Skip to main content

Ivan Reitman’s First Film “Orientation” (1968)

Last night, we sadly learned of the passing of Ivan Reitman, director of many beloved comedies–Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and beyond.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1946–his mother an Auschwitz survivor and his father an underground resistance fighter–Reitman moved to Canada as a young child, where he eventually attended McMaster University. And there he “produced and directed Orientation [in 1968], the most successful student film ever made in Canada,” writes Macleans. “Produced at a cost of $1,800 while Reitman was president of the McMaster University Film Board, Orientation — the story of a freshman during his first week at university — was acquired by Twentieth CenturyFox of Canada as a “featurette” to accompany John And Mary in first-run engagements across the country.” “It earned $15,000 in rentals and continues to be in demand…” You can watch it above, or on McMaster’s website.

For anyone interested in hearing Reitman discuss his development as a filmmaker, we’d recommend listening to his 2014 interview with Marc Maron.

Related Content 

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the National Film Board of Canada

Listen to Bill Murray Lead a Guided Meditation on How It Feels to Be Bill Murray

Bill Murray Explains How a 19th-Century Painting Saved His Life

 



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/ZjBRowr
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more