In a perfect world, how much should it cost to make a film out of Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise“, a nearly 40-year-old satire of academia (or, in the present context, deranged wokesters) and a general meditation about the inevitability of death?
We’re talking, of course, about the Noah Baumbach film (directed and written by) that was shot last summer and fall in various Ohio college towns (including Oberlin), funded by Netflix and starring Adam Driver as perturbed Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and Greta Gerwig as his neurotic wife Babette. It costars Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith and Don Cheadle.
If I was to spitball the budget, I would guess (especially given the tendency of Netflix films to cost more than anyone might expect) something in the range of $40 million plus, maybe a touch higher. But it appears as if White Noise might be an ’80s period piece**. I’m basing this on a set photo of Gerwig wearing big ’80s hair. Shooting period (clothes, cars, signage) is always costly.
If you know anything about Baumbach’s films and more particularly his writing and shooting style, White Noise most likely will be medium close-ups of dialogue, dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. White Noise‘s big visual element is a depiction of a big train accident that spreads toxic waste all over the place; there’s also a car accident scene involving a lake or pond in which the car sinks. But it mainly sounds like a boilerplate Baumbach talkathon.
I’m asking because there’s a Twitter rumor (linked to last night by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy) that the White Noise tab is over $100 million, and perhaps as high as $140 million.
The latter figure comes from a film-set worker named “Saul Atreides” (a Jewish nom de plume inspired by Paul Atreides). This calls for a serious trade-reporter inquiry, because as the above headline states, “Noah Baumbach” and “$100 million budget” are a serious contradiction in terms.
On top of which Driver has been made up to look late 40ish or early 50ish, and to this end Baumbach has given him a prominent pot belly. Is it prosthetic or did Driver do a “Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta” by going to Italy and tanking up on pasta?
Ruimy: “How does a budget on a smallish, intimate drama, set on a Midwestern college campus, balloon to $100 million plus?! This is madness. I liked Marriage Story and Kicking & Screaming, but this isn’t a guy with a big enough name or following to justify that kind of spending. It’s no wonder Netflix is cutting back now — they’ve been spending like drunken sailors for about a decade now.”
HE’s all-time favorite Baumbach film is still Greenberg (’10), but I wouldn’t like it as much if it had cost $100 million.
Paul Kolas: “It was a fool’s errand to even attempt to make a movie out of White Noise. It may be a brilliant novel, but an apt metaphor would be Ahab chasing the White Whale, and if this turns out to be Baumbach’s Heaven’s Gate, l can just see critics calling it Noah’s Flood.
“I want this to be a great movie, do I ever, but this news is most distressing. Notice that Netflix is not promoting it, or Blonde, and focusing on more commercial audience-friendly films like The Gray Man and Knives Out 2. And look at the way they are already promoting the living daylights out of Maestro, which you know will be their biggest Oscar bait movie to date, and we’ll most likely have to wait until October-November-December of next year to see it. I don’t know what the budget is on Maestro, but I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near $140 + million. No wonder Netflix is in a panic.”
** If White Noise is, in fact, an ’80s period thang, we can obviously scratch the “deranged campus wokester” angle.
