Mysterious Island (1961), Twilight Time’s Nick Redman, and readjusting the concept of MODs

PART I:  Mysterious Island on Blu, and Twilight Time Turns One

In less than a month, indie home video label Twilight Time will celebrate its 1 year anniversary, and I’m pretty sure its founders, employees and contributors will look back with pride at what was accomplished.

This could apply to any label that aspires to essentially fill a void that’s kept niche fans hungry for ages. I use the term niche deliberately, and with some regret, because that’s what seems to happen as a generation of film fans (or film music fans) age, and titles that were once cherished just doesn’t impact people the way they used to.

Soundtrack News & Reviews

Just uploaded is a quartet of soundtrack reviews, with another handful to appear every two days, as there’s a very large stack of CDs and digital albums (‘virtually’ speaking, of course) in need of being completed before a fat baby in diapers flies across the horizon and nails a long white banner across the sky, reading “2012.” (This is really what happens at the stroke of midnight every December 31st. We regular humans can’t see it, but generations of commercial illustrators and cartoonists have broken the fifth wall and seen how we move into a New Year. Fat, diapered babies with wings. No lies.)

Uploaded is a review of Henry Jackman’s surprisingly punchy & fun score for Puss in Boots [M] (Sony Classical); Trading Places [M] (La-La Land), Elmer Bernstein’s (unintentional) seasonal salute to cruel moral jokes; and a pair of underrated Jerry Goldsmith classics from the early nineties: Forever Young [M], and the ridiculously titled Sleeping with the Enemy [M] (also La-La Land).

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds: Part I

The face that punked a nation would like a hug, please.

On the eve of Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles mounted a fake newscast of Martians invading Earth, and he managed to terrify a significant chunk of Americans into believing little green men had landed and were starting to massacre humanity. Or maybe it was the Nazis, as others believed.

Adapted from the classic H.G. Wells novel by Howard Koch and performed by Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe for CBS, The War of the Worlds was either the ultimate prank taken far too seriously, or it simply captured the mass fear of invading forces just a year before the outbreak of WWII.

On the one hand, you can’t blame Welles for sticking to his guns and performing the show without any mid-drama disclaimers to alert listeners that the whole broadcast was 'someone behind a white sheet shouting 'Boo!' but he did establish a significant precedent: that if you package things correctly, some people will believe almost anything.

To prove the point (or rather, exploit the novelty of creating a bit of infamy), a Spanish version of Koch’s script was performed in Ecuador in 1949, with tragic results; and some local American stations took a poke at the concept, notably Buffalo’s WKBW in 1968 with their own adaptation.

In addition to other re-mountings of the 1938 production, there was also Without Warning, an original teleplay in 1994 (aired by CBS) in which the concept was transposed to a live CNN-type news feed.

Perhaps the most intriguing re-conceptualization of the script happened this past March thru April Fool’s weekend at Toronto’s Harbourfront World Stage, where The Art of Time Ensemble not only performed the radio play in front of an audience, but designed the production to resemble a fly-on-the-wall experience, with live foley and band.

Prior TV dramatizations of the mass-hysteria that pricked a nation – Studio One’s 1957 production of The Night America Trembled, and the 1974 TVM The Night That Panicked America – featured recreations of the radio studio environment in excerpts or vignettes, but this 2011 performance gave audiences an opportunity to experience the complete play, and a sense of the workings involved in a live radio performance, with the actors, sound effects man, and musicians just a few meters away.

Directed by Andrew Burashko, AOTE’s production was also preceded by a half-hour tribute to composer Bernard Herrmann, who scored / conducted the Mercury Theatre dramas in addition to classic Alfred Hitchcock films such as Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).

(This year marks the centenary of the composer’s birthday, and I’ll have a set of DVD reviews of classic Herrmann-scored films still unavailable in Region 1 land, but of course, widely available in Spain, because unlike Fox in America, Spain’s home video labels realize the classic film market hasn’t collapsed on a global scale, and people don’t want to re-buy All About Eve, An Affair to Remember, Patton, and The Sound of Music for the 4th time.)

So in this first part of a new series (Yes! Another one!), I’ve uploaded a review of the AOTE production, plus an interview with director Andrew Burashko [M], who discusses the project’s genesis, the Herrmann suite, and his plans to mount a live version of “I send you this cadmium red,” with Daniel Brooks directing Gavin Bryars’ dramatization of the correspondences between John Berger and John Christie.

And I’ve added reviews of The Night America Trembled [M], part of VSC’s Studio One 3-volume series released in 2002 on DVD; and Without Warning [M], which did get a fleeting DVD (and now OOP) release via Madacy, but I happened to videotape when it was broadcast by Hamilton’s CHCH for Hallow’s Eve.

Yes, I'm that olde, and I've a storage locker of this ephemera that I'll continue to mine until invading little green men ring the doorbell, masquerading as Girl Guide cookie vendors.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Psycho returns to the Big Screen (with BIG SOUND)

(A frame-by-frame guide on why showers are not safe.)

For Rue Morgue’s current October issue, where Psycho is saluted for being 50 years young & still grisly, I posed three questions to a number of composer specially contacted for the article.

The final piece contains several quotes, but there were further details, opinions, and some digressions that obviously didn’t fit the retro’s purview, so I divided the transcripts from the Q&As into three parts, of which two have already run.

However, before you choose to dig into the pieces, let me direct your attention first to James Burrell’s blog on Psycho memorabilia (and take a good look at that beautiful Belgian poster – much more attractive than the North American campaign).

Part 1 of our Q&As with composers has comments from Elia Cmiral (Splinter), Daniel Licht (Dexter), and John Frizzell (Whiteout).

Part 2 features comments from Austin Wintory (Grace), Michael Wandmacher (Piranha 3D).

In Part 3 – to be uploaded around Monday, closing out this Psycho-themed month – I’ll focus solely on a discussion with Christopher Young (Drag Me to Hell), and maybe a few other goodies.

Those wanting to experience Psycho on the big screen can do so via the TIFF Bell Lightbox, where a cleaned up version of the film will have an exclusive run, starting today!. I’ve seen the print and heard the new Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, and I’ve blogged about what to expect when you see it in theatres this weekend, or on Universal’s new Blu-ray edition.

This past Sunday I caught a live performance of Michael Nyman’s NYman with a Movie Camera, accompanied by the composer leading the Michael Nyman Band.

In a nutshell: Nyman composed an original score to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and then edited an original film patterned after the structure of Vertov’s movie, and set to his score. The NYman footage comes from the composer’s own archives, and the resulting film is really, really good.

I’ll have a review of the Vertov film, Nyman’s film, and notes on the DVD versions out there this weekend.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor

KQEK.com

“From Benny Herrmann, and his band of merry melodians!”

Belated holiday greetings from a slightly self-imposed exile. Figuring most people were struggling to get through the heavy/wet/neverending snowfall during the days leading up to (and perhaps including) Christmas, as well as having zero time beyond family commitments to read, I’ve held back posts until today, meaning there’ll be almost a new set of reviews every day, through New Year’s Day.

The first reviews are focused on (uh, surprise) Christmas, and it starts with a review of a vintage fifties teleplay, where director Ralph Levy directed Fredric March in Maxwell Anderson’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Featuring music by Bernard Herrmann and a libretto by Anderson, the one hour drama was part of Chrysler’s Shower of Stars show, and included Basil Rathbone as the Ghost of Marley, and Sally Fraser as ex-luv Belle/Ghost of Chrismas Past before she became a bit of a cult icon in low (low!) budget sci-fi flicks.

Herrmann had previously scored Orson Welles' 1938 adaptation of Dickens' classic (hence the Wellesian sign-off in today's header), but the 1954 teleplay marked the first time he applied operatic songs as well as noew score to the beloved holiday tale.

Sticking to the mid-fifties and that era's fixation with noble morals and unabashed religious iconography (think of all those Biblical epics), there’s also a review of Herrmann's score, newly released on CD by Kritzerland, and double-billed with another holiday operetta, A Child is Born, which Herrmann based on Stephen Vincent Benet's play, and composed for this December 1955 episode of the General Electric Theatre.

Both scores were previously released on bootleg LPs which themselves drew from legit albums, and the good news is that the sound quality of the legit Kritzerland disc is a marked improvement. Carol apparently appeared as part of a multi-disc LP set from CBS, while Child was a classic Decca mono-drama mix, and one could regard these platters as early precursors to dramas released on VHS tapes and DVD.

Given the music was all that could be retained from these live teleplays in the fifties, the LPs were accessible, commercial ways for the average consumer to ‘relive’ the drama at home (which made sense, since radio dramas were still an active component of the home entertainment system).

Decca actually produced several holiday-themed mono-dramas, which included Ronald Coleman as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Bing Crosby and Orson Welles in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Loretta Young in The Littlest Angel, Gregory Peck in Lullaby of Christmas, and an edited soundtrack from The Coming of Christ, the NBC Project XX documentary featuring music by Robert Russell Bennett.

If I can squeeze time between less seasonal uploads this weekend, I’ll try and have reviews of at least a few of the aforementioned, too. (If not, hey, there’s Xmas ’09.)

- MRH