Dinner for Schmucks Sometimes I'll be working on a piece, and I'll think, "No, this is bullshit." So I will literally rub bull excrement on the piece as a metaphor. Directed by Mel Brooks. With Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman. In order to ruin a western town, a corrupt politician appoints a black sheriff. Parental Guidance was a funny movie. The kids in the film are really cute, funny, and charming. It's a good movie for the whole family. The way our parents parented. Directed by Jay Roach. With Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Stephanie Szostak, Zach Galifianakis. When he finds out that his work superiors host a dinner celebrating the.

A discussion with Title Sequence Director, and Executive Producer and Co- Editor JON POLL, Storyboard and Concept Artist JOEL VENTI and Diorama Creators THE CHIODO BROS (Charlie, Edward, and Steve Chiodo). Can you give us some background on how this sequence came about? JP: This sequence sprang from the mind of the film's director Jay Roach as a way to introduce Barry, the lead character, without ever seeing him. JV: One of the biggest problems that we had—and Jay was always thinking about this—was that we don't see Barry for about 2. Then, he’s hit with a car and here he is with all of his mice and.. Do we need any character development earlier on and how do you deal with that? View 3 images. Storyboard examples.

JP: And when we find him, he's an oddball: he's running across the street, he's got dioramas. I mean, this is a comedy and comedies always deal with things that are on the edge. But we're also supposed to love him. How do we get to that place? So the idea was that we would show, in the beginning, that he's an artist.

It's all about the care that Barry puts in. JV: At one point, Jay talked to Jon and I about an opening sequence that introduced the mice and Mouseland and in half a day I just worked out the storyboard sequence for what I thought Mouseland could be. It was already built, so I was able to look at it and look at the drawings and try to figure out how we could implement these characters. Watch Kalifornia HD 1080P. I did the whole sequence trying to show this unseen character building a Utopian world with mice. And if you follow the progression—because for me it's all about the story—it's all about building a character so that when we do see Barry later on we actually know a little bit about him. We’ve seen him lovingly and carefully put together this world, build it from scratch.

Safe. This movie tells about an excellent fighter who must deal with double-mission. He must rescue a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by the Triads and find a good.

We’ve seen his little workshop, so you're getting a sense that there's a person here who really cares about this. And we're hoping that you make the link between his character, Barry, and the mice that we saw at the beginning of the movie. I'm really glad that Jay decided to do it because it turned out great. EC: For us, Mouseland was the first look into Barry's world. The idyllic day in his life with his wife that he is now separated from. So from our perspective, the whole extension into the main titles was kind of an afterthought.

JV: Yup. Jay and I would sit there and he'd have me draw the different possibilities of what the mice could be. He kept saying, 'what would an idyllic life be like in this park setting? A day in the life of Barry and what he thought his life should have been like with Martha?' He's building up this relationship to what he wanted to have. And we see the longing, the sadness of love not fulfilled. View 4 images. Diorama concepts. EC: What was really important to Jay was that connection between them.

I remember going back and forth about the placement of the [miniatures’] hands in each others' pockets. That was a really intimate, touching little moment. CC: Well, those personal mouse dioramas gave the character his heart. You connect with the guy, so he’s not just a wacky artist.

He’s a sensitive, tragic character. And there were two levels of the mouse dioramas; one was a re- creation of the artistic masterpieces with mice in them from The Last Supper to the Mona Lisa to the American Gothic, and then there was the personal stuff from Barry’s life.

SC: The detail he put into the dioramas is the amount he would have put into the relationship. Diorama example. So Edward, you folks worked on both the set piece dioramas and Mouseland? EC: Yeah, we did all the mice. Everything that Barry is purported to do in the movie, we did. So the main titles, again, grew out of the Mouseland that was in the movie proper from day one.

CC: What was it, about 2. Steve Carell’s character? EC: Thirty people did the work that Barry did in his garage.

SC: In the beginning when we had our meetings with Jay and Walter Parkes, they wanted realistic mice. And then when we looked at a real mouse, we found out that they weren’t very attractive; they weren’t really endearing. CC: Yeah, go to crappytaxidermy. SC: For the poses that they wanted us to create, the real arms weren’t long enough. They didn’t have any necks, so you couldn’t put a jacket on them! EC: Yeah. Not enough shoulder, really. Watch The Recall Streaming. SC: So we really had to redefine.

They are realistic but there’s a characterization. No real mice were used or killed in the making of this. CC: And real mice are smaller than what we created, because to get the tiny details of the hands and the fingers and the feet—a real mouse would have been impossible.

So we suggested that we scale it up just a little bit to make it more manageable. View 6 images. Mice set- piece details. EC: Yeah, it was very helpful.

Real taxidermy wouldn’t have held up to the detail and the scrutiny that these things had to. SC: I think the hands were maybe three millimeters long and two millimeters wide—very, very tiny. CC: Well, there was a cuteness and an empathy that you wanted from them. If you filled the screen with a mouse face, it would have taken the essence of the scale away. SC: It would be a King Kong mouse! It had to remain small relative to the frame of the screen. And actually even in the context of the dioramas themselves, there was an effort to make them smaller in the box so they didn’t look like giants.

They were still mouse- sized within the environments. It kept them cute. Finished mice ready for the shoot. JV: The taxidermy question gets brought up a lot. How did you get the real mice to do that? How did you learn taxidermy?” The fact that so many people question that those mice are real is a testament to these guys.

EC: Well, them and the people we work with. A husband and wife team, Mark and Heidi Tyler, did all the fur work on it—amazing work—and then Joanne Bloomfield did all the wigs. Really an amazing team. We’re only as good as the people we work with. CC: And how many mice were there all in all? EC: Oh, I know. Absolutely. We made 1. 21 mice.

Can you talk a bit about how the sequence was shot? JP: I tried to shoot it as if everything was real size—not to treat it like a miniature. But it is very difficult to do that—it's the tiniest and most delicate moves. We were lucky enough to get the best dolly grip off the [first unit] and people liked working on it because it's a fun little sequence. So most of it—about three- quarters of it—was shot the first day. There are shots that we tried 8 or 1.

View 6 images. Title shoot on- set photos. Right. But that is part of its strength—the fact that it is shot that way, with dolly moves and tracking. Techniques that you wouldn’t normally see on something so small. JP: Exactly! Normally that would be incredibly difficult to do; and it was sort of difficult to do! We did go back later because the movie had so many name titles. I think we ended up going back and re- shooting and getting six or seven new shots. Amazingly almost everything we shot made it in.

Is it all manual shooting versus a computer- controlled camera? JP: All manual, yes. Just regular people working on the back of the main set, trying to shoot the sequence between first unit shooting, and trying to be quiet. JV: Right. Even as it was, we found out when Jon and I were doing all the second unit stuff, you can only get so close on a mouse before some of the little hairs and details of the actual mouse doesn’t hold up on a huge theater screen. So we had to make sure that we never were more than a medium shot on a mouse. We didn’t do any ECUs on there or anything like that. It’s not anything against these guys, it’s just that you are dealing with a four- and- a- half- inch tall creation.

They are beautiful beyond words, but you have to be careful when you are getting too close on them. EC: There was a conversation of doing it in motion control, where you could reprogram and everything like that. But that was maybe a little too precise.

JV: And also with the motion control, we had potential problems in getting the lenses in the right place.

Blazing Saddles (1. IMDb. Edit. Trivia. According to Mel Brooks' 1.

Playboy" interview, "We mentioned Raisinets in 'Blazing Saddles' and now the company sends me a gross of them every month. A gross of Raisinets!" See more ». While Taggart and his gang ride into the fake (2 dimensional buildings) Rock Ridge, when Bart and company arrive and the fist fights break out, the buildings are clearly the 3 dimensional set. See more ». Come on, boys! The way you're lollygaggin' around here with them picks and them shovels, you'd think it was a hundert an' twenty degree. Can't be more than a hundert an' fourteen.

Crazy Credits. The Warner Bros. Pictures logo is on a black screen nd burns on fire, revealing the start of the movie.

See more ». Connections. Referenced in Clue (1. See more ». Soundtracks. Springtime for Hitler. Written by Mel Brooks.