The Art of Bob Peak
Anyone who’s visited this blog over the last few years would know I have a passion for Poster Art. Great news this week with the announcement of the release of The Art Of Bob Peak which celebrates the works of one of the world’s most legendary movie poster artists, edited and annotated by his son Thomas Peak.
Peak casts a huge shadow across the worlds of popular illustration and graphic design, and his influence is also felt in comics. His style and innovations echo through the work of Jim Steranko, Howard Chaykin and Bill Sienkiewicz, three of the most groundbreaking artists ever to produce sequential art.
Peak himself actually got his start as a cartoonist, providing strips for his college newspaper before becoming one of America’s most in-demand illustrators, and this book covers his career from those early gag panels through to his last painted masterpieces.
Bob Peak’s use of hue and shape to call attention to specific figures, and his knack for dropping out color and detail to sharpen focus are just a couple of his compositional hallmarks. His figures race forward and almost vibrate apart, separating into component tones and lines – the motion pulls the viewer’s eye across the page, and the kinetic combination of textures gives these images a depth and character that goes beyond any that could emerge from more realistic styles of depiction.
And nearly all of Peak’s iconic works are represented in this collection. From his Coke promotions to his posters for My Fair Lady, Camelot, Modesty Blaise, Superman, and countless other films, to the abstract motion of his sports illustrations and the stark graphic nature of his airline commissions, it’s all here, and all stunning.
Tom Peak has crafted a fitting tribute to his father’s creative prowess, but he’s also provided an invaluable service for scholars, pop culture historians, designers, and art aficionados. This is rewarding reading for anybody with an interest in American visual culture, or for anyone who simply likes to look at beautiful pictures.
Richard Matheson R.I.P.
Influential science fiction and fantasy author Richard Matheson died yesterday from natural causes at his home, surrounded by friends and family. He was 87. “For having such a fantastic imagination, he passed very peacefully,” son Richard Matheson Jr. told Deadline. “He was not only a monumental talent, he was also every bit a father, friend, and husband.” Friend and fellow author Harlan Ellison wrote today, “I am downsmashed.”
The celebrated writer began his 6-decade-plus career in 1950 with the story “Born of Man and Woman,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Matheson’s best-known and oft-adapted works ranged from short stories like “Button, Button” (which Richard Kelly adapted into The Box) to novels including I Am Legend (adapted four times into features The Last Man On Earth, The Omega Man, I Am Omega and I Am Legend). Matheson wrote more than a dozen episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone — including “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet,” starring William Shatner, which was remade as a segment of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie — and penned the “evil Kirk “Enemy Within” episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.
Over the decades Hollywood turned frequently to his writing for its twisty but humanist genre storytelling. Films adapted from his works include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Steven Spielberg’s Duel(1971), Somewhere in Time (1980), the Will Smith-starrer I Am Legend (2007), and Real Steel (2011).
During his career Matheson earned a Writers Guild Association nomination for 1985′s Amazing Stories and won the Hugo Award, The Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Horror Writers Association, and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films. Earlier this year Matheson signed on to adapt his own The Incredible Shrinking Man for MGM with Richard Jr. The pair completed a draft prior to Matheson’s passing.
Star Trek Into Darkness – IMAX Promo
New clip from the IMAX promo for Star Trek Into Darkness: In the wake of a shocking act of terror from within their own organization, the crew of The Enterprise is called back home to Earth. In defiance of regulations and with a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads his crew on a manhunt to capture an unstoppable force of destruction and bring those responsible to justice. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.
J. J. Abrams Star Trek to Star Wars Internet Comics
JJ Abrams ‘defection’ to Star Wars from Star Trek has had the fan boys buzzing on the net…
Zoë Saldaña
Zoe Saldana (born June 19, 1978), sometimes stylized Zoë Saldaña, is an American actress. She had her breakthrough role in the 2000 film Center Stage and the 2002 film Crossroads. She later gained prominence for her roles as Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Uhura in the 2009 film Star Trek, and a starring role as Neytiri in James Cameron’s megahit Avatar. She has since shared lead roles in the action films The Losers (2010) and Columbiana (2011). She will return for sequels to Star Trek in 2013, and Avatar in 2016 and beyond.
Malcolm McDowell
Malcolm McDowell (born 13 June 1943) is an English actor, whose career spans more than four decades. McDowell is known for his early roles in the controversial films if…, O Lucky Man!, A Clockwork Orange, and less favourably, Caligula. Since then, his versatility as an actor has led to varied roles in films and television series of different genres, including Tank Girl, Star Trek Generations, Gangster # 1, the TV serials Our Friends in the North, Entourage, and Heroes, and the 2007 remake of Halloween and its sequel.
McDowell was born Malcolm John Taylor in Horsforth, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now a part of the City of Leeds, the son of Edna (née McDowell), and Charles Taylor. His family later moved to Bridlington, since his father was in the Royal Air Force. McDowell trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
McDowell made his screen debut as school rebel Mick Travis in if… (1968) by British director Lindsay Anderson. If… satirises, and is famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at an English public school, the film is associated with the 1960’s counter-culture movement because it was filmed by a long-standing counter-culture director at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. It includes controversial statements, such as: “There’s no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts”. It features surrealist sequences throughout the film. Upon release in the UK, it received an X certificate. The film stars McDowell in his first appearance as Anderson’s “everyman” character Mick Travis.
The Mick Travis films are three films directed by British film director Lindsay Anderson and written by David Sherwin, featuring McDowell as Mick Travis, in which Travis features not so much as a single character with a character arc, but as an everyman character whose role changes according to the needs of the storyteller.
In if…, his first appearance (and McDowell’s film debut), Travis first appears as a disaffected public school boy boy whose anti-establishment attitude and experiences lead to armed insurrection at a public school. In O Lucky Man!, co-written by Sherwin and McDowell, Travis becomes a picaresque character, often compared to Voltaire’s ingénu character Candide, in a satirical drama that starts with Travis’s first job as a mobile coffee salesman and, after many adventures involving arms-sale scandals, experiments in human-animal genetics by the mad scientist Doctor Millar (played with relish by Graham Crowden), and a sojourn with the musician Alan Price, ends in his rebirth as a film star, thanks to a slap by a film director played in a cameo by Anderson.
In Britannia Hospital, Travis is a reporter attempting to make an investigative documentary about a hospital where Doctor Millar, the mad geneticist from O Lucky Man! is continuing his unspeakable experiments. if…. won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. McDowell also made the incredible documentary Never Apologize (2007), a film of a one-man-show in which Malcolm McDowell talks about Lindsey Anderson.
His performance in if…. caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who cast McDowell as the lead in A Clockwork Orange, adapted from the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess. He won great acclaim (nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of Best Actor) as Alex, a young hoodlum brainwashed by a dystopian British government of the near future.
He made his Hollywood debut as H. G. Wells in Time After Time (1979). He often portrayed antagonists in the late 1970s and 1980s, including the title character in Caligula (1979). He later remarked upon his career playing film villains: “I suppose I’m primarily known for that but in fact, that would only be half of my career if I was to tot it all up.”
McDowell appeared in the 1982 remake of Cat People. He is also known in Star Trek circles as “the man who killed Captain Kirk” in the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, in which he played the mad scientist Dr. Tolian Soran.
In 1992, he played himself in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), in which he chastises protagonist Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) for badmouthing him behind his back. He co-starred with actress and artist Lori Petty in the action/science fiction/comedy film Tank Girl (1995).
He gave strong performances in Gangster No. 1 (2000), and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, (2003) in which he played a straight married man who rapes a young drug dealer to “teach him a lesson”. McDowell appeared as Dr. Sam Loomis in Rob Zombie’s remakes of Halloween and Halloween II (in 2007 and 2009, respectively).
McDowell is set to appear in the upcoming film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D as Leonard Wolf, an insane cult leader. In between all that, he has featured in countless TV series and B-Movies. However, looking at that list you can forget McDowell’s claim that villains only make up half of his career, it may be so, but those villain roles are unforgettable.
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Simon Nimoy (born March 26, 1931) is an American actor, film director, poet, musician and photographer. Nimoy’s most famous role is Spock in the original Star Trek series (1966–1969), and in multiple film, television, and video-game sequels.
Nimoy began his career in his early twenties, teaching acting classes in Hollywood and making minor film and television appearances through the 1950s. In 1953, he served in the United States Army. In 1965, he made his first appearance in the rejected Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”, and would go on to play the character of Mr. Spock until 1969, followed by seven feature films and guest slots in various sequels. His character of Spock had a significant cultural impact and garnered Nimoy three Emmy Award nominations; TV Guide named Spock one of the 50 greatest TV characters. After the original Star Trek series, Nimoy starred in Mission: Impossible for two seasons, hosted the documentary series In Search Of… (TV Series), and narrated Civilization IV, as well as making several well-received stage appearances.
Nimoy’s fame as Spock is such that both his autobiographies, I Am Not Spock (1977) and I Am Spock (1995) detail his existence as being shared between the character and himself. He is the only original cast member to make an appearance in the J. J. Abrams reboot.
William Shatner
William Alan Shatner (born March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor, musician, recording artist, author and film director. He gained worldwide fame and became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the science fiction television series Star Trek from 1966 to 1969, Star Trek: The Animated Series from 1973 to 1974, and in seven of the subsequent Star Trek feature films from 1979 to 1994. He has written a series of books chronicling his experiences playing Captain Kirk and being a part of Star Trek, and has co-written several novels set in the Star Trek universe. He has also authored a series of science fiction novels called TekWar that were adapted for television.
Shatner also played the eponymous veteran police sergeant in T. J. Hooker from 1982 to 1986. Afterwards, he hosted the reality-based television series, Rescue 911 from 1989 to 1996, which won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Dramatic Series.
He has since worked as a musician, author, producer, director and celebrity pitchman. From 2004 to 2008 he starred as attorney Denny Crane in the television dramas The Practice and its spin-off Boston Legal for which he won two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award.
Douglas Trumbull
Visionary filmmaker, innovator and entrepreneur Douglas Trumbull, has been selected by the Visual Effects Society Board of Directors as the recipient of the 2012 Georges Méliès Award. The award will be presented at the 10th Annual VES Awards, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on February 7, 2012.
The Méliès Award honors individuals who have “pioneered a significant and lasting contribution to the art and/or science of the visual effects industry by a way of artistry, invention and groundbreaking work.” One of four effects supervisors [on] 2001: A Space Odyssey, he subsequently influenced moviegoers with stunning visual effects in films such as The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and more recently the stunning 20+ minute sequence for Terence Malik’s The Tree of Life.
Previous recipients of the George Méliès Award were Robert Abel (2005), John Lasseter (2006), Phil Tippett (2009) and Ed Catmull (2010). Trumbull was given an Honorary Membership in 2002, a Lifetime Membership in 2009 and made a VES Fellow in 2010.
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