For the Dark Shadows fans - Page 5

MacShadowsBall · #61 04-21-2012, 10:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chiliD

It said he died of "natural causes", so that made me think:

Did he eat some garlic bread?

Did he not get into his coffin before sunrise?

Did he get a wooden steak...uh, stake?

(too soon?)

Not really, "Barnabas" dying is kinda ironic, since he never really died on the show.

One of the local newscast did a nice yet quick 30-second story about his passing. They misspelled his first name as Johnatan.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Macfanforever

Foe some reason I never got into the show.Maybe I shoould check it out.

All 1,225 episodes are available on DVD from amazon and deep discount, including the 1991 remake series along with several behind the scenes, documentaries, and extras.

Check out youtube also.

TrueFaith77 · #62 04-21-2012, 10:39 AM

The whole show is avail for streaming on netflix.

Macfanforever · #63 04-21-2012, 11:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MacShadowsBall

Not really, "Barnabas" dying is kinda ironic, since he never really died on the show.

One of the local newscast did a nice yet quick 30-second story about his passing. They misspelled his first name as Johnatan.

All 1,225 episodes are available on DVD from amazon and deep discount, including the 1991 remake series along with several behind the scenes, documentaries, and extras.

Check out youtube also.

Thanks. I got to check them out.

MacShadowsBall · #64 05-02-2012, 10:56 AM

Well Warner Brothers and company are moving ahead with promoting the new Dark Shadows movie. Check out the late night shows, especially Jimmy Kimmel live as he had Johnny Lee Miller(Roger) on Monday night and Eva Green (Angelique) will be on tonight's episode.

Here's the Dark Shadows news blog that has great information along with clips/interviews from the new movie.

http://darkshadowsnews.blogspot.com/

Dodfather · #65 05-06-2012, 04:44 AM

I wasn't too excited about this film until I saw the trailer. It looks very funny! I especially love the gag from 1:10-15: "Reveal yourself, tiny songstress!" Haha!

The Chain · #66 05-06-2012, 12:56 PM

A few things I've read by people who attended test screenings say that while the trailer somewhat represents the movie, that there is a bit of classic Burton darkness, and some scenes that are quite bloody, if they are to be believed. Which I hope is true, Tim Burton is always at his best when combining absurd comedy with macbre.. as a pretty big fan of his, the last decade has been very hit or miss, disappointing Seems like he's been in a rut. Just compare his earliest films to anything from 2001 to the present, it almost feels as if a different person is behind the wheel sometimes. (Hit: Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd) (Miss: Planet of the Apes, Alice In Wonderland) (On the fence : Charlie & The Chocolate Factory)

All that said, from the things I've read online, I am actually looking forward this and I'm hoping it will be good.. it can only be uphill after Alice In Wonderland right? Some of the test screen attendees even said the approach reminded them a little of Beetlejuice

The Chain · #67 05-06-2012, 04:33 PM

and Burton working with Michelle Pfeiffer for the first time since her incredible portrayal of Catwoman in Batman Returns? That's worth the price of admission alone. I always wondered why he's worked with Depp, his wife & so many others over and over again, and not Pfeiffer, when she did such a great job. She really seemed to "get" Burton in that role, completely fit in with his style & approach. Heres hoping this is the beginning of frequent collaborations. Here's a still from Dark Shadows, with Michelle looking pretty beautiful & bad ass

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Dodfather · #68 05-06-2012, 04:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Chain

and Burton working with Michelle Pfeiffer for the first time since her incredible portrayal of Catwoman in Batman Returns? That's worth the price of admission alone. I always wondered why he's worked with Depp, his wife & so many others over and over again, and not Pfeiffer, when she did such a great job. She really seemed to "get" Burton in that role, completely fit in with his style & approach. Heres hoping this is the beginning of frequent collaborations. Here's a still from Dark Shadows, with Michelle looking pretty beautiful & bad ass

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I couldn't agree more. I'm a huge Michelle Pfeiffer fan. Not only does she never get her due an actress (only two Best Actress Oscar nominations and no wins?!) but, lest we forget. she is hot!

The Chain · #69 05-06-2012, 05:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dodfather

I couldn't agree more. I'm a huge Michelle Pfeiffer fan. Not only does she never get her due an actress (only two Best Actress Oscar nominations and no wins?!) but, lest we forget. she is hot!

Such a shame. She more than deserves it. Great actress. And yes, incredibly hot.. that skintight leather cat suit combined with her beautiful eyes made her my first celebrity crush when I was growing up. And she's aged insanely gracefully.

vivfox · #70 05-06-2012, 08:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Chain

Such a shame. She more than deserves it. Great actress. And yes, incredibly hot.. that skintight leather cat suit combined with her beautiful eyes made her my first celebrity crush when I was growing up. And she's aged insanely gracefully.

I remember a long time ago in the 1980's, Sandra Berhardt was on Letterman and she made fun of Michelle having a herpes sore on her lip in a movie. She said they had to include her sore in the script because there was no getting around it. Kinda cruel if you ask me, but hey, I'm just the messenger.

MacShadowsBall · #71 05-07-2012, 12:31 PM

Excellent New York Times article about Dark Shadows...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/ar...ovie.html?_r=2

May 5, 2012
The Vampire Who Came Out in the Afternoon
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

IT was “Satan’s favorite TV show,” according to a religious tract of the time. Tim Burton, 8 years old when the Gothic daytime soap opera “Dark Shadows” came into the world and not quite 13 when it breathed its last, was clearly untroubled that his viewing preferences were similar to those of the Prince of Darkness.

“I should probably have been doing homework or playing sports after school instead of watching ‘Dark Shadows,’ ” he said. “But seeing that show every afternoon, at home, in Burbank, it just doesn’t get much weirder than that.” And for Mr. Burton, the director of “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sleepy Hollow,” and now a splashy silver-screen “Dark Shadows” (opening Friday), “weird” is a term of the very highest praise.

Some pop culture phenomena are easy to understand, he said, like “Star Trek,” which had its premiere just a couple of months after “Dark Shadows” began, in 1966. “Even if you’re not a ‘Star Trek’ fan, you kind of get the dynamic,” Mr. Burton said. But “Dark Shadows,” he continued, is “an acquired taste, and it’s really hard to describe it to people who never saw it.”

He’s right about that. There’s been a lot of supernatural drama on television since the demise of the original “Dark Shadows,” in 1971, but even under the influence of a powerful spell you would have a difficult time coming up with another show that roamed so freely and so recklessly through the underworld of horror pulp. Though nearly forgotten now, the series’s conflicted vampire, Barnabas Collins (played by Jonathan Frid, who died last month), was its biggest draw — at the time, he was more popular than the comparably peculiar Mr. Spock of “Star Trek”— but he was hardly the only unlikely denizen of the soap-opera town of Collinsport, Me. Over the course of 1,225 half-hour episodes Collinsport, a demographic anomaly even by the standards of New England, rolled out the Welcome Wagon for a staggering number of witches, warlocks, doppelgängers, mad scientists, werewolves, and, of course, ghosts, who seemed to descend in waves, like tourists in foliage season.

This satanic soap was Dan Curtis’s baby. Curtis, who had been a successful producer of golf telecasts, had the idea that a Gothic-romance kind of daytime drama — something on the order of “Rebecca,” with an innocent young woman rattling around in a gloomy old house — might appeal to the soap operas’ stay-at-home audience, and ABC gave him a shot. The show didn’t catch on right away, though, so Curtis, with nothing to lose, decided to throw in a ghost. One of the show’s directors said to him, “We’ve crossed the line with this, you know.” But the ratings went up. And they rose even higher when a few months later, in the 211th episode, Barnabas Collins emerged from his grave after almost 200 years of involuntary confinement.

In the context of late-’60s daytime drama these choices were, to put it mildly, counterintuitive. A few years later we would learn to call such desperate moves “jumping the shark,” but what “Dark Shadows” proved at the moment Barnabas’s cold, pale hand reached out of his coffin was that soap-opera narrative is in its essence an act of desperation, like the telling of bedtime stories by weary parents to wakeful kids: the stories just seem to go on and on and on, and the longer your audience stays with you, the more sharks, inevitably, will have to be jumped.

Seen from this point of view what Curtis did in “Dark Shadows” wasn’t all that different from what other, more ostensibly reality-based, soaps did when they found themselves hard up for story lines to hold their viewers’ attention. The traditional daytime dramas have always required a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief too, what with their amnesia plots and evil twins, their periodic recasting of familiar roles and bizarre reversals of character. When an actor introduced as a villain becomes popular, the producers generally contrive to turn that character into a more sympathetic figure. (See Luke the rapist from “General Hospital.”) In soaps, pretty much anything goes.

But “Dark Shadows” sure felt different. “It kind of created its own universe, had its own weird vibe that wasn’t like anything else,” Mr. Burton said, admiringly. (He used some form of the word “weird” no fewer than 17 times in a 20-minute phone call.) “The fact that it was a soap opera, on TV every day in the afternoon, in itself made it strange. But the tone it had made it even stranger.” Part of that stranger-than-strange tone has to do with the acting style, which inhabits some odd no-creature’s-land between drab soap solemnity and the over-the-top histrionics of Hammer horror.

For Mr. Burton that made casting a challenge. Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer, who play Barnabas and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the matriarch of the cursed Collins clan, knew the show, but other cast members — like Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley and Mr. Burton’s partner, Helena Bonham Carter — did not. “I felt like I was using a kind of ‘Dark Shadows’ filter, which I could never quite verbalize to the casting director,” Mr. Burton said. “Somebody was either part of the ‘Dark Shadows’ club or not, and I could never say why. It’s something personal.”

Before the soap opera ended its run Curtis managed to crank out a couple of theatrical features, “House of Dark Shadows” (1970) and “Night of Dark Shadows” (1971), which doubtless put unseemly pressure on a cast and crew whose creative blood was already draining fast. Even with the extra narrative latitude allowed by the horror genre, the show ran out of ideas, and died a (more or less) natural death. (The entire saga, all 400-plus hours of it, will be available Tuesday in a 131-disc DVD set, boxed in an attractive coffin.) Curtis continued, through the ’70s, to put horror of some quality on the small screen. The contemporary vampire thriller “Night Stalker” (1972) remains one of the most terrifying things ever to creep into American living rooms. (“That was cool,” Mr. Burton said. “I loved that.”) The series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” was spun off from it, and Curtis, who died in 2006 and is now perhaps best known for the “Winds of War” mini-series, also produced or directed very respectable television adaptations of several of the literary classics whose plots he had plundered for “Dark Shadows” story lines: “Dracula,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Mr. Burton chose to set his movie in 1972, not long after the original “Dark Shadows” met its timely end. “For me doing this movie was about re-experiencing that time in your life when you feel weird all the time, that age when you’re in transition from being a kid to being a teenager, and it’s all so unpleasant.”

The soap opera Curtis created, with or without the powers of darkness, helped create the culture in which a sensibility like Mr. Burton’s could thrive, and it is still, after all these years, indelibly, unkillably weird. If “Dark Shadows” had never existed, even Tim Burton might not have been able to invent it.

vivfox · #72 05-07-2012, 06:17 PM

Great article MacShadowsBall. Nice of you to take a break from your pole dancing to post this.

MacShadowsBall · #73 05-07-2012, 10:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vivfox

Great article MacShadowsBall. Nice of you to take a break from your pole dancing to post this.

Thanks, vivfox!

So right now is the official movie premiere at Gauman's Chinese Theater where the red carpet has been replaced with a black, gothic one.

Also Michelle Pfeiffer is on The Tonight Show tonight, Chloe Moretz is on Kimmel tonight, and tomorrow these two along with Johnny Depp will all be on Ellen's talk show!

Remember the movie comes out this Friday, May 11th.

...back to my pole dancing...