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The Man Who Foretold the Future

Roger Ebert

By Roger Ebert / March 6th, 1988

Los Angeles, California – A 1982 documentary narrated by the late Orson Welles has become an overnight hit at California video rental stores, where customers are willing to pay up to $6 a night to view a prediction that California will be destroyed by an earthquake in May 1988.

The movie, named “The Man Who Foretold the Future,” was produced by television tycoon David L. Wolper nearly six years ago, and languished in oblivion. It uses old newsreel footage and scenes from Hollywood and foreign features to illustrate the prophecies of the medieval scholar Nostradamus.

Welles, looking appropriately solemn and posed with a cigar and world globe in an opulent library, narrates the story of Nostradamus. And there is footage shot especially for this film showing that when the scholar’s body was dug up two centuries after his death, he wore a plaque carrying the exact date of his exhumation.

In the video, Nostradamus is said to have predicted the rise and fall of Napoleon and Hitler, as well as the atomic bomb, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and World War III, which he believed will start in 1994.

But for Californians, it is the earthquake prophecy that has made the tape a hot item on the rental circuit. Welles doesn’t beat around the bush: A fire from the center of the Earth will cause the quakes, and “Nostradamus has given us the exact month,” he intones, “and the year: May 1988.”

Sales clerks at the busy 20/20 Video Store on La Cienega Boulevard told me the tape is renting like crazy, and the overnight fee has been raised to $6, reflecting the demand. Spokesmen for Warner Bros. Home Video confirm that “The Man Who Foretold the Future” has emerged as a surprise hit from their backlist.

At the end of the film, Wolper adds a footnote saying that the producers “do not agree with any of the prophecies.”

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Public Edition #5

Roger Ebert

This is a special free sample of the Newsletter members receive weekly. It contains content gathered from several past issues and reflects the diversity of what you’ll find inside the Ebert Club. For Roger’s invitation to the Club, go HERE.

“There is a stubbornness about me that can never bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Sauce for the goose

Roger Ebert

My video tours of London, Cambridge and York

Roger Ebert

I was so surprised to find this on You Tube. I hosted several segments of the “Focus on Britain” series in the 1980s. It was produced by the British Tourist Authority. I haven’t seen this in more than 25 years.

…and then, a month later, this turned up! I’d never seen it. I take the reader on the route traced by my book The Perfect London Walk. With an introduction by Sir MIchael Caine, no less. When a reader found his and told me about it, it had less than 100 hits, perhaps because the title didn’t tempt Google.

West Virginia 8th grade test in 1931

Roger Ebert

To take the test, open this file: tests.pdf

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Hot Tickets: “Lovelace” and “Before Midnight”

Michał Oleszczyk

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s “Lovelace” tells the story of the eponymous porn star who stunned the world with her sexual talents in “Deep Throat” (1972), only to pay a dear price for her brief flash of celebrity. Linda Lovelace, as played by Amanda Seyfried, was a love-hungry, innocent young girl led astray by Chuck Traynor, a manipulative pimp of a husband, whose affection quickly turned into exploitation.

Dancing the Sundance sadhu dance

Why is it that the culture surrounding art is so far removed from the process of making that art? I suspect this week is hell for many filmmakers here. The world you have to exist in as a great artist (one that values the interior over the exterior, the spiritual over the corporeal) is directly opposed the world you have to exist in to get your movie made. I wonder how many other people here are wondering what’s wrong with them. How many people are pretending they love partying in order to not feel like a weirdo.

All hooked: Porn addiction and computer chess

Michał Oleszczyk

The goodies are in! After a slow start, Sundance Film Festival 2013 has begun to offer real discoveries, even if the wait for that elusive game-changing masterpiece is by no means over. Still, there’s stuff to enjoy in Park City and appetites seem pleasantly whetted.

Fresh cinematic air at 7,000 ft.

Today at Sundance I wandered aimlessly around a supermarket picking up different cheeses and putting them back down. I can never decide on a brie.

Cheese-less I journeyed to a bustling main street (a very steep hill) where altitude-acclimated rich ladies breezed by me in furry hats and sunglasses. They were having a good time.

Slippery Slopes in Park City

Michał Oleszczyk

At night, the ski slopes of Park City, Utah, are lit so beautifully they look like screens awaiting a projection from the sky. A moviegoer attending Sundance Film Festival couldn’t wish for a better backdrop for a long trek home after the final movie of the day is over. Even if the film happened to be lousy, those huge mid-air patches of white seem to hint that the good stuff is yet to come.

A couple too frail to last?

Michał Oleszczyk

At Sundance, going to the movies is a way of taking shelter from the surrounding snow and cold, and I find it amusing to see scores of cinephiles arguing about movies in their full winter attire. It’s as if skiing wasn’t enough: the real fun over here is to slide down the slopes of filmmakers’ visions — even if every now and then pain and bruises may result.

A comedy beyond time and space

Paul Rudd walked by me on Main Street in Park City wearing reflective sunglasses so I couldn’t see if his eyes could see that my eyes saw him and were staring. I knew it was him from the way he walked. I can recognize a gait a mile away. But I didn’t know yet that “Prince Avalanche” was a masterpiece or I could’ve had a good conversation starter.

Disney magic: The terror of constant entertainment

Michał Oleszczyk

The Disney mystique is a secular religion so global, powerful and self-contained — not to mention litigious — that it practically courts desecration. Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow,” which just premiered at Sundance and is unlikely to come to a theater near you any time soon, is the boldest act of cinematic violation at least since the “Mickey Mouse Club” finale of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (in which scores of American soldiers in Vietnam adopted the show’s anthem as a deranged battle cry).

Sundance New Frontier: The Volcano

“Eyjafjallalokull” is a stunning and moving video art installation that played at Sundance in the “New Frontier” art exhibition space. I visited the piece several times. Nicolas Boritch, director of the AntiVJ visual label and producer of “Eyjafjallalokull” (“The Volcano” for short) wants to put viewers in a space where “they just forget where they are and they forget about understanding anything because we want to leave a lot of space for the audience to create their own story or to find whatever they want to find.”