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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

James Cameron

Academy-award winning director James Cameron reacts with shock and horror as deranged fan Earl J. Woods presents him with a pile of spec scripts. "What the hell is Finger Puppet Star Trek? Generous Nature? Toilet Chase? Uhhh..."

On the way to work this morning, I happened to run into James Cameron, director of some of my favourite films - The Terminator, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Aliens, etc. Seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I whipped out my portfolio and forced it into the director's hands as he tried to escape...

Actually, that's not what happened. Cameron is in Alberta to learn about the oil sands and to see what he can do to help First Nations peoples affected by the environmental consequences of oil sands development. The First Nations of Fort Chipewan, grateful to Official Opposition Leader David Swann for his interest and promotion of their issues, arranged for Swann to meet with Cameron this morning.

I went along to shoot some photos, and my boss Neil Mackie, knowing what a huge science fiction and film fan I am, had David introduce me to Cameron. I stammered something or other about loving his work, and the director was very gracious indeed in his response to probably the zillionth fan to say something he's heard many, many times before. "Suck them in with a little action and adventure and sell a good message," he said. That describes the Cameron canon, all right.

Personally, I don't like to bother people, especially famous people who I imagine must have to put up with a tremendous amount of nonsense from fans. But I have to admit that I'm grateful to David and Neil for providing me with what was, in truth, a thrilling moment. And I'm grateful to my coworker Tanara for snapping a candid of the moment!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats Earl. Whenever there's a Cameron film featuring someone named Earl, you can now pore over it looking for your influence.

I really like James Cameron's work, I'm just hoping that he's not about to do what I expect he'd going to.

Paul T

"Jeffday's Child" said...

Double Neat-O!

For a while there, I thought your pic was a photoshop fake. I also thought you were framing the shot with Leslie Nielsen. I guess I should clean my glasses more often.

I've always wanted to ask James Cameron how he can write compelling female characters yet he can't seem to sustain a rtelationship with a woman past a few months. For a talent who can create great female roles, he doesn't seem to understand them all that well. Well, who does?

And anyways, like you say, that's a lot of personal questions for a man who is obviously on a mission.

If I were you, I would keep the details of Toilet Chase, ST:TFPM, etc., under wraps as much as possible! Lately, the Toilet Chase and Finger Puppet pages over on JSVB have been getting an unusual number of hits. I've been meaning to mention that to you, since I discovered the stat index that Blogger finally included with my page. Now we can see page hits as well as the basic source of some of them.

I mention all of this, as there are a large number of people who have gained media fame through suing James Cameron over the rights to characters and ideas from his films. He does go through great lengths to find his source material. And he is reported to be working hard on Avatar II... Toilet Chase: Salvation could be right around the corner!

AllanX said...

That's just beyond awesome. I saw John Carpenter's "Escape from New York" a couple weeks ago at the Egyptian in Hollywood with Carpenter in the audience and doing a question and answer afterwards. The BEST part of "Escape from New York", hands down, are the stunning matte paintings of a darkened, destroyed Manhatten. All done by...James Cameron.

Anonymous said...

I thought the best part of EFNY was Snake Plissken's wristwatch.

Paul T

"Jeffday's Child" (a) said...

I thought it was Adrienne Barbeau's dress. Yow!