, 1999), and is about Disney’s first feature length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

The important thing you need to know about the following is what Barrier means by rotoscoping in this context. For a fair chunk of Snow White, live action versions of each scene were filmed; these were then used as reference for the animation, either as loose inspiration, or in the later stages of production, rather more directly. Rotoscoping is this latter technique: literally tracing over the live action footage of the actors, in order to create the animation.

As Barrier describes, this caused noticeable problems in the final film. But he describes it using an absolutely beautiful piece of writing. The kind of writing that inspires any critic to try and become better at their craft.

“Snow White‘s failings do not count for much when weighed against its great central successes, and the film’s most obvious failing – the weak, rotoscope-derived animation of Snow White and the Prince in the opening and closing scenes – actually gives it a dimension that Disney himself surely did not intend. It is in those scenes that the film is most wholly “fairy tale,” artificial and removed from reality; the all-but-weightless animation in the opening scenes is of a piece with the operetta-like musical treatment. Snow White seems more substantial when the animals lead her through the woods and into the dwarfs’ cottage, and then as she cleans the cottage—the music here is a work song. By the time she meets the dwarfs, she is at last a solid figure. She is most real in the evening musicale, as she dances with the dwarfs; her graceful movements, although they originated with Marjorie Belcher, are wholly the character’s.

Disney decided as early as the fall of 1934 to fence off the final sequence from the rest of the film by using a highly artificial device, three title cards that represent the changing seasons. It is in that sequence that Snow White melts again into a reverie. When the Prince appears at her glass coffin, operetta returns with him—he is singing “One Song,” his serenade at the beginning of the film. The dwarfs are mere spectators as the Prince kisses Snow White and lifts her to carry her away. He pauses long enough for her to kiss the dwarfs; she addresses only Grumpy and Dopey by name. The boy and girl are like two wraiths, bidding farewell to creatures of flesh and blood. Only what comes in between the fairy-tale sequences seems altogether real: the homely particulars of housekeeping and cooking and amusing one another, and the girl’s death most of all. It is as if the dwarfs dreamed this lovely girl’s life before she joined them, ever so briefly, and now that she is dead, they dream of her resurrection.

That the film should admit of such an interpretation is owing not just to the weakness of the rotoscoping, but to the tremendous vitality of the best dwarf animation. Because that animation is so emotionally revealing, it is the dwarfs, and not the characters who look more nearly human, who are the most like us. And like us, they long for a world where kindness can vanquish cruelty, and love conquer death.”

Barrier isn’t exaggerating about the odd nature of the rotoscoped scenes which bookend Snow White; even a cursory watch reveals they have a markedly different nature to the central part of the film. But it’s his interpretation about why those scenes still work anyway which I find the most fascinating.

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92.

Published 10th October 2023

Film

As I kid, I never really got on with films. Oh, I watched a few, don’t get me wrong. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was formative for all the obvious reasons. But they were long. I found it very difficult to sit still for 90 minutes, let alone for more than that. A half hour sitcom, brilliant. A film? Sounds a bit tiring.

And over the years, things calcified. I still watched the odd film. I even went to the cinema occasionally. But I was never a “film person”. I was too busy throwing myself into as many half hour sitcoms as I could find. That was my thing. I didn’t need anything else.

The problem: you can very easily end up starting to become a bit of a parody of yourself. At some point, I wasn’t that into film, simply because that’s what I’d told myself for years.

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New-Old Films on the BBC

Published 21st September 2023

Film

BBC Two showing the same old films has become a running joke in our house. If you check the page on the BBC website for 1960’s School for Scoundrels, we can find out it’s been shown no less than 14 times since 2013. I don’t care how much you like Terry-Thomas, that’s surely overkill.

Which means that when the BBC does start showing some “new” old films which they haven’t actually broadcast for years1, they can get somewhat lost in the schedules. So consider the following a public service announcement. The first two have already gone out and are on iPlayer, and the other two are on this weekend:

Funny Face (1957)
Recent BBC TX: 16th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 4th May 1998 (Genome)
A film that more than one person has cited as a possible inspiration for parts of Barbie, quite aside from the more obvious elements from another film directed by Donen: Singin’ in the Rain.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Recent BBC TX: 17th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 17th Mar 1996 (Genome)
One of Judy Garland’s final film performances. A strong film to show on BBC Two before the watershed due to the use of real Holocaust footage, which garnered an equally strong warning from continuity beforehand.

Moulin Rouge (1953)
Next BBC TX: 23rd Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 19th Feb 1978 (Genome)
This one in particular feels very strange that it hasn’t been on the BBC since 1978! It should have been on every bank holiday! (Although Channel 4 had rights for years.)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Next BBC TX: 24th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 7th Sep 2001 (Genome)
This was remade as In the Good Old Summertime in 1949, which is one of my favourite musicals. Oddly, despite my recent sojourn through Golden Age Hollywood, I have somehow conspired to see none of the above films. So this is an ideal opportunity to rectify this.

Other interesting things are popping up here and there; it’s so widely-seen that I didn’t think it was worth adding to the above list, but BBC Two are also showing the original Psycho for the first time in years this Sunday the 24th. So it’s worth keeping an eye out for other shards of joy/terror in the schedules during the upcoming weeks.

  1. Other channels will have shown them more recently, of course – I’m only talking about the BBC here. ↩

Presents.

Published 24th August 2023

Film / TV Presentation

“I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper.”

— Greta Gerwig, in conversation with Noreen Malone

I love the above quote. I love it partly because I’ve spent years trying to explain why I think title sequences and fonts and all that shit are important, and Greta manages to explain why in fifteen words. And not just with films. No more will I be at a loss to explain why that sitcom should have a proper title sequence, thank you very much. The channel shouldn’t rip off the wrapping paper for you, just because it saves a bit of time.

For that matter, it’s also why radio shows should start with a lovely sung jingle.

But I love it for more than that. The idea that what you make as a creative person is a present to your audience is such a simple, obvious idea, but it’s one which is so easy to forget. We can get lost in a spiral of grumpiness, annoyed that things don’t work, annoyed that the process is such a damn pain.

But the above makes it all worthwhile. You’re making a present. For millions of people, for just a few, perhaps even only for yourself, it doesn’t matter. In the fog of pain, it’s something to grab onto.

A present. The simplest, nicest gesture in the world.

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I Never Tossed Off

Published 12th July 2021

Film / TV Presentation

What is the best way for a teenager to watch John Hughes’ Weird Science?

I first saw it on a black and white portable TV in my bedroom. Maybe a black and white portable TV isn’t the ideal thing to watch Weird Science on. But the important thing here was that it was in my bedroom. Which means there is one scene absolutely seared into my mind, yes?

Lisa in the doorway

I mean, yes, that scene meant a great deal to me growing up. But my visceral memory watching Weird Science for the first time isn’t actually that shot. My memory is of the ridiculous hacking scene which precedes it, the big ACCESS DENIED sign, and then… this:

Skull from the hacking sequence

I can still remember the shiver that went through me as I glimpsed that horrific visage. The fact I was watching it in black and white made it even worse, if anything. I was absolutely terrified. And anyone who has hung around on Dirty Feed for any length of time knows exactly why. Clearly, my brain linked that skull with a certain life force symbol in Knightmare. Put into that context, I don’t even feel like I was being a wuss. Unexpected skulls which remind you of something you’re already scared of, when you were hoping for something naughty instead, would surely freak anybody out a bit.

Oh, OK, fine. I was also being a wuss.

*   *   *

When writing these pieces about my TV memories, I always try to nail down a date. Sadly, I’m not sure I can really do that here. I suspect the BBC network premiere on BBC2 in December 1989 is too early – I would have been eight years old. This BBC1 showing in November 1991 is possible, as is this August 1993 showing. It could even be later, I have no real idea.

But I can give you one date: Saturday 10th July 2021. That was the date I sat in NC1 – BBC One’s control room – and transmitted Weird Science to the nation myself. Three decades or so after watching it as a kid, I was on the other side of the TV screen, playing out exactly the same thing. Every time something like this happens, it completely blows my mind. It’s not something I ever could have conceived of happening, all those years ago. Two ends of my life, suddenly joining together unexpectedly.

The skull didn’t bother me this time round, mind. And as for Lisa… we’ll draw a veil over that one. Though I will admit I got excited at one point. Extremely excited.

Well, who wouldn’t? I got the end credit VO to fit perfectly over the instrumental section of the theme, so it didn’t crash any of the lyrics. That’s enough to get anyone tumescent.

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Carré On Screaming

Published 29th January 2021

Film / TV Drama

Here’s something touching, from the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account1:

That message, from le Carré:

“Dear Stanley – Just maybe, this time?”

Kubrick, in his reply:

“Unhappily, the problem is still pretty much as I fumbled and bumbled it out to you on the phone yesterday. Essentially: how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of words you get to say in a two hour movie, based on 150wpm speaking rate, less 30% silence and action) without flattening everybody into gingerbread men?”

There is a very interesting debate to be had about this. Let’s check out what John Gruber, avowed fan of Kubrick, thinks:

“I am reminded of the fact that Alfred Hitchcock argued that short stories make for better source material for movies than novels. (Stephen King’s oeuvre seems to prove that rule.) But today’s world of prestige TV opens new door to long, deep, mature adaptations.

Le Carré’s The Night Manager, the novel Kubrick so obviously enjoyed but argued couldn’t be made into a good two-hour film, was in fact adapted for the screen in an excellent 2015 series2 - 6 one-hour episodes - directed by Susanne Bier, written by David Farr, starring Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Debicki, and Olivia Colman.”

Hmmmm.

Recently, I watched Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. No, not the 2011 film – the extraordinarily well-regarded 1979 BBC serial. Seven episodes, 40-50 minutes each, running a total of a shade over five hours.3 And, if we really care about such things, it was shot entirely on film, and featured yer bona fide film star in the lead role.

Afterwards, I watched 1982’s Smiley’s People. Six episodes, an hour each. Both serials were recently re-released on Blu-ray, and neither serial is obscure in the slightest. And both serials also got an airing in the US.

None of this required us to wait for “today’s world of prestige TV”.

Gruber:

“Anyway, Kubrick’s Napoleon as a 10-hour drama. My god. What could have been.”

I prefer to look at what we’ve actually had. For decades.

  1. I find “the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account” an odd phrase to write. A bit like J. D. Salinger hosting Salinger Tonight or something. ↩

  2. Actually, 2016. ↩

  3. At least, the UK version does. The US version is re-edited to six episodes, runs a shade under five hours, and apparently reorders some scenes as well as trimming things a little. I’m sadly not aware of any article which discusses the differences between the two versions in detail; I’ll have a crack at writing about this one day if nobody else does. ↩

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New York by Design

Published 9th December 2020

Film / Other TV

Khoi Vinh, “Movies Watched, 2017”, January 2018:

“That beats my 2016 total by five and averages out to just under sixteen a month, a pace I credit to my continued adherence to a largely television-free diet. I’m going into my third year doing this now and I don’t miss TV much at all, especially as eschewing it has afforded me the time to watch and re-watch so many great or obscure or fondly remembered movies that I’d never be able to otherwise. Television is a waste of time, people.”

Khoi Vinh, “New York Design and Me on Television”, December 2020:

“Two things that you don’t normally see on television very often are now on television: design and yours truly. The new series “New York by Design” (which follows last summer’s “California by Design“) is five episodes of stories about all kinds of design innovation: architecture, industrial design, consumer products, electronics, software and UX, and more. As it happens, I appear on the show as a presenter and a judge […]

The show airs Saturday evenings on CBS Channel 2 New York and the full season will stream on Amazon Prime next February.”

I don’t know, sounds like a waste of time to me.

Carry On Exploding

Published 20th September 2020

Film

Hello there. Join me once more, for another of my TV memories… and another insight into my warped and generally unpleasant mind.

*   *   *

As usual, I can’t remember exactly how old I am. Around 10, maybe? I’m upstairs in bed, and I should be asleep; it’s past midnight. But for some reason, I am awake, and I hear my Dad laughing away downstairs. I rarely hear this. Not because Dad doesn’t laugh much, but because in general, I’m a very good sleeper.

I don’t know what made me get up. I rarely did that, either. But I distinctly remember creeping downstairs, and finding Dad chortling away in his chair. He’s watching a film. Unlike some of these memories, I need no help identifying what he’s watching. It’s etched clearly onto my memory: Carry On Again Doctor. Probably the first bit of Carry On I ever saw. It won’t exactly be the last.

For some reason, Dad doesn’t send me immediately back to bed. We end up talking. He tells me that the Carry On films were known for their low budget. Why haven’t I been sent upstairs back to bed at this point? He really must have been in a good mood. Maybe Kenneth Williams pulled a face.

And this is probably the point where I share a touching moment with my Dad, about a shared experience of comedy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Because what appears on the screen disturbs me.

There’s something wrong with the electrics in the hospital. There’s a fusebox, with sparks pouring out of it. A lady is listening to earphones, which blow up in a shower of yet more sparks. I distinctly remember thinking: “How can this film be low budget? Surely it costs loads of money to do that and not hurt someone!”

And worst of all, there’s some kind of scary pump attached to a person. And that pump starts moving faster and faster. I really, really, really don’t like this. Something highly unpleasant is about to happen to that person in the bed. Will they explode in a shower of guts? I have no exact memory of what happens next, and I can’t say for sure that I ran screaming from the room. But no doubt I’m back upstairs safely in bed before too long.

Carry On films were clearly just too disturbing for me to deal with.

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