Q&A Hollywood
Q: I was watching “Austin Powers” the other day and started wondering about the music video that plays in the credits. It appears to feature Austin himself as the singer. Is he playing with a real band?
A: Actually, Ming Tea is a real band, and it’s where Austin Powers got his start.
OK, sure, we all know that’s comedian Mike Myers in an outlandish faux-British Invasion getup, and we know Austin Powers is just a character he created. But he created him, initially, to front that band.
Ming Tea, who perform their song “BBC” at the end of 1997’s “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” and have songs on the soundtracks of the sequels, formed in the mid-’90s. The band was started by Myers, Susanna Hoffs of ‘80s hitmakers The Bangles, and ‘90s indie-rock sensation Matthew Sweet.
All of them had goofy fake British identities: Hoffs called herself Jillian Shagwell, Sweet was Sid Belvedere, and, of course, Myers was Austin Powers.
They formed the band for fun shortly after Myers left “Saturday Night Live” in 1995. As the story goes, Myers’ wife at the time, Robin Ruzan, heard them performing and encouraged her husband to write a movie based on the Austin Powers character.
Presumably, Myers chose to include the band in the films as a nod to Austin’s roots — and because they do indeed seem to be having a lot of fun.
By the way, the band’s name is itself a nod to swinging ‘60s pop culture: Ming Tea is the name of a fictional company in the 1965 Ursula Andress action-romance film “The 10th Victim.”
Q: I just watched “The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” which starred Robert Forster, but the credits also say it was dedicated to Forster's memory. How does that work?
A: It works through film great Robert Forster’s dedication, combined with the slow process of releasing an indie film. Forster died of brain cancer on Oct. 11, 2019, at age 78, not long after wrapping work on “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” (2020).
Though every director in the world will tell you that there’s plenty of production work to do after they say, “That’s a wrap,” it’s especially true for indie films.
Unlike films produced by major studios, which generally either distribute their own films or have deals in place with distributors, indie films have the extra step of finding distribution after producing a finished product. For “The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” that didn’t happen until September 2020, almost a year after it finished filming. (Which, of course, gave the producers plenty of time to add an inmemoriam note to Forster in the final credits.)
It’s incredible to think that Forster was working right up to the end with such a disease — and on a werewolf movie, no less. But as you know having watched it, “Wolf” is more than just that. It’s also very much about the relationship between a dying father and the son trying to step into his boots.
Needless to say, art was very much imitating life when Forster, afflicted with brain cancer, was playing a cop who refused to retire in the face of his own terminal (heart) disease.
Q: Is the poem that Sean Connery quotes at the end of “The Hunt for Red October” real?
A: “And the sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home” is a beautiful line that sums the film up quite nicely — entirely too nicely to be real.
Capt. Marko Ramius (played by Sean Connery in his silver years, long after becoming famous as the definitive James Bond) speaks that line at the end of 1990’s “The Hunt for Red October,” after he took to the sea with hope of finding a new and better life in the West and knowing that he’d never see his home again. (Pretty spot on for the moment.)
Ramius attributes the line to explorer Christopher Columbus, but in a commentary track on the DVD release, director John McTiernan reveals the true author to be “Red October” screenwriter Larry Ferguson, saying, “Larry wrote the poem that Sean quotes at the end. Obviously, Christopher Columbus never wrote anything like that, but the gimmick works.”
That means that not only did explorer Columbus not say it, but it didn’t appear in the movie’s source novel by Tom Clancy either.
In keeping with Clancy’s preference for the technical over the poetic, the last few pages of the book are devoted to the logistics of who went where after disembarking from which boat following the climactic submarine battle.