This week I have been tending to a personal matter and have been out of the loop in my interactions with the fantastic. With this post I will point to a couple of items from the past week that I find noteworthy and which attempts to catch me up on recent relevant events.
First, yet another significant figure in the cinema of the fantastic has passed away with the death of Charles H. Schneer, pictured to the left with frequent musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann. Schneer served as the producer and collaborator with Ray Harryhausen in his fantasy and science fiction films from the 1950s until Harryhausen’s final film Clash of the Titans. Without Schneer’s vision and support of Harryhausen’s fantastic ideas many of his film classics might not have found the funding necessary to see the silver screen.
The second item of possible interest to my readers is the Cinefantastique Online first annual Wonder Awards. As the omissions in the Academy Award nominations indicate, the cinema of the fantastic has still yet to receive the critical praise it deserves in the academy, even while these films do exceedingly well at the box office. Cinefantastique seeks to address this deficiency and has done so for the first time with nominations for the films of 2008 to which I contributed my own nominations. The complete list of nominations can be viewed here.
It’s easy to forget the critically important people in between the creative talents, who bridge the business gap from ideas to completed productions. Thanks for mentioning Schneer. Without people like him the cinema of the fantastic would be much harder to bring to screen.