When Current Projects and Vanishing Point collide.

When I first saw Vanishing Point on the telly, it was subjected to all the bastardizations that network television enjoys fostering on those things that might be considered, "possibly offensive." What I remember is a lot of car stuff, but I really remember the naked chick tooling around on her motorcycle in the desert. Hey, I was a kid, and you didn't see naked - even conservatively cropped naked - every day on the tube.

Fast forward to twenty-some years later and my roommate at the time has picked up the recently (at the time) released DVD version of Vanishing Point. Only upon watching this version did I realize what those network bastards had done to put VP on the television: not only did they crop, cut, dub and edit at nausem, but they had broadcast degenerated crap version of the movie to boot. How do I know this? Well, my memories of Ms. Naked Biker Girl are clearly of her riding around the desert at late sunset - an image which caused her to be in a bit of a haze and difficult to see (go figure).

In the movie as it was intended to be seen, however, this is clearly not the case, as Ms. Naked Biker is plainly grooving to the vibrations of her desert bike during the mid-afternoon at the latest.

Crazy.

I bring all this up because I think that those late-night broadcasts of these "cult" movies didn't do them any service: many people probably have similar memories of VP as I do - kinda' fun, but really just a movie that aspires to B-movie status.

Thank goodness for DVD. Not only do we get to see the movie as it was ment to be, but we can view it with an eye towards analysis without fear of - literally - not getting the whole picture.

I'll continue this later (I feel an essay coming on...), but I'll leave with this: on a metaphysical level, just exactly what does happen between 10:02 and 10:04 am Sunday morning in this movie?

I've got my theories; maybe you have yours.

In any event, I'm watching VP because I'm doing an homage piece to it in a current script I'm writing - homage in the sense that VP captures the emotional and philosophical aspects of the film I want to make. Am I writing a remake? No. They did that in 1997, and - from what I've read - it wasn't that good. The curious thing is that Viggo Mortensen was in the "Kowalski" role in the remake, and he's exactly the cat I'd like to cast in this script, so... yeah. A little weird serendipity going on here.

Hmm. What other news... Vagabond Lane is coming along with a schedule to be finished by the end of the month (sans potential voice overs. Yes, it IS that difficult to edit...); I've shot a few project with Andrew since then, and been all-in-all working on getting distribution for our early movies.

More sometime down the road. Film hard.

Will