Premaking Movies

This would have been a great exercise back in my days of teaching film and video production classes.

A former student sent me a link to a "premake" of the trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark as a 1951 film. Raiders is an excellent choice for this editing exercise since Spielberg and Lucas were echoing a bevy of those earlier adventure serials.

The person behind these premakes on YouTube (maybe he invented the genre too) is whoiseyevan, who describes himself as "a writer/filmmaker trying to get his big break. The videos on my channel were posted to show-off some of my editing, directing, and art direction skills." (He needs to post more info - full name? website? contact info?)

He has actually grabbed some clips from some of those films that inspired S&L and created enough of a story for a "coming attractions" trailer.

I'm not sure if there are copyright issues in the exercise. It looks like he found trailers and clips that were already on YouTube. If Paramount Pictures or Lucasfilm went after him, I would be disappointed in them.

On Raiders, he lists the sources: The 10 Commandments, Prince Valiant, Naked Jungle, Secret of the Incas, Jungle Queen, Zulu, Look to Lockheed for Leadership, Casablanca, The City of Brass, Mr. Moto takes a Vacation, Star in My Crown, A Pain in the Pullman, On Dangerous Ground, Patton, King Solomon's Mines, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Greatest Show on Earth, David and Bathsheba, The Screaming Skull, When You Know, Mysterious Mr. Moto, Lawrence of Arabia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and Superman at Bay.

Of course, I HAD to look at his Ghost Busters (1954) because that is a favorite because I watched it MANY times with my sons - especially Justin who had every intention to become a Ghostbuster when he grew up. (We still have the toys in the basement, so that I can introduce grandkids to PK meters and cyclotrons some day.)



I love that Fred MacMurray from the Flubber movies are there. I had quite a fascination as a kid with those Flubber films and the professor's inventions from the garage laboratory during my own mad scientist phase. (I could never bear to watch the remake - sorry Robin Williams.)

There's also another film favorite of mine premade with his Forrest Gump (1949).

He's not the first to do a fanfilm. There are plenty of samples online of people actually remaking favorites frame-by-frame with their friends playing roles and using homemade props, sets and neighborhood locations.

"Eyevan" also has a little frame-by-frame explanation of his own Raiders film.

Renegade, Radiance and Rosebud Are Playing With The Dog on the White House Lawn. Over and Out.

Who is Rosebud? (Image from Citizen Kane)


According to a June 17, 2007, report in The Washington Post, the U.S. Secret Service gave the code name "Renegade" to Senator Barack Obama during the campaign (as far as I can tell, it still holds).

Some people ponder the possible symbolism in these code names (How exactly did George W. Bush "tumble"?), but the claim in the article was that “according to a Secret Service spokesman, all code names are chosen by military officials, suggesting that they should not be examined too closely for deeper meaning.”

Some other code names past and present:

Hillary Clinton .................Evergreen
John Kerry ...................Minuteman
Al Gore ......... Sawhorse, then Sundance
George W. Bush ..................Tumbler
Bill Clinton.........................Eagle
Jimmy Carter .................... Deacon
George H. W. Bush ...........Timberwolf
Ronald Reagan ...................Rawhide
Dick Cheney ........Backseat, then Angler
Josiah Bartlet ............. Eagle; Liberty
Zoey Bartlet ...................Bookbag
Claudia Jean “C. J.” Cregg ..... Flamingo

There are also general code names:

POTUS - President of the United States
FLOTUS - First Lady of the United States
VPOTUS - Vice President of the United States

There is an initial letters thing going on - for the Obama family:

Michelle Obama - Renaissance
Malia Obama - Radiance
Sasha Obama - Rosebud

There are some funny and kind of mean ones too.

Scott McClellan - Matrix (which might be a generic name for the White House Press Secretary
Andy Card - Patriot
Josh Bolten - Fatboy
Rahm Emanuel - Black Hawk
Queen Elizabeth II - Kittyhawk

There are even ones for locations.

The Harry S Truman Building (Department of State headquarters) - Birds-eye
Camp David - Cactus or Buckeye
The Vice President's office - Cobweb
The Vice President's staff - Pacemaker


Of course, none of this is Top Secret and Wikipedia is trying to keep up with it.

Doctorow's Homer and Langley

Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Collyer were two American brothers who became famous because of their compulsive hoarding.

The brothers are often cited as an example of compulsive hoarding associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as disposophobia or 'Collyer brothers syndrome,' a fear of throwing anything away. They collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.

Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades.

Collyer, a blind, bedridden hermit, had died of malnutrition and heart failure. Weeks later, after excavating more than 100 tons of rubbish, police found Homer's brother, Langley, who had also died in the house after accidentally crushing himself with a booby trap he had set to capture intruders.

This bizarre story captured the imagination the young E.L. Doctorow who has re-imagined their lives in his new book, Homer and Langley.


In an interview on NPR, Doctorow said he was intrigued by the idea that they had come from a well-to-do family but had chosen to leave that world behind. They had attended Columbia University before they shut out the world in their family's mansion on Fifth Avenue.

I like most of Doctorow's novels, and Ragtime really carried me away when I read it right after college graduation.


I like Doctorow's method for writing the new novel. He says that he needed to "break into that house" and see what the brothers were doing and that this book required "interpretation, not research."

The Collyer Brothers' Brownstone
on Fifth Avenue and 128th Street in 1947.