The Wiz (1978): Michael Jackson's Film Debut

Young Michael Jackson perform a Scarecrow? Well, he did it in The Wiz, a 1978 musical film adapted from the 1975 William F. Brown's Broadway musical of the same name. The film's story was a retelling of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and featuring an entirely African-American cast, including Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Ted Ross as Cowardly Lion/Fleetwood Coupe de Ville, Nipsey Russell as Tinman, and Richard Pryor as The Wiz.

The film follows original story of classic Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy travel through the world of Oz, a fantasy wonderland where she befriended by a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, and a Cowardly Lion. She just want to seek an audience with the mysterious "Wiz", who has the power to take her home. A little different from the original story, Dorothy in this movie was from Harlem, New York, and the fantasy wonderland Oz resembles a fantasy version of New York City.

Quincy Jones supervised the adaptation of Charlie Smalls and Luther Vandross' songs for film. The first song that Michael Jackson sings, "You Can't Win" was originally written for the stage version, but was included in the film as the Scarecrow's song.

Michael Jackson's performance as the Scarecrow was positively reviewed, with critics noting that Jackson possessed "genuine acting talent". In a 1980 interview, Jackson stated that his time working on The Wiz was "my greatest experience so far...I'll never forget that."

Although the film proved to be a commercial flop, it has been periodically broadcast on television on Thanksgiving Day. Since the 1980s, The Wiz available on VHS home video, and was released on DVD in 1999. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly magazine named The Wiz #28 of the 50 Top Cult Movies. A remastered version entitled The Wiz: 30th Anniversary Edition was released in 2008.

Vintage Movie Posters Trading Cards Box - From Breygent

2009 Breygent Classic Vintage Movie Poster Collector Cards feature theater poster images of any old movies, including classic horror films, comedies, and dramas and highlighted with Prop Cards, Cut Autograph Cards, and Costume Cards.

Breygent only produce 3,000 boxes, and each box will deliver 3 Vintage Costume Cards. Collectors can store their sets in a custom designed Collector's Album. 6 cards per pack/24 packs per box.

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Vintage Movie Posters Found Their Way Into the Hands of Collectors

Movie posters were originally produced for the exclusive use by the theatres exhibiting the film the poster was created for, and the copies of the posters were required to be returned to the distributor after the film left the theatre.

Between 1940 and 1984, a nation-wide operation called the National Screen Service (NSS) in the United States printed and distributed most of the film posters for the studios. American film studios began taking over direct production and distribution of their posters from the National Screen Service in the 1980s, which make the process of making and distributing film posters became decentralised in that country.

At the time, the NSS regularly recycled posters that were returned, sending them back out to be used again at another theatre. Movie posters which were not returned were often thrown away by the theatre owner, but some film posters found their way into the hands of collectors - as a result of market demand.

Some of the more popular older movie posters have been reproduced either under license or illegally. Collectors began seeking out original advertising material, and the classic one sheet film poster became the pinnacle object to own for any given film. The record price for a poster was set on November 15, 2005 when US$690,000 was paid for a poster of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis from the Reel Poster Gallery in London.

Below are some vintage movie posters that are still soughted by collectors:

CITIZEN KANE - VINTAGE ITALIAN MOVIE POSTER (link)

GONE WITH THE WIND ~ RHETT & SCARLETT (link)

KING KONG - VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

METROPOLIS - FRITZ LANG - VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

MICKEY MOUSE DISNEY VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

BUS STOP - MARILYN MONROE - VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

MOULIN ROUGE - VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

THE WIZARD OF OZ VINTAGE MOVIE POSTER (link)

Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings Animated (1978)

Ralph Bakshi's animated fantasy film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been cited as an influence on director Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi on his interview with IGN is quoted as saying "Peter Jackson did say that the first film inspired him to go on and do the series, but that happened after I was bitching and moaning to a lot of interviewers that he said at the beginning that he never saw the movie. I thought that was kind of fucked up."

The 1978 animated fantasy film makes some deviations from the book, but overall follows Tolkien's narrative quite closely. Bakshi had created it by utilizing new technique in animated filmmaking, used live-action footage which was then rotoscoped to produce an animated look. The technique could transform highly complex live-action scenes into animation, thus saved production costs and gave the animated characters a more realistic look.

Same as Peter Jackson's version, Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings was both financial and artistic success. While the budget was only $4 million, it grossed $30.5 million at the box office. At the Giffoni Film Festival Bakshi won a Golden Gryphon award for the film. The film's score (composed by Leonard Rosenman) was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Motion Picture Score. The Lord of the Rings was ranked as the 90th greatest animated film of all time by the Online Film Critics Society.

The film, along with The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980) has released by Warner Bros as a boxed-set "trilogy" of films on VHS and DVD format (packaged separately).

The Worst Movie Ever Made(?)

Plan 9 From Outer Space, a 1959 horror/science fiction-wannabe film written, directed, and edited by Edward D. Wood, Jr (Ed Wood) has earned Wood a posthumous Golden Turkey Award as the worst director ever, and the film itself dubbed by author Michael Medved (who created the Golden Turkey Award) as the worst movie ever made because of its grotesk absurdity and multiple continuity problems, along with so many amusing goofs and very poor special effects.

Plan 9 From Outer Space was shot only in five days on a budget of around $20,000. The plot is focused on aliens from outer space implement their "plan 9" (Where's plan 1 to 8, Ed?) to stop humans from creating mass destruction weapon that would destroy the universe by resurrect dead bodies as zombies to causing chaos on earth.





Plan 9 From Outer Space originally titled as Grave Robber From Outer Space, but retitled by members of the Southern Baptist church (film investor) because the title considered profane. The film bills Bela Lugosi (as Ghoul Man) posthumously as a star, although Lugosi only completed a few minutes of footage just before his death in 1956. The film was not released until July 1959 through Valiant Pictures. Other cast including Maila "Vampira" Nurmi as Vampire Girl and Tor Johnson as Insp. Dan Clay.

Bela Lugosi: Sad Ironies of Hollywood's Count Dracula

"Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified. In my case, that role was Dracula."

Bela Lugosi was born as Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó on October 20, 1882, in Lugos, Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), outside the western border of Transylvania. Lugosi began his acting career in 1902. He then moving to Budapest in 1911, where he played dozens of roles with the National Theater of Hungary in the period 1913–1919.

Legally inspected for immigration at Ellis Island in March 1921, Lugosi became an American citizen in 1931, then entered the theater in New York City's Hungarian immigrant colony. In the summer of 1927 he was approached to star in a Broadway production of Dracula adapted by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston from Bram Stoker's novel, subsequently filmed by Tod Browning in 1931, establishing him as the screen's greatest personifications of Dracula. Following the success of Dracula, Lugosi received a contract with Universal.

Ironically, his association with Dracula, along with his heavily accented voice limited the roles he could play to only typecast as a horror villain in such movies. Throughout the 1930s his career rapidly decline. Lugosi accepted only small roles in non-horror, low-grade Hollywood's Poverty Row or B-movies where he was used for his "name value" only.

Lugosi ended his career working for the legendary Worst Director of All Time Edward D. Wood, Jr., such as Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and in Ed Wood's legendary Worst Movie of All Time Plan 9 From Outer Space as Ghoul Man (interspersed with a double because Lugosi died during production). At the time of his death (16 August 1956), Lugosi was in such poor financial straits that Frank Sinatra quietly paid for his funeral. He was buried in his Dracula cape, in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

An excellent video Tribute To Bela Lugosi by FritzFassbender:

Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat (1972)

Fritz the Cat (1972) was the most successful independent animated film of all time, grossing over $100 million worldwide. The film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi based on the comic strip of the same name by Robert Crumb, and is widely noted for featuring explicit sexuality and violence.

MPAA gave Fritz the Cat an X rating, something make the film lost playdates and 30 American newspapers rejected display ads for the film or refused to give it editorial publicity. The misconceptions were eventually cleared up when it received praise from Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and the film was accepted into the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

Fritz the Cat is not a pornographic film (at least not intended to be). It's a satire on American college life of 60s era, mixed with race relations and the free love movement. Of his direction of the film, Bakshi stated "My approach to animation as a director is live action. I don't approach it in the traditional animation ways. None of our characters get up and sing, because that's not the type of picture I'm trying to do. I want people to believe my characters are real, and it's hard to believe they're real if they start walking down the street singing."

Fritz the Cat movie Trailer (warning: featuring some explicit sexuality):

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The Great Dictator: When Chaplin Mocking Hitler

Perhaps a bit reckless in his time, but the Great Dictator show that Charlie Chaplin is an intelligent comedian who has a sociological abiliity to see the possible birth of fascism and antisemitism, even before most people realize it.

In The Great Dictator, Chaplin leveled his comedy arsenal at Der Fuehrer by playing the dual roles of Hitler-like Adenoid Hynkel and unnamed Jewish barber and private fighting for the Central Powers in the army of the fictional nation of Tomainia. After a plane crash in which he survive and had been hospitalized for the past twenty years (but having suffered memory loss), the Jewish private and barber returns to his barbershop in the Jewish ghetto.

Briefly, the Jewish barber, who has assumed Adenoid Hynkel's identity because of their resemblance, is taken to the Tomainian capital to make a victory speech. In contrast, "Hynkel" declaring that Tomainia and Osterlich (a corruption of Österreich, the German name for Austria) will now be a free nation and a democracy.

At the time when the film released to public (October 15, 1940), the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Even the British government announced (when the film was in production) that they would prohibit The Great Dictator exhibition in keeping with its appeasement policy concerning Nazi Germany.

Here is a scene from the film The Great Dictator when the Jewish barber, who has assumed Der Fuehrer Adenoid Hynkel, make speech:

THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) Charlie Chaplin (IMPORT HIGH QUALITY FOR ALL REGIONS)

Green Inferno, a la Ruggero Deodato

I always think Quentin Tarantino a little too far in exploiting sadism and violence as a mass entertainment through his films. But after watching the controversial film by Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Tarantino movies is now seen like merely softcores.

Violence and sadism in Cannibal Holocaust is not spices, but the main course. The portrayal of gore, human body impalement, animals killing, and sexual violence scenes are presented graphically, so Deodato must face a lawsuit for allegedly making a snuff film.

Deodato seem to use Cannibal Holocaust as his media to criticize hypocrisy of modern civilization in the spirit of anti-imperialism. In the film, he shows how "more civilized" people (group of documentary filmmakers from New York) treat the lower civilization (primitive Yanomamo tribe in the interior of the Amazon) arbitrarily. As a result, they receive a punishment that is slaughtered and eaten by members of the cannibal tribe. This is more obvious when the film was asking a rhetorical question "what is it to be civilized"?

But on the other hand, Deodato was also criticized. His interpretation of the essence of civilization in the film is just a cover and a poor justification for a film that gaining controversy because of many disturbing and gore materials presented.

However, as a cinematographic work, Cannibal Holocaust is considered innovative because it uses the concept of "found footage" as a plot structure - which later used by some other directors. The plot structure allows Deodato to make the film look as a true story of the people who lost in the Amazon jungle, leaving the videotape footage of the last moments of their lives. Seen very realistic, so that Deodato was taken to court to prove that he hasn't slain real people for his motion picture ..