Month: November 2007

MTV’s Josh Horowitz: “Francis Ford Coppola recently told Esquire he doubted how hungry you are for roles anymore. Did those comments upset you?

Jack Nicholson: “He called me. I’ve known Francis for a long time. I didn’t even bother making him explain it. I just told him if anybody in the world understands being burned by an interview, I do. Don’t give it a second thought. [But] if that’s what he said, and that’s what he meant, and now he feels he said something he shouldn’t have, that’s fine by me [also]. I’m hungry in the sense that I always was. Do I have to work? I haven’t had to for quite a long time. Am I as hungry? I don’t know that I’m as hungry, but I’m as vicious about the meal as I ever was.”

A classic sequence from The Train, the very last big-budget action film shot in black and white. I know that your average dipstick action fan doesn’t want to know from monochrome, but it would be a great innovation in today’s market to make a hard-core, black-and-white action flick. You could make it more of a wow if you shot it in 3D. Talk about a visual must-see event. Black and white didn’t hurt Sin City…why not an action or adventure film?

There’s a good-vibe antidote to the bad-vibe quote in that 11.4 N.Y. Post piece by Susannah Cahalan in which the real-life Richie Roberts said that American Gangster depictions of Frank Lucas — Denzel Washington‘s Harlem drug-dealer — “as a family man are ludicrous…to make him look good and me look bad.”

I’m speaking of last Friday’s Charlie Rose Show discussion between Roberts, Lucas, New York writer Mark Jacobson and American Gangster exec producer Nick Pileggi.

The Post piece made it sound like Roberts was pissed and taking swings at the film. That is not the impression he gives during the Charlie Rose chat.

Jonny Greenwood “was really one of the first people to see There Will Be Blood. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific, because I had no impression.” — TWBB director Paul Thomas Anderson explaining the genesis of the score to Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Willman in a piece that’s mainly a q & a.

I spoke to famed producer-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (1408, Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody (a.k.a. “the new Tarantino”) during my early afternoon visit to the Paramount Bronson gate entrance. They and maybe 25 other picketers were doing what they could to visualize and perhaps energize the Writers Guild’s resistance to the greed and bluster shown so far by the studios and the producers.

Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody outside Paramount Bronson gate — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:55 pm

Neither had much to say about the WGAW goals except to repeat what everyone understands (or at least has heard or read), which is that writers aren’t looking for a whole lot — just a fair percentage of new-media pie, and to redress the lopsided terms of the 1988 agreement. (“Why are picketing by the gate? Because we got screwed in ’88”) And they didn’t say much about the major studios’ reported decision to suspend several long-term deals with TV production companies. “They’re just cutting overhead,” Karaszewks remarked.

“During the ’88 strike, there were a lot of writers fighting among themselves,” he added. “it sounds like a cliche but there’s a feeling today that we’re very together on this one, and very justified.”

It’s awesome to stand with the strikers and just listen to those obnoxious car honkers driving by on Melrose. Every third or fourth car was just leaning on it and making a huge racket. It was so noisy it was hard to talk, but the energy felt good. Average Joes definitely seem to be with the writers. If the producers were to try and drum up sympathy for their side of the argument by chanting and holding signs in the same spot, drivers would most likely go “booo!” and given them the finger or the thumbs-down.

Producer-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, ditto — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:40 pm

I apologized to Cody for missing a Juno two-for-one interview session six or seven weeks ago (during the Toronto Film Festival) with herself and director Jason Reitman. She said she was in a slightly awkward position because she’s still promoting to promote Juno (i.e., helping the enemy make money), but that she’d gotten permission from the WGAW to do so. This is what all writers with movies coming out soon are doing — i.e., making sure it’s cool to talk to the press.

Cody was definitely the coolest-dressed picketer of all. Lots of black set off by red and pink — a Nightmare on Elm Street T-shirt and black skirt and boots, red socks with red tassles, a red-and-green leg tattoo, a red “key” pendant hanging from her neck, a reddish-pink phone, pink heart-shaped glasses, and shortish jet-black hair.

Again — here’s the mp3 file.

Karaszewski’s specially-made red T-shirt

About 90 minutes ago I was soaking up some WGAW strike vibes at the Paramount Pictures’ Bronson gate. Some guy brought along a boom box and was playing some Motown, and some of the female picketers were doing a slow slinky shing-a-ling as they held their signs aloft and went “whoo-hoo!” to the cars that kept driving by and honking out their support. (Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski was calling it “the funky Bronson gate.”) Here are two slow-loading videos — one of the Bronson gang, the other of the picketers at the main Paramount gate.

Bronson gate WGA picketers — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:35 pm

With all the late-night talk shows doing re-runs because of the WGA strike, movie marketers are losing out on the big promotional bumps that come from celebrities visiting Leno, Letterman, O’Brien, Ferguson and Ellen DeGeneres. No way you can’t call that a signficant hurt factor. But the Oprah Winfrey show isn’t affected by the strike (it’s technically regarded as a news show, like Larry King‘s) and so the attention she’ll be giving to The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25), which she’s one of the producers of, will be unaffected also. I’ve been told that research screenings have been “through the roof.” One report said that the number of people checking the top two boxes (very good or excellent) were in the low 90s, and that the “definite recommend” factor was 84%.

Here’s a clip of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and Richard Roeper going gah-gah for No Country for Old Men. Scott mentions at the end that Josh Brolin shoots a dog in both American Gangster (Denzel Washington‘s) and No Country (a pit bull that has it coming).

A 2 and 1/2 minute trailer for Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie has been attached to prints of Lions for Lambs that have gone to theatres for debut this Friday. UA spokesperson Dennis Rice says the trailer will have its broadcast debut tomorrow (after being teased tonight) on Access Hollywood and online tomorrow at Yahoo’s trailer site.

There’s also a Valkyrie featurette on Apple.com today.

In any event, a U.K. projectionist has watched the trailer for the WWII thriller, which concerns a German military plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler with Tom Cruise playing ringleader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, and say it’s “fairly gripping.” He adds no one in the cast is speaking with a German accent a la Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. “All of the [mostly British] cast members use their own accents,” he says. “Kenneth Branagh sounds English. And Cruise just sounds American, although maybe he’s softened it a bit to sound more English.”

“Another theory I’ve been working on is the ‘murder your darlings’ [one] that says that the film everyone thinks is the frontrunner, or the film a publicist or studio tries to position as the frontrunner, is the one that is doomed to lose the big prize,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote earlier today.

Wildebeest herd in Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya

“Murder your darlings — if you want a movie to win best pic, don’t position it as the frontrunner going into Oscar season unless it’s Schindler’s List, Titanic or Return of the King.”

In other words, Atonement — seen in some quarters as a kind of front-runner (i.e., not precisely “the” front-runner but a close approximation) from the end of the Toronto Film Festival until late October — is either slipping or slipped. Which is fine because now it doesn’t have to shoulder any kind of pseudo-front-runner status. Now it can kick back and gallop along with the rest of the panting wildebeests making their way across the plains of Kenya. But watch out for those lions!

Variety‘s Dave McNary wrote this morning about screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood) having “made a major fashion statement” outside Paramount Studios with a red T-shirt emblazoned with a reprint of a recent LA Times story headlined: “Viacom profit shoots up 80%.”

Fine, very clever, typical Karaszewski move . But why didn’t McNary’s story have a photo of Karaszewski’s actual T-shirt (i.e., with Karaszewksi wearing it) instead of a fake Photoshop simulation, and a simulation of a female T-shirt at that? If Karaszewski writes or calls, I’ll meet him tomorrow (or whenever) down at the Paramount gate with my camera and I’ll show Dave McNary how it’s done.

I don’t care that the real Richie Roberts has accuracy beefs with American Gangster. I’m glad Ridley Scott and Steve Zallian made stuff up…good! Russell Crowe plays the former detective in Scott’s film. Two days ago Roberts told N.Y. Post writer Susannah Cahalan that the film “whitewashes” the facts about former Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas and misrepresents aspects of Roberts’ life. Fine!