-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- From: http://www.alienzoo.com/features/o/200003240001.html Success of 'Mission To Mars' the talk of Tinseltown Was Brian de Palma in hiding because NASA was out to get him? No one seems to know. by Paul Davids - 03/24/2000 What a difference a week makes in Hollywood! A major film lives or dies based the weekend box office numbers. From one week to the next, depending upon those Friday-to-Sunday grosses, the world changes overnight, as a film's fortunes rise and fall. Case in point: Consider the slugfest at the box office last weekend between 'Mission To Mars' and ''Erin Brockovich''. The Julia Roberts film opened to about $28 million gross this past weekend, while director Brian De Palma's Mars journey, beginning its second week, sunk over 50 percent. 'Mission To Mars' was down from $23 million the opening weekend to just over $10 million last weekend, its second weekend in theaters. Despite its strong first weekend showing, 'Mission To Mars' is now in the dog house, due to the beating it took from critics. However, on Tuesday night, March 14, 'Erin Brockovich' hadn't officially opened and 'Mission To Mars' was still the box office champ. And on that night, I swooped down from the sky in my hovercraft to attend the premiere of 'Erin Brockovich' in Westwood, Los Angeles, at the Mann's Village Theater. It was a "hard-ticketed" event, which meant that the theater assigned seats, similar to how it is for a play. 'Brockovich' had one the biggest Hollywood premieres of the year 2000. The film was an unqualified success. Without exception, everyone in the audience relished Julia Roberts's performance. Steve Soderbergh's directing of a near-perfect screenplay was pure tour de force. I sat alongside Steve Stabler, who produced around 80 films, and not one of them takes place in outer space or has any aliens in it. I guess this means that science-fiction wouldn't qualify as his favorite genre. But he did produce a few of Jim Carrey's most popular movies when he was at Motion Picture Corporation of America, including Dumb and Dumber, which is America's favorite moron flick of all time. About a year or so ago, Steve Stabler founded Destination Films, which has made about nine pictures in its first year. After the film premiere (which the _real_ 'Erin Brockovich' attended), Steve and I marched down the red carpet that connected the Mann's Village Theater to the gigantic tented party down the street. The honchos of Universal, including President Ron Meyer, smiled ear to ear after the successful premiere, sensing a potential hit. But there was another movie being discussed by those present: 'Mission To Mars'. The movie wasn't the topic of discussion because people _liked_ it. Rather, the film stunned people because it had barreled its way to the number one position at the box office despite horrible reviews. The Mars film had become the one to beat; it was lodged there in first position. Yes, I will admit that the screenplay of 'Mission To Mars' was not great. It had its moments of klunkiness and corniness. But the story did strive to open our minds. You could certainly pick away at trivial points of the plot. But considering the garbage that passes for movies these days, you could argue it was a bit of a masterpiece - especially in set design, special effects and overall visual concept. The weird thing about the anti-'Mission To Mars' hysteria that is sweeping Hollywood is that none of the Mars-haters even try to explain what they didn't like about the film. They don't consider it worthy of an itemized list of bad points, as though it's beneath that level. My theory, of course, is that people are freaked out by the premise. They'd never thought about it before. Could life on Earth - and mankind in particular - have been seeded by a life-form from another planet? For some inexplicable reason, most of the folks in Tinseltown seem to think that this kind of speculative storytelling makes for bad science and even worse science-fiction. In fact, at a pre-release press screening, the audience actually HISSED and BOOED at the ending. Interestingly, TIME magazine credits the concept to Richard C. Hoagland, author of the book 'The Monuments Of Mars', which has rocketed up the Amazon.com bestseller list since the Mars film appeared on the horizon. The book continues to climb at warp speed. Never mind that Hoagland was never paid a dime. That's Hollywood! But Hoagland still has the _real_ story to tell, better known as the version that will _really_ make NASA go nuts! TIME actually wrote that 'Mission To Mars' echoes Hoagland's book. The Mars film is predicated on the concept that there is a face on Mars and that it is real. The story has twisted reality, changing the appearance of the actual face on Mars to look like the face of an alien gray: large eyes, slit mouth, etc. When the astronauts go inside the face at the climax, they see holographic images that convey the history of our solar system and the seeding of planet Earth with DNA in ancient times. And they also see an image of the long-departed Martians, who are depicted to look more or less like Grays. But these Martian Grays have emotions. The one we see sheds a tear. It's a tear for the destruction of the life that was on Mars, eons ago. Then again, maybe it's a tear of joy because humans finally found their way back to Mars, the planet of humanity's forefathers. For kids, and for adults with open minds, the imagery of the destruction of life on Mars, and the creation of life on Earth (and its evolution) was some of the best screen imagery seen in ages. Don't forget, it's a Touchstone picture, and Touchstone means Disney. I refer you to the 'Flying Saucers Over Hollywood!' of a few weeks ago featuring Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney. He has been positioning himself as a hero to ufologists and those who have made the leap to the "New Paradigm." First there was Disney's 'Alien Encounters' TV show, which point-blank charged that there was a UFO coverup. Stanton Friedman himself couldn't have done a better job of stating the case. Then there was 'Fantasia 2000', in which playful whales levitate to the sky in beams of blue light from the heavens. How's _that_ for an abduction fantasy? And now there is 'Mission To Mars', in which, contrary to everything NASA has ever said about the subject, a face on Mars is presented as a real, constructed artifact from ancient times. So Disney has proven to be something of a thorn in the side for NASA. As you can discover at Richard Hoagland's website (www.enterprisemission.com), one of the trailers for 'Mission To Mars' actually _accused_ the space agency of covering up the truth behind the movie. They waited until the last possible moment to say it, and as a strategy, it may have boosted box office revenue. We saw the _old_ trailer for months before the film opened, so, giving us something new at the last minute was good promotion for ye ol' opening weekend box office grosses. There was another topic of conversation at the premiere party: the director of 'Mission To Mars', Brian De Palma. People wondered where in the world he was (and if he was still on Earth, for that matter). It seems that Brian has disappeared. No press interviews. He was gone in 60 seconds. Abducted? In hiding? Why does a director who has the number-one movie at the box office go into hiding? Doesn't commercial success insulate a filmmaker from the nasty hisses and cruel critiques of the rabid makers of public opinion? There may have been another dimension (no pun intended) to Brian's disappearance. You see, it seems that when they were making the Mars film, there was no mention whatsoever of a face on Mars. It wasn't in the script. The screenplay, without the Mars face, was brought to NASA with requests for advice and help. Lunar Astronaut Story Musgrave even agreed to play a bit part (a very bit part). Scads of NASA advisors climbed aboard the project as consultants. Yet, according to my inside source for the last few months (a special effects designer who used to work at Hoyt Yaetman's special effects company, Dreamquest), the script was suddenly changed. The face was added. Well, not THE face. As I said, filmmakers changed it into a large-eyed 'Gray' face -- without NASA having a clue about what was happening. The story was changed from a conventional space rescue mission to homage for the Face on Mars and the concept of aliens having seeded life on Earth in very ancient times. Was Brian de Palma in hiding because NASA was out to lynch him? No one seems to know. And what is NASA saying about the movie? Absolutely nothing. The silence of _no_comment_ is as loud as it can possibly get. NASA has been trying to erase the Face on Mars from public consciousness for decades, and no doubt they considered this film an ambush. A rather successful and sneaky ambush, at that. If we were a fly on the wall at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (JPL), we'd probably hear a bunch of grown engineers arguing about whether Brian de Palma should be roasted on a spit or merely boiled in oil. For ufology, it's always great to have a number one picture out there that tells part of our side of the story. In echoing Richard Hoagland's book with its face on Mars premise, 'Mission To Mars' definitely puts part of the 'new paradigm' into the public consciousness in a new way. It's always risky to imply that aliens may have had a hand in our Creation, that maybe God needed aliens to accomplish what the Bible always told us God did in a single day - the last day of Creation before He rested (Hey, anybody who's getting that much bang for the buck deserves a day of rest!). But part of the problem is that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell don't like this kind of science-fiction movie. So you get huge opening weekend grosses, and then the Word whispers out to quash the excitement. And for those who didn't reject the movie on religious grounds, they had other grounds for dumping on Brian de Palma. It ranked 99 out of 100 in 'hokiness', as defined by the Establishment. That's the same Establishment that doesn't believe in UFOs. After all the damage done by the devastating reviews, TIME tried to resurrect the Mars film a bit. They conceded that 'Mission To Mars' was not the devastatingly bad movie the critics portrayed it to be. They gave it credit for its ingenuity and some captivating touches, such as a jitterbug sequence in space that was, like, totally charming. The question is, now that the dust has settled, where will the movie leave ufology? And where does it leave other producers who have an interest in this subject matter? What are the chances that we'll ever get the _real_ story of the _real_ Face on Mars onto the screen. We'll have to wait and see. I'll be among those biting their nails. Hoagland and I have worked almost five years together trying to bring a loosely fictionalized version of the Face on Mars to the screen, from the inception of its discovery in 1976 (when it showed up in two of the Viking spacecraft photos), to the recent disappearances of various _real_ Mars spacecraft. When I left the premiere of 'Erin Brockovich' that night, the question was uppermost in my mind as to who would be champ at the box office on 'Erin Brockovich''s opening weekend: Erin or Mars? Would Mars defy the critics again? Would it give Julia Roberts a Martian sized migraine? The question has been answered. Julia Roberts left Brian De Palma coughing and sputtering in a cloud of Martian dust. BRIAN, WHERE ARE YOU? EARTH TO BRIAN DE PALMA, DO YOU READ US? We still love you! Some of us, anyway. At least, those of us who don't want to slime you! EARTH TO BRIAN DE PALMA, come in, this is 'Flying Saucers Over Hollywood!' Well, no answer, folks. So that's it for this week. Another Mars mission has lost touch with ground control. Oh well. Log on again next Friday, because I'm going to take my tuxedo out of the mothballs, so I can bring you AlienZoo's own up-close-and-personal look at the Academy Awards! Until then, this is Paul Davids, bringing you the ufological 'Truth' from Hollywood Boulevard - _and_ the planet Mars! Over and out! � 2000 AlienZoo, Inc. ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day. ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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