wired

It’s official: Daniel Craig is the new James Bond. The first blonde 007, and…the shortest. Sorry but I had to throw that in. I’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Connery, Moore, Brosnan and Craig and I know whereof I speak. But this is easily maskable on-screen. Craig told journos at this morning’s London press conference that the Casino Royale script (I presume he means the revised one by Paul Haggis) is “incredible” and “once I’d read that, I realized that I didn’t have a choice. I had to go for it.” I still say a film can only be as good as the most clueless powerful person on the above-the-line team, and not even a good script can entirely overcome the influence of…well, I’m repeating myself.

Another diss for 20th Century Fox’s marketing team: Ridley Scott has criticized them for selling last May’s Kingdom Of Heaven as a romantic actioner instead of a religious and political piece, which he argued for but didn’t get. Fox marketers were seemingly afraid of playing up the Islamic-vs.-Christian conflict element in the film’s advertising because this would reflect on the U.S. presence in Iraq and other political issues of the day. Okay, but the running-time issue is a bit more interesting. I read two or three posts last spring claiming that Scott’s three-hour Kingdom cut, which was test-screened before being trimmed, was a somewhat better film that the 2-hour, 25-minute version that went into theatres. So why wasn’t the three-hour cut offered on the recently issued DVD? Because they intend to wait a year and get a second revenue stream out of “Director’s Cut” sometime in ’06, I imagine.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Eon Productions will officially announce that Dan…sorry, will announce the name of whomever’s been chosen to play James Bond in Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale at a London press conference tomorrow (Friday, 10.14). If only Wilson and Broccoli had gone with Quentin Tarantino’s idea for Casino Royale…”let me do it my way, I won’t screw up your franchise,” etc…but they’re going with Campbell and Crash screenwriter Paul Haggis, who’s said to be interested in remaking the Bond series the way Chris Nolan revitalized Batman and Bruce Wayne. This can’t really happen, of course, with producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli running the show, so forget it. Daniel Craig, whom the Daily Mail identified earlier this week as the new 007, has real machismo and an icy killer quality in his cold gray eyes, but I wonder how the mainstream popcorn crowd (i.e., those who’ve never seen him in Layer Cake or anything else) will respond.

Harold Pinter was named today in Stockholm as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The Birthday Party, The Servant, Accident…the screenplays for Turtle Diary, The French Lieutenant’s Woman…of course. But for me the ultimate Pinter work has always been Betrayal, which I first saw on the New York stage in 1980 with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner. Maybe the rights holder to David Jones’ riveting 1983 film version (CBS Fox Home Video put out a cruddy, muddy-looking VHS in the mid ’80s) will take notice and finally release a cleanly mastered DVD of this disappeared Pinter film, which costars Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodges. Where would the art of dialogue be without Pinter’s influence? Verbal evasion, unspoken menace, less is more, the things that are there but unsaid.

The first press screenings of Sam Mendes’ Jarhead that I’ve heard about will begin late next week. The sound of those slowed-down synthesized helicopter blades on the website is an obvious salute to Apocalypse Now, but the script suggests it’ll be something more Full Metal Jacket-ish than Platoon-like.

Director Tony Scott (Domino) on his forthcoming remake of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (’79), which will start shooting sometime in ’06: “I see it as Kingdom Of Heaven meets The Warriors because with these gangs…instead of having twenty or thirty guys, I’m going to have three thousand, five thousand guys in the L.A. river beds and it’s going to look like L.A. during the riots. I love the original movie…that’s why I’m in doing this, but I’m not going to copy the original”. Hill’s film,
based on the ancient Greek nonfiction tale “Anabasis,” was about a New York gang trying to make it get home to Coney Island alive after being framed from the murder of an untouchable gang leader. The director’s cut version of Hill’s film came out on DVD on 10.4.

Leonardo DiCaprio obviously has this liking for dark heavyweight melodramas (The Blood Diamond, The Departed, The Chancellor Manuscripts, Gangs of New York) or biopics about famous ballsy guys (The Aviator, Catch Me If You Can and a film in development about Timothy Leary). Is anyone else thinking he needs to make something light…a clever comedy, maybe a mushy romance of some kind?

There’s an “airline geek” named Andy Smith who points out that (a) there’s a dusky twilight shot of the mythical 747 that Orlando Bloom’s character takes from Portland to Louisville in the trailer for Elizabethtown, and says (b) that this aircraft “is none other than Columbia Airlines flight 409 (obviously not a real airline) from the movie Airport ’75. You know…the one with crossed-eyed stewardess Karen Black trying to fly a plane with a large hole ripped into it from an air-to-air collision?” This has to be checked out. Bloom and Dunst flirting all alone in first-class, and Karen Black in the pilot’s seat? Awesome if true. Anyone?

Two changes with 20th Century Fox’s The Family Stone. One, they’ve decided to do a platform-release on 11.4 (i.e., the original opening date) in 800-plus theatres, and then go wide on 11.11. (The theatre tallies were wrong before…sorry.) Two, they’re cooking up a new one-sheet that will presumably try to sell what it actually is (a sharply-written family comedy with heart) as opposed to whatever that upraised wedding finger one-sheet conveys. Which is what exactly? Marriage sucks?…my husband sucks?…I’ve changed my mind? It’s catchy (I showed it a woman friend who’s out of the loop and she went, “Aha!”) but it has nothing to do with the film.

I said before going to the Toronto Film Festival than I hoped Niki Caro’s North Country (Warner Bros., 10.14) wouldn’t just be another dramatization of a sexual-harassment issue, which seemed old-hat to me. And I’m afraid N.Y. Times writer Caryn James is also on the money when she says the following: “While it seems to be a film with a cause, [North Country] refights a battle that took place long ago. As one of the few women working in a mine, Charlize Theron faces insults and discrimination in a role that seems conceived with an Oscar campaign in mind. Women still suffer in jobs that have traditionally belonged to men, but the blatant discrimination her character faces — her boss flat-out says she has no right to take a job away from a man — has no vital connection to the present. A truly provocative film would deal with the backlash against sexual harassment laws, the contemporary sense that political correctness has gone too far. The sitcom ‘The Office’ (both the British and American versions), with its troglodyte boss and a human resources department that stages seminars on appropriate behavior, says more about harassment today.”

It occured to me last weekend in the course of the Family Stone junket in Pasadena that right now, a healthy portion of the publicity team at 20th Century Fox is (a) female, (b) married and (c) with child and on the verge of going on maternity leave, or with recently arrrived kids at home. When Fox marketing exec Jeff Godsick was told a couple of weeks of still another impending birth and a request for maternity leave, he allegedly replied, “Hmmm…maybe I’m pregnant?”

Nobody cares about the James Bond casting process. I might have mentioned this once or twice before, but the franchise is a kind of cultural tumor…about a character and a mindset that has nothing to do with anything in our world today except for the bizarre fact that when a Bond movie opens several million people pay to see it (which I attribute to mindless habit)…about a character who mattered in the world of the early ’50s to early ’60s, and then degenerated into a fey figurehead of a series of special effects-and-gadgets movies during the ’70s and ’80s, and whose legend over the last eight to ten years has been further marginalized by the most clueless producing team in the history of mainstream filmmaking, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. That said, Variety‘s Katja Hoffman, quoting London’s Daily Mail, says that Daniel Craig has probably been chosen. I love this sartorial acknowledgement: “Brit thesp, who plays the second lead in Spielberg’s terrorist thriller Munich, would be the first blond Bond.” The clincher for me is that “Craig’s publicist only offered a ‘no comment'” to Hoffman, and that the authorities at Eon Productions, the producers of the Bond franchise, “were said to be ‘in a meeting.'” The only way the Bond franchise can ever really get going is for Wilson and Broccoli to be removed from the equation, which will never happen so forget the whole thing. Craig will pocket a nice paycheck and get to buy a much bigger home…great.