1987 Short Film

[Crispina Blomker]

Priorto making his breakout debut feature Cronos, Del Toro directed a string of short films including his 1987 horror comedy Geometria, which displays both his sense of humor and some serious directing chops. Check out the short above and, as you watch, remember that the flick was reportedly made for about $1000.

Geometria opens with a recent widow haranguing her teenaged son about how he is flunking out of geometry. At the end of the fight, the son vows that he will never fail at the subject again. Instead of hitting the books or even hiring a tutor, though, the lad turns to black magic. Spoiler: this proves to be a bad idea.

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This classic short film provides an unusual showcase for Don McGlashan and Harry Sinclair, the founders of musical theatre group The Front Lawn. The slice of life narrative unravels like a baton relay; the duo play every character, revolving around pedestrians on Auckland's Karangahape Road. Walkshort was directed by editor Bill Toepfer. Sinclair went on to do some directing of his own (Topless Women Talk about their Lives), while McGlashan would pay musical tribute to another famous Auckland street, Dominion Road. Costa Botes writes about Walkshort here.

This interview has been retro-edited to alter or delete some of my more embarrassing and distracting writing mannerisms. The quotations from Lynch and Rossellini, however, have not been changed. The preliminary ramble about the definition of a cult movie may seem a little redundant to a contemporary readership, but back in 1987 the differences between commercial and cult cinema had yet to be extensively defined in the mainstream press.

Devotees of a cult movie can bask safe in the knowledge that the object of their devotion is not cheapened by universal approval, that their tastes are recherch and their tolerance unbounded. And each cult breeds a counter-cult; overenthusiastic word of mouth can only result in anti-climax for some, while latecomers to the party may feel that a reputation for truly recherch taste can only be maintained by a vote of nix. You know a film has achieved cult status when, after the first flush of must-see cultdom, the triple hipsters start saying they hate it.

Since not one of us knows exactly what awaits us after this life, that definition, I think, satisfies me as well as any, even though I have never tasted pelican. But other people have other notions of the sweet by and by, and in "Heaven," Diane Keaton assembles a large number of them and asks them such questions as: What is heaven? Is there sex in heaven? How to you get to heaven? How do you get to hell?

Some of the answers she receives are memorable, or funny, or moving. Most are not; most are simply opinions from random subjects who have no particular credentials - except, of course, that like all of us they will someday either be, or not be, in heaven.

But there's more to the film than a simple Q & A. Keaton also assembles old film footage showing how heaven was visualized in previous films. And she photographs her subjects in a sort of angelic limbo, as if they were in heaven's waiting room.

But heaven's real waiting room, as we all know, is Palm Springs, Calif. And "Heaven" is an idea for a movie that is not quite realized. The weakness, I think, is in Keaton's excessive attention to visual detail. She has gone to a lot of effort to create her abstract sets, her heavenly decor in which the people seem almost like exhibits. But that has given her subjects time to think about their answers, some of which seem too clever, too thought out.

Perhaps a sloppier film would have been a better idea. I can imagine the "Candid Camera" approach, in which people would have been invited to talk about life and death in a totally unself-conscious way. That might have produced more spontaniety, and even more truth, than the deliberate artiness of "Heaven."

Even so, there are moments in "Heaven" I am glad I saw. Some of the old film clips, for example, of angels being issued their wings. A debate between a believer and an atheist. And the utter certainty of some of the subjects, who know for sure what cannot, by definition, be known at all. There is enough good stuff in "Heaven" to supply a short film of 30 or 40 minutes, but at 80 minutes Keaton runs out of inspiration as well as material. The other night, I was showing a film called "Gates of Heaven" to some people. It is, as faithful readers will know, one of my favorite films, a 1977 documentary by Errol Morris about people involved in the operation of two California pet cemeteries.

Toward the end of the film, one woman speaks of her certainty that she will meet her dead dog in heaven. She says: "There's your dog. Your dog's dead. But what happened to the thing that made it move? There had to be something, didn't there?" And in those simple words are summarized the final mystery of life for all of us. "Heaven" never quite achieves a moment like that.

Paul Flinton, 59, is an award-winning location sound manager for NFL Films who now lives in Philadelphia. But in 1987, he was a 23-year-old film student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, looking for a new project. He was fascinated by bridges, especially the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

Red's DreamSome attributesFirstRelease Dates: July 10th, 1987SecondProduction Company: PixarThirdDistributed By: PixarOther attributesFourthDevelopers: John LasseterFifthRunning Time: 4 MinutesSixthCountry: United StatesOrderPreviousLuxo Jr (1986 short film)Red's Dream is a 1987 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs four minutes, stars Red, a unicycle. Propped up in the corner of a bicycle store on a rainy night, Red dreams about a better place. Red's Dream was Pixar's second computer-animated short following Luxo Jr. in 1986, also directed by Lasseter.

Red's Dream is more strongly character-driven than Luxo Jr. The short was designed to demonstrate new technical innovations in imagery. The short was created by employing the company's own Pixar Image Computer, but the computer's memory limitations led the animation group to abandon it for further projects. Space was growing tight at the company, and as a result Lasseter and his team worked out of a hallway during production, where Lasseter sometimes slept for days on end.

The short premiered at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim in July 1987 and received general enthusiasm from its attendants.[1] Red's Dream was never attached to any later Pixar feature unlike many other early Pixar shorts. The film was released for home video as part of Tiny Toy Stories in 1996 and Pixar Short Films Collection, Volume 1 in 2007.

Set in a lonely city on a rainy night, the film takes place in a bicycle shop (named "Eben's Bikes" for Pixar animator Eben Ostby) that is closed for the night. In the corner of the shop sleeps Red, a red unicycle who languishes in the "clearance corner", waiting to be purchased. As the camera zooms on him, the sound of rain falling turns into a drumroll, and we go into the dream-sequence. In his dream, Red is being ridden by a circus clown (which was nicknamed 'Lumpy' due to his appearance) as part of a juggling act.

The clown enters the ring, accompanied by a fanfare, expecting a huge applause, but instead receives only a few scattered claps from different parts of the (unseen) audience. Nevertheless, Lumpy starts juggling three balls whilst riding Red, occasionally dropping them as he does. However, Red slides out from underneath Lumpy (while the clown stays afloat) and spikes the balls back to him with his bike pedals. The confused clown ponders this for only a second before continuing on with his act. At this point, Red is forced to catch another ball which Lumpy unintentionally throws across the ring. Lumpy continues to ride in the air while juggling the other two balls while Red bounces the green ball up and down.

Eventually, Lumpy comes to a sudden realization, and looks between his legs, only to discover he's been riding on nothing before he falls to the ground (and seemingly disappears from the dream). Red catches the other two balls and begins juggling all three of them, and then balances them on top of each other, after which he receives an uproarous cheer. But then the sound of clapping turns into the sound of rain, and Red awakens, left to face bleak reality. Depressed, he returns to the corner where he was previously resting, and goes back to sleep.

According to Lasseter in the short's audio commentary, Ed Catmull wanted the Pixar staff to make a film using the Pixar Image Computer and the rendering software Chapreyes. Lasseter began to develop the story of a circus clown who is upstaged by his own unicycle while at the same time, animators William Reeves and Eben Ostby starting working on their own separate ideas. Ostby had wanted to animate a bicycle, and Reeves began working on a city during a rainy night. Ultimately, the three combined their ideas, which resulted in the creation of Red's Dream. The film project came with two technical rationales. The bike shop scenes at the beginning and end were to demonstrate the tendering of highly complex imagery; with the bikes and their spokes and the shop fixtures, a typical frame of the scene had more than ten thousand geometric primitives, which in turn were made up of more than thirty million polygons.[2]

The idea of a bike shop setting was inspired by Eben Ostby, a cycling enthusiast and graphics programmer at Pixar, who had been working on generating a complex still image of a bike shop.[2] The dream sequence was to be a demonstration of rendering with the Pixar Image Computer. An engineer named Charles Gunn had converted Pixar's rendering software to run on the PIC, with Loren Carpenter's help, but it turned out that the machine's design left its processors without enough memory for a program as complex as Reyes, and so Gunn was able to convert only a portion of Reyes's features. On account of those limitations, the dream sequence was cruder in its look than the rest of the film, andRed's Dream was both the first and last Pixar film to be made with the Pixar Image Computer.[2]

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