Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

TAKE ONE For $935, including airfare and land package costs, you can now take a tour through middle Europe called “Spotlight on Dracula” and subtitled “An Adventure in Transylvania”. Pan Am and General Tours Inc. put together the trip, the cost of which does not include wooden stakes, crucifixes or garlic. A ton of popcorn was sold in the five New York theatres showing The Godfather during the first week of the run. For the filming of Prime Cut (a Cinema Center film with Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman), a brand new $8000 Cadillac limousine was driven from the U.S. to the movie's Calgary, Alberta location, where it was then during the course of one of the film’s more action-packed scenes — run into the powerful jaws of a reaping machine and came out the other end neatly baled. Under Canadian importation legislation, the car had to be returned to the U.S. at the end of the picture, regardless of its condition. It was at that point that the producers found they had to pay the U.S. 10 percent import surtax of $800 on the baled-up car! Currently creating a religious controversy in Mexico is Alexandro Jodorofsky with the filming of Sacred Mountain (his last film was El Topo). Newspapers have accused the Chilean producer-director of filming nude actors and crucified goats at Mexico’s most revered shrine, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Both charges have been denied. (Allan Klein’s ABKCO Films have some $750,000 invested in the picture.) In the new $1.5 million house of pro basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, covers for two couches and a bed, plus a large bedroom rug, are made from the carefully-pieced-together Advertising Age, October 25, 1971 News Pane tiny triangles of fur from the noses of some 17,000 Arctic wolves. Chamberlain told reporters proudly that the nose fur came from a full year’s collection of pelts from wolves slain by bounty hunters in Alaska. Agis I. Mihalakis already with about fifty other inventions to his credit has demonstrated a new screen that allows drivein theatres to operate during daylight hours, that makes it impossible for people outside the theatre’s enclosures to see the image, and that permits simultaneous viewing by persons seated in different areas of the theatre of as many as three images thrown by three projectors on the same surface. The screen is a lenticular surface made of embossed stainless steel on a plywood base. Akira Kurosawa has been tagged to direct a western (so-far called, confusingly, The Longest Day) that is scheduled to be shot in Spain with Toshiro Mifune and Sidney Poitier starring. This would be Kurosawa’s first assignment since his reported suicide attempt of last December. Magnavox has introduced its Odyssey electronic game simulator. Hooked up to any 18inch or larger tv set, the system(to retail in the $100-range) will allow two players to use the tv screen for a range of games of skill or chance ranging from roulette to football. The American Humane Association has added Arruza to its list of films branded unacceptable because they allegedly resort to the killing of animals for entertainment purposes. Other films on the list include: Alaskan Safari, Outback, and Walkabout. Among those films scored for objectionable use of horses are: Wrath of God, Chato’s Land, The Culpepper Cattle Company, and Waterloo. Walt Disney’s Fantasia has now grossed nearly $7.1 million. It is currently being released for the fourth time. (It was originally made, in 1940, for $2.2 million.) Western Union's singing telegram is being phased out (interstate service was discontinued this spring and service within each State is being dropped as quickly as WU can obtain permission). The 39-year-old service is dying largely because of problems finding operators willing to sing. Stanhope Adams II, a graduate student at Purdue University, has designed a low-cost television set to be built in Africa by Africans. The set would be used for receiving educational programming, can receive one channel, and will cost less that $9 a unit. CBS Laboratories has applied for patents on a lighting amplifier that is said to raise film sensitivity to the equivalent of ASA 16,000, The truth 24 times per second. making it possible to film in dawn or twilight hours without the use of artificial light. (Foreed processing can further raise the ASA to 50,000. ) Peter Grave's new “Mission: contract is 78 pages long. Impossible” According to UNESCO, there are now 251.000,000 television sets in the world (as against 87,000,000 just ten years ago). The U.S. leads with over 81,000,000 sets, followed by Russia (31,000,000), Japan (22,000,000), England and West Germany (16,000,00 each), The U.S. is closest to saturation with 397 seis per 1000 population. Ampex has announced the first installation of a machine that can duplicate colour videotape recordings ten times faster than present devices used. Three hour-long tv programs can be reproduced in six minutes. Constantine Costa-Gavras (director of Z) has been signed to direct the Claude Berri production of O Jerusalem! (an account of the birth of Israel). Meanwhile, Costa-Gavras is being attached by both the right-wing establishment press and the Communist Party in Chile, where he is filming State of Siege, despite the fact that the story-line of the film is as yet unknown. French film actor Pierre Clementi (Belle de Jour, Benjamin) has received a two-year sentence on drug charges from an Italian court, and has already been in a Rome jail for a year (seven months of that prior to sentencing). Committees are being established to raise money for an appeal. (Clementi was convicted after being arrested in an apartment not his own where a stash of cocaine was also found.)