Satellite

Marvelous Movie Mondays

EPFC | October 10th, 2016

Marvelous Movie Mondays!!
guest curator: Salise Hughes

Our theme this month is Seattle Plays Hollywood, where we will look at a collection of clips from five Seattle inspired movies and TV series that impose a little Hollywood glamour and surrealism on my home town.

McQ is a 1974 film staring John Wayne as an aging Seattle cop who lives on a house boat. According to Wikipedia Dirty Harry was originally to be shot in Seattle and was offered first to Wayne who turned it down. Feeling he made a mistake Wayne made McQ and kept the Seattle location. this was the era of the great car chases and I had to choose from two posted on Youtube. One is a tour of downtown Seattle and I-5 freeway ramps reminiscent of the car chase in Bullitt made a few years earlier. But the other is the final climatic chase ending on the Washington coastline. The action of the scene is framed by the pristine and very chilly ocean beach of the Quinault Indian Reservation.

Marriage, Chinese Style

EPFC | October 3rd, 2016

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Salise Hughes

Our theme this month is Seattle Plays Hollywood, where we will look at a collection of clips from five Seattle inspired movies and TV series that impose a little Hollywood glamour and surrealism on my home town.

This week we will look at an episode of the late 60s TV series Here Come The Brides: Marriage, Chinese Style.

Here Come The Brides was a series that ran from 1968- 1970, and was very loosely based on the true story of Asa Mercer’s efforts to bring marriageable women from the east coast to Seattle in the 1860s. A lot of the show’s popularity was due to teen idol Bobbie Sherman as one of the three brothers, again very loosely based on the Mercers. The show also featured the hit song, The Bluest Skies You’ve Ever Seen Are In Seattle sung by Perry Como. In this episode, Marriage, Chinese Style, Bruce Lee, who was an actual Seattle resident is featured.

 

 

UFO

EPFC | September 12th, 2016

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Continuing with the theme of “Behind The Scenes” I present an episode of UFO called Mindbender

UFO was Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s first live action television program. Stepping away from Supermarination, UFO was geared towards adults and took on themes like death, adultery, divorce, and drug use.

UFO’s basic premise is that in a alternate universe 1980 Earth is being visited and attacked by aliens from a dying planet and humans are being covertly harvested for their organs. The show’s main cast of characters are members of a secret, high-technology international agency called SHADO (an acronym for Supreme Headquarters, Alien Defence Organisation) established to defend Earth and humanity against the mysterious aliens and to learn more about them. Their headquarters are hidden beneath the Harlington-Straker movie studio where the agents both protect the Earth against aliens as well as produce entertainment programs.

In the 25th episode in the series the creators decided to mess with the idea of the suspension of disbelief. Half way through the episode, the camera pulls back to reveal that SHADO HQ is nothing more than a film set and Straker is actually Howard Byrne, the leading actor. A dazed Straker exits onto the studio grounds and makes his way over to Theatre 7, where the rough-cut of his “show” is being screened.

This episode not only breaks the 4th wall, it also addresses the idea that movie makers could steal someones life and memories and “put them up on the screen” for the entertainment of others. It uses the actual movie studio (Pinewood) in which the TV show was filmed and stirs up reality enough for one character to scream out “Let’s get back to realities,” to which another character replies “CUT PRINT!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jer2_sWZuQk&index=24&list=PLjrdBM3OjcIh0eUSbYziUj12mSwrLfSBM