Daily post 04 Aug 2007 08:06 am
Martin & Chast & The Thief
– One of my favorite videos on the internet right now is this Steve Martin interview with Roz Chast on the New Yorker site. They posted the piece last year, just after the event had occurred, and I saw it then but caught it again recently thanks to the notice at Drawn.
The two of them have a new book about to come out this coming October, The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! Since they were already doing the book when this interview took place, it was obvious for the New Yorker to team them up at their event.
Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:
The ABCs have never had it so good. Created by two of today’s wittiest, most imaginative minds, The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z! is a sheer delight from A to Z.
In twenty-six alliterative couplets, Steve Martin conjures up much more than mere apples and zebras. Instead we meet Horace the hare, whose hairdo hides hunchbacks, and Ollie the owl, who owed Owen an oboe. Roz Chast contributes the perfect visual settings for Martin’s zany two-liners. Her instantly recognizable drawings are packed with humorous touches both broad and subtle.
At the moment, Steve Martin is in Paris shooting the next Pink Panther film. (I know this because Alfred Molina will be joining him in the film soon, and he’ll stop off in NYC to record lines for my film, POE, on his way to Paris.) Martin also has an autobiography coming out, Born Standing Up, due out in November.
Garrett Gilchrist continues to work on his recobbled version of Dick Williams’ prime opus, The Thief and the Cobbler. You can read about Garrett’s dedication to this film and to other works by Dick Williams at the forum on his site.
Unfortunately, YouTube has removed the video from their site that Garrett had posted last year. He’d put up The Thief in several parts. This gave you a good view of the entire workcut of the film, prior to the completion Bond company’s halt of the film. They’d pulled it out of the drawing hands of Dick Williams. This labor of love was completed in a truncated way, turned into a musical, and dumped on the market to fail.
Perhaps, the unremittant work of Garrett can bring us a version of the film.
on 04 Aug 2007 at 12:14 pm 1.Ward said …
I’ve heard that Disney might be working on getting a definitive version of the film put together finally. But you didn’t hear it from me.
on 04 Aug 2007 at 1:53 pm 2.Steve said …
It would be good of Disney to do that, since they ripped off carloads of character and background art direction for their “Aladdin” film at a time when they temporarily had Williams’ “Thief” picture in their posession, having promised Williams that if he’d direct their “Roger Rabbit” animation, they’d release his opus. Well, they didn’t. The Pixar guys would know enough to right that early 90′s corporate wrong. When the truncated, hackwork-abridged version of “Thief” finally hit theaters, audiences thought “Aladdin” had done much of it first, when it was the other way around. Jafar’s character design and the cave of wonders owe a great deal to Williams’ original source material.