Week #46 The Making of the Making of… - Movie

While looking online the other evening at the upcoming movies I was taken aback by the high percentage of them that where either based on another medium (usually comic books or video games) or a straight up remake of another film. The one that made me wonder if I was living in an evil alternate reality was the Robert Zemeckis motion capture remake of “Yellow Submarine”.

Having just ranted about this for a while my girlfriend Kirstin suggested that this weeks project be something about this subject. Her idea was a remake of a “making of” movie.

I liked the idea a lot and immediately thought the perfect one to do would be Heart’s of Darkness, the making of Apocalypse Now. We’d cast a full group of people to play Francis Ford Coppola, Brando, the weird tribe of people who had to play severed heads then we’d direct based it entirely based on a transcript from the original documentary.

Another more ironic idea would be to do one of a lesser known movie. Netflix’s first response to a search for the phrase “The making of” was “The making of Westword”. I’ve never seen that particular documentary but I’ve seen Westworld and I can only imagine how awesome the making of it was.

Another idea, to get even more meta, would be to do a dramatized film based on the making of “RKO 281”, the movie about the making of Citizen Kane. Now that would be far out!

Week #45 James Call’s World - Conceptual Art

So I didn’t have any idea what to post for this week so I asked James Call if he had any ideas this was his response:

"Yeah I think the backgrounds in Super Mario Brothers 1 and other famous video games should be filtered out (like, filter out blue or black, etc.) and replaced with congressional hearings, documentaries about torture, etc. I also think old episodes of Love Connection should be randomly interspersed in the middle of any given television show, especially news programming, like someone needs to invent a machine that does that. I also think occupying an entire city block and populating it entirely with cats and dogs - only humans allowed are caretakers, who can only visit - should happen.”

My idea would be to either work this into my ideas for project #25 (The James Project) or #37 (Greg Travis James Call Greg Travis).

Either way I think the best way to do it is to document these ideas as if James had already done them complete with pictures of there completion and critical/popular responses to them.

Week #44 Mishap Trading Cars - Trading Cards

This is an idea that actually belongs to two other people.

The idea is simple and fairly self explanatory. Trading cards with pictures of all the various members of Mishap Productions. The front having a picture and name of the member on it and the back containing facts and statistics about the person.

The first person to attempt this was James Call. He made a bunch of them back when we where living in New York. He used to hand them out at German Cars Vs. American Homes shows. You can see mine here. Or the Beebe brother’s one below.

A couple months back Kirsten Goldberg (Aka KGB) had pretty much the exact same idea. She sent out an email about it and we bounced a bunch of ideas back and forth. Eventually we decided it would be cool to make them like Magic the Gathering cards where we’d all have weird statistics like “smarmyness” and special abilities “exeptional sleeping power”.

We never got around to making the actual cards but it’s never too late. The idea just keeps seeming better and better.