wired

“I’ve made about 120 movies. I think maybe six are good. The two pictures that I’m most remembered for are two pictures I never thought would be successful. I thought The Magnificent Seven was going to be terrible. And I turned Bullitt down four times. I thought, ‘This’ll be another dumb picture with a car chase.'” — Robert Vaughan speaking to The Observer‘s Sanjiv Bhattacharya.

What are the other four? My choices are The Young Philadelphians, The Man from Independence, The Bridge at Remagen and The Towering Inferno. None of these are wonderful, but they’re decent.

“To to be a well-known actor growing up in Hollywood, and to have money in your pocket is like having died and gone to heaven. Hollywood is where every beautiful girl in the world between the ages of 18 and 22 comes to become movie stars. By the time they get to 24, most of them are gone, but we got them while they were there.”

An interesting piece by Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke about how The Weinstein Co. flipped off the core audience for Grindhouse by refusing to book the Quentin Tarantino- Robert Rodriguez film in actual grindhouse cinemas like Portland’s Clinton Street Theatre.

“I received some very interesting info this weekend from Seth Sonstein, the owner/programmer at the Clinton Street Theater, detailing how he tried in vain to convince The Weinstein Co. to allow his venue to play the pic,” Finke begins. “The Clinton is a unique single-screen indie art house considered a true Grindhouse in Portland, Oregon. (For instance, it just ran a film series that included original 35mm prints of Switchblade Sisters, Crazies and Spook Who Sat By The Door.)

“Looking at the email exchange, I can see that TWC’s branch sales manager Keir Gotcher kept giving The Clinton the run-around. “I wanted to give you some insight into Grindhouse being a flop,” Sonstein wrote [and explained]. “We begged The Weinstein Company for a print of this film. In the end they would not give us a print.

“Also, Dan Halsted runs the Grindhouse Film Festival out of The Hollywood Theater in Portland, and Weinstein would also not release a print to him. (Dan knows more about Grindhouse films then anyone in the country.) So I attest that the distribution was botched on this film.”

“To not just ignore a movie’s base, but actually rebuff it, makes no sense,” Finke concludes.

With the whiners and haters making Hollywood Elsewhere such a pleasant place to be in recent days, I thought I’d share a letter from a longtime reader named Alexandro Aldrete, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspective of someone outside the country — someone with different cultural references and whatnot — to see things in a fresh light. (And I’m not saying he’s right or wrong or anything in between.)

“The reason I’m writing is because the comments situation has gotten to a point where it’s frankly pathetic,” Aldrete begins. “You must have the most consistent group of whiners on the internet. There’s nothing you can say without receiving dozens of useless posts about how outraged they are by what you say.

“The last one about Easter Sunday is particularly funny in the self-righteous indignation that everyone felt because of what you said about American families watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD. How you are a bigot, an asshole and so on.

“You totally got it right about the director of Porky’s too. It’s refreshing to read some honesty from time to time. I don’t always agree with you (The Aviator sucked? Wedding Crashers was a truly pleasant experience?) but I enjoy it nevertheless. Your site was frankly more fun when you had the ocassional reader response. Now it’s like you’re the evil teacher in the teenage-girls-with- emotional-issues classroom. Everyone is oh so sensitive and melodramatic about everything.

“I hardly read any of those comments anymore because they depress me. Your readership needs a sense of humor. And when you have people that feel that you must be stopped for saying that Eddie Murphy has been a money-grubbing whore, that twenty-something girls at Starbucks laughing out loud can be a pain in the ass, and that the numbers show in a very cold non-judgmental way that the majority of the American movie going public (and worldwide movie going public for that matter) has low, low, low fucking taste (at this point I don’t think that’s even debatable)…well, those persons need a little less self importance.”

What are three darkest and most traumatic disasters of the past six years? 9.11, Katrina and the Asian tsunami, right? The last two were about awful floodings, drownings, hundreds of bodies, stench, misery on a massive scale…really horrific wrath-of-God stuff. And yet everyone’s ho-humming about the summer’s biggest (i.e,, the most grossly expensive) comedy, Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22), being about God (Morgan Freeman) deciding to bring the absolute worst super Katrina-tsunami of all time down upon the world.

We all know that Universal isn’t going to drown everyone while trying to make us laugh, and that God, despite ordering Evan (Steve Carell) to build an ark big enough to hold all the animals, will reverse course at the finale and say something like, “Evan, you’ve kept your word and fulfilled your task…God is pleased with you….now go home to your family because I’ve changed my mind about bringing about the most ruthless act of mass murder in the history of the planet.”

But even with this cheap turnabout ending, doesn’t a film with all these echoes and intimations (i.e., about how homo sapiens has screwed the world up so badly that God has decided to wipe the slate clean and start all over again) at least make you crack a smile? I personally feel that that the threat of cataclysmic disaster involving the death of hundreds of millions is fucking hilarious.

On one level Evan Almighty is just another God comedy-slash-moral fable (a tradition that goes back Oh, God!) but it’s also arriving in the wake of the industry having been mightily impressed by those Passion of the Christ bucks and deciding to try and grab as much of that religious-right moolah as it can. It’s also following in the backwash of The Reaping, another slick pander-job about God’s Biblical wrath. On top of which Tom Shadyac, the director of Evan Almighty, is said to be a guy who takes spiritual and religious matters fairly seriously.

I don’t know if one is connected to the other or what the overall quilt will look like, but throw this all together and add the certainty of all that mirth-smothering CGI, and the Evan Almighty laughs are going to be mostly about shtick and little else. The bits may be funny, but undercurrent is gloomy as hell.

I can see people who love the idea of checking their brains at the door crowd having a rollicking good time with Evan, but all you have to do is think for 20 or 25 seconds about the content and the sub-currents, and the reasons that went into the greenlighting of this thing apart from an interest in making money, and honestly… what’s to laugh at?

What is Evan Almighty deep down? Basically a religious metaphor concept about a relatively shallow and opportunistic man being touched by a cosmic spirit, and the difficulty he goes through in order to express his state of illumination and be at one with his vision. As such, it may seem to some like a companion piece to what Richard Dreyfuss went through in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Except this time there can’t be a payoff climax (i.e., the world-flood equivalent of aliens landing their mother ship next to Devil’s Tower) because Universal doesn’t want everyone dead.

So Freeman’s change-of-heart scene (or whatever it is that Shadyac and his writers have dreamt up that will prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions) is going to be the equivalent, more or less. of Francois Truffaut‘s Lacombe character saying to Dreyfuss, “I am sorry, Mr. Neary, but the aliens have turned around and flown home.”

The writers of Evan Almighty are Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Oedekerk, based on a story by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow.

The trailer for Jon Kasdan‘s In The Land of Women (Warner Independent, 4.20) — an intelligent-sounding, well acted, seemingly sophisticated romantic drama about an introspective young guy (Adam Brody) nursing a broken heart who visits his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis ) in the midwest and falls into a semi-initimate relationship with a mother (Meg Ryan) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) — looks like it might be pretty good.

In The Land of Women director-writer Jon Kasdan

And Brody is appealing in his MySpace site video introduction. The only thing that scares me is that the IMDB says ITLOW was shown at some 2006 Cannes market screenings, which was almost a year ago. And there’ve been no festival or word-of-mouth showings of any kind since? Plus I got this weird mail a while back urging me to RSVP to an all-media screening that’s happening at a secret location. (Will journalists need to know a password to gain admittance?)

I called Mike Binder, a big fan of Brody’s who wants to cast him in an upcoming film, to see if he’s seen the Kasdan film but he didn’t get back. The first screening I know about is the all-media on 4.20. Does anyone have any kind of lowdown or info?

I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but there are one or two mentions in this N.Y. Times Sharon Waxman q & a with Kasdan (son of Lawrence, younger brother of Jake) that smack of elite lineage.

One is that after completing one year at New York University film school young Jon was asked to join the staff of Judd Apatow‘s Freaks and Geeks, which Jake Kasdan had directed several episodes of, because it was “decided there was a value to having someone fresh out of high school on the staff.” (This in itself puts a scowl on my face.)

Adam Brody, Meg Ryan

The other is Kasdan explaining that he wrote the script of In The Land of Women in record time — four weeks — during a getaway retreat in “my parents’ cabin in Telluride.” That’s it — I’m sold on this guy. Something tells me that cabin has really good wi-fi and a high-def 60″ flat-screen with 80 or 90 Blu-Ray DVDs stacked in alphabetical order and a juicer and lots of fresh vegetables in the fridge and a kind of tasteful-homey vibe. Which helps, you know, when you’re writing because it’s relaxing and all.

I’m presuming everyone knows that Jake Kasdan ‘s The TV Set, about the making of a TV show, opened Friday, just as I’m assuming everyone knows that Lawrence Kasdan is the director-writer of Mumford, Silverado, The Big Chill, Wyatt Earp, Grand Canyon and Body Heat. He also executive produced In the Land of Women (i.e., grandfathered, paved the way, arranged for the financing and distribution).

All of the prominent weekend movies were more or less flat yesterday (i.e., didn’t increase upon Friday’s numbers) and yet Grindhouse dropped 19%. This means it won’t even hit $13 million — this morning’s estimate is that it’ll have $12,123,000 by late tonight.

Today is a dead movie-going day because almost all Middle Americans are visiting family and hiding chocolate Easter eggs and sitting around watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD as they lash each other with cat ‘o’ nine tails.

The rundown: Blades of Glory is #1 with $23,614,000, Meet The Robinsons is #2 with $17,175,00 Are We DoneYet? is #3 with 14,975,000. Grindhouse is fourth with $12123 and The Reaping is fifth with $10,139,000. The Hoax is projecting about $1,418,000 and $6000 a print — fair, okay, not terrific.

“The main difference between The Sopranos and its spawn wasn’t prurience, it was ambition. Most shows overreach or ‘jump the shark’ when they pile on too much melodrama and too many dead bodies. On The Sopranos, it was the opposite: The show lost its way when it put murders and mischief aside and weighed itself down in ponderous character sketches and too many Bergmanesque dream sequences.

“Those flights of fancy were not surprising given how often the series was hailed as Shakespearian or Dickensian. Norman Mailer recently called The Sopranos the closest thing to the Great American Novel in today’s culture.” — from a piece by N.Y. Times columnist Alessandra Stanley called “This Thing of Ours, It’s Over,” in the Sunday (4.8) edition.

Harrison Ford has long shown a kind of avoidance mentality (some would say a chickenshit attitude) when it came to starring in realistic docu-dramas. He famously declined to star in Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic (a movie about drugs), and then bowed out of a starring role in Stephen Gaghan‘s Syriana, which was about the geopolitics of big oil. (“I didn’t feel strongly enough about the truth of the material ,and I think I made a mistake,” Ford allegedly said). He also sidestepped a shot at starring in A History of Violence.

Now, weeks before he starts work on the fourth Indiana Jones film, Ford has had a change of heart. Starting on Wednesday he’ll be playing some kind of lead role in a Mexican immigration film for the Weinstein Co. called Crossing Over. Costarring Sean Penn and Ray Liotta, it reportedly “focuses on the gut-wrenching drama of people caught up in the nation’s immigration morass,” blah, blah.

The consensus seems to be that it’s going to be Crash-like. This would normally be a concern, but the fact that Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, The Cooler) has written the script and is also directing is reason for hope. The film is tentatively set for a fall ’07 release. What is that, three or four months in post?

The only people I know in real life who smoke are (a) young and courting a kind of contrarian identity, (b) older with vaguely self-destructive attitudes, and in some cases beset by addiction problems, (c) serious “party” people with unmistakable self-destructive compulsions and tendencies, and (d) life’s chronic losers — riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs. Cigarette smoking used to be extremely cool but no longer, and that goes for actors in movies too.

All the above associations seem to kick in every time sometime lights up in a film, and it’s gotten so that I don’t want to watch characters in movies smoke at all. Unless it’s a period film or unless they look extremely cool doing it (a la Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless), but very few actors have that ability.

I smoked for years and years but I don’t any more, and I don’t like the way cigar- ettes smell unless I’m in Europe. (It’s different over there). Smoking isn’t exactly outright suicide but it’s the next thing to it, and every time someone lights up in a movie it half-pisses me off and makes me think negatively about the film in general, especially if this or that actor smokes all through the movie and looks and acts like a lowlife. Criminals in movies are always smoking because of (b), (c) and (d), but I think it’s way too easy for an actor to use smoking as a piece of business. It’s tedious and repellent. It makes me want to see the actor get shot or at least beaten up.

I think the sun has really set on the sexiness of smoking in movies, and I’m starting to think that actors who light up all the time in front of the camera are second-raters.

Slate‘s Kim Masters wrote on Friday that “powerful anti-smoking groups have been pushing the MPAA to slap any movie that shows smoking with an automatic R rating, unless that movie deals with a historical figure who actually smoked (as in Good Night and Good Luck) or shows people suffering hideous consequences as a result of their folly.” That sounds a bit harsh, but I’m getting so sick of watching people light up I almost don’t care how it stops as long as it does.

People should be free to do anything they want of a self-destructive nature — cigarettes, booze, compulsive eating, coke, heroin — as long as they don’t hurt anyone else doing it. And actors should be free to do anything they want that will make a performance connect. But smoking has lost its coolness, and actors who lean on it repeatedly or compulsively are boring, and I’m starting to say “the hell with them” when they pull one out and strike a match.

Deep down I guess I’m acknowledging that I wouldn’t be surprised if I live a slightly shorter life because of my smoking in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m kind of angry about that possibility.

Here’s the difference between a highly judgmental British film columnist like the Guardian‘s John Patterson and a streetcorner mess-around-and-fess-upper like myself. Patterson thinks actors who’ve won Oscars should be subjected to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law — i.e., appear in three turkeys after winning your Oscar and you have to give it back.

Halle Berry ought to return hers, he feels, because she made Catwoman, Gothika and now Perfect Stranger (which Patterson hears is “Color of Night bad”). And Hilary Swank has to almost give her Oscar back as punishment for making The Black Dahlia and The Reaping. (One more and she’s done.) Whereas my attitude about Swank’s post-Million Dollar Baby transgressions is that she has to live in the world and take what comes, and she’s therefore not really “calling the shots” and that her critics should try to cut her a break….for the time being. Berry, however, may be a different story — she’s almost the female Cuba Gooding these days.

Good heavens…has anyone looked at the “Road to Box-Office Hell” Grindhouse projections on the front page of Movie City News? Poland didn’t jump in, but Coming Soon projected $25.8 million, Box-Office Guru said $25 million, Box-Office Prophet said $24.3 million, and the more cautious Entertainment Weekly analyst said $19 million. Coming Soon’s Ed Douglas informs that Box-Office Guru predicted a $29 million haul….hah! (My estimate, posted yesterday, was that it would do around $20 million.) Apologies for my earlier dyslexic posting — Douglas predicted $25.8 million, not $28.5 million.

It’s a blue and cloudy Saturday morning for poor Harvey Weinstein with those weekend Grindhouse projections of $20 million or thereabouts falling way short. A studio-based estimate has Grindhouse coming in fourth with $11,992,000 for the weekend. (It made about $4,894,000 yesterday.) The just-shy-of-$12-millon estimate is probably about a million short — I see it doing around $13 million when the final data is in. (Figures for the top ten plus The Hoax are in the next item.)

Once again, a tasty hip-popcorn movie that a lot of big-city critics and urban types are having a great old time with proved a little too hip for the room when it came to suburban slow-boaters. “A double feature is like an anthology film,” a marketing analyst told me this morning. “And people generally like to see one picture telling one story. It’s very tough to sell a double feature or an anthology. Plus Tarantino has always had more of a cult following than a mass following. Rodriguez makes kids pictures that did business, but neither one is a star.”

I’m especially appalled by one posting from a guy who saw it yesterday that the audience was into the gloppy-gross Rodriguez zombie movie (i.e., Planet Terror) more than the obviously superior Tarantino car-chase film by way of The Iceman Cometh (i.e., Death Proof). Plus an HE poster said he’s noticing that about half seem to prefer Rodriguez and half the Tarantino. If people prefer the old-shoe comfort of a single movie telling a single story…fine. Death Proof doesn’t really tell a story at all, when you get right down to it. But to say the Rodriguez is better than the Tarantino…my God!

We’re really and truly living in the United States of Hong Kong — a sprinkling of sophisticated urban havens surrounded on all sides by a massive Gorilla Nation. Two different planets, two different worlds…the high and the low…hip urbanity vs. the mentality of the mall.

The Weinstein Co. hasn’t had any hits since the last Scary Movie, Grindhouse allegedly cost closer to $70 million than the low 50s, and the word on the street is that the Weinstein creditors are looking to get out. And now Grindhouse is looking like Snakes on a Plane. Is the beginning of the end of Little Rico?

“Harvey has been running scared recently — he’s not the guy he was a year or two years ago,” the analyst said. “Tarantino and Rodriguez pushed hard for the anthology idea which meant a three-hour length, and he caved. The idea was too hip for the room, and Grindhouse, in the end, was basically an expensive art film.

“It’s starting to look like it might be over for the Weinstein’s now. It’s almost time for the fire sale and the funeral. You can’t keep putting out movies that don’t make money, although The Nanny Diaries might do some business. But the creditors, I’m hearing, are looking to get out, and there isn’t going to be any more money from them. The Weinsteins have fucked a lot of people and are hated. They have to go to festivals to get films. Too many people are allied against them.

“There was no good commercial reason to release Grindhouse as a double feature. If they had put the Rodriguez or the Russell car-chase movie out as a longer stand-alone (as they’re going to do in Europe), each might have done decent business or maybe better than that.

“People want to see a simple film…they want to see a trailer that tells them a story. It’s not the length, you need a handle on one film, and anthologies are always a tough sell. The Grindhouse matinee business [yesterday] was more than respectable in New York and the other big cities, but it did worse elsewhere.”