slider

In a 4.3 podcast interview with The Moment‘s Brian Koppleman, Beirut screenwriter Tony Gilroy talks for the first time about the re-writing and re-shooting of Rogue One. Key Gilroy quote: “I came in after the director’s cut [and] I have a screenplay credit in the arbitration that was easily won.” Indeed — the WGA wouldn’t have given Gilroy that credit unless his rewrite was fundamental.

Gilroy quote #2: “I don’t think Rogue One is a Star Wars movie in many ways…to me it’s a battle of Britain movie.”

Gilroy quote #3: “There were no assholes involved in the process at all, on all the upper level, there were no assholes, it was just a mess [and there was] fear, and they had just gotten themselves…and because it wasn’t really my movie…for a while, I slept every night. For my own movie, I wouldn’t sleep, but because it was somebody else’s movie…”

Gilroy quote #4: “At a certain point, it kinda tipped, at a certain point everybody’s looking at you like, [ya gonna fix this or what?], but through a lot of it I was pretty calm, I was pretty chill.”

Gilroy quote #5: “I was in London, I was having a great time every day, I was throwing strikes every day, I was so happy to be engaged, my endorphins were firing, I was happy with what I was doing in front of me, I had…my god, [the production resources], it’s a Ferrari, man, oh my God. I had a great time.”

Read more

I felt a pang when I read about the passing of actress Susan Anspach. She was felled three days ago (Monday, 4.2) by a heart attack. She was 75. The Hollywood Reporter obit was only posted today so I guess the news is just getting around. Anspach’s son Caleb Goddard, whose father is Jack Nicholson, announced her death earlier today.

Anspach made her mark in Hal Ashby‘s The Landlord (’70), Bob Rafelson‘s Five Easy Pieces (’70) and especially Paul Mazursky‘s Blume in Love (’73). She was quite the vibey presence in these films, very silky and sexy with the ability to suggest a complex and particular inner life. To more than a few she was an object of erotic fascination. There, I’ve said it.

No offense but I don’t even remember Anspach in Jeremy Kagan‘s The Big Fix.

Her last performance that left a significant impression was in Dusan Makavejev‘s Montenegro (’81), in which she played a bored housewife who gets into “slut-strutting” (a term used by a smart female critic) during a visit to the country formerly known as Yugoslavia (i.e., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia).

I’m sorry but sometimes the end comes suddenly. Life is short, but then you knew that. Wings of a dove.

There’s an interesting bit of speculation in a 4.5 Cineuropa piece by Fabien Lemercier about next month’s Cannes Film Festival (“A New Phase For Cannes?“). “Several names from North America continue to pop up rather insistently,” Lemercier writes. “Namely, Under the Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell, Domino by Brian De Palma and” — wait for it — “Black Klansman by Spike Lee.”

This is the first spitball piece to mention Lee’s fact-based melodrama as a serious possibility…no?

Black Klansman is based on on Ron Stallworth’s 2014 novel, the full title of which is “Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.”

Set in the late ’70s, pic isn’t literally about a black guy joining the Klan but an undercover investigation of the Klan by Stallworth when he was “the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department.”

After initial correspondence with the Klan, Stallworth received a call in which he was asked if he wants to “join our cause.” According to an Amazon summary, “Ron answers the caller’s question that night with a yes, launching what is surely one of the most audacious, and incredible undercover investigations in history. Ron recruits his partner Chuck to play the ‘white’ Ron Stallworth.”

In Lee’s film Stallworth is played by John David Washington. The “Chuck” character is apparently called “Flip,” and is played by Adam Driver. Laura Harrier and Topher Grace costar. Corey Hawkins plays Stokely Carmichael.

Read more

Last August Tatyana Antropova, the fabled SRO and wife of Hollywood Elsewhere, began the application process for a green card and Employment Authorization card. A lot of work, a lot of forms, roughly $1700 in fees.

We were informed on 10.16.17 via I-797 (“notice of action”) that the USCIS (U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services) had approved her application for employment authorization (otherwise known as an EAD or work permit card) and that it would be arriving soon in the mailbox. All seemed well.

Then it all went bad. In early November we were informed that the letter containing the work permit had been mailed to our address but sent back. This was apparently because the letter had a 90046 zip code instead of the correct 90069, and so the mailman decided not to deliver it. That was six months ago, and despite countless pleas, appeals, letters, phone calls and visits to the downtown L.A. USCIS office (300 No. Los Angeles Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012), the work-permit card senders, based in a building in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, about 10 miles southeast of Kansas City, haven’t re-mailed the card.

Because of one lame-ass decision by a West Hollywood mailman (the zip code is a meaningless distraction as there’s no other Westbourne Drive in the entire city and 90046 is right nearby), poor Tatyana has been without a work permit for a full half-year, and to this date we still haven’t received it in the mail.

We have received, mind, several USCIS letters about other immigration matters at this address, but never the work permit. We have received letters with the incorrect and correct zip codes. We have repeatedly informed the USCIS that the correct zip code is 90069, and they have confirmed to us that their “system” now understands this, but we’ve still gone six months without a card. So much frustration and hair-pulling, so much draining of the spirit.

What government agency mails you something, and then, when it gets sent back to the agency for a nonsensical reason, refuses to re-send? These people are bureaucratic fiends.

I’ve watched this old Steven Spielberg clip a few times. I love it because it’s a reminder that serious artists have no interest in hearing nice bullshit from their alleged friends and admirers. Give it to me straight or don’t say anything at all.

Stanley Kubrick had to sit on Spielberg’s chest and force him into being honest about his true, deep-down feelings about The Shining. He had to grill and interrogate the truth out of him, otherwise Spielberg (who has since come to love The Shining) would have never given it up.

Husbands and wives are like this also — they always lie to protect each other’s feelings. The only way you get the real truth from a husband or wife is when you’re arguing with them and they’re really angry at you and losing their temper, and so they’ll tell you some uncomfortable fact or observation they would otherwise keep quiet about.

Before I stopped drinking (I’ve been sober since 3.20.12) I told an ex-girlfriend that I was starting to feel horrified about my weight and that I was starting to resemble a 50ish lesbian in a cowboy hat. “Stop it…you look fine!” she insisted. She lied — I was turning into Wallace Beery in Min and Bill. Hell, I was turning into Marie Dressler. Everybody lies about everything, including your enemies.

Six years ago Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom opened the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. A great honor and much red-carpet hoopla, for sure, although an opening-night choice is sometimes excluded from festival competition.

At a mid-festival press conference Anderson told a story about sharing the news with a Parisian cineaste friend. “Competition is better,” the friend said. As it turned out Moonrise Kingdom was slotted as a competition film, but a film chosen to open the festival is always presumed to be slightly less consequential than a competition film…a tiny bit underwhelming or off-the-mark in some way. Or a political “gimme” of some kind. Always a cause for concern.

It is in this context that the selection of Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, a “psychological thriller” with Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darin, as the opener at next month’s Cannes Film Festival…it is in this context that the announcement needs to be processed.

(l. to r.) Everybody Knows selfie: Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Asghar Farhadi, Eduard Fernandez, Ricardo Darin.

A Separation, About Elly, The Past, The Salesman — nobody worships Farhadi like Hollywood Elsewhere. The man is hardcore and ultra-meticulous and thoroughly invested in character-driven stories, and is all but incapable of making a mediocre film, much less a bad one. It is a near certainty that Everybody Knows, a Spanish-language family reunion film about disturbances and disruptions, will be a strong, satisfying film. But the opening-night thing is scaring me a teeny-weeny little bit. A hint of slight foreboding.

Everybody Knows (aka Todos Lo Saben) is only the second Spanish-language film to open Cannes. Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education (’04) was the first. It’s also a departure for the Iran-based Farhadi, having made his first film in Spanish and his second not in his native Farsi.

I’m in no way dismissing Everybody Knows because of its opening-night selection. It’s just that I know what “opening-night selection” tends to mean. Will it be better than last year’s opening-nighter, Arnaud Desplechin‘s Ismael’s Ghosts (Les fantomes d’Ismael), which, apart from Marion Cotillard‘s nude scene, was agony to sit through? Almost certainly.

A friend: “Moonrise Kingdom was in competition. Other opening nights, like Moulin Rouge, have been too. It’s at the determination of the festival and the filmmakers. The problem is that because most opening-night films at most festivals are NOT in competition, somehow even when you are in competition the film tends to get disregarded by the jury anyway. So it’s something of a double-edged sword, but those are the facts.”

Yesterday Indiewire‘s Kate Erbland devoted one of her “Girl Talk” columns to a piece about the retired-until-further-notice Cameron Diaz. It was basically a career-summary piece along the lines of what I wrote on 3.15. What blows my mind is that Erbland (a) considers Roger Kumble‘s The Sweetest Thing to be one of Diaz’s most engaging films, despite being one of the most inane piece-of-shit comedies I ever walked out on with a 26% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and (b) she completely ignored what I regard as her best film, Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes, in which she gave her career-best performance. Erbland obviously doesn’t have to agree with me, but she didn’t even mention the Hanson, which has an RT rating of 75%.

The great Dominic Eardley and I have been futzing around with the flavor and ornamention of the new HE:(plus) design. A friend urged me to make HE:(plus) look different and distinct from HE classic. So I decided to substitute the Hollywood hills backdrop for one of Paris…Hollywood Elsewhere, right? And then stealing Francis Bacon’s occasional use of arrows in some of his paintings, except make the arrows red and pointy and very, very narrow. I also decided to change the content area background from medium gray to olive drab, and the background area from dark gray to mineshaft black.

The other HE:(plus) columns besides my stuff (Ruimy With A View, Il Foro Romano, Miserable Wanderer, etc.) will line up below. The individual logos for each column are being designed as we speak by HE’s own Mark Frenden. This is not the end-all and be-all of HE:(plus) design, of course, but a beginning. If anyone has any suggestions or improvements, please share. Again, the basic layout so far.

Latest HE:(plus) mockup, as of 3.31.

Read more

Roughly two years after the big Sundance debut of Beasts of the Southern Wild, or in December 2013, I wrote director-writer Benh Zeitlin about what I’d heard was his next project. It was called Wendy, I’d been told by a friend, and was thought to be some kind of rural-American, loose-shoe reimagining of the Peter Pan saga. Or something in that vein. So I wrote Zeitlin and asked what up.

“I’m looking to verify that your followup to Beasts of the Southern Wild will be some kind of variation on the Peter Pan legend, called Wendy,” I said. “Which will basically be the classic story told from Wendy’s point of view. A similar kind of organically magical other-world vibe that you delivered in Beasts, I gather, but within a more familiar structure.”

In his emailed reply, Zeitlin said what I’d been hearing was almost 100% wrong, and that the vision of the film had changed every which way. He asked me to keep it zipped until he knew what it finally would be and was ready to share. I said fine and that was that.

Wendy director-writer Benh Zeitlin.

4 1/3 years have passed since that exchange, and Zeitlin’s Wendy is finally done, having shot last year in Montserrat and Antigua, and currently in post. And ready to roll out in the fall, I’m presuming, under Fox Searchlight. Or maybe not. I wrote Zeitlin earlier today to ask how thing’s are going…silencio.

Wendy‘s IMDB page offers the following synopsis: “A young girl is taken to a destructive ecosystem where she befriends a young boy and discovers a mystical pollen that allows them to break the relationship between aging and time.” That sounds kinda Peter Pan-ny, no?

Wendy is played by the very young Tommie Lynn Milazzo, who may be the new Quvenzhane Wallis mixed with a slightly younger sister of The Florida Project‘s Brooklyn Prince. Shay Walker plays Angela Darling, the IMDB says. Darling, of course, was the last name of the London family that Peter Pan visited in the original 1906 J.M. Barrie novel, “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.”

I have it in my mind that Zeitlin is temperamentally the new Terrence Malick, and that he likes to take his time in the editing room. I’m figuring nonetheless that Wendy will probably screen in Venice, Telluride and/or Toronto.

Last night I had my second viewing of John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 4.6.18). It happened at Pete Hammond‘s KCET class at the Sherman Oaks Arclight. Curran and Jason Clarke, who plays the 36 year-old Ted Kennedy as he grapples with an appalling and ruinous tragedy, were the post-screening guests.

We all know the basic bones of the Chappaquiddick story, but most of us don’t know the particulars. It’s not pretty and certainly not admirable. The film is a study in self loathing all around. In a good way.

This horror story was oddly concurrent with the saga of astronaut Neil Armstrong, hundreds of thousands of miles away that weekend and about to step onto the moon. Armstrong’s story will be depicted later this year in Damian Chazelle‘s First Man (Universal, 10.12). Clarke costars in that film also, portraying astronaut Ed White.

Clarke isn’t a dead ringer for Kennedy but the voice is close enough, and his whole performance is an expression of “Jesus, what have I done?” with a side dish of “Lord, take this cup from me.” Kennedy acted deplorably during this episode, but Clarke’s inhabiting of this nightmare stirs something close to…pity? You poor, alcoholic, overwhelmed weak sister. If you hadn’t gotten riled by that Edgartown cop and gunned the engine you might’ve…forget it. The woman you killed, Mary Jo Kopechne, has been dead for nearly a half-century, and you’ve been dead for eight and a half years. But you’re both alive in this new film, and it’s quite the revisiting. It sinks right in.

For some reason a guy who works for the KCET series came up during the q & a and told me to stop taking video. Why? What’s the problem? Leave me alone.

Read more

Today (3.28) the Guardian published a Solo assessment piece by Ben Child — “Is the Han Solo Star Wars Spin-off Spiralling Towards Disaster?” The headline suggests a hit piece, but it’s actually more of a “maybe it didn’t work out or maybe it did” thing.

A few hours ago director-producer Robert Meyer Burnett attempted to burnish Solo‘s rep with the following tweet: “Folks, a very trusted friend who saw Solo in a very unfinished state at a ‘friends and family’ screening said it was really good, had everything you wanted to see (even how the Falcon interior got so dirty) and even Alden Ehrenreich does a fine job.”

HE response #1: Never trust the opinion of anyone who’s attended a friends-and-family screening because they wouldn’t have been invited in the first place if they weren’t in the tank.

HE response #2: Burnett’s “very trusted friend” saw “a very unfinished” version? Saw it when? Relatively recently or sometime last year or what? If it’s the latter something’s wrong because Solo opens in eight weeks (i.e., 5.25) so the friends-and-family crowd — if they saw it, say, sometime in February or early March — should been shown a nearly finished version, given the nearness of the release date.

Read more

It’s been announced that Cannes Classics will host the world premiere of an unrestored 70mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday, 5.12.18, in the midst of the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival.

A new but not restored 70mm print of 2001, struck from “new printing elements made from the original camera negative”, will be shown. An official festival release says that the idea is to “present the cinematic event audiences experienced 50 years ago.” The 70mm Cannes print, created by Warner Bros. with supervision by director Chris Nolan (who will introduce the film at the special Cannes screening), “is a true photochemical film recreation — no digital tricks, remastered effects or revisionist edits.”

Sounds like a reasonable idea, but restoration guru Robert Harris (Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus, Rear Window) says “non…c’est des conneries. C’est pour les nerds de cinema.”

The new 70mm print they’ll be showing in Cannes “will not look like 2001 did in 1968,” Harris claims. “My problems with the project are not with what’s being done, or how it’s being done. It’s with the verbiage of the press release. It can’t be an authentic recreation of how the film looked 50 years ago for any number of reasons. Color stocks, black levels and grain structure are different now, color temperature of the lamps has changed but can be adapted. They were using carbon arc lamps in ’68 and they aren’t now, and on top of everything else the film stock is different — the stock used for original prints was a stock that arrived back in 1962. And so the images will ironically look too clear.”

(Harris is speculating, for example, that Cannes audiences might see that Dr. Heywood Floyd‘s floating pen is actually mounted on a circular piece of lucite or glass, which the original ’68 film didn’t have the resolution to deliver.)

“What they show may be beautiful — I’d like it to be — but they’re not working from the original camera negative, which has been badly damaged,” Harris explains. “They’re working from ‘new printing elements’ taken from the original negative, which basically means a fourth-generation print. All original prints were struck from the camera original. They won’t be using the original film stock that the original 2001 was printed on, which was Eastman 5385, a 1962 film stock, that had appropriate film grain to the way the film had been designed. So it’s not off the negative, they don’t have the original film stock, and they’re be making it off a dupe rather than using 4K or 8K files.

“All of that noted, stocks are so good today that the fact that a print is fourth-generation may not matter.”

Final Harris thought: The promising news is that FotoKem, the lab producing the elements, does superb work, so in the end everything should look wonderful, if a bit shop-worn. Most important thing is that the skies must be black, black, black!”

2001: A Space Odyssey will also return to U.S. theaters in 70mm beginning on 5.18.18. But why not in uprezzed IMAX, fellas? 2001 freaks worldwide would cheer this.