Hey folks, Harry here... I really hate Quint right now. This sucks... This back injury sucks, I want to go talk to Stan Winston. That would rule. I want to see that TIME MACHINE, it looks so much better than that bean bag chair Time Machine of Moriarty's. And it looks like there is no need for Jelly Beans. THANK GOD! And I want to see these damn Big Trouble figures... no... scratch that, I want them on my shelf right friggin now! ARGH!!!!!!! Also, how much do you wish that you could do what Winston did after shooting finalized on JP3? Oh you don't know? It's the coolest fucking thing in the world... Read and weep that you, me, us... that we don't get to do that. THAT WOULD RULE EVERYDAY OF THE YEAR FOR THE REST OF MY FRICKIN LIFE!!!!! AAAACK!!!!
Ahoy there Harry, squirts... ladies and gentlemen. 'Tis I, the exhausted yet still crusty seaman, Quint, here reporting in after a long and busy day at San Diego Comic Con. You've seen the pics of the Time Machine up at CHUD and also on this site. I've seen it in person... sucka!
I also saw one of the CHUD guys buy a one-sheet movie poster of... C.H.U.D., how cool is that? Not as cool as the Time Machine, granted, but you know... Anyway, upon entering the dealers room this morning, I almost immediately found myself peering into a glass case containing prototypes of a new toy line... A series of Big Trouble In Little China toys... Yes... that was my reaction, too. After cleaning myself, I took a closer look at the toys. They weren't McFarlane, but the detail was really good. They stood about 9 or 10 inches and included Jack Burton (in the classic poster image pose), Egg Shen, Wang, The Wild Man, that floating eyeball thingy, Lightning and Mr. David Lopan himself (the 12 foot tall "first you see him, then you don't" version). I'll try to nab you folks a couple of pics of those guys tomorrow. Also of note from that collection was a Steve McQueen figure from (I think) Bullit.
I then wandered over to a movie poster dealer who had... lots of stuff. I ended up walking away with a handful of movie posters. I then wandered into Dreamworks's Time Machine Booth and saw the extremely impressive full-sized Time Machine. After I picked up my jaw from the dealer room floor, I looked around at the smaller things. There were some pics from the film of the Morlocks. There are 3 different kinds: Warriors, Spies and the Uber Morlock. The pic that appeared in the Time Machine story a few hours ago of the morlocks was a warrior. The spies are much thinner and have softer features. The Uber Morlock is the ringleader, played by Jeremy Irons. He looks fantastic. White as a sheet like the rest, but much more human.
The booth also had a behind the scenes tape playing and it had a clip of Jeremy Irons interacting with Guy Pearce and it was damn cool with Irons being as creepy as ever... moreso with all that Stan Winston makeup on. Which brings me to Stan Winston. I had gotten a heads up that Winston was going to be at the booth to do a Q&A session. I, of course, wouldn't miss that for the world. I got there 10 minutes early, after grabbing a soda and checking out a few animation cells.
Winston showed up and no one seemed to notice. I jumped by his side, shook his hand and introduced myself. Then people started gathering. He asked for questions. I recorded most of the Q&A. Here are the highlights:
FAN BOY: HOW MUCH DID YOU DRAW UPON THE ORIGINAL FILM FOR INSPIRATION IN THE DESIGN OF THE MORLOCKS? OR DID YOU JUST SCRAP THAT AND DRAW INSPIRATION FROM THE BOOK?
STAN WINSTON: As far as the design of the Morlocks? It's fresh. It's very fresh. There are certain things that are based on the book and the original designs from the original film, which are also based on the book. There's the feeling of what, you know, the aspect of the fact that these creatures live underground. We just didn't quite as... I don't want to use the word cartoony because I'm a fan of the original.
But they're very pale because they don't spend a lot of time in the sun. We went in that direction, but we also tried to make them a little bit more organic and different. Something you hadn't seen before. We didn't want to come to you with a replication of what we've seen before.
FAN BOY: T3... ARE YOU ON BOARD WITH THAT?
STAN WINSTON: Well, there's not a completed script right now, but I have been approached by the producers and of course Arnold and I are close friends, so we talk about it occasionally, but it's not there. We'll keep our fingers crossed and if it happens I would plan on being on board.
[TALKING ABOUT JURASSIC PARK 3]
STAN WINSTON: We wanted to go on a real good dinosaur ride with Jurassic Park 3. People had thought they had seen everything they could with dinosaurs. What you see with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 3 is so far beyond anything we did in either of the two movies. The combination of technologies... there are animatronic dinosaurs and CG dinosaurs in the same shot and you cannot tell them apart. I think it's amazing footage. I'm very happy with the film.
UBER FAN BOY (ME, IN THIS CASE...): WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW? WHAT'S COMING UP?
STAN WINSTON: The main thing I'm working on right now is a toy line that's coming out at the end of September. It's an action figure toyline called Stan Winston's Creatures coming out at the end of September, first part of October. What we've been doing for the film for the last 30 years, which is creating characters and creatures people hadn't seen before we're now doing for the action figure world with stuff nobody's ever seen before. Not necessarily attached to movies, but brand new characters.
FAN BOY (NOT ME): WILL ANY OF THE TOYS BE BASED ON YOUR FILMS... PUMPKINHEAD, MAYBE?
STAN WINSTON: No, actually Todd McFarlane's done a really good job with Pumpkinhead and Todd's done a great job of licensing characters we've created in the studio. What we want to do with our action figure line is create brand new stuff. They'll be slightly larger than McFarlane figures and along with the action figures, in the first line, there's a CD-ROM that will go with each toy. Then, in every line after that, there'll be a password because these toys, these action figures, are designed and sculpted and created by the same artists who are the original artists who did The Terminator, who did the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, who did The Predator, so the toy is actually sculpted by the original artists. So, you're getting the real Picasso rather than the copy, which I think will make them immediately collector's items because they are actually sculpted and designed by the original artists for the most iconic characters in film history.
FAN BOY (ME AGAIN): THEN WE'LL SEE MOVIES BASED ON THOSE.
STAN WINSTON: Then you'll see movies based on those, yeah. The idea is to introduce these characters into the toy world, then create films from them. Now, the first five characters are actually coming out based on a series of movies I produced for HBO called Creature Features. So, the first five characters are Creature Feature characters and every one after that is brand new. Our second or third line is a line of Cat Gods and it's called The Realm of the Claw and they're really wonderful Cat God creatures.
FAN BOY (NOT ME): HOW HAS THE SPECIAL EFFECTS PROCESS CHANGED OVER THE YEARS?
STAN WINSTON: It hasn't changed at all, actually. If you stop to think about it... 1930s with King Kong, which was very inspirational to me, from the first time we started doing fantastic characters for film, you would do what you could live and what you couldn't you'd do animated. With King Kong, the only thing you could do live with a character like that was a big hand that Fay Wray was in and a huge head outside of a window and everything else was animated. It was stop motion animation then.
Today, we do everything we can live and what you can't do live, we do animated. But today in the animatronic and robot world, in the puppet world, we have much more ability to do more organic things full size and live action because we also design on computers, we control through computers, so our robots are much more organic and alive and what we can't do live we do with animation. Today the animation is computer generated animation. It's still the same concept. What you can do live, you do live, what you can't do live, you do in animation.
FAN BOY (NOT ME): IN JP3, HOW MUCH OF YOUR WORK WAS IN THE FIGHT SCENE BETWEEN THE T-REX AND THE SPINOSAUR?
STAN WINSTON: Uh, the battle that you see in the movie is virtually all CG with the exception of one shot where the Spino takes the T-Rex down and snaps its neck. The T-Rex is a real T-Rex, full size, and the Spino's CG. That's the kind of stuff we did in that movie that nobody's ever scene.
BUT we did say to Joe Johnston, "You know... what the hell? Once we got everything in the can, when you got everything you need of the Spinosaur, when you got everything you need of the T-Rex, at the end of the shoot we'll put these two guys together and let these two machines go at it." And we did. We put it on film. And literally this dinosaur ripped the T-Rex's head off. It was that powerful. Literally, it took one swat at him and the T-Rex's head was layin' there, with oil spurtin' outta his neck. So, in fact, the truth is: The Spinosaur killed the T-Rex.
Winston went on to talk about his interest in doing a Dark Crystal-esque movie using all animatronic and puppet creatures that were enabled with the same technology he invented for Teddy in A.I., which he said was the most sophisticated robot built... with something like 48 points of motion. Not bad, eh? Internet movie website sidenote: I saw noneother than Mr. Garth Franklin in the crowd listening to Mr. Winston and wanted to go up and say hi, but, alas, he disappeared before I got the chance. I'll run into him somewhere sometime in the next few days, I'm sure.
It was around this time that I got pulled into Mattel's booth. I was walking away from the Time Machine booth and saw He-Man was playing on a screen at the Mattel booth. I paused a second, wondering why there was a huge line and crowd of people surrounding this particular booth when I was grabbed by a guy in a He-Man shirt. He informed me there were unveiling the new He-Man design for the new toy and ushered me into a little press area. The wonders of having a little green ribbon that says "PRESS" on your badge.
What can I say? I grew up on He-Man. It was great to watch a couple episodes while they were counting down to the first public unveiling of the new design for He-Man. I was told that next year He-Man celebrates his 20th anniversary and they're re-releasing a He-Man toy line, with classic figures and this brand new He-Man on top of it all. When they finally showed us the new He-Man... well, I dug it, but it's not all that different. He just had a bigger sword and a bigger shield. I took some pics, but that was with a still camera, so you folks'll have to wait for the Quint San Diego Comic Con Photo Essay, coming shortly.
I then wandered into the autograph area and met Ken "Do you know how fucking cool I am" Foree (black dude from Dawn of the Dead) and David "Beware the Moon" Naughton from An American Werewolf In London. I chatted with Reggie Bannister and his fiancé Gigi Porter for a little while about Bubba Ho-tep (Yes, he's in it in a very small role) and various musings on Phantasm 5.
I left to grab a bite to eat before attending the US Premiere of Storm Rider director Andrew Lau's The Duel, a kung fu flick with a helluva lot of swordplay and some really awesome characters. One character in particular, he's called Four Eyebrows in the film, is hilarious. The film is weird. Four Eyebrows wears sunglasses in certain scenes, although the film is set in 1800s China... weird, but fun.
The film's basically about a match (the duel of the title) between two absolute gods of swordplay. This event is holy and can only go down in the King's temple. The King allows it, thinking it'll be great fun. At the same time there's a lot of people getting killed and Four Eyebrows is running around trying to figure the mystery out.
Overall this movie was a lot of fun. I have a few small problems with it... like it's about 15 minutes too long and the ending duel is a bit of letdown, not due to poor choreography, but its short length. Don't get me wrong, this movie kicked a lot of ass when it was moving and the characters were funny and interesting most of the time. It's well worth a view, especially if you're into the mystical kung-fu shit, like I am.
Well, there squirts. I'm gonna head to bed. Gotta rest up. Big day of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, trailers, clips, featurettes and even a DVD panel to be had tomorrow. Farewell and adieu.
-Quint
