Quick Bit of Nothing

I've been preoccupied with other things lately, but I've been saving some things up and will be posting more regularly soon (with maybe a big surprise early next month). But thought I'd just make a quick post to mention something that caught my eye.

Okay, actually, first, go to lileks.com for today (3/7/08) and read his discussion on Leonard Rosenman, who died recently. I've been planning to mention basically the same thing (which is that Rosenman's scores all seem to repeat the same riff), but he does it better, with audio illustrations.

Right after reading that today, I clicked over to Yahoo and saw an ad for a sleep aid that used an image from an old movie of a gorilla suit. And it reminded me of an old article I read in Famous Monsters of Filmland (IIRC) about guys who specialized in gorilla work. There were only like three or four good "gorilla men" back in the 30's and 40's, and they did most all of the movie gorilla work because they had their own suits ready-made (there's a pretty good article here that talks about two of the greats, Charles Gemora in the old days and Bob Burns in the 60's and 70's).

It's really amazing to think about, because the movie industry is such a different animal now. Movie make-up and special effects technology have advanced so far, and budgets are so big, that virtually every suit is custom-made, assuming you even use a suit. Audiences are so much more familiar with real gorillas now that it's getting increasingly hard to sell them on a suit; better to go with real gorillas or CGI versions.