The S&V Interview

During a time when movies were made entirely by hand, Ray Harryhausen knew better than anyone how to make the most spectacular cinematic creatures come to life. Inspired, like so many, by the original King Kong, Harryhausen honed his filmmaking skills on a variety of short subjects before he tackled his first feature film, Mighty Joe Young, working alongside Kong's stop-motion maestro Willis O'Brien. For you kids reading at home, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of moving one or more specially designed models a precise fraction of an inch for each frame of film. Do it perfectly 24 times in a row (which can take a full day or more), and you've created one second of a movie. Along the way, Harryhausen even invented the Dynamation technique to more realistically combine his creations with live-action backgrounds, and his work became the gold standard that continues to stoke Hollywood's collective imagination. His 1957 black-and-white, monster-attacks-Rome opus 20 Million Miles to Earth was colorized and released on Blu-ray disc, the first Harryhausen title in high def, along with a new DVD boxed set that adds colorized special editions of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, all from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

One of those great New York actors who just brings a smile to audiences' faces, the ever-affable Danny Aiello has been in front of the camera for more than 30 years with a string of memorable supporting and starring roles, and even an Oscar nomination for 1989's Do the Right Thing. He's also been in front of the microphone as an accomplished singer, and he's now behind the scenes with his own production company, Revolution Earth. Their first film, Shorty, shares the inspirational tale of a very special lifelong football fan at an impossibly friendly, small Southern college town. Shorty is now available as part of Mill Creek Entertainment's Reel Indies line, which showcases movies from smaller studios.