The Screengrab : the x-files

Don S. Davis, 1942--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:52:00 GMT

The character actor Don S. Davis has died at 65 of a heart attack. Born in Aurora, Missouri, Davis spent served three terms of active duty in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of Captain, before pursuing a degree in theater and spending a decade working as a teacher at the University of British Columbia. He was forty when he began to get work acting in film and television. Squat, burly and bald, he was a natural for authoritarian figures and played many a dad, judge, doctor, prison guard, and befuddled bystander in such movies as Stakeout, A League of Their Own, Hero, and Con Air. But it was his role in Twin Peaks that earned him a permanent place in pop culture history and made him a cult character god. As Major Briggs, father to barking malcontent Bobby Briggs, he first came across as the dad of fifties nightmares, a stuffy, repressive hardass who seemed to have been born in a military uniform. But as with so much in David Lynch's world, Major Briggs's blandly domineering surface turned out to be camouflage, and in a key scene with his troubled son, the Major revealed a warmer, soulful side that nicely set off his can-do attitude and mysterious inside knowledge of the UFO phenomenon. he would go on to reprise the role in Lynch's movie Fire Walk with Me, but the real impact of Twin Peaks on his career was that his association with it seemed to make him a prize catch among casting directors working on TV shows that aspired to hipness, such as Profit, where he could be seen in the pilot episode as the local sheriff shaking his head in wonder at the sorry upbringing of the sociopathic title character. Certainly his background playing Major Briggs seemed to inform his two other best-known roles: Major General George Hammond on the cable TV series Stargate SGI, which ran for ten years starting in 1997, and Captain William Scully, father to FBI agent Dana Scully, in the great The X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea." His big scene there, sitting in a chair and speaking inaudibly to the daughter who hasn't yet received the news that he's just died, is the best David Lynch sequence in TV history that wasn't directed by David Lynch.

Morning Deal Report: Spielberg Gets a Clue

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Actually, Steven Spielberg gets The 39 Clues, or at least the screen rights to the “multiplatform adventure series to be launched in the fall by Scholastic Media,” Variety reports. A planned 10-book series with additional elements including an online game and collectible cards, Clues is about “the most powerful family in the world, the Cahills, who count Napoleon and Houdini among their relatives. Readers will be challenged to discover the source of the family's powers, revealed through 39 clubs that are hidden around the world and scattered throughout history.” Spielberg already has a full plate, including an adaptation of Tintin and a Lincoln biopic starring Liam Neeson, but anything that keeps him away from another Indiana Jones movie is fine by us.

The Hollywood Reporter uncovers a secret conspiracy headed by X-Files mastermind Chris Carter. Carter is in the middle of shooting Fencewalker, “a coming-of-age semiautobiographical character piece with no supernatural elements…Carter wrote the script for what is thought to be his passion project some time ago and raised the financing himself. The film has a modest budget and no distributor at this point.” The truth is out there, even if no one is talking.

Finally, you may have heard that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are set to make their Bollywood debuts. It turns out that this story is only half-true. The U.K. Telegraph claims that “Stallone has signed up for a cameo role in Kambakht Ishq, a big budget blockbuster starring Indian heart-throb Akshay Kumar. Schwarzenegger has also been approached - and it would be the first time the two action heroes have shared the big screen.” But in a Reuters U.K. report, the California governor’s spokesman dismissed the rumors. Stallone’s participation is confirmed in the story of an Indian stuntman in Hollywood, which will set a Bollywood record with its $21 million budget.

Related:
Steven Spielberg: Teacher's Pet
Stallone All Juiced to Play Rambo Again

Summer of '78: "Capricorn One"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Capricorn One

Release Date: June 2, 1978

Cast: Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, OJ Simpson

The Buzz: A conspiracy thriller with a dash of sci-fi intrigue.

Keywords: NASA, Astronaut, Fraud, Chase, Reporter, Scorpion, Helicopter Crash

The Plot: Three astronauts (Brolin, Waterston and The Juice) are onboard their spacecraft ready to launch the first manned mission to mars when a NASA suit rushes them out of the capsule and onto a waiting plane. When they arrive in Los Angeles and meet with NASA chief James Kelloway (Holbrook), they learn that the ship’s cheaply made life support system was deemed unsafe, and that their ship has left for Mars without them. Appealing to their patriotism – and when that fails, not-so-subtly threatening the lives of their families – Kelloway coerces them into participating in a hoax. The Mars landing is faked on a Hollywood soundstage, as is their return to Earth. (You can imagine how this would be a scandal on par with Milli Vanilli lip-synching on the Grammies.) When the ship splashes down, Kelloway announces that the heat shields have failed and all aboard have disintegrated. Figuring that they’ve been duped, the astronauts escape and split up, heading in three different directions. At this point, you will guess correctly that Brolin will be the lone survivor. (The black astronaut is, of course, the first to die, but since it’s OJ, it’s hard to get too worked up over it.) Meanwhile, reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould, doing a broader take on his Philip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye) is sniffing around the story and figuring that something isn’t quite right.

The Test of Time: I’m actually a little surprised there hasn’t been a remake of Capricorn One yet, and not surprised at all that a Google search of “capricorn one remake” turns up dozens of rumor sites. The urban legend that the moon landing was faked persists to this day (see the recent NASA documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, in which exasperated lunar module pilot Charlie Duke points out, “We went to the moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times?”), and Mars is back in the headlines this very week. Granted, the most recent cycle of Mars movies (Red Planet, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars) met with little support from critics or the box office, but Capricorn has a solid premise, even if the execution is half-baked. In the hands of sci-fi hack Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010), it’s a lumpy thriller with no real momentum and little suspense. Also, the ending SUCKS - it's one of those '70s freeze-frames that thinks its so profound and ambiguous, when really it's just denying us a well-deserved comeuppance for no good reason. It's not like they'd be messing with a classic, so I can easily picture a more sophisticated Capricorn One, in terms of both conspiracy and technology, from, say, Steven Soderbergh. Yes, I can see it now: George Clooney, Will Smith and Steve Carrell as the astronauts. Call me, Stevie! We'll do lunch!

Quotable Quote: “You know, when Apollo 17 landed on the moon, people were calling up the networks and bitching because reruns of I Love Lucy were cancelled. Reruns, for Christ's sake! I could understand if it was the new Lucy show. After all, what's a walk on the moon? But reruns?”

2008 Equivalent: Let’s see…conspiracies, outer space, an investigator who stumbles onto something big…it’s gotta be The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Previously on "Summer of '78": Thank God It's Friday