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I missed last week’s Movie Trivia because I was on vacation, so I figured I’d make up for it today by doing a Tim Burton double feature. First up? Big Fish. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about William, a son (Billy Crudup) coming to terms with his relationship with his dying father (Albert Finney), who is prone to telling tall tales. William spends the movie sorting through his dad’s legends, trying to figure out which ones are real and which ones are just the products of an overactive imagination. His mom is played by Jessica Lange, and the younger versions of his parents are played by Ewan McGregor and Alison Lohman.
The movie was based on a 1998 book by Daniel Wallace called Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions.
There’s a parallel between the movie and what was going on in Burton’s own life at the time – his father had died two years earlier and his mother died just one month before he accepted the directing job. He said that filming the movie and thinking about father-son relationships and death was really cathartic for him.
Most of the scenes were shot on location in Wetumpka, Alabama, and Prattville, Alabama.
Jack Nicholson was the first choice to play Edward Bloom – both the older and younger versions. They were going to use computers to make him look younger so he could play the younger Edward. Burton has said that it became clear who to cast when he came across the pairing of Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney because the two of them seemed to have some sort of a spiritual connection that would be perfect for the movie.
Steven Spielberg was originally slated to direct as of 2000, but as the script went through several re-writer, Spielberg became engrossed in other projects. By the time the third draft was done, the directing job ended up in Burton’s hands.
Most of the scenes were shot on location in Wetumpka, Alabama, and Prattville, Alabama.
Matthew McGrory, who played Karl the Giant, was once in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the the largest feet in the world – size 29.5. Sadly, Matthew passed away in 2005. He was 7’6″ and only 32 years old at the time of his death.
The banjo player that you see when Ed first walks into Spectre is the same actor who played the banjo-playing kid in Deliverance.
When we see Steve Buscemi’s (Norther Winslow) poem about Spectre – “Grass so green/skies so blue/Spectre is really great! – that’s actually Tim Burton’s handwriting.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tim Burton hates the circus and is afraid of clowns. I knew there was a reason I liked him.
The guy who plays “Colossus” in the first circus scene is actually a circus performer.
In the book, the town of Spectre was depicted as incredibly dark and creepy. Tim Burton put his own spin on this and compared his version of Spectre to Burbank – it may look idyllic and sweet (and rather technicolor), but there’s something sinister lurking just beneath.
Alison Lohman was cast as Sandra Templeton Bloom because Tim Burton loved her silent movie-esque looks and felt that she was able to convey a whole range of emotions even when she was just standing still.
The part where the elephant takes a massive crap was, obviously, not scripted. Instead of calling that take a loss, Ewan McGregor just acted through it. The cast and crew thought the take with the elephant pooing in the background was hilarious, so it was kept in the final cut.
Ewan McGregor really did get to hang out in a cage with a lion when he filmed the scenes of him performing menial tasks around the circus. He also really learned Cantonese for the scene where he talks to the conjoined twins. I mean, just a couple of lines of Cantonese, but still…
Tim Burton has a very brief cameo – literally a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it situation. When the ringleader (Danny DeVito) and Edward Bloom burst out of his trailer because Calloway is morphing into a werewolf, keep your eye on the clowns that immediately scatter from their card-playing table. One of them is Tim.
Speaking of which, in case you’re wondering, that’s really Danny DeVito in the buff. No stunt doubles were required.
Another brief cameo: the author of the book, Daniel Wallace, can be seen as Sandra’s professor at Auburn.
If Sandra’s fiance (and Edward’s rival) looks familiar, I’d be willing to bet it’s because you know him as a slightly scruffier character: Roy on The Office. Poor dude is always getting his fiance stolen!
In the scene where Sandra opens the window to find Edward standing there in a field of daffodils that he planted for her, you’re really looking at daffodils. They weren’t digitally added in later. Tim Burton explains that his crew spent an entire weekend digging and planting and replanting when they didn’t look right, but he felt that it was extremely important to the reality of the scene.
Check out Jessica Lange’s outfit at the end of the movie during the funeral scene. Her character, Sandra, is the only one dressed in red. This is supposed to be symbolic of the fact that she was quirky and individualistic and the perfect match for Ed Bloom, who wouldn’t want her to be dressed in mourning black anyway.
Eddie Vedder composed “Man of the Hour,” the song that runs during the credits, after watching an early screening of the movie and adoring it. He apparently went home and wrote the music, had a demo for the band the next day and recorded it with them five days later.
Number two on the Burton double feature – The Nightmare Before Christmas. I know; it’s neither Halloween nor Christmas, but I think this is one you can watch year-round.
Nightmare dates all the way back to 1980. Burton worked on Fox and the Hound and the Black Cauldron and then started working on his own animations such as Frankenweenie and Vincent – Nightmare was in that group of projects he worked on.
By popular demand, a bullet about Henry Selick. Selick was, in fact, the director of Nightmare. Due to his prior commitments to Batman Returns, Burton wasn’t able to spend as much time on set as he would have liked and hired newbie director (although industry veteran) Henry Selick to do the job. The movie was (and still is) billed as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas because studio heads were convinced that the movie wasn’t going to do well, but attaching Burton’s name to it might give it a better chance at the box office. You might know Selick’s from his latest amazing stop-motion picture, Coraline, which he also directed.
You know the voices of the characters; you just don’t know you do (or maybe you do). Jack’s speaking voice is done by Chris Sarandon, who is Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride. Sally is voiced by the legendary Catherine O’Hara, who has been in everything from SCTV to Home Alone and Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. If Dr. Finklestein sounds familiar, I bet you’re also a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation fan: he was the cigar-smoking, toupee-wearing Uncle Lewis. The Mayor of Halloween Town is voiced by Glenn Shadix, Otho from Beetlejuice, and if you listen closely, you’ll notice that Lock is voiced by Pee Wee himself – Paul Reubens.
Tim Burton has said that Jack Skellington is one of his favorite characters largely because he so deludes himself into thinking that he’s going something wonderful and great without thinking about how his actions would impact others.
Jack Skellington has cameos in other Burton movies and Selick movies, if you’ve got eagle eyes . In Beetlejuice, his head is on top of Beetlejuice’s carnival-type hat near the end of the movie, and in James, he can be spotted as one of the pirate skeletons James comes across.
Danny Elfman says the composing songs for this movie is the easiest job he has ever had. This was news to me – he used to be in the band Oingo Boingo. At the time Nightmare came around, the members of Oingo Boingo were starting to go their separate ways; he wasn’t sure what was going to come next. Reflecting this, he simply wrote Halloweentown songs as if they represented Oingo Boingo – the past and what he had always known – vs. Christmastown, which was new and fresh and exciting.
The NAACP became upset with the makers of the movie because they felt that the movie’s chief villain, Oogie Boogie, was made to use “blackspeak” while the heroes of the film used “whitespeak.” Director Henry Selick and composer Danny Elfman say that it had nothing to do with race; they had simply based his singing voice on Cab Calloway because they liked the style and tonal quality. I, for one, am inclined to believe them – Danny Elfman has been influenced by Cab Calloway since his Oingo Boingo days when the band was doing covers of his songs.
Oogie Boogie used to look a lot different. Burton’s original drawings portrayed him as a pillow-sized baddie, which wasn’t too intimidating. When they upgraded him to a larger-than-life sack o’ bugs, suddenly a lot more bugs were needed in order to animate the scene where he unravels and all of his insects come pouring out. So, any time anyone had any downtime on set, they were tasked with making a bunch of Oogie bugs to use for that scene.
Greg Proops from Whose Line is it Anyway? voices a bunch of minor characters in the movie – the sax player in the band, a red devil and the harlequin demon among them.
There was talk of a sequel for a while. Obviously it has been quite the cash cow for Disney, so around 2001 they started buzzing about making a computer-animated sequel. Tim Burton managed to talk them out of it, saying that it was really best the way it was and “Jack visits Thanksgivingworld” or something similar just wouldn’t have the same impact and would also cheapen the first film.
Just as Jack shows up in other Burton movies, other Burton movies show up in Nightmare. A cat from Vincent can be seen in the beginning knocking over a trash can; the snake in the movie looks suspiciously like the Sandworms from Beetlejuice; one of the toys Jack hands out is an evil duck on wheels which is just like the Penguin’s vehicle of choice in Batman Returns.
Vincent Price was originally slated to be the voice of Sandy Claws. Unfortunately, Vincent had just lost his wife and had a very sad quality to his voice that wouldn’t read right during his recording. They ended up not using him and he died not too long afterward.
Tim Burton has said that he felt a little subversive in designing the Nightmare characters the way he did. Coming from Disney, he had to draw the big “wet drippy eyes” that Disney characters are famous for. Quite a few of the characters in Nightmare either have big black voids for eyes, like Jack does, or have eyes that are sewn shut or are otherwise mangled. Burton said that not having eyes to convey emotion and expression was challenging and felt that if they would be able to accomplish emotive characters without eyes, it would be a real achievement.
The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland has transformed into Haunted Mansion Holiday featuring Jack and Sally every year since 2001. I’ve yet to see this for myself, but I hope to someday soon – the pictures look amazing.
Photo from DoomBuggies.com.
Now this is a manly man’s ad. Here’s an advertisement for Makita power tool by Bennie Du Plessis of Saatchi & Saatchi in South Africa – if you look closely, the "pixels" are 20,081 carefully drilled holes!
What can I say. It’s Sunday, so here’s a cute video clip of a slow loris who loves getting tickled (see how sad it gets when the tickling stops?) Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Arbroath
Researchers from the Universite de la Mediterranee-CNRS-EFS in France analyzed the DNA of Neanderthal fossils and found that the species might actually be composed of several "races":
We tend to think of Neanderthals as one species of cavemen-like creatures, but now scientists say there were actually at least three different subgroups of Neanderthals.
Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups.
The evidence points to a subgroup of Neanderthals in Western Europe, another in Southern Europe near the Mediterranean, a third in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and possibly a fourth in Western Asia. These groups have been postulated before, but this is the first study analyzing DNA data to look for genetic variations differentiating the subgroups.
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Swiss twins Harold and Michael Lengen have found the perfect loophole to get out of paying parking tickets:
Police say that in the last year alone the twins have collected 29 parking tickets on a car which they both share. But every time they refuse to pay them and tell courts that the other was driving.
And police say that as they are identical twins it is impossible to rely on visual evidence to prove who was driving the car when they got the ticket.
A police spokesman said: "It is immensely frustrating for our officers. Every time we hand one of them out a ticket we know what is going to happen next and that they will never pay it.
If Twitter were human, what kind of a person would it be? And, more importantly, would you befriend such a person? Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum has an opinion about what she dubbed the "Age of Oversharing":
… at the risk of unilaterally offending 14 million people, I need to say this: If Twitter were a person, it would be an emotionally unstable person. It would be that person we avoid at parties and whose calls we don’t pick up. It would be the person whose willingness to confide in us at first seems intriguing and flattering but eventually makes us feel kind of gross because the friendship is unearned and the confidence is unjustified. The human incarnation of Twitter, in other words, is the person we all feel sorry for, the person we suspect might be a bit mentally ill, the tragic oversharer.
… as Twitter’s popularity wobbles at the tipping point between faddish distraction and worldwide obsession, it’s worth wondering how much of this "connecting" is simply hastening the erosion of our already compromised interpersonal skills. Are we tweeting because we truly want to communicate with a select group of true friends, or because typing has replaced talking and indiscretion has been stripped of all negative connotations? Are most Twitter posts merely inane, or do they carry the faint whiff of the insane?
Those wily Tasmanians have hit upon a gem of an idea that lets them:
a) get rid of stuff no one wanted (i.e. wombat poo)
b) make lots of money doing it (make it into paper)
c) from people they don’t like (tourists)
Creative Paper manager Darren Simpson says the manufacturing process can be rather unpleasant.
"When we are boiling it, it does smell horrific as you can imagine, but once it has been sterilised and rinsed properly there’s no scent left to it. If anything it just gives you a nice organic smell," he said.
He added that it was the tourists themselves who came up with the wombat idea.
"As people were coming through and we were showing them the samples of our paper, they would throw questions at you like ‘can you make it from sheep poo or can you make it from koalas?’. And the one that kept popping up more than any other was the wombat."
Previously on Neatorama: Tiny Flower Turns Pig Poop into Fuel, Elephant Dung Paper
