Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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_ EtCetera Hollow Man from page 6 girls, so I don’t really fantasize about being invisible anymore.” For many early civilizations, legions of supernatural forces acted unseen on people’s lives. In “The Aeneid,” Venus pulls the shades from Aeneas’ eyes so he can see invisible gods fight ing on behalf of the Greeks at Troy. Mythology and folklore are rife with devices that confer invisibility, including Jack the Giant Killer’s cloak, the hel met of Perseus, the Arthurian legend of Luned’s ring — right up to Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak. Shakespeare, Dante and Ben Jonson wrote about fern seed or the quartz heliotrope and their supposed power to make people invisible. Jimmy Stewart’s best buddy in “Harvey” was a 6-foot rab bit invisible to everyone else. Abbott and Costello met the In visible Man in a 1951 comedy. Mia Farrow had invisible es capades in Wbody Allen’s “Alice.” And “Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” starring Chevy Chase, turned the concept into a comic apy capci. In “Hollow Man, audiences see Bacon vanish from skin to oigans and blood vessels to bone, all while his character, Sebastian Caine, writhes in agony on a lab table. After he’s gone, his presence is marked with crafty, creepy computer effects showing Caine as a wispy ghost in mist, a crys talline figure in water, a predator splattered with blood. When he first signed on. Bacon thought he could practi cally phone in his role, since Caine is invisible for most of the movie. For realism in interactions with the other actors, though, director Paul Vferhoeven had Bacon on set the whole time, paint ed blue, green or black so he could be blotted out later and a digitized invisible Caine substituted by computer. In some scenes, Caine is visible as a skinless monster of or gans and sinew. “The complexity of what we did here surpasses anything we did in ‘Starship Troopers,’ where you’re making things that don’t exist and trying to make them fully alive,” Verhoeven * .. said of his 1997 sci-fi war story that featured armies of giant bugs. “To digitally recreate a complete, muscular man went way beyond the amount of detail even that’s necessary to build some thing like a digital dinosaur. ” The appeal of invisible man horror flicks is fear of what can’t be seen, said Ken Graffeo, a home-video marketing ex ecutive at Universal, which is issuing the DVD debut of Rains’ “The Invisible Man” on Aug. 29. “With a monster, you can see it. But the real horror is when you can’t see it, but you know it’s there.” The ring of invisibility pops up repeatedly, from ancient philosophy in Plato’s “Republic” to modem fantasy in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” Platoused the idea of invisibil ity to examine morality, saying anyone with such power would be like a god and could not resist the temptation to do evil. It was that theme that attracted Verhoeven to “Hollow Man.” how tar would you go into evil it you Knew you could get away with it? If the restraints of society were not around you, what would you do?” Verhoeven said. “To see how the shadow takes over the whole personality, so ultimately, only evil is left. That process of deterioration is what I thought was fascinating.” Wells’ 1897 novel brought a sense of science to invisibili ty. The book delved into such practical matters as how to climb stairs when you cannot see your feet, and how an invisible man can eat and remain unseen when the food inside him remains visible until it’s digested. But like “Hollow Man,” “The Invisible Man” novel and movie also examined the megalomania that might accompany invisibility. “There’s a sense of power that comes with invisibility,” said Bill Warren, a science-fiction expert whose books in clude “Keep Witching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the ’50s.” “It’s almost like being a ghost without being dead. This sense of phantom power. You can have an effect on the world with no one knowing who’s causing it. It’s like billionaires you never hear about but who can make things happen the world over. They’re invisible men, in a way.” Look... for the Welcome Back issue of lEhc 0amccock on August 18th j Hey, we're changing our name.... Look for Spotlight in the welcome back issue of UChe C5amccock for all your entertainment news. Aviators Are Back! (Summer Sale Now In Progress?) Fine Living from page 6 disposable income and yet so little disposable time ... to enjoy the fruits of our labor,” Packard said. Fine Living will be aimed at satisfying “the needs of these very time-starved people by providing the best of the best in a number of categories.” The channel will key on five main topics: dining (fine cuisine and spirits), personal transportation (luxury cars, yachts and jets), homes (mansions, ski chalets, antiques), travel (exotic getaways, five-star hotels) and personal fi nance (estate planning, charitable giving). What you are trying to do is grab a demographic that is high-end,” said analyst Derek Baine at Paul Kagan Associates. “It is just a question of how big is that market and how much competition are they going to have from the ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ and some of those programs on E!” Baine guesses Fine Living will find an audience, and could even leverage its cache if it manages a joint ven ture later with some of these upscale magazines it emu lates. Scripps Networks is drawing from the lessons learned j with HGTV, which tapped the do-it-yourself audience of home remodelers, crafters and hobbyists so effectively when it launched in late 1994. Today, HGTV reaches 62 million homes and gets 14 million hits a month on its Web site. i Ken Lowe, who founded HGTV and is now president and chief operating officer of parent company E.W. Scripps, said Fine Living is a logical next step. He compares it to Home Depot’s expansion into EX PO Design Centers, home improvement stores in which stoves are commercial grade and lighting Fixtures can cost thousands. “It is a smaller audience but it is an audience that is growing out of the basic Depot story,” Lowe said. Similarly, he said, Fine Living is “just an extension both economically and taste-wise of the folks who are maybe Home & Garden or rood viewers... and certainly those folks who are already there.” Scripps will be targeting households in the $75,000 and up income brackets. Programming will focus on “profes sional men and women who are adventurous, active, fo cused on quality and service, and tech-savvy,” the network says. Though a smaller audience, it could still represent tens of millions of potential viewers, the network says. And they could lure advertisers who are trying to reach them now, primarily through print media. “The future is about continuing to define passionate audience segments that have sizable advertising and com merce attached to them, and this is certainly one that we think has not been tapped,” Lowe said.