Just when some of us were getting all alarmed about the Golden Globes being a celebrity-free disaster due to NBC’s declared intention to broadcast the 1.13 event without or without a strike agreement (because a lack of one would have guaranteed that most of the talent wouldn’t show up), along comes an announcement, posted on Deadline Hollywood Daily, from Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Jorge Camara, to wit:
“On Saturday morning, December 29, 2007, [HFPA] attorneys began discussions with the Writers Guild of America to enter into an interim agreement similar to that entered into by the WGA and Worldwide Pants, which permits writers guild members to go back to work writing for The Late Show With David Letterman. We feel that the Late Show With David Letterman agreement is very reasonable, and hope and expect the WGA will agree to the same terms and ultimately permit the Golden Globe Awards to be broadcast as scheduled, without picket lines, on Sunday, January 13.”
Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is reporting that “there’s a secret meeting of some top screenwriters — the really, really successful ones known as the A-listers — coming up this weekend and their intention is to band together and make a powerful coalition that will force the WGA leadership to accept whatever deal the DGA makes with the AMPTP. Many of these big movie scribes are hyphenates who carry cards for both the writers guild and the directors guild.”
Given the longish length of Zodiac (the Director’s Cut DVD runs 162 minutes) and the general theme of obsessiveness and meta-detail, it seemed fitting that this morning’s phoner with director David Fincher should run longer than usual and go into a little more technical detail than normal. We talked for 49 minutes and the time just flew.
We began by discussing Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 11.28), which he hasn’t test-screened or even come close to finishing. To go by yesterday’s posting (which came second-hand from a below-the-liner who allegedly worked on it), this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s 1922 short story may be more emotionally affecting than the Fincher usual-usual, which has always been on the dark, visually audacious side.
I told Fincher my only problem thus far is with the name “Benjamin Button,” which sounds like something out of Hans Christian Andersen. Fincher doubts if the title means anything to anyone these days, and doesn’t hold the Fitzgerald association in terribly high regard. “He probably wrote the story for drinking money,” he says.
We moved on to (a) digital photography and the revolutionary qualities that after-dusk images now possess; (b) a reported tendency on his part to ask certain actors (or at least Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal) to perform numerous takes of a given scene until it’s right; (c) the bizarre cuts that were made to Zodiac due to test-screening reactions (like the 45-second black-screen time-passage sequence), (d) the fact that Zodiac is currently listed as the 4th best film of ’07 on the Movie City News critics’ chart (even though this liking hasn’t translated to any Best Picture awards), and so on.
The money quote comes right at the beginning when Fincher asks me, “Where do I send the check?” Again, the interview in all of its raging 49-minute glory.
I tapped out a brief thing yesterday about the ’09 award-level films, one of them possibly being Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling (Universal, 11.08)…except I called it The Changeling, which was and still is incorrect, according to Universal publicity.
Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood during shooting of Changeling.
I used the “The” was because Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley called it The Changeling and because the IMDB is calling it The Changeling, which, I’m sure, is at least partly due to Peter Medak‘s The Changeling, a 1980 film with George C. Scott, using the “The” in its title.
In any case we were all wrong. Eastwood’s film, which costars Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich and Amy Ryan, is called Changeling…one word, not two. Issue settled.
I hate that word, by the way…”changeling.” It means “a child unintentionally or surreptitiously substituted for another” but that’s a fairly bizarre thing to have happen, no? Why is there a word for something like this? Why isn’t there a word for a dog that has had a bucket of red paint spilled over its body? Why isn’t there a term for a man who has had his suit tailored and discovered that the tailor has sewn up rear slit in the jacket? I understand calling a young tree a sapling or a very young horse a yearling or brothers who puts on circuses with rings in the center of the tent being called Ringling. But “changeling” bugs me for some reason.
“I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it. I usually do about five cuts as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.” — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull director Steven Spielberg to profiler Jim Windolf in the just-out Vanity Fair.
“Set in 1957, the new film pits Indy against Russian Cold Warriors, including Cate Blanchett, whose character, Agent Spalko, looks like the toughest Soviet customer since Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb took on Sean Connery in From Russia with Love.”
Spielberg also notes that he screened the first three Indiana Jones films for Indy 4 cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, renowned and dreaded for his repeated use of oppressively milky, white-sunlight-saturated color in film after film.
“I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work [that original Indy dp] Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look” —thank God! — “and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”
Two Obama-favoring assessments of what may/will happen at tomorrow night’s Iowa caucuses — one by Washington Post reporters Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut, another by Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen.
Noteworthy Yepsen passage: “On Monday night at a New Year’s Eve party in Ames, hundreds packed the Great Hall at Iowa State University and waited for more than an hour to hear Barack Obama deliver his well-polished stump speech.
“In that speech he does something interesting. He always asks for a show of hands of those who’ve never been to a caucus. (More than half the hands go up.) He always asks for a show of hands of those who are undecided. (Maybe a third of the hands are in the air.)
“Now, I assume here that someone who would devote their New Year’s Eve to attending a political speech might just be a little predisposed to go out a few nights later to caucus for the candidate who delivered it. Just a guess.”
“Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom?
“She is speaking in a soft, measured voice in these final days, so that, as with Daisy Buchanan, you have to lean in to listen. But is she really different than she was in the years when she was so careless about the people around her getting hurt by the Clinton legal whirlwind that she was dubbed the Daisy Buchanan of the boomer set?
“The underlying rationale for her campaign is that she is owed. Owed for moving to Arkansas and giving up the name Rodham, owed for pretending to care about place settings and menus when she held the unappetizing title of first lady, owed for enduring one humiliation after another at the hands of her husband.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 1.2.08 N.Y. Times column, “Deign or Reign?”
Speaking of David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 11.26.08), a longtime HE reader and sometime correspondent wrote a few days ago about a very early reaction to this adaptation of an F.Scott Fitzgerald story which costars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton with a script by Eric Roth:
“A friend of my wife’s who is a costume designer was back in Pittsburgh visiting family over the holidays. During her visit we were discussing interesting projects she is or will be working on, and she said she’s unequivocally excited about her latest film — The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
“Top to bottom she said the set and production was a dream, that both David FIncher and Brad Pitt were consummate professionals, and that the script was top-notch — the only script she can recall making her cry, she said. She added that the look and scope of design of the film while ambitious is also intricate and exacting
“Furthermore, she mentioned that some of the sequences they saw that had been edited were absolutely stunning. Her desciption of the mood of those who worked on it is that of bated breath — a near universal belief that they have made an outstanding and moving film, one that transcends and one they wish not to jinx by too much loose talk.
“I take this with more than a passing interest as she has worked on Traffic, all of the Ocean’s movies, Solaris and Miami Viceone of the highlights of her career.”
Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley has come up with a list of ten movies that may, he suspects, be the top Best Picture contenders next year. At the top of the list are Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che Guevara films — The Argentine and Guerilla. I’ve read the scripts for both and believe in the potential for these films immensely. (Here are two articles about them — #1 and #2 — I posted in mid ’07.)
The other Tapley contenders are Baz Luhrman‘s Australia, Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies, Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling, David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Edward Zwick‘s Defiance, Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon, Anthony Minghella‘s The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader and Sam Mendes‘ Revolutionary Road.
The only ones I feel any real enthusiasm for are Body of Lies (have the script, too lazy to read it so far but it has a great action-thriller idea), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road…maybe.
Follicular traumatic expression caused by the WGA strike is the subject of Ben McGrath‘s “Strike Beards,” a piece in the 1.7.08 New Yorker. “Beards have always marked transitions in men’s lives,” says Allan Peterkin, author of “One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair.”
And so, McGrath writes, “we get Al Gore after the election (whiskers of grievance and release), and Ted Kaczynski in his cabin (isolation, madness), and Johnny Damon with the Red Sox (superstition) — all iconic beards in their proper context.” And now David Letterman and Conan O’Brien and scores of striking writers, including Saturday Night Live writer Colin Jost. Asked to describe what he’s got growing so far, Jost says, √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúLet√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s see…it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s sort of a Russell Crowe, 3:10 to Yuma beard.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
I can’t even grow a Seth Rogen Knocked Up man-beard. The best I’ve ever managed is a pathetic Bob Dylan-on-the-cover-of-New Morning-beard.
Ellen Page‘s Best Actress Oscar odds have surged, according to The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, because Juno became a huge indie cross-over hit last weekend and…wait, what? I love Page’s sass and spirit, but since when have actors won Oscars because they project good spunk?
Away From Her‘s Julie Christie may be dooming herself with her Roman Polanski-esque non-campaign, agreed, but actresses barely out of their teens can’t win Best Actress Oscars. Nominations, yes, and more power to them — but winning is out. You’re not a winner because your film makes a lot of money. You’re a winner because you strike deep chords , and the only time Page did that in Juno was when her note to Jennifer Garner was revealed: “If you’re in, I’m in.”
The Best Actress Oscar is, I think, still Marion Cotillard‘s to lose. Months have passed, but her Edith Piaf was about so much more than posture and makeup. Am I misreading? Cotillard and Picturehouse need to do something right now, however, to combat the Page surge. I don;t know what exactly, but I suppose the usual round of interviews along with a big party and a new mailer of some sort would help. You don’t want to seem too desperate, but you can’t just sit on the sidelines and cross your fingers either.
Taken during a mid-afternoon stroll on one of the Venice canal paths — Monday, 12.31.07, 4:45 pm; mud; meditation
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