Grind House

[Neil]

hype house.

[Ghostboy]

That trailer contest sounds like too much fun to pass up! Especially seeing as how I'm more excited about the fake trailers than the actual films themselves.

[squints]

That trailer contest sounds like too much fun to pass up!

Yeah! and it'd be easy too. All you have to do is slightly alter the title of some cult film from the seventies just like Rob Zombie and his Ilsa, "werewolf women of the SS" crap!
Harem Keeper of the Oil Barons!

[MacGuffin]

[MacGuffin]

Directors Who Go Together, Like Blood and Guts
Source: New York Times

AUSTIN, Tex.

STUCK in traffic here some months ago, the director Robert Rodriguez — many of whose films had already dabbled in cannibalism, torture and murders of every degree and then some — began wondering how to get attention for his next effort. The answer, he decided, was a machine-gun leg.

As Mr. Rodriguez’s notion evolved, the leg became a stump on the body of the 33-year-old actress Rose McGowan. Ms. McGowan’s character, a go-go dancer, has lost her limb to zombies. Her ex-boyfriend, played by Freddy Rodriguez (no relation to the director), helps her fight back, attaching an automatic weapon to what’s left. The result is spattered throughout “Planet Terror,” a movie within the forthcoming meta-movie “Grindhouse,” from Mr. Rodriguez and his collaborator Quentin Tarantino, both of whom have been laboring for months to shock and amaze an audience that thinks it has seen it all.

“I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever thought of that before,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez said of his high-caliber epiphany during an interview at his Troublemaker Studios here last month. “Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.”

For Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Tarantino, the central problem of “Grindhouse,” due from the Weinstein Company on April 6, is a nettlesome one: how to top yourself when you’ve built a career on going over the top. Mr. Rodriguez had already tried killing as fast as he could — most recently in “Sin City” — as had Mr. Tarantino with a guest-directing spot in that film and his own “Kill Bill.” Lethal stump notwithstanding (and, yes, the director Sam Raimi played with a similar idea in “Darkman”), the solution, they perceived, would lie not simply in violence but also in breaking through the walls of the medium.

“Grindhouse” is being billed not as one movie, but two for the price of a single ticket. “Planet Terror,” from Mr. Rodriguez, is 80 minutes long, and tells a story of, well, biochemical terror. Mr. Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” clocking in at 90 minutes, has to do with a murderous stuntman and his car. The films are connected by trailers for four movies that do not exist, by four directors who do — Eli Roth (whose most recent real film was “Hostel”), Rob Zombie (“House of 1,000 Corpses”), Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead”) and Mr. Rodriguez himself.

The experiment, if it works, will be a triumph both for the filmmakers and for Weinstein, which is readying the largest promotional push since its founders, the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, established the studio on their exit from the Walt Disney Company’s Miramax unit in 2005. To hear Bob Weinstein tell it, the industry itself has something riding on the exercise. “The whole theatrical business is looking for something new, a little showmanship,” he said recently. “These guys took something old and are making it new.”

Even in the era of all-knowing fandom, the reinvention to which Mr. Weinstein refers may take some explaining, a process that will get help from a partnership with Yahoo and “as big a TV and marketing campaign as possible,” Mr. Weinstein said. The film also stands to benefit from a series of grindhouse movies currently appearing every Friday on IFC.

By the filmmakers’ lights “Grindhouse” is a gift to moviegoers who miss, or missed, the experience of watching B-grade genre pictures of the sort that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s sold what the big studios wouldn’t: usually sex and gore. The films, often shown back to back, were plugged with garish posters that promised more than their pathetically low budgets could deliver. (In that spirit “Planet Terror” isn’t about another planet at all, but our own, at a particularly bad moment.) The theaters too were sometimes a fright.

“Grindhouses were usually in the ghetto,” Mr. Tarantino said in a phone interview. “Or they were the big old downtown movie theaters that sometimes stayed open all night long, for all the bums. At the grindhouse that I went to, every week there was the new kung fu movie, or new car-chase movie, or new sexploitation movie, or blaxploitation movie.”

Audiences aren’t supposed to be comfortable with this new film. As part of the game, the two directors have “aged” their movies, adding scratches, dust and dirt to the prints. “That’s part of the lurid quality,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “It feels like it’s a popular film that’s been screened a bunch of times. The texture, all the scratches, makes it look really creepy, like you’re watching something you’re not supposed to, where anything could happen at any moment.”

And since the old grindhouse films were often missing reels, both filmmakers have purposefully cut out a segment of their movies. “My whole thing is to play with the audience,” said Mr. Tarantino. “I guarantee you, when it pops up ‘Missing Reel,’ the entire theater is going to scream. They might very well be screaming my name: ‘Quentin, you bastard! We hate you!’

“And then the next reel starts, and all of the sudden, people who don’t like each other suddenly like each other now. ‘What happened to that guy?’ The only way to do a missing reel is, it’s got to be something you can’t wait to see.”

On visiting Troublemaker Studios, it became apparent that such self-conscious cinematic slumming takes a lot of work. Remains of the shoot were scattered about: supply trucks in military garb were huddled in one corner; across the lot a collection of smashed-up automobiles were piled on top of one another, defeated, while two menacing black muscle cars lurked nearby, white skulls painted on their hoods.

In a darkened office Mr. Rodriguez tinkered with one of his computers, deciding which sequences of “Planet Terror” to show. “This section is so creepy,” he said, cueing up a hospital scene in which Josh Brolin takes revenge on his wife, an anesthesiologist played by Marley Shelton, by slowly and deliberately pricking her hands with her own needles.

In the film a biochemical weapon is released from an abandoned military base — thus the Army trucks — in a small Texas town outside Austin. Residents quickly become infected and crowd the local hospital. The virus has a gruesome effect of course: Not only do the victims’ bodies start to disintegrate (lots of bubbly skin, pus-filled sores and tumors), but they become murderous zombies.

Mr. Rodriguez said “Planet Terror” was inspired by the early-’80s movies of John Carpenter, who directed seminal horror films (“Halloween,” “The Thing”) as well as action movies (“Escape From New York”). And like Mr. Carpenter’s movies, “Planet Terror” is “very brooding.”

Mr. Rodriguez added: “It takes place at night, and weird things happen, yet everything is played very seriously, so you buy into it. Even though she’s got a machine-gun leg, it’s not jokey in any way.”

Mr. Tarantino, when thinking about his contribution, was fresh from having viewed a run of slasher films. “I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do a slasher film,’ ” he recalled. “But what’s good about the slasher-film genre is that it’s so specific. This has to happen, then this has to happen. They’re all very similar, and that’s kind of what you like about them.”

Knowing he couldn’t just copy the classic format — a killer on the loose with a knife, the “final girl” left at the end (“That would just be too self-reflective”) — Mr. Tarantino devised his own version. “Part of my fun in doing genre cinema, since everyone knows the rules well, whether unconsciously or not, is leading you down a road and giving you all the information that you’ve gotten in other movies, and then using your own information against you,” he said.

In “Death Proof” a sociopathic stuntman played by Kurt Russell stalks and kills women with his car, the black one with the white skull. “This was something I’d had in the back of my mind from making movies: that stuntmen can reinforce a car and pretty much make it death-proof,” said Mr. Tarantino. “You could drive it 100 miles an hour into a brick wall just for the experience.”

Citing the fast and furious 1971 car-chase film “Vanishing Point” as inspiration, Mr. Tarantino said he hoped that “Death Proof” would include “one of the greatest car chases, if not the greatest car chase ever made. I’ll take Top Three.”

But most of “Death Proof” isn’t action or dismemberment. It lies in the interplay between women who, in the course of evening bar hopping in Austin or joy riding in rural Tennessee, meet the stuntman, Mike. “I always loved it in horror films when you actually got to care about the characters so much that you almost resented that the horror was going to come in,” Mr. Tarantino said. “You don’t want these people to die.”

His “girls,” as he lovingly refers to them, include the actresses Rosario Dawson, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jordan Ladd and Ms. McGowan, and the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell (Uma Thurman’s double in “Kill Bill”), who plays herself. Mr. Tarantino called his female characters’ dialogue, which simultaneously evokes both “Sex and the City” and teenage girls’ MySpace profiles, “some of the best dialogue I’ve ever written in my life.” After finishing the script he sent it to Bob Dylan, because he thought Mr. Dylan “would appreciate the wordplay.” He has not yet heard back.

The filmmakers are counting on younger viewers to be considerably more responsive to what Mr. Tarantino calls their “subversion from within.” They expect to direct or produce a series of such double features for the Weinsteins. “We’ve thrown around so many ideas, it’s just a huge concept to wrap our brains around,” said Mr. Rodriguez.

Mr. Tarantino was a bit more cautious about the likelihood of future installments. “Who knows if we’ll do it?” he said. “We say we’re going to do all this stuff. I was going to do a bunch of Japanese animation sequels and prequels to ‘Kill Bill.’ Haven’t seen them lately, have you?”

[Pubrick]

this is probably going to be a lot of fun, and i'm going to enjoy it, despite the hype and QT and "git-r-done" Rodriguez.

the difference between this slick two-some and the indulgent piece of shit kill bill borefest is obvious. QT is not just wacking off for several hours here. the aim is still to be "cool", as dictated by his advisors, but he seems to be aware that the best element of "cool" is its fleeting nature.. there should be no time to fall asleep here, no narcoleptic plot development because the function of each shot is to get to the next cool part.. and not mistake every single shot for the epitome of cool.. "this guy walking to the car is SOOOO coool!".. "this worthless character is SOOO COOL", etc. none of that.

i don't even need to see the movie to know this, and that's why it'll be cool.

haven't all of his films been just one cool thing after another? the problem with Kill Bill was that he took one cool thing and stretched it beyond breaking point, it simply was not as cool as he thought. and worse, because of its long singular thread of cool, many fell into the trap of thinking it was more signficant than his previous efforts.. a grand statement or something. it was more like listening to "Cold as Ice" on loop for an hour. the yellow and black jumpsuit was a nice colour combination, that's the entire legacy that came out of those 7 years and 3 hours of waiting.. which he stole anyway right?


ah it's too hot today.

[Pozer]

haven't all of his films been just one cool thing after another?

god yes.  his dialogue is what gets to me the most...

QT's mind of coolness in the writing stage:

"Instead of just handing him the car keys, alriiiight, I'll have Sam Jackson TELL HIM to hit the button and then he'll do that alarm sound with his voice, alriiiight!" 

"He'll say, 'wake up, bitch!'  Ha ha ha ha ha!  Ooo, no!  'Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.'  That fucking rocks the casbah, man!  Ooo, I've gotta file that 'rocks the casbah' line!"

"'My name's Ron, and I like to get it on...'  'My name's Zed, and I like gettin' head.'  Nooo, they can never have the same name.  Only having them refer to past characters from my other movies is cool."

[MacGuffin]

New Sybil Danning Pic From Zombie's Nazi 'Werewolf Women'
Source: Bloody-Disgusting     

Today we've scored an exclusive image of Sybil Danning from Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, his faux trailer that will play between Robert Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" in Dimension Films' Grindhouse, which hits theaters April 6. Danning is also cast in Zombie's Halloween remake.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/8138
 

EDIT: New image

[MacGuffin]

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
"What Is Grindhouse?" - Directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez tell how the films of their youth inspired their new film here.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

Not the same old 'Grind'
Double-bill may be split for foreign auds
Source: Variety

Is "Grindhouse" an old-fashioned double feature or two separate films?

It depends on where you live.

Since the double-bill concept is alien to many filmgoers around the world, "Grindhouse" will be going out as two pics in some parts of the globe, while the U.S. and a few other English-speaking territories will see it as one singular experience.

The pic -- with a finished cost of $53 million, not the much higher figure incorrectly reported last week -- consists of two segments directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. It was envisioned as a salute to double- or triple-bills of the 1950s and '60s.

But most non-English-speaking territories have little tradition of a grindhouse double bill. So the central conceit of the film -- two short exploitation films, separated by faux trailers for upcoming cheapies -- would be lost.

When split, the two pics will be titled "Grindhouse: Planet Terror" (Rodriguez's seg) and "Grindhouse: Death Proof" (Tarantino's).

With the split, some additional footage could be added to each one.

Glen Basner, prez of Weinstein Co. international distribution, was at the Berlin fest discussing release patterns. The general plan is that the two films will be released three-five months apart, but there's no decision yet on which will be first.

They're also weighing the logistics of the faux trailers -- what will be attached to which pic. (In the united version, the pseudo-trailers will come between the two segs.)

The project was presold in a number of territories, including the U.K. (Momentum Films), Spain (Aurum), France (TFM), Germany (Senator Intl.), Italy (Medusa), Australia/New Zealand (Village Roadshow) and Thailand (Major).

In the non-English-speaking areas, the split pics will allow the Weinstein Co. and the local distrib to harness income for two pics, rather than one.

[Fernando]

This is fucking bullshit, fuck the Weinsteins up their greedy arses.

[MacGuffin]

This is fucking bullshit, fuck the Weinsteins up their greedy arses.

http://www.petitiononline.com/ghsplit/petition.html

[Pubrick]

Since the double-bill concept is alien to many filmgoers around the world,

and therefore ungraspable. ha, they're basically saying it's the dumb foreign ppl's own fault they get charged twice as much. those are balls.

the concept is foreign to everyone born after the 60s. language has NOTHING to do with it. well i'm not complaining, i wouldn't pay twice again for anything with a QT credit. the cheapness of two films in one is not only the sole reason i'm watching this, it's also, uh, the whole gimmick.

[modage]

Eli Roth talks his Grindhouse trailer
Source: ComingSoon.net

At this weekend's New York Comic Con Eli Roth talked about his mock trailer for the upcoming Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez horror anthology Grindhouse, his tribute to those great (and we use that adjective loosely) '80s slasher films based on holiday themes. Roth told us how that came about. "Quentin comes to me and he's like [at this point Roth goes into an impressive Tarantino impression] 'We're going to do this f*ckin' thing! It's going to be like so cool, right? It's going to be like Grindhouse and we're going to have fake fuckin' trailers! You gotta do one, cause Robert already shot his! Dude, check out the f*ckin' lobby cards!' It's like they talked about it, but Robert literally went and shot his while they were on the phone…and then he did f*ckin' lobby cards! This guy is unbelievable, like how did he do this? Then the lobby cards are what got everyone talking, they were so funny, and I was like, 'I gotta do one of these things.' There's this slasher movie my friend Jeff and I've been dreaming about, cause growing up in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving is the biggest f*ckin' deal, it's ALL you hear about. Every year, there was a new slasher movie and it was a different holiday… it was 'My Bloody Valentine', 'Friday the 13th', 'Halloween, 'Silent Night, Deadly Night.' I'm like, 'How can they not have done Thanksgiving?' I'm like, 'What are they going to start doing? Passover Massacre'? So when Quentin said, 'Dude, you gotta do a trailer!' and I was like 'Thanksgiving! It's my 1981 slasher movie, I've been dying to do it for years!' We had all the gags worked out.

"But first he put me in 'Grindhouse' which is a whole 'nother weird experience and then while I was shooting 'Hostel: Part II', I was writing the trailer and then I just added two days on after and we took like a decapited head here and a body part, and we kind of recycled everything we had and threw it all into this trailer, and had a great time doing it! It was so much fun. It's like two days of just money shots, every shot was like gore, nudity, no continuity, bad acting, just everything. 'Who cares If there's a light in the shot? It's Grindhouse!' It was so freeing to do something that was just fun and off-the-hook. I was like I really have to do something like this next, just something that's going to be nuts and insane and fun, almost like an old Woody Allen movie, just to switch it up a little."

We'll save Roth's hilarious analogy about being in Tarantino's segment of Grindhouse for our full interview from Comic-Con coming soon, then look for even more with Roth closer to the release of Hostel: Part II on June 8, but you can see Roth's homage to '80s holiday horror films two months earlier when Grindhouse, which opens on April 6.