Monday 13 April 2009

Balls

Well, I didn't get any of that done, but I did write 250 words about Spaceballs. At this stage I'll take anything. I just wanted to get something down in concrete form, and everything else seemed too involved with everything that had gone before. This Spaceballs idea is pretty self-enclosed, though. It caps a to-be-written section on Blade Runner and Brazil, accompanying the existing Dune stuff, which discusses how the various industrial shifts in Hollywood in the early '80s led to a curious series of sci-fi films made by talented young directors which struggled, literally, to find a finished and satifactory form (3 cuts exist of Dune and Brazil, 5 for Blade Runner). Anyway, Brooks had already produced Lynch's Elephant Man and Cronenberg's The Fly by the time he made Spaceballs, so he's right in the mix with the guys I'm discussing, and he nails the obsession with home markets and the shift in perception of possibility and possession which home video brought in this ace scene.



The count:

Words remaining: 34, 750

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh Rick! Where hast thou gone?

I loved that, thanks. Another clip I could watch again and again and again and ... I just did.

If you get stuck -- though I'm not suggesting that you are -- you could just change your whole thesis to something different, something like 'The Genius that is Mel Brooks'. (I just posted a clip on my blog that you can use for inspiration, too.)

If nothing else, you could just transcribe the entire scripts for Spaceballs and History of the World. Who wouldn't give you a doctorate for that?