scallenger

Here is an article that went unnoticed by me in April when JP came to theaters in 3D. It actually features a LOT of newly revealed factoids I certainly have never heard before (although it does also cover a lot of stuff I did know, so you just gotta skim through it all to find the good stuff).

http://insidemovies....k-oral-history/

Here are the best highlights below. A couple here and there I did already know but this time had more details than I previously knew (and included the Williams quote even though it didn't say much, lol):

According to Spielberg, other interested directors may have included ­Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon) and James Cameron (Avatar).

TIPPETT Another thing that was really important is that they locked me in a room with Gary Rydstrom for a week. Before we started doing the actual performances, I wanted to have the dinosaur voices, or as close as we could.

With preproduction under way, Spielberg selected screenwriter David Koepp to help Crichton adapt the book, based on a ­recommendation from Robert Zemeckis, who was directing Death Becomes Her, co-written by Koepp.

 

DAVID KOEPP Screenwriter Steven was looking around for somebody to take a fresh shot at Jurassic so I read it and got a meeting and told them how I thought I’d do it. I do remember that I wanted to start it in a sort of a globe-trotting way, I wanted to give it this feel of international dimension.

 

SPIELBERG David basically took it from a banquet to fast food and that’s a compliment because the movie feels like a drive thru. The scenes are tight. The story David wrote is a page-turner. There’s just enough science to make it credible and then it’s a downhill race from then on.

 

KOEPP The problem turning the book into a movie was that there’s vast amount of scientific exposition and how on earth do you get that in a movie? I remember Steven and I were wrestling with that very issue, about the DNA, and one of us said, “What are we supposed to do? Have a little animated character called Mr. DNA?” And the other one said, “Yes! That’s exactly what we’re going to do!”

 

SPIELBERG Yeah, that was my idea. When I was a kid, the AV kids used to wheel in the projector and show these Frank Capra produced and directed documentaries on the mind, the heart and the sun. I just remember all the interstitial animation that was done to illustrate the science and thought, “Why don’t we do all this in a 2-minute animated handbook for the audience?” It would be easy for everybody to understand how this is even possible to bring dinosaurs back.

LAURA DERN Dr. Ellie Sattler I was talking with Nicolas Cage, and we had just done Wild at Heart together, and I said to him, “Nic, they want to put me on the phone with Steven Spielberg, but they want to talk to me about a dinosaur movie…” And he was like, “You are doing a dinosaur movie! No one can ever say no to a dinosaur movie!” I was like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Are you kidding? It’s a dream of my life to do a movie with dinosaurs!” [Laughs] So he was such an ­influence on me. Then I talked to Steven and he goes, “I know that you’re doing your independent films, but I need you to be chased by dinosaurs, in awe of dinosaurs, and have the adventure of a lifetime. Will you do this with me?” And I was like, “Sure.”

 

SAM NEILL Dr. Alan Grant I was in L.A., on the way to a job in Canada, and my agent called and said Steven Spielberg would like to meet with you in half an hour. So I got a cab and I went over to Steven’s house and we sat in his hallway and I looked at his art and we talked about this thing Jurassic Park. It was all very surprising. So I went to Canada and two days later, I had the part. And three or four weeks after that we started shooting in Hawaii. So it all happened real quick. I hadn’t read the book, knew nothing about it, hadn’t heard anything about it, and in a matter of weeks I’m working with Spielberg.

 

JANET HIRSHENSON Casting director I read the book and I thought of Jeff Goldblum right away. There were several other people we taped for the part, though. Jim Carrey had come in and he was terrific, too, but I think pretty quickly we all loved the idea of Jeff.

 

JEFF GOLDBLUM Ian Malcolm A meeting was set up, so I went over there to Amblin. I’d quickly read the book in preparation and Steven said, “Since we scheduled this meeting, there’s an idea afoot to combine the two characters, to absorb your character into the Sam Neill character.” I said, “Well, geez. I hope you don’t do that.” I might have even advocated on the spot, and I came back and lo and behold I had a little part in it.

 

ARIANA RICHARDS Lex I was called into a casting office, and they just wanted me to scream. I heard later on that Steven had watched a few girls on tape that day, and I was the only one who ended up waking his sleeping wife off the couch, and she came running through the hallway to see if the kids were all right.

 

JOSEPH MAZZELLO Tim Steven had me screen-test with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman for Hook. I was just too young for the role. And because of that, Steven came up to me and said, “Don’t worry about it, Joey. I’m going to get you in a movie this summer.” Not only a nice promise to get, but to have it be one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time? That’s a pretty good trade.

JOHN WILLIAMS Composer The sight of the animals as we saw them for the first time, I thought what I saw was awesome and that the animals were beautiful and inspiring and the orchestra could illustrate some of the sense of absolute wonder and breathtaking beauty of what our actors are supposed to be seeing.

NEILL We were all huddled into the ballroom of this hotel, which was completely trashed in the course of the hurricane. What kept morale up was that the only thing to read in the whole ballroom, the only thing anyone thought to bring in with them, was a Victoria’s Secret catalog. So that, in our darkest moments, cheered us up.

 

GOLDBLUM The lights went out, and I remember Steven Spielberg took a flashlight and held it above his head and shined it down on himself and said, “Love story,” and then put it under his chin and said, “Horror story.” “Love story. Horror story.”

 

RICHARDS Steven helped to combat boredom with both Joey and me. He took it upon himself to tell us ghost stories, and I think the ghost stories scared me more than the hurricane.

 

SPIELBERG Kathy Kennedy jogged to the airport. She found some guy about to leave on a small private single engine aircraft. She hitchhiked her way to Honolulu and she was trying to find a plane that could get our crew and cast back to Los Angeles. She bumped into this guy she kind of recognized and she walked over to the guy and said, “Don’t I know you?” and he said, “Hi Kathy.” It was the young man that flew the biplane in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was the pilot that was in our movie and he just happened to be a pilot of a four-engine 707, a cargo plane and he was between flights. So Kathy arranged with him to send a large plane to the island the next day to take the cast and crew out. It’s once again something else that seems to only happen in the movies. And when things like that happen in the movies, the audience rejects that!

KENNEDY The T. rex went into the heebie-jeebies sometimes. Scared the crap out of us. We’d be, like, eating lunch, and all of a sudden a T. rex would come alive. At first we didn’t know what was happening, and then we realized it was the rain. You’d hear people start screaming.

 

MAZZELLO We were in that car, and I think the T. rex was only supposed to go down so far, and the Plexiglas was the only thing between the dinosaur and us. It came down too far one time, and it chipped the Plexiglas and broke a tooth. And if you pause on it, you can actually see in the movie that there’s a shot during that scene where the T. rex was missing a tooth.

NEILL I’ve still got a big scar on my left hand that I’m looking at right now from the flare. It dropped some burning ­phosphorous on me and got under my watch and took a chunk of my arm out.

 KOEPP I remember the day it opened, I was in New York and I walked to the Ziegfeld [Theatre] to see how it was doing. The guy comes out and announces to the big line, “Ladies and gentlemen, the 7 o’clock show 
of Jurassic Park is sold out.” And ­people go, “Oooh.” And he goes, “Also the 10 o’clock show is sold out.” And they went, “Ooooooh.” “And also Saturday night’s 
 7 and 10 o’clock shows are also sold out.” And I was like, “I’m not an expert, but I think this is very good.”

 

SPIELBERG My reaction was “Thank God.” 
 I don’t often preview the movies I direct. 
 I did not preview Jurassic Park. The first 
 time I saw it was at a theater with the 8 p.m. Friday audience. I sat in the back with my agent Mike Ovitz and my wife.

 

KENNEDY That was a period of time where it was so fun to release movies because it was like a rock concert. You’d get in a limo and get a couple bottles of champagne and drive around town and see the lines around the block and people going crazy and getting dressed up. And then you go into the theater, and people were so excited. We’ve lost a bit of that with movies opening in so many theaters.

SPIELBERG I think people like Jurassic Park because it’s a helluva yarn.

It's still fun. Probably the last truly fun Spielberg film.

It's just so odd then that they can't ever seem to find or obtain master tapes for so many of Williams scores. Hook apparently was missing some. Jaws seems to have been recorded with inferior technology at the time compared to something like Kong. The Indiana Jones score releases, like from Concord, seem to be from more than one source. It's just odd to me.

Well I got my copy of King Kong the other day from MovieMusic. This score is so wonderful, in the most beautiful and somber of ways. For a score from '76, the sound quality is AMAZING. It makes me wonder why scores from around the same time period, like Jaws, do not sound just as good as this. Does it all depend on how the music is stored or recorded? It's just so odd because the restoration here is so amazing, as are other recent efforts like Star Trek: The Motion Picture... why do a lot of older Williams scores sound so... horrible in sound quality in comparison?