Eucalyptus is the title of a Jocelyn Moorhouse-Fox Searchlight film that was recently put on hold because the script isn’t ready yet. Actually, because star and executive producer Russell Crowe had problems with it. The film, which would have costarred Nicole Kidman, is about “an Australian widower who plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land,” according to a Reuters news story “He tests his daughter’s suitors by making them identify every species. One succeeds, but by then Ellen (Kidman) already has lost her heart to a handsome stranger (Crowe).” I’m sorry, but that sounds like fanciful chick-movie horeshit.
Damn Numbers
It was being predicted a couple of weeks ago that the February 27th Oscar telecast will be among the lowest-rated in history, if not the lowest rated. Are we supposed to be concerned? All right, let’s say we are.
In the early to mid 1930s, back when Irving Thalberg had something to say about the way this town was being run, the Oscars were intended as a classy promotion for the studio’s higher-quality films.
The industry was saying to the public, “Enjoy your westerns and your Wallace Beery movies, but keep in mind that every so often the movie industry tries to make films of lasting value, and we’d appreciate your support in these efforts.”
That concept went into the toilet a long time ago, largely due to the interlocking rules of TV ratings and advertising revenues.
People are said to be scared because the Golden Globes awards telecast in mid-January attracted only 16.8 million viewers — 37% less than it enjoyed last year. But this is because it played opposite ABC’s Desperate Housewives, or so goes the rationale.
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If the Oscar ratings go south, it’ll have nothing to do with Chris Rock being the new host (although I’m sure some industry journos will take a stab at this if the ratings debacle happens). Most of the blame will rest on the shoulders of three Best Picture nominees — Million Dollar Baby , Finding Neverland and Sideways — for not having sold enough tickets, and therefore weakening rooting interest on the part of mainstream viewers.
Ray and The Aviator are the Best Picture nominees that have made reasonably decent coin so far — $74 million and $77 million, respectively. Decent but not humungous.
Actually, Sideways is doing fairly okay for a small film — $15 million earned since the Oscar nominations were announced on 1.25 for a total of close to $48 million. Million Dollar Baby has taken in a post-Oscar-nom $28 million for a $36 million tally. Finding Neverland has received the smallest post-nomination benefit, bringing in almost $7 million for a $36 million gross.
What the doomsayers mean, I suppose, is that none of these films have brought in over $100 million, which implies they aren’t doing as well as they should in the hinterlands. (Most of the money, I’m assuming, has come from blue-state cities, largely because the weakest three haven’t played Bubbaland theatres until fairly recently.)
And so this means…what? That Academy members need to forget about nominating movies and filmmakers that fit their “best” criteria? (Not that they do this with any focus or sincerity now, but that’s another story.) And from here on they need to concentrate on nominating only the movies (and the people who’ve made them) that have sold the most tickets?
This, of course, would be tantamount to turning the Oscars into the People’s Choice Awards, but everything’s swirling in a downward direction anyway so why not?
“The Aviator might have a chance at breaking $100 million because of all of its nominations,” Box Office Mojo’s Brandon Gray told USA Today‘s Scott Bowles in a recent piece. “But that’s a long shot. The other movies are middling performers that people don’t care about.”
People don’t care about seeing Million Dollar Baby or Sideways? What kind of dead-to-the-world, potato-chip-munching attitude is that?
On the other hand, I half sympathize with people saying “naahh, later” to Finding Neverland. It’s a decent heartfelt little film, but Kate Winslet and her coughing…oy. And it’s hard to suppress the urge to strangle Johnny Depp and be rid of his burry Scottish accent for good.
I don’t know why I’ve even getting into this. It’s appalling that people are saying that the Oscar show, or the concept of the Oscars, needs to adapt to the aesthetic vistas of a nation of rurals who wear flip-flops and don’t read Anthony Lane (much less anything hardbound) and spend too much time on the couch.
Isn’t the Oscar-choosing process polluted enough? I guess not.
My son Jett, 16, doesn’t respect the Oscars, and is saying he doesn’t care that much about watching the show this year. A lot of people have written in and said the same thing. This probably means that the show needs to change, get loose, get a new spikey haircut…but in what fashion or direction?
Or is it the movies themselves that aren’t working, or are missing, to an increasing degree, something fundamental?
A friend explains the basic problem as follows: The studios and the “dependents” aren’t making movies for the Big Middle anymore, and the backwash of this policy has been affecting interest in the Oscar awards. And it’s only going to get worse.
The studios are primarily in the super-budgeted, theme-park, Brad Pitt, make-sure-it-plays-in-Germany-and-Croatia business. Some good big-studio pics are getting made here and there, but mostly we’re getting C-level projects at A-level budgets.
(There are only two possible big-studio Oscar contenders opening between late April and Labor Day: Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.)
And the smaller outfits, my friend said, are mostly about making or acquiring films aimed at better educated blue-state audiences (i.e., Sideways).
I don’t like that people have been labeling Alexander Payne’s film this way. It’s not about a couple of celestial physics instructors, but about the kind of guys everyone knows or at least rubs up against. But when you keep hearing the same things over and over, it’s hard to keep arguing.
A friend who loves Sideways took a Manhattan-raised ex-boyfriend to see it last week and he started seriously complaining about it about 45 minutes in. “I can’t take this…it’s all about drinking,” he said. He insisted on leaving. They went across the lobby and saw Hide and Seek instead.
Obviously this guy’s a lowbrow (with a past alcohol problem, I’m told, which explains his reaction) but avoidance scenarios like this have probably happened with others.
For some reason, and despite being called the Best Picture of the Year by almost every critic in the country, Sideways is doing only pretty well. It hasn’t really caught on, and I keep sensing that people are smelling something they don’t like about it. This sounds cruel, but they seem to have some kind of problem with movies starring (or are largely about or cuddle up to) balding, bearded, whiny-voiced pudgeballs.
I just can’t accept that would-be moviegoers are asking each other what they want to see on a Friday night, with one saying “what about Million Dollar Baby?” and the other saying “naaah.” I refuse to live in a world that shuttered.
And yet I think people should at least go to The Aviator, despite the several irritations. (DiCaprio is brilliant, despite his not being quite the right guy to play Howard Hughes, and it is, you know, a Scorsese film.)
It’s ironic, of course, that the one Best Picture nominee that people haven’t had to talk themselves (or their dates) into seeing, is arguably the weakest candidate. And I loved watching it last fall, and I’ll watch it again this week on DVD. What’d I say?
Smart Bomb
My natural tendency is to side with a critic or journalist when there’s some kind of scuffle, but I thought the writing that went into Owen Wilson’s hammering of New Yorker critic David Denby for his slice-and-dice of Wilson’s longtime homie and costar Ben Stiller was pretty tasty.
I know, I know…I should have run with this last Monday or Tuesday.
At the very least, Wilson’s witty tirade makes for a more elevated contretemps than the one that went down between actor Rob Schneider and L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, which was largely about Schneider’s attempt to trash Goldstein’s rep by pointing out he’s never won any journalism awards, whatever that infers.
Here’s Wilson’s thing:
“I read David Denby’s piece on Ben Stiller with great interest (“The Current Cinema,” January 24th & 31st). Not because it was good or fair toward my friend but exactly because it wasn’t,” he began.
“I’ve acted in two hundred and thirty-seven buddy movies and, with that experience, I’ve developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have. And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain.
“Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. And in Denby I realized excitedly that I had hit the trifecta. How could an audience not be dying for a real `Billy Jack’ moment of reckoning for Denby after her dismisses or diminishes or just plain insults practically everything Stiller had ever worked on?
“And not letting it rest there, in true bully fashion Denby moves on to take some shots at the way Ben looks and even his Jewishness, describing him as the `latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.’ The audience is practically howling for blood! I really wish I could deliver for them–but that’s Jackie Chan’s role.”
Here’s the link to Denby’s Stiller piece.
Downfall
There’s a nicely written, highly persuasive piece by Louis Menand in this week’s New Yorker called “Gross Points.”
Here’s Menand’s entire piece and here are some excerpts:
“The people who make the popcorn basically know what they’re doing. The people who make the movies basically don’t, at least not until the product is out there, and then it’s too late.
“The history of Hollywood is a comic routine of bad guesses, unintended outcomes, and pure luck. Half of the failures were well-intentioned, and half of the successes were, by ordinary standards of fairness and decency, undeserved. People do get rich making movies; more often than not, they’re the wrong people. That’s why moviemaking is so much fun to read about. Unless, of course, it’s your money.
“The cinema, like the novel, is always dying. The movies were killed by sequels; they were killed by conglomerates; they were killed by special effects. Heaven’s Gate was the end; Star Wars was the end; Jaws did it. It was the ratings system, profit participation, television, the blacklist, the collapse of the studio system, the Production Code. The movies should never have gone to color; they should never have gone to sound. The movies have been declared dead so many times that it is almost surprising that they were born…”
Of course, ‘death,’ in this context, does not mean ‘extinction.’ What it means depends on the speaker.
“David Thomson’s The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (Knopf; $27.95) is a coroner’s report. The title is misleading. The book gives roughly two hundred and ninety pages to the first fifty years of Hollywood and about eighty pages to the last fifty, and the true scope of its interest is even narrower.
“Thomson thinks that Hollywood had only two phases of first-class product: from 1927 to 1948, The Jazz Singer to the Paramount decision (the Supreme Court case that broke the studio system by forcing the studios to divest themselves of the theatre chains they owned); and from 1967 to 1975, Bonnie and Clyde to Jaws.
“If you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art. Thomson’s subject is not, strictly speaking, the history of the movies; its subject is the history of caring about the movies. That calls for something more than just the facts.
“Giants like [Independence Day, Godzilla, Pearl Harbor and the two Matrix sequels] continue to stalk through the multiplexes, shaking gold from the heavens with their thunderous, THX Certified footsteps; but inside their high-definition, digitized craniums their tiny brains are dead.
“[This] wouldn’t matter so much now if the industry didn’t care. But the industry does care. The people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do. The situation would be simpler if everyone was certain that the movies making money today have no more creative integrity or cultural significance than a beer commercial. But no one is certain. People fear that they’ve lost the key to the distinction.
“Most autopsies of the cinema tend to be `it all started to go wrong when…’ narratives. They’re appealing in the same way those `wise old person who knows the secret’ stories that turn up in so many fantasy-adventure movies today are appealing, and they have the same shortcoming, which is that in life there never is just one secret, and there never is just one cause.
“In the case of a collaborative, semi-regulated, high-cap, worldwide, mass-market entertainment like a Hollywood movie, identifying causes is like predicting next year’s weather. A butterfly flutters its wings in Culver City, and a decade later you get The Terminator.
“One of the merits of The Whole Equation is that it avoids isolating a cause of death. It maintains a kind of analytic deep focus; it tries to take in everything. Thomson thinks that some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. `It’s not so much that movies are dead,’ he suggests at one point, `as that history has already passed them by.’
“Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.
“And what is the main cinematic experience? The tickets, including the surcharge for ordering online, cost about the same as the monthly cable bill. A medium popcorn is five dollars; the smallest bottled water is three. The show begins with twenty minutes of commercials, spots promoting the theatre chain, and previews for movies coming out next Memorial Day, sometimes a year from next Memorial Day.
“The feature includes any combination of the following: wizards; slinky women of few words; men of few words who can expertly drive anything, spectacularly wreck anything, and leap safely from the top of anything; characters from comic books, sixth-grade world-history textbooks, or ‘Bulfinch’s Mythology’; explosions; phenomena unknown to science; a computer whiz with attitude; a brand-name soft drink, running shoe, or candy bar; an incarnation of pure evil; more explosions; and the voice of Robin Williams.
“The movie feels about twenty minutes too long; the reviews are mixed; nobody really loves it; and it grosses several hundred million dollars.
“The blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and the resources out of every other part of the industry. A contemporary blockbuster could almost be defined as a movie in which production value is in inverse proportion to content.
“Troy is a comic strip, but what a lavish, loving, costly comic strip it is. The talent, knowledge, and ingenuity required to make just one of the battle scenes in that film, or one mindless James Bond chase sequence, interchangeable in memory with almost any other Bond chase sequence, would drain the resources of many universities.
“But why doesn’t anyone put more than two seconds’ thought into the story? The attention to detail in movies today is fantastic. There is nothing cheap or tacky about Hollywood’s product, but there is something empty. Or maybe the emptiness is in us.”
Forecast
David Poland ran a list this morning of some ’05 films he thinks will be Oscar nominated as of 1.25.06. I agree with all of them except two.
Forget about Columbia’s Memoirs of a Geisha. I realize how lowbrow this sounds, but any movie title with the word “geisha” is out, as it obviously portends something excessively delicate and (let’s be honest) probably dreary.
And forget Universal’s King Kong — double-triple-quadruple forget it. A remake of a classic ape movie with Andy Serkis as the ape can’t be Oscar material, and no rational person out there expects it to be…especially under the hand of Peter Jackson.
Tribute
Thing Ding
When a movie is working with an audience, you can feel it.
I’m not talking about an opinion. You’re there and people are beaming and laughing and giving standing ovations when it’s over, and you can sense it coming out of every pore in the room. Guys like Variety‘s Robert Koehler can pooh-pooh all they want and it doesn’t matter — a hit is a hit is a hit.
This is the bottom-line deal with Paul Reiser’s The Thing About My Folks, an above-average, surprisingly effective father-son relationship film that I saw last Friday night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
Paul Reiser and Peter Falk in The Thing About My Folks.
I don’t like films that try to jerk you around and make you feel primary emotions, or ones that play the “square card” too heavily, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding did.
I understood what people saw in that film (as awful as it was) and why it comforted or charmed older audiences. Reiser’s film is plowing the same turf, but it does a better job of it.
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I didn’t even want to go at first because I’d heard it was not for me, and that it was aimed at the crowd who liked Greek Wedding and so on. My plan was to maybe watch the first 45 minutes or so and then make a call. I was also feeling a bit drowsy and wasn’t in the mood for a difficult sit.
But then the story and the acting and the writing kicked in, and I flushed all the negativity out of my system and just sat up and went with it. And then the lights came up and Reiser did a q & a with the audience, and he had them eating out of his hand.
It was announced last Sunday night that The Thing About My Folks had won the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Audience Award.
This is a kindly, amiable, recognizably human story about a middle-aged married guy (Reiser) getting to know his 75 year-old Dad (Peter Falk) over the course of a brief trip to rural New York.
The story kicks off with Sam (Falk) telling Ben (Reiser) and his wife Rachel (Elizabeth Perkins) that his wife Muriel (Olympia Dukakis), neglected for several decades due to Sam’s focusing on his business and being a bit of an emotional miser, has left him and gone off somewhere.
Attempts to find Muriel by Ben’s sisters are initiated while Ben tries to chill Sam out with an invitation to drive an hour or two north of Manhattan and look at a farm he’s thinking of buying.
What happens isn’t on the level of Eugene O’Neill, but it’s honest and sharp and, for me, sweetly satisfying. Falk kills (it’s his best role in a long, long time), Reiser is believably befuddled and sympathetic, and Dukakis comes in for a third-act score at the very end.
It’s a well written thing — tonally TV-ish, okay, but the snappy energy never flags, and there’s always an emotional point being constructed or reflected upon. And it’s nicely cut and smoothly paced. The same unpretentious homey quality that DeFelitta brought to Two Family House has been adhered to and enlarged upon.
This is not a Luchino Visconti or a Stephen Frears film, and it’s not for critics like Koehler or B. Ruby Rich, but on its own terms it works.
Here’s the weird part: audiences have been lapping it up at the Palm Springs Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival, and at some kind of test screening in Pasadena and another at Hollywood’s Arclight, and yet distributors have been reluctant to grab it.
Why? It’s not a kid’s film — it’s pretty much aimed at people in their 30s, 40s and beyond — and distribs aren’t sure they can sell it or “open” it.
I understand what they’re saying, but on another level this view feels bizarre. Sappy as this may sound, The Thing About My Folks really gets and expresses family values. Not the George Bush kind (culturally regressive, turning-back-the-clock) but the universal kind that most of us have dealt with in our own lives. Connecting with your elders, caring for them, understanding what they’re about.
I know what this sounds like, but Thing is better than that.
I’ve heard that one potential distributor is a tiny bit concerned about the movie’s ethnicity, that it’s a little “too Jewish.” Right…just like My Big Fat Greek Wedding was too Greek, which is why no one except Greek immigrants went to see it.
The main characters in The Thing About My Folks are New York Jews, but that’s the window dressing. It’s what inside a movie — i.e., the values it expresses — that counts.
One of the two producer’s reps for The Thing About My Folks is Jeff Dowd (a.k.a., “the Dude”), and he expressed a thought yesterday about why this film has been connecting that makes sense.
“With movies that are quality-level and playing well, there’s two kinds of buzz — good word-of-mouth and what we call compelling word-of-mouth,” Dowd said. “This movie has compelling word-of-mouth.
“You have compelling word-of-mouth when it’s value-based….like Passion of the Christ. That was a movie that culturally embraced the values of a certain audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 had a value-based appeal, and so did Greek Wedding .
“This has a value base. People want to see adult films that are positive and empowering and also entertaining, and this is a real family values film. It’s what people really go through in holding families together…without being ideological or getting into any kind of red-state thing. It’s playing just as strongly in blue states. Throw a dart at a map of the country and it’ll play there.”
Dowd’s partner repping Thing About My Folks is David Garber, who worked in the same capacity for Monster and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Some of the major buyers haven’t seen it yet, but some who’ve seen it have said, “I laughed, I cried, and I’m not sure I can sell it.”
I’m going to show The Thing About My Folks on Monday, February 21st, at the UCLA Sneak Preview class I’m hosting during the winter-spring season. The series is happening at the Wadsworth theatre on the Veteran’s Administration grounds, adjacent to the UCLA campus.
The 2.21 screening will kick off at 7 pm. Industry fence-straddlers are urged to get in touch with Jeff Dowd and get their own reading. Anyone else who wants to attend can enroll in the class through UCLA Extension (310.825.9971, reg. # Q9853).
Dowd is confident the film will be sold sooner or later. He understands what buyers are up against. “Right now they’re very, very busy…they’re swamped,” he says, “and there are all kinds of ways to feel uncertain about anything, but I used to be an exhibitor, and I get my information from audiences.”
Jeff “the Dude” Dowd, the real-life model of Jeff Bridges’ character in The Big Lebowski, going for a strike.
What Dowd is trying to do now is to ease buyer concerns about how the film can be sold, and on this point his pitch is simple: Paul Reiser and Peter Falk are ready to go on Oprah and other TV and radio talk shows as a team and sell the hell out of it.
“These guys are great together, and they can get on television,” says Dowd. “The producers of these shows know who they are, they know Reiser is funny and they’ll put them right on.
“This is a relationship movie, and it’s hitting the responsive chord that we all yearn for, but more than that, it’s not only saying that women like vulnerable men, but it’s about two men learning to be more romantic with women.
“We’re real enthusiastic at this point,” says Dowd. “With sports or movies, sometimes you have to climb the mountain. Hilary Swank has had to climb it. So have Jamie Foxx and Taylor Hackford. More often than not, climbing the mountain is what this business is all about.”
Dean’s Ghost
James Dean will have been dead a full fifty years as of 9.30.05 — over seven months from now. But Warner Home Video, owner of the rights to Dean’s three feature films, doesn’t want to wait that long to exploit this anniversary.
Anyone who was young in the ’50s or ’60s has a special thing for this quietly intense young actor who was the first to make something iconic and riveting out of teen angst in mainstream films, and in a way that still touches and penetrates.
Twice I’ve visited the Dean death site, which is located near the small town of Cholame off Route 46. I’ve stood next to the spot where Dean’s spirit left his body. I’ve taken it all in and felt vague stirrings of what I’ve told myself is probably some kind of historical after-vibe, and I’ll bet there isn’t a single Warner Home Video exec who’s done this or felt this, so don’t tell me.
James Dean action figure, marketed in Japan and I don’t know where else.
Every time I re-watch a Dean flick I’m still heavily impressed by those amazingly delicate chops of his, and how he managed to deliver that aching vulnerable thing with just the right amount of finesse.
But does Dean mean all that much to GenXers and GenYers? How many under-35s have seen and really enjoyed East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause? These are great films (nobody cares much about Giant… it’s a dull film), but does the Dean legend/mystique pack that much of a punch these days?
I’ve asked my son, Jett, to riff on this in his next Sixteen column.
In any event, Warner Home Video will release a brand-new Dean DVD package on May 31 — remastered, double-disc, extra-heavy presentations of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, plus a new documentary, James Dean: Forever Young, with previously unseen footage of Dean’s TV work.
And they’ll be debuting the Forever Young doc at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival, along with screenings of the three features, which have all been digitally restored.
(I wanted to ask someone at the press thing if their original negatives have been genuinely — i.e., photochemically — restored in the organic, old-fashioned way, but questions weren’t allowed.)
Aftermath of Dean car crash tragedy on 9.30.55. I’m not certain if the guy on the ground is Dean or the guy (Rolf Wuetherich) who rode with him that day…or if the photo has been faked.
Plus they’re organizing “Dean Fest,” a big three-day media festival happening in Dean’s home towns of Fairmont and Marion, Indiana (he was born in Marion, raised during his teen years in Fairmont by his aunt and uncle) from June 3rd to 5th.
I don’t know how worshipping at the altar of Dean’s memory is supposed to amount to three meaningful days for anyone of any age, but I guess the Warner folks will try and make that dog hunt.
I know — why don’t they imitate what David Cronenberg did in Crash and hire guys to drive imitations of Dean’s Posche Spyder (i.e., “Little Bastard”) and Donald Turnupseed’s black-and-white 1950 Ford Tudor, and have them smash into each other? Too perverse?
A bunch of other opportunists will be getting in on the hustle — merchandisers, piggy-backers, sweet-talkers. Peddlers of T-shirts, coffee mugs, red Rebel jackets, Dean dolls, etc.
Why am I writing about this now? Because Warner Home Video threw a press event yesterday morning at the Grove to announce the Dean bandwagon, and I had nothing else to do. All right, I was vaguely interested.
James Dean
They got Pete Hammond to be the master of ceremonies. A parade of corporate suits took turns at the mike, blah-blahing about Dean’s rebel spirit and lasting influence. Some pals and colleagues of Dean’s from the old days shared some recollections. Martin Sheen (who played Dean in a TV movie about 25 years ago) showed up also, paying tribute to Dean’s profound effect upon actors, etc.
There was no trace of Dean’s old pal Dennis Hopper, though. There should have been.
I was told the whole presentation would last a little more than an hour. I stayed for the first 90 minutes, at which point the screen presentations had completed and Hammond had introduced and interviewed six or seven of Dean’s former friends, co-workers and/or associates. There were thirteen empty chairs to go when I left.
If Dean had lived he’d be 74 today — Clint Eastwood’s age. But I don’t think it was in the cards for Dean to reach a ripe old age. Photographer Phil Stern, easily the morning’s most caustic and honest speaker, said Dean was reckless about driving and was probably nursing some kind of urge to self-destruct.
Stern said he was driving on Sunset Blvd. (near the corner of Crescent Heights Blvd.) one day in early ’55, and he nearly killed Dean after he ran a red light.
“Dean was very prescient because he structured his career in such a way that he passed away, which I believe was inevitable, in a way that precluded the possibility of people seeing him as a pot-bellied bald man,” Stern remarked.
There was something odd about friends and contemporaries of a guy known as the most influential troubled teenager in movie history…the proverbial `50s youth with a turned-up hood…there was something disorienting about Dean’s contemporaries looking so old and crochety and bent over.
Corey Allen, 70, the actor who played Buzz in Rebel Without a Cause (i.e., the one Dean had knife fight with, and who went over the cliff in the car) was white haired and bearded and carrying a cane and apparently suffering from Parkinson’s, or something like that. He seemed okay attitude-wise.
You came out of this corporate presentation knowing one thing: time sure as shit marches on, and getting old is a sonuvabitch.
I’m a huge Dean fan, and I’m very glad that East of Eden is finally coming out on DVD. (I own the laser disc version that was issued in ’93, but I threw my laser disc player into the dumpster around ’99 or thereabouts).
And as long as I’m breathing I’ll always love Leonard Rosenman’s scores for both East of Eden (especially the overture and main title pieces) and Rebel Without a Cause .
James Dean, 24, taken sometime during or after the making of Rebel Without a Cause.
But there was something seriously odious about all these bottom-line corporate suit types paying tribute to Dean’s earning potential as a brand name, but not necessarily (or at least, not believably) paying tribute to who he actually was.
There’s a line in Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters in which Max von Sydow’s artist character says that if Jesus Christ were to come back to earth and see what is going on today in his name, “he would never stop throwing up.”
I was wondering what Dean would have thought of Tuesday morning’s presentation. I like to think he would have been amused in some way, shape or form. I was also imagining his ghost sitting in the seats yesterday and throwing ectoplasmic spitballs.
Dean Again
“I’m under 35 (a good 15 years under, actually) and I’ve never seen East of Eden, mostly because a good copy is hard to find, and I’ve never gotten aorund to Giant. But I want to say that me and my friend damn near worship James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
“His subtle performance as a tortured youth is made only more legendary by the stories of his own tortured life and tragic death. The myth of lost promise built in the themes of Rebel Without a Cause may have been solidified by his death, but they were created by his performances.
“I’m glad that Warner Brothers has decided to give his movies the big editions they deserve, although I do agree that the hype only seems to be the shallow corporate bottom line.
“Maybe Universal will want to get with the program and release a DVD of James Bridges’ 9.30.55, a movie about Dean’s death that I’m told is pretty okay.” — Michael Avalos
“I’d cut the Warner Home Video people some slack if I were you. Okay, so the Dean event was run by a bunch of suits and htey don’t get it. I wasn’t there and couldn’t say. Everybody sells out at some point, whether it’s them or someone else doing it on their behalf (remember Disney using The Doors’ “Break on Through” to promote Monsters, Inc.?
“What I do know is that there’s no other studio today putting out better DVD releases of classic titles than WHV. Hell, they may be the only reason many under-35s like myself have even heard of certain films, whether they see them or not.
“No matter what the money men do to promote the discs, the fact that they’re putting the time and money into promoting them at all is enough for me, as it’s clear to me that this is one studio that cares about their classic titles more than most.
“In this case, the announcement of double-disc East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause set and the new doc should go far in showing who Dean was as an actor and a person rather than, as you say, his ‘earning potential as a brand name.’ His movies are getting the treatment they deserve, and that’s enough for me.” — Mark Van Hook, Boston, MA.
Strange Invaders
There√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s no telling how good or even credible Timothy Hines’ screen adaptation of H.G. Wells√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ The War of the Worlds will be, but it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s hard not to sympathize with any David facing a Goliath…especially when the kid with the slingshot got rolling on his project first.
Hines’ film cost $12 million and apparently has no formal distributor, but will open, it is being claimed, seven and a half weeks from now — on Wednesday, March 30 — in five major cities on a four-wall basis…or so I’ve been told. (Hines is claiming he has a distributor, although he won’t identify it.)
Paramount Pictures War of the Worlds (6.29), which is costing at least $150 million to produce, boasts the talents of director Steven Spielberg, star Tom Cruise and screenwriter David Koepp. Nonetheless, it will open about three months after the indie upstart.
A turn-of-the-century English military man (James Lathrop) enduring an attack by Martian invaders in Timothy Hines’ modestly-budgeted version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
No one thinks this will have even a slight effect upon the grosses of the Spielberg film, but the timing of the release of Hines’ film could work in his favor.
The notion of a Seattle-based, hip-pocket filmmaker beating Spielberg, Cruise and Paramount Pictures to the Martian punch is, at the very least, intriguing.
As Hines told me yesterday over the phone, “I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not doing this on the coattails of Spielberg. I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve been working on this film for seven years. We almost made it two years ago but 9/11 forced us to rewrite it and start over. In any event we√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re not selling sizzle — we actually have the steak.”
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And yet there are issues about the Hines project that are giving me concern.
For one thing, the 44 year-old Hines (House of the Rising, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) won√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t tell me who his financial backers are, except to describe them as “computer industry people, and I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not talking about Paul Allen or Bill Gates.” He said one of the individuals behind the project is “one of the largest venture capitalists in the world.”
Then there’s the issue of Hines declining to tell me who his distributor is. I was told Friday morning that he doesn’t actually have one — he and his partners are going to self-distribute (i.e., “four wall”) by booking screens outright, paying for their own advertising, etc. Hines has since declared this is “not true,” although he wouldn’t cough up specifics.
The one-sheet for Hines’ film looks half-classy, half-exploitation…passable but a little bit cheesy-looking. It’s not the sort of movie poster, I would think, that a savvy, hard-core distribution marketer would necessarily use to sell a movie with. Is this reflective in some way of the film itself?
Hines, the head of a Seattle-based company called Pendragon Pictures, has been doing a fairly skillful job of promoting his film on at least two websites aimed at sci-fi geeks, but it bothers me that the trailer won’t play, and is viewable only via Windows Media.
(Hines wrote me after this article posted on Friday and insisted “the trailers on howstuffworks.com are perfectly downloadable and have been downloaded by millions.” Good to hear…but I couldn’t download them, and a screenwriter friend who lives in New York had the same experience.)
Hines’ feature, an apparently faithful adaptation of Wells novel that√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s set in 1900 England, cost a reported $20 million, although $8 million of this was sunk into an earlier version that was going to be set in the present day, but was abandoned after the 9.11 tragedy. (It was decided that a modern-day film about invading destructive Martians would seem exploitive.)
H.G. Wells√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ The War of the Worlds, the official title of Hines’ project, may turn out to be a half-decent low-budgeter, a surprisingly inventive film or a grade-Z stinker, but come hell or high water it is apparently set to open in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco on 3.30.
A follow-up DVD release is set for 6.15 — two weeks before the Spielberg-Cruise flick hits screens.
Mechanical, spider-like Martian menace in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
Whatever else it may turn out to be, the Spielberg-Cruise War of the Worlds is expected to be an all-out, go-for-broke CG extravaganza. It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a modern-day spin on Wells’ allegorical tale of alien invaders (i.e., it was meant as a metaphor for British colonialism, and was actually a kind of protest about the Boer War), and will be set largely in and around Hoboken, New Jersey, with Cruise apparently playing a longshoreman.
It wouldn’t be totally out of line in a present-day context to call the Spielberg-Cruise flick a metaphor about U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq — just think of U.S. forces as the Martians and the Iraqis as Hoboken natives.
I called around yesterday (i.e., Thursday) and found it hard to find anyone in the indie distribution community who√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s seen Hines’ film, or has spoken to anyone who√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s seen it.
Hines told me a story about the film’s release strategy and financial backing was expected to break in Forbes on 2.11, but I checked about this on Friday morning and it appears that the story may be delayed.
I asked Hines why his pre-release strategy didn’t involve a trade story or two in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. He didn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t have much of a response other than to air a suspicion that trade magazine reporters are too caught up in catering to powerful Hollywood distributor-advertisers to deliver an unbiased report about a small-time producer going up against the big guys.
I asked Hines two or three times about when the film would be shown to critics, and each time he gave what sounded to me like an evasive answer. He later told me he’ll let me have an exclusive peek sometime in early March.
Here’s some verbatim excerpts from what Hines told me. I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m just running the quotes undoctored, not having time to double-check everything before my scheduled return to Santa Barbara early this afternoon:
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìI√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve been wanting to make War of the Worlds since I was ten years old. We were going to make a present-day version but we had to abandon our plan after 9/11.”
[Note: I don’t know for a fact that Hines began his film in ’98, but he took out a trade ad announcing his project in the 5.7.01 issue of Daily Variety, timed for appearance during the Cannes Film Festival.]
“I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m a small independent coming out of nowhere. We√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re clearly not part of the Hollywood machine. Obviously, Steven Spielberg doesn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t want to be seen as trailing in our footsteps. This is the first time ever in history in which a major studio, big-budget film will be following a smaller indie version of the same thing into the marketplace.
“We’re expecting to be trashed by critics, but my film is gorgeous. I cry every day at how well it’s coming together.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìWe√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re following the Wells book very closely, which partly involves using an old-fashioned idea know as story tension. The book begins with the initial landings, but the Martians don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t really show their hand until one third of the way in…but you know all the while that they’re going to emerge and start attacking, and that√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s where the tension lies.”
Timothy Hines, apparently. (I haven’t met the guy or taken his photo personally.)
“I didn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t make it as an analogy to the Iraqi War, although, yes, it√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s about occupiers and hubris. All through history invaders and conquerors have fallen prey to their own hubris. You see it again and again and again. Wells was protesting the Boer War with his book. He was saying Britain is going to fall one day, and it did…it was beaten by a little brown man wearing a loincloth.
“Paramount is trying to get people to compare our film with theirs on the basis of budget and special effects alone, but a satisfying film is about more than just that.
“That said, our effects are going to look as good as if not better than what you see on Star Trek, for instance. Our film, at its best, comes off as visually assured as The Matrix.”
SBIFF: The Return
Prior to the “Directors on Directing” panel at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre, on Saturday, 2.5.05, staged as part of the Santa Barbara Film Festival (l. to r.): the totally hidden head of Joel Schumacher (The Phantom of the Opera, Kevin Bacon (Loverboy), the partially hidden head of Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), Jeff Arch (Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys ), Luis Mandoki, i.e., Mexico’s answer to Carrot Top (Voces Inocentes), Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside), Michael Traeger (The Moguls), and producer-moderator Peter Guber.
(l. to r.): Bacon, Schumacher, Arch, George, Mandoki, Amenabar and Traeger.
Santa Barbara’s Haley Street looking east, State Street at the traffic light — Saturday, 2.5.05, 5:25 pm.
Mike “Mouse” McCoy (l.), pretty much the star of Dana Brown’s Dust to Glory, a rousing, fast-moving doc about the Baja 1000 race in November ’03, with Brown (r.) at an after-party at Soho, an upstairs bar just off State Street — Saturday, 2.5.05, 10:40 pm.
Thoroughbred
I have this notion that the Norman Jean Roy photo of Hilary Swank that appears on page 362 of the new Vanity Fair (as well as on a Sunset Strip billboard plugging this issue) is going to cinch Swank’s chances at winning the Best Actress Oscar.
Million Dollar Baby star Hilary Swank in 1936 Leni Reifenstahl mode, as seen on Sunset Strip billboard plugging current Oscar-themed “Hollywood” issue of Vanity Fair.
One look at this photo and you can’t help saying, “Wow…she’s on it.” If nothing else it’s a reminder of the intense physicality that Swank brought to her performance in Clint Eastwood’s boxing film.
A Swank triumph has been feeling like a strong likelihood anyway, but this photo feels like a closer of some kind. Or am I just floating on my own fizz?
Throat Session
A gala invitational screening of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s Inside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11) happened Thursday night at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre, followed by a discussion of some of the subjects raised by the film (social values, the legacy of pornography, etc.) by five prominent panelists.
Conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager brought about gasps from the mostly-liberal audience by saying he believed that damaging a child’s sense of sexual innocence was more emotionally harmful than exposing the same child to violence. He also advanced the notion of good violence (i.e., the shooting of evil Nazis) vs. bad violence.
After Thursday night’s screening of Inside Deep Throat, a discussion of sexual values by Democratic strategist/spokesperson Lawrence O’Donnell, author, filmmaker and Time critic Richard Schickel, author and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager and Variety editor Peter Bart — 2.4.05, 9:25 pm at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre.
Democratic spokesperson and campaign strategist Lawrence O’Donnell and Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel contended that no parent can keep his or her child in a state of idyllic innocence these days regarding sexual matters. Schickel said one needs to adopt an “existential, case-by-case, child-by-child” approach in dealing with these matters.
Moderator Peter Bart didn’t let audience members ask questions, but if he had I would have brought up the concept of good sex vs. bad sex, and why neither the film nor the panel had addressed the fundamental issue of how deeply depressing pornography is. The fact is that pornography envelops the viewer in the spiritual world of some very desperate and untalented people who are doing things that may seem hot at first, but after watching them for ten minutes or so constitute a total turn-off.
O’Donnell, Schickel, Huffington — 2.3.05, 9:40 pm at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre.
I’ve always said that I would be a major porn fan if X-rated filmmakers would make their films look and feel like a 1960 Ingmar Bergman film — using moody, carefully- lighted black-and-white photography with someone of the calibre of Sven Nykvist serving as the director of photography, and using actresses like Bibi Anderson and Liv Ullman, and spoken in Swedish, of course.
I have never seen a single porno film shot in lustrous black-and-white. Has anyone? This alone indicates the skanky, donkey-like mentality of X-rated filmmakers, and their general unwillingness (inability?) to do anything other than shoot the same old boring crap.
Sharon’s Book
The first thing that got me about Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot (Harper Entertainment) was its assurance. It’s a very smooth and soothing read.
Call me a plebian but I love inside-the-beltway books that deliver that massage-y, cruise-control, we-know-everything feeling(like Peter Biskind√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Down and Dirty Pictures and David Thomson√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s The Whole Equation did) along with…you know, the other virtues.
The next thing that got me was a certain compassion for George Clooney and David O. Russell. Those poor guys…fine on their respective turfs, but put them together on the set of a physically difficult, hard-to-get-right movie like Three Kings and sparks of agitation are inevitable.
International Creative Management hotshot agent Robert Newman (i.e., “the hip indie guy”), Rebels on the Backlot author and New York Times Hollywood beat Sharon Waxman, and producer Don Murphy (From Hell, Permanent Midnight) at beginning of party for Waxman’s just-released book at Book Soup, an oasis of literacy in West Hollywood — 2.3.05, 7:05 pm.
Waxman delivers a better, more convincing story of their fight during the making of this 1999 film than anything I’ve read or heard anywhere else.
What was the hassle about? Russell, King√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s director, told Clooney before filming began that he needed to break a lot of bad acting “habits,” and that he wanted Clooney “to be very still” in his role. When Kings began rolling, Russell kept on Clooney to cut down on the Clooney-isms, in response to which the TV-series veteran repeatedly “bristled.”
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìTheir relationship seemed doomed,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù Waxman writes. Clooney “felt undermined by his director and labored under the burden of knowing he was Russell√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s last choice…this led to disastrous consequences.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Out-there guys like Russell are never a day at the beach, but David O. was only trying to bring about the aesthetically right thing. Clooney does have a lot of bad habits. That cool-smug-guy thing that he employs all the time…don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t get me started. Russell may have been the provocateur in the breakdown of their working relationship, but Clooney needed — needs — what he was trying to dispense.
It was reported two or three months ago that Russell was upset with Waxman for making him seem slightly looney-tunes in her Times profile of his methods in the making of I Heart Huckabees. Many people agreed with him to some extent, but Waxman√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s book has balanced the ledger sheet. To my eyes, she’s portrayed Russell as the most doggedly exacting and perceptive high-profile director in town.
Rebels on the Backlot is essentially a story about the adventures of six cool-cat Gen-X writer-directors — the leaders of the pack who defined a certain accomplished, provocative, well-funded hipness over the least ten years: Russell, Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I wanted to know about who they were,” Waxman told a New York Observer writer last week. √¢‚Ǩ≈ìWhen you are talking about films that are so personal in their vision, you can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t help but wonder from what mind or personality [those pieces of work] sprang.”
Waxman was in Park City covering the Sundance Film Festival for the New York Times, for which she handles the Hollywood beat. I could have arranged some face-time with her myself (which would have made the piece you’re reading a better one), but the festival kept shoving me around and throwing me off my game.
I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve run into these directors at one time or another, mostly in the course of doing this or that story, but I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve never gotten to know them. Not like I know Wes Anderson, I mean. (Hey…how come Waxman didn’t include him in the book? Focus on seven directors rather than seven, etc. Wes is as important as any of these other guys, I feel.)
Another thing that caused me to find Waxman√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s book delightful is that it conveys facts that significantly add to my understanding of what these filmmakers are about…what√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s driven them, scared them, briefly defeated them, inspired them.
Three Kings director David O. Russell, star George Clooney during the problematic (some would say tumultuous) shooting.
I was shocked, shocked to read that Quentin Tarantino’s background was not that of a white-trash, fast-food-eating Tennessee kid from a broken home, but one that was more or less upper middle-class.
There√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a passage about Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s personal lives that I find fascinating. Partly because this is exactly the kind of passage that an aggressive and brilliant male writer would never include in a book about Hollywood filmmakers. It’s mildly cool nonetheless that Waxman has shown her colors in this fashion.
Tarantino nor Soderbergh “had trouble with intimacy” and “seemed [unable] to sustain relationships with the opposite sex,” she writes.
There was “a quiet woman” who was part of Tarantino√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s life about 12 or 14 years ago named Grace Lovelace “who remains -√¢‚Ǩ‚Äú according to many who know [Tarantino] — the true love of his life.” She reports that after he became famous Tarantino became “a serial dater of his leading ladies or his producer or the starlet of the moment.”
This is nothing compared to what she does to Soderbergh. She suggests that he may be James Spader in sex,lies and videotape, “the articulate intellectual dealing with emotions in distant, muted ways,” a guy, like Spader√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s “Graham” character, “who could enjoy sex with women only through the distance of the camera eye.”
To varying degrees, all the directors in Waxman’s book come off as fickle, egoistic, thin-skinned, prickly, brusque. This is nothing strange, of course. There’s always seemed to be a basic disconnect between submissive, mild-mannered, go-along behavior and being possessed of exceptional talent, smarts and vision. I’ve noticed this time and again, and it’s no big deal.
Some day, somehow, someone will discover on what set this shot of Steven Soderbergh was taken. My guess is The Limey.
A strong director can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t be a strong director without being tough and flinty and at times unyielding. It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a tough game that requires toughness and tough hides. I respect this, and have no problem with anyone who wants to try and bitch-slap me (so to speak) or give me an argument of some kind about something I’ve written. As long as they’re straight about it, fine.
A week and a half ago Soderbergh lectured me during the Inside Deep Throat Sundance party. It was about my writing a couple of years ago that George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind seemed strongly influenced by Soderbergh-ian visual stylings, which, in his view, diminished Clooney’s rep by suggesting he had no visual chops or chutzpah of his own.
I wish more people in this town would play it like Soderbergh and just walk right up and say it to my face.
It may sound like a vague put-down to call Rebels a great airport lounge or a coast-to-coast read, but this book is friendly. I read it cover to cover, but it’s structured and titled in such a way that you can just drop into any chapter and go to town. I guess what I’m really saying is that people with attention deficit disorder will have no problem with it.
Monochrome Porn
“Regarding your comment about there being no black-and-white pornography: I’ve seen it done by Andrew Blake (http://www.andrewblake.com). He actually uses it quite a bit. His stuff is really top notch — all shot on film, excellent lighting and the best looking girls in porn. The only problem is that he’s really gotten into the bondage stuff, which does nothing for me.” — Ross Williams, writer-
director (http://eraticate.com)
Truce Already
“I liked your two stories about the competing Christmas Truce of 1914 projects. I thought you might be amused to know that there is a virtual train wreck of Christmas Truce projects in the works.
“Besides the Vadim Perelman’s The Truce, Paul Weitz’s Silent Night and the German-French co-production of Joyeux Noel costarring Diane Kurger (now in the can and slated for a Xmas ’05 release), there are also:
“(1) Truce: 1914 — A British production ramping up for a 2005 start to be helmed by Peter Shillingford, a director known for his IMAX work. Brian Cox, Til Schweiger and Jonny Lee Miller are attached. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1466053)
“(2) Light of Peace — A film being produced by Marc Rosco of Electric Entertainment. Roland Emmerich was attached to direct.
“(3) …and a short film called Offside (produced by pop singer Michael Bolton) that premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.
“And then there is my own short film, also called The Truce, which won a Student Emmy and played at the 2001 Hamptons Film Festival (while Offside screened in an adjacent theater).
“I can’t accuse anyone of ripping me off; I was still shooting while Offside was in post. (http://www.thetruce.com and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289587/ combined).
“I had my own idea for a Christmas truce feature where the German and British soldiers team up to destroy an asteroid heading towards a crash collision with Earth, but none of the studios bit…alas.” — Eric Rolnick
Strange Invaders
There’s no telling how good or even credible Timothy Hines’ screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds will be, but it’s hard not to sympathize with any David facing a Goliath…especially when the kid with the slingshot got rolling on his project first.
Hines’ film cost $12 million and apparently has no formal distributor, but will open, it is being claimed, seven and a half weeks from now — on Wednesday, March 30 — in five major cities on a four-wall basis…or so I’ve been told. (Hines is claiming he has a distributor, although he won’t identify it.)
Paramount Pictures War of the Worlds (6.29), which is costing at least $150 million to produce, boasts the talents of director Steven Spielberg, star Tom Cruise and screenwriter David Koepp. Nonetheless, it will open about three months after the indie upstart.
A turn-of-the-century English military man (James Lathrop) enduring an attack by Martian invaders in Timothy Hines’ modestly-budgeted version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
No one thinks this will have even a slight effect upon the grosses of the Spielberg film, but the timing of the release of Hines’ film could work in his favor.
The notion of a Seattle-based, hip-pocket filmmaker beating Spielberg, Cruise and Paramount Pictures to the Martian punch is, at the very least, intriguing.
As Hines told me yesterday over the phone, “I’m not doing this on the coattails of Spielberg. I’ve been working on this film for seven years. We almost made it two years ago but 9/11 forced us to rewrite it and start over. In any event we’re not selling sizzle — we actually have the steak.”
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And yet there are issues about the Hines project that are giving me concern.
For one thing, the 44 year-old Hines (House of the Rising, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) won’t tell me who his financial backers are, except to describe them as “computer industry people, and I’m not talking about Paul Allen or Bill Gates.” He said one of the individuals behind the project is “one of the largest venture capitalists in the world.”
Then there’s the issue of Hines declining to tell me who his distributor is. I was told Friday morning that he doesn’t actually have one — he and his partners are going to self-distribute (i.e., “four wall”) by booking screens outright, paying for their own advertising, etc. Hines has since declared this is “not true,” although he wouldn’t cough up specifics.
The one-sheet for Hines’ film looks half-classy, half-exploitation…passable but a little bit cheesy-looking. It’s not the sort of movie poster, I would think, that a savvy, hard-core distribution marketer would necessarily use to sell a movie with. Is this reflective in some way of the film itself?
Hines, the head of a Seattle-based company called Pendragon Pictures, has been doing a fairly skillful job of promoting his film on at least two websites aimed at sci-fi geeks, but it bothers me that the trailer won’t play, and is viewable only via Windows Media.
(Hines wrote me after this article posted on Friday and insisted “the trailers on howstuffworks.com are perfectly downloadable and have been downloaded by millions.” Good to hear…but I couldn’t download them, and a screenwriter friend who lives in New York had the same experience.)
Hines’ feature, an apparently faithful adaptation of Wells novel that’s set in 1900 England, cost a reported $20 million, although $8 million of this was sunk into an earlier version that was going to be set in the present day, but was abandoned after the 9.11 tragedy. (It was decided that a modern-day film about invading destructive Martians would seem exploitive.)
H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, the official title of Hines’ project, may turn out to be a half-decent low-budgeter, a surprisingly inventive film or a grade-Z stinker, but come hell or high water it is apparently set to open in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco on 3.30.
A follow-up DVD release is set for 6.15 — two weeks before the Spielberg-Cruise flick hits screens.
Mechanical, spider-like Martian menace in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
Whatever else it may turn out to be, the Spielberg-Cruise War of the Worlds is expected to be an all-out, go-for-broke CG extravaganza. It’s a modern-day spin on Wells’ allegorical tale of alien invaders (i.e., it was meant as a metaphor for British colonialism, and was actually a kind of protest about the Boer War), and will be set largely in and around Hoboken, New Jersey, with Cruise apparently playing a longshoreman.
It wouldn’t be totally out of line in a present-day context to call the Spielberg-Cruise flick a metaphor about U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq — just think of U.S. forces as the Martians and the Iraqis as Hoboken natives.
I called around yesterday (i.e., Thursday) and found it hard to find anyone in the indie distribution community who’s seen Hines’ film, or has spoken to anyone who’s seen it.
Hines told me a story about the film’s release strategy and financial backing was expected to break in Forbes on 2.11, but I checked about this on Friday morning and it appears that the story may be delayed.
I asked Hines why his pre-release strategy didn’t involve a trade story or two in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. He didn’t have much of a response other than to air a suspicion that trade magazine reporters are too caught up in catering to powerful Hollywood distributor-advertisers to deliver an unbiased report about a small-time producer going up against the big guys.
I asked Hines two or three times about when the film would be shown to critics, and each time he gave what sounded to me like an evasive answer. He later told me he’ll let me have an exclusive peek sometime in early March.
Here’s some verbatim excerpts from what Hines told me. I’m just running the quotes undoctored, not having time to double-check everything before my scheduled return to Santa Barbara early this afternoon:
“I’ve been wanting to make War of the Worlds since I was ten years old. We were going to make a present-day version but we had to abandon our plan after 9/11.”
[Note: I don’t know for a fact that Hines began his film in ’98, but he took out a trade ad announcing his project in the 5.7.01 issue of Daily Variety, timed for appearance during the Cannes Film Festival.]
“I’m a small independent coming out of nowhere. We’re clearly not part of the Hollywood machine. Obviously, Steven Spielberg doesn’t want to be seen as trailing in our footsteps. This is the first time ever in history in which a major studio, big-budget film will be following a smaller indie version of the same thing into the marketplace.
“We’re expecting to be trashed by critics, but my film is gorgeous. I cry every day at how well it’s coming together.
“We’re following the Wells book very closely, which partly involves using an old-fashioned idea know as story tension. The book begins with the initial landings, but the Martians don’t really show their hand until one third of the way in…but you know all the while that they’re going to emerge and start attacking, and that’s where the tension lies.”
Timothy Hines, apparently. (I haven’t met the guy or taken his photo personally.)
“I didn’t make it as an analogy to the Iraqi War, although, yes, it’s about occupiers and hubris. All through history invaders and conquerors have fallen prey to their own hubris. You see it again and again and again. Wells was protesting the Boer War with his book. He was saying Britain is going to fall one day, and it did…it was beaten by a little brown man wearing a loincloth.
“Paramount is trying to get people to compare our film with theirs on the basis of budget and special effects alone, but a satisfying film is about more than just that.
“That said, our effects are going to look as good as if not better than what you see on Star Trek, for instance. Our film, at its best, comes off as visually assured as The Matrix.”
SBIFF: The Return
Prior to the “Directors on Directing” panel at Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre, on Saturday, 2.5.05, staged as part of the Santa Barbara Film Festival (l. to r.): the totally hidden head of Joel Schumacher (The Phantom of the Opera, Kevin Bacon (Loverboy), the partially hidden head of Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), Jeff Arch (Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys ), Luis Mandoki, i.e., Mexico’s answer to Carrot Top (Voces Inocentes), Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside), Michael Traeger (The Moguls), and producer-moderator Peter Guber.
(l. to r.): Bacon, Schumacher, Arch, George, Mandoki, Amenabar and Traeger.
Santa Barbara’s Haley Street looking east, State Street at the traffic light — Saturday, 2.5.05, 5:25 pm.
Mike “Mouse” McCoy (l.), pretty much the star of Dana Brown’s Dust to Glory, a rousing, fast-moving doc about the Baja 1000 race in November ’03, with Brown (r.) at an after-party at Soho, an upstairs bar just off State Street — Saturday, 2.5.05, 10:40 pm.
Thoroughbred
I have this notion that the Norman Jean Roy photo of Hilary Swank that appears on page 362 of the new Vanity Fair (as well as on a Sunset Strip billboard plugging this issue) is going to cinch Swank’s chances at winning the Best Actress Oscar.
Million Dollar Baby star Hilary Swank in 1936 Leni Reifenstahl mode, as seen on Sunset Strip billboard plugging current Oscar-themed “Hollywood” issue of Vanity Fair.
One look at this photo and you can’t help saying, “Wow…she’s on it.” If nothing else it’s a reminder of the intense physicality that Swank brought to her performance in Clint Eastwood’s boxing film.
A Swank triumph has been feeling like a strong likelihood anyway, but this photo feels like a closer of some kind. Or am I just floating on my own fizz?
Throat Session
A gala invitational screening of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s Inside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11) happened Thursday night at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre, followed by a discussion of some of the subjects raised by the film (social values, the legacy of pornography, etc.) by five prominent panelists.
Conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager brought about gasps from the mostly-liberal audience by saying he believed that damaging a child’s sense of sexual innocence was more emotionally harmful than exposing the same child to violence. He also advanced the notion of good violence (i.e., the shooting of evil Nazis) vs. bad violence.
After Thursday night’s screening of Inside Deep Throat, a discussion of sexual values by Democratic strategist/spokesperson Lawrence O’Donnell, author, filmmaker and Time critic Richard Schickel, author and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager and Variety editor Peter Bart — 2.4.05, 9:25 pm at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre.
Democratic spokesperson and campaign strategist Lawrence O’Donnell and Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel contended that no parent can keep his or her child in a state of idyllic innocence these days regarding sexual matters. Schickel said one needs to adopt an “existential, case-by-case, child-by-child” approach in dealing with these matters.
Moderator Peter Bart didn’t let audience members ask questions, but if he had I would have brought up the concept of good sex vs. bad sex, and why neither the film nor the panel had addressed the fundamental issue of how deeply depressing pornography is. The fact is that pornography envelops the viewer in the spiritual world of some very desperate and untalented people who are doing things that may seem hot at first, but after watching them for ten minutes or so constitute a total turn-off.
O’Donnell, Schickel, Huffington — 2.3.05, 9:40 pm at Hollywood’s Arclight Dome theatre.
I’ve always said that I would be a major porn fan if X-rated filmmakers would make their films look and feel like a 1960 Ingmar Bergman film — using moody, carefully- lighted black-and-white photography with someone of the calibre of Sven Nykvist serving as the director of photography, and using actresses like Bibi Anderson and Liv Ullman, and spoken in Swedish, of course.
I have never seen a single porno film shot in lustrous black-and-white. Has anyone? This alone indicates the skanky, donkey-like mentality of X-rated filmmakers, and their general unwillingness (inability?) to do anything other than shoot the same old boring crap.
Sharon’s Book
The first thing that got me about Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot (Harper Entertainment) was its assurance. It’s a very smooth and soothing read.
Call me a plebian but I love inside-the-beltway books that deliver that massage-y, cruise-control, we-know-everything feeling(like Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures and David Thomson’s The Whole Equation did) along with…you know, the other virtues.
The next thing that got me was a certain compassion for George Clooney and David O. Russell. Those poor guys…fine on their respective turfs, but put them together on the set of a physically difficult, hard-to-get-right movie like Three Kings and sparks of agitation are inevitable.
International Creative Management hotshot agent Robert Newman (i.e., “the hip indie guy”), Rebels on the Backlot author and New York Times Hollywood beat Sharon Waxman, and producer Don Murphy (From Hell, Permanent Midnight) at beginning of party for Waxman’s just-released book at Book Soup, an oasis of literacy in West Hollywood — 2.3.05, 7:05 pm.
Waxman delivers a better, more convincing story of their fight during the making of this 1999 film than anything I’ve read or heard anywhere else.
What was the hassle about? Russell, King’s director, told Clooney before filming began that he needed to break a lot of bad acting “habits,” and that he wanted Clooney “to be very still” in his role. When Kings began rolling, Russell kept on Clooney to cut down on the Clooney-isms, in response to which the TV-series veteran repeatedly “bristled.”
“Their relationship seemed doomed,†Waxman writes. Clooney “felt undermined by his director and labored under the burden of knowing he was Russell’s last choice…this led to disastrous consequences.â€
Out-there guys like Russell are never a day at the beach, but David O. was only trying to bring about the aesthetically right thing. Clooney does have a lot of bad habits. That cool-smug-guy thing that he employs all the time…don’t get me started. Russell may have been the provocateur in the breakdown of their working relationship, but Clooney needed — needs — what he was trying to dispense.
It was reported two or three months ago that Russell was upset with Waxman for making him seem slightly looney-tunes in her Times profile of his methods in the making of I Heart Huckabees. Many people agreed with him to some extent, but Waxman’s book has balanced the ledger sheet. To my eyes, she’s portrayed Russell as the most doggedly exacting and perceptive high-profile director in town.
Rebels on the Backlot is essentially a story about the adventures of six cool-cat Gen-X writer-directors — the leaders of the pack who defined a certain accomplished, provocative, well-funded hipness over the least ten years: Russell, Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I wanted to know about who they were,” Waxman told a New York Observer writer last week. “When you are talking about films that are so personal in their vision, you can’t help but wonder from what mind or personality [those pieces of work] sprang.”
Waxman was in Park City covering the Sundance Film Festival for the New York Times, for which she handles the Hollywood beat. I could have arranged some face-time with her myself (which would have made the piece you’re reading a better one), but the festival kept shoving me around and throwing me off my game.
I’ve run into these directors at one time or another, mostly in the course of doing this or that story, but I’ve never gotten to know them. Not like I know Wes Anderson, I mean. (Hey…how come Waxman didn’t include him in the book? Focus on seven directors rather than seven, etc. Wes is as important as any of these other guys, I feel.)
Another thing that caused me to find Waxman’s book delightful is that it conveys facts that significantly add to my understanding of what these filmmakers are about…what’s driven them, scared them, briefly defeated them, inspired them.
Three Kings director David O. Russell, star George Clooney during the problematic (some would say tumultuous) shooting.
I was shocked, shocked to read that Quentin Tarantino’s background was not that of a white-trash, fast-food-eating Tennessee kid from a broken home, but one that was more or less upper middle-class.
There’s a passage about Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh’s personal lives that I find fascinating. Partly because this is exactly the kind of passage that an aggressive and brilliant male writer would never include in a book about Hollywood filmmakers. It’s mildly cool nonetheless that Waxman has shown her colors in this fashion.
Tarantino nor Soderbergh “had trouble with intimacy” and “seemed [unable] to sustain relationships with the opposite sex,” she writes.
There was “a quiet woman” who was part of Tarantino’s life about 12 or 14 years ago named Grace Lovelace “who remains -– according to many who know [Tarantino] — the true love of his life.” She reports that after he became famous Tarantino became “a serial dater of his leading ladies or his producer or the starlet of the moment.”
This is nothing compared to what she does to Soderbergh. She suggests that he may be James Spader in sex,lies and videotape, “the articulate intellectual dealing with emotions in distant, muted ways,” a guy, like Spader’s “Graham” character, “who could enjoy sex with women only through the distance of the camera eye.”
To varying degrees, all the directors in Waxman’s book come off as fickle, egoistic, thin-skinned, prickly, brusque. This is nothing strange, of course. There’s always seemed to be a basic disconnect between submissive, mild-mannered, go-along behavior and being possessed of exceptional talent, smarts and vision. I’ve noticed this time and again, and it’s no big deal.
Some day, somehow, someone will discover on what set this shot of Steven Soderbergh was taken. My guess is The Limey.
A strong director can’t be a strong director without being tough and flinty and at times unyielding. It’s a tough game that requires toughness and tough hides. I respect this, and have no problem with anyone who wants to try and bitch-slap me (so to speak) or give me an argument of some kind about something I’ve written. As long as they’re straight about it, fine.
A week and a half ago Soderbergh lectured me during the Inside Deep Throat Sundance party. It was about my writing a couple of years ago that George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind seemed strongly influenced by Soderbergh-ian visual stylings, which, in his view, diminished Clooney’s rep by suggesting he had no visual chops or chutzpah of his own.
I wish more people in this town would play it like Soderbergh and just walk right up and say it to my face.
It may sound like a vague put-down to call Rebels a great airport lounge or a coast-to-coast read, but this book is friendly. I read it cover to cover, but it’s structured and titled in such a way that you can just drop into any chapter and go to town. I guess what I’m really saying is that people with attention deficit disorder will have no problem with it.
Monochrome Porn
“Regarding your comment about there being no black-and-white pornography: I’ve seen it done by Andrew Blake (http://www.andrewblake.com). He actually uses it quite a bit. His stuff is really top notch — all shot on film, excellent lighting and the best looking girls in porn. The only problem is that he’s really gotten into the bondage stuff, which does nothing for me.” — Ross Williams, writer-
director (http://eraticate.com)
Truce Already
“I liked your two stories about the competing Christmas Truce of 1914 projects. I thought you might be amused to know that there is a virtual train wreck of Christmas Truce projects in the works.
“Besides the Vadim Perelman’s The Truce, Paul Weitz’s Silent Night and the German-French co-production of Joyeux Noel costarring Diane Kurger (now in the can and slated for a Xmas ’05 release), there are also:
“(1) Truce: 1914 — A British production ramping up for a 2005 start to be helmed by Peter Shillingford, a director known for his IMAX work. Brian Cox, Til Schweiger and Jonny Lee Miller are attached. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1466053)
“(2) Light of Peace — A film being produced by Marc Rosco of Electric Entertainment. Roland Emmerich was attached to direct.
“(3) …and a short film called Offside (produced by pop singer Michael Bolton) that premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.
“And then there is my own short film, also called The Truce, which won a Student Emmy and played at the 2001 Hamptons Film Festival (while Offside screened in an adjacent theater).
“I can’t accuse anyone of ripping me off; I was still shooting while Offside was in post. (http://www.thetruce.com and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289587/ combined).
“I had my own idea for a Christmas truce feature where the German and British soldiers team up to destroy an asteroid heading towards a crash collision with Earth, but none of the studios bit…alas.” — Eric Rolnick
Sharon’s Book
The first thing that got me about Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot (Harper Entertainment) was its assurance. It’s a very smooth and soothing read.
Call me a plebeian but I love inside-the-beltway books that deliver that massage-y, cruise-control, we-know-everything feeling (like Peter Biskind√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Down and Dirty Pictures and David Thomson√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s The Whole Equation did) along with…you know, the other standard virtues.
Three Kings director David O. Russell, star George Clooney during the problematic (some would say tumultuous) shooting.
The next thing that got me was a certain compassion for George Clooney and David O. Russell. Those poor guys…fine on their respective turfs, but put them together on the set of a physically difficult, hard-to-get-right movie like Three Kings and sparks of agitation are inevitable.
Waxman delivers a better, more convincing story of their fight during the making of this 1999 film than anything I’ve read or heard anywhere else.
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What was the trouble about? Russell, King√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s director, told Clooney before shooting began that he needed to break a lot of bad acting “habits,” and that he wanted Clooney “to be very still” in his role. When Kings began rolling, Russell kept on Clooney to cut down on the Clooney-isms, in response to which the TV-series veteran repeatedly “bristled.”
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìTheir relationship seemed doomed,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù Waxman writes. Clooney “felt undermined by his director and labored under the burden of knowing he was Russell√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s last choice…this led to disastrous consequences.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
Out-there guys like Russell are never a day at the beach, but David O. was only trying to bring about the aesthetically right thing. Clooney does have a lot of bad habits. That cool-smug-guy thing that he does all the time…don√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t get me started. Russell may have been the provocateur in the breakdown of their working relationship, but Clooney needed — needs — what he was trying to dispense.
It was reported two or three months ago that Russell was upset with Waxman for making him seem slightly looney-tunes in her Times profile of his methods in the making of I Heart Huckabees. Many people agreed with him to some extent, but Waxman√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s book has balanced the ledger sheet. To my eyes, she’s portrayed Russell as the most doggedly exacting and perceptive big-gun director in town.
Rebels on the Backlot is essentially a story about the adventures of six Gen-X writer-directors — leaders of the pack who defined a certain accomplished, provocative, well-funded hipness over the least ten years: Russell, Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I wanted to know about who they were,” Waxman told a New York Observer writer last week. √¢‚Ǩ≈ìWhen you are talking about films that are so personal in their vision, you can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t help but wonder from what mind or personality [those pieces of work] sprang.”
Waxman was in Park City covering the Sundance Film Festival for the New York Times, for which she handles the Hollywood beat. I could have arranged some face-time with her myself (which would have made the piece you’re reading a better one), but the festival kept shoving me around and throwing me off my game.
I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve run into these directors at one time or another, mostly in the course of doing this or that story, but I√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve never gotten to know them. Not like I know Wes Anderson, say. (I’m wondering why Waxman didn’t include him in the book. Wes pushed to the front of the pack in the mid ’90s, and is as important as any of these other guys…no?)
Another thing I found delightful about Waxman√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s book is that it conveys facts that significantly add to my understanding of what these filmmakers are about…what√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s driven them, scared them, briefly defeated them, inspired them.
Rebels on the Back Lot author Sharon Waxman signing books at (I think) the party thrown by Harper Entertainment in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival.
I was shocked, shocked to read that Quentin Tarantino’s background was not that of a white-trash, fast-food-eating Tennessee kid from a broken home, but one that was more or less upper middle-class.
There√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a passage about Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s personal lives that I find fascinating. Partly because this is exactly the kind of passage that an aggressive and brilliant male writer would never include in a book about Hollywood filmmakers. It’s mildly cool nonetheless that Waxman has shown her colors in this fashion.
Tarantino nor Soderbergh “had trouble with intimacy” and “seemed [unable] to sustain relationships with the opposite sex,” she writes.
There was “a quiet woman” who was part of Tarantino√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s life about 12 or 14 years ago named Grace Lovelace “who remains -√¢‚Ǩ‚Äú according to many who know [Tarantino] — the true love of his life.” She reports that after he became famous Tarantino became “a serial dater of his leading ladies or his producer or the starlet of the moment.”
This is nothing compared to what she does to Soderbergh. She suggests that he may be James Spader in sex,lies and videotape, “the articulate intellectual dealing with emotions in distant, muted ways,” a guy, like Spader√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s “Graham” character, “who could enjoy sex with women only through the distance of the camera eye.”
To varying degrees, all the directors in Waxman’s book come off as fickle, egoistic, thin-skinned, prickly, brusque. This is nothing strange, of course. There’s always seemed to be a basic disconnect between submissive, mild-mannered, go-along behavior and being possessed of exceptional talent, smarts and vision. I’ve noticed this time and again, and it’s no big deal.
Some day, somehow, someone will discover on what set this shot of Steven Soderbergh was taken. My guess is The Limey.
A strong director can√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t be a strong director without being tough and flinty and even unyielding. The game that requires toughness and tough hides. I respect this, and have no problem with anyone who wants to get in my face and give me an argument of some kind about something I’ve written. As long as they’re straight about it, fine.
A week and a half ago Soderbergh lectured me during the Inside Deep Throat Sundance party. It was about my writing a couple of years ago that George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind seemed strongly influenced by Soderbergh-ian visual stylings, which, in his view, diminished Clooney’s rep by suggesting he had no visual chops or chutzpah of his own.
I wish more people in this town would play it like Soderbergh and just walk right up and say it to my face.
It may sound like a vague put-down to call Rebels a great airport lounge or a coast-to-coast read, but this book is friendly. I read it cover to cover, but it’s structured and titled in such a way that you can just drop into any chapter and go to town. I guess what I’m really saying is that people with attention deficit disorder will have no problem with it.
More Later
New stuff, I mean. In the meantime, I’m holding on to some of the stories I ran last weekend at the Santa Barbara film Festival…
Panel Thief
Maybe a story about the intoxicating elements within a certain woman’s personality isn’t exactly page-one material, but Oscar screenwriting nominee Julie Delpy (for her Before Sunset collaboration with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke) totally killed at Saturday’s screenwriter’s panel at the Lobero Theatre.
Delpy is — right now, in my humble opinion — the absolute coolest, wittiest and most radiantly attractive actress around. Her Sunset performance had me half-convinced of this, but yesterday’s panel dazzle brought the house down and amounted to a total closer.
Actress-screenwriter Julie Delpy during Saturday afternoon’s panel discussion, “It Starts With the Script,” at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
She was quick, hilarious and unabashedly confessional. Her mind was here, there and everywhere…but always amusingly and never scattershot. She said at one point that she’d lost the ability to think because she was listening too much to the sound of her own voice, and she had everyone in stitches as she described the disorientation. She unintentionally reduced moderator Frank Pierson to a straight-man stooge during a brief back-and-forth. Her facial expressions alone were inspired.
And she got off a great line about how women will have truly secured their just portion of power in the film industry “when a mediocre woman is given a powerful job.”
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard erred in not hiring Delpy to play Sophie Neveu opposite Tom Hanks in the forthcoming production of The Da Vinci Code. (They’ve gone with 26 year-old Audrey Tatou, who’s too young and small and slender to play Hanks’ pseudo-love interest…he probably outweighs her by at least 100 pounds.)
Garden State director-screenwriter Zach Braff was asked the most questions and drew the heartiest applause during yesterday’s discussion, as a good chunk of the audience was composed of under-35 types, the demographic that has turned Garden State into a formidable nationwide hit.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and The Incredibles director and co-writer Brad Bird seemed to be the most popular after Braff, and all three delivered the best cracks.
(l. to r.) Screenwriters John Logan (The Aviator), Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries), Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby), Julie Delpy (Before Sunset), Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon), Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Zach Braff (Garden State), Bill Condon (Kinsey), and Jim Taylor (Sideways) just prior to Saturday afternoon’s panel discussion at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
That is, if you left Delpy out of the equation.
The other screenwriter panelists were Million Dollar Baby‘s Paul Haggis, Kinsey‘s Bill Condon, The Aviator‘s John Logan, Sideway‘s Jim Taylor,and The Motorcycle Diaries‘s Jose Rivera.
Pierson (Cool Hand Luke, Dog Day Afternoon), the current president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, got shouted down at one point by an audience member because they thought he was talking too much and not letting the panelists have their say. Pierson’s moderating skills can be on the avuncular and loquacious side, but he’s also a wise and perceptive man.
A very young aspiring screenwriter — a woman — asked Braff at one point whether “this feeling of uncertainty and nervousness and not knowing what’s going to happen in my life…is this going to continue or get worse or what?” Braff said he was sorry but no, it’s not going to stop, but hang in there and don’t let it defeat you.
Pierson had a better answer. He said to the woman, “If you’re lucky, it will never stop…because your writing will be better for it.”
Elvis Mitchell interviewing Sideways star Paul Giamatti at Santa Barbara’s Victoria Threatre late Sunday afternoon — 1.30.05, 5:45 pm.
Leonardo DiCaprio addressing crowd at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre after being presented with the SBIFF’s Platinum Award by Aviator director Martin Scorsese — Sunday, 1.30, 9:20 pm.
Piece of letter-sized paper taped to seventh-row seat at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre — Sunday, 1.30.05, 7:25 pm.
Author, film critic and TV personality Leonard Maltin and Best Supporting Actress nominee Virginia Madsen (for Sideways, as if I had to say that) after a small luncheon at Nu, a restaurant on State Street, which followed a women’s filmmaker panel at the Lobero Theatre — 1.30.05, 2:25 pm.
Santa Barbara Film Festival artistic director Roger Durling just before Saturday evening’s Annette Bening tribute — 1.29.05, 7:25 pm.
Former New York Times critic and current Columbia consultant Elvis Mitchell interviewing Best Actress nominee Annette Bening (Being Julia) at Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre — 1.29.05, 8:35 pm.
Woody Time
I drove up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival late Friday afternoon, checked into a Holiday Inn and went straight to the Arlington Theatre on State Street to catch the festival’s opening-night attraction — Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda.
Most of the reviews out of Europe (it played last fall at the San Sebastian Film Festival and has since opened commercially in Spain and other territories) called Melinda a return to form for Allen, and I seem to recall someone saying it was his best since Mighty Aphrodite.
That’s close to an accurate statement, or at least not far off the mark. Melinda and Melinda is a very good…make that a slightly-better-than-very-good Woody.
(l. to r.) Will Ferrell and Radha Mitchell in Melinda and Melinda.
It’s a half-downerish, half-amusing piece about the fine line between comedy and tragedy. It basically says that the two opposite poles are made of the same story material, and the difference essentially lies in the attitude we bring to this or that situation or circumstance.
The piece is framed by a couple of playwright/screenwriter pals (Wallace Shawn, Larry Pine) discussing the differences between comedy and tragedy. They expound by talking about a real-life story they’ve heard about an actual New York woman named Melinda (who’s known to a friend of theirs), and riffing on how her story might turn out as a tragedy or comedy.
These writers proceed to entertain each other by telling parallel tales about Melinda (which we see dramatized, of course) that are similar in every respect except for the fundamental slant.
Only Melinda (Radha Mitchell) appears in both versions. The downer piece costars Chloe Sevigny, Johnny Lee Miller and Chiwetel Ejiofor (the doctor from Dirty Pretty Things) while the comedic piece costars Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet.
The two stories explore themes and plot turns that Allen fans will quickly recognize. Anxious and lonely New Yorkers, lovers at cross purposes, spouses cheating on each other, and the constant dodging and lying that goes on between significant others.
√¢‚Ǩ≈ìOf course we communicate,” Peet says to Farrell, her live-in partner, at one point. “Now, can we not talk about it?√¢‚Ǩ¬ù
I wouldn’t quite place Melinda among Allen’s very best (Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives). I would, however, put it in roughly the same realm as, say, Sweet and Lowdown or Bullets Over Broadway.
It’s not quite a nine-course meal, but is undeniably nutritious. It’s been written with a fairly sharp quill, gets right down to business in short order, and delivers the philosophical goods, gags and witticisms in an agreeably absorbing fashion.
It provides Mitchell, who portrays two versions of the same character of Melinda, with a chance to shift between Bergmanesque edge-of-suicide emoting and Annie Hall-like bubbly-goofy stuff, and she delivers with assurance and buoyancy on both counts.
And Ferrell has fun playing the neurotic, emotionally frustrated, wittily judgmental Woody character. The idea of an actor hired by Woody Allen to deliver a performance that literally channels Allen’s spirit and personality will always be an extremely weird confection, but Kenneth Branagh and John Cusack have obviously done it before and I suppose we’re all getting used to this.
The comic highlight is a would-be seduction scene between Farrell and Vinessa Shaw (the prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut). The gags in this scene aren’t profound, but they’re funny as hell.
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