The Fate of the Furious
- Thread starter Kenny Orange Powers
- Start date
How they missed the opportunity to call this The F8 of the Furious is baffling.
How this started as a movie about street racers and turned into this is amazing.
The original was based on an article written by an acquaintance of mine in L.A.. - Dennis Romero. He's currently a writer/reporter for the L.A. Weekly, which is a once-a-week newspaper that covers news, dining, clubs, movies, music, and the unusual going on around town. (He also works as a "stringer" selling articles to all kinds of publications.)
He was writing a story about the local car culture, when he found out about and got an invite to a local street-racing club. He documented the events and wrote an expansive story on its popularity, which he sold to the LA Times. (He followed up with several more articles in the Times and Weekly.) The Producers read the articles and formed the idea for the original movie around them. Unfortunately, he never got any credit or $ for it. They changed just enough from his articles to avoid copyright infringement.
http://articles.latimes.com/1997-01-22/news/ls-21099_1_car-clubs
BTW, my wife was an extra in Tokyo Drift. Was on set for about a week or so, for the filming of the race scene in the parking garage and then in the nightclub scene.
The original was based on an article written by an acquaintance of mine in L.A.. - Dennis Romero. He's currently a writer/reporter for the L.A. Weekly, which is a once-a-week newspaper that covers news, dining, clubs, movies, music, and the unusual going on around town. (He also works as a "stringer" selling articles to all kinds of publications.)
He was writing a story about the local car culture, when he found out about and got an invite to a local street-racing club. He documented the events and wrote an expansive story on its popularity, which he sold to the LA Times. (He followed up with several more articles in the Times and Weekly.) The Producers read the articles and formed the idea for the original movie around them. Unfortunately, he never got any credit or $ for it. They changed just enough from his articles to avoid copyright infringement.
http://articles.latimes.com/1997-01-22/news/ls-21099_1_car-clubs
BTW, my wife was an extra in Tokyo Drift. Was on set for about a week or so, for the filming of the race scene in the parking garage and then in the nightclub scene.
KOP,
One of the things that stood out in my wife's mind (besides that they filmed all of her scenes in an abandoned shopping mall in Inglewood as a stand-in for Tokyo) was the racing scene in the parking garage.
All the extras were told to make waiving up-and-down motions as the cars approached and went by, but in slow motion 1/3 to 1/4 normal speed. The cars were actually only going about 20 to 25 mph, but when the footage was speeded up, it made them look like they were going 80-100 mph. So the crowd had to be "synched" to the action to make it look right, otherwise they would have looked like they were on 20 types of speed.
With overtime, as they went over all but one day, I think she ended up clearing about $90/day. Oh, and she did say that craft-services put out some really tasty quality food for the crew, including the extras - they got the same food as the stars.
One of the things that stood out in my wife's mind (besides that they filmed all of her scenes in an abandoned shopping mall in Inglewood as a stand-in for Tokyo) was the racing scene in the parking garage.
All the extras were told to make waiving up-and-down motions as the cars approached and went by, but in slow motion 1/3 to 1/4 normal speed. The cars were actually only going about 20 to 25 mph, but when the footage was speeded up, it made them look like they were going 80-100 mph. So the crowd had to be "synched" to the action to make it look right, otherwise they would have looked like they were on 20 types of speed.
With overtime, as they went over all but one day, I think she ended up clearing about $90/day. Oh, and she did say that craft-services put out some really tasty quality food for the crew, including the extras - they got the same food as the stars.
That's crazy and very interesting. I love hearing these types of behind the scenes stories.
One of the things I really love about this franchise, and a reason why their budgets are so big, is that they try to do a lot of practical stunts. In the last movie there was a crazy scene where they parachute out of a plane in their cars. They really put parachutes on cars and pushed them out of a plane. That's a massive cost and could have been done for cheaper but they wanted it to look as good as possible. I know CGI is getting better but I miss movies utilizing practical effects. It's great to see Star Wars using practical effects as much as possible too.
Saw the trailer tonight. Charlize Theron is my hall pass and I go to South Africa a lot. I also noticed that @Kenny Orange Powers is in the new Aliens movie.