Six Feet Under: The opening titles - VIDEO
One of my favorite parts of Six Feet Under is the opening titles. When I get ready to watch the show, I don’t turn it on and do other things while the opening titles play. I sit down and watch the titles from the beginning. It prepares me for the show ahead.
As I learned from watching the behind-the-scenes featurette on the season one DVD set, when a show is created, the opening pictures are usually done first and the music added later. That wasn’t the case with Six Feet Under, mainly because creator Alan Ball had no idea what he wanted to do with the pictures. So he had composer Thomas Newman — whom he worked with on American Beauty — score the music first.
Digital Kitchen, a film production company, then drew up storyboards for the sequence. “We wanted to tell the story of what would happen after a person is placed into a casket and goes into a hearse to the cemetery,” said designer Danny Yount.
It’s true — the titles really transport you into that surreal world of death. You see the stark tree on the barren hill, the hands coming apart, the hands preparing to work with the body, the body on a gurney going down a tunnel towards white light as a lone body stands in the background, the embalming fluid, the flowers wilting, the casket being unloaded from a hearse, the gravestone, vintage photos on a desk, the crow flying into the air, and then back to the lone tree. It’s all a big circle.
Just for fun, let’s pick it apart a little:
The hands separating. The music fits here perfectly, because as the hands separate and go into slow-motion, the staccato notes of the string instruments kick in. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, because, as Alan Ball says, you know that once the hands separate, there’s no going back.
The gurney. Ditto on the music here — everything is precisely timed. When the wheel on the gurney turns, the percussion track kicks in and the instrument begins playing — I think it’s an oboe, which has an ethereal sound to it.
The crow. It’s actually illegal to film true crows in the United States for commercial purposes. So what you see in the opening titles is a pied crow with a white chest that’s been painted black. It’s a subtle nod to the darker feel of the show.
The flowers. Digital Kitchen rigged and photographed the arrangement over a period of ten hours to capture the wilting process. When the flowers didn’t turn brown, they had to add color in postproduction, then speed up the shot to make the flowers wilt rapidly. Again, the music fits here perfectly.
The tree. The lone tree on the flat, barren hillside became the show’s logo. Digital Kitchen searched far and wide for a tree that would fit the bill, but finding that tree in the dead of winter in Seattle proved challenging. They ended up paying $400 to dig up an unwanted tree from someone’s yard, then place it on Kite Hill. An Internet search revealed that this hill is often used to fly kites. Death and kites. Yeah, I can see it.
Coppola Settles Up
All together now…it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Francis Ford Coppola has resolved a lawsuit brought by a film production company that claimed it had been jilted out of its share of the profits from daughter Sofia’s directing debut, The Virgin Suicides.
Muse Productions sued the Oscar-winning Godfather director last November in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging breach of contract and demanding a full audit of the movie’s earnings.
According to the complaint, Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, struck a deal with Muse in October 1997 that essentially cleared the film rights to the original Virgin Suicides book by Jeff Eugenides, in exchange for Muse receiving a percentage of the film’s revenue.
Muse’s lawyers submitted a two-page document to the court stating that a settlement had been reached. Terms were not disclosed, and neither side was available for comment.
Released in May 2000, The Virgin Suicides starred James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett and Danny DeVito and marked the first outing behind the camera for Sofia, who up until that point had been known mostly for her widely panned performance in The Godfather Part III.
The film grossed more than $10 million worldwide and, more importantly, paved the way for the younger Coppola’s Oscar-winning sophomore flick, Lost in Translation.
Jenna Jameson Biography
Jenna Jameson (born Jennifer Marie Massoli on April 9, 1974) is an American pornographic actress. She is one of the most successful female porn stars in the world, sometimes given the unofficial title “The Queen of Porn”. She has been in over 100 porn related videos in her career.
Originally from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father is a police officer of Italian descent and her mother was a Las Vegas showgirl. Her mother died of cancer when Jenna was three years old. During her childhood, she took ballet classes, which helped her future career in dancing, and was a frequent entrant in beauty pageants.
At age 16, Jenna began dancing in strip clubs with the help of a false I.D. Initially rejected from dancing at the Crazy Horse strip club because of her braces, they quickly relented when she removed them herself. During her dancing days, she became a voracious drug user, using such drugs as LSD and methamphetamine.
When she was 18, she moved to California, where her father had moved, and with his help she became clean. By age 20, and with her father’s blessing, this quickly led to nude pictorials in such magazines as Hustler, Penthouse and Chéri.
After a bidding war, Wicked Pictures, a pornographic film production company, signed Jameson to an exclusive contract. After only a few films, she quickly achieved notice and critical success, and, in 1996, won top awards from three major industry organizations.
Jameson has also made cameo appearances in some mainstream movies, including Howard Stern’s 1997 film Private Parts.
In 1997, she made an appearance for an Extreme Championship Wrestling PPV as the valet for the Dudley Boyz, followed by a few months where she was the ECW interviewer. She also filmed a vignette with Val Venis, a character in the WWE, in the late-1990’s.
In 2001, she was scheduled to debate the merits of porn against a panel of anti-porn activists at the Oxford Union but cancelled at the last minute. Despite her absence, the debate was won 204 to 27. The widely-held view that she actually attended the debate is mistaken.
In 2002, she voiced Candy Suxxx in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of the most recognizable characters in the popular game.
In 2004, Jameson’s autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale (ISBN 0060539097) was released. Co-written with Neil Strauss, it was an instant best-seller.
She currently is co-owner of ClubJenna, a website and movie-production company, along with her husband, porn producer/director Jay Grdina (whose professional pseudonym is “Justin Sterling”). The couple resides in Arizona.
In 2005, her moan tones telephone ringtones were made available for download.
As of April 13, 2005, she and publisher ReganBooks were embroiled in a lawsuit. The point of contention was the new reality show around Jameson’s “everyday life” — a deal inked between her husband and A&E. ReganBooks maintained that the A&E deal was a breach of Jameson’s ReganBooks contract, as the contract indicates that ReganBooks has a stake in the profits generated by two different venues: a one-hour special based on her memoir and reality-based series. As of this writing, a resolution has not been reached.
In August 2005, she launched Club Thrust, an interactive website for her gay fans, which includes videos, galleries, sex advice, gossip, and downloads. Jameson is one of the few actresses in straight porn to have developed a following among gay audiences.
In October 2005, production began on The Provocateur, in which Jameson made her directorial debut. The film is expected to be released in late 2006.
In November 2005, she released the much anticipated “Armagetiton” starring Jason Ridder and Sam Smith, known in the industry for their performances in “One Night and Pounding.” Smith said the experience was “the best of his career.”
In 2005 she purchased Babes Cabaret, a strip club in Scottsdale, Arizona. The club faces closure under a new Scottsdale ordinance limiting adult-entertainment venues.
She is the host of Playboy channel’s Jenna Jameson’s American Sex Star.
On February 3, 2006, Jameson, Savanna Samson, and several other Vivid Girls hosted the first ever Vivid Club Jenna Super Bowl Party at the Zoo Club in Detroit, Michigan for a $1,000 ticket price, that featured a lingerie show. When first announced, the party caused controversy with the NFL, which did not sanction this as an official Super Bowl event. In the January 19, 2006 edition of The Detroit Free Press, Jameson attempted to end some of the controversy by assuring that there will be no nudity or sex acts at the party, although the February 6, 2006 edition of The Detroit News reported Jameson did have one planned “wardrobe malfunction” at the party.
Jenna will star in the motion picture, Sin-Jin Smyth, which is due for release in October. Info about her character in the film has been kept classified by the writer and director, Ethan Dettenmaier.