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In a perfect world, how much should it cost to make a film out of Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise“, a nearly 40-year-old satire of academia (or, in the present context, deranged wokesters) and a general meditation about the inevitability of death?

We’re talking, of course, about the Noah Baumbach film (directed and written by) that was shot last summer and fall in various Ohio college towns (including Oberlin), funded by Netflix and starring Adam Driver as perturbed Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and Greta Gerwig as his neurotic wife Babette. It costars Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith and Don Cheadle.

If I was to spitball the budget, I would guess (especially given the tendency of Netflix films to cost more than anyone might expect) something in the range of $40 million plus, maybe a touch higher. But it appears as if White Noise might be an ’80s period piece**. I’m basing this on a set photo of Gerwig wearing big ’80s hair. Shooting period (clothes, cars, signage) is always costly.

If you know anything about Baumbach’s films and more particularly his writing and shooting style, White Noise most likely will be medium close-ups of dialogue, dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. White Noise‘s big visual element is a depiction of a big train accident that spreads toxic waste all over the place; there’s also a car accident scene involving a lake or pond in which the car sinks. But it mainly sounds like a boilerplate Baumbach talkathon.

I’m asking because there’s a Twitter rumor (linked to last night by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy) that the White Noise tab is over $100 million, and perhaps as high as $140 million.

The latter figure comes from a film-set worker named “Saul Atreides” (a Jewish nom de plume inspired by Paul Atreides). This calls for a serious trade-reporter inquiry, because as the above headline states, “Noah Baumbach” and “$100 million budget” are a serious contradiction in terms.

On top of which Driver has been made up to look late 40ish or early 50ish, and to this end Baumbach has given him a prominent pot belly. Is it prosthetic or did Driver do a “Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta” by going to Italy and tanking up on pasta?

Ruimy: “How does a budget on a smallish, intimate drama, set on a Midwestern college campus, balloon to $100 million plus?! This is madness. I liked Marriage Story and Kicking & Screaming, but this isn’t a guy with a big enough name or following to justify that kind of spending. It’s no wonder Netflix is cutting back now — they’ve been spending like drunken sailors for about a decade now.”

HE’s all-time favorite Baumbach film is still Greenberg (’10), but I wouldn’t like it as much if it had cost $100 million.

Paul Kolas: “It was a fool’s errand to even attempt to make a movie out of White Noise. It may be a brilliant novel, but an apt metaphor would be Ahab chasing the White Whale, and if this turns out to be Baumbach’s Heaven’s Gate, l can just see critics calling it Noah’s Flood.

“I want this to be a great movie, do I ever, but this news is most distressing. Notice that Netflix is not promoting it, or Blonde, and focusing on more commercial audience-friendly films like The Gray Man and Knives Out 2. And look at the way they are already promoting the living daylights out of Maestro, which you know will be their biggest Oscar bait movie to date, and we’ll most likely have to wait until October-November-December of next year to see it. I don’t know what the budget is on Maestro, but I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near $140 + million. No wonder Netflix is in a panic.”

** If White Noise is, in fact, an ’80s period thang, we can obviously scratch the “deranged campus wokester” angle.

In a 6.122 THR article by Borys Kit, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman is described as “an expensive vanity project.” The statement is Kit’s own, and I’m sorry but it’s bullshit.

The Irishman is easily one of the greatest films of the 21st Century, and the last 30 or 40 minutes delivers perhaps the most devastating passage about grief, regret and facing the end of one’s life in the history of movies.

For the 47th time, “Wild Strawberries with handguns.”

Parasite is a toy movie…a toy movie about class conflict, made by a serious, super-crafty cineaste and blah blah. Don’t crank me up again about the drunken con-artist family letting the fired maid into the house, etc. History will not be kind.

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If there’s a general consensus about the Depp-Heard verdict, it’s probably something like “it’s finally over…let it go…whatever the truth of it, Depp seemed more honest than Heard plus he’s certainly more likable…it’s gone on long enough…let it go.”

From “Why We Love to Watch a Woman Brought Low,” a 5.20 N.Y. Times essay by Jessica Bennett:

“One might have thought — or, at least, I might have thought — that we’d be in a more enlightened place by now. And yet despite the public reckonings of #MeToo and the recent reexaminations of pop culture figures — Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Janet Jackson and others — there is precious little introspection over the widespread hatred of Ms. Heard.

“This trial seems to have exposed some of the rhetorical weaknesses of #MeToo. ‘Believe women’ for example — a phrase that was meant to underscore how rare it is for a woman to lie about her own abuse — had somehow morphed into ‘believe all women,’ which left no room for the outlier. That has apparently become, as the comedian Chris Rock put it this week, ‘Believe all women…except Amber Heard.’

“The intent of that early slogan was, in part, to encourage the public to treat women who speak up with basic dignity and respect, however messy and imperfect they or their stories may be. Yet none of that seems to have trickled down here.”

@gamethinkingtips Initially, I believed #amberheard. Then I watched the trial, saw the evidence… & realized that I’d been CONNED 😡 @gamethinkingtips #justiceforjohnnydepp #deppvsheard #johnnydepp ♬ original sound – Amy Jo Kim

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