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nyxravessnow · 3 years

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Review 2021 Kuromyu – Namashitsuji Secrets of the Public School Arc

Disclaimer: This is not an unbiased review so please proceed knowing that it is heavily opinionated.

2nd Disclaimer: I have never seen the anime or read the manga of Black Butler. All of my thoughts are based on comparisons to previous musicals and comments from fans about how accurate their portrayal is. I understand this may turn some people off my review which is understandable but I think an important thing for shows is how accessible they can be for people who don’t know the source material.

FREE OF SPOILERS

Overall rating: 8/10

Acting – 8/10

Music – 8/10 (I took an average of my song scores)

Ease of understanding – 8/10

Direction – 7/10

Overall Summary:

I think the show was excellent and showed respect to the old shows but also did quite a few new things. All the scenes and songs had clear thought put into them and the acting showcased these things very well. It was not quite like what I expected it was going to be like but now that I’ve seen it, I can’t quite think of what I expected. I think if you like 2.5D or if you like Black Butler or the actors in this show then you will enjoy the show quite a lot. It is not exactly the same as before from every standpoint apart from it being Black Butler so I would say don’t go in expecting it to be just the same.

I will move to a spoiler review under the cut but plainly, this show is very good and I think all the actors did a great job.

As I normally do I am going to give my thoughts on story, acting, songs and directing, then mention some extra stuff that I might think of at the end. I am sorry if I bring up the fact that I’m British and went to boarding school like my parents too much.

Story: The story was mostly pretty easy for me to follow, especially as a British person who knows about Cricket and boarding schools. I haven’t seen Campania so the dolls confused me a little at first but that is completely on me for not having seen the previous show. When watching I was very confused about what was going on towards the end but looking back on it that was mainly because of my migraine and not because it wasn’t clear. Scenes were set out well and the camera work was done in a way to make it very easy to follow along. But omg the cricket made me a little upset. It was super fun and all. But it was so inaccurate XD. I guess I now know the pain of people who like tennis when they watch the Prince of Tennis.

Acting: I am going to go actor by actor and give a rough overview of what I thought of them

Tateishi Toshiki as Sebastian Michaelis

I felt like we didn’t get a terribly demonic Sebastian in this show but otherwise I loved Toshi as Sebastian. He felt very elegant and reserved most of the time which contrast well with the times in which he was annoyed at Ciel. He wasn’t terribly present in a lot of the show but I did really enjoy him when he was on stage. His singing voice is excellent and I loved hearing him sing, will go into more about it later during the song summaries.

Konishi Eito as Ciel Phantomhive

I thought Eito was amazing as Ciel and he is my favourite Ciel so far. He showed Ciel’s switch between cute and normal so well and it really made me think about how good of an actor Ciel is. I don’t know how he did what he did to his voice but he makes himself sound like a young child with a slightly higher and scrapey voice than normal and it really makes you think that he is very young. I know many people were worried that they were casting an adult as Ciel because they wanted to sexualise him and this was not the case at all. He only showed any skin in the very first scene when in the cage and he had the sheet/robe-thing showing his shoulder. His singing voice is quite a lot mature than the previous two Ciels, for obvious reasons, and I think it really helped me enjoy his songs.

Okayama Ryousuke as Soma Asman Kadar

While I would still say I prefer Sho’s Soma, mainly bc Sho is one of my fav actors and I am biased, I really liked Ryousuke’s Soma. He was super energetic and friendly and really gave off this air of innocence as he believes Ciel’s reasoning for him to join Weston. His cricket was also very fun. His singing was pretty okay. I think this was as his singing suffered when he was trying to sing in Soma’s voice.

Ueda Kandai as Undertaker

I was honestly quite surprised how good Kandai was as Undertaker. I think his Undertaker voice got better as the show went on so I assume the reason it was less good at first was nerves. He wasn’t in it too much but I thoroughly enjoyed him in every scene he was in. I think I would love it if he learnt to sing in his Undertaker voice more but I also understand that is quite difficult so understand why he’s not doing that.

Sana Hiroki as Edgar Redmond

I thought he was very good as Edgar and carried the emotion needed for the more serious scenes, like the flashback about Derek, very well. He definitely emphasised the queerness of Edgar and had some rather flirtatious moments with Maurice and Joanne. However, despite being flirty and not seeming to be very serious, I completely bought it when he became serious and he played the shift very well (such as in the Maurice reveal scene). His singing voice is good.

Tazuru Shogo as Herman Greenhill

I thought Shogo was really good as Herman, even if it did feel like him playing a slightly nicer version of Sanada – his character from Prince of tennis. He was my 2nd fav of the four and I always enjoyed watching him in his scenes. He played the emotion in the Derek flashback amazingly and you could really see the pain in his eyes when he realised what he had done. His voice was really perfect for Herman.

Satonaka Masamichi as Lawrence Bluewer

I really loved Masa as Lawrence. I don’t know how accurate it is as he didn’t seem very sweet from what I read on his wiki page, but his Lawrence seemed quite tsundere. I loved his bit in the Cricket match when he was talking about wanting to win in his very last year. He also just seemed quite cute. I really enjoyed his singing.

Goto Dai as Gregory Violet

I LOVED Dai as Gregory. He definitely gave off the aura of being weird but he also seemed very sweet to Cheslock and the two actors had really good chemistry. He was really cute in his Cricket gear. He was by far my favourite of the prefects. Despite seeming cute and sweet to Cheslock he definitely retained the aura of mystery and you could never tell what he was thinking. His singing voice is pretty good but he didn’t have many solo bits.

Furuya Yamato as Clayton

While at the beginning I did get an intelligent stuck up vibe from Yamato as Clayton that kinda died away as the show went on and he became much more of a dork. I dunno how much of this is in character but to me it felt slightly like Yamato playing himself. As I think Yamato is an excellent actor, I was a little bit disappointed to see his character change quite a bit but I don’t know how much was him and how much was the direction. Since Yamato is known for comedy and his adlibbing I wouldn’t be surprised if this was actually just direction and the route they decided to go down for this character, hence why they scouted Yamato. I know his singing voice may not appeal to everyone, but I really like it.

Nakajima Takuto as Edward Midford

Takuto was very good as Edward and I think he played his straightforwardness quite well. I love Takuto but I don’t think Edward had much to do apart from the cricket which Takuto did very well. His singing voice is excellent.

Warning: Tsukasa is my favourite actor, and I am very biased

Taguchi Tsukasa as Maurice Cole

Tsukasa was AMAZING as Maurice. He played the changes in his character so well and even though he’s not a very nice person I felt really bad for him during his breakdown as Tsukasa’s scream was heart wrenching. When he was pretending, he felt so light and sweet and then when he was being his normal self he dropped down his voice and even changed his accent slightly as well as changing the way he would stand and walk. Ngl I was not paying too much attention to other people when he was in the scene and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m biased or because his command of the stage is that good but I really felt his stage presence. I loved the way he repeated 2 O’clock to Edgar and the others and how he mirrored the way he did it with Ciel and all the subtleties to his acting were great. He didn’t get to sing very much but he sounded really good.

Fukuzawa Yu as Cheslock

Apart from Tsukasa I think Yu was my favourite in this show. He brought so much energy to Cheslock and I don’t mean making the character energetic, just that he always has so much power and feeling behind his lines and he was so good and cool! He had good command of the stage and worked so well with Dai to be the one the stands out and the one that fades into the shadows. He mostly rapped so I don’t remember his singing voice very much.

Uchino Fuuto as Joanne Harcourt

Fuuto didn’t really stand out to me very much and I don’t think he had very much to do. His singing voice was pretty good.

Hayakawa Iori as Macmillan

He served his part in the story well and was very cute and energetic which I liked. He kinda reminded me of doll a little. His singing voice was pretty good.

Yamaguchi Kooki as Derek Arden

He wasn’t in very much of the show but he played his part very well and even though we got so little of him being unpleasant the way he played it made me hate Derek immediately. I don’t think he got any solo singing bits?

Takahashi Shunichi as Johann Agares

He filled his role very well. The most impressive thing was his falling from the stairs, I was very worried he was going to hurt himself, so I was really glad he was okay as he went from pretty high considering there were lower stairs. His singing voice was good.

Songs: I really love Yu(vague) the composer of the show and he is my favourite music composer. I think he did a really good job with the songs on the whole. I think he did well making them seem different and new yet familiar.

Opening song – 7/10

I think this song was a good opener. I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but it got better as the song went on. Toshi’s voice didn’t sound to be working with the song at first but since he sounded fine later, I think it was just his voice wavering at first from nerves so I’m excited to see what he’s like in the last show. I like how they did short recaps of the previous shows from Lycoris to Campania so the fans are caught up on what has happened, especially since it becomes important when Undertaker comes back with the dolls at the end.

2nd song, I think it’s called ‘It’s perfect black’ – 8/10

I really like this song. I think it is a nice scene setter and is very well sung by everyone. The dance works well and kinda brings Druitt’s dancing to mind with some of it. The song features the full cast and is effectively the Pawn and Sword song of this show.

Welcome to Weston song – 10/10

My first 10/10 song. I really love this song and I already can sing along to it. I love the prefects singing and that the others sing the chorus for them. (Also partly love it for its reprise but I’ll get to that later) I love how rigid and together it sounds. By that I mean that everyone is singing their lines as quite cutting and the harmonies are very crisp. Everyone is perfectly in time and there is no deviation. The rigidness shows the formality and tradition of the school which is reinforced by the students marching around the stage to get to the places. This is the case for everyone except the prefects who have more flowy lines and they walk a lot more freely showing the school’s hierarchy. I also love the prefects pushing Ciel around and surrounding him which foreshadows how he his treated.

Only Prefect Four – 9/10

I might be slightly biased as a Mankai stage fan as this song sounds so like a Mankai stage song but I love it so much. It would be 10/10 but I think their harmonies at the end could be a bit tighter. I think the soft and flowery and upbeat music works really well after the last song. Kinda indicating that the prefects live in a different world to the rest of the school which kinda serves as storytelling so that later when they’re so surprised by Derek’s actions it makes sense as they feel kinda separate from everyone else and it makes sense that they wouldn’t know what was going on in the rest of the school. I also love how they each get their solo bits which tell you stuff about the characters. Edgar’s dance is really reminiscent of Druitt which I really love. Herman’s music is a lot less flowy with a base note and the dance, using cricket bats, really gives off an image of strength. Lawrence’s mixes classical music into the instrumental and it has a more traditional feel. The dance involves a lot of stepping and stopping showing a formulaic approach rather than being flowy or strong. Gregory’s music has a grand feeling to it and it goes lower. Gregory doesn’t move much while Cheslock is doing some hip-hop dancing next to him. And instead of singing a solo section he talks about how he wants to go to bed.

Yes, my lord – 10/10

My favourite song in this show. It shows Ciel being told to do things and him passing his chores to Sebastian and Sebastian getting more and more annoyed with him, even breaking and calling him a brat at one point. The upbeat tone is quite fun and it works really well as a montage song. I like how it goes from Ciel saying ‘Yes, Clayton-senpai’ (senpai is a polite suffix for names of people who are higher up than you) to dropping senpai to just saying yes then turning to Sebastian. It really showcases brat Ciel.

Soma’s song – 10/10

His song is all about being Ciel’s friend and it’s really cute and energetic. The outfits from Soma’s song in Circus and brought back and it has a similar instrumental to his song there. He messes around a lot more in this song, though. Even though he is now much older than Sho was when he played Soma through this song he feels far more youthful through the more relaxed choreography and the energetic music.

Ominous prefect song – 9/10

This song is so cool. I really like the sharp shapes being projected onto the back with lilac light and the softly ominous instrumentals. (it comes right after Edgar mentions ‘the secret of what happened that day’). The vice-principal walking around at the back is really interesting as it looks like he is monitoring them. And the other students walking around with lanterns gives the song an almost supernatural feel. And then Undertaker peeking out from the back at the end gives a more direct hint of what is going on.

Nightmare, opening reprise – 8/10

This is just a reprise of the 1st song but I like it a bit better because it is shorter and the choreography of the cultists surrounding Ciel’s bed is really nice.

The Headmaster’s decision – 10/10

I like the fast pace of this song as Ciel runs around to ask about Derek and keeps just being told it was the headmaster’s decision. The students moving and singing together, then encircling him reinforces Ciel’s feeling like there’s a secret that everyone knows but isn’t telling him. I also like the use of Derek’s actor walking around the stage, always just beyond their sight from where they are.

Cricket song, last song of Act 1 – 6/10

This song is good it’s just not super enthralling. I think it’s probably the weakest pre-interval song out of the Kuromyus. At the beginning Sebastian and Ciel’s mics got really quiet for some reason and the instrumental was a bit louder than them. It’s a nice gentle and weirdly happy and hopeful instrumental which is a bit at odds with the past two ominous songs and I can’t decide if I like that or not. Also, I think the harmonies are a bit off so hopefully that will be better by the final performance. A lot of the singers sound like they have tension in their voices so I think they were all pretty anxious for this song. I do like the song and it might go up a bit if they can get the harmonies in the final show because they got almost none of them in this show. (The one that they did get sounded really good though)

INTERVAL

Cricket tournament – 9/10

While the previous song was also more upbeat than the ominous songs I don’t think it worked due to being directly afterwards, as the first song of Act 2 I quite like that’s it’s more energetic as it gets you hyped for the 2nd Act. This is the song that some Tenimyu, Prince of tennis musical, fans are saying was inspired by Tenimyu. And I will say, it was 100% inspired by Tenimyu XD. Yana-sensei is a fan of Prince of tennis and Shogo, Herman’s actor, was cast in a role very similar to his Prince of tennis role then the Green Lion section literally has lines that are exactly the same as lines from the team Shogo was in. Also, the music during their bit is actually somewhat reminiscent of the music that team normally has.

[Yu(vague) is so good at changing types of music during songs ahh, the Green Lion to Scarlett Fox transition is just so good.]

Honestly, this song would be a 7 or 8 out of 10 without the Violet Wolf part bc omg that part slaps so hard. Gregory and Cheslock high-five and the music just switches to electronic disco music and they rap most of their bit. I love it so much.

Sapphire Owl’s bit is cool too.

Scarlett vs Sapphire Cricket match – 6/10

It’s pretty good. Solid song but isn’t too exciting. Soma’s solo bit is really cute. Main thing letting it down is the ‘It’s cricket’ refrain that is in all three match songs. I was already done with it after like 30 seconds in this song and this song doesn’t have anything else lifting it above like the others do.

Violet vs Green Cricket match – 8/10

Cricket match as a rap battle. I dunno why Violet House became a rap house but I love it and I love Cheslock rapping about his awesome pitch. Then he and Herman having a rap battle is just so fun. I don’t know if this is as fun to Black Butler fans who know the characters a lot better or whether it would be uncomfortable but I had a blast in this song.

Sapphire vs Green Cricket match – 7/10

I really like the beginning instrumental and the short song bit at the very beginning of the song but the refrain hit again so it couldn’t go above a 7 for me.

Victory song – 6/10

Not a bad song but I don’t think the harmonies were there for this one and so I’m excited to see it in the last show again and hear if they improve.

Weston Reprise – 10/10

Oh my god I love this reprise so much. At first it sounds very like the original song then as the prefects slightly lose it as they realise what they have done it becomes more out of sync and the music quietens and it sounds more acapella and they sound slightly like they’re losing it due to the horror of what has happened. And the scratchiness of Gregory’s voice making it sound like he’s going to cry really reinforces that they are just children and they cannot deal with something like this.

Fight song – 7/10

I love the Undertaker taking Ciel to the side and staring at him crazily and singing at him. Again, I could hear Toshi’s nerves and I hope that he can sing the song better in the final show. I really love the Undertaker and Sebastian’s duet though and I think their voices sound really good together and I love the blood refrain in the song.

Finale song – 7/10

A pretty short but solid refrain of ‘It’s Perfect Black’

Direction: I thought the direction overall was pretty solid. There wasn’t anything really innovative attempted I don’t think but I didn’t really feel like there was anything lacking.

Overall: I really loved this show and look forward to seeing the final show and I think this show set up the new cast well for future shows.

Do I recommend buying the stream and DVD?

If you are a fan of 2.5D, any of these actors or Black Butler I really recommend trying to see this show. (The final show with be on 4th April on theatre-complex.jp and you can buy a ticket with just a vpn) While it is very different I feel like it was fairly faithful to its roots but is also trying to grow into something new.

Lastly: If you have any questions about the show, any parts, any songs or about any of the actors feel free to drop me an ask and let’s talk about it!

#Kuromyu 2021 #kuromyu #Secret of the Boarding School #weston arc #stage review

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abybweisse · 3 years

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🤡 the lords of the stars

Send 🤡 for a crack theory

Lord Sirius: Well, we know that Lord Sirius is real Ciel, and that he’s now got Blavat, Polaris, and others using that title for his younger twin. A crack theory for real Ciel? Maybe that he wants his younger twin’s soul to be combined with his own body, since he cannot get his own soul back from the demon.

Lord Polaris: Since he says “butler”, I will assume this person is biologically male (though I could be wrong), and my biggest crack(?) theory for Polaris is that he’s one of the former butlers from the Phantomhive household, back when Vincent was earl. He died during the attack, but his body was spared the damage that Vincent’s received. In other words, his body wasn’t too badly burned... and it was either picked up by Undertaker or taken right to his funeral parlor by the Yard (or whoever was investigating the crime scene). Undertaker decided to turn him into an advanced bizarre doll because it would be easy to make him retain that loyalty to the Phantomhive family, particularly to whoever was the rightful heir... if either of them survived. Since, at the time, Undertaker probably had to verify that there were no remains of either child at the ruined manor. Just like bizarre doll real Ciel went through a phase of being “mindless”, so would this one. Undertaker probably just kept this one at that mindless stage until he also had real Ciel’s body and the rest , so he could advance all of his chosen “lords of the stars” at the same pace. Or nearly.

Lord Canopus: This is likely someone of relatively low status (like a servant or even lower) who died of severe injuries. They also seem to be relatively small and agile. Their room is the roughly appointed one with the bloody bandages on/near the bed and the trap door in the ceiling. My biggest crack theory for them is, if anyone from the circus was picked up by Undertaker and turned into a bizarre doll, it would be Doll, who was killed by Sebastian in some way that we didn’t witness. Stabbing? Crushing? 🤷🏻‍♀️ But Undertaker was there to witness it and would have had relatively quick and easy access... with John Brown possibly watching....

Lord Vega: Given the way they talk and how their room was appointed, it’s probably a set of twins with somewhat high status. Probably girls. My absolutely crackiest theory about them is that something happened to Bluer’s little twin sisters, and that’s why he pushed himself so hard, to the point of exhaustion, as a member of the S4. You have to remember that the S4 (when they were the P4) killed Agares, Arden, and those others. And then they had Undertaker make bizarre dolls of them. Redmond had contacted his uncle, the viscount contacted Stoker, and Stoker brought Undertaker with him. It’s possible that Bluer’s twin sisters died, and he was desperate enough to beg Undertaker to “bring them back”. Total crack, I know, and I hope it stays that way. I really do. But we have to recall that Bluer will do anything to protect his sisters. He’s the one that got the special invitation to the Midnight Tea Party the previous year... when he took a cricket ball to the face to protect a young woman in the audience... who calls to him by name; I think it’s one of his big sisters that he saves in the audience. He and Vega are not the same blood type, but Polaris (type A) and Vega (type O) can happen among children of the same parents. So, yeah... Lord Vega could be his little twin sisters.... 😔 (Link goes to really old post — over 2 yrs old — about Bluer’s twin sisters and about blood types.)

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realhousewives-fan · 3 years

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I Googled the Shit Out of the 80’s!

I was watching this episode with my boyfriend and I told him that Kary Brittingham was “a fucking nightmare” this season.

He saw the scene with her daughters where they learned how to make Mexican food and he didn’t understand my wrath.

So I showed him the scene with Charles and salsa on the bed – it didn’t take long for him to agree with me.

I won’t be fooled by her charming quality time with her daughters, Kary is a fucking nightmare this season.

The producers even fast forward to her wreckage of the beloved Southfork Ranch!

But let’s talk about D’Andra Simmons’ husband for a moment. Jeremy Lock deserve an award for being an amazing husband!

When Mama Dee is riling her up, Jeremy calms her down.

And he waited for D’Andra for 2 and a half hour as she was talking with her step-mother. That’s an incredible partner!

I’ve got to say, watching D’Andra and Jeremy together this season has been like watching a love movie or something.

It’s like they’re an iconic couple at this point.

But Brandi Redmond is inviting the ladies to a sleepover at the legendary Southfork Ranch.

I would have died in excitement by such an invitation.

I’m clearly way more excited about this ranch than some of these housewives.

I remember I hurried home from school to watch reruns of the TV-show “Dallas”.

For some reason “Dynasty” was the most popular American soap opera in the 80’s in Norway...

But I’ve always liked “Dallas” and watching Bobby running in slow motion.

Now, I was born in 1988 so I’m not as old as I sound like right now.

But I’ve got a master degree in media science. I guess I’ve watched and read a lot about iconic TV-shows and their impact on society.

However, the ladies had a 80’s party and they were absolutely rocking their 80’s outfits. Tiffany Moon said “I googled the shit out of the 80’s!”

When Brandi asked D’Andra what her favourite move from the 80’s was, she pretended she was sniffing cocaine.

Outrageous and hilarious, this was D’Andra’s episode!

#Real Housewives of Dallas #RHOD #Kary Brittingham #D'Andra Simmons #Brandi Redmond

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positively-inhumane-bread-bucket · 4 years

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Idea i had when i couldn't sleep

When the Admin has to hire mercenaries (wheter is 1930 or 1968) she only hires 9 mercenaries and clones them (there's teleports so why not clone machines) then she shuffles the teams so that half of the clones are RED and the other half are BLU (4 on RED and 5 on BLU) the clones don't know whether they are clones or not and there is a way to distinguish the clones from the originals, because the clones are only identical in the body features some things like subtle personality traits and speech patterns, just the Admin knows which mercs are the originals, and when they don't need them anymore, the clones get killed (this also happened when Redmond and Blutarch died, so the originals were taken and put in team Mannco).

The clones share all the memories and affections to people, not even the families know if they have there a clone or not

Here are what i think are the original mercs (and a reason why if i thought of that)

BLU Scout and RED Spy (RED Spy is shown with BLU Scout's mother, but never actually with RED Scout's mother, which we have only seen in one of Scout's dreams, so it probably is that BLU Scout is the true one and RED Spy is his true father, Scout's mom is just one, the BLU one)

BLU Soldier and RED Demoman (These two shared a deep friendship from a long time that didn't perpetuate in the clones, but in them both yes, also the Soldier we see in the comics doesn't seem to remember any of the facts happened in Expiration Date, he would have probably told to Zhanna)

RED Pyro

RED Heavy

BLU Engie (the one we see in the comics could be the BLU one, even thought we see him as a RED in "A fate worse than Chess, plus he's the one who was called to fix Blutarch's machine)

RED Medic

BLU Sniper (his father doesn't answer RED Sniper one the phone because he suspects that it isn't his son because of the subtly different speech pattern)

#tf2 #medic #spy #engie #heavy #pyro #sniper #demoman #scout #theory #headcanon #administrator

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abbottikeler · 3 years

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The Ikelers: A Family Chronicle, 1753-2018 (Part III)

The Ikelers in the Nineteenth Century There are many descendants of Wilhelm who, to this day, live within a few miles of Jerseytown and his original Greenwood farm. They are, most of them, eight or nine generations removed either from his eldest son, Andrew, or his only daughter, Elizabeth. (Barnabus, his second son, did not marry, and William, his third born, though he married in New Jersey and lived out his life in Columbia County, could not convince most of his descendants to stay. Many migrated west to Ohio and beyond.) Especially if you can trace your ancestry back to Andrew Ikeler, you will easily find third, fourth and fifth cousins in Bloomsburg and neighboring townships. Evidence of their long presence and influence is everywhere in Columbia County—in two Ikeler cemeteries, a church, a street, and even a village named Ikelertown. In the case of Wilhelm’s friend Daniel, and his son-in-law William, Elizabeth’s legacy lives on in the ubiquity of the Welliver name in local phone directories, in the Jerseytown cemetery established by Daniel, and in numerous published histories of Daniel’s involvement with the ill-fated Whitmayers. There is, in fact, near Bloomsburg a country crossroads and a hamlet surrounding it named “Welliverville.” Those two families, after all, were among the first pioneer farmers to clear and work the land after the 1780 treaty with the local native-Americans. Ikelers and Wellivers have been there ever since. In this segment of the narrative, I’ll be looking at three generations of Ikelers who lived all or most of their lives in nineteenth-century Columbia County, PA. They are, in order, Andrew Ikeler (1772-1850) and his wife Christiana, nee Johnson (1774-1865); Andrew’s son Isaac (1804-1883) and his wife Mary, nee Taylor (1810-1872); and Isaac’s son Elijah (1838-1898) and his wife Helena, nee Armstrong (1840-1913). For information about the siblings of Isaac or Elijah (there were in fact a dozen), the best local sources are the County Courthouse and the Columbia County Historical and Genealogical Society in Bloomsburg. Under discussion here are only the children from whom my immediate family and I are descended. Andrew reached his majority in New Jersey under the sole care of his mother. In 1792, he married the daughter of an English settler—the first with the new surname Ikeler to do so. Christiana Johnson’s father, Isaac, was most likely sympathetic to the British cause, since he allowed the union of his daughter to the son of a notorious loyalist. He also later moved to the Pennsylvania neighborhood where Wilhelm had settled. It appears that Christiana and Andrew may have been the last of their generation of Ikelers to leave New Jersey for Columbia County. The 1888 Beers Book makes reference to Andrew’s journey there in 1804. Presumably, he was waiting for confirmation from his father that the land they needed for their growing family had been purchased. That news came in 1804, and Andrew appears on the tax records of 1805 as the owner of a log cabin and a saw mill and 150 acres of land in Greenwood Township. Unlike most of the farmers around him, Andrew seems to have cut quite a public figure. Near the end of the War of 1812, he led a company of militia to the defense of the nation’s capital. While underway, they learned the threat had passed, so he and his men returned to Columbia County without firing a shot. Again, in 1835, he made news when elected Magistrate at the ripe age of 62. At his death in 1850 he had outlived his brothers and his sister by nearly a decade. We know precious little about Christiana’s life, either in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but she and Andrew lived long enough to see many of their grandchildren grown, long enough to celebrate their 57th wedding anniversary, and, in her case, long enough to see the end of the Civil War. Born before the nation itself, she died at 91 in 1865. One can only image what a diary of her times she might have written! She and Andrew are buried in the far right corner of what is known as the “churchless” Ikeler cemetery, at the top of a hill overlooking both their and Wilhelm’s original homesteads, and planted in corn to the very borders of the graveyard. The site functioned up until 1840 as the informal burial place for Ikelers and their near neighbors. In that year, Andrew’s eldest son, William, set money aside to preserve it in perpetuity and later erected the limestone tombstone that marks his parents’ last resting place. In the row immediately behind them are several broken slabs of slant, the inscriptions on them (if any) long since effaced. It is very likely that they mark the burial place of Wilhelm and his wife, presumably carried there (in 1808 and 1815 respectively) from their nearby log house in a homemade pine box, or perhaps simple in winding sheet. Ironically, far less is known of Andrew’s son Isaac, my great-great grandfather, and his wife Mary Taylor. Though he followed his father’s example and married a woman of English stock, he kept close to the land Andrew left him, and rarely participated in the life of the wider community. Yet, since he lived into the 1880s, I suspect at least one photograph of him must have been taken, and may somewhere still exist. Certainly there are available photos of other children of Andrew. Much research remains to be done on his wife as well. Happily, some has recently come to light through the efforts of my third cousin, Chris Sanders. Mary Taylor was sold by her father into indentured service at age twelve, along with her brother. The promise of an apprenticeship was often written into the contract—in Mary’s case, the promise was, in the course of her seven years of servitude, that she would be taught “the mysteries of housewiffery.” Why her father, a widower, was driven to take such an extreme measure remains a mystery. Perhaps he simply thought he couldn’t manage their upbringing on his own. It was, as one wise genealogist reminded me, a different time. Mary’s servitude did, at least, have a foreseeable end. She married Isaac Ikeler immediately upon regaining her freedom at 19, in 1829. Her son Elijah, perhaps as a tribute to the suffering she had endured in her adolescence, christened his second son with the middle name “Taylor” just two years before his mother’s death. Her memory was apparently cherished by later descendants as well---they passed it down to this very day as the middle name of at least four other Ikeler males. Mary, fortunately, was something of a genealogist herself, and faithfully kept what she knew of the Ikeler family tree on the flyleaf of her bible. For most of us, that partial record represented the starting point for our research into the early generations. Mary Taylor Ikeler predeceased her husband by eleven years. Isaac passed away in 1883. All but one of their eight children survived into adulthood. Both parents are buried under well-preserved limestone monuments in what became the next, newer Ikeler cemetery, atop Ikeler Hill and directly across the road from the Ikeler Church. Their resting place sits right above the border between Mt. Pleasant and Greenwood Townships, looking down on the very hills and fields they plowed. Elijah Redmond Ikeler, their fourth child and second son, is perhaps the most widely remembered and controversial of all the Ikelers in this history. Even his birth year is debatable, variously recorded as any of four years between 1837 and 1840. Most sources, including his large granite tombstone in Bloomsburg’s Rosemount Cemetery, declare it to be 1838, however. From his early days he appears to have been disinclined to take up farming. At 18 he was apprenticed to a mill owner, and shortly thereafter had acquired a share in the business. At the outset of the Civil War, he seems to have been equally disinclined to take up arms in defense of the Union. Whether he paid the standard $300 to send someone else in his place, or simply wasn’t called up because the local quota of soldiers had already been filled, he clearly had no interest in risking his young life for a cause he didn’t believe in. In a Bloomsburg newspaper article from 1864, in which a local volunteer at the front complains about the lack of support and enthusiasm from the folks back home, Elijah is quoted (among others) arguing in favor of a compromise with the Confederacy that would allow the Southern States to keep their slaves and end the bloodshed sooner. By that time he had already been married for a year—to one Helena Armstrong, two years his junior and a resident of Bloomsburg. Her father owned a prosperous stonemasonry business, producing monuments in limestone and granite for local cemeteries and public places, as well as the marble window frames and sills for the more prepossessing homes along Main and Market Streets. Helena also brought an impressive pedigree to the union with Elijah: among her father’s ancestors were the socially prominent Rittenhouses of Philadelphia, and the Hiesters, one of whom had been an officer under Washington in the Revolutionary War. She was thus a member of the D.A.R., with the bona fides to prove it. On her mother’s side she was descended from the Vanderslices, a Dutch family and one of the wealthiest in Columbia County. How did Elijah, the 25-year-old son of a Greenwood farmer, manage to marry into an established upper middle class family such as the Armstrongs? Probably a combination of ambition, political savvy, and good looks. He looks out from photographs and portraits taken of him then and later with a self-assurance and a symmetry of aspect that commands admiration. By 1865, he and Helena had taken up residence in Bloomsburg, the county seat, at the time a settlement of some 3,000 souls on the banks of the Susquehanna. Elijah would remain a townsman the rest of his life. He struck up a friendship with a much older Bloomsburg lawyer, John Freeze, who had lost his own sons to childhood illnesses several years before. Freeze took him under his wing, taught him the law, and, from 1867, admitted him into his own practice as a fellow attorney. Thereafter, Elijah rose quickly to political prominence, becoming Bloomsburg town treasurer in 1870 and district attorney a short time later. His domestic fortunes, despite an initial setback, were also advancing. In 1867, Helena had lost a pair of twins, but she gave birth to one healthy son, Frank Armstrong Ikeler, the next year, and another robust boy, Fred Taylor Ikeler, in 1870. Why they had no more children after that, though both were in their early thirties, I can only speculate. Certainly Elijah grew increasingly involved with public affairs and the business of making money. He participated in the early prosecution of the Molly Maguires (though the miners were ultimately tried, convicted and hanged by others), and he bought numbers of residential properties within Bloomsburg proper (whether for rental income or resale I haven’t been able to ascertain). By the 1880s he thought himself well enough known and respected to run for elected office. The position he sought was that of Presiding (or President) Judge: a five-year term of office with jurisdiction over both Columbia and two adjoining counties. He was twice elected: in 1888 and again in 1893. He ran again in 1898 at the age of 60, but fell ill in the midst of the campaign and died within a week in August, 1898. At the time of his death he was living on Market Street in a mansion-sized home of his own design, known for years after as “the Judge’s house.” The building has since been extensively renovated and functions today not as a place of residence, but as a funeral home. In the last two decades of his life, there was also much going on at home to keep him happy with only two children. Given his risen position in society, Elijah was clearly ambitious for his sons. They both attended and graduated from Lafayette College—the first Ikelers to earn baccalaureate degrees—and, by the mid-90s, both boys had begun to practice law, just as their father had done. Aside from vague rumors that Elijah was a bit too fond of the bottle, and his arguable lack of patriotism during the Civil War (neither one of which sins was considered much of a problem in that part of Pennsylvania), everything about his life and his family seemed above reproach. Particularly in 1888, when he ran for high office, it was essential to his success: he needed to present an unblemished record to the voters of three counties. One small problem arose the year before that election. A chronicle of Columbia County was being prepared, a chronicle that would rely for much of its information on interviews with prominent members of long-established families in the region—people who could recount their own and their ancestors’ history. The chronicle (known then and since as “The Beers Book”) was due to be published in 1888, shortly before Elijah planned to open his election campaign. And, given his social prominence, there was certainly no Ikeler more likely to be approached for genealogical information than Elijah. All to the good, it would seem: a chance to boast, modestly of course, of his and his forefathers’ accomplishments, and perhaps, amongst interested readers, to gain a few votes. The Ikeler section of the Beers Book that appeared in 1888 does indeed suggest the interviewee was Elijah—more than half of the entry praises the deeds of the would-be Presiding Judge, and has little to say of his siblings or his parents. But the passage makes some quite curious claims about earlier generations. Fact gets oddly mixed up with fiction—the first Ikeler [it reads] was “Joseph Eggler...of an honored old family of German extraction,” not a tenant farmer named Hieronymus Eichler; he landed in New Jersey, not Philadelphia, arriving in 1760, not 1753; most curious of all, “at the outbreak of the Revolution he promptly enlisted with the Colonists, and throughout that historic conflict unselfishly rendered service to his country.” This founding father of the American Ikelers is also said to be Elijah’s great-grandfather, when in fact Hieronymus is his great-great-grandfather. Elijah skips a generation in order to make Andrew, not Wilhelm, the son of this fictional hero. It is Andrew, so the account runs, who brought the Ikelers from New Jersey to Greenwood Township in 1804. What Elijah’s version does, of course, is to wipe out the first seven years of the family’s indentured servitude, credit Hieronymus/Joseph with an honorable, unselfish war record on the side of the Colonists, and eliminate Wilhelm and the “shame” of his fugitive years altogether. There simply is no Wilhelm in Elijah’s account of his ancestry. It’s a neat blending of fact and fiction, calculated to sit well with his neighbors and the electorate. But I suspect Elijah’s dissembling had a second, and perhaps more powerful motivation behind it. He was, we remember, married to a member of the D.A.R., a descendant of a genuine hero on the side of the Revolution. When the chronicler came calling, Elijah could enhance respect for his heritage in the eyes of Helena by “recalling” an equivalent hero in the Ikeler family past. But it was even more important for both husband and wife that he expunge any trace of Wilhelm and the family’s loyalist background. And God forbid, Helena should find out one of her husband’s ancestors was a redcoat under arms during the conflict! Elijah’s efforts to bowdlerize or mythologize his family’s past remained unchallenged for another 27 years, until both he and Helena were no longer among the living. At last, in 1915, and just two years before his own death, I suspect it was I.B. Ikeler who offered a very different story to the county historian who came by collecting information for a second edition of the chronicle: “In another account it is stated that William Ikeler [so the 1915 printed version reads] was the name of the founder of the Columbia county branch of the Ikelers. William Ikeler also came from New Jersey and settled on a farm…approximately one hundred twenty-five years ago [i.e., circa 1790]. His wife’s name was Barnhart, and their issue were four children: Andrew, William, Elizabeth and Barnabus.” Except for getting Elizabeth Bengert’s maiden name wrong, his version squares with the facts as we now know them. I.B. Ikeler was in the best position to set things straight, after all, since it was he who held that “ancient” deed of sale, the proof that William Ikeler had paid 450 hundred pieces of gold or silver for an additional 350 acres of land in 1804.

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shirbertshitposts · 4 years

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I can’t help, as I watch this new season, wonder where Moira plans to end the series.

I remember in some of her earliest interviews she said something about wanting 5 seasons to tell just book 1...and we are quickly approaching the end of book 1. Anne of Green Gables ends with Anne returning from Queens after doing the accelarated program for one year and graduating and then Matthew dies and she becomes a teacher. Oh and her and Gilbert become friends. So if she sticks with it then the next two seasons are set at Queens with maybe the later part of 5 set in Avonlea for Matthew’s death, the aftermath, and the teaching position situation.

It also makes me wonder what she has in mind for the shirbert arc because that has been sped up a lot but if the rest of their life stories aren’t sped up it’s gonna feel weird if they like propose to each other during Queens they are younger than in the books (when they are at Redmond and after they graduate from Redmond) So best case is they declare their love, maybe agree to court.

Idk no matter how good this end is it’s still gonna feel really bittersweet knowing there is still so much story left to be told and explored. Anne’s life will have just begun really when the series ends. We won’t see her be a teacher, or get her writing published or be a school principal. We won’t see her have a happy family of her own with Gilbert. We’ll just have to take comfort in knowing that that all takes places sometime later and imagine how the new characters from the show fit into that.

#idk why i feeling sad about this right now #we dont even know for sure how many seasons the show will get #this is all speculation #awae spoilers #anne with an e spoilers #anne with an e #awae

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frankchurchillsaysrelax · 4 years

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Ahhh you didn’t tell me why you left!! I’m so sorry that happened and hope you feel better. Oddly enough, I went to your page to send you an ask 😂 Gimmie some AWAE shirbert headcanons, if you want to. Also, throw in some non-shirbert ones if you feel so inclined. Feel better soon!

Thanks! I took some painkillers and I’m lying very still so hopefully that will help. On to the headcanons! Also, please remember, I haven’t seen all of season three so if some of this is impossible based on stuff that’s happened, well I don’t care...thanks Katie!

Ok so like I already told you, but just to put it out there publicly, in the awae universe when shirbert starts courting/gets engaged/confesses their undying love for each other, the epic sunbursts and marble halls line is turned on its head with Anne telling Gil that there won’t be the Sorbonne or fancy apprenticeships and Gil telling her he doesn’t want all of that, he just wants her *swoon*

Matthew has been putting money aside ever since the bad investment/grifters incidents, just in case. When he is dying (because we all know it’s coming) he calls good old school-chum-and-family-friend-nothing-more Gilbert Blythe to Green Gables and gives it to him for school. It isn’t enough to get him to Paris but it’s a start. When Gil asks why he’s giving it to him, Matthew tells him it’s an investment for Anne’s future

Diana passes her exams and chooses to go to Redmond with Anne against her parents’ wishes. There she meets a kindhearted man who falls in love with her, challenges her, and supports her as she figures out where life will take her. Aunt Jo tells her she couldn’t be more proud of her when they graduate.

Billy gets shipped off to Winnipeg to marry an old family friend. She’s a sweet girl. He dies of a horrible disease that destroys his face. She inherits everything.

Moody and Ruby are the first from the class of 99 to marry. Gilbert comes home for the wedding and notices Ruby looks ill but is able to cure her in the days leading up to the ceremony. He and Anne dance at the reception and when he proposes she says yes.

On Marilla’s first night alone at Green Gables after Anne has left for school, Rachel shows up after dark with a bottle of moonshine and they get shitfaced. It is never spoken of again.

And finally, Josie Pye befriends Jerry after overhearing the other girls talking about him “at least being handsome”. They’re a strange pair but they are able to confide in each other about things they’ve never told anyone else. When Josie tells her parents she is marrying him they both drop dead.

#kindred katie #shirbert #a carrot by any other name #awae

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timewormbloom · 5 years

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I’ve decided to do a bit of a series of Crowley and Halt just interacting because I love their dynamic and I miss them. Here are the first two, hopefully more are coming soon!

One of Crowley’s tasks as the newly appointed Commandment was to get rid of all the obnoxious idiots currently waddling around in silk cloaks. Of course, he could have just stuck with the original plan and signed the letters King Duncan was going to send out, but he had taken one look at the mountain of paperwork waiting for him and promptly grabbed Halt after insisting that it was ‘his duty as the new Commandment’. King Duncan though that was utter nonsense, but he had his own paperwork and didn’t have time to deal with his shenanigans.

The guards had taken one look at the Rangers waiting at the gate and stepped aside. The pompous fool had officially irritated every single person in the castle. Of course, they simply couldn’t let them go without giving them a very interesting tidbit of information. Apparently the insufferable bastard had a nuclear meltdown every time he got so much a drop of water on his cloak. At that moment both Rangers noticed the moat and shared a meaningful look. Neither of them had to confirm their thoughts.

Those helpful words of wisdom turned out to be true as Crowley and Halt watched an adult having what could only be described as a tantrum as a single droplet of wine fell on him. They had a clear view of the head table from where they were sneakily watching (lurking) from the edges of the room. Crowley could all but hear Halt’s scowling.

“Bastard,” Halt growled. Crowley replied with a cheery smile and a pat on the back. To be honest, Crowley was about three seconds from fighting someone, but waiting would be so much more fun.

“Now?” Crowley asked, nerves alight with anticipation. Crowley didn’t bother to turn and see the smirk he knew Halt was sporting. He also didn’t bother to signal Halt to start moving. They both simply waited for the slightest lapse in conversation before slinking off.

Halt wished he could remember the look on the imposter’s face forever. But considering how Crowley was probably going to talk about this forever he likely would. A few minutes later, and a very wet and very bruised former Ranger was fuming as he was forced to hand over anything that could even remotely signify he was a Ranger and pack his bags. While the local baron kept up his neutral indifference, it wasn't hard to find the pleased look in his eyes.

“That was effective. I might try that again sometime,” Halt mused thoughtfully as they bed down in the Ranger cabin a few miles away.

“Oh dear, we’ve unleashed a monster!” Crowley cried in fake horror only for Halt to launch a pillow at his face.

“Shut up,” Halt muttered, but Crowley noticed there wasn't any bite to it.

“Never. You’re stuck. There’s no escape!” He mock shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. Only to receive a light yet solid hit to the chest as he jostled Halt.

“I will throw you in a moat,” was all Crowley heard before he fell soundly asleep.

When one receives a message labeled urgent, one expects it to be urgent. Not an overly cheerful pain in the ass wanting to rant about nobles that are every more of a pain in the ass. Whatever, Halt had lived that for nearly his entire life. Crowley could just deal with it. Besides, it wasn’t like Crowley was responsible for entertaining them or negotiating with them.

Halt toyed with the idea of telling Crowley the truth about his past, but rejected it. It was certainly not the last time it had crossed his mind and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. He let the routine blast of guilt wash over him, but shouldered on. He had left that behind. If it so much as mildly damaged his relationships now he was going loose it.

Halt sent back a brief letter summarizing his displeasure at being worried. Despite it being brief, he somehow managed to add nearly every curse he knew in. A few days later he received a message also labeled as urgent that merely contained a sad face.

He knew Crowley just wanted annoy him, and he also knew that Crowley knew how much he despised people misusing important emergency systems. Still he couldn’t stop the fond smile that grew traitorously over his face.

He glanced over at the message that started this whole thing. Suddenly, he was struck by a thought. What if he never told him? What if he died carrying his greatest secret, never telling the people (more spercifically the person) that meant the most to him? The wrongness of that thought was enough to nearly send him to the floor. While it may be behind him, it was still a part of him and if anyone deserved to know it was Crowley.

Before he could rethink it, he grabbed a slip of paper and wrote three sentences. Still high on the rush of emotions, he rode to Castle Redmond to give it to a messenger. At the last moment he added that it was urgent.

Out of all the possible outcomes that could have arisen from his decision, Crowley bursting through his door was probably one of the more mild. His faithful horse barely had the chance to notify him of a friend approaching.

“Morning,” Halt remarked casually. Crowley stalked over and grabbed his shoulders.

“I thought at first that this was just your sense of humor,” Crowley told him, clearly agitated. “But the fact that you labeled this as urgent, and the last line…” he added, trailing off into silence to let Halt explain.

“I never intended on telling anyone, but not telling you felt wrong,” Halt softly told him. Crowley just threw his arms around him in a hug.

“I’m glad you told me,” he replied, before adding in typical Crowley fashion, “but what I don’t get is how you grew up in a literal palace but still manage to look like a hobo.”

Halt scoffed but accepted the hug. A warm feeling sprouted up in his chest but he would never tell Crowley that his acceptance his past was a huge emotional milestone for Halt, thank you very much.

The note lay forgotten on a table, with three simple sentences. ‘I’m technically the crown prince of Hibernia. My brother tried to kill me so I left. If you hate me I understand.’

#rangers apprentice #halt o'carrick #crowley meratyn

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paperclipninja · 5 years

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Younger post-ep ramble 6x03

This week’s episode of Younger, ‘The Unusual Suspect’, was a big one. No scenes felt wasted, each one moving the story along and it all felt very purposeful. Despite some capital H hotness and really light and funny moments being scattered throughout, mostly thanks to fave (and only) NYC agent Redmond and the resurrection of some truly classic Diana Trout, there was definitely the sense of tension on the rise. It’s been simmering since the end of this season’s first episode and I feel like this week we have hit an apex.

We open with brunch at Maggie’s and what one can only assume is a time jump (either that or Clare has recovered remarkably well from birthing a baby the size of a four month old) and right away an overarching theme for this episode is established, as Lauren enters raving about the latest hit podcast, Exonerated. I’m gonna come straight out and say that I am so into this premise. The excitement around the table sounded like the break room in my office most days, they definitely nailed the trend of true crime fixation. It immediately allowed for Maggie’s quip about white women loving murder, a delightful array of OTT facial expressions from Liza and Kelsey dropping in that Millennial will be meeting with Audrey Colbert, subject of the podcast, to nab her book before anyone else does. Of course the other big news is that Josh and Clare appear to be happily family-ing it up (though mommy wipes, daddy dipes = vom in my mouth a little bit) and Maggie is dealing with unresolved BoUBT (Back of Uber Birth Trauma). Lauren’s vow to help get Maggie back on the ‘h for hunt’ once again epitomises why I love her character so and I want to record her sympathetic ‘oh Divaaa’ as my ringtone. I just love that Maggie, of all characters, is the one who seems like she should be the most pragmatic when it comes to something like birth yet her coping level is zero here.

You know who else wasn’t coping? Me and my Liza and Charles loving heart as Liza suddenly up and left the brunch because she ‘was late for a thing’, cue the scene that was released as a sneak peek last week that I have definitely only watched a normal number of times *cough*. The set up for The Rubin Museum from the opening conversation was fab and the fact that Charles and Liza are using the podcast to frame up a role play situation is just too much. Obviously I had seen the scene prior to the ep and while it is certainly *insert flames here*, I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like not to have expected it (actual combustion probable). I mean regardless, I will never think about a trip to the museum in the same way again. The voice-over narrating what we were seeing was such a great device that is really different to anything the show has done before, it built the anticipation of what was playing out and it felt like a scene from a movie. The moment when Charles turned and came face to face with Liza was a great reminder of how electric the chemistry between these two can be (actual lightening bolts were sighted) and quite frankly, seeing these characters being adventurous and lustful in their relationship is a yes on all fronts. I think the fact it all took place in a place of intellect and culture was extra fitting, it somehow kept the whole thing true to the characters and I am here for the #nerdlove.

The office drama was amped this whole ep and that of course was largely due to the ever growing reign of our season 6 villain, Quinn. With the time jump since last episode confirmed by the fact that Quinn’s book is both published and sitting on the best seller list, Kelsey and Diana’s first encounter with Quinn as she uses the WiFi for a conference call included a) Diana saying goodbye in Mandarin, which was yet another lovely tidbit to add to this character while also setting up the classic Diana we got throughout this ep and; b) some of the best fashion and hairstyles all in one scene (and episode as a whole) ever. I mean the fashion on this show is always next level but this episode in particular took it up a notch: Diana’s high-neck printed electric blue top and Kelsey’s hair/makeup/outfit in the conference room were so stunning I was actually distracted by them.

Kelsey’s office refurb was also noted, loved Liza’s ‘set it (Claw) on fire’ comment and of course, Diana telling Kelsey that now she is publisher, maybe she should stop speaking like a trucker was D. Trout golden line no.1 for this episode. Even better was seeing Kelsey, Diana and Liza settling into this new way of working. I adore the dynamic between these three and the way we’re seeing Diana adjust to her former assistant now being a peer without a fuss is why this show is so wonderful. It would have been easy to have Diana trying to assert herself and maintain some sort of authority, but to see her just want to get on with the work and do the best job she can gives a great credibility to the notion that this character is the best in the industry. I could pretty much write out every Diana Trout line from ‘The Unusual Suspect’ and leave this entire ramble at that (’why is everybody in this country obsessed with true crime? Actual people have died and they’re selling branded beanies on Etsy’ LOLLLLL) but I would then need to do that for Redmond because the fave one and only agent in NYC was back this week and as always, he was in fine form.

The pitch of Audrey Colbert’s book is up there with the funniest scenes of this series, from the creepy af Audrey (A+ casting of Willa Fitzgerald) to Liza and Kelsey trying to play it cool while being hella freaked out to Redmond’s attempt to present a compelling pitch being railroaded by Audrey’s ‘crippling lack of media training’, it was Younger writing and delivery at its finest from start to finish. Seeing Redmond so unnerved by Audrey was unnerving in itself and really, I am so happy with the amount of Michael Urie in this episode. Our next encounter was of course when Kelsey and Liza interrupt his infrared sauna treatment (again, so many hilarious lines, I really feel that a transcript of the entire episode is about the only way to do it justice but may be problematic to pass off as a recap/review…or would it?) and discover that Audrey’s book is being shopped around thanks to the dagger next to Claw on the bestseller list, which = bulk sales = dodgy business = Chinese bots tweeting = Quinn is the worst (math doesn’t lie) = Audrey doesn’t want to be associated with anything suspicious on account of the fact she’s been accused of murdering two ppl (fair). I do want to back this truck up a little though to the way Kelsey and Liza discovered their next big hit was being pitched to half the major publishing houses around town.

Diana Trout hobbling into the office on crutches before dropping the bomb that her injury was the result of being so frazzled upon hearing the news re: Audrey going elsewhere, that she got caught up in her reformer (just go and re-watch this scene, you will not be sorry) is everything I never knew I wanted to see. The reference to Jackie Dunn, who you may remember has been a longstanding nemesis of sorts of Diana’s, was such an utter delight as a long time fan and once again, seeing Kelsey, Liza and Diana all equally vexed by the news was so great and continued to solidify them as a team. I promise no more direct quotes* (*this is a very loose promise), but ‘postpone the power-trip Kelsey, I am handicapped’ in response to Kelsey’s stunned expression upon Diana’s request for espresso, is so outrageously funny and makes this whole scene an absolute stand out on account of its hilarity.

I missed Lauren and Diana interacting this week, however I appreciated seeing Lauren be the wonderful friend she is to Maggie and Josh. Taking Maggie to the support group obviously allowed us to meet Beth, who Maggie engaged for some one on one tutoring (looking forward to seeing where that goes this season) after returning to the store to apologise for running out during the group session. While Maggie was lining up her ongoing therapy, Lauren and Josh shared a sweet and heartfelt moment that highlights why their friendship is such a lovely one on this show. Obviously Josh had told Lauren that he and Clare had a moment that made him think, ‘maybe we should make this relationship work’ and Lauren is following up to see where his head and heart are at.

I absolutely loved said scene between Clare and Josh, when he had finally settled the baby, asks Clare if she wants to go to her bed and then joins her on the floor when she says she sleeps where she can now. There was such a sense of unity and care and it made my heart swell. So in his discussion with Lauren we also find out the baby is named Gemma (last name TBC, for both father and daughter) and when pressed about what he actually wants, Josh reveals that he doesn’t think he and Clare are right for each other. I have said it before, but for all the wacky that Lauren can be, she is the most incredible friend who only wants the best for those around her in such a relentless and genuine way and this scene really highlighted that once again (the line about her dad having such a little bottom though brought us straight back to Lauren light in the best possible way).

The divorce proposal was such a great scene and while I was hoping that perhaps Clare and Josh could work things out, I am thrilled to see that the writers put both these characters on the same page right from the get go. I love that this show constantly bucks stereotypes and expectations of how certain characters and relationships will play out, so to see two adults who have an agreed desire to put their child first but know they need to do so outside a romantic relationship is something really unique on television. I have always enjoyed Josh and Clare’s dynamic and I hope we get to see a real, loving co-parenting arrangement play out.

Kelsey’s interaction with Zane when she is buying a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate scoring Audrey’s book (eek!) is my favourite interaction of theirs this season. Their banter was really effortless, Zane’s, ‘you’re not listening’, as he pulled out the cash to pay for the one remaining bottle smooth and a little bit over confident, but really played up that he has something in the works that is legit. I especially love that we later discover both are buying champagne to celebrate the same win. I feel like we also need to stop and appreciate that they were about to drop $400 between them on two bottles of bubbles like it was no big deal. What is this life? How do I get it?

Though admittedly Kelsey deserves a nice glass of something this ep considering all that she is dealing with. I have made no secret that I have struggled with Kelsey’s character these past couple of seasons and no one is more surprised than me at how much I am getting on board with her this season. Kelsey calling out Quinn point blank that she faked her best seller was so good to watch and seeing Liza backing her up and standing her own ground made this extra satisfying. Gah, I just LOVE how Laura Benanti plays Quinn and her stating that ‘the money is real, what else do you need?’ is so cold and matter-of-fact. What I love most about this whole confrontation is that it immediately made me think back to the first time we met Quinn - her whole presentation was about the fact that no one wants your success more than you do and that women helping women is actually holding women back. That right there should’ve been the red flag that her “helping” Liza and Kelsey was not legit.

And so her true motivation for investing in Empirical becomes evident. It had nothing to do with saving an ailing publishing house, it was to ensure her book would be published, she could have some control over how big it would become and be seen to have the support of a reputable publishing house, all in order to gain name recognition so she could successfully run for Senate. In her mind, Kelsey and Liza benefit from the whole thing financially so it’s a win win but she also holds the power so feels like she has the upper hand. Which is why the scene at The Cut (which is so fab, the looks Quinn shoots Kelsey are searing), when audience members question the dagger next to her book, is so damn satisfying. Kelsey’s move to announce Quinn’s run for Senate is so bold, I am very on board and boy oh boy Kels, I think you’ve got yourself quite the adversary. I was very much Liza watching this all unfold, shocked, impressed and a little bit scared for and of Kelsey and what this all means.

Now Liza was late to the event because she was living out the next chapter of the podcast at the Brownstone which we need to discuss, however I first owe some of you an apology. At the end of last week’s ramble I suggested you may need a fire blanket at the ready after seeing the museum scene sneak peek to you know, contain the flames. I fear some of you may have deployed it prematurely (this is not a euphemism though I am very aware it sounds like one) in response to how damn hot that scene was, but I was not to know that we were going to get this later scene, in which Liza just wanders into the townhouse BECAUSE SHE HAS A FREAKING KEY (suspected ep 2, confirmed ep 3, appreciated always) and decides to have a good old snoop at her bf’s mail. Similar to the museum scene, this set up felt more like a movie than a typical Younger episode. There was an ominous weight to it; the music, the lighting, the Charles padding silently up behind her (barefoot again?) and the tension was palpable.

Liza asks Charles about what’s going on, he provides a vague answer about moving some things around before asking her if she’s listened to chapter 7 of Exonerated, which conveniently mirrors almost exactly what just occurred, with Audrey’s ex finding her going through his things. Ok, so this is where it gets tricky for me. This entire exchange, from the way these two fall into that speaking in third person and wrapping a narrative around themselves, the way Charles wraps his arms around her, the way they look at each other, I mean, this whole thing makes my heart spontaneously combust because it is sexy and flirty, dripping with desire and just really really hot *reaches for backup fire blanket*. But then Liza is clearly distracted by that letter and Charles’ deflection and part of me is wondering why on Earth she isn’t pressing him harder for an answer or following up, I mean, we saw how open they were with one another last season, but then the other part of me looks at Liza and thinks, you are a person who has eyes and that whole situation is right there in front of you so I get it, go with it and worry about it later.

I am aware of how long this ramble already is, but I am going to do something a little different here and digress slightly away from the episode itself and put out some conjecture on my part. It could well be completely over-analysing (lol, I’m neck deep into a freaking novella about a 25 min episode of TV, I think that’s a given) but I know that there is concern about Charles behaving secretively and I have seen some people expressing disappointment in this season so far.

For what it’s worth, my take on it is that it might seem as though some of the characters are behaving a little out of character but I feel that actually, the characters are behaving in ways we haven’t seen before because they’re in situations we haven’t seen them in before. As invested viewers we feel like we know these characters as whole people in every aspect of their lives when in fact, we’ve not seen Liza at the top of her game in her career or Josh as a parent or Charles in a romantic relationship or away from the office. So while the way they behave might not be the way we imagined it, to me it isn’t so much out of character as seeing a new dimension of the character. Also, the addition of flaws does not necessarily equate to destroying a character, it builds them out and makes them more real, if anything.

In relation to Charles and Liza’s relationship and the ‘Charles is being shady’ concern, IMO the key purpose of that is to create tension and you can FEEL it building. As crazy as it may sound, I think the Liza/Charles dynamic thrives in the build and resolution of tension and that’s why their moments in this episode felt so electric and hot, it’s like those unspoken, unresolved tension points charge their chemistry. As much as I think I would love to have Charles and Liza sitting around blissfully happy (I mean, I would obvs), the reality is, it’s not that fun to watch. I believe the tension is building towards a resolution of sorts that will actually put them in a better place and move the relationship forward. (*Full disclosure: since writing this I listened to the podcast from ATX fest and Joe Murphy, one of the writers for Younger, said very similar things so if you listened to that podcast I promise I have not just taken what Joe said and pretended they’re my thoughts, I legit had this written and then heard (ngl, I may be feeling a little smug as a result). I’m putting it down to us both being Australian because clearly that is a thing that makes sense).

I also think there is an unsettled feeling this season because the entire premise of this show, the roles these characters played, the interactions we have grown accustomed to week after week, has been completely flipped upside down. As viewers we garner comfort from the routine of watching a show but also from knowing where the players are positioned, how they will behave and what it looks and feels like. I think the writers know exactly what they’re doing and are achieving exactly what they would’ve hoped (apologies writers if this is wildly inaccurate and I’m just assuming things incorrectly left, right and centre) - everyone is sitting in discomfort and it’s largely due to the unfamiliarity of it all. The set up, the way we’re seeing characters etc, it reflects what the characters themselves are experiencing on our screens, which is all kinds of meta and actually pretty cool. But the further you push that discomfort and make viewers sit in it, the greater the impact and more satisfying the resolution. It’s like waiting for a beat to drop in a song, the build up can become almost unbearable but damn it’s good when it lands. That’s how I feel this is all going to go.

That is what I meant by this episode feeling like an apex, it feels as though there’s a limit to how far an audience can be taken in a state of flux without some resolve somewhere. And the writers know this, it’s what they do, it’s WHY we tune in. I’m not suggesting that everything is going to go back to the way it was, the evolution of a show like Younger is exciting and part of the fun is seeing where it goes, but we are three episodes in to a twelve episode season and while we consume it week to week, it ultimately has to make narrative sense across the whole season. It’s as though we’re at the end of an ‘establishing’ phase right now. So I am reserving any judgement until I see how it all comes together, but have no doubt there will be many resolutions and many new points of tension throughout.

Right now, I am thoroughly enjoying all that we’re getting and I think the writing this season has been excellent so far, with moments like the final scene of ‘The Unusual Suspect’ providing us with the first true cliffhanger of the season. Our last bit of Redmond for the ep was peak Redmond (I love that he dashed off to a better table uptown), and of course the big Mercury reveal, YESSS. That moment of realisation washing over Liza’s face, props to Sutton Foster, and I cannot WAIT to see how this all goes down. The prospect of inter-generational team ups of Kelsey/Liza vs. Zane/Charles while members of each team are in relationships with one another is the kind of set up I live for in a TV show. Is it July 10th yet?

#original post #incorrect spelling in link

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themastercylinder · 5 years

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SUMMARY

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing. When he was 19 years old, Alex had been the prime subject of a scientific research project documenting his psychic ability, but in the midst of the study, he disappeared. After running afoul of a local gangster/extortionist named Snead (Redmond Gleeson), Alex evades two of Snead’s thugs by allowing himself to be taken by two men: Finch (Peter Jason) and Babcock (Chris Mulkey), who identify themselves as being from an academic institution.

At the institution, Alex is reunited with his former mentor Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow) who is now involved in government-funded psychic research. Novotny, aided by fellow scientist Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), has developed a technique that allows psychics to voluntarily link with the minds of others by projecting themselves into the subconscious during REM sleep. Novotny equates the original idea for the dreamscape project to the practice of the Senoi natives of Malaysia, who believe the dream world is just as real as reality.

The project was intended for clinical use to diagnose and treat sleep disorders, particularly nightmares, but it has been hijacked by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a powerful government agent. Novotny convinces Alex to join the program in order to investigate Blair’s intentions. Alex gains experience with the technique by helping a man who is worried about his wife’s infidelity and by treating a young boy named Buddy (Cory Yothers), who is plagued with nightmares so terrible that a previous psychic lost his sanity trying to help him. Buddy’s nightmare involves a large sinister “snake-man.”

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A subplot involving Alex and Jane’s growing infatuation culminates with him sneaking into Jane’s dream to have sex with her. He does this without technological aid—something no one else has been able to achieve. With the help of novelist Charlie Prince (George Wendt), who has been covertly investigating the project for a new book, Alex learns that Blair intends to use the dream-linking technique for assassination.

Blair murders Prince and Novotny to silence them. The president of the United States (Eddie Albert) is admitted as a patient due to recurring nightmares. Blair assigns Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly), a psychopath who murdered his own father, to enter the president’s nightmare and assassinate him—people who die in their dreams also die in the real world. Blair considers the president’s nightmares about nuclear holocaust as a sign of political weakness, which he deems a liability in the upcoming negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

Alex projects himself into the president’s dream—a nightmare of a post nuclear war wasteland—to try and protect him. After a fight in which Tommy rips out a police officer’s heart, attempts to incite a mutant-mob against the president, and battles Alex in the form of the snake-man from Buddy’s dream. Alex assumes the appearance of Tommy’s murdered father (Eric Gold) in order to distract him, allowing the president to impale him with a spear. The president is grateful to Alex but reluctant to confront Blair, who wields considerable political power. To protect himself and Jane, Alex enters Blair’s dream and kills him before Blair can retaliate.

The film ends with Jane and Alex boarding a train to Louisville, Kentucky, intent on making their previous dream encounter a reality. They are surprised to meet the ticket collector from Jane’s dream.

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The Dream Master Roger Zelazny

According to Roger Zelazny, the film developed from an initial outline that he wrote in 1981, based in part upon his novella “He Who Shapes” and novel The Dream Master. He was not involved in the project after 20th Century Fox bought his outline. Because he did not write the film treatment or the script, his name does not appear in the credits; assertions that he removed his name from the credits are unfounded.

DEVELOPMENT

DREAMSCAPE’s title encapsulates both the film and the mental landscape that its independent filmmakers occupied for almost three years. Its creators hoped that the production would not only prove to be a success, but that it would also give them the clout to go on to bigger, even more ambitious projects. Featuring elaborate special effects by Peter Kuran’s Visual Concept Engineering Company and makeup effects by Craig Reardon, the film was launched as the first outing of newly-formed Zupnik-Curtis Productions.

Producer Bruce Cohn Curtis is one of the few men left in Hollywood who still has ties to its fabled beginnings, the nephew of the legendary Harry Cohn, one of the founders of Columbia Pictures. Looking the producer, from his immaculately clipped hair down to his tailored, sharply creased suits, a chill falls over any set that Curtis walks onto. With a military air of no-nonsense, Curtis keeps a close eye on his productions and is happy only if filming is on schedule.

“I’m tyrannical on a set,” Curtis says with a smile of relaxed authority. “That’s why I use the people I have as well as I do. Many of the people on DREAMSCAPE have worked with me before and have come back because I am a perfectionist and won’t settle for less. I have a standard of excellence in my films that I’ve always maintained, no matter what the cost, so that even though you might not like the stories I’ve done, the look of the film is always rich.”

Remembering that he had to prove himself publicly in an industry filled with people just waiting for the newest Cohn to fail, for his first effort Curtis made OTLEY, a sharp-edged spy spoof/drama with Tom Courtney as an ersatz spy who finds his make-believe assignment being taken very seriously by the other side. The film died at the box office, but drew good critical notices. The industry sat up and noticed; Harry Cohn’s nephew was off and running.

Curtis partnered with various producers for awhile, including Irwin Yablans on HELL NIGHT, but chafed at being the junior partner without clout. The matter came to a head when he was making THE SEDUCTION with Yablans and grew tired of having his ideas ignored.

Curtis resolved to start his own company and make pictures his way. He found financial backing from businessman Stanley Zupnik, and was looking for scripts to start Zupnik-Curtis Productions when associate producer Chuck Russell brought in director Joe Ruben and the DREAMSCAPE script. Curtis had worked previously with both and gave the green light for Ruben and Russell to begin revising the script, written by David Loughery.

Ruben discovered Lowery’s script in 1981 at the William Morris Agency, which represents both artists. Lowery, a television writer, had come out to Hollywood in 1979 after winning a script writing contest sponsored by Columbia Pictures, while a student at the University of Iowa. Ruben had just finished directing the TV-pilot for BREAKING AWAY, and was looking for a new project.

Once Ruben started reading the DREAMSCAPE script he found he couldn’t put it down. The vision Loughery described was breathtaking, with rivers ablaze and boats filled with the undead. Ruben was excited by the property and showed it to Russell, his assistant director on JOY RIDE and GORP (also starring Dennis Quaid), films made with Bruce Cohn Curtis for producer Samuel Z. Arkoff. Russell suggested they take the script to Curtis and his new company.

It took seven months for Ruben and Russell to rewrite DREAMSCAPE; with Curtis providing detailed criticism and ideas throughout. Loughery was brought back in to help write the final draft.

“We knew some things in Loughery’s script, like the holocaust dream at the end, were so expansive that it was virtually un-filmable,” said Russell about the changes that were made. “The original ending was set in New York. We changed that so we could do the movie out here in Los Angeles. In Loughery’s script you saw all of New York on fire after the bomb had hit. You saw the Statue of Liberty, ferry boats filled with the undead, and flames across the harbor. It was really great, but I knew we couldn’t afford to do it like that.”

Putting a screenplay into production inevitably means rewrites and not always by the original writer. In the final billing, Loughery receives story credit, while sharing screenwriting credit with director Joe Ruben and associate producer Chuck Russell. When I started writing with Joe and Chuck,” he says, “the original screenplay was pretty ferme, about 108 pages. They wanted to work some more on the characters, and their relationships. That was a good thing the development of the characters gave the audience more reason to care for the people and what happened to them.”

One of the things that really worried us about the character of Alex Gardner is that he’s something of a smart ass. So, we were afraid the audience wouldn’t like him. As soon as Dennis went to work, it was obvious we weren’t going to have any problem.

“My favorite character is Tommy Ray, the psychotic psychic, played by David Patrick Kelly. He doesn’t have many scenes, but when he’s on, he does a great job. The ‘have a heart scene is going to be seen by the audience as a rip off of Temple of Doom, but the fact is we shot it months before Temple of Doom even went into production. That is Chuck’s idea; he has a grisly and macabre sense of humor.”

Russell and Ruben beefed-up the character of Buddy (Cory “Bumper” Yothers), the little boy whose nightmares are cured by the film’s dream research project. In Loughery’s script Buddy wasn’t a running character. The idea for Buddy’s character arose from concepts the writers picked up from the study of dream research.

“We found the case of a little boy who was having such terrible nightmares that he couldn’t sleep,” said Russell. “It was affecting him physically; we used that case as our model for Buddy. The first time in the film when Alex (Dennis Quaid) acts unselfishly is when he enters Buddy’s dream to try and help him. He rises to the occasion and fulfills the role of hero.”

THE DREAM CHAMBER

On an adjacent stage the set for the Dream Chamber was built. Outside, the set looked like a plywood igloo circled with florescent lights. Inside however, a small, padded chamber led to a main control room by a door and a large window. The set was a quiet haven, even when the normal racket of production was going on outside.

“The initial sketches of the set design for the Dream Chamber were some wild approaches that we felt were interesting, but not what we wanted,” Russell said. “Some of them made us feel too much like we were on a spaceship, while others were more like a classic, BRAINSTORM-type, wire-strewn lab. We decided we didn’t want a lot of whirling lights and buzzers, but something quiet and womb-like. It was a very difficult set to design because we were trying to make something that looked authentic, but we didn’t have any precedent for it.”

From an aesthetic standpoint, the design worked wonderfully. From a practical standpoint however, problems cropped up immediately that led to several delays in shooting. The set itself had been designed by Alan Jones without consulting with director of photography Brian Tufano. Jones then abruptly left the production for personal reasons so that when the set was built, Tufano had still not been consulted during the shuffle to find a new set designer. Tufano had great difficulty in setting up his lights and camera within the small confines of the set. An outside computer graphics firm had been brought in to supply authentic looking medical displays for the many small monitors built into the set. Unfortunately, the computer wouldn’t work right and left a full crew standing around collecting pay while technicians tried to figure out what had gone wrong with their expensive battery of equipment. Later, one of the technicians would quietly tell Russell that an Apple home computer would have been sufficient to give them the displays they wanted.

BEHIND THE SCENES / SPECIAL EFFECTS

“Some of the rough figures from effects companies were just staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need.” – Chuck Russell

Chuck Russell was told to shop around for people who could create the film’s extensive special effects and draw up a budget.

“It was very exciting to shop the script around and find out what could and couldn’t be done,” said Russell. “Some of the rough figures I got from effects companies were staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need. We just didn’t have the preparation time or budget of something like ALTERED STATES.

“When we found Peter Kuran’s VCE and Craig Reardon, and they got excited about the project, we knew they were perfect for it. They even helped sell the project because of their reputations, Reardon’s for working on Steven Spielberg’s POLTERGEIST and Kuran from his work with George Lucas.”

Russell assigned the live action makeup effects to Reardon, and the miniature and optical work to Kuran’s VCE company. Richard Taylor’s MAGI company was also asked to contribute computer animated imagery for the film’s “Dream Tunnel” effects. For the Dream Tunnel, Russell and Ruben wanted a semi-abstract look different from the other effects work in the picture, a “hazy.” dreamlike look, with an object or two from the upcoming scene to form and float towards the viewer to act as a visual cue for what was about to happen.

The effects sequences were storyboarded by Len Morganti; the budget was finalized on the basis of those storyboards. Because director Joe Ruben had not worked with special effects before, he carefully went through each scene with the storyboard artist.

“I knew that I had to be totally committed to my boards,” said Ruben. “I spent a lot of time thinking through the sequences and how I wanted to shoot them because I knew if I didn’t, the film would go out of control because the special effects people wouldn’t know what they were responsible for and what had to be done with each shot. I was able to get just what I was looking for. Morganti would sketch out something and if I asked him to move it a little lower and more to the right, he’d be able to do it with just a few strokes of his pencil. It was almost like working with a camera.”

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BUDDY”S NIGHTMARE

To try and save money while providing a sense of heightened realism, Russell and Ruben had wanted to shoot the “Buddy” dream, the little boy’s nightmare, on location.

“We found an old Victorian house and were actually shooting,” said Russell. “We realized that by the time you put in the lightning and thunder, it was going to look like Vincent Price was going to come around the corner. It was too on the nose, too traditional. We asked Jeff Stags, our art director, to do something different. He came up at the last minute with the idea of a forced perspective set, sort of Dr. Caligari style. It was a small set, but much more effective, as well as inexpensive. Buddy’s dream is really my favorite because it has much more impact, even though it’s not as spectacular as the last dream.”

Another problem that cropped up involved Reardon’s Snake man suit. Although an impressive work up close, Ruben felt that at even minor distances, it would seem as just a man in a rubber suit. Ruben and Russell still hoped that flickering low-level lighting would help. but Ruben began to realize that even with the extensive work he had put into planning the storyboard angles, the lighting was not going to be enough to sell the suit to an audience. Reardon firmly disagreed, “Contrary to negative thinking about rubber suits, you’ve got to see them as something delightful, and full of potential for doing something wonderful,” said Reardon. “You have to think of them almost as toys. Right when we were about to shoot the basement struggle scene, I went aside with Ruben and said there are two ways of looking at this; you can think of this as a rubber suit which will look bad, or as something which, with the proper angles and lighting, will convince people that they’re looking at a living, breathing, snarling Snake man. Now when Ruben first saw it, he said ‘Oh boy, Reardon, I don’t know…it’s a rubber suit. I thought that had a dangerous ring to it if he really believed it, which was hard to tell because he, Russell, and Loughery had this camaraderie among the three of them based on this constant derogatory kidding. That’s well and good and worth a few chuckles, but where it begins to become pernicious is when it begins to condition thinking to be truly negative.”

Reardon also objected to the low-level lighting strategy that Ruben and cinematographer Brian Tufano used to film the suit. “Tufano seemed to have a fine contempt for any kind of supplementary light which would be, in logical terms arbitrary, but in dramatic terms exciting and interesting … something that would catch the eye, something that would fill in a face or create a little cross light to show textures,” said Reardon. “The naturalistic photography Tufano used can be very detrimental, I think, to SF and fantasy stories. You contrast this with the work of John Hora, who shot THE HOWLING and GREMLINS, and you see that special effects profit enormously from using special tiny spots and direct lighting. But I didn’t feel it was my place to raise the issue.”

Reardon did try to get his viewpoint across to the filmmakers by preparing a lighting test on video. The test was crude but illustrated the alternative Reardon was suggesting. “They ignored it,” said Reardon of the test. “Yet, when they got on the set, they were completely vapor locked on the suit. They didn’t know what to do with it, and they didn’t have any ideas. All the storyboards that had been prepared in advance were completely ignored. Not once did I see anybody bring up a storyboard and crack it open and say that for this frame here we need to set up this angle. All the audacious plans evaporated. Ruben was at a loss to shoot special effects or rubber suits.”

Aupperle s first job was to coordinate the sculpture of the stop-motion Snake man, which was being done by Steve Czerkas, with the suit being built by Craig Reardon.

“They told me that they wanted to feature Craig’s suit prominently, so I was going to try and make the miniature as close as possible to Craig’s suit,” said Aupperle. “We started with a man’s armature and sculpted Craig’s design over it. I knew we were going to have to make some changes, like making the tail longer so it could whip around, but I wanted to avoid one of those instances where the suit never matches the miniature. I’d run back and forth to Craig and measure his design with calipers just to make sure we were dead on.

“Since Craig’s suit was being done in pieces our model was the first time the producers saw the way the design was going to come together. They wanted more changes than I ever expected. They actually had Steve Czerkas re-sculpt the model. It got away from the manlike design and no longer really matched the suit. I was a little concerned that the two would intercut, but that’s what they insisted upon.”

Causing Aupperle the most concern was the production’s seeming lack of respect for the story boards. *They wanted to be able to use Craig’s suit any way they wanted,” said Aupperle. “They didn’t want to be tied down by storyboards. At one time they asked me to revise the storyboards. They said they’d just have to wing it on the set. That attitude left me little to do until they were done with the live action. I found the situation very distressing.”

Perhaps the greatest disappointment for Reardon was the scant use made of a full snake-man costume. The suit appears in the film for just a few frames, as the man-snake breaks through a door; most of the action originally planned for Cedar was replaced by Jim Aupperle’s animation using models built, following Reardon’s design, by Steve Czerkas.

THE SNAKE MAN

Most changes made in the script did not alter Loughery’s story significantly. In Loughery’s original draft, the creature that menaces Buddy in the boy’s dream and later reappears as the creature stalking the President and Alex was to be a rat-man. “We changed that because so much had been done with werewolves,” said Russell. “This was right after THE HOWLING and AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and we felt the difference between a man with a rat’s face and a man with a wolf’s face would be minimal.

“We wanted to take a different approach,” Russell continued. “Not the direction of John Carpenter’s Thing but something identifiable, so that when Tommy Ray changed into something to scare Alex, you would be able to see that it was Tommy Ray’s version of the same creature. Joe Ruben wanted to go with something that scared him, and since he’s scared of snakes, we went in that direction. I did some sketches of a snake creature and came up with something that really excited us because it was a departure from anything either of us had seen before. I think part of it came to me from my memories of seeing THE SEVEN FACES OF DR. LAO. When we showed it later to our effects people, Peter Kuran and Craig Reardon, they were really sparked by it too.

A stop-motion animator was the last member of the effects team to be hired, done through VCE. Both Russell and Ruben had agreed early on that the best and cheapest way to get what they wanted from the Snake man sequences would be with a mixture of live-action and stop-motion effects, but they were unsure just how they would mix the combination.

“I knew we would need a good animator,” said Russell. “I knew a live-action Snake man with its long neck and swishing tail would never work in a master shot. We didn’t have umpteen million dollars for physical effects.” Russell and Ruben planned to use low-key, flickering lighting for the sequences in order to seamlessly blend the two effects techniques.

Said Russell, “ Joe and I sat down with the special effects people on the Buddy sequence storyboards, which is the first appearance of the Snake man, and asked which way it made more sense to do it? It made sense to do the wide shots in stop motion and the close-ups in live action, and in the cases where we weren’t sure, we would have both of them overlap and whichever worked better, then that’s what we would go with.”

Although this arrangement was made in good faith and with the best intentions, the decision to let the two techniques overlap and not make a clear distinction between which shots would be assigned to each ultimately proved to be a decision that led to tensions and feelings of betrayal between makeup expert Craig Reardon and the production company.

Opticals were also used to create the clouds and background sky for the first dream that Quaid enters, the vertigo dream where he goes into the mind of a steelworker and falls. “There’s one shot where Dennis Quaid is supposed to be falling. said Kuran. “I spent some time trying to figure out how a person should fall so it will look right on film. We had a good plate of a falling background, and they rigged an elaborate harness at Raleigh to hold Dennis. When we were on the set. Ruben asked me how a person should fall, and I went through the motions of what Dennis should do, but Joe didn’t do that. He told Dennis to do something else that looks really corny. He ruined the shot. There was no way that I could think of to fix it and I think it looks really cheesy right now.

THE PRESIDENTS NIGHTMARES

At a budget of over $300,000 for some 90-odd cuts, DREAMSCAPE was one of the largest jobs VCE had taken on, as well as one of the most difficult. As the producers were continually asking VCE to create more or make changes with what they had done, Kuran wasn’t under pressure to have all the special effects done by the original deadline. Kuran pretty much improvises his effects as he goes along. The more they wanted him to do, the less certain he was about how much longer it would actually take to finish the effects. One thing was certain. There was no way they’d be able to get the movie out in the fall as Russell had originally hoped.

In a way though, the delays had been a good thing; something everyone was almost afraid to acknowledge because of all the tribulations the film had gone through. Kuran was creating the effects layer by layer, and even with only early tests to show, the effects still looked very good. It helped convince Curtis that even though the schedule and budget had gone to hell, it was still within limits he could work with—he was getting a better product for his money than he ever dreamed possible. The more Kuran tinkered with the visuals, the better they got. The live action footage of the actors had come out better than expected, too. Quaid and Von Sydow were marvelous in their roles, and if they could just get the effects to come out anywhere near what had been described in the script, they all began to feel they might have a movie yet, even if they did have to grimace a bit when they realized that the work on the film was still far from over.

Working with Zupnik-Curtis productions was not without its problems for Kuran in the beginning. Because Curtis had never worked with special effects before, he wasn’t sure what to expect.

“We started getting pressure from them early on,” said Kuran. “They had a rough cut of some of the sequences for us to work from, and they wanted to see something. But they kept changing the cutting without realizing that it meant we’d have to go back and redo the whole scene. There was a trolley shot that they wanted to make longer by one foot of film. At that point, all the backgrounds had been shot to length. All the miniatures had been broken down. I managed to talk them out of that one.”

Another problem is the very nature of post-production work. “When somebody does a movie, they make a little mistake here and a little mistake there, and if it doesn’t work, they just kind of throw the shit over their shoulders and it lands on them in post-production,” said Kuran. “Unfortunately, this is where we do most of our work. People are at their worst to deal with in post-production. They’re under deadlines, and if the movie doesn’t work they’re in even worse shit. The people who shot the movie are gone and they usually refuse to accept the fact that the movie is crummy because of them. Lots of people can go onto a production and create a lot of shit and come off smelling like a rose because the movie’s not finished when they leave it.”

Although VCE was contributing some 90 cuts to the film, the majority of the effects were going to be clustered around the holocaust dream near the end, and at the start, including the terrific A-Bomb teaser which opens the film. “I thought the bombs in THE DAY AFTER just didn’t look right,” said Kuran. “They looked so dark and cold. You look at a nuclear test and you can see it’s a very bright fireball, so we wanted a very hot look to our bomb.”

The Trolly/Subway Cart

Reardon’s and Kuran’s most elaborate work is seen in the climactic sequence, a surreal view of the day after Nuclear Armageddon. Dennis Quaid enters a dream which represents the President’s worst fears of nuclear war, the setting is an old trolley car that travels among the bombed-out ruins of Washington, D.C., past several surrealistic tableaux-travelling mattes and miniatures courtesy of Peter Kuran’s V.C.E. David Kelley, Plummer’s henchman, enters the dream as well, for a climactic confrontation with Quaid.

For the holocaust dream at the end, Kuran’s basic effects strategy was to have a live-action foreground element, an intermediate miniature behind that, and then have a matte or tinted water tank shot as the background. The scenes were difficult because Kuran needed something that would convey a sense of extremely large scale while still having realistic detail, a tall order on the show’s tight budget.

Russell had originally wanted to do the holocaust effects scenes first and rear-project them as they were shooting the live action. Kuran pointed out that it would take thousands and thousands of feet of film to try and generate the footage they would need, and that they would have a better chance of making sure the background footage matched with the live-action trolley car if they shot the trolley first and then had it to play the backgrounds against.

“Jim Belohovek and Sue Turner built the miniatures for the scenes, and we photographed them in different layers,” said Kuran. “To get good depth of field, we shot them at one frame per second. Then we started adding the fires. Because those had to be slowed down, we shot them at 72 frames a second. We don’t have any motion control equipment. I set up a dolly for the camera, filled the room with smoke, then lit the fires. It takes a couple of seconds to get the camera up to speed. Then we pushed the dolly down the tracks until eventually timed the push right and got it to look the same speed that we thought the trolley would be moving at. The background is a water tank shot that we used to make it look moody by adding some glows and fires. Counting everything I’d say there’s about 20 elements in that shot.”

While Kuran labored in the bowels of VCE, director Ruben and Academy Award winning editor Richard Halsey were slowly cutting the film together using unfinished optical tests that were the right length and Jim Aupperle’s Snake man animation. Kuran had been able to find them an east coast underground filmmaker named Dennis Pies (pronounced “pees”) to do the Dream Tunnel effects and the stuff looked wonderful. It was exactly what they wanted. But now it was time to decide how they were going to mix the live action Snake man and the animation, and to a great degree, they were coming down against the live action footage.

With the will to manipulate the dream to his own ends, Kelly at one point extends his fingernails into stilletos, which he uses to rip the heart from the car’s conductor, with the logic of dreams, the trolley then becomes a subway car, populated with a dozen grisly war victims, looking more dead than alive, Shortly after, Kelley transforms into a snake monster.

Reardon details the other effects he did for Dreamscape. “Tommy Ray Kelly transforms with knives springing from his fingers. He uses these to tear out someone’s heart which sits beating in his fingers,” the effects Technician says. “We made a prosthetic hand and an artificial heart for this scene.

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“We made 12 mutants up for them, Reardon says of the subway denizens, “all extremely exaggerated in their ugliness, so that, in the heavy shadows and flickering light that was planned for the shot, they would still prove effective. The design is heavy-handed, but suitably macabre for the scene.

“I hogged all the major sculpture on the picture for myself, but there were a number of other people working with me on this that also deserve mention. My greatest praise must go to Bruce Kasson, who took the weight off my shoulders where mechanical work is concerned. He worked out the mechanical effect used for the death of one of the characters at the end, as well as the stilleto fingernails. David Miller was our acrylic man, doing all the hard plastic pieces, and certainly one of my right hand men in doing the sculpture, along with David Cellitti.

Snake Man Transformation Effect

Following the completion of principal photography, there was a brief hiatus, during which Reardon re-stirred his somewhat-dampened enthusiasm, before tackling the transformation sequence.

Replacement animation is a variety of stop motion that uses separate, slightly differing sculptures, rather than the movable models most frequently associated with the form. Pioneered by George Pal, replacement animation is nowadays seen mostly in David Allen’s television commercials featuring such animated characters as Mrs. Butterworth and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Reardon’s suggestion to try this technique for an unusual transformation. Because of the frame-by-frame nature of the animation process, the sequence would be a short one-less than two seconds in sculpting work than Reardon (or, most likely, anyone else) had ever expended on a transformation effect of such short duration; 32 heads, each altered slightly from the previous head in sequence, each making a barely more than subliminal appearance in the film. It was this rapidity, and the violence of the change, that Reardon felt would make it entirely unique.

“The major problem was one of time,” Reardon says. “How was I to produce 32 different heads for this sequence within a reasonable schedule? The first thing you want to consider in a situation like this is, can you do it full-size? It took me about 15 seconds of heavy thought to realize that would be a killer, because of the molds that would be involved, and the sheer awkwardness of doing such an extensive sequence in full scale. From the beginning, they wanted David Kelley’s features discernible in the snake head’s face, so l also briefly considered taking a cast of Kelley’s face and using reduction techniques, like special shrinking molds, to bring it down to scale-but there is enough distortion in the reduction process that it wouldn’t likely be worth the effort. So I finally decided on doing a miniature portrait sculpture based on his features.

“One way to have gone would have been to produce molds of each and every stage cast one head, alter it a little further, make a mold from that and cast another stage. I ruled that out; it takes about a day to make one mold, so it would have taken a full month to prepare for the sequence.

“Instead, I took a master mold of the first stage turned out a dozen or so duplicates of that, and altered each of them to cover the first third of the total transformation. I then made another mold from the last of these, and changed those progressively. That way, I had to make no more than three molds. As the work progressed, I did some rough tests on video, which helped to show up a number of small glitches. Some of these proved very difficult to correct-seen side by side, two heads might appear to match perfectly, but tiny variances would show immediately on video.”

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A chief problem with all stop motion effects is that of temporal aliasing,” a term used to describe the unnatural look of objects seen to be in motion, but not blurred as they would be if actually filmed in real-time. All along, Chuck kept saying, ‘I hope this won’t look like animation,” says Reardon, “and of course all I could say was, I hope so, too.’

“Jim Aupperle, who did the stop motion animation on the snake monster, and my friend Randy Cook, made some suggestions to counter that problem. Both suggested that if each stage would be slightly dissolved into the next stage, that would soften the edges, and disguise whatever anomalies there were from one head to the next. So Peter took the negative and a dupe negative, printing them to a single positive with overlapping frames, so that no single frame gives a really razor sharp image of one sculpture.

The Caves

Another kind of problem arose in shooting the climax of the President’s holocaust dream, set in a cave-like underground grotto decorated with fires, twisted girders and a glowing pool of green water. Originally it was planned to shoot the scene on a section of the ruins” set at Raleigh Studios. But Russell found out that he could get a few days shooting time at Bronson Canyon. The site, long a favorite locale for low-budget productions, is actually a short “Y” shaped tunnel through a jutting canyon wall in the nearby Hollywood hills. Open at all three ends and with a high ceiling, Ruben and Russell felt they could put up a more effective set inside the cave at relatively little cost to the production.

The art department scrambled on something like 48 hours notice to come up with a revised set for the cave. They did well, but lighting the set so that the lights themselves wouldn’t show was a difficult task made harder by the fact that creating the pool of water just past the junction of the “Y” in the cave had turned the rest of its sandy floor into gritty muck that forced the crew to support the lights and camera on wooden planks and sandbags the best they could. Working in the enclosed confines quickly turned miserable too. Brian Tufano, who had been hired because of his work on QUADROPHENIA and THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, is yet another British cinematographer who likes to use smoke to diffuse his lighting to give the set greater visual depth. Every time Ruben went for a take, Tufano’s assistants would pump the small, sealed cave full of hot, oily smoke and wait to see if the density was right. While the crew and stars quietly gasped behind their respirators, either more smoke would be pumped in if it wasn’t enough.

According to Craig Reardon, the first scenes that were supposed to be shot in the caves were thought to be relatively straightforward. Quaid, followed by Albert, is moving through the cave when they are attacked by a mutant dog. For the dog’s costume, Reardon’s assistant, Michiko Tagawa, had made some wonderfully revolting costumes.

“They were beautiful.” Reardon said. “They had entrails bulging out of the body and exposed rib cages and boils and french fried skin. Now we were told that a Doberman would wear the costume, and in fact, the trainer had auditioned the dogs in a costume they worked in on the BUCK ROGERS television show. So Michiko went to a great deal of trouble to measure the Dobermans and I contributed sculptures for the heads while she built the body parts up from reject castings for the subway zombies.” Once we got them suited up at the Bronson location however, the Dobermans refused to perform.

“The dogs trouped around in the mud and the zippers and their fur got packed with it,” said Reardon. “It was a disaster. They took one of the suits and tried to put it on a German Shepherd, a dog which is considerably different in body build.”

In his big scene the dog was supposed to run a short distance and jump at Quaid. In take after take however, the dog merely trotted up to Quaid and stopped at his feet to try and shake the costume off. Eyes turned on the dog’s embarrassed handlers who quickly explained that the dog usually didn’t act like that; it was probably because he felt uncomfortable with the costume.

Reardon snipped parts of the costume’s legs away, hoping to make it more comfortable, but this produced no better reaction. Next, the dog’s owners took to furiously waving a little furry target at the dog. then quickly sticking it just inside Quaid’s shirt while everyone enthusiastically urged the dog to attack. This made the dog think everyone just wanted to play. It would run up to Quaid, half-hop once, then bark excitedly while waiting for his trainers to get the toy again.

Quipped Reardon, Bruce Cohn Curtis said the mutant dog looked like someone’s dirty laundry running across the floor.” Finally the dog made one decent leap past Quaid and Ruben called it a take. The shot is still in the film, although the rest of the mutant dogs were replaced with German Shepherd with their fur shaved in patches and dabbled with red goo.

“The script also called for these two raggedy dogs to chase after Quaid and Albert in the dream. It seemed that the easiest way to achieve a really striking appearance for the dogs would be to suit them in a costume covered with foam latex. I consulted with the trainers on the feasibility of it, and they said

‘Yeah, sure.’ So l sculpted two mutated dog heads, and Michiko Tagawa, a very good craftsperson who’s done work with Winston and Burman, did a beautiful job on the body suits-really hideous and nasty. She took some reject castings from the subway mutants, and reworked them into twisted body shapes, warped, burned and decked with growths. But the dogs wouldn’t wear them, and the trainers sort of shrugged, and said ‘What do you expect?’

“Those trainers were let go, and replaced by Karl Miller, who allowed them to shave his dogs in erratic patches, and we gobbed all kinds of blood, goo and crap on them. Good enough, but it’s unfortunate that Michiko’s suits will never be seen.”

VCE generated the bits and pieces that would help add life and highlights to the live action effects. A red glow was added to the mutant dog’s eyes, as well as crawling purple electrical effects when the dogs vanish. Opticals materialized David Patrick Kelly’s nunchaku weapons smoothly into his hands as well as allowed Dennis Quaid to heal his wounds and transform himself into Kelly’s father.

Snake Man Showdown

The next scene planned for the cave involved Quaid and Albert, discovering it is a dead end and that the Snakeman is right behind them. It comes out of a side tunnel, snarls, and attacks Quaid. Ruben decided he wanted to use the full-sized Snakeman suit for the shot, and Reardon was given short notice to get it ready. At the time, Reardon was working full tilt to prepare the suit needed for the basement struggle in the boy’s nightmare. A different head would be needed for the cave sequence.

“Russell got a hold of Bronson Canyon and said we’ve got to do the Kelly head to look like David Patrick Kelly, playing the President’s assassin) right away. You can’t change things around like that. I said I’d try when I should have told him no.”

Ruben shot Reardon’s live Snakeman suit in the cave, although eventually discarded most of it and replaced the scene with a stop-motion cut. Also discarded was a small but important effect Reardon had worked very hard on getting right, a brief shot where Dennis Quaid “heals” a wound in his shoulder.

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“We created a sort of bite effect, then put a plastic membrane over it and melted it with a plastic solvent so that when they ran the film backwards, the wound would heal,” explained Reardon. “It didn’t work as well as it did on the bench, which is frequently the case, but you did get a feeling of the actual fleshy material knitting itself. They opted to have Peter Kuran redo it with animation.”

More successful was a Reardon designed effect where Kelly, now distracted by an ingenious ploy of Quaid’s, reverts to a half-human, half-snake form. While diverted, Albert sneaks up behind him and drives a length of pipe through Kelly’s chest. For this shot, Reardon made a false chest with a mechanical rubber pole section inside that was connected to a spring and operated by cable. Albert would sneak up holding the pipe, then drop it out of camera sight as he lunged for Kelly, and the rubber pipe would burst through a section of painted tissue paper. Although the complex mechanical effect took some time to rig, it was accomplished in only three takes and is gruesomely realistic. It made for a happy interlude before the crew was to run into yet more problems once they left Bronson Canyon and returned to Raleigh Studios.

Dave Millers Unused Snake Man

“I also worked on a snake man head, the one that was originally going to be in the elevator sequence, emerging from the head of Dennis Quaid. But then, they had some kind of quibble over Craig’s head of Quaid–they said it didn’t look like him, or some such garbage-and they hired Greg Cannom to do that sequence over. Greg did another head of Quaid, which they wound up not even showing, though it looked perfect, and another snakeman, which-sorry, Greg I didn’t care for too much. It didn’t seem to have much definition; it was hard to tell what it was. Plus, it was pretty badly edited.” – David Miller

BOB BLAIR’S DREAM DEMISE

The “Buddy” dream completed the bulk of the main shooting. DREAMSCAPE moved from the largest soundstage at Raleigh into one small stage for what was hoped would be the final shot of the would grasp what was happening. Because Quaid’s strike against Plummer was to be a surprise, Ruben and Russell felt it was absolutely necessary to make sure that the lighting look realistic right up to the moment of the attack. This meant shooting the effect not with lighting that would highlight the makeup, but with ordinary florescent lighting. Reardon hated the lighting, but went along with Ruben’s insistence that changing the lighting would tip-off people that something was about to happen.

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About a month earlier, in late June, Reardon had supplied a transformation head, known as a “change-0” head in the business, for a scene late in the film in which Dennis Quaid confronts political schemer Christopher Plummer in the one place where Plummer is vulnerable, inside Plummer’s own dream. Quaid borrows a trick from dream assassin David Patrick Kelly and changes into his own version of the Snakeman before killing Plummer. The effect was planned to first show Quaid’s head beginning to change, cut back to Plummer as the Snakeman’s hands shoot out for his throat (a very brief scene which was shot earlier) then a quick cut back to Dennis Quaid’s Snakeman head coming for the camera.

“We prepared a head, which I felt was better than a lot of THE HOWLING heads,” said Reardon. “We didn’t content ourselves with just having the face bulge out. We had the eyes blink, and when they opened they were snake eyes. At the same time the neck elongated and the cheeks distended, and the eyes began to pop out of their sockets. The mouth opens unnaturally wide and the teeth elongate. But nobody liked it. Ruben said to me, ‘Geez Reardon, I expected something like AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.’ That’s great. You give me six months and six hundred thousand dollars and maybe you could get that. Besides, that effect was five different heads. I told them all along that I was only going to come up with one head and do as much with it as I could.”

Neither Russell nor Ruben had been happy with the head when Reardon had brought it in. Under the flat lighting of the elevator mockup, the hair looked too bushy and still, the face too lifeless, and the neck far thicker than Quaid’s. The head didn’t work well either. with eyes that frequently jammed as they started to roll up. It took several takes to get the mechanism to work right. But beyond that, when Ruben and Russell saw footage of the effect, they realized that what they thought would be a good visual just wasn’t that exciting.

“Forget that it wasn’t convincing on film,” Ruben said. “When I saw it, I just realized that we needed a more shocking effect.”

“It wasn’t exciting enough,” added Russell. “We didn’t realize that until we saw it. It was a subtle effect that just wasn’t explosive enough. Craig’s head didn’t show anything either that would connect it with the Snakeman, and we decided we needed that, so we racked our brains and decided on something simple, like a guy’s head ripping apart with the Snakeman’s head coming out of the pieces.”

Russell contacted Reardon, but by this time, Reardon was both fed up with the production and busy trying to finish the replacement animation for David Patrick Kelly’s Snakeman transformation so he could be done with the film. Since Reardon was busy, Russell had to find someone who could do the effect and do it quickly. He decided on Greg Cannom, a former assistant to Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. Cannom’s first solo assignment was THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, and more recently he assisted Baker with the apes for GREYSTOKE.

Cannom had talked with Russell about a year before DREAMSCAPE about another film project that never went through. Cannom was interested in the assignment, but checked with Craig Reardon first, before committing himself. Reardon gave his blessing. Cannom went into his workshop and tried an effect which would combine the two concepts that Russell discussed, creating a skull that would not only split apart, but split apart and turn into a monster at the same time. “I could see the use of the Snakeman with the kid’s nightmare, but going into an adult’s nightmare, I thought it should be a lot more horrendous and scary,” said Cannom.

Cannom’s first prototype makeup was deemed unacceptable by producer Bruce Cohn Curtis. It was a bitter decision because of the amount of effort Cannom had put into it. Cannom took a fiberglass skull which he cut and hinged so it could be pulled apart. Inside the skull, Cannom used a soft foam and sculpted a hideous face so that when the skull was pulled apart, the jaw would drop down and the foam face would come out to form the monster.

“I loved Cannom’s first approach,” said associate producer Chuck Russell. “I think it was terrific. The dangerous thing about the makeup was that in a very quick cut, with a man splitting his head open and something gooey, dark, and spongy coming out, it might look like brains. It was hard to argue for it because of that.”

Curtis told Cannom that they wanted something closer to Reardon’s Snakeman concept. Cannom tried to figure out how to fit Reardon’s Snakeman design into a reworked version of the splitting skull but finally gave up and settled for a two-piece approach. Cannom first built a small, embryonic Snakeman head which would be moved like a hand puppet inside the skull after it split apart. Cannom wanted to stop the camera and replace the small head with a fullsized but slimmer Snakeman head that would rise out of the neck and lunge for the camera dripping goo and skin. As with Reardon before him, Cannom was less than happy with the treatment he felt his makeup got from Ruben and Curtis. Assisted by Jill Rocklow, Kevin Yagher and Brian Wade, Cannom did the effect, but felt little enthusiasm for the final product.

“Bruce Cohn Curtis and the other producer, Jerry Tokofsky, were so insulting and rude to me it was incredible,” said Cannom. “It was like they already had something against me and wanted to find fault. I never want to see Bruce Cohn Curtis again.

“I don’t really think my effect works either,” added Cannom. “It’s not done the way we wanted to set it up. We were very careful about it. First, the skull would split apart, then we would cut away, put the snake creature back into the neck and put skin all around it, and then have it come at the camera. I spent hours getting the chicken skins for the makeup and preparing them, then setting-up the effect. Ruben looked at it and said, ‘That’s not what I want. No neck and no skin. I just want the head coming at the camera.’ I told him that didn’t make any sense! But that’s what he wanted, so we did it his way.”

POST PRODUCTION

Because Ruben and Halsey had been able to do much of the editing work while the final opticals were being generated, the final scoring and assembly of the footage was completed quickly. Curtis had a finished film only a month later and premiered it to his friends in mid-January at a small mixing theater in Hollywood. Although there were some clunky spots that hadn’t been fixed because of time and budgetary problems, the final cut was deftly edited around most of them and they were visible only if you knew what to look for. The audience gave the film a big hand and Curtis was very happy, as well as Kuran. Russell, Ruben and Loughery, who now looked forward to having a potential hit associated with their names. Although Craig Reardon liked the film, he was still unhappy with director Ruben.

Ruben defended his decision to replace Reardon’s work. “Craig was under tremendous pressure to deliver an awful lot of complicated physical effects,” said Ruben. “I wouldn’t be able to see a finished physical effect practically until the day we were ready to shoot it. That was a rough way for both of us to work. I was disappointed some times, and I’m sure he was disappointed in the way I was shooting things, although at no time can I remember him making specific suggestions. I think that the main thing I would change if I were to do it again, and I wouldn’t mind working with Craig again.

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Dreamscape (1984) Music by Maurice Jarre 01.DREAMSCAPE 2:58 02.THE JOURNEY 4:22 03.FIRST EXPERIMENT 1:55 04.SUSPENSE 2:09 05.JEALOUSY MERRY-GO ROUND 2:56 06.THE SNAKEMAN 1:08 07.ENTERING THE NIGHTMARE 4:17 08.LOVE DREAMS 4:10

REFERENCES and SOURCES

Twilight Zone v04 n01_ Fangoria 44 Fangoria 27 Fangoria 34 Fangoria 39 Cinefantastique v15 n02

Dreamscape (1984) Retrospective SUMMARY Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing.

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