Mel Brooks, History of the World Part Two

Looking at Internet Movie Database, it seems strange that Mel Brooks' peak as a director came from movies released over a period of just four years.  

His first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs didn't do well. I liked The Twelve Chairs, based on the comedic Soviet novel by Ilf and Petrov. It never made sense to me that the theater audience in The Producers thought "Springtime for Hitler" was funny.

Then he had a string of movies, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and High Anxiety that I thought were great. Siskel & Ebert were critical of High Anxiety because it had references to Alfred Hitchcock movies like Spellbound which had been out of circulation for years. They were jokes no one would get.

History of the World Part I kind of killed it. I only saw a few minutes of it on TV, so I don't know, but it did very poorly.

Brooks made a comeback with Spaceballs, but then there was the disaster of Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I liked Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Now The History of the World Part II, an eight-episode series, will appear on Hulu.

I read in an old Guinness Book of World Records thing about movies that The Black Bird, a comedic sequel to The Maltese Falcon, had the longest gap between original movie and sequel at 34 years. It's been 41 or 42 years since History of the World Part I. But a series isn't really a sequel.

I was a young fellow working as a dishwasher in an alcoholism treatment center when The History of the World Part I came out. The cook there was excited about it. I suppose she saw it, but never mentioned it again. 

Night of the Blood Beast (1958)

I remember seeing this in an ad in Famous Monsters of Filmland or some such thing. They were selling abbreviated Super 8 versions of feature films. I'd seen very few of them and I was 12 so I'd already blown my disposable income on the magazine and even if I could have bought one, I didn't own a movie projector.

But I wanted this one. Night of the Blood Beast. I thought I liked science fiction and the description said it had a rocket ship and a guy in space and a space monster, but it turns out most of it takes place after the ship crashed on Earth in a field somewhere.

Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene. But it had a couple of Roger Corman trademarks, like the Freudian symbolism. It takes place in a base the main feature of which is a huge radio tower and it ends in a cave.

And it really wasn't very good. How is one blood beast in a cave going to take over the world? Shouldn't scientists have had wanted to study it instead of setting it on fire?

Available on Pub-D-Hub, and other public domain channels I'm sure.

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Dana Andrews as an oddly well-dressed drifter who finds himself in a small town. He marries a wealthy girl for her money so he can dump her, take half her money and marry the girl he's really after. A degenerate in love. Another movie made during World War Two with no mention of World War Two. It might have ruined it if it did. Is COVID-19 a thing in movies and TV shows now?

Alice Faye and Linda Darnell. With John Carradine as an itinerate spiritualist and Percy Kilbride, cinema's Pa Kettle, as Pop.

Maybe film students should be like Sam Bankman-Fried

With all that money, he could have done anything.

They make it sound so easy. I read an article somewhere saying that other youthful "Effective Altruism" believers have gone into fields where they could make as much money as possible.

I have two brothers who are jazz musicians. Somewhere, one of their friends, noting some of their other friends, said that a spouse with a lucrative career was the musician's best bet.
 

Maybe going into a field where you can embezzle billions before you're 30 would be the best way to fund your absurdly expensive filmmaking hobby.

How many people become movie directors by studying to be movie directors? Most of them seem to go into it by way of some other career. Actors, musicians, stuntmen. I know of one animal wrangler. Bigfoot researcher, comedian, novelist, screenwriter. I heard of a law student in the South who bought an old movie theater in a small town for almost nothing, then made a movie so he'd have something to show. There was a school principal who made educational films. Evangelicals. Anti-Communists. 911 truthers. Guy who thought Michael Jackson was innocent. Newspaper columnist. 

What's the best field to go into if you want to parlay it into movie directing?

Something someone else wrote about Harry and Meghan which I haven't seen

I read this and, for a minute, I really wanted to see it:

Netflix’s Harry and Meghan has been billed as a documentary, but it is clear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have never watched that form of the genre.  Hardly surprising: Prince Harry is unworldly and semi-literate and Meghan can hardly count herself as a cerebral giant. Indulgent, narcissistic and manipulative, the Prince and his Hollywood companion have done a spectacular job of undermining any reserves of sympathy they might have had in their freezing out from the Windsor universe.

Much has and will be made of the various personal details the Netflix production is promoting.  The dominant theme is blame and blamelessness, enriched by a layering of score-settling.  Unaware by the implications of her own conduct, Meghan herself observes that, “Most people need to find someone to blame.”

The couple are, naturally, clean, washed, pristine; the laundry of everybody else, from the media to the ghastly relatives, is not.  “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the (Daily) Mail did.  I watched the whole thing,” states a forlorn Harry.

Read the whole thing here.

After watching some of the former rich kids in the 7 Up series and reading attacks on Prince Charles, I realized that I approved of self-pity in the British upper crust. The poor devils get no sympathy from anyone else.

But this thing just sounds like Reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

War of the Gargantuas (1966)

Like a more serious Godzilla movie because much of it took place at night. And it was better. Less cartoonish, although it was pretty much the same thing. Two giant ugly ape men fight in a Japanese city. With Russ Tamblyn as an expat scientist. Ikio Sawamura, the town officer from Yojimbo, appears briefly.

Post Avatar Depression

Avatar never interested me, but now I see articles about something called Post Avatar Depression Syndrome. A shocking number of people who see the movie become despondent.

“Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them,” one wrote. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar.”

I almost want to watch the movie just to see if I'm made of tougher stuff than these Avatar fans, but I checked Roku. The movie has brought in nearly $3 billion but they're so greedy they still won't let you see it for free. 

I don't know if there've been any Avatar-related suicides. People started disappearing off cruise ships after Titantic, presumably while trying to climb out on the prow so they could yell that they were king of the world. How many people have James Cameron movies killed?