1-18-08 Project Cloverfield - Warning! Spoilers

FACT ONE: It Came From Japan Producer J.J. Abrams took his son to a toy store in Japan and saw rows and rows of Godzilla toys. Feeling that the U.S. lacked a giant monster of its own, he decided to a make his own creature feature that would be filmed entirely through the point-of-view of the people on the ground, running for their lives.

FACT TWO: "Felicity" Fans Are in for a Shock Abrams picked his childhood friend Matt Reeves to direct the film. Together, they created Felicity, a show about young New Yorkers looking for love. But while the most exciting moment on that show was the time Keri Russell cut her hair, in this movie the entire city gets hacked to pieces.

FACT THREE: This Poster Doesn't Lie As a kid, Abrams loved Escape From New York. But he felt cheated that the image of the Statue of Liberty's head lying in the street on the movie's poster wasn't actually in the film. Abrams finally got to see it on the big screen in the teaser trailer that appeared before Transformers last summer.

"It's not hard to find Phil Tippett, who is waiting upstairs in the main building of his special-effects studio in Berkeley. Just follow the trail of Tyrannosaurus rex models, which are scattered liberally among the memorabilia from scores of science fiction films he's contributed to since his groundbreaking work on "Star Wars."

"Little boys diverge into two groups: One goes into trucks and the other goes into dinosaurs," he says. "I went into dinosaurs."

Among the special-effects pioneers of his era, many of whom have settled in the Bay Area, Tippett is a bit of a dinosaur himself. The Berkeley native carried the stop-motion animation torch longer than anyone else, and was so despondent when computer graphics took over the industry in the early 1990s, that he became physically ill.

But a decade and a half later, his studio continues to thrive - known for its superior creature effects. Tippett Studio was responsible for the monster in "Cloverfield," and the studio teamed with Industrial Light & Magic to create various beasts for "The Spiderwick Chronicles." Tippett's resume already contained a toy chest's worth of science fiction geek icons, starting with the animated chessboard monsters in "Star Wars" and the stop-motion AT-AT snow walkers in "The Empire Strikes Back."

"Phil's like this big blustery guy - he's grumpy but he's also funny," says Spiderwick animation supervisor Todd Labonte, who has worked at Tippett Studio for almost a decade. "And then you start talking about work, and he has this great understanding of animation and animal behavior." (...continue)

(via Variety) "Paramount's "Cloverfield" may have posted the biggest January opening of all time, but it's turning out to be more of a marketing win than a runaway crowd pleaser at the box office.

Pic plunged 68% in its second weekend at the domestic box office, putting "Cloverfield" in that category of films that rely on a huge opening weekend, akin to a much-hyped pay-per-view event.

But Par spent just $25 million to produce the movie, which has grossed $64.3 million in its first 10 days domestically, according to Rentrak. The film, still very early in its run abroad, has grossed $15 million internationally from only a few territories. Par, which likely spent as much marketing the movie as on the production budget, says the movie will easily be a financial success.

"Shells fired by M-1 tanks from the New York National Guard's 42nd Division just bounce off its hide. Same with MLRS and AT-4 rockets, missiles from F/A-18s and Mk 82 bombs dropped by a B-2 bomber. Infantry are like camouflaged candy to the five-legged, 500-foot-tall creature that flattens Manhattan and gobbles hipsters in the new movie Cloverfield. After the everyday weapons fail, in a last-ditch defense the U.S. military apparently deploys one of the most powerful non-nuclear bombs in its inventory: the Massive Ordnance Air-Burst, aka "Mother of All Bombs."

MOAB releases a cloud of combustible gas before igniting, creating a vacuum effect that pulverizes anything nearby and, at a distance, can turn bodies inside out, according to legend." (source)