It's been a frustrating four years for Joe Dante, whose latest feature, the kid horror flick The Hole, has endured a rough road to release since filming in 2008. The effective and spooky chiller, about two brothers (Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble) fighting the stuff of nightmares with their neighbor (Haley Bennett) after opening a mysterious void in their basement, was one of the first recent films to film in 3-D — but, as Dante recalled to Movieline, being at the forefront of filmed 3-D was ironically also what hurt The Hole's distribution hopes.
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Over at the fantastic retro cinema celebration series that is Trailers From Hell!, Joe Dante is currently running a Kickstarter to back the next batch of webisodes, which feature Dante and his "Grindhouse Gurus" — Eli Roth, Guillermo Del Toro, and John Landis, among others — dissecting their favorite genre fare of olde. And while a top pledge will get you all sorts of one-of-a-kind rewards ranging from lunch with Dante to the arachnid jaw from Starship Troopers, one prize in particular offers an opportunity so rare, someone had better jump on it, fast: A script reading by screenwriter Josh Olson.
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This weekend sees the release of Dark Shadows, marking the eighth time director Tim Burton has teamed with Johnny Depp, his second-favorite performer on screen. (He no doubt frequently has to tell Helena Bonham Carter as much.) So natural is their pairing that we have come to expect a certain level of quality and/or box-office performance from their combined efforts, and an announcement of a new Burton title has generally come to carry the promise of a Depp appearance. Although Hollywood has long brought us such fruitful and lucrative actor/director relationships — from both Cary Grant and James Stewart's collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock to Robert De Niro's legendary work with Martin Scorsese — consider nine other long-term pairings packing a little (or a lot) less luster.
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Only in Hollywood: "In the commentary on the Gremlins 2 DVD, which has been ported over to its Blu-ray (out this week), [director Joe] Dante calls Gremlins 2 'one of the more unconventional studio pictures ever. And if it weren't for the fact that the studio was in dire need of another one of these movies to put into the cans and send to the theaters, I can't conceive of us getting away with this.' He took advantage of that dire need by taking the piss. On that same commentary, [producer Michael] Finnell recalls Warner Bros. head Terry Semel telling them, 'Just come up with something. Whatever you want. It doesn't matter. Between 90 minutes and two hours, call it Gremlins 2, and we'll make it.'" [Gawker]
What's second unit? What's the 180 degree line? These questions and more were often answered by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman in his grindhouse movie heyday, when he famously took newbie future auteurs like James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese under his wing while churning out B-movies left and right. In an exclusive deleted scene from Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, almost a dozen of his former proteges, including Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Penelope Spheeris recall the crash course in filmmaking he gave them at the start of their careers.
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