It’s Alive »

Groundbreaking animator Ralph Bakshi, who caused a sensation with the first X-rated cartoon feature — 1972’s “Fritz the Cat,” based on Robert Crumb’s comic strip — is 73 now. For the last decade, he has lived in a home on top of a mountain in New Mexico. He has a website created by his daughter, teaches animation and makes a good living selling his paintings. “I am very happy,” Bakshi said recently in a phone interview. But that wasn’t the case for a long time. “I was working seven days a week keeping an entire movie in my head,” Bakshi said. “It was just so hard. I thought I had failed. Let me be perfectly clear: When I left the business I was burned out. I was exhausted from the fights. So many of my films were cut up, chopped ...

Mel Gibson is going back into the Thunderdome of public opinion. The actor, filmmaker and polarizing persona will appear onstage on Jan. 21 for a “Mad Max” triple feature at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Gibson will sit for a Q&A at the American Cinematheque event that will include screenings of “Mad Max,” “The Road Warrior” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the post-apocalyptic action trilogy that helped launch Gibson’s star in America. The films were directed by George Miller (the third one had George Ogilvie as co-director) and he has plans now to return to the brand with a fourth film, “Mad Max: Fury Road,” this time starring British actor Tom Hardy, who is also playing the villain Bane in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.” For Gibson, who turns 56 next month, the event is a way to focus on his silver-screen glory. But ...

It was 110 years ago this week that Walter Elias Disney was born on the west side of Chicago. He would go on to become a titan in American popular culture, a man whose name became a global brand name of highest order. There have been many, many things written about Disney through the decades: about his heritage and life trajectory; his collaborations both famous and unexpected; his business acumen; his politics and prejudices; and, most often, his legacy and proper place in history. Sometimes, though, we connect best with history by studying the lines of its face and trying to peer into the eyes of the past. With that in mind, we bring the above photo gallery, which shows snapshots of a life marked by big gambles and truly rare vision. Be sure to click the “CAPTIONS ON”option to see the photos, which are also courtesy of D23. ...

It was 137 years ago that Jules Verne first took his readers to the strange South Pacific environs of “The Mysterious Island” but the bookshelf sensation still clearly casts a spell in Hollywood – just consider the upcoming “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” a liberal updating of the classic tale packaged as a sequel to the 2008 film “Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D,” which also mined Verne for adventure concepts. Verne’s imagination has launched plenty of Hollywood projects — “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Journey to the Moon” and “Around the World in 80 Days” spring to mind — and “The Mysterious Island” has been visited often by studios in search of screen spectacle. Sometimes the actual novel itself doesn’t survive the trip to the screen — a 1929 part-talkie/part-silent film adaptation with Lionel Barrymore had almost had nothing to do with the original ...

Producer/director William Castle, who died in 1977 at the age of 63, may not have been the greatest horror filmmaker, but he was one of its most ingenious. A master showman who would appear in the trailers for his own films boasting a cigar, wide grin and a tongue-in-cheek demeanor, Castle would invite audiences to enjoy the chills and thrill of his films such as 1959’s “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Tingler,” and 1964’s “Strait-Jacket.” And a lot of his films had a gimmick: “House on Haunted Hill” came with “Emergo,” which was a fancy rigging system that allowed a plastic skeleton to fly over the audience at certain times in the movie. “The Tingler,” which screens on Halloween at the Cinefamily’s Silent Movie Theatre, had Percepto, which featured buzzers wired to the audiences’ seats that would give them ...

John Landis is best known for his hit comedies — films such as 1978’s “Animal House,” 1980’s “The Blues Brothers,” 1983’s “Trading Places” and 1988’s “Coming to America” — but he’s also walked on the dark side. The 61-year-old directed the 1981 horror classic “An American Werewolf in London,” which featured Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup design. Landis and Baker reunited two years later for Michael Jackson’s landmark 1983 music video “Thriller,” and in 1992, Landis directed the vampire movie “Innocent Blood.” Now he’s exploring his love of the genre in the new book “Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares.” The 320-page book, which features glorious photographs from the famed John Kobal Collection, is divided into types of monsters: vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, zombies, ghosts and mummies. Landis also engages in conversation with his longtime friends who have ...

MGM’s 1956 sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet” was an anomaly for the Hollywood dream factory that was known for its lush Technicolor musicals, adaptations of literary works and star-driven dramas and comedies. It represented the studio’s first foray into the sci-fi genre. “It was rare enough that any of the major studios made sci-fi,” said Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt (“Star Wars,” “Wall-E”), who saw the film as a boy in 1956. Burtt and Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Craig Barron (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) are hosting a sold-out digital screening of “Forbidden Planet” Saturday evening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Linwood Dunn Theater. Before the movie, the two will discuss the secrets behind its production. The event also kicks off a free exhibition in the lobby of the Linwood Dunn, “Forbidden Planet: Artifacts from the ...

Tim Burton’s  gleefully macabre aesthetic is currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — the exhibition that bears the filmmaker’s name and runs through Halloween brings together more than 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, film and video works, storyboards, puppets, concept art, costumes and other movie memorabilia. During a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Burbank-born director talked about the influence classic monster movies have had on his life’s work, and picking up on that theme, the museum this weekend will launch a Saturday Monster Matinee series spotlighting nine films that are close to Burton’s heart. Here’s a look at the lineup: “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958): Directed by Nathan Juran, the film was the first of three “Sinbad” movies Columbia produced that special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen designed and animated with the dazzling ...

Tod Browning’s films were often unsettling, shocking and disturbing. They were populated with freaks, geeks, carny folk, ruthless people and vampires. Though his best-known film is 1931’s “Dracula,” with Bela Lugosi, his greatest productions were his collaboration with the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” Lon Chaney. So it seems only appropriate that two of his legendary films with Chaney: 1925’s “The Unholy Three” and 1927’s “The Unknown” open “American Gothic: A Tod Browning Retrospective” on Thursday evening at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre. Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1880, Browning began performing and singing as a youngster. He ran away from  home at 16 and joined a circus, where he went from carnival baker to contortionist. Many of his films revolve around circuses. He later went into vaudeville and was introduced to D.W. Griffith in 1913 by an old vaudeville partner. ...

There was always something menacing about British actor Oliver Reed. He had a thick bull neck, a sinewy frame, dark eyes, a noticeable scar on his face and a flat nose. He was a notorious boozer and rabble-rouser,too, a life as rough as his visage. The presentation wasn’t always gentle, either; when he appeared in the 1980s on David Letterman’s show, for instance, he would answer questions only in German. If there was a beast inside, it came out during his first starring role, the blood-curdling “The Curse of the Werewolf” from 1961. The only werewolf film from Hammer Film Productions, the Terence Fisher film was feted Saturday night at Pitzer College in Claremont with a 50th anniversary celebration that  featured a life-size sculpture of the hirsute monster, a creation of Mike Hill. “The Curse of the Werewolf” finds Reed at his hair-raising best as ...