MOVIE QUIZ
Slow week for movie releases, being January and all. One of only two “new” releases is “The King’s Daughter.” The fantasy film finished filming back in May of 2014, meaning it took nearly eight years for it to see the light of day. Many other movies have followed similarly long and winding roads from shooting to screening; let’s test your knowledge on these drawn-out delights.
1. The recently deceased Peter Bogdanovich took over directing duties in 2018 on his long-time friend Orson Welles’ unfinished epic, “The Other Side of the Wind,” which began shooting in 1970. The troubled production was on-and-off all the way through Welles’ death in 1985, and even after, before finally being released in 2018. A third director, a legend who appeared with Welles in the 1967 spoof “Casino Royale” and directed him in 1956’s “Moby Dick,” was the main star. Who was he?
2. By design, 2014’s “Boyhood” was shot piecemeal over the course of nearly 12 years beginning in 2002. It ended up garnering six Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and took home one. What was it?
3. Which animated Disney classic from the 1950s took seven years to complete, with its dialogue being recorded a full six years before its release: “Cinderella,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Peter Pan” or “Sleeping Beauty”?
4. Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 anthology film “Coffee and Cigarettes” features three short films made in 1986, 1989 and 1993, and eight new ones. One of the earlier shorts stars actor and filmmaker Roberto Benigni and comedian and actor Steven Wright. True or false, since then all three – Jarmusch, Benigni and Wright – have won Oscars?
5. While live-action filming on 2009’s “Avatar” only began two years prior, the development process for the industry-changing blockbuster started as far back as 1994. Sam Worthington nabbed the lead role, but director James Cameron originally offered it to which Oscar-winning screenwriter and actor, who turned it down due to commitments to his own action-thriller franchise?
6. Peter Jackson’s first film, the 1987 sci-fi horror comedy “Bad Taste,” was shot on weekends over a span of four years on an initial budget of $25,000. By contrast, he filmed all three installments of his “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy simultaneously in a little more than a year from 1999 to 2000 for a combined $281 million, with the entries being released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Of these four films, which one was named 416th greatest film of all time by British movie magazine Empire in 2008?
7. Aerial war film “Hell’s Angels” took three years to complete from its start in 1927 until its release in 1930, partially because of the overbearing and demanding behavior of its producer and co-director, Howard Hughes. The other major reason was because of what major change in filmmaking?
8. “Hoop Dreams,” the 1994 documentary about two inner-city high school basketball players in Chicago, was originally planned as a 30-minute piece for PBS, but its 250 hours of filmed footage resulted in three years of editing to get it down to a nearly three-hour feature. That work paid off with an Oscar nomination for best editing, only the second documentary to score a nod in the category. Interestingly, the first film to do so, came out in 1970 only seven months after the real-life cultural event it chronicled. What was it?
9. Speaking of documentaries, Claude Lanzmann’s epic and groundbreaking 1985 Holocaust documentary “Shoah” took 11 years to make -- the first six consisting exclusively of recording hundreds of interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators – and ran almost 10 hours. True or false: Lanzmann received death threats during production and even suffered a severe beating by former Nazis while secretly filming undercover.
10. The raunchy, starstudded, 2013 comedy anthology “Movie 43” took four years to make owing to the level of coordination required to work around the schedules of so many famous actors – Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, etc. It did well enough financially, but critics were harsh: it holds a four percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and one critic even wrote it was “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of awful.” Which of the following quotes is from a review of “Movie 43” and which is from one for “Citizen Kane”?: “There is not a single redeeming quality to this absurdly inane film” and “A study of magnificent futility ... it’s bizarre enough to become a museum piece.”
—C.J. Lais Jr.