During last night’s Clint Eastwood tribute at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre — a two-hour chat that started about 25 minutes late. 45% of the discussion covered Eastwood’s beginning years in the ’50s and ’60s, 25% to 30% focused on the early ’70s and his beginnings as a director, and 25% was devoted to his output of the ’80s, ’90s and 21st Century.
(l. to r.) In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, L.A. Times/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling at Eastwoood reception at Cafe Luck.
Feinberg, Eastwood height disparity is less than it would have been five or ten years ago. Anyone with an elderly parent knows that inches give way as people they get into their ’70s and beyond.
Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.
I was cupping my ears when Clint Eastwood spoke last night about his Nelson Mandela biopic-slash-sports drama, which will begin filming in March with Morgan Freeman in the title role and Matt Damon as rugby player/coach Francois Pienaar. And I didn’t hear Clint say that the title will be The Human Factor, which is what the IMDB thinks it will be.
Eastwood said it might simply be called Mandela or — this is much better — Playing the Enemy, which is the name of John Carlin‘s book about how then-president Mandela’s wily strategy of using a sporting event — the Sprinkboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup — to try and heal South Africa’s racial divisions.
Eastwood’s pattern of being pretty quick on the turnaround suggests that the Mandela pic will be released sometime at the end of this year for Best Picture contention. Maybe.
Interviewer Leonard Maltin didn’t ask Eastwood about his post-Mandela plan to direct Hereafter, a supernatural thriller in the vein of The Sixth Sense that’s based on a script by Frost-Nixon scribe Peter Morgan.
I was told last night at the Eastwood reception party that Clint may be looking to shoot it sometime next fall, or perhaps in early ’10.
ClintEastwood2 from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.
When are people going to stop saying “two thousand and…”? It all stems from the cultural dictatorship of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey . We’re now in the year twenty-oh-nine and next year should be referred to twenty-ten. I don’t want to hear that it’s two-thousand ten. Enough of that.
The Guardian has posted a diary-like Sundance recollection by In The Loop‘s Armando Iannucci. Excerpt: “Next day, I team up with James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy, two of the U.S. cast. They play a Pentagon general and a US state department politico doing their not-very-best to stop a war happening. Mimi is hilarious and James is always charming and generous, and very patient with the press.
“Which is just as well. The first interviewer is from the L.A. Times. That’s an important newspaper so we all have to be on our best behavior. The reporter places a small mobile phone on a tripod. We look at each other, and get ready for the smart and incisive questioning. We are asked, ‘If you had to lose one body part to frostbite, what part would it be?” Somewhere out in the digital ether, there’s footage of the three of us all looking at each other thinking, ‘What in arse’s name has happened to the L.A. Times?'”
Update: What journalist pitched this question? Falco Ink says it was a woman named Gaynor Flynn “but she doesn’t write for the L.A. Times. She’s an international journalist, based in LA and Australia. In fact, Armando didn’t talk to the L.A. Times at all — not sure where he came up with that. First Sundance and maybe a little overwhelmed?”
“This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters.” — San Francisco Examiner‘s David Cole speaking in a 1981 KRON news report about a then-primitive technology.
Clint Eastwood didn’t arrive at this evening’s tribute event with any pomp or airs. A friend simply drove him up and dropped him off a block south of Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre. Clint walked up the sidewalk and into a cluster of fans waiting behind metal barriers. Realizing he’d boxed himself in, he climbed over the temporary fence (with the help of said fans) to cheers and guffaws. This just happened about 25 minutes ago. I hope someone took a shot.
“As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 1.27.09 N.Y. Times column, titled “Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters.”
Entrance to Santa Barbara’s Bouchon on Victoria, just off State Street.
Great Depression 2.0 hasn’t hit yet — Wednesday, 1.28.09, 7:35 pm
If Milk is in the midst of a come-from-behind, last-race-at-Hollywood Park surge that will overtake Slumdog Millionaire, it’s news to me. And this the first time I’ve heard of any symbolic linkage between a Milk win and the Brokeback Mountain loss that happened three years ago. Nothing can ever erase that injustice, that homophobic gravy stain upon the Academy’s rep.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich “says, ‘walk a mile in his shoes.’ Well, if I were innocent and I were in his shoes, I would have taken that witness stand and I would have testified and I would have told you why I was innocent. The governor didn’t do that.” — comment about today’s action that removed the Illinois governor from office.
A Blu-ray Straw Dogs will be available via Amazon.uk on 3.9.09. The 100% believable way Dustin Hoffman says the above (which could have sounded horrible in the wrong hands) is one reason why he’ll always have my respect. He says it with such amazement in his voice, such immense pride. He’s nothing less than profoundly happy. Elated, almost.
One reason why it would be very difficult for a Straw Dogs remake to be accepted by the critical elite is because the 1971 Sam Peckinpah original contained elements of pig-brute misogyny that simply won’t fly today, much less be financed.
Making a politically correct, woman-respecting Straw Dogs makes as much sense as making an NC-17 version of Toy Story. In other words, one of the reasons the original is still potent and disturbing — as least as far as Susan George‘s Amy character is concerned — is due to the fact that Peckinpah was a bit of a woman-hater. (Actually more than a bit.) And the days of even obliquely venting such feelings in a mass-market entertainment are over. Unless you’re talking Grand Theft Auto. Welcomely, all the air has been sucked out of that attitude over the last 38 years.
Clint Eastwood and his latest film Gran Torino are being honored tonight by the Santa Barbara Film Festival. (It’ll be my last SBFF event as I need to return to L.A. tomorrow morning.) It led me, in any case, to some quick surfing and this S. James Snyder Time piece that ran on 1.26. Three days ago!
“At some point this week, Gran Torino will pass the $100 million mark, easily surpassing the box-office receipts brought in by not only some of the Oscar front-runners (Slumdog Millionaire now totals $56 million, Milk $21 million) but also Eastwood’s last Oscar winner, Million Dollar Baby.
“‘It’s an amazing story that no one’s really talking about,’ says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst with Hollywood.com. ‘For a movie starring a 78-year-old to have a $29 million opening weekend in wide release, and in the process to beat out the likes of Anne Hathaway in Bride Wars, I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. It’s a testament to how people still feel about Clint Eastwood.”
“Originally released Dec. 12 in only six theaters and hyped by Warner Bros. as a major-awards contender, the film won Eastwood early recognition by the National Board of Review as Best Actor, but that’s been the exception to the rule. At the glitzy Golden Globes, Gran Torino was mentioned in just one category: original song. When the Oscar nominees were unveiled last week, Gran Torino was shut out of the competition completely.
“It is certainly one of the least likely blockbusters in some time. Starring Eastwood as a crotchety widower living in Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood — a veteran of the Korean War who eyes his Hmong neighbors suspiciously and launches into racist tirades when provoked — Gran Torino was filmed on location in a mere five weeks on a slim budget of $35 million. The majority of its Hmong characters were played by nonprofessionals. In addressing such tumultuous issues as racial strife, gang warfare and urban blight, it can hardly be categorized as escapist entertainment.
“The film confronts issues that are very timely, from racial violence to economic struggles. It’s a working-class world that we may not see all that often in blockbusters, but it’s something a good many people can relate to,” says Karie Bible, an analyst with Exhibitor Relations.
“Surely Eastwood could not have predicted, when he first set out to make the film, that Detroit’s economic woes would be making national headlines by the time Gran Torino arrived in theaters (his character is a retired Ford assembly-plant worker), nor that the movie would be launching into wide release the same day the U.S. government released the darkest unemployment report in 16 years.
“Audiences, though, have embraced the film’s realism. Bible’s firm projects that the title will soar north of $150 million before it leaves theaters — making Gran Torino the biggest haul ever for an Eastwood film. By then, it may well pass the box-office totals posted last year by such summer tent poles as Mamma Mia!, The Incredible Hulk and Sex and the City.
“‘Slumdog and The Wrestler are these Cinderella stories that have overshadowed Gran Torino, and yet here is another Cinderella story all its own,’ Dergarabedian says. ‘You look at Eastwood, and here he is directing Changeling, which got Angelina Jolie her Oscar nomination, and starring in this blockbuster where he proves again that he’s one of the biggest box-office stars. To become a leading man again at 78, I think it’s a story that’s unparalleled in cinema.’
“Eastwood has been quoted as saying that this could mark his last outing as an actor. If that’s true, he will be going out on top.”
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