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Bobbie Wygant reviews The Empire Strikes Back from Atombomb.tv on Vimeo.
I went to The Bobbie Wygant Archive first thing this morning hoping to find an interview with the now-late, great Leslie Nielsen; no such luck, sadly. At which point news broke that Irvin Kershner had died — and right there, from May 1980, was Wygant’s review of The Empire Strikes Back, which Kersh directed. Turns out, Bobbie didn’t much care for the ending.
Kershner, of course, also directed Robocop 2 — which moved to Houston for production after Paul Verhoeven shot the first film here. I wondered, for the first time: Why? Said producer Jon Davison in this interview: Dallas city officials “very reticent to close down streets for us or let us do our pyrotechnics. They were just not helpful when it came to our action sequences. Houston promised us a lot of assistance, and they came through. They were enormously cooperative, letting us do things that would have been very difficult to do elsewhere.” Davison also co-produced Airplane, starring, of course, Leslie Nielsen. The circle is now complete.
