1990s - Part 1
Year
|
Event and Significance
|
1990
|
Director Pedro Almodóvar's offbeat black comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was the last film to receive the MPAA's X-rating - however, it was released unrated, due to its depiction of forced bondage and rape.
|
1990
|
Universal Pictures' and director Philip Kaufman's adult-oriented film Henry & June prompted a change in the ratings system. It was the first film given an NC-17 rating instead of an X-rating. The name of the 'X' category was changed to a new name or ratings category - NC-17. The MPAA introduced the NC-17 (not for children 17 or under) rating to differentiate MPAA-rated 'adult-oriented' films from hard-core pornographic movies rated X. The effort basically failed because many newspapers and TV still refused the ads for NC-17 rated films and theatres wouldn't show the films. In financial terms, an NC-17 rating amounted to an implicit kiss of death. Film critic Roger Ebert criticized the new ratings - he viewed them as meaningless standards, and felt that they denigrated the artistic integrity of many films - and forced film-makers to adjust to the ratings standard. Many film producers were forced to self-release their films as unrated (to bypass the stigma), and self-promote using flyers and alternative publications. Other film-makers were forced to add PG content to basically G-rated films, in order to secure larger audiences.
|
1990
|
Garry Marshall's (and Disney's - Buena Vista/Touchstone) modern-day, unlikely fairy-tale romance Pretty Woman was an unexpected blockbuster (eventually earning $450 million worldwide). It starred rising actress Julia Roberts as a Hollywood streetwalker with a heart-of-gold turned Cinderella. This was the film that made Julia Roberts a mega-star, and signaled her rise as Hollywood's leading, most powerful (and well-paid) actress.
|
1990
|
Johnny Depp's breakout hit film was Tim Burton's fantasy romance Edward Scissorhands, co-starring then-girlfriend Winona Ryder, and featuring the final film appearance of Vincent Price as his Inventor/father.
|
1990
|
Actor Kevin Costner's directing debut of the revisionist western, Dances with Wolves was an unexpectedly huge success -- it won seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music, and Best Sound) from its twelve nominations. It was the first Best Picture-winning western since Cimarron (1930) -- sixty years earlier.
|
1990
|
Time Warner's New Line Cinema founded a specialty art house division named Fine Line Features. It would go on to produce or distribute movies such as Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), The Rapture (1991), Robert Altman's The Player (1992), Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), Hoop Dreams (1994), and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996).
|
1990
|
Rob Reiner's Misery, derived from horror meister Stephen King's 1974 novel, won an Academy Award for its lead actress Kathy Bates, the first acting Oscar awarded to a horror film since the Best Actor award given to Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931/32).
|
1990
|
Director/actor Warren Beatty's big-budget Dick Tracy, derived from Chester Gould's original comic strip and lots of 1940s B-movies, was noted as being the first 35 mm feature film made with a digital soundtrack. For authenticity, it also restricted itself to the six main printing colors from the original newspaper strip: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple, plus black and white.
|
1990
|
Martin Scorsese's mob crime classic GoodFellas, was a grittier take on Coppola's The Godfather films, and the precursor to the popular 1999 cable TV series The Sopranos.
|
1990
|
The Japanese electronics corporation Matsushita purchased MCA Universal for $6.1 billion.
|
1990
|
The first interactive entertainment on CD-ROM for adults was the game Virtual Valerie, first released by Reactor, Inc. (a Chicago-based company founded by comic artist Mike Saenz) in 1989.
|
1990
|
In between his two Terminator films (in 1984 and 1991), action star Arnold Schwarzenegger was featured in director Paul Verhoeven's excessive science-fiction film, where he solidified his persona as a muscle-bound, heavily-accented quipster (i.e.,"Consider this a divorce"). By 2003, Arnie would become California's "Governator."
|
1990
|
Disney's The Rescuers Down Under, the studio's very first, theatrically-released animated sequel, was a noteworthy animated feature film for two other milestones. It was the first 100% completely-digital feature film ever produced and released - it included impressive flight-aerial action sequences using rotoscoping and multi-plane cameras -- especially in the scene of Cody (voice of (Adam Ryen) setting free and riding the magnificent golden eagle Marahute. It was also the first animated feature fully using CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) - the first digital (or computerized) ink-and-paint system (developed by Disney and Pixar), to color the film with computerized ink and paint (not using acetate cels or traditional paint).
|
1991
|
Disney's Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
|
1991
|
24 year-old USC film graduate John Singleton received an Oscar nomination as Best Director (the first time in this category for an African-American) for his debut film Boyz 'N the Hood. He was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. It was the first mainstream movie to deal with gang violence in America's urban ghettos.
|
1991
|
Jonathan Demme's Best Picture and Director win for the horror film The Silence of the Lambs was unexpected - it was the third film to win the top five awards since two other films had accomplished the same feat: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and It Happened One Night (1934). It was a five-time major Academy-Award winner, sweeping Best Picture, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), Best Director (Jonathan Demme), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). The film contained a classic representation of evil personified - the notorious, cobra-like, intelligent psychiatrist turned psychopath Hannibal Lecter (portrayed masterfully by British actor Anthony Hopkins), playing opposite dedicated, fledgling, vulnerable and rising female FBI agent-trainee/investigator Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). Foster's strong, yet restrained, vulnerable female lead role in the much talked-about film was intensified by public knowledge of her real-life associations as a victim with assassin John Hinckley and her role as child-prostitute Iris opposite Robert De Niro's portrayal of a crazed killer in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
|
1991
|
Pixar and Disney agreed to co-produce the first fully computer-generated feature film, Toy Story, released four years later.
|
1991
|
The first truly believable, naturally-moving computer-generated character was the morphing, liquid molten metal, T-1000 cyborg in James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It was the first instance of a computer generated main character. Over 300 special effects shots made up 16 minutes of the film's running time.
|
1991
|
The first film in history to cost $100 million to produce was the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The film's trailer alone cost $150,000.
|
1991
|
First time writer/director Julie Dash's historical epic drama Daughters of the Dust was the first independent film produced, written and directed by an African American woman to be distributed in the US to a wide and general audience. It was added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 2004 - the first film made by an African American woman to be placed inside the registry.
|
1992
|
Americans spent $12 billion to buy or rent video tapes, compared to just $4.9 billion on box office ticket sales. 76 percent of all US homes had VCRs.
|
1992
|
The first film released in Dolby Stereo Digital sound was Tim Burton's sequel to the original 1989 film, Batman Returns.
|
1992
|
The mediocre film The Bodyguard was significant for its superstar Whitney Houston (in her first major acting role) and the soundtrack -including her rendition of the 1974 Dolly Parton hit song: "I Will Always Love You"; the song sold 17 million copies and became the #1 all time Grammy-winning film soundtrack (replacing Saturday Night Fever).
|
1992
|
Writer/director Leslie Harris' authentic, low-budget independent film, an emotional coming-of-age drama titled Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., was shot in only a few weeks. It was one of the first honest portraits of urban black female teenagers - it was also about sexual ignorance and unplanned pregnancy; the film won first-time director Leslie Harris a Special Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival.
|
1992
|
The Lawnmower Man, a breakthrough film with eight minutes of ground-breaking special effects, introduced Virtual Reality to films. It was one of the first films to record a human actor's movements in a sensor-covered body suit - a technique called Body Motion Capture. [The technique was later perfected in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), for the CGI character of Gollum.]
|
1992
|
12 year-old Macaulay Culkin was paid $8 million to star in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the largest paycheck for a child star.
|
1992
|
Miramax began an unbroken, eleven-year streak lasting from 1992 until 2002, of Best Picture-nominated films each year, beginning with The Crying Game (1992). It was the longest streak for any company since the Academy limited the Best Picture nominees to five films in 1944.
|
1992
|
Actor Sylvester Stallone received a record number of consecutive nominations and wins for the Worst Actor Golden Raspberry (Razzie) Award, from 1984 to 1992. He was nominated nine consecutive times for Worst Actor, winning four times (for Rhinestone (1984), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)). In 1990, he was honored as the Worst Actor of the Decade, for Cobra (1986), Lock Up (1989), Over the Top (1987), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Rocky IV (1985), Rhinestone (1984) and Tango & Cash (1989).
|
1993
|
Steven Spielberg's influential Jurassic Park was released, and noted for its full-motion, computer-generated (CGI) dinosaurs created at George Lucas' ILM facility. The dinosaurs were very realistically-rendered and seamlessly integrated within live-action sequences. There were 14 minutes of dinosaur footage in the movie, with only four of those minutes generated by computers. DTS Digital Sound also made its theatrical debut in the film.
|
1993
|
Steven Spielberg's black and white Holocaust drama Schindler's List became a Best Picture winner in 1994 (with a total of seven Oscars from its twelve nominations), and it brought Spielberg his first long-sought-after Best Director Oscar award. Its dramatic recreation of the events of the Nazi Holocaust demonstrated the power of the medium to influence audiences and capture the reality of past history.
|
1993
|
The ground-breaking, historically-significant film Philadelphia from Jonathan Demme, starring straight actors Tom Hanks (who won his first Best Actor Oscar) and Antonio Banderas as gay lovers, was the first major studio (big-budget) film to confront the AIDS issue from a societal, medical, and political point of view. Hanks' character was an AIDS-afflicted lawyer who contracted the disease and was forced to sue his law firm over job discrimination - he was ably defended by a black lawyer (Denzel Washington).
|
1993
|
28 year-old actor Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was killed during the filming of Alex Proyas' The Crow (1994) in Wilmington, N.C., by a prop gun that fired part of a dummy bullet instead of a blank. The film was completed by rewriting the plot, using a body double, and by 'digitally-painting' Lee's face onto another actor.
|
1993
|
Walt Disney Studio Entertainment bought Miramax Films for about $80 million - now considered a bargain-basement price. Miramax soon acquired a reputation for releasing underdog, independent, adult-oriented films that won an astonishing number of Academy Awards (and nominations). Miramax's (under the Weinsteins) first Best Picture Oscar was for The English Patient (1996), soon followed by another one for Shakespeare in Love (1998), and a third for the financially-successful Chicago (2002).
|
1993
|
Director Martha Coolidge's Lost in Yonkers was the first feature film entirely edited on an Avid Media (or Film) Composer system. This was the first non-linear editing system to allow viewing at a film's required "real-time"-viewing rate of 24 frames per second. By converting film into digital bits, film could now be electronically edited on a computer.
|
1993
|
To create the special effects for his own films, James Cameron launched an innovative, state of the art, visual effects digital production studio, called Digital Domain, with partners IBM, character creator Stan Winston, and former ILM chief Scott Ross.
|
1993
|
Unknown 23 year-old director Robert Rodriguez filmed the low-budget, Spanish-language action thriller El Mariachi for only $7,000 in about two weeks. The independent film, released by Columbia Pictures in Spanish with subtitles, became an unexpected hit at the Sundance Film Festival, went on to gross $2 million, and led to two sequels (Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)) and other low-budget efforts by other directors (i.e., Clerks (1994)). It was one of the cheapest films ever released by a studio.
|
1993
|
Beverly Hills madam Heidi Fleiss, responsible for arranging high-class hookers for Hollywood celebrities (i.e., Charlie Sheen, among others), was arraigned for narcotics possession (cocaine), and pandering. She served time in prison for tax evasion, money laundering, and attempted pandering. In 1996, a BBC documentary titled Hollywood Madam was released, and in January of 2003, Heidi Fleiss sold her life story to Paramount Pictures.
|
1993
|
Considered one of the major box-office flops of the 90s (and of all time) with an eventual budget of almost $100 million and box-office of only $10 million, Cutthroat Island was also apparently the first Hollywood film to combine two different anamorphic widescreen film processes: Technovision for the earlier Malta sequences (doubling as 1600s Jamaica), and Panavision for the latter sequences filmed in Thailand (the setting of Cutthroat Island itself).
|
1993
|
Actress Kim Basinger was sued by the producers of Boxing Helena (1993) for $8.92 million dollars for breach of contract and for acting in bad faith brought by the movie's producer, Carl Mazzocone, president of Main Line Pictures, although the case was "reversed in full" in 1994 following an appeal.
|
1994
|
Turner Broadcasting merged with New Line Cinema and soon was successful with two blockbusters starring popular comedian Jim Carrey: The Mask (1994) and the slapstick Dumb and Dumber (1994). Superstar Carrey had an earlier third popular hit in the same calendar year: Warners' Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994).
|
1994
|
Turner Classic Movies (TCM), a 24-hour commercial-free network for programming classic films (mostly from the combined Turner and Warner Bros. library of film greats), was launched.
|
1994
|
Writer/director James Cameron's True Lies (1994), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Bond-like secret agent, was a spy-adventure packed with special effects, thrills, co-star Jamie Lee Curtis, and an exciting jet and car chase over the Florida Keys. It was the first movie with a budget to exceed $100 million, although it eventually grossed $365 million.
|
1994
|
Three of the most powerful, influential and successful individuals in modern Hollywood -- director/producer Steven Spielberg, the recently-departed Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film and music industry mogul David Geffen -- formed the film studio DreamWorks SKG. (The SKG stood for the first letter of their last names.) It was the first new major studio in more than 50 years.
|
1994
|
The almost three-hour documentary Hoop Dreams followed the aspirations of two African-American high school students (from Chicago, Illinois) who dreamed to be professional basketball players. Because the exceptional film was not nominated in the category of Best Documentary Feature by the Academy, changes were made in the nominating procedure for future years. It was also the all-time top-grossing documentary film (until Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002)).
|
1994
|
Disney's first Broadway musical was Beauty and the Beast, based on its film version of Beauty and the Beast (1991).
|
1994
|
Disney became the first studio to gross more than $1 billion at the box office domestically in a single year, mostly due to the release of The Lion King, although Pulp Fiction (1994) and November's The Santa Clause (1994) were also hits. The Lion King was the highest-grossing traditionally (hand-drawn) animated feature film in the US at the time - and in history. It was later surpassed at the box-office by Disney/Pixar's computer-animated Finding Nemo (2003). The Lion King was Disney's first film based upon an in-house original story, rather than upon a well-known children's narrative. Its Hamlet-like story was beautifully animated, enhanced by a Hans Zimmer score, and contained songs by composer Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice.
|
1994
|
Disney's successful animated The Lion King was among the first feature animations featuring many major stars' voices for its characters. (Previously, there was only one big voice-name, such as Robin Williams as the Genie in Aladdin (1992), or there were unknowns who lent their voices to the characters.) With box-office receipts of over $312 million, this film spurred a boom in animation production and merchandising, and other animation production studios besides Disney entered the picture.
|
1994
|
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had eight theatrical re-releases (1944, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1975, 1983, 1987, and 1993), and then in late 1994, it was finally released on VHS home video (and laser disc) and sold 10 million copies in its first week of sale. After three weeks of availability, it sold over 17 million copies, and would soon surpass the all-time champ, Disney's Aladdin (with 24 million copies sold since its late-1993 release). It eventually sold 50 million copies worldwide, the best-selling cassette of all time. It was the last of the early Disney animated films released for home video, following Pinocchio (1940), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Cinderella (1950). [Snow White was later released for the first time on DVD, in late 2001.]
|
1990s - Part 2
Year
|
Event and Significance
|
1994
|
Best Picture winner Forrest Gump used revolutionary digital photo tricks to insert the film's main character into archival historical footage with past Presidents (John F. Kennedy and LBJ) and other situations. It would encourage the trend of physically inserting actors into old existing footage, making it appear like the characters were interacting with each other. Shortly afterwards, this technique - which expanded to advertising commercials - controversially presented dead stars hawking products (i.e., James Cagney and Louis Armstrong appeared in Diet Coke ads, and John Wayne was in a Coors Light commercial).
|
1994
|
Tom Hanks won two consecutive Best Actor awards (presented in ceremonies in 1994 and 1995) for Philadelphia (1993) and for Forrest Gump (1994). He became the fifth performer to win back-to-back acting Oscars, and the second performer to win a consecutive Best Actor Oscar (the first was Spencer Tracy in 1937-1938).
|
1994
|
Director Oliver Stone's controversial work on the media's exploitative precoccupation with violence by following the path of two serial killers on a murder spree, Natural Born Killers, came under critical fire for its own graphic, on-screen violence.
|
1994
|
The cost of obtaining the rights to the soundtrack for director Kevin Smith's low-budget comedy Clerks was greater than the production costs for the entire film - a first in modern cinematic history.
|
1994
|
Writer/director and B-movie fanatic Quentin Tarantino delivered the non-formulaic and inventive hit Pulp Fiction - an 'independent' film distributed by Miramax, that featured guns, femmes fatales, deadly hit-men, and drugs; it brought new fame to star John Travolta (in an ensemble cast) and a revolutionary script structure with its three interwoven (and fragmented) stories told in non-linear order. The unpredictably shuffled, post-modern film, winner of Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or, shocked with its hip combination of violence, sex, drugs, and profanity (including 269 F-words).
|
1994
|
A Harvard School of Public Health study showed that violence occurred just as frequently in PG, PG-13, and R-rated films. The study was repeated a decade later, illustrating the existence of "ratings-creep", meaning that more risqué and violent scenes were being allowed in films rated G, PG, PG-13 and R than in the past. For example, The Santa Clause (1994) was rated PG, yet it had less sex and nudity, violence, gore and profanity than The Santa Clause 2 (2002), which was rated G.
|
1994
|
The theatrical run of Il Postino in New York City stretched for almost two years -- it was still in theaters after the video release and its premium cable run.
|
1994
|
SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound), a digital sound-on-film format in which the digital information was optically printed in two continuous strips along both edges of the 35 mm. film, was introduced. The revolutionary system avoided the need for separate CD-ROM soundtracks and synchronization codes. SDDS supported increased surround-sound options by offering eight channels of sound.
|
1994
|
The TV series Insektors (1994) was the first completely computer-animated cartoon series to be broadcast on television. It told about two warring anthropomorphic tribes of insects (the Joyces vs. the Yuks). It first aired in France, and was then dubbed into English for US and UK television. Its appearance was only a few months before another completely-CG animated cartoon series was aired - the full-length Canadian action-adventure series called ReBoot.
|
1995
|
The R-rated biopic-documentary Crumb sympathetically portrayed counter-cultural, sex-obsessed cartoonist R. Crumb, known for 1960s-era underground comic books, the character of Mr. Natural, the phrase: "Keep on Truckin'", Fritz the Cat, and the cover art for Janis Joplin's best-selling record Cheap Thrills.
|
1995
|
The ILM spin-off company named Pixar, owned by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, was formed as an independent company in 1986. Pixar Studios (and director John Lasseter) and Disney (with their first collaboration) entered into a 1991 deal worth $26 million, to jointly develop, produce, and distribute up to three feature-length animated films.
|
1995
|
The cutting-edge Toy Story was the first totally-digital (or computer-generated) feature-length animated film. It was noted as being Pixar's first feature to be released in theaters. The visuals were entirely generated from computers, creating a wonderfully-realistic 3-D world with lighting, shading, and textures, that included real toys in supporting roles (Etch-A-Sketch, Slinky Dog, the plastic toy soldiers, Mr. Potato Head, etc.).
|
1995
|
IMAX 3-D was introduced with the 40-minute movie Wings of Courage, which cost $15 million to make. It was viewed through high-tech goggles with liquid crystal lenses.
|
1995
|
Miramax announced the creation of the short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures, a "specialty label" headed by Quentin Tarantino, to bring rare and independent films into theaters. Its first acquisition was from Hong Kong cinema: Chunking Express by director Wong Kar Wai. The company closed in 1998 when Miramax pulled support due to poor sales.
|
1995
|
Warner Bros. created the WB Network, a TV broadcast outlet for its TV properties. (Some of the new network's earliest shows were Buffy The Vampire Slayer, 7th Heaven, and Dawson's Creek -- curiously none of which were produced by Warners.)
|
1995
|
The 17th official Bond film, GoldenEye, was the the first of four films starring Pierce Brosnan as the new Bond after a six-year hiatus. It was the first Bond film to be released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was the most successful and well-received Bond film to date.
|
1995
|
Danish director Lars von Trier announced the manifesto of the Dogme 95 collective and movement, a return to simplicity in film-making. Ten goals or principles of the collective's 'Vow of Chastity' included on-location shoots, use of hand-held cameras and use of digital-video (DV), an uncredited director, no special effects or fixes in post-production, and no major enhancement of sound or light even on set. This type of low-cost, non-genre film-making stood in sharp contrast to Hollywood's big-budget blockbusters.
|
1995
|
Two weeks prior to the release of his comedy Nine Months, British actor Hugh Grant was arrested in Los Angeles (in a car on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard) when found engaging in "lewd conduct" (oral sex) with prostitute Divine Brown. Although fined $1,180 and placed on two years probation, Grant was able to resurrect his career by confessing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno ("I did a bad thing"). Surprisingly, Nine Months surpassed his previous hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) (at $52.7 million) with $69.7 million box-office business.
|
1995
|
The first feature film with a digitally-created, CG character that took a leading role (almost 40 minutes of film time) was Casper, derived from the Harvey Comics character.
|
1996
|
Planet Hollywood, a restaurant chain (noted for its collection of movie & TV memorabilia) with backing and celebrity investments by movie stars (including Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore and Arnold Schwarzenegger), went public. Its stock skyrocketed initially, but in just two years, it lost its appeal and many of the restaurants would be closed by the turn of the century.
|
1996
|
Kenneth Branagh's excellent, opulent Hamlet (set in 19th century England) was the first unabridged, 'full-length' cinematic version in film history of William Shakespeare's penultimate work. It was also the first British film to be shot in 70-mm. in over 25 years (and the first 70-mm. film since director Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992); also as of the winter of 2005 the last film to have been shot entirely with 70-mm. film), and one of the few films in history to exceed a four hour running time (with an intermission at the 2:40 mark.)
|
1996
|
The Coen Brothers' Fargo, an off-beat, absurdist morality tale from the creative and original producing/writing/directing collaborative team of Joel and Ethan Coen, was very unlike many of their previous films, with a straight-forward, realistic narrative devoid of their typically quirky and bizarre sequences. From its seven Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture), it won for Best Original Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best Actress (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen's real-life wife). Frances McDormand became the first actress to win the Best Actress Oscar in a film directed by her nominated husband.
|
1996
|
The infamous and satirical black comedy, The Cable Guy, which starred comic Jim Carrey as the malevolent and pathological cable installer (an atypical character for him), was directed by comic Ben Stiller. The film was universally criticized, under-appreciated by audiences, and did poor box-office at the time of its release, but it was significant because it was the first film to break the $20 million salary barrier for an actor.
|
1996
|
Director Cameron Crowe's most quotable script was for Jerry Maguire, a romantic comedy and sports-related film known for its catchphrases: "Show me the money!" "You complete me" and "You had me at hello!" The film was a breakout film for Renee Zellweger, won Best Supporting Actor honors for Cuba Gooding, Jr., and received nominations for Best Actor (Tom Cruise), Best Screenplay, and Best Picture.
|
1996
|
The genre of teen slasher and horror films was revitalized by the tongue-in-cheek, self-reverential horror film Scream from famed horror director Wes Craven. The half-parody and half-tribute film (with nods to Hitchcock's films, Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978), among others) gave rise to two sequels (1997 and 2000) and other copycat films (i.e., I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and The Faculty (1999)), including the silly Scary Movie franchise.
|
1996
|
In the US, Jan de Bont's disaster thriller about tornados, Twister was rated PG-13 for "intense depiction of very bad weather." Twister was also the first Hollywood feature film to be commercially released on DVD.
|
1996
|
Another technological advancement, still currently being developed and tweaked, was the introduction of HDTV - the first public HDTV broadcast in the United States occurred in 1996. HDTV resulted in higher resolution (an increase in the number of horizontal lines on a video screen), and improved the sharpness and detail of the image. Now, feature films projected at home on HDTV screens, with theatre-quality audio as well, have come closer to the image and sound found in projected widescreen films in commercial theatres.
|
1996
|
CARIcature software was first used by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for the state-of-the-art digital animation in the 10th century fantasy fable Dragonheart (1996). It was used to create the very complex CGI or digital film character of a talking dragon named Draco (with realistic facial animation and expressions, and voice provided by Sean Connery) - an 18 ft. tall, 43 foot long creature. The highly-realistic aliens in Tim Burton's science-fiction comedy Mars Attacks! (1996) were all-digital, CGI animated creations, rather than stop-motion puppets - also created with CARI software by ILM.
|
1997
|
Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension, a 12-minute Warner Bros film, was the first computer-animated CG film that was to be viewed with 3-D glasses. It combined the experience of watching a fully CGI film with polarized/anaglyphic glasses, and was a feature of the Warner Bros.' theme park "Movie World" in Australia.
|
1997
|
James Cameron's Titanic, the most expensive film of all time at the time of its release, also soon became the highest grossing and most successful film of all-time in Hollywood history (at $600.8 million domestic gross box-office receipts, and $1.8 billion total worldwide gross). It was the first film with a budget of $200 million, and it was the first movie to gross $1 billion. Delays during production and a budget of $200 million threatened to 'sink' the film, but didn't affect its overall success. Repeated theatrical viewings by young teens (enthralled by the romance between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) were partly responsible for the film's high returns. The bulk of the state-of-the-art visual effects (CGI and miniature models) were provided by Cameron's own company, Digital Domain. And the film was backed or co-produced by two studios in order to foot the bill -- Fox and Paramount. The blockbuster film had a record-tying fourteen nominations and won a record-tying eleven Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture and Best Director. When adjusted for inflation, however, Cleopatra (1963) had the highest budget of any film, and Gone with the Wind (1939) remained the highest grossing.
|
1997
|
The 18th official Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) was the first film in cinematic history to have the largest product placement deal ever, covering its entire production budget of $110 million. Sponsoring companies included BMW, Ericsson cellphones, Bollinger champagne, Omega watches, Dunhill, Brioni clothing, Avis rental cars, Golden Wonder potato chips, L'Oréal cosmetics, and Heineken beer. Some joked that the Bond films had now become the "Licence to Sell."
|
1997
|
The first time product placement appeared in an animated picture was Chanel perfume in Anastasia (1997).
|
1997
|
Due to its opening against James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic (1997), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) was the first (and only) Pierce Brosnan Bond film to not open as the #1 film at the box-office.
|
1997
|
Slim DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs), the new generation of optical disc storage technology, began to be sold to consumers. By 2003, there were over 250 million DVD playback devices worldwide, one of the most successful consumer electronics products of all time. It was destined to replace the laser disc, videotape (bulky VHS), and videogame cartridges. In mid-2003, DVD rentals first topped those of VHS.
|
1997
|
Writer/director Paul Thomas' Boogie Nights was a significant film for authentically portraying the Southern California pornography industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, through the character of Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) - based upon the life of porn actor John C. Holmes, who became well-endowed porn star Dirk Diggler.
|
1997
|
Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-Wai's haunting and melancholy film Happy Together (aka Cheun Gwong Tsa Sit, HK) about a gay couple, was released. It was controversial for its portrayal of Chinese male homosexuality, and was banned in Singapore, among other places.
|
1997
|
George Lucas released re-vamped Special Editions of the Star Wars Trilogy. Episodes IV, V, and VI were remastered and re-released for theatrical showings. Most of the changes were cosmetic - various scenes or images were cleaned up or restored, but some changes were made to the films as well. For example, in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), there was a new CGI version of Jabba the Hutt (originally a latex puppet), and a modified "Cantina Scene" in which Greedo shot first.
|
1997
|
Star Wars (1977) was the first film to earn more than $400 million domestically. It reached this mark in February 1997 after the re-release or re-issue of its 20th anniversary edition.
|
1997
|
Founded in 1994, DreamWorks SKG's first feature film release was The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. A year later, they released their first animated film Antz (1998).
|
1998
|
The American Film Institute (AFI) announced its list of the Top 100 American Films of All Time, with Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane (1941) ranked # 1.
|
1998
|
Steven Spielberg's war epic of D-Day, Saving Private Ryan, gave its director his second Best Director Oscar. The film was noted for its half-hour, spectacularly-bloody, realistically-filmed opening of the Omaha Beach landing. It also inspired dialogue between generations regarding the events of World War II.
|
1998
|
After the FCC approved the digital television standard in late 1996, the first HDTV receivers were introduced to consumers, and HDTV broadcasts began to regularly appear in the US.
|
1998
|
Consumers modified their movie-watching practices when Netflix, a revolutionary online DVD movie rental service established in 1997, first began to offer postal shipping of rented DVDs on its website to subscribers in 1998. Netflix was the first subscription service to also offer online video downloading/streaming of rental movies directly onto one's computer screen. Early on, Netflix experienced competition (and market-share business) from brick-and-mortar video rental stores Blockbuster and Wal-Mart, and then from cheap $1 DVD-rental kiosks or automated vending machines in grocery and discount stores. A changing landscape of digital movie delivery forced Netflix to also team up with consumer electronic companies to provide a range of devices that can instantly stream films, including TV shows, to Netflix members' TVs and other devices. It faced further competition with other video on demand (VOD) services available from cable and satellite companies and from Web giants.
|
1998
|
Miramax turned its release Life Is Beautiful, the wildly successful, bittersweet, comedy-drama Italian Holocaust fable, into the most successful foreign-language film in US history, up to that time. It was the first foreign language film to receive seven Academy Awards nominations - the most-honored foreign-language film in Oscar history up to that time (until surpassed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) with 10 nominations). It had three wins - and was the first film since Z (1969) to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film. Its three wins were for Best Actor (for Roberto Benigni), Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Dramatic Score. Miramax backed both Life is Beautiful (as distributor) and Shakespeare in Love (as producer) with millions of dollars in an expensive publicity blitz before Oscar time, and their aggressive efforts paid off handsomely - with a total of 20 nominations between the two films (and 10 wins, including Best Picture).
|
1998
|
Bruce Willis became the first prominent actor to act in a Sony PlayStation arcade-style game when he had his voice and movements digitized for the action-oriented, shoot-'em-up Apocalypse game published by Activision.
|
1998
|
The Farrelly Brothers' audacious, gross-out, and bad-taste R-rated comedy There's Something About Mary was an unexpected hit (due in part to its widely-advertised 'hair-gel' scene between its two relatively unknown stars: Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz), eventually earning $176 million. Comic actor Ben Stiller created a loser-persona that remains his trademark. The film was the precursor to even cruder teen films such as the R-rated American Pie films (1999 and 2001), and other non-PC films such as The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005).
|
1998
|
Wes Anderson's coming-of-age comedy Rushmore told of a love triangle between a rich, middle aged businessman (Bill Murray), a widowed elementary schoolteacher (Olivia Williams), and an eccentric Rushmore Academy student (Jason Schwartzman). The film launched comedian Murray's 'second' career as a serious actor in independent films.
|
1998
|
The Last Broadcast was the first film to be directly broadcast into theatres via satellite for its premiere screening (to five US theatres) - and shown on digital cinema projectors. It was also the first "film" to be made entirely digitally (in its filming, editing, and screening) - without the use of celluloid film. Its theatrical debut was less than three months before The Blair Witch Project (1999) was shown at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival - with a similar storyline told in faux documentary style.
|
1998
|
DreamWorks' Antz was the first computer-animated film to receive a PG rating. It was also the first computer-animated feature film to use computer software to simulate the properties of water -- hence, digital water.
|
1999
|
The first of three prequels (released from 1999-2005), George Lucas' highly-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I -The Phantom Menace, opened and became the top grossing film of its year. It made $28.5 million in its first day of showing, and passed the $100 million level in a record five days. It eventually grossed over $400 million. It was the first film with a Dolby Digital Surround EX soundtrack. This film undoubtedly contained more computer animation and special effects than any previous film - over 90%. It also featured a completely CGI-generated (all digital), fully-articulated main humanoid character named Jar Jar Binks (voice of Ahmed Best), a widely-derided aspect of the feature film.
|
1999
|
The pseudo-documentary, low-budget (budgeted at about $30,000), media-savvy cult film The Blair Witch Project, grossed $249 million worldwide, making it the most profitable film in Hollywood history (with a record budget/box office ratio of 1:10,931). Low-cost Internet advertising (suggesting that the story was true) and video production contributed to its financial success for the small-time distributor (Artisan Films) - making it the first independent blockbuster. The surprise hit was mostly shot with Hi-8 camcorders and looked like a home-made film with no-name actors.
|
1999
|
This was the debut year of the popular TiVo device, a personal digital video recorder (PVR or DVR) -- also dubbed a hard-disc recorder (HDR), with the capability of recording movies and episodes of favorite programs, quickly skipping past the commercials and even pausing and rewinding live TV. Within a few years, a broadband-connected TiVo DVR offered a vast library of video-on-demand choices from a who's-who list of online entertainment partners.
|
1999
|
Pokemon: The First Movie (released in Japan in 1998 and in the US in 1999) became the most successful foreign animated film at the box office in U.S. history.
|
1999
|
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was threatened with an NC-17 rating for its most talked-about sequence - an upper-class masked, choreographed orgy function which began with incantations by a high-priest, a circle of cloaked figures, and many naturally-endowed, almost-nude, G-stringed, masked females in an inner circle who were there to ritualistically service the masked men in anonymity and isolation; the sequence included tracking shots of tuxedoed, caped, and masked doctor Harford (Tom Cruise) roaming through the ornate mansion's rooms filled with emotionless, loveless copulating couples (in a 69 sexual position, in a lesbian three-some, and other mechanical stances of intercourse); these scenes were heavily digitally edited (or digitally censored, obscured and obstructed in various releases to prevent an NC-17 rating). In some instances, computer-generated people were placed over explicit sexual images in order to secure the R-rating.
|
1999
|
The writing/directing team of the Wachowski Brothers released the hugely-successful, profound and influential sci-fi thriller The Matrix with amazing action and digital effects sequences. Its popularity led to a trilogy of films: The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). The first film in the series made reference to prototypical elements of the 21st century high-tech culture, such as hacking and virtual reality, and included bullet-dodging (digital effects dubbed "flow-mo" and "bullet time" - slowed-down rotating action - were created with suspending actors on wires, and filming segments with multiple still cameras from multiple angles), cyber-punk chic, time-freezing, shoot-outs, wall-scaling, virtual backgrounds, and airborne kung fu. These tremendous visual effects were combined with Eastern world-denying philosophy, metaphysical Zen statements, Japanese anime, neo-Cartesian plot twists, film noir, and Lewis Carroll references.
|
1999
|
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, an animated comedy feature film (by producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone) was filled with political satire (and based on the hit TV show South Park); it was originally rated NC-17 (for its foul-mouthed profanity and obscenity), and then reduced to an R-rating after being edited down. The notorious film was notable for having the most profanity of any animated film (with 140 F-words).
|
1999
|
M. Night Shyamalan's ghost story and psychological thriller The Sixth Sense - with the catchphrase: "I see dead people" - was his first major film with his trademark plot-shifting twist revealed by the film's conclusion - and it came to be known as the "Shyamalan twist."
|
1999
|
The longest Oscars awards ceremony ever held was this year's March 21, 1999 ABC-TV broadcast, at 4 hours and 2 minutes. It was the 71st annual Academy Awards show, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. It also marked the first time that the ceremony was held on a Sunday.
|
1999
|
The popular and influential film review TV show Siskel & Ebert lasted until 1999, when Gene Siskel died from a brain tumor in 1999, and the show was renamed Roger Ebert & the Movies for one year. After 1999, the show featured a rotating series of guest critics, including Elvis Mitchell, Kenneth Turan and Janet Maslin. In the year 2000, after a long try-out period of guest critics, Ebert chose fellow Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper as his permanent co-host, for a show retitled Ebert & Roeper and the Movies, shortened in 2001 to Ebert & Roeper.
|
Decade
|
According to Film Facts, the busiest Hollywood actor during the decade of the 1990s was Samuel L. Jackson with 36 films. Whoopi Goldberg headed the female list with 29 films.
|
Share with your friends: |
