Since finishing Castaway in 2000, Robert Zemeckis has been on a mission to make motion-capture animation happen.  People hated it when he first finished Polar Express in 2004, and they’re only casually dismissive of it now, so I guess that’s progress.  Just last week he was still defending the process while promoting Mars Needs Moms, which he produced.

“The thing that’s always been at the core of the performance capture artform is the performance of the actor. The emotional warmth and the performance is what that performer has done, exactly like if a musician sits at a keyboard and plays, but then a processor takes those keystrokes and turns them into an entire orchestra.”

I’d say it’s more like auto-tune, which has so far given us a few funny parodies and thousands of Rebecca Blacks.

And in Mars Needs Moms, [using motion-capture] means Seth Green can play a nine-year-old, an insolent kid who gets what he arrogantly asked for when Martians kidnap his mom (Joan Cusack) to suck the “mom-ness” out of her and implant it in an army of “nannybots” to raise the Martian children. The diminutive Green has the physicality to pull off a child’s movements, but his beard would otherwise be an impediment.

Yes, or he could just voice a character that someone else drew, allowing him to play a monkey, a rocketship, or a yak fetus, all without having to shave his beard or even change clothes (thank God we finally have the technologies to make the job of a big Hollywood actor a little more comfortable, btw).  Put it this way: have you ever heard anyone complain about what a terrible actress Bambi or the Little Mermaid was?  I thought not.  In fact, we’ve long had non-motion capture cartoons lifelike enough to satisfy even the most discriminating of sex-pillow enthusiasts.  There’s just not a lot of upside to digitizing an actor’s entire face. Draw it or don’t.  Avatar, okay maybe, but let’s try not to shoe horn performance capture into every project like an Asian teen who just discovered emoticons.

Fast-forward to today, after Mars Needs Moms became the lowest-grossing opening ever for a broadly-released modern 3D-animated movie, when Disney chair Rich Ross strode into the boardroom atop his most muscular man servant and proudly knocked Zemeckis’ next mo-cap experiment into the sh*t pile with his pimp cane.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just when I thought Back to the Future month was finally over, Robert Zemeckis is back in the news.  Word is he’s in “early talks” to direct a live-action remake of Wizard of Oz using the original script (because who wasn’t clamoring for that?). Last we heard, Zemeckis was attached to a time-travel project, but my guess is he dropped that as soon as he smelled the chance to make creepy motion-capture flying monkeys.  (Is Crispin Glover busy?)

Warner Bros is in early talks with Robert Zemeckis to direct a live-action remake of the The Wizard of Oz and plans to use the original script from the 1939 classic. Warner Bros owns the screenplay because Ted Turner bought it along with the MGM library before Warner Bros bought Turner’s empire. This latest Oz twist comes as Disney is trying very hard to mount The Great And Powerful Oz [the Sam Raimi 3D prequel for which they want Robert Downey].

The original Wizard of Oz script had a total of 19 writers (seems not much has changed in Hollywood) with many of them uncredited, including Bert Lahr who played the film’s Cowardly Lion. This wouldn’t be the first hugely high-profile remake for Zemeckis; he’s in the middle of a Yellow Submarine animated redux for Disney, scheduled for a 2012 release. [Deadline]

Wait, so first he does three motion-capture animated pictures, which are basically to animation what tracing is to drawing, and now he’s doing a remake without re-writing the script?  If Brett Ratner ever chokes to death on a Totino’s pizza roll, Robert Zemeckis will be the laziest man in Hollywood.

(The Fading Photograph with original McFly Eric Stoltz — thanks for the tip, Videogum)

Yesterday, Back to the Future was in the news when for the first time, some of the footage of original Marty McFly Eric Stoltz was released.  Stoltz had been the original lead before Zemeckis had him replaced five weeks into shooting because he sucked so bad creative differences.  Another part of the story you probably didn’t know is that when they hired Michael J. Fox, they had to fire the actress who played McFly’s girlfriend — Melora Hardin, aka Jan from The Office — because she was too tall.  Hardin talks about it in in this interview (thanks for the tip, Joel):

We heard a rumor that you were originally cast to play Jennifer Parker on Back to the Future. Is that true?
Yeah, I was. It was a real small part in the first one and then a bigger role in the second one that Elisabeth Shue ended up playing. When I got it, it was a two picture deal, so it was going to be both films and Eric Stoltz was originally cast to play McFly, so I was going to play his girlfriend. And then they let Eric Stoltz go and I was too tall for Michael J. Fox. They called me in very regretfully and said that it wasn’t going to work out, which was sad. I was like 17 and, of course, shed some tears over that.

Now that it has become such an iconic movie, do you ever wonder what would it have been like to have been in it?
Sure. I guess it had the potential to kind of change everything for me, but I don’t know. It didn’t really do anything for the girl who played the small part and then was recast.

Especially since she’s “the girl who played the small part.”
(Laughs.) Exactly. So, I don’t know. I don’t think it would have been bad for me, that’s for sure. But who knows how good it would have been.

Hardin’s part went on to be played by Claudia Wells (5’4″ – only an inch and a half shorter than Hardin, according to IMDB), who was in turn replaced by Elisabeth Shue in the two sequels, when Wells had to quit after her mother was diagnosed with cancer.  But it was clear that God had had a plan for Hardin when she went on to star 2010′s Knucklehead, about a retarded MMA-fighting church orphan. (more Back to the Future comparison pics below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something you probably didn’t know unless you’re a huge nerd (my term for people that know something I didn’t):  Marty McFly in Back to the Future was originally played by Eric Stoltz.  Stoltz is a fine actor in his own right (I’ll always remember his manic drug dealer, Lance, in Pulp Fiction) but Zemeckis didn’t think he was right for McFly and had him replaced with Michael J. Fox– five weeks into production.

Details of the shocking Hollywood switch and never-before-seen footage of Stoltz as McFly are part of the extras package for the “Back to the Future 25th Anniversary Trilogy” to be released on Blu-Ray on Oct. 26. [and which will receive a limited engagement theatrical run courtesy of AMC]
Zemeckis says the casting change was “this horrific decision; it was heartbreaking for everybody.”
Executive producer Steven Spielberg said that Zemeckis consulted him before pursuing the casting change.

“(Zemeckis) showed me the first five weeks of shooting that he had put together,” Spielberg said. ” And he said, ‘I just don’t think we’re getting the laughs I was hoping we would get.’ ”

Spielberg said he realized his director “was absolutely correct.” [THR]

To understand just how ballsy this is, imagine telling your boss you screwed up and wasted five weeks of work.  It’s impressive for everyone involved that they cared that much.  And it makes it all the more insane that someone watched Paul Walker in the dailies for The Fast and the Furious and thought, “Eh, f*ck it.  This movie’s about cars, right?”

Before 2004, Robert Zemeckis was best known as the much-loved, popcorn-movie director behind Castaway, Forrest Gump, and Back to the Future.  Between 2004 and now, he’s been the guy trying to make mo-cap happen, forcing his creepy, dead-eyed, smooth-skinned condom people on us in such movies as Beowulf and A Christmas Carol.  Those films used motion-capture technology to give us none of the realism of live-action plus a miniscule droplet of the stylization of animation, and it was as genius an innovation as a vagina-less girlfriend who does nothing but talk. Could it be that Zemeckis is finally ready to jump the uncanny valley on a common sense-powered motorcycle?  Could I have stretched any further for that overwrought metaphor?

Box my chocolates, Deadline:

It has been a decade since Robert Zemeckis last directed a live action film, the classic Cast Away. It has been 25 years since he launched the time travel trilogy Back to the Future.Zemeckis is plotting a return to both folds [see also: your father's euphemism for sex with your mother] at Warner Bros, where he is at the center of a deal for the time travel pitch Timeless. It’s a big tent pole picture that will be written by Mike Thompson.

Mike Thompson the former Lakers center?  I’ll be honest, folks, I wrote the first half of this post before I heard about Greg Giraldo, and now I find myself not really giving a sh*t.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get drunk.

Robert Zemeckis' dog