ThunderPeel2001

Haha

It's shocking to see these big companies having so little regard for their workers. I think you should form a union. Er. By yourself.

Hello, James. Long time no see. Nice to see you back on the Thumbs... That being said, I wish you'd used spoiler tags

Don't remember different takes, but I do remember they added more of the love story. Gilliam cut a lot of the girl's dialogue, because he didn't like her performance, but Sheinberg added it all back in... leading to extended versions of those scenes. Could that be what you're thinking of, or have I just forgotten the different takes they used?

The "Love Conquers All" version is despicably bad, but I did make it to the end... Most of the time with my face like this:

That sucks. Who would do such a thing?

Actually, that's not entirely true. The studio cut was never released theatrically, only as a "TV version". It's highly unlikely you'd stumble across it by accident... so no need to worry.

Yep, on release day there was a bug that wouldn't even allow the game to load. (It would keep downloading itself, and then installing itself over itself. A real clunker.)

Looks like they may have fixed them. They had a real release-day clunker.

Hehe, from the trailer it looks like you won't be getting that until Episode 3 at the earliest.

Hey! I just finished an old Amiga game that I liked back when it came out, but for some silly reason I left. It's been bugging me for years that I never got around to finishing it, but now I finally did! The ending was insanely hard, with moments of insta-game-over, so I'm glad I had an emulator with savestates -- doing it on a real Amiga would have meant having to start over from scratch as a result of one tiny wrong move. Really dumb. It was called D/Generation. I even posted my on YouTube, showing the "alternate" ending. Even though it's probably only of interest to 5 people on the planet. Boy, do I feel geeky right now.Yay!

Hey, at least TLE is set on a train travelling through Europe -- but I take you're point

Wow... embarrassing! That's such an odd thing to say... I mean, she wasn't breaking the news to you in that phone call. You already knew. Weird!

I'm a huge Gilliam fan, but I've never seen The Brothers Grimm or Tideland. I also haven't seen 12 Monkeys in ages (and I never was fan, as much as I wanted to be), and I haven't seen The Fisher King in ages, either (but I LOVED it when I saw it -- I hope I still will if I see it again). Brazil is probably my personal fave. In other news: The King's Speech is great!

I'm currently playing that now. Very good!

Yup, I sure do. Those cheap games tend to get me. 3,500 still seems like a lot to me, though. Plus, maybe the fact that I'm low on money at the moment means I have a lot less impulse buys that I used to. Or maybe I should be reading more I see what you're saying, and I hope you're right. I think the system of finding quality goods would have to improve, though... I think the ratio of shit to good might slide... a lot, unless Amazon was careful to what it allowed to be sold (unlikely). I have friends who have self-published books that are listed on Amazon, but the prices of self-published books tends to be higher than professional ones (or sometimes equal, but never less, it seems)... So maybe you're right, if the price was less... But I still remain unconvinced -- a market of self-made books sold at a lower price through a vendor, just doesn't sound good to me. Time will tell, I guess.

Fair enough, but I don't think it's fair to call it a veneer. Courtesans were treated as equals by the upper-classes of their society. They were highly educated, sophisticated, and respected. I've forgotten, why are we discussing this again? Edit: Because Joss Whedon touches upon prostitution in two of his series. I remember now. FWIW, the idea from Dollhouse came about from a lunch he had with Eliza Dushku. She was saying how she was surrounded by people telling her how and what she should be, and pulling her into different directions. And it had gotten to a point where she was beginning to lose her own sense of who she was and what she wanted. Whedon said, "Hey! That's what your new show should be about!". So it really came about from someone losing a sense of who they were as a result of people trying to shape them into something else... Not really a meditation on prostitution. But anyway, I suppose it is interesting.

Apparently so! It features Tim Schafer, Costume Quest's Tasha Harris and Gabe Miller. Tiny news article about it on the DF site: http://www.doublefine.com/news/comments/this_is_a_test_of_the_double_fine_action_cast_system/ MP3 Here: http://bit.ly/gn8LS4 Edit: Finished listening to it and I have to say that I rather enjoyed it! I hope they do more. I think they could take a leaf out of Idle Thumbs's book and actually take a break between segments -- you could tell that it helped to keep the energy up. In the DF one Gabe and Tasha sounded like they were flagging towards the end.

You mean the Courtesans/Geishas then. I think prostitute is a pretty harsh word for a Courtesan, myself. But there you go.

Where did you go?

Well I don't own 3500 books either :-/ All of Dickens individual works are available for free on Kindle, but it seems that some collected editions or "special" editions cost a few dollars. (I suppose if there's any commentary, footnotes or special formatting, then the person who did that stuff would want to get paid). But yeah, all copyright free works are available for free in the Kindle Store (I just looked). Personally I'd pay a $1 for an edition that was specially formatted for my Kindle, or that came with footnotes for those tricky references. But... widespread publishing is available to everyone, thanks to the internet. For the first time in history I can write something, and immediately someone else on the planet can search for it and find it. Ideas are free-flowing, mostly uncensored and immediately distributed everywhere... Unfortunately I don't see the internet as a paradise of creativity, although there are undoubtedly wonderful things happening, and technically, little to no boundaries, as there's just so much shit on it. Lol.

Well the book I read said they'd agreed to 200, but they never got anywhere near that number. As I said before, the debt had already been written off to the hold heads. The new heads were eager to show what they were capable of, they weren't keen to become associated with the next Heaven's Gate. Also, you've got to remember, it wasn't just about making more prints, the film needed about $20 million spent on promoting it. Instead they spent $3 million. The new heads weren't about to risk another $20 million on a film that had such a bad stigma attached to it. If it had done badly at the box office, it would have made them look like idiots for throwing more studio money into it... Or that's probably what they thought. An internal memo from Dan Michelle, Columbia's President of Marketing, read: 1. The finished picture's playability will achieve normative levels at best. 2. The picture has limited appear based on pre-interest in title and stars, genre, period setting and lack of marketable stars. 3. Based on Terry Gilliam's track record with Brazil and Time Bandits, the picture will receive mixed reviews. 4. The picture is not likely to generate strong, positive word-of-mouth from mass audiences. Of course this set everyone thinking, "Don't throw good money after bad!". One of the many injustices of the filmmaking world, but as you say, it's clearly found an audience in the long run. (A friend of mine was telling me that Labyrinth was considered a failure, but someone at Disney did the numbers since its release and noted that, over all that time, it had actually earned Disney a huge amount of money. It was because of this that gave Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman the go ahead to make Mirrormask.)

If you can't afford to take the time to write a book, you can't afford to take the time to write a book. Yes, so the JK Rowlings and Stephen Kings of the world will be set. They'll have a huge hit, but the fringe stuff will suffer. I'm not even sure Philip K Dick would survive today, let alone if the market becomes devalued. But my concern is that certain books will not be written, because the market will be unable sustain the authors.

Well, time will tell. I personally think tablets and eReaders will merge and become as commonplace as iPods. I think in the future, pretty much everyone will have one of these things... and they'll get better and better, too. I think my main concern is that someone has made a way of pirating the unpiratable, and this will unquestionably have an impact on the industry. The question is how much. I hope you're right!

Basically, Gilliam had a falling out with his producer Arnon Milchan after their collaboration on Brazil, and during pre-production on Munchausen. He was then looking for a new producer to help make this latest script. Every producer he spoke to told Gilliam that the film couldn't be made for less than $40 million, and none of the studios were prepared to give him that much money. This is where Thomas Schuly came along. He claimed he had a stellar resume, had saved all these great films single-handedly, and said the film could easily be made in Italy (where he had lots of connections) for $26 million, no problem. Everyone was sceptical, except Gilliam, who was giddy at the thought of being to make his next film. Eventually Columbia/Tri-Star bit the hook, but under the proviso that a bond company guarantee the film (this means that if it goes over-budget, they take over production costs). They found a bond company who agreed and production went ahead... all because one man came along and told everyone what they wanted to hear. Quite astonishing, really, but I bet it happens all the time. As it turns out, Schuly, predictably, was talking out of his arse. Production didn't go anywhere near as smoothly or cheaply as he promised, and his amazing claims of previous experience came under serious question. As soon as there were troubles he became hard to find, and when he was around, locked himself away in his office. Gilliam felt he'd been betrayed by Schuly, because as his producer, they should have been trying to fix the problems together, but Schuly (presumably panicked) threw Gilliam under a bus and started pointing fingers in his direction behind his back. Ultimately Schuly had promised the moon, and obviously couldn't deliver it. Gilliam and everyone else were far too naive and eager to believe the crap he was selling them. (Schuly had some weird personal issues, too. In the book I read he's quoted as saying that the whole thing was a conspiracy against him because he was German... okaaay.) When the Bond company took over, it got really ugly. Production was shut down, Gilliam was made a scapegoat, and the whole thing was a horrible nightmare -- even for the cast. (Eric Idle later described it as the worst experience of his life, "and I went to public school".) In the end the film cost $46 million, a little over the original estimates, and a long way over Schuly promised $26 million. When it was all said and done, it actually got pretty great reviews, but by this time the head honchos at Columbia/Tri-Star had changed. In that all too familiar story, the new heads of the studio saw the film as an embarrassment of the previous administration, and wanted nothing to do with it. They spent next to nothing on advertising and gave it a very limited release.