I had forgotten all about that trailer and it just sucked me right back to 2003. Chills, etc.
Was that the first trailer for Kill Bill? Must've been pretty cool to watch that trailer in 03, after waiting 5 years since Jackie Brown.
I don't believe it was the first (I think there was a teaser with Battle Without Honor or Humanity playing, and it featured footage from a cut sequence where Bill kicks ass in B&W) but once discovered it was my favorite.
Seeing this again honestly made me well up a bit, as it brought me back to a very nice time in my life. I was but a lad of 16, had my first girlfriend, I'd lost like 150 lbs the year before so I was lookin prettay prettay prettay good, and I was full of energy and enthusiasm and was madly in love with cinema. Not much has changed, it's just...harder now, I suppose. Though I have relatively few complaints, all things considered...
Also I worked at a movie theater, and this was back when 35 projection was the norm, so I used to take home all the trailers on celluloid, several Kill Bills among them. I still have them somewhere.
Okay, nostalgia trip done.
150 lbs .... That's insane! Wow. A late congratulations to you. It sounds like it vastly improved your quality of life. I know what it's like to be at that age and just be full of energy, but I've never accomplished anything physical on that level. That's seriously a huge thing to do.
I was born in the early 90s, so hearing about 35 mm artifacts like that is very interesting to me. Were there extra copies for you to take home? I'd imagine that the production companies would send your theatre a surplus and you'd yoink the extras. Very cool.
I'll add that I came of age during the cusp of Napster and that era, and music was and has been my first point of artistic pull. I think that music has borne a massive portion of that change. It's a big part of why I'm so interested in that era (the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s), when things were recorded to 4- and 8- and 16- track tape. There was a transition in those days from trying to capture live recordings to experimenting with mixing things in the studio. But still, the emphasis was on capturing live sounds first.
These days, recording is so expedient and young people tend to not care about the source (where the sounds originate from). It's so easy to program a digital beat and then put vocals over it. On the one hand, it empowers people to create, but on the other, it embodies what Pynchon (my favourite author and of course initial author of PTA's IV) was getting at when he explored information entropy. Media and art start to becomes noise as it's so much easier to create, record, and distribute. At the risk of getting very, very personal and too heavy here ... these are the things that keep me up at night. On the one hand, it's good that people are empowered, but on the other, I wish the process were more stringent, demanding, and for those who are into the craft enough to see out a process that presents challenges to the intellect and problem-solving capabilities. And unfortunately, there are the un-discerning masses who will gulp up the lowest common denominator without concerning themselves with things that are produced with thought and utmost craft.
This is all why I'm so obsessed with Kubrick's productions. I'm currently reading Michael Benson's Space Odyssey, which goes in depth about the production of 2001. If I could distill the importance of the production of that movie from what I'm reading, it's that Kubrick and co. leaned against the boundaries of film infrastructure of that time, and challenged the technological and philosophical limits of the medium. I mean, the production went on for about three years, overtook nine stages of MGM's London studio, and Kubrick pushed his producers and his team to do things that hadn't been done to produce something that dared to transcend the artistic medium. The point there is that they had to face limits which demanded a serious and skilled creative process, one which rewarded reflection and sustained effort.
The greater point is that I fear production has maybe become too easy. It's empowering, yes, but it increases the noise of things out there. But to get back on topic, this is all why I'm so fascinated with what you said about that era of cinema and being able to snag physical prints of trailers ... and a director of the old guard who is making a movie in this era that's set during the turn of the old Hollywood to the new, using some old film techniques at the highest level of artistic application, with his knowledge and experience of film background.
