LoC #132 Top 112 Road Movies / Journey Films

[Pak-Man]

MILE 28

Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe( 2022 )

22 Points, 1 List, #4 RVRII

I was surprised I forgot this one and checked my list and I had it in at number 8.

[stethacantus]

MILE 28

Beavis & Butt-Head Do The Universe( 2022 )

22 Points, 1 List, #4 RVRII

I was surprised I forgot this one and checked my list and I had it in at number 8.

#8 on the list you submitted was Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, which is one of the films from multiple lists, so will come up at a higher spot in this LoC. I double checked the PM list you sent and it was ....Do America as your #8. not ....Do the Universe

[stethacantus]

MILE  24

Wristcutters: A Love Story  ( 2006 )

Studio: Autonomous Films
Director: Goran Dukić

24 Points, 1 List, #2 Pastor of Muppets

TRAILER

Zia commits suicide, only to wake up in an afterlife similar to Earth where the dead who have committed suicide are sent. He settles in and finds friends, but then meets someone else from his past life who is there from suicide, who tells him the girl he had been in love with on Earth had committed suicide shortly after he did. Zia decides to go on a road trip with a friend through the purgatory to find his girlfriend. 


If you are keeping track, this is the third film where the characters travel through a version of Hell.  Which could be the basis of a list of all the films that have the protagonist traveling through the Afterlife.  Which I am tempted to do because the next three films are cult films with nearly no production histories. The production history for Wristcutters: A Love Story can be summed up in a couple of sentences, and it gets worse from there. Croatian film maker Goran Dukić immigrated to America somewhere around the year 2000, and after making a couple of short films, wanted to make a feature. He found an Israeli book of short stories called Kneller's Happy Campers, the title story being about a young man trapped in limbo along with others who died by suicide.  Dukić contacted the author of the book, Etgar Keret, and asked if the film rights were available.  It turned out two foreign studios were bidding against each other for the film rights. So Keret told Dukić what he had told the other studios. He would pick the one who wrote a screenplay that came the closest to doing his story justice. With nothing more than Keret's word that he would relinquish the film rights to whoever had the best script, Dukić began writing one that kept everything from the story, while adding a few touches of his own. Keret loved the script, and chose Dukić as he director for the film adaption.

[stethacantus]

MILE 23

Il Sorpasso  ( 1962 )

Studio: incei Film
Director: Dino Risi

24 Points, 1 List, #2 Edward J Grug III

TRAILER

An uptight law student is invited on a road trip across Italy by a brash man in a convertible.

" Il Sorpasso" translates to "the overtaking", and is a phrase used in Italy for aggressive drivers who tailgate and drive around slower moving vehicles, usually crossing onto the opposite side of the road  and into oncoming traffic in order to pass the vehicle. Since that is a phrase not well known outside of Italy, this film was released under the title of The Easy Life in the United States. Composing this write up though is the opposite of easy. There is nothing at all about it's production history anywhere online. I did notice that the Criterion release has some documentaries as extras which would probably have a production history. But I don't have the Criterion disc on me at the moment. It was written by Rodolfo Sonego, a screen writer who wrote the scripts to a lot of films you would not know unless you are familiar with Italian cinema. And directed by Dino Risi, a director who's only film you would recognize would be Profumo di donna ( 1974 ) which was released in America as Scent of a Woman, and then only because of it's 1992 Hollywood remake starring Al Pacino. And that is pretty much all I can say about this movie. I will bring up the trailer, which tells you nothing about what this film is about. A bunch of random stills from the film which tell you absolutely nothing about what it is about, all to a bouncy and annoying Italian pop tune which is unfortunately an earworm. I found the trailer a week ago while getting the URLs for a dozen trailers for this LoC. And the damn song is still in my head. The song is Guarda Come Dondolo sung by Eduardo Vianello. Now the annoying song is as stuck in my head as HyunA's Bubble Pop!, Edward Khil's Trololo Song and Pinkfong's Baby Shark.

[stethacantus]

MILE 22

Mad Max( 1979 )

Studio: Roadshow Film Distributors
Director: George Miller

24  Points, 1 List, #2 RVRII

TRAILER

Max Rockatansky, a tough as nails police officer working for the highway patrol, gets into a deadly feud with a motorcycle gang after he kills one of their members during a pursuit.

This is the disappointing film in the Mad Max franchise. Mainly because most of the people who have seen this film outside of Australia, did so after seeing Mad Max 2 a.k.a. The Road Warrior, and on finding out it had a prequel, rented Mad Max expecting it to be the same as the sequel. However, in Mad Max, the world has not yet collapsed. Society still exists. So aside from Toe Cutter's bike gang terrorizing the outback, it is nothing like the world seen in the Mad Max films to follow. Thee are few chase scenes, and those are mainly brief one on one chases with not that much action. Certainly nothing like the 20 minute car chase involving multiple vehicles  at the end of Mad Max 2 is in this movie. It is mostly a thriller. The second act is  more like a remake of Cape Fear with the motorcycle gang harassing Max and his family.  The third act has Max on a mission of revenge, hunting the gang down one by one. But that lasts a surprisingly short amount of time. In it's own right, and was an impressive screen debut for director George Miller. Especially as his budget was no more than $200 thousand and still managed to earn $100 million worldwide on this movie. Miller had been studying medicine at the University of New South Wales when he became interested in making movies as a hobby. He attended a film workshop where he met fellow film maker Byron Kennedy, and the two became close friends. He completed his medical studies and became an emergency room doctor. He claimed his inspiration for Mad Max came from the constant road accident victims brought to the E.R. Together he and Kennedy developed the script for Mad Max. Miller initially wanted it to be mostly action, with a lot of the chases the later films would be known for. However, realizing they could only raise a meager amount of money for the budget, and didn't have the permits to shoot on the roads even if they did have the budget for massive chase scenes, they settled for the film being mostly a thriller. What few action scenes were shot were shot quickly, and the debris immediately cleared from the road after filming, so the police would not know they had been filming chase scenes without a permit. It was a blockbuster when released in Australia, but was mainly a B picture in other countries. It was distributed by AIP in the United States who marketed it as another one of their biker films, and was shown mostly in grindhouse theaters. AIP decided to take the extra step and have it dubbed into English by new voice actors, as they felt the Australian accents would be too hard for American audiences to understand, and felt they needed to remove any of the Australian slang and replace it with American slang.

[Edward J Grug III]

il Sorpaso is one of my all time favourite films. Really fun, but also that stressful-brand of comedy that I love so much.

[stethacantus]

MILE 21

Starlight Hotel ( 1987 )

Studio: New Zealand Film Commission
Director: Sam Pillsbury

25 Points, 1 List, #1 Stethacantus

TRAILER

During the Great Depression, a 13 year old girl is orphaned when her mother suddenly dies. Left with adults who mistreats her, she decides to make the journey across New Zealand by foot to find and live with her father, who had left for Christchurch a year earlier to find work. On the way she runs into a wanted fugitive. Both become reluctant traveling buddies, eventually becoming close friends. 


And we have reached yet another milestone. I have reached the films that were #1 on the individual lists. Which means when I get through with these, every movie after was on more than one list. Coming in the back of the pack is my #1, which for tie breaking purposes got the least points on Rotten Tomatoes.  Starlight Hotel is the only movie from my top 10 favorite film list which qualifies as a road film, even if the characters mostly walk the distance. I first came across this film on ABC before they had Jimmy Kimmel Live. Nightline was on at 11:30, Ted Koppel still the host, and from midnight to 2am were movies. Mostly independent films I never heard of, and B movies from grindhouse  theaters. The sort of films that you see in those $5 bins at Dollar Tree, or in a budget DVD called 100 Family Films, or 100 Westerns, or 100 Comedies. The unfamiliar films that HBO notoriously filled their schedule with. Anyway, I didn't have cable yet, so would often have Nightline on because I was too lazy to change the channel, and would often sit through the first ten minutes of these mystery films before I got off my lazy ass to turn the channel. ( For those of you who remember when most televisions had no remotes. ) But ten minutes into the film, I found myself wanting to see another ten minutes.  I ended up watching the entire movie and enjoying it. I subsequently bought it on laserdisc and it became one of my favorite films. Now if it seems as if I am wasting this write-up discussing how I found this obscure movie, then there is good reason. It has no production history.  I could bring up that director Sam Pillsbury went on to direct Knight Rider 2010 ( 1994 ) and Free Willy 3: The Rescue ( 1997 ) ( How many times does that little Brat have to save the same Orca? You know what, maybe Willy deserves to be stuck in an Aquarium.  ) While this has never been confirmed, it seems as if Twilight Hotel was a rip-off of the live action Disney filmThe Journey of Natty Gann ( 1985 ) which starred a 14 year old Meredith Salenger, a few years before becoming a sex symbol in late 80s teen comedies. While there are distinct differences between the plots of both films, they still both take place during the Great Depression, and involve a motherless girl running away from their foster parents to go on a cross country journey to find their father. Too much of a coincidence.

[stethacantus]

MILE 20

The Passenger ( 1975 )

Studio: M.G.M.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

25 Points, 1 List, #1 Charles Castle

TRAILER

A news reporter looking to interview rebels, assumes the identity of a recently deceased arms dealer he met in Africa.

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to direct three English language films. The first, Blow-Up, was a financial and critical hit, considered by some critics as a masterpiece on the level of Citizen Kane ( 1941 ). It was important for bringing down the Production Code, which had dictated what content could be in films for the past three decades. There had been plenty of foreign and independent films that did not abide by the Production Code, but were not in the mainstream. Blow-Up had explicit  sexual content, and was condemned by the National League of Decency. But M.G.M. had it distributed through Premier Productions, a distributor that had become a subsidiary of M.G.M. When the various decency leagues and censorship boards failed to stop it's distribution, and it earned $10 million at the box office, the major studios knew the Production Coad was dead. The MPAA immediately began formulating the film rating  system to replace the Production Code. Antonioni's second film for M.G.M., Zabriskie Point ( 1970 ), was both a critical and box office failure, and considered by many as one of the worst movies ever made. Antonioni was already working on pre-production for his third film for M.G.M. when Zabriskie Point bombed. Going by the title of Technically Sweet. it was based on the short story The Adventure of a Photographer by Italo Calvino, and had both  Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider on board as it's stars.  However,   producer Carlo Ponti, who had previously produced Zabriskie Point, became concerned that Antonioni was about to direct another disaster, especially as the proposed budget kept increasing as new exotic locations not found in the short story were added. In 1973 Ponti cancelled Technically Sweet. Ponti had two problems to take care of. One was that he and Antonioni owed M.G.M. a third film, which he had just cancelled. The other, that he was producing a different film called Fatal Exit which was co-written by Mark Peploe who was to direct it. It would be Mark's first film as director, and Ponti was beginning to have serious doubts of Peploe's directing abilities. So to solve both problems, Ponti asked Antonioni to direct Fatal Exit instead. Antonioni saw a lot of similarities between the script for Fatal Exit and the script for Technically Sweet and decided to take Ponti up on the offer if he could rewrite the script to import some of his ideas for Technically Sweet. The end result was the film The Passenger which was a hybrid of both films. It was another critical success for Michelangelo Antonioni, with some critics calling it his best film. However, it soon became a lost film. Jack Nicholson was working on a different movie for M.G.M. when the studio cancelled it. Nichelson claimed that he was out millions on the pre-production of the cancelled film. To compensate him, they gave him ownership of The Passenger.  For whatever reason, Nicholson kept it out of circulation. It was only briefly released on VHS in the 80s, but Nichelson never agreed to allow it on any other format. It wasn't until Sony Pictures Classics talked Nichelson into re-releasing it if they agreed to pay for the restoration, that it finally returned cocirculation in 2006.

[Edward J Grug III]

I've never seen The Passenger, but I should track it down. I saw Zabriskie Point in a theatre in 2020 and actually really enjoyed it.

[stethacantus]

MILE 19

Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road ( 2002 )

Studio: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Director: Bob Gale

25 Points, 1 List, #1 Pastor of Muppets

TRAILER

An aspiring artist goes on a journey to a non existent town called Danver which can only be reached by Interstate 60, a magical highway that also doesn't exist.

Bob Gale spent the latter half of the 70s trying to sink the career of Steven Spielberg, and nearly succeeding.  As a student at USC he met fellow film student Robert Zemeckis. Together they made the student film A Field Of Honor which won the school Academy Award. This caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, a director who had been directing television shows for Universal for several years before being offered the chance to direct features, and hit paydirt with his second film Jaws. Believing he saw a lot of potential in Zemeckis and Gale, he became their mentor. They spent a few years at Universal, with only one script for the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker to show for it. They wrote a bunch of scripts that were rejected, including for a horror comedy called Bordello of Blood., and a time travel comedy called Back to the Future. The pair wrote a comedy about the mania surrounding the Beatles first broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show called I Wanna Hold Your Hand ( 1978 ) which Spielberg produced and got green lit. It was Zemeckis directorial debut, and was expected to be a hit, because who didn't like the Beatles? Well, it bombed. And while Zemeckis saved money by shooting the movie on the Courthouse Square backlot, the same sets he would shoot Back to the Future on seven years later, redressing it to look like New York City, the film still lost money. Had they not spent a million licensing Beatles songs, the movie probably would have broke even. Undaunted, Gale and Zemeckis turned in the script for their second comedy, which examined the war mania in America shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Spielberg thought it was another great script, but decided the budget for what Gale and Zemeckis wanted to do would be enormous, so he should direct it himself, and let the novice director instead direct another  Zemeckis-Gale script, Used Cars ( 1980 ). It also bombed, as did 1941 ( 1979 ) which due to it's budget, lost the studio $20 million on its initial release. Zemeckis and Gale turned in yet another script to Spielberg called Growing Up which Spielberg shoved in a draw somewhere and forgot. He began to realize that while the Zemeckis and Gale scripts were fantastic, they had a knack for being about subjects few theatergoers were interested in seeing. With two failed comedies he produced, and a major money loosing flop with 1941, Spielberg hit a low point in his career. Her rebounded with Raiders of the Lost Ark which in turn got Michael Douglas' Romancing the Stone ( 1984 ) greenlit after years of studio rejections due to the fact that it had a hero similar to Indiana Jones. Since Spielberg would not direct it, the next best thing  was to hire the director Spielberg was mentoring. After Zemeckis finished directing Romancing the Stone, he was hired to direct Cocoon ( 1985 ). However, after seeing a rough cut of Romancing the Stone. the producer of Cocoon immediately fired him. Which was a bit hasty as Romancing the Stone became a major blockbuster. This in turn convinced Universal to dust off the script for Back to the Future ( 1985 ) and ask him to direct it. It would be the last hurrah for the Zemeckis-Gale writing team, as Gale reunited with his old partner to rewrite the script, then write the sequels Back to the Future Part Il ( 1989 ) and Back to the Future Part III ( 1990 ). After the trilogy was completed, Gale and Zemeckis went their separate ways, with Universal occasionally dusting off one of their rejected scripts from the 70s, such as The Looters which was given to Walter Hill and released as Trespass ( 1992 ), and Bordello of Blood ( 1986 ) which was rewritten and released as a Tales from the Crypt movie. While Zemeckis went on to be a major director, Gale chose other paths, including writing Saturday Morning cartoons, comic books for DC and Marvel in the late 90s, and working on video games. Now, as for the history of this film, there is none. You world think I could find something online about Bob Gale's one and only film as director. But there is nothing. No explanation as to why after three decades he suddenly decided to write and direct a film. No explanation as to why he hasn't made a feature film since. No explanation as to where he got the idea for the story. It just sort of showed up out of nowhere as a direct to video release with no publicity.

[stethacantus]

MILE 18

Mad Max 2 ( 1981 )

Studio: Roadshow Film Distributors
Director: George Miller

25 Points, 1 List, #1 RVRII

TRAILER

Civilization collapses after World War III, and former police officer Max Rockatansky finds himself taking refuge in a makeshift fortress with a colony who is refining gasoline, and is under constant attack by a mobile gang of barbarians who seek to steal the fuel for themselves.

After the success of Mad Max, George Miller was beset by offers from Hollywood studios to direct various films, one of which was a film that was in constant production hell since 1972 called First Blood. Miller chose instead to direct his own script , which was for a Rock and Roll musical called Roxanne. However, after a year of post production, the studio he was making the film for suddenly cancelled it. Roadshow Film Distributors, the studio Mad Max had been made for, wanted a sequel, and had been badgering Miller for over a year about it. They mentioned that Warner Bros., who wanted worldwide distribution, was willing to give the sequel a Hollywood budget. With free time due to Roxane being cancelled, Miller became interested, especially if he got the budget promised, which would allow him to do all the things he wanted to do in the first film. The original edit of Mad Max 2 ran a lot longer, but went through some major edits to appease Australian censors. This included entire scenes. To date, those scenes have not been restored. When released in the United States, the title was changed to The Road Warrior as Warner Bros. felt AIP had not properly distributed or promoted Mad Max to the point where barely any Americans would have seen the first movie. Warner made some additional cuts in order to obtain an R rating instead of the X the MPAA  wanted to give it. Those two edits were recently restored for the Blu-Ray release.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I am amused that the top of my list has obscure movies that you cannot find any history on.  But if I may postulate, maybe Bob Gale got the inspiration to make this movie the same way I got the inspiration to buy the DVD.  Since Interstate 60 does not exist in real life, maybe we can make a fantasy story about one that does.

I am an interstate highway nerd.  There are several interstate highways that travel east to west across the continental United States.  They go most of the way, with a few stretching coast to coast.

I-10 runs from Jacksonville Florida to Los Angeles California
I-20 runs from Florence, South Carolina to a Scroggins Draw, a small town in western Texas
I-30 is an oddball that just runs between Arkansas and Texas for fewer than 1000 miles
I-40 runs from Wilmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California
I-50 and I-60 do not exist.
I-70 runs from Baltimore, Maryland to Cove Fort, Utah.
I-80 runs from somwhere near New York, New York, and ends in San Francisco.
I-90 runs from a tunnel under Boston's Logan Airport and ends in Seattle, Washington

I've been to both ends of I-70 and I-40.  I-40 on the eastern end just stops abruptly at a stop light.  I think on the west end it continues a little further and more gently merges into a surface street.  I-70 on the eastern end runs into a park and ride where you can just drive through, make a U-turn, and go west.  I-70 on the western end merges with I-15 and goes toward Las Vegas and then further on to Los Angeles.

So anyway, my obsession with interstates led me to this movie.  In the movie, the main character, Neal Oliver, runs into a guy named "O. W. Grant", a being who will grant you one wish.  The guy is a confused young man, looking to find his way in the world.  He wishes for "an answer".  Grant is so intrigued by the novelty and lack of greed in this wish, so he sends the kid on this cross country journey to deliver a package to a bar in Danver, Colorado (no, I didn't misspell Denver).  He is told to take the non-existent Interstate 60 to get there.  At the start of his journey, he runs into O. W. Grant on the side of one of the surface streets of Saint Louis, who guides him to the on ramp to Interstate 60.  When Neal asks why Interstate 60 isn't on any maps, Grant just says "there are plenty of unlisted phone numbers, so what's wrong with the idea of an unlisted road?"

So Interstate 60 essentially exists in an alternate universe.

The reason there is no I-60 in real life is because of the U.S. Highway system.  The US Highways are interstate highways like the interstates, but these are slower travel because in many places they are just regular surface streets full of traffic and stop lights and intersections and all that.  They still run great distances, almost across the country.  US Highway 1 runs from Key West, Florida all the way up to the Canadian border in Fort Kent, Maine.  US Highway 40 runs from Atlantic City, New Jersey to somewhere near Salt Lake City, Utah, and I have driven every mile of it.

US Highways start with the low number up north, with the US Highway 10 going between Michigan and Wisconsin.  Interstates start with the HIGH number up north, with I-90 going from Boston to Seattle.  With this alternation, the middle numbers of 50 and 60 would still be in the middle of the country, and the people who built the interstate system didn't want there to be confusion, so they skipped those two numbers.

[stethacantus]

MILE 17

Paris, Texas ( 1984 )

Studio: Tobis Film
Director: Wim Wenders

25  Points, 2 Lists, #2 Charles Castle

TRAILER

After having been missing for years and believed to be dead, Travis Henderson wanders out of the desert and passes out in a grocery store. Still dazed and confused and appearing to be mute, the doctors find his brothers phone number in his wallet. Taken home to meet his son who he hadn't seen since he was an infant, Travis also learns the boy's mother abandoned him soon after he was presumed dead. He decides to go on a road trip with his son to find the mother.


We have  reached yet another milestone.  Because from this point on, every film in this LoC were on more than one list. So let's get to this one. German director Wim Wenders was inspired to direct a film about America after visiting the Western states. He had been invited to America to direct Hammett ( 1982 ), during which he had wanted writer and sometimes actor Sam Shepard to rewrite the script, Known more for being a playwright, Shepard had co-written a few notable movie scripts, including Zabriskie Point, which we mentioned here in a previous write-up. Shepard ultimately turned down the offer to rewrite Hammett, when Wenders mentioned his desire to shoot a film about the American West, and wondered if Shepard could adapt his book Motel Chronicles into a movie he would star in. The two discussed it more, but eventually decided to take parts from the book and use it to create an original fictional story about two brothers. The script that soon became Paris, Texas was further developed with Shepard potentially starring in it as soon as he was finished shooting his scenes for The Right Stuff ( 1983 ) where he would be playing test pilot Chuck Yeager. Soon after Shepard was offered the lead role in the movie Country ( 1984 ) which co-starred his common law wife Jessica Lange, who was also the film's producer. So it was not as if he could just turn the offer down. BTW, Country was directed by Richard Pearce who was previously mentioned in the write-up for Leap of Faith as it's director. Anyway, Shepard gave Wenders his blessing to recast his part. Wenders chose actor Dean Stockwell, who later claimed he was about to retire from acting  and become a real estate agent when he was offered the role, which he said turned his career around. Also ready to give up on show business was  Harry Dean Stanton cast as the brother who returns after being missing for years. According to Stanton, Paris, Texas was the first time he landed a role he liked. Playing his son was 11 year old Hunter Carson in the first movie of his career. Too young to film a road movie without his parents, they came along. His mother was Karen Black, an actress who was big in the 70s and is best remembered as the stewardess  who has to fly the plane when the pilots are killed in Airport 1975 and the woman being chased around her apartment by a killer doll in Trilogy f Terror. His father was screen writer and sometimes actor L. M. Kit Carson, who had just written the script for Breathless ( 1983 ), an American adaption for a French film of the same name. ( Both of which would have qualified for this LoC, and one which I forgot about when making my list. ). This ended up coming in handy. Shepard had not completed the script. Knowing Wenders had intended to shoot the script in chronological order, he had decided to  write the ending when they got to it based on how he and the other actors were portraying their characters. Now stuck on the set of Country, he had no time to write the ending, and instead sent Wenders notes on how the story should end. Having a screenwriter on set, Wenders asked Carson to turn Shepard's notes into a workable script, and to add any ideas of his own. Near the end of filming, the production ran out of money. Wenders was about to reluctantly pull the plug on the film when he shot a scene with Nastassja Kinski as the woman Stanton's character was searching for. Kinski had prepared so much for her role that she even wrote a fictional diary as a way to give her character a back story that didn't exist in the script. Wenders liked Kinski's performance so much, that he became determined to complete the film. Last minute financing was found, and Paris, Texas was released to critical acclaim, earning nearly a million over the budget on it's initial release.

[stethacantus]

MILE 16

Norh by Northwest ( 1959 )

Studio:    Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

27 Points, 2 Lists, #5 Charles Castle

TRAILER

After an advertising executive is mistaken by spies as an agent they are after, he is framed for murder and sent on the run to prove his innocence.

For one of Hatchcock's best remembered films, this has a very thin production history. There are two competing stories as to it's origin. One was that Hitchcock had an idea for a film scene where Cary Grant is on the run from villains at Mount Rushmore and hides inside of Abraham Lincoln's nose. The villains are unable to find him, and are about to leave when Grant sneezes, giving his position inside the nose away. Supposedly every time he worked with a new screenwriter, he would ask them if they could turn the idea into an entire feature film, which eventually became the climax of North by Northwest. While the film does end with a climatic fight between the hero and villains at Mount Rushmore, nobody goes inside of Lincoln's nose. the book Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock claims a different version of how the movie originated. Hitchcock had signed a deal to make one movie for M.G.M. The studio had just acquired the novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare and wanted Hitchcock to direct a movie adaption. Hitchcock hired screenwriter Ernest Lehman who had an impressive resume that included Sabrina ( 1954 ), The King and I ( 1956 ) and The Sweet Smell of Success ( 1957 ). Lehman spent two weeks trying to adapt the novel into a movie, then told Hitchcock he wanted to quit because there was no way he could turn that novel into a decent film. Realizing Lehman was a good authority on the subject of adapting novels for feature films, and not wanting him to quit because he thought they worked well together, Hitchcock suggested they forget about the novel and come up with an original story for M.G.M. Without a plot, they spitballed ideas, such as a murder at the United Nations. Among those ideas was for a chase across Mount Rushmore which Hitchcock said he had wanted to do for years. This eventually lead to a plot that would explain how the hero ended up in all those locations. Which came from a story Hitchcock had bought from a Journalist  years earlier, where he learned that a spy agency once dressed  a medical cadaver, then put forged papers in his wallet so that enemy agents would think the cadaver was the agent they were looking for. Trying to think how this could be used, the two men liked the idea of a corpse mistaken for a wanted spy, but then wondered what would happen if a living parson was mistaken for being a spy. While shooting the film, the United Nations refused to allow Hitchcock to shoot the film on their property. Hitchcock had a hidden camera inside a van that filmed Carey  grant walking into the United Nations. When it was completed, M.G.M. demanded Hitchcock cut 15 minutes from the run time. However, he produced the contract he had with the studio which gave him final edit over the film, and the fifteen minutes stayed.

[stethacantus]

MILE 15

Apocalypse Now ( 1979 )

Studio: United Artists
Director: Francis Ford Coppola

28 Points, 2 Lists, #11 Edward J Grug III

TRAILER

During the Vietnam War, a government assassin is sent  upriver to terminate a rogue general.


When Francis Ford Coppola first entered the film business, he did so making pornography. The films he shot were called Skin Flicks which involved no sex, but rather just women removing their clothing. Exactly how many of these he made are unknown as there are no listings for them on IMDb. But it did give him the idea to finance and film his own porno to sell to a distributor. The Peeper was about a man peeking through the door of a photo studio as a girl was changing her clothes. who was played by  Playboy Bunny Marli Renfro. Shopping the film around to porn distributors, he stumbled upon Premier Pictures Company, who were sitting on the negatives of an incomplete erotic Western shot by Jerry Shafer to be called Wide Open Spaces. That film also starred Marli Renfro. Coppola was offered a $500  to shoot new footage that would link both the short and unfinished Western into a single feature film. That is how the erotic comedy  Tonight For Sure ( 1962 ) became Francis Ford Coppola's feature film debut. It also caught the attention of  Screen Rite Pictures who had bought this German porn film called Sin Began with Eve  which they wanted to keep just the porn stuff, and replace the other scenes with new footage shot in English, and asked Coppola if he would do it. It was released as The Bellboy and The Playgirls. Not initially with any credit for Coppola, but on home video re-releases two decades later, the distributor made sure Coppola's name was prominently displayed on the box. Somehow Roger Corman found out that this young film maker had shot new English footage for a German porn film, and hired Coppola. Corman had bought a Russian science fiction film called Nebo Zovyot ( 1959 )  but instead of dubbing it into English, wanted most of the Russian scenes cut and replaced with scenes with English actors. It was released as Battle Beyond the Sun ( 1862 ). Coppola stayed with Corman doing odd jobs, usually uncredited second unit directing. In 1963 he was working as the sound man for The Young Racers when Corman realized he had completed the film way under budget, and asked Coppola to use the remaining budget to write and direct a quickie horror film. Coppola wrote the first draft for  Dementia 13 ( 1963 ) in one night, and shot the film in nine days.

Seven Arts Productions was impressed with Dementia 13 enough that they hired Coppola, first as a script writer, but eventually as a director. It was just after Seven Arts merged with Warner Bros. when Coppola met a young film student named George Lucas who he hired to be his production assistant. In 1969 Lucas  introduced Coppola to a classmate from the  University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, John Milius, who had just completed a script for a film adaption of Heart of Darkness. There had been several attempts to adapt the 1899 novel into a feature film, but all never resulted in a workable script. Back at the University, Milius and Lucas film professor brought Heart of Darkness up as one of the most unfilmable books of all time, and dared his students to write a workable script based on it. Milius took up the dare by changing the location of the story from the Congo River in the 1800s, to the Vietnam War, which at the time America was still fighting. Very little of the plot from the novel remained in Milius' script, which was  called Apocalypse Now. The idea was for Lucas to direct the film and for Coppola to produce it. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts bought the script, but then put the project into turnaround. In the meantime Lucas directed other films, and completely abandoned the project once Star Wars became a massive blockbuster. Coppola remained obsessed with the script, and ended up buying it back from Warner Bros.-Seven Arts so he could get it greenlit by a different studio. But neither Lucas nor Milius were interested in directing it. Coppola had directed the two Godfather films which gave him a lot of clout, and he decided he wanted to direct Apocalypse  Now Filming began in 1976.  Son after, Typhoon Olga destroyed most of the sets, delaying the film as they were rebuilt. Martin Sheen had a near fatal heart attack, and production was shut down again. Marlon Brando arrived to the set overweight, and the ending had to be changed to accommodate his larger size. Coppola ended up going $25 million over budge and ended up offering his house and Godfather profits as collateral  so United Artists would let him complete the film.