Wing, the elderly Chinese guardian of Gizmo, when he was child in 1920s Shanghai and first encountered the Mogwai and their dark progeny, the Gremlins. JOE DANTE:I was at the Annecy Film Festival for the premiere of Gremlins : Secrets of the Mogwai (2022), an HBO Max animated series that functions as a prequel to Gremlins, following the adventures of Mr. GABE KLINGER:You were traveling recently. It’s Elizabeth’s son’s child, he says, so he can’t fully claim the title. He tells me he’s a grandfather-well, sort of. Joe spoke to me via Zoom from his dining room in Los Angeles, where his partner and producer Elizabeth Stanley lurked around behind him. The circulation of StudioCanal’s new 4K DCP restoration-color timed by Dante himself-presents the best opportunity to discover The Howling since its original release. Where do you go from there? Looking at The Howling, which directly precedes the filmmaker’s embattled Hollywood period, it appears as the work of an upstart whose ambitions hadn’t yet met a ceiling (or studio writer’s room, as it were), working through genre film problems with the savvy of a true film connoisseur, and elevating a would-be grindhouse item by virtue of curating worthy collaborators-among these, John Sayles, who rewrote the film’s mediocre script Pino Donaggio, who composed its roaring, evocative themes and cinematographer John Hora, who designed its gloriously saturated images. As an outsider masquerading as an insider, Joe’s confidence was chiseled away by a series of demoralizing incidents, such as losing final cut to production partners Burger King-yes, Burger King-on 1998’s Small Soldiers. The shifting power ranks of the studios never sought to empower him in the same way as contemporaries Ron Howard, Tim Burton, Robert Zemeckis, or indeed Spielberg, who frequently alternate between blockbuster and prestige cinema. In the introduction to our book, we touched on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s idea of Dante as a “post-cult” director whose career self-effacement can be partly attributed to an engagement with cinematic traditions that have been derisively viewed as lowbrow. That last film, Joe’s so-far final effort for a major studio, was a necessary corrective to Joe Pytka’s abysmal Space Jam (1995), and symbolized, among other things, the eager matinee attendee from suburban Newark’s disillusionment with the industry that had once left him starry-eyed. The latter’s unexpected box-office success led to nearly two decades of unceasing mainstream activity, from Explorers (1985) to Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Having sharpened his monster movie teeth with Roger Corman on Piranha (1978), Dante graduated to making The Howling (1981) under the quasi-exploitation AVCO Embassy banner, and then almost immediately landed the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (1984) for Warner Bros. Sadly-though somewhat expectedly given the uncharitable response to the film-many concurrent and subsequent auteur projects Joe has tried to push through the gates have mostly been gathering layers of dust (we touch on a couple of these in our conversation below).ĭante’s half-century-long relationship with Hollywood and its contours is a rich and frustrating one. There was just enough from the Danteverse to remind one of better times. Joe’s reaction to this was akin to that of an enthusiastic camp counselor: “Oooh, scary!”īurying the Ex didn’t end up one of Joe’s finest-I attribute that to an inadequate budget and a middling script-but there were a handful of graceful touches familiar to any Dante fan: the peculiar tone of mournful comedy and nostalgia references to cartoons and B-movies (Ed Wood’s 1957 Plan 9 from Outer Space makes an appearance) and a walk-on by actor Dick Miller (R.I.P.), who had appeared in all of Dante’s features dating back to his very first. Once, actress Alexandra Daddario contorted her face and stuck out her tongue at the end of a set of placid close-ups. Observing him, there was no ostentation, no extra comfort outside of a director’s chair that he rarely sat in, no effort to make it known he was the boss. I positioned myself by the director’s monitor for three consecutive days, something that irked producers but not the easy-going Dante. “It’s the only problem I have with the book,” he told me, “I pretty much have to keep it to myself.”Īround the same period, Joe graciously let me visit the Los Angeles set of Burying the Ex (2014), his last feature film to date. When it arrived stateside, Joe’s modesty prevented him from sending the book to family and friends. Believe it or not, the 254-page volume I co-edited on Joe Dante, jointly published by the Austrian Film Museum and Slovenian Cinematheque in 2013, remains the only comprehensive critical appraisal of the veteran filmmaker available in English.
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