‘JURASSIC PARK,’ ‘ROCKY’ AND ‘SOME LIKE IT HOT’ JOIN SUMMER-FILM-FEST-IN-PROGRESS AT FOX THEATRE
THE 2016 FOX SUMMER FILM FESTIVAL has already crossed 30 days off its calendar. If you’re late to the popcorn-scented, A/C-cooled party, you’ve missed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
But don’t sweat. Eight titles are still to come, including Rocky and Jurassic Park, which have recently joined the lineup, and one film that Fox audiences and Facebook fans helped select. Drumroll, please … from among Some Like It Hot, The Notebook and The Wizard of Oz, you chose Some Like It Hot, the 1959 cross-dressing caper starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe.
Movie tickets are on sale via the Fox website, at the ticket office on Peachtree Street or at 1.855.285.8499. With one exception, tickets are general admission ($10 advance, $12 day-of, you decide where to sit). Processing fees are extra. These are the same prices as the past several years.
The exception is The Little Mermaid sing-along (Aug. 27). These tickets are $15 in advance and $20 day-of-show, plus processing fees. Seating is reserved.
For select screenings, a pre-show event will include a sing-along with a vintage cartoon and the famous Mighty Mo organ, played by surprise guests. You might recall that longtime Fox organist Larry-Douglas Embury died in February.
Movie tours (capacity: 20) are available before many screenings. They take guests through the projection booth, screening room, celebrity dressing rooms and onstage. Tours aren’t recommended for age 7 or younger; age 2 and under are not permitted, period. Be forewarned: The tour is not ADA-accessible and includes plenty of steps. Tours must be purchased with a movie ticket ($35 total).
Some $5 parking vouchers are available in nearby Lanier lots. Contact the Fox for details.
Enough logistics. Here’s a closer look at the remaining main features.
July
The Shining. 7:30 p.m. July 7. A wild-eyed Jack Nicholson turns from nice guy to menace in this 1980 thriller based on the Stephen King novel and scripted by Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange). If you’re a normal writer and ex-teacher, be careful about choosing a hotel, especially in winter. Shelley Duvall plays Nicholson’s wife. By the way, King was most unhappy with the final product.
- Trivia nugget: The color red is visible, either overtly or subtly, in nearly every shot. Watch for it. Also: To keep Nicholson in the ugly mood his role required, he was fed only cheese sandwiches, which he hates.
Shrek. 7:30 p.m. July 21. A 15th anniversary screening of the 2001 animated story about a big green ogre who just wants his swamp back. Voiced by Mike Myers (Shrek), Eddie Murphy (Donkey), Cameron Diaz (Princess Fiona) and John Lithgow (Lord Farquaad). If you’re into jokes about flatulence, this one’s for you.
- Trivia nugget: Myers improvised the line “You’re on your way to a smacked bottom” after a director annoyed him. He’d used the line when playing Austin Powers in a Madonna video a few years earlier.
Rocky. 7:30 p.m. July 28. New to the lineup. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, who also wrote the script) plays the now infamous small-time boxer who gets a supremely rare chance to fight the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed. The flick won 1977 Oscars for best picture, director and film editing, and spawned four sequels plus 2015’s Creed with Michael B. Jordan. It also was the highest-grossing feature film of 1976.
- Trivia nugget: Stallone was inspired to write the screenplay after seeing the Chuck Wepner-Muhammad Ali fight on March 24, 1975, at Ohio’s Richfield Coliseum, outside Cleveland. Also, Rocky’s dog, Butkus, was Stallone’s dog in real life.
August
Jurassic Park. 7:30 p.m. Aug. 18. Also new to the schedule. Steven Spielberg directed this Michael Crichton script about dinosaur exhibits that run amok during a preview tour of a new theme park called Jurassic Park. The 1993 thriller won Academy Awards for its sound design, sound effects and visual effects. Among the cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Sir Richard Attenborough, B.D. Wong and Wayne Knight. Paleontology has never been the same.
- Trivia nugget: When the T-Rex comes through the glass roof of the Ford Explorer in the first attack, the glass wasn’t supposed to break, so some of the screams heard in the final cut come from genuine fear. The T-Rex’s roars were a combination of dog, penguin, tiger, alligator and elephant sounds.
Saturday Morning Cartoons. 10 a.m. Aug. 20.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. 7:30 p.m. Aug. 20. A 45th anniversary showing of the 1971 original. This family-friendly fantasy from the pen of Roald Dahl centers on a boy named Charlie Bucket, who receives a golden ticket to a candy factory and discovers there’s an adventure in everything. Oompah loompas abound. Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka. With lyrics and music by Leslie Bricusse (“The Candy Man,” “Pure Imagination”).
- Trivia nugget: Peter Ostrum, who plays Charlie Bucket, made no other movies. He became a veterinarian.
Citizen Kane. 7:30 p.m. Aug. 25. A 75th anniversary screening of the 1941 feature considered an American classic by almost every list maker imaginable. When a publishing tycoon dies, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final word: “Rosebud.” Orson Welles directed a cast that includes such famous names as Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorhead (decades before her Pollyanna and “Bewitched” days), Ruth Warrick (“All My Children”) and Welles himself.
- Trivia nugget: The movie, obviously based on his life, infuriated newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. “Rosebud” was reportedly Hearst’s name for a certain body part of his longtime mistress. Also, the American Film Institute ranked the movie No. 1 on its list of greatest American movies of all time in 1998 and 2007; in its day, however, Citizen Kane was a big-time box-office flop.
The Little Mermaid (sing-along). 2 p.m. Aug. 27. A mermaid princess makes a Faustian bargain with an unscrupulous sea witch in order to meet a human prince on land in this 1989 animated musical from Disney. It’s loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and features one of the earlier scores from the songwriting team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (“Part of This World,” “Under the Sea,” “Kiss the Girl”). It won two Oscars — one for best score and one for the song “Under the Sea.”
- Trivia nugget: When King Triton arrives at the arena in the opening scene, you can briefly see Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck and Kermit the Frog as mermen in the crowd of sea-people.
Some Like it Hot. 7:30 p.m. Aug. 27. Two Chicago musicians (Curtis and Lemmon) witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, so they flee the state disguised as women in an all-female band. That’s only the beginning of the complications in this Billy Wilder-directed comedy that counts George Raft and Joe E. Brown among its cast.
- Trivia nugget: When Curtis and Lemmon first put on their female makeup and costumes, they walked around the Goldwyn Studios lot to see if they could pass as women. Then they tried using mirrors in public ladies’ rooms to fix their makeup. When no one complained, they figured they’d nailed it. Another delicious tidbit: Kansas banned the film, claiming that cross-dressing was “too disturbing for Kansans.”
