Tim Burton Biography
The following paragraphs are missing their topic sentences. Read the text and choose an appropriate topic sentence for each paragraph (write the sentence on the lines provided!).
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Burbank is the home to many film and television studios including NBC, Warner Brothers and Disney. While growing up, Burton did not exactly fit in with the people around him He was not particularly good at school and was not a bookworm. Instead, he found himself in painting, drawing, and movies. He loved monster movies; Godzilla and the work of Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad). One of his heroes was horror actor Vincent Price. 2________________________________________________________________________________
Cal Arts had been founded by Disney as a “breeding ground” for new animators. Burton entered the Disney animation program in his second year, and was drafted to join the Disney animation ranks in 1979. 3________________________________________________________________________________
Imagine, if you will, what it’s like to be an animator. Films are projected at 24 frames per second. For a 90 minute film, that’s over 129 000 individual frames. Characters are drawn separately and then put together, and placed over painted backgrounds. The work requires talented artists, but they cannot deviate from the structured manner of drawing the characters. Burton has been brought in to work on The Fox and the Hound but it bored him. 4________________________________________________________________________________
They made him a conceptual artist; the people who design the characters that appear in films. He did early work on The Black Cauldron. They weren’t well received and his drawings were not used. However, he was allowed to work on his own projects. These included a poem and artwork that years later would become The Nightmare Before Christmas, the animated short film Vincent and the live-action short Frankenweenie. The latter two received little or no outside exposure, but Burton did get to work with his idol
Vincent Price for the first time and remained friends until Price’s death in 1993. Frankenweenie was awarded a PG rating and only saw a theatrical release overseas, and a short release on VHS. However, it would be the film that landed him his first feature directing job. 5_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lee then showed the film to Paul Reubens. Reubens was the man who portrayed Pee-Wee Herman and was in the process of taking this character to the big screen. He knew right away that Tim Burton was the right man to be the director and the film was made.
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It wasn’t until he was offered the screenplay for Beetlejuice that he finally found another project suited to his unique vision. The film was even a bigger hit, and led to Warner Bros. offering Burton the job directing an eagerly awaited comic book adaptation that had been years in the planning. 7________________________________________________________________________________
It sparked controversy with the casting of Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight. Despite all the hype and studio interference, Burton still managed to put his own stamp on the film and it remains one of the most influential Hollywood movies of the last few decades. Its box office gross of over $250 million is also one of the highest in the studio’s history.
