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Batman: The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight

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More from the Memorial August 26th, 2007

We’ve recently been drawn to this impres­sive post at the Super­Hero­Hype forums by ChicageauxTiger:

This was the gen­eral scene of the shoot:

Con­tinue read­ing for the spoil­ers. Read the rest of this entry »

Impending Implosion: August 30th August 26th, 2007

A few weeks ago we reported about an upcom­ing and expen­sive action event — the implo­sion of Brach Candy fac­tory site. The ever reli­able Hol­ly­wood Chicago are back with more juicy gos­sip con­cern­ing the nature of the event and most impor­tantly — a date.

The new date is Thurs­day, Aug. 30. It is sched­uled to hap­pen between 10:30 a.m. and noon.

This will be two build­ings. The larger build­ing is to be filled with flam­ma­ble liq­uids and the sec­ond smaller, four-story build­ing will be imploded. This is the last big stunt for the film to be shot.

And to relay the appended infor­ma­tion, the address of this site is 401 N. Cicero Ave. in Chicago::


View Larger Map

HC’s lat­est post also dis­closes the nature of this build­ing. See­ing the pic­ture will reveal the spoiler, fol­low this dan­ger­ous link to con­tinue.

Pictures from the Memorial August 26th, 2007

This shoot­ing event was a big occa­sion, and as expected, a lot of peo­ple were there to take pic­tures. Yippee. One of the best col­lec­tions of pic­tures of The Dark Knight Memo­r­ial ser­vice comes from flickr user kedziers in his Gotham City set.

Here are a few select and super high res­o­lu­tion (2mb each) pic­tures pro­vided under the Cre­ative Com­mons license that I have picked out, fol­lowed by the tra­di­tional flickr slide-show gallery:

Our sec­ond set comes from tiffanyjbt. Here we can see Chris­t­ian Bale, as Bruce Wayne, rid­ing a Ducati:

A third col­lec­tion comes from nailtechnician’s efforts:

You can find even more here and we’ll prob­a­bly keep updat­ing this post with more and more links as they come in.

Let’s get some old videos in here too whilst I am at it — these show the street level fire and a heli­copter fly-by:

August 24th Set Reports August 26th, 2007

First up, Lon­nie set in this nice lit­tle spoiler-filled report from August 25th:

I was at the film­ing for The Dark Knight yes­ter­day, they were film­ing a memo­r­ial ser­vice for an impor­tant char­ac­ter who dies, Police Com­misoner Loeb. There was a stage set up in front of “City Hall” with a pic­ture with a wreath around it. The pic­ture was of Loeb. Dur­ing film­ing of the scene, they would shoot of a gun and the crowd would scat­ter. No prin­ci­pal char­ac­ters there when I was there, but I hear Eck­hart was there earlier.

Patti later wrote to con­firm this and give a few more inter­est­ing details:

Went down­town 8/24 to check out the film­ing. We saw them set up (around 730) for a memo­r­ial ser­vice for the police com­mis­sioner and pos­si­bly Har­vey Dent. (We could not get a good look at the pic­ture dis­played on the stage). When they were ready to start to film , the streets were cleared of onlook­ers. There were a lot of police extras there. Very hard to see from a block away. This part was filmed right in front of the Board of Trade. We left and came back around 1130. We walked around to the back of the set were peo­ple were allowed to stand but they were very strict on no pic­tures. We saw Gary Old­man. The police horses were there (actual horses from a Wis­con­sin sta­ble) and police for the 21 gun salute which we just missed. They broke for lunch around 12noon.

Drove past (my hus­band is not into this adven­ture) Brach’s today 8/25. They were work­ing on the front of the hospital.

As per usual, run the mouse over the area above to view the spoilers.

Dark Knight August 23rd Filming Report August 23rd, 2007

Rory_bat, from the Super­Hero­Hype forums has been on loca­tion recently for the lat­est TDK shoot,

He had this to say:

Alright, I am sure you guys already know where they were shoot­ing today: Berghoff’s (I think I spelled that right), some kind of old and classy restaurant/bar type. The crew had vehi­cles all on Adams and the adjoin­ing streets. The first time I walked by early on in the day they were shoot­ing inside. They had some screens up over the exte­rior and I could hear them yell “rolling”. I didn’t know who was inside at this point. Out­side there was a large bus that had “Cor­erc­tions” writ­ten on the side of it. It was a GPD bus, pre­sum­ably for haul­ing off pris­on­ers of a sort. There were also a few GPD extras milling around. I walked fur­ther down toward State St. and saw all kinds of GPD and Gotham cars wait­ing to be used. I fig­ured some exte­rior stuff would be hap­pen­ing later. I wasn’t wrong.

Around 2:30 or 3:00 I made my way back and sure enough, there was quite a bit of action. There was a whole crowd of extras dressed in suits, they seemed to be reporters or maybe just onlook­ers. In front of this crowd was a GPD offi­cer holdig a shot­gun (very cool). Some of the extras were pre­tend­ing to shiver..don’t for­gett the fall set­ting. It was amus­ing to watch. A bit fur­ther down in front of Berghoff’s was were the good stuff was hap­pen­ing. Nolan and co. were shoot­ing a scene where GPD and Lt. Gor­don escort Maroni and his goons into the cor­rec­tions bus, bust­ing them. I stood across the street and watched (tak­ing pics and got video of one whole take). Eric Roberts looked great as Maroni, cuffed and all. After each take they would wipe the sweat off of Old­man, Roberts and the extras, attempt­ing to keep the atmos­phere of Fall in place (cer­tainly tough with today’s weather).

Shots from the film­ing:

Upcoming Chicago Street Closures August 23rd, 2007

Hol­ly­wood­Chicago have posted up the lat­est set of street clo­sures as a result of The Dark Knight film­ing schedule:

“The Dark Knight” Street Clo­sures

Wednes­day, Aug. 22 (weather per­mit­ting)

2 to 4 p.m.
Heli­copter hov­er­ing at 515 N. McClurg Ct.
Inter­mit­tent traf­fic con­trol of Grand between Peshtigo and Colum­bus
Inter­mit­tent traf­fic con­trol of Peshtigo between Grand and Illinois

Thurs­day, Aug. 23
5 a.m. to 8 p.m. (no clo­sures; park­ing only)
Adams between Wabash and Dear­born
Wabash between Adams and Van Buren
Wabash between Adams and Mon­roe
Dear­born between Adams and Monroe

Thurs­day, Aug. 23
8 to 9 p.m.
Heli­copter over Chicago River
Traf­fic con­trol of Lake Shore and Colum­bus Street bridges
Traf­fic con­trol of Wacker between Michi­gan and Columbus

Fri­day, Aug. 25
5 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Full clo­sure of LaSalle Street between Jack­son and Adams
Full clo­sure of Quincy between LaSalle and Clark
Park­ing: Wells between Jack­son and Monroe

Fri­day, Aug. 25 (weather per­mit­ting)
9 to 11 p.m.
Heli­copter hov­er­ing at 515 N. McClurg Ct.
Inter­mit­tent traf­fic con­trol of Grand between Peshtigo and Colum­bus
Inter­mit­tent traf­fic con­trol of Peshtigo between Grand and Illi­nois
(Sat­ur­day and Sun­day as alter­nate dates)

Sat­ur­day, Aug. 25 and Sun­day, Aug. 26
5 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Full clo­sure of LaSalle between Jack­son and Madi­son
Full clo­sure of Jack­son between LaSalle and Clark
Full clo­sure of Adams between LaSalle and Clark
Full clo­sure of Mon­roe between LaSalle and Clark

And to sparkle this post with pic­tures, thanks to Sarah Lewert’s flickr:

Justice League Movie Fiasco August 22nd, 2007

Recently a lot of “will they wont they” dis­cus­sion has been aired about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a Jus­tice League movie; ide­ally recruit­ing Chris­t­ian Bale as Bat­man and Bran­don Routh as Super­man — amongst oth­ers. These rumors were orig­i­nally fuelled by two Vari­ety arti­cles, the first reveal­ing that Warner Bros. were look­ing into the movie’s development,

 “The Jus­tice League of Amer­ica has been a peren­nial favorite for gen­er­a­tions of fans, and we believe their appeal to film audi­ences will be as strong and diverse as the char­ac­ters themselves.”

And the sec­ond enti­tled “Jus­tice League film gets script”.

Husband-wife writ­ing duo Kieran Mul­roney and Michele Mul­roney turned in a first draft that had Warner Bros. suits actu­ally smiling

How would this film­ing sched­ule work in-between TDK and Man of Steel? Would the cor­rect cast be present? These are the ques­tions being asked. The IESB had a chance to talk to Chris­t­ian Bale, he stated cat­e­gor­i­cally that he was not involved in the adap­ta­tion and nor had he been approached. And later Moviehole con­firmed that the WB are look­ing for an all new cast and that the movie was “full steam ahead” with cast­ing start­ing imme­di­ately. They also men­tioned an assigned direc­tor, George Miller (Happy Feet meets Mad Max).

All this seemed a lit­tle con­fus­ing until the final and fit­ting piece of the puz­zle unearthed, how this could be pos­si­ble with­out dis­may­ing fans and whilst aim­ing for an early 2008 pro­duc­tion sched­ule. The IESB have a num­ber of some­what reli­able sources stat­ing that the JLA movie shall in fact be a CGI/Motion Cap­ture film (e.g. sim­i­lar to The Polar Express or more recently Beowulf). This still needs some clo­sure but it all makes per­fect sense. These films tra­di­tion­ally take slightly longer to cre­ate so we could see a late 2009, sum­mer 2010 release.

Justice League of America Team

Antony Michael Hall and his Dark Knight tale August 22nd, 2007

Long has it been rumored that Mr. Hall, made famous for his appear­ances in those eight­ies films, was to play the infa­mous Edward Nygma, also known as The Rid­dler. Recent rumors, and if true, spoil­ers, have now sur­faced to debunk that the­ory — paint­ing the new role in an entirely dif­fer­ent light. This exclu­sive comes from the reli­ably informed Hol­ly­wood­Chicago.

These are spoil­ers, if you don’t want to know the scores, look away now (or just don’t hover to reveal the text):

Hall’s char­ac­ter is intensely jeal­ous of Bruce Wayne. He even has an exactly match­ing Lam­borgh­ini Murcielago.

The char­ac­ter learns of Bruce Wayne’s true iden­tity as Bat­man and plans to use the GCN to blow the whis­tle on him. My source describes Hall’s char­ac­ter not as a vil­lain but as an antagonist.

Of course, the Joker is the true vil­lain. Out of fear that the Joker will lose the object of his game-playing affec­tion, he sets out to stop Hall’s char­ac­ter by call­ing in a bomb threat to the TV station.

The bomb threat causes wide­spread havoc. The move is designed to steal the atten­tion off the char­ac­ter so he can’t issue the Batman-revealing report.

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