On Wednesday, William Shatner was at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and this is one of the photos from Getty Images. It's Friday and that means it's a good time for a caption contest. Boldly go to the comments section and give us your best line about this cosmic moment.

-- Geoff Boucher

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Patrick Kevin Day is back with another installment of Scene Stealer, which digs into the magic of movie-making. You can read his previous interviews and Liesl Bradner's Wizards of Hollywood series right here. 

 

A love for the horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s fueled writer-director Ti West's precise re-creation of the period in his film "The House of the Devil." But he started with a very odd detail. "The first thing [production designer Jade Healy and I] planned on was using the Coke cups that say Coke really big on the side," he said.

To further enhance the look, West adapted the filming techniques of the era: few close-ups, zooms, sustained shots and the use of Super 16-millimeter film instead of digital or 35-millimeter. The effect worked. Two weeks before the film opened, it had a sneak preview for an audience who'd never heard of it. "Most people thought it was a lost film from the 1980s until this 29-year-old director gets up at the end to speak. They said, 'What's going on here?'"

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Photo: Jocelin Donahue stars in "House of the Devil." / Magnet Releasing

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As this Spider-Man tale opens, the audience sees New York City "on fire and in ruins" as "a section of the Brooklyn Bridge ascends with Mary Jane bound and dangling helplessly from the bridge." Soon thereafter, a new villainess called Arachne flies into the picture spinning her own deadly trap, and as Spider-Man battles all kinds of criminals he's swinging right over the audience.

It sounds like the 3-D opening for the next "Spider-Man" sequel, and even though this superhero story is filled with Hollywood-style special effects, it is instead a glimpse from a confidential script of a planned "Spider-Man" musical -- the priciest undertaking, and among the most troubled productions, in Broadway history.

Theater producers are always looking for the next movie-inspired musical blockbuster, and the pedigree of "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" couldn't be more stellar: Sony's three Peter Parker movies have grossed nearly $2.5 billion worldwide, the musical's songwriters Bono and the Edge have shipped more than 50 million U2 records domestically, and writer-director Julie Taymor's "The Lion King" has earned in excess of $3.6 billion around the globe.

But rather than develop into a surefire hit, "Spider-Man" the musical instead has turned into a tangled web of production delays, unpaid bills and costly theater renovations that even Peter Parker's alter ego would struggle to escape, according to interviews with half a dozen people close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the show and its finances. Given its immodest ambition to "reinvent Broadway," the musical's budget has soared into the stratosphere: a staggering $52 million, counting theater renovations, according to one person familiar with its finances -- more than double the cost of 2006's "Lord of the Rings" musical, one of the most expensive musicals ever.

Like any compelling superhero story, "Spider-Man's" real-life final act is a cliffhanger.

Despite all the talent the musical has in its corner, it's still far from certain when -- or even if -- the elaborate musical will open after six years of development, as it has struggled to find a deep-pocketed backer to close a massive budget shortfall. If the show doesn't premiere by the end of April, it not only will miss Tony Award eligibility but also face the expiration of the musical's license from Marvel Entertainment, whose comic-book division created the enduring superhero in 1962. Bono and Edge, seem bewildered by the show's odyssey. "But who cares?" Bono said. "The visuals and the music are amazing, and that's what will matter."

THERE'S MORE; READ THE REST.

-- John Horn

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This is the 25th anniversary of "Firestarter," director Mark L. Lester's adaptation of Stephen King's spooky and scorched tale about a little girl with a special talent for trouble. The movie had little 9-year-old Drew Barrymore in the lead; she had made her screen debut in "Altered States" in 1980 and became a famous face with "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" in 1982, and in this film she was teamed with three Oscar winners (George C. Scott, Art Carney and Louise Fletcher) as well as Martin Sheen, David Keith and Heather Locklear and a score by Tangerine Dream.

I caught up with Barrymore as she basked in the glow of her well-received directorial debut “Whip It” and asked how "Firestarter" echoes for her. She chose her words carefully. “It’s a weird, different little movie. It looks dated when you watch it now, but it was a unique idea.”

Unique, perhaps, but part of a crowd. "Firestarter" was the fifth King adaptation to arrive theaters within a year ("Christine," Cujo," "The Dead Zone" and "Children of the Corn") and, well, it didn't exactly light it up with audiences or critics. Roger Ebert wrote that the film imports King's vivid creations but "the most astonishing thing in the movie, however, is how boring it is." Ouch, that burns.

-- Rachel Abramowitz

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Artwork: Vertigo Comics. 

-- Associated Press

It’s been 144 years since Lewis Carroll introduced the world to an inquisitive girl named Alice, but her surreal adventures still resonate – Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” arrives in theaters in March and next month on SyFy it's “Alice,” a modern-day reworking of the familiar mythology with a cast led by Kathy Bates and Tim Curry.

And then there’s “The Looking Glass Wars,” the series of bestselling novels by Frank Beddor that takes the classic 19th century children’s tale off into a truly unexpected literary territory – the battlefields of epic fantasy. The series began in 2006 and Beddor’s third “Looking Glass Wars” novel, “ArchEnemy,” just hit stores in October, as did a tie-in graphic novel called “Hatter M: Mad with Wonder.” 

Beddor said it’s intriguing to see other creators at play in the same literary playground. “It’s amazing how many directions it’s been taken in,” Beddor said of Carroll’s enduring creations. “There’s something so rich and magical and whimsical about the original story and the characters and then there’s all those dark under-themes. Artists get inspired and they keep redefining it for a contemporary audience.”

Indeed, creative minds as diverse as Walt Disney, the Jefferson Airplane, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Tom Petty, the Wachowski Brothers, Tom Waits and American McGee have adapted Carroll’s tale or borrowed memorably from its imagery. Few, though, have been as audacious in their reworking as Beddor, whose massive re-imagining of Wonderland has prompted some Carroll-admiring purists to call for his head. It hasn’t helped that he has admitted publicly that he was no fan of the original works as a youngster when his grandmother essentially force-fed him “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

“I didn’t like them, it’s true,” Beddor said, “but his imagery became an amazing inspiration for me and this world creation. The idea was to create a bigger world so more characters and environments and quests and conflict and obstacles can confront the lead character.”

Beddor’s basic premise: Carroll’s books weren’t fantasy, they were a betrayal of a refugee in need – the author created a misleading cartoon that distracted everyone from the “true” story about a real girl (an exiled princess named Alyss, not Alice) and a real place (a Wonderland that exists in a different dimension but is linked to our world). After a bloody coup, the “real” Alyss fled Wonderland with her bodyguard, Hatter Madigan, but they were separated before arrival on Earth. And so begins their adventure…

The fantasy-based intrigue and dimension-hopping may remind some readers of another little-girl trilogy, “His Dark Materials,” but there’s also a sci-fi layer over the tale that, for Beddor, syncs up with the “The Matrix,” a different story with key touches of Carroll imagery.

The books have been bestsellers and the tie-in “Hatter M” comics (with fan-favorite artist Ben Templesmith collaborating on the early releases) have earned better reviews than the prose books. Beddor has immersed himself in the universe he’s created and invited fans to jump in with him; there’s a MMORPG;  a soundtrack (or "aural novel") with songs inspired by the books; a collection of videos including trailers; and a new tie-in strategy card game. For fans who prefer a tactile experience, there’s a lavish coffee-table book, “Princess Alyss of Wonderland."

Beddor may the model for the contemporary, middle-tier commercial novelist; in this age of niche media and non-stop digital self-promotion he has found a dozen ways to repurpose his epic and each one is an exercise in cross-promotion. It's no surprise, of course, that his foremost aspiration is a film franchise. The rights have been snatched up by Charles Roven, producer of “The Dark Knight” and the upcoming Sam Raimi film “Warcraft.”

All of it has added up to a surprising odyssey for Beddor, who has one of the stranger resumes in Los Angeles, which is impressive considering the Mad Hatter nature of career paths in this town.

A former world-class skiing champ, the Minnesota native came west to pursue an on-camera career and he made it (sort of) as John Cusack’s skiing double in “Better Off Dead” and traded lines with Carrie Fisher in “Amazon Women on the Moon.” Despite the acting studies with Stella Adler, Beddor decided that it was writing that suited him better.

In a Shakespearean lit class at UCLA he met two screenwriters with an unwanted idea for a raunchy comedy; he liked it, bought it, championed the idea and then struck gold with it in 1998. “There's Something About Mary” grossed (in every sense of the word) close to $370 million in worldwide box-office and Beddor was in the Hollywood game in a big way.

For all that success, Beddor still felt that “Mary” belonged to the writers and filmmakers and he wanted a creation that he could likewise call his own. It was during a visit to England for the London premiere of “Mary” that Beddor visited The British Museum and found his future in the past: He was mesmerized by a set of Napoleonic playing cards and their images, which were studies in palace culture and its mix of the stately and the sinister.

Beddor melded those images with his tortured memory of listening to Carroll’s book read to him by his grandmother (whose name, by the way, was Alice) and was on his way. Research led to a complex plan and, he hoped, a movie and/or book deal.

Beddor created characters that boys would find appealing – among them an action-hero version of the Mad Hatter in Hatter Madigan, the master swordsman whose hat converts into a whirling weapon that Bruce Wayne would envy – and a shape-shifting assassin called the Cat, based on the Cheshire Cat. Even with the boys and toys, the author said he was careful to emphasize the matriarchal foundations of Wonderland and the savvy courage of his young female protagonist. An intriguing layer to the story is the idea that Wonderland is a fount for a very special sort of energy.

“The concept behind my book is the power of imagination and the idea that it comes from this place called Wonderland that inspires our world,” Beddor said. “So it’s this parallel world and this imagination — which  is something tangible, something you can conjure — is gifted to us here and is communicated to artists, inventors and even children, who have the most powerful imagination.”

-- Geoff Boucher

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Some story lines just never get old — star-crossed lovers, mistaken identity, lizard men from outer space.

It’s impossible to tiptoe around the main plot device of ABC’s “V” — those aliens may be smart and purty but they’re up to no good — because it is, of course, a remake of the 1983 miniseries. And even if it weren’t, writers Kenneth Johnson and Scott Peters have infused the pilot with as many sly sci-fi references as CG special effects. [For the record: The review of the television series “V” in Tuesday’s Calendar said the pilot was written by Kenneth Johnson and Scott Peters. As the writer of the original miniseries, Johnson was given a “story by” credit. Peters wrote the pilot.]

Which are pretty terrific, as is the pilot in general. Although fans of the first “V” may find themselves longing for Richard Herd’s Supreme Commander in his jaunty jumpsuit and funky glasses, this “V” is not only sleeker, faster and more visually gripping, it promises to be thematically more compelling.

Its opening sequence is a masterpiece of back-story compression. What appears to be a temblor startles a series of characters (and an almost flawless cast gathered from various sci-fi hits): Erica Evans (“Lost’s” Elizabeth Mitchell) is an anti-terrorism agent with the FBI and divorced mother of Tyler (Logan Huffman), a basically decent but rebellious teen. Chad Decker (Scott Wolf from “Party of Five”) is a newscaster who aspires to do more than “read the news”; Father Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch of “The 4400”) is a young priest working among the homeless; and Ryan Nichols (Morris Chestnut) has just purchased the engagement ring he hopes to offer Valerie (Lourdes Benedicto).

All of their plans are put on hold, however, when the quake turns out to be the arrival of an enormous spaceship, one of a matched set now hovering over all the major cities of the world. But even as the throngs prepare for the requisite scream-flee-and-die scene of mass hysteria, the underbelly of the craft becomes a screen and the lovely Anna (“Firefly’s” Morena Baccarin) assures everyone in flawless English (and French and Egyptian) that “the Visitors” are here to offer technology in exchange for a few undisclosed but very renewable resources, and they come in peace.

Undone by relief, Anna’s Audrey Hepburn haircut and the promise that the Visitors can cure 65 of our diseases, humans, or at least New Yorkers, neglect to consider that they are a renewable resource themselves. Like the gullible little oysters in “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” they quickly embrace the “V’s,” signing up for theme-park-like tours of the ship and, of course, merchandising like crazy. Fortunately, not everyone is convinced...

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Geoff Boucher

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-- Geoff Boucher

Top photo by David Strick; photo of Neil Gaiman, below, by Kimberly Butler

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If you want to understand the meaning of comics in India, one place to start is a battered, chipped piece of sandstone from the 9th century. "Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon," in which an eight-armed goddess impales a part-man, part-animal monster, doesn't bear any obvious resemblance to the X-Men or even the hipster graphic novels of Dan Clowes.

But this sculpture carved out of stone for purposes of worship represents an image that echoes through Indian culture -- and fuels some of the work created today on computer tablets by companies like Bangalore, India-based Liquid Comics.

"You're going to see visions of Durga all over the place," says Julie Romain, the curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who organized the new show. "In both traditional and popular form -- movies, posters, comics."

She sees Durga and others as archetypes, figures that replicate through Indian society. The show, "Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics," which runs through Feb. 7, looks at the transformative power of the imagery of Indian mythology: figures such as Durga, an often vengeful mother goddess who is one of several forms of India's supreme goddess Devi, as well as Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, and the mace-wielding monkey god Hanuman. (Though India is religiously diverse, most of the figures in the show come out of the Hindu tradition.)

Romain is not a fangirl but a scholar of classical Indian art, albeit one married to a comic-book lover going through what she calls a nostalgic period.

The show of 54 pieces she put together with paintings curator Tushara Bindu Gude is not comprehensive -- it doesn't look at the entirety of Indian comics and does not explicitly connect the images to the rest of Indian pop culture, whether Bollywood films or contemporary graphic design....

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Scott Timberg

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May the Farce be with you. ... Thanks to Oric for the link.

-- Geoff Boucher

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The artist who gave the comic-book world Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade and Fritz the Cat has a new cast of characters: Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham and, well, You Know Who.

R. Crumb, the Albrecht Dürer of the urban demimonde, has just published “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” (W.W. Norton), a profusely pictorial, surprisingly faithful version of the first 50 chapters of the Old Testament. In theory, the project may strike some as perverse, like having Charles Bukowski pen the script for a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life."

But as he writes in his introduction, Crumb conceived his work as a "straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes." Speaking by phone from France, where he has lived for two decades, the artist suggested that his source material needed no embellishment.

"The original is so strong and strange in its own right," Crumb said. "There's so much in there that's lucid and lent itself to comic book adaptation."

In richly detailed black-and-white imagery and cleanly lettered text blocks, Crumb opens his book with a superbly drafted image of God holding a giant cosmic void in his hands, spinning like a ball of black cotton candy, and ends it with a sober but lavishly detailed picture of Joseph's funeral procession.

Elsewhere, the book bears traces of Crumb's characteristic wit. Its front cover boasts "Nothing Left Out!" and notes that "adult supervision" is "recommended for minors." The back cover looks like a movie poster, with medallions of the dramatis personae and God hovering in the background like some providential Cecil B. DeMille. But for the most part Crumb's Genesis is a literal adaptation of the King James Version, notable more for its painstaking craft than its interpretational risk-taking.

In time with the book's release, an exhibition of Crumb's original "Genesis" drawings will be on view through Feb. 7 at the Hammer Museum. Crumb is hardly the first comic artist to illustrate parts of the Bible. Numerous children's authors have done it, along with such well-known cartoonists as Basil Wolverton.

What's perhaps most striking about the book is how well Crumb's illustrative style matches his subject matter. The brawny, big-boned women he's been drawing for decades are re-purposed here as pneumatic, iron-willed Old Testament matriarchs. Variants of the wild-eyed furry freaks who populated Crumb's semi-true tales of Detroit and the Haight have been retrofitted with goatskins and tunics, and seem to fit their new roles perfectly.

Although he avoids editorializing, Crumb granted himself poetic license to flesh out certain passages. Among his most powerful series of images are three large panels showing the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the inhabitants flailing in agony. The Bible dispatches with this chillingly dramatic episode in a single sentence.

And Crumb's representation of Adam and Eve romping together before the Fall is as innocent and exuberant a drawing as this artist ever has produced. "That was one of the great things to show," he said. "They're frolicking like pups, they've got nothing to worry about. They're in the Garden of Eden!"

There's more, read the rest.

-- Reed Johnson

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 Its awfulness is nearly unmatched. Some have even declared it the worst movie of all time. For many, “Troll 2,” the shameful 1990 horror movie, is the best worst movie.

Now there’s a documentary to prove it. In “Best Worst Movie,” director Michael Stephenson — the child star of the undisputed cinematic disaster, which has a rating of 0% on the film critic website Rotten Tomatoes — reunites with his former “Troll 2” costars and investigates the improbable rise of the film to the status of pop-culture touchstone.

“Up until four years ago, I wanted nothing — nothing — to do with ‘Troll 2.' ” says Stephenson. “Then, out of nowhere, I started getting these messages from kids all over the country on MySpace asking if I was the Michael Stephenson from ‘Troll 2.’ Some would send pictures from parties they’d throw. ... I just stared at them and thought, ‘Why would anyone do this? How can anyone like this film?’ That’s how it all started.”

His documentary, shot over a three-year span, has been making the rounds on the festival circuit. It won the “best nonfiction motion picture award” at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain. And it took home the best documentary award from the Indianapolis International Film Festival. The film plays Saturday at the AFI Film Festival in Hollywood.

“It was very cathartic, making the film,” the 31-year-old director says. “I’ve seen the positivity and the fun and the enjoyment that people are having around this awful, awful film.”

“Troll 2,” directed by Claudio Fragasso, centers on the Waits family as they vacation in a deserted town called Nilbog (“goblin” spelled backward); things go awry when they’re pursued by small vegetarian goblins who turn people into plants before they devour them. Don’t be confused, though. It’s not a sequel to the 1986 Empire Pictures film “Troll,” despite the title.

It was filmed in three weeks in a small town in Utah in summer 1989. Twenty years later, the ultra-low-budget horror film has been resurrected into a treasure — much the way “The Room” and “Showgirls” have become cult favorites. In Chicago and New York, and even in Canada and Austria, fans savor every minute of the film; some travel to attend screenings, others host viewing parties.

The documentary includes fan testimonials and scenes from the horror flick, as well as a glimpse into the lives of the actors. At the center is George Hardy, the film’s father figure, who’s now a dentist in Alabama; he’s touched and confused by the movie’s status.

“I didn’t want to simply focus on the pandemonium surrounding this horribly bad movie,” Stephenson says. “I was most interested in having people get to know the cast who had been part of this cinematic car crash.”

Hardy drills cavities by day and moonlights as a cult figure, attending screenings where he often reenacts the infamous scene in which he declares one should not urinate on hospitality (in a more colorful way, of course).

“I remember a patient of mine gave me the VHS about a year or two after it came out,” Hardy says. “I remember ... putting it in and thinking, ‘Ugh, I can’t watch this.’ ”

It wasn’t until he attended a 2006 New York screening — the first scene Stephenson filmed — that Hardy saw the film’s effect, as hundreds of fans attended.

“The way people have embraced it ... it speaks to the power of film — good or bad.”

--Yvonne Villarreal

Photos, from top: "Troll 2" goblins; George Hardy and Michael Stephenson on the set of the awesomely bad film. Credits: Michael Stephenson 

Wander around the home of Leonard Nimoy and you'll find very few mementos from all those years spent roaming the galaxy as Mr. Spock. He kept the last pair of pointy ears he wore on the classic television series, and on one wall of his bright and airy home office, there are two Hirschfeld drawings of the actor in his Starfleet uniform. But that's about it -- no movie posters, no plastic models of the good ship Enterprise, no tribbles on the mantel.

Instead, the walls and shelves reflect the passion of Leonard and Susan Nimoy for contemporary art; in fact, their collection would be envied by many gallery owners. But some of the most interesting pieces are the actor's own photography, and on Halloween night he will be at the Santa Monica Museum of Art for a one-night exhibition of selected pieces from his conceptual project "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Last year, Nimoy spent two 16-hour days shooting portraits of total strangers in Northampton, Mass., who had answered a public invitation to share a glimpse of their hidden selves. He photographed 95 people and chose 25 of them for the exhibit that will go on display next summer at MASS MoCA.

"The idea was to invite people to reveal their secret selves, the self they wish to be or the self they hide from the world," said Nimoy, 78, who has been an avid photographer since his youth. "There was a measure of bravery in this by everyone involved. I had no idea what to expect. Some of the people walked in with these amazing stories, stories you couldn't anticipate or make up."

A rabbi arrived with a leather vest over his bare torso and announced that he would use the photograph to publicly acknowledge for the first time that he is gay. A middle-aged psychologist showed up in conservative clothes but toting a chainsaw, a symbol of her inner masculine power, which still goes unrecognized after years as a single woman. One heavyset woman, her voice trembling, came and dropped her robe to reveal the tattoos up and down her backside and described her secret self as "a shy whore."

One of the more striking images is a man who looks like some sort of forest spirit. He is a painter who specializes in portraits of war veterans, and to show his secret self, he applied brown body makeup, pulled on a loincloth and sprinkled tree leaves at his feet -- his desire was to avoid "war, strife and violence of all kind, and be part of nature," Nimoy said.

The portraits speak to the culture of Northampton, which has an active gay and lesbian community, a tilt toward academia and, apparently, a fair number of eccentric souls.

"It would be interesting to see what would happen if you solicited people -- sought them out instead of making a public invitation; it might be a difficult process, an ordeal, or it might be explosive. What would you get if you did this in a different community, such as Los Angeles? Would it be totally different? I don't know the answers to these questions."

Nimoy is a renaissance man -- he may be forever associated with the role of Spock, but he has directed six films (among them "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," "The Good Mother," "Three Men and a Baby"), written two autobiographies, published seven books of poetry and made a somewhat infamous foray into music in the late 1960s. Photography may be his true passion, though. In the early 1970s, he attended UCLA to study for a career change that would have found him behind a camera instead of in front of it.

 "I thought very seriously for a brief time that I would go in a new career direction, but then I realized that commercial photography was not for me," Nimoy said. "I didn't want to photograph to fill a need or at someone else's direction. I wanted to pursue it as an art."

As a young man, Nimoy was fascinated by the darkroom process and for decades he shot only black-and-white and developed all of his own prints. He took a camera with him everywhere he went. Shooting films and television productions on location, he snapped pictures of people and places across the globe.

Only once, though, did he take a photo on the set. Nimoy photographed Yul Brynner while the two were making the 1971 western "Catlow." But looking through the viewfinder, he saw the cast and crew stiffened or changed when a camera was aimed at them. Nimoy realized the camera was invasive in that setting and might undermine the trust of the actors at work.

"I never took a camera to the set again," Nimoy said.

Nimoy's photography has always been based on serendipity, but he changed his approach with "The Shekhina Project," in which he sought to study "the feminine aspect of God" by shooting portraits of women that emphasized the body and soulfulness of the gender. There was a small stir of controversy in 2005 when Nimoy published a book of the photos, many of them nude and sensual, side-by-side with commentary of Jewish scripture.

Next came "The Full Body Project: Photographs by Leonard Nimoy" in 2007, a book that collected  his portraits of plus-sized women. Nimoy said that book was intended as a look at the "distance between reality and the fantasy of fashion photography where clothes are worn by women who, on average, weigh 25% less than average women."

The third in his series of concept projects is the secret-self study, which was inspired by a line of mythology about Zeus splitting humans in half -- the species had four legs and two heads before the deity cleaved them down the middle. The idea that the split left humans incomplete on some level, hungry to reconnect with their other aspect, fascinated Nimoy. For the portraits, he shot in color for the first time. He spent eight to 10 minutes with his subjects, on average. The process was videotaped, and a 40-minute "making-of" movie will be screened on Halloween at the Santa Monica Museum fundraiser, which has a masquerade-ball theme. Visitors are encouraged to come dressed as their secret selves.

Nimoy said he no longer carries a camera with him, waiting for moments that present themselves; instead he found, through his latest project, some insight into his own secret self.

"This is the one that came the closest to the bone to the things that interest me," Nimoy said. "There was a certain amount of performance and direction and psychological exploration involved. There was also a lot of role-playing involved, and I've spent a considerable amount of my life doing that. What I love about the project is that anyone who sees it immediately asks themselves, 'What would my secret self be? What could I show -- what would I show?' I know people ask me what my secret self is and I have to laugh. I have no secrets left. I revealed it all a long time ago."

-- Geoff Boucher

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences explores the things that go boo  tonight at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. But don’t expect any scholarly examination of the use of sound in horror films at "The Sound Behind the Image III: Real Horrorshow!"

"I think what it really amounts to is a ... horror movie night in the doors with friends, pizza and some horror movies," says the program host, veteran sound editor David E. Stone, who won an Oscar for his spook-tacular work on the 1992 horror hit, "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

"What we are going to do is have a handful of basically post-production sound people each introducing clips of a horror movie where we think there is something interesting to say on how the sound was treated," says Stone. "The most exciting role that sound can play in a horror movie is that enhances what you don’t see , and that adds to the suspense."

Sometimes silence is golden in horror movies.

"Scholars tell us sound was always thought about in silent films," says Stone. "It was made part of the story by the composition of music or the characters’ miming that they heard something."

To illustrate the point, Stone will be showing the famous clip from 1925's "The Phantom of the Opera" where Mary Philbin rips off the mask of the Phantom (Lon Chaney), and her silent scream literally echoes in audiences’ ears.

Besides Stone, Oscar-nominated sound effects editors Mark Mangini and Richard L. Anderson will offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the chilling sound effects were created for 1982’s "Poltergeist." Foley artist Vanessa Theme Ament will discuss the work of master foley artist John Post, who was responsible for the terrifying sound effects on John Carpenters 1982 "The Thing." And veteran Oscar-winning production sound mixer Gene Cantamessa and supervising sound editor Don Hall will discuss their work on Mel Brooks' classic 1974 horror spoof, "Young Frankenstein."

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. For more information, go to www.oscars.org.

-- Susan King

Photo: Winona Ryder stars as Mina Murray/Elisabeta and Gary Oldman stars as Dracula in "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Credit: Columbia Pictures

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When it came to making movies quickly and cheaply, it was hard to beat Roger Corman, who once joked that he could make a film about the Roman Empire with two extras and a sagebrush. He directed 1960’s "The Little Shop of Horrors" in two days.

Corman started directing films in 1955 and, during his peak, could turn out seven a year. A true auteur of "B" movies, his films featured offbeat characters, dark humor, social commentary and a savvy use of special effects and sets -- he would often simply shoot another film on the same sets with the same actors.

With its low-budget, fast-paced parameters, it’s no wonder that Corman jumped at the chance to produce "Splatter," a three-part interactive horror Web series for Netflix that allows viewers to vote on which characters they want to see killed off in the subsequent installments.

"Who doesn’t love Roger Corman?" asks Catherine Fisher, director of publicity for Netflix, the company that offers mail-order DVDs as well as live streaming of movies. "What we wanted to do with this project was to bring to life the fact that Netflix delivers movies two ways to your TV."

And you don’t have to be a Netflix subscriber to catch "Splatter": It will be streamed beginning today for free at www.netflix.com/splatter.

Viewers will be able to cast their votes on the fate of two characters for the Nov. 6 episode. After that installment, they again can choose who meets their maker on the Nov. 13 finale.

"The audience becomes part of the screenwriting team," Corman says.

Shot in eight days on digital video at the evocative Hollywood Castle mansion in the Hollywood Hills, the series was directed by Joe Dante ("Gremlins"), who cut his teeth editing trailers and eventually directing movies ("Piranha") for Corman in the 1970s.

Another Corman/Dante veteran, Corey Feldman ("Gremlins," "The Lost Boys"), plays Johnny Splatter, a goth-rock star who kills himself in the opener. Over the three eight- to 10-minute episodes, Splatter’s five friends get more than they bargained for when they arrive at his mansion for a reading of the will. Only one will survive the night

Corman, who produced the series with his wife, Julie, became involved for the challenge and fun of it.

Netflix’s timing was "incredible," Julie Corman says. "We were just in the throes of moving into digital distribution, so this is on-the-job training. It has really been a dream project, I would say."

Though "Splatter" is embracing the latest technology, the series is also a throwback to Corman’s early days as a filmmaker when he could direct a film in less than a week -- in fact, Corman directed 1960’s "The Little Shop of Horrors" in two days.

Corman turned to veteran writer Richard Matheson, who has written such classic novels as "I Am Legend" and penned the scripts to most of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to see if he would write the script.

"Dick, as I am, is fairly old and said he was working on what could be his last novel and didn’t have time," Corman says.

But he did recommend his son, Richard Christian Matheson, "who is starting to write in the same style. So I called Dick and we kicked around a number of ideas."

Originally, Corman wanted to shoot the first installment and then wait a day for the audience votes to be tabulated before frantically beginning a six-day process of writing, shooting, editing and doing post-production on the next one.

"I wanted to see if I could do this stuff again," Corman says. But he and Dante soon realized the logistics would be a nightmare.

His wife came up with the solution. "We would shoot the deaths of all five and then, as the votes come in, we may do a little pick-up shooting to tie things together," Corman says. "Then we would edit the deaths in."

Still, the pace is crazy. "We have to have everything ready for when the first vote happens," Dante says. "When the first vote happens, we have to have a rough version of all of these different possibilities and the same thing for the third week. You have to shoot everything three times. There are all of these logistical issues you have to carry around in your head."

"This is guerrilla filmmaking at its finest," Feldman says. "There are Web episodes and interactive stuff out there, but it’s never been presented in this format before. Everybody involved is skilled. It has the signature Joe Dante stuff as far as the dark, twisted humor, and it's scary and gory, which is signature Roger stuff. It’s like ‘American Idol’ for the Internet."

-- Susan King

Photos: Roger Corman with wife Julie, who helped him produce "Splatter" for Netflix. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times. Netflix's "Splatter" site. Credit: Netflix.com

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"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Twilight Zone."

With those now-famous words, TV audiences 50 years ago were introduced to Rod Serling's breakthrough sci-fi series "The Twilight Zone." The series, essentially morality plays with evocative twists of fantasy, ran for five seasons on CBS -- and endlessly in reruns and the public imagination.

One week, viewers could be on a plane with a troubled young man who insists he sees a monster on a wing; another week, an elderly woman could invite death into her house. Performers included veterans such as Ida Lupino and newcomers like Robert Redford and William Shatner.

"He created a new form of television," said screenwriter Marc Scott Zicree, author of "The Twilight Zone Companion."

Science fiction was basically viewed as kids' stuff," he says. "There is a great interview that Mike Wallace did with Rod just prior to 'The Twilight Zone' where he says to Rod, 'Now you are doing this kind of kids' stuff, are you giving up writing anything important?' "

Read the entire article HERE.

-- Susan King

And here's a portion of a great "Twilight Zone" episode featuring a certain Starship Enterprise captain out of uniform.

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Photo: Rod Serling.  Credit: Museum of TV and Radio

Forget the flying dragons and giant blue aliens, Sam Worthington is in search of human life amid all that extraterrestrial spectacle of “Avatar.”

Director James Cameron’s sci-fi epic arrives Dec. 18 amid intense discussion of its state-of-the-art performance capture and 3-D innovations, but for Worthington, the 33-year-old Australian star of the film, none of that is as important as locating the human heart in the story.

"I don’t believe there’s a certain way to act in an action blockbuster and I think it’s a mistake to approach it that way,” Worthington said. “It’s still has drama, romance, suspense; it’s only a blockbuster because of the size of scale and the money they throw in and maybe the time of year it comes out. If you bring in the subtleties of proper human emotion, then an audience can relate to a character. That character isn’t just a cartoon. I don’t want to be a cartoon.”

Cartoon or “dead” faces are the bane of motion-capture films and exactly what Cameron hopes to avoid with “Avatar.” The filmmaker wrote the script for “Avatar” before he made his Oscar-winning 1997 film “Titanic” and has been waiting, he says, for the technology needed to pull off his vision. That’s why some observers are referring to “Avatar” as a “game-changer” for special effects films -- and others are calling it the most over-hyped Hollywood release of 2009.

And at the center of this massive machinery is the brawny Worthington, a former bricklayer and high school dropout from west Australia. His life path changed at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. A girl he knew planned to submit an application for the program, and he joined her as a lark.

“To have these opportunities now, I’m extremely humble about it, to be honest with you,” Worthington said. “I feel lucky to do these kinds of films. I always said I wanted to make movies that I would go see. I would pay 12 bucks to go see ‘Avatar.’ Just to be part of it all -- I pinch myself.”

In person, Worthington comes off as coolly confident and wildly straightforward; he seems about as ironic as a rugby tackle. He said, for instance, that one of his goals as an actor is to portray men who prove that "a man's fate isn't written, that he decides his own fate," a lesson he himself wants to impart to his 9-year-old nephew. Worthington’s screen career began with an episode of “JAG” in 2000 and he caught the eye of Hollywood with performances in smaller films, such as his lead role in Geoffrey Wright’s gritty 2006 “Macbeth,” which reframed the Shakespeare play in the criminal underworld of Melbourne, Australia.

But there was a big one that got away: Worthington was one of three finalists in the search for the new James Bond but lost out to Daniel Craig, whose screen aura is a more cynical menace. Instead, Worthington is getting a reputation as an action hero with soulful eyes; in “Terminator Salvation,” opposite Christian Bale, the relative newcomer was the most memorable part of the film for many reviewers.

“Wearing his conflicted humanity like Clint Eastwood in his Sergio Leone days ... Worthington overtakes every scene that he is in,” film critic Betsy Sharkey wrote in The Times.

Cameron, whose last leading man was Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic,” said that for “Avatar” he needed a star who could handle the action but also pull the audience along on an adventure that covers a lot of emotional ground as well as exotic alien-jungle terrain. Cameron said that, in aspiration, “Avatar” has more in common with Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Rice Burroughs than with modern Michael Bay cinema.

“I’ll go to a ‘Transformers’ film for the fun of seeing the spectacle,” Cameron said, “but, personally, my soul craves a little more story, a little more meat on the bone and characters and that sort of thing.”

In the futuristic tale of “Avatar,” Worthington portrays Jake Sully, a Marine who comes home from combat in a wheelchair. He gets a chance to walk, run and fight again, though, through a strange off-world mission. Scientists will place his consciousness in an avatar, a towering blue body grown in a laboratory melding of alien genetic material with Sully’s DNA. This new body is sent to a jungle planet to help plunder a valuable mineral but, in a sort of intergalactic “Dances With Wolves” scenario, Sully goes native.

In “Terminator Salvation,” Worthington presented the mash-up of man and machine; this time it’s the hybrid of earthling and alien. He chuckled when asked whether there were themes that pull him toward certain roles.
 
“I just want to work with people of high caliber, whatever kind of genre,” the actor said. “I don’t basically go, ‘I want to make a movie of this type’ or ‘I want this genre.’ I look at who’s making it and who’s in it. With ‘Avatar,’ they tell me Jim Cameron is directing and Sigourney Weaver is in it? Sign me up.”

There’s considerable interest in Hollywood to signing up Worthington. He will star with Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes in “Clash of the Titans,” which hits theaters in March, and he has completed two other films, John Madden’s “The Debt,” a war-crimes thriller with Helen Mirren, and “Last Night,” a New York romance with Keira Knightley, which was shot in 2008.

He was slated to star with Charlize Theron in another thriller, “The Tourist,” but that project may be in flux. There is talk, too, that Worthington will reunite with “Terminator Salvation” director McG for Disney’s major revival of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

For the actor, though, the bigger the franchise, the tighter his focus on the people living and breathing between the explosions.

“If you’re going to do blockbusters, you have to find the human in them or else you’re just making a video game,” he said. “I’ve always said if I’m going to make these things, I’m going to do the thing I can do in a $4-million Australian film -- a dramatic piece -- and bring that into the action film. If you do that, the audience feels it and then they’ve got a way in. They see themselves up there on the screen.”

-- Geoff Boucher

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Photos: At top, "Avatar" director James Cameron, left, and lead actor Sam Worthington on the set. Credit: Mark Fellman. Middle: Worthington in "Terminator Salvation." Credit: Warner Bros.

Leonard Nimoy, who was coaxed out of retirement for "Star Trek" and then lingered in order to portray the mysterious William Bell on "Fringe," says it may be the logical time to say farewell to acting for good -- especially since the Bell role hasn't been a compelling one for him.

"I have such a great life," the 78-year-old actor said at his home last week. "I'm not looking for work."

Nimoy had invited me over to talk about his Halloween night photography exhibit at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (watch for a full story on that event and his photography career here tomorrow), which is just one of the many pursuits that Nimoy would rather focus on these days. "As an actor you're always wondering when you're going to work again, who you're going to work with, what it will be. I don't have that consuming drive," he said. Then he nodded toward an image that will be on display at the exhibit. "This is my creative outlet. This is what I do."

Nimoy was fresh from a trip to the Vancouver set of "Fringe," where he had shot an upcoming episode. He made it sound as if it might have been his final one in the role of Bell, a rarely seen character on the show but one that is, by all appearances, at the very core of the series' mythology. 

"I've done three appearances for them. I don't know if I will do a fourth..."

"They've asked me to do more, but we have to talk about where the character is going. So far my character, William Bell, and my appearances have been used to lay in information about this alternate universe and the experience of being in this other world. And that's OK, but I don't know yet what plans they have for really developing a dramatic story for the character. I'm waiting for a conversation about that."

Nimoy said that conversation will be "some with J.J. Abrams" but more so with show runner Jeff Pinkner and series creators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the same tandem that came up with the script for "Star Trek," which was good enough to coax Nimoy back into Starfleet service despite his initial resistance to the idea. Nimoy said Orci and Kurtzman are "just terrific, very talented and very smart" but it was quite clear that the actor's goodwill posture toward "Fringe" was earned entirely by the "Trek" experience and that it has its limitations.

"I think they're talking amongst themselves now so they can present some kind of plan, a story arc of some kind."

The sci-fi icon surprised me when he said he signed up for the "Fringe" first-season finale without much knowledge of the series at all.

"I never paid much attention until I was asked to work on it and even then I didn't know a lot. I got the [home video] collection of the first season and [my wife] Susan and I were up in Lake Tahoe and last week we sat there about four or five hours at a time and watched them. And, wow, that show is something. They do a great production job. They have great story hooks, terrific production values and very interesting performances."

He mentioned in particular the work of John Noble, who portrays the wonderfully eccentric Walter Bishop, Bell's onetime colleague in the business of mad science.

"We just met for the first time and it was very enjoyable," Nimoy said, although he was careful not to say whether that encounter was on-screen or off.

For those of you in Southern California, you have a chance to meet Nimoy yourself and even have him shoot your portrait during a photo session. On Halloween, the Santa Monica Museum of Art will be displaying selected works from Nimoy's project "Who Do You Think You Are?" (which will be an exhibit at Mass MoCA next summer); the collection is a series of portraits where Nimoy asked strangers to reveal their secret selves. That "secret self" theme will carry into a costume contest at the Oct. 31 event and there a different price-level tickets. For more details on the event and the possibility of a photo shoot with Nimoy, go right here. 

-- Geoff Boucher

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PHOTOS: Top, Leonard Nimoy on "Fringe" (Fox) Middle: Nimoy at his home. (Christina House / For The Times)

Vertigo is launching a new monthly comic book series from short-story writer Scott Snyder ("Voodoo Heart," "The Goodbye Suit") and artist Rafael Albuquerque.

“American Vampire” hits shelves in March, with a breed of vampire — more brawny and vicious — that has distinctly American characteristics. 

The series’ first story arc, to unfold over the course of five issues, will feature two separate stories; one penned by Snyder, the other by horror novelist Stephen King. 

Marvel has had success adapting King’s preexisting work such as the “Dark Tower” and “The Stand” mini-series. But this new series represents King’s debut in comic book writing.  He’ll provide the origin story of the first American vampire: Skinner Sweet, an outlaw of the 1880s.

“He really made it his own thing,” Snyder said in a phone interview. “It was really inspiring to watch him take these characters and make them and their stories so much better.” Snyder’s tale is set in the Jazz Age and centers on Pearl, who “frequents Hollywood’s speakeasies and dance-halls searching for her first big break, only to find something far more sinister waiting for her.” Hero Complex contributor Yvonne Villarreal spoke with Snyder about his new project. Read this brief Q-and-A as he discusses how the series aims to reinvent the idea of our fang-toothed friends.

YV: When people think of you, ‘comic book writer’ isn’t associated with your name.  What prompted this venture?

Snyder: Well, the idea … I’ve been sort of kicking around for a while. For the last couple of years, I’ve just been thinking of how I would do it.  Would it be through short stories or a book? I actually thought about doing it as a book for a while and then I happened to write a short story for an anthology that was about literary writers writing superhero stories and it caught the attention of an editor at D.C., Mark Doyle. He wound up approaching me at a reading for the book and asked me if I had anything I wanted to pitch for Vertigo DC. So I pitched him this idea and he really fell for it and it went into development pretty quickly. So we hashed it out together. That’s how -- sort of from the production side -- it came together.

YV: There’s no shortage of vampire-themed projects floating around. Did the idea come about pre-vampire craze?

Snyder: It was definitely pre-vampire craze...

...but I’m a fan of all that stuff.  We’re trying to do something very different from than what all those other things are doing and trying to do something on our own that’s exciting. It was definitely conceived apart from all those things. 

The general concept … the thing that we’re really excited about, is the series sort of centers on this notion of vampire evolution. What it imagines is vampires are [these sorts] of physiological creatures that have evolved over time so that their bloodline as it hits different populations at different points in history has mutated a little bit and evolved every once in a while into a different species of vampire.  And so some vampires have completely different characteristics, abilities and weaknesses than other ones.  And there’s sort of this secret genealogical tree that we have behind the scenes that sort of traces the vampire bloodline all the way back to pre-modern times and all the different branches and all the different species that have popped up. And, so, the fun of the series itself – or the reason it’s sort of American vampire -- is that for reasons that are part of the mystery of the series for fun, there haven’t been any new species of vampire for a few hundred years. The dominant species -- the only one that seems to exist anymore is the classic vampire that you’re aware of…the vampire that is burned by sunlight, has massive allergic reactions to certain organic materials, has small fangs and has this kind of anemic look; very elegant, aristocratic and so on.... That species has its own history of how it formed and why it now has become the dominant species. And so the series picks up with this guy. He’s this sort of a sociopathic outlaw out in the old west. Skinner Sweet, who is the character Steve writes about, who becomes by accident, sort of turned into a vampire and he happens to represent one of these sudden jumps in the evolution. He becomes this new kind of vampire that they call American vampire, the European predecessors and he have a completely different set of powers; we’ve been calling him the vampire 2.0. He’s thrives in the sunlight as opposed to being burned by it. He’s not vulnerable to wood; he has his own secret weaknesses that are immediately obvious. He has longer, bigger claws and fangs. He’s tougher and meaner so they’re sort of all trying to figure out what to do with them. Steve’s story is sort of the origin story of that character. My story follows the first person that he turns.  A young woman in the 20s who is trying to make it in Hollywood in the silent film era. So that’s the kind of general, specific…

YV: Do these story lines stem from a childhood fascination with vampires?

Snyder: I’ve always been a huge fan of Americana. In my fiction and the novel I’m working on, I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of what makes us American.  I think I started thinking about it a few years ago when it was sort of— I think right now, especially, the reason we were all thinking about it enough to make the series is there’s so much changing in terms of the central idea of what it means to be American. Some people think it’s exciting and wonderful; other people think it’s terrifying and that everything’s going down the drain. Right now is such a fluid time for the American imagination — the American character — that we really felt it was a fun time to do this series. The idea itself came about pretty organically out of me thinking I’d like to do a vampire story that takes places in some of these locations that I’ve never seen historically. What would it mean to be a vampire during the Depression? The sort of other side of the series — the thing we try to do to make it more than just a popcorn horror story is that each cycle will follow a different decade; it follows the bloodline of Skinner Sweet.  The idea is that by following the bloodline, we’re also able to move from decade to decade and trying to explore a little bit what is vampiric or monstrous at that particular moment -- or heroic -- in the American character during the '20s, during the '30s; what makes us ‘us,’ for better or worse during those time periods. In that way, I think, it’s been a really fun thing to work on right now when I think the question of what it means to be American is something that everyone is talking about.

YV: Why did you decide to do it as a comic book as opposed to a novel?

Snyder: I was thinking about doing it as a novel but I think part of it was just that — I mean, I grew up on comic books and I love comic books to death. But, also, I think the way the series is structured; the way it suddenly became apparent we could do it when I was talking to Marc Doyle — the editor who helped me develop it — was that we’d be able to do these five or six issue arcs where we could explore different decades and pick up with sometimes the same characters and sometimes a new cast in serial way and it started to feel like this would be a really good organic match to sort of what this series is about: tracing this monstrous bloodline through different decades in American history. I was sort of struggling, trying to figure out if I should do it as a series of short stories taking place in different decades; it all felt almost too self-contained that way. This way is open-ended and fluid and fun and it’s completely visual. That’s part of the other thing. It’s one thing to describe the species of vampire and say, ‘He’s got these crazy fangs’.... But when you actually see Raphael’s artwork, it jumps off the page.  The sensuality of it and the immediacy of it was appealing right away to doing it as a comic book.

YV: This being your first comic book series, what were some of the challenges you faced?

Snyder: It was strange how painless it was and I really did sort of grow up around the comic shop.  The ones I remember being completely seminal were everything from “The Dark Knight Returns” … you know Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing.” Frank Miller’s “Year One” also. Spider-Man, not to go over to Marvel. The things DC was doing with Superman at that time too - - The Man of Steel with John Byrne -- all those things…. It was a great time to be a comic book fan when I was 9, 10, 11, years old. For me personally, comics have been a strong influence on my writing. Reading comics is not something I did as a child and stopped doing as I became an adult. So the transition in that way was not that bad at all. The thing that’s different in a surprising way, for me, is that … literary writing, as much as I love it, is very lonely. It’s just you being the writer, editor and artist for a long time all by yourself. One of the great things about this is working with Raphael and Mark; you collaborate for a good part of the day and they wind up bringing so many interesting creative ideas to the table that make the series so much better. It’s something that makes me feel like I’m part of something outside my computer. That was the biggest shock. I didn’t realize how collaborative it would be on a day-to-day basis. That’s been one of the most inspiring things about it.

YV: There’s obviously an audience in the vampire genre. How do you set yourself apart from the Twilights and True Bloods?

Snyder: I think each one of them bring something exciting to the table when it comes to vampires. This comic is supposed to follow the tradition of our favorite horror stories where the vampires are meant to be scary and adult. They’re not romantic figures the way they are in these other franchises.  They’re meant to be creatures that have been preying on humans for a long time and have their own history. We’ve been trying not to think of the audience that much, except to try and put out the best story we can for them to enjoy; one that people will love enough to open up a comic book and read. I’m hoping that the people that like those things will like this too. So far, we’ve just been focused on making our own favorite comic of the year.

YV: How did Stephen become involved?

Snyder: I’ve been in touch with him for a long time. He wrote a quote for my story collection; I’ve been sort of closely in touch with him ever since. I sent the series for him once it was green-lit by Vertigo, just to get his opinion on it; to see if there was anything I could do better. Asked him if he was interested in giving me a quote at some point if it went through.  And he wrote back saying that he liked the idea enough that if we’d be willing to let him, he’d be up for doing a couple of issues. Of course, everyone was on board.  I made sure he was serious about it and he was. We went back to DC and Vertigo and they were really excited about it cause he’s never done an original comic before; he’s had things adapted but this is the first time he’s actually scripted one. So it was a new thing for him.

Snyder: Originally, I had tried to make it really easy for him because I wasn’t sure how much he wanted to do. The characters were already developed. I wrote him a brief outline of what could happen in each issue. I told him, ‘Have fun with the dialogue; do whatever you want to do in terms of details.’ He got into Issue 2 and he wrote me an e-mail saying, ‘You mind if I go off the res a little bit?’ I was like, ‘Do whatever you want.’ And he wound up writing five issues where he took the story that I wrote so much further -- to such a better place. He made up so many new things, added so many elements to the characters and story. There are so many twists and turns. There’s psychological layers to the characters; he really made it his own thing. It was really inspiring to watch him take these characters and make them and their stories so much better. I think people are really going to like it.

--Yvonne Villarreal

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Artwork: Vertigo. Photo credit: Los Angles Times archives

I was only inside the venue for 10 minutes when I saw a familiar face in the churning crowd of the stadium's outer ring. I called out to J.J. Abrams and he smiled, waved and paused but really there was no way to stop and talk amid the crowd current. "See you inside," he said.

My son, Ben, who is 8, was attending his very first concert and he recognized Abrams but not as the creative brand behind "Lost," "Star Trek" and "Fringe": "Hey, he's the guy who played keyboards in that video 'Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions,' right?" Um, wow, yeah, son, that is him.

We were lucky enough to get bracelets for the pre-show party at the Round Room, a swanky (but sweltering) VIP tent, and one of the first people we saw when we walked in was Ewan MacGregor, who was posing for pictures with some people. Ben was properly awed by the presence of Obi-Wan Kenobi and he was searching faces in the rest of the room in hopes, I suspect, that Chewbacca might be in some corner debating the merits of "Joshua Tree" with General Grievous.

The room was dotted with Hollywood execs (Tom Freston, Jimmy Iovine, Jeffrey Katzenberg) and glossy-magazine faces (Cindy Crawford, Paris Hilton) but they held zero interest for Ben. I ran into a friend, Nancy Sullivan, who said Chris O'Donnell, the former Boy Wonder of "Batman & Robin," was walking around, and not long after Colin Farrell, who probably doesn't put "Daredevil" at the top of his resume, sauntered in wearing a jaunty hat. I saw Michael Bay arrive with his statuesque date and walked over to say hello. I congratulated him on the commercial success of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (which still stands as the highest-grossing film of 2009) and got him to promise I could visit the set of the third robot film. Ben, hoping he might get to tag along, smiled like the Boucher family had just won the lottery.

It was time to head for our seats so I assumed the fanboy subplots were over but I was wrong. The startling set for the show, the cosmic claw, looks like something that Jack Kirby would have dreamed up. Bono mentioned Scarlett Johansson, star of "Iron Man 2" and "The Spirit," at one point but that was just a footnote. The great line came midway through the show (a show, by the way, that was absolutely astounding) when Bono began a tongue-in-cheek introduction of the band members. He described the Edge as a mad scientist and an alien visitor, whose mission has "gone where no other guitarist has gone before." I wondered if, somewhere in the crowd of 97,000, Abrams fell out of his seat at that line. Bono added, "He's Mr. Spock to us, he's the Edge to you."

Lovely. Live long and prosper, rock fans.

-- Geoff Boucher

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Photos: Bono performs at U2's Rose Bowl show in Pasadena. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times.

UPDATED: Fixed a misspelled name. And, no, it wasn't Bonno or Beno and Bobo.

The 2009 Scream Awards air this Tuesday night and I don't know if the broadcast version will (or even could) have the same frenetic charm of the taping last weekend at the Greek Theatre, but I hope that it does well. This is a franchise that I'm rooting for, quite honestly, as a fan of sci-fi, comics, fantasy and all the other entertainments that veer toward the fantastic. The Scream Awards may sound like a horror gala, but it's more like Comic-Con International -- it's a big, noisy tent for any and all of the contemporary Hollywood enterprises that require a special-effects budget, but it also has enough sense of history to hand an on-air award to Stan Lee.

Last year, the Scream Awards earned  everyone's attention by getting George Lucas and Tim Burton in the house. This year they could have gone for a mainstream, play-it-safe approach to the program, but instead they gave stage time to comics writer Geoff Johns (a superstar in comics, to be sure, but not exactly a big draw for mainstream television audiences who think Sinestro and Kilowog sound like the new models from Hyundai) and brought in pirate king Keith Richards instead of, say, the Jonas Brothers dressed like zombies. Co-executive producers Michael Levitt and Casey Patterson aren't crazy enough to ignore mass appeal -- there was a nice big chunk of time devoted to "Twilight," which will bring a young female viewership to the broadcast, I suspect. 

I sat down with Patterson at the control board during part of the show and she was giddy. It was hard to hear her -- the crowd was cheering and the music was pumping -- and it occurred to me that maybe that's why they call it the Scream Awards. She told me that one of the reasons the show feels different than other trophy broadcasts is that, unlike most awards franchises, this one does not completely rely on all the scripted one-liners that are force-fed to presenters from a teleprompter. Here's hoping that trend catches on. We watched the show for a bit and she shook her head slowly. "Can you believe all of this? You were here last year, you know how great it was, but now it's just getting even better. I feel like people get it now, they know what we're trying to do and they know who we are."

-- Geoff Boucher

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"Battlestar Galactica" will be back from the dead on Tuesday.

The best-written sci-fi show in the history of television ended its 75-episode run last March, but it won't feel like it Tuesday, not with a special tribute to the show airing during the 2009 Scream Awards broadcast and a new "Battlestar" film, "The Plan," hitting store shelves that day as a DVD and Blu-ray release. That's the trailer for "The Plan" above.

At the Scream Awards taping last week at the Greek Theatre, amid plumes of pyro and a vigorous ovation, the stars of "The Big Bang Theory" introduced a good-sized contingent of "Battlestar" cast members and, somehow, it already felt like it had been too long since we'd seen them together. Backstage, I got to catch up with some of the show's familiar faces, among them Edward James Olmos, Kate Vernon, Tahmoh Penikett and executive producer David Eick.

"What a night!" Olmos said with a big smile. He was excited about the upcoming release of "The Plan," which he directed, and didn't seem phased by SyFy's decision to postpone the movie's television airing to next year. In a way, I'm sure he prefers that fans seek it out on home video so they can see the director's cut; the broadcast edition may well be shorter. I asked him how much he expected would be trimmed from  "The Plan" when it eventually did air.

"A lot. I have mixed feelings about that, of course," Olmos said. "I'm glad to have the DVD and Blu-ray version but hate seeing it chopped for television. But that was done to the show the whole time. We would make our cut of the show, and it would be excellent and come in at 44 or 45 minutes and they would look at it and say, 'Okay, that's great, it plays fantastic, it's beautiful. But you need to cut it down to 41 minutes. It really hurts."

Sure, but I asked Olmos if those wounds really last -- after all, the extended-version episodes now available on home video are the fossil record of the show's achievement and will be watched for years and years, perhaps by far more people than the audiences reached by the broadcasts.

"That's right, that's what's going to hold. They are more complete. And, like 'Blade Runner,' I think this show will be more poignant and more appreciated in 30 years than it is today. I lot of people don't get it right now. Most people didn't get 'Blade Runner,' either."

Olmos leaned forward and gave me a funny look. I could tell he wanted to try out one of his new theories on me. Olmos always has new theories, which is why it's always a treat to run into him.

"If you want to try something, go do this: Watch the entire run of 'Battlestar' from beginning to end and at the end, in those last moments when Six says to Baltar, 'It's all going to happen again' and Baltar says, 'No I think maybe this time humanity has learned,' after that, as they go walking off into Times Square, put in 'Blade Runner' and watch it. 'Battlestar' finishes in 2008 and 'Blade Runner' starts in 2019. There's a lineage there. Gaff becomes the direct descendant of Adama, and the lineage is so pure they resemble each other."

Just then Eick joined the conversation. "And by the way, don't think that was a mistake. Don't think that was an accident. Look, we cast Eddie because of 'Blade Runner.' I grew up loving that film, and we were clearly thinking of it as an influence and a standard to seek. The funny thing is, when you're putting together a show, you say, 'Oh and we'll get an Edward James Olmos type for this role,' you know, just as you're filling in the blanks in your mind, and we did that. Never for a moment did we actually think we would get him."

Olmos looked at Eick for a long moment and then nodded. "I'm glad you did."

-- Geoff Boucher

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You never know who you're going to meet at the Scream Awards -- last year I found myself standing between Marilyn Manson and George Lucas -- and this year didn't disappoint. Not long after I arrived at the Greek Theatre for the taping of this year's show I was whisked off to a trailer for an unexpected interview with a guitar hero who qualifies as true rock royalty -- even if he was tapping his cigarette into an ashtray he had just made out of aluminum foil.

"I've never see one of these shows," Keith Richards said with a rasp and a chuckle, "but it sounded like fun and when I heard Johnny was going to be involved, I said, 'Well, at least I'll know somebody there.'"

Richards meant Johnny Depp, of course, the actor who based a good bit of his Jack Sparrow screen persona on the bleary, decadent charm of the Rolling Stones guitarist. Depp even brought Richards into the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise for a cameo as Sparrow's father. For the youngest generations of movie fans, the 65-year-old musician actually may be better known for his sea-dog duty than he is for playing the signature riffs in "Satisfaction," "Gimme Shelter" and "Start Me Up."

"Yeah, it's always cropped up, ever since I was in the movie and some kids even think I'm Johnny's dad," Richards said. "Like his real dad. That's not so bad, right?" Then, with a wink, he added: "We might enlarge upon that in another movie."

Depp may be the biggest movie star in the world right now, but later, during the taping (shown in photo above), he was the picture of respectful deference to Richards as he presented his British elder with the Rock Immortal Award. It's a trophy that maybe they should call the Rock Undead Award, considering its past winners were Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. Those previous winners have long and interesting careers but they can't really compete with a member of the Stones as far as pop-culture heft. I said as much to Richards and, behind a haze of smoke, he grinned. "Yeah, really, we're going uptown now."

Richards and Depp were born 20 years and an ocean apart, but their close friendship has become a topic of fascination. Rolling Stone (the magazine, not the band) put the pair on its cover in 2007 with a story that read like a long valentine to a pair of roadhouse souls who just happen to be wildly rich and famous. The pair met in the mid-1990s and Richards talks of Depp as a peer, not a protege.

"We've grown together," Richards said."Funny enough, I met Johnny through my son, Marlon, who said, 'Dad, this my mate, Johnny.' I knew the name but not much more. He was just a friend of my son's, I didn't know more than that. It's been grand."

Richard needed to get going, so I asked one last question: Looking back on rock and its history, was it strange to him that we've reached a point where young consumers show more marketplace enthusiasm for buying ring tones and guitar-playing video games than albums?

He shrugged and said it was all just part of the evolution of a revolution. "It's interesting how the music has pervaded everywhere. You have video games now and movies and commercials and TV. You can't get escape it. There's the air you breathe and there's rock 'n' roll."

As I left the trailer I noticed that Depp had been waiting patiently right outside the door for his turn to visit with his pal and, when he did enter the smoky trailer, he had a big smile on his face.

-- Geoff Boucher

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PHOTOS: Top two photos by Kevin Winter / Getty Images. Johnny Depp portrait by Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times.

It’s been 57 years since Astro Boy first took flight in Japan, but today the rocket-powered robot boy attempts flying to new heights with a feature film that may surprise even loyal fans with its bittersweet tale.

“Astro Boy” features Freddie Highmore in the role of the mechanized wonder boy while Nicolas Cage, Kristen Bell, Bill Nighy and Samuel L. Jackson lead the deep supporting cast. The movie is heavy on heroic action and futuristic spectacle, but there are also themes of identity and loss that may remind adult viewers of Steven Spielberg’s “A.I: Artificial Intelligence.”

For Cage, it was those themes that set the movie apart from the standard lighter-than-air animated entertainments of today. The 45-year-old father said he was pulled in by the premise of a synthetic boy who believes he is a “real” human and then finds himself cast out by his creator.

“The sadness of the story,” Cage said, “is exactly what drew me to ‘Astro Boy.’ I can't help but feel for him especially when his father rejects him.”

Cage’s character, Dr. Tenma, is a famed scientist in the floating metropolis of Astro City, where he spends less time than he should with his son, Toby, and too much time with the belligerent military leader Gen. Stone (Donald Sutherland). Stone’s recklessness causes the lab test of a new weapon to go awry and Tenma’s son is killed in the chaos. Driven to obsession by grief and guilt, Tenma constructs a robot that resembles his lost child and invests it with the boy’s memories. That robot becomes the superpowered Astro, but Tenma sees only a cruel reminder of his dead son.

“Astro Boy” presented a number of challenges for producer Maryann Garger, director David Bowers and their team. For one thing, the film was made in 20 months, a mad-dash pace compared with most contemporary animated features. Garger said that was in part due to the imperatives of deals struck with licensing partners, which include McDonald's, L.A. Looks and American Greetings.

But Bowers, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Timothy Harris, said there was a freedom in the rigid schedule. “Some of these films take five years and it’s just too long,” said the British filmmaker, whose directorial debut was "Flushed Away" in 2006. "I was intrigued by making a movie so quickly because I knew I would have to go with first instincts.”

Another challenge was finding a film that would satisfy loyal, longtime fans of the character but also deliver a crowd pleaser to the wide Western audience that had little knowledge of the hero. Garger, who was also the producer of "Flushed Away" and "First Flight," said the key thing was to hold on to the sadness of the origin story and then build a bright action film around it.

"It's part of the lore, and what makes that lore so powerful is that it is about this tragic event that happens and it's nothing that we could shy away from, even though there were concerns" from some voices involved in the production, Garger said. "But it's the core of what this property is. It's a very emotional story. I think that's why it's so classic and it's lasted over 50 years."

What about pleasing Japanese fans and the wide Western audience? Cage, a longtime fan of "Astro Boy," dismissed the notion that anything would be lost in the translation during Astro's flight into feature film.

"I try not to think of things in terms of how one culture will receive a movie versus another. The fact that 'Astro Boy' appealed to me as a boy in America was proof that the story and character transcend cultural stereotypes."

Bowers said his approach was to please himself first: “I’m quite selfish, so I just made the movie for myself. At the same time I love Astro Boy, I love the property, so I wasn’t about to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Astro Boy began as Tetsuwan Atomu (Iron-Armed Atom) and was created by the late, great Osamu Tezuka. It first appeared in 1951. The manga jumped to the television screen in the 1960s for a black-and-white animated series, which was followed through the decades by popular color cartoons, a mountain of manga, toys, etc.

“There’s a lot of love and respect for the original property -- especially the manga as opposed to the television shows -- but this film is not entirely faithful,” Bowers said. “One of the wrinkles I added is that when Astro is created, Tenma gives him Toby's memories, so when he awakes for the first time Astro believes he’s a real boy. That’s different from the manga, where he always knows he’s a robot. ... I wanted to give Astro some serious identity problems.”

Highmore has plenty of experience dealing with roles steeped in bookshelf history and fan expectation. He starred as Charlie in Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and took on roles in "The Spiderwick Chronicles" and "The Golden Compass."

Highmore was the first one cast on "Astro Boy" and, recording his parts in the studio first and alone, he was a key shaper of the film's tone, Bowers said. For Highmore, the project was a satisfying mix of plot elements that recalled "Pinocchio" and the vivid spectacle of a highflying sci-fi romp. 

"There's different layers to the movie, there's a lot of action and the fact that he is a superhero and the kids will love all that," said the 17-year-old British actor. "But there's also some bittersweet things, like Astro's desire to fit in, his search for identity and his relationship with his father. There's all the history of the character too, but for us it was important for this film to be its own piece. I think fans who know 'Astro Boy' will enjoy and so will people coming to it all for the first time."

The cast also includes Nathan Lane, Charlize Theron, Eugene Levy and Matt Lucas (who will be playing both Tweedledee and Tweedledum in the upcoming "Alice in Wonderland").

With Jackson, Lane, Cage and Sutherland, Bowers acknowledged that there are big personalities in the movie, but he said they all deliver performances that are controlled.

"It was a challenge coming in but in the end it worked wonderfully," Bowers said. "I told each of them that the movie that I hoped I was making would have an emotional truth to it and that the performances would be very natural, I didn't want it to be cartoony or broad. But there's a lot of humor in the film. Once we got the emotional side of the story working, then we just went and put as much action, fun and spectacle in the movie as we could fit. The action makes the movie fun and, hopefully, the story makes it involving."

-- Geoff Boucher

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Credit: "Astro Boy" film images, Imagi Studios

UPDATE: I had a line in this story that said this was Imagi Studio's first film. It is a key release for them and their biggest project to date, but certainly not their first feature.

Max Records

JP: When did you first read "Where the Wild Things Are?"

Records: Hmmm ... I don't know.  A long, long time ago.  My parents first read it to me whenever they started reading to me.  I was super, super young.

JP: What did you do when you found out that you got the role?

Records: I was pretty psyched. I don't know what I did specifically.  Was probably just super-mega mega psyched!

JP: I assume you may have had to act in front of CGI screens?

Records: Actually, there was basically no CGI screening -- for the most part there were no screens.  There was always Catherine Keener or somebody.  When the 'Wild Things' weren't there, then it was Catherine Keener right there off camera, reading the lines, or Spike or somebody.

JP: So you were able to meet some of your other costars?

Records: I have actually still never met some of the other costars. The few that I have met, which is Catherine O'Hara, Lauren Ambrose, James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker.  The only times that I met those guys were during press junkets and stuff.

JP: What are your hobbies?

Records: Me and my friends like to wrap mattress film and duct tape around PVC piping and then make foam weapons out of it that we have big foam battles with.

JP: Wow.

Records: Yeah. It's cool.

JP: That's imaginative.  Speaking of imagination, some say that the movie is a little too much for younger kids.  What do you think about that?

Records: It depends on the kid.  There are parts of it that are pretty intense. When I was 7 years old, I could not have seen this movie.  It would've scared me.  But my younger brother, who's now 7, could've seen this a year ago.  It depends on the kid.

JP: If you were on an island with these creatures, how would you have handled the situation?

Records: I probably wouldn't have started a dirt-clod fight for fear of serious injury, but that's about it for the most part.

JP: You were in almost every scene. Was it tough on you at all?

Records: There were times that were very hard and just tough.  But there were also times that were totally just running around and having a bunch of fun.  It was fun.

JP: When you finally got to sit down and see the movie, did it turn out how you thought it would?

Records: I guess when I went to see the movie the first time I didn't have any expectations. I was just really excited to see it.  I don't know what I was thinking, but in the end, when I walked out of the theater I thought it was just so beautiful.

JP: So you're looking for your next role now or just keeping your options open?

Records: I think if the right job comes along, that I'd definitely look into it.  I think for the most part, right now  me and my family are just gonna go and take a long, long nap.

-- Jevon Phillips

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Photos: Max Records (top) arrives for the premiere of the film "Where the Wild Things Are," in New York Tuesday, Oct., 13. Credit: Stuart Ramson/Associated Press. Bottom: Max and Carol in "Where the Wild Things Are." Credit: Warner Bros.