#if only this wasn't filmed on a literal potato

[bronzeagepizzeria]

DAVID TENNANT AND BILLIE PIPER AT THE BAFTAS

[ratherembarrassing]

2024: weeks 39 and 40 (wtf?!)

time is a fucking hamster wheel and i'm literally too lazy to edit this into the way i usually do, so. enjoy!

england!:

the cold that hit me on the bus home after chappell roan persisted through every event recorded in this post. just a little context for fun.

monday morning, awoke to a giant fucking billboard ad for hinge literally outside my hotel window having gone up overnight, which felt unnecessarily pointed and i decided i had to leave london immediately.

but i didn't, because i needed food. can we talk about eggslut's hashbrowns again? cause they are fucking incredible.

was immediately punished for not leaving london, as i turned a corner in shoreditch and walked straight into a film set, which did in fact give me a mild panic attack because reasons. it was citadel, so it was fine.

then i got the hell out of london. i got in a car and i drove! off into the countryside! apparently there was flooding across southern england, but as i drove literally all the way across southern england in both directions, i saw little more than puddles, so i'm not convinced. also, trees. so many trees!

thus begins what i think i will simply refer to in the future as "that time i drove all over southern england just because."

i did absolutely zero research or planning for anything beyond typing "seven sisters" into google maps to check how far it was, but i did not die so it's fine, and then i did in fact see the seven sisters. i did get asked if i was there to kill myself, which i was not, but i can see how i might have given off that vibe.

salisbury can go fuck itself, but it's probably not the town of salisbury's fault so much as the weather, the cunt at the front desk of the hotel i was staying at, and the horrible potato thing i ate there. they do have a very cool cathedral.

stonehenge can stay.

bath is in fact prettier than advertised. the hotel i booked while in some jetlag-fueled delirium was in fact a bath. at this point i did feel like wandering the english countryside was revealing something to me, which might have just been the general lack of sleep talking.

after a very early morning trip to the actual roman baths and stomping around in the rain, i had had enough of doing things, and that is how i ended up eating kfc at 4pm in my hotel bed and then sleeping for like 12 hours.

three days in the country was all i thought i could tolerate, so i went back to london for a hot minute to look at some art at the national gallery. once again i was denied seeing the turners i should have been able to see.

insert here the story of me frantically trying to find a way to charge my phone with only 1% battery and my train ticket trapped inside it and all of st pancras having exactly zero ways for me to do so.

train - the bad version.

@notabuddhist treated me to the sights of her lovely town! again, i feel like Seeing England has revealed something to me, if not about myself then at least about the goals of the white people in australia that were previously unknown to me. don't know what to do with this knowledge yet.

train - the good version.

and then: emma time. listen, i don't think that play was any great work of art. it might actually have been corny as hell. but that's not the point. the point is i didn't die, and i went back again the next night and didn't die again. growth!

i wasn't planning to go to the tate, but sometimes you just have to go to the tate.

refusing to concede my final day in england, brunch in soho, wandered over to the royal academy for some more art, took my life in my hands again biking from buckingham palace back to my hotel.

i did not manage to find a lick of football to watch, so i went to the airport and went home.

the nightmare that followed:

monday did not exist for me

tuesday i arrived home at like 5am, slept all day, slept all night.

wednesday???

thursday i went back to work.

friday, i have no fucking clue.

weekend??????????????????? will my sleep schedule ever return to normal, we just don't know. i'd like to be a cool international traveler who just bounces from place to place, but the timezones between here and there specifically have destroyed me every time on returning to australia.

the end.

[fauxfickle]

Another month, another info dump of things you already know, or the search for "The Great All-American Pizza Show!"

Last time, we talked about the Citrus Heights commercial produced by Bob Wilkins Advertising Inc and it's potential showing at the Orinda Theatre. The bad news is that I don't know anyone from CA and I don't have anywhere near a big enough platform to spread the word. Was it there? Was it not? We'll never know! Good thing is that the Psychotronix Film Festival is putting on another show in May at Foothill College, also in CA.

But on to other news! I finally got a response from PBS about Ben Wattenberg's segment on PTT. They said they didn't have it so yeah...

I've been looking around for Ben Wattenberg's 1980 and PM Magazine listings on Ebay, hoping for maybe a DVD copy or something but nothing comes up. These aren't really my top priority since they aren't part of TGAAPS but it helps me from burning out looking at a million commercials

Let's move onto the real meat and potatoes, the ads themselves. Starting with the Citrus Heights commercial, I've been doing research on Bob Wilkins' ad company and you'd be surprised how scarce info is on it. His obituary states that he made ads not only for PTT, but Lay-Z-Boy as well. This newspaper from 1981 says that his agency makes over $1M annually and was doing "amazingly well" which makes it all the more stranger that there's so little documentation of it. I also found a house in Oakland, that was used by the company at some point. I won't link the house, the company is so far removed from it and I don't want the people living there to be bothered. Something funny I found while looking on other search engines for traces of BW's agency is that Bing's AI assistant literally uses my post as a source. It's surreal seeing the info I wrote be regurgitated back at me by an AI. Weird...

Now the animated ad! I'll admit, I've been slacking a bit when it comes to looking for this ad, however I found 3 people on Linkedin that worked for Colossal Pictures during the late 70s. Also found out that Adam Savage from Myth Busters worked for (C)P at some point. Hmm, having your company initials be CP wasn't the smartest move in hindsight. Maybe that's why they added the parenthesis.

Something that wasn't found by me :( was a storyboard for one of the live action commercials. From what I've heard, it was posted in the showbizpizza.com discord server and spread from there. In the bottom left it says UBC which I can't really link to anything. I thought maybe it could be a production company, or an acronym, but I've got nothing. Maybe it just says Inc. Bottom right isn't much better, it's completely illegible and the first page of the storyboard is in even worse quality. An exciting find for sure, but not one that really helps me.

Or so I thought! In the end card it says (location tag), not just "Kooser and Blossom Hill". Unlike the radio ad, nothing in here denotes any sort of specific location like having a certain guest star or cabaret act. Sure it uses the Winchester bots, Kooser bots, and Mopsey sisters but people aren't really going to pay attention to whether the backup singers are mops or crows and they probably wouldn't even notice the small diffences between the portrait bots and a cyberamic in a 60 second ad.

Here's my big theory though. Oh yeah, we're getting conspiratorial! Someone asked me about that forum post I discovered that mention a PTT jingle from 1978 - 1980. Way back in my first post, I found that this person was most likely from the Detroit area, and probably didn't see the ads that I thought at the time were only in the Bay Area and aired during early 1980. I thought that because the ads ended around spring and the first store to open in MI was around November, this person was simply misremembering the "Smile America" ads from 1982. It's been a few months, and in that time I've learned probably more than any sane person should know about this campaign, and while looking at the store lists on the Cheese-e-pedia after that person mention the post, I realized something that made me feel like a complete idiot. The first PTT to open in MI was in Westland. I looked up where that was, and low and behold, Westland is A SUBURB OF DETROIT. I felt so stupid but also really happy that this tiny detail actually meant something. My theory is that maybe, just maybe, one of, if not a few of these ads were aired outside CA with the location tags edited for each store. PTT has done that before, so I feel it's not totally out of the picture for them to have done it few years earlier. If this is true, then it expands this search from just CA to Nevada, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina, and of course, Michigan.

I still want to keep most my searching in the Bay area, but I think this could lead to exciting things. Or I could be delusional, who knows? Until next time!

[fallingsunflower]

I'm not really a fan of him acting in general. I don't think he's good at it so for him to be cast in Marvel is weird to me. Now if he's just doing cameos then I could possibly be more on board but if he has like a 7 movie deal where he's the main lead then...idk about that one. He's mediocre at best at acting, in my opinion

I agree with you. And what really annoys me is that he went straight into getting main roles when he had no experience at all (apart from iCarly but yeah) and I don't know if he auditioned for Dunkirk or if he was offered the role. I feel like he should've gained experience and took acting lessons before doing lead roles. And no one attack me for this please but I really don't think Harry can do emotional scenes. Like when I watch him in those type of scenes it looks like he's really struggling to look emotional / cry. For me I think the only scene of his that I actually liked was a scene from DWD when he was singing "boiling the potatoes" because that was literally Harry and that was the only part that looked natural to me. I feel like Marvel was a big jump for him. Like he jumped before he walked. He also needs to remember that a lot of the GP will be watching not just harries. He may have had harries praising his work in the other three films but Marvel is much bigger so there will be a lot more criticism if he doesn't do a good job. With acting you can't just rely on your fandom because it won't be just them watching especially if you're part of a big film like Marvel.

Dunkirk wasn't a huge shock I suppose. I think he did audition and he got the role based off of talent. Christopher Nolan didn't even know who he was apparently lmao but I think that started this interest in Harry, which is totally fine and valid, and pushiness from his team, which could also be viewed as a good thing for getting him roles. I just don't personally think he's been in roles that are good for him. He wasn't AWFUL but I certainly thought a majority of his scenes were cringey, especially in MP. Again just a personal opinion. I've been marinating with my thoughts for quite some time now, trying to think them all through lmao

also yes the boiling the potatoes sent me LMAOO the one perk of DWD. I will say the issue with that though is that you're right - that was def Harry but it also doesn't help that people have a hard time separating Harry from his characters

[nicoleanell]

#please continue i need to know things and have no money @houseofpurplestars

Okay, you know what? FUCK IT WE BALL. I took Renfield Audio Commentary notes. Under the cut.

The commentary has no cast but various crew members, mostly talking about technical aspects of the movie - lighting, sets, sound design, etc. - also the screenwriter as I mentioned and producer Samantha Nisenboim leads a lot of the discussion. I largely can't tell who is speaking unless they identify themselves.

It was director Chris McKay's idea to do the flashbacks and recreate the 1931 scenes, not in the original script. Thought it was important to have some backstory for people who had no idea who Renfield is. (And it was a cool way to do it.)

This doesn't come up in the commentary until way later, but the voiceover is something that was added later for exposition reasons. Nobody really sounds that keen on it. It basically disappears after 20 minutes and only comes back briefly when the group dies and at the end.

They literally lit a stunt guy on fire. "We didn't light him on fire once but twice."

McKay having done animation before uses animatics to plan out scenes, and also allows a lot of improv. The woman who played Carol could cry on cue (a skill not used in the movie, just in her audition) and came up with a lot of her own dialogue, the writer joked she could've done a pass on the whole movie.

It originally wasn't even jokes about ska, in an earlier draft it was the band Rush.

Nicholas Hoult ate mostly fake and a couple real (dead) bugs. He was up for eating anything except potato bugs. There were some edible bugs people could try on set but most did Not.

No live bugs were harmed. The ones in his little box are digital.

They mention a stunt coordinator who worked with Marvel, and then they're like "Are we allowed to talk about competing franchises? UNNAMED FRANCHISE FILMS." Heh.

Most of the commenters were watching the final cut of the movie for the first time. It was not released yet when they recorded this.

The hospital exterior and hallway was a real abandoned hospital damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the main (gorgeous) room was a separate set.

They called the first most fucked-up version of Dracula his "Picasso phase" - contorted figure, ears in the wrong place, etc. Took 3.5 hours to apply prosthetics, then hours of shooting and another hour to remove.

They talk a bunch about the COLOR AND SATURATION, my beloved. <3 Something about holding the characters apart from the backgrounds. The fact it it's not visually dark, it's "vibrant day-glo horror" - the things happening are still horrific, but the audience is having Fun in a way they shouldn't be.

A lot of technical talk about how they emulated a film look despite shooting on digital. I can't say I understand any of it but it's cool! They did a good job!

McKay is a "maximum volume all the time" kind of director, I think they were specifically discussing sound here but I thought it summed it all up lmao.

They point out the guy in the restaurant fight scene who goes up and never comes down. Speculating he might've gotten impaled on something or went through the roof, lol.

Pretty much entire Rebecca/Renfield meet cute had to be ADR'd because the audio recorded badly. They did a good job 'cause I never noticed that. One of the hostages never put her wine down, a subtle joke which I also never noticed. XD

The real manager of the restaurant appeared as an extra, also it's the actual owner of the building giving Renfield his apartment keys.

I took a bunch of notes when they were talking about Dracula 2.0's "very moist lips" and shark teeth and his wispy baby hair. Still took 2 hours, not as long as other makeup. They said "He just needs to be wet. He needs to look like a wet sore." The sound effects are sticky, like a "walking open wound".

More talking about the color palette and Renfield's Sweater that everyone loved the moment they saw it on him. It's already colorful but again they did a lot with the color grading to bring it out more, it shows excitement of life coming back to him. As the movie progresses "you see where life exists and where life doesn't." 🥺 Rebecca's blue also looks brighter in the scene in the police station.

The flowers bit with Rebecca was taken in and out of the script a couple times, but it was something Nicholas Hoult loved a lot which is ultimately why they left it in. There was another thing about rats following him around that was cut, the writer said it was like "the weirdness of Renfield's world infringing on his attempts at normalcy." (Later they brought this up again and made it more clear it was Dracula having control over the rats and encroaching on him.)

The Lobos are very "opulent", a lot of gold decor and colors around them.

I wrote down that someone said it was "heartwarming" how pumped Nicholas Hoult and Nic Cage were about the movie, like excited watching the camera tests and stuff.

Canonically Dracula can turn into a wolf. They really would've liked to do more stuff with animals (the turning into wolf and having rats as like his children of the night) but only the bats made it into the movie. Aspirations vs. budget.

APARTMENT SCENE TIME. They did a couple of hours of shooting it over and over, the director really wanted a lot of takes of it & every take Nic Cage was doing something different. One person says it was like a "pinch me" moment on set and very awesome, and the producer jokes "That's why there were so many takes, we were just havin' a good time." They saw the raw footage and were like, oh my gosh, this is terrifying, this is a great scene.

@pinkiepiebones THEY MENTIONED RENFIELD'S BAD PAINT JOB. "If you look at the set, you can see that Renfield is not a master painter. He's a bit slapdash, but he's colorful!" It matches his sweater (he belongs there uwu). They point out the really obvious contrast of Dracula with his pallid face and dark suit against all the bright neon colors. ("Like the eighties threw up in the background, I mean that in the kindest way.")

Nic Cage said that he channelled his dad for some of this performance, the mid-atlantic accent thing. (They tragically do not mention Anne Bancroft at all.) They had a Zoom meeting with him in November 2021 when he first came onboard the movie, and "by December he was basically off-book and just fucking around with what his voice would sound like."

They had a very limited time actually shooting, but a lot of time pre-production (I feel like that GENERALLY explains so much about this movie lol) and that included the actors rehearsing and workshopping stuff in offices and on set. At one point early on both Hoult and Cage were in an office with only the director and screenwriter and just went into doing a scene like it was a play -- it was actually not that scene but the one where he slices his belly open. And the writer afterwards was like "okay, that was insane for me, and later on I found out it was also insane for Nicholas Hoult."

Originally the idea was he was reading from the book, with the self-help as Bible imagery, and there would be a thing with title cards onscreen showing the chapter headings, where he was following what was in the book. (They talk about this in that Cinema Therapy ep on youtube btw. The last title card was like "don't let them back you into a corner" when he ends up in the corner.) "It was quite funny, but because the performances were so incredible they didn't want to distract or take away from the Nicks."

FYI not two minutes into the "Renfield" DVD commentary someone asked what inspired the codependent support group stuff and the screenwriter dead responded "Living it. Life." I love this silly movie to the ends of the earth y'all.

[monstersslut]

Parent problems #9

This year on Thanksgiving, my ever so lovely mother was first making such a fuss about needing to take a pic of the entire dining table -- foodless, but also decorated, mind you.

Then when she began to film my siblings and me individually, boasting about how each of us was working on different foods, she would acknowledge each of my siblings by their name and birth rank, and then she paused before coming over to film me and fucking just addressed me as somebody.

As in, "and somebody is opening cans of corn," not even in a joking way either.

You know how I know?

cuz when I said "somebody?" she merely apologized, claiming "she wasn't even thinking," instead of, idk, swearing she was only joking like a healthy normal parent that doesn't burden a secret dislike for their youngest descendant.

And why I would think that is cuzz she not only threatens to kick me out of her house - since I'm barely in my twenties over every little miscommunication or tough argument - but also she hardly ever is there for me the way a mom should be because she somehow feels that she doesn't really need to be, since "God doesn't actually have unconditional love so why should her," or whatever.

Also, she would single me out wayyy more than my other and all older siblings in doing clean up or fixing her a meal cuz she didn't feel like standing in line to make her plate. I was rightt about to sit down to mine, hoping my tension headache would ease up a bit, when my mother literally fucking orders me to make her a plate.

Then when I snappily put potatoes on her plate because my mother always does this typa thing when the other half of my siblings come over, she then of course managed to guilt me into not letting her do it herself, and the whole time, my sister was staring hard in disapproval.

Hardly ever a please or thank you as well from my mom - which my sister only pointed out to her once my mom seemed to be triggering my bipolar, sensitive brother with her demands. Imagine that lmao.

also when I began to silently weep after doing the dishes my mom orderd to clean, of coursee all my siblings were being biased and tryna be fair for they haven't even experienced her narcissism like I have, so ofc they were all making excuses for her while tryna comfort me at the same time loool.

Happy Eat-to-your-heart's-content-Day, Tumblr :3, hope you guys had better luck with your holiday than I did lol.

until next time. <3

[corninthegob]

Wasn't tagged but IM GONNA DO IT ANYWAY B-) if u see this feel free to rb even if i didnt tag u

3 SHIPS

i will restrain myself from making all 3 of these OFMD i swear on my life i can think of a different show i can do it ((sweating and shaking and crying))

Gentlebeard (Our Flag Means Death). i cannot add extra details like with the others or i will combust. I love them so much.

um

uhhhhhjh

nick and stu WWDITS 2014 honestly it doesnt even have to be romantic at all like that isnt really in the film i just want more of them interacting together and i happen to have a gay agenda where i want people to be gay in my medias

Venom and Eddie look i swear im not a monster fucker like that may be a little bit the reason but also i love how their relationship evolved over the 2 films and also My Gay Agenda

BONUS SHIP!!! Spirk ive literally never watched the original star trek but ive seen like 10 clips of the way they interact and Holy Shit. Oh My Fucking God. plus they invented half the goddamn fandom tropes in existance i cant NOT love them

speaking of star trek, we need more Tuvok appreciation. Voyager was the first series i watched and he is by far my favourite character. i love him. He's the best.

FIRST SHIP

Im pretty sure it would be Discord x Celestia from MLP:FIM or some pairing from youtuber Aphmau's old Minecraft fantasy roleplay series

LAST SONG

Meltdown by Iroha

LAST MOVIE

either JoJo Rabbit, The Wilderpeople, or WWDITS (2014). i literally never watch movies this is all from like the earlier half of this year.

CURRENTLY READING

Slow crawl, but I've been reading "No Longer Human" by Osamu Dazai. It's really good but it has some REALLY fucked up content in it so please only read it if you're able to handle that stuff (i say ignoring my own advice)

Another one I've been slowly going through since the end of last year is "Shiver," Junji Ito's collection of some of his shorter stories. It's all horror manga and contains a lot of disturbing imagery and themes.

Part of the reason I'm taking so long to read both these books, despite them both not being that long, is because of all the goddamn OFMD fics ive been reading ever since the first season ended 😭😭😭 i may be slightly (extremely) obsessed with this show ok after all the years of queerbaiting and my pessimism towards us ever getting mainstream queer love stories and representation i was FINALLY PROVEN WRONG and it means so much to me.

also it means i get to savour those other 2 books longer and get more of my money's worth so it's a win-win

CURRENTLY WATCHING

Not anything really, but i did just recently finish rewatching Over The Garden Wall after probably 5 years.

CURRENTLY CONSUMING

medicine for my Illness, for I am a Sickly Young Man who is being very brave about it and definitely isnt very mad that it's been sick for a WHOLE BLOODY WEEK

also some baked sweet potato yummu yumby yump

CURRENTLY CRAVING

to not be sick so that i can draw again and finish my gay little OFMD fanart that i started

BBQ Pork Buns i love them i love them i love them

TAGGING: @where-am-i-nblwnblm @kerflouie @vendettart @my-good-friend-cosmo And anyone else who wants to do this!!!

Tag 9 people you want to know better

I was tagged by @life-jim-but-not-as-we-know-it :) thanks for the tag!

3 ships: Huh, well, I don’t tend to write a lot of ships myself but they’re certainly fun to read! I’d say Thrawn/Pellaeon (Star Wars) is a favorite, then maybe Sherlock/Watson (ACD Holmes specifically), and Thrawn/Car’das. Honorary mention goes to Thrawn/Nuso Esva!

1st ever ship: Well, it would have to be Steve/Tony (Marvel); that’s the fic I first started reading and that was my friend who recommended all that fic’s favorite, so that’s what I read! It was fun - back in the Avengers-Found-Family days, when I could still stand the movies.

Last song: had one of my somewhat random character playlists on while working this afternoon, so it’s Tell God and the Devil by Solas.

Last movie: Knives Out, which I finally got around to watching while home over Thanksgiving. It was a good one!

Currently reading: Just finished 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann - nonfiction about Native Americans before and after Columbus. I’m hoping to pick up Star Wars: Rogue Planet - I finally found someone who’s read it and they enjoyed it, so I don’t have to worry it’s going to be unreadably terrible and I can finally get the lore I’m using for D&D from the source instead of Wookiepedia!

Currently watching: Whatever episode of Rebels I think will get me through my writer’s block on this one fic. Ezra’s serious voice is so hard to capture!

Currently consuming: a nice herbal tea

Currently craving: nothing at the moment, but I’ve been off and on craving pizza for a few weeks and haven’t gotten around to fulfilling it. Yet.

I love these, they’re super fun! I never know who to tag though… let’s go with: @ele-millennial-weirdo, @handbaskethell, @evarinaandlat, @jedihlaalu, @emp-roar, @nekobakaz, @jewelliffer, @loud-shimo-screes, @grand-admiral-lawn. Only if you want to! But if you want to, go for it, whether I’ve tagged you or not :)