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#Malcolm Marmorstein
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Episode 309: The tougher the better
Over the years, nine writers were credited with scripts for Dark Shadows. This is the final episode attributed to Malcolm Marmorstein, who is not among the eight best of those writers.* Well-meaning governess Vicki has told her depressing fiancé Burke that she will break off their engagement unless he ends his investigation of her friend, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. Burke comes to see…
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nero-neptune · 1 year
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“god, i wish i’d met you 300 years ago”
love bites dir. malcolm marmorstein
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Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary
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In Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s MARY, MARY, BLOODY MARY (1975, Shudder) tax problems force a reunion between divorced couple Bob (Barry Nelson) and Mary (Debbie Reynolds), with Mary turning up a changed woman. She’s now a vampire. No, that’s not the film I saw on Shudder, but wouldn’t that make for a cool movie? The actual film is a drive-in quickie with two positive factors: the leads are attractive, and there are some picturesque shots of the Mexican countryside (after a flaccid car chae) at the end. The rest is a sorry mess. Artist Mary (Cristina Ferrare) is tooling around Mexico painting surrealistic pieces and sucking the blood from various strangers. She picks up a handsome hitchhiker (David Young) she likes enough to avoid eating. And she’s stalked by a masked man (John Carradine and various doubles) doing a little bloodsucking of his own. There’s also a Mexican police detective and an FBI man trying to find the killer. As a sign of the times, they’re sure they’re hunting for a man, so when they connect the murders to Ferrare’s travels, they consider Young the chief suspect. This is another film that looks as if it were cobbled together after people ran out of money, or am I being too kind? There are numerous bad cuts and a flashback that pops in out of nowhere. Ferarre’s chief talent seems to be for taking her clothes off. Young seems more gifted, though his lines aren’t as unspeakable as some of her statements on love and art. You also get a stereotyped gay art dealer, a predatory lesbian and victims who ignore the obvious escape routes and practically run into the arms of their killers. The script is by Malcolm Marmorstein, who was one of the writers on DARK SHADOWS, which looks like CITIZEN KANE compared to this pitiable excuse for a film.
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videomessiah · 3 years
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Adam Ant as Zachary Simms in Love Bites (1993)
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theoscarsproject · 3 years
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Pete's Dragon (1977). An orphan boy and his magical dragon come to town with his abusive adoptive parents in pursuit.
Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen this movie, which is kind of funny given I think I've seen every other Disney film at this point, haha. It's a fun little premise, and the heart of it with Pete's relationship with the dragon is pretty sweet. I like the animation style too, and wish 2D mash-ups with live action were still a thing. That said, the music is often cringey, and the dastardly plot is wildly unnecessary, and never really works. 5/10.
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dweemeister · 6 years
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Pete’s Dragon (1977)
Combining live-action and animation in film has been around longer than you may think. Among those pioneers included Winsor McCay, who synchronized an on-stage performance with Gertie the Dinosaur’s (1914 short) on-screen performance; Max Fleischer’s Koko the Clown short films also experimented here, as did Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks for the Alice Comedies (1923-1927). Of those names, it is Disney’s that is most associated with live-action/animation hybrids – Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), and the subject of this review, Pete’s Dragon, which is directed by Don Chaffey. The rights to Pete’s Dragon – based on the unpublished short story by Seton I. Miller (better known for hard-edged film noir and 1938′s The Adventures of Robin Hood) and S.S. Field – were purchased by Walt Disney in the 1950s, who hoped to use it for his anthology television series. The project languished for years, outliving Walt, and is one of the better live-action Disney movies released in a difficult decade for the studio.
The 1970s and early 1980s were marked by the studio’s shifting approaches to its movies by catering more exclusively to children. This is reflective of the Dark Age of Animation (historians and other writers will differ, but I label this as beginning after Walt Disney’s death to 1988), where the overlaps between films intended for children and those intended for adults almost disappeared. Pete’s Dragon is expressly for children, but contains just enough appeal to save itself from being all but permanently locked inside the Disney Vault.
It is the 1900s in coastal Maine. An orphan named Pete (Sean Marshall) is escaping his abusive, bedraggled caretakers, the Gogans (Shelley Winters as the matriarch, Lena). Unbeknownst to the Gogans, Pete has befriended a dragon named Elliott (incredibly, even official sources differ between one “t” or two in his name), who is determined to protect Pete from any danger and can alternate between visibility and invisibility at any time. Pete and Elliott escape to Passamaquoddy, where the local lighthouse operator Lampie (Mickey Rooney) and his daughter Nora (Helen Reddy) provide a place to stay. Elliott, being too large for the lighthouse, stays in a spacious cave nearby. Pete loves Elliott, and speaks of length about him – Nora, Lampie, and other townspeople think that the dragon is just an imaginary friend. In town, snake oil salesman and quack Dr. Terminus (Jim Dale) and assistant Hoagy (Red Buttons) arrive to turn things upside down; the Gogans, too, eventually arrive. As time passes, Pete finds a home and family with Nora and Lampie – but this is a Disney movie, so chaos must ensue first.
After the release of Mary Poppins, a formula of a magical person/creature saving the lives of a hero became the tonic of Disney’s live-action movies. Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971; which is Mary Poppins lite), and Pete’s Dragon rigidly adhere to that structure. Pete’s Dragon offers nothing innovative or profound in terms of its storytelling, and anybody who goes into this movie with slightest expectation of any of that will come away frustrated. This is a safe comfort movie with its messages – depicted with more invention and grace in earlier decades – muted.
Even a young, talented animation team boasting names like Don Bluth (the American Tail series, 1988′s The Land Before Time); Glen Keane (who worked at Disney from 1977′s The Rescuers to 2012′s Paperman) as Elliot’s character animator; Ron Clements (who later directed eight Disney animated features, including 2016′s Moana); Ken Anderson (who worked at Disney from the 1930s-1970s); and Don Hahn (best known as a producer for various films in the Disney Renaissance) were unable to navigate around a breakneck production schedule. This leaves Pete’s Dragon with worse animated effects than even Mary Poppins and Song of the South as characters clip into the animated Elliott and the background-foreground composites are more distractingly artificial than they should be. Given the restrictions and the fact Pete’s Dragon is the first animated or partially-animated Disney movie without the input of the Nine Old Men, the animation’s efforts are valiant, but too limited given the technology of the era.
The screenplay, penned by Malcolm Marmorstein (primarily a television writer for the original Dark Shadows series), is filled with cockamamie characters and cringeworthy attempts at humor. As Pete and Elliot descend upon the unsuspecting population of Passamaquoddy, we are introduced to the mayor, trying to propose a new town motto:
Passamaquoddy... where the sun always rises and where the sun always sets!
Oh brother.
Too many of the supporting characters seem to have a single quirk that defines them throughout the film – a punchline with no modification or a person who adopts a behavioral tone and never alters it regardless of the situation. As Lampie, Rooney is a caricature of crassness (albeit appropriate within the bounds of Disney family movies) in public while almost inexplicably dropping that persona around Pete and Nora. Nora is pining for her beloved, lost at sea for a year, becomes a mother figure to Pete (this part is not a criticism and will be expanded upon shortly, because Nora’s nurturing results in the most genuine moments in Pete’s Dragon), and little else. The schoolteacher, Ms. Taylor (Jane Kean), is a frumpy, no-nonsense woman with little sympathy for misbehavior. And the Gogans? Good lord, the Gogans. Unhygienic backwoods hillbillies with tendencies towards kidnapping and post-Thirteenth Amendment child slavery are as easy to write about as villains can be.
But enter Nora and, to a lesser extent, Lampie. As justified as many of the criticisms directed towards the Walt Disney Studios’ there are, even the bitterest critics concede the studio’s films have long championed non-traditional, surrogate families. Without questions, judgment, they take in Pete as their own. And though their acceptance and early days of taking Pete in seem a little too easy, without conflict, Nora and Lampie (Reddy and Rooney give good performances) give the constancy and nurturing that Pete has been lacking from others. Well, that is if you exclude Elliott, who – at the end of the film – is revealed to be a benevolent soul who goes around helping frightened, vulnerable children. Elliott – imaginary friend to some, menace to others, but a steadfast guardian to Pete – might be the eponymous dragon in the film’s title, but this is still Pete’s story. Sean Marshall is serviceable and never grating as Pete, a character too passive for my liking, but makes up for in his kindness.
Composer Irwin Kostal centers his score around the songs penned by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. The Kasha-Hirschhorn musical numbers are as uneven as can be. Starting with insomnia-inducing jumpscares, “The Happiest Home in These Hills” opens the film by introducing the audience to the Gogans. Oh yes, the so-called Disney Villain song opens the movie! This is the most menacing the Gogans ever get (thankfully; their other song, “Bill of Sale” makes so little sense in every way imaginable). with threatening lyrics regarding Pete like:
Gonna snag him, gag him, drag him through town. Put his head in the river; let the pup drown. Trap him, strap him, wrap him in a sack, yeah, Tie him screaming to a railroad track.
It’s a juvenile, difficult way to start a movie, and that’s not even mentioning a lyric that has something to do with lynching Pete (which, as a Disney fan, gave me weird flashbacks to the Ku Klux Klan’s appearance in 1976′s Treasure of Matecumbe). Other weak entries include: “Boo Bop Bopbop Bop (I Love You, Too)” (in addition to its shoddy special effects) and “I Saw a Dragon” (Onna White’s choreography recalls her work for 1968′s Oliver!, but this is discount Oliver!). More creative are the likes “Brazzle Dazzle Day” (songs that capitalize on nonsense words are risky, but this one is okay) of “Every Little Piece” (because songs about con artists licking their chops about imminent fortune are usually hilarious).
But the two best songs in the film are the most lyrically modest in this score. “It’s Not Easy” is sung on Pete’s first night with Nora and Lampie, and where Pete talks about Elliott to Nora for the first time. Upon my first listening (as some may know, I get picky with music), I rejected the song because I found the rhyme scheme awkward: early in the song, Nora interjects between Pete’s first rhyme describing Elliott:
PETE He has the head of a camel, The neck of a crocodile...   NORA It sounds rather strange! PETE He’s both a fish and a mammal, And I hope he’ll never change.
Soon after, Nora completes one of Pete’s rhymes, throwing off my expectations of a constant rhyming scheme. But as the song progresses, they sing together (when Nora sings her aside about the one she loves, she changes key and breaks the consecutive rhyming scheme) and their rhymes come together as they begin to better understand each other. In a very subtle way, keeping rhymes close together in a duet can heighten emotion, develop a relationship.
But the film belongs to “Candle on the Water”, a torch song that is referenced throughout the film in Kostal’s score and that might not have been out of place in any musical movie decades earlier. The staging might be unimaginative and the gradual close-up a dreadful decision, but it is Reddy’s performance that defines this scene. “Candle on the Water” should be considered an essential entry in the esteemed Disney songbook, yet it does not appear to be in the canon (why is Mary Poppins the only Disney live-action film that receives that treatment?).
Pete’s Dragon would be the last live-action/traditional animation hybrid released by Disney until Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988; released through the company’s Touchstone Pictures label). These techniques, now even more of a curiosity in times where movies featuring human actors interacting with CGI environments and characters are commonplace, were the culmination of decades of experimentation and punishing handiwork. For the film’s value to today’s audiences, its messages will be fine for children, if they can get past the first musical number featuring the Gogans (if I was younger and watching this for the first time, I would not have accepted those jumpscares if I did not know in advance that this was a Disney movie). Elliott is selfless and lovable to a fault; Pete displays an understandable mixture of courage, courtesy, and fear.
The version shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) on December 20/21, 2017 shows how much Disney cares for its older movies – the print was beautiful to look at, despite the questionable yellowscreen. But is the company interested in having their older live-action films not called Mary Poppins a chance to connect to younger viewers? That is something to ponder about as live-action remakes only do so much to raise awareness or interest for the original versions.
My rating: 6.5/10
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.
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March 4, 2022 MiniBadges and the Creative Multiverse presents: #MagicalMarch Day 4 (Dragon) Pete's Dragon is a 1977 American live-action/animated musical fantasy film directed by Don Chaffey, produced by Jerome Courtland and Ron Miller, and written by Malcolm Marmorstein. Based on the unpublished short story "Pete's Dragon and the USA (Forever After)" by Seton I. Miller and S. S. Field, the film stars Sean Marshall, Helen Reddy, Jim Dale, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Jeff Conaway, Shelley Winters, and the voice of Charlie Callas as Elliott. #CreativeMultiverse #MagicalMarch #Disney #petesdragon1977 #art #artwork #artistofinstagram #artist #artistforhire #Custom #create #drawing #drawingaday #draweveryday #illustration #pencil #sketch #ink #colordrawing #Sketchcard #fabercastell #copic #twitchstreamer https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca_sA49OioW/?utm_medium=tumblr
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loughie · 3 years
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Love Bites (1993) dir. Malcolm Marmorstein
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deadlinecom · 3 years
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healed1337 · 4 years
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Disney Associated Movies 7 - Pete's Dragon (1977)
Disney Associated Movies 7 – Pete’s Dragon (1977)
For my fellow Canadians, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving weekend. We’re now at the half-way point in this blog series, focusing on movies that involved Disney Animation Studios, but aren’t produced by the legendary studio. Some of these movies are mostly live-action, some are almost entirely animated. From this point on, with a couple of exceptions, there’s pretty much always a mix of both.
Pe…
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Episode 327: Snap! Like that.
For the last eight weeks, Dark Shadows has been presenting a riddle about strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #288, he wondered if mysterious little girl Sarah might be a ghost. Since then, he has seen her several times, and every time she has given fresh evidence to corroborate that hypothesis. When he isn’t with Sarah, David is either looking for her or fielding questions from adults who…
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nero-neptune · 11 months
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“as a vampire, you had your own kind of perfection. you were more human when you were dead.”
love bites | 1993 | dir. malcolm marmorstein
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'Pete's Dragon' Writer Says Sons Duped Him into Screwing Over His Wife
The guy who helped create the children's movie, "Pete's Dragon" claims he got screwed over by his own kids when they pulled the wool over his eyes to line their own pockets. Malcolm Marmorstein's now battling 2 of his 4 kids in court over his…
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videomessiah · 4 years
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Adam Ant as Zachary Simms in Love Bites (1993)
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labelleperfumery · 4 years
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'Pete's Dragon' Writer Says Sons Duped Him into Screwing Over His Wife
‘Pete’s Dragon’ Writer Says Sons Duped Him into Screwing Over His Wife
The guy who helped create the children’s movie, “Pete’s Dragon” claims he got screwed over by his own kids when they pulled the wool over his eyes to line their own pockets. Malcolm Marmorstein’s now battling 2 of his 4 kids in court over his…
from TMZ.com https://www.tmz.com/2020/01/20/malcolm-marmorstein-petes-dragon-screenwriter-kids-duped-estate-living-trust-court/
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distincttoday · 4 years
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'Pete's Dragon' Writer Says Sons Duped Him into Screwing Over His Wife
‘Pete’s Dragon’ Writer Says Sons Duped Him into Screwing Over His Wife
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TMZ/Walt Disney Pictures
The guy who helped create the children’s movie, “Pete’s Dragon” claims he got screwed over by his own kids when they pulled the wool over his eyes to line their own pockets.
Malcolm Marmorstein‘s now battling 2 of his 4 kids in court over his living trust …which he claims they duped him into altering…
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