Month: April 2007

A letter has been sent out to Academy members telling them to expect a survey about their media-reading habits by way of the Oscar race. The survey won’t be sent from the Academy but from a publication that the letter doesn’t identify. A publicist friend who told me about this last night knows nothing concrete, but speculated that it’s probably from one of the trades, or possibly from the Los Angeles Times.

She said that the survey will ask where Academy members get their information and to what degree. How often do they read the trades or online sites like this one (or Hollywood Wiretap, The Envelope, Nikki Finke, Movie City News) or Patrick Goldstein‘s column or David Carr or what-have-you? As soon as I get hold of a copy of the survey I’ll scan it and post it here and HE readers can respond on their own.

“‘There has been much, much more demand from producers, distributors, directors — from people in every branch of filmmaking,’ a festvial staffer told Variety‘s Alison James a few days ago. ‘Everyone wants to come to Cannes this year.’ Journos, however, report a bigger struggle to get that all-important press badge this year. “They are being much more finicky about what publication you write for, how big its circulation is and how many articles you are intending to write,” a freelancer told James.

I’m still way behind on the video-editing tutorials, but I feel confident enough to announce that I’m going to start posting short little video reports on Hollywood Elsewhere in a week or so, and certainly by the start of the Cannes Film Festival.

I’ll probably run two versions of each report — one in an MPEG4 format and the other in Flash. No pop-fizz editing, no narration, no music cues…nothing slick. Austere, spartan. Almost no hand-held stuff, 90% tripod-mounted. Visual infuences: Stanley Kubrick (I’ve got a little wide-angle lens that makes everything look Clockwork Orange-y), Sergei Eisenstein, Bruno Dumont‘s Flandres, Jim Jarmusch‘s Stranger Than Paradise.

I’ll probably start posting quickies from Manhattan sometime during my stay there — Friday, 5.4 to Monday, 5.14. Until I get more proficient with the editng software I may forego editing altogether except for opening titles and just “cut” in the camera. I’m just saying this in anticipation of reader complaints about the video stuff being too stark or funky or whatever. I think it’s better to deliberately go in that Dumont/Jarmusch direction and make the shorts as good as I can in this mode, and then gradually slick things up as I shuffle along.

In 1997, a guy named Michael Regalia bought a 1963 Ferrari Luosso that Steve McQueen used as an “everyday run-around car,” and spent 4,000 hours restoring it to its original condition. Christie’s is auctioning the car, which is expected be bought for at least $750,000. And Newsweek and other outlets (mine included) are helping Regalia and Christie’s in this effort.

Everybody’s pitching in, you see, because McQueen is a mythical figure of ’60s machismo and because driving this car around will bestow an aura of instant legendary cool upon the purchaser. We’re talking major babe magnet here. The buyer, who will almost certainly be some guy in his 50s or 60s, will of course be making a solid investment, but will also be shelling out close to a million bucks in order to get laid.

Eddie Murphy is continuing on his glorious career-recovery path by covering himself in the terra firma of kiddie movies. Last year at this time he was thought to have made a turn in the road and was on his way back to true career vitalty with his said-to-be-triumphant performance in Dreamgirls leading the charge. Then he bolted out of the Kodak auditorium when he didn’t win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar…nothing but class.

I forgot to run this audio clip of Marlon Brando‘s “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” speech speech from Julius Caesar, which is naturally brought up in the two-part, four-hour Turner Classic Movies documentary on Brando that will air on May 1st and 2nd. I’m still calling it a relatively candid, nicely sculpted, entirely respectable portrait of the single most influential actor of the 20th Century, and probably also the greatest.

David and Edie Ichioka‘s Murch, a wonderfully engaging doc about one of the most renowned and respected film and sound editors of our time, played at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last night, and I’m really glad I took the time.

Walter Murch after last night’s q & a at SFMOMA — 4.27.07, 10:57 pm

The smooth and avuncular Walter Murch, 64, is commonly regarded as the Yoda of film and sound editors. That in itself makes this essential viewing for film buffs, but also for anyone willing to just sit and listen to a hugely articulate man expound on a fascinating art form. Murch’s needle-sharp vocabulary and exquisite phrasings are a contact high in themselves.

You need to be fairly familiar with the classic films that Murch has edited or sound designed (Cold Mountain, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Godfather, THX 1138), to really appreciate this film. Otherwise, it’s mainly an intellectual trip — a fascinating dissertation about the fine points of editing and sound design that Murch has picked up over the last 40-plus years.

Murch has been playing various festivals since debuting at last September’s Telluride Film Festival, and I trust it’ll be out on DVD sooner than later.

Click on the brief Murch video clip at the bottom of this web page, or better yet listen to this recording of Murch speaking last night after the SFMOMA screening. Yeah, that’s me and my fractured syntax asking the first two questions. Note to action-film editors: consider Murch’s 14-set-ups-per-minute rule!

For the third weekend straight, Disturbia was #1 — $9,248,000, off 29% and a $52,323,000 cume. Invisible was #2 with $7,975,000 and $3900 a print. Next, the Nic Cage film, was #3 with $6,908,000 and $2783 a print. Fourth-place Fracture did $6,804,000, off 36%…hang in there, Ryan and Tony! Blades of Glory did $5,210,000 for a fifth-place showing, and Meet the Robinsons was close on its heels with $4,892,000. Hot Fuzz, #7, expanded slightly and took in $4579, off 22%. Eighth-place Vacancy did $4,193,000, off 45%. Condemned, #9, did $3,788,000, 1844 a print…nothing. Are We Dead Yet?…slip of the tongue but a better title than Are We Done Yet?…did $3,372,000. off 35%.

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.