Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s Behind the Scenes Pic!
Poltergeist is one of my favorite movies and indeed my very first movie memory. The tone, music, effects, script, casting, pacing, photography and sound design are tip of the top as far as I’m concerned. I love how the family is that great Spielbergian middle class suburban family unit forced to deal with some very nasty ghostly hostiles. I love how the film balances the feeling of awe and the stark terror of the supernatural. In short, I just love this movie.
There’s been a geek debate for almost 30 years now on just how much influence Steven Spielberg had on the film. You have to admit that the movie looks and feels much more like a Spielberg movie than a Tobe Hooper movie. I’ve met Hooper, a super nice guy, by the way, and he insisted that Poltergeist is his movie. Naturally. But I also got to know Zelda Rubinstein in the last few years of her life and she was very vocal about her dislike of Hooper from the initial audition process and told me, on the record no less, that she shot for 6 days on this movie and was never directed by anybody other than Spielberg.
I’ve heard this from other crew members as well and all the behind the scenes material seems to be Spielberg-centric, including the two pics I’m running today.
The first pic has Spielberg playing with a skeleton and the second is a line-up behind camera.
I especially love that second pic with Spielberg looking calm, cool and collected (and even slightly worried) and Tobe Hooper looking like he just saw his dead grandmother crawl naked out of a fiery hole in the ground with a rusty knife clenched in her pointy cannibal’s teeth.
Thanks to Bill Whirity for digging these pics up! Click to embiggen!
If you have a behind the scenes shot you’d like to submit to this column, you can email me at quint@aintitcool.com.
Tomorrow’s behind the scenes pic features a temporal paradox!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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