Action sequences get developed for movies but don’t make it into the final product all the time. The reasons can vary from something as simple as cost to changes in the screenplay move the story in a different direction. For A Good Day To Die Hard, Eric Jacobus at The Stunt People was brought on to develop a knife fight sequence between hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) and bad guy Alik (Rasha Bukvic). Unfortunately, the sequence got cut before it could be filmed for the movie, but Jacobus has shared the video his crew shot while developing the sequence. On The Stunt People’s YouTube channel, Jacobus notes that this footage won’t be on the upcoming blu-ray releaseof the film, so enjoy it now.

For my money, the sequence is pretty intense and rivals, if not exceeds, much of what we saw in the final film. It’s a shame that this wasn’t included.

Via Bleeding Cool.

You can take a lot of things from Warner Brothers’ President Jeff Robinov’s talk with Entertainment Weekly for their Summer Preview issue, which should hit subscriber’s mailboxes today and newsstands on Monday, but the main thing we’re taking from the interview is that we should never trust scoop from Latino Review’s El Mayimbe ever again.

Back in the beginning of March, El Mayimbe once again broke out the camcorder and gave us a video blog detailing some hot scoop regarding the tumultuous Justice League film. Unfortunately, that video has been taken down (surprise, surprise), but we reported on the contents of it here. Mayimbe stated emphatically that Christopher Nolan would be taking over a Joss Whedon-like supervisory role with Warner’s DC Comics films, that Zack Snyder would be on board as producer if not director for Justice League and that Christian Bale would be returning to the film as Batman.

Entertainment Weekly, which is part of the same Time Warner media conglomerate that Warner Brothers is, asked Robinov point blank about the rumor:

However, Robinov was unequivocal when asked if the rumor is true that Nolan will produce aJustice League movie, and bring Christian Bale back with him: “No, no it’s not.” (Nolan’s reps, who have previously declined to comment on that rumor, also confirmed Robinov’s statement and told EW that he definitely wasn’t involved with Justice League. Nolan is currently busy prepping his sci-fi film Interstellar.)

I’m sure Mayimbe will say these denials is just a smokescreen by the studio to throw people off the scent of his rumor. But Nolan is prepping Interstellar, and casting has already begun. It’s not logical that the director can have as hands on a role on the DC Comics film franchises that El Mayimbe claims while directing a new film at the same time, especially with a 2015 target date for the Justice League film.

This has come at the end of fairly bad stretch for El Mayimbe. How bad? Let’s roll out the “El Mayimbe Roll Call of Shame!”

•  June 5, 2012: El Mayimbe claims that four sources have told him that Black Panther will be the second film released by Marvel in 2014. We all know now that it is Guardians of the Galaxy.
• December 3, 2012: States Darkseid will be the villain in Justice League. And…
• December 13, 2012: States the movie will be based on three particular issues of the Justice League of America comic book. And…
• January 24, 2013: That the JL line-up will consist of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Flash. This version of the film was eventually scrapped, making these three rumors moot.
• January 29, 2013: Theorizes that Tony Stark will be headed into space at the end of Iron Man 3 based on a armor that showed up in a toy design. This has yet to be rejected, but as recent ads for the film show us, the armor could simply be part of the armor armada that Stark calls in during that big battle scene. UPDATE: We now know this one isn’t true either.
• February 4, 2013: A big one, where El Mayimbe states that Planet Hulk and World War Hulk will be the framework for Marvel’s Phase II and Phase III. This was shot down by Ain’t It Cool News and Joss Whedon. Mayimbe holds on to the idea that his version is still true, and gives reasons here.
• February 15, 2013: States Jason Momoa was offered the part of Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy. The part went to Dave Bautista. El Mayimbe states Momoa priced himself out of the role.
• March 3, 2013: The Nolan/Justice League thing we are talking about today.
• April 3, 2013: States the Controller will be a henchman for Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy. Rumor yet to be refuted.
• April 8, 2013: Stated Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez is developing a film for Marvel, most likely Doctor Strange. Rumor yet to be refuted.

El Mayimbe has become the film rumor version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. And like that fable, there will quickly come a time when film sites like us will simply refuse to listen to him anymore.

Why is he so wrong so often? Is it like he wants us to believe, that he is right and the studios are lying just to make him look bad? Dubious. Are the studios changing their plans after lets the cat out of the bag? Even more dubious. Or are his sources at Marvel and Warner Brothers deliberately feeding him incorrect information just to discredit him? That seems more likely.

The truth will come out in the coming months and years. Maybe, flying in the face of all logic and all denials, El Mayimbe’s rumors will come true. We’ll see. But if that happens, I’ll be the first to apologize for being wrong, something El Mayimbe is reticent to do.

Well, now that that’s over, let’s go back to the Robinov interview. The other big news from the interview is that Robinov states that there will be an announcement coming in the next few weeks about Warner’s plans for films based on the DC characters, including what films they will be making. My guess this would come after The Man of Steel debuts on June 14th. No better time than than after a big weekend for your tentpole film to tell us where you’ll be going from there.

Robinov also states that starting with The Man of Steel and going forward all the DC films will not be standalone films but be open to be part of a shared universe. That goes for the new Batman films as well.

Be sure to check out this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly for more.

In the second half of our discussion with Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvarez, we talk about the rebooted franchise’s future, which, by its nature, is somewhat spoilerish. If you haven’t seen the film already, take care moving forward.

Q: Now I noticed that you used some of the original audio of Professor Knowby, so in a way are going the J. J. Abrams/Star Trek route by being a remake and a sequel at the same time?

A: We’re not overwriting anything. We’re not saying that this movie overwrites the mythology of the original. They live together. If you see it from a certain point of view, this happens at the same house, thirty years later. The car’s still there. If you didn’t see the second one where the car goes back in time, at the end of the first one everybody dies. The car’s still there. But this happens thirty years later and there’s an old rusted car next to the house. There’s definitely a lot of things to geek out over if you’re a fan of the original.

Q: Given everyone’s excitement over the reception of the film at SXSW there has already been some talk of a sequel. Given that Evil Dead II took an interesting shift in tone away from the first one are you thinking of doing something similar or do you have to go in a completely new direction to avoid even further comparisons to the original?

A: If people know where [a sequel] goes, than we’ve failed. I think we really have to surprise people with a sequel. We have to really go to a different place. I agree that there is something in the Evil Dead saga that every movie is in a completely different place from the previous one. It would have to happen with this one too. The sequel should surprise you and should be something that you don’t expect.

Q: So it may very well be an adaptation of the off-Broadway musical?

A: (laughs) That would be good. I loved that.

This weekend, director Fede Alavrez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s classic horror film The Evil Dead opens. Recently, I had a chance to chat with the director about the film, working with Raimi and the perils of remaking a cult classic. Part of our discussion moved into territory that would spoil the film, so we’ll save that for later this weekend.

Q: Over the last several years, we’ve seen a lot of horror film remake that no one has been too happy about, but the word coming out of SXSW (following the screening of The Evil Dead) has been very positive. Did you have to live with the worry that fans were not going to be receptive no matter how good a film you put out there.

A: A little bit, at the early stages when we didn’t know exactly what the movie was going to be. Remaking a cult classic sounds like a fool’s errand and it’s going to be impossible to succeed. But it’s so different from all those other movies in that it isn’t a big studio release. This is a franchise that is owned by Sam Raimi, Rob Tappert and Bruce Campbell, the guys who did the original movie. They’re the ones who wanted to do a new Evil Dead, they’re ready for a new film. It comes from them and they’re the creative producers.

It’s completely different from those other horror movies you’re talking about. Those are properties that are owned by studios and they’re not connected to the original creators at all. They do three or four different scripts from different writers and then one day a director comes in and shoots it. This movie, I write it with one of my best friends. The two of us are the biggest Sam Raimi fans since we were kids. So we write it from scratch. We do two drafts and then we had Diablo Cody do a pass on dialogue but we didn’t use much of that, so that’s why she doesn’t have a credit. Then we shot the movie and cut the movie and my director’s cut is the one you’re going to see in the theaters.

And that doesn’t happen often in Hollywood. Usually there’s a producer’s cut and that doesn’t have much to do with what the director wanted to do. And like I said, [those other remakes have] a script that was written by several writers trying to do different things and that’s why those movies sometimes don’t work as they’re so many voices at the same time. This one is just Sam and myself basically just going out and making the movie. It’s a more independent film in a way.

Q: How involved was Sam in giving feedback during development? It seems to be that it would be like an adoptive father trying to raise a kid while the biological father was looking over his shoulder.

A: Part of his job was to give us as much freedom as he could. He knows as a director that the last thing a producer has to do is not be in the director’s face forcing him to do something that he doesn’t want. He was really committed to giving me that freedom. He said at the beginning “I am going to give to you everything that they never gave me, which is complete freedom to do whatever you want to do.” And he knows his audience better than anybody. He was really helpful in the process of the writing. When he read a scene that he knew that the fans were going to love, he would always encourage us to keep going and go a little further. He was a great mentor to have. He struck the perfect balance between being there and giving me all the room possible to make the movie I want.

Q: I think most people see the decision to cast the film’s lead as a female character instead of a male one as a concession that you just can’t replicate what Bruce Campbell did in the original films. Was there anything else that came out of that decision that you discovered you could do while in the writing process?

A: Well, it wasn’t so much that we said “Well, since we can’t use Bruce let’s create a female character,” as it was more an organic thing of the story. The thing, though, is if I talk too much about it, I’ll be spoiling the movie. The heart of the story is kind of the same as the heart of the original story – these women are driving these men crazy, right? The women are the ones to get possessed first and the guys are the ones who have to deal with it. Such a great idea from the original and it’s something that really sets apart the original film from the rest of the trend which was always a woman being chased by a guy with a chainsaw or a hammer or whatever. Evil Dead was completely contrary with guys being harassed and tortured by the women. That’s something I think is a key idea in the original and is definitely back in this one.

We have a new hero, in a way, and at the end of the day Jane’s character is that person. But like I said, if we talk too much about it I think we’ll be in trouble. But it wasn’t just trying to do something different from Ash it was just something that organically happened with the story.

Q: In the film you stayed away from a lot of computer created visuals and instead opted for practical effects.

A: I think horror needs to be done with practical effects. Nobody’s scared of CGI. Even if you don’t consciously recognize the CGI, I think your mind does. And if for some reason you see something that feels off or weird, you’re not scared. So we knew that we wanted to be scary, graphic and gory we had to go practical. All of the best moments of the movie are not only practical, but 100% real. It’s the same kind of effects you could have done in the `50s.

And also you want to pay some respect to the original movies. Those movies are classics, they’ve stayed around for ages. You want to make sure that you don’t make a film that is forgettable in two or three years. And when you use CGI usually movies get dated fast. Usually the greatest CGI in five years looks weird and then ten years later is unwatchable.

And it is here where our conversation veered into spoiler territory, so see the film this weekend then come back on Sunday for Part Two.

Shakespeare may have said that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, but that doesn’t mean that finding the right name for something is any less an arduous task.

Take Star Wars, for instance. George Lucas at one point planned on encumbering his space opera with the rather awful The Adventures Of Luke Starkiller, As Taken From The Journal Of The Whills – Saga I: Star Wars. A decade or so earlier, one of Lucas’s idols, Stanley Kubrick, found himself in a similar predicament. He was in the midst of adapting Peter George’s Cold War thriller Red Alert into a satire about nuclear war and felt that the book’s title wasn’t sufficient to convey what his film was about. So he sat down and started jotting ideas into a notebook, the results of which you can see below. It is interesting to see him experimenting with the format and the number of permutations of words he went through to find just the right combination. I suppose that it would be more informative about his creative process if he had just written each idea down in a straight column, but then again Kubrick was really never one to let people into his thoughts on how he made his films.

I have to admit that out all of the ones seen here, my two favorites are The Passion Of Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Strangelove’s The Secret Uses Of Uranus, though I could see that second one attracting an entirely different kind of audience.

Via Lists Of Note.

Let’s start off this edition of the Weekend Read with a question – Are audiences becoming more prudish about sex scenes in movies? That’s what is explored in Nerve’s article The Demise of the Hollywood Sex Scene. Turns out that the answer probably lies more in the simultaneous rise of the home theater and unrestricted-by-network-censorship cable series like Californication and Game Of Thrones. Stimulating reading, nonetheless.

As movies move through development they often pass through the hands of a number of writers, each trying to contribute whatever the developing producer or director want in the screenplay. But not every writer who contributes something to a script gets their name on the final product. The process of determining who does get final screen credit (and the years’ worth of residuals that accompany a screen credit) is administered by the Writers Guild of America. As I discovered when researching something once, the WGA does not publicly comment on the arbitration process. But Die Hard 2 and Bad Boys writer Doug Richardson gives us a peek behind-the-scenes at the nasty fight over how the credits were determined for his 2005 Hostage, which he had adapted from a novel by Robert Crais, turned out to be. (And check out the rest of Richardson’s blog for more strange-but-true stories from the trenches of Hollywood.)

But not all stories involving novel writers and film adaptations of their work are as contentious. In fact, sometimes authors are thrilled with the final product, especially with whatever star is chosen to play their favorite character. The Atlantic talked to several big name novelists about the big screen adaptations they are most happy with.

One of the directors in the Atlantic article who delivered what a novelist thought was a faithful adaptation of his work despite a number of changes, was Quentin Tarantino with his translation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Rum Punch into Jackie Brown. It just so happens that this past week saw the iconic director’s 50th birthday, for which London’s The Guardian compiled this list of five reasons to be thankful for from the director’s career.

We end this week’s installment with an appreciation of the sometimes forgotten Marx Brother Zeppo, and how he sartorially influenced one young actor by the name of Archibald Leach, though you may know him as Cary Grant.

The Weekend Read is weekly roundup of some top notch film articles that we think deserve your attention.

Sam Raimi’s Oz, The Great And Powerful is still doing some gangbuster business in its third weekend of release with the prequel to the literary The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz being poised to easily pass the $200 million mark in domestic ticket sales over the coming week. But what of other cinematic trips over the rainbow to author L. Frank Baum’s magical land? Over at the George Eastman House blog, there is a short post about how the museum is preserving not only the original Technicolor camera negatives to the classic 1939 MGM The Wizard Of Oz but also their preservation of the only known print of a silent 1910 Wizard Of Oz film.

And speaking of film restoration, Some Came Running has an excellent, in depth interview with British film restorationist James White about his work in preserving the likes of Hitchcock’s silent thriller Blackmail and Lucio Fulci’s notorious Zombi. The conversation covers the transition from the more traditional methods of photochemical film restoration to work that is now being all done in the digital realm and what dilemmas that can pose for those doing the work.

And while digital distribution and presentation is clearly the future of the moviegoing experience, Open Space, the blog at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art extolls the virtues of the film print by talking about their first viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo in its original imbibition Technicolor format.

And to finish things up, the New York Times has an appreciation of the nearly forgotten comedy duo of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey to coincide with the release of the nine film Wheeler & Woolsey: RKO Comedy Classics Collection from the Warner Archives Collection. If you have a love for other early film comedy the likes of Laurel and Hardy you should find something to like here. The Warner Archive has also posted a portion of the films online.

Hugh Jackman and director Gavin Hood on the set of X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.

It has been no secret that former 20th Century Fox honcho Tom Rothman liked to put his two cents into the production of various comic book adaptations put out by his studio. But filmmakers have been rather loathe to discuss it probably out of concern about working at the studio again. And audiences were left with the results – films like The Fantastic Four and X-Men Origins: Wolverine that didn’t live up to their expectations and weren’t particularly liked by critics.

Perhaps spurred on by Rothman’s retirement at the end of last year, cinematographer Don McAlpine, who shot X-Men Origins: Wolverine for director Gavin Hood, has come out in a recent interview with the Australian Cinematographer’s Society’s AU Magazine, and described the shooting of the film as a “political minefield.”

I think basically one of my main functions on that film was to help Gavin through the political minefield that he’d found himself in the midst of. You know, a first time director at any of the major studios is just considered “game”! [laughs]

And so we had an endless struggle to try and make the film that he wanted. I mean they actually asked him to do this Wolverine as more of an adult drama. And of course after the first week they realised they didn’t want that, and they wanted it to be just the classic kiddies’ action movie. So to still make a presentable movie and stay employed by the studios was quite an interesting battle.

It will be interesting to see if any other filmmakers come forward with their own stories of working with the studio and how that affected the final product. It should also be interesting to see if that with Rothman’s departure there will be a change in how management deals with its talent who are making the films.

There are times when you watch a new film and you instantly know that it is going to be considered a classic. And there are sometimes when you just don’t realize it. That’s the position that Tandem Productions’ Jerry Perenchio, Bud Yorkin, and Robin French were in when they began reviewing rough cuts of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Although they presumably read the screenplay that Scott brought them to finance, they certainly seemed to be disappointed in the film that Scott returned with if the recently discovered studio notes are any indication.

Reddit user VanTrashcan (via SlashFilm) has brought the sheet of notes from an early 1982 screening of the film to the internet’s attention and boy were these guys not impressed with what they saw. Rough comments range from “This voice over is terrible, the audience will fall asleep,” to “Why did they put in more slow motion in Zhora’s death?” to “This movie gets worse every screening.” Damn.

What’s really interesting is that these notes are from the screening of what is Scott’s third edit and the producers are still not happy with what was being turned in. There’s some brief discussion about taking the film out of Scott’s hands and assigning another editor on the film, which leads to speculation as to how disastrous that would have worked out.

There is a long history of hiding Mickey Mouse in various Disney films from 1982’s TRON to various Pixar films. But this is probably the first time that a Mickey Mouse cameo has been discovered in a film from three decades before it became the property of Disney.

The blog at the official Star Wars site has discovered something in a handful of background scenes in The Empire Strikes Back – computer displays that resemble Mickey’s silhouette. You can see them in the screen grabs below.

Now, I don’t think that anyone is saying that George Lucas was already hinting that he was thinking about selling his Lucasfilm empire to the House of Mouse way back then. It’s just a fun coincidence. Hopefully you’ve gotten a chuckle out of it like I did.