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Posted: |
Aug 18, 2019 - 2:45 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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In DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY, “Deke” (Adam Roarke), a racecar mechanic, drives to a motel where his partner, “Larry” (Peter Fonda), spent the night with a young blonde named “Mary” (Susan George). As Larry gets into the driver’s seat, he asks Deke about building a faster car, but Deke tells him “speed is expensive.” Driving past a supermarket, Larry mentions the increasing price of groceries, then hatches a spur of the moment plan to rob the store. He drops Deke off at the home of the store’s manager, “George Stanton” (an uncredited Roddy McDowall). Deke accosts “Evelyn Stanton” (Lynn Borden) in the shower and holds the woman and her daughter, “Cindy” (Adrianne Herman), hostage while Larry goes back to the market. Meanwhile, Mary, who is displeased at being left at the motel, follows Larry to the store.
During the shoot, Vic Morrow, playing “Capt. Everett Franklin,” insisted on a one million dollar life insurance policy before he would film any scenes involving the helicopter, and said that if he wouldn't be insured, he would walk off the picture. His wish was granted, and he very reluctantly agreed to fly in the chopper. When asked why he wanted the policy, Morrow replied "I have always had a premonition that I'll be killed in a helicopter crash!" Of course, on July 23, 1982, Morrow was indeed killed, along with two children, when a helicopter was brought down by special effects explosions, right on top of them while they were filming TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983). Gary McLarty, the stunt pilot that was flying the helicopter that killed Morrow, also appears in this movie as a State Trooper.
Susan George and Peter Fonda in DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY
John Hough directed the 1974 film, which has an unreleased score by Jimmie Haskell.
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easy rider did BOFFO at the box- office!
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 5:15 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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A riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” OPEN SEASON finds three Vietnam vets, “Ken,” “Greg,” and “Art” (Peter Fonda, John Phillip Law, and Richard Lynch), going on an annual getaway, and terrorizing a young couple traveling the same roads. “Nancy” (Cornelia Sharpe) is a sexy blonde, and her companion, “Martin” (Alberto de Mendoza), is a clean-cut dweeb whom the hunters correctly guess is having an extramarital affair with Nancy. This culminates in a cross-country hunt, in which the couple is permitted a half hour head start.
The original script by David Osborn and Liz Charles-Williams was purchased 31 October 1973. By 8 November 1973, filming was underway in Spain with a $1.5 million budget financed by producer José S. Vicuña’s Spanish company, Impala S.A., as well as by the Swiss studio, Arpa S.A. The picture was “Made at”: “Estudios Roma, Madrid; Pinewood Studios, England; and Orthophonic Recording, Rome.”
John Phillip Law, Richard Lynch, and Peter Fonda in OPEN SEASON
While Columbia Pictures had acquired the domestic rights to the film for release in the U.S. and Canada before it went into production, Warner Bros. was reportedly in charge of distribution in Spain. Peter Collinson directed the 1974 release, which had an unreleased score by Ruggero Cini.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 5:58 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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RACE WITH THE DEVIL represented the second pairing of Peter Fonda and Warren Oates, who first starred together in 1971’s THE HIRED HAND. In this 1975 film, two couples (Fonda & Lara Parker, and Oates & Loretta Swit) are vacationing together in an RV from Texas to Colorado and are terrorized after they witness a murder during a Satanic ritual. Fonda's screen wife Lara Parker once roomed with his sister Jane Fonda at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, NY. Sixteen cars, two trucks and eight motorcycles were destroyed in stunts for the film.
Lara Parker, Warren Oates, and Peter Fonda in RACE WITH THE DEVIL
Jack Starrett replaced original director Lee Frost when Twentieth Century Fox head Alan Ladd Jr. was unsatisfied with the dailies. Most of Frost’s footage was re-shot. Reportedly, this was Starrett's favorite movie of his own. Leonard Rosenman’s score was released by Intrada in 2017.
Reviews, including those in the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, commended the fast pace of the story, the dimensionality of the characters and the convincing nature of the Satanists’ threat. But reviews in Variety and the New York Times found the film clichéd.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 6:31 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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The 1976 action-adventure KILLER FORCE is set at The Syndicated Diamond Corporation mining compound in the South African desert. The mine’s second-in-command security officer, “Mike Bradley” (Peter Fonda) has been dispatched to an “airborne intruder” alert picked up by radar on the mine’s desert perimeter. The SDC’s Chief of Security,” Harry Webb” (Telly Savalas), making a surprise visit, is convinced someone is stealing diamonds from the complex, and he suspects everyone, including the mine manager’s daughter, beautiful international model “Clare Chambers” (Maud Adams), who’s there visiting Bradley, her long-distance lover.
Maud Adams and Peter Fonda in KILLER FORCE
Val Guest directed and co-wrote the film. Georges Garvarentz's score was released by Music Box in 2013.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 6:45 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Writer-director Jonathan Demme based the screenplay for FIGHTING MAD on actual news stories about "unsolved acts of sabotage" against mining companies, "presumably by outraged farmers." In the film, an Arkansas farmer (Peter Fonda) stages a one-man war against corrupt land developers who want to evict him and his neighbors from their farms for real estate developments.
The opening montage of scenes featuring Fonda and Gino Franco driving home to Arkansas was shot by Tak Fujimoto, who was originally Jonathan Demme's choice of cinematographer, as they had worked together on a couple other films prior to this. But because this was a union picture, Fujimoto got caught by the union teamsters and was sent packing back home to California. Although Fujimoto's footage was used in the film, Michael Watkins is the only credited cinematographer.
Peter Fonda in FIGHTING MAD
To give film editor Anthony Magro some relief from the film's tight deadlines, Demme actually edited the entire climatic sequence of the picture. Like many other films, Peter Fonda provided his own artillery for the climactic scene where he infiltrates Crabtree's (Philip Carey’s) house.
Fonda insisted that Bruce Langhorne compose the music for the 1976 movie. Langhorne had scored Fonda's directorial debut, 1971's THE HIRED HAND. The score has not had a release.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 7:32 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Upon uncovering the dirty secret of futuristic theme-park FUTUREWORLD, an ex-employee is killed after he tips off two reporters (Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner) who decide to do an undercover investigation. Yul Brynner reprised his role as “Gunfighter” from WESTWORLD (1973) in a dream sequence for this sequel. In was Brynner's final film before his death on October 10, 1985 at the age of 65. The picture was the theatrical film debut of longtime game show host, Allen Ludden.
Producer James T. Aubrey stated that he tried to make FUTUREWORLD while he was president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M). After Aubrey’s departure, M-G-M decided to shelve the film to focus on another science fiction film, LOGAN’S RUN (1976). Aubrey rejoined the project after American International Pictures (AIP) paid M-G-M and author of WESTWORLD Michael Crichton $100,000 each.
Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner in FUTUREWORLD
FUTUREWORLD utilized NASA facilities in Houston, TX. Use of the center was free, but AIP paid the cost of extra security and overtime to NASA employees. Locations included the mission control center used for the Apollo moon missions. Most of the center’s major buildings were used and the production company had to negotiate with private contractors and sub-contractors who utilized the space. Producer Paul N. Lazarus, III stated that the shooting schedule was adjusted due to the film crew’s lack of experience in lighting and wiring for sound in such humongous chambers. A prop rocket was damaged when it fell off the transport vehicle, delaying shooting by a day. The four weeks of principal photography was completed 31 March 1976.
FUTUREWORLD set a company record for AIP, with 600 prints being made for the film’s release. The film won the Best Motion Picture of 1976 award from the Academy of Science-Fiction and Fantasy Films. FUTUREWORLD was the first American film shown to a general audience in the People’s Republic of China. Other U.S. films had been screened for elite audiences, but the day after U.S. president Jimmy Carter officially recognized mainland China’s sovereign nation status, Jules Stein, senior vice-president of AIP received a cable requesting the film for general distribution in China.
Richard T. Heffron directed the film. Fred Karlin’s score was released by Reel Music Down Under in 2004.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 4:46 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Peter Fonda co-produced his own CONVOY-like film with HIGH-BALLIN’, in which two truck drivers (Fonda and Jerry Reed) fight off thugs who have been hired to drive them out of business. The picture was filmed in Toronto, Canada during the winter of 1978 and picked up by American International Pictures for release in the summer of 1978.
Several contemporary critics agreed with the 16 June 1978 review in the Independent Film Journal, which stated, “although HIGH-BALLIN’ is no great shakes in terms of original storytelling, director Peter Carter provides a good deal more polish and flash than one might expect of the raucous road genre.” The three leads received praise in a variety of publications, with the Los Angeles Times singling out Helen Shaver’s portrayal and Boxoffice preferring Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed’s performances. The Motion Picture Product Digest had the harshest review, describing the film as “[existing] not to provide any kind of realistic picture of the trucking industry today but to exploit it for a standard action movie with lots of violence.” Paul Hoffert’s score has not had a release.
Jerry Reed, Helen Shaver, and Peter Fonda in HIGHBALLIN’
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 5:35 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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WANDA NEVADA was initially set to debut as a television film on the NBC network, but the producers withdrew from the arrangement after United Artists signed on as theatrical distributor. Set in 1951, the film was a comedy-drama following the fortunes of a drifter named “Beaudray Demerille” (Peter Fonda) who wins a young orphan named “Wanda McGinty” (13-year-old Brooke Shields) in a poker game and takes her gold prospecting in the Grand Canyon.
Henry Fonda, Peter Fonda's father, plays an old prospector in the Grand Canyon. As the prospector leaves Beaudray and Wanda, the song "Oh My Darling, Clementine" plays on the soundtrack. (Henry Fonda starred in the John Ford film MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) as Wyatt Earp.)
Peter Fonda and Brooke Shields in WANDA NEVADA
Principal photography began 7 June 1978 on location in Arizona. The $3 million production visited The Palace Bar, a historic saloon in Prescott, AZ, as well as sites in Page, AZ. A twenty-six person crew, equipped with three rafts and a picture boat, descended into the Grand Canyon for four days to film the final sequence of Beaudray and Wanda navigating the Colorado River. The production also shot at Marble Canyon, a gateway to the Grand Canyon.
Peter Fonda directed the film, which had an unreleased score by Ken Lauber. The film opened in several markets during Memorial Day weekend 1979. Box-office earnings by the end of summer 1979 were $1.6 million, while domestic rentals totaled $800,000. The final box office take was $2.4 million. Peter Fonda planned a sequel titled, “Wanda Havana,” and received permission to shoot on location in Cuba, but the project never came to fruition.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 5:45 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Burt Reynolds’ 1981 action-comedy THE CANNONBALL RUN followed a wide variety of eccentric competitors who participate in a wild and illegal cross-country road race. However, the entrants will do anything to win the race, including low-down, dirty tricks. Reynolds played “J. J. McClure,” owner of a land-sea-air delivery business. Roger Moore was millionaire “Seymour Goldfarb, Jr.,” who is chastised by his mother (Molly Picon) for calling himself “Roger Moore” and thinking he is the star of James Bond films. “Seymour” was originally written as a man who thinks he's James Bond. But for legal reasons, he was charged to a character who thinks he is Roger Moore.
The film was based on the “Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash,” a “no-holds-barred transcontinental race.” The race, created by writer Brock Yates, was held five times between 1971 and 1979, and was named to honor driver Erwin “Cannonball” Baker, who set a 1933 cross-country record of 53 hours and 30 minutes. In an interview in the November 2002 Car and Driver, Yates noted that he used incidents from the races as material for the film, including the use of an ambulance and a fake patient. The film’s director, Hal Needham, accompanied Yates in the ambulance during the final Cannonball race in April 1979. Yates’s wife, Pamela, was the “patient” and a radiologist named Lyle Royer played the role of the “doctor.” The ambulance driven by Burt Reynolds’ team in the film is the ambulance Needham and Yates drove in the actual race. The film has a long brawl towards the end with all the Cannonballers against a gang of bikers, led by Peter Fonda.
The $12 million film was directed by former stunt director Hal Needham, his fourth film with Burt Reynolds. The film’s song score was released on a Warner Bros. LP, but has not been reissued on CD. The film did excellent business, grossing about $90 million worldwide.
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 8:23 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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THE ROSEGARDEN is set in modern-day Germany, where an old man, “Aaron Reichenbach” (Maximilian Schell), attacks another old man (Kurt Hübner) and is arrested. The attacker refuses to speak. A female lawyer, “Gabriele Schlueter-Freund” (Liv Ullmann), is appointed to him. She discovers that the attacker has numbers tattooed on his arm, and that the attacked man was a WWII German officer. Peter Fonda plays Gabriele’s estranged husband, “Herbert Schlueter.”
Peter Fonda in THE ROSEGARDEN
THE ROSEGARDEN marked Dutch director Fons Rademakers’s third film about World War II, following THE SPLITTING IMAGE (1963) and THE ASSAULT (1986), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Rademakers was not eager to make another picture about the war when he first read the script for THE ROSEGARDEN, but he was struck by the true story of twenty Jewish children who were hanged at Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg, Germany, after being used for medical experimentation by a Nazi physician named Kurt Heissmeyer at the Neuengamme concentration camp. Heissmeyer believed he could find a vaccine for tuberculosis by injecting the children with live tuberculosis bacilli, and was testing Nazi theories of racial genetic superiority by inflicting the children with the debilitating disease.
As the war came to an end, the Nazis were under pressure to conceal their crimes, and the twenty children were taken from Neuengamme to Bullenhuser Damm School, where they were hidden in the basement for over one week. At the time, British troops had already invaded Hamburg, and were located just over three miles away from the school. On the night of 20 April 1945, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and just ten days before the Führer committed suicide, SS Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel oversaw the hanging of the twenty children, along with their adult caretakers and at least thirty Russian prisoners. Years later, students at Bullenhuser Damm School planted a rose garden at the site to honor the murdered children, and a memorial was constructed in the school basement.
Upon reading THE ROSEGARDEN, Fons Rademakers was outraged to learn that Arnold Strippel had been declared “permanently unfit to stand trial” and was exonerated from his participation in the Bullenhuser executions. Since Strippel was still living as a free man, Rademakers believed it was urgent to bring the story to light and use filmmaking as a tool to exact justice where the German legal system had fallen short. Rademakers, who was arrested in Amsterdam, Holland, and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for harboring Jews during WWII, told Dutch Heights that “collective guilt” was an inadequate response to the Holocaust, and that it was imperative to continue identifying war criminals, dead or alive. Rademakers argued that the failure to single out perpetrators by name promoted “the misconception that it [the Holocaust] wasn’t so bad, after all.”
Principal photography began in January 1989 after seven years of preparation, indicating that the project began before Arnold Strippel’s second arraignment in the mid-1980s. The budget was set at approximately $5 million. Cannon Films was the distribution company, with its owners, Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus, as executive producers, although Golan and Globus are not credited onscreen, and Pathé International has a title card on the film instead of Cannon. Due to threat of bankruptcy and a pending investigation of fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cannon was sold to Pathé in the late 1980s, and Golan left the company before the film’s 1989 release.
Arnold Strippel tried to halt production on the film, and demanded that his name be changed in the script. Even when the picture was set for a Los Angeles release on 22 December 1989, Strippel was reportedly still trying to prevent its opening. Star Liv Ullmann hoped Strippel was successful, since it would bring attention to the ways in which international legal systems continued to capitulate to, and protect, war criminals. The character’s name was ultimately changed to “Arnold Krenn.” Egisto Macchi’s score for the film was released by Silva Screen.
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There's a third Bernstein film music composer? And none of them are related? That's more than Max and Fred Steiner!
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2019 - 10:47 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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BODIES, REST & MOTION was based on a stage play by Roger Hedden, who was hired to adapt his play for the screen, and serve as a co-producer. In the film, “Nick” (Tim Roth) is a feckless television salesman who gets fired and impulsively decides that he and his girlfriend, “Beth” (Bridget Fonda), will move to Butte, MT, which he's read is "the city of the future." He waits until the last moment to tell “Carol” (Phoebe Cates), his ex and Beth's best friend, about the move. While Nick is working his last day, “Sid” (Eric Stoltz) comes to the couple's house to paint it for the next tenants. He quickly develops an interest in Beth.
Bridget Fonda, of course, is Peter Fonda’s daughter. Peter has a small role in the film as a “motorcycle rider.” Michael Steinberg directed the 1993 film. Michael Convertino’s score was released by Big Screen/Giant Records.
Director Michael Steinberg and Peter Fonda on the set of BODIES, REST & MOTION
BODIES, REST & MOTION was featured at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 1993, where Fine Line Features acquired North American distribution rights. The film grossed only $800,000 in the U.S.
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