Movie where they go to a haunted space ship12/25/2023 Turner split off United Artists and sold it back to Kerkorian, and then Turner immediately went into debt, and sold MGM back too. He merged MGM and United Artists in 1981, and sold it to Ted Turner in 1986. And along comes crazy Dan Curtis, who was used to making something out of next to nothing, and he wanted to shoot his movie on location at an old mansion in New York state, which was exactly as far away from Los Angeles as Kerkorian and Aubrey wanted their movie shoots to be.Īfter 1973, MGM continued to make some films here and there until 1980, when they split off the movie studio and the hotel business. Selling off all the sets and props took a while, and they still wanted to pretend that MGM was a movie studio and not a garage sale, so during the four years that it took Kerkorian to close the place down, Aubrey was tasked with greenlighting a small slate of movies each year which could be made cheaply, and not on MGM property. You know the stuff that Les Moonves got up to, when he was president of CBS? Well, Aubrey was the guy who invented it. He was also taking kickbacks from production companies, and doing something with pretty young women that nobody wants to talk about in print. Aubrey was a shark in human clothing who turned CBS into the top network by going straight for the lowest common denominator with sitcoms for the extremely stupid - The Beverly Hillbillies, M ister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, My Favorite Martian, and so on. While he was dismantling the studio, Kerkorian needed a henchman, so he hired James Aubrey, the president of the CBS Network from 1959 to 1965. In 1973, Kerkorian closed down MGM’s film distribution offices, and then he went to Las Vegas and built the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, which was the largest hotel in the world. In 1969, real estate speculator Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM with the intention of selling off all the assets, knocking the studios down and then selling the valuable real estate in Los Angeles and London where they used to make movies. Now, the thing that you need to understand about Night of Dark Shadows is that MGM didn’t actually want to be in the movie business anymore. Lovecraft story, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, which when you get right down to it isn’t really very much like Night of Dark Shadows at all. Night of Dark Shadows was vaguely based on the show’s Parallel Time storyline, which was vaguely based on Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, plus some inspiration from The Haunted Palace, a 1963 Roger Corman film that was supposed to be based on an Edgar Allen Poe poem, but was actually based on an H.P. So Dan took the show’s second male lead, David Selby, and set him up with two leading ladies - Lara Parker, Dark Shadows’ veteran vixen, and Kate Jackson, an ingenue who’d joined the show about ten months earlier and was obviously destined for stardom. He’d planned to resurrect Barnabas for the second movie, but Jonathan Frid was sick of playing vampires, and asked for a million dollars. Dan had nine hundred thousand dollars, six weeks, and a cast and crew that was mostly from the TV show. The final taping day on Dark Shadows was March 24th, 1971, and shooting began for Night of Dark Shadows on March 29th. Unfortunately, almost every character in House of Dark Shadows met a grisly end in one way or another, so bang goes the Dark Shadows Cinematic Universe before it’s even started.įor the sequel, Dan had the good manners to wait until the TV show was over before hauling half the cast to Tarrytown, New York and dousing them with a hose. The movie did well at the box office, considering how cheap it was to make, and MGM asked for a sequel. Last year, Dan signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make a Dark Shadows movie, and he came up with House of Dark Shadows, a fearlessly unrestrained retelling of the original Barnabas storyline. This time, we’re only jumping about eight months ahead we’re going to watch the 1971 feature film Night of Dark Shadows, executive producer Dan Curtis’ next attempt to catch lightning in a bottle. It’s traditional on pre-emption days to do a little time travel, and watch a future version of Dark Shadows. Happy Turkey Day! It’s time for another pre-emption, as we reach Thanksgiving 1970 and ABC decides to spend the day looking at basketball.
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