angryclown
Jingang
This is one of the few Japanese martial art clips that I like.
I don't think there's anything particularly relevant to what we do there, I just like to watch it. Don Angier was a beast, and he only took a few students in his garage, so by-and-large what he did in seminars was with people who trained adjacent arts, but weren't his regular students.
I met Don Angier in the late 90s, when a friend and I went and watched him teach a seminar in Dallas, TX. My friend and I went up to meet him during a break, and when he found out we were theater guys, he started telling us about how after he retired from being an undercover cop, he got interested in makeup and special effects for movies. He went to a shop in LA and asked if he could work there for free helping out with whatever, and in exchange they let him learn and stay after hours to work on whatever he wanted. He was doing some stuff one night when a producer walked in and started checking out his work. The producer liked it, and asked if Don wanted to work on his movie. Don said he would love to, but he was just a guy and wasn't even in the union, so he wouldn't be allowed to. The way a lot of trade unions work is that you can only hire someone from outside the union if no one in the union can or wants to do the work. So this producer had his people call every makeup artist in the union and ask them if they wanted to do a movie with a young director and a bunch of kids for several weeks in the desert. Predictably, they all said no, and Don was inducted into the union so he could do the movie. As it turns out, that young director was Stephen Spielberg, and the movie with a bunch of kids in the desert was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Later on, Don got a job as a makeup artist for The Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno. He said Lou was a sweet guy, but about as smart as a pile of rocks. They kept having problems shooting scenes where the Hulk comes smashing through a wall, but Lou would miss his cue because he couldn't figure out which was the break-away wall. As a simple solution, they put a sign on it that said "Breakaway Wall." Naturally, they had to move the sign when it was time to shoot the scene, and naturally, Lou broke in through the non-breakaway wall that they had moved the sign to. There were lots of other funny stories about Lou, as well.
Being young and dumb, we didn't realize it, but I think the seminar organizers got kind of pissed because Don spent like an hour telling us stories during what was supposed to be a 5 minute break. It's a fun memory, both talking to Don and seeing his amazing skill. He could do a lot of the things in live action that the "chi masters" ape for gullible audiences nowadays, with the difference being he did them to skilled people he didn't know, and could teach exactly why and how it worked, as well as how it related to the broader art as a meaningful skills (this was before youtube and social media).
I met Don Angier in the late 90s, when a friend and I went and watched him teach a seminar in Dallas, TX. My friend and I went up to meet him during a break, and when he found out we were theater guys, he started telling us about how after he retired from being an undercover cop, he got interested in makeup and special effects for movies. He went to a shop in LA and asked if he could work there for free helping out with whatever, and in exchange they let him learn and stay after hours to work on whatever he wanted. He was doing some stuff one night when a producer walked in and started checking out his work. The producer liked it, and asked if Don wanted to work on his movie. Don said he would love to, but he was just a guy and wasn't even in the union, so he wouldn't be allowed to. The way a lot of trade unions work is that you can only hire someone from outside the union if no one in the union can or wants to do the work. So this producer had his people call every makeup artist in the union and ask them if they wanted to do a movie with a young director and a bunch of kids for several weeks in the desert. Predictably, they all said no, and Don was inducted into the union so he could do the movie. As it turns out, that young director was Stephen Spielberg, and the movie with a bunch of kids in the desert was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Later on, Don got a job as a makeup artist for The Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno. He said Lou was a sweet guy, but about as smart as a pile of rocks. They kept having problems shooting scenes where the Hulk comes smashing through a wall, but Lou would miss his cue because he couldn't figure out which was the break-away wall. As a simple solution, they put a sign on it that said "Breakaway Wall." Naturally, they had to move the sign when it was time to shoot the scene, and naturally, Lou broke in through the non-breakaway wall that they had moved the sign to. There were lots of other funny stories about Lou, as well.
Being young and dumb, we didn't realize it, but I think the seminar organizers got kind of pissed because Don spent like an hour telling us stories during what was supposed to be a 5 minute break. It's a fun memory, both talking to Don and seeing his amazing skill. He could do a lot of the things in live action that the "chi masters" ape for gullible audiences nowadays, with the difference being he did them to skilled people he didn't know, and could teach exactly why and how it worked, as well as how it related to the broader art as a meaningful skills (this was before youtube and social media).
