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Leverage Season 2, Episode 4, The Fairy Godparents Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

Frakes: Hi, I'm Jonathan Frakes, Director.

Amy: Hi, I'm Amy Berg, Supervising Producer and Writer of this episode.

John: I’m John Rogers, Executive Producer of Leverage. I’ve got a Guiness. Uh, Jonathan, what are you drinking?

Frakes: I’m going with a little Chivas on the rocks.

John: There we go, just establishing the ground rules before we get into the commentary.

Amy: And I’ve been drinking all day, so I don’t have anything now.

John: That’s fantastic. [Amy laughs] Welcome to an excellent Leverage commentary! Uh, Amy Berg, why don’t you tell us how this episode was born?

Amy: I have no recollection of that at all. [Laughs]

John: Uh, well, I’ll tell you -

Amy: It wasn’t my idea, remember? It was-

Frakes: Not afraid of handheld, this one-

Amy: This was a, uh, this was an episode that you and Mr. Downey had talked about. And I was, I believe, working on Two-Live Crew Job-

John: Two-Live Crew, that’s right. And then we knew we were gonna make Two-Live Crew the season-ender-

Amy: Right.

John: So we had to move that back, so we moved this up. But you did a fantastic job on the structure, and what really, uh, what I really fell in love with this episode was, the idea of a kid having the world’s greatest thieves as fairy godparents.

Amy: Yes.

John: That’s where the title came from.

Amy: That’s sort of the key, uh, in, uh, coming up with-

John: Kind of a reference to Tokyo Godparents.

Frakes: You didn’t steal it from Fairly Odd-parents?

John: No, I did not, though I’m a big fan of that cartoon. Jonathan, why don’t you tell us about shooting this episode?

Frakes: Yes, did you notice that handheld at the beginning?

John: It was lovely.

Amy: Sexy.

John: It was very beautiful.

Frakes: God. All action, all the time.

John: Thank you.

Frakes: The great thing about these opening beats in the Leverages, is you can do whatever you want, in whatever style you want, and then you go in and say, ‘Ah- now we’re on Leverage.’ I look forward to those moments. It’s about 80 seconds, or 60 seconds worth, but it’s- here we are. Setting up the story.

John: It’s actually interesting, because we had set up- The first season, we set up a conference room, and then we kind of duplicated it in the apartment. And this was gonna be our secondary location, and we just fell in love with the bar. Over the course of the year. And the bar became where we always met the clients.

Frakes: Call me crazy, why wouldn’t that work for you?

[All Laugh]

John: I know. Nevermind I fell in love with the bar, we as a creative entity fell in love with the bar.

Amy: What were drinking, John Rogers, again? [laughs]

John: Exactly. And, um, and also, to the point where the other episode you directed, The Bottle Job, the bottle show-

Frakes: - was all in the bar! We never left the bar!

John: I know. And it’s just one of those great things about how shows evolve, that, you know, you go into these things with a plan, and then they all go magnificently askew.

Frakes: Right.

Amy: Right.

Frakes: This is a great beat here, where Beth has replaced Gina in the sequence with -

Amy: By the way, I do recall Frakes arguing with me.

Frakes: About removing her or-?

Amy: About whether or not Beth should be out of this scene, but I was convinced that Beth would be really funny.

Frakes: But you were so right.

John: When isn’t she? She’s fantastic. And that’s the uh-

Frakes: Here’s TNT’s contribution. We like to call the interstial.

[All Laugh]

John: It’s a saga sell.

Amy: It’s weird placement, though, because the last time we left Nate, he’s saying “Where’s Sophie?”, and then we go to this little intro and then we go to Sophie, so it’s kinda all over the place-

John: It’s one of those things where you never know where to put it. You don’t want to do it after this beat, because Gina does a really fantastic bit of acting in this scene, um -

Amy: Yeah, she’s so brilliant in this entire episode.

Frakes: She can’t believe, she can’t believe she’s being dumped. It’s beyond her; the possibility doesn’t really exist for her.

Amy: Well, look at her, I mean why would you dump her?

John: Well because she’s being dishonest, she’s emotionally shut down.

Amy: Yeah, you don’t know who she is.

John: And this was interesting because really, when Gina told us she was pregnant first episode, and we said, we really need to be able to give her some space and ease up on her work for the midpoint-

Amy: And grow- You can’t see what I’m doing, but I’m doing a belly motion.

John: And grow, and let her grow. She’s- yeah, wardrobe started getting creative fairly early.

Frakes: Even though she was in denial about it. I remember her saying “Frakes, no no no, you don’t have to worry about it yet”. I said “What do you mean I don’t have to worry about it yet?” I say to Mr. Rogers, Rogers says to me “Frakes, her [strike zone?], look at her strike zone.”

John: Don’t shoot the strike zone.

Frakes: Don’t shoot the strike zone.

John: I mean, Gina would work 24 hours until the end of season.

Amy: That’s true, yeah.

John: We brought her back in the finale actually, and she was like 7 months pregnant, and she was running around in explosions and stuff.

Amy: She’s fantastic.

Frakes: She’s a theater girl.

John: We really wanted to give her a little room there. This is one of the anchors- this episode became the one where we introduce Sophie’s emotional arc. We hint at it in the first two or three, but really, this is where we land it. And then we develop it over 4, 5, 6, 7.

Amy: Cause you know what I do really well?

John: What do you do?

Amy: I write the heart.

John: You do write the heart. You’re a real sap.

[Laughter]

Amy: I’m just waiting for you to shoot back at me about how lame I am.

Frakes: I do sensitive.

Amy: Yeah, you’re great.

John: Yeah, you do sensitive.

Frakes: Used to be a big action, green screen guy; I do sensitive now, that’s all I do.

John: Yeah, sensitive, all heart. Is that why you can’t compose a frame? Anyway.

Frakes: Exactly.

Amy: Oh!

John: The point is-

Amy: See, this is what he does.

Frakes: I know.

John: I wouldn’t say that you write all heart. I’d say you rely overly on a midpoint victim. I would say that is accurate.

[Laughter]

Amy: Ok here we go, this is what I was waiting for.

Frakes: This is the time to wash this laundry.

Amy: I was waiting for him to start in on my fixations.

John: You started it.

Frakes: Here’s an argument for why we do it a bunch of different bars as we can, because this room is tough.

Amy: Let’s explain what the act one used to be.

John: The act one- what was the act one?

Amy: The act one used to be, um, we’re going out and we’re actually doing the things that they’re talking about in this scene.

John: Yes.

Amy: Which is: we light his apartment on fire, and-

John: We actually set his apartment on fire and give an old woman a heart attack. And it was pointed out that doing a montage of mini cons in the first act was probably somewhat budget busting.

Amy: Financially unfeasible?

[Laughter]

John: So it became this discussion- and this is interesting, because it’s a slower first act, but this was the other thing we kinda discovered over the course of the second season - it’s ok to hang out with these characters.

Amy: Yeah, people like them in scenes together.

John: Yes.

Amy: All five of them.

John: And they want to watch them plan. You know, this- planning sequences for the writers are boring as hell, because we wanna get them up on their feet. And we got testing back from the audience - the audience loved this part of the show.

Frakes: You know why? Because these actors like all being in the same scene.

John: Yes.

Amy: And they’re great together, play off one another perfectly. It’s competence porn.

John: It’s competence porn; that’s the phrase.

Amy: Thank you, John Rogers.

John: That's the phrase we invented, is people love to watch people who are good at something.

Frakes: Usually I don't have two people eat in a scene, but in this case it was a strike zone cover.

John: This was- people were going, “Are you having Gina eat because she’s pregnant?” It’s like the- no the counter’s there, the counter is a good bit of obstruction.

Amy: The counter’s there and she just got a broken heart.

Frakes: That and I'm kind of a pushover when Beth says, “Would it be ok if I got some cereal and ate it?” “Sure Beth.”

[Laughter]

John: Sure, why not?

Frakes: Whatever you say.

John: Now this is interesting, this is our most explicit Madoff reference, and what happened is, right before the beginning of the second season, is that the entire world financial system collapsed. Bad for the earth, good for us.

Amy: Awesome for Leverage.

John: Just gave us a long line of evil white dudes to pick from, and when we read about the conditions of Madoff's house arrest, that was just even-

Frakes: Played right into your hands.

[Laughter]

John: This is one of those times, where just-

Amy: Well it pissed us off, and you’ll see that's where we get most of our stories.

John: Exactly. The rule is, whenever we open up the newspaper and say, ‘I hate that guy!’-

Amy: Yeah, that's exactly right.

John: That gave it to us. Then when his wife mailed his jewelry out, the fact that she could still have this money in the house gave us this idea for basically, a treasure hunt. Well, how do you do a treasure hunt? Well the guy in the house, that brought up- and we actually went and looked up the rules about, how do you get out of house arrest? How are you allowed out? And that brought us out to this. And now this young man,-

Amy: Alex Mentzel.

Frakes: Alex Mentzel, genius.

John: He is local.

Amy: Lovely.

John: He is Portland, right; he's Oregon.

Frakes: He's not from Portland, he's actually- his father teaches at -

John: University of Oregon, or-?

Frakes: No, not University of Oregon. In Eugene, what's the school in Eugene?

John: I'm not sure.

Frakes: He's a music teacher.

Amy: Yeah.

John: Oh cool.

Frakes: And he was incredibly helpful.

Amy: He’s a brilliant vocalist.

Frakes: And this kid is spectacular.

Amy: Yeah, he's a wonderful actor.

Frakes: And a wonderful singer, and actually a wonderful kid.

John: And this was tough, because-

Frakes: Was it ever.

John: This was- did not start out as a musical.

[Laughter]

John: It started out- If I remember, the only musical beat that was in it, remember I kept singing girl’s thing over and over again, because I was so-

Amy: Photosynthesis.

John: No, the star.

Amy: Oh, yeah yeah yeah.

John: The star song.

Amy: Fusion.

John: Fusion. I was so happy I had come up with a rhyme for fusion that- in the room-

Amy: The fact that it's a musical is kinda my fault.

John: Yes, it started with one song and spun out into a full musical score.

Frakes: Also LoDuca said, “Oh, I couldn't possibly write enough songs for you.”

Amy: Yeah.

Jonathan: Ended up delivering three or four original songs in about three days, as I recall.

Amy: Yeah, we really couldn't have done this episode without Joe LoDuca, our brilliant-

John: This is- and again, Hardison, as always, going way over the top. Now what was the exterior there for Dalton Academy? What? One of the great advantages of shooting in Portland-

Frakes: This place, they showed us on our first trip up to Portland when we were being pitched, ‘Come to Portland, we can give you these buildings for free.’ This was a former courtroom building that the city said-

John: Was it the customs house or the courtroom?

Amy: Customs house!

Frakes: Customs house, that's right. Good call. And this was our first stop, on our first trip to Portland two Novembers ago, whenever that was, and they said, “You can have this building.” And we finally found a way to use it as an exterior and an interior. So this scene is actually inside the building that we shot at the exterior of, which rarely happens.

Amy: One of the few times the exterior and interior are actually connected.

John: Now this is- now who played the assistant?

Frakes: Yeah, see, I’m looking for her name and she’s not on here.

Amy: I didn't do my job.

John: No, it’s ok, just feel bad; she just had a great little running gag.

Amy: Oh yeah, we lost.

Frakes: She was fabulous here. Fabulous.

John: One of the things about doing 42 minutes of television is, you shoot 50, and anything that's not essential to plot winds up going away.

Frakes: Get a load of Tim’s entrance. Get a load of this staging. Hold on.

John: It's subtle. Wow. Now, did you do this or did Connell come up with this?

Frakes: Symmetry.

John: Symmetry is beautiful.

Frakes: This one, and on the other side? Who’s with him?

Amy: Well-

John: Not yet. They come down together. Youre talking about Chris’ and Gina's entrances.

Frakes: First of all, it's the combination of: is it a rug, is a hair piece, is a pull over?

[Laughter]

Frakes: Is it a combination? And this is a man unafraid of costume, unafraid of hair, and unafraid of wearing glasses.

John: The hair is actually a hat. We- I think we already established in one of the commentaries this season, the nicknames for Tim's characters are the hats. And the hats are- for all the characters, we say what hats the characters wore.

Amy: Well Gina added an ad lib later, where she gets distracted by that thing on his head.

John: Yes it's- I love the mocked up book, too. Like, there would be a best seller by a German educational expert.

Frakes: There we go, Mark Sanford - Richard Topping. Wonderful.

John: By the way, we chose the name Mark Sanford because it cleared, and it was utterly unrelated to the governor who then got into an enormous amount of trouble, like the week this aired.

Amy: Yeah, the week it aired. That's the governor of South Carolina? Who-

John: Who decided to visit his Argentinian girlfriend.

Frakes: They say he was on the Adirondacks on a hike.

Amy: Yes.

[Laughter]

Amy: He was just clearing his head, you know.

John: To be fair, “I am on the Appalachian trail” and “I am getting some Argentinian tail” sound very similar over a cell phone connection.

Frakes: Bam.

[Laughter]

John: Yes, I love the eyes here. Who did he was doing? Was he doing Polanski a little?

Frakes: He stole the Polanski because he had just done a film-

John: He had just done a film with Polanski. And, kind of, the whole idea that, if you live in Hollywood, you have friends who have kids at these ridiculous schools.

Frakes: Here we go.

John: And so the urge to make fun of the idea that you would pay 30 thousand dollars for your kids to get an education that's barely better than a free one, was highly entertaining. And also the sort of bullshit names, like, they don't call it gym they call it body in motion study and that sort of thing.

Amy: Motion Sciences.

Frakes: And all the kids, Sierra and-

John: Oh yeah.

Amy: I'm here for the kids’ names. Like I would say half of the fun of the episode-

Frakes: Widmark.

John: Yes, Widmark; that's right.

Amy: Widmark Fowler.

John: I forget where Widmark came from. That one popped early cause it was just - what's the worst thing you can call your kid? That's just a bad idea.

Frakes: Boom.

John: And big zoom up through the-

Frakes: David Fincher.

John: Yes, that is Fincher, that is David Fincher. That was a lot this year.

Frakes: Steal from the best.

John: Well a lot this year, we were playing around with different transitions and playing around with different ways out of scenes.

Frakes: Well that's actually- Mark Franco made that shot work. Again local hire, the actors.

Amy: Wonderful Portland actors.

Frakes: The actors in Portland are just spectacular.

Amy: And I love Nadine’s wardrobe in this episode, and-

Frakes: And unafraid- look at how unafraid Beth is.

Amy: Stick your whole body in there.

[Laughter]

John: Thank you, thank you. Alright you're cut off.

Frakes: “Frakes do you see my ass?” “Yes. Yes I do, Beth.”

John: Thank you. I love Parker’s obsession with air ducts there, that we actually made a running gag in the second year that she just begins to compare and contrast them. This is also one of the times that they- where the team- this is another thing in the second season, they call Nate on the fact that he's kind of ignoring collateral damage here.

Frakes: Yes, exactly, good call.

Amy: Yes.

John: And especially in the one you did for the second half of the season, in the bar-

Amy: Well this is the beginning of Nate’s arc, and his, sort of, slow demise.

John: And this was interesting, we really- we knew what Nate’s arc was for the year, and we had to sort of stagger it with introducing Sophie's arc.

Amy: Yeah

John: And then compress Sophie's arc into four episodes to clear out for episode 7. So it really changed the dynamic, and sort of the way they played off each other. I miss the whole opening for this; there’s a whole-

Amy: There's a huge fencing scene.

John: We may have to hunt that up. I hope it makes it on the DVD.

Amy: I hope it makes it in the special features, cause there's a lot of fun fencing stuff that I-

John: Well also just-

Frakes: Also the charm that Christian has with kids is just amazing.

Amy: And they love him.

Frakes: They adore him. He clearly adores them.

Amy: He's Superman, he's Batman.

Frakes: Look at the look on his face.

John: Well Chris has a great bit earlier, when he's just freaked out about the fact that there's no balls. There's a whole opening bit to this where Eliot is dealing with this, kind of, gym-

Amy: Yeah.

John: That's just hilarious.

Amy: There's a lot of stuff in this script that we- for a bunch of reasons, did not include.

Frakes: He's a great kid, too.

Amy: Mason Knight plays Skyler here.

John: Skylar the bully we all knew.

Frakes: The bully we all knew.

[Laughter]

Amy: Which is great.

Frakes: “Stab him. Stab him. Stab him again. Stab him again!” This was me directing this scene “Stab him again! Stab him again!”

John: Thats nice.

[All Laugh]

Frakes: Very healthy .

Amy: Yeah I know, you weren't working out anything there.

John: Exactly.

Frakes: And the bag is in front of her belly because…

John: Alright, so what you're implying here is, Gina's pregnant this episode.

Amy: Oh is that right? I never-

John: This is the spelling bee.

Amy: This is a spelling bee; it was shot brilliantly by Mr. Frakes.

John: Look at Skyler just seething at him there. He does a great delivery on the food line here.

[Laughter]

Amy: “He got food!” That kid was awesome.

John: And it was interesting, because to a great degree, the way they’re planning out the con here was what happened in the writers room. Which was, we had, ‘Ok, we want Eliot teaching gym because that'll be fun; in theory, Gina or Sophie should be some sort of English teacher - that fits; Nate as the headmaster. We knew we were bringing back the feds, so we wanted them to run into two people they run into before, which were the FBI guys, so, but-

Frakes: Very annoying Joyce Kim- Judy Kim. Wonderful.

John: Yes, she's really great. Really great in an annoying way. Yeah.

Amy: We all knew a Judy Kim when we were growing up.

John: But to a certain degree, when we were plotting this, we ran into the same thing that the actual crew ran into. Which was, ‘Ok, what the hell’s the big con?’ When these two things fail - cause, you know, structurally, these two things can’t work out.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And I don't remember how science-ical was born.

Amy: Science-ical was just me-.

Frakes: Science-ical the musical.

Amy: What we were looking for was something- where it was already something the school was already doing.

John: That’s right; it's the time frame.

Amy: What was something the school would have in motion-?

Frakes: That she could spin this into.

Amy: That she could paint it into, rather than create- creating a musical from scratch, which would be next to impossible, even for Sophie. And so I just, sort of, came up with this science-ical idea based off of- coming off of a, you know, science fair that maybe the school was doing, and then she just spins it into a grandiose musical extravaganza.

Frakes: Gina was hysterical in this scene.

John: Well she's not afraid to be cruel to children, which is a great thing for actresses.

[Laughter]

John: No she- her- Sophie's dislike of the little girl is really-

Frakes: Just palpable.

John: It’s also a really nice connection here, and that's because this kid’s great.

Amy: This is where she falls in love with him a little bit, as we all did with Alex.

Frakes: Well also, she feels like she's seeing herself.

Amy: Yes, exactly.

John: And that's the thing we kind of blew by that scene with the boyfriend, but the end of that scene she just really lays into the whole fact that, you know-

Amy: She's a fractured person and some- to some respect she-

Frakes: ‘My lies have caught up with me.’

Amy: She doesn't even know who she is anymore; she's been living so many separate lives, all three aliases-

John: Something when you and I wrote the- 207, the summer season finale, the bit where it's like ‘you and your solo crusade’. Her relationship has changed her, but Nate’s too broken to have a relationship with, so now she's in this gray zone.

Frakes: No comedy here.

Amy: It's almost like we planned this stuff.

Frakes: Comedy colors.

John: Not this season.

Frakes: Physical comedy.

John: Big physical comedy. Frakes is always a big fan of the physical comedy.

Frakes: Here they are.

Amy: Here they are! Rick Overton and Gerald Downey! Taggert and McSweeten.

Frakes: We know them, we love them.

Amy: I’m in love with these two.

John: Really, if we did a web series, it would be Taggart/McSweeten. Because in the writers room, the theory is by the Leverage team constantly throwing them scraps of their cons, these guys have become superstars in the FBI. Like there are young FBI trainees who are like “C'mon I'm no Taggart!” But yeah.

[Laughter]

John: And there's the big reveal of who it is and, you know, hopefully a good act out with guns out. Yeah, there you go.

Amy: An act out with guns out, that's awesome.

John: Was it Dashiell Hammett? When in doubt have a guy with a gun [trails off].

Amy: That's exactly right.

John: It might not be Dashiell, I think it is Dashiell. And then, now we catch up with these guys.

Frakes: Let's talk about the wardrobe.

John: Yeah, this wardrobe is fearless.

Frakes: She is fearless.

Amy: Nadine said, you know, part of-

Frakes: Nadine is fearless.

Amy: Nadine takes a word and makes it a wardrobe out of it. Like in this scene where she’s- where she's in the air vent, he addressed as “Binky” and then that automatically became hipsters.

Frakes: Look at what she's wearing!

Amy: So she's- oh god.

Frakes: The mattress[?] pants weren't enough - she gave him a mattress belt.

Amy: I know.

John: And the hat. Look at the hat.

Amy: Which matches her hair band, it's lovely.

Frakes: Or does it?

John: Well it kinda does, yeah, look at that.

Frakes: Brilliant.

Amy: Pattern-esque.

Frakes: Yeah, they're really- they're either a preppy couple/lovers, or serial killers. There's only two choices on that particular-

Amy: And I always love Aldis and Beth together, too. Aldis and Beth are just a tag team made in heaven.

John: Yeah, we were talking about in one of the other commentaries, is that Beth’s done this great thing. She sorta established that she’s not gonna be very emotionally open with him, but she's always physically in proximity to him. She's very comfortable with him and always kinda got his back.

Amy: And she’s unintentionally teasing him, which I don't even think she really gets.

John: Well that's the thing, she’s really found a way to- well both she and Aldis found a way to advance the Parker and Hardison relationship without us making it text.

Amy: This might be my favorite moment in the whole thing. ‘Do you want to see other partners?’

John: ‘Do you want to see other partners?’ Yes.

Amy: Oh I love it.

John: Yeah, this sort of jealousy beat there. And this is what Chris Downey- Chris and the “let me get this straight,” moment.

Amy: Yeah, let me get it straight. Every episode has let me get this straight.

John: Just because, you know what? And I've referenced this-

Amy: It's a reset moment.

John: I’ve referenced this research before, but 30% of our audience never understands the cons.

Amy: Are you talking about my parents, John?

John: No.

Amy: Ok.

John: No, I'm not talking about your parents. You know, we want to make sure everyone understands the goals and everything moving forward.

Amy: Yeah, it's resetting what they’re after, and why they can't get it, and what they have to do to accomplish it.

John: This place looks great at night, by the way.

Frakes: Here’s a little DVD commentary moment: that entire scene that we’re watching right here was not meant to be in these costumes. Everyone else had their costumes except-

Amy: That's right.

Frakes: Remember this day?

Amy: Yeah, I remember.

John: So no, tell me what's going on.

Frakes: So Hutton’s costume hadn't been established yet and I begged Nadine. And I talked to the actors and I said, ‘Let’s- everybody should be in costume. This is gonna be funnier for the audience to see them as their con characters.’ And Nadine and Tim, God bless them, put together this costume from the shop. Broke into the woman's house who was building his original costume to see- remember all this?

Amy: I remember; it was awesome.

John: Can we not talk about felonies on the DVD commentaries?

[Laughter]

Frakes: This was a big call on my part that I wouldn't have made in the first season, where I said. ‘You know what? This really, visually, is gonna be worth the half hour that we’re gonna take to put this shit together.’

John: And to a great degree Leverage is not just an adjunct to your career. We’re more there to serve you, than you are there to direct our episodes, at this point.

Frakes: I'm so glad you said that.

[Laughter]

John: Now which song did we have- how did we have this song?

Frakes: He’s singing not Danny Boy, he's singing-

John: He's singing something like-

Amy: Just so you guys know we can’t hear it right now, so were listening to a silent screen and this was filmed in March, and now we’re-

John: No, I remember trying to- oh this is-

Frakes: Oh here's seussical the musical.

John: This is my fusion confusion moment.

Amy: This is John singing to us every single day in the writers room. Even when the episode was long done.

John: I just thought you should all be aware there's no confusion, that fusion powers the star.

Amy: Yes, I like it.

John: Yeah Gina’s hair is great this-

Frakes: Not to mention her pins.

John: Yeah, that's a lot of-

Amy: And, you know, I pick these science fair projects because, I apparently- I'm just really wanting to kill Joe LoDuca. Because it was like, “what- what science projects- bread mold? How do you write a song about bread mold?”

Frakes: Easily, apparently.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And brilliantly. But yeah, there's- we don't make Joe’s life easy.

Amy: Yeah, I didn't wanna make it easy on me either.

John: We need a song about photosynthesis. Poor Skylar.

Frakes: Poor Skylar, “But look, it turns on a light! It works! It works! It turns on a lightbulb!”

John: Just the seething resentment.

Frakes: It’s great.

John: There's actually another line-one line here, which I would take a small amount of credit for, is my favorite thing we slipped in, which is “What is science without emotional context?”

Amy: Oh yeah.

John: “Facts.”

Amy: That is the epitome of John Rogers, that line right there.

John: It's just, come on people, science is our friend.

Frakes: I stole these outfits from when my daughter went to school in London at Hill House where they had these horrible maroon-

John: Hill House? The Haunting of Hill House? Your daughter went to school- Oh my god! Your daughter was Julie Harris?

[Laughter]

Amy: That’s terrible.

Frakes: No, no, no.

Amy: Why would you do that?

John: Oh, and there's more seething resentment from her, yes.

Amy: Well we cut out the moment at the end that Judy Kim had.

Frakes: The musical comedy star that she always wanted to be, she couldn't resist.

Amy: There was a moment at the end of that scene, where that tag was Judy Kim saying, “I’m gonna go call my agent,” but then we thought that it was a little self-referential, so we sort of cut that out.

John: No, Sophie’s-

Frakes: Oh that was a good cut.

Amy: That was a good cut.

John: Sophie's sense of projection in this episode is truly magnificent.

Amy: I know, yeah.

John: All the seething resentment of being dumped. And I also love the fact that we could actually did a show with the four of these people as federal agents.

Frakes: Oh my lord, the physical stuff that Aldis and-

John: And Rick do.

Frakes: -Rick do is insane, because they always have to have the last beat, each of them.

John: Each one struggling to get it.

Frakes: Until you call cut and then beyond cut. “Are you done?” “No I'm not done, are you done?” “No I'm not done, I got more.” “You got more? I got more.”

John: I like Beth's little ad lib “neh neh neh neh” there, just her frustration with normal humans is always-

Amy: How do you know that wasn't in the script? I don't even know how I would write that.

Frakes: Hiding behind the chess set now.

Amy: “Neh neh neh neh neh?”

John: This was tricky, too; we actually, originally, had broken this out and then we had to go back and plant this guy. Remember that? Cause we- once we figured out how the end worked, we had to go back and find the spots where we could highlight him.

Amy: We had laid in Sanford a little heavier so people remembered him at the end. Oh man, his hair just keeps getting worse and worse.

Frakes: I was just gonna say, a little mismatch on the hair.

John: I think it changes from shot to shot.

Frakes: There's not many people who can make real hair look like a pullover.

[Laughter]

John: I know, that's what's weird - he's not bald. How the hell did you guys do that?

Amy: It's like the Robin Hood Mel Brooks movie where the mole on the face keeps moving around every shot.

John: Moving around, yeah exactly.

Amy: Oh, I love it.

John: Yeah and this is the Nate/Sophie “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Now it's interesting-

Frakes: She references the hair.

John: They basically trade these speeches during the whole course of the season.

Amy: Yeah, it's a back and forth that's sort of- that starts out here-

John: And then to a great degree, this- we basically wrote the whole episode-

Frakes: This is awesome, yeah.

Amy: This is really the moment we wanted when we came up with the concept.

John: Yes, we really started with - I wanna see Eliot teach girls how to kill - cause-

Frakes: Look at his face at the end of this. Oh they took it out?!

Amy: I know we did.

Frakes: Who cut this show?!

[Laughter]

Amy: We were running a little long, I don't think I had anything to do with that cut, though.

Frakes: Oh man.

Amy: I know.

John: Do you wanna file your complaint?

Frakes: Is this a good place?

John: This is the only- the DVD commentaries is the only place, the time, to file your complaint with the cut.

Frakes: Is this the time, the place? Here's an example of what it's like to be a director on a television show, as opposed to directing a movie.

Amy: ‘They cut that scene?’ Just blame me; I did the producers cut on this.

John: Alright, I will. So yeah, this is where he's-

Frakes: It was just a shot, for Christ's sake!

[Laughter]

Amy: I'm gonna take the blame. Poor Sonny.

John: You know, like, two more, I'm just gonna stop until we settle this and then come back in. Alright, so this, you know, this is kind of a prelude up to, you know, ‘I'll be there for you. I'll be there for you.’

Frakes: It speaks to their equality, that's what I like. This is- these two, of anybody in the team, fell on equal ground, and when they're alone together, they speak that language.

John: Yeah, it's interesting, cause Eliot kind of has a vibe like that with Nate, but it’s always an outsider. It's like he's not- he respects Nate, but he doesn't look up to him the way the other team members do. And that holster look, good look.

Frakes: But Gina’s got so much, I think-

Amy: I know, you love Beth in this outfit.

John: Everyone loves Beth in this outfit.

Frakes: What's not to like? What part of this wouldn't they like?

John: It's also, like, you can put Aldis in anything-

Frakes: It's a chick with a gun!

Amy: It's a chick with a gun, pretty hot.

John: But look, you can put Aldis in anything, man. Look at this, he's rocking the suit, he's rocking the preppy-

Amy: He's rocking the suit better than most people I have ever seen.

Frakes: Hey, I got Aldis to take his clothes off in another episode I did.

John: I think that'll be a big motivator for people to buy the second half of the DVD, if they know that's coming out.

Amy: That’s season 2.5.

John: Frakes got the shirtless Aldis, he's the one. So yeah, little flirtiness, little vibe going on there.

Amy: And again, with the Rick and Gerald, these two actors, like-

Frakes: These four could do a show-

Amy: I think that 18 takes of what Beth and Gerald were talking about in the background. And it was just adlib, after adlib, after adlib, which I hope will be on the DVD.

Frakes: Same thing happened with the FBI truck, with the Wedding Job.

John: You directed when we introduced these characters. Right, yeah. And that was the same foursome right? And then, yeah, basically the same split, as a matter of fact. Yeah, and then we wound up- we wound up tweaking this whole arrangement on who had to stay, who had to go based on the physical availability of the sets. That was-

Amy: Yeah, yeah.

John: But that's the thing, when you write television-

Frakes: See, again with this hand stuff, these two will not quit. “I've got one better. If you’re doing it with one hand, I'm doing it with two hands. I'm coming at you with two.”

John: The-

Frakes: Oh him and kids. The beret!

Amy: The little girls are literally following him around, which is pretty great.

Frakes: The hair wouldn't work, so the beret went on for the show.

John: Yeah. Yeah and now we cruelly mock a child for our own amusement. I like how Eliot steps in there, like, I love-

Amy: Don’t make fun of him!

John: He's not gonna hurt them. What's the possible threat there?

Frakes: The wife of Madoff, here, is a very big friend of the film commission.

Amy: Oh Leanne Littrell, she's terrific; she was on our side.

Frakes: She's part of the reason the whole thing worked.

John: Why we went to Portland, that's right.

Amy: She and Lana Veenker, our casting agent, are our two big reasons why we get the tax breaks we do.

John: A lot of people worked very hard to bring several hundred jobs to Portland, Oregon. And it's- I have to say, it's very easy to lose faith in government, but when you see it work at that level, when you see people care about the community, you know, spend a year and work with the government.

Frakes: Plug it.

John: And plug it, make it work, it renews your faith in it. I like that sort of appraising look.

Amy: Well, yeah, I actually fought with Sunny on this scene a little bit. I was like, “We need some air.” “We’re long!” I’m like “We need looks; in this moment we need looks.”

John: Yeah.

Frakes: “What are you thinking? Why- don’t put me with this guy!”

John: This actually echoes a beat in Ice Man in 208.

Amy: Oh in Ice Man Job, oh yeah.

John: Where whenever- cause we were kind of setting up the idea that, you know, as Sophie was gonna disappear for the back half of the season, we need to remind everyone that there's a reason you need Sophie.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And that is when you put other people in cons, they're only okay for x amount of time. And putting Parker in this situation was not a good idea by any stretch of the imagination.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And meanwhile, Hardison fully believes he can do absolutely anything.

Frakes: Anything, at any time. ‘I’ll do it alone.’

Amy: ‘Don’t worry I got this,’ is basically his motto.

John: Which is why we actually, one of the things why we built Ice Man, which is, at some point, Hardison’s gonna have his ass handed to him.

Amy: It’s gonna bite him in the ass at some point.

John: And now this is- How many people did you have for this auditorium?

Frakes: We did very well.

Amy: Yeah, made a lot of great extras.

Frakes: We split ‘em up. We had 150 people moving around the room; looked like it was a full house. Nice use of a crane in the toilet.

[Laughter]

John: It's a very nice-

Frakes: You don't usually see that combination.

John: You rarely see the crane in the toilet shot.

Frakes: You rarely see the crane going into a practical bathroom.

Amy: Yeah.

John: I do remember when we hired you cause-

Frakes: I don't recommend it!

John: They were saying: no one knows how to shoot a toilet like Jonathan Frakes.

Frakes: It's good to be friends with the DP and the grip so they can get the crane in it early, or they'll called the anchor-

John: Yeah, now I think there was actually a bounty put on that crane at one point; like $10,000 to make it disappear.

Amy: Oh, I should point out, originally what were we were-

Frakes: Smoothies, they have smoothies in the lobby for this school.

Amy: But originally that whole exchange between Parker and McSweeten happened at the apartment.

John: Yes, they're actually in the kitchen.

Amy: And then in the original version of this, they got trapped inside and Hardison had to do the theft while they were both there and Parker was creating a distraction for him.

John: But the sightlines in the set just didn't work.

Amy: Yeah, the sightlines just didn't work.

John: Yeah, this actually works out funnier, I think.

Frakes: Also, Dave Connell gets credit for taking this whole scene outside, said, “Why don't we use this exterior of this building, if we own this building?”

John: Oh yeah, that was brilliant. And that's the thing is, when you have- The great thing about a show when you have one DP who knows the show so well, Dave was there for the pilot. It's just, you know, he knows- a lot of time when you're directing, you're so focused on the performances, you're so focused on making the story points. He's the one who says “You know, we can make this a little more interesting, visually”, and he gives you permission to take it out.

Frakes: Yeah, exactly. “I could do it just as fast outside as I could inside”

John: Yeah.

Frakes: “And it'll look more interesting.”

John: And you don't feel bad as a director asking for something, cause you know you're not putting a burden on them. This is another great- just another great scene. I love the fact she drops her accent here, it's like she’s actually being honest with him.

Amy: Yeah, it was tough to find the exact moment in which she needed to drop it, but, you know, Gina found it, so-

Frakes: Gina was on fire this episode. She was on FIRE.

John: I tell you man, she did just fantastic work this year.

Amy: Yeah.

John: I mean Gina was just relentlessly good all season long. But we gave Sophie a lot of beats that we hadn't given her first season. A lot of the first season was about how kind of- she was disappointed in the relationship she was supposed to have with Nate.

Amy: Yeah.

John: And this year, it was all about her personal growth and Gina just teed off on it.

Amy: She really found Sophie this year; it's amazing.

John: And this is, by the way, classic farce, and it's really great to have good comedic-

Frakes: This is, like, noises off.

Amy: It is.

John: This is noises off; we’re doing noises off.

Amy: This is exactly noises off.

John: Yeah, because, particularly, it was written as noises off with them in the same room.

Amy: I know, yeah.

John: And so moving them to another location. No, the- and then great work by Derek to give us the screens that, you know, match everything; they help sell the tech stuff.

Frakes: The tech stuff, including the fact that we were looking for the blue wire; there happened to be 30 blue wires on the day.

Amy: Yeah, that was tough; we had to rewrite that in post, basically that whole scene.

John: No, her growing desperation here, and the fact that- that this works in the crosscuts, is really nice. And thank you for giving us the locked off comedy shots, which a lot of people would get too busy. You don’t understand, when you're doing a cross cut thing, it’s just looks.

Frakes: It's just looks.

John: Wanna sell the geography. And the kind of weak look; the kind of weak smile. And then, this changed several times. This was like a big safe; it was-

Amy: Yeah, where it was located within the apartment had- there were many variants. Once it was in a statue, at some point.

John: Was that a statue?

Frakes: It became a budget issue.

John: It was a pillar.

Amy: It became a budget issue, and a set issue, and where can we possibly build a giant hole in the wall?

John: Yeah, welcome to television.

Frakes: This whole sequence is intercut beautifully, cause none of the scenes are too long.

Amy: Yeah.

Frakes: And there are 3 different emotions going on.

Amy: Yeah, yeah.

Frakes: It's Hardison feeling like, ‘I can conquer the world,’ we’ve got a farce scene, and we've got an emotional scene.

John: Yeah, exactly.

Amy: Sonny Baskin edited this one; he's amazing.

John: And it's also, kind of- This editing taught the writers, to a great degree; it really became a format in the fourth act to do the cross cutting fourth act.

Frakes: It's brilliant.

Amy: Yeah. It became a template for sure.

John: It became a template as like- just to keep the action up without having to be too busy, is just establish two lines and follow both lines through.

Amy: And even, I mean, cause this fourth act is more emotional than it is anything. And so the cross cutting really helps keep the pacing up.

John: Yeah, this is one of the few fourth acts where something isn’t- there isn't any action; nothing’s going horribly wrong.

Amy: Yeah, no one’s chasing anything. Well until the fight happens.

John: Well, you know, they’re chasing their heart.

Amy: Oh really, oh wow, alright.

Frakes: Chasing their heart. When in doubt shoot low and wide.

John: Is that a good- What would you say?

[Laughter]

Amy: That's what she said.

John: You know what? This year on the set, I asked everyone on the set to describe their job. Like, one trusiem they would give to a five year old.

Frakes: That’s mine.

John: Like David Connell’s was, “Front light bad; backlight good.”

Frakes: Backlight good.

John: And yours is, “When in doubt, shoot low and wide.”

Frakes: Absolutely.

John: What would you say your advice?

Amy: “Don't be a writer.”

[Laughter]

John: I read a great quote the other day - I can't remember who it was - is somebody asked a writer: What do I hate about writing? And he said, ‘writing’.

Amy: Writing, yeah.

Frakes: Nobody does this stuff better than Aldis.

Amy: I know.

John: Yeah.

Amy: He can make it work out of anything.

John: The cocky- yeah.

Frakes: And it’s a necessary part of Leverage; it’s a huge part of what the fans look forward to. He’s a technogeek; he's great at the stuff. And he's given this handful of gack and gadgets and told to make it work.

John: Yeah.

Frakes: And he- he’s spectacular. Big snap zoom.

John: Big snap zoom type of guy.

Amy: That was an insane snap zoom.

John: It’s- when he auditioned, actually, the night he came in, the speech he had was the long speech about the-

Amy: Talking about Aldis now?

John: Yeah, when we did the-

Amy: By the way, I'm taking credit for that first.

Frakes: Photosynthesis is the-

John: Yeah you should, you wrote that.

Amy: Yeah, that verse was mine.

John: You wrote that.

Frakes: The cloud song?

Amy: The cirrus, remember? I emailed Joe, “How are we not doing a cirrus pun?”.

[Laughter]

Amy: “What's going on? You can't do a cloud song without a cirrus pun.”

John: This is another thing where, you know.

Frakes: That shot, unfortunately, looked like it was out of Barnaby Jones.

[All Laugh]

Amy: A great show in it’s own right.

John: In it’s own right. I love her quietly breaking his heart here.

Amy: Yeah.

John: But, you know, other shows it's like, ‘Oh look, we’re at the theatre, at hospitals, or they're in the squad room’. We’re the only show that ‘oh this week were at a private school; oh we're doing a science-ical, so I need set dec to build a science background.’

Frakes: ‘I need set dec, and I need four original songs, and I need four talented kids to sing, locally.’

Amy: How do we pull this stuff off? I don't understand.

John: Barely, and drunk. No, but Aldis- everyone came into audition, and everyone just stumbled over this page long speech of technobabble.

Frakes: And he nailed it.

John: And he went through it like an F1 driver, just- He just kissed each joke as he went through, and we knew at that moment.

Amy: Aldis is always prepared. He always is great. I love it.

John: He's one of the hardest working young actors I know.

Amy: Yeah, he's fantastic.

John: He really digs in. I love these, sort of- I love the relatability of those two. Everyone sitting with their kids-

Amy: Nadine Haders, oh my god, with the costumes.

Frakes: Look at the makeup; the makeup and the costumes together.

Amy: The makeup was great, too.

John: Her shaking her head.

Amy: I really do love this episode. I forgot how much I love it.

John: This was a great episode. This was a lot of fun.

Frakes: Oh this little kid. He auditioned for -

Amy: William Grim? Grime? [Transcriber Note: Will Grimme]

John: The kid in the plants?

Frakes: Yeah.

Amy: Yeah, photosynthesis kid.

Frakes: Yeah, he auditioned to play Widmark, and I loved him so much that he needed to find a place for him, and he got the photosynthesis song.

Amy: And it was, like, three octaves too high for his voice, which was perfect. Because he kept trying to reach it, but that's what we wanted. We wanted him to not quite get there.

Frakes: And we recorded all these kids live.

Amy: Yeah.

John: Oh really?

Frakes: We did Widmark pre-tape.

Amy: Widmark was live- no, Widmark was- pre-taped him and did it live, just so we could have it.

Frakes: But the other kids did live on the day.

Amy: Yeah, and Hannah, who played the cloud kid, also was live. And they had like a day to prepare.

Frakes: Wait, bad guy?

John: Bad guy.

Amy: Um, that's Brian Hite, our stunt guy, slash bad guy, slash ass kicker.

Frakes: How do you happen to know his name?

Amy: Um, no particular reason.

John: He's a very talented young man, who works hard on the show.

Amy: He's a very talented young man.

John: This is a good fight. This is actually a pretty- you know, the trick is always figuring out how to find people to fight Chris.

Frakes: How much, and when?

John: Yeah and when. And also the intensity, you know. There's two types of people that Eliot fights in an episode - sort of your rent-a-goon or rent-a-thug, that he puts down pretty quickly-

Frakes: Or a high-end guy.

John: Or a pro. And, you know, that's really where you have to dial up and down with the stunt director.

Amy: But the intercut fight here with Sophie, you know, “Shhh, you're gonna ruin his big finale.” I love the intercutting in there.

John: Yeah. And Sophie’s monomania on the show.

Amy: I mean, it's kids singing and a giant fight happening simultaneously. What's not to love?

Frakes: Chris is such a goer in the fights; he's such a goer.

Amy: Oh yeah.

John: He banged himself up bad a couple times this year.

Amy: And he was feeling sick this day, too, and he was still like “I'm doing it”.

John: He was into it.

Amy: Yeah, he was totally into it.

Frakes: He was so into it. Check out the bread mold outfit.

John: The bread mold outfit. I love the fact that-

Frakes: I’m here.

Amy: The shirt is amazing, I want that shirt. How did I not get that shirt when we wrapped? I gotta go inquire about that.

John: How did you not steal wardrobe from the show?

Amy: I don't know how I didn't steal more things.

John: Thank you for not stealing from us that day.

[Laughter]

Amy: It's sort of my thing.

Frakes: Never afraid of the 45 degree shutter here. A Dean Devlin signature.

John: On the fights, that's what we do - the 45 degree shutter. And what effect does that have, director Jonathan Frakes?

Frakes: Well, you can tell it enhances the feeling of movement and intensity.

John: Interesting; makes it just snappier.

Amy: That’s hot.

Frakes: That much snappier.

John: And then Widmark’s big moment of truth. This may be the only time that the climax of a crime drama has focused on whether a boy will sing.

Frakes: A boy can or cannot sing.

[Laughter]

Frakes: This is like A Chorus Line!

Amy: I know, right?

John: By the way- but you know what? Oh my god, you know what this whole bit came from? I just forgot, we were talking about The Man Who Knew Too Much-

Amy: Oh!

John: That's where the idea for this sequence came from, was the stage in the background, and the stage in the background.

Amy: Yeah yeah, I forgot about that.

John: Yeah well, I mean, when these shows come together, to a great degree it’s- everyone brings, you know, whatever the little-

Frakes: Look at her, she can't help herself.

Amy: We all have different toolkits.

John: Yes, that's the perfect way of looking at it.

Amy: I bring making music out of science projects.

Frakes: I thought you brought the heart.

John: She brings the heart.

Amy: I bring so much it's really hard in a 43 minute DVD commentary to limit my awesomeness; it’s pretty much impossible.

John: I just gotta let that sit for a moment.

[All Laugh]

Amy: Don't let that hang there!

John: I love how you, kind of, rack out of there, cause Chris actually gives a great annoyed look there.

Amy: Yeah, yeah.

John: And just the- him- whenever Eliot is a little annoyed is actually the funniest thing in the show. It's like, he's very hard- there's a great bit in, I think it's 206, where, “Does anyone want my job? I get kicked and punched.” Every now and then he has to remind people that that's his gig.

Frakes: Look at this kid. Look at this kid go.

Amy: And the socks.

Frakes: And the intercut - this guy’s put away in the prop box.

John: And then we’re on the big solo.

Frakes: He’s going on for the high note. Parents are happy. This is great

John: And by the way, we’re now tagging how much of an asshole this guy is, cause how can he not share in the kid’s triumph?

Frakes: Stand up for his son!

John: This is a guy who plainly deserves whatever brutal beating we dish out to him just as well. There we go.

Frakes: Fortunately, Nate Ford spotted the entire event.

Amy: I don't even know how we got that shot; that was amazing.

John: Yeah, with everyone standing up?

Amy: It was tough, cause we had so much to do in this day, and like, to get all the little moments that we got, and not having forgotten anything, was amazing.

Frakes: Shot list baby! Shot list!

John: This is the other thing.

Amy: You know who's awesome, too? Jonathan Frakes.

John: Jonathan Frakes.

Amy: That’s why he’s number one.

John: Really?

[Laughter]

Amy: Come on!

John: No, not giving that to him.

Frakes: Not gonna go there? Not gonna go there?

Amy: Alright, now I'm getting teased.

John: You know, though, if you say red alert during the commentary- you say red alert during the commentary that means a million more people will buy the DVD.

Frakes: Red alert!

John: Thank you.

Frakes: Shields up!

John: Thank you. Thanks for helping out.

Amy: Wow, I think I need to-

Frakes: How about Brewer? Our former stunt coordinator.

John: Oh, that's right.

Amy: Oh yeah.

Frakes: Throwback to Charlie Brewer.

John: Little hat tip to Charlie.

Frakes: Little hat tip.

John: Too busy working in LA to haul up to Portland. But we had- we had a great crew up there; everyone was just fantastic.

Amy: Oh Portland has an amazing talent pool, in front of and behind the camera.

John: Mark Sanford looks like he's kind of upset, but enjoying being pinned up against the pillar there; he's kind of conflicted at that moment.

[Laughter]

Amy: Well it is Christian Kane, so.

Frakes: There. All your science projects made it to the show.

John: And then the public humiliation, and then there you go and now he's down.

Amy: And Taggert gets his moment like he always does.

Frakes: Good use of the cane.

John: I'm trying to remember how we came up with Mark Sanford the exchange. “You hire the killer and I'll get the- I'll turn over the tape.” Because it was basically- it was interesting, he's basically blackmailing someone from inside the con.

Frakes: He framed somebody who one of his clients.

Amy: He framed one of his coworkers, essentially, into helping him get a free pass.

John: I like that little look.

Frakes: Downey, yeah.

John: That little look, yes.

Frakes: It's ‘remember you for the next episode I’m in’.

John: There's a little something there.

Frakes: Oh and a happy ending.

John: Yeah, and that's a little something- again, we're not gonna change Parker overnight, but kind of advancing her that she learns to trust people over the course of the year.

Frakes: Not afraid of 360.

John: Is this the only 360 in here?

Amy: No, there was a lot of stuff, even in the principal's office; in the school we had a 360.

Frakes: Yeah, went around there, too.

John: And then going the other way. Yeah, that's another signature of the show.

Amy: So you know you're watching Leverage.

John: And then you have to do the little, yeah.

Frakes: Look who's back!

John: Widmark's ok.

Frakes: His mom works as a volunteer.

John: I'm not sure what that wave is. What’s that wave?

Frakes: Does he remember me? Is that him? How much time has passed?

Amy: What's he doing here?

John: Yeah. And this is nice. This is where Nate basically says, ‘It’s ok to change.”

Frakes: Yup.

John: And maybe not just destroy children's lives in pursuit of your own selfish needs .

Amy: Yeah. And she can’t say, ‘Yes it is okay,’ because what kind of arc is that?

Frakes: You know what it is? These two are the adults.

Amy: Yeah.

Frakes: These really are the adults.

Amy: It’s the adults and the kids.

John: Well there's actually something we talked about, and this was the beginning of the arc where both of them need to change, and what happens is Sophie realizes she needs to change first.

Amy: Yeah.

John: The career criminal is actually the smarter one. And that's the episode, The Fairy Godparents, and that was not bad, that was pretty fun.

Frakes: Yeah.

Amy: Yeah.

John: Only a little drunk and pretty fun. Jonathan got anything you wanna say before we’re out of this?

Frakes: Thank you. Only thank you.

Amy: Oh, thank you Frakes.

John: Oh, that's lovely, thank you very much. Berg anything you want to say?

Amy: I love you guys.

John: Oh, we love you too, Berg.

Frakes: Oh we love you too, man!

John: And that's The Fairy Godparents Job, and hopefully we'll be- nah, we won’t be sober for the next one.

Amy: No, we’ll just get drunker and drunker. Bye everybody.

John: Thanks for watching.

Frakes: Bye bye! Enjoy!

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 2 #Episode 4 #Season 2 Episode 4 #The Fairy Godparents Job

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violethowler · 4 years

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A Farewell To The Clone Wars

Yesterday was the end of an era

After 11 years and 104 days

After a theatrical movie, a novel, a comic miniseries, 8 incomplete story reels, and 133 episodes

After 49 hours and 12 minutes of incredible, heartbreaking, beautifully animated television….

Ended, The Clone Wars have.

I watched all of the existing Star Wars movies on DVD when I was a kid, but I was never particularly enamored with them the way that others are. And then in August 2008, I went to the local movie theater with my grandmother to see an animated movie that – while I didn’t know it at the time – would chart the course of my future for years to come.

While a lot of the general Star Wars fandom looks down on the theatrical Clone Wars movie as weak and lackluster, 11-year-old me loved every minute of it. I’ve been obsessed with animation my entire life, and around 2 years before the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I had just begun to explore the world of animation outside of my childhood Disney bubble, diving headfirst into SpongeBob and Avatar and Codename Kids Next Door. Whenever I saw commercials for an animated movie playing in theaters I would beg my family to take me to see it. It didn’t matter what the movie was actually about, all that mattered was that it was animated and I thought it looked fun.

So, when I saw Star Wars: The Clone Wars in theaters with my sister and my grandmother, I loved it. I enjoyed the movie so much that when I learned there was going to be a TV show following the movie, I was ecstatic. From the moment that the first episodes of Season 1 aired on Cartoon Network a few months later, I was hooked. From the very beginning I refused to miss a single episode. From middle school all the way through high school The Clone Wars became the axis around which almost all of my entertainment consumption revolved.

I started reading more Star Wars books and comics from all over the timeline. The Thrawn trilogy. Darth Bane. Fate of the Jedi. The Old Republic. Lost Tribe of the Sith. I devoured every piece of Star Wars media I could find as this show awakened in me an appetite for all things Star Wars. Whenever my parents asked for gift ideas for my birthday or Christmas, at the top of my list would be the latest season of The Clone Wars on DVD. Every summer I trawled the internet looking for news from Star Wars Celebration or San Diego Comic Con about the next season – trailers, clips, plot details, whatever I could find.

When the show was initially cancelled following the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, I was devastated. This show had such a staple of my life that the idea that it wasn’t going to be coming back hurt. As I started looking around at online Star Wars fandom to find someone, anyone, who felt the same way that I did, I discovered #SaveTheCloneWars, and joined the campaign. Through that first year after the plug was pulled, I wrote to Disney asking them to continue the show. I signed fan petitions and made posts on Facebook. It was my first real engagement with the wider online fandom.

Then came The Lost Missions and the Clone Wars Legacy releases – Crystal Crisis, Son of Dathomir, Dark Disciple… Having more Clone Wars stories helped soften the pain of the show’s loss, but the story still felt incomplete. Hearing about future arcs that had been planned for the show only added to the sense of incompleteness, knowing that there were more stories we didn’t get to see. When rumors had begun circulating about an animated Star Wars show set post-Clone Wars, resolving unanswered questions of The Clone Wars was at the top of my wish list for a future Star Wars show.

When Rebels was announced I was cautiously optimistic. I didn’t want to get attached to a new set of characters when the loss of Ahsoka and Rex and my other Clone Wars favorites still felt so raw. After Dave Filoni and the production crew of Rebels posted videos introducing the crew of the Ghost and the core cast of Rebels I reluctantly became more interested, I still was cautious about investing my time in this new show out of fear that it too would be ripped away from me without a proper conclusion just like The Clone Wars was.

So, when the final episode of Rebels’ first season confirmed that the mysterious Fulcrum was none other than Ahsoka Tano I was out of my seat cheering. There were still questions I needed answered about what happened to her after she left the Jedi Order, but the fact that she was there, back on my TV screen once more, was a relief. And when I watched the first trailer for Season 2 a month later, the words “My name is Rex,” made me scream and cry. I was overcome with tears of joy knowing that not only would my favorite Jedi be appearing in Rebels but my favorite Clone Trooper as well.

By the time Rebels’ first season had ended, I was getting ready to graduate from high school and planning where I would go to college in the fall. Taking art electives in high school, particularly a computer art class during the airing of Season 5, made me appreciate just how beautiful the show’s art style was, and when the time came for me to plan where I wanted to go to college, I chose schools that had programs for animation. I had originally wanted to be a game designer because of Kingdom Hearts, but The Clone Wars made me realize that the passion I truly wanted to make a career out of was animation.

I continued to follow Rebels as I went off to college, and by the end of Season 3 – with Maul dead for good, Ahsoka MIA, and Rex and Hondo as the only major Clone Wars characters left on the show – I had gotten attached to the Rebels characters as well. I was just as invested in their fates as I was for those of Clone Wars characters like Rex and Hondo. Season 4 finished airing at the end of my junior year, and the knowledge in the final five episodes that Ahsoka had not only survived her confrontation with Anakin at the end of Season 2 but that she was still alive years after the events of the original trilogy had me crying tears of joy as I went to sleep.

The trailer announcing the return of The Clone Wars had me in tears for hours. Long had I been dreaming of the remaining stories of this show being released in some form. I would have been content with more novels and comics like Son of Dathomir and Dark Disciple, but to have the show return in animated form was a miracle I had given up hope for years ago.

But within the last twelve months, my interest in Star Wars cooled.

I was never the biggest fan of the movies. Revenge of the Sith was my favorite because in the absence of a proper conclusion it functioned as a de facto finale to The Clone Wars. I enjoyed the original trilogy, but they weren’t movies I considered my favorites. I saw The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in theaters and cried on my first viewing of both films, but on repeat viewings the magic of them faded and I lost interest. While I could understand why other fans liked them, there was a spark that was missing from most of the movies released under Disney that prevented them from really having any staying power for me.

And then The Rise of Skywalker came out and completely shattered any expectations I had that Disney really knew what they were doing with the franchise. Where before I was willing to trust that there actually was a plan because of how precisely Rey and Ben Solo’s arc followed the path of the Heroine’s Journey across The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, now I realize that what I initially believed to have been a carefully planned narrative arc was most likely JJ Abrams planning to set up a conventional Hero’s Journey which Rian Johnson used to try and tell a Heroine’s Journey instead. And even if there was a plan for Rey and Ben Solo that got screwed around by behind the scenes conflicts, there was clearly no plan as far as Poe and Finn and Rose were concerned.

For months after this, I started questioning and doubting my love of all the canon Star Wars media. How could I enjoy anything in the Original and Prequel trilogy eras knowing that all the hard work of dismantling Palpatine’s empire would be undone in order to rehash the same plotline with new characters and no concern given for whether the audience could follow what was happening or why these events and character decisions mattered if they hadn’t read every comic and novel and played every video game connected to this era.

Since the last trailer for the final season of The Clone Wars went up on YouTube, I vacillated between enthusiastically sticking to the shows I loved regardless of my problems with the film saga, and abandoning the franchise altogether and gifting my Clone Wars and Rebels Blu-Ray sets and associated novels to my college friend who had just gotten into Star Wars.

And then ‘The Phantom Apprentice’ Happened.

Ahsoka and Maul’s two-part duel in the throne room and the rafters of Sundari reminded me of everything I loved about The Clone Wars in the first place. The animation. The art style. The music. The attention to detail on every character and in every detail. The tragedy of what was to come. On my third re-watch of the third-to-last episode of Season 7, that was when I realized that despite my problems with the Sequel Trilogy, despite the many flaws in the writing of the Prequel movies, I could never give up on The Clone Wars, or on Rebels. These two shows have meant too much for me to ever walk away from either of them.

I have cried at least ten times in the last five days watching the final two episodes of The Clone Wars. The final of this incredible series was such a gut punch even though I knew what was coming and who would survive. I had and saw so many ideas about what the last episode would include. Would their be a montage of all the Jedi who survived Order 66 as a mirror of the death montage in Episode III? Would Ahsoka and Rex receive Obi-Wan’s recorded message from Rebels warning surviving Jedi to stay away from the temple?

But in the end, none of those things happened. The focus of the episode remained on Ahsoka and Rex. Their escape from the ship. The tragedy of their inability to save the other clones. And ending with a shot of Vader finding the ship some time later, all these symbols of the Republic buried beneath the winds of time as the empire rises. It was bleak and depressing and when the credits rolled I was holding back tears. But looking back on the entire series and the era of the war, knowing what was coming, there was no other way I could have expected it to end. The audience already knows that this is not the end, but Ahsoka and Rex don’t know that, and so the finale of The Clone Wars reflects this. The pain and despair. The tragedy and confusion over what will happen next. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Despite all the movies I’ve watched; the comics and novels I’ve read; the video games I’ve played; very few things in Star Wars canon or Legends have been able to match the magic of The Clone Wars in my heart. I have never truly been a Star Wars fan so much as I have been a Clone Wars and Rebels fan. The novels and comics and movies I enjoy are an extension of my love for the shows, but the shows will always come first. The characters these shows introduced have stuck with me more than any characters from the movies ever has. Clone Wars made me love Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padme and Yoda, but to me, my Star Wars favorites have always been Ahsoka, Maul, Rex, Ventress, Fives, Hera, Zeb, Thrawn, Sabine, and all the rest.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to Dave Filoni, Ashley Eckstein, Matt Lanter, Catherine Taber, James Arnold Taylor, Sam Whitwer, Nika Futterman, Dee Bradley Baker, as well as every single person involved in bringing this show to live for all the hard work and passion you have poured into this series. Your work on this show shaped the person I am today, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

May the Force Be With You.

#star wars the clone wars #clone wars season 7 #thank you dave filoni #the siege of mandalore #victory and death #farewell to the clone wars #tcw spoilers #clone wars spoilers

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sinnadone · 4 years

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JUST FINISHED FILMING MY FIRST SHORT FILM

YEEHAW

Two months of film school left, now we’re off to the post-production stage. It’s for sure a student film, e.i. it’s mostly learning opportunities rather than a polished passion project, but there are some real nice shots (as well as some real ugly ones XD). Not sure if I’ll be able to get it into any film festival, but tbh, the only thing about it that makes me kinda sad is pressure from the organizers of the academy

Main lessons in random order (most of them boil down to Plan Ahead): (this is mostly for future me, but also

You can only shoot 10 shots per day maximum (I had 70 shots in my first storyboard, to be filmed in 3 days. I managed to film 39 in 4)

Everyone needs a fanny pack

4 days of filming is too little for a 15 page script

8 hour work day is hell and should be abolished

If you’re behind the schedule, it’s equally as likely that the problem isn’t that you’re being too slow, but that the schedule was the one that’s been done poorly

SCHEDULE BREAKS BETWEEN SHOTS, OH GOD

In general, I only ever want to shoot one (1) scene per day. That way I could both actually live and pay attention to details

This one should have been fucking obvious, but meet with your actors before the shooting, and rehearse with them (I only ever did a table read with my two main actors and I’ve literally never met all my other actors IRL until they came onto the set. It sure made things... difficult...)

You don’t actually need to put makeup on actors if you’re not a coward. You do need some anti-shine powder though

Once you have a storyboard/rough idea of shots, get your actors/people of the approximate height of your actors, go to the location with the camera and lenses you will shoot with, and see if the stuff you pictured in your head is even possible.

Stand-ins should be a separate role on the set. Just get some people who are down to chill that are your actors’ height.

Go over every scene of the script with your actors (...it has accidentally happen so that on the third day of filming I found out that my main actress has never read two pages of the script (from the CLIMAX) due to a printing error. Both her and I were very... surprised at the revelation)

If you use your living space as a shooting space, you will not be able to actually live there!

It’s painful, but you gotta hold auditions...

There’s actually a lot of people totally down to play in student films, professional actors included! Just don’t try to tick people into working for free. I just wrote at the top of my Facebook casting calls “This is a student project and I cannot pay anyone, this is just for fun and learning!” and I got all my roles filled pretty easily. (There’s one guy in my film who has a long list of credits on IMDB, and it really does show in the three lines he had in my film XD) Some people come for the experience, some for the line in a resume, some just for fun and some just want to support the project

Working with a lot of extras isn’t that hard actually (well, a lot is subjective, but I had 8 theater kids as extras & they were amazing!)

You gotta print stuff. You gotta print the schedule and shit

Get someone to cook lunch for the crew, that helps so much and elevates morale. It’s also cheaper for everyone involved. Like, instead of a 5€ prepackaged meal per person that most will inevitably get because no one has the strength or time to cook during the off hours, the crew can chip in for a bucket of soup, for a fraction of the price.

If you shoot outside, passersby WILL look straight into the camera during a take

I’ll later make a list of stuff that you need to shoot a film, but really, a camera, a couple of lenses (we had a 25, a 50 and an 85, and we barely ever used the 85 (maybe like once or twice per film. I don’t think it’s actually ever been used on my film???)

I’ll also make a list of crew member that you need/don’t really need

Equipment seems scary (god, the fear I felt the first time I set eyes on our TRIPOD), but I promise, iPhone settings are harder to dig through than any of that shit

You can learn a lot just from looking up a film set memes page on Facebook and googling every unfamiliar word

I will not fucking even try to “break into the industry starting from the bottom”, I love myself & care about my health. That’s not much of a lesson, though it is something I learned (I’ll just make the two indie passion projects I have in mind & the world can take it or leave it)

Sources: I’m in a hands-on film academy & I worked on 8 films over the span of 2 months. The teachers kinda dunked us into the deep end of the pool with the actual filming, but while it for sure could’ve been better, it’s still a great jump-start! Filmmaking is ridiculously inaccessible for no real reason.

If anyone has questions, send them, I’ll do my best to answer! I’ll fucking organize one-on-one skype lessons (though maybe open & recorded streams are more beneficial for everyone) with you if you’re down. I’m just really passionate about spreading filmmaking knowledge.

Oh, and my film will be done by about December 25th, and I will post it here, though I do hate that it’ll tie my tumblr to my real identity XD

#Film school #Filmmaking #Filmmaking tips #Sinnatold #About The Short

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buginabog · 5 years

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Not-So Soulmates

Pairing: queerplatonic logince

Summary: Roman doesnt want a soulmate. So why does he have one? (Aro Roman)

Roman had always hated soulmates.

It's not that he hated the concept of them, he actually loved it! The thought of two, sometimes more, people who were destined to love each other? It was practically a fairytale!

He just hated how everyone had one. Even him.

He didnt want a soulmate. Didnt need one. True, when he was younger he saw all his friends get crushes and fall in love and talk excitedly about their soulmates. And he had too! ...If only to fit in.

He had never felt butterflies in his tummy, never had that feeling of wanting someone to notice him and look at him different.

It took him a good few years to learn that he wasnt strange or off. He was aromantic.

So that's why he always covered up the stretch of skin on his stomach that said, in beautiful cursive, "That looks exquisite."

So he covered it up. Didnt look at it. Pretended it didnt exist. Wanted it not to exist.

But everyone has a soulmate.

Senior year, high school:

Roman was doodling in math class. Well... "doodling" was an understatement.

He had taken out his sketchbook and was working on a concept he had thought up earlier.

...They were on a break it was fine.

He was drawing and was maybe trying to draw up the courage to talk to his current squish. Logan Berry. But he was sitting totally absorbed in a book and Roman didnt want to interrupt that.

Said squish stood up and started walking to the trashcan to throw away some gum wrapper. Said squish also passed behind Roman and took the moment to look at the drawing Roman was doing.

"That looks... exquisite! Your sense of imagery and colors is truly impressive."

Roman froze, Logan was his soulmate? Logan? Too shocked to think, he stammered out an answer, "oh, ah, thank you kind sir!"

Logan smiled and left, but not before taking another look at the page, and then asking, "would you like to be on the design team for the schools stage crew? You certainly have an eye for it. And we're running a little low on set designers. If you're not interested, however, its completely understandable."

Roman tilted his head, "you work in the theater?"

Logan smiled shyly, "stage manager."

Roman smiled, "sure! Where do I sign up huh?"

Logan looked slightly taken aback, "you dont... have to sign up?"

Roman's smile faded, "uh, joke."

"Ah"

"Yeah"

Logan walked off, smiling, "we meet right after school and end at 5:00 if you're interested."

Roman sighed and pushed his drawing away, thinking, I am in deep shit.

Months later, and he was staring awkwardly at Logan as... well he wasn't sure what was happening. Only that Logan was being weird and fumbling with his words and was he nervous?

"-and, and I know I'm your soulmate!"

Oh. Oh shit.

Logan smiled awkwardly at him, "so... would you... go on a date with me?"

Roman stared. Oh no. Oh shit. Oh fuck. This cant be happening! He doesnt want to hurt Logan but... he cant lead him on! Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuuuuuuck.

"I- I'm aro." He winced, "Im... sorry, Logan."

Logans eyes widened, "ooh."

Roman smiled sadly and rested a hand on his shoulder, "I'm sorry." And he walked away.

"For what?"

Roman stopped and turned, "huh?"

Logan turned around to face him, "you said you are sorry... for what?"

Roman nervously rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture he picked up from one of his friends, "well, for not liking you back."

"That's preposterous. You cannot help being aro any more than I can help being trans and gay." Logan smiled, "I am not going to be angry with you for simply being who you are."

Roman ran to Logan, "Logaaaan!" He hugged him, "who knew ya had feelings huh?"

Logan fake frowned and pushed him away, "I have feelings!"

Roman grinned at his friend, "well... thanks Microsoft Nerd."

Logan sighed, "Roman why on earth do you give me nicknames?"

Roman stuck out his tounge, "cause I love you."

Logan leaned on his head like an armrest, "nice to know shorty."

"I AM NOT THAT SHORT!!!!"

"Yyyyes you are."

"LOGAN!"

#aromantic #ts roman #roman #roman sanders #sanders sides roman #logan sanders #logan #ts logan #sanders sides logan #fic #sanders sides fics #my wriitng #my writing #fanfiction #fanfic #my fics #sanders sides #sanders sides fanfic #soulmate au

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a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives · 5 years

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HIT THE HIGH SEAS IN THIS INTERVIEW WITH BLACK SAILS STAR LUKE ARNOLD

I had the pleasure to sit down with Luke Arnold who stars as Silver on the Starz drama Black Sails. I wanted to find out his approach to this season considering that it will be the shows swan song as well his character’s evolution and a whole lot more.

Hank (GWW): Can you talk about the tremendous evolution of your character Silver which seems to be the tale of one man living two lives. The way Silver started off the series seems like a lifetime ago compared to where he finds himself as this season starts.

Luke Arnold: It has been a real pleasure, its not often that you’re given a character that goes on such a journey. I’m really pleased with the way that we have been able to tell his story.

Hank (GWW): The public found out a few months back that this would be the Final season, how did that go for you guys? Was it something that you guys had mapped out for a while or is it something that became apparent to you recently or was it just kind of a last minute notification. (Laughs}

Luke Arnold: The writers always had kind of end point in mind and once we got into making season 4 i think everyone kind of felt like this could be it. I feel like what we are doing is ending the show when the story ends instead of any kind of outside influence. In season 4 the further we go into the story there is this kind of feeling that the end is kind of creeping into all of the characters lives. At the start of season 4, there is a lot of talk about the last battle and moving on and what this is going to mean. I think the story that we started telling 4 years ago, it kind of has a natural ending.

Hank (GWW): Does having the knowledge that this is the final season affect your approach or your portrayal of the character?

Luke Arnold: We have always worked very hard on the show with rehearsals, be it on the sets or afterwards around at each others place on weekends so that it's kind of like a piece of theater to make sure we are really game ready for every scene. Even more so than usual knowing that we really had to stick the landing everyone pushed their work ethic to the limit to make sure that this season fulfills the promise of the last three seasons.

Hank (GWW): I think that one of the big story-lines from day one has been your relationship with Toby Stephens (Captain Flint) and the evolution of that relationship from the slickster of the crew that was kind of a thorn in his side to a peer that he relied on to this season where it seems in some ways you become his superior. Can you talk about how that relationship has grown and taken different forms through the years leading to season 4.

Luke Arnold: That’s something that Jon Steinberg always said, that the central relationship to the show was Flint and Silver even though we barely talked to each other during the first season. I’m a thorn in his side, then i’m kind of his right hand man, then I’m the quartermaster that’s kind of part friend and antagonist to each other. At this part in season 4, it's a whole new part of their relationship, they are closer to each other than anyone had been during the course of the show. When we start season 4 they are very much allied for the same cause, that relationship and the turn it takes is the real central thread of season 4. It takes many twists and turns within these last 10 episodes.

Hank (GWW): How do you feel with the evolution of your character who is now a leader of men, he's out front and he's putting it all on the line. There has been some tremendous character growth with Silver as he's been shaped by some extraordinary events and times.

Luke Arnold: It's really on looking back that you realize, “wow he was a different person not that long ago”. He went through that time when he was kind of a coward ordering people from the back line and this season he really is on the front line and he's the first man going into battle a lot of times. He’s leading his men from amongst them and that’s very different than the man we first saw. I think that’s what happens when you kind of go through these traumatic events and different kind of pressures are put upon you. He’s been through a lot between losing his leg, becoming the leader of a revolution. In season 4 from the word go he's put through even heavier things than what he’s been through in the previous 3 seasons before. So I feel like I’ve played three different characters already and played almost three new versions of Silver in season 4.

Hank (GWW): The biggest obvious change that Silver has undergone during the previous 3 seasons was when he lost his leg. The only replacement available was a barbaric peg which at the time was cutting edge medicine, for most men such an injury would be debilitating but for Silver it lit a fire within. The injury and subsequent peg served as a catalyst for Silver, can you talk about that and the challenges of working with the peg yourself.

Luke Arnold: It was brutal but at least I got to have my leg back at the end of the day. I’ve kind of been sharing the role with a guy named Ben de Jager who has lost a part of his left leg. He steps in for a lot of the shots from behind and some wider shots where you need to see Silver missing the leg, Ben would come in and do a lot of that stuff. It was amazing talking to him and some other people, other amputees and other people that had gone through similar stuff. They talk about there is a change in them and they talk about what its made them realize they can do and find this strength from within that they never knew was there. I think with Silver he was so adaptable and so kind of not really ever connected to anyone or any particular thing. What he gained was the respect of the men which was something he never had before and really wasn’t out to get. He also had a mindset that the last thing he wanted was for this to define him and to be seen as less of a man than he was seen before.

Hank (GWW): The question out there is that after this season concludes and Black Sails ends the next natural step would be something with Treasure Island. Is there any chance that something like that could happen or is that even something that you would be interested in?

Luke Arnold: I think we’ve had such a good time and I'm so proud of the show that the idea is appealing in a lot of ways. There’s also something at this point I think that everyone is very satisfied with what we were able to accomplish and how we feel about this final season. It could maybe happen and it could be interesting down the track. I think at the moment we are all very happy to walk away from what was one of the toughest shoots I could imagine being a part of. To know that no one ever let up caring about every piece of the story and being able to walk away and look at every piece of it and being happy with the result. We all had so much fun, maybe in like 5, 10, 15 years and if the audience continues to grow we might come back and do something when the time's right but at the moment I think that we are going to let this land and I’m going to enjoy having both of my legs back.

- credits to GeekWorldWide

#luke arnold #interview #black sails

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rosalyn51 · 5 years

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‘Chasing Liberty’ 15th Anniversary: 19 Revelations From Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode’s DVD Commentary by Rachael Ellenbogen Jan 9, 2019

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Near the end of her reign as a teen romance movie queen, Mandy Moore starred in 2004’s “Chasing Liberty.” [and the breakout star, Matthew Goode] Today, the iconic Andy Cadiff-directed film celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Not to be confused with Katie Holmes’ “First Daughter,” which came out later the same year and had a very similar storyline, “Chasing Liberty” followed Moore as Anna Foster, President James Foster’s (Mark Harmon) 18-year-old daughter, as she tried to gain a sense of freedom from constant security supervision by running away while in Europe.

She wasn’t alone, though. She found a random, good-looking guy named Ben (Matthew Goode) — who happened to be undercover as a security agent — to help her on her adventure, of course. And, just like in Moore’s “How to Deal” and “A Walk to Remember” before it, this acquaintance-level relationship soon turned into so much more. We’re talking an epic romance, people.

Mandy Moore and Matthew Goode’s “Chasing Liberty” turned 15 years old on Wednesday. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Well, instead of us talking about it, let’s let the stars themselves share with you what they loved about the movie and its cast, as well as some behind-the-scenes secrets.

The movie released in theaters on Jan. 9, 2004, and on DVD a few months later, which means now — 15 years later — is the perfect time to go back and remind ourselves of Moore and Goode’s revealing DVD commentary. Here are the 19 best tidbits from the DVD special feature:

1. The stars were just as in love with Harmon as everyone else.

Moore: Mark Harmon, possibly...

Goode: The most devilishly handsome 50-year-old there is in the country?

Moore: Well, just possibly one of the greatest people ever.

Moore: I wish I had more stuff to do with Mark in this film.

Goode: Me too because there was some scenes for us to do, originally.

Moore: He’s definitely part of the TFC — Tremendous Fellas Club.

Goode: Oh yeah, he’s the manager.

Moore: He’s the president.

Moore: I would vote for Mark Harmon for president.

Goode: I’d vote for Mark Harmon.

Moore: He has my vote. Forget Oprah, I think Mark should run.

Goode: I think Tom Hanks.

[long post]

2. They also mentioned how great they thought Jeremy Piven was.

Goode: What are you saying about Jeremy [Piven]?

Moore: He’s a wonderful, wonderful guy. Very talented actor. And a charming man, as well. Very charming.

Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra played professional (and, eventually, romantic) partners in “Chasing Liberty.” Photo: Daughter Productions LLC

3. When Moore’s character was on a dinner date and a fan asked to take a photo with her (without her date in it), she felt like it was real life.

Moore: Not to be weird, but this sort of felt like life mirroring work a little bit…Yeah, one of the only parts of the film where I kind of felt like, ‘Ooh, wow. This is a tinge of reality in a sense.’

4. The “This Is Us” actress thought Anna should’ve ended up with Stark Sands’ Grant.

Moore: See, I think Anna should’ve stayed with him for the film. Maybe that would’ve been…

Goode: With this character?

Moore: With this character, yeah. With Grant.

Goode: Would’ve been an interesting film. Maybe they could’ve gone to art school together.

5. The co-stars had cute nicknames for each other.

Moore: You are so random, Goodey, I love it.

Goode: God bless you, Mooreski.

6. Gabrielle’s (Beatrice Rosen) tongue piercing wasn’t real, and it didn’t stay very well.

Moore: That was one of those silver balls that you can use, like, in cooking, and they actually tried to somehow glue it on her tongue. It kept falling off, so I think that was the only usable take. ‘Cause it just kept falling out of her mouth every time she opened it to stick her tongue out.

7. The Roots performing in “Chasing Liberty” was a big deal for everyone involved.

Moore: This is one of the best scenes in the movie. And I think the crowd was all fired up, too, because The Roots were actually on a European tour at that point but they weren’t actually stopping in Prague, so the crowd was really fired up to have them there. Even though they kept just playing the same song.

Moore: I had a crush on Martin Luther [McCoy] from The Roots.

8. Moore used a butt double for when she skinny-dipped in the river, and she picked the double out herself.

Goode: This was butt double night.

Moore: When every male crew member showed up about two hours earlier than they were called to be on set…I picked my own butt double. I think everyone at this point knows that.

Goode: She had 10 polaroids.

Moore: No, I think I had less than that, by the way. I had like six, seven, maybe…To be quite honest, I’m a modest girl. I didn’t want to show the bum, but that river was so disgusting and so unhygienic, I was afraid something was gonna swim into my body that wasn’t meant to be there.

9. The “Walk Me Home” singer had a bit of a wardrobe malfunction when her character climbed a roof to watch a movie with Ben.

Goode: You actually ripped your trousers in this, darling.

Moore: I ripped my trousers.

Goode: Where did you rip them? On your knee or the bottom, I can’t remember?

Moore: Actually, yeah, right below my bottom. Just on the back of my thigh. Ripped my jeans.

10. Moore wasn’t about to kiss Goode if he had smoker’s breath.

Moore: Goodey’s actually a smoker, and a tremendous fellow, by the way, but a smoker nonetheless, and I’m not a big fan of smoking at all, so I made sure that there were Altoids, any sort of breath fresheners, available at any point on set.

11. The scene where Anna pretends to get a tattoo actually had a big effect on the actress.

Moore: This solidified the fact that I wanted to get a real tattoo. Not on my arm, [though].

12. Moore’s toe, which she’d named, was injured when she had to run away from the waiters after not being able to pay.

Moore: Oh, this was actually, I had dropped a suitcase on my toe.

Goode: Yup, on Bonnie.

Moore: On Bonnie. I affectionately called my big toe Bonnie. My toenail was — my toe rather, was swollen and infected, but yet I still had to squeeze myself into those cute, little Prada flats.

13. The actors took their first-ever gondola rides for this film…unfortunately.

More: This is one of my favorite scenes. Very romantic. I was a little bummed out, my first gondola ride, no offense, but…

Goode: Had to be with me.

Moore: Not that it was a bad thing, but you kind of want to take your first gondola ride in Venice on a beautiful evening, [with] someone you truly love.

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14. The “Crush” singer didn’t care what anyone thought of this DVD commentary.

Moore: I think our commentary’s gonna get bashed, Matthew. They’re gonna say that we were really boring to listen to. So, you know what, for all those reviewing the commentary right now, we don’t care. It can’t be any worse than, you know, some of the film reviews that I got. Apparently, I’m a very bad lip actor. I was told that I lip act a lot. In this scene [of me in the room in a towel with my ‘husband’ Ben] actually. So, thanks to that reviewer.

15. They thought a still from the scene of her sleeping in the bed and him on the floor, both with their eyes open, would’ve been a good promo picture.

Moore: This should’ve been the movie poster.

Goode: Yeah, it would’ve been great.

Moore: I mean, it would’ve got the girls in with you with the shirt off.

16. The extras in the crowded Venice square scene with Piven and Annabella Sciorra’s characters couldn’t help looking at the camera…and now you won’t be able stop looking at them when you do a rewatch.

Goode: Oh, this was great because I don’t think you could have more people looking directly into the camera. It’s just a nightmare with all these tourists, saying, ‘Please, please do not look at the camera. You’re screwing with our film.’ And, as you can see, if you look at the background, everyone is looking.

17. It wasn’t actually marshmallow on that s’more Anna wiped on Ben’s cheek.

Moore: This was actually shaving cream.

18. They used real photos of Moore in Anna’s White House room and in her dad’s office.

Moore: Those are actually pictures of me when I was younger in the background. They kind of made it into the whole little Andy Warhol-esque situation.

Moore: That was my high school freshman yearbook picture. Right behind my right elbow there…Ugh, terrible. Such a geek. Still am, but, you know.

19. The teen rom-com movie queen’s just as big of a fan of the genre as everyone (re)watching the movie.

Moore: The last scene of a movie is my favorite. I’m such a romantic, girly girl, and this melted my heart.

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Rosalyn51 note: It has been 15 GOODE years! Both Mandy and Matthew have won accolades and nominatiions for their amazing performance in This is Us, and The Crown season 2 respectively. Matthew Goode filmed ‘Medieval’ in Prague last December. Hats off to fans who’ve followed him since ‘Chasing Liberty’!!!

#matthew goode #matthewgoode #matthew clairmont #mandy moore #chasing liberty

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justforbooks · 5 years

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Herman Wouk, Pulitzer Prize-winning master of sweeping historical fiction, dies at 103

Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Navy drama “The Caine Mutiny,” whose sweeping novels about World War II, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel made him one of the most popular writers of his generation and helped revitalize the genre of historical fiction, died May 17 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 103.

His literary agent, Amy Rennert, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Mr. Wouk (his last name is pronounced “Woke”) penned a dozen novels, a handful of plays and several nonfiction books over the course of his nearly 60-year career. A meticulous researcher, he specialized in stories of personal conflict set against the backdrop of compelling historical events, including “The Caine Mutiny” (1951), “The Winds of War” (1971) and “War and Remembrance” (1978). The latter two became ABC miniseries in the 1980s starring Robert Mitchum that averaged tens of millions of viewers over the course of their broadcast and were the highest-rated miniseries after Alex Haley’s “Roots.”

In a form that the author would echo in other novels, “The Winds of War” and its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” trace World War II through the experiences of one family. “The Winds of War” follows Navy officer Victor “Pug” Henry and his relatives from the German invasion of Poland to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, where its sequel begins and then proceeds to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

The pair of books established Mr. Wouk’s legacy as a master of historical fiction, in which he blended the narrative power of fiction with great understanding and empathy for the human motivations behind wars and other historical events. The Economist magazine said “The Winds of War” was “as serious a contribution to the literature of our time as ‘War and Peace’ was to that of the nineteenth century.”

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said Mr. Wouk helped enliven history in ways that many academic tomes never could and prompted readers to examine the past through engaging fictional characters. “I think he’s been a seminal figure because he’s recrafted the historical novel for a modern audience and not for some niche market,” Billington, who died last year, told The Washington Post in an interview for this obituary.

Mr. Wouk, who said he was never a “high stylist,” attracted a mass audience with books that espoused such values as gallantry and leadership under pressure. Leading critics sniffed at his books, which they often said broke no ground in writing style or character development.

The literary essayist Leslie Fiedler once explained Mr. Wouk’s critical reputation by comparing him with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. “Bellow, like most writers critics take seriously, attacked the basic values of middle-class Americans: easy piety, marriage, life in the suburbs,” Fiedler said. “Wouk challenges nothing.”

Mr. Wouk said he found nonconformity for its own sake an all-too predictable theme in modern literature and had no interest in experimental or temporarily trendy prose styles. “I write a traditional novel, which is rather unfashionable, and I’ve taken a lot of kicking for it,” he once told The Post. “But the strength of my work comes from this intense grounding in the 18th- and 19th-century novelists.”

His very significance, wrote Time magazine in a 1955 cover story, was that “he spearheads a mutiny against the literary stereotypes of rebellion — against three decades of U.S. fiction dominated by skeptical criticism, sexual emancipation, social protest and psychoanalytic sermonizing.”

Mr. Wouk began his professional career as a gag writer in the 1930s before moving to the staff of the popular radio comedian Fred Allen. He got that job in part for his notoriety at Columbia University, where his Class of 1934 yearbook named him the wittiest student. He later joked, “It was not a very sparkling class.”

Enlisting in the Navy during World War II proved a transformative experience in his development as a writer.

“My life was broken at the time, as it was for all of our generation, by the coming of the war, and the winds of war swept a Bronx boy halfway around the world, below the equator, and he landed on an old destroyer minesweeper called the USS Zane,” Mr. Wouk told a National Press Club audience. “And that, I think, is where my adult education really began, because there, the hard shell of a New York wise guy cracked and fell off. The shallow conceit of a successful gag man faded away. . . . When I came back, there no longer was a question of a gag writing. I wanted to write novels.”

“The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II” in 1951 brought Mr. Wouk his first critical and popular success, including the Pulitzer. The book centers on a power struggle aboard the destroyer-minesweeper Caine, culminating in a young lieutenant seizing control of the vessel from the paranoid Capt. Queeg after the crew thinks it faces imminent danger.

The action culminates in a court-martial for the lieutenant. Although the novel raised questions of authority and duty versus personal freedom, the naval community embraced it. Queeg also became one of the most memorable characters of the day, a man who relieved his stress by obsessively rolling steel bearings in the palm of his hand.

Time magazine called “The Caine Mutiny,” which sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and was translated into 17 languages, the “biggest U.S. bestseller since ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” A 1954 film adaptation of the novel, starring Humphrey Bogart as Queeg, became a popular hit, earning Bogart an Academy Award nomination.

The stage version of the courtroom scenes from “The Caine Mutiny,” called “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” proved a Broadway success in the 1950s with Henry Fonda and Lloyd Nolan and remained a staple of community theaters, with productions as far away as China.

Mr. Wouk became further embedded in the cultural firmament with film adaptations of his other books, including “Marjorie Morningstar,” with Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood.

“Marjorie Morningstar,” published in 1955, underscored another major aspect of Mr. Wouk’s life: books whose themes were central to his Orthodox Jewish faith. “Marjorie Morningstar,” about a young Jewish woman who dreams of being an actress and eventually settles into a life as a suburban housewife, explores how Jews struggled to reconcile their faith with American society. It earned the public’s affection, if not the critics’, and it was credited with helping broaden interest in Jewish American novels later that decade by Philip Roth and others.

Herman Wouk was born May 27, 1915, in the Bronx, which he once called “that romantic, and much overcriticized borough” of New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and his father worked his way into the presidency of a laundry-chain business.

As a child, he told Time, he was the neighborhood fat boy forever being “clobbered” by street toughs. He found comfort in books that his mother bought from a traveling salesman when he was 12. In particular, he grew to love the writing of Mark Twain for his ability to make people laugh, even at matters of faith.

The arrival from Russia of his maternal grandfather, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, would have a decisive influence on Mr. Wouk’s beliefs and many of his later works of fiction and nonfiction.

Mr. Wouk decided at a young age that he wanted to be a writer. He wrote for the college humor magazine and several student musical comedy revues, one of which prompted a student critic to quip, “All Wouk and no play.”

He graduated in 1934 with majors in philosophy and comparative literature and took a $15-a-week job working for a man he called the “czar of gag writers,” who modernized and cleaned up old jokes and sold them to entertainers such as Eddie Cantor. Within a few years, he joined Fred Allen’s comedy-writing team.

Mr. Wouk returned to comedy later in his career, collaborating with singer Jimmy Buffett on a musical based on Mr. Wouk’s 1965 novel “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” about a harried New York publicist who flees to the fictitious Caribbean island of Amerigo to run a resort hotel. The show became a crowd favorite when it opened in 1997 in Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse.

As war broke out in Europe, Mr. Wouk in 1941 worked on radio shows promoting purchases of war bonds before enlisting in the Navy. The experience, eventually as executive officer of the destroyer-minesweeper Southard, helped inspire “The Caine Mutiny.”

Mr. Wouk’s first novel, “Aurora Dawn,” was published in 1947. It started as a play he was writing while at sea during the war but evolved into a full-blown story about the life and romances of a radio advertising worker. Though the reviews were mixed, it was selected by the Book of the Month Club.

His next novel, “City Boy” (1948), was about a Jewish youth from the Bronx whom Mr. Wouk based in part on himself. Then, in 1949 came the screenplay for the film “Slattery’s Hurricane,” starring Richard Widmark as a man seeking to redeem himself by flying a reconnaissance mission in a hurricane. The book of the same title was published in 1956.

“The Caine Mutiny” proved the sensation that fully established Mr. Wouk's career. His later novels included “Youngblood Hawke” (1962), about an American writer who becomes a victim of his own success, and “The Hope” (1993) and “The Glory” (1994), which documented the struggle for Israeli statehood from the perspective of several fictional families. In 2012, Mr. Wouk published his last novel, “The Lawgiver,” which revolves around the making of a screenplay about Moses and includes Mr. Wouk himself as a character. In 2016, he published a memoir, “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author,” and up until a month ago, he was working on another book.

The Library of Congress held events in honor of Mr. Wouk on multiple occasions, including naming him, in 2008, the recipient of its first lifetime achievement award for fiction writing. But he acknowledged that he wasn’t much for being in the public spotlight or at large soirees, instead preferring to throw small dinners with his wife of more than 60 years, the former Betty Brown, who went by her Hebrew name, Sarah. Mrs. Wouk died in 2011, at 90.

Their son Abraham drowned as a child in 1951. Survivors include two children, Iolanthe Woulff and Joseph Wouk; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wouk once joked in a speech that historical fiction is “at best a bastard form and highly suspect.” While his dedication to the genre earned him the respect of such scholars as historian David McCullough and Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert, Mr. Wouk said he recognized that his most important job was as a storyteller.

“A historical novel, to have any chance of lasting, must meet the highest standards of academic history,” he told an audience in Melbourne, Australia, “and then the novelist has to discard 90 percent of the history in order to tell the story.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #IN MEMORIAM #HERMAN WOUK

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jessalynlearns · 5 years

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Timeline Reference - Incredibles 2 (2018)

I really enjoyed making a timeline for the first Incredibles movie, and even though there were some discrepancies (let's just all agree to ignore adult Stratogale, who should have been about 5 years old in 1947, being at Bob and Helen's wedding), it was still a pretty cohesive timeline.

Incredibles 2 ... not so much. Despite the fact that it takes place over a much shorter period of time than the first movie, the timeline is so muddled that it's very difficult to track the passage of time, and it's absolutely impossible without making some choices to rectify the discrepancies that are inherent in the story (when Brad Bird says he really doesn't care about timelines/geography, he means it!)

But ... here's my best shot!

As I established in my timeline for The Incredibles, the main story takes place over six month period in 1962 (Wednesday, May 16 through mid-autumn). The only canonical date that we know of in I2 is Friday, October 25, which is the day after Helen saves Ambassador Selick from the Screenslaver, which actually corroborates my findings pretty closely.

Simple right? Actually, no. October 25 was a Thursday in 1962, but a Friday in 1963. It's likely that 1963 was the year that the crew was using for this movie, since Dementia 13 (which is spoofed as DementiA 113 at the end of the movie) came out in 1963. However, as the days of the week are so insanely inconsistent in this movie, I’m going to ignore the Friday part and still assume that we’re in 1962.

Day 1 -- Underminer Attack: Three months after the Omnidroid Battle, Dash takes second place at his track meet, the Parrs and Frozone battle but fail to capture the Underminer, the Parrs are taken in for questioning by the police, and Elastigirl receives and accepts the job offer from the Deavors.

[Note: you could make the case that Incredibles 2 ignores the three-month time jump established at the end of the first movie. There's nothing explicit that shows this, but it does seem strange that the Parrs are still living in the motel, Bob is unemployed and hasn't even looked for work, and he even mentions that his business suits were "burned up when the jet destroyed our house," which is a silly thing to say if he's had three months to buy new suits. However, given the date established by Helen's newspaper, I'll continue to operate under the assumption that it has been three months since the Omnidroid attack.]

Day 2 -- The Parrs move into Winston's house outside Municiberg, and Helen leaves the same day, taking the Elasticycle to the airport and traveling to New Urbem, arriving just as the sun begins setting.

[Note: I initially thought that Helen left the next morning before Violet and Dash got up for school (which is kind of implied by Dash and Bob's lines, "Where's Mom?" "She's up and out...") but when Helen is putting on the Galbacki suit, Bob and Jack-Jack are in the same clothes as when they arrived at the house, and the gift basket from the Deavors is still sitting on the bed, which is meticulously made, and it seems unlikely that that would be the case if Bob and Helen had slept in it the night before. It's more likely that Helen simply left sometime in the mid-afternoon the same day that they arrived.]

Day 3 -- This is the first full day that Bob cares for the kids on his own. The kids eat breakfast and go to school, and then the narrative jumps to the evening. Helen saves the MetroLev train from derailing, first learns of the Screenslaver, and Tony fails to show up for his date with Violet, presumably having had his mind wiped by Dicker the day before. Bob struggles to help Dash with his math homework and later learns of Jack-Jack's multitude of powers after his fight with the racoon.

[Note: it is established in both movies that Tony and Violet's date is on a Friday. However, if that's the case, then the next day should be a Saturday, yet the kids go to school the very next day. And there is definitely no weekend time jump between Violet's date and when she confronts Tony at his locker, because Bob stays up all night to figure out Dash's math homework, and when he wakes him up extra early the next morning, Bob's line is, "I think I understand your math assignment. We still have some time to finish it before your test."]

Day 4 -- Violet confronts Tony and thinks that he's pretending now to know her. Helen meets Ambassador Selick and goes on TV to talk about saving the MetroLev, but the Screenslaver strikes for the second time, hijacking the Ambassador's aerocade.

Day 5 -- Friday, October 25 -- The morning after Elastigirl saves the Ambassador, Violet discovers that Dicker erased Tony's memories of her. Having flown back to Municiberg, Helen sees the little girl holding the Screenslaver sign, Helen goes to DevTech and meets the Wannabee Supers. They have a little celebratory gathering, but by the time they've finished their cake and gotten mildly tipsy, it's getting dark outside and Winston says that he's going to bed. Helen proposes a way to catch the Screenslaver, and says that she needs to fly back to New Urbem ("How soon can you ... meet me at the airport? Gotta get out of town, pronto.")

[Note: there are several discrepancies inherent in this. Tony and Violet's Friday night date was only two days before, but the newspaper says that it's Friday again. In addition, Helen was clearly in New Urbem when she saved the Ambassador, but the next day, she travels to in the limo to DevTech which is headquartered in Municiberg. We also see the Everjust outside the building, so we know that this is Municiberg, and not a DevTech located in New Urbem. I'd be tempted to assume a time jump between Days 4 and 5, but the newspaper Helen reads clearly states that the save of the Ambassador happened the night before. To me, it seems to be morning when Helen’s in the limo, but I suppose you could say that it’s early afternoon, and see traveled back that morning.]

Day 6 -- Bob calls Dicker and learns more about Tony. That evening, he takes the kids to the Happy Platter, where Bob tries to mend Violet and Tony's relationship, with disastrous results. That night, back in New Urbem, Helen has a remote interview with Chad on the news, but Screenslaver strikes for the third time. Helen tracks him to the Screenslaver lair, and captures the perpetrator in spite of the fact that the lair is destroyed.

Day 7 -- In the evening, Dash comes to an exhausted Bob for more help with his "fractions and denecimals" homework, and Bob learns that the Incredibile still exists. Dash and Violet discover Jack-Jack's powers, Lucius comes over and encourages Bob to get some outside help. Bob brings Jack-Jack to Edna's house, and apologizes to Violet for the Tony situation. That same night, once again back in Municiberg, Winston hosts a party at DevTech, where he announces that Supers will be made legal again. Helen discovers the true identity of the Screenslaver, and Evelyn hypnotizes her.

[Note: Violet says that Bob slept for "seventeen hours" but if that's the case, that would mean that Bob wakes up in the early afternoon, and yet everything in that scene points to it being an early weekend morning: Dash is watching cartoons in his jammies. He has mussy hair and is eating cereal, and the entire scene is cast with a gentle, diffused light reminiscent of a rising sun (you can actually see the sun rising behind Bob’s head when he says that he feels “Super.”). The scene outside Edna's house also looks like it's the morning when Bob picks him up, and Edna doesn't make any comment about Bob leaving Jack-Jack with her all night and all day long, so the best option, in my opinion, is to assume that Violet is exaggerating and that Bob only slept a more regular amount of time.]

Day 8 -- Bob wakes up the next morning and picks Jack-Jack up from Edna's house with his new suit and tracker. In the evening, Helen wakes up in the ice chamber, and Evelyn (unironically) monologues at her before hypnotizing her again.* Evelyn calls Bob, he drives to the ship at DevTech and is hypnotized by Helen.** Evelyn sends the Wannabees to capture the Parr children at Winston's house, but they escape in the newly-summoned Incredibile and only Lucius is captured. The kids decide to go after the ship themselves and arrive at dawn of Day 9***.

[*Note: Evelyn has Helen hypnotized for nearly 24 hours before she monologues at her, which I feel is a pretty significant jump, because I can’t imagine that she was in the ice chamber for 24 hours.

**Note: Bob tells Evelyn that it will take him 15 minutes to get from Winston's house to the ship at DevTech. When the kids escape in the Incredibile, it's not that late at night, and it doesn't seem to take them long to get to the ship, but by the time they get onboard, the sun is clearly rising.

***Note: As the signing ceremony doesn't happen until later in the day on Day 9, we'll just assume that the kids sleep through the morning and afternoon before taking action, considering none of them slept at all the previous night]

Day 9 -- The Signing Ceremony and Final Battle: Before the signing, Violet and Dash have to chase Jack-Jack around a bit. The signing occurs, legalizing Supers again, and then Evelyn strikes again, hypnotizing the ambassadors and Superheroes and sabotaging the Everjust to run into downtown Municiberg at top-speed. The kids help to save their parents, Lucius, and the Wannabees from Evelyn's control, and Evelyn attempts to escape the ship. Helen pursues her as Bob and Lucius divert the ship away from the city. By the time the final battle is over and Evelyn is arrested, it's dark outside once again.

Day 10-ish and after -- The judge of Municiberg declares Superheroes legal again. Violet talks to Tony at school, and she and Tony (and the rest of the family) go to the movie theater, but are diverted by a police/criminal shootout.

So at least we can establish that the movie takes place over the course of about 10 days, and those days seem to happen consecutively, without any time jumps in between. This is an insanely quick amount of time to enact a piece of world-wide legislation, but ... whatever! That’s probably the least annoying thing about this timeline as a whole!

#Incredibles 2 #Nitpicking the Timeline #Incredibles Reference Materials #I have way too much time on my hands #Mr. Incredible #Elastigirl #Bob Parr #Helen Parr #Violet Parr #Dash Parr #Jack-Jack Parr #Frozone #Lucius Best #Edna Mode #Evelyn Deavor #Screenslaver #Winston Deavor

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gloriousgwendolinechristie · 5 years

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Press: The end of Game of Thrones: An exclusive report on the epic final season

EW – OCTOBER 2017: THE TABLE READ

When Kit Harington entered the conference room, he had no idea what to expect.

The final season’s scripts had been emailed just a couple of days earlier, sending the Game of Thrones cast into a reading frenzy. Like millions of fans around the world, the actors had been waiting nearly a decade to learn their characters’ fates. The entire six-episode season arrived at once, protected by layers of password security.

Sophie Turner flew through her copies in record time, quickly messaging the producers her reaction. “It was completely overwhelming,” says the actress, who plays Sansa Stark. “Afterwards I felt numb, and I had to take a walk for hours.” Others, like Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), first had to hurry home to get some privacy. “I turned to my best mate and was like, ‘Oh my God! I gotta go! I gotta go!’” she recalls. “And I completely flipped out.” She then settled in for a reading session with a cup of tea. “Genuinely the effect it had on me was profound,” Clarke adds. “That sounds insanely pretentious, but I’m an actor, so I’m allowed one pretentious adjective per season.” Peter Dinklage, meanwhile, broke his years-long habit of checking immediately to see if Tyrion Lannister survives. “This was the first time ever that I didn’t skip to the end,” he says.

Even showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss were uncharacteristically anxious, wondering how the actors would react to the climactic twists. “We knew exactly when our script coordinator sent them out, we knew what minute they sent them, and then you’re just waiting for the emails,” Benioff said.

The cast then journeyed to Belfast to gather in a production office for the formal read-through. By then, everybody knew the tale that was about to unfold, with two notable exceptions: Davos Seaworth actor Liam Cunningham (“The f—ing scripts wouldn’t open, the double extra security!” he grouses) and Harington, who outright refused to read anything in advance.

“I walked in saying, ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’” Harington says. “What’s the point of reading it to myself in my own head when I can listen to people do it and find out with my friends?” So, yes: Jon Snow, quite literally, knew nothing.

Benioff and Weiss opened the proceedings by asking the cast to refrain from doing anything during filming or afterward that might reveal even the tiniest spoiler (“Don’t even take a photo of your boots on the ground of the set,” one actor recalls being told). And then, seated around a long table scattered with a few prop skulls, the cast read aloud the final season of Game of Thrones.

At one point, Harington wept.

Later, he cried a second time.

SEPTEMBER 2012: IT’S IMPOSSIBLE

After the table read, the Game of Thrones cast spent 10 months filming just six episodes of television. But the season actually took far longer to pull off. GoT’s final chapters have been in the works for years. To better understand what’s ahead, let’s first go back to EW’s season 3 set visit and this never-before-revealed conversation with Benioff and Weiss…

The production camper was like many others on the set — barren, cramped, cold, utilitarian, with dirt on the floors from muddy boots tramping in and out all day. The showrunners sat on the same side of a tiny dinette booth while the wind coming off the Northern Ireland bay howled outside. They were already thinking about their final season, and it worried them.

During its second season, the fantasy drama averaged 10.3 million viewers across all platforms. That was enough to ensure they were eventually going to finish the series, yet that inevitability was also the problem. Because when they first pitched Thrones to HBO, they hadn’t exactly been honest. And now they were working every day toward a finale that was impossible to make.

“The lie we told is the show is contained and it’s about the characters,” Benioff said, which was at best half true. The epic fantasy was very much about its ensemble cast, but it’s also the least “contained” series ever made. “The worlds get so big, the battles get so massive.”

Author George R.R. Martin, whose series of novels forms the basis for Thrones, had revealed to the duo the broad strokes of how his Song of Ice and Fire saga secretly ends, including a description of an epic final battle that’s been teased from the show’s very first scene. But this climactic confrontation was miles out of reach for a series that cost about $5 million per episode. “We have a very generous budget from HBO, but we know what’s coming down the line and, ultimately, it’s not generous enough,” Benioff said.

So the producers had an idea: The final season could be six hours long and released as three movies in theaters — just like Martin’s best-known influence, The Lord of the Rings. It’s not that the duo wanted to make movies per se, but it seemed like the only way to get the time and money needed to pull off their finale. “It’s what we’re working towards in a perfect world,” Weiss said. “We end up with an epic fantasy story but with the level of familiarity and investment in the characters that are normally impossible in a two-hour movie.”

The flaw in this plan was that HBO is about serving its subscribers, not taking gambles at the box office. Behind the scenes, the network brass gently shot down the movie idea. But executives assured Benioff and Weiss that they would eventually have everything they needed to make a final season that was “a summer tentpole-size spectacle.”

Years later, the producers would strike a deal with the network to spend two years on a shortened season 8 that would cost more than $15 million an episode. You could say HBO made good on that promise from 2012, and the showrunners will happily give the network full credit. “They put their money where their mouths are — literally stuffed their mouth full of million-dollar bills, which don’t exist anymore,” Weiss quips.

But it’s probably more accurate to say that since season 3, Benioff and Weiss willed their ambitious final season into reality the hard way: by growing Game of Thrones into the biggest show in the world, a hugely profitable pop culture and merchandising sensation with more than 30 million viewers an episode and a record number of Emmys. Only with that kind of leverage do your towering ambitions begin to look like reasonable requests.

In fact, the GoT team was so successful that the biggest sticking point in the agreement was persuading HBO to halt the series. “We want to stop where we — the people working on it, and the people watching it — both wish it went a little bit longer,” Benioff says. “There’s the old adage of ‘Always leave them wanting more,’ but also things start to fall apart when you stop wanting to be there. You don’t want to f— it up.”

That concern — a constant desire to conclude the show on the strongest possible note — is something we heard over and over from the cast and crew when we visited the GoT set for the last time.

MARCH 2018: THE FINAL SEASON

Arriving at the studio gate, I’m halted by a guard and asked to scan my badge, a security upgrade from past years. Then I’m asked for my phone, and the guard covers its cameras with stickers — that’s new too. Along with an HBO escort, I walk inside an enormous hangar that’s so large it’s where the RMS Titanic was painted.

What’s being filmed here is episode 6, the series finale. Like Harington going into the table read, I don’t know anything about the final season’s storyline. I look around at a meticulously constructed set that I’ve never seen on the show before. Several actors are performing, and I’m stunned: There are characters in the finale that I did not expect. I gradually begin to piece together what has happened in Westeros over the previous five episodes and try not to look like I’m freaking out.

There is absolutely nothing more that can be said about that scene at this time.

A word about spoilers: The cast is used to keeping story secrets, yet they’ve never sounded so anxious about it. “There are moments where you don’t trust yourself to have this in your brain,” says Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry. “You’re in possession of something millions of people want to know. It’s such a bizarre feeling. And between now and when it comes out, I’m gonna be drunk at some point.”

So far, at least, the team has done a far better job than in previous years at keeping the story under wraps, even while drunk. Theories abound online, but they are guesses. A purported script leaked to Reddit, but here’s a way to spot a fake — real Game of Thrones scripts don’t say “Game of Thrones” on them. “Drone killer” guns were used to guard against any peeping robots attempting to fly over the set. Production documents stating which actors were required to be where and when used code names (Clarke, for example, was “Eldiss”). “It gets highly confusing when you need to remember who is who,” Turner says.

Benioff and Weiss’ next gig is writing a new Star Wars film, and they received some final-season secrecy tips from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and producer Kathleen Kennedy. “They’ve given us a lot of hints about how to lock things down, things we never would have thought of or didn’t know were possible,” Weiss says.

At some point HBO will release a proper final-season trailer revealing more. Until then, here’s some basic setup we can tell you: Season 8 opens at Winterfell with an episode that contains plenty of callbacks to the show’s pilot. Instead of King Robert’s procession arriving, it’s Daenerys and her army. What follows is a thrilling and tense intermingling of characters — some of whom have never previously met, many who have messy histories — as they all prepare to face the inevitable invasion of the Army of the Dead.

“It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death,” co-executive producer Bryan Cogman says. “It��s an incredibly emotional, haunting, bittersweet final season, and I think it honors very much what George set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head.”

How these fan favorites get along drives much of the drama this season (okay, here’s one specific tease from the premiere — Sansa isn’t thrilled that Jon bent the knee to his fancy new Targaryen girlfriend, at least not at first).

The drama builds to a confrontation with the Army of the Dead that’s expected to be the most sustained action sequence ever made for television or film. One episode — the same that Benioff and Weiss were concerned about pulling off so many years ago — is wall-to-wall action, courtesy of “Battle of the Bastards” director Miguel Sapochnik.

Last April a crew member revealed that Game of Thrones had wrapped 55 night shoots while filming a battle. Media outlets around the world ran stories saying the final season’s battle took twice as long as the 25-day shoot for season 6’s climactic Battle of the Bastards. This wildly understated what really happened. The 55 nights were only for the battle’s outdoor scenes at the Winterfell set. Filming then moved into the studio, where Sapochnik continued shooting the same battle for weeks after that.

“It’s brutal,” Dinklage says. “It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park.”

The battle doesn’t have just one focus, either, but rather intercuts between multiple characters involved in their own survival storylines that each feels like its own genre. “Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting — it actually sounds pretty boring,” Benioff says. “Part of our challenge, and really, Miguel’s challenge, is how to keep that compelling… we’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence.”

To help pull it off, the production hugely expanded its set for the Stark ancestral home of Winterfell, adding a towering castle exterior, a larger courtyard, and more interconnected rooms and ramparts. Strolling around the new Winterfell is like wandering a sprawling, immersive medieval resort compared with its previous Days Inn-like scale. The ground is covered with snow and blood. The air is thick with smoke from the fire pits. You can turn any direction and only see more Winterfell. It’s easy to feel like you’ve somehow wandered into Westeros.

The Winterfell expansion is just a small example of how every element of the production was heightened this year in an effort to “not f— it up.” Scenes that normally might take a day to film now took several. “[Camera] checks take longer, costumes are a bit better, hair and makeup a bit sharper — every choice, every conversation, every attitude has this air of ‘This is it,’” Clarke says. “Everything feels more intense. I had a scene with someone and I turned to him and said, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to do this ever again,’ and that brings tears to my eyes.”

Lena Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister, agrees: “There was a great sense of grief. It’s a huge sense of loss, like we’ll never have anything like this again.”

More tears, like during the table read.

You know, Harington will actually reveal why he cried that second time.

“The second time was the very end,” Harington says. He’s referring to when the cast reached the last page of episode 6, and what the showrunners wrote there at the bottom.

“Every season, you read at the end of the last script ‘End of Season 1,’ or ‘End of Season 2,’” Harington says. “This read ‘End of Game of Thrones.’”

Press: The end of Game of Thrones: An exclusive report on the epic final season was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline | Gwendoline Christie Fansite

#gwendoline christie #game of thrones #got cast #Brienne of Tarth #star wars #Captain Phasma #The Force Awakens #Mockingjay 2 #Commander Lyme #THG #The Hunger Game

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eyeodyssey · 5 years

Text

Film Production Log #3

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. What year is this? It’s been a long time coming that I finally got around to writing another one of these things. It’s three months into 2019 already and I hardly even noticed, made a rude awakening when I looked to the calendar to see that it went from 28 back to 1. With all that, it hit me that I hardly wrote about the progression of any of my current film projects in that period of time. I thought I had a rough idea of how the passage of time worked, as it turns out I know as little about a concept as abstract as time as I do about every other thing in life that defies explanation. There’s a reason why I simultaneously dread everything and nothing after all. I’ve written through many variants of this first paragraph beforehand, each draft starting off with the same “long time coming” comment, which gained further relevancy with each rewrite. Let’s go and cut this ongoing habit before it goes beyond simple procrastination into flat out absurdity.

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. Like mentioned with the second production log, we spent most of the December of 2018 haphazardly preparing a forced move that we had to undergo with the sudden gentrification of our apartment at the time. This wasn’t the first time I faced the systematic Kafkaesque horror of gentrification. I was pissed, to say the least, and I did the only thing I could do, I documented it. With The Death Of A Home as it is currently, all the footage from the move itself has been compiled and made into a rough cut, adding up to my first proper feature length film at an hour and 12 minutes. The film is comprised of long shots, with scenes ranging from a crew of biohazard workers cleaning the basement of a black mold infestation that was never reported to the tenants to a sequence where long kept hand-painted furniture is forcibly discarded (tossed down a staircase into the back lot to lead to a rain of multicolored paint shards). The whole film will also be accompanied by a harsh noise soundtrack, I mostly have Merzbow stuff playing throughout as a placeholder. I’ll be shooting on the side some abstract visual sequences for the documentary, communicating certain details of our story that weren’t captured on film. I have a lot of ideas brewing for the mixed media techniques I could use for creating these images in a live action format, specifically ones that return to the sort of trash bag special effects that I used in my prior film concerning the subject of gentrification, Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage. Setting foot in the new apartment, the first thing we came to notice was the absolutely vacant house next to us. The building was completely abandoned with electricity still hooked up, looked like no one set foot there in years. Having it face the bedroom every day, with our constant visual subjection and time to contemplate we came to the conclusion that something was gonna happen to the building at some point. It was clearly the middle child to an estate that left it to rot. Just in time for when we wrapped up unboxing everything, the building caught fire. At first I didn’t pay much mind to the sound of sirens driving through (it’s an Atlanta custom). It eventually hit me that something wasn’t quite right when I looked to one of the windows to see bright red, Suspiria technicolor light shining through.

A frame from “Burning Fragments: Mode 3 - Winter 2019″. Did I go out to have a look? Of course, so did the rest of the neighborhood. Made an interesting meet your neighbor type of gathering, to say the least. I also brought my camera with me, and I came back with a metaphorical stack of raw footage along with a slow-cooked pair of lungs, the film is more important though. From that raw footage, I got the visual edit for the short Burning Fragments, a part of my seasonal “Mode” series that was first kicked off by Hard Drive and continued by my currently unreleased Factory Dreams. Burning Fragments is a montage of morbidly humbling sequences, from a roof visibly caving in through the smoking windows to medical staff cautiously carting out a stretcher, prepared for the worst case scenario. No one came out injured luckily, though I don’t mention that in the film (to keep up the haunting atmosphere). Power was cut to the building, the fire was put out and the street stunk of smoke for the next month. I thought it smelt like a smoked rib, one neighbor of ours said it smelt exactly like pot smoke.

A frame from “Factory Dreams: Mode 2 - Fall 2018″. Right around there was where we thought the story would end, but several days later the building went back up again. This time around I went to one of the firefighters to ask what started the fire in the first place. As it turned out this second eruption was from the ongoing work of someone who had a great disdain to a singular sofa in the abandoned building. The first fire was started off by the arsonist setting this certain sofa aflame, and the guy returned to the scene of the crime to incinerate it for good. Our friendly neighborhood sofa arsonist is still on the run to this day. Going into rapid-fire mode, some other noteworthy moments of the year so far include: OS updating, film editor street fighting, more OS updating, cool experimental film screenings (as seen in my documentary Moonlight Tunnel), one last OS update for good measure and discovering the new OS is as thought out as a tumble down a staircase.

Kafka’s Supermarket sorta ended up bunched between everything, seeing one quick, sporadic development at a time. The issue with actors still stands, gotta track down some people for the film to act in those pesky performed segments. It all goes smoothly until you’ve gotta spend the time and physical resources of other living, fleshy beings into your freaky unscripted cinematic daydreams. Around the end of February, I collaborated with local collage artists Steven and Cassi Cline to write the dialogue for the film, collage literature style. We took several different approaches when it came to fully fleshing things out, some were done as experimental writing games while others were the more familiar cut n paste technique. The script took a wide variety of resources, including the FBI documents printed from the internet archive, the prologue of a Georges Bataille philosophical text and a book on nuclear weapons. I was largely the supplier when it came to the process, while I do visual collage stuff often I’m less of a writer (both letter by letter and cut up source by cut up source). Readings of the literary collages will be interspersed throughout the film with an announcer who seems completely detached from the surreal nature of the scenes he describes. Burroughs’ approach for writing Naked Lunch aside, the primary source of inspiration for this detail comes from my memories of a radio clock that we had during my childhood. I would tune through channels with it searching for classical music, but most often I’d find news stations. Not knowing anything about politics at the time (being 5 to 6 years old and all), the nature of what was being discussed was completely alien to me. With how Kafka’s Supermarket is focused on the nightmarish distortion of everyday life in capitalist America, I felt it was necessary to recreate the atmosphere of those broadcasts that confused me all those many years ago. One detail that left the production hung for a significant amount of time, as minuscule as it may seem, was the masks the actors would be wearing. The visual style of Kafka’s Supermarket was adapted from my 2017 zine What Brought Me To This Point, an experiment in nihilistic writing that focuses on the mental state of a man with prosopagnosia and a non-specified mental illness. My general understanding of prosopagnosia at the time was admittedly limited, I had just heard of a condition where someone couldn’t recognize faces and something about the idea creatively resonated. From this, all the characters were designed with the same basic facial template, prioritizing the bare essentials of the human face with an emphasis on the uncanny. Kafka’s Supermarket further branches out this aesthetic in using it as a wider embodiment of the lack of individual personality in a capitalist state, where everything is selling to a set of categorized markets that represent the general populace.

A frame from “Kafka’s Supermarket”. The thing is, human heads aren’t structured like these figures I was drawing. I spent an absurdly long time contemplating how exactly I could recreate the look of these characters not only with a budget but with a budget without having it look too “store-bought” in a way. The main catch was I was going by realism and not surrealism. At that point, I briefly lost sight of what exactly I was doing. We all make mistakes. I brooded on how I could convincingly recreate an abstract illustration. It took until I started reading the screenplays of Kōbō Abe that sense hit me again when I questioned how it would be done in a theater production. That was when I remember that I’m making a non-narrative experimental film, not something like a superhero fan film where a certain level of suspension of disbelief is expected. Since then I plotted out an alternative that’s simultaneously more affordable than anything I was theorizing beforehand while also being more surreal and true to the theories and atmosphere behind Kafka’s Supermarket (and even it’s predecessor, What Brought Me To This Point). Since then I’ve found myself further experimenting with the fusion of film and theater, specifically the use of minimal props and images to convey a greater concept. I’ll be reposting cast calls for actors through the next several days, hoping for the best while I also simultaneously pester a nearby grocery store for permission to shoot a short sequence on their property. Productions like this are the ones that leave me realizing the oxymoronic nature in pursuing capitalist chains about the production of strictly anti-capitalist cinematic rhetoric.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. While juggling well more than a handful of personal projects (all the films mentioned earlier, a second chapter of Iron Logs and a harsh noise album experiment), I also convinced myself that I can get back into animation again. I was publicly tiptoeing around the idea of a second Wilderness Within Hell film for a while, and now it seems that it will likely be a thing with Empire Of Madness. It’s not really a direct sequel as much as it is a continuation of the style that was first started with Madhouse Mitchel. Set in the same age of industrial totalitarian inferno as Madhouse Mitchel, Empire Of Madness follows the life of Prometheus after his divine punishment for giving mankind knowledge. Having finally passed physical torture in the complete separation of his physical body, Prometheus wanders the Earth as an anomalous figure that assembles itself in a seemingly manufactured, mechanical nature. With pieces of his blood and flesh inherited by every man and woman with his given wisdom, he is inconsequently responsible for a curse put on all of humanity that destines man to collapse in paranoia and violence. Prometheus is shunned by everyone who crosses his path, seeing him as a sickly demon. Prometheus comes to realize that aside from his physical torture, the true act of divine punishment enacted on him will be the experience of having his own creation slowly destroy itself while it collectively tries to kill him.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. I’m simultaneously writing the film’s screenplay while I draw certain visual intensive scenes. Like I mentioned I’m still a bit rough around the edges with writing, so for this phase of production, I’ll actively study Kōbō Abe’s scripts and also the screenplays to an Akira Kurosawa film and Battleship Potemkin. I’ll still in a way aim more to minimalism with how certain things play out, with this series’ influences in Japanese guro art it’s more inclined to create a certain nightmarish atmosphere above all else. While Madhouse was largely anti-systemic rage, this film leans more to bleak existentialism. Bits of the soundtrack are already recorded, the main theme can currently be heard here. That’s about all I have to write for now. Now to wait another four months until I post anything text based on here again.

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