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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1982 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| Jim Clark founded Silicon Graphics, a cutting-edge company that contributed to the growth of computer imaging and animation in films. | |
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) just beat Tron (1982) into release, to attain the honor of being the first film to use computer-generated images (CGI) to any extent. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), the "Genesis Effect" sequence (the birth and greening of a planet in a one-minute segment) was cinema's first entirely computer-generated (CG) visual effects sequence. This visual effect (created by the Lucasfilm division of Pixar at ILM) marked the first use of a fractal-generated landscape and a particle-rendering system (for the fiery effect) in a film. |
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| Columbia Studios broke the previous record (set for My Fair Lady (1964)) when in 1978, it purchased intellectual property film rights to Annie (1982), to be directed by John Huston, for $9.5 million. | |
| In March 1982, Claus von Bülow was found guilty of twice attempting to murder his socialite wife Sunny von Bülow. In June of 1985, he was granted a new trial and was eventually acquitted on both counts. Reversal of Fortune (1990), starring Best Actor-winning Jeremy Irons, was based on the case. | |
| TV's Saturday Night Live regular Eddie Murphy became a big-screen star with his debut feature film performance in the action-comedy 48 Hrs. (1982), playing convict Reggie Hammond opposite Nick Nolte as SF Detective Sgt. Jack Cates. The influential film was the first "buddy-cop" film, and spawned such imitators as the Beverly Hills Cop (1984) series, the Lethal Weapon (1987) series, and more. Murphy was the first actor to be paid $1 million for his feature debut film. | |
| The most destructive chase sequence in a film was in director H. B. Halicki's The Junkman (1982), taglined as "the chase thriller of the 80s". The overall wreckage included over 150 transport vehicles (two Cadillac Eldorados, two Chrysler Magnums, numerous boats, trucks and motorcycles and two Pitts high-performance aeroplanes). [Note: The record was surpassed, years later, by The Matrix Reloaded (2003) (with more than 300 GM-donated and destroyed vehicles), and then by Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) (with more than 530 vehicles destroyed, although most were flood-damaged anyway). | |
| Santo (1917-1984) was a legendary masked Mexican wrestler-actor who achieved icon status due to his highly colorful wrestling career and starring appearances in nearly 60 motion pictures. It was a record for an actor portraying himself in film. He made almost 5 dozen action-adventure films over a few decades, beginning with his first film appearances in the ultra-low budget Santo Contra series in 1961, and ending in 1982. | |
| In 1982, the Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp bearing the portraits of John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore. Ethel became the first actress to appear on a US postage stamp. Some complained that Grace Kelly, who appeared SOLO on a postage stamp in 1993 (jointly issued by the US Postal Service in Hollywood and the Principality of Monaco), should have received the accolades as the first. The Grace Kelly stamps depicted Kelly's portrait taken from a publicity poster for the movie Country Girl (1954), for which Kelly was awarded a Best-Actress Oscar. | |
| Walt Disney Studios' Tron (1982) was released as both a feature film (with more state-of-the-art computer-generated animation than any other film) and an arcade video game. This inside-a-video-game adventure film was heralded as the first live action film with over 20 minutes of full 3D graphics and computer animation (extensive use of 3-D CGI occurred in the famed 'Light Cycle' sequence depicting computerized vehicles in a high-speed race). However, the film's failure at the box-office held up greater development of computer animation. | |
| Director Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was released -- another all-time champion blockbuster. It was the highest-grossing film up to its time (and of 1982), originally earning $359 million (and eventually taking in a domestic lifetime gross of $435 million). Special effects were produced by George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) Company. It greatly surpassed the second-place film of 1982, the popular comedy Tootsie (1982) which earned only $177 million. The sci-fi drama about a lost, loveable alien did very well at the Academy Awards, taking home four Oscars from its nine nominations: Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects. | |
| During the making of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) during the summer of 1982, two child actors (My-ca Dinh Le and Renee Chen) and Vic Morrow (the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) were killed in a freak helicopter crash, on July 23rd. As a result, greater precautions would be taken on Hollywood sets through the passage of reformed US child labor laws and safety regulations. Almost a half decade later in 1987, director John Landis and four others were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. | |
| Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly actress Grace Kelly (born in Philadelphia), died at age 52 of injuries from a car crash in Monaco when she suffered a heart attack/stroke while driving. During her brief six-year film career (1951-1956), she rose to prominence after appearing in High Noon (1952) opposite Gary Cooper, and opposite Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in Mogambo (1953). She appeared in three of Hitchcock's thrillers: Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955) and then opposite James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) - her most memorable role. She won a Best Actress Oscar for The Country Girl (1954). Her last film was MGM's musical High Society (1956), after which she retired and married Prince Rainier III in 1956. | |
| Ex NBC-TV Saturday Night Live comic and film actor John Belushi died at the age of 33, of an accidental drug overdose. His most notable films were (National Lampoon's) Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980). | |
| By the early ’80s, producers knew that a little nudity could go a long way in attracting young audiences. And while (National Lampoon's) Animal House (1978) has its few flashes of flesh, the breakthrough teen sex comedy at the time was Porky’s (1982), a vulgar flick loaded with sexual innuendo, T&A shots, crude slapstick and a crass major plot point: high school boys out to lose their virginity. Suddenly, theatrical films originally made for "dirty old men" were being targeted at teenagers. Porky’s ushered in a flood of similar teen-oriented material, some of it superb in 1982 (Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Last American Virgin). | |
| The first feature-length, free-form 'music video' film was Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. | |
| Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress (presented in 1984) for director Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982, Australia/US) for playing the character of a man (Chinese-Australian photographer Billy Kwan). She was the first female actress to win an Oscar for playing a gender-switched character role - a character of the opposite sex. | |
| Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was released in November of 1982. The short music video film Thriller would debut in the next year. | |
| The biggest home-video seller from 1983-1985 was Jane Fonda's exercise video titled Workout (aka Jane Fonda's Workout), first released in April of 1982. The trend continued in 1986 (the top seller was Jane Fonda's New Workout) and in 1987 (Jane Fonda's Low-Impact Aerobic Workout). The videotape revolutionized the video industry, with numerous celebrities imitating Fonda with their own fitness and diet videotapes. | |
| Only one actor in film history (to date), James Coco, was nominated for two opposing awards in the same year, an Oscar and Razzie, for his supporting role in Only When I Laugh (1981). | |
| The soft-drink giant Coca Cola Company bought Columbia Pictures in a $750 million transaction. In 1982, a Columbia movie, Gandhi (1982), won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the Company secured its first Oscar. The biopic won eight total Academy Awards, including Best Director (Richard Attenborough), Best Actor (Ben Kingsley), and Best Original Screenplay. [Note: It also set a record for the largest number of extras ever - in the film's final scene of Gandhi's funeral. There were 200,000 volunteers and 94,560 actors who were paid a small fee for their participation.] The newly-organized studio Tri-Star Pictures was formed by CBS Television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures. | |
| Louis Gossett, Jr. was the third African-American performer to win a competitive Oscar and the first to win Best Supporting Actor, for his performance as the tough, principled drill sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). | |
| After a contractual dispute, film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel left the PBS-TV show Sneak Previews in 1982 to start At the Movies, owned by the Tribune Company's multimedia subsidiary Tribune Entertainment, which also owned Siskel's review newspaper. The name of the show was taken from their show's sign-off phrase: "We'll see you at the movies." They developed the "thumbs up-thumbs down" rating system as a permanent trademarked feature of the show. Siskel and Ebert remained on the nationally-syndicated show until 1986, when they had another dispute (with Tribune Entertainment), and left to create a new Disney-produced show (Buena Vista Television), titled Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. [When they left in 1982, Sneak Previews continued until 1996, first with New York film critic Jeffrey Lyons and Detroit Free Press critic Neal Gabler, until Gabler left in 1985 and was replaced with Michael Medved.] |
