Tag: melissa mathison

April 27, 2018

Black Stallion at the Egyptian Theater on Sunday!

A clean and sharp copy of “The Black Stallion” will be screened at the Egyptian Theater (map) in Hollywood on Sunday, April 29. It’s a bit early, 9:15am, but sure it will be a great show.
Screenwriter Jeanne Rosenberg and critic Leonard Maltin will introduce and discuss the film. Try to make it if you can. Only $20 for walk in seats!
It’s a beautiful theater and going to be a really fun time!
http://filmfestival.tcm.com/programs/films/the-black-stallion/

If you didn’t get to see Mel Brooks and “The Producers” at last night’s Gala (neither did I) here’s the skinny;

ROBERT OSBORNE AWARD/THE PRODUCERS ( 1968 )

SCREEN TO STAGE
6:30 pm

TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX
THE ROBERT OSBORNE AWARD: For the inaugural award, TCM will celebrate world-renowned filmmaker director Martin Scorsese and his longtime dedication to preserving and protecting motion picture history. This presentation will be made as part of the official Opening Night Gala and the screening of THE PRODUCERS (1968) to follow. THE PRODUCERS (1968): Mel Brooks once stated that one of his goals in life was to make Adolf Hitler a laughing stock. One of his first attempts in that direction was answering questions about his next project with “Springtime for Hitler.” Over time, however, he conceived of a failing Broadway producer (based on producers he had known or heard of) overselling shares in a guaranteed flop to outwit auditors with a musical romp about Hitler. Brooks was met with resistance as all of the major studios turned the film down as tasteless, as did Zero Mostel, who only agreed to star in the picture because his wife thought the script was funny. Distributor Joseph E. Levine agreed to back the film but didn’t want Brooks to direct, wanted to fire co-star Gene Wilder and, finally, didn’t want to release the film at all. It took urging from Peter Sellers, who had screened a print, to get it into theatres, where it flopped, even though Brooks went on to win an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Within a few years, however, college screenings had turned it into a cult hit, and it is now considered one of the funniest pictures ever made and went on to inspire a hit Broadway play. From Mostel’s seducing an elderly backer (Estelle Winwood) to get her money, through Wilder’s hysterical outbursts to the hilarious “Springtime for Hitler” number, the film is an almost non-stop barrage of inspired, off-beat humor. Restored in 4k by Studiocanal. (d. Mel Brooks, 88m)

MARTIN SCORSESE, MEL BROOKS, LEONARDO DICAPRIO

Here’s a recent (and funny) interview by Mel Brooks:

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/26/605297774/mel-brooks-says-its-his-job-to-make-terrible-things-entertaining

November 6, 2015

Sad News :-{

Melissa Mathison, co-screenwriter on Black Stallion and many other famous films,

has passed away this week.
We will miss her as a writer and friend.
Here is the story in the LA Times;

Steve Chawkins Contact Reporter

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, whose enormously successful “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” became a landmark in film history, specialized in stories revolving around children. But, as she often said, she made a point of not condescending to them.

“I go to movies with my children and see fat kids burping, parents portrayed as total morons, and kids being mean and materialistic, and I feel it’s really slim pickin’s out there,” she told The Times in 1995. “There’s a little dribble of a moral tacked on, but the story is not about that.

“We’d get back in the car after seeing a movie and I’d say, ‘Now what did you think about this?,’ and they’d have nothing to say.”

Mathison, 65, who portrayed children as sensitively heroic, died Wednesday at UCLA Medical Center. The cause was neuroendocrine cancer, her brother Dirk Mathison said.

Mathison’s film credits also include “The Black Stallion” (1979), “The Escape Artist” (1982) and “The Indian in the Cupboard” (1995).

“Kundun” (1997), a movie about the Dalai Lama’s childhood and growth into a young man, reflected her decades-long interest in Tibet.

She received an Oscar nomination for her work on Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” which was released in 1982.

“Melissa had a heart that shined with generosity and love and burned as bright as the heart she gave E.T.,” the director said in a statement Wednesday.

“E.T.” was the story of a young boy in the suburbs and the alien he befriended. While Spielberg had wrestled with the idea of a film about a stranded alien for some time, he asked Mathison to develop the plot.

She described it years later as a “boy-meets-dog story.”

“It is a story of resurrection and redemption.”

When it opened, Times critic Sheila Benson said it was “so full of love and wonder, of pure invention, and the best kind of screen magic, that it’s not only the film of the summer, it may be the film of the decade and possible the double decade.”

Mathison, she said, “seems to know the newly separated young family, that sad American statistic, from its cracked heart out.”

Mathison spent eight weeks writing “E.T.” It made $793 million at the box office worldwide.

She had two children, Georgia and Malcolm, from her marriage to actor Harrison Ford. They divorced in 2004 after a 21-year marriage.

From 1983 to 1985, Mathison, Ford and their children lived on a 700-acre ranch outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., where the screenwriter put her career on hold.

“I have two little children,” she told Newsweek. “I didn’t want to be missing their childhood while I was away, busy writing about children.”

Born in Los Angeles on June 3, 1950, Mathison grew up in the Hollywood Hills, one of five children born to Richard Mathison, who was The Los Angeles Times’ religion editor in the 1950s before becoming Newsweek’s Los Angeles bureau chief, and his wife, Pegeen.

“We weren’t your mainstream ’50s family,” she said in a Times interview. “Both my parents had wonderful, eccentric, artistic friends who treated us as friends as well. How your mind worked was considered important.”

Even though Hollywood was essentially Mathison’s hometown, she still felt a certain thrill at being around show business.

“I remember not really caring that much about the Hollywood premieres because they were always so crowded,” she told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 1982. “But if something like a stagecoach drove by followed by a camera crew, I got really excited.”

She went to UC Berkeley, where she interrupted her studies in political science for a job in the movies with a family friend. The friend was Francis Ford Coppola, whose children she used to baby sit. Mathison became his assistant on the set of “The Godfather, Part II.”

She was soon hooked on film. After Coppola urged her to write, she came up with her script for “The Black Stallion.”

Over the years, Mathison became fascinated by Buddhism and Tibet. In college, she later said, she thought the story of the exiled Dalai Lama would make a great movie. She turned that story into “Kundun.”

“I am sort of famous for little-boy stories, and this was a fantastic little-boy story, a story of destiny and nurturing and tragedy, the idea of finding a 2-year-old child and then investing in him everything that is good about human beings, your people and your beliefs,” she told the New York Times in 1996.

With the help of actor Richard Gere, a supporter of Tibetan causes, she and Ford met with the Dalai Lama in Santa Barbara in 1990. At that meeting and subsequent visits in Santa Cruz and in India, she pitched the notion of a film based on his early years.

The Tibetan spiritual leader wanted “everything to be as correct as possible,” she said in a 1998 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Each time we met I would bring him new scenes.”

Mathison’s last film is due for release in 2016.

“The BFG,” which stands for “big friendly giant,” reunited her with Spielberg, who directed it. Based on a 1982 children’s story by Roald Dahl, the film stars Mark Rylance as the title character, with Bill Hader and Rebecca Hall.

In addition to her children and brother Dirk, Mathison’s survivors include her sisters Melinda Johnson and Stephanie Mathison; and brother Mark Mathison.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

March 28, 2015

Alec Ramsay talks about the Black!

Here’s a blast for your Black Stallion history, an interview with Kelly Reno about working on the classic movie!
He and his wife, Dawn post on the forum so if you have any questions you may find the answers there already. You can always leave a special note to them – BlackStalGal.

Our friends at Horse Illustrated published this last fall but if you didn’t get a chance to read it then you can now. Stop by their site at www.HorseChannel.com and see all the latest stories.

For a bit of Alec’s magic pick up your own Bucephalus at the Gift store!
Thanks for reading … and writing! – tim

It was 35 years ago when a young boy from Colorado named Kelly Reno thundered down a pristine beach against an aquamarine sea with outstretched arms, riding bareback
on a black Arabian stallion named Cass Ole. Together, they became the embodiment of the boy and horse in Walter Farley’s classic tale, The Black Stallion, giving life to Alec Ramsay and the wild stallion The Black in ways that only the extraordinary visual storytelling of Hollywood conveys.
As timeless today as when the Academy Award winning movie was released in 1979, Reno was only 11 years old with no acting experience when filming began. In contrast, riding was totally ingrained from growing up on his parents’ 10,000-acre cattle ranch.
“Basically, my whole childhood from birth was sitting on horseback somewhere,” says Reno, now 47. A family friend spotted an advertisement in The Denver Post for the lead role in a new movie based on Walter Farley’s book, The Black Stallion, and told Reno’s mother. The idea of getting out of school to go to Denver for auditions held immediate appeal to the young boy. “One thing led to another and I happened to be what they were looking for, and I wound up getting the part,” says Reno. “I had never done any acting, but I was always kind of a ham.” The actor who played Alec Ramsay recalls his classic role.
By Elizabeth Kaye McCall

This is the link to the full story with photos;
HI Kelly and the BlackStallion

Ride on!!!

February 24, 2015

Horse Illustrated on Black Stallion’s 35th movie anniversary!

Here’s a nice article on the Black Stallion in the movies written by our friend Elizabeth McCall.
This were great days in Italy with so much to see, do and learn. Very talented people working on a “small” film like Black Stallion was very, VERY exciting.
Let’s Do it Again!!

Life on the Set of the Black Stallion

Walter Farley’s son, Tim, talks about the filming of the movie just in time for its 35th anniversary.

By Elizabeth Kaye McCall | November 2014

Tim Farley was wrapping up his photography degree at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., when his father Walter’s 1941 novel, The Black Stallion, began its transformation to the big screen. Francis Ford Coppola’s Academy Award-winning feature film was released 35 years ago this fall, and it remains a cinematic classic.

It’s the story of a young boy named Alec Ramsay, who is shipwrecked on a desert island with a wild Arabian stallion that he befriends and names The Black. After being rescued and later discovered by a veteran racehorse trainer, they enter a match race between two champions of the track. Inspiring millions when it debuted in 1979, the film’s exquisite portrayal of the horse-human bond is more appreciated than ever today.

Kelly Reno, who plays Alec, grew up riding and was a natural when it came to the bareback scenes.

When the movie first headed into production in 1977, Tim skipped his graduation ceremonies to work on it.

Were you there from the start?
I had the honor of working on the movie from the very first days. I met director Carroll Ballard when he and my dad were looking for an Arabian stallion to play The Black. I was still in college. I went to talk to Carroll and to Fred Roos, the producer, to see if I could get a job. Of course, they said I could have a job. They didn’t say they would pay me at first. I was a 21-year-old kid who knew nothing about making movies.

What did you do?
My screen credit was production assistant, but with only about 30 of us on crew, I did a little bit of everything. My first job was working in the office. The film was in preproduction at that point, and one of my assignments was to make copies of all the script changes for the crew. However, I also ran off an extra set of copies to send to my dad! They weren’t real happy with that. Everyone was wondering, “Where is he getting all this information?” I was his mole!

But actually my dad is the one who came up with the fun sequence in the jockey’s room before The Black races. It became a humorous scene in the movie, because they kept adding weight to this little kid. The way the script was originally written had Alec sneaking weight into his pockets, or putting on a weight belt or something. My dad said, “Nobody would ever do that because the officials add all the handicap weight jockeys must carry before a race. They would never sneak weight.” He came up with some helpful ideas.

What was it like being on the set?
They probably wouldn’t make a film like that these days. It was shot almost like a documentary, with a small crew on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. That’s why the footage is so different. Those scenes with the magic of the boy and the horse getting to be friends on the island really did happen. I was one of the lucky people there watching a young Kelly Reno portray Alec Ramsay, together with Cass Ole as The Black.

It was exciting. Even though we had to take cold showers! Working on those beach sequences, there were no hotels out there. We stayed in an empty school with cold-water showers. Every once in a while you’d see a tourist come through for an hour or two, but we were pretty far out. Almost all the locations were like that.

How were those galloping-on-the-beach scenes filmed?
We had do to a lot of tracking shots, like sequences of The Black running down the sand bar, especially when Alec’s learning to ride and keeps falling off. But, we couldn’t say, “Oh we need some dolly track here for 500 yards and we have to go 30 mph.” So, how are you going to do that? Well, they came up with a Citroën 2CV; it’s like a French version of a Volkswagen Beetle. With one wrench you can take apart the whole thing. We took the doors off and took the seats out. We used that as our [camera] dolly to race down the beach because the horse was going pretty fast. We had to kind of wing it.

What stands out?
Probably the “tag” sequence, when Alec first rides The Black. The scenes where he gives the horse a little bit of the seaweed, then they start following each other back and forth, and pretty soon, he gets on the back of the horse to ride—and keeps falling off. Those scenes on the beach were magical. Also, at the end of the movie where you see that big double rainbow and the horse rolls on the ground and Kelly [Reno] rolls on the ground. It was totally impromptu. It’s during the credit roll at the very end of the film.

The budget on The Black Stallion wouldn’t even pay for most TV commercials these days. I think that the actual budget, including advertising, was under $15 million.

You took lots of photos on set. How was shooting Cass Ole?
He and Kelly had a good relationship because they spent so much time together before the movie started, but Cass Ole was kind of like the character of The Black. He was very independent, knew he was gorgeous, and that everybody loved him. He’d take control if you’d let him. On the other hand, Cass was gentle with Kelly. He didn’t run off, and he could have several times. That’s saying something about Corky Randall too. Corky trained Cass for months to be able to work him at liberty and have him listen to voice commands to come back. When Corky would call and crack his whip, Cass would come to him no matter where he was.

What else was memorable?
The most memorable days for me were on the island. It took us months to get some of those shots. It was almost like in the movie—when Alec arrives back in America, that first sequence when he’s in a real bathroom with running water contrasted with being on the island for months. That’s kind of what happened to us too.

It was fascinating driving to the set daily with Mickey Rooney in Toronto, the location for our 1940s New York scenes. Mickey had been in a long career slump, but The Black Stallion brought him an Oscar nomination and he returned to the stage.

Corky Randall trained Cass Ole to come with the crack of a whip.

Here’s to the 35th anniversary. What’s ahead?
We’re still working on getting that next feature, The Black Stallion Revolts, into production. I’d also love to see them re-issue an enhanced version of the film. There’s a lot of footage no one’s ever seen. If you put that together with the extra footage from The Black Stallion Returns, all the outtakes and deleted scenes and so forth, they could make a three-day Movie of the Week for TV or come up with a great boxed set on Blu-Ray.

Speaking of Blu-Ray …
On March 18th, the HD version of The Black Stallion feature film came out on Blu-Ray disk. That’s big news for the fans. It’s an MGM/UA film, but a www.foxconnect.com release. You can find it on www.theblackstallion.com.

ELIZABETH KAYE McCALL is an author, journalist, and media consultant based in Los Angeles, Calif., specializing in the horse industry, travel and entertainment. Her new children’s book about a talking horse, Rajalika Speak, was inspired by her own Egyptian Arabian stallion that “speaks on request.”

President and creator of TheBlackStallion.com, the official Black Stallion fan site, TIM FARLEY is based in Florida, where he furthers the spirit of The Black Stallion legacy along with his work as co-founder of the HorseTales.org literacy program.

Another article from Horse Channel coming soon!