Bela Lugosi is the actor most closely associated with Count Dracula, but he is certainly not the only one. More than 200 others have played old toothy over the years including mister tall, dark and gruesome Christopher Lee, who played the blood sucker eleven times.
Ditto Frankenstein’s Monster. Boris Karloff owned the role in 1931, but 60 other actors have tried to fill his size fifteen platform shoes in subsequent years.
The point is, no actor has total possession over a role, no matter how well known they are for playing it.
Just ask Robert Englund.
For 26 years, he has been Freddy Krueger, purveyor of bad dreams, in The Nightmare on Elm Street series. In seven films and the television series, Freddy’s Nightmares, he played the evil offspring of a nun and one hundred maniacs. His take on the character is so loved some people even pay permanent tribute to it.
“I saw an entire magazine of Freddy Krueger tattoos,” he says. “There are thousands of people walking around America with my tattoo on them!”
He’ll always be associated with Freddy, but as of this weekend his run as the most hated man in Springwood, Ohio comes to an end when Jackie Earle Haley makes the iconic role his own in the reboot of the series.
Ironically, Haley auditioned for one of the teen roles in the original film in 1984 but the part went to his friend Johnny Depp.
As for taking on the role, Haley says, “A lot of people wish it was Robert and I get that. He’s made this character iconic and he’s iconic as well. It’s a tough thing, and hopefully when the movie comes out people will dig it.”
Haley is just the latest to fill in for a famous face. Recently, Benicio Del Toro donned the lupine face mask of the Wolf Man, but Lon Chaney Jr. (who had yak hair glued to his face during his 1941 transformation scenes) originated the role 70 years before.
Chaney is best known as The Wolf Man, but he was also one of those actors who stepped in to sub for some of the most famous monsters of filmland. In fact, he is also the only actor to have played all four of the classic movie monsters: The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein, the Mummy in The Mummy’s Tomb and Count Anthony Alucard, Dracula’s son, in the appropriately named Son of Dracula.
Zoe Saldana’s career is white hot after starring roles in Star Trek and Avatar but she is no newcomer.
She’s been a big screen regular for ten years, even appearing in the odd blockbuster like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and working with high end directors like Steven Spielberg, but she didn’t become a household name until last year.
The actress, who describes herself as “a cool geek who happens to dress nice,” hopes to add to her growing box office clout this weekend with The Losers, a wild action movie based on the comic book series of the same name.
She may have become a bold face name sucking up to the fanboys, but she hasn’t always played comic-book characters, giant blue aliens or iconic sci fi characters.
Early roles included a sharp-tongued aspiring dancer in Center Stage and the prim-and-proper best friend of Britney Spears in Crossroads — although she’d probably rather forget that one.
Roger Ebert said, “I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest,” but it was another dance role in Drumline that earned her the best notices of her budding career.
In the time between Drumline and Star Trek, however, she made thirteen films, some big, like Pirates, some so small they barely made a blip on the screen.
For example, Haven, a complex crime drama set in the Cayman Islands scarcely made it past a festival run, but is well worth a look on DVD. Mixing and matching stories of corrupt businessmen, tax havens and romance it was too out-of-the-box for general audiences, but Saldana shines (the L.A. Times called her performance “sweet and complicated”) opposite her Pirates co-star Orlando Bloom.
Also unfairly relegated to the bargain bin was Ways of the Flesh, a 2005 medical comedy about a chief resident at a Florida Hospital who also happens to be a stand-up comedian. Saldana plays an artist whose life was once saved by the main character.
Directed by real-life doctor-turned-filmmaker Dennis Cooper, it’s a sweet and funny film about not taking yourself too seriously.
Dues paid, Saldana now stars in blockbusters, which has benefits other than the juicy paycheques. In the past she says she was often mistaken for Thandie Newton — so much so that her own mother once confused the two of them — but given her recent success, I’m guessing it’s now Newton who gets mistaken for Saldana.
Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Iron Man are the gold standard for comic book characters on the big screen. Between them, they have grossed a heroic amount of money, literally adding billions of dollars to box office tallies. They are the bigwigs, the VIPs of the superhero world, but there are dozens of other, lesser known, comic book characters that have made the leap from the page to the stage.
Hit Girl, the ruthless eleven-year-old vigilante played by Chloë Grace Moretz in this weekend’s Kick-Ass, might not be a match for Batman’s bat-shaped shurikens or his box office pull, but Jeff Moss, the proprietor of Montreal’s coolest comic book shop, The 4th Wall, says her story has all the makings of a great movie adaptation.
“For a comic to make a good movie it must have, first and foremost, good characters,” he says. “Also, if the story’s not there, it’s not going to make a good movie. Next up, it’s got to have good visuals and decent ‘Whoa’ moments.”
The 1999 superhero comedy Mystery Men—based on Flaming Carrot Comics by Bob Burden—works because of the mix of story and offbeat characters. Paul Reubens, for instance, plays The Spleen, a crime fighter who uses turbo flatulence to level his enemies and Leader of the Disco Boys, as played by Eddie Izzard, neutralizes his adversaries with a can of highly flammable hairspray. It doesn’t have the all-American heroics of Superman, but Mystery Men has become a cult classic.
Bulletproof Monk, loosely based on Michael Avon Oeming’s comic book, delivers on Moss’s “whoa” moments. Chow Yun-Fat, hot off of the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starred as a Tibetan monk who trains a street kid to protect a sacred scroll. Its combination of martial arts and humor didn’t score at the box office, but it makes for a good rental.
While it may seem that every comic ever written has been turned into movies—an IMDB search for based-on-comic-book returned 607 titles—not all necessarily lend themselves to the Hollywood treatment.
“Some of my favorite comics that have yet to be made into movies include Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Nextwave, and Bone,” says Moss. “All of these books have rich characters, and amazing storylines, but the sheer size of them (Bone clocks in at 1300 pages, and Preacher runs nine volumes) would require either a series of movies, or a supreme dumbing down of the stories.”
If you’ve only ever seen New York projected onto a screen it’s understandable that you may have a skewed idea of what the city is all about. Charles Bronson made a career of showing the city’s down, dirty and dangerous side in the Death Wish films, and The Warriors didn’t exactly earn high marks from the NYC Tourist Bureau.
Even comedies frequently paint the Big Apple as a scary place. Sure, romantic comedies make the city look great, but there is a tradition of setting hapless comedic characters loose in Gotham with predictably chaotic—for instance, see After Hours, a Kafkesque Martin Scorsese trip through the mean streets of NYC—though funny results.
This weekend’s Date Night sees two of television’s funniest actors, Tina Fey and Steve Carell, as an average married couple who get pulled into New York’s seedy underbelly after a case of mistaken identity.
It’s a funny premise that breathes the same air as another 40-year-old film. Neil Simon originally planned to write the story of Gwen and George (Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon), an Ohio couple who experience the worst of NYC life, as a chapter in his Broadway play Plaza Suite, but as the tale grew to include a series of calamities—exploding manhole covers! Cuban protesters!—the playwright realized he needed a larger canvas and wrote it directly for the screen. The Out-of-Towners (later remade starring Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin) set the template for the indignant, put-upon NYC tourist comedy. In this story even the police sympathize with—and maybe even envy—the unlucky day-trippers.
“You folks live out of town?” asks Officer Meyers.
“Oh yes,” replies Gwen.
“You’re lucky,” says the cop.
Gwen and George can’t even catch a break when they flee the city. On the plane home they get hijacked to Cuba.
King Shadov, an exiled king played by Charlie Chaplin in A King in New York has better luck, but just barely. Shot in 1957 but not released until 1973 because of its rapier jabs at American culture, the film follows a monarch who arrives in NYC only to discover his bank accounts have been drained. Broke and on unfamiliar terrain, he clashes with the American way-of-life, denouncing rock and roll, CinemaScope and Joseph McCarthy’s communist hunt. It’s one of Chaplin’s best—although lesser known— films and would make a great double feature with Date Night.
Movies are like time machines. No, they don’t physically transport viewers to another time and place but, like dreams and memories, they can take the audience back to ancient Rome or forward in time to a planet populated by giant blue people. I guess that’s why stories about time travel have been so popular on the big screen.
This weekend John Cusack stars in the latest time travel tale, the self-explanatory Hot Tub Time Machine. For Cusack, the idea of getting stuck in the 1980s doesn’t require a time machine. A star for thirty years, he says all he has to do is turn on the TV to be taken back: “Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.”
In the movie, Cusack and his buddies head back to the ’80s, a decade that one of the more famous time travel movies used as a starting point.
Everyone remembers the time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future — chosen because its sleek futuristic look resembled a spaceship — but it wasn’t until the third draft of the script that the filmmakers decided on the famous gull-winged car. Originally the time travel device was a laser, but that concept was rejected because it wasn’t exciting enough. Then, director Robert Zemeckis considered housing the machine in a refrigerator, but nixed the idea over concerns that the movie could inspire kids to crawl into iceboxes and get trapped.
In the original script for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the titular characters bring historical figures back from history to help them with a school project, the time machine was a 1969 Chevy Van; afraid of inadvertently plagiarizing Back to the Future, the filmmakers went with a phone booth instead.
Probably the most famous time-shifting story is H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the 1960 movie version, director George Pal fashioned the look of the time machine on a sled (a idea borrowed years later for the hardware in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Timecop), so, he said, it could slide into the future. Paying tribute to the story’s author, he affixed a plaque on the time machine that reads “Manufactured by H. George Wells.”
In 1971, when MGM sold off a warehouse of old props (including Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers), the sled time machine was purchased by a collector who used it as part of a yearly Halloween display at his Burbank, Calif., home.
Nobody likes repo men. Repossession agents are dream-killers who prey on people who fail to make payments or default on loans, but, sadly, in these times of economic hardship business is booming. There are even repo recruitment websites—you don’t need a formal education, they say, but a “certain level of detective skill” is considered a bonus.
But it’s not just in the real world that recovery professionals are in a growth industry. On screen repo representatives are also making a comeback. In this weekend’s Repo Men, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play gents who specialize in reclaiming artificial organs from deadbeats who fall behind on the payments, and doing the festival circuit is Repo Chick, the sister film to Alex Cox’s much loved 1984 cult hit, Repo Man.
“The life of a repo man is always intense,” says Repo Man actor Tracey Walter. So is the movie. Roger Ebert described it as “…a little weirdo fun. It is the first movie I know about that combines (1) punk teenagers, (2) automobile repossessors, and (3) aliens from outer space.” A few years ago, a group of Los Angeles Times writers deemed the strange story the eighth best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years, and its odd mix of punk rock ethos and droll humor has also inspired several other artists. Terry Pratchett’s novel, Reaper Man is named in tribute and a graphic novel called Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday is a semi-sequel to the film.
The official sequel, Repo Chick directed by Cox, is awaiting release. It sees the original premise expanded to include not only cars but “boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations… children.” Variety said its “wacky blend of leftist, anti-establishment politics, eye-searing colors, outre costumes and manic overacting… could be likened to what you would get if Michael Moore directed an episode of the Nick Jr. kiddie series, Lazy Town.”
And finally, a little more straightforward than Repo Man’s dark social satire, or Paris Hilton’s unhinged Repo! The Genetic Opera, is Repo Jake, a dirty little B-movie about a hot rod driver (Dan Grizzly Adams Haggerty) who becomes a retrieval specialist in the hopes of living a quiet life. His plans go awry when he repossesses a vicious crime lord’s car. About the best thing that can be said about this stinker is that the DVD comes with “high fidelity sound.”
Pierce Brosnan has never been nominated for an Oscar. He has a couple Golden Globe nods to his credit and an MTV Movie Best Fight Award statuette on his shelf, but so far the heavy gold has evaded him.
Perhaps because of his dapper good looks he doesn’t get spoken about in the same breath as Colin Firth or Morgan Freeman. Perhaps a resume dotted with films like Dante’s Peak knocks him down a peg or two in the Academy’s opinion.
Or maybe it’s his predilection for doing shamelessly populist fare like Mama Mia and this weekend’s Remember Me (co-starring as Robert Pattison’s father) that keeps him from being taken as seriously as say, George Clooney, another genetically blessed actor, who, like Brosnan, got his big break on television.
He could have been nominated for his work in The Matador, a little seen, but critically lauded film from 2005. In it, Brosnan plays Julian Noble, a jaded hit man, or “facilitator of fatalities” who finds a confidant in a struggling businessman, played by Greg Kinnear.
Brosnan’s performance as Julian, the hit man who develops confidence problems, is a revelation. We have seen Brosnan as the slickly comic private eye Remington Steele on television, the sophisticated James Bond and even as the suave jewel thief in The Thomas Crown Affair, but until now we have never seen him in Beatle boots and a Speedo traipsing across a hotel lobby.
His Julian is a manic creation — amoral, rude and unlike Bond, the character that has defined his career for the last decade, unshaven.
With this one performance Brosnan entered a new phase in his career, effortlessly leaving the urbane Bond behind.
Maybe next year he’ll finally get the recognition he deserves when the Academy gets a load of his work in The Ghost Writer. As ex-prime minister Adam Lang he embodies the role, like he was born for photo ops in front of private jets, waving to his constituents.
It’s good work that effectively erased the image of him as a half man / half horse in the recent film Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Despite the odd misstep, he is an interesting actor who deserves more respect than he gets.
If the movie gods can allow Mon’ique to go from co-starring in Beerfest to winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, surely they can ignore Brosnan’s silly beard in an ill-conceived Robinson Crusoe remake, or the non-thrilling thriller Live Wire and finally give him his due.
Is she the 19 year old rebel played by Mia Wasikowska in this weekend’s 3-D Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton? Or the insane character of America McGee’s video game Alice? Or the martial arts instructor of a recent Syfy channel adaptation?
In fact, she’s all those people and more.
Originally written in 1865 by Lewis Carroll, the little girl who found a world of wonder down the rabbit hole, has become one of the more enduring and malleable characters of literature and film.
“The books are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people project their own ideas,” says The Mystery of Lewis Carroll author Jenny Woolf.
Alice first got the big screen treatment in 1903 in a 12-minute silent version featuring rudimentary special effects of the hero changing sizes. Played by Mabel Clark, (who was also employed on the set as a “help-out girl,” making costumes and running errands), the look of this traditional retelling closely resembles the book’s original illustrations. Out of print for many years, it’s now available as a DVD extra on the recent reissue of the 1966 Alice starring Peter Sellers.
The Sellers version, a made-for-BBC television movie, is as mad as a hatter. Director Jonathan Miller sought to boil the production down to the essentials, to dispense with the “japing and game play” of earlier versions. To that end none of the strange creatures Alice meets along the way are played by actors in animal costumes. This approach could have fallen flat, but when you have actors like John Gielgud and Peter Cook accentuating the wonderful dialogue rather than the flashy production design, it works. Add a trippy soundtrack by Ravi Shankar and some veiled drug references and you get a film that could only have been made at the height of the Swingin’ Sixties.
It’s hard to know what Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired the movie would have thought of any of the wild and wacky versions of the story, but we do know she enjoyed the 1933 Paramount version.
“I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted,” she told the New York Times. “Alice is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!”
This weekend’s The Crazies, a remake of a 1973 George A. Romero film, is one of those “everyone we know is dead” movies. It’s the story of a virus that turns the inhabitants of a sleepy Norman Rockwell town into koo-koo bananas killers. In this age of big diseases with little names—AIDS, SARS—and deadly airborne germs like swine flu, bacteriological horror movies have some resonance, but they’re nothing new.
In recent years, 28 Days Later—which is kind of like The Crazies with English accents—and the Ebola-esque Outbreak have used contagious illness as a starting point for their medical mayhem, but without The Andromeda Strain, The Cassandra Crossing or the intense vision of Panic in the Streets, those movies may not have existed.
Written by Michael Crichton when he was still a medical student, The Andromeda Strain sees an outer space biotoxin destroy a small town in New Mexico. Directed by Robert Wise—also at the helm of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Sound of Music—the movie mixes standard sci-fi with credible medical theory and contains eerie lines like, “Most of them died instantly. A few had time to go quietly nuts.”
More down to earth is The Cassandra Crossing, a big budget disease- on-a-train flick. This time it’s not an extra-terrestrial virus, but a plague contaminated terrorist starting all the trouble. Structured like a Love Boat episode, with an all-star cast that mixes and matches Sophia Loren with O.J. Simpson, it has none of Andromeda’s serious edge, but for sheer cheesy fun it can’t be beat.
Predating all of them was Panic in the Streets, a low-budget film noir set in 1950s New Orleans. In it, a doctor and policeman (Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas) have just 48 hours to track down an illegal immigrant infected with pneumonic plague and stop a possible eruption of Black Death. Made during the Cold War, the rapid spread of the infection plays like a paranoid metaphor for the proliferation of Communist ideology. Despite this subtext, director Elia Kazan said: “This isn’t very deep. It has other virtues. It has lightness of foot, it has surprise, it has suspense, it’s engaging.”
Next to jump on the bio-thriller bandwagon will be Steven Soderbergh who is set to team with Matt Damon and Kate Winslet in Contagion, a thriller focused on the threat posed by a deadly disease.
Bela Lugosi is the actor most closely associated with Count Dracula, but he is certainly not the only one. More than 200 others have played old toothy over the years including mister tall, dark and gruesome Christopher Lee, who played the blood sucker eleven times.
