Cloverfield News

I've just returned from vacation, so here is the news you may have missed while I was gone:

• Amazon now has the Cloverfield Blu-ray on sale for $16.95 - only 96¢ more than the standard DVD! And Tower.com has it for $13.86!!!!
  
• The California DMV finds Slusho! offensive
• George Jones sent in this scale drawing of the LSA
• Harvey Dent noticed that the pictures on Rob's refrigerator, are the same ones from Marlena's MySpace page, and from Jamie's videos.
• The 2-hour premiere for FRINGE , the new Sci-Fi drama TV series from JJ Abrams, was pushed back until September 9th (although you can probably find it on the internet)
• The Holomove ARG turned out to be for Microsoft Visual Studio - not FRINGE as initially suspected.
• JJ Abrams will be at Comic-Con on Saturday July 26th for FRINGE. There will also be a LOST panel on Saturday, where the new LOST ARG will launch.
  
• There will be an adult movie spoof titled - Cleavagefield. "Check out these monsters!"

Cloverfield's ROAR! Overture Coming Soon

Film Score Magazine has a video interview with Michael Giacchino, the composer of Cloverfield's closing credits overture "Roar!". Giacchino was surprised by the demand for the score, but is said to be working on releasing it in some form soon, presumably in time for the DVD release.

ScoreKeeper of AICN reports that "the original composition was thirteen minutes long while the version which ended up in the film was edited down to eleven minutes. [Giacchino] concludes by saying the version they’re going to release will be the full thirteen minute work."

* Thanks to Michael L. for the update!

Cloverfield Selling Out Midnight Shows

Harry at Fandango is reporting many midnight showings of Cloverfield are already sold out, so get your tickets soon!

Hello friends - just FYI: a number of tonight’s midnight shows of CLOVERFIELD are already sold out (mostly in Manhattan ). It’s clearly the most anticipated film of the season, according to thousands of moviegoers voting in our online poll (see below). Best wishes for a thrilling weekend, Harry

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 1/17/08 3:00 p.m. PT)*
Movie / Fandango User Rating / % Fandango Sales

• Cloverfield / “Go” / 60%
• 27 Dresses / “Go” / 6%
• The Bucket List / “Must Go” / 4%
• Juno / “Must Go” / 4%
• There Will Be Blood / “Go” / 2%

Fandango Weekly Poll (as of 1/17/08 3:00 p.m. PT)
Which new film are you most looking forward to seeing this season?

• Cloverfield 52%
• 27 Dresses 20%
• Jumper 10%
• The Spiderwick Chronicles 5%
• Be Kind Rewind 3%
• Other 10%

CloverfieldClues in NJ Star-Ledger

The Star-Ledger newspaper has a story on Cloverfield, and there's a mention of CloverfieldClues!

NJ.com: Innovative marketing could turn 'Cloverfield' into a monstrous hit

* I know this isn't as exiting for you as it is for me :)
** Thanks to Lisa Rose!

Cloverfield Tickets and Showtimes

The official Cloverfield website, CloverfieldMovie.com, has added links to tickets and showtimes. Some theaters will be showing the movie beginning at midnight on the 17th, so get your tickets now.

Cloverfield Buzz Still Strong On Yahoo!

According to Yahoo Buzz, the search buzz is still strong for Cloverfield, charting in the Top 20 Movies for over a month. In fact right now, Cloverfield is the number one movie search term, beating out Juno and Transformers.

One odd thing I noticed is Blake Lively, who was originally rumored to be in the movie, is on the list of top 20 decliners in searches.

* Thanks to Peter from Slashfilm!

Cloverfield News

Here is some Cloverfield news from the last week.

IGN: Cloverfield Actor Readies for Destruction

"I think he's somebody that people expected would be further along in his life than he is. This is not another in a long string of accomplishments. This is like the first time he's getting his s--t together. And he's also in a relationship with this girl, which has always been a friendship but has recently changed, and that's kind of when catastrophe strikes. And things get put into perspective for him."

"What we were doing wasn't exactly free-form, complete improvisation. It was more like, 'Put this in your own words. This is what happens in the scene. If the line that's here doesn't feel real to you, doesn't feel organic, then make it your own.' And that flexibility really allowed us to get something that felt real."

ShockTillYouDrop: Michael Stahl-David Talks Cloverfield Experience

[Reeves] wasn't going to make me do something I didn't feel was real. If there was something on the script I didn't feel quite like it would happen in that moment, we wouldn't do it. I would say something else, do something else. It wasn't about trying to be clever and come up with your own stuff. It's not a very talky movie, it was more about questioning what would you do in this situation? What would I do?"

"I think in some ways it's as much a survival movie as it is about the monster," he continues. "The monster is definitely the problem, but you're seeing it the way we would, we don't pan back and watch it perfectly. It is going to be exciting. It is contemporary film vocabulary - this kind of first-hand account, something that could've been on YouTube or something. Someone just holds up the camera and starts filming, there are probably other accounts, [our footage is] just the one the government happens to find."

NY Daily News: 'Cloverfield' has one huge secret

It's been a Godzilla-size task to keep that kind of secrecy in an era of spoiler Web sites, saturation advertising and product tie-ins.

"The actual creature, he's hiding somewhere," jokes the film's director, Matt Reeves. "Everybody knew about how part of the fun of the whole thing was sneaking up on people."

NY Daily News: Odette Yustman, in the company of monsters in 'Cloverfield'

“My mum is Cuban and my father is of Italian and French descent and was born in Bogota, Colombia, and raised in Nicaragua. But they moved to California a long time ago,” she says.

NY Post: Beauty And The Beast (Odette Yustman Interview)

I couldn't tell you [about the movie's ending] even if I wanted to - I haven't seen it yet. ... Honestly, no one has. I have seen a rough cut of the film, but as for the climax it will be a complete surprise for me as well as everyone else when it premieres. The producers won't let anyone see it.

Hollywood Reporter: 'Cloverfield' monster movie hoping for monster business

"You know, it's funny because when we were making the trailer we weren't sure if it was a smart thing to be doing or a disastrous thing because we were spending a lot of time using up what was our limited prep for the movie and not really sure whether or not it was going to take away from the prep that was needed for the movie," Reeves told me. "But the truth of the matter is it was also the situation we found ourselves in because the script at that point was not ready. Drew was still writing it on the weekends. He was working on 'Lost' at the time so (doing the trailer) was really what we could do. It only turned out (well) in retrospect.

Another movie Reeves said he had in mind while working on "Cloverfield" was "'Alien,' which I thought was a terrifically suspenseful movie. When you did see the alien it was absolutely terrifying, but there were long periods where you were just waiting for when it was going to come out and reveal itself. It was so brilliantly designed and shot, the way that film was put together. So obviously those films were in the back of my head in terms of thinking, 'OK, how can we try and create some suspense?' So I watched those movies. I love John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' which is, I think, a kind of underrated movie. I think it's a very, very frightening movie. But, again, you're not seeing the creature continually. You're getting these kind of long build-ups.

Cloverfield Article on Variety

Variety has an new article about Cloverfield (and some other movie).

Her summary is a little off:

The initial scenes set up the premise: The camera's hunky owner Rob is in love with a beauty named Beth. He doesn't want to shoot a testimonial video at his brother's going-away party, so he passes the camera to a guy named Hud, who keeps shooting through the long night as New York is attacked by something gonzo, loud and very scary. "I saw it, it's alive!" cries one onlooker.

Huh?

However, there is some great new information about how the film was made:

The filmmakers coaxed Paramount into letting them use no-name actors who could improvise, low-key natural night light, herky-jerky HandyCams (as opposed to SteadiCams, which can be artificially jerked around later; "People would smell that in a second," says Reeves), and no musical score at all -- just source music and well-orchestrated ambient sound.

Somehow, with smart advice from "Zodiac" director David Fincher, the filmmakers persuaded the studio to let them blow up digital footage to 35mm; early tests came out looking almost "too good," says Reeves. (The digital "Cloverfield" will screen in a few hundred situations.)

"Cloverfield" thesp T. J. Miller's handling of a lightweight Panasonic HD HandyCam accounts for about an eighth of the final film.

"The little camera establishes a feel -- its grace notes; you see the reflections of the actor holding the camera," says Reeves, who reserved the minicam for intimate scenes among the actors. He kept tweaking those scenes, shooting as many as 60 takes.

The film starts out with the Panasonic, then moves into transitional sequences shot with a 3-lb. Canon for about a third of the film.

For the widescreen scenes with visual effects, which require higher resolution, a cameraman dressed like Hud sports the much-heavier hi-res Sony F23 or Thomson Viper."The cameraman was creating the illusion that huge cameras are very light," says Reeves. "It was grueling. People fell."

The filmmakers seamlessly melded all the shots, including continuous masters with massive effects added by VFX houses and stop-motion master Phil Tippet. One five-minute shot incorporates 20 VFX elements.

"People think you use the 'Blair Witch' aesthetic to avoid seeing things," says Reeves. "I didn't want to have all that anticipation and not reveal him. The fun thing is you do see everything over the course of the movie in several different ways, but it's filmed heavily from one point-of-view. You move quickly. By the end you have intimate contact."

* Thanks to dalphx from Unfiction for finding this!

Searching for Cloverfield News

Cloverfield popped into the "Top 10" searches on Yahoo over the holiday weekend. Now Yahoo has an article about the huge increase in Cloverfield searches.

Interestingly, one of the searches mentioned in the article is "Cloverfield Clues", which has jumped 112% this week.

I receive about 40% of my traffic from search engines, although only 4% of my visitors come from Yahoo! (35% from Google)

Cloverfield Monster Revealed?
Mysterious New Cloverfield Trailer Sparks Searches
By Erik Gunther
Tue, November 27, 2007, 3:23 pm PST

We're counting the days as January 18 draws closer. What's special about that ho-hum Friday in the middle of January? Well, that's the date the shrouded-in-secrecy "Cloverfield" is scheduled to land in theaters.

The trailer for the mysterious monster movie made its debut back in July and sparked huge buzz. Since then, the buzz has quieted a bit, but an ardent group of movie buffs are still scouring the Web for the scoop on the flick.

This week we witnessed a 371% increase in searches on "cloverfield monster revealed" after a new trailer offered a glimpse of the horror to come. Related queries on "cloverfield monster" and "cloverfield trailer" have also smashed through the Search box. Diabolical director J.J. Abrams, the mastermind of all this hype, has jumped 116% in searches over the past week.

The Web-based viral marketing component has been key in keeping the movie's buzz alive. Searches on "cloverfield clues" jumped 112% as sneaky sleuths attempted to unravel a few of the film's mysteries. One question as of late—does the movie's classified colossus have anything to do with the legendary Cthulhu? Searches on the horrific creation of author H.P. Lovecraft

We can't tell if Cthulhu is involved in the Cloverfield saga, but the latest cinematic clue to make a splash in Search is "slusho." Stir that latest tidbit with past buzzworthy bits such as "cloverfield myspace," "ethan haas," and "1-18-08" and you'll find yourself knee deep in the film's mysterious mythology.

* Thanks to Cameron at one-eighteen-oh-eight for the article

Will The WGA Strike Impact Cloverfield?

The writers in Hollywood (WGA) have officially begun their strike today. This means NO new material for your favorite movies or TV shows, although TV will be hit the hardest. Starting today all "live scripted" shows will be in reruns, which means no new Letterman, Leno, Daily Show, Colbert Report, or even SNL.

The current crop of fall season TV shows have four to five shows "in the can", with another one to five scripts already written that could be filmed - that is, "if scripts are in tip-top shape and can shoot without any changes". After that, the season will have to end early.

The big question here is, how will this affect Cloverfield?

The movie itself has already been filmed and should be in "post". The only thing that might be affected is if any scenes need to be changed or re-shot, there would be no writers around to help.

The future of Cloverfield "ARG" however seems uncertain. While there is probably a outline for what they want to accomplish, I doubt there is an entire script already written out. In the Lost Experience ARG, one of the writers of the show (Javi) was the "main dude" running the show. There already hasn't been any updates in over two weeks. Hopefully, they have been using this time to stockpile something so this can continue until the movie release.

If we are lucky, the ARG was subbed out to a marketing firm, like Hi-Res (the company that ran The Lost Experience), and won't be affected by the strike.

Knock on wood (six times for good luck!)

BTW, The reasons for the strike are complicated, but the main sticking points are the WGA wanting a bigger cut of DVD sales and the "nets" not wanting to pay for TV shows watched online, which they consider "promotional".

For the latest coverage in WGA Strike news, check out Variety.com.

Cloverfield Nominated for "Most Anticipated Movie"

Cloverfield was nominated for "Most Anticipated Movie" at the Spike TV's Scream 2007 Awards - the awards show that celebrates "The Best in Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror and Comics voted by you!"

Also nominated: The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy 2, Iron Man, Wolverine, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

And the winner is...?

* Thanks to Joe from the comments for finding this!

International Release Dates

IMDB has a list of international release dates, although it is not quite up-to-date, so I have added a few more that were found by Euchre at Unfiction. If you know of any other international sites or dates, please leave a comment below.

Here is a current list of release dates, which I will try to keep up-to-date as new info is released.

Australia ... 01-17-08
USA ......... 01-18-08
Belgium ..... 01-23-08
Estonia ..... 01-25-08
Iceland ..... 01-25-08
Mexico ...... 01-25-08
Argentina ... 01-31-08
Germany ..... 01-31-08
Spain ....... 02-01-08
UK .......... 02-01-08
France ...... 02-06-08
Netherlands . 02-07-08
Sweden ...... 02-08-08
Chile ....... 02-21-08
Russia ...... 02-21-08
Norway ...... 02-22-08
Turkey ...... 03-21-08

The Paramount International website has a few more countries worth exploring.

BTW, The French Cloverfield site shows a release date of 06-02-08 (in addition to a French subtitled trailer), but they list their dates in Day-Month-Year order, so it's really 02-06-08.

Jessica Lucas (Lily Ford) News

The Canadian news site CANOE.ca has a story about 22 year old Canadian actress Jessica Lucas, who plays Lily Ford.

Tonight on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Lucas will continue her four-episode arc as Ronnie Lake, a sought-after young hot-shot investigator.

Just prior to taping her CSI arc, however, Lucas spent several months working on the Abrams movie which has been dubbed Cloverfield in common parlance, but whose name has not officially been revealed. Abrams is the creator of TV series Lost, Alias and Felicity, and was the director of Mission Impossible III.

First publicized prior to theatre screenings of Transformers, Cloverfield is scheduled to be released on Jan. 18, 2008. Plot rumours have centred on monsters attacking New York City, but Lucas wouldn't shed any light on the specifics. You know, sworn to secrecy and all that.

"It really is kind of crazy, isn't it?" Lucas said of the Cloverfield buzz. "The hype has been unbelievable. And it doesn't even have a name yet. The trailer created such a stir.

"When they first explained to us what they were going to do in terms of marketing, it sounded pretty weird. But obviously it has worked. And there are going to be more trailers coming out very soon, so that will give people even more reason to get excited."

Lucas plans to spend the next couple of months helping to promote the movie.

"The CSI thing just wrapped up so I'm going to have a little bit of down time right now, although it won't be for long," said Lucas, who splits her time between Los Angeles and Vancouver. "We already are planning all the promotion we're going to be doing for Cloverfield, or whatever you want to call it. So that's going to be my focus."

* Thanks to EW for emailing me about this!

Cloverfield on Five News

Five News investigates a strange movie phenomenon sweeping the States.

British news program Five News did a clever story on Cloverfield / 1-18-08 yesterday. No new information, but it was shot in the style of the trailer, and "The Blair Witch Project". Cheers!

Paramount Cease and Desist

I received a Cease and Desist email from Paramount today. :)

Paramount has learned that you are reproducing, displaying and distributing the “Cheese” call sheet on your website
...
Paramount hereby demands that you immediately remove the “Cheese” call sheet from your website.


The funny thing is, I haven't even read the call sheet, let alone posted it here. I only posted a link to the story in NY Magazine. I guess they didn't bother to actually look at my blog! LOL

I guess this means the call sheet was authentic. I'm glad I didn't read it!

BTW, I just checked NY Magazine, and they still have it posted up.

UPDATE: I talked to the lawyer who represents Paramount, and he was a really nice guy. The C&D letter is definitely legitimate, but he wouldn't comment on the call sheet. BTW, Slashfilm also received the same letter.

CNBC on Cloverfield and the "Overnight" rumor

Melissa Francis from CNBC's On The Money discusses the rumor that "Overnight" might be the real title for Cloverfield, with Peter Sciretta from Slashfilm.

Best Week Ever for Cloverfield / 1-18-08

Someone TheBookPolice mentioned that Cloverfield / 1-18-08 was mentioned on VH1's Best Week Ever, so I Tivo'd it, Archos'd it, and put it on YouTube.

If there's anything that JJ Abrams taught us with LOST,
it's that "Everything means something".