Day: August 25, 2006

Year’s Best Trailer

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Year’s Best Trailer

Stop what you’re doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field‘s Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It’s probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I’ve seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it’s almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.

The trailer tells you right off that Little Children is a smart, A-level drama about suburban infidelity with a kind of John Cheever-ish guilt-trip atmosphere. It tells you it’s about Kate Winslet and her little red-headed daughter (who actually looks like her…amazing), and an extra-marital affair she has with Patrick Wilson, and how Jennifer Connelly, playing Wilson’s wife, fits into the general discomfort.
Fields’ script is based on Tom Perrotta‘s novel of the same name, and there’s more to the story than an extra-marital affair, but for the purposes of the trailer and the “sell,” it works beautifully. And with the train-horn effect and all (I used to listen to that lonely sound every night when I was a kid living in a sedate New Jersey suburb called Westfield), it feels exciting. As in original, grabby, exciting.
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The idea for the trailer came from Field in a meeting in…actually, there’s some debate about that. Two sources say that the first creative sitdown happened in very late 2005, and another says it happened in March or early April of 2006. That’s a huge discrepancy, but whatever.
The main thing is that Field said early on that he didn’t want the Little Children trailer to have music, dialogue or story. The guy he told this to was Mark Woollen, 35 year-old owner of the Santa Monica-based Mark Woollen & Associates, an agency known for creating smart atypical trailers for hip movies like About Schmidt, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The other agency guy in the room during that first meeting was Woollen’s top editor, Chad Misner. The third principal party was New Line executive vp creative advertising Laura Carrillo, who had brought Wollen and Misner in.
“The train horn came from something that Chad found,” says Woollen. “And we had a piece cut together by January ’06, which was pretty mich the version you’re seeing now.” Another source says Woollen’s train-horn trailer was delivered closer to early April 2006. (Are these discrepancies amazing or what?)
“So we showed it to Todd and he was very turned on,” Woollen says. The other source says Woollen’s first cut wasn’t quite as train-horn pure as the final version. Field and Little Children editor Leo Trombetta actually cut together a trailer of their own around this time, and I’m told that a fair portion of the elements in their version made it to the finish line.

“And then we spent several months revising,” says Woollen. [The New Line people] wanted to see how it would play with music, which we worked on in June. The final version was locked only just recently.”
As it turned out, the final version does have a few quiet lines if dialogue, but they’re spoken in almost a whispering way. I especially like Kate Winslet’s line about how almost everyone she knows has “a hunger for alternatives and a refusal to accept a life of unhappiness.”
From Carillo’s point of view the trailer was basically a Field-and-Woollen show. “Mark really wrapped his brain around this [piece],” she says. “He began as a trailer editor and has grown this company on his own. He likes to be away from the whole Hollywood thing but tends to be a very collaborative partner with filmmakers.
“I also know that early on, Todd brought up the metaphor of trains connecting all these towns in America. I wrote this down as a note. As you’ll see in the movie., there are trains and train sounds in it. Todd shot lots and lots of trains, although a lot fewer made it into the final cut.”
The operative phrase here is a famous one: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.

Woollen started his company in ’01. He’s been cutting trailers since he was 18. The first trailer he did that he was really proud of , he says, was one for Schindler’s List.
Mark Woollen and Associates also did the trailers for Crash, Brick, Syriana, March of the Penguins and Hard Candy.
Note: This piece was slightly re-written between the time it was posted early Friday evening and Saturday morning at 9:40 am, some 15 hours later.

Cox in Monument Valley

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This is the strangest piece about The Searchers that I’ve ever read. Written by Alex Cox, it’s supposed to be about his watching John Ford‘s 1956 classic western in Utah’s Monument Valley, where it was shot. Cox describes the drive (a little bit) and then sidewinds into a perceptive but relatively generic appreciation of the movie, blah, blah, the duality of John Wayne‘s Ethan character, blah, blah. What happened to the outdoor movie-watching experience? The desert dust inside the boots, the way they bleachers felt, the size of the screen, whether it was sufficiently audible, what kind of people showed up, etc.?

Beerfest Boys

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Cartoonist-satirist Mike Russell did a sitdown last month in Oregon with Beerfest boys Eric Stolhanske and Steve Lemme (two from the Broken Lizards comedy troupe who costarred in Super Troopers), and here’s how it went down.

SAMO, Starbucks, McDonalds

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When I was living in my cockroach-infested, struggling-young- journalist Soho pad in the late ’70s, there were all those Jean Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti pieces painted all over Soho and the Bowery.
SAMO was Basquiat’s graffiti alter-ego — it basically meant “same old shit‘ — and I remember being hugely disappointed when I met Basquiat himself on a street corner and he told me in passing it was pronounced “same-oh”. I had always preferred “sam-oh”.

Some of the slogans were “SAMO as a neo art form,” “SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy” and “SAMO as an escape clause.”
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten a certain SAMO graffiti that said the poiltical power of McDonalds had become equal to that of the CIA or the Vatican. I saw it somewhere near Broadway and Prince. That was something like a Major Moment for me, burned into my brain. McDonald’s = pernicious, anti-human, scourge of cvilization.
McDonalds is on the wane these days. In this country, anyway. The fearsome corporate franchise beast of 2006 is Starbucks, of course. Which is why I paid attention a week or so ago to that story about actor Rupert Everett joining forces with his Bloomsbury district neighbors to try and prevent a Starbucks outlet from moving into the neighborhood.
And then it all came together today with one big whammo when I saw this world map about the spread of the Twin Corporate Cancers of Starbucks and McDonalds.
The chart says there are 6200 Starbucks around the world with an average of 3 new outlets opening each day, and 13,000 — 13,000? — McDonalds around the world generating $41 billlion in annual income. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Sounds light. If someone told me there were 130,000 McDonalds outlets worldwide, I would buy that.

Goldstein on Redstone

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Paramount Pictures “remains firmly in the grasp of a man so out of touch with the modern world that when citing the support he’d had for his remarks, Sumner Redstone told reporters he’d had a congratulatory call from Vanity Fair celebrity chronicler Dominick Dunne, who told him he behaved like Samuel Goldwyn. Being compared to Goldwyn has a nice ring to it, but the truth is that Redstone really has far more in common with N.Y. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. That’s why I suspect that no matter how many good pictures get made at Paramount, as long as Redstone is around, studio executives won’t last any longer than Yankees managers during Steinbrenner’s heyday. Both men live in a world where winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.” — from Patrick Goldstein‘s latest “Big Picture” column.

Thompson Redstone

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A recap & post-mortem on the Redstone-Cruise- Wagner-Grey kerfuffle from Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. Here’s one thing we definitely agree upon, which is that turmoil and transition can sometimes provide a creative blessing in disguise. Thompson writes that not having a Paramount berth is just such a situation for Cruise: “Freeing himself from a studio like Paramount could be the best thing to happen to him.” And I said last May in my “Upside of Taps” piece about Cruise’s implosion that “if he’s smart (and he is), he can damage control his way out of this, to some extent. Just downplay the weirdo stuff and focus on the work, the work, the work. This a big opportunity for the guy. He’s begun of those life passages that can lead, with the right attitude, to non-material riches.”