Soylent Green

[james]

Regarding Planet of the Apes, a few years ago I read Bill Warren's The Evil Dead Companion and Planet of the Apes Revisited by Joe Russo and Larry Landsman, one after the other. Both books provide plenty of detail of the making of those film series, and I was struck by the differences.

According to Warren, the Evil Dead films were the vision (with assistance from others) of the director, Sam Raimi. According to Russo and Landsman, the Apes films were a producer-driven series, with Arthur P. Jacobs orchestrating the films, hiring the writers, directors and others and giving final approval (or not) on all ideas.

Now, these are two common approaches to filmmaking (maybe the two most common), and if you know anything about movies, you probably know this already. But reading these two books in close proximity was an interesting way to learn about the differences between the two types.


James

[morbiousfod]

One of the things I always liked about the Apes series is that they had to keep thinking out of the box after they had ended the last movie, and Fox would always want a new one, on a lesser budget of course, so they had to do a lot of thinking outside the box to keep the series running. Unfortunately this also lead to some of the stranger movies like Escape and Battle. Conquest having been set up at the end of Escape, when the creators finally caught on to the game, thus it actually turned out to be one of the better movies in the series.