“Buyers [coming to Sundance ’08] say they are looking carefully at three star-packed films aimed at young audiences: Hamlet 2 (with Steve Coogan and Elisabeth Shue), about a high-school drama course that puts on a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play; The Wackness (with Mary-Kate Olsen), about a high-school kid growing up in New York who pays his therapist with marijuana; and Assassination of a High School President (with Mischa Barton), about a newspaper nerd and popular girl at a Catholic high school who investigate stolen SAT exams.” — from a 1.12.08 Wall Street Journal piece by Lauren A.E. Schuker.

A publicist friend just said to me, “I don’t know if Barack Obama is prepared to be president.” And I said, “And Bush 43 was? An intellectually challenged frontman for vested oil and other military- industrial interests, and a putty-like pawn of his father’s right-wing friends? Abraham Lincoln, a jack-legged legislator from Illinois with a knack for plain talk and “reading” people and political accommodation, was prepared? JFK had gone to U.S. Presidents School and was fully prepared? Bill Clinton hit the ground running? Jimmy Carter‘s training as Georgia’s governor was adequate preparation, and he used that background to form a brilliant political consensus and provide masterful leadership for the U.S.?
Leadership is about judgment, brains, vision, alliances, consensus-building. It’s time to turn the page, start the 21st Century engine and roll the dice.
Then my publicist pal wondered if America is ready for a black president, and I said there are at least 43 or 44 shades of non-Anglo Saxon pigmentation, and 43 or 44 different types of personalities and value systems to go with each. By any cultural standard I’ve ever known or gone by, I said to her, Barack Obama isn’t black — he’s latte. Which feeds into the term “Starbucks liberals,” who (apparently) compose the base of his support. Or at least the emotional base.
We need to prove to the world and ourselves that our multicultural society means something more than just statistics and percentages and charts, and we need to show to the pan-Arabic world that the term “American leadership” is not just about oil and imperialism and belligerence, and is not synonymous with right-wing ogres like Dick Cheney.
And I don’t know about that Bobby Kennedy guy either, I said. I don’t know if I can trust him. He’s only 42 years old. He’s the son of a corrupt multi-millionaire, the brother of a flagrant womanizer, and he worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and has a long reputation for hard, ruthless behavior. And who says he’s been such a great U.S. Senator? Has he ever heard of birth control? And he didn’t have the courage to stand up to Lyndon Johnson‘s Vietnam War policy on his own — he let Eugene McCarthy do it first, and then he jumped in after the waters had been tested.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. Hubert Humphrey has a lot more experience, and so does Richard Nixon, for that matter. I think people should vote for one of these two and let Kennedy wait his turn, maybe try again in ’76.

“There are signs of resistance to another Clinton administration,” according to a N.Y. Times story by Robin Toner and Marjorie Connelly about a recent N.Y. Times/CBS News poll. “Thirty-eight percent said they thought it was bad for two families — the Bushes and the Clintons — to hold the presidency for so long.” Really? People don’t think it’ll be kinda cool for the same two families to be running things for (if Hillary Clinton wins and gets two terms) a total of 28 years?

If I was inhabiting the mind and body of Warner Bros. honcho Jeff Robinov, I’d say “of course!” to those urging that the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows be made into two films. That way I’d double the grosses and include the dozens of plot details in the 776-page book that would otherwise have to be sacrificed. And I’d get Guillermo del Toro to direct them both.
Now…that doesn’t mean I would necessarily sit through these films. (This is Hollywood Elsewhere inside the body of Robinov, remember.) Naturally, the prospect of having to endure yet another Harry Potter film fills me with dread. The idea that intelligent people might actually find these films haunting or absorbing is ludicrous. The Potter films are about the corporates and the creatives making money and poor sods like me suffering, suffering…sitting in the dark and trudging through…slosh, slosh. I have been there, I have been there…and I would rather go to the dentist.

After seeing There Will be Blood and relishing the now-legendary “I drink your milkshake!” scene, it occured to the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell (and perhaps a few hundred others) that the “milkshake” line might be an anachronism, since the scene in which it’s spoken is set in 1927 or ’29 or somewhere in there. Howell was under the impression that milkshakes had been invented sometime in the early to mid 1930s.
But he checked Wikipedia’s milkshake page and “lo and behold, not only were they invented but they were a fast-growing fad. On top of which it’s quite plausible that Daniel Plainview was not only drinking other people’s milkshakes, but ones made with newfangled electric blenders. All indicating that Paul Thomas Anderson really did his homework. Impressive.”

Atonement is dead again. The nominations for the Producers Guild of America feature film award are The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. The winner will be announced during a ceremony that will be somewhat ignored when it happens on February 2nd at the Beverly Hilton. Nobody wants to get too excited about anything to do with producers, i.e., the bad guys who won’t give even a little bit in strike negotiations with the WGA.

L.A. Times-er Monica Corcoran has written one of the dozens of pre-Sundance, gearing-up-for-Park-City articles that are flooding the web right now, although hers has an unusual focus — the necessity of sharing accommodations.

Carol Rixey’s Star Hotel

“Come Thursday, about 45,000 parka-wearing people will flock to this tiny, former mining town nestled in the Wasatch mountains. But according to the visitors bureau, there are only 23,000 pillows for all those well-coiffed heads. And these lopsided lodging logistics cause more confusion and headaches than the altitude sickness.”
For journalists, Sundance is pretty much synonymous with tight accomodations and shared bathrooms. O give me a bunk and a shower and a table and a chair and some good wifi, and it’s all cool. Not only do serious festivalgoers make do without outdoor hot tubs or crackling fireplaces or nouveau riche Deer Valley chateaus with 22-foot-high ceilings or those bullshit Utah buckaroo king-size bed frames. It’s kind of against the mindset (the religion, if you will) to stay in a lavish place. Pricey McMansion digs are for the dilletantes and lookie-lous and — the absolute dregs of Sundance Film Festival visitors — skiiers.
I’m a loyal fan of Carol Rixey‘s Star Hotel, easily the warmest and homiest place in town. And it has great wifi, and an excellent living room with soft easy chairs and fat sofas, and a dining room with nice long table to have a nice warm breakfast in. (Comes with the room.)

Star Hotel dining room

“Usually, the first co-workers to arrive hit the local Albertsons supermarket to stock up the fridge and pantry in the company condo,” Corcoran writes.
“Last year, we found Warner Independent’s grocery list in the produce section when we were doing our shopping,” says Michael Lawson, senior vice president of independent film publicity firm, mPRm. “It was so Sundance to read ‘get health bars for me’ and ‘I want root beer.’ ”
“Lawson says his team of seven has a general rule to ‘be respectful’ in the three-bedroom mountain house with the ‘stereo from 1972’ that they rent out every year. There’s also a sleeping annex upstairs that he likens to ‘the orphanage in Cider House Rules with a row of beds along the wall.”
I can tell you something — it’s the volunteers and the assistants sleeping in those Cider House beds who get all the nookie. In the mid ’90s I asked an assortment of festival veterans if they’d ever gotten lucky during Sundance, and all but one said “nope.” The exception was Usual Suspects and Valkyrie screenwriter Chris McQuarrie, who said yes, good things have personally happened to him in Park City but “only with an import.”

I agree with The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil that Golden Globe award winners tend to get a bump, yes, but mainly — at least in the acting categories — by delivering a great acceptance speech. Or they can hurt themselves by delivering a bad or uncharming one.
(I seem to recall that Eddie Murphy‘s remarks after winning the Best Supporting Actor GG award for his Dreamgirls performance included mispronouncing a producer’s name, or something along those lines. I definitely remember thinking after hearing his acceptance speech, “Uh-oh…that’s not going to help.”)
So without any kind of presence at all last night the ’08 Golden Globes bump factor is probably nil as far as the Oscars are concerned.
O’Neil reports that “most Oscarologists are poohing-poohing” the wins by Atonement and Sweeney Todd. Maybe, but I don’t know. I hope and pray that No Country for Old Men sails to a Best Picture Oscar victory next April (i.e., isn’t that what the rumor is? To give the strike negotiators more time?), but I wonder if Atonement‘s win last night was more of an anti-No Country thing than a full-out “we love Atonement” consensus.
My suspicion is that Atonement, the Hillary Clinton of the Best Picture contenders, may be the default favorite of older, more conservative-minded viewers. Which isn’t to say it’s not a strong and worthy film. It is that, but it’s also a place to go to if you don’t like the dark and arty contenders — No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood and Sweeney Todd.
If, God forbid, Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee for President (a calamitous act that will plunge this country into a replay of ’90s animosities and poisons that will be truly ugly to behold — the beginning of an entirely new National Depression), it will be said that sufficient numbers voted against the hope and rightness and once-in-a-generation connectivity that Barack Obama embodied.
By this same token, an Atonement win, which I think is highly unlikely, will be seen more as a rejection of the art-film intrigues and thematic lamentings contained in No Country for Old Men — a concoction that for some people was obviously well made but didn’t quite amount to a strike across the plate.
These people are wrong, of course. No Country is a solid strike, all right, but it’s not a fastball. It’s a slider or a knuckleball…no, it’s a change-up. Thrown by Hoyt Wilhelm.

The surreal nothingness of last night’s Golden Globes announcements stirred “a philosophical question,” writes L.A. Times Mary McNamara. “If a winner is announced to the absence of applause, does anyone hear it?

Somewhat less concisely, Variety‘s Timothy Gray wrote that “it raises a philosophical question. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? Similarly, if you win an award in Hollywood, but there is no red carpet, no kiss from the presenter, no acceptance speech and no interviews backstage, did you really win?”
Gray’s piece, augmented by reporting from Cynthia Littleton, Bill Higgins and Steven Gaydos, had more meat on its bones, but McNamara’s rant seemed to catch the enervated, Samuel Beckett-like spirit a little better.
“For those of you who wisely spent the evening rearranging your sock drawers or watching your TiVo queues of reruns, [the Golden Globes awards press conference] was a less than magical night,” she wrote. “Um, evening. OK, hour or actually 35 minutes depending on which network you chose to watch the awards…announcement.
“KCBS, E!, CNN and TV Guide went bare-bones, airing the HFPA news conference, which clocked in at a nominee name-rattling 35 minutes, while NBC got a little fancier, enlisting the talents of Billy Bush and Nancy O’Dell and a lot of film clips to create what played like an award-show farce on YouTube. Wayne’s World, meet the Globes.
“I cannot stress this strongly enough: We must never let this happen again.
“Gil Cates, producer of this year’s Academy Awards, if you are reading this, I don’t care if you have to kidnap every member of the studio alliance and lock them in with the WGA until the two sides reach a deal, but you cannot let anything remotely like this happen to the Oscars. Cancel them if you must, or inform the winners by mail, because the only thing worse than all the over-hyped, over-covered awards shows the media loves to hate is the stripping bare of the process.
“You know something has gone seriously wrong when even wins by Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie seem somehow diminished, their names just, well, names on a meaningless list. Daniel Day-Lewis! Julie Christie! We need the exclamation points!
Especially, she said, “when that silence is filled by the bloviations of Billy Bush. ‘You know, I thought it would be Amy Ryan,’ he said one beat after Cate Blanchett was announced as the winner of best supporting actress while calling Javier Bardem‘s win ‘a no-brainer. He’s one of the best villains ever, right up there with Darth Vader.’ Javier, try to contain your gratitude.”

Terrible news concerning Beowulf producer-cowriter Roger Avary, with whom I just spoke a couple of days ago. I’d let it alone but it’s all over the news services and it may as well be acknowledged. Strength, faith, prayers. I’m so sorry.

Okay, I made the mistake of watching NBC’s “fake” time-delayed, Stepford Showbiz News presentation of the Golden Globe Award winners. If I had watched CNN or whomever else, the announcements would have been revealed to me earlier. I should have known that NBC would drag things out to make a full-hour show out of it. It was my mistake, but HE is hereby delivering a resounding thumbs-down to NBC’s decision to play games.