Dear Basketball – Oscar for Best Animated Short 2018
- Here is a link to a short documentary on the Disney animator who did the incredible hand-drawn animation in Dear Basketball https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=151995019413886
Gone With The Wind – Staircase Scene – 1939
Gone With the Wind is a controversial film these days because of its problematic portrayal of race. But it is still an important film. I show this clip to help illustrate how GWTW was able to play fast and loose with the production code rules of the late 1930s, in part because it was such a big budget studio film that it had to be allowed to do what the filmmakers wanted to.
Love With The Proper Stranger – 1963
This little romantic drama tells the story of a relationship between jazz musician Steve McQueen and shop girl Natalie Wood. In the movie, McQueen gets Wood’s character pregnant from a one-night stand, and Wood wants McQueen to help her find “a doctor.” Given that this was made during the Production Code era, the filmmakers made an entire film about getting an illegal abortion without once using the term “abortion.”
Midnight Cowboy Trailer – 1969
Midnight Cowboy was the first, and only, movie to win the Oscar for best picture while having the toxic X-rating. The ratings board tried to get the producers to make some minor changes (remove a single frame) so they could say the movie had been re-edited and give it a more acceptable R rating, but the film’s producers refused. The rating board still went ahead and claimed the movie had been edited and gave it an R rating.
Titanic – 1997
Like Gone With The Wind, Titanic was a movie that was “too big to fail,” so it ended up with a PG-13 rating to make it more accessible to the target teen audience even though it had an attempted suicide, extended nudity, a sex scene, violence against women, and an extended, disturbing death scene.
Jaws – 1975
Jaws was the first of the big summer blockbuster films featuring the very young Steven Spielberg as director and the iconic score that helped make John Williams the most sought-after composer in Hollywood.
Star Wars – 1977
While Star Wars did not have digital effects in it, it was the first movie to have computer-controlled motion cameras that could make multiple passes making the exact same motions each time, allowing for spectacular practical effects.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – 2004
Sky Captain was the first feature-length American released film to have entirely digital sets. The movie was a financial and critical flop, but it showed how you could make an incredible-looking film for a reasonable budget. The techniques pioneered with this film have now become a standard for Hollywood.
Mad Max – Fury Road 2015
Mad Max – Fury Road has been credited with bringing back practical effects to big budget movies. Maybe… While it has lots of computer generated imagery in it, they have mostly been created out of scenes that were actually shot in the field with real-life stunts. The CGI looks so good in this movie because they are all based on things that actually happened.
Black Panther – 2017
Black Panther illustrates one of the ways to make a movie profitable. Make a movie for a big budget ($200 million), load it up with movie stars and an up-and-coming director, then promote with lots of marketing tie-ins. Because it had a great director, cast and script, and was well promoted. it is in the Top 10 all-time box office.
Everything Everywhere All At Once – 2022
Everything Everywhere was made for a modest $25 million budget but made $143 million globally. It it had had a Black Panther-level budget, it would have been a failure. But with low costs of production and promotion, it didn’t need to make a lot to be a success. All those Oscars didn’t hurt, either.