I ran a piece on 4.14.11 about the decision to remove the words “God of” from Roman Polanski‘s adaptation of Yasmina Reza‘s God of Carnage, and to therefore call it Carnage (Sony Classics, 11.18). I was told by a publicist that day that the decision “was made by the producer Said Ben Said and Polanski.” Most people felt this was an odd call but whatever. The movie’s the thing, right?

My suspicion is that Carnage was adopted because of the U.S market, and particularly a fear that hinterland yahoos might react negatively to the word “God” not being used in a strictly Christian context. Even if this isn’t true the U.S. is still the most religiously primitive, culturally backward, finger-up-its-ass country in the Western hemisphere, hands down.

The French poster for the film has been released, and while the French acknowledge the original title on the the bottom of the poster, they’re sticking to Carnage.

Even in 1984’s Footloose the idea of dancing being banned in a small Midwestern town was ridiculous. Yes, the script came from an actual dancing ban that had been enforced in the town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, and was finally revoked in 1980. But the banning of dancing — not the jitterbug or square-dancing but suggestive pantomining of sexual congress, which is what modern dancing more or less is — is like some ghostly remnant of America’s buried puritan past.

The idea, in short, comes from those small-town preachers and community leaders who were afraid of race music and be-bop Elvis Presley and Little Richard music in the early to mid 1950s.

If it was ludicrous in 1984, some 27 years ago, it’s much, much dopier today. There is no more rural America except in the low-income country backwaters. Everything has been corporatized and Walmart-ized. The internet has opened everything up to every kid in the country. Outside of Mormon, Amish and Hassidic culture there are no more middle-aged farts who look like Dennis Quaid telling high school kids not to grind their hips on a dance floor. The early to mid 1950s, when fear of rock ‘n’ roll was at its height, was 55 to 60 years ago. And that’s over. The small-town elders who inveighed against Presley and who burned Beatles records in 1966 when John Lennon said “we’re more popular than Jesus” are dead and gone, or too old to matter.

Which is why the new Footloose is going to be awful, and why it’s going to take a lot of pain pills to get through Quaid’s performance as John Lithgow. I know, I know…the under-25 target audience won’t care because they’ll just be into the idea of grooving to a new Dirty Dancing before the actual remake comes along.

On top of everything else, Gov. Rick Perry‘s Supercuts hair style is really quite awful. His hairline is too close to his eyebrows and seems to crowd his facial features. And those fat yellow ties and those awful elephant-collar businessman’s shirts he wears with his suits. There’s just something oozy and odious about Perry. He makes you want to leave the room.

Last night an industry-connected HE correspondent wrote to say he’d “just returned from a PGA screening of The Help at the WGA theatre,” and that his wife “was in tears” and that the overall response was quite emotional. “The crowd name-checked the credits, clapping five different times,” he wrote. “Crazy applause. An entertainment attorney was sitting next to me, a guy in his mid ’50s, and he wasn’t just saying at the end ‘yeah, pretty good, whatever’ but ‘man…amazing!’

“Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan and other producers did a q & a. They seemed very confident and self-satisfied, but in a good way. The crowd really loved the movie.

“The decision to do a food product tie-in seems certain to backfire and is already stirring the racial controversy pot. But the audience that has reward the book is going to go see this in droves. It feels like this movie is going to get talked about and make a lot of money, and land some awards.”

The expectation is that The Help will end up with something like $32 million by Sunday night, and may go on to earn as much as $100 million…who knows?

The reason The Lone Ranger‘s budget was so astronomically high that Disney execs decided to shut it down was because it’s an effects-heavy CG thing due to being a kind of an Indian-spirituality werewolf movie — a.k.a., The Lone Ranger Meets the Wolfman. Yes, I’m serious. A 3.29.09 draft of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio‘s script makes it clear it was going to be at least partly about some kind of Native American wolfbeast tearing victims apart and leaving a bloody mess.

Don’t take my word for it — look at the below photo capture of page 61 of Elliott and Rossio’s draft.

“It was always going to be a big Bruckheimer CG movie with traditional Bruckheimer elements with an eye toward being a tentpole, totally Pirates-style,” says a gadfly screenwriter who always hears stuff and has been following the project through postings on writersactionbss.com — a private writers’ website that Elliott has posted on.

“It was never going to be a semi-traditional western…it was never going to be Zorro,” he says.

“It was going to be a Tonto show mainly. Tonto as the top dog and more dominant than the Lone Ranger. Tonto and the Indian spirits like Obi Wan Kenobi and the force. The driving engine was going to be Native American occult aspects worked in with werewolves and special effects. But flavored with doses of Native American spirituality in a serious way.

“But then Cowboys & Aliens came along and tanked and Disney got cold tenderfeet, spooked by the idea of a pricey mashup. If Cowboys & Aliens had made $200 million, this wouldn’t be happening. A Bruckheimer-style western in the wake of Cowboys & Aliens is nothing anyone is feeling secure about at this stage. Trust me, the writers of tentpole garbage are all scared now.”

The success of Rise of the Planets of the Apes with its relatively low cost (at least compared to The Lone Ranger) and no big stars has also colored the mentality out there, I’m hearing. Who needs big payday players? Studios do, obviously, but they’d love to get rid of them. Because they want bigger profit margins. Simple.

The most interesting angle for me is the story about Depp taking the Native American spiritual stuff seriously, and how he didn’t want to camp it up like Captain Jack. He wants his role to honor Native American culture and its spiritual foundations.

“Depp’s interest in playing Tonto is about fulfilling his Marlon Brando legacy,” the director-writer believes. “Deep is partly Native American himself and he was partly mentored by Brando, who was a big Indians’ rights advocate. So he didn’t want to do any kind of jaunty performance that plays it light and spoofy with the Native American thing. No Captain Jack crap this time around.”

Justin Haythe was the latest Lone Ranger screenwriter. His Revolutonary Road work suggests be was brought in to class things up a bit and perhaps raise the solemnity levels.

But the film was always going to have a theme that could be summed up as “Tonto knows best.”

Almost three years ago on writeractionbbs.com, Ted Elliott was asked who will be playing the Lone Ranger, and without posting his exact quote he said that while the Lone Ranger character is the lead, any actor might be concerned about Tonto’s character overshadowing the Ranger’s, given the casting.

Which is why the up-and-coming but new-to-the-game Armie Hammer was a perfect fit as The Lone Ranger.

It wouldn’t be out of character for nervous-nelly Disney executives, prior to the shutdown, to be concerned about Quentin Tarantino‘s forthcoming Django Unchained, a totally flip, revisionist and goofy-ass downmarket western with Kevin Costner as a villain, and on the other hand you have Depp as Tonto playing it more or less straight….how would that shake out as they opened more or less in the same time period?

Two days ago Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney shot himself in the foot and the head with his “corporations are people, my friend” comment. I really think he’s killed his candicacy with that remark. Because one of the key seminal concepts of the aughts, articulated by Joel Bakan‘s “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” (’05) and the 2004 documentary of the same name and recognized by every person on the planet with an IQ over 50, is that corporations are not people — they’re sociopaths.

Bakan’s book (which oddly came out after the doc) is basically about putting corporate behavior under psychological examination. What he found is that corporations behave like your boilerplate clinical psychopath or sociopath.

The sociopathic personality is about antisocial tendencies, “me, me, me and mine,” manipulation, inflated grandiose visions about destiny, “who, me?”, a lack of empathy, a refusal to accept responsibility for antisocial actions, and an inability to feel remorse. This is precisely the attitude and modus operandi of your typical corporation.

Corporations are solely about profit. As one guy said in an Amazon review, “Every action taken [by a corporation], no matter how altruistic it looks, has to ultimately be a search for profits. Otherwise, the corporation is subject to litigation by the shareholders. The corporation is deliberately programmed and legally compelled to externalize (dump) costs (pollution, for example) without regard for the harm it may cause. Every cost it can unload onto the general public is a benefit to stockholders — a direct route to profit.

“Many major corporations habitually engage in criminal behavior with records worse than even the most prolific human criminals. GE collected 42 heavy fines over 11 years, which is akin to a hardened repeat criminal receiving occasional hand slaps while on perpetual parole. Corporations don’t mind chalking these fines up as a cost of doing business, and then delegating a committee to figure out how to cover their tracks better in the future.

“Within the past 20 years corporations have really gotten in bed with government in the United States. Billions in PAC money is spent every year for lobbying and political contributions. Grateful politicians find reasons to vote for causes supported by their benefactors. How can virtually unfunded (by comparison) watchdog groups compete with this machine aimed toward sugar-coating their industries and de-regulation? ”

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported a while ago that Disney has shut down Jerry Buckheimer and Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger, the Johnny Depp-Armie Hammer western that’s currently in pre-production, and which would have begun principal photography in October. The problem, says Fleming, was that Disney wanted the all-in cost to be $200 million and that the production tab was either $232 millon or $250 million or…whatever, too high.

I don’t know anything but cheers (I think) to the Disney execs who approved this. Mainly because The Lone Ranger isn’t, according to the grapevine, about fighting aliens or the Mexican Army or the entire Sioux nation, and it doesn’t involve gargantuan steampunk machines a la Wild Wild West or a cattle drive involving 80,00 steers. Or at least no one’s heard of anything along these lines. So why the hell would a movie about a masked avenger and his loyal Indian friend riding around on horses cost $200 or $232 or $250 million….are the filmmakers insane?

Unless, of course, the film is about the Lone Ranger vs. aliens or Mexican soldiers or steampunk monsters or dinosaurs, etc. In which case the filmmakers have gone off the deep end. Scale and grandiosity in and of themselves are not entertaining.

I obviously need to read a script and call around but isn’t The Lone Ranger supposed to be, like, a “western”? The Legend of the Long Ranger, the crappy 1981 version with Klinton Spillsbury, was more or less “realistic” and cost about $18 million. That translates to about $45 million in 2011 dollars so how the hell could Bruckheimer-Verbinski jack their budget up to four and half times that amount? Or higher?

Update: A friendly reader just sent me a 3.29.09 draft of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio‘s script. $200 million divided by 125 pages = $1,600,000 per page.

I’ve just spoken with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil about the likely award-season strategies for The Help‘s Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, and he’s convinced me that Disney is going to push Davis as Best Actress and Spencer as Best Supporting Actress.

Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis in The Help.

As O’Neil partly says in a recent “Awards Tracker” article, Spencer has the best shot at winning between the two because she’s playing an impudent back-talker and that this is the kind of performance — spunky, spirited — that tends to win in that category.

“They have to split up those two maids,” O’Neil said a few minutes ago. “And Davis is not the sort of actress who at this stage in her career, after winning a Best Actress Tony award for Fences on Broadway…she will not will accept sitting at the back of the bus.

“In Fences she took a role that Mary Alice had won a Best Featured Actress Tony for in 1987…and then the same play comes back in 2010 and her reps pushed for Davis to be nominated as Best Actress…they peititioned the Tony committee to change their minds, and they did change their minds and Davis won. That is why we know she’s not going to accept a Supporting Actress campaign for The Help.

“So she’s not going to go for a Best Supporting run anyway, and this works out because that way the two maids won’t be running against each other and possibly cancelling each other out.”

But Davis’s role in The Help isn’t a lead, I told O’Neil. It’s basically a strong supporting part about a woman who doesn’t drive or instigate the action (i.e., the writing of a book about maids in Jackson, Mississippi circa 1963) but who stands up for herself in a strong, dignified way. So why campaign Davis as Best Actress if (a) she’s not delivering an unmistakably lead performance, (b) if people are thinking, rightly or wrongly, that she’s playing a supporting role, and (c) if the likelihood of Davis winning over Glenn Close or Meryl Streep in their respective lead roles in Albert Nobbs and The Iron Lady, is not that high?

“Because they dont give a fuck,” said O’Neil. “This is about splitting up Davis and Spencer and putting them into different acting categories and about what Davis will and won’t accept. It’s about stature and status and politics…it’s highly unlikely that Davis will accept a Best Supporting campaign, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to have Davis and Spencer run against each other.”

“I know this is what they want to do,” said Deadline columnist Pete Hammond, referring to the split-up scenario, “but the bottom line is that Disney has to see what the actors branch says.

“Obviously they don’t want Davis and Spencer in the same category. This is an ensemble cast in The Help, and running actresses against each other used to be done all the time, like when they ran Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine for Best Actress in Terms of Endearment, but these days the studios feel it ruins their chances to actually have a win, so they’re going to want to split them up.”

A couple of days ago I was told by a friend that a Disney publicist had said following a recent Academy member screening of The Help that they want to run both Davis and Emma Stone as Best Actress…maybe. But then I was told this decision hasn’t yet been firmed.

Hammond offered some historical perspective. “Remember that Susan Sarandon‘s performance in Atlantic City (’78), which even she thought belonged in the Best Supporting category, wound up being nominated for Best Actress,” he said. “And Patricia Neal won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Hud even though it was arguably for a supporting role, playing a maid.”

In a piece based on a chat with J. Edgar director Clint Eastwood, EW’s Anthony Breznican writes that “while the screenwriter…believes it was J. Edgar Hoover’s suppressed sexuality that twisted him into the ultimate control freak with ultimate enforcement power, the screenplay keeps things somewhat ambiguous. After all, the premise is that failing to be able to feel something for another person is what warped Hoover, leading him to see everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Robert F. Kennedy as enemies of the state.”

In other words, J. Edgar is, in a sense, a cautionary tale about what happens when you suppress your feelings and deny who and what you are. Which was more or less what Brokeback Mountain was, right?

“Eastwood says he didn’t want to make a definitive statement about whether Hoover was gay, since that history is far from certain: ‘Some people might interpret it that way. Some people might say [he and Tolson] were just inseparable pals. Or maybe it’s a love story without being gay, I don’t know. But it’s very interesting, the way [Dustin Lance Black] laid out the script. It was nicely written. It didn’t go to the obvious.”

Due respect, but the version of Black’s script that I read last year wasn’t as oblique as Eastwood suggests.

Repeating again my April 2010 impression: “The scenes between Hoover and FBI ally/colleague/friendo Clyde Tolson are fairly pronounced in terms of sexual intrigue and emotional ties between the two. Theirs is absolutely and without any qualification a gay relationship, Tolson being the loyalty-demanding, bullshit-deflating ‘woman’ and Hoover being the gruff, vaguely asexual ‘man’ whose interest in Tolson is obviously there and yet at the same time suppressed.”

Almost every ATM I’ve used in this country, Europe and/or Africa (and we’re talking hundreds) has refused to give me the cash until I withdraw the debit card, which always quickly spits out after you punch in the data. Bank of America ATMS are the only ones in the world that give you the cash first and then, very slowly, spit the card out.

The B of A people know that people who are scatterbrained and in a hurry tend to grab the cash and run and forget the card. They obviously know this, and for years they’ve refused to change the machines so they’ll work like all the others.

As I’m scatterbrained and always in a hurry, I’ve lost ATM cards four or five times with the help of Bank of America technology. This happened three weeks ago and again today, and both times when I tried to retrieve the cards from the B of A staffers in the adjoining bank they’d disappeared. My fault, of course, but it’s really B of A’s.

Pet peeve #2: People who get into their car inside a crowded parking structure, obviously aware that a driver is waiting to take their spot when they leave, and don’t leave. They get into the car and futz around, taking their sweet time before finally (sometimes a full minute or 90 seconds later) starting the car and backing out. And the guy/gal looking to take the spot is still waiting and blocking other cars, and no one thinks to go around him/her and before you know it it’s a total logjam with nothing happening, all because of the guy sitting in in his car and doing nothing. I never do this. When I get into my car in a crowded parking lot I get the hell out of there right away so as not to cause trouble.

But being able to beat L.A. traffic on the scooter is such a joy. I can get around almost twice as quickly as I can in the car.

This Best Buy Exclusive Bluray of Midnight Cowboy came out last May, and I guess with Cannes and everything it slipped between the cracks or something. I happened to spot it on a rack last night at a Best Buy on La Brea. The film looks exactly as it should, like a moderately grainy 1969 film that was deliberately under-exposed by dp Adam Hollender, who wanted a verite, un-prettified, grubby-Manhattan-streets aesthetic. And he got that. And I’m fine with it. The Oscar-winning classic has never looked better.

I tried to write a 30 Minutes or Less review three times over the last five or six days, and it wouldn’t come. Mainly because I just sat in my seat and pretty much waited for it to be over. It’s strenuous but almost entirely unfunny — I know that much. I knew going in that I didn’t want to see a movie about a guy forced to assist in a robbery because a device with plastic explosive is strapped to his chest because it happened for real in ’03 and the guy died. Sue me but I just didn’t want to see it. Not into chest bombs.

As it turned out there was one thing I laughed at. One. I wrote about it seven days ago. Otherwise the film is thin. Strained and thin and kind of drab.

I just sat there feeling a little badly for Jesse Eisenberg. Well, not that badly (he’ll be fine) but what a cliff-drop after The Social Network. I guess it all boils down to my Danny McBride problem. I haven’t much a choice, of course, but I really don’t want to see his morlock/warlock eyes in another comedy again…really. He’s not funny. And director Ruben Fleischer ‘s stock is surely worth a lot less now that it was in the wake of Zombieland. Because the comic inspiration that fed into that Bill Murray zombie sequence is nowhere to be found in 30 Minutes. It’s not a funny idea, not a funny script…I’d just like to forget it if it’s all the same. Just let it go.