Entertainment In Brief
Forget Halloween, October’s all about baseball for Saw star Tobin Bell. Plus, Buzz’s bust
He’s a killer coach
It’s October, which means two things for Tobin Bell — the release of another Saw movie (Saw VI, on October 23rd, to be precise) and the baseball playoffs. Bell, who plays the franchise’s game-loving serial killer Jigsaw (who died several movies back but lives on via flashbacks and evil protégés), spends the month promoting the movies but wishes he could focus solely on baseball.
“It would be fun to go to some World Series games, but I’m so busy talking to the press that I can’t go,” says the 67-year-old Bell on the line from New York.
Bell was raised in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and grew up a Boston Red Sox fan, but after living in New York for 35 years he’s become a dedicated New York Yankees fan. “I lived through the Billy Martin years, Reggie Jackson, all of those guys,” he says. “There was no way you couldn’t get swept up in the Yankees drama of the ’70s, so I guess you could call me a traitor if you want.”
Bell is not only a fan, he’s a Little League coach who instructs his 13-year-old son’s team. Imagine being a teenage boy and having Jigsaw as your baseball coach, how cool would that be?
“Generally, when we’re on a sports field it doesn’t come up,” he says, “we’re totally immersed in what we’re doing and a lot of these kids haven’t even seen these films. But there are some who have and they come up every once and a while and say something like, ‘Do the voice, do the Jigsaw voice.’”
Bell’s son hasn’t seen any of his dad’s movies, but “he’s seen bits and pieces of them. He will see them when he’s interested in seeing them, but even the trailer on TV was a bit too much, he was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s pretty scary.’”
—Ingrid Randoja
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Artifact
This month’s objet de film
Buzz Lightyear Bust
It may look like an ironic work of kitsch art inspired by the Toy Story movies, but this Buzz Lightyear bust was an integral part of the animation process when the first two Toy Story
films were created in the 1990s.
It’s what Pixar animators call a “Digitizable Sculpt” — a polymer clay
model used to map a character’s face. A technician uses a stylus
attached to a robotic arm to touch the surface of the model along
points defined by that grid. The information is then fed into a
computer and the resulting “mesh” allows animators to move and
manipulate the character’s face.
Not quite to infinity and beyond, but Buzz has been travelling
the world for the past few years as part of the Pixar: 20 Years of
Animation exhibition. He’s currently in Taipei.
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Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are being re-released in theatres this month, in 3D no less, and the brand-new Toy Story 3 (also in 3D) hits screens in June 2010.
—Marni Weisz