Jeffrey Wells

A few cynical cheap-shotters wrote yesterday that the excerpts of Stanley Weiser‘s W script, provided yesterday in an ABC News article by Marcus Baram, led them to wonder if this was some kind of April Fool’s joke. These guys are monkeys, in my opinion, and they need to reel it in. Or better yet, consider what Weiser wrote this morning in an e-mail and what I wrote back.

“I’m glad that you see the potential in W,” Weiser began. “As the writer of the script, you saw an early draft. The ABC News piece only pulled out the whacky sensationalistic points from that draft, as you know.
“I’m also glad you nailed Ari Fleischer‘s denial of Bush talking about kicking Saddam’s motherfucking ass across the Mideast because this was sourced directly from Michael Isikoff’s book, Hubris.
“A few of your cynical readers think this is an April Fool’s joke. So will others in ten years, three trillion dollars and thousands more dead when they look back at this fiasco.”
“Thanks for your note,” I wrote Weiser back. “I’m constantly irked by some of those little right-wing bitches and cheap cynic contrarians who write in response to various Hollywood Elsewhere pieces. The draft I read might be an early stab, but I’ve gone over the 10.15.07 W twice now and it’s a lot deeper and fuller than it seems at first. It’s tightly written and clear of mind — everything is very choice and precise, and it never wavers from its focus.
“The general reaction has been ‘is that all there is’? In other words, because it’s an Oliver Stone movie, people want some kind of ‘holy shit!’ lightning-bolt element …and they feel this isn’t that. What they’re reading, instead, is a well-honed portrait of who this guy is, what’s driven him, what he’s always wanted, how he’s gotten to where he is, and what the central themes of his life seem to be (i.e., the drag-downs and the uplift).
“But in the modesty of this approach there is serious virtue. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the script precisely because it’s not wild-ass, because it really seems to have its ducks in a row and is carefully shaped and ordered, because the dialogue is very tight and pruned down, because you seem to have captured Bush’s speech style perfectly (or so it seems to me), because I believed each and every line.
“Not once did I sense the presence of Hollywood far-left liberals getting off on skewering Bush because it’s in their blood and it makes them clap their hands and say yeah. I sensed a real submission to documented or reliably sourced fact. I say this having only read Bob Woodward‘s two books about the Bush White House, but you seem to have done your homework.
“Yesterday Chris Matthews said during the news-review section of Hardball (in reaction to Baram’s ABC News piece) that “this being an Oliver Stone film, don’t expect a rigorous adherence to the facts” or words to that effect. Whether each and every line is precisely sourced or not (which would surprise me — a writer has to have a little leeway to make a script feel organically human and alive), this is precisely what I got from this 10.15 draft, that I’m reading a heavily-researched, straight-dope recounting.
“Boiled down, W is a cogent dramatic summary of the significant chapters and stages in the life of an aw-shucks, smart-but-dumb, silver-spoon fratboy who, like all of us, has had his issues and limitations and hang-ups and challenges to deal with, but nonetheless managed to grow into a donkey demagogue of the first order.
“I can’t wait to see what Josh Brolin does with the role. And I keep seeing Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney. And I love the mention of Cats being Bush’s favorite stage musical. (Cats…asshole! He probably loves Mamma Mia also!) And the metaphor of the fly ball at the very end is just right.”

Almost exactly 13 years ago Oliver Stone and his publicist Stephen Rivers arranged for me to pay a brief visit to the Nixon West Wing — Oval Office, cabinet room, hallways, various offices, etc. Production designer Victor Kempster had built the amazingly detailed set (including an outdoor portion with grass and bushes) on a massive Sony sound stage.

I was let in just after Stone and his cast (including Anthony Hopkins) and crew had finished filming. It was sometime around February or March of ’95. I wrote up my impressions for an L.A. Times Syndicate piece. Nixon opened on 12.20.95.

The Nixon unit publicist (or somebody who worked for Rivers) escorted me onto the stage and left. Nobody was around; I had the place all to myself. I had a video camera with me and shot all the rooms, and took my time about it. I was seriously excited and grateful as hell for the opportunity because it was, in a sense, better than visiting the real Oval Office in the real White House (which I would have never been allowed to do even if I’d been best friends with someone in the Clinton administration).

Every detail was Eric von Stroheim genuine. Wooden floors, real plaster, ceilings, rugs, moldings, early 1970s phones, bright gold French aristocracy drapes, china on the shelves and mantlepiece, etc.

Five years later I was granted a visit to a replica of Jack Kennedy‘s West Wing that had been used for the shooting of Roger Donaldson‘s Thirteen Days. It was about the same time of year — February or March of 2000, roughly nine or ten months before the movie’s release in December. The set had been built by production designer Dennis Washington inside a warehouse-type sound stage somewhere in southern Glendale or Eagle Rock.

The difference between the Nixon Oval Office’s decor — creamy beiges and golds, a bright blue rug, gilded bric a bracs on the shelves (which contributed to a kind of effete, faux-aristocratic atmosphere) — and the subdued greens, browns and navy blues of JFK’s office (which even had a replica of the coconut shell that Lt. Kennedy used to carve out a message to command during his PT 109 adventure) will always stay in my mind.

Tacky, varied-grain wooden floor put in by Bush in ’05.

You can tell a lot about people from the decor in their homes and workplaces. Only an arrogant know-nothing would have installed the nouveau-riche wooden floor that Bush put in three years ago. The White House is a place of great history, echoes and ghosts, and it should look and feel like it’s been hanging in there for at least a century or so — stressed floors, old timber and dark varnish, like the early 20th Century and 19th Century homes that are found in the northeast.

These visits were as close as I’m ever going to get to the real Oval Office — they gave me a real organic window into recent history. Even if I’d been invited to the real White House I wouldn’t have had the chance to poke around and study everything at my leisure.

In a 4.1 article, New York critic David Edelstein has written that “it was wrong to finger [Harvey] Weinstein for pulling [the late Anthony] Minghella‘s strings” in a 3.25 blog piece.
Here’s how Edelstein synopsizes the original thing: “I said that Minghella, who died suddenly following surgery, never lived up to the potential of his first feature, Truly, Madly, Deeply, and I suggested that his career trajectory had a lot to do with Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein pushing him in the direction of tony Oscar-bait material following the slew of Academy Awards for The English Patient.”
“Yes, it’s a minority view that those films were artistically compromised. But even allowing for their considerable merits (and my reviews of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain were largely positive), it’s a pity that unlike, say, Neil Jordan, Steven Soderbergh, or Stephen Frears, Minghella didn’t also make smaller and more personal projects that were as adventurous, as sui generis as Truly, Madly, Deeply.”
Edelstein says that I wrote in this column (on 3.26) that Minghella, whom I knew slightly from having interviewed him once and run into him at a couple of parties, “liked living well and making high-profile pictures.” Well, not quite. I qualified and mushed up my statement a bit more than that.
“My sense of Minghella,” I wrote, “is that on some level he was at least half-comfortable with not being the most prolific filmmaker of all time.” That also means, obviously, that Minghella may have been half-uncomfortable with not having made more films. And when you say you have a “sense” of a man you’re saying it’s obviously from a certain distance. Otherwise you would say, simply, that you knew him.
I also said “he was a beautiful man in many respects, but I think he liked to live well.” That’s plain enough, and not that controversial — every person with money develops a strong affection for the lush life that comes with it. I also said that Minghella “loved the aromas and textures and ecstasies of day-to-day living as much as (and perhaps a tiny bit more than) the rigors and tortures of creation.” All in all, I think that was fair observation. Writing is a bitch. Directing too. Life is hard.

A few days ago I mentioned a passing interest in wanting to read the script of Down and Dirty Pictures, an adaptation of Peter Biskind‘s 2004 book about the indie movie heyday of the ’90s. A couple of days later a guy sent me a draft of it, written by Joshua James and Dean Craig, undated, 121 pages, based on a story by James and Ken Bowser. u

And I have to say the following: the movie, which PalmStar Pictures is going to shoot in September, may turn out well or not. But the script isn’t half bad. At the very least it has a certain bold, punchy recklessness. It’s a movie within a “movie” with lots of yelling, arguing, maneuvering, jousting. It breaks down the fourth wall with characters talking to the camera. I muttered the word “Fellini-eseque” to myself at one point. It also reminded me at times of American Splendor. And it’s pretty funny at times. Especially the Bingham stuff.
The script could use a little refinement. The tone is a little too belligerent. It needs some meditation, quiet, stillness. But it’s a lot better than I expected. Here’s page #1, page #2, page #3 and page #4.
It’s basically a series of scenes showing some famous indie players — Bingham Ray, Harvey Weinstein, Jeff Lipsky, Quentin Tarantino, David Dinerstein, Cassian Elwes, Robert Rodriguez, Jeff Katzenberg, Tony Safford, Amir Mailin, Scott Greenstein, Allison Anders, Kevin Smith, Tim Roth, John Schmidt, Linda Lichter — trying to out-do or out-finagle or out-bullshit each other. Arguing, sniping, boasting, bellowing, boasting, bitching, whining, moaning. It’s pretty much Biskind’s book — all the good parts, I mean — minus the narrative padding and commentary and windy perspective.
You know the story if you’ve read it. It’s about how indie films became cool and happening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, how some titles caught on or exploded commercially, how the corporate guys bought some of indie operations and their operators and slowly, gradually co-opted and corporatized the “movement,” as it were.
The best characters, for me, are Bingham and Harvey — partly because they’re the most outsized and bellicose. It begins and ends with Bingham. Lipsky, Ray’s former October Films partner, figures prominently.

The problem, of course, is that the “characters” will be played by actors, which will probably feel strange. (To me, anyway.) The other obvious problem is that audiences haven’t exactly flocked to inside-the-beltway films about the film business.
I talked earlier today with PalmStar’s Kevin Frakes about the script and the shoot. He sounded like an intelligent, fair-minded guy. The film will not be “micro-budgeted,” he said, but will cost less than $15 million, he said. Name actors will we cast, he said. The shooting, which will happen during September and October, will shoot in Toronto (“Toronto for itself and Toronto for New York”), Park City and a couple of days in the South of France.
The very first copies of the revised script were sent to Harvey and Bingham, he said, right before the start of the WGA strike. Weinstein “told us to get somebody good to play me…that’s a quote,” he said. He didn’t share Ray’s reaction, whatever that was or is. Ray didn’t return my calls about the script. I also called Biskind — zip. My former boss Kevin Smith has yet to return also. Presumably they feel chagrined or rattled or at the very least guarded about it.
Something is telling me that Down and Dirty Pictures would work best as a six-hour HBO miniseries. The story covers a ten-year period and needs room to breathe. The PalmStar script is pretty good, but it feels a little too compressed.

N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr considers the recent disappearance of all them film crickets — Newsday‘s Gene Seymour and Jan Stuart, the Village Voice‘s Nathan Lee, Newsweek‘s David Ansen plus critics “at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining,” etc.
Carr quotes Defamer/Reeler columnist Stu VanAirsdale, MCN’s David Poland, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman, Sony Classics co-chief Michael Barker, Village Voice executive editor Michael Lacey, ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman, etc.
“Given that movie blogs are strewn about the web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it’s just appearing on a different platform,” Carr writes. “And no one would argue that fewer critics and the adjectives they hurl would imperil the opening of Iron Man in May. But for a certain kind of movie, critical accolades can mean the difference between relevance and obscurity, not to mention box office success or failure.”
And for certain kinds of readers, critical huzzahs will never be fully real unless…I’m tired of saying it.

ABC News entertainment writer Marcus Baram has profiled Stanley Weiser‘s W screenplay, which Oliver Stone will begin shooting later this month, in some detail. At the end of the piece he quotes Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleisher (who denies, amazingly, that Bush used salty language), myself and University of North Carolina at Wilmington history professor Robert Brent Toplin, who wrote “Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: How One Film Divided a Nation.”

Two articles about Hillary Clinton‘s Bosnian tall tale, written with gleaming steel scalpels by two highly respected essayists, the N.Y. Daily News‘ Stanley Crouch and Slate’s Christopher Hitchens, appeared yesterday. The latter is especially searing regarding the Clinton administration’s Bosnia policy in the early ’90s.
They both use the term “White House” in statements of a similar context. “For all of the sound and the fury, I do not think that the Clintons will destroy the Democratic Party,” Crouch writes. “And they will not ensure the victory of McCain. But I think that they have destroyed any possibility for themselves of returning to the White House.” Says Hitchens, “Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.”

My Earthlink e-mail messages stopped coming in last night around 9 pm Pacific. The whole network is down as we speak. It took me 45 minutes this morning to pull this priveleged information out of the Earthlink tech support team in the Dominican Republic. With a pair of pliers. I went through through three very friendly guys who were reluctant to own up. If someone has an urgent message try me at gruver1@gmail.com. The D.R. guys said the Earthlink network would be back up in one or two or three hours. In other words, possibly by midnight tonight.

Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which HBO opened in Manhattan and Pasadena last Friday in order to qualify the doc for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar, was reviewed by plenty of people at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, but N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has taken advantage of last Friday’s very limited, zero-profile opening to formally review it.
The doc “gets at the strong, curiously divisive reactions” that the famed director of The Pianist, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown “has long inspired, reactions that have as much to do with the disturbing power of his best work as his own history as a victim and a survivor,” she writes. “Mr. Polanski survived the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. It was the American legal system that almost did him in.”

With his direction of Leatherheads (Universal, 4.4), George Clooney has attempted “one of the hardest things there is to do — re-create the fizz of old Hollywood screwball comedies,” notes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. The result, lamentably, is “just a mild buzz.”

Indeed, the best screwball comedies play as if everyone in the cast is (a) slightly deranged and (b) on some kind of light flutter drug. Like the effect of two or three sips of champagne and a half-quaalude. Or a half tab of ecstasy. His Girl Friday, Some Like It Hot, 20th Century, The Lady Eve, My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby, Ball of Fire and The Awful Truth all feel like this. They’re so stoned that they provide a kind of contact high. That’s the trick of these films, and why the best ones are still loved.
Leatherheads doesn’t quite manage this. It’s too good-hearted, too “charming,” too quick to smile. You want Clooney to pull back on the game and get real. A comedy without a serious foundation can feel too much like a jape, and so the mood humor in Leatherheads has a kind of ceiling. You want to give yourself over to it, but you can’t. The movie won’t let you. Because it only wants to make you feel good and spritzy, after a while it almost makes you feel a little bit bad. Even though it’s mostly “likable.” A curious effect.
“A larky romp about the early days of professional football, Leatherheads aims only to please and proves perfectly amiable, but the ultimate effect is one of much energy expended to minimal payoff,” McCarthy writes. “Arch and funny in equal measure, Leatherheads looks like a theatrical non-starter that Clooney fans and football devotees might be tempted to check out down the line on DVD or on the tube.”

George Clooney‘s Leatherheads (opening Friday) is tracking well at 73, 40 and 18 — it should do close to $20 million, maybe a bit more. Nim’s Island, a kid’s picture with Jodie Foster, is running at 59, 27 and 7. The Ruins is at 44, 22 and 6…doesn’t look like much. Among next weekend’s (4.11) openings, Prom Night is at 59, 28 and 5; Smart People is running at 39, 22 and 2, and Street Kings (Fox Searchlight) is at 47, 35 and 3. 4.18 openings: 88 Minutes at 42, 33 and 4, Fobidden Kingdom is at 59, 39 and 6, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall is running 47, 28 and 3.

As it must to all men, death came today to the great Jules Dassin at age 96. A Greek-descended, Hollywood-employed, highly-rated noir director, Dassin was blacklisted in 1949 only to bounce back with Rififi (’55), the greatest heist film ever made. (Rififi was actually released in France in ’54.)

The Paris-based melodrama re-ignited Dassin’s career and led to subsequent hits such as He Who Must Die (’57), the lightly comedic heist film Topkapi (’64), Phaedra (’62),and the legendary Never on Sunday (’60). He also directed Uptight (’68 — a Harlem-based remake of John Ford‘s The Informer), Promise at Dawn (’70), The Rehearsal (’74) and Circle of Two (’80).
Dassin’s noteworthy Hollywood-era films include Brute Force (’47), The Naked City (’48) and Night and the City (’50). Forget noteworthy — these three are essential if you haven’t yet seen them.
I’ll forever be grateful for having attended Dassin’s special visit to the L.A. County Museum of Art in 2004, during which he spoke on-stage for about 90 minutes before a screening of Rififi. A 40-minute video of that visit can be found on the Criterion Collection’s 2007 DVD of The Naked City.

Jules Dassin

One of Dassin’s more ardent admirers was Alexander Payne, who felt a kinship based on their common Greek heritage. Payne told me this afternoon that he recently lobbied for Dassin to be given a special honorary Oscar from the Academy, but it was no-go.
In view of the Academy having given a politically controversial honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, who was despised in some corners for having named (or confirmed) names to HUAC, Payne feels “it would have been nice for the Academy to have acknowledged both sides of that very difficult coin — a director who stayed, and another who was forced to leave.”
Dassin was married to Greek actress Melina Mercouri until her death in 1994. He was a very wise, charming and elegant man, to judge from his comments during the LACMA interview. He deserves some kind of special posthumous tribute on next year’s Oscar show, considering how the Hollywood community came close to ruining Dassin’s life during his creative prime.