SKY CAPTAIN AND THE HOLLYWOOD OF TOMORROW: I loved 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and saw it twice in the theater; longtime readers of my friend Steve Green’s VodkaPundit blog will recall the Sky Captain-themed masthead that Stacy Tabb designed for him that summer. Today, a whole host of Hollywood mega-productions and even DIY fan movies such as Star Trek: Axanar have taken Sky Captain’s concept of green screens and computer-generated virtual sets and have run with it big time. In a new article, the London Telegraph looks back and asks whatever happened to its creators? “Over a decade ago, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow laid the foundations for today’s effects-driven blockbusters. Why haven’t its creators made a film since?”
Kevin Conran, and by his inference his brother, seem unusual in the realm of Hollywood’s sad stories in that they don’t really blame other people for their misfortune. Every explanation given by Conran points to something he and his brother got wrong, or failed to understand about the Hollywood game. Conran never once suggests anyone else is culpable. Trying to get him to talk about his and his brother’s achievements is like trying to get a straight answer out of a politician. He just can’t blow his own trumpet. When the subject of the greatest endorsement of his career comes up, that call from George Lucas and the subsequent summit, he evades the question and paints himself as the loser.
“It was entirely surreal and continues to be so,” says Conran. “It feels like something that didn’t really happen… George Lucas personally invited us, flew us up there, put us in his place for a long weekend, with all these amazing luminaries, who were genuinely interested in hearing what we had to say. It was unbelievable. I remember the first morning we went down to breakfast. We walked into the dining room and there’s this big table in the middle and it’s George and James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis and Brad Bird, Caleb Deschanel, Robert Rodriguez to name some.
“Kerry and I were so intimidated we went and sat at a separate table. We didn’t know what to do! They all turned around, almost en masse, and were like, ‘What are you idiots doing over there? Get over here!’ Then I’m sitting next to Robert Zemeckis.”
Conran laughs, but then goes quiet for a few seconds and sighs. “Much to my eternal embarrassment we never stayed in touch with any of those guys.”
This may be part of what kept the Conrans out of the Hollywood playground, their inability and discomfort with hustling or acting as if they belong. The brothers have never been good at self-promotion. In a New York Times interview from the set of Sky Captain, the reporter noted that the first two things Kerry said to him were, “I’m shy” and “I am basically an amorphous blob of nothing”.
Read the whole thing. Woody Allen famously said, “80 percent of success is just showing up.” Perhaps the other 20 percent is acting you belong there in the first place.