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Overview
Enlivened by humorous incidents, brewing controversies, and deeply moving personal dramas, Inside Oscar 1995-2000 offers the complete lowdown on six more years of Academy Awards glory . . . from Braveheart in 1995 through Gladiator in 2000, with the Titanic phenomenon and the Saving Private Ryan/Shakespeare in Love feud in between. There is also complete coverage of the awards ceremonies?with delicious anecdotes on the presenters and performers, the producers and egos, the fashion stars and fashion victims. And, of course, a complete list of all the nominees and winners, as well as a list of notable non-nominees.
Picking up where the classic Inside Oscar leaves off, this must-have guide treats us to a behind-the-scenes look at one of America's most beloved annual traditions!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345448002 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2002 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 916 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
1995
Suppose they gave Best Picture to a movie nobody cared about.
Hurling Toward Space
The year 1995 was shaping up like this: Only one movie released through the end of July managed to garner both generally favorable reviews and huge bucks at the box office. Apollo 13 dealt with a relatively recent but little remembered piece of history: the 1970 moon launch during which an explosion crippled the spaceship, and NASA’s subsequent efforts to return the three astronauts on board safely back to earth. Ron Howard needed only to take a look at a ten page outline of a book by the mission’s commander, Jim Lovell, to know he wanted to do a film version. Christine James of Box-Office magazine noted the eclectic subject matter of Howard’s movies, which most recently had included the slick newspaper comedy The Paper and the lambasted empire-building epic Far and Away. “About the only predictable aspect of Howard’s filmmaking,” she noted, “is the obligatory cameo casting of brother Clint Howard. In Howard’s latest project, the new frontier is the space program (and Clint is a Mission Control worker).”
Jim Lovell instructed the director, “Listen, just tell our story as it happened, and you’ll have a thrilling movie.” Originally, the screenwriters worked on the script with Kevin Costner in mind because he bore a pronounced physical resemblance to Lovell and his production company was interested in the project. But Howard gave the part to Tom Hanks, whom he had directed in 1984’s Splash, the actor’s breakthrough film. Hanks was now the biggest star in America after his two consecutive Oscars and the phenomenal box-office success of Forrest Gump; Lovell said that when Hanks was announced for Apollo 13, his friends all teased him that he was going to be portrayed by Forrest Gump. And when doing publicity for the film, Hanks showed he still had some hyperbole left over from his two Oscar speeches, as he declared the story of Apollo 13 to be a “saga as great as anything the Greeks put down on paper, or any story from Shakespeare or the Bible.”
Director Howard, on the other hand, seemed most excited about the verisimilitude of his film, especially one piece of hardware. In interview after interview, he gushed about the NASA KC-135, a jet that under certain flight circumstances causes weightlessness and which the Space Program used in training astronauts. Like a little kid, the director delighted in calling the contraption by its nickname, the Vomit Comet. Rather than attaching wires to the actors or relying on computer graphics to simulate weightlessness, Howard put his astronauts on the jet and filmed the real thing. One of them, Kevin Bacon, called this a “crazy idea,” and acknowledged that Howard had to “convince me to go up in this stupid plane, that was a big job in itself.”
While Hanks told CNN’s Sherri Sylvester, “Well, now, none of us actually spewed,” he and fellow astronaut Bacon did take boyish glee in the fact that although they managed not to throw up, celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz, who had come onboard to shoot them for Vanity Fair, lost count as to how many times she vomited. Still, Bacon was man enough to admit that being on the jet “just scares the shit out of me.” Lovell had great respect for the cast members because “the actors playing astronauts actually spent more time in the zero-gravity plane than any real astronaut ever did.”
The previously best-known film based on actual events at NASA was Philip Kaufman’s irreverent The Right Stuff, a 1983 Best Picture nominee and a box-office dud. The two movies had one common element: actor Ed Harris, who played John Glenn in the earlier film and was grounded here as the Mission Control flight director in Houston. Originally, Howard was reluctant to cast Harris because of his association with the earlier film, but Harris countered, “There are more than a couple of actors who’ve played cops or cowboys several times. So I don’t see why there couldn’t be more than one NASA employee in my career.” Harris noted the difference between the two movies: The Right Stuff “was about the space program as a PR phenomenon, whereas Apollo 13 is about men fulfilling a duty.” Tom Hanks was reunited with Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump, Gary Sinise, who played the astronaut bumped from the moon mission after being exposed to measles, and Bill Paxton was also in orbit with Hanks and Bacon.
Despite his status as the number one box-office draw in the business, Hanks insisted that in Apollo 13 he was part of an ensemble piece and not the star of the film. “A movie like this would not exist as a star turn,” he said. “You could do it as a star turn, but that would be unfair. It would be a disservice to the reality of it all.” Nevertheless, Hanks did take top billing, instead of being placed alphabetically after Kevin Bacon.
Space Cadet
Hanks readily admitted that he was a science nerd growing up, his room decorated with models of rockets and spaceships; even now he could still spout off the names of all the astronauts and the purpose of each Apollo mission. He also stated that he’d always been “fascinated by spacesuits.” Entertainment Weekly visited the set and reported that “Hanks has been going at the movie with the ardor of a boy reeling from his first crush.” The actor recalled that when the real Apollo 13 crisis was occurring, he was a 13-year-old who would rush home from school “waiting for [ABC-TV science reporter] Jules Bergman to explain what was going on in the spacecraft.” On the other hand, Gary Sinise—one year Hanks’s senior—said he scarcely had any recollection of the actual event because he was “too busy on Earth playing rock ’n’ roll and looking for girls.”
No Frills Thrills
Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Examiner cheered, “Even though it focuses on what was then one of the space program’s worst disasters, Apollo 13 is a gripping movie about a time when America still worked. . . . With no frills and no commentary, Howard and company have made the kind of absorbing thriller we have in mind when we wistfully sigh, ‘They don’t make movies like they used to.’ ” And to the Austin Chronicle’s Mark Savlov, the film was “a riveting, nail-biting, two-buckets-of-popcorn return to form for Howard, filled with the almost unassailable heroics of the United States space program”; he added that Apollo 13 “may be the only summer adventure blockbuster without bullets or warheads. At the risk of sounding like Michael Medved, that’s a welcome change of pace.”
Having a more temperate response was Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who observed that “This film is wall-to-wall with straight-arrow, manly types like Lovell, inevitably played by Tom Hanks, who are such wholesome heroes that it’s something of a shock to remember that all this took place in 1970, not the 1950s of Father Knows Best. Ron Howard, the master of Opie-Vision, is certainly well suited to the kind of sentimental, middle-of-the-road filmmaking of which Apollo 13 is the epitome.” And Newsday’s Jack Mathews noted, “Howard is not a flashy stylist, which is a tremendous plus on this movie.”
Naysayers included Amy Taubin of the Village Voice, who complained, “Only twelve years separate Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff from Ron Howard’s straight ’n’ narrow Apollo 13, but they seem to have come from different planets. . . . Apollo 13 is so totally vacuumed of politics and history that a stray reference to ‘President Nixon’ is totally disorienting. If Forrest Gump was right-wing revisionist history, then Apollo 13 represses history entirely.” Lizzie Francke of Sight and Sound had a similar reaction: “One reason why the Apollo 13 mission was such a government priority was as a distraction from the Vietnam War. This political context is conspicuously disregarded here.” She elaborated that “a more astute filmmaker might have teased out the ironies and contradictions of an event that, in retrospect, seems to signal the downbeat and fearful mood of the new decade. . . . Instead, Ron Howard tells a story of courage in which the crew and Mission Control pull together to work the problem through (much in the way that the firemen do in Howard’s Backdraft or the family members in his Parenthood).”
Despite Tom Hanks’s insistence that he was part of an acting ensemble on this film, his work managed to be singled out. For Time’s Richard Corliss, “Hanks provides the anchor. His Lovell—as strong, faithful and emotionally straightforward as Forrest Gump—carries the story like a precious oxygen backpack.” Jim Lovell liked him, too, deeming Hanks “quite authentic” as Jim Lovell. Cowriter Al Reinert begged to differ, saying, “Actually, he’s a bit more lovable than the real Lovell.” Meanwhile, David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor liked the fact that Ed Harris “lends a hint of his patented weirdness as the Mission Control Chief.”
Two observers with very specific agendas had differing responses to Apollo 13. Satellite Orbit Magazine thought it was really neat that the film went against the grain of the typical Hollywood space movie, in which “dilithium crystals are a whole lot cooler than jet propulsion engines, ooze-spewing aliens elicit a stronger response than malfunctioning solar panels and Klingons are more menacing than funding cuts to NASA.”
And an Internet site called “Christian Spotlight on the Movies” had a unique take on Apollo 13: “Christians can marvel at the vastness of our Lord’s creation as well as His manifold grace in loving rebellious sinners like us. His grace is especially evident as we watch virtually every central character incessantly blaspheme His name or utter other profanities whenever problems arise, yet God still grants them the vision and ingenuity to persevere.”
Then there was director Oliver Stone, who lambasted the film as “an homage to bullshit patriotism. The fucking critics, they all loved it. I can’t make movies anymore, I guess.”