shorts
Your Chariot Awaits
Extreme sports enthusiasts and movie buffs have joined forces to recreate one of cinema’s most famous moments — Ben-Hur’s edge-of-your-seat chariot race.
Last September, close to 300,000 people jammed into the Stade de France outside Paris to witness Ben-Hur: Bigger than the Legend, a five-night extravaganza starring 500 actors and extras that climaxed with the recreation of the 1959 film’s epic race, complete with six chariots and dozens of horses.
But don’t think that spectacle was an anomaly — chariot racing has gone global:
• Swede Stellan Lind is obsessed with Ben-Hur, to the point where he convinced the Jordan Tourism Board to fund races twice a day for tourists visiting an ancient Roman hippodrome near the town of Jerash. Lind even tracked down a prop man who worked on Ben-Hur (and who had a few of the chariots from the film stored away in Rome) to help design the new chariots.
• From Leeds to Shropshire to Northumberland, you’ll find countless English summer festivals featuring chariot racing (that’s of course if it’s not raining in Britannia).
• While recovering from an injury, Brazilian farmer Luiz Augusto Alves de Oliveira repeatedly watched Ben-Hur and swore he would race chariots when he recovered — and he does, every few weeks in the fall and winter on his ranch. He’s planning to expand his racing circuit across Brazil. —Ingrid Randoja
ARTIFACT
This month’s objet de film: The Indiana Jones 4 set
Steven Spielberg’s up to his old tricks, keeping the plot details of the fourth Indiana Jones movie entirely under wraps. As we go to press, one carefully orchestrated pic of Harrison Ford as an elder Indy is all that’s officially been released.
But unless you’re shooting on a private lot, you can’t keep everything a secret.
|
A shot from the set of Indiana Jones 4 in New Haven, Connecticut
|
These shots of the film’s New Haven, Connecticut, set were taken by fan Mitchell Hallock, who actively campaigned to be an extra in the film via his MySpace page. Unfortunately it didn’t work, but Hallock has been visiting the set — College and Chapel Streets, which border Yale University, have been dressed to look like the 1950s — and reporting about it on MySpace.
“The actual Yale campus is sectioned off too because they’re going into some historical places like the rare books library, the dining hall — they kind of turned it into a room in a Harry Potter movie and he’s going to be driving his motorcycle through there,” says Hallock over his cellphone while watching Ford’s stunt double ride his motorcycle up and down Chapel Street. The real Ford is reportedly inside Yale shooting a classroom scene.
So what clues can we gather from these storefronts? “Well, Brody was the name of his friend, played by [the late] Denholm Elliott,” says Hallock, “so maybe he gave up being a professor and became a barber.”
|
Hallock also noticed a bridal theme running through several of the storefronts — wedding gowns in one, a wedding cake in another.
The plot thickens.
“Karen Allen, who played Indiana Jones’s love interest in the first movie is supposed to have been spotted in town, little rumours are popping up on local radio stations,” says Hallock. “She lives up in Massachusetts I guess, which isn’t too far…. So I thought maybe they’re going to be walking down the street and thinking about getting married, ’cause I guess Shia LaBeouf’s playing his illegitimate son, and she’s the mom.”
Maybe. The way Spielberg likes to keep a lid on things it’ll be May 2008 —when the film is released — before we know for sure. —Marni Weisz