Mel Gibson, wearing a mask and a wig so he wouldn’t be noticed, visited two Oklahoma towns on Thursday and Friday to attend test screenings of Apocalypto, which Disney will release on 12.8. The Friday screening played before “a mostly American-Indian audience” — the film is about an ancient Mayan culture — at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, Oklahoma. The Thursday screening happened at Cameron University in Lawton. If anyone who saw Apocalypto at either screening wants to share, please get in touch. It’s strange that Gibson would wear a “mask”, no?

Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) has been seen on the Left Coast, and it’s “damn good,” according to a certain eyeballer. The word is that some kind of limited peek will be given to a select group within a few days. That doesn’t mean anyone’s necessarily going to write anything about it straight away. Let’s see how it plays out.

There’s a certain John Fordian echo in Flags of Our Fathers that I won’t explain but which I loved hearing about this morning. If the film has a primary focus, it’s about the battle between war legend and war reality — the space between the legend of battlefield heroism as promoted in political speeches and by war memorial statues, and the reality of what it actually is for the men who lay their lives on the line.
But the comment that really raised my eyebrows was a thought passed along to this witness from a voice in the Eastwood/Warner Bros. camp, to wit: as good and admirable as Fathers is, Letters From Iwo Jima — Eastwood’s lesser-budgeted film about the Japanese forces who fought the Americans on that volcanic island in early ’45, and which is acted entirely in Japanese — is “a better film.”
This is obviously just an opinion, just one guy talking, etc. But when you consider the persistent questions about whether Letters will in fact be released in December ’06 or sometime in January ’07, well….what are people thinking? Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are joined-at-the-hip movies — same war backdrop, same battle, same director, same color scheme. Some of the same incidents, according to Peter Bart‘s 9.3.06 Variety piece, are depicted in both.
How, given all this, can they not be considered as a single unified work? What person with any respect for what Eastwood has apparently constructed here would argue for Flags to be released on 10.20.06 and Letters to be released in January ’07, which would mean that the latter wouldn’t qualify as a ’06 Best Picture candi- date? Especially given that guy’s view that the Japanese film is the “better” work?

I reviewed Paul Haggis‘s Flags script last April — here’s a portion of what I wrote:
“Flags of Our Fathers is about the loneliness and apartness of young soldiers living in two worlds — the godawful battle-of-Iwo-Jima world where everything is ferocious and pure and absolute, and the confusing, lost-in-the-shuffle world of back home, where almost everything feels off and incomplete.
“There are many, many characters in Flags but it’s basically about three of the six young Marines who raised the American flag on a pole atop Mt. Surabachi during the Iwo Jima fighting in early 1945, resulting in a photo that was sent around the world and came to symbolize the valor of U.S. soldiers.
“Three of the flag-raisers died in battle soon after, but the three survivors — John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford ) — were sent home to take bows and raise funds and build morale on a big public relations tour arranged by the military.
“And the film — the script, I mean — is primarily about their vague feelings of alienation from their admirers and even, to some extent, their families. And vice versa.
“Heroes, a narrator says at the end, are something we need and create for ourselves. But the soldiers don’t get it or want it. They only feel for each other. They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends.”

There was a Big Unaddressed Element in Michael Fleming‘s 9.21 Variety story about Crash director Paul Haggis suddenly abandoning Against All Enemies, a feature adaptation of Richard Clarke‘s best-seller about the roots of 9/11, and his jumping into “talks” to direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in The Garden of Elah .
The BUE is why did Against All Enemies, a Sony project with Sean Penn playing Clarke, suddenly disassemble? An ICM source close to the situation says Fleming’s story creates a misleading impression since “there’s always been this little movie” — i.e., the Garden of Elah project — “that Haggis has wanted to do before Enemies, which, for the longest time, has been set for a March or April ’07 start date.”
Haggis never returns calls, but here’s a scenario involving Penn. A person who usually hears reliable info passed part of this along (he first heard it around the time of the Telluride Film Festival) and the core of it has been confirmed again today by another party in a position to know.
Sony execs, it’s being speculated, finally saw a finished version of All The King’s Men in July/August, realized they almost certainly had a bomb on their hands, and decided this was imminent partly due to Penn’s less-than-charismatic lead performance as Willie Stark. (The $3,709,000 it’s expected to earn this weekend means it has bombed, and as much as Penn’s performance has been admired by some criitcs, lovable and charismatic he’s not.)
This determination led to attempts to try and figure a way to uncast Penn as the Enemies lead. One way to push him out was to renegotiate (i.e., reduce) his fee. (Before he won the Best Actor Oscar for Mystic River Penn was probably struggling in the under $5 million range, and after the Oscar he probably got his quote up to the $8 to $10 million range…maybe.) Penn’s CAA agents balked and wouldn’t reduce it, and Haggis stood by Penn, and so Sony pulled the plug.
The Penn-wouldn’t-reduce-his-fee-so-Sony-pulled-the-plug story is precisely how it was passed along to me. The rest is informed speculation. If it turns out to be true it could be read as another instance of a big studio saying no to out-of-proportion demands from a big-name movie star.
Another possible factor is that Sony had developed concerns about the box-office potential of Against All Enemies, given the decent but less-than-explosive responses to United 93 and World Trade Center.
Sony may have also developed cold feet due to the political storm that came out of the anti-Clinton-administration inaccuracies in ABC TV’s Path to 9/11, which covered some of the same territory as the Clarke book, and perhaps because they saw a potential for troublesome controversy in Against All Enemies, which had onscreen speaking parts in an early screenplay for Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney (but not President Bush).
Fleming reported that Warner Independent Pictures will distribute Garden of Elah (which is ashitty title, by the way…what does “Elah” mean?) domestically, because WB owns the underlying material from which Haggis wrote the script.
Elah is an adaptation of Mark Boal‘s Playboy magazine piece “Death and Dishonor” about a mysterious disappearance of an Iraq War veteran.
“Jones will play a career soldier whose son mysteriously goes AWOL, shortly after returning to the U.S. from the front lines in Iraq,” Fleming’s story reads. “Theron will play a local police detective who helps him get to the bottom of the soldier’s disappearance.
“Pic is a fictionalized version of a true story, in which retired Army vet named Lanny Davis uncovered that his son had been murdered during a night of carousing. He’d been attacked by members of his own platoon who were still hopped up from a ferociously violent battlefield tour in Baghdad.”

“But for the most profoundly cinematic/ thematic take on our shared global dilemma, nothing compares to Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27.06). It’s the apotheosis of the multi-story, meta-tragic approach Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga have been perfecting with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Here the scope is wider, the craftsmanship gives Martin Scorsese a run for his money, and the emotional, political and philosophical implications are devastating yet, in their simple, honest way, reassuringly humanistic as well.” — L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss on the recently-launched “Reel Deal” site.

Postscript to yesterday’s riff about Pete Hammond‘s what-about-Zodiac? piece: a certain know-it-all is saying there’s no way Paramount is going to platform-release David Fincher‘s drama in late December in New York and Los Angeles because they don’t want anything else in the soup that might dilute their efforts, even a little bit, to get World Trade Center a Best Picture nomination.
The likelihood of this happening is just about zilch — ask anyone, it’s not in the cards — but WTC is the only pure-Paramount, pure-Brad Grey, pure-Gail Berman contender and apparently it’s a point of pride. Flags of Our Fathers and Dreamgirls are, first and foremost, DreamWorks productions, and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel isn’t pure-Paramount either but Paramount Vantage.
Zodiac, a deep-dish procedural about the hunt for a serial killer in the late ’60s and early ’70s, is not the sort of film that tends to attract Best Picture talk, but it might be good enough to wind up on some ten-best lists, and there’s a chance that this or that element (Robert Downey‘s supporting performance is said to be special) could be saluted by this or that group. But Paramount doesn’t want it released before 12.31.06, this guy is saying, because of a Quixotic dream that World Trade Center might lasso a Best Picture nomination.
How titanically lame is that?
The brilliant David Poland has written on his Hot Blog that “Paramount will NOT release Fincher’s Zodiac for Oscar contention this year. I would bet much on this. They not only have too many awards movies already, but World Trade Center has been given high priority, while Dreamgirls and Flags are expected to make their own gravy, the charge being led by Terry Press. There is less than 1 percent chance that Paramount would ever risk WTC for the sake of Zodiac. I know it gives bored people something to talk about, but it ain’t happening.” Listen to the tone in his words. Poland is smugly satisfied and content that a David Fincher movie is, he believes, going to be kept out of the 2006 Derby for the sake of Oliver Stone’s not-bad 9.11 movie. This news actually PLEASES him. What the…?