Latest news with #TheLostWorld
Perth Now
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Gareth Edwards doesn't 'feel guilty' about Jaws reference in Jurassic World Rebirth
Gareth Edwards doesn't "feel guilty" about a Jaws reference in 'Jurassic World Rebirth' because it was approved by Steven Spielberg. The moviemaker has taken the helm of the dinosaur franchise for the seventh film which comes 32 years after Spielberg directed 'Jurassic Park' - based on the book of the same name by Michael Crichton - and the latest movie features a scene taken from the original book in which a dinosaur stalked a group of people on a raft from the water and Edwards admits it seems like a nod to Spielberg's shark classic 'Jaws'. He told Empire magazine: "You can't put a fin in the water and have it be a threat to people on a boat without thinking of a particular film ['Jaws']. "And I would feel really guilty about this, except for the fact that the screenplay was given to me by Steven Spielberg." Spielberg is an executive producer on 'Jurassic World Rebirth' which has reteamed him with screenwriter David Koepp - who penned the script for the original 1993 blockbuster and its 1997 sequel 'The Lost World'. Koepp previously revealed he re-read Crichton's two 'Jurassic Park' books to get him back into the mindset to work on a new movie - and he ended up using the water scene from the first novel which never made it into the first two films. He told Variety: "I reread the two novels to get myself back in that mode though. We did take some things from them. "There was a sequence from the first novel that we'd always wanted in the original movie, but didn't have room for. We were like, 'Hey, we get to use that now.' "But just to get back in that head space 30 years later - is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun." Koepp loved working on the original two 'Jurassic Park' films, and he's excited to be making a return for the next instalment. He added: "The first two movies were two of my favorite experiences ever. And Steven [Spielberg] said, 'What about starting over? Let's try something all new.' "I said, 'Oh, that's a cool idea. What if blah, blah, blah,' and then I threw an idea back. That's it. It caught. "You do that all the time with your friends and collaborators: throw ideas back and forth. And sometimes they catch, usually they don't." He admitted there was still "pressure" because of big budgets and high expectations, but original talks were simply framed around "the pursuit of our ideas". Edwards previously admitted he wanted 'Jurassic World Rebirth' to return to the franchise's "horror" roots because the 1993 original terrified him as a child. He told Vanity Fair magazine: "'Jurassic Park' [the original] is a horror film in the witness protection program. Most people don't think of it like that. "We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared s*******, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack. "It's one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar's really high to come on board and try and do this." Edwards added: "There's something very primal that's buried deep inside everybody. As mammals, we evolved [with] this fear of the bigger animal that's going to come one day and maybe kill us or our family. "The second we see it happening onscreen, you're like, 'I knew it … We had it too good for too long'." Edwards went on to reveal he drew inspiration from some of his favourite movies - including the 'Alien' and 'Star Wars' franchises - to create a scary new dinosaur. He explained: "When you make a creature, you get a big, massive pot and you pour in your favorite monsters from other films and books ... "Some ['Star Wars' beast] Rancor went in there, some H.R. Giger ['Alien' designer] went in there, a little T. rex went in there …"
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dennis James presents ‘The Lost World'
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – An organist who plays with two hands and two feet has dedicated his life to preserving silent film music scores. Dennis James is joining the Binghamton Theater Organ Society on Sunday for 'The Lost World.' Based on the book by Arthur Conan Doyle, the 1925 film The Lost World is a silent science fiction film that uncovers a land full of prehistoric animals. It was the inspiration for modern movies such as King Kong. James has been playing the organ for over 50 years, becoming a professional when he was just 16 years old. He has always had an affinity for silent films as well. James says he doesn't change anything about the original music, he plays it the way it was intended to be heard years ago. 'I'm doing it the way it was, and the films haven't died. When we do it the way it was meant to be, this is what movies are. Sound movies are not what movies are, movies were meant, were invited, to be done with live music. So, we're just doing show movies,' said James. The performance will take place at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for veterans or members. Students can see the show for free thanks to the Early Owego Antique Center. To purchase, visit Molinaro on Capitol Hill for FTA nomination hearing ICE detainees housed at Broome County Jail Mayor Kraham vetoes Good Cause Eviction law BU art exhibit celebrates Women's History Month BOCES holds annual Job Readiness Fair Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ask Chris: Who was the first female movie executive?
FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Sherry Lansing made headlines around the world when the former math-teacher-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-executive broke the glass ceiling of the movie industry by being named head of 20th Century Fox. The Oscar-nominated producer was honored with footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Lansing's appointment was a milestone, but not the first time ladies were in charge. 'Bottom line,' historian Mindy Johnson, author of Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation, says, 'there were more women in power — in front of and behind the camera — in the silent era, than there are today.' In 1912, actor/writer/director Lois Weber took over Universal's Rex Motion Picture brand. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were dating when they teamed up with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith to launch their United Artists studio in 1919. Another actress, Mabel Normand, became a director and ran the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. 'The whole industry was small studios,' Johnson says. 'And many were owned and run by women.' Marion Fairfax, who adapted the dinosaur action epic The Lost World in 1925, was one of the women who formed her own production company. Producer Margaret Winkler was a titan in the animation industry, distributing Felix the Cat, Fleischer cartoons, and Walt Disney's first films. In 1945, Virginia Van Upp, who had written and produced hit films for Rita Hayworth, was chosen by Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to supervise all production at stat studio, the last time a woman would hold that position for many years. Said Lansing in 1980, 'I hope as the new decade goes on, the appointment of a woman to a major post will not be so noteworthy: That it will become natural for women to have high positions in every industry.'
Telegraph
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
From Fawlty Towers to ‘rawdogging' – the bizarre history of in-flight entertainment
In 1919, passengers enjoyed the first in-flight meals – pre-packed lunch boxes at three shillings each on a trip from London to Paris. But they would have to wait another six years for the full mid-air experience, when the first feature-length in-flight movie was shown on the same route on an Imperial Airways' converted Handley-Page First World War bomber in April 1925. The picture was The Lost World, an American stop-motion fantasy adventure released two months earlier, and adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. The 106-minute movie told the story of a group of explorers who discover that dinosaurs still walk the Earth, and featured stop-motion special effects by Willis O'Brien, years before he would use them on King Kong. A sign on the side of that groundbreaking flight – containing a dozen or so wicker seats – declared: 'World's first aircraft cinema'. The film was silent, but accompanied by a live orchestra, broadcast over radio from the Berlin Broadcasting Station. The stunt combined two roaring new technologies, cinema and passenger flight, just a few short decades after two sets of brothers, the French Lumières and the US Wrights, had pioneered their development. The Mon Ciné French film magazine was sceptical about the British innovation. 'Will the airlines decide to install cinemas on board their planes to charm the passengers during the flight hours?' it asked. 'This is hardly probable, because the enterprise is not without risks.' After all, the bulky nitrate film reels being hauled on-board were highly flammable. Ultimately, it was the concept – not the celluloid – that caught light. Regular film services were eventually rolled out in 1961, with US pioneers Trans World Airlines advertising: 'Don't just sit there! Fly TWA and see a movie on the way!' By 1965, a reporter for Life magazine said passengers had got the hang of the newfangled offering. He recalled one occasion where he 'encountered turbulence at the gate. Some of my fellow travelers had found out that our feature was Winston Churchill in The Finest Hours, while, at the next gate, TWA's flight landing at Kennedy had immediate seating for one of the Rock Hudson-vs.-Doris Day epics. Mass defections from the Churchill flight followed.' As we celebrate a century of airborne entertainment, why are millions of us still choosing to watch films during our flights, despite an ocean of new media alternatives? 'Movies are still incredibly important,' says Dominic Green, president of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) and director of in-flight entertainment at United Airlines. 'They're still our number one piece of content.' Eighty per cent of the airline's passengers engage with the seat-back screens, and at least half of those are staring at old-fashioned motion pictures. The in-flight entertainment market is estimated to be worth almost £7 billion. And even Hollywood stars value it. Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain was furious last year when she received $15 credit from JetBlue after complaining 'that I paid that for your flight entertainment system that didn't work for the duration of my 6hr flight'. When it comes to who watches what, Green says it is very hard to predict based on departure point or destination. 'The golden rule, we found, is there is no golden rule.' Action and comedy tend to be the most popular genres, but you might be surprised to hear that horror and thrillers also do well. Whoever chose to screen The Lost World above the world 100 years ago was clearly on to something. Raphael Girardoni, managing director of customer experience at American Airlines, says that whether you turn left or right when you board is also largely irrelevant: 'The content is, I would say, class-agnostic.' However, says Green: 'What we do see is some of that niche content that might be a bit more edgy sometimes performs a bit better in business class because there's more privacy there.' He admits: 'I'm one of those creepy people that's curled up in the corner getting thrills out of watching scary movies on a flight.' At the other end of the spectrum, he also enjoys episodes of animated preschool series Bluey, which was in the airline's top five most-watched TV shows for the whole of last year. 'We don't have that many child passengers to account for the viewership, but it's because a lot of adults like me are dipping into that for a kind of mental break.' It speaks to passengers' hunger for lightweight content in the clouds – perhaps after enduring the rigours of travelling to the airport and making it through security. The likes of family comedy Inside Out 2, an in-the-air favourite throughout last year, are the visual equivalent of a tomato juice and packet of pretzels: the perfect tonic as you begin to ascend. 'Barbie did amazingly well and it wasn't necessarily with the typical audience that would go and see it at the cinema,' says Green. 'It was often middle-aged business travellers [looking for] a bit of an escape.' When it comes to TV, the 'comfort factor' is the name of the game, with many travellers choosing to binge-watch old sitcoms such as Friends and The Big Bang Theory (a trend also seen with at-home streaming services). 'I myself fall into that category,' says Girardoni. 'When I get on board, I'll watch things that I have seen before, movies like The Holiday [the 2006 romcom starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet].' United's top movie title in December was It Ends With Us. 'We were wondering whether some of that was to do with all the drama associated with the two main actors,' says Green, of the bitter and now litigious dispute between director Justin Baldoni and his co-star Blake Lively. 'Interestingly, Deadpool & Wolverine was number two, which has a relationship obviously [its star Ryan Reynolds is Lively's husband].' Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice were in third and fourth place. At Qantas, Oppenheimer was the top choice of 2024, beating its Barbenheimer counterpart (Barbie was 2023's most-watched film). At Delta, both were top of the tree across its 165,000 seat-back screens. While at cruising altitude, you will not just be subject to jet lag and cabin pressure, but also to movie censorship. Swearing might have been stripped out, while many airlines ask for the logos of rival carriers to be Photoshopped away. For companies based in the Middle East, images of pigs will likely have been redacted. The censoring is usually done by hired agencies, or 'in-flight content distribution specialists', with the approval of the movie-makers themselves. What about films that feature plane crashes? 'Generally, we don't show things that are unsettling in that regard,' says Girardoni. Overall, explains Green, as a single screen at the front of the plane has been replaced by individual monitors, the need for editing (whether it be 'the odd F-bomb or cleavage shot') has diminished, replaced instead by content 'warning slates'. United has 60, preparing viewers for everything from cigarette use to discussions of mental health. He adds that that figure is unlikely to grow further because 'we don't want to make it too messy and complicated'. He adds that the airlines also have copious data on 'not just selections, but also duration by title and completions. We can't actually tell if a customer falls asleep during a movie without putting a camera or other type of sensor in the seat. But we do capture active exits.' This is when a passenger switches off a film once the credits have started rolling. 'That tells us that a customer is still actively viewing, rather than asleep and letting the movie play through the credits and then ending by itself.' Most film-makers probably give little thought to how their creations are experienced in the sky. Christopher Nolan is famously fastidious about every detail of his process, from the sound mixing to Imax film 1.43:1 aspect ratio. Yet he has allowed Oppenheimer to be watched on the back of a seat. Studios, in consultation with directors and producers, have the final say on what gets shown, and how it gets edited. The aerial audience tends not to have an impact on how movies are made or marketed, but it is a handy extra slice of revenue that film-makers court. Most large studios have specific salespeople dedicated to selling to the 'out-of-home' audience. And on 12 February, APEX holds its annual Content Market in Dubai, which unites movie companies with all the major airline buyers. Some studios will even actively accommodate plane audiences, recording alternative, airline-friendly scenes during filming that can be seamlessly swapped to replace bad language with family-friendly rewrites (the alternative is bleeping or dubbing done in post-production). Meanwhile, increasing numbers of producers and directors are telling airlines they will not accept any changes to their movies whatsoever – it is a matter of take it or leave it. 'I might get into trouble with the studios if I start throwing out names,' says Green, though he is prepared to cite two creatives who used to ban their productions being shown on planes at all, but have had a change of heart. 'One was Fawlty Towers in the UK. It was only a couple of years ago that the BBC got approval from John Cleese for airlines to be able to license that content, 40-something years after it was aired. In the US, Jerry Seinfeld did not feel that the size and quality of the screens that were then available were the right way to show Seinfeld. They've both since relaxed those rules, and I think it's partly because we're investing in much better quality screens.' The volte-face also comes at the same time as the everyday consumption of content on compact tablets and phones at home has normalised the watching of multi-million dollar productions in miniature. No-one is arguing that 30,000ft is the ideal place to appreciate art. But the airlines still believe that we value the experience – observing this in customer satisfaction surveys – and they are responding by investing in new 4K screens, more intuitive software and higher quality content. Nevertheless, the seat-back movie screen is facing a number of challenges. On the one hand, some youngsters are experimenting with the 'rawdogging' trend, popularised online, of travelling on long flights without indulging in any form of on-screen amusement. @arrdeetik Ignore the marks on my head they dont mean anything😴 #rawdog #easyjet #fyp ♬ original sound - •MÛŠÎX• 'Just rawdogged it, 15 hr flight to Melbourne. No movie, no music, just flightmap (I counted to one million twice),' an Australian music producer wrote in a caption to a viral video on TikTok last year. In January, shooting began on The Entertainment System Is Down, a dark satire set on a long-haul flight on which passengers are compelled to face the agony of being bored. On the other hand, passengers are choosing from all manner of other options offered by carriers, or are ignoring them all, in favour of using their own devices as airlines usher in fast, free Wi-Fi across their fleets. Flyers are no longer restricted to movies, and are enjoying podcasts, top-flight TV and music. Qantas customers last year listened to half a million hours of Taylor Swift – the equivalent of 35,700 flights between Sydney and Los Angeles. In October last year, Qatar Airways launched the world's first Boeing 777 Starlink-equipped flight, using Elon Musk's satellite technology to offer TV streaming, live sports, video calling and real-time online gaming free of charge. It remains to be seen whether the offering of such easy and reliable internet will threaten the on-board movie, and a trusty revenue stream for the film studios. However, one thing is for sure: jet-powered film is still gaining altitude. Sarah Downs, managing director of in-flight entertainment and connectivity at Delta, says: 'We expect the next five years will be more transformational than the last 50.' In January, Delta launched a partnership with YouTube to offer ad-free videos. From next year, its flight attendants will have the ability to send generalised flight information messages to seat-back screens and translate them into a customer's preferred language. And artificial intelligence and virtual reality are likely to transform the in-flight entertainment offering once again. Expect an array of choices, personally customised and translated, to be on your screen before you have closed your overhead locker. Green says United is one of several airlines looking into how AI can be used for bespoke customer curation. And do not be surprised if, before too long, air stewards are handing out VR headsets along with the eye masks and hot towels. Century-old habits, and inventions, die hard. Just like the creatures in The Lost World, the now-prehistoric technology of moving pictures on planes may still be plodding along aeons after its expected demise.
