Year: 2006

Two expensive period films have had a scheduling face-off, and the less heavily-budgeted of the two has retreated with its tail between its legs. The July ’06 shoot of Ridley Scott ‘s American Gangster, a ’70s-era crime film that will costar Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, has delayed a planned September start of a 1930s period drama to be directed by Baz Luhrman and costar Crowe and Nicole Kidman.

Following his detour into soul-stirring otherness in Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic Southland Tales, Seann William Scott is back to playing bozos in formula crap films. His next, Gary, the Tennis Coach, is about a high school janitor coaching a group of misfits to the Nebraska state championship…zzzzz. Pic will roll this summer under director Danny Leiner (Dude, Where’s My Car).

“If you want to keep your argument so narrow as to say the United #93
passengers didn’t enter the cockpit and/or manually force the plane into the ground, and therefore weren’t quite the heroes so many of us believe they are…fine. But whatever strategy the hijackers had in mind, it was not to kill squirrels in a Pennsylvania field . Whether they made it to the cockpit or not, United #93 crashed as a direct result of the passengers revolting against the hijackers. It seems quite clear that everyone on that plane had decided and accepted they were already dead, and that they weren’t going to be taking anyone else with them. I think that field in Pennsylvania is every bit as sacred as the Civil War battlefields that dot the east coast. And frankly, I think the people who say it’s ‘too soon’ are cowards; you don’t have to see the film, but my God…what makes these people think they can speak for the rest of us?” — Michael Andry , San Antonio, Texas.

This is Vivien Leigh as Blanche (Blanche!…Blanche!) Dubois in Streetcar, giving her “don’t hang back with the brutes” speech. Substitute the behavior of Stanley Kowalski, whom she refers to in the early portion, with today’s ape-cage downmarket movies, and…well, something to mull over, I think. I liked this Tennessee Williams play quite a lot when I first saw it in my late teens, but I love it now… especially the second half, starting with that scene with the visiting newspaper boy.

Hey….this Movie City News link (Mel “There’s No Such Thing As A Dead Language” Gibson On Apocalypto) dates back to 3.27.06, and I ran it on 3.20.06. This is an hour-by-hour racket we’re in, and the rules say no links to stories more than a day old. Okay, two days at the outside.

Wouldn’t you say the brand-new redesign of the New York Times online site is a wee bit similar to the design of El Pais, the influential Spanish-language newspaper? I’m not saying the Times design guys actually ripped off El Pais, but they might as well have.

I finally got my copy of the forthcoming two-disc A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Home Video, 5.2), and here are two recordings from the 1947 Marlon Brando screen test, when he was 23. It’s mainly footage of Brando and a somewhat older actress acting a scene from an early version of a script called Rebel Without a Cause, in which Brando’s character wasn’t named “Jim Stark” (the teenaged kid played by James Dean in the 1955 film) but “Harold.” In excerpt #1, Harold, obviously angry and distressed, is talking to the girl about getting away (maybe to South America, he says), and excerpt #2 is recorded from footage of an off-the-cuff chat between Brando and an off-screen casting woman (possibly named Ruth Ford). The test was apparently shot before Brando began performing in the ’47 play of “A Streetcar Named Desire”– when the woman asks for his previous stage credits he only mentions plays he did prior to “Streetcar.”

That disputed headline for Sharon Waxman‘s 4.4 N.Y. Times story about the currently-playing trailer for United 93 upsetting people (which has prompted West 43rd Street notions about Universal withdrawing the trailer…notions that are entirely confined to West 43rd Street, apparently) reads “Universal Will Not Pull ‘United 93’ Trailer, Despite Criticism.” But the headline for the same story in today’s (4.4) print edition doesn’t imply quite the same assumption…it feels a tad less negative. Here it is…

“The best mise en scene is the one you don’t notice. You have to make the public forget that there’s a screen. You have to lead them into the screen, until they forget the image only has two dimensions. If you try to be artistic or affected you miss everything.” — director-writer Billy Wilder

Okay, so DHL (the courier company with the yellow trucks and yellow jackets) isn’t really involved in “a logistic and shipping partnership” with Paramount Pictures and Mission: Impossible: 3 . The real deal, according to Mark Ebner’s Hollywood Interrupted, is that they “paid millions to Paramount for the opportunity of having Tom Cruise appear on screen driving a stupid yellow DHL truck around Italy” in the film. I for one am shocked, shocked, that this sort of thing goes on in the film industry. In Billy Wilder‘s One Two Three, Horst Buccholz screams in exasperation, “Is everybody in the world corrupt?” in response to which a chubby Soviet trade ambassador replies, “I don’t know everybody.”

“To me, Flight 93 was a defining moment in the sense that the hijack victims of Flight 93, when they understood what was going on, changed themselves into the Flight 93 militia and fired the shot heard around the world, the beginning of the war against Al-Qaeda, followed by Congress and Bush officially declaring that same war. To me, this is something that I think is probably…we haven’t had a moment like this since 1776. These victims said, ‘We will be victims no more.” They became soldiers, men and women alike, shoulder to shoulder, and took on Al-Qaeda and said, ‘You will not succeed,’ and they took down that plane and I think it’s marvelous.” — caller to Rush Limbaugh show on 4.3.06. Note: I never thought I’d link to Limbaugh in any way, shape or form, but there it is. Exception: However director Paul Greengrass decides to depict the final moments of that flight, the 9/11 Commission concluded, based on black-box recordings, that the passengers never busted into the cockpit and therefore didn’t force the plane down.

That headline for Sharon Waxman‘s N.Y. Times story about negative responses to Universal’s United 93 trailer is, I feel, pretty unfair. It reads “Universal Will Not Pull United 93 Trailer, Despite Criticism.” This implies that some kind of heated consensus has taken shape against the showing of the trailer, and that angry crowds are massed outside Universal’s gates. There’s resistance to the trailer, granted, or rather to the idea of seeing the film. I’ve received more than a few letters from different U.S. cities and regions since the trailer was first shown a week ago last Friday (on 3.31), and a lot of people are apparently saying “too soon!” Fine. But nobody’s carrying picket signs and no one is pressuring, much less asking, Universal to pull the trailer, and that’s why it’s unfair to try to make an issue out of Universal’s refusal to do something that nobody’s asked them to do. The notion that people are complaining about the showing of the trailer came from a currently-running Newsweek story about a manager at an AMC Loews theater in Manhattan “taking the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints.” The story quotes one of the theater’s managers, Kevin Adjodha, as saying “‘one lady was crying’ [and that] we shouldn’t have [played the trailer]…that this was wrong…I don’t think people are ready for this.'” Waxman reports that theatre managers at this same theatre decided to show the trailer only before R-rated films or “grown-up” PG-13 ones. A Universal spokesperson told me this afternoon “there were two [trailer] complaints reported to us.” Waxman also talks to people whose mates or family members were killed in the planes on 9/11 — David Berry, Tom Roger and Sandra Felt. Two said they were disturbed or somewhat disturbed by the trailer; Felt said “she was surprised that the trailer had disturbed some moviegoers” and that “9/11 is a fact…it happened…running away from the movie isn’t going to resolve underlying factors of why we’re upset by it.”