With Tall Timbers on Big Boulders, Moosilauke Lodge Rises The environmentally sound building pays homage to nature and history on a scenic site. The new Moosilauke Ravine Lodge is taking shape. Tall white pines—harvested from property owned by Dartmouth and from the Bradford, Vt., woodlands of alumnus Putnam “Put” Blodgett ’53—have been stripped of their bark but otherwise left as visible reminders of the forests they came from. The timbers rest on giant boulders excavated from the lodge site and nearby locations. With spectacular views and a rustic interior, the lodge will be comfortable, durable, environmentally sustainable, and accessible to people with disabilities. “It’s exciting to watch a building go up that will address all our program needs and connect generations of Dartmouth people for the next hundred years or more,” says Dartmouth Outing Club Director Dan Nelson ’75. College photographer Eli Burakian ’00 has spent many happy hours hiking up to the Moosilauke summit and working or relaxing in the lodge and bunkhouses, so he was eager to take his cameras to the construction site to see how things are progressing.

This giant boulder beneath a gnarled tree trunk will be visible inside the lodge. “The tall pine columns are unique architectural elements,” says project manager James Pike. “This one makes it look almost as if a tree is growing inside the building.” The new lodge is rising in the shadow of Mount Moosilauke. Pike says snow has fallen frequently enough to require daily plowing and sanding to the site. Timbers are being notched and joined to form the structure for a standing-seam metal roof, which will allow snow and ice to slide off easily. A view from the basement shows the combination of traditional and more modern building materials. Timber framing is a building system that dates back hundreds of years. Moosilauke Ravine Lodge also has a rich history.  “It used to be that people rode a train to Warren and took a carriage or walked up to the lodge,” says Dartmouth Outing Club Director Dan Nelson ’75. These days, nearly every student spends time at the lodge, sharing memorable experiences with faculty, staff, and alumni.

A few of the timbers retain the striking silhouettes they had while growing in the forest. Part of the concrete foundation can be seen from the vantage point of the Class of 1984 Crew Quarters, built in 2010, largely by volunteers, to provide living quarters for crew members working at the lodge.leather swivel chair and stool Contribute to This Pagepower lift chair recliner rentalStarting in 1938, Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing appeared in The New Yorker in a series of cartoons by Charles Addams. bean bag chair organicAfter two seasons in the mid-'60s as a sitcom, then two more as a Saturday morning cartoon in the '70s, the adventures of the strange, morbid Addams family seemed destined to solely exist in illustration form. buy hula chair

Then, after Charles Addams' passing in 1988, even the cartoons stopped—but in 1991, The Addams Family movie brought the pale gang to the cinema. Here are a few things you might not have known about the film. Scott Rudin, head of production at 20th Century Fox, was riding in a van with other company executives one day after a movie screening. table and chair furniture perth"Everyone was there—(studio chiefs) Barry Diller and Leonard Goldberg and (marketing chief) Tom Sherak—when Tom's kid started singing 'The Addams Family' theme," Rudin told the LA Times . used stacking chairs canada"And suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme, letter perfect, note for note." office chairs on cork floorThe next day, Rudin proposed to Diller and Goldberg that they make an Addams Family movie—and they went for it.cheap office chairs adelaide

The "Addams Groove" music video played before the film during its first few weeks in theaters. The final track on Too Legit to Quit would end up being MC Hammer's last visit to the top 10 of the Billboard singles charts in the U.S. It also won the 1991 Golden Raspberry for Worst Original Song, beating out fellow nominees "Why Was I Born (Freddy's Dead)" by Iggy Pop, and Vanilla Ice's "Cool as Ice."cotton chair cover rentals Hopkins instead opted to play Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (he got the role after Sean Connery was initially approached). Hopkins would win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Burton had worked with Addams Family screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson on previous projects, but ended up not taking the job. Almost 20 years later, Burton was rumored to be developing a 3D stop-motion animated Addams Family movie, but it was announced last year that he was off the project.

The Addams Family was Barry Sonnenfeld's directorial debut, but he had experience as a cinematographer on films like Blood Simple, Big, Raising Arizona, Misery, When Harry Met Sally..., and Miller's Crossing. After his agent told him that he would lick a carpet if he couldn't find him a directing job within one year, he found Sonnenfeld a seemingly plum first time assignment helming a high profile movie (in less than a year). As a joke, Scott Rudin let it be known to Sonnenfeld that he wasn't his first choice by putting a different director's name on the back of the director's chair every morning on set. Some of the names that replaced Sonnenfeld's were Joe Dante, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Rudin's first choice, Tim Burton. Three weeks into directing, Sonnenfeld was talking to a studio executive who was concerned about the budget for the film when he felt a "tremendous pressure" in his chest, "as if someone was blowing up a balloon inside me," then passed out. He also dealt with sciatica during filming, and had to shut down the Los Angeles production for several days when his wife needed major surgery in New York.

Owen Roizman, the film's cinematographer, quit to work on another movie shortly after Sonnenfeld's fainting incident. His replacement, Gayl Tattersoll, stopped production for a couple of days when he needed to be hospitalized for a sinus infection, and never returned. Sonnenfeld ended up doing the job himself. In front of the camera, a blood vessel burst in the eye of Raul Julia, the actor who played Gomez. These incidents led the future Get Shorty and Men In Black director to say that he felt like there was a "pervasive black cloud" hanging over the movie. The actors were concerned about the ambiguity of the big Fester storyline in the script. Initially, it was going to be unknown if Gordon, the man suffering from memory loss that looked just like Uncle Fester, was actually Fester. The actors nominated Wednesday Addams herself, Christina Ricci, to give an impassioned plea to Rudin and Sonnenfeld two weeks before shooting that Fester should not be an imposter. Sonnenfeld remembered that the only actor to not care was Christopher Lloyd, the man playing Fester.

Cher was interested in playing Morticia, but Huston was producer Rudin's first choice. Huston, who grew up in Ireland, was more familiar with the Charles Addams drawings than the old TV show, and decided it would be pointless to try and replicate actress Carolyn Jones' "ideal" portrayal of Morticia anyway. The future Academy Award winner turned to the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens—a movie about the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy who lived in a deteriorating mansion filled with garbage and animal waste—for inspiration instead. ''Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw,'' Sonnenfeld told Entertainment Weekly, ''so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I've never seen any woman have in reality.'' The role also required Huston to get gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and fake nails daily. ''Come afternoon, I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages,'' she told EW. ''And because I couldn't lie down (in the corset) or rest, it was fairly exhausting.''

Because Orion Pictures had the rights to The Addams Family, they were the ones responsible for financing and potentially releasing the movie. Even though there were some budget concerns, selling the movie to another company was something Rudin and Sonnenfeld had not even considered. But three-quarters of the way through filming, Rudin was informed that Orion had sold the movie to Paramount by Hollywood Reporter writer Andrea King. Even though Rudin was also working on a movie at the time with Paramount, in addition with having phone conversations daily with Orion over The Addams Family, he had absolutely no idea. Initially "The Mamushka" scene was much longer, and it featured Gomez and Fester singing about brotherly love. Even though Broadway veterans were hired to write the traditional Addams clan number, most of the scene was cut because a California test audience mostly composed of 16- to 32-year-old white males didn't care for it. David Levy, the executive producer of the old Addams Family TV series, sued Paramount and Orion after the movie was released to surprising commercial success.