Without Lifting A Finger

Rewatched Tarkovsky's Stalker first (found it free on Hulu or somewhere), so I could feel the difference: both great. Excerpt from the book: I come over to them with my glass. Gutalin grabs me by the coat, sits me down at their table, and says, “Sit down, Red! Sit down, servant of Satan! I love you. Let us weep over the sins of humanity—weep in despair!” “Let us weep,” I say. “Swallow the tears of sin.” “Because the day is nigh,” proclaims Gutalin. “Because the pale horse has been saddled, and the rider has put a foot in the stirrup. And futile are the prayers of the worshippers of Satan. And only those who renounce him shall be saved. Thou, of human flesh, whom Satan has seduced, who play with his toys and covet his treasures—I tell thee, thou art blind! Awake, fools, before it’s too late! Stamp on the devil’s baubles!” Here he comes to an abrupt halt, as if forgetting what’s next. “Can I get a drink in this place?” he asks in a different voice. “Where am I? You know, Red, I got f...

Freeze a Tarkovsky film, shoot, and you've got near-museum pieces (contra Berger). Not saying my amateur clicks are that, but I'm sure a professional could get there. Anyway, these are just a few shots from Stalker :  

In my Kindle version of Roadside Picnic the text ends on p. 193 and, on the same page, begins an Afterword by Boris Strugatsky. Lots of interesting tidbits here: re the writing and publishing of the novel in Soviet Russia, but I'll only allude to the interesting discussion of the word "stalker": Apparently, the term "stalker" came to us in the process of working on the first pages of the book. As for the "prospectors" and "trappers," we didn't like those terms to begin with; I remember this well.      We were the ones who introduced the English word "stalker" into the Russian language . Stalker --pronounced "stullker" in Russian--is one of the few words we "coined" that came into common use. Stalker spread far and wide, although I'd guess that this was mainly because of the 1979 film of that name, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and based on our book. . . . It would have been more correct to say ...

I think (if you tweak the rules slightly) you can easily get from Red Schuhart to Rex Swihart. Of course his full name is Redrick Schuhart and that would be a bigger stretch.

Stalker in the Zone , a photo by nkimadams on Flickr.

from Tarkovsky's "Stalker" , a photo by nkimadams on Flickr. Anatoly Solonitsyn (used by Tarkovsky several times) plays "the writer" in Stalker. He is on the left.

Several people involved in the film production — including Tarkovsky — had met deaths, which some crew members attribute to the film's long, arduous shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. [ 6 ]   [From Wikipedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film )]