GIALLO?

I was sorta hoping for DARIOARGENTOMOVIEBRE.

This is coming together more quickly than I'd anticipated.

Hmmm...I thought Argento had been filming the last few films in English? That article states GIALLO being his first..how come that seems to be a type-o...

GALLO IS GIALLO! :o

The Italian film industry is in such bad shape that, if Sergio Leone was still alive, he'd probably be announcing SPAGHETTI WESTERN.

It strikes me as funny that Argento is announcing an all-star American movie with an Italian title that 99.9% of Americans won't get, a word that still has to be footnoted in many reviews expressly written for horror movie fans.

Tim,
I had the same reaction to the title and the cast. It's great that Dario can get such names, but I think maybe they're a little "wasted" in that most people stateside will have NO CLUE what this title means. But hey, maybe it will open up Dario to tons of people here that have never heard of him or seen anything of his outside of Suspiria.
But part of me hopes not. I kinda like Dario being a relative unknown here. Makes him more special in a way.
But either way I'm excited about this project, because I love Gallo and Liotta.

With the apparent exception of THE FIVE DAYS IN MILAN (which I haven't seen, but was apparently designed specifically for the Italian market and not for export), Argento has shot all of his movies almost entirely in English. Only the occasional supporting character might be speaking another language on set, or they might be speaking phonetic English that would be post-synced by a different vocal artist later.

Vincent

The brow-furrowingly literal title implies to me that GIALLO will be a Eurocult version of EPIC MOVIE. In which case there will be a scene where the psychopathic killer smokes a doobie and sees a J&B bottle break-dancing.

Vincent Gallo and Ray Liotta? Is this a movie about bad skin?

[whisper]Bad skin. Bad, filthy skin![/whisper]

Maybe it's about hepatitis, hence the title.

Vincent

But doesn't hepatitis just make your eyes yellow? So maybe it could be called "Occhi Gialli"?
I know, I know terrible joke, but it's midnight and I slept 3 hours last night.

When someone figures out nobody in America will understand GIALLO, watch them change the title to JELL-O.

Just as I thought....

I doubt many people had a handle on SUSPIRIA either but that did okay.

There's something sinister and compelling in the word "suspiria" that's lacking, I suspect, in "giallo". I think it's there in "phenomena" as well. "Tenebre" is interesting, but my dull English speaking brain didn't want to invent a pronunciation until I'd actually seen it. They all beat "giallo", though.

Worst of all, if I were an ad guy selling it, I'd have them say the anglicized "gee-AH-lo" on TV, because that sounds creepier to my ear than the proper pronunciation.

Of course, who's to say it won't be 'translated' as SLASHER, or some other Ameri-centric rough equivalent?

That will probably be the case.

And as far as words like SUSPIRIA, PHENOMENA, and TENEBRE, only SUSPIRIA was released theatrically in the US under that title - and to very little success at the time, I might add. PHENOMENA and TENEBRE had their titles changed and received only the slightest theatrical release. Don't look for GIALLO at your local multi-plex.

I really want this to go out as UNSANE IN THE MEMBRANE

Or DEEP RED 3! (SUSPIRIA was released in Japan as DEEP RED 2.)

I think the Weinsteins should pick it up and call it SIX FILM REELS ON A DUSTY SHELF. :ph43r:

I, of course, knew that. I just got to babbling about my own more dull-witted impressions of the titles as they're now accepted. As it goes, I also find "phenomena" to have a more unsettling sound than "creepers" and find every word in the world to be more effective than "unsane", no matter the intended effect.

I recall this debate running on a thread about Mother of Tears and it's distribution - Has that been settled yet? I'm not sure I've been paying enough attention - but am I seriously supposed to expect this at my local multiplex by any title at all. I see the American distibution friendly star names, but they still fail, to my eye, as multiplex filling marquee type names.

I can see that "an Argento movie" could, with the right campaign, be a solid art house hit, but count me in skeptical that any of them would do too well in wide release.

Woah- SUSPIRIA wasn't a success in the U.S.? I thought the legend was that it was a surprise success, which inspired Fox to invest in INFERNO?

Vincent

I've always been a little confused by that issue personally.

One of the issues raised in all of this for me is that there seems to exist a continuing theory that shooting for English is helpful for the international success of Italian genre cinema, which I'm sure was true at the peak there in the '60s and '70s, but I can't help seeing it as working against them at this point. The best hope today would be in the art house/film geek limited release audience.

I know the issue of shooting in English and most or all of the sound being done in ADR anyway but some of the actors being shot in other languages, etc. is the one that causes me the most trouble when I'm trying to turn people on to Italian movies. And without the kind of drive-in circuits, the best distribution system in place for these kinds of movies would be the art house circuit, in which being in Italian and subtitled would seem an advantage over that confusion.

I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.

SUSPIRIA barely got a theatrical release in most of the country as far as I remember. I know it never opened where I lived until a arthouse theater booked it for one week in 1980 or '81 (in 4-track mag!). I assume it played OK in some of the major cities in 1977, but by no stretch of the imagination would I ever call it a boxoffice success. Even to this day, the majority of the population has never even heard of it.

So basically, the oft-repeated tale that SUSPIRIA did well in the U.S. is a fabrication?

Vincent

That's a great point, Neil. One of the things "modern" audience tend to chuckle at in the Argento films is the stilted dialogue and the random off-putting post-synced supporting voices. If he would shoot in Italian, I wonder if the subtitled versions would get that same response.

Vincent

I've never heard that "tale" myself. And "did well" is a pretty flexible term anyway. I'm sure the limited engagements of the film made a little bit of money for whatever screens they played at, but runaway success or blockbuster status would definitely be a tall-tale. Maybe someone here has access to actual numbers and playdates from the day. I would be very interested in seeing exactly how many screens around the country actually showed it because it was definitely not an elaborate wide release. Not even close.

My comments have no bearing on the merits of the actual film, of course. I just think Fox may have been a bit busier dealing with getting STAR WARS into more theaters than worrying about SUSPIRIA.

Would YELLOWJACKET be a more accurate title than YELLOW or GIALLO? I believe the books were called “yellow jackets” back then.

You never heard that SUSPIRIA was considered to be successful in the U.S.? Really? I've read that many times myself, Jeff. The generally accepted view that I've been aware of for all these years is that SUSPIRIA was a surprise hit for Fox and for that reason, they funded INFERNO. I'm not even trying to compare its hit status to STAR WARS, but the accepted legend is that SUSPIRIA was considered a surprise box-office success in the U.S. Maybe that is indeed a bald-faced lie, but it's still been the story for many, many years, and I'm surprised you've never heard SUSPIRIA referred to as having been a success in the U.S.

Vincent

Nope, I just know what I saw and heard at the time. I actually happened to be alive at the time. It seems like a lot of history gets rewritten over the years, a lot of times by people not even born yet. It's even worse with the internet where everyone out there is suddenly a journalist and I've read a lot of erroneous information about such stuff. If you have solid figures and actual data that SUSPIRIA was some sort of runaway success, I'd love to see it and be proven wrong. If not, I'll take all the stories you've read over all these years with a huge grain of salt.

EDIT:

And as I said before, "Success" is a very fluent term that can mean practically anything. Maybe Fox released the film in ten theaters and it did great in those ten theaters. For such a small investment, it was a "boxoffice success". Personally, that sounds great, but it didn't do me much good at the time when the film never opened in a 3-state radius. All I had was that Cinefantastique review for three years until the local repertory theater acquired it in 1980. So it could all be how you interpret that kind of "success".

I'd like to hear other people's experience with the film at the time. Did it open wide in your city? Did you go see it? How long did it play? It is possible that certain areas got a big push whereas others got absolutely nothing.

It should also be remembered that 20th was so embarrassed by SUSPIRIA that they dusted off their old International Classics beard to distribute it, and it was also distributed in cut form. It came out with a nicely creepy TV spot (the girl's hair being combed, turning around to reveal a skull - "Roses are red, violets are blue / And the iris is a flower / That will be the end of you!"). It played locally for a couple of weeks, and prints remained in circulation at grindhouses and drive-ins till the color on the prints faded. I saw it at a Chicago grindhouse in 1979, very faded, paired with Al Adamson's DEATH DIMENSION (which I believe was shown as THE KILL FACTOR). My memory is that it did okay, but certainly not OMEN-sized business (I thought of THE OMEN as an Argento-like giallo in Catholic dress). The reviews were not so hot; I still remember being taken aback that CINEFANTASTIQUE, of all magazines, was unsupportive. Mick Garris reviewed it for CFQ, a review in which he grudgingly allowed that Argento could conceivably make a good movie if only he would "knock off the bullshit." And today -- they're colleagues!

I assume there were other cases, but I've only seen the International Classics logo on one other Fox release: Michael Cacoyannis' THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT.

Now With Added Bullshit™!

What's extra amusing is that for a very short time, there was the "20th Century Fox International Classics" branding logo that was used for foreign film pickups like PIAF: THE EARLY YEARS, arthouse movies like REUBEN, REUBEN and EATING RAOUL, and oddities like ZIGGY STARDUST. Way to blur the line further, boys.

Does it really matter what it's called? It's not like it's going to play wide nationally, right? GIALLO is better than say, a more generic "SLASHER" or a less threatening, "YELLOW", or whatever.

Though I think seeing ARGENTO GIALLO GALLO LIOTTA on a poster would be eye strainingly vowel crazy.

Say it five times fast!
:blink:
:wacko:

Fangoria.com has an interview up with 1/2 of the GIALLO screenwriting team:

http://www.fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=5779

Alan Jones at DARK DREAMS is reporting that GIALLO is about a killer with Hepatitis C, which leaves his skin yellow in color and similarly jaundices his view of the world. So the title has a double meaning -- at least in Italy.

Wonder if they'll just call it JAUNDICE here...