* 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!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.