Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 The Daffy Doc, (co-starring Daffy Duck,) directed by Bob Clampett
Neither Bob Clampett nor Chuck Jones cared much for this short, not because they thought it was bad, but because it used an iron lung as a gag prop at a time when polio deaths were on the rise.
Hey bunkies it's still cold outside nut it seems like we dodged another snow storm. The staff at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like you to get very cozy and watch some TV with them. Why not join us in watching another one of our favorite comics - Lewis Blank and his latest Rantcast:
Lewis has perfected cranky to an art form.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1986 coming-of-age drama Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner (based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body) and starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and Kiefer Sutherland. Stand by Me was both a commercial and critical success. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and for two Golden Globe Awards, and it ultimately earned $52,287,414 - well above its $8 million budget.
Director Rob Reiner took important steps to ensure that his four young actors would bond with one another before filming and understand the time period and culture in which their characters lived. These steps included giving them tapes of late-1950s music and making sure they knew the era’s slang. Importantly, he also brought them to Brownsville, Oregon, where he led them in games and exercises drawn from Viola Spolin’s book Improvisations for the Theater. One exercise involved guiding one another blindfolded through their hotel lobby. The point of these exercises was to build trust and friendship so that, onscreen, they would be comfortable with one another and their group of friends would seem real.
Reiner credits much of his success with the cast to the fact that he had been an actor himself. Wil Wheaton said he did not realize it at the time, but that the experience of working with Reiner taught him the meaning of the term “an actor’s director.” Kiefer Sutherland said of Reiner, “Because he’s so proficient as an actor, he can allow you to discover a moment when, in fact, he’s telling it to you.”
According to Sutherland, the title of the film (changed from The Body, the name of Stephen King’s novella) may have come from an interaction he had with Reiner while he and River Phoenix were playing guitar together. Phoenix had been learning to play the instrument for some time, and Sutherland began playing “Stand by Me” on a whim, prompting Phoenix to remark that he loved the song’s melody. Sutherland began teaching Phoenix the tune on guitar, at which point Reiner walked by and commented that he loved the song as well. The original Ben E. King recording of the song was used over the end credits, and a music video featuring Phoenix (shown singing along and playing guitar) alongside co-star Wil Wheaton was also filmed.
Please find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this touching movie: Stand by Me.
In an interview with Variety, Jerry O’Connell said that it was not until he had already been dating Rebecca Romijn (who would later become his wife) for many months that he learned she had been a devoted fan of the movie as a child—and she wasn’t the one to tell him. O’Connell said, “I’m married to Rebecca Romijn, a beautiful model. She’s way out of my league— a million times out of my league. About three months into dating, my wife is from Berkeley, and I went up there to meet her high school friends. We got a little drunk, and her high school best friend said to me, ‘You know, Stand by Me is Rebecca’s favorite movie of all time. You know she had posters of it all over her room growing up.’ She never told me that.”
Demand Euphoria!
No comments:
Post a Comment