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From: [e-mail] (evelyn.c.leeper)
Subject: rec.arts.sf.movies Frequently Asked Questions
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Contents:
     1. Star Trek.
     2. The animated LORD OF THE RINGS by Ralph Bakshi covers only the
        first half of the trilogy.  Bakshi did not make the second half.
     3. Frequent subjects.
     4. Abbreviations commonly used in this group:
     5. BLADE RUNNER: the sixth replicant, why voice-overs, and Deckard a
        replicant?
     6. "Can the X beat the Y?" where X and Y are mighty ships or alien
        races from different space opera movies/series.
     7. Is the movie HEAVY METAL out on video?
     8. Why is there an acknowledgment to Harlan Ellison in the credits of
        THE TERMINATOR?  or  Doesn't THE TERMINATOR have the same plot as a
        TWILIGHT ZONE episode?
     9. What about the relationship between HAL (the computer in 2001: A
        Space Odyssey) and IBM?  (If you add 1 to each letter in HAL you get
        IBM.)
    10. Who was the voice of the seductive Jessica Rabbit in the film
        "WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT"?
    11. What are all of the "cute" gimmicks in the film BACK TO THE
        FUTURE?
    12. What role did Jamie Lee Curtis play in THE ADVENTURES OF
        BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION?
    13. When is George Lucas going to make more STAR WARS films?  What
        will they be about??
    14. In OUTLAND and TOTAL RECALL, people exposed to vacuum promptly
    explode.  In 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a few seconds' exposure to
    vacuum doesn't bother one at all.  Which is right?
    15. What does "FTL" mean?
    16. I was told that the director's cut of DUNE was seven hours long,
        and did a much better job of portraying the novel.  Where can I
        find it?
    17. What are the two minutes of new footage on the STAR TREK VI: THE
        UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY videocassette?
    18. What are the various Quatermass films and the names they go under?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
rec.arts.sf.movies is a newsgroup devoted to discussions of science
fiction, horror, and fantasy movies.  It is a high-volume newsgroup and
this article is intended to help reduce the number of unnecessary
postings, thereby making it more useful and enjoyable to everyone.

If you have not already done so, please read the articles in
news.announce.newusers.  They contain a great deal of useful information
about network etiquette and convention.

Before we begin, two pieces of net.etiquette.  Both of these are
mentioned in news.announce.newusers, but since they are so frequently
violated, and at least one of them is particularly relevant to this
group, we mention them here:

SPOILER WARNINGS:  Many people feel that much of the enjoyment of a film
is ruined if they know certain things about it, especially when those
things are surprise endings or mysteries.  On the other hand, they also
want to know whether or not a film is worth seeing, or they may be
following a particular thread of conversation where such information may
be revealed.  The solution to this is to put the words SPOILER in your
header, or in the text of your posting.  You can also put a ctl-L
character in the *first* column if you are using rn.  Some people think
that spoiler warnings are not necessary.  We don't understand why, and do
not want to discuss it.  Use your best judgment.

REPLIES TO REQUESTS AND QUESTIONS:  When you think that many people will
know an answer to a question, or will have an answer to a request,
RESPOND VIA E-MAIL!!!  And if you don't know the answer, but want to
know, DON'T POST TO THE NET asking for the answer, ask VIA E-MAIL!  If
you think a lot of people will want the same information, you might
suggest that the person summarize to the net.

Even if you don't see an answer posted, and you have the answer, please
send it e-mail.  The thirty other people who answered may have already
sent it, and your site just hasn't gotten it yet.  It clogs the net and
gets very tedious to see 30 people answer the same question, and another
30 people asking for the answer to be posted.  All of that should be
done via mail.  The net is a highly asynchronous medium.  It can take
several days for an article to make it to all sites.  It is also quite
common for followups to messages to reach a site before the original.

There is also a FAQ list posted to rec.arts.movies which covers more
general topics and includes the location of many useful databases.  And
finally, there is a group, rec.arts.movies.reviews, that carries reviews
of both SF and non-SF movies.

Please keep in mind two points:

    1.  Always remember that there is a live human being at the
    other end of the wires.  In other words, please write your
    replies with the same courtesy you would use in talking to
    someone face-to-face.

    2.  Try to recognize humor and irony in postings.  Tone of
    voice does not carry in ASCII print, and postings are often
    snapped off quickly, so that humorous intent may not be
    obvious.  More destructive and vicious arguments have been
    caused by this one fact of net existence than any other.  It
    will help if satiric/ironic/humorous comments are marked with
    the "smiley face," :-)


Below is a summary of questions and subjects which appear frequently in
this group.  Please read it before posting anything to rec.arts.sf.movies.


1. Star Trek.

There is a hierarchy for Star Trek, rec.arts.startrek.  If you have
access to netnews, use it for discussions about any Star Trek subject
(old series, new series, movies, novels, etc.).  If you are absolutely
sure you cannot access the startrek newsgroups, and you *must* post to
rec.arts.sf.movies, include the phrase "Star Trek" in the subject line.

Do not post flames about people violating this guideline.  Use e-mail
to request they follow it.  It's likely that this person is reading
rec.arts.sf.movies via a gateway and has no access to netnews or
rec.arts.startrek.


2. The animated LORD OF THE RINGS by Ralph Bakshi covers only the
   first half of the trilogy.  Bakshi did not make the second half.

There was a completely independently produced animation of THE RETURN
OF THE KING by Rankin/Bass who also did an animation of THE HOBBIT.

(Someone notes that Tolkien deplored the fact that the "Lord of the
Rings" is considered a trilogy.  That's as may be, but I'm afraid
we're stuck with the terminology.)


3. Frequent subjects.

Some subjects have been discussed numerous times in this group.  Please
consider carefully before starting discussions on these topics.

    1. Casting your favorite book as a movie.
    2. The Ten Best SF Movies
    3. What SF books would make good movies and, conversely,
       why sf movies from books are usually not very good.


4. Abbreviations commonly used in this group:
    BTW  -- "By the way"
    FYI  -- "For your information"
    IMAO -- "In my arrogant opinion"
    IMHO -- "In my humble (honest) opinion"
    ROTF -- "Rolling on the floor"
    ROFL -- "Rolling on the floor, laughing"
    RPG  -- "Role playing games", like D&D (Dungeons and Dragons)
    wrt  -- "with respect to"


5. BLADE RUNNER: the sixth replicant, why voice-overs, and Deckard a
   replicant?

This, and lots of other BLADE RUNNER questions, are hashed out in a
separate BLADE RUNNER FAQ posted monthly to rec.arts.movies,
alt.cult-movies, alt.cyberpunk, and rec.arts.sf.movies by
[e-mail]


6. "Can the X beat the Y?" where X and Y are mighty ships or alien
    races from different space opera movies/series.

These kind of discussions are fairly pointless.  Please keep them off the
net.


7. Is the movie HEAVY METAL out on video?

No and yes.  Due to legal problems, it has not been officially released.
There are a number of bootleg copies in circulation, though.


8. Why is there an acknowledgment to Harlan Ellison in the credits of
   THE TERMINATOR?  or  Doesn't THE TERMINATOR have the same plot as a
   TWILIGHT ZONE episode?

(The following answer is taken from a posting by Jerry Boyajian.)

Ellison filed suit against the studio claiming that THE TERMINATOR
was plagiarized from his two teleplays for THE OUTER LIMITS. One was
"Soldier" (based on a short story he written years before), in which
a soldier is zapped from a future war zone into the present and causes
all sorts of problems. In addition to basic plot similarities, the
scenes of the future in THE TERMINATOR are very similar in look and
feel to those in "Soldier".

The other teleplay was "Demon With a Glass Hand", in which a lone man
with a glass-and-computer-chips hand and a woman he meets up with are
on the run from some unknown enemy. He has amnesia and doesn't know a
thing about who he is, or why he's in his current situation. Eventually,
he finds out that he's from the future and was sent to the present on
a mission to save the human race.

Separately, I feel that THE TERMINATOR is a legitimate variation on the
ideas presented in Ellison's stories. However, taken together, it would
seem as if James Cameron got the idea from Ellison's stories, in which
case, Ellison is owed something. At any rate, as the story goes, the
studio was going to fight the suit, but in preparing their defense, they
found out from someone in the production crew that Cameron had quipped
on the set about how he'd "ripped off a couple of OUTER LIMITS episodes".
At that point, they decided to settle out of court, giving Ellison some
undisclosed amount of money and inserting the credit.

(Thomas Pluck ([e-mail]) adds the following:)

You left out one important thing with the Ellison/Cameron suit; the
concept of Skynet, the military supercomputer that sees all humanity as
the enemy, was taken from Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I
Must Scream," collected in the book of the same name and various other
SF anthologies.  Ellison's computer called itself AM, and it kept five
people alive to  torture for all eternity because it hated its creators
so much.  The two OUTER LIMITS scripts plus that short story are half or
more of the TERMINATOR plot.


9. What about the relationship between HAL (the computer in 2001: A
   Space Odyssey) and IBM?  (If you add 1 to each letter in HAL you get
   IBM.)

According to Clarke, this relationship is entirely accidental.  In
fact, he claims that if he had been aware of it, he would have chosen a
different name for his computer.  (HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic.)

10. Who was the voice of the seductive Jessica Rabbit in the film
    "WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT"?

This is sort of a trick question, because there are TWO voices.
Kathleen Turner provided the speaking voice, and Amy Irving did the
singing.


11. What are all of the "cute" gimmicks in the film BACK TO THE
    FUTURE?

Apparently, the makers of this film (Stephen Spielberg & Robert
Zemeckis) did all kinds of cute things, playing with the names of some
of the characters and with issues of time travel.  Some of these are:

a) The mall where Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) meets Dr. Brown
(Christopher Lloyd) for their time travel experiment is called the
Twin Pines Mall.  Dr. Brown comments that ol' farmer Peabody used
to own all of the land, and he grew pines there.  When Marty goes
back in time, he runs over and knocks down a pine tree.  When he
comes back to the mall at the end of the film (BACK TO THE FUTURE)
the sign at the mall now identifies the mall as the Lone Pine Mall,
reflecting the fact that Marty had changed the present (1985) by
his trip to the past (1955).

b) Farmer Peabody's son is named Sherman. Sherman was the name of
the little boy time traveler in one segment of Jay Ward's cartoon
show, "The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show."  The dog who owned his time
machine was named (surprise) Mr. Peabody.


12. What role did Jamie Lee Curtis play in THE ADVENTURES OF
    BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION?

She played Buckaroo's mother in a flashback sequence.  The sequence
was cut, and so does not appear in the final, release version.

13. When is George Lucas going to make more STAR WARS films?  What will they
    be about??

First of all, there is a group, rec.arts.sf.starwars, that exists to
discuss this.  However, here's what I know:

There had been a rumor that another STAR WARS film would come out soon ...
maybe in 1992 for the 15th anniversary of the first film.  Presumably,
this would have been the first of a trilogy which will depict the years
before the three films that have been made.  (Therefore they have been
known as Chapters 1, 2, & 3.  This is consistent with the labeling of the
films that have come out as 4, 5, & 6.  Of course, at least some of these
labels were added post-release).  Lucas has, in the past, claimed that
there will someday maybe be a series of three trilogies: The three
already made, the three preceding these events (see above) and three
that take place after the three films that are already made.

However, all of the information about new films coming out does not go
much beyond the rumor stage--as the fact that 1992 has been here and gone
and the next film is not.  We'll believe it when we see it.

[The latest is that "Entertainment Tonight" and some Los Angeles local
news stations announced Lucas will be releasing the next trilogy once
a year starting in 1997.  Again, we'll believe it when we see it.]

Lots of books, comics and other stories that have been released are
supposedly *not* directly related to the planned films.  These were
additional merchandising items.

(And by the way, the first STAR WARS film was originally released as
just "STAR WARS"; it was only in re-release that it was entitled "STAR
WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE."  The other two were always labeled
"EPISODE  V" and "EPISODE VI.")

14. In OUTLAND and TOTAL RECALL, people exposed to vacuum promptly
    explode.  In 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a few seconds' exposure to
    vacuum doesn't bother one at all.  Which is right?

This hasn't occurred in real life, but there have been experiments where
animals, or parts of a person's body, were exposed to vacuum; these
experiments happened before any of these films were made.  2001 was right;
OUTLAND and TOTAL RECALL ignored the known facts.  A full discussion of
this can be found in the sci.space FAQL.  (Discussions of whether TOTAL
RECALL is a dream or not are not pertinent to the question of vacuum, but
since the film is often mentioned in this context, it is included here.)

15. What does "FTL" mean?

"FTL" means "faster than light."

16. I was told that the director's cut of DUNE was seven hours long,
    and did a much better job of portraying the novel.  Where can I
    find it?

As Jerry Boyajian explains (hopefully for the last time [but of course
it wasn't]):

There is *no* "director's cut" of DUNE of *any* length.  The existence
of one is a complete myth.  Perhaps when Lynch was cutting the film
originally, there existed such a cut, but if it isn't long gone by now,
it's most likely an untimed work print and not in any sort of releasable
form.

*IF* David Lynch were inclined, and *IF* Dino DeLaurentiis were inclined
(and *IF* his organization wasn't bankrupt), and *IF* the scrap footage
is sitting in a vault somewhere, Lynch could probably reconstruct his
original cut, but all three (or four) of those are mighty big "ifs".

No such cut exists on video, no such cut exists in any final film print.
[There is also no truth to the rumor that there was a European version
that was 4 hours long.]

There exists only one version of the film that's longer than the
original theatrical release, and that was the expanded version made for
television syndication, and it's maybe 50 minutes longer than the
original.  But it certainly can't be claimed to be a "director's cut"
because not only did Lynch not get involved in cutting it, he
disapproved of it so thoroughly that he had his name removed as both
writer and director.

I have a large number of film reference books, both genre-specific and
general.  I follow a number of film and video magazines, and so forth.
I've heard and read detailed descriptions of different cuts of various
films including BLADE RUNNER, BRAZIL, LEGEND, HIGHLANDER, et alia.  I've
read and heard first-hand descriptions by people I know of such longer
versions, or I've seen listings for them as import laserdiscs.  But I've
never heard nor read of any definite, substantiated, unquestionable
existence of a version of DUNE, either in commercial release or floating
around in collectors' hands, that is longer than the 190-minute TV
version.

As a matter of fact, the *only* place I've even heard *rumors* of such a
cut of DUNE has been here on Usenet.  [One says his rumor is of a
4-hour cut.]  I've heard other rumors (via people asking about it, as
did the person who started this thread) of 5-hour versions, 7-hour
versions, 9-hour versions, and in one case, someone reported hearing
about a 15-hour version!  [Herbert did apparently mention in an interview
that the first draft of the screenplay ran about 14 hours, so that may be
the source of this mis-information.]

They are mythical. And until their existence is documented, and not just
a rumor that's floating around the net, I will stand by that statement.
[-jmb]


17. What are the two minutes of new footage on the STAR TREK VI: THE
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY videocassette?

According to Jerry Boyajian:

There are a couple of very minor bits, but the two significant (and
related) additions are:

 --The details of the proposed operation to rescue Kirk and McCoy from
   the Klingons, presented by Col. West (played by Rene Auberjenois) in the
   President's office. In the theatrical release, this is completely
   missing, though the easel with the plan diagrams on it seems to
   mysteriously appear out of nowhere.

The second is a spoiler, so...  (hit return *twice to skip through it)

 --The revelation that the Klingon assassin at Khitomer was actually
   West in disguise.


Susan K. O'Fearna also suggests that in the arrest scene, they show Kirk
being cuffed, then show him being cuffed again be a part of the extra two
minutes.

18. What are the various Quatermass films and the names they go under?

Nigel Kneale wrote three television Quatermass plays for the BBC in
the 50's the last one ended just a week or so into 1959.  Each one was
more popular than the previous one.  The last one was so popular that
churches had to change their hours because people were staying home to
watch the play.  Each of the three involved the adventures of British
rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass foiling an unusual sort of invasion
from outer space.  Each was in six 40-minute episodes shown one a week.
Hammer Films took the three stories and adapted each into a film.  Each
was renamed in the U.S.

BBC Play    Film Title        U.S. Retitling of film

THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT
        THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT
                    THE CREEPING UNKNOWN

QUATERMASS II
        QUATERMASS II
                    ENEMY FROM SPACE

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT
        QUATERMASS AND THE PIT
                    FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH

The last, as far as I can tell, invented the concept of uplift that
David Brin has been using to great advantage.  The last film, in my
opinion, is the best science fiction film ever made, richer in ideas
than most science fiction novels I have read.  Incidentally, the
"Xperiment" was an invented word to emphasize that the film had gotten
the X-certificate.

In the late 70's Nigel Kneale was convinced to do one final Quatermass
TV play and did THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION.  This time it was not
adapted into a film but the play was edited into a feature-length story
of the the same name.  It went directly to cassette and is available in
this country.

Each of the plays was published in paperback and in their original
editions are quite valuable.  They were reissued about the time of the
last TV play in the late 70's along with a novelization of THE
QUATERMASS CONCLUSION (called just QUATERMASS).  There was also an
episode of "The Goon Show" (great British radio comedy series starring
Harry Secomb, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers) entitled "The Scarlet
Capsule" which lampooned the play QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

Of the stories there is no common agreement as to whether QUATERMASS II
or QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is better, but I generally rank QUATERMASS
AND THE PIT (a.k.a. FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH) as being one of the
best science fiction films ever made.  Recently the original TV-play
has become narrowly available in this country.  I would claim that the
play is even a little better than the film made from it.  It is a
little slower at three hours, but in the film the explanation at the
end is a little terse and hard to follow.  Things are better explained
in the play.

[This part contributed by Mark R. Leeper ([e-mail]).]

Evelyn C. Leeper | [phone] | [e-mail] / [e-mail]