I haven’t time to review Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (opening tomorrow), but it’s better than Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review indicated. I was basically pleased, amused and never bored for the first 45 or 50 minutes, and then came the Bill Murray Beverly Hills mansion sequence and I was flat-out blown away. For this sequence alone the movie must be seen, although generally speaking it’s an engaging zombie comedy with dabs of a marginal Wes Anderson attitude-personality. All to the good. I’ll amplify later today.
I heard from Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich at 2:30 am this morning. She was ringing from Zurich, where she’s working on a followup doc about the Polanski brouhaha. She’s actually been working on it since last February, she said. I had urged her in an e-mail yesterday to respond to yesterday’s Marcia Clark-authored Daily Beast piece in which former prosecutor David Wells claimed that he lied to Zenovich on-camera about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal, etc.
Zenovich said she’d send a carefully worded response, but the long and the short is that she’s flabbergasted. Suffice that I’m not alone in detecting certain suspicious currents and motives contained in yesterday’s reaction piece. And we’re both agog, we agreed, at Clark’s new blonde hair.
I’m leaving soon for Newark airport, where I’ll catch a jet to Houston and then a connection to Shreveport, Louisiana. A degree of revelry and exploration this evening followed by a day of Straw Dogs inquiry with director-writer Rod Lurie and the cast — Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. A Shreveport Hilton staffer says their wifi is fast and steady, and if it isn’t they also offer ethernet cable connections in the room plus an in-house Starbucks with wifi of its own. So I can’t lose.
Shreveport, Lousiana — distinguishable, I presume, from Akron, Ohio, or Mobile, Alabama? Other than a few sound stages being there, I mean?
A 9.27 posting by The Atlantic‘s James Fallows presents two specially highlighted U.S. maps that reveal a very precise alignment. The areas with the highest levels of poverty and obesity voted the most heavily for McCain-Palin in last November’s election. “A minor point at such a moment,” as Rhett Butler once said.
Paramount has shifted the opening of Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air back to December — 12.4, to be exact — to avoid any overlap with Overture’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Both films star George Clooney. Air is expected to be a bigger commercial hit, but it can’t hurt to get out of the way of Goats just to be safe.
I should have run the news yesterday that screenwriter-director Roger Avary has been sentenced to a year in jail for causing a car crash on 1.13.08 that resulted in the death of a friend, Andreas Zini. Avary, the director of Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe and co-author of Pulp Fiction and Beowulf, pleaded guilty last August to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and other charges in the collision. He also got five years’ probation.
Avary’s attorney, Mark Werksman, told the L.A. Times that his client is heartbroken over the Zini family’s loss. “Roger Avary is a decent man and a good man who has always strived to do the right thing in his life,” Werksman said. “He never meant any harm to anyone, and this was just a terrible accident.”
I posted the following about Roger and his situation on 8.22.09, to wit: “My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should use this tragedy as material. Sometime down the road he needs to write or create something from this.
“I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, ‘Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.'”
The taste of frozen popsicle wine after thawing is slightly different than before freezing
Former prosecutor David Wells is claiming that he lied to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal.
Why, I’m asking myself, is the 9.30 Daily Beast article in which Wells recants, and which has suspiciously been written by former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, appearing at this moment? It’s obviously a mortar shell intended to make the pro-Polanski (or forgive-Polanski) side look bad. It looks to me as if somebody friendly with the Los Angeles D.A.’s office wanted to compromise the integrity of Zenovich’s doc (which the D.A.’s team has reportedly been irked by) and made some calls and pulled some strings. Well, doesn’t it?
I wrote Zenovich for a comment and she didn’t reply. She really needs to put her notes and recollections on the line and set things straight.
Mel Gibson is only 53, but with that jowly, weathered face and heavily-graying hair and that thinning forward thatch and that burly, beer-gutty, don’t-work-out-much physique, he looks like a guy pushing 60 if not a bit older. I know guys who work in hardware stores or auto-parts stores who look like this. Nice dependable guys and all, but movie stars are supposed to look…I don’t know, a little trimmer and tonier. More of a Pierce Brosnan thing going on…right?
Mel Gibson in Jodie Foster’s currently-shooting The Beaver
There’s no contract that says a guy who nine years ago was regarded as moderately hunky or at least in very presentable shape for someone in his mid 40s (in films like What Women Want and Signs) has to remain that way as he gets older. But there is this admittedly old-fashioned idea that movie actors are supposed to look a little spiffier and more 24 Hour Fitnessy than Average Joes of a similar age. Gibson seems to have said to himself a while ago, “The hell with that…my hunk days are over…time for my Jack Nicholson phase, only grayer.”
This recording of a 1966 Stanley Kubrick interview by Jeremy Bernstein has been around for several years. (It’s on a disc inside Taschen’s Stanley Kubrick Archives book.) But listen to Kubrick’s voice — it could belong to a bright Bronx cab driver or a Bronx-born English teacher in a local high school — and compare it to the voice that Peter Sellers uses in Lolita (’62).
Boiled down, The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman is reporting that Universal Studios President Ron Meyer intends to whack the studio’s two co-chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde and most likely replace them with marketing chief Adam Fogelson and head of production Donna Langley.
(l. to r.) Ron Meyer, Adam Fogelson, Donna Langley, David Linde, Marc Schmuger
It’s a tough game, running a big-studio film division. Hard to survive, much less “win.” I feel sorry for Schmuger-Linde if this is about to happen. And if it’s not, I still feel sorry for them.
Apart from weak or underwhelming performances of such Universal pics as Bruno, Funny People, Public Enemies, Duplicity, Land of the Lost and State of Play, the beef against Schmuger-Linde, Waxman reports, is that certain producers working with the studio — Brian Grazer, Sean Daniel, Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner — have complained about “being unable to get a consistent answer from a single executive to passive-aggressive eye-rolling from Universal colleagues.
“Producers and talent say they are unable to get clarity on their projects in the current climate ,” she writes. “‘If you’re a producer, you’re feeling chaos in ways that you’ve never felt before,” a prominent anonymous exec tells Waxman. ‘It’s completely taken the fun out of the process.'” Fun?
Last night Nikki Finke posted Bill Mechanic’s keynote speech about the future of indies from yesterday’s Independent Film & Television Production Conference. Mechanic ran Fox from ’94 to ’00, is now an indie producer (Coraline) and owner of Pandemonium LLC. Here’s my favorite portion of the speech:
“It’s disrespectful if not downright dumb to think audiences can’t tell the difference between the original, which occasionally might even have some fresh faces, and the copy, which almost always is populated with retreads. It’s like thinking you can sell yesterday’s news under a different banner.
“The exception to the rule is District 9, which didn’t try to compete with the majors with special effects or stars or plot. Instead of feeling recycled, it was fresh and is now one of the year’s best and most successful pictures. But lot of credit has to go to Peter Jackson since it was undoubtedly his clout that got the film made.
“[Indies] following the lead of the majors presumes that the majors know what they want. It presumes they have a fix on their audiences. I would say that’s anything but true.
“Admissions are down over the past few years and, perhaps most troubling, the audience that Hollywood spends the majority of time focusing on, the under 25’s, are the ones finding other things to do.
“Take a look at this shift over the past decade. While use of the internet and video games have dominated leisure time activities, movie consumption is down or flat over the same period. And, more to the point, you can see that there is a 21% drop in film-going amongst the core target audience and a 24% drop in the next key category, 25-39 year olds.
“And yes, these charts beg another question: if the audiences are shifting, why isn’t the product shifting as well? Name five mainstream films this year that successfully targeted an over-30 year audience.
“In that way, Hollywood in the broadest sense of the word is much like Detroit. It’s a manufacturer’s mentality that reigns, seemingly indifferent to the consumers it serves. Ignore whether the consumer likes our product as long as they buy it. Market it and they will come.
“And don’t worry if they don’t come back. Accept 60% drop-off rates as the norm, saying it’s all about wide openings.
“When was the last time you heard anyone either from a studio or an independent talking about improving their product, of creating positive buzz and expanding the audience?
“Here’s one basic question to ask yourself: If the most popular film in history was Titanic and it did so by weaving together interest in all demographic pockets as well as pulling in non-filmgoers, why in the last 12 years has no one attempted to do the same?
An independent couldn’t and shouldn’t make movies of Titanic’s scale but it should make movies as individualistic and compelling. Certainly there are good examples among some of the smaller independent films — Slumdog Millionaire being an easy choice — that actually do stand out and succeed because of their quality and their uniqueness.
But the independent world [has been] no more concerned with the consumer than the studios. With the influx of hedge fund money, the past decade saw a glutting of product, again most of it with no idea of who it was for or how it could be sold. Whether some of these movies had artistic integrity or not, there is no question there was no audience appeal.
“From the low-water mark of 1990, there has been a 50% increase in the number of pictures and even since 2000, nearly a 25% increase. And most of the influx came from non-majors, rising from 150 in 1990 to 450 in 2008. That, my friends, is insanity.
“Remember that through this entire period, the only growth at the box office has been inflationary, which means more films were fighting for a share of a flat box office. Over approximately this same period, the biggest hits took even a greater share of the box office pie” — i.e., because of an increase in Eloi movie-watching patterns — “meaning the independents, even with a vastly greater number of releases, are taking a dramatically smaller percentage of the available money.”
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