You don’t have to overtax the Google machine to find negative comments about being on set with Steven Spielberg. Type in “working with Steven Spielberg” and in 0.57 seconds 20,900,000 results appear, including an article where Shia LaBeouf rants, “He’s less a director than he is a f—ing company.”
LaBeouf’s resume is dotted with Spielberg-produced or -directed films like Disturbia, Transformers, Eagle Eye and, most famously, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but if Spielberg ever does the same search it’s unlikely they’ll ever pair up again. “You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” LaBeouf told Variety. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career.”
But that’s pretty much it for the negativity. There’s a story about Crispin Glover suing Spielberg for using his likeness in Back to the Future Part II and the critical drone that his films are overly sentimental, but primarily it’s LaBeouf against Spielberg and the world. Most of his other co-workers have nothing but praise for the filmmaker Empire magazine ranked as the greatest film director of all time.
This weekend he returns to theatres with Ready Player One, a sci-fi film that brings a virtual reality world called the OASIS to vivid life. Star Tye Sheridan calls the director a great and passionate collaborator who makes everyone feel equal on set. Co-star Ralph Ineson calls Spielberg “one of the most iconic figures of the last 100 years,” adding that it was difficult to takes notes from him on set. “When he is speaking to you your mind vaguely goes blank the first few times because your internal monologue just goes, ‘My god, Steven Spielberg is giving me a note.’ And then you realize you haven’t actually heard the note.”
All directors give suggestions on set, but it seems it’s the way Spielberg speaks to his actors that sets him apart.
Ed Burns remembers making a mess of several takes on the set of Saving Private Ryan to the point where Tom Hanks said to him, “I’ve seen you act before, and this isn’t acting.” Afraid he would be replaced, he got nervous and continued to blow take after take but Spielberg didn’t offer guidance. Two weeks passed. The cast started laying bets on who would be fired first.
Turns out, no one was fired and Burns learned a lesson he would later take into his own directorial efforts like Sidewalks of New York. The actor reports that Spielberg said, “I like to give my actors three takes to figure it out. If I step in after the first take and give you a note, especially with young actors, you’ll hear me rather than your own voice.”
Burns calls the experience “a life changer” adding it taught him that being a director is “about knowing when to give direction.”
The superstar director says the listening lesson was learned early in life. “From a very young age my parents taught me probably the most valuable lesson of my life: Sometimes it’s better not to talk, but to listen.”
There’s someone else Spielberg keeps in mind when making a film. “I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.”
Jurassic Park transformed the movie-going experience for an entire generation and became the highest-grossing film of all time in 1993, winning three Academy Awards®. Now audiences can experience this ground-breaking film as never before as it is projected in HD with a full symphony orchestra performing Williams’ magnificent score live!
Join us before the show on Thursday, December 28, for a conversation with Toronto Film Critic and TV Host Richard Crouse and Conductor Evan Mitchell. Together, they will share a closer look at the impact that Jurassic Park had and continues to have on pop culture. They will also explore John Williams’ memorable score and share a behind-the-scenes look of how the orchestra performs live and in sync with the film. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Behind The Curtain pre-show talk is open to all ticket-holders attending the Thursday performance.
As Dave Edmunds once warbled, “From small thinks baby, big things one day come.”
In Hollywood right now no one is bigger than Chris Pratt. His films Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lego Movie were two of the top five grossing hits of last year and Jurassic World is pegged to light up the box office with an estimated $100 million take this weekend.
Esquire has declared him “awesome” and The Guardian noted “there’s a lot of love for Chris Pratt right now.” He has momentum, the kind of Hollywood heat that gets your name mentioned as the lead in every big movie, including the proposed reboot of Indiana Jones. In fact, some even label him the next Harrison Ford.
The hype swirling around the affable thirty-five-year-old actor places him at the top of the Hollywood ladder, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. A scan of the early credits on IMDB does not point toward superstardom.
Guest spots on the short-lived bounty hunter series The Huntress and a third lead in the so-little-seen-it-doesn’t-even-have-a-Rotten-Tomatoes-rating action film The Extreme Team seem positively high profile compared to his first credit.
Pratt was working as a waiter at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant in Maui when actress Rae Dawn Chong came in for lunch. She happened to be in the midst of casting Cursed Part 3, a short horror satire about a director who tries to convince his actors and crew not to flee when a mysterious killer visits the set.
Pratt was living with a group of friends in a van, doing stand-up comedy and community theatre when he approached the Quest for Fire star. “I said, ‘I know you. You’re a movie star, right?’ She said, ‘You’re cute. Do you act?’”
Chong thought he’d be a good fit for the part of “a beautiful kid to play the Brat, an actor who complains out loud about having to make out with an older actor, played by Donna Mills.”
The film was set to roll in five days and after a quick audition Chong offered Pratt a plane ticket to California and the role of Devon. “I had far more confidence than capability at the time,” he says, “but I knew I could do it.”
Shot next door to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Cursed Part 3 isn’t much of a movie, but Pratt made $700 for his debut, money he invested in a car so he could drive to auditions.
“I went from waiting tables in Maui to waiting tables in Beverly Hills,” he says of Cursed Part 3, “but with a little bit of movie experience under my belt.”
The film was a stepping-stone to bigger and better jobs, including the role that made him a star, Pawnee City Hall shoe-shiner Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation.
Movie stardom was harder to come by. Losing blockbuster roles like Avatar’s Jake Sully and Captain James Kirk of the rebooted Star Trek was discouraging, but he was determined to act. “People have to work,” he said. “I just don’t want it to be at a restaurant.”
With big budget movies on the way like the proposed sci fi adventure Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and an all-star remake of The Magnificent Seven, it doesn’t look like he’ll have to dust off the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. uniform again any time soon.
For the fourth time all heck breaks loose on Isla Nublar when gene-spliced dinosaurs get loose and start chowing down on humans. And you thought genetically modified food was bad for your health.
“Jurassic World” is set in a theme park of the same name, a bigger, flashier version of the one first seen in “Jurassic Park.” For years over 20,000 people a day have come to visit the dino petting zoo and see the T-Rex in his “natural” habitat. Think SeaWorld with Archaeopteryx instead of dancing dolphins and you get the idea. Business is brisk but park director Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) feels their exhibits are old hat, as exciting as a clown in an elephant suit.
“No one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore,” she says. “Consumers want bigger, louder and more teeth.”
Her solution is to genetically manufacture a designer dinosaur, a hybrid of T-Rex DNA and bits and pieces from several other creatures. Called Indominus Rex, it’s a fearsome fifty-foot tall beast with fierce intelligence and an attitude to match. When it escapes (that’s not a spoiler, just a fact of life in the “Jurassic” films) Claire calls upon dino trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt)—he’s the Cesar Millan of the dinosaur world—to bring the situation under control before her two visiting nephews get eaten or a military contractor (Vincent D’Onofrio) who wants to repurpose the beasts as weapons.
“Jurassic World” is a respectable entry into the “Jurassic Park” genus. It’s a monster movie, with a bigger, louder and toothier villain than the previous films, but not quite as many thrills. It’s near impossible to top the visceral thrills of Steven Spielberg’s original movie so director Colin Trevorrow doesn’t try. Instead he weaves an homage or two to “Jurassic Park” into the fabric of the story and makes sure there are roaring dinosaurs and snarling Raptors on screen as much as possible. They run, leap and do battle in a climatic scene that can only be described as ridonkulous. The tempered skill Spielberg brought to the first movie is replaced by bombast, but what can we expect form a movie whose manifesto is, “No one is impressed by dinosaurs anymore; consumers want bigger, louder and more teeth”?
Pratt takes a step closer to claiming the role of Indiana Jones by playing Craig as the wisecracking but charming and resourceful hero and “New Girl” star Jake Johnson offers some welcome comic relief. Howard is self-possessed and intense, and has good chemistry with Pratt.
“Jurassic World” is a fun summer distraction, with enough of its predecessor’s DNA to be worth a look.
Movie dinosaurs come in all forms. As screen characters — from Jurassic Park’s terrifying T-Rexes to the cute and cuddly baby dinos of this weekend’s Ice Age: The Dawn of the Dinosaurs — they are as versatile as they are extinct.
Just as varied are the methods used to bring the prehistoric behemoths to big screen life.
The first film dinosaur was a pen-and-ink creature seen in a fanciful 1908 British film called Prehistoric Man. In it a caveman sketch comes alive and threatens its creator. The artist survives by drawing a picture of a dinosaur, which also comes to life and eats the prehistoric man.
Another of the original celluloid dinosaurs was Gertie the Dinosaur. Released in 1914, the film featured 10,000 hand-drawn images to animate the tango-dancing Apatosaurus.
After Gertie, pen and ink animated dinosaurs remained popular for the next seventy years in everything from 1915’s Stone Age Adventure to 1988’s Land Before Time.
The word dinosaur means “fearfully-great lizard” so it makes sense that lizards have frequently subbed for their vanished cousins on celluloid.
A 1914 film called On Moonshine Mountain tried to pass off geckos as dinosaurs while 1940’s One Million B.C. dressed up lizards with cardboard fins for a more “realistic” dinosaur appearance. D.W. Griffith tried for a more menacing look, using an alligator dressed up as a dino for his two-reeler Brute Force, which described the great beasts as “one of the perils of prehistoric apartment life.”
Other methods of crafting on-screen dinos include the old “man in a rubber suit” trick (pioneered by cheapo producer Roger Corman in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet but perfected by Toho Studios in the Godzilla films) and the wondrous stop motion animation of Willis O’Brien (The Lost World) and Ray Harryhausen (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) but the biggest and baddest show biz dinosaurs sprung from the mind of Steven Spielberg (and the computers of his animators).
Even though Jurassic Park’s binary code velociraptors and triceratopses weren’t biologically accurate and didn’t exist during the Jurassic days (most didn’t live until the Cretaceous period) they were the loudest and proudest dinos the movies had ever seen.
Hundreds of films have featured dinosaurs and audiences never seem to tire of them, but why?
“Perhaps people’s fascination with prehistoric life has something to do with bridging fantasy with reality,” offers Harryhausen. “They are connected with the shadowy key to our mysterious origin.”
