Day: January 9, 2010

I’ve just finished reading 24 pages about the making of the embarassing Love Affair (1994) in Peter Biskind‘s “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America” (Simon & Schuster). Biskind offers quote after quote about how Beatty, the film’s star, producer and co-writer (with Robert Towne), marginalized and pretty much ignored and deballed Love Affair‘s director Glenn Gordon Caron.

Using quotes from several sources including Caron himself, Biskind also reports that director of photography Conrad Hall ignored Caron for the most part, treating him with little if any respect.

Towards the end of filming in late 1993 I was told similar stories by two excellent sources (the late production designer Richard Sylbert, a longtime Beatty collaborator and friend, and another insider I’d rather not name). And I included it in a file submitted to Entertainment Weekly‘s “News & Notes” section, edited at the time by Maggie Murphy, for a story about the making of Love Affair. The file made it clear that Beatty was really running the show and that Caron (hired off his rep as the creative light behind TV’s Moonlighting and Remington Steele) was the director in name only.

I talked to Beatty about these stories, not naming the sources but telling him I’d heard this and that, and he (a) denied that they were true and (b) calmly expressed outrage that EW was working on a story along these lines, which he naturally felt would tarnish the film as a troubled production and perhaps dent its box-office appeal. He mentioned at one point that he might sic his attorney, Bert Fields, on the magazine.

I don’t know who said what to whom, but I do know that EW decided to ignore the Caron-having-his-balls-cut-off angle when they ran their story a week or two later in mid-December 1993. Anne Thompson, who also did some Love Affair reporting, was assigned to write a cottonball piece called “Love and Warren” that said Beatty was a perfectionist and blah blah. It was basically a valentine.

The Caron angle was removed, I was told, because managing editor Jim Seymore didn’t like the fact that we couldn’t name the sources. I heard second hand that he told Murphy there was “no story here.” I always suspected this was code for “I’m feeling too much corporate heat on this thing so let’s kill it or water it down.”

I later told Beatty that by all appearances he’d played his cards well and had clearly won the round. If you have any sporting blood you have to respectfully acknowledge when you’ve been out-maneuvered.

I got pretty good at imitating Beatty’s voice. I remember calling Thompson during the end of the Love Affair episode. She picked up and said hello. “Anne Thompson?,” I said. Yes? “Warren Beatty.” She fell for it. “Hey-hey….howz it goin’?'” and so on. “Anne, Anne…I’m sorry. It’s Jeff. Foolin’ around…sorry. I wanted to see if I was good enough.”

Love Affair opened in October 1994 and was panned by just about everyone. I saw it once and found it flat and mundane. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who gave it a break. It cost about $30 million and made $18 million, give or take. But Beatty would rebound four years later with Bulworth, one of the sharpest and most unflinching political comedies ever made in this country.

HE reader “btwnproductions” said “the fat people will be relieved” that I was going through a writing slump earlier this afternoon. Just for that I’m going to post a 100% true fat-people anecdote — actually a comment that I heard during the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.

I’d just finished interviewing the great Ken Kesey at Burgie’s on Main Street. (Remember Burgie’s?) He was talking to journalists about The Source, a Chuck Workman documentary about the hip movement of the ’50s and ’60s in which he appeared. I got a rise out of Kesey when I told him I’d played Dr. Spivey in a small theatrical production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest . He grinned faintly. “So you played Spivey, eh?” Our chat lasted 20 minutes and then the next guy took over.

I walked outdoors to a second-floor balcony area that looked down upon Main Street. Kesey’s son Zane — heavyish, late 20s or early 30s — joined me. Down below were hordes of festivalgoers, all looking and behaving like typical industry types from NY or LA. Zane, who lived on or near his dad’s farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, looked down and said, “Where are all the fat people?” He was joking but critiquing. “This isn’t real America,” he was more or less saying. “These people are too hip looking, too well-dressed.”

I can’t get going today. It’s not that I feel depressed or under-energized. I’m just especially sick today of being indoors and tapping out stories with the TV on and yaddah-yaddah. I feel like Ashley Judd in that motel scene with Robert De Niro in Heat: “I’m sick of it…sick of it!”

With James Cameron‘s Avatar now the #1 film four weekends in a row ($46 million projected earnings by Sunday night) and the second-highest worldwide grosser of all time at the worldwide box office, can it overtake Cameron’s Titanic tally of $1.8 billion, and thereby become the all-time #1 earner?

It can do this if it gathers another $600 million worldwide starting Monday morning. By Sunday night Avatar will have earned $1.2 billion and change in only four weekends of play, or three and a half 7-day weeks (Friday, 12.18 to Sunday, 1.10). At this rate another $600 million doesn’t seem too hard.

It’ll take a little longer, of course, due to diminished post-holiday revenues and the fact that the first and second wavers have already seen it. But there’s a repeat-viewing factor at work plus an understanding that Avatar is not something to wait for on DVD.

I’m figuring Avatar will take Titanic by…what, February 1st? Mid-Feburary?

Avatar‘s domestic cume through last Wednesday was $374.4 million with a foreign tally of $760.9 million. It’s expected to pull in $100 million globally this weekend ($46 million here plus another $55-something over there) for a Sunday-night worldwide total of $1.235 billion, give or take. So to pass $1.8 billion it needs another $600 million.