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Monday, January 20, 2014

Night #37 - Notes From the Commentary Underground - Part 3

We now move into the sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, and specifically right into the screenwriters' commentary. As per the last screenwriter commentary, all the way back in part 1 of Notes From the Commentary Underground, there is a running gag, a little bit of story/tablet information, and everything else. They also still believe that if you're bothering to put up with the screenwriters yammering for an hour and a half (or more, as the case may be) then you basically need to trot your ass outside and get some fresh air, or read a good book, do something.

The Running Gag:

Instead of "It's magic" (which should be pretty well established by the nature of the franchise by now), the running gag of the commentary track is a concept for NATM 3 where the movie is set in a big rig. The idea is to have Dr. McPhee, Larry Daley, and Dexter commandeering a big rig to get a random wholly mammoth to Atlanta on a deadline which requires speeding ("Are you aware this big rig was doing a hundred and ninety miles an hour" or something like that) and Shania Twain for some random reason. As the commentary progressed, the concept came to involve a Mounty and a random detour through either Canada or Seattle, Larry the Cable Guy in some capacity, and the taglines "We've got mammoth troubles" and "We've got a mammoth problem" (the second comes off more naturally in my opinion). And for some reason they try to convince the police that it's really just a huge, hairy elephant, but Shania Twain knows the secret, but that's neither here nor there.

Story/Tablet Tidbits:

The screenwriters were actually pretty excited about having something that the tablet fit into and "where it was obviously supposed to be" for a very long time.

Speaking of the tablet, apparently it thinks that the museum is a temple/pyramid, hence its operation on a building-by-building basis, and there was considerable back and forth on whether or not the tablet would stay or go, but the writers decided that the tablet should stay, since "Larry would be a real fool to knowingly let it go" out into the world from its safe, sheltered little museum home. This meant that Dexter had to steal the tablet in order to make the plot happen, hence Larry having "less time to prepare" and needing to jump right into the story, basically.

Interesting little character tidbit: Hank Azaria (Kahmunrah) did two takes of every scene, one where he was dead serious and the other where he was sillier than a "road lizard" to use Jed's phrasing, giving editors the choice of which they wanted to use. One cut was just all his silly stuff, which made for a good laugh but didn't give the flick any forward momentum. What eventually happened was that serious and silly were blended together to give the effect that "the wheel is coming off" as the movie progresses and his plan is falling apart at the seems because he has to actually, oh I don't know, implement it.

Stiller made this decision where his character remembers everything's just wax, so he just has to wait until sunrise and everything will work itself out, and he sticks to it no matter what the living hell is going on around him, something the screenwriters admire in his performance in BOTS.

Originally this was a riddle of the sphinx, a giant cat that spoke only in ancient Egyptian (in which case what would Kahmunrah need anyone for?), and for a while it was called "Night at the Museum: Riddle of the Pyramids".

The "Lincoln Ex Machina" was in the plan from the get-go. Stiller also enjoyed the idea of Lincoln having a vendetta against pigeons ("really would've had it with the pigeons, just enough with the pigoens"), and originally he wanted to know what happened to his hat.

Picture the cherubs as voiced by the guys from The Sopranos, as "tough mafiosos from New Jersey".

Miscellany:

"Boom! Bang! Fiyapowa!" is this film's version of "Dum-Dum gum-gum" in that it's just as memetic.

One of the running curiosities (rather than just a running gag) was the idea that everything seems to be unlocked in this movie. They suspect that in reality, everything is locked up, considering the high "historic and intrinsic value" (National Treasure) of essentially everything on display or in cold storage at the Smithsonian complex.

The screenwriters are quick to hyperbolically praise themselves when it comes to their remarkably small parts as the Wright Brothers.

There's a book by Graham Hancock about pi and the pyramids, called Fingerprints of the Gods, which claims that all these cultures around the world learned pyramid building from Atlantis. Take of that what you will. Also, they only needed enough digits of pi to fit on an ATM keypad in order to open the gate to the underworld. Graham Hancock also wrote The Sign and the Seal, about the Ark of the Covenant.

They want to see an Oscar the Grouch origin story, answering the questions of how he ended up in the can, why he's evil, and whether or not he wants to take over the world by flooding it with garbage.

The Horus warriors (originally to be Kahmunrah's henchmen from the beginning but deemed just too damned scary for kids) are representations of Horus, the patron god of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. (I'm pretty sure the pharaoh was believed to actually be Horus incarnate, or the son of Ra, or both, but I can't be sure.) However, they like the idea that your evil army cuts and runs at the first sign of trouble, rather than being steadfast as they always are in movies.

One of the writers did a piece on the psychological abuse of monkeys, known as Monkey Torture. It can be found on the DVD release of The State.

The process of actually writing the script is as follows: they come up with an approximately twenty-five page outline, then divy it up into sections in an alternating fashion, which they then email back and forth. Each time they recieve an email of the script, they go through it from the beginning and make notes and changes as needed so that by the time the script is finished, it's essentially draft twenty-five. The script is guided along the way by studio people so that it doesn't surprise anyone upon its completion. This process they feel is twice as fast when they're in their basements emailing back and forth rather than half as fast, as it would be if they were in the same room trying to finish it. The writers in this case have the advantage of knowing both the Smithsonians and the Natural History Museum really well and therefore being able to use the exhibits for character inspiration.

Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": Notes From the Commentary Underground - Part the Fourth

Countdown: 334 Days to NATM 3

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