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"He always said that she just sort of happened." "The smart thing would've been to get out and let her happen to somebody else."
Taking a cue from @The Scribbling Man 's B+ editions and @Wakeupkeo 's black-and-white rendering of Dick Tracy, I'm turning The Hot Spot (1990) into a shorter black-and-white version that feels like a '50s film noir instead of a '90s homage to those films. To imagine that this film was made when the book was written in 1953.
This is my first time turning a color video into B&W. I compared the look of several original 1950s B&W films and I've found a black-and-white balance that I like, after lots of fine-tuning and watching test clips on laptop screen, desktop, and projector screen to evaluate the grayscale balance and brightness on different screens.
I'm trimming this from 130 to ~92 minutes.
Film critic Roger Ebert summarized the film very nicely in 1990:
"A guy comes in from out of town. He doesn't have a past - at least not one he wants to talk about. He gets a job in a used-car lot. It's one of those typical small towns from the movies of the 1940s and 1950s, the kind of backwater where the other guy on the job is a nerd, and the boss is a blowhard with a bum ticker - but the boss' wife is this great broad with blond hair and big eyelashes and when she gets up in the morning she puts on her negligee just when the other women in town are taking theirs off. Oh, and the bookkeeper at work is this innocent young girl who is intimidated, for mysterious reasons, by the vicious creep who lives in a shack outside of town."
Taking a cue from @The Scribbling Man 's B+ editions and @Wakeupkeo 's black-and-white rendering of Dick Tracy, I'm turning The Hot Spot (1990) into a shorter black-and-white version that feels like a '50s film noir instead of a '90s homage to those films. To imagine that this film was made when the book was written in 1953.
This is my first time turning a color video into B&W. I compared the look of several original 1950s B&W films and I've found a black-and-white balance that I like, after lots of fine-tuning and watching test clips on laptop screen, desktop, and projector screen to evaluate the grayscale balance and brightness on different screens.
I'm trimming this from 130 to ~92 minutes.
Film critic Roger Ebert summarized the film very nicely in 1990:
"A guy comes in from out of town. He doesn't have a past - at least not one he wants to talk about. He gets a job in a used-car lot. It's one of those typical small towns from the movies of the 1940s and 1950s, the kind of backwater where the other guy on the job is a nerd, and the boss is a blowhard with a bum ticker - but the boss' wife is this great broad with blond hair and big eyelashes and when she gets up in the morning she puts on her negligee just when the other women in town are taking theirs off. Oh, and the bookkeeper at work is this innocent young girl who is intimidated, for mysterious reasons, by the vicious creep who lives in a shack outside of town."