2jakes
I'll Lock Up
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Wow....you wern’t kidding!
Wow....you wern’t kidding!
There were many, many cases of actors passing out on the set from the heat, and it became common to film late at night when the outdoor temperatures weren't as high. It didn't help a lot, but it helped some. Sometimes they'd have cakes of ice right outside the soundstage for actors to sit on and cool off -- they couldn't use any kind of fans or air conditioning because the sound was recorded live, and it would pick up on the mics. One actress, the Warner Bros. comedy star Winnie Lightner, permanently damaged her eyesight because the lights were so bright, and had to retire prematurely.
This kind of stuff was a big factor in the formation of the Screen Actor's Guild in the mid-thirties, and was also a big part of the reason why the Technicolor fad of 1929-30 collapsed so quickly. The later Technicolor processes would use faster film that didn't require so much light, and used more efficient prisms in the camera so there wasn't as much light loss, bur even then Technicolor wasn't a particularly pleasant process to work under.
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Very interesting material Lizzie.
I watched a documentary about Abbott & Costello and the
segment “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein” (Glenn Strange).
(Glenn Strange, not Karloff in this image.)
By this time a rubber head piece was used on the top to create that square shape.
Took “only” about two hours where as Karloff’s make-up took much longer.
Nevertheless, it was mentioned that sweat about a cup full would pore down when
Glenn removed the head piece .
More useless trivia: The development of the Star Trek character Spock was dictated somewhat by black-and-white television sets. Spock was originally going to be half-Martian, and actor Leonard Nimoy had undergone a number of makeup tests in which his face and hands had been painted red with greasepaint. This was the plan until someone mentioned the fact that so many people still had black-and-white television sets, and that his red makeup would appear black on them. Gene Roddenberry changed "half-Martian" to "half-Vulcan", Max Factor created a special greasepaint (still designated "LN-1" to this day) with a yellowish hue that would hint at the Vulcan's green blood, and the rest is television history.The first season of "Star Trek" (1966) was sponsored by a color tv manufacturer (RCA, I think). Watch a first-season show sometime and notice the bizarre colors, with different-colored light coming out of every doorway on the Enterprise. It was done deliberately, to showcase color tv.
Really? I was five years old when Star Trek premiered, and even then I could tell the stuntmen were far too obvious....And this is akin to folks watching Trek now who complain about stuff like, "It's obvious that it's not William Shatner in the long shots in the fight scenes - it's a stuntman!" You literally could not tell back then when watching on a 19" b/w TV with antenna reception...
CBS remastered the entire series in 2005 or 2006 because high-definition televisions were becoming the norm in most homes. The live action scenes were color and sound corrected, and the special effects scenes were replaced with CGI. I've recently finished re-watching the entire series on Netflix, and for some reason one of the episodes (I can't remember which) was the original version rather than the remastered version....I assume they've been restored because the quality of the Netflix streaming picture for those, now, almost 50 year old shows is incredible.
The main thing was that the Technicolor Corporation itself maintained a very tight leash on the technology. It used propeitary cameras that were owned by the Corporation and had to be operated only by Technicolor's own camera crews. This was both an expensive proposition for the studios, which had no negotiation power at all -- they either paid Technicolor's fees and used their equipment, or they didn't film in Technicolor at all -- and one controlled by scarcity: there were never more than a handful of three-strip Technicolor cameras built, and studios had to wait their turn to use them. And when they did use them, they had to follow color guidelines set by Technicolor's own "color consultant" to ensure that the process looked as its owners wanted it to look.
There were rival processes, the most notable of which was Cinecolor, but they were markedly inferior -- Technicolor controlled the patents for three-color professional processes, and the competing systems were two-color (like Cinecolor,) or based on blown-up consumer technology (like Kodachrome, which was never a serious factor for professional motion picture use.)
In the early fifties, the key Technicolor patents were expiring, and there was a burst of activity with cheaper, simpler full-color systems based on Eastmancolor -- marketed under such phony names as Metrocolor, Warnercolor, Pathe Color, Deluxe Color, and so forth. Eastmancolor was nothing like Technicolor -- it was a chemical process rather than an optical one, and because of that it was extremely unstable and prone to fading, graniness, and erratic color stability -- but it was cheap, and it cut the Technicolor Corporation right out of the picture. Technicolor abandoned its own process by the end of the fifties, and adopted a different, simpler system, and eventually got out of photography altogether. Technicolor Corporation survives primarily as a distribution and film-shipping organization, while variations on Eastmancolor remain the standard for color film photography today.
Anyone watched Paper Moon lately? I would watch Madeline Kahn in anything, and I enjoyed her in Moon, but I thought that there was entirely too much fuss about about the film at the time. That would include Tatum O'Neil winning an Oscar. A nice period piece; that was about it for me. A good film, but nothing special for me.
That was my favorite movie when I was a kid, especially the soundtrack. I even bought the soundtrack album, thus becoming the only kid in my class to know who Enric Madriguera was. But even then I noticed that Tatum O'Neil seemed to have one, and only one, facial expression.
That's the one. I resented her because I could make that face too, and I even had the same haircut. And I did it first.