{"id":1745,"date":"2009-06-20T09:57:05","date_gmt":"2009-06-20T09:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1745"},"modified":"2009-06-20T09:57:05","modified_gmt":"2009-06-20T09:57:05","slug":"barsoom_update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/06\/20\/barsoom_update\/","title":{"rendered":"Barsoom Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of Pixar, you may recall <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2007\/10\/pixar_is_going_to_barsoom.html\">my enthusiasm a  while back<\/a> at the news that Pixar &#8212; the one movie studio these days that&#8217;s consistently turning out genuine <i>movies<\/i>, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing &#8212; is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic &#8220;Martian tales&#8221; of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I&#8217;ve been accumulating little tidbits of news about the project for the past several months, and it&#8217;s time to perform an infodump for any of my readers who may be interested. The last item should be particularly exciting for my fellow Utahns, if that&#8217;s any incentive to click through&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, it appears that at least the opening film in the series, <i>John Carter of Mars<\/i>, will be directed by Andrew Stanton, who was at the helm for two of Pixar&#8217;s strongest efforts, <i>Finding Nemo<\/i> and <i>WALL-E<\/i>. Although it might&#8217;ve been interesting to see what Brad Bird (<i>The Incredibles<\/i>) would&#8217;ve made of this material, I think Stanton is a strong choice. The Girlfriend pointed out that he&#8217;s directed only animated films in the past, so working in a live-action situation may present a challenge for him. However, I think a strong creative vision is important for a project like this, and <i>WALL-E<\/i> and  certain scenes in <i>Nemo<\/i> demonstrated that Stanton knows how to evoke the all-important sense of wonder that so many recent sci-fi flicks have been lacking. You need a director who can do that in order to make Burroughs&#8217; sprawling, imaginative world of Barsoom &#8212; the native name for Mars &#8212; really work. I&#8217;m confident Stanton is a good man for this job.\n<li>In another development that sets my nerd-sense a-tingle, it was reported in April that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/2009\/04\/14\/michael-chabon-writing-john-carter-of-mars\/\">Michael Chabon was doing &#8220;some revisions<\/a> to an already strong script by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews.&#8221; Chabon, if you&#8217;re not familiar with him, won the Pulitizer Prize for his glorious love-letter to superhero comics, <i>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/i>. He&#8217;s a rare hybrid, a smart, literary novelist who writes well-respected fiction but who also <i>gets<\/i> comic books and pulp and so-called &#8220;low culture.&#8221; He loves the same crap all of us aging fanboys do, and he&#8217;s not afraid to express his affection for it, while also reinterpreting and being intelligently critical (in the academic sense) of it. With him on board, I&#8217;m hopeful the dialogue of Pixar&#8217;s <i>John Carter<\/i> may actually resemble the admittedly stilted and old-fashioned language of Burroughs while still being contemporary enough not to sound ridiculous. A happy balance, in other words, between the original source material and something actors can actually <i>say<\/i>, with no painful anachronisms or self-conscious camp. At least that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to see.\n<li>More recently &#8212; just last week, in fact &#8212; the news went out that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/2009\/06\/12\/lynn-collins-and-taylor-kitsch-cast-in-john-carter-of-mars\/\">the movie&#8217;s leads have been cast<\/a>. Taylor Kitsch, last seen in a brief appearance as Gambit in <i>X-Men Origins: Wolverine<\/i>, will portray John Carter, and Lynn Collins, also a veteran of <i>Wolverine<\/i>, is his true love, Dejah Thoris, Princess of the great Barsoomian city-state of Helium.<br \/>\nI liked Kitsch&#8217;s take on Gambit and while he strikes me as being a little young &#8212; Carter is effectively immortal but has the appearance of being about 30, while Kitsch definitely looks to be in his early twenties to me &#8212; I think he&#8217;ll work out just fine. He&#8217;s certainly got <a href=\"http:\/\/i248.photobucket.com\/albums\/gg197\/BubblesY2K2003\/Pic-TaylorKitsch-12-Big.jpg\">the physique<\/a> to play a &#8220;clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia&#8221; who (in the original source anyway) spends much of the story naked.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m a little more uncertain about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.behindthehype.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/lynncollins.jpg\">Lynn Collins<\/a>. She&#8217;s an attractive woman, but frankly doesn&#8217;t do much for me. She certainly doesn&#8217;t live up to <i>my<\/i> definition of &#8220;incomparable,&#8221; the descriptor often associated with Dejah Thoris. Maybe my personal vision of Dejah has been too heavily influenced by <a href=\"http:\/\/tonova.typepad.com\/thesuddencurve\/images\/frank_frazetta_1.jpg\">Frazetta&#8217;s take<\/a> on the character, but Collins is neither exotic nor, ahem, <i>rounded<\/i> enough, in my opinion. But then I really can&#8217;t think of <i>any<\/i> actress currently working who would fit the bill. Dejah Thoris is one of those ideals that&#8217;s very hard for a real flesh-and-blood woman to measure up to. Maybe Collins will surprise me&#8230;<\/p>\n<li>Moving on, here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/News\/ci_12571320\">the item<\/a> that I promised would be of interest to my local readers: about half of <i>John Carter<\/i> is going to be shot right here in our home state. The article I linked is probably about to vanish behind the <i>Tribune<\/i>&#8216;s lame archive wall, so here&#8217;s the salient info:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>\nPortions of the Beehive State will double as Mars, including Lake Powell (where the original &#8220;Planet of the Apes&#8221; was partially filmed), <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moab,_Utah\">Moab<\/a>, and Kane and Wayne counties.<br \/>\nIn exchange for filming here, the production will receive a tax credit through the state&#8217;s film incentive program. &#8230; &#8220;It&#8217;s the biggest movie we&#8217;ve ever used incentives on,&#8221; said Utah Film Commission executive director Marshall Moore. &#8220;We haven&#8217;t seen these kinds of numbers since doing a TV series for a year.&#8221;<br \/>\nThe <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/San_Rafael_Swell\">San Rafael Swell<\/a> already doubled as the planet Vulcan in this year&#8217;s summer blockbuster &#8220;Star Trek,&#8221; but second-unit crews only shot for four days in Utah.<br \/>\n[Disney\/Pixar] is scheduled to shoot in Utah for 45 days.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is extremely good news for Utah&#8217;s film industry, and the state economy in general. A lot of movies and TV series are filmed here, in part because of our proximity to LA, and also because the state&#8217;s diverse and often bizarre landscape can double for just about any place, but it&#8217;s a feast-or-famine thing, and my understanding is that belts have been pretty tight the last couple of years. Well, Utah film-folk, get ready for some turkey and stuffing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nAccording to a GOED executive summary, the filmmakers are committed to spend $27.7 million in the state and employ 398 Utahns during the seven months of pre-production and shooting. In turn, the production would receive a $5.5 million tax credit under the state&#8217;s incentive program.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow. Just&#8230; wow. That&#8217;s major, by Utah standards. I can&#8217;t express how excited I am that my home state has been chosen to bring Barsoom to life. For all bitching about cultural issues here, I&#8217;m proud of this place, and I always get a little rush when I recognize familiar locations up there on the silver screen, especially when it&#8217;s some spot that we locals tend to take for granted. (For example, the white desolation of the Bonneville Salt Flats &#8212; which for many Salt Lakers is simply a landmark on the way to the casinos in Wendover, Nevada &#8212; was used to depict Captain Jack Sparrow&#8217;s personal hell in <i>Pirates of the Caribbean 3<\/i>.)<br \/>\nThe Utah-based work on <i>Carter<\/i> is scheduled fro run from November through July.<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s that for now. Have a good Saturday, everyone&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of Pixar, you may recall my enthusiasm a while back at the news that Pixar &#8212; the one movie studio these days that&#8217;s consistently turning out genuine movies, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing &#8212; is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic &#8220;Martian tales&#8221; of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I&#8217;ve [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}