The recent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the passing of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers, got me thinking about the two groundbreaking science fiction epics released back in 1977, George Lucas’ original Star Wars (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope upon its 1981 theatrical re-release) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the only movie for which Zsigmond received an Academy Award,
The Public Eye (1992, dir. Howard Franklin)Anyone who’s ever flipped through a Life magazine photo retrospective while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room most certainly has seen the work of Arthur Fellig, a photographer better known to the world by his nickname, Weegee.
It’s funny to think that something as inconsequential as one’s middle name could impact the probability of one’s genius, but it seems that that is exactly the case when it comes to the art of movie direction.
Take, for instance, George T. Miller, the Australian behind The Man from Snowy River (1982) and The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990).
Back in 2004, director Steven Spielberg decided the time was ripe to remake the granddaddy of all hostile alien narratives, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, the 1898 serialized novel telling the story of a Martian invasion as seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator based in Surrey and his younger brother, based in London. This would be quite a departure for