I couldn’t react to Anne Thompson‘s 8.19 report about Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life opening later this year after all. Which posted a day or so after Todd McCarthy predicted it wouldn’t be seen until next May’s Cannes Film Festival. After reading McCarthy’s piece I asked a super-connected guy and he said “no decision” had been made. A day or so later Thompson reported her version. Is anyone else sick of this?

I had lunch with the great Ray Bradbury on the Disney lot in ’84, a week or two before the debut of Something Wicked This Way Comes. (The chat was facilitated by veteran Disney publicist Howard Green.) I especially recall Bradbury talking about how writing was pure joy to him, and how banging out three or four pages was always the high point of his day.

“Pure joy?,” I remember saying to myself. “In what parallel universe?” Doing HE is actually fun most of the time, and when it isn’t it’s not too difficult. But in the bad old typewriter days I equated writing with digging ditches. “I don’t care how successful Bradbury is,” I muttered. “Is he taking…what, happiness pills? Writing is pain. He’s just spewing.”

In his review of a new British Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents, DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze ignores a significant visual element. The 1961 film was clearly shot with older Fox CinemaScope lenses, and therefore suffered from the “CinemaScope mumps,” a syndrome that mostly manifested in CinemaScope films of the ’50s in which actor’s faces (and everything else) looked a tad wider than in actual life.

Deborah Kerr, Pamela Franklin (who’s now 60 years old) in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents.

The “mumps” began to gradually disappear around ’59 or ’60 when then-new widescreen Panavision lenses, which didn’t produce wider-than-normal images, were put into use. But Fox’s British unit was apparently using older-style CinemaScope lenses.

I hate the “mumps” syndrome. It makes me grind my teeth. DVD Talk’s Glenn Erickson noticed it in his 2005 review of an Innocents, to wit: “The only hindrance is that the lenses used appear to be older models that give faces the CinemaScope ‘mumps’ in close-ups. These earlier lenses with distorted fields show up frequently in Fox films made in Europe.”

Millions of moviegoers watched widescreen “mumps” films in the ’50s and early ’60s and didn’t notice or say anything, of course. It’s my cross to bear that I do notice this stuff (like the 1.85 masking of On The Waterfront the other night, which the entire audience was apparently cool with) and being the only guy who goes up to complain, or who writes about it.

Toooze also says, by the way, that “this dual-layered 1080P transfer from the BFI does indeed improve especially in the visibility of grain…[it] is far easier to see, providing some earthy texture to the visuals.” I understand how detail and grain sometimes go hand in hand with older films, but how does a film improve by “the visibility of grain”? Forget it. I don’t want to know.

Until last night I’d never seen footage of Frank Zappa‘s 3.27.63 visit to the Steve Allen Show to demonstrate how bicycles can be used as musical instruments. It’s a four-parter — here’s part 1, part 3 and part 4. Zappa was 23 at the time of taping. A year later he formed a band that gradually became the Mothers of Invention.

The only Mothers song I ever really listened to was “Dirty Love.” A band that I played drums with briefly adopted Dog Breath, a Zappa term, as a name. (At the time it was a fairly obscure composition.)

Graham King‘s GK Films seems to be in fairly good shape with Ben Affleck‘s The Town (playing Venice and Toronto festivals, opening on 9.17) and Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Tourist (recently advanced to 12.10.10 opening, always a good sign). But it appears that something’s wrong with William Monahan‘s London Boulevard, a GK-funded crime drama which finished principal in August ’09 and has long been presumed/rumored to be a fall 2010 release. That seems unlikely at this stage.

London Boulevard costars Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley during shooting. Stills from William Monahan’s film are so sparse that I’ve no choice but to use half-ass candids.

My guess is that Monahan’s superb screenwriting talent hasn’t fully translated over to directing, and that his inexperience combined with anal tendencies caused problems on the set (or so says a London source), and that reactions to the unfinished film were such that extra shooting was deemed necesssary (ditto), and that King has decided to pull the plug on a fall awards-campaign release and punt instead for 2011. Again, some reporting but I’m mainly guessing.

LB is a London-based crime drama about an ex-con named Mitchell (Colin Farrell), just out of the slammer, who falls in love with Charlotte (Keira Knightley), an actress who’s fallen into a odd kind of career slumber, while running afoul of some gangster guys (Eddie Marsan or Ray Winstone or both). Costars include David Thewlis, Anna Friel, Ophelia Lovibond, Ben Chaplin, Sanjeev Baskhar and Jamie Campbell Bower.

Lovibond told me a few weeks ago that she expects (i.e.. had been told ) that Monahan’s film would get a U.S. release in November. On top of which the IMDB (hardly an authority, I realize) has posted a U.K. release date of 10.15. But I’m seeing indications that London Boulevard isn’t going to open this year due to GK deciding it’s not an award-season contender. This would mean a 2011 release, possibly in the early months or the late summer/early fall.

Not that I’m hoping for such a scenario. I’d love to be wrong. I’m a fan of Monahan’s script — a delightful read — and I’ve been rooting big-time for London Boulevard to turn up at the Toronto Film Festival, etc. It doesn’t look that way now, but if Lovibond’s forecast turns out to be correct, great.

London Boulevard‘s Colin Farrell (r.) and some crew guys, taken during filming.

“They did some extra shooting in London between two and three months ago,” my London guy says. “They also did very brief additional shooting in L.A. with, I believe, a stand-in for Keira Knightley. You’ve read the script so you know that it’s a back shot of KK’s character standing, if I remember correctly, of the balcony of the Chateau Marmont.

“I did hear there were a lot of problems during the shoot and that Monahan” — Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Departed, but a total first-time director — “was beyond paranoid, involving himself in every single aspect of filming, which, of course, meant that shooting took forever.”

No announcement on a U.S. distribution deal means it’s been seen (GK apparently showed whatever he had to buyers in Cannes last May) and there are doubts, or that no one’s seen a finished cut at all — i.e., Monahan being anal and obsessive and slow to pull it together, like he allegedly was during filming.

The usual strategy in a limbo situation of this sort would be for GK to take London Boulevard to Telluride, Venice and Toronto, but to my knowledge there’s nothing doing on that score as far as Venice and Toronto are concerned. (Telluride slates are never announced until the last minute.)

I read Monahan’s script a couple of months ago and recognized right away it’s a sturdy, character-based, unhurried crime drama mixed with romance and hints of dark poetry. Well-sculpted dialogue, sprinklings of echo and nuance and melancholy, a little touch of Mona Lisa in the night. Which is precisely the kind of film that could benefit from dog-and-pony shows at the early September festivals.

The only approved still I’ve been able to find.

And where’s the trailer, at least? Boulevard wrapped a year ago, was being shopped in Cannes last May, and is supposedly coming out on 10.15 in England — seven weeks from now — and there’s still no trailer? And no London Boulevard website? You can’t even find decent stills online…c’mon.

Monahan’s script is based on Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel. Mitchell’s romantic interest in Bruen’s book is a 60 year-old reclusive actress named Lillian Palmer, so Monahan has definitely shuffled that element around. Knightley is, what, 25 or 26?

Bruen’s book was described in a book-review synopsis as a “gritty reimagining of Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard, transplanting the action from glitzy Hollywood to the rough and tumble London streets…looking for an honest job, Mitchell finds work as a handyman for Palmer, who lives in a sprawling estate with her taciturn butler, Jordan.”

Thewlis is playing Jordan in the film, and Friel is playing Briony, who is Palmer’s sister in the book but Farrell’s in the film.

E-mails to Maxine Leonard, GK Films‘ senior vp marketing and publicity, and Joy Fehily of Prime Public relations, were unanswered when I posted this morning. I also asked a couple of film festival guys who always know stuff, but they didn’t respond either.

Criterion Guy #1: Okay, everyone’s here? As you may have heard, Criterion is coming out with a DVD/Bluray disc with several very cool movies next fall. All made in the late ’60s or early ’70s by the celebrated Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson and some other guy…what’s the name again?

Criterion Guy #2: Steve Blauner.

Criteron Guy #1: Who?

Criterion Guy #2: Steve Blauner.

Criterion Guy #1: Browner?

Criterion Guy #2: Blauner. B-L-A-U-N-E-R.

Criterion Guy #1: Blauner, fine. And the idea is to try and market it — now listen to me carefully — we want to market it so as to diminish interest in anyone buying or renting this thing except for film nerd types like…whomever, Gavin Smith, that type of customer. And to even make it hard on them. Okay? I want ideas. How do we do this?

Criterion Guy #3: Question?

Criterion Guy #1: Shoot.

Criterion Guy #3: Why do we not want people to buy this? I’m not…

Criterion Guy #1: Because we’re Criterion…hello? You work here and you’re asking me that?

Criterion guy #4: How about calling the package, I don’t know….call it 40 Year-Old Hollywood Coolness. You know, something that’ll turn off the under-35 customers? By making it seem like a boomers-only thing?

Criterion Guy #1: Yeah, but then we’d get boomer-aged buyers. I want an idea that will turn off everyone. Or at least a title that will mean nothing and do nothing to spur sales with any quadrant. C’mon, people…think.

Criterion Guy #5: I got it.

Criterion Guy #1: Yeah?

Criterion guy #5: Let’s call it America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. It sounds partly like some milk-carton lost children thing, and partly like an obscure code for…I don’t know, some British TV station in Manchester or whatever. The point is that it’s extremely fucking obscure-sounding. Like, ridiculous obscure.

Criterion Guy #3: You’re saying people won’t be able to figure out what BBS stands for? It’s right there on the back of the package

Criterion Guy #5: Presumably, yeah, sure. They’ll figure it out. But nobody wants to figure anything out — that’s my point. Any marketing course will tell you people don’t want to consider or ponder anything. They just want to get it fast…snap! Even if they figure out that BBS doesn’t stand for three last names but three first names, which is weird as it is, they’ll never, ever in a million fucking years figure out that the “S” stands for Steve.

Criterion Guy #4: Steve Browner?

Criterion Guy #3: Blauner.

Criterion #1: I think you’re on to something.

Sometime in October Taschen is putting out a limited-edition $700 coffee-table book called Steve Schapiro, Taxi Driver. The title suggests a pictorial essay about Schapiro’s adventures as a yellow-cabber. It’s actually a collection of shots about the making of Martin Scorsese ‘s Taxi Driver (’76), which Schapiro served as the unit photographer for.

The only non-muted color shot I’ve ever seen of a blood-soaked Robert De Niro at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

The coolest shot by far on the website is the one of DeNiro’s Travis Bickle as he lies on the tenement couch at the end, mimicking a suicide shot into his left temple. As everyone presumably knows this image has never before been seen in full color due to Scorcese having toned down the blood to sepia brown in order to get an R rating.

Taxi Driver‘s Wiki page recalls that “in later interviews Scorsese commented that he was actually pleased by the color change and he considered it an improvement over the originally filmed scene, which has been lost. However, in the special edition DVD, Michael Chapman, the film’s cinematographer, regrets the decision and the fact that no print with the unmuted colors exists any more, as the originals had long-since deteriorated.”

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” — Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man.”

N.Y. Times guy Michael Cieply has posted an 8.21 piece about Facebook management being mildly angry about The Social Network‘s unflattering depiction of founder Mark Zuckerberg, as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg. I haven’t seen the film but I’ve read the script, and Zuckerberg comes off as a manic, brilliant and opportunistic asshole — and yet fascinating for that. I don’t want to shock anyone but successful guys can be selfish dicks, and some nice guys actually do finish last.

(l.) Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; (r.) Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

Zuckerberg and friends, concerned about Facebook being indirectly tarnished or made to seem like a slightly dicey environment, have, according to Cieply’s article, decided to ignore The Social Network. But they’ve also told Cieply that some or much of the film is made up.

This may be the case to some degree. Movies tend to exaggerate retellings of true-life stories for dramatic emphasis, and…like, whatever, Francis Bacon wasn’t a naturalist. Welcome to the art world. People want strong points of view, and basically to see the non-provocative stuff pruned down so the provocative stuff can be savored all the more, and so the core issues confronting characters can be addressed in some detail. Didn’t William Shakespeare play more or less by these rules?

And didn’t Zuckerberg create this issue in the first place by declining to talk to Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, which Aaron Sorkin based his Social Network screenplay upon to some extent? If Zuckerberg had spoken to Mezrich instead of blowing him off, he would have most likely been portrayed more sympathetically. If you’re a serial killer of small children, you’ll come off a bit more sympathetically than not if you talk to the author who’s writing about you. It works this way every time.

It felt calming to sit on the cool grass at last night’s Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow screening of On The Waterfront in Hoboken. The weather was perfect and the stars were out, and the soundtrack, at least, was damn near perfect. I could hear every vowel and consonant spoken by Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.

A Waterfront image shown last night on Hoboken’s Pier A, projected at 1.85:1.

But the projection, sad to say, was close to horrific. Hundreds of movie lovers turned out to witness a ceremonial tribute to a great film, and the Drafthouse guys couldn’t be bothered to respect appropriate projection standards. Nice.

The same scene on the Waterfront DVD, which is presented at 1.37:1.

Instead of showing this 1954 classic at the proper 1.66:1 (or 1.37:1) aspect ratio, the Alamo guys showed it at 1.85:1, which lopped off huge portions of the top and bottom of the frames. On top of which the focus was almost comically soft. It was like watching a film underwater but without goggles. And the screen wasn’t properly anchored so river breezes caused it to billow every now and then.

And of course, the audience just sat there, content or complacent or happy just to be outdoors and lying on the grass. As I was, but c’mon. Most people are sheep when it comes to projection standards.

I spoke to the projectionist, a 30-something guy who didn’t seem to know all that much and was basically going “who, me, what?” I told him I’d worked as a projectionist years ago and that I knew from aperture plates, and that he was ruining the vibe by showing Waterfront at 1.85:1. (He was projecting actual film, by the way — I had expected a digital show.) I told him I’d seen Grover Crisp‘s Waterfront restoration in a screening room, and that it should be shown at either 1.37:1 or 1.66:1, but that going with 1.85:1 was vandalism. The guy was obviously no aspect-ratio fanatic. “Huh?”

There was a pre-gathering at The Dubliner starting around 6 pm. Sports writer Benn Schulberg, son of Waterfront screenwriter Budd Schulberg, spoke about his dad, the film, Brando, and director Elia Kazan. James T. Fisher, author of On The Irish Waterfront, an account of the real-life Waterfront history and the filming in Hoboken, also spoke.

Benn Schulberg speaking at The Dubliner — Friday, 8.20, 6:55 pm.

I asked both these guys if they had any inside info about a Waterfront Bluray eventually coming out. “Bluray?” I also asked if they knew of a really detailed On The Waterfront location website. They didn’t. They were also more interested in talking to the women at the gathering (especially a certain leggy blonde) than to me. A Hoboken Chamber of Commerce rep named Gerry Fallo said there’s a guy named Lenny Luizzi, a longtime Hoboken resident, who sometimes takes visitors on Waterfront location tours. His email is movielen@aol.com. Here’s an article about him. And here’s another.

This video clip mainly shows Fisher delivering remarks, starting about 95 seconds in:

Eat Pray Love hasn’t done very much since opening last weekend. It’s not being totally ignored but it is kind of piddling along with revenues diving from seven days ago and an apparent $36 million cume after eight days. And I’m a little surprised. I’ll bet a lot of people are. This was supposed to have legs and not drop all that much, but it fell 57%. I’ll bet Julia Roberts is looking at the numbers this morning and saying to herself, “Well, I’m proud of what we did, however much money it makes.”

I know the willingness to see EPL among somewhat older women, particularly among those who either hadn’t read the book or who don’t go to films that much (or both), was there. I spoke to three or four older women who all said “this I’m going to see!” And what happened to all the ladies who did buy Elizabeth Gilbert’s book (and in some instances read it more than once), and who were expected to come out in droves and bring their friends and then go to restaurants in groups of four and five and talk it over and drink wine and shriek with laughter?

I know for a fact that Eat Pray Love is reasonably decent in sections, and that Richard Jenkins delivers in that one Indian rooftop scene, and that Javier Bardem charms and really acts, and that the Rome/India/Bali footage is certainly beautiful, and that it unfolds like a class act with some really nice Neil Young music on the soundtrack…so what happened?

Is it that Roberts’ character seems a little too stuck on herself and her issues? That she seems out of touch with ground-level concerns? Or is Roberts herself simply over as a box-office attraction (which is also what people were saying after the fizzle of Duplicity)? Or is it that the film, while agreeable here and there, simply didn’t provide what female moviegoers wanted?

Vampires Suck, one of those silly, blink-of-an-eye distractions that nobody cares or thinks about, is #1 so far with $5 million earned yesterday, a projected $14 to $15 million by Sunday night and a five-day cume of $21 million. Boxoffice‘s Phil Contrino says “there’s no way Vampires Suck will be #1 this weekend. We’re estimating $4.24 million yesterday and $12.8 million for the weekend. The Expendables will easily be on top by Sunday.”

And yet as we speak Sylvester Stallone‘s actioner is down 64% from last weekend’s opener, and is in second place so far with $4.8 million yesterday. I’m looking at $14.5 million for the weekend and a grand cume of $62.7 million. So…what, it might limp to $80-something million by the end of the run?

The third-place Lottery Ticket, another nothing movie, did about $3.7 million yesterday for an approximate $11 million by Sunday night.

Eat Pray Love, not bad in my book but clearly not igniting with the general populace, is down 57% from last weekend’s opener with $3.6 million yesterday, a little more than $11 million for the weekend and a $36 million cume, give or take.

Piranha 3D — can you imagine actually saying to a friend, “Hey, let’s go see Piranha 3D“? — will come in fifth with 3.6 million yesterday and a possible $10 million for the weekend. The sixth-place Nanny McPhee has sputtered — $3 million yesterday, maybe $9 million by Sunday night. The Other Guys is down 47% for $2.9 million yesterday, possibly $9.5 by Sunday night — whoa, it could wind up beating Nanny McPhee and Piranha 3D!

Jennifer Aniston‘s girly-girl fans didn’t come out for The Switch — $2.8 million yesterday, $8 million for weekend and a #8 slot. But she’s loaded and has a great ass (really) and is probably vacationing in Barbados as we speak.

Inception is #9 for a $2.1 million Friday, a $7 million weekend and a grand $261.2 million cume.

The tenth-place Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is an absolute corpse — $1.5 million yesterday (down 65% from last weekend), $4.5 million for the weekend and a $20.2 million cume.