The jewish barber’s speech from The Great Dictator (1940). A poor jewish barber looks just like the bad dictator and is mistaken for him. He uses his chance to deliver a speech to the people disguised as the Dictator. A speech of love and kindness.
Chaplin managed to create one of the most beautiful and epic speeches of all time in the end scene of The Great Dictator. This was also Chaplin’s first true talking picture and his best grossing film ever. This film and speech has also great significance because it was delivered just before the WW2 broke loose.
"I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was make movies."
— Paul Thomas Anderson
— Paul Thomas Anderson
This famous stunt in the movie was actually built around what went wrong with the original stunt. Keaton intended to leap from one building onto the roof of another building, but he fell short, smashing into the brick wall and falling into a net off-screen. He was injured badly enough to be laid up for three days. But when he saw the film (his camera operators were instructed to always keep filming, no matter what happened), he not only kept the mishap, he built on it, adding the fall through three awnings, the loose downspout that propels him into the firehouse, and the slide down the fire pole. (The Three Ages - 1923)
Sidney Lumet had the actors all stay in the same room for hours on end and do their lines over and over without taping them. This was to give them a real taste of what it would be like to be cooped up in a room with the same people.
12 Angry Men (1957)
The notebooks themselves were created by designers Clive Piercy and John Sabel, who filled the pages with large blocks of text, broken only by the occasional macabre photograph or ambiguous artifact taped in place.
[The team] photographed books and shadows and mapped it all out with stills to get an idea of what it would look like when you see through the pages and you see the shadows behind the page and the backlight.
The typography itself was hand-etched into black-surface scratchboard and manipulated during the film transfer process to further smear and jitter it. This transfer was then cut up and reassembled during post production to add a final layer of temporal distress.
“[Fincher] knew that he wanted it to be drawn by hand, because it was from the mind of the killer, and I was taking that further, wanting it to be like the killer did the film opticals himself.”
Even though digital editing and compositing were already commonplace in Hollywood and especially in post-production, Cooper and his team opted to assemble the majority of the sequence by hand, giving it an analog warmth and randomness which may have otherwise been cheapened by digital effects.
Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando’s friendship started when Jack moved to Mulholland Drive in 1969, living in a house next door to Brando. Brando was Jack’s idol, since Jack was a small boy living in New Jersey. He said Brando was a reclusive neighbor “I don’t see him much. He plays classical music late at night, and if I’m out walking around in the moonlight, I hear it up there. He’s the perfect neighbor.“
Once, during one of Jack’s Halloween bashes, Brando called the cops on him. “What does Marlon want from me?” Jack said. “Does he want me to move back to Neptune?“ Jack once shared his weed with Brando’s son, Christian, until he caught him stealing his stash. Brando blamed Jack for his boy’s drug problems.
They starred together in The Missouri Breaks (1976) and Jack said “It’s a pleasure to be in the same sentence with him, no less in the same movie.” but later complained about Brando’s method: “Marlon’s still the greatest actor in the world, so why does he need those goddamned cue cards?“
Brando manipulated Tom McGuane’s script and director Arthur Penn to enlarge his role in the movie. By the time Jack realized what was up and began to protest, Brando had already given his role an Irish brogue and was trying to transform Jack’s character from a noble horse thief to a noble red man. For their penultimate scene together, Brando gave Jack a full-moon target by heaving his naked bulk into a bathtub and daring Jack to shoot.
Promoting the movie, Brando stole the show. "I actually don’t think Jack Nicholson’s that bright” Brando told the reporters “Not as good as Robert De Niro, for example.“
Brando also suggested that he and Jack might be having an affair, and as preposterous as that sounded, Brando told his fictions with as straight a face as his convictions, levaing the gullibe in the media to sort out the truth.
"Poor Nicholson was stuck in the center of it all, cranking the damned thing out while I whipped in and out of scenes like greased lightning”
When Brando died, in 2004, Jack wrote an epitaph: "Marlon Brando is one of the great men of the 20th and 21th centuries, and we lesser mortals are obligated to cut through the shit and proclaim it (…)“. He also purchased his neighbor’s bungalow for $6.1 million, with the purpose of having it demolished. Jack stated that it was done out of respect to Brando’s legacy, as it had become too expensive to renovate the “derelict” buildingwhich was plagued by mold.
The “Dance of Death” in The Seventh Seal (1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
“The final scene when Death dances off with the travelers was, as I said, shot at Hovs Hallar. We had packed up for the day because of an approaching storm. Suddenly, I caught sight of a strange cloud. [Cinematographer] Gunnar Fischer hastily set the camera back into place. Several of the actors had already returned to where we were staying, so a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes.
That’s how things can happen on the set. We made the film in thirty-five days.”
– Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Films
The Anniversary You Can’t Refuse: 40 Things You Didn’t Know About The Godfather
From early on in his legendary career, Marlon Brando used cue cards for his lines, which he felt increased his spontaneity. His lines were printed and placed in his character’s line of sight; stills from the production show that they sometimes required clever placement. In one photo, a cue card is taped on the wall behind a lamp. In another, Robert Duvall is seen holding Brando’s cue cards up to his chest. In the scene above, they are held just beyond the view of the camera.
Some thought Brando used the cards out of laziness or an inability to memorize his lines. Once on The Godfather set, Brando was asked why he wanted his lines printed out. “Because I can read them that way,” he said. And that was the end of the cue-card discussion. —Nate Rawlings
Robert Duvall with Brando’s Godfather cue cards twitpic.com/bk4lov
— Emma Green (@emmafgreen) December 8, 2012