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Eleventh Hour USA
It’s been announced in Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily and elsewhere that, following a screening of the pilot for Les Moonves and other executives last week, CBS has now placed a series order for Eleventh Hour. Which I had an inkling of when certain of our prospective Crusoe directors weren’t available because they were booked…
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Wendigo, Night Tide
A week or two back, Stephen Volk asked me if I’d seen “the peculiar, eerie Wendigo“. And the answer was, yes, I have. Stephen Laws had discovered it and was determined that he was going to get me to see it. On the face of it, Larry Fessenden’s modestly-budgeted indie horror reads like a standard…
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Deadwood
Last year we made one of our US road trips. It’s by far our preferred kind of holiday; pick a part of the country we’ve never seen, book a flight, rent a car, and then launch. We’ve never been disappointed, and I’ve always come home with notebooks loaded with ideas and material. A couple of…
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La Roue
I just heard that Abel Gance’s monumental La Roue is to be released on DVD May 8th. La Roue was Gance’s major project before his five-and-a-half hour Napoleon. It’s an epic Zola-esque love triangle set against the iron and steam imagery of the French railways. I’ve been wanting to see it ever since I read…
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Sound Effects and TV History
This link from Mark Ayres tells of plans to issue a CD box set celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BBC’s now-defunct Radiophonic Workshop, pioneering in-house department responsible for themes and sound effects across a range of programmes. Ah, that original version of the Doctor Who theme – described by my godson as “ghosts screaming…
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Six Tales
Stephen Laws writes: “Completely by accident, I was looking at the TV schedules last night – and the title Spectre caught my eye (like I have exclusive rights on the word, or something). “Turns out that it’s the first of a six part Spanish series called 6 Tales to Keep You Awake – very much…
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Crusoe Casting
The Hollywood Reporter‘s telling everyone, so it’s safe for me to say that we have our leads. Crusoe will be played by Montana-born, LAMDA-trained British citizen Philip Winchester. Susannah Crusoe is played by Anna Walton, fresh from Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy 2. Yeah, I know that in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Defoe doesn’t…
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The Fall of the Roman Empire
DVD Savant has an extensive review of the Miriam Collection special edition of the Samuel Bronston production, from the days when American dollars plus a European army gave you an epic. I have an earlier no-frills DVD of the title, but this new release gives it the restored-to-glory treatment. It’s a film that planted two…
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Dumping Miss Daisy
I saw the first Pushing Daisies when it was leaked pre-air in 2007. I thought it made a great mini-movie but couldn’t see the long-running series potential in it. Series tend to follow formula and spread their invention, and this did neither. The second episode surprised and convinced me. It was the second episode that…
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On Happy Endings
Well, there’s happy endings and happy endings. When Robin Williams was making Mrs Doubtfire there was studio pressure to conclude the story with a reconciliation of the divorced parents and a restoration of the broken family unit. Which probably would have prevailed (as the same reconciliation fantasy did in both versions of The Parent Trap)…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
