#it's just a concession that had to happen. they had to age up claudia. but in doing so i DO feel like something was lost in translation

[cinematicnomad]

#I think this is good analysis but it’s missing a fundamental element #they don’t think she’s fucked up for anything she’s done or will do. they don’t think her life is a tragedy from her actions. #her life is a tragedy bc she’s a child. think about how much independence and autonomy a child has. #she’s 14. barely out of middle school. #(her actress obviously is older. bc a real 14 year old could not provide the necessary level of performance. but TV claudia is 14.) #claudia cannot exist in human society without a parent figure. which means she is eternally tied to a vampire companion by necessity #book claudia is 5 years old. Louis carries her around like a babydoll. brushes her hair and puts ribbons in it. #obviously TV claudia would not put up with that treatment. she has MUCH more autonomy than book claudia. #but Claudia being uniquely cursed is due to her age. and as her maker lestat is responsible for that #and lestat projects his insecurity back at her #armand wants her out of the way and he recognizes her insecurities/weaknesses immediately and plays them up #that’s why he creates the psychological torture of the baby lulu character for her. #madeleine well that’s interesting. TV madeleine is much more well adjusted as a human being. #book madeleine is a doll maker who lost a child. and Claudia is her replacement baby. they match each other’s freak but it’s crazyyy #they never really touch on Claudia’s age in Europe. they show her basically as a functioning adult. #when like. a biggest part of her tragedy is that she CANT leave Louis. she NEEDS an adult body with her to be passably human. #I’m rambling but yeah. it’s her age. #but she’s literally a black 14 year old who can only go out at night #the human world is so fucking dangerous for her (via @punk-pins)

As much as nearly every character she meets tends to act like there's something uniquely broken and wrong with Claudia, at no point does it truly seem to me like there actually really is? I mean, obviously she is extremely fucked up, she straight up went through a serial killer collecting trophies phase, but there's a level of fucked up that's sort of the baseline for every character in the show, and obviously being turned into a vampire as a child puts her at a unique disadvantage. But for all that everyone around her spends their time bemoaning how dreadful and doomed her life is, even Louis who genuinely loves her but also builds so much of his identity around feeling responsible for her Terrible Fate™, I really don't think she's like, fundamentally damaged any more than any of the other vampires are.

But Lestat is so unwilling to be wrong that every time her life hits an inevitable road bump instead of helping her through it he points and says "look! see! she IS a monster, I was right Louis, making her was a mistake!" (and I think he sees his own monstrousness in her but fails to also see her humanity)

And then Armand meets her and sees only someone who will inevitably lose her mind, so of course speeding up the "inevitable" and siding with the coven to plan her death is just a mercy, absolving himself of any blame. (and he projects his own frailty and desire for death onto her, failing to see her strength and her desire for life)

Which makes it so cathartic when she meets Madeleine, admits to her how broken she feels sometimes, and Madeleine's response is just. Well that's normal. Who isn't a little broken these days. Let yourself feel it, move on, let yourself feel it again if you need to. After spending her life having others act as if her emotions are something uniquely dark and worrying, Madeleine's incredibly blase attitude must have been such an incredible breath of fresh air for Claudia!

To spend her whole life being made to feel like something is Wrong™ with her, and then meet someone who's just like, "yeah, and?? Who isn't? Join the club I guess"

Which makes her death so incredibly tragic and frustrating because like. She was fine! She was making a life for herself! She wasn't doomed by her nature, she wasn't "doomed by the narrative" (whatever the fuck that even means), she was doomed for no reason other than that everyone around her (except for Madeleine) preemptively DECIDED she was doomed and never gave her a chance to prove them wrong.

[aion-rsa]

Back to the Future Not Being Planned as a Trilogy Is What Makes It Great

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In the last decade, it’s become a common refrain among fans and industry players alike: the filmmakers should’ve “planned it better.” This trilogy could’ve been mapped out; those five sequels needed to be outlined first. Perhaps this is inevitable in an era where “shared universe” is part of the everyday vernacular, yet I cannot help but be amused when folks grow wistful over sequels with allegedly concrete roadmaps: franchises like Star Wars, Godfather… and the Back to the Future trilogy.

Whenever social media discussions about sequels or franchises that most smoothly told their sagas rear, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s little trio of time traveling adventures always spring to the forefront. With their economy of storytelling and strong fixation on characters, particularly lovable Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and eccentric Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), the three movies’ narrative is as stainless as the steel doors on the DeLorean. Even innocuous, seemingly throwaway details in the first movie turn out to have unexpectedly delightful payoffs in the sequels, such as the Doc’s interest in discovering who will win the next 25 years’ worth of World Series games.

Of course the irony in this is that Back to the Future was not planned as a trilogy; this was a “universe” structured around only one story, with its sequels acting as mere expansions on those initial foundations. Even the “cliffhanger” ending of the first movie, with Marty, Doc, and the original Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) piling into a now flying DeLorean to “do something about your kids,” was never meant to be more than a gag.

“We never designed the first Back to the Future to have a sequel,” director Zemeckis confirmed on the 2002 DVD release of Back to the Future Part II. “The flying car at the end was a joke, and it worked as a great joke and a great payoff. Everyone assumed we had this grand design like George Lucas did about Star Wars and had all these sequels. My only hope for Back to the Future ever was that it would make its money back.”

He goes on to say that if he had planned on doing a sequel, he would’ve never put Jennifer in the final scene—hence why in the sequel, the character (recast with Elisabeth Shue) spends most of the film asleep on a front porch.

Said Zemeckis, “I would’ve had only the Doc and Marty be in the car, and then I could’ve put them on any adventure. But what happens when you make a movie this successful is it becomes a piece of real estate, it becomes a franchise. And the reality comes at you very quickly, which is ‘we’re making a sequel. You can either help us or not, but the sequel is going to be made.’”

Fortunately, that sequel was made with most of the key players who turned the 1985 film into an enduring classic still in place, including Zemeckis and his co-writer/producer, Bob Gale, at the top of that list. Indeed, it’s even fair to look at the success of the trilogy and conclude that world-building is overrated. What makes Back to the Future shine all these decades later, both as a singular film and an appealing trilogy, is it was always about developing an intriguing story, as opposed to an open-ended milieu of content.

The first movie was originally conceived of by Gale based on a simple epiphany. While going through his father’s old high school yearbook, he came across a photograph of the old man that revealed he’d been elected class president.

“I had no idea,” Gale told Den of Geek last year. “And I’m looking at this picture of my dad, and he’s very proper and straight. And I’m thinking about the president of my graduating class who was just somebody I would have nothing to do with. We were just in completely different circles.”

This raised a million-dollar question: Would he have been friends with his dad in high school?

The dawning realization every young person must come upon, when they realize their parents and authority figures really were young folks like themselves once upon a time, had never been captured on screen before, much less in a mainstream movie through the prism of science fiction. But that’s what the original Back to the Future script did with its yarn about an ‘80s teenager inadvertently traveling 30 years into the past to spend the week with his mother and father in high school.

Granted, it’s more than the premise that makes Back to the Future so winsome. While the movie unquestionably benefits from the striking social distance between 1950s teenagers and their ‘80s counterparts—with the sexual revolution, Vietnam, civil rights, and second wave feminism between the two eras—it still plays to kids another 30-plus years later because of its intelligence and timeless universality. Taking the concept of “Chekhov’s gun” to its breaking point, there is not a single element, character, or detail set up in the first act in 1985 that isn’t paid off once Marty travels back to 1955, and then paid off again when he returns home in the denouement.

Marty’s mom, Lorraine (Lea Thompson), attempting to micromanage her children’s love lives with apparent 1950s social values? Well, in the actual ‘50s, she was smoking, drinking, and had no problem “parking” in cars with boys. Mayor Goldie Wilson running for reelection in 1985? He’s a young ambitious man on the make in ’55 (and with a keen eye for a good campaign slogan). The clock tower that hasn’t worked since it was struck by lightning 30 years ago? It becomes the gosh darn centerpiece of Back to the Future’s climax.

Everything flowed together with the precision of an actual, working clock tower, and it worked in service to the self-awareness which springs from young people seeing their parents in a different light. Plus, Alan Silvestri’s musical score just made everything Marty and Doc did seem to have the import of charging across the frontlines.

Read more

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Back to the Future: Why You’ll Never See More Eric Stoltz Marty McFly Footage

By Chris Cummins

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Why Fan Response to the Back to the Future Sequels Changed

By Chris Cummins

So this proverbial little ‘80s teen comedy overperformed at the box office after ending on a teasing note that left viewers hanging. Zemeckis and Gale did not write Back to the Future to lead anywhere but the line “where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” but audiences (and the studio) wanted to see what was at the end of that skyway.

Thus Back to the Future Part II and Part III came into existence—but with the ambition of its creators to make them every bit as narratively complex as the first film they were borne out from. While the sequels were very much designed on the conventional wisdom that audiences want to see their favorite characters get up to the same shenanigans, Back to the Future Part II particularly subverts this. The sequences of the film set in the future of 2015 plays into “the same but different” by bringing nearly every actor from the first film back to play their same character at a more advanced age—or younger in the unnerving case of Fox being asked to play all of Marty and Jennifer’s children—but that sequence is then quickly jettisoned for something closer to It’s a Wonderful Life than Back to the Future.

Even when Gale first began conceiving of the sequels, he imagined Marty and Doc winding up in 1967 to “correct” the future. There Marty would again see his parents, George and Lorraine McFly, in shocking ways: George would be a college professor while Lorraine would’ve become a flower child, joining the hippie movement.

However, it was Zemeckis’ input that had the story fold into itself. Instead of just playing with different time periods and doing the same setup again, the director suggested using the third act of the sequel to enter the first movie from a different vantage point. He actually did what mainstream audiences supposedly want—basically remakes of the same story—but with a much more skewed sensibility with two Martys and two Docs running around, and all of them converging on a plot that involves further cliffhangers and switchbacks on the first movie, like an ending where the sequel’s Marty surprises 1955’s Doc Brown moments after Doc had sent Marty home. Now the Marty we’ve followed for the whole second film runs up behind the Doc to say, “I’m back from the future.”

Also in a quaint departure from how sequels are conceived today, the absence of Crispin Glover as George McFly in Part II and Part III stemmed from Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment failing to lock actors into sequel clauses. Back then, it was assumed movies were a one-off experience, and when Glover decided he didn’t want to appear in a sequel… well, there’s a reason George McFly had to die in the alternative 1985 ruled over by a Trumpian Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson).

All of these concessions and choices made on the fly were not preordained or sketched out, but the talent involved was so keen on connecting their limitations to previous successes that they made a satisfying three-part whole out of a one-off, and without getting bogged down by fan service or further world-building. Nearly every choice made in the Back to the Future sequels—with exception to the inexplicable development of Marty being unable to withstand the insult of “chicken”—organically built off character traits or story concepts in the first one, flowing into a self-perpetuating circle.

Sure, there are inconsistencies. Consider the way the third movie is seeded into the second; it betrays a looseness to the world-building when Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen’s photo in Part II looks nothing like the character design in Part III. But it doesn’t ultimately matter. The elements that really determine the films’ quality, such as character, structure, and dialogue, are airtight across all three pictures.

Strangely though, this connective tissue was hidden at the time of release. As Gale told Den of Geek last year, there was a resistance at Universal to let general audiences know a third movie was on the way until after they’d seen the second one. There was even a fight to exclude the trailer of scenes from the third film at the end of Part II (at Gale’s suggestion).

“The biggest fight that I had with the president of Universal when we were planning the release of Part II is that I was adamant that I wanted to advertise this as part two of the three-part Back to the Future series, part two of the trilogy, and he didn’t want to do that,” Gale said. “He just wanted to say, ‘This is part two. Let them find out about part three later.’”

Gale is convinced that lack of understanding that Part II was setting up Part III led to both films being somewhat underappreciated during their releases. Now their legacy is as tightly woven with the first film, as well, those early Star Wars movies are. To the point where Back to the Future is often singled out as this rare thing—a near perfect film trilogy. That might be true, but it wasn’t set up that way. There’s a lesson in that.

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The post Back to the Future Not Being Planned as a Trilogy Is What Makes It Great appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[dumdeeedum]

I'm talking about the grown man she fucks before she meets Bruce. The man that fucks a person meant to be a child, that we are meant to understand looks like a child, and therefore cannot consent as far as he's concerned. The one we're meant to think was a nice guy and that we're meant to feel bad for when Claudia kills him. You can play the "back then" or whatever card but the writers in 2020-something added that to the story, not Anne Rice in the 70s, and no one whom actually had those antiquated sensibilities where one might just marry a 14-year-old because that shit did happen back then. Making her VISIBLY A CHILD takes away all ambiguity. The situation with Bruce also had no such ambiguity.

The situation with Madeline is obviously more complicated because Claudia is older but looks like a child and at the VERY LEAST Madeline knows her actual age and that she's a vampire but it doesn't exactly make it better. Especially when they aged up Armand for the same reason, that they wanted him to have a more explicit relationship with Louis and it would have been weird to have a 17-year-old fucking a grown man. But if that's the rationale then the same could be said for Claudia, whom is YOUNGER than even book Armand, and that's the part that doesn't make sense to me. Who says a child actor would have had to kiss anyone?! There have been plenty of child actors in things intended for adults and they figure it out, there's plenty of child actors in horror, etc. Wtf are you talking about? The only practical reason there would be to not hire a child actor would be that child growing too quickly like what happened with the kid from the show "Lost" or the kids in "Stranger Things."

It also isn't better to have an adult depicting a child in sexual situations that didn't happen in the source material either, especially when we're not meant to understand that the people engaging in those things with her are creeps. She says it later on but it feels wholly disconnected from her first and only "consensual" sexual experience and is meant to only make us think of Bruce and that's weird to me.

It would have been more meaningful, in fact, if the person she bonded with and fell in love with was UNWILLING to have a sexual relationship with her because she looked like a child and they only saw her as a child and condescended to her as such, etc. We'd understand that she has needs and desires and wants the love of her contemporaries but without their understanding her situation and making concessions she can never have that. It's something the book was able to wonderfully convey without making Claudia fuck adult men. And it especially doesn't work when the actress visibly looks like an adult and we can't have the visceral reaction of it FEELING wrong for a child to be having these adult feelings and imagining the type of adult whom would be willing to go with her on that. That wouldn't be shock factor for the sake of it, it'd be a true visceral reaction. Our modern pop culture, sadly, makes us all to used to seeing adult women portraying teenagers having sexual situations so that particular situation has lost the impact something like this is supposed to have.

I've read the entire series, baby, probably before you were thought of, if we're gonna play that fucking game.

It isn't like I'm unaware of what can come/is to come. Lestat fully rapes a woman in "Tale of the Body Thief," but non-Games of Thrones tv show addled brains may have a different appreciation for a rape scene that is written with purpose vs a rape scene written without purpose.

Lestat, for example, is not meant to be right in what he did , it's supposed to be shocking and fucked up that he did that and also tell us something about how he's getting on in his body-switched body after hundreds of years as a vampire.

Having Claudia fuck an adult man when it's too ambiguous whether he thinks she's a child or just looks young serves no real purpose. All it tells us is that she MIGHT look old enough that it may not matter, they certainly flip flop on the subject enough. I think the Bruce rape was a little more purposeful and unambiguous than the one she has "consensually" and goes a lot further to convey its point than the first one that tramples all over it. When things are done without intention and seemingly just for shock value it loses its interest for me, you don't have to feel the same.

Claudia having to be 14 so they could hire an adult actress and put her in sexual situations is not interesting to me. Claudia being a child and having to look and deal with being a child and growing up with a child's body and a mind that is both adult and not adult is more interesting and doesn't have to physically include someone fucking the child. Do you understand? Now off you get, go lecture someone else about "gothic shit."

girl… SISTER? be serious for real

So you're suggesting that in the show that couldn't make Armand 17 and hired a man in his mid-30s so as to not have to deal with all that made it so that Madeline is in love with the child that we're meant to understand looks like a child and will always look like a child?

I guess I wouldn't put it past the writers that made Claudia 14 instead of 5 and hired an adult actress just so her character could be raped by a grown man that we're somehow meant to believe was a nice dude and Claudia was wrong for killing him. Sure, why the fuck not. Sounds about as bizarre as most of the decisions this show has made so far.

[stuckinthedeadlights]

#interview with the vampire#iwtv#iwtv amc#claudia de lioncourt#flawless tags are flawless#yeah this is one of those things where it's like#to discuss this aspect of the story you HAVE to acknowledge that the adaptation had to make allowances in the casting#to actually functionally MAKE the show#it's just a concession that had to happen. they had to age up claudia. but in doing so i DO feel like something was lost in translation#in s1 they really do try to make the case that her being a teenager means her emotions will always be at the extreme of either end#but then she DOES settle down. and you don't really see the same claudia as you do when she was first turned#she really does function in the world as an adult. like punk-pins says v few characters in s2 remark on her age#it's there (louis pretends he's her father + tells her to play with the children etc etc)#but it's not like. deeply embedded in the character#so like. op is right. in the canon of the show we really don't SEE evidence of cause for concern re:claudia#which i think?? works for all the reasons OP says. it makes her death even more tragic. there's no defense of it.#it is functionally a lynching. she exists. the other vampires assume she is inherently wrong.#and so they humiliate her and subjugate her and ultimately murder her.#the book it's all like. anne rice dealing with the trauma of her daughter's death from leukemia which can be genetic#so it's all of anne rice having to grapple with the grief she feels for losing her daughter.#but also the guilt for maybe passing on the very thing that killed her. right?#so for louis and lestat in the book: the very act of creating claudia. of loving claudia. dooms her at the same time.#her inevitable death cannot be avoided. she was always going to die.#and then the version in the show is much more about the choices we make and the consequences of our (in)action.#they love claudia and yet they do not protect her. in fact lestat helps to kill her. they love her but they do not save her.#she didn't HAVE to die like this. she could have been happy. she could have lived. their wild wonderful daughter could have thrived. (via @cinematicnomad)

As much as nearly every character she meets tends to act like there's something uniquely broken and wrong with Claudia, at no point does it truly seem to me like there actually really is? I mean, obviously she is extremely fucked up, she straight up went through a serial killer collecting trophies phase, but there's a level of fucked up that's sort of the baseline for every character in the show, and obviously being turned into a vampire as a child puts her at a unique disadvantage. But for all that everyone around her spends their time bemoaning how dreadful and doomed her life is, even Louis who genuinely loves her but also builds so much of his identity around feeling responsible for her Terrible Fate™, I really don't think she's like, fundamentally damaged any more than any of the other vampires are.

But Lestat is so unwilling to be wrong that every time her life hits an inevitable road bump instead of helping her through it he points and says "look! see! she IS a monster, I was right Louis, making her was a mistake!" (and I think he sees his own monstrousness in her but fails to also see her humanity)

And then Armand meets her and sees only someone who will inevitably lose her mind, so of course speeding up the "inevitable" and siding with the coven to plan her death is just a mercy, absolving himself of any blame. (and he projects his own frailty and desire for death onto her, failing to see her strength and her desire for life)

Which makes it so cathartic when she meets Madeleine, admits to her how broken she feels sometimes, and Madeleine's response is just. Well that's normal. Who isn't a little broken these days. Let yourself feel it, move on, let yourself feel it again if you need to. After spending her life having others act as if her emotions are something uniquely dark and worrying, Madeleine's incredibly blase attitude must have been such an incredible breath of fresh air for Claudia!

To spend her whole life being made to feel like something is Wrong™ with her, and then meet someone who's just like, "yeah, and?? Who isn't? Join the club I guess"

Which makes her death so incredibly tragic and frustrating because like. She was fine! She was making a life for herself! She wasn't doomed by her nature, she wasn't "doomed by the narrative" (whatever the fuck that even means), she was doomed for no reason other than that everyone around her (except for Madeleine) preemptively DECIDED she was doomed and never gave her a chance to prove them wrong.