Jonathan Crocker

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (voted one of the worst movies ever). Mission To Mars (Rolling Stone: “DePalma has never made a dull movie. Until now.”). Red Planet (Variety: “Mission To Mars had style to burn compared to Red Planet”). Ghosts Of Mars (killed John Carpenter’s career for nine years). Doom (one of Time magazine’s 10 Worst Ever Videogame Adaps). Mars Attacks! (Budget: $100m. US box-office: $38m). Mars Needs Moms (the biggest box-office bomb of all time).

If history has taught us one lesson, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie about Mars, it had better star Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lady with three boobies. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

Do you like to be called Leo or Leonardo?

Either one is fine. Leo is probably the only nickname I’ve had. Most people call me Leo.

Didn’t they try to make you change your name?

Yeah, there when I was 11 years old when I first wanted to be an actor professionally. We went to an agent and they wanted to change my name to Lenny Williams. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

Bobbing helplessly like a tiny cork, a 12-year-old boy drifts alone in the middle of the freezing Atlantic Ocean. With every minute, he’s dragged further and further away from his father, who’s also been caught in the rip current that’s left them treading water far out to sea.

Darkness falls. By now, the father can barely see the boy. He’s scared. His son has autism. Jellyfish begin to sting them both.

The man calls into the night: “To infinity…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

What’s this talk that you wanted Big Daddy to be a paedophile?

This is bollocks, right. Where did this come from? Did Vaughn say this? He actually just doing this to piss me off! I never said that. What I suggested was I wanted Big Daddy to have a twist to it that wasn’t just as simple as him being a cop. One of the things I suggested was that he maybe kidnapped Cindy. But Vaughn has somehow turned that into making him a paedo. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

Just after he finished making True Lies, James Cameron picked up the phone and called Stanley Kubrick. They spend a day together watching Cameron’s film in the basement of the house in the English countryside where Kubrick was now a virtual hermit. Kubrick was fascinated by Cameron’s effects shots, wanted to know exactly how he’d hung a man on the missile of a harrier jump-jet and fired him through a skyscraper. Cameron must have been thrilled. He’d finally returned the favour. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

1. Lucas is a boy racer

Before young George fell in love with cameras, he fell in love with cars. Fast cars. Dangerously fast cars. A near-fatal accident in his souped-up motor put Lucas off becoming a race car driver. But it didn’t stop him enjoying the 1995 Monaco Grand Prix as a guest of Red Bull. Much safer, that. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

Corkscrewing past space debris, phaser fire and blazing Starships, that very first camera-shot sends us hurtling headfirst into JJ Abram’s rebooted Star Trek universe – just minutes before baby James Tiberious Kirk does too. Blasted out of the womb, blasted out in an escape pod, Kirk will never meet his father, who singlehandedly crash-courses the decimated Starship Kelvin into its Romulan attackers to save his newborn son. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

Why James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fier is the most important movie of your lifetime…

James Cameron has not made a film since Titanic. That was 1997. That was 12 years. What has he been doing? Taking the movies to another dimension. Having pioneered visual effects in The Abyss (the first photorealistic CG character), Terminator 2 (CG plus human actors) and True Lies (composite technology), Cameron is convinced the future is 3-D. And when you’re the King Of The World, you don’t wait for the future. You invent it. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7% [?]

“I’ve made a Walt Disney movie. A cross between Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. It’s gonna do eight, maybe 10 million.” George Lucas was wrong about a lot things. That Star Wars might work if Luke Skywalker and his aunt and uncle were dwarves. Or that the entire cast should be oriental. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]

The full story behind the most influential CG movie ever made…

Wyatt Earp was puzzled. Sitting on a horse in the middle of the hot Arizona desert, he scratched his huge handlebar moustache. He looked again the script that had been handed to him. “I’m reading this thing called Tron,” remembers Bruce Boxleitner, shooting made-for-TV Western I Married Wyatt Earp at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]