Crap. Dave beat me to it. When I saw that Five Million Years to Earth was airing on TCM, that one title eclipsed all other offerings on tap this week. I say that with no offense to Waterloo Bridge or The Prince and the Showgirl, to name but a few other movies also popping up this Wednesday (and I’m not even familiar with those titles, so what would I know?)… S’aright, I’m not in a writing mood anyway. I recently lost two four-legged friends, which is also the reason for changing my avatar. With what little energy I have, I’ll do this: I’ll segue from Kubrick, to the MGM lion, to parting words for Five Million Years to Earth, and call it a day.
On my last post I plugged the 70mm screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey held at the Portland Hollywood Theatre. Kubrick’s epic kicked off with the following logo from MGM:
Of course, most folks know the majestic MGM lion in a more animated form:
Okay, the B&W version is a stretch for most people nowadays. Most people are familiar with the color version:
There’s no shortage of pictures showing the MGM lion in a variety of settings, but I wonder how many people are familiar with the one shot included here in this collage center-bottom?
It was just a matter of time before smaller cats made their debut:
And smaller cats with bigger padding:
Naturally, as as cat-lover, when the time came to come up with a custom opening to put up in front of the movies I program for the calendar film series I’ve been running here in Boulder since 1997, how could I not think of Chief? Chief, my half-tailed Manx cat of 14 years who, though the runt of his litter, had the regal mane of a lion. Ironically, he wasn’t a meowler. He was a squeaker. A very talkative squeaker. One day while petting him with one hand, I used my free hand to grab my smart-phone and capture a snippet of Chief telling me something. (I’m not the cat whisperer, so I can’t pretend to know what exactly he was saying, but it was probably something along the lines of “Dude, it’s a beautiful day, why are you still in bed?) With that scant and fleeting footage we did this:
It was done on a lark, and was meant more as a work-in-progress rather than anything definitive. I had much bigger schemes in my mind for Chief, and maybe Oliver too, since he had been my Tabby companion of 16 years, two years longer than Chief. I was hoping to capture Oliver snoring (I’m not kidding when I say that cat would wake me up with his snoring, but what’s cuter than a cat snoring?)… None of this was meant to be.
What happened was this:
1) Audiences loved the Chief intro. Even now, a year later, it still gets laughs.
2) I started to put Chief on fliers, ads, and punch cards, making Chief the official IFS mascot.
3) When staff suggested we do a new t-shirt design, Chief was once-again front and center:
4) Then Chief got ill and I had him hospitalized. The vet told me it was probably bone-marrow cancer, I brought him home, and the next day…
5) The new t-shirts with Chief arrived at the same time I took a week off of work to be with Chief as he slowly got weaker and…
6) Seven days later I buried him in my front yard and, that night for the first time, I spent the night completely alone except for Oliver. I was now poised to spoil Oliver silly, but he was clearly not okay with having lost his life-long companion.
7) The morning after I buried Chief I woke up to find Oliver gone (yes, Chief and Oliver were free to come and go as they pleased, and editorializing from cat lovers that keep their cats indoors all the time is not required). That was three weeks ago, and Oliver has not yet returned.
What’s a middle-aged unmarried dude with no kids who just lost his two companions of 16 and 14 years to do? Watch a lot of movies, of course. Read a lot of books. In other words, the normal stuff I do. But Oliver and Chief were my perfect movie-watching and book-reading companions, so can’t help but miss them both. Things are quiet around the house, too quiet. Yesterday I spent the day listening to Miles Davis. Today I’m blasting Black Sabbath. And it’s still too quiet around here.
Which brings me back to Five Million Years to Earth. Three years ago I got a chance to sit in a chair opposite Robert Osborne to guest program a film. My guest-programming pick was Five Million Years to Earth. Being in front of the TCM cameras taught me some important lessons (namely that I don’t like being in front of cameras and that I find the overall experience rather horrifying). It also taught me that if you have cats, those cats might shed a lot, and all that cat hair might find its way onto your clothes and require TCM staffers to body-massage you with lint-rollers before sitting on a big red chair opposite Mr. Osborne. I’m pretty sure I left a bit of Chief and Oliver behind on that red chair, so I’ve decided to put aside my embarrsment and share here my original blog piece and awkward appearance on TCM with Osborne to promote Five Million Years to Earth. It’s a smart film that was ahead of its time in many ways, and I’ll dedicate this post to my two boys who gave me so much joy over the years. Maybe not in monolith years, but certainly in cat years:
http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/10/03/buggin-out/