Jeffrey Wells

Tomorrow night I’ll be at Sony Studios for a presentation of 22 “gigantic” backdrops, sponsored by the Art Director’s Guild and created by JC Backings and used for classic films as North by Northwest, Singin’ in the Rain and The Sound of Music. The backdrops (some 60 feet wide and 24 feet high) will presumably occupy at least a few of sound stages. The press release says they’ll “represent a wide cross section of genres and techniques used by artisans for more than 75 years,” meaning they’re duplicates of the originals, I gather.

The evening will celebrate the ADG’s 75th anniversary. Members of IATSE Local 800 will attend. There will be a special appearance by scenic painter Karen L. Maness, co-writer of ADG’s next large-format publication, “The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop.”

The swoony ComicCon fanboys didn’t say boo about Peter Jackson‘s 48 frame per second turn-tail during yesterday’s Hobbit panel in Hall H, but TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman brought it up, at least.

Hobbit director Peter Jackson during yesterday’s Comic-Con panel discussion in Hall H.

11 or 12 minutes’ worth of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey had just been screened, but in the standard 24 fps format. Waxman writes that Jackson “didn’t even mention 3D or show the higher-resolution 48 frames-per-second footage that was shown to theatrical exhibitors in April.”

“Like anything, you’ve got to get used to it,” Jacxkson told the crowd yesterday. “You don’t know whether you like it or not until you can be immersed in it for two hours. That’s how it should be judged — not in a convention hall, in an environment that is not the cinema.”

For what it’s worth I’ve heard that Warner Bros. tech guys ran a test projection of Jackson’s 48 fps Hobbit footage inside Hall H, and that they weren’t satisfied with it. If this really happened and this alleged dissatisfaction was a key factor in the decision not to show the 48 fps reel, I don’t know why Warner Bros. didn’t just say that. This I would’ve understood.

“Forty-eight frames is terrific,” Jackson told the crowd. “I think it’s going to change the way things are made. It’s a terrific advancement, giving people an immersive experience that they can’t get off their iPads and to get people back to the cinemas. We are living in an age where teenagers are not going to the movies.”

But “I didn’t want people to sit there and watch 10 minutes of film and all they write about is 48 frames.”

Jackson elaborated in a 7.15 interview the The Huffington Post‘s Mike Ryan, who began by asking if Jackson was “disappointed by the internet reaction” to the 48 fps footage shown during Cinemacon in Las Vegas.

“Yeah…I mean, disappointed, I guess, is one way [of putting it]. I wasn’t surprised in the sense that my experience with 48 frames ?? and I’ve seen hours and hours and hours of it, obviously ?? is that it’s something that becomes a real joy to watch, but it takes you a while.

“It’s like watching a movie where the flicker and the strobing and the motion blur what we’ve been used to seeing all of our lives — I mean, all our lives in the cinema — suddenly that just disappears. It goes. And you’ve got this incredibly vivid, realistic-looking image. And you’ve got sharpness because there’s no motion blur, so everything is much sharper. And plus we’re shooting with cameras that are 5K cameras, so they’re super sharp.

“So you sit there and you think, ‘Wow, this is different.’ The first few minutes, you think, ‘Wow, this is really different.’ It’s cool, but it’s different. And at the end of two hours, or two and a half hours, you think, ‘That was cool. It was a great way to watch the movie.’

“Now, what I learned from the CinemaCon experience is don’t run a seven or eight or ten minute reel where the total focus is going to be on the 48 frames. I mean, that was a disappointing thing at CinemaCon. Forty-eight frames I’m not worried about, because when this movie comes out and people see it at 48 frames, they’re actually going to get the experience that I’ve had for the last 18 months. I’m a film guy, I’ve grown up all my life going to the movies, and I think 48 frames is great. So I’ve got to believe I’m not stupid. I have to believe it.

When Ryan says he’d been hoping to see the 48 fps version at Comic-Con, Jackson says, “I
know, but Hall H, a big convention center…that’s not the way to judge it. It’s an important thing to judge, because the industry may or may not want to adopt high frame rates, and I think it has to be taken very seriously. And I think the only logical thing to do is to let people see a feature-length narrative film at 48 frames. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that people are going to enjoy it.

“But the disappointing thing with CinemaCon is that no one talked about the [content of the] footage. The first time we ever screened The Hobbit, all the stories were the 48 frames stories. And then the negative guys, the guys that say this doesn’t look like film — the guys who are in love with the technology of 1927 — are sort of sitting there saying, ‘But it doesn’t look like cinema. This is not what we’re used to seeing in the films.” And those stories rush around the world and no one talked about the footage.

“So I’m not going to go to Comic-Con with 12 minutes of footage and have the same reaction. I don’t want people to write about 48 frames. Forty-eight frames can be written about in December. When people can actually watch a full-length narrative film, everyone can go to town on 48 frames, because that’s the form that you’ve got to see it in. And if you hate it, you hate it. And if you like it, you like it. [But] I think most people will [like it].”

Early this morning HE reader “gazer” wrote that yesterday’s riff about (a) alleged buyer reactions to Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder and (b) my judgments about Sarah Green and Nick Gonda‘s apparent tendencies as Malick’s producers (“Malick’s Enablers Doing Him No Favors“) boil down to my “essentially trying to lobotomize a filmmaker who rubs [me] the wrong way.” I wrote a response an hour ago:

Wells to gazer: Malick doesn’t rub me that aversely. He’s always been a very special, obviously gifted filmmaker-poet-dreamer-painter. Most people understand that. His personality and spiritual worldview are part of the threadwork of everything he’s done, and he’s influenced others here and there. Badlands and Days of Heaven are mesmerizing works. But more to the point, they’re disciplined…unlike, in my view, the films he’s made since he returned 14 years ago from his J.D. Salinger-like withdrawal with The Thin Red Line.

I read Malick’s fascinating draft of The Thin Red Line script in ’96. It was quite different than the 1998 film that he shot and cut together — compressed, tightly threaded, far less meditative. The New World gets better and better every time I see it — I watched the longest director’s cut on Bluray a year or so ago and was really taken away by the primeval Jamestown portion, although I still felt and do feel unsatisfied and even irked when Colin Farrell abruptly disappears and Christian Bale shows up and Pocahantas travels to England and suddenly dies. And I thought that the first hour or so of The Tree of Life was sad and moving and detestable and quietly mind-blowing, but that the center didn’t hold and it kind of spaced itself out and lost the thread, whatever that thread may have been. (I’m forgetting now.)

My point is that Malick’s method of shooting and particularly editing strikes me as random and swirly and catch-as-catch-can, and in a strange way almost forced. He shoots what he shoots and then he tosses the lettuce leaves into the air and grabs a leaf here and there and eliminates Sean Penn‘s Tree of Life character or Adrien Brody‘s Thin Red Line character (“Fife”) when the mood strikes, and then he picks some strands of pollen fibre out of the air and weaves them through the lettuce leaves and throws it all together into some kind of swoony patchwork ball of yarn or free-association mescaline trip — an impressionist fever dream by a guy who’s looking to rewrite the manual.

Which is very brave and exciting on his part, and at the same time bothersome, depending on my mood when I’m watching one of his more recent films. I basically feel/believe that the Malick of the ’70s was a much more interesting and transporting director than the one who re-emerged with The Thin Red Line — that’s all. I’m not dismissing him out of hand or saying that he rubs me the wrong way….although he actually kind of does at times. But he also amazes and delights me from time to time.

During this afternoon’s Django Unchanged panel at Comic-Con, Quentin Tarantino explained what Empire‘s James White calls an “intriguing link” between Jamie Foxx‘s Django and ’70s blaxploitation cinema. According to QT, Broomhilda Von Shaft (Kerry Washington) and Django “will eventually have a baby, and that baby will have a baby…and then John Shaft will be born! Our hero and heroine are the Great, Great, Great Grandparents of Shaft.”

If John Shaft, who was around 30 in 1972, was born in 1940 or thereabouts, then his dad was born around 1915 or so, and Shaft’s grandfather would have been born, say, around 1885 or 1890, and his great-grandfather was born around 1860 or 1865. His great-great grandfather could have been born in in 1835 or 1840, and his great-great-great grandfather — the son of Django and Broomihilda, according to Tarantino — would have been born around 1815 or 1820. Isn’t Django Unchained set sometime just before the Civl War, or in the 1850s? Or have I got that wrong?

Here’s a portion of a Michael Keaton q & a on Grantland, filed by Daniel Kellison:

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According to a 7.10 posting by terrencemalick.org’s Paul Maher. Jr., Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder — an Oklahoma-set romantic drama he shot in late 2010 with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Chastain and Javier Bardem — has scared away distributors, who have presumedly been shown the film in its entirety or in portions.

In other words, the same buyers who were going “what the eff is this?” after seeing The Tree of Life are again throwing up their hands and muttering to themselves in the general vein of “here we go again,” “life is too short,” “Jesus H. Christ” and “not me, babe.”

As Maher puts it, “Possibly the difficulties of The Tree of Life and its polarizing effect on the box office may be an underlying issue.”

Maher’s source is either closely affiliated with or working for Film Nation, and of the female persuasion. I’m listening to Maher because he’s a Malick fan, and like any webmaster running a kiss-ass website his default tendency is to praise Malick and otherwise shine favorable lights upon his accomplishments.

Not only is To The Wonder not being released in this country any time soon (although it may open in Europe a few months hence), but “the possibility of any trailer or publicity-related material coming out in the fall of 2012 is still vague, possibly unlikely,” Maher writes. He also reports that “when asked for any kind of teaser image or information, I was told [by my FilmNation source] that there still is nothing in the public domain that they could release.”

What the eff does that mean?

Malick taking two years to cut a film together is SOP (Days of Heaven was in the editing room from ’76 to ’78) but he can’t be moved to even issue a selection of still images from To The Wonder? Or allow a one-sheet to be created? Or put together an appetite-whetting teaser of some kind?

I’ve been saying for years that Malick needs a tough ballsy producer who isn’t afraid to get in his face and read him the riot act and goad him into adhering to a semi-reasonable editing deadline (i.e., between a year and eighteen months, let’s say) and perhaps even influence the shaping of his films in a way that won’t flagrantly agitate the thick-fingered vulgarians in the distribution business, at least to the point that they’ll make semi-serious bids on his finished films, which has not apparently happened on To The Wonder, per Maher.

The fact that To The Wonder is allegedly homeless nearly two years after principal photography is the proof in the pudding. Terrence Malick needs an intervention. He needs a strong partner and counsel who can save him from himself.

More to the point, the indications are overwhelming that Sarah Green and Nick Gonda, Malick’s producers on (a) To The Wonder, (b) the film formerly known as Lawless and (c) Knight of Cups, do not believe in the tough-love approach used by Bert Schneider, Malick’s producer on Days of Heaven. Malick’s endless dithering and dilly-dallying indicates that Green and Gonda are not forcing the issue and have decided to serve him in a passive, whatever-Terry-wants sort of way. They appear to be hand-holders, friends, toadies, facilitators, go-alongers, enablers.

In a 5.18.12 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintock, FilmNation’s Glen Basner said he “hit it off with Sarah Green and Nick Gonda, two of the producers of [To The Wonder]. We were very like-minded people and maintained a friendly relationship. They were looking to make his next movie more outside the system, allowing Terry to have a process that works best for him, and we devised a way to finance the movie that met all of those needs.”

In other words, Malick says “jump” and Green and Gonda say “how high?”

In a 12.13.11 obit, I praised Schneider as “the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies by somehow persuading him to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes.

“After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the ’90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.

“An avowed leftie, Schneider was a renowned, down-to-business producer of late 1960s and ’70s classics such as Easy Rider (which Schneider reportedly honed into shape when director Dennis Hopper‘s undisciplined editing became problematic), Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He also won a Best Documentary Oscar in 1975 for Hearts and Minds.

In his landmark book ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,’ Peter Biskind called Schneider ‘the eminence grise of the American New Wave.’

From Wiki’s account of the post-production of Days of Heaven:

“After the production finished principal photography in ’76, the editing process took over two years to complete. Malick had a difficult time shaping the film and getting the pieces to go together. Schneider reportedly showed some footage to director Richard Brooks, who was considering Gere for a role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

“According to Schneider, the editing for Days of Heaven took so long that ‘Brooks cast Gere, shot, edited and released Looking for Mr. Goodbar while Malick was still editing.’

“A breakthrough came when Malick experimented with voice-overs from Linda Manz‘s character, similar to what he had done with Sissy Spacek in Badlands. According to editor Billy Weber, Malick jettisoned much of the film’s dialogue, replacing it with Manz’s voice-over, which served as an oblique commentary on the story.

“After a year, Malick had to call the actors to Los Angeles to shoot inserts of shots that were necessary but had not been filmed in Alberta. The finished film thus includes close-ups of Shephard that were shot under a freeway overpass. The underwater shot of Gere’s falling face down into the river was shot in a large aquarium in Sissy Spacek‘s living room.

“Meanwhile, Schneider was upset with Malick. He had confronted Malick numerous times about missed deadlines and broken promises. Due to further cost overruns, he had to ask Paramount for more money, which he preferred not to do.”

As I wrote on 6.29.11, “Terrence Malick’s 10.1.96 draft of The Thin Red Line was tight and true and straight to the point, and it had no alligators sinking into swamps or shots of tree branches or pretty leaves or that South Sea native AWOL section or any of that languid and meditative ‘why is there such strife in our hearts?’ stuff.” Why didn’t Malick shoot the down-to-it script he wrote? I wouldn’t know, but one reason, surely, is that his producers didn’t say boo when he decided to throw in the alligators and the tree leaves and all but jettison Adrien Brody‘s performance.

Terrence Malick, in short, has been enabled to death by his friends and supporters. He’s a fascinating, highly educated sea captain-auteur who has always followed his heart and has taken his three-masted schooner around the world to exotic and illuminating destinations, but he has almost always been impractical and unreasonable, and he’s been known to allow his canvas sails to become ripped and tattered. He’s almost like a kindly, gentle-mannered version of Captain Ahab — a man tasked with delivering oil to the people of New Bedford but who has other business to take care of. That “other business” has resulted in some great filmmaking, but Malick needs a strong Starbuck in his life.

How hard is it to sing on-key? For many people, it can’t be done. I’ve sat in restaurants and listened to people absolutely murder the “Happy Birthday” tune — and singing “Happy Birthday” is about as easy as it gets. It’s not just hitting notes — you also have to slide into them, sustain them. Wake me up at 4 in the morning and I’ll sing “Your Smiling Face” perfectly in terms of phrasing and hitting notes. Same thing with “Be-Bop Baby.”

America is “turning into Tsarist Russia,” Avengers director Joss Whedon said today during a Comic-Con panel. “We are watching capitalism destroy itself right now, [and] we’re creating a country of serfs.”

“We have people trying to create structures and preserve the structures that will help the middle and working class, and people [are] calling them socialists,” Whedon went on. “It’s not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal…it’s some people with some sense of dignity and people who have gone off the reservation.”

The 2012 Toronto Film Festival (9.6 thru 9.16) has a lot of slots to fill, and will screen anything it can grab as long as the film has any kind of jaunty pedigree and is opening between late September and the mid fall. It’s also likely that almost everything shown at the Venice Film Festival (8.29 thru 9.8) and the Telluride Film Festival (8.31 thru 9.3) will play Toronto. It’s also likely that the New York Film Festival (9.28 thru 10.14), which begins 12 days after Toronto, will try to exclusively screen two or three biggies.

I don’t think anyone on my level is going to have anything figured out until early August, but let’s do some guessing. Not about Toronto, which is Walmart, but Telluride and New York. I can never figure out Venice.

Argo, The Master, To The Wonder, No, Cloud Atlas, On The Road, The Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond The Pines, Only God Forgives, All You Need Is Love…probably all of these. 12 in all. Venice, NY, Telluride…all over.

I could see Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina (Focus, 9.7) playing Venice but not Telluride, which ends only four days before Karenina opens. Doesn’t Telluride usually want more breathing room?

I know nothing about Trouble With The Curve (Warner Bros., 9.28), a Clint Eastwood baseball-scout drama in the vein of Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino, but I wouldn’t mind if it played Telluride. A touch too sentimental? Outside of Telluride’s aesthetic turf? Maybe. But if Telluride can show Butter, they can show Trouble With The Curve.

If I was New York Film Festival honcho Scott Foundas I would try to show Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson (Focus, 12.7), a natural for the NYFF with its upper New York State setting and historical ties to Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray), who served as Governor of New York State from ’29 to ’32. I would also try to land Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (Paramount, 11.2), a “commercial” drama with a great trailer (which is all anyone knows at this point) with Denzel Washington on top.

I’m betting that Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Pyschopaths will turn up at Toronto, but…who knows?

End of the year, out of the picture: Lincoln, Les Miserables, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Zero Dark Thirty, This Is Forty, Django Unchained, The Great Gatsby, Life of Pi.

What am I missing?

Congratulations to the people who delivered this Cosmopolis trailer. It makes we want to see David Cronenberg’s film and I didn’t like it when I saw it in Cannes. Except for the very effective ending, which concludes a long dialogue scene between Robert Pattinson‘s Wall Street shark and Paul Giamatti‘s beaten-down everyman, I mostly hated it. But this is a good trailer.

Entertainment One is opening Cosmopolis on 8.17.

“We all know that Wall Street sharks are the compulsive demons of our time and are probably living with suppressed torment of one kind or another,” I wrote on 5.2, “so going into this I knew it wouldn’t do for Cronenberg to just say that Pattinson’s Eric Packer is a beast and show how devoid he is of humanity. The film would have to say ‘yeah, he’s a beast but he used to be human…see?’ Or ‘he’s more than a beast — he’s an alien.’ Or ‘he’s a beast but there might be a way out.’ Something more than just ‘this guy is all but dead, and you’re going to spend 108 minutes watching him be a zombie as he talks trade and devaluations and currencies and fucks hot women.’

“Lamentably, Cosmopolis does almost exactly that. And with non-stop chatter so compact and persistent and airless your ears will eventually fall off. With the same determination that Packer takes himself down, Cosmopolis talks itself to death.

“I was dying for a little silence, a little quiet outside the limo…a sunset, an empty, wind-swept boulevard at pre-dawn, an encounter with a friend or two. Oh, that’s right — Packer hasn’t any.

“Cosmopolis is ‘too familiar, too regimented, too claustropobic, too obvious. Yes, you’re constantly aware of Cronenberg’s fierce behind-the-camera talent, his determination to stay with his apparently quite faithful screenplay of Don DeLillo‘s book and to not cop out by making a film about how Packer used to be human but is now an alien although there might be a way out. That’s not the Cronenberg way. He gives it to you his way, and you just have to sit there and take it.”

I’ve been meaning to complain about two elements in Don Winslow and Oliver Stone‘s Savages, although the fault is more Winslow’s than Stone’s. I’m a fan of Winslow’s novel of “Savages” (particularly his “tight sentences and smack-dab phrasings,” as I said in my 7.6 review of the film) but — here’s the first beef — I found his descriptions of Laguna Beach and other Orange County havens bothersome. Negligent, I mean.

Winslow omits a fundamental aspect of the character of Laguna Beach and that general south-coast sprawl, which is that it’s an over-developed, traffic-suffocated hell-hole. I’ve felt this way about Laguna since I first visited in the late ’80s, which is one reason why I’ve only gone back once. Portions of the beach area are nice and you can take an attractive photo if you’re careful, but it’s way overstuffed — too many cars, too much clutter and crap, not enough parking, too many tourists, surrounded by Republicans. It was probably sublime in the 1920s and ’30s.

But to go by Winslow’s descriptions — “rich and beautiful,” “oceans and cliffs,” flower-covered hills, fragrant aromas — Laguna and that neck are just like Tuscany or inner Belize or the Cote d’Azur, albeit spotted with gas stations and freeways and 7-11’s and super-malls. That’s just not honest reporting. Drive down sometime and tell me Laguna satisfies anyone’s definition of “paradise,” which is how Blake Lively‘s “O” character describes it at the start of Stone’s film, the screenplay for which was co-written by Winslow, Stone and Shane Salerno.

My other complaint contains that SPOILER I mentioned in the headline. It’s about the ending. The first ending, I mean. The real one taken from Winslow’s book. Here it is:

How realistic or believable is it that O and Taylor Kitsch‘s Chon, in the prime of their lives, would purposely submit to death with a shot of morphine in order to stay with Aaron Johnson‘s Ben as he expires from a couple of gunshot wounds? The idea is that these three are so emotionally entwined that if one goes, the other two are compelled to follow because there’s no reason to continue without their profoundly close bond.

Except there’s this little instinct we’re all born with called “survive at all costs.” Ask any male combat veteran if he was ever seized by an impulse to lie down next to his dying best buddy and shoot himself in the temple. Doesn’t work that way. My late father, who was with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II, told me some stories that gave me a little insight into this. The instant somebody really close to you catches a bullet in the eye or falls off a cliff or gets eaten by a lion, the universal reaction is always “whoa, shit!… dude, that’s awful and sorry to lose you…I’m freaking and weeping but, well, at least I’m still here! Whew!”

Winston Churchill spoke of the exhilaration that comes when a bullet aimed at you misses its mark. I suspect that being close to death is more on that level.

That’s how it is, how we’re built. Life is awfully precious and you don’t throw it away out of sympathy for a fallen comrade. Until experience teaches me otherwise I say Winslow’s finale is bunk.

Just like that, highly respected veteran producer Richard Zanuck died this morning at age 77. What a trooper, what a life. The son of legendary 20th Century Fox founder Daryl F. Zanuck, he learned the ropes in the early ’60s and cut his teeth and became a smart, tough operator with a knack for churning out solid, middle-of-the-road, well-made films, most notably Jaws, The Sugarland Express, Compulsion, The Sound of Music, The Verdict, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy (ouch) and Sweeney Todd.

Zanuck was never radical or renegade. He played the game safely, but always with taste and diligence and political skill. This is very sad news. Condolences to friends, family and colleagues, and especially Zanuck’s wife Lili Fini Zanuck and his longtime collaborator Tim Burton, with whom he made six films.

Zanuck is, I believe, the only studio chief to have been whacked by his own father. He became president of 20th Century Fox in the mid ’60s and oversaw its post-Cleopatra rebound with the success of The Sound of Music, but the ignominious failure of Doctor Dolittle, the 1967 Rex Harrison talk-to-the-animals fantasy, prompted his chairman-of-the-board dad to cut him loose.

Zanuck took a gig as a Warner Bros. exec vp, and in ’72 he partnered with the wise and elegant David Brown, one of the best guys I’ve ever known in this industry, to form Zanuck/Brown, which was based at Universal Pictures. It was this partnership that led to Zanuck’s greatest run.

I wish I could find a clip from Laurent Bouzereau‘s fascinating documentary about the making of Jaws. (It’s available on the 2005 Jaws DVD, and should be on the forthcoming Bluray.) It was this doc that told me what a steady and fair-minded guy Zanuck was — a guy who could roll with the punches and hang tough when push came to shove.

Zabuck’s other credits include The Black Windmill, The Eiger Sanction, Clean Slate, Mulholland Falls, Deep Impact, Rules of Engagement, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and Dark Shadows.

Spokesperson Jeff Sanderson told Reuters this morning that Zanuck died of a heart attack.