* My pal TJ Dietsch has conducted an absolutely fascinating interview with Harold Ramis about Ghostbusters. It’s for ToyFare so he leads with a bunch of questions about the toys and video games, but stick with it for gems like this:
Have you seen any of the guys recently?
I talk to Dan a little bit, I’m in touch with Ernie, and Bill I have virtually no contact with. I just keep track of him through his brothers, who I’m still friends with, and other people. You know, he’s a mystery man.
And I’m not sure I knew this about the original premise for the first film:
…the script was pretty much unmakeable the way Dan conceived it. The Marshmallow Man, which is the large-scale effect that really pays off the whole movie, happened around page 50 in Dan’s original script, and things got bigger after that. So, not only was it impractical as a production, it sort of took it too far from the world of the mundane, which is where the comic edge was really vivid. Ivan and I had a similar thought independently. We thought the origin story would be really interesting, how the Ghostbusters came to be Ghostbusters, who were these guys, how did this happen, whereas Dan’s original script surpassed all that. He projected into a time in the future when ghost occurrences were common, when Ghostbusters were around pretty much like Orkin exterminators, that there were a bunch of teams around, and that the Ghostbusters in Dan’s script were just one of many teams of ghost exterminators in New York.
Sounds like a sequel waiting to happen, no?
* Speaking of juicy interviews, Chris Mautner speaks with PictureBox honcho Dan Nadel about adopting a pledge/preorder/subscription model for some of his books, the all-adventure-stories Art Out of Time 2, and more.
* The staff of Clive Barker’s official website Revelations has seen a 144-minute workprint of Nightbreed! And they say there’s even more footage out there. Pray to Eris that the Director’s Cut of this film happens. (Via Dread Central.)
* The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island has been making the rounds, and taking the horror sites by storm–if I had a nickel for every big gorehound site that said something to the effect of “I wasn’t sure whether or not to cover this movie until I saw this trailer” I’d have, I dunno, fifteen cents. Is it Marty’s Shining, or a second Cape Fear? Either way I’m sound as a pound.
* Battlestar Galactica‘s Ronald D. Moore has been speaking with SciFi Wire. First he sounds off on a variety of issues: fan reaction to the BSG finale (for the record: maybe the best series finale I’ve ever seen), the Caprica pilot’s DVD release (I still haven’t seen it!) and the current status of the series, and the revelation that they’ve brought in another writer to work on the prequel to The Thing he was writing the screenplay for. And here he is on the prospects for Virtuality, his new Fox movie/pilot, depending on whether you’re talking to Fox or to him.
* Torture Link of the Day: Andrew Sullivan traces the history of the word “torture” in The New York Times, noting how the paper once didn’t hesitate to refer to the techniques the Bush administration adopted as torture when done by other regimes, but switched to Newspeak when American torture enthusiasts began insisting these techniques weren’t torture.
* Now this is what I’m talking about: I Knew It Was You, a short documentary about the late great actor John Cazale, the man with the single greatest resume in the history of filmmaking.
* Drawn & Quarterly’s Jessica Campbell’s MoCCA photo parade includes a photo of yours truly with my David Bowie sketchbook in action, but I am not reposting it here because on this blog, at least, I can maintain control of my image and edit out unflattering views. (All that hair is already gone, by the way. Thanks, Armory–lesson learned!)
I’m in that photo set too! God, there really didn’t need to be another pick of me displaying my horrible posture while exhausted in that sweatbox of a panel room.
I have no idea what the majority of the response to the BSG finale was, but I thought it wasn’t quite as positive as Moore spells it out, was it? I thought the episode was very good myself, and I’m hesitant to bring this up for pissing anyone off, but did you get the feeling that some of the most vitriolic responses came from people who were more offended by the idea that God worked within the parameters of the show than they were the execution? I don’t know. I’m someone who’s both liberal and Catholic, so maybe I’m just more sensitive to this kind of thing, but I always think it’s really shoddy when otherwise thoughtful and accepting people who are on the left turn into insensitive ass holes whenever they get an opportunity to make “Flying Spaghetti Monster” jokes at the expense of people with different belief systems. It’s like talking about religion turns the same gene in their brain on that fuels cross town high school sports rivalries.
Kiel, re the BSG finale reactions: I’m liberal and somewhat religious too, and I got very much the same impression that you did from several atheist/agnostic friends and acquaintances. To oversimplify, it kind of boiled down to “Bah! God! Angels! What bullshit!” The only thing I can think of is that these otherwise intelligent people watched four seasons of a show in which God(s) was/were mentioned in every single episode, but had projected their own beliefs (or lack thereof) onto the characters and the show. The implication, from their point of view, was that they (consciously or unconsciously) viewed the characters as stupid/primitive for having these beliefs, and the futility of those beliefs would be revealed at the end because there was a rational explanation for everything (just like real life, dontcha know) and the showrunners had somehow been sort-of kidding about the God(s) thing all along. When it failed to meet their expectations on this front, and hey – Moore and Eick really weren’t kidding the whole time about God and whatnot – they got pissed.
Which is not to say reasonable people (and even people of faith) can’t disagree about the degree to which there was a whole lot of deus ex machina going on in the storytelling there, and I’ve had those discussions too, but the most vitriolic of the responses I’ve observed personally is, like with you, largely attributable to a reaction to religion in general. It’s the one acceptable prejudice to the right-thinking liberal.
Speaking as someone who’s liberal and agnostic, I guess I did get really angry at first, because I do think the finale espouses values I disagree with wholeheartedly. But upon further reflection, I decided I couldn’t get angry about it, because it wasn’t a cheat within the rules as established by the show.
I think what I found disheartening was the sheer ambiguity of it all; the implication that all the characters were just pieces on God’s Monopoly board, and this is where His roll of the dice ended up. My reaction was that Moore and Eick threw up their hands, decided they couldn’t figure out where they wanted to go and what they wanted to say, or if they had anything to say, beyond resolving each character’s personal storyline, which they did.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. But that doesn’t mean I have to just take what I’m given.
I don’t like the implication that if I don’t like something, something is primarily wrong with ME, which is the vibe I’m getting here. (it’s also part of the reason I havent’ seen Star Trek- I pretty much loathe J.J. Abrams as a writer, and I didn’t want to put up with the “Lighten up, fanboy” cracks)
Bill Murray said after finishing voicework for the video game that “The Wounds from Ghostbusters have healed.”
Er, Ghostbusters II, that is.
I loved the finale, but I can see people’s gripes with it.
I do think that whoever was involved with the decision to put The PLAN in the beginning title sequence of every episode of the first 3 seasons bears some fault in whatever criticisms the show took in its final season. That iconic bit of text was a major influence on all the conspiracy type viewers who watched the first three seasons like many fans watch Lost; looking for clues to the mystery. I know it’s disappearance from the intro sequence in the 4th season confused me, and I read in one of these interviews or podcasts that it wasn’t Moore’s idea in the first place to include it; just an PR move or something.
When you’re told for 3 seasons that there is some mystery and you’re watching for the resolution of that mystery, the outrage becomes a bit more understandable. That TV movie seems more like an effort to appease these fans who want to know WTF the Plan ever was. But the Plan was never mentioned in the show itself, and if you ignore that it was ever in the opening credits, the show doesn’t really leave any glaring loose ends. It answers them all within its framework of God and angels. The only real loose end is ever mentioning The Plan in the first place.
I think people began to rely on The Plan as an explanation for all the mysterious junk going on in the show. I know I was convinced that the Cylons weren’t actually trying to kill the Fleet for much of the first two seasons for whatever insane God reason their Plan was telling them until Ron Moore said in one of his podcasts that no, the Cylons really were trying to eradicate the Fleet.
I admit that I was thinking a lot of the God stuff was a bit of a fake out. Because so often in genre and otherwise mass produced fiction, talk about God and the like is eventually contradicted, counterargued, whatever. The character talking about God, especially when that character is possibly the figment of a delusional other characters mind, well, you tend to wait for the punchline in those cases. You tend to wait for the monologuing part of the movie, where the villain explains it all and the heroes uppercut him and win the day. You don