There’s an empty storefront on Main Street here in downtown SLC, just across from the light-rail station where I get off in the mornings, in which someone has set up two big video displays in the windows, one on either side of the door. These displays run an endless loop of PSAs and promos for the Salt Lake Film Society, presumably for the purpose of informing and entertaining the captive audiences who are standing around waiting for their trains. Or something. Personally, I don’t find the vids all that entertaining or informing most of the time. Moreover, I find I’m increasingly annoyed by the ubiquity of video screens in our environment. Ironic, I know, given my primary interests and hobbies, but honestly, there are times when I’d really rather not have the distraction. At least the loop changes every couple of days so I don’t have to see and hear the same damn thing day after day. And every once in a while, something will turn up that actually catches my interest.
Today, for example, the screens were running the original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I have no idea if this has anything to do with all the Apollo anniversary stuff going on, or if it’s pure coincidence.) Well, naturally I had to stand and watch that iconic footage before heading on into the office.

Somehow, though, the experience of watching scenes from 2001 projected onto the window of an empty storefront in the year 2009, with a dreadlocked homeless guy reflected in the glass, is curiously lacking in magic…

Speaking of Pixar, you may recall my enthusiasm a while back at the news that Pixar — the one movie studio these days that’s consistently turning out genuine movies, as opposed to unsatisfying exercises in spectacle and marketing — is developing a trilogy based on the pulp-tastic “Martian tales” of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, I’ve been accumulating little tidbits of news about the project for the past several months, and it’s time to perform an infodump for any of my readers who may be interested. The last item should be particularly exciting for my fellow Utahns, if that’s any incentive to click through…

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It’s a sentimental story to be sure, almost too cinematic to be believed. But sometimes life really is like a movie, and in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, sometimes we do get to write our own ending.

In this case, the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl named Colby who was dying of a rare and vicious form of cancer. The ending she wanted was simple enough: she wanted to live long enough to see the new Pixar movie Up. But by the time the movie opened, she was too ill to go out to the theater. So a family friend started cold-calling Pixar and Disney, hoping she could somehow make the little girl’s wish happen before it was too late. She finally managed to reach an actual human at Pixar and explain her situation. And the very next day, a Pixar employee was knocking at Colby’s front door with a DVD of Up — it’s still running in theaters, remember — and a sack of related swag.

It was Colby’s last day on Earth; she died seven hours after the movie ended. As fate would have it, she couldn’t even open her eyes to actually see what was on the screen. But she could hear it, and her mom described the images to her.
I hope it made her happy. I can think of worse ways to spend your final day.

The article I linked above is worth reading in its entirety, by the way. If you can get through it without tearing up, you’re not human.

Hat tip to Jaquandor for bringing this to my attention…

From the Department of Retro Awesomeness, Pulp Adventure Section (well, actually from Chris Roberson’s blog, but that other intro sounds a lot more impressive, doesn’t it?) comes this, a trailer for an upcoming web series that sets my heart a-racing:

A square-jawed, all-American hero dressed like the Rocketeer fights glowing space-ghost guys and a brain in a jar with a raygun, and all in glorious black and white? How could that not be cool? (Actually, don’t answer that… this sort of thing is pretty tricky to pull off without falling into either self-conscious — and usually not very funny — parody or painfully earnest ridiculousness. Nevertheless, I think this attempt looks promising.)

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I’m not especially a fan of Marilyn Monroe — with the exception of the sublime Some Like It Hot, all of her movies that I’ve seen blur together in my memory, and I’m not even certain which ones I have seen — but she was undeniably pretty, and I like photos of pretty girls. I’m also fascinated by those occasional stories of long-lost artifacts being rediscovered in somebody’s attic, so naturally my ears pricked up when I heard on The Today Show this morning that a cache of unpublished photos of Marilyn had turned up in the archives of Life magazine. You can see a nice selection of them here. These shots were taken in August of 1950, when Marilyn was 24 years old and still a few years from attaining full-fledged stardom. To my eye, she looks happier and sexier in these than in most of the better-known images of her that were taken later on. But then I’ve long suspected she was much happier as Norma Jean than she ever was as Marilyn.
FYI, yesterday was her birthday. She would’ve been 83 years old, something that’s nearly impossible to imagine…

Via Evanier, I see that the final bits and pieces of the late Forrest J. Ackerman’s collection of movie memorabilia have gone under the auctioneer’s gavel. I’ve written before about Forry’s legendary collection, how it was reputed to be the world’s largest and how he would generously show it off to anyone who came calling on a Saturday afternoon, how plans to base a museum around it never seemed to come together and how in recent years he was forced to sell off the bulk of it to pay for his mounting medical expenses. I understand that the items that remained were his most cherished ones, the ones he couldn’t part with while he was alive, including Bela Lugosi’s Dracula ring, which Ackerman personally wore every day, and a replica of the Robotrix — a clear ancestor of C-3PO — from the silent classic Metropolis.

This news makes me deeply sad. To think that a man spends his entire life gathering around himself the things he loves only to have them scattered to the four winds upon his death… well, it all seems like rather an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? I suppose you could see it as these items returning to circulation now that Forry’s no longer using them, and hope that they’ve all gone to good homes with owners who love and appreciate them the way he did. Forry himself might have even wanted it that way. But I still have a problem wrapping my head around the way a person’s hobbies and interests just… evaporate. If your collection ends up being broken apart anyway, if the people you leave behind have no interest in saving it and loving it as you did, why collect it in the first place?

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