Live Action TV & Movies (page 3)

An SDCC weekend of News Tweets

Another Comic-Con has passed us by. From the outside looking-in the entire social media and real time blogging was heavily evident this year as it was easier than ever to follow events via live bloggings by the major sites and the flurry of twitter postings from individual people. People were posting pictures to flickr although it’ll probably take a few days for people without wifi to get home an upload their photographs. As they have done in previous years, DC was posting podcasts of their panels to their website – ignore the dates on the podcasts, they are actually from 2009. Maybe next year they’ll finally stream the panels on the web.

We got hints about the roll call of James Robinson’s Justice League, but there seems to have been more Justice Society news than then Justice League news (re: my previous observation). As an experiment this year I tweeted (“posted”) the more salient news items on twitter rather than blogging them one at a time. I’ve included an archive list of them below.

  • SDCC News: JSA to split into Matt Sturges’s JSA All-Stars (Magog, PG, and younger characters) & Bill Willingham’s JSA (the older/core characters)
  • JSA All-Stars does sound a little bit like the old Infinite Inc. team. More than one fan has pointed out the JLA Cry For Justice parallel.
  • The JSA SDCC panel links – Newsarama: http://bit.ly/fwhmZ CBR: http://bit.ly/bNT0Z DC’s Source: http://bit.ly/PMuyb
  • Things appear to be getting interesting at the DC Editorial panel, Thunder Agents out integrated into DCU just like Red Circle & Milestone
  • Blacked out promo-pick of Robinson’s JLA http://bit.ly/WuFeY – Donna Troy, Mon-El (new costume), Batman (Dick Grayson) and Congorilla.
  • It would appear that every Justice League fan this isn’t at SDCC is watching the JL marathon on Boomerang.
  • RT @vuze: Live from Comic-Con: Justice Society of America in search of booth babes… http://bit.ly/Of8xF
  • RT @joeyvesh13: RT @britl: http://twitpic.com/bm69d – Superheroes! #sdcc – JLA awesomeness!!
  • Smallville next season: Metallo, Zod, the Justice Society (with Geoff Johns writing of course), and Clark in costume! http://bit.ly/p0Tnh
  • JLA #35 by @LenWein RT @DC_NATION: DCU: The Source – It’s the last day of Comic Con – have some JUSTICE LEAGUE pages: http://bit.ly/vpnGO

I usually tweet from within my wordpress blog using a rather nice plug in called tweetable, but this weekend I’ve been trying out Tweetdeck. What amazed me was watching the stream of tweets from people watching the Justice League marathon on Boomerang. There is ususally a background buzz of people “Watching Justice League”, but this weekend that buzz became a flood. I just hope the network folks notice how popular the show is.

50th Anniversary of the death of George Reeves

An article on the Wired website points out that George Reeves, the original actor to play Superman, died fifty years ago today on June 16th, 1959.

Although alternative theories persist over Reeves’ suicide, ably explained in the 2006 film Hollywoodland, the passage of time has told the tale of an ultimately frustrated artist locked in a spiral of bad luck and disastrous relationships.

The legend of Reeve’s death and a possible curse have lingered for years, but they shouldn’t be allowed to over shadow the tremendous joy and wonder that Reeves brought to that first generation of Superman TV fans.

Life-size Lois Lane statue heading for Metropolis

CNN are reporting that Metropolis, IL is adding a Lois Lane statue to join their iconic Superman statue.

The villain is the economy. Despite being about $70,000 shy of the funding needed to cast a figure in the image of the fictional “Daily Planet” reporter, this town of 6,000 residents says it’s going forward with a ground breaking. Metropolis wants its Lois Lane statue.

There are no skyscrapers here. If you search the local telephone book you won’t find any familiar names. There’s no Lex Luthor or Perry White. The closest Jimmy Olsen lives in Aledo, Illinois. If you call the nearby nuclear plant and ask about kryptonite they won’t take you seriously. Most days of the year you can walk about town without seeing anyone in a cape or leotard.

Very little about Metropolis, Illinois, resembles the metroplex made famous in “Action Comics,” except for the constant presence of Superman. His statue stands 15-feet tall outside the Massac County Courthouse and 50 yards away is the county justice center.

Specifically it’s a life-size bronze statue of Noel Neill, the actress who played Lois Lane in the Adventures of Superman.

(Picture credit http://www.fanpix.net/)

One imagines that the funding could be raised quite easily if copies of it were to be released as part of DC Direct’s statue program.

I remember driving past Metropolis a few years ago on my way to a conference in Memphis. Interstate 24 runs right by the town, anybody heading south from the Chicago area is probably going to pass by. I got to see the big sign saying “Welcome to Metropolis”, but I never made it into the center of town as we were only stopping for gas. Maybe one day I’ll go back there for the annual Superman festival.

Yes, Legend of the Superheroes was real

Over at the Pulse Jennifer Contino faces the realisation that, like many people, she didn’t just imagine the Legend of the Superheroes.

But something I was pretty sure was all imagination for a long, long time was The Legend of the Superheroes: The Challenge and The Legend of the Superheroes: The Roast. After all, I was just four or five when they aired, and I don’t believer either special was ever re-run, so how was I to know it wasn’t all just some dream like the others?

Her memories are fairly representative of the American public’s memories of Legends. I’ve lost count of the number of people that have e-mail my JLA site asking if it existed or thanking me to proving that it did. Never rebroadcast, never released on video or DVD, its the DC comics equivalent of the Star Wars Holiday Special.

RIP Neal Hefti

As serious comicbook fans we wince at the BAM and KAPOW jibes used whenever a bored mainstream journalist tries to write about comics, but their presence just underlines the cultural impact of the 1960s Batmania craze. Despite all its vainglorious hype the 1960s Batman TV has genuinely made an impression on popular culture. Even in the 1980s school kids would sing “dinner dinner dinner dinner Batman!” as they charged around the playground with their school coat tied around their neck in an approximation of Batman’s cape (not that I’d ever have done that you understand, cough, cough).  The theme tune was a quintessential part of the unreformed Batman experience and its author has now passed on to the great bat-orchestra in the sky.

Neal Hefti was a big band musician during the middle of the twentieth century, but it was as an arranger of music for the legendary Count Basie and Frank Sinatra that he received his widest recognition. Hefti also wrote music for television and that included the theme for the 1960s Adam West & Burt Ward Batman TV show. On writing the score he once commented that:

“I tore up a lot of paper. It did not come easy to me. I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it. I was almost going to call them and say, I can’t do it. But I never walk out on projects, so I sort of forced myself to finish.”

Neal Hefti was 85 when he died and had been retired since the 1970s. [Via the LA Times]

The Tim Burton Batman movie and later sequels have done a lot to reform Batman in the public’s mind, but the shear gloriousness of the 1960s Batmania can never be erased. Hefti’s theme was front and centre in that and will never be forgotten by the legions of former children who once believed that they could have been the caped crusader.

And, just for old times sake:

DC Comics motion picture strategy meeting.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at this meeting.

Warners and sibling DC Comics are holding high-level talks to hammer out a master strategy for their stable of superheroes.

Warners has never had such a strategy, and there have long been complaints the studio has been slow to exploit a potential treasure trove of franchises. And while the studio is basking in critical love for “The Dark Knight,” it has watched studio rivals rake in big bucks from Marvel Comics characters, and Marvel itself get into the tentpole business.

The Marvel films work so well because they are very close adaptations of the comics and that’s allowed them to establish a motion picture Marvel Universe, but that traditionally hasn’t been Warner’s approach. They’ve had more success with more edgy or innovative adaptations. Even in animation they’ve always drifted away from the core DCU.

Something stuck me the other day. DC Comics’s version of the Ultimates Universe isn’t a comic book universe. Their version of the Ultimates is the DC Animated Universe (DCAU)! The one that ran from the start of Batman the Animated Series and concluded with the final episode of Justice League Unlimited. If only DC did a comic book based on the DCAU that was able to advance continuity and maintain the more sophisticated tone that Unlimited ended with!

MTV: JLA Movie still a “go”

The MTV blog offers DC comics advice on how to get their movies back on track. They also quote a studio rep as saying the movie is now a “go”.

Get a lock on the League. Despite earlier reports, a studio rep told MTV News this one is now a “go.” Don’t let tax-incentive issues in Australia derail the potential “Justice League” franchise, just find another place to shoot the movie. And if there are problems with keeping some of the cast because of the delay, look for new actors who can play superheroes in and out of the League.

[via Comics 2 Film]

Meanwhile, Common, who had been up for the role as Green Lantern John Stewart, talked to the Comics Continuum about his hopes for the role.

Common told The Continuum he auditioned for director George Miller and was “considered” for the role, but was careful to go any further, particularly since the film missed its original production start and seems to be in a state of flux.

“It was exciting. It was so hopeful man,” Common said. “It was like, ‘Man, I’m going to be part of something that is going to explode on the world.’ It was going to be powerful. You felt like it was going to be a great project. JLA, man. George Miller.

“Just the start of it felt so good. JLA — that’s one of my favorite comics. You’ve got all these great characters. God willing, it may happen.

“I was enthused about being considered. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s definitely divine timing with the right characters and the right actors at the right time of our careers. I would love to be Green Lantern. I was just started to get into digesting who he would be, John Stewart. I started reading so much about Green Lantern — a cool character.”

Joel Silver briefing against the Justice League?

Is it my imagination or is Joel Silver carrying out a campaign to dis-information about the status of the Justice League movie. Almost every interview I see with him has some comment about how the League has been shelved or postponed. The running looks like he commented on it once a few interviews back and he keeps getting asked about it. In his latest interview with Ain’t It Cool News he notes that the movie has been postponed.

The thing is that Silver isn’t actually involved with the JLA movie directly and is actually attached to helm the Wonder Woman movie. In a slightly earlier interview with ISEB he notes that

They were really close to making this Justice League movie, I think it’s been tabled for a while now but…With Wonder Woman we’re in development and when we figure out a way to do it we’ll do it.

If you were cynical you could argue that Silver has a vested interest in the fast-tracked JLA movie being sidelined to allow his own project to push forward.

There have also been the usual anonymous sources cited as saying that the move is dead. Howver, there hasn’t been any real and confirmed Justice League movie news for a while now. (That isn’t meant to be a dig as the fine sites reporting stories their own anonymous insiders have thrown up, but there is so much noise and bluster in the fansphere that I generally don’t trust a story until it has a publically named source who is willing to stand-up and be identified with the story.) The information gap means that fans and bloggers are starting to getting jumpy, rumours start being bounded around and comments by insiders like Silver get jumped upon and echo around the void left by the vacuum of regular news. The agents for the actresses involved claim they’re still involved and are just waiting for start dates.

Could it just be that the film is now developing at a normal pace rather that the unnatural whirlwind development we saw associated with the writers strike? I’m reminded of a recent – and completely unrelated to the JLA movie – comment by Warren Ellis on his Bad Signal mailing list:

If I told you how many other-media things I have hanging in limbo right now, you’d laugh. Until you’re in it, you never realise quite how slowly film and tv stuff moves. It’s glacial. And fragile. Any of it could go to hell at any time. It all exists as nothing but potential until the last of a hundred hurdles is cleared.

Its like like the JLA film has moved into a glacial period.

NYT on JL movie; now the SAG want a piece

Michael Cieply has a nice JL movie write up in the New York Times summing up all the trouble the development has faced and the hurdles that still faces it. He points out there is a second strike (the actors this time) on the horizon which may threaten the Justice League movie.

But nothing has been easy in a season when the usual difficulties of a globe-spanning, effects-laden production with a budget that could approach $200 million have become tangled in uncertainty over pending negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild. Around the industry, executives are wrestling with versions of the same dilemma: Should they go forward with movie projects that might be disrupted by an actors’ strike if shooting does not end by the guild’s June 30 contract deadline? Or should they wait, with the risk that prospective films will fall victim to afterthoughts and lost momentum?

The movie seems critical to Warner Brother’s long term plans:

Warner Brothers executives declined to comment. And Mr. Miller, whose work has been as varied as “The Road Warrior” and “Babe: Pig in the City,” did not respond to requests for an interview. But several people involved with the film — who requested anonymity because of the studio’s policy of silence about a work in progress — said the revisions were part of a push to revive a project seen as crucial to broadening the studio’s rewards from its subsidiary DC Comics.