Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio, TCM’s Forbidden Hollywood, Special Effects: The History and Technique, TCM’s Essential Directors, American Visions: The Films of Frank Capra, Roger Christian’s Cinema Alchemist, and Aardman’s A Grand Success, and I’d have students watch Paramount’s The Offer, Prime Video’s The Last Tycoon, and Dark Star: H.R. Were I to offer a college course in film, my textbooks would include TCM’s 20th Century Fox: Darryl F. Like ILM’s myriad contributions to movies, the result feels like magic. The six-part docu-series is now streaming on Disney+. You may think you have seen it all, then Kasdan, Ron Howard, and their friends show up and find this incredible footage and get most of the original creators of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic to walk fans through how it all happened. It probably won’t get an Oscar nod next year, but sure it has the most nostalgia per minute.
#STAR BACKSTAGE PASS GAME SERIES#
I count Michael Apted’s 7-Up documentary series as the best of all time, with the rest of the best to include the World War II story Ghost Plane of the Desert: Lady Be Good, Nova’s biography of Andrew Wiles searching for Fermat’s Last Theorem The Proof, Penn & Teller’s Tim’s Vermeer, Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer, the Bruce Lee biography Be Water, Thor Heyerdahl’s Oscar-winning Kon-Tiki, Stephen Fry’s fandom journey Wagner and Me, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, PBS’s The Farthest: Voyager in Space, the FBI scandal story 1971, Kurt Russell family’s The Battered Basterds of Baseball, and one from everyone’s top 10 list, Harlan County USA.īut how about a documentary about a subject you know you like? Lawrence Kasdan’s Light & Magic fits the bill, a docu-series about the making of Star Wars… and more. The best documentaries tend to be about a subject you had no interest in before watching it. We’ve come a long way from old fashioned stereoscope viewers, but the same awe can be found in the new book 3D Disneyland: Like You’ve Never Seen It Before (available now here at Amazon), a decades past look inside a beloved theme park, including its Tomorrowland and its mid-century modern art movement-inspired world. By the 1950s anyone could preserve life in the moment for future generations via stereo cameras, and every kid marveled at easy to view View-Master reels documenting life across time and space, even via 3D images taken from the actual Apollo missions to the Moon.
#STAR BACKSTAGE PASS GAME MOVIE#
Cinema followed, thanks to a stereoscope release of George Méliès’ 1902 movie A Trip to the Moon. Almost from the inception of photography, stereoscopic viewers brought three dimensions to audiences by 1840, thanks to Charles Wheatstone. With Victorian ingenuity, we could see the past in three dimensions. Early cinema came in the subsequent decades, and both photography and cinema made it possible for we future beings to see the past in color. Since the 1840s, early photography has allowed us to literally see the past. Maybe you don’t think of it as time travel, but written history for millennia has allowed humans to see the past through the eyes of our ancestors. To read previous High Road columns, go to /highroad.If you love history and the idea of time travel, scientists and writers have provided mankind with several options to bridge the two. But maybe next time, you all just go to the mall. Explain good-naturedly that it was next-to-impossible-in-fact-harder-than-giving-birth to get those backstage passes, but you really hope that she has luck doing so, “and here’s the contact name and number so you can ask.” Assume that this was an unusual manipulative lapse into bad judgment on the part of a mother trying to prevent hard feelings between siblings. Since your friend made an unilateral decision to buy that extra ticket, tap into her independent streak.
You and your daughter get to do something really cool together that she will long remember. It’s a shame that your friend is putting you in this awkward position when you have done something so generous for her. Low road: Tell your friend you’ll meet her and her two girls at the event, but “accidentally” give her the wrong date.
This puts me in a difficult position, since I had to jump through hoops to make the backstage thing happen because of strict security. An hour later, she called me back and said she’d bought an additional ticket for her older daughter (whom we barely know) and is “really hoping” that she can come backstage, too. My daughter, who is the same age as hers, also will be with us.
The problem: I gave a friend and her daughter tickets to a special event, which includes backstage passes to meet the entertainer.