For the last five decades, Sight and Sound magazine’s every-ten-year-poll of film critics and filmmakers has always reached the same consensus – That Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane was the greatest film of all time.

But the pillars of cinematic heaven were shaken today when Sight and Sound released the results of their latest poll which states that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo has taken the top spot, bumping Citizen Kane down to number two. Vertigo first made it onto the poll in 1972 where it tied at #11. By 1982 it was able to claw its way up to #7. In 1992 it had jumped to #4, and in 2002 it jumped again to #2.

Sight and Sound polled over 800 “film critics, academics, distributors, writers and programmers from all corners of the globe” in order to achieve the rankings announced today. (Disclosure – I was not asked to participate. The nerve.)

Here is the poll’s Top Ten -

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)

2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)

5. Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)

10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

You can read all of Sight And Sound‘s coverage of their annual poll here.

I have to admit that I am a bit surprised by this turn of events. Not so much that the critical group-think has shifted somewhat. That was bound to happen over time. I’m just mildly surprised that the film to unseat Welles’s masterpiece was Vertigo as I frankly don’t think it is his best work. Sure, I would put it in his top five, where it would be sharing space with Strangers On A Train, Notorious, Psycho and North By Northwest. Granted these are based on personal preference, but in a way, aren’t all these lists?

Vertigo certainly wasn’t a big hit with critics when it was first released and even when the critical move to re-evaluate Hitchcock as an artist rather than as a showman started in the 1960s, the film was not one that would be part of those discussions. But Vertigo was one of five of Hitchcock’s films that were taken out of circulation in 1973 and I am forced to wonder if its reemergence to public view ten years later led critics to embrace it a bit more enthusiastically due to its renewed availability.

Those who have travelled with me know that I like to work in visits to real world movie and television filming locations onto the itinerary. And such side trips have taken me from places like Cincinnati’s Fountain Square as seen in the opening to the classic sitcom WKRP In Cincinnati to the Tribecca firehouse that serves as the headquarters of the Ghostbusters.

The blog ScoutingNY has not only been a wonderful site highlighting the great and stunning architecture that Manhattan and its environs have to offer, but it has also been a great resource for finding sites that have previously been used in various films. The past two weeks, the blog has been taking a tour of New York City’s five boroughs, tracking down the locations of Woody Allen’s quintessential romantic comedy about New York, Annie Hall in which he starred with Diane Keaton.

Allen is well known for his use of the city as his own personal backlot, and this two part article is a great trip back in time to how the city looked in the 1970s. As location shooting traps sites in cinematic amber, this trip highlights the contrasts the changes three-and-a-half decades has brought. We can see where neighborhood movie theaters and Cooney island roller coasters have disappeared. Changes run from the cosmetic updates to the Central Park Zoo to a bookseller that now houses a Prada store. Perhaps more amazing is how some of the little things like street blocks, store fronts and even park benches have remained same.

It’s a fascinating read if you’re a Woody Allen fan or just planning on a trip to Manhattan and want to see some sites that aren’t your usual tourist destinations.

You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Given that we’ve taken the time to chart out a meticulously chart out a timeline for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it should be obvious that we here at FilmBuffOnline love a good, multi-film cinematic universe. But while most films that could be described as exisiting in the same world are franchise features like Star Trek or the Bourne films,  director Quentin Tarantino is one of the very few where the connections exist but aren’t necessarily part of the overall ongoing story.*

From fairly early on in his careeer, Tarantino has made it obvious that his films  all inhabit the same universe. Reservoir Dogs‘ Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) is brother to Pulp Fiction‘s Vincent Vega (John Travolta), while the “Alabama” that Reservior Dogs‘ Mr White mentions as having worked with is the same character played by Patricia Arquette in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance. And the movies that they all watch include Kill Bill, From Dusk `Till Dawn and Jackie Brown.

More recently, Tarantino stated that Eli Roth’s Donny “the Bear Jew” Donowitz from Inglorious Basterds is the father of movie producer Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek) in True Romance.

And this brings up an interesting notion. While the the modern day set films all seem to exist in a world nearly identical to our own, they actually exist in a reality where World War Two ended in a dramatically different fashion. So how would this have affected society? One writer at Cracked first theorized the fall out that such a change to history would have had and more recently a commentator on Reddit expanded on the idea.

It’s well known that all of Tarantino’s films take place in the same universe – this is established by the fact that Mr. Blonde and Vince Vega are brothers, everybody smokes Red Apple cigarettes, Mr. White worked with Alabama from True Romance, etc.

As it turns out, Donny Donowitz, ‘The Bear Jew’, is the father of movie producer Lee Donowitz from True Romance – which means that, in Tarantino’s universe, everybody grew up learning about how a bunch of commando Jews machine gunned Hitler to death in a burning movie theater, as opposed to quietly killing himself in a bunker.

Because World War 2 ended in a movie theater, everybody lends greater significance to pop culture, hence why seemingly everybody has Abed-level knowledge of movies and TV. Likewise, because America won World War 2 in one concentrated act of hyperviolent slaughter, Americans as a whole are more desensitized to that sort of thing. Hence why Butch is unfazed by killing two people, Mr. White and Mr. Pink take a pragmatic approach to killing in their line of work, Esmerelda the cab driver is obsessed with death, etc.

You can extrapolate this further when you realize that Tarantino’s movies are technically two universes – he’s gone on record as saying that Kill Bill and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn take place in a ‘movie movie universe’; that is, they’re movies that characters from the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof universe would go to see in theaters. (Kill Bill, after all, is basically Fox Force Five, right on down to Mia Wallace playing the title role.)

What immediately springs to mind about Kill Bill and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn? That they’re crazy violent, even by Tarantino standards. These are the movies produced in a world where America’s crowning victory was locking a bunch of people in a movie theater and blowing it to bits – and keep in mind, Lee Donowitz, son of one of the people on the suicide mission to kill Hitler, is a very successful movie producer.

Basically, it turns every Tarantino movie into alternate reality sci fi. I love it so hard.

EDIT: Oh hai upvotes. Glad everybody liked this as much as I did! Let me address some things:

1) I don’t think the same actors necessarily correlate to the same characters – the bit about Mia Wallace in Kill Bill seemed like just an interesting detail or maybe an exception rather than the rule. Mr. White and The Wolf are two different people. That said, I remember Tarantino mentioning that Sheriff McGraw and The Wolf are the only characters that can jump between the regular movie and the movie movie universe. Proof.

2) I’m not implying that nuking scores of innocent people is less violent than anything else – I just think it would have a different effect on the American psyche. Growing up knowing our home country vaporized two whole cities has influenced our culture in its own ways; I feel like the movie theater plot would do the same. Also, since this is primarily a fan theory, I don’t think the psychology of it needs to be 100% irrefutable and airtight.

3) Yes, I initially saw this on Cracked and then extrapolated on it. Since it was a fan theory and it blew my mind, I posted it here.

I have to say that I really love this idea.  An interesting theory and well thought out to be sure. It’ll be fun to see if Tarantino’s future films will continue to sustain it.

And check out the rest of Reddit’s Fan Theories discussions if you have a couple of hours to kill. So far my two favorites are the one that states that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air actually takes place in the afterlife and a rather creepy one regarding the cartoon series Rugrats.

* Kevin Smith’s “View Askewinerse” would probably be the only other one.

Via SlashFilm.

Film adaptations of books are something that goes back all the way to the earliest days of cinema and the British Film Institute has announced the discovery of a very example of one such adaption in their archives.

The Death Of Poor Joe, a 1901 production that adapted a scene out of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House was discovered by archivist Bryony Dixon, while doing unrelated research. The film had come to the BFI back in 1954 as part of a collection from a film collector who knew the film’s director G. A. Smith. It had gone unnoticed in the archives as it had been mis-labeled as the 1902 film Man Meets Ragged Boy. It’s original release predates by a few months Scrooge (aka Marley’s Ghost) which had been thought the be the earliest Dickens film adaption.

The one-minute long film depicts the scene where Joe, a chimney-sweep, lies dying outside a church yard in the snow. As a night watchman attempts to comfort him, Joe mistakes his lamp for heaven and dies.

Smith was a British silents director who managed to create nearly 100 short films between 1897 and 1910.

The discovery of the one-minute long film comes just a day after the BFI held a celebration for the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth. The BFI has announced that they plan on screening the film at their upcoming program of Dickens’ pre-1914 shorts.

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series of novels have thrilled readers for a century. And although it has taken until now for those books to make the transition to big screen it hasn’t been for a lack of trying. And while the complexity of bringing to the screen such fantastic creatures as the four-armed Martian tharks and eight-legged thoats has only been achievable in the last couple of years thanks to advances in CG technology, the very first attempt to mount a cinematic version of John Carter actually dates back to the 1930s.

The person spearheading this early attempt was animator Bob Clampett. Hired onto the Harman-Ising Studio at Warner Brothers in 1931 following his high school graduation, Clampett was slowly learning the art of animation and trying to work his way up the cartoon studio ladder. Feeling that the chances for upwards mobility were limited at Warners, Clampett decided that he should develop his own projects independently. Realizing that there could be more to animation than just the cute animals that made up his work on the Merrie Melodie shorts he was doing at Warners, Clampett approached Burroughs in 1936 with the idea of bringing John Carter and his adventures on Barsoom, as the red planet is called by its inhabitants, to the big screen via animation.

To his credit, Burroughs immediately gleamed on to the idea, recognizing that no special effects budget could limit what an animator could draw. He gave Clampett permission to begin developing a series of cartoons that would not be strict adaptations of the books but would take the cast of characters and place them in new adventures. Joining Clampett on the project was Burroughs’ son John Coleman Burroughs. Recently graduated from college, John helped to develop the look of his father’s world by sculpting models of many of Barsoom’s inhabitants.

Clampett’s idea was for a series of nine-minute long shorts, each one telling a complete story. Clampett worked nights and weekends on the test footage, even enlisting fellow Warner Brothers animators Chuck Jones and Robert Cannon to lend an occasional hand. The finished test reel was shown to various studios and MGM expressed initially interest but backed down when their sales representatives in the south and mid-westreported that theater owners were more interested in more Tarzan than they were in a possible John Carter of Mars animated series so the idea died. It wouldn’t be until 1941 when the Fleischer Studio’s first Superman cartoon would arrive in theaters showing that animation could indeed stretch beyond the boundaries it was currently confined within.

The footage below appears to be all that is left of however much material Clampett may have generated for the project. There’s also a voice over from Clampett from what I am presuming is a public appearance later in life where he talks about the approaches he used in creating these tests. At just about two minutes in length, the footage gives us a tantalizing glimpse at a series of cartoons that could have changed how animation was used to tell stories.

Of course, Clampett would go on to make a number of other impactful and lasting contributions to the art of animation. But a potential movie version of John Carter would bounce around Hollywood for several decades. Special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen was approached in the mid-1950s to work on a version but he declined, feeling that the script wasn’t strong enough. In 1986, Disney would launch an attempt that saw a number of screenwriters, including a pre-Pirates Of The Caribbean Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio,  and Back To The Future‘s Bob Gale and director John McTiernan working on it before letting the rights lapse in 2002. Paramount promptly snatched them up and had Robert Rodriguez, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow‘s Kerry Conran and Jon Favreau all working on it before the studio decided not to renew their option on the rights in 2006. Disney snatched the rights back up and the reslut is now in theaters.

Legendary conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie has died in his Los Angeles home. He was 82.

McQuarrie was working as a technical illustrator (most notably at CBS  for their coverage of NASA’s Apollo program) and film poster designer when a fan of his in the film industry came to him with an offer. The fan had an idea for space epic featuring robots, star ships, knights, weird aliens and exotic planets that he needed to be conveyed to financial backers and studio executives. This fan went to McQuarrie and asked him if the artist would give his ideas shape and substance.

McQuarrie thought that fan’s idea would never make it to the screen–too expensive–but threw himself into the project full-force anyway. He made over 20 drawings to flesh out his fan’s dream, designing numerous worlds, aliens, and characters based on his fan’s script.

That fan, of course, was George Lucas and that concept was what turned out to be Star Wars.  Lucas showed McQuarrie’s concept drawings to potential financial backers in order to shore up financing. McQuarrie’s ability to put Lucas’ words into visual images helped many backers and studio executives see that Lucas’ outlandish script could work–and be beautiful. McQuarrie’s art swayed a lot of doubters to Lucas’ side, including comic legend Roy Thomas, who convinced his friend and mentor Stan Lee to reconsider his decision on Marvel Comics doing a promotional Star Wars tie-in comic book series (which I previously covered in detail here).

While most of McQuarrie’s designs were changed quite considerably by the time they got to the screen, I think it’s safe to say that if it wasn’t for Ralph McQuarrie, Star Wars might have never been made, or at least not as soon as it did and not with the freedom Lucas was given.  Yes, we can probably blame McQuarrie for Jar Jar Binks, the incessant marketing tie-ins, and just about anything negative you can apply to the Star Wars franchise. But without his strong concept drawings, we would never have an indelible part of popular culture that not only shaped my generation, but also the generations that have and will come after it.

McQuarrie went on to do concept art for Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, doing matte paintings in all three films. He was offered the chance to do the same for the prequel trilogy, but McQuarrie decided to pass the opportunity on to a younger generation of artist.

Lucas did give McQuarrie a form of immortality few conceptual artist ever receieve. He cast McQuarrie as “General McQuarrie” in Empire. Since almost everyone who has appeared on screen for at least a half a second in the franchise gets an action figure, you can track down a small, plastic representation of McQuarrie to interact with the rest of your Star Wars toys (there are also figures based directly on McQuarrie’s original designs, ).

If the first Star Wars trilogy was the only listing on his resume, you could call his career legendary. But McQuarrie went onto contribute iconic images to other iconic films for more than a decade after the first Star Wars film.

McQuarrie designed the spaceships in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., worked as an illustrator for ILM on Raiders of the Lost Ark, acted as a “visual consultant” on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and did concept design on *batteries not included, Nightbreed, and Cocoon, winning an Academy Award for the latter.

The worlds of Hollywood, art, pop culture and science fiction lost a legendary light today. Rest in peace, Mr. McQuarrie.

Movie trailers have been a part of the movie-going experience since almost the beginning of cinema itself. And as the art of movies has changed and evolved so has the art of the trailer. CBS News has put together a nice piece that gives a quick overview of the history of trailers that, while it may only scratch the surface, still serves as a good primer.

You can head over to CBS’s website for a list of all the trailers used in the piece, but before you do, challenge yourself to name as many as you can.

Although it has been facing the wrecking ball for some time now, it was announced today that the Dixie Square Mall, the Chiacgo-suburbs shopping plaza famously featured in the 1980 musical comedy The Blues Brothers will finally be torn down. It joins a number of former Chicago locations that can now only be visited in the movie.

Opened in 1966 at 151st Street and Dixie Highway in the suburb of Harvey, the mall hosted some 60 merchants at its peak in the 1970s. By the time that director John Landis and film crew arrived in Chicago to film The Blues Brothers in 1979, the mall was already in financial trouble and had closed. In fact, it was its vacancy and availability for filming that lead to  the creation of the the movie’s famous indoor car chase sequence.

The property sat vacant for more than three decades. In the last several years, Harvey officials have tried in vain to redevelop the site, with the property changing four times in the last six years. Finally last year, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn granted $4 million in state disaster relief funds to tear the crumbling building down.

In a statement, Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg said -

The former Dixie Square Mall was once the heart of a thriving industrial community. However, the filming of this movie left the city of Harvey with an eyesore that has become one of the oldest white elephants in the country.

But Mayor Kellogg is being unfair and grossly mis-characterizing the film’s part in the mall’s history. The city was already in an economic downturn at the time and had a rising crime problem. It has been reported that many people were choosing other shopping centers in what could be considered safer neighborhoods. It was already a problem property before the film came to town. To state otherwise is to hide the city of Harvey’s own inability to do anything with the property over the last 30 years.

Here is the first of a four part look at the shooting of that famous sequence-

Via Chicago Tribune.

There are a number of stories about the Golden Age of Hollywood that everyone seems to know. Some of them are true and the ones that aren’t simply persist because they simply make a good story. The stories that circulate around the classic Casablanca are no different. And with the news of the 70th Anniversary DVD/Blu-Ray release, we thought we would take a look at the most famous one.

One of the most lingering stories is that Ronald Reagan and George Raft were offered the lead part of Rick Blaine before Humphrey Bogart took it and created one of the most iconic roles in film history. But the truth is probably far less interesting than the “What if” scenarios conjured by the possibility of  those other two actors in the roles.

The Reagan myth is easily explained. When Warner Brothers first acquired the unproduced play Everybody Comes To Rick’s, they sent out a press release on January 5, 1942 announcing the purchase that stated that the planned film would star Reagan and Ann Sheridan. The fact is that Warners had no intention of having these two stars in the film. The studio was actually using the press release to get some extra publicity for their two stars who were appearing in the films King’s Row which was set for release just a few weeks later. And even if Casablanca producer Hal Wallis wanted Reagan in the part, the future President was currently in the Army Reserve and could be called up to active duty at any moment with the country just entering into World War Two.

The George Raft story is slightly more complex. To say that Raft was a bit of pain in the backside of studio chief Jack Warner would probably be an understatement. The actor had turned down several parts that the studio exec wanted him to play, complaining that they weren’t good enough for him. Warner thought that Raft would actually respond to the part of Rick in Casablanca and suggested the actor to producer Wallis. The thing is, Casablanca was being produced independently by Wallis for Warner Brothers and Wallis had complete freedom to cast the film as he pleased from any of the actors under contract with the studio. As you can see from the memo below (click to enlarge), Wallis already had his own idea as to who should be playing the part and we know how that turned out.

Memo via The Humphrey Bogart Estate Page on Facebook.

With the 30th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner this year and a followup film heading our way in the next couple of years, director Ridley Scott’s science-fiction noir classic has a little higher than usual profile right now. And one of the things that have helped the film’s longevity is the meticulous world that Scott and his production designers created. At the time of Blade Runner‘s release, you could see some of the work those designers did in the book The Blade Runner Sketchbook. Unfortunately, it has been out of print fro some time and a much sought after collector’s item, demanding close to $300 from Amazon marketplace sellers online.

But for those fans who don’t have the three bills for a copy of the book there is an alternative. The book is now available online for everyone to peruse the stunning work of designers like the legendary Syd Mead, Mentor Huebner, Charles Knode, Michael Kaplan and Scott. It’s an amazing look at what went into the creation of the film’s dystopian future and what didn’t get get into the film.

You can check it out here.