wmartin@Almsa-2 (08/29/85)
From: Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI <wmartin@Almsa-2> I believe that the movie referred to by Kevin Carosso in SF-L #342 was "Rocket Ship MX", if I recall the title right. I do believe it was one of those old private-enterprise-mad-scientist-builds-a-spaceship movies -- they were to head for the moon originally but made some error or turned left instead or right or something and landed on Mars instead. Makes you wonder why NASA expends all that effort worrying over "launch windows" and the like... :-) Speaking of poor special effects, a local station broadcast the accidental-nuclear-attack film "Fail Safe" the other day. Even though they used some really atrocious effects, the film still comes across rather effectively. As far as bad EFX, for example: they wanted to portray a spy-satellite real-time TV picture, and for this they used that old shot taken by a camera looking down from a V-2 or one of the earlier test rockets, taking off from White Sands. They used the end part of the film, where the rocket is tumbling violently so the image spins and oscillates between views of earth and sky, as what the "normal" image from the spy satellite would be; then, to simulate zooming to higher magnification, they showed the takeoff portion of that old film, run in reverse! (What a crock! :-) The other strange aspect of the effects was that they showed all the aircraft-in-flight shots as if they were negatives (it is a B&W movie); this could be just artistic license, though -- however, for some inexplicable reason, when they were attempting to depict a group of fighter planes (the same group each time) they used a motley assortment of shots of various types of fighters, differing each time. Another poor selection was that they used a shot of a fighter launching rockets as one depicting "fighters going to afterburners" -- though you saw smoke trails from the rear of the plane, you also saw them extending to the front, and caught a glimpse of the rockets moving off-screen as the shot began. Considering that stock footage of all sorts of aircraft doing all sorts of things can be easily bought, I see no excuse for such sloppy selection and editing. As I said, though, despite all this evidence of poor craftsmanship, the movie still was pretty effective, providing good tension and suspense (even for someone like me who had seen it several times before). One last point -- nowadays we have seen repeated news stories discussing the "Hot Line", and emphasizing that it really is a teleprinter link, not a telephone line. However, I can see that having a telephone link would be most useful and valuable. Is there a telephone Hot Line circuit available at all, maybe subsidiary to the teleprinter link? Regards, Will Martin ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin