THE WONDERS OF POST-PRODUCTION

     Post-production is that phase in movie making that filmmakers dread, but audiences love.  Filmmakers dread it because it's where you think all your problems will go away.  Audiences love it because it's where all the cool special effects and wacky sounds come in to make a movie look really, really cool.


     On Monday, we here at Bad Craziness took a day trip to West Philadelphia for a small film convention.  At the convention, we heard about a nearby auction for old school negatives/original shoot film reels.  Beings that we're nerdy film students, we jumped on this opportunity faster than you can say "Clark Gable has a manly mustache" and tried to get everything we could.  Tragically, they only had the negatives and old reels of good movies so we couldn't get all of them but the ones we got are SPECTACULAR.


     The most entertaining thing about these negatives is comparing them to the finished post-production products everybody knows so well.  I'll start things off in chronological order:


I.     DR. NO'S OPENING SEQUENCE

After post

     The opening gun barrel sequence of a James Bond movie is iconic.  Everybody knows that it epitomizes cool, and those who don't think so are locked away in dungeons and forced to watch From Justin to Kelly for 20 hours straight by the MI6.  But what most movie viewers don't know is what this sequence really looked like.  Here's the still we swiped at the auction of what this actually looked like.

Before post

     As you can clearly see, fair reader, they touched up this photo a lot if post.  Besides getting rid of the floor, thus granting James Bond the ability to fly, they moved his shadow and gave him a bowler hat.  


     Perhaps the greatest feat in this piece of post-production is the touching story behind it.  As is obviously true, Sean Connery lost his arm in a battle of wits with a tiger during the First Boer War.  This always made him extremely self-conscious and unwilling to get into acting.  However, the James Bond folks knew he was the only person suave enough, cool enough, and manly enough to take on such a role (since it was all downhill from there), so they told him about the magic of post-production.  In post, they gave this famous amputee a new arm, and even changed his position to make it look like he had it all along.


     It's said that there are only four times when Sean Connery cried: 1) When he lost his arm to that savage beast (even though he still won the fight in the end; delivering it a crushing blow with a pygmy gentleman he found crouching in a tree) 2) When the Allies won World War II 3) When they put preserves instead of jelly on his PB&J (Sean Connery couldn't stand Smucker's since they sounded like a bunch of Republicans) and 4) When the whizzes in Dr. No's post-production team gave him a new arm, and a new life.


II.     THE LEG SHOT IN THE GRADUATE

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     "You're trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson, aren't you?"  The famous shot from this even more famous scene in The Graduate is an amazing example of post-production, especially when you see the original:

Before post

     It's almost as if it's a completely different movie or a really bad knock off by untalented college kids.  The story behind this shot is pretty amazing in terms of production.  Obviously, everything looks completely different.
Dustin Hoffman's classic short quasi-bowl cut hair is long and luscious; his clothes are almost nothing like what we know as his clothes in the scene; the room looks literally nothing like the room the scene takes place in.  Perhaps the most shocking difference is the angle.  You see folks, the cameraman was drunk during the shoot following a fight with his soon-to-be ex-wife, but since time is money in the movie business, Mike Nichols (the director) decided to go on with the shoot anyway.  What came next, no one expected.


     The scene was set.  Anne Bancroft looks sexy as all hell in her femme fatale, MILF role (minus the cargo pants that would be taken out in post); she rolled down her stocking slowly; all Hell breaks loose and several of the crew members who went missing are still yet to be found.  No one was expecting her to be that pale in the set lighting and it made several people step outside to vomit, have a smoke, and talk to their psychoanalysts.  Everyone was off the set except the director and of course, the drunk cameraman who, at  the sight of Anne Bancroft's pasty flesh, fell over while the camera was still rolling, and shot the ENTIRE SCENE 90 degrees to the left.


     Some might say it was the leg hair, but we here Bad Craziness know everybody loves women with hairy legs.
     
III.     THE POSTER SHOT IN A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

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     Whether you like extreme psycho-sexual violence and torture or not, A Clockwork Orange is one of the greatest, most wholesome family films in the history of cinema.  This poster is a classic, but it comes with a funny story of how it came to be.

Before post

     This is the original still they were thinking of using for the film.  While in the depths of a cocaine binge in a dark room, Malcolm McDowell was ordered to stop what he was doing immediately by Stanley Kubrick and get onto the set.  As McDowell turned around, he reached the lowest point of his high and suddenly went completely catatonic.  Kubrick, who was renowned in New York as a still photographer prior to becoming a filmmaker and was also on cocaine, became inspired.  He grabbed a camera, put his pocket knife in McDowell's catatonic Kung Fu grip, grabbed a desk lamp, tore off his favorite I Love Lucy t-shirt and covered the light to make some shadows, and took the now famous snapshot.  


     Needless to say the people in post, who were on somewhat less cocaine, were not as inspired by the photo as Kubrick or McDowell (who remained catatonic for the rest of the day's shoot, hence the freaky prison scenes), so they opted to have Bill Gold come in a draw a dramatic recreation.  Everybody was happy except the English government, who blamed the film for a spike in crime back in '71.


IV.     THE "HERE'S JOHNNY" SHOT IN THE SHINING

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      In post, they created this poster by splicing two separate shots from The Shining (another Kubrick flick for you people) and rolling with it.  The scene's a famous one.  Jack Nicholson hacks through the door with an axe, Shelley Duvall screams to high horsefaced Heaven, and Jack goes "Heeeeeeeeeeeeere's JOHNNY!" and things go haywire.  But you only got to see it after post, so here's the story before post.

Before post

      Jack Nicholson is a famous ladies man.  Maybe it's the fame; maybe it's the front row Lakers' tickets; maybe it's the eyebrows.  Whatever it is, Jack gets the ladies.  On every set, he'd charm all the ladies and do what Jackie does best.  But on the set of The Shining he wasn't feeling his A-Game.  Maybe it was the fact that he knew Carter was screwed for the next election (he couldn't stand Ronald Reagan after living in California or being a real movie star); maybe it was his eyebrows not functioning in their normal demonic way.  These hypotheses have all been tested, but rendered no results.  The real reason is his leading lady in the film, Shelley Duvall.


     Shelley Duvall is a woman who got places with her acting talents, not her looks.  She didn't live during a time when Sarah Jessica Parker could be in a show called Sex & the City; she lived in a time when Sarah Jessica Parker would be in a show called Mr. Ed.  Nicholson, the classic charmer, felt no attraction to Shelley Duvall, so he wasn't as into the film as he wanted to be.  Kubrick did this on purpose so the post-award show parties wouldn't be awkward.  If you'd pay special attention to Nicholson's eyes readers, he's not looking at Duvall.  This is from an alternative take before the real take and post-production.  Jack was so horrified by Shelley Duvall's teeth that he couldn't complete this now-legendary scene.  He famously ran off the set in tears, wondering how God could give him such a looker to work with.  Luckily for Jack, Kubrick sometimes had a heart and told him that if he'd finish the shoot with a body double for Duvall, he'd buy him some ice cream.  Jack Nicholson, being the avid Rocky Road fan, jumped at the opportunity.  Kubrick brought in a pretty body double and the famous shot took place.  


      The people in post were glad to help Jack Nicholson out (probably fearing their own demise), so they let him keep the takes with him and the double for personal use.  As for the real take, the good old boys of post just added some shots of Duvall howling like the strange-looking monkey woman she is and everybody went to have some Rocky Road, courtesy of Kubrick.


V.     THE POSTER STILL FOR AMERICAN BEAUTY

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      This is one of my favorite movies of all time and to me, it's the greatest American film of the 1990's.  No, I'm not one of those nerdy film boys who think Pulp Fiction or Rushmore or The Shawkshank Redemption is the greatest film of the '90's (even though I love every single one of them and they are definitely some of the greatest films of the '90's).  And I definitely don't think Princess Mononoke (the American-English dub/subtitled version) is the greatest film of the '90's because I have the ability to speak to girls (even though it's also an amazing film).  American Beauty is just one of those movies that everybody, critics and audiences alike, knew is beyond incredible and deserved all every award and bit of praise that it received.  This famous still from this famous movie has an interesting and not so famous story behind it.

Before post

     Kevin Spacey's guilty pleasure in American Beauty is his teenage daughter's best friend, played by Mena Suvari.  Director, Sam Mendes, was a rookie.  This was his debut film and he figured that once shooting was done, that was it and he was done.  He completely forgot about scheduling a promotional stills shoot at anytime before, during, or after filming.  Luckily, his cousin-in-law was none other than Wolfgang Puck who knew plenty of food photographers.  He scrambled together a lighting crew and his cast for a day-long promotional shoot.  Since it was a few weeks after shooting had finished, everybody kind of let themselves go.  Mendes originally wanted to do a Bad Lieutenant type of still with Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, but this idea was dropped for undisclosed reasons.  They decided to go with something simple that spoke about the movie.  The random food photographer (whose insistence on all this "naked" shots made everyone think Puck's accent made it sound like "food" but he actually meant "porn") told Mena Suvari to disrobe and lay on the ground.  She was hesitant and then when she took her shirt off people were in shock.


     Just like Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, she looked so pale.  She as so pale, Spacey even made a joke that went "WOW MENA!  You're so pale, the whiteness almost drowns out your sweet chest hair."  Mena started crying about her paleness, but the random photographer told her that everybody gets pale sometimes, it was winter anyway.  He then added that they could just touch it up in post!


     The end result is quite different from the original, and we can thank the folks in post for that.  They took that pale mess and ended up with a classic movie poster that influenced plenty more promotional stills to come.  Spacey was so upset that they removed the hair that he decided to move to Europe.


     Ah, post-production: the easy way out.  You're told in film school that post-production is a last resort and you want to get it all right the first time, but these stories tell you something a little bit different.  From all of us here at Bad Craziness, happy Wednesday hombres!  Follow me on Twitter (@DylanMerrick6) and like the Facebook Page to get so much movie knowledge, no one will want to speak to you ever again!  As always,


~Viva amigos,
      ~D. Merrick


All "Before post" stills shot by Dylan Merrick with Ciara Musson, Megan Markle, and of course the man, the myth, the legend Mr. Beckett Mufson.