Little-known screenwriter Tom Benedek tweaked it into the quirky tale of eight retirement home residents, three of them frequent trespassers to a nearby vacant house with an indoor pool. A producer named Lili Fini Zanuck saw something in the story and paid $2,500 for it, developing it into the $17 million project that would be her filmmaking debut. Petersburg Times collected memories of Cocoon in telephone interviews with people who made it happen.Ĭocoon sprang from an unpublished novel by an unknown writer named David Saperstein. This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of St. It's a cinematic time capsule, an artifact of old landmarks and a few regrets. Twenty-five years ago, Cocoon was a retirement community's coup. Games played then by seniors evolved into multigenerational pastimes. Like the movie's cosmically rejuvenated heroes, St. Then something else unexpected happened. After its debut on June 21, 1985, Cocoon became Academy Award-winning confirmation of that image. Petersburg in the early 1980s was the city of green benches, lawn bowling and shuffleboard courts, where retirees spent final days in rickety recreation. Call it typecasting the city's reputation as "God's waiting room" had been sealed years before with a Johnny Carson joke. Petersburg, the extraordinary came from Hollywood, whenthe little movie with an emerging director arrived for 11 weeks of filming, and put the city in the spotlight. "YOU MUST NEVER AT ANY POINT IN YOUR LIFE IGNORE THE POSSIBILITY OF SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY COMING ALONG."ĭIRECTOR RON HOWARD, IN HIS DVD COMMENTARY FOR COCOONįor the fictional Florida retirees in Ron Howard's 1985 film Cocoon, the extraordinary came from outer space - when aliens turned a swimming pool into a fountain of youth.
0 kommentar(er)
