The Three Gandalfs
April 13, 2015 6:58 AM   Subscribe

 
Upon further consideration, the plural of "Gandalf" should probably be "Gandalves."
posted by griphus at 7:02 AM on April 13, 2015 [15 favorites]


Gandolfini.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:05 AM on April 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


Forever? That's a mighty long time.
posted by zzazazz at 7:08 AM on April 13, 2015




Man, those little girls from the shining are just as creepy off-camera. Like Come To Daddy creepy.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:14 AM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


Seeing young, happy Carrie Fisher makes my heart smile.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:20 AM on April 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


Oh my gosh, unmasked Boba Fett is the BEST. It's like he decided to take a break from his accounting gig to bounty hunt for awhile.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:25 AM on April 13, 2015 [32 favorites]


Huh. I was convinced that riding Gandalf was instead standing-next-to-a-Hobbit-Gandalf.
posted by Ashenmote at 7:29 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think what my life is missing is a pair of terror lizard pants. Yes.
posted by phunniemee at 7:29 AM on April 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


Delightful! Thank you.
posted by harrietthespy at 7:32 AM on April 13, 2015


This could have been twice as long and I would have kept scrolling. So much fun, especially the older ones.
posted by Mchelly at 7:32 AM on April 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


I have only now realized how much better Ben-Hur would be if the climactic race had been done with scooters rather than chariots.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:43 AM on April 13, 2015 [10 favorites]


It's interesting the wounded in Spartacus are numbered. They don't explain it, but I would guess it's a technique for directing a large crowd? Someone can shout, "Number 240 move a little to the left!" instead of shouting, "You there! The one behind you! The other one behind you."
posted by RobotHero at 7:50 AM on April 13, 2015


There's a big ole reddit thread about that photo if someone wants to dig through the muck and see if there's a definitive answer somewhere in there.
posted by griphus at 7:55 AM on April 13, 2015


It actually sort of bothers me to see pictures of any of the Muppets, that don't hide the fact they're just puppets on someone's hand. It feels somehow disrespectful, or something like that, to have those pictures. Like it's a shared illusion that we've all just sort of agreed to go with, and those pics break that.
posted by evilangela at 7:55 AM on April 13, 2015 [9 favorites]


Most of those are posed by the studio, and thus not really candids. None of them are correctly sourced, either, but then nothing is (Life magazine photo credited to "imgur"?)
posted by Ideefixe at 8:00 AM on April 13, 2015


It actually sort of bothers me to see pictures of any of the Muppets, that don't hide the fact they're just puppets on someone's hand.

I hear you. It's like seeing Kermit the Frog with his pants down. Yeah, that might happen, but you don't have to rub my nose in it. Show the frog some respect!
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:11 AM on April 13, 2015


There are things about theater that I don't miss, but one thing I do is this sort of down-time cameraderie that happens. You're introduced to strangers on the first day of rehearsal, and for a couple months you form this super-close and intense sprawling family - and then it blows up when the show closes, so you get used to bonding fast and hard.

The technical rehearsals for every show are always boring stop-and-start days, where you have the lighting and sound designers finally showing the director their light cues and the actors are all doing the mental "oh, I need to stand two inches to the left to be in the light" calculations, and there's a lot of repetition and going-through-the-motions and standing-around-doing-nothing, and the actors lapse into autopilot - I have seen so many actors in the exact stance that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are in in that TITANIC photo - sitting down on the floor somewhere out of the way, sort of chillin' and waiting to be needed. Or they lapse into goofiness - on one of my favorite shows, we'd accumulated so many in-jokes that by the time we hit the tech rehearsal, every third thing anyone said was a joke. The lighting designer was laughing so hard that he actually begged everyone to grim up and let him concentrate.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:21 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's like seeing Kermit the Frog with his pants down. Yeah, that might happen, but you don't have to rub my nose in it.

I have bad news for all of you. I found a leaked photo from the Kermit and Miss Piggy sex tape.
posted by phunniemee at 8:25 AM on April 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


Love Heston on the scooter.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:48 AM on April 13, 2015


The Joker has thought up his most fiendish trick yet and Batman is powerless to stop him!
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:50 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love the MGM logo filming picture. The camera is far too close to the lion and the little microphone is adorable.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:50 AM on April 13, 2015


That Winona Ryder/Johnny Depp photo is like every early 90's party I went to.

(Including the scissorhands)
posted by Lucinda at 8:57 AM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


I hear you. It's like seeing Kermit the Frog with his pants down. Yeah, that might happen, but you don't have to rub my nose in it. Show the frog some respect!

q.v. Mr Rogers vs. Carroll Spinney.
Caroll Spinney agreed to appear in the episode as Big Bird after some dialogue with Fred Rogers; when Spinney originally received the script for the show he saw it required him to remove the costume and discuss the inner-workings of the Big Bird puppet. Spinney protested, as he didn't believe in ruining the illusion of Big Bird for the children. Rogers agreed, but only under the stipulation that Big Bird’s appearance was restricted to the fantasy segments of the "Neighborhood of Make-Believe," as he didn’t believe in perpetuating the deceitful blur of real and pretend to children that occurred when presenting the character as real in the "real world."

While Sesame Street Unpaved mentions that Rogers understood Spinney's concern over showing the children how Big Bird works, Spinney said at some of his book signings (promoting his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird) that he and Fred Rogers argued over the phone for roughly twenty minutes over whether or not to have him tell the kids how he performs Big Bird.

In the same episode, Rogers still throws a disguised punch back at Spinney by putting on a tall giraffe costume shortly before Big Bird's appearance, stating to the child viewer "When you see big make-believe creatures in parades or in plays or on television, you can know that the people inside are just pretending to be something else." He adds "Sometimes of course there are machines inside of them too, that make them move. But they're just pretend."
posted by zamboni at 9:04 AM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


They're all great except for the Joker skateboarding one, which is a bad photoshop of a shot taken straight from the movie.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 9:12 AM on April 13, 2015


Huh, the blue woman in the aforementioned Boba Fett scene is wearing pointe shoes.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2015


Yeah, doesn't she do some kind of spinny dance in Jabba's palace?
posted by phunniemee at 9:19 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think they feed her to the rancor after.
posted by phunniemee at 9:22 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's like seeing Kermit the Frog with his pants down.

Its more like Kermit the Frog having come to terms with a life that has already seen his back legs sacrificed for cuisine, who has then crashed on a swamp planet and is being fisted by a hairy man. Its all in his expression. Henson was a genius.
posted by biffa at 9:24 AM on April 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think they feed her to the rancor after.

After-ish. The scene being filmed is for the special edition and was filmed in 1996. The actress playing Oola, Femi Taylor, had taken good care of herself and aged remarkably well, and so she reprised her role from Return of the Jedi, which she had filmed in 1982. So, yes, Oola gets et by the rancor after, but that actually happened fourteen years earlier.

It is a tiny role to be sure, but she filmed additional scenes for the rerelease, including some close-ups. How many people working onscreen today would be prepared to shoot additional close-ups to be added to a movie from 2001?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:36 AM on April 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


Forever? That's a mighty long time.

But I'm here to tell ya, there's something else...
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:38 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love the one of Jim Henson and Kermit.
posted by shelleycat at 9:57 AM on April 13, 2015


So did one Gandalf retire to a monastery, while another was forced to relocate to Arnor, and declared to be the Anti-Gandalf?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:01 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Nope, Sigismund the White came and sorted it all out. Of course, he packed Huss off to Mordor, but you can't be 100% fair....
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:08 AM on April 13, 2015


Oh my gosh, unmasked Boba Fett is the BEST. It's like he decided to take a break from his accounting gig to bounty hunt for awhile.

Apparently, he was a creature animator around that time, and just so happened to fit into the costume.

http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.com/2010/03/mark-austin-interview-boba-fett-star.html

You played the part of Boba Fett in the special edition of A New Hope. How did you manage to get this part?

This all happened long before I ever got asked to do the creature animation. I was working on Spielberg's Casper when I read an email asking for volunteers to be Stormtroopers in some planned Star Wars summit at the ranch. Of course I emailed my soul away in approximately 5 seconds flat. Soon after I received a call from a recent acquaintance of mine, Don Bies (the operator of R2-D2). He told me that the response had been so huge that they had decided to broaden the summit plans to such a degree that it now encompassed a certain character I had a strong affinity for. No prizes for guessing who that might be. But he made it very clear that he couldn't make any promises since I would have to try on the flight suit. If the suit didn't fit, I couldn't be Boba. Since all the armor, the most separate pieces of any Star Wars character at the time, layered onto the flight suit.
We arranged a lunchtime visit to the archives and I was nervous I’d be returning crushed. That was my introduction to the costume.
I did two summits as Boba. I was Boba. They needed someone, they called me. Life was sweeter than sweet.
Then one evening I received a call from a colleague telling me of a rumor that they were going to revive the original Jabba footage and add Boba. I emailed the producer, Tom Kennedy and offered my services. A month later in November of 1994 we shot the "Docking Bay 94" footage.


Good looking guy

And what's funny is that all this and actually the entire story seems like it makes the original capture under the photo a misattribution. The photo of the mustachio'd dude does look a little photoshopped. Look at his chin.
posted by alex_skazat at 10:09 AM on April 13, 2015


And what's funny is that all this and actually the entire story seems like it makes the original capture under the photo a misattribution. The photo of the mustachio'd dude does look a little photoshopped. Look at his chin.

I expect you've seen quite a few shops in your time. The mustachio'd dude is Don Bies, who apparently wore the Fett suit in Jabba's Palace. Mark Austin was Fett in the Docking Bay scene.
posted by zamboni at 12:13 PM on April 13, 2015


I would like this more if the Godzilla pic and the Jurassic Park III pic were one after the other.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:05 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Not sure if it's funny or just sad that the photos are credited to places like imagur and redit
posted by photoslob at 1:36 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


That Life of Pi picture makes clear how hard acting must be in the digital age. I'm a kid in fake boat on a crane in an empty room talking to nothing for months on end.

Which does lead to my question about acting in the olden, non-CGI days. When a movie films an over the shoulder conversation between two actors, are there typically two cameras filming an actual conversation or one camera filming actor 1 doing all their lines and then actor 2 filming theirs, and then they are cut together? Because if it was the latter, I would think it was just as hard as talking to nothing in a CGI film.
posted by rtimmel at 2:44 PM on April 13, 2015


Lisa Burns and Louise Burns look far less creepy between their haunting stints in hallways.

jesus no they don't
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:21 PM on April 13, 2015 [5 favorites]


It's not like they had a magnifying glass and were gleefully pulling the wings off of flies....
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:06 PM on April 13, 2015


I had gone all my life to this moment without ever quite seeing behind the curtain of the Muppets. I'm not even joking--that picture should have had a 'click to reveal' thing on it. Part of me just... not died, exactly, but maybe vanished.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:17 PM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Which does lead to my question about acting in the olden, non-CGI days. When a movie films an over the shoulder conversation between two actors, are there typically two cameras filming an actual conversation or one camera filming actor 1 doing all their lines and then actor 2 filming theirs, and then they are cut together?

It's usually the latter. The exigencies of lighting and ensuring you're not capturing the other camera in the shots usually mean that (for closeups and reaction shots) you film Actor 1, then turn everything around and film Actor 2. Then (or before; separately in either case) you have separate setups for wide and mid shots, two-shots, etc. Then it all gets cut together in the editing room.

The thing that always blows my mind--even before easy face replacement digital magic--is how stunt doubles only vaguely resemble the people they're doubling. Same wig, same costume, eh that's close enough--and it almost always is. Movie magic indeed.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:28 PM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


(Filming both halves of a dialogue at the same time is called cross-coverage)
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:42 PM on April 13, 2015


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