AS GIGS FOR SEMIRETIRED ROCKERS GO, Who lead singer Roger Daltrey’s role as the host of Extreme History—a new History Channel program that runs Sunday nights through the end of the year—looks pretty sweet, especially for a guy who for years has been working off steam as a gentleman rancher.

Talkin’ ’bout my peregrinations: Daltrey on location for Extreme History in Albany, Texas

During ten half-hour episodes, Daltrey, 59, immerses himself in events like the Lewis and Clark expedition and Major John Wesley Powell’s 1869 first descent of the Colorado River. To bring Powell’s expedition to life, Daltrey steers a 16-foot wooden boat through Class III rapids, then scales a 20-foot sandstone pitch—without using his right arm. (Powell had lost that wing in the Civil War.) In an episode about Native American buffalo hunts, he dons a wolf skin and crawls toward 400 wild shaggies in Wyoming, shooting rubber-tipped arrows at them from 30 feet away. “This 2,000-pound bull started pawing the earth,” Daltrey recalls. “It was not a good situation.” The pinball wizard has had dozens of parts on stage, film, and TV over the past 30 years and owns a 400-acre ranch in England, but he had zero outdoor adventure experience before filming for the series began, in 2002. Nevertheless, he gamely dressed in jeans and western shirts, hitting the trail with the ribald gusto his fans expect. (After seeing the first episode, Daltrey says, a History Channel executive sent producers an e-mail that read, “Love the show. Bleep the ‘fucks,’ lose the ‘whore,’ keep the ‘shits.’ “) Meanwhile, Daltrey’s British spurs helped him convince Texas cowpokes who worked on an episode about Chisholm Trail cattle drives that he wasn’t a complete wanker.


“They thought I’d be some prissy pop star,” says Daltrey, “but I knew more about the rear end of a cow than they did. Well, maybe not more—it’s lonely out there.”

The post Whodunit appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Director David Breashears is the James Cameron of the IMAX set—no one will ever let him forget his first big disaster movie. And for good reason: Five years back, in a tragic twist of luck, Breashears, an accomplished mountaineer and Emmy-winning cinematographer, captured on large-format film the drama of the infamous deadly storm that killed eight climbers on the world’s highest peak. The resulting feature, Everest, raked in more than $100 million worldwide, to become the fastest-grossing IMAX production of all time, and propelled Breashears into a kind of macabre celebrity that he’s been trying to live down ever since.

Imax auteur David Breashears tackles Kilimanjaro.

“How do you top the disaster?” he asks, sounding a bit like Billy Ray Cyrus after “Achy Breaky Heart.” “I could walk across the Sahara naked and no one would notice.”
This March he hopes to answer his own question with the release of Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa, his first new film since you-know-what. Though (thankfully) no one dies in the 40-minute production, Breashears tries his darndest to weave a compelling tale around a group of seven trekkers—including a 64-year-old historian and a Danish fashion model—all slogging up 19,340-foot Kilimanjaro, an “Everyman’s Everest” known more for its quasi-colonial support system (climbers are required by law to hire a guide and porters to “assist” them up the mountain) than deadly ice falls and savage weather.


Breashears, 46, is hoping his new film, which demanded seven trips to Africa and $4 million to complete, will pack in the high-school science classes and armchair adventurers who make up the bulk of IMAX box-office receipts. But in a tacit admission of how tough it will be to top his earlier achievement, the director is already attempting to downplay the inevitable comparisons. “Climbing a mountain is an act of discovery, magic, wonder,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be Everest. It just doesn’t.”

The post Life After Everest appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.