Now that Thanksgiving has gone and still no trailer, it makes me wonder at what kind of emotional pressures Burton may be under--from himself.

If I were as big a fan as I am and had the chance to do a remake of the some of this story, I can't imagine the kind of grief I could give myself trying to make every detail perfect.  (It does not matter that the original was rife with the imperfections of shooting material after only 2 or 3 rehearsals--in my fan's mind, it is still the ULTIMATE.)

If they are still doing post production, which I think is almost certainly the case, I don't see how there can be a final budget tally yet.  The 60 million must cover shooting costs.  I don't know about other costs.  It's interesting to think that Depp & Burton may have taken major salary cuts to get this out of the gate. 

It just may be the glossiest, most high end fan production ever seen to this date.

G.

I watched the new DVD of Gargoyles (1972) tonight and couldn't help thinking it was too bad the artist for the comics didn't have access to some screen shots of Grayson in this as a model for Julia in the Fall of 1971.  I thought the curly shag do Grayson had as Mrs. Parks took years off her face, and her figure hugging stylish white top with the silver belt made her look great.

There was an old thread with some screen captures but I guess it is no longer available since a search for "Gargoyles" on the site search engine turned up "no pages."  Check the movie out if you haven't seen it and are a Grayson Hall fan.

G.

There is one episode where Quentin's 1930s/40s pre-Grant Douglas identity is mentioned.  Julia finds a clipping and some other things and a name is mentioned.  I can't recall it at the moment but it's one of my favorite episodes.  I love the shows where Julia is trying to help "Grant" overcome his amnesia just because I think Grayson and Selby had such fabulous on-screen chem.

But you're right, the show could have done more with this, but they didn't.  An option might have been to have a storyline that involved the 1920s and Quentin having to do the I Ching back to his former self then and come to Collinsport and change history.  I think Selby would have looked very hot in 20s regalia, and the women would have looked great in the period fashions too.

Ah, we can dream...

G.

That was a wonderful interview you posted some years ago with Joel from a year or two after he had left DS.  I was fascinated to learn that he had written several episodes for the series, though never received screen credit due to union issues.

There was so much more to Joel than met the eye... a truly rare and beautiful soul.

G.

This is getting very technical but here are my thoughts:

[spoiler](1) We may presume Julia's original 1967 formula would have worked, had Barnabas not forced her to accelerate the treatment.

(2)  Lang's 1968 formula did work for a time, but it seems that the "destructive" cell in Barnabas' blood that kept him a vampire (according to Julia's original 1967 analysis) gradually developed immunity to that formula, hence Barn's fixed looks at Vicki's neck (one of my favorite scenes) and the howling of the dogs again.

(3) In 1897, Barnabas is still under Angelique's original curse.  Julia is able to cure him with a "new, improved" formula (I still find it difficult to imagine how she was able to synthesize it given 1890s medical technology, especially the very low grade that would have been available in Collinsport).  The final injections are administered by Angelique.

(4) In 1970, Barnabas becomes a vampire again, this time because of Jeb's Leviathan curse.  That curse seems to have induced an even more virulent state of vampirism; Julia's attempt to cure Barnabas failed, and her formula actually intensified his cravings for blood.[/spoiler]

Beyond that it gets pretty confusing, but I do feel that Julia was in her rights to claim that she had cured Barnabas.  It's unclear at the end of the 1840/1971 storyline whether Barn would have reverted to being a vampire again.  That was what Sam Hall's notes stated, and I presume that a vampire Barnabas made a more attractive subject for the current comic book project than a cured Barnabas would have done.

G.

Also, note that the order in which the IMDB lists performers ordinarily has zilch to do with billing (in some cases, it seems to go alphabetically), which is a real nuisance when you're scrolling through a long cast list of an unseen production trying to determine who the principal players were.  The IMDB is pretty much a world unto itself.  With all its faults, however, it is a very useful resource, so long as you bear in mind the guideline that every fact needs to be checked--same goes with the "Wikipedia."

cheers, Gothick

KLS and the others were only at Pinewood for a day or two at most.  Unless Burton's people decide to be super generous (which I doubt), I do not think she would have enough material from that brief encounter to fill a book length memoir.  That accounts for the inclusion of other material in the book.  There's been mention of "previously unpublished photographs" in the Hermes Press reprints of the Gold Key comic books, so it does seem as if KLS truly has even more photos sitting around at home we haven't seen, although the quality of anything being excavated now may be somewhat dubious if all the best shots were weeded for her numerous previous books about the show.  (I still laugh when I recall somebody telling me around 2004 that KLS had informed the individual that she "wasn't doing anymore Dark Shadows books" out of PomPress.)

I am sure there will be a number of media tie-in pubs for this project.  Given the screenwriter's rep I am sure there will be a script book, and there will probably be a third book that is set photos, etc. for the Depp fan market.

On the topic of how the 2012 movie will be edited, I would be very surprised if the story is told in "chronological order" starting with 1752. I expect the movie to begin with Victoria's arrival at Collinsport, perhaps counterpointed with scenes of [spoiler]Barnabas' coffin being excavated, as described in the Empire mag article.[/spoiler] But Burton may change his mind about a lot of things as he goes through his usual intensive, prolonged and elaborate postproduction work on the film.  We may end up with only brief snippets and clips from the 18th century sequences.  At least in this era of extras-laden DVD releases, we can expect at least some deleted scenes when the movie hits the home video market.

G.