Day: April 27, 2007

I’m told that Children of Men dp Emmanuel Lubezki (a.k.a. “Chivo”) will be shooting the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, which is one of the two films Joel and Ethan are making for Focus Features. The Coens and Lubezki “won’t be using many storyboards as it will be done in a handheld verite-style,” my source confides.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand are costarring in this “contemporary caper flick” about a CIA agent who’s writing a tell-all book “but then loses the disc”…I don’t know what this means at all. Pitt will apparently play the agent; Clooney will play a hired gun of some kind. No time to call and check so confirmations and/or denials will have to wait until Monday, but I’m fairly certain this is accurate.

True story: I was sitting earlier today in the fairly famous Caffe Trieste, an espresso-cappucino joint on the border between North Beach and Telegraph Hill, when who walks in but Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson. I’ve written once or twice about how Owen and I used to talk with some degree of relaxation and trust in the mid to late ’90s and how he stopped picking up the phone when he got big, but that was six or seven years ago. Move on, shake it off, be here now.

So I went over and poked him in the arm. Owen turned and lit up — he has a smile that really beams — and said, “Heyyyy!….howya been?…whaddaya doin’?” I smiled and muttered the same “yeah, yeah”-type stuff and gave him the rundown — San Francisco Film Festival for three more days, Cannes in mid-May, Jett joining me, blah, blah. I didn’t ask him for any recent news on his end. I’m fairly up to speed on his comings and goings.

Owen introduced me to Kate. “Hey,” I said, shaking her hand and keeping my smile in check. “Friend of Cameron’s.” (Well, sort of. Crowe has treated me like a friend, at least, and I’ve tried to reciprocate without being a journalistic kiss-ass.) Owen said that he and Kate had just been to the famed City Lights bookstore and were told that “Wes and Luke had [recently] been there also.”

I did my usual chickenshit thing when I meet an actor I know or like personally, which is to not be the journalist and pump him/her with questions. (I don’t even think about taking a picture.) So I didn’t bring up my feelings about The Darjeeling Express script or mention that I’d just re-watched The Big Bounce and liked it a bit more this time, or that I was curious to know how a script he’s been co-writing with Mike Binder (who lives close to Owen’s place) is coming along.

I did, however, mention that I saw The Wendell Baker Story, which ThinkFilm is bringing out on 5.18.07, “about two years ago.” Owen’s brother Andrew, who co-directed with Luke Wilson, showed it to me in a cutting room in the spring of ’05.

Seymour Cassel, Luke Wison, Harry Dean Stanton on the set of The Wendell Baker Story

I told him I liked The Wendell Baker Story a whole lot except for the ending (I feel it’s a little too upbeat), and that maybe we could do a sit-down interview of some kind during their press junket interviews in New York on May 8th. Owen side- stepped the slight criticism and said “there’s a lot of good stuff” in the film, and he’s right. “It’s got that understated Wilson-y vibe,” I said. “That flip, ironic, dry humor thing.” An HE reader has described it as a “Rancho Deluxe quality.”

I’ll just say this and maybe the Wilson brothers will do something about it. The film’s once-operational website, www.wendellbaker.com, is no longer running and the ThinkFilm site doesn’t point the reader to some other Wendell Baker site. (Leading me to conclude that probably there isn’t one.) This shouldn’t be, and it’s easy to fix.

New Line has signed Queen Latifah to either play Steve Martin‘s or Lily Tomlin‘s role in a remake of All of Me. I’m presuming that my first reaction upon reading this in yesterday’s Variety — a mixture of revulsion and horror — is being echoed all across America and on all the ships at sea.

Let’s presume that Queen Latifah, being a woman of considerable fame and a sizable ego, is looking to play the Martin role. (It’s unusual to announce a big star being in a new project if he/she is set to play the second lead.) Martin’s performance was probably the best thing he’s ever done, due in large measure to his gifts as a spazzy physical comedian. Does Queen Latifah possess even a fraction of the comic talent that Martin has — or used to have, at least — in his little pinkie finger?

People of taste should, of course, avoid this film at all costs if she takes the Martin role, but if she’s playing Tomlin’s…well, let’ see.

The Reeler (a.k.a. Stu Van Airsdale) reported early this morning that Angelina Jolie was likely to screen her documentary A Moment in the World at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center “around 4 or 5 p.m.” Who gives a shit, right? As I write this it’s 3 pm in New York City, and you know wild-dog papparazzi are almost certainly congretating at TPAC as we speak. News at 11…

Nicole Kidman is intending to produce and most likely star in a remake of How to Marry a Millionaire, with Sacha Gervasi (The Terminal) delivering the screenplay. The 1953 original costarred Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as three plucky gold-diggers. Great, except Kidman has gotten too old to play a woman looking for a rich guy to support her, and there’s no way she can play, say, Bacall’s role without seeming distasteful.

Kidman will be hitting 40 in November, and there are few things more pathetic than a woman past her hot-bod prime who hasn’t sold her skills sufficiently in the job market (i.e., isn’t making enough money to “live well”) and has decided to try and snag a multimillionaire husband as a last-ditch attempt to live a flush life. The odds against such a quest are astronomical. Egoistic multi-millionaires looking for a trophy wife are not inclined to pursue 40-something women. Because they’re disinclined or unable to understand that women are much better people and much better partners at age 40 (or in their mid 40s, or in their mid to late 30s). I know what rich guys are like so don’t tell me. They’re into fresh bouquets.

Note: Sorry for not correcting Betty Hutton/Betty Grable error until just now.

Today’s LX.TV Tribeca Film Festival webcast includes footage of the red-carpet premiere of Brando plus interviews with Patricia Clarkson and John Turturro as well as clips from the TCM movie featuring Al Pacino and Ed Norton. A festival doc called Hellfighters is also profiled by former sportscaster Jon Frankel.

Frank Langella, who’s been getting great reviews for his performance as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, the Peter Morgan play that just opened in Manhattan, scored a major coup by snagging the Nixon role in Ron Howard‘s movie version, which will start shooting in August and come out in the fall of ’08. Howard wanted Warren Beatty as Nixon but apparently Beatty managed to somehow persuade Howard and partner-producer Brian Grazer to reconsider. (I could speculate but I won’t.)

London’s Daily Mail went with this story also, and Variety went with it a little after 9 ayem based on the Daily Mail report.

Howard was right to cast the best man as opposed to casting someone with more marquee value, and thereby deciiding to make the best possible film based on the quality of the merchandise. Like I said earlier, Frost/Nixon film isn’t going to break records no matter who plays Nixon.

Quentin Tarantino has told the Telegraph‘s John Hiscock that his stand-alone Death Proof, which will show at the Cannes Film Festival and then commercially in Europe, will run 30 minutes longer than the 85-minute version that was included in Grindhouse, the three-hour, ode-to-exploitation double feature that became a devastating financial fizzle for the Weinstein Co. a few weeks ago.

Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that the longer Death Proof would only run about 100 minutes, or roughly 15 minutes longer. But a film running 115 minutes that originally comprised 85 minutes — that’s significant. One presumes (hopes) that the extra length will really and truly add to the film, and not just extend it.

“There is half-hour’s difference between my Death Proof and what is playing in Grindhouse,” Tarantino says. “I wrote my script — I couldn’t be prouder of my script — then I had to shrink it way down to fit inside this double feature.

“I was like a brutish American exploitation distributor who cut the movie down almost to the point of incoherence. I cut it down to the bone and took all the fat off it to see if it could still exist, and it worked. It works great as a double feature, but I’m just as excited if not more excited about actually having the world see Death Proof unfiltered.”

It is naturally assumed that the stand-alone Death Proof will have some kind of limited U.S. theatrical exposure prior to being released here on DVD, but maybe not.

“I can’t wait for [Death Proof] to premiere [in Cannes],” Tarantino says. “It will be in competition, and it’ll be the first time everyone sees Death Proof by itself, including me.”