I received a couple cards and gifts in the mail from readers last week. I’d like to thank everyone who sent ( or is sending) holiday greetings/gifts. Gift-giving is always cool, but I’d rather you use your resources to enhance your own resilience rather than sending some cool geegaw to some faceless dude you read about on the internet.
However…if you’ve already got the whole resilience angle all taken care of, well, by all means, send the Zero some love.
But…cards or not, gifts or not, I still think youre all awesome.
ETA: Some trivia – For the shot where Hans Gruber falls from the top of the building, Alan Rickman was really dropped 40-feet onto an airbag with a blue-screen cover; the background was later edited in. A stuntman held Rickman up with a rope. Mirroring Rickman’s line repeated twice in the movie, the stunt crew was to count to 3 before releasing, but to get a genuine reaction from Rickman, the stunt man released the rope on the count of two, not three. Rickman later said during a Q&A that the stunt was purposely done on his last day on set.
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I’m really curious if P7 sales increased after that movie.
I thought it was G7, for the mysterious Glock 7. One of my favorite Christmas movies along with Lethal Weapon.
Most stunts are done on last days, for obvious reasons.
I lost track of how many low-budget movies I was called in to work on, for the final week of principal photography, because there were stunts and FX involved, rather than just walk & talk dialogue scenes. (Which is the low-budget producer’s way of telling the crew “We don’t give a shit if you get hurt, because you’re as replaceable as Home Depot Mexicans; only the actors are important.”)
It’s awkward and expensive when you break your actors with a month of work left. Not so much if it’s just a few shots, which can be replaced with over-the-shoulder shots with stunt doubles, wide scenes, etc.
Even with CGI and greenscreen magic (if they have the budget), you don’t want your actors hurt, limping, gimping, pissed off, or dead, and still have substantial amounts of movie left to shoot.
So the seriously hazardous potential bits are always at the end whenever possible.
And chiseling producers (that would be every single one of them, ever) know, like Longshanks noted in the middle of Braveheart, “…the dead cost nothing.“
I’m not sure if you’ve ever mentioned it and perhaps I just missed it, but was your role in the movie industry?
I was the medic.
On non-union shows, optional, but always suddenly around for the stunts and FX days, because lawyers.
On union shows, mandatory unless you were filming in a working ER. 50′ away, and you had to have a medic on set from first call to wrap out. This included in Death Valley 100 miles from the nearest medical care, and at 40,000′ on the first commercial Vomit Comit. (I have pictures of me standing upside down on the ceiling while the cameraman is sitting rightside up.) New producers would occasionally bitch about paying someone to be there without working, until I reminded them what it meant to them if the medic was having a busy day. Then the 20-something skinflint @$$holes would STFU and go back to minding their own business.
Unsurprisingly, stunt men seldom (but occasionally) get injured, because they’re experienced professionals who want to work tomorrow.
Most of the business, including the serious injuries, were extras (who have the average intelligence of a flock of retarded turkeys on dope), and crew members working 14- to 20-hour days and 130-hour weeks, especially when loading 1-ton equipment carts into semi-trailer trucks after a 19-hour shoot day, in the dark.
BTW, have I mentioned that actual valid studies show that after 16 or more consecutive hours on the job, your brain is functionally identical to that of someone legally impaired by alcohol?
Now see if you can better understand some of the crap that gets burped out of Hollywood any day of the week, knowing that 20% of it was made in double overtime.
Oh, and dollars to donuts, the stuntman was told to drop Rickman early by the director, whether John McTiernan cops to that or not.
A) That’s what directors do, and
B) Stuntmen don’t make those kinds of decisions on their own, ever.
Hitchcock was infamous for f**king with his actors’ heads to get the reactions he wanted, and Spielberg had an animal handler drop a live snake onto Karen Allen in the Well Of Souls scene in the original Indiana Jones flick. The real scream that gag elicited from Karen Allen was lifted and dubbed into every other scene in the movie where he needed a scream from her, and it was an epic one, as Spielberg admitted later.
You write well and have a lot of stories to share. Have you considered writing an autobiography about your movie experiences? I’d buy a copy, in a heartbeat. Let us know.
I’m waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on several incidents. 😉
No sense jamming someone one up for nothing, just to sell some books.
Alan Rickman was a great villain… RIP
Apparently, Die Hard was his first movie. He had only been in Hollywood a week when he got it. And he didnt want to do it for fear of being typecast as a villain.
Since Hans Gruber starred in all of them, should the Harry Potter movies be considered to be Christmas movies?
That would suggest that what makes a movie a Christmas movie is having Alan Rickman in it. I don’t think thats the case. Die Hard is a Christmas movie because it being Christmas is an essential part of the storyline.
“Gunny” and the recruits singing “Happy Birthday dear Jesus” in FMJ could be a qualifier.
Happenstance, not an essential plot point.
Agreed. In Die Hard Christmas is a key element:
– Mclane’s wife? Holly.
– At a Christmas Party
– “Ho Ho Ho I have a machinegun”
– Christmas carols are played throughout
– Heist has to take place at Christmas for the reduced security