I was told this morning that Dimension’s senior production vp Steve Barnett and director of development and production Alex Franklin are thinking about following production president Richard Saperstein out the door.
If the Barnett-Franklin story is true, this would leave Dimension honcho Bob Weinstein with no L.A. production execs, no creative presence…headless for the time being. No comment so far from Weinstein/ Dimension publicity staffers in Manhattan, so I called Franklin’s L.A. office. Franklin picked up and said that (a) he and Barnett are involved “in an ongoing situation that we’re all trying to resolve,” (b) that things are “up in the air” and (c) that he hopes to have his situation “resolved later this week.”
A non-Dimension production exec said this morning that Franklin is “walking for sure. They have an option on him but he told them in no uncertain terms he isn’t interested in staying. All I keep hearing are rumors that they [i.e., the Weinstein brothers] are running severely low on money.”
Saperstein’s departure was heatedly denied last week by Weinstein Co. spokes- persons, but “rumors continued to race around the industry that Saperstein had indeed been fired but that TWC was trying to figure out a way to avoid paying out a lengthy contract,” according to Variety columnist Michael Fleming.)
A Weinstein Co. spokesperson would only say that Barnett and Franklin “are employees at The Weinstein Company.”
I don’t have a comprehensive tally of all the Welcome Back, Potter spoofs have appeared over the years. I know there was one that ran on SNL in ’02. This one is British-produced (Dawn Patrol Prods., apparently) and droll and, for me, freshly funny.
Today’s press conference by Republican Sen. David Vitter and his wife Wendy, which I watched on MSNBC, was an attempt by the Louisiana-based legislator to put the D.C. Madam hooker scandal behind him. The press should probably stop camping out on his front lawn, but any guy who allies himself with Bush administration attempts to push “family values” by voting against stem-cell research and making things tough for gays, and is then caught in a moral issue of his own deserves every last thing he gets.
Sen David Vitter and wife Wendy
I love it when righties suffer in this manner, but I felt sympathy for Vitter when I realized why he’s prone to playing around. His wife is physically bigger than he is, especially in terms of head sizes, and she’s got a very fearsome stare.
According to Politico, “Vitter was included in a Newhouse News Service story [in 2000] about the strain of congressional careers on families. His wife Wendy was asked by the Newhouse reporter: If her husband were as unfaithful as Livingston or former President Bill Clinton, would she be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton?
“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy answered. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.” She added,”I think fear is a very good motivating factor in a marriage. Don’t put fear down.”
So that explains it. Wendy’s got anger and violence in her, she’s tough, she’s physically threatening, her head is bigger than David’s and she could probably whup his ass. Obviously he cats around so he can feel like more of a man-with- the-power, so he can hang with eyelash-batting women who are less challenging.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) was shown last week to a group of elite Fifth Estate cool cats. Digitally projected, sans credits…despite the 9.21 release date only two months away. We all know by now that poor, embattled, unloved Jesse James needs all the help it can get from sympathetic journos — i.e., those with a vulnerable soft spot for a long, painterly, Terry Malick-styled western shot by Roger Deakins, no matter how it plays otherwise.
Lord knows there’s very little sense that WB distribution execs have been burning the midnight oil to promote the film. They can’t even be bothered to send out any new photos (i.e., the same four or five shots have been kicking around since last fall). The Jesse James website hasn’t changed either.
It’s funny, but I’ve heard so much about Andrew Dominik‘s much-delayed, kicked- around film that I almost feel I’ve seen the darn thing. Lots of dialogue, beautiful- ass photography, “not really a western,” much more Casey’s movie than Brad’s, etc. The version shown last week ran about two hours and 40 minutes, I’m told. In one conversation the word “attenuated” was used. The same guy said “it could be tightened” by “15 minutes,” and that the story “tends to play out without things that really add to it.”
Brad Pitt‘s performance as Jesse James is one of his better turns, a viewer feels. Unlike the various James portrayals of yore, Pitt’s version is “sort of a psycho.” Sam Shepard plays Frank James, and the viewer I spoke said there’s no problem believing that Shepard could be Pitt’s brother despite the former being 20 years older than the latter. The film belongs more to Casey Affleck‘s Robert Ford, “a bumpkin who wants to be part of the gang.”
The film doesn’t end with James’ shooting, but deals interestingly with the aftermath. “It’s sort of about celebrity,” the viewer says. “By killing Jesse Ford figured he’d become a celebrity. [To this end] he reenacts the murder in a show around the country, but he becomes a pariah.”
HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me, which isn’t featured at all on the HBO website but is scheduled to air on September 9th, is about the emotional but mostly sexual lives of three middle-class couples. I haven’t received any HBO screeners yet, but it’s being described here and there as a precedent-setter in its depictions of graphic, no-holds-barred sexuality.
Tell Me You Love Me costar Michelle Borth
“No previous series, on pay cable or anywhere else, has dared show anything even close to this much skin,” writes L.A. Times guy Scott Collins. “The climax, if you will, of the first episode finds a woman (Sonya Walger) in her 30s masturbating her husband (Adam Scott) to orgasm, with the entire act and all relevant body parts plainly visible. Even Jane Alexander — yes, that Jane Alexander, the snow-domed, regally poised 67-year-old former chief of the National Endowment for the Arts — drops trousers for some frisky senior sex.”
The Kansas City Star‘s Aaron Barnhart conducted an informal poll of TV junket journalists who’ve seen an advance episode or two, and found “that while eyebrows were raised by the sex scenes involving the younger couples, jaws positively fell open when Alexander got it on with her husband. No ageism on this show!”
Barnhart also reports that “perhaps the actress who will get more attention than any other on this show is Michelle Borth, who plays Jamie, a 20-something whose frequent romps with her fiance, Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby), are, to borrow the phrase of another HBO program, real sex.”
As I wrote before, the notoriety of “Obama Girl” Amber Lee Ettinger is mildly troubling because of what that website video she performs in (www.barelypolitical.com) says about the intellectual and spiritual vistas of average 20-something women, which is that they can only get excited about a Presidential candidate (Rudy Giuliani has a few “girls” also) based on their perceptions of sexual power and/or charisma — i.e., the “Daddy factor.”
Imagine if Hilary Clinton looked like Valerie Plame. Can anyone imagine a guy (or guys) performing in a music video that expresses how aroused they are with her, and how much they’d like to do her? C’mon…
It’s a safe assumption that Ettinger isn’t very knowledgable about Sen. Barack Obama‘s political positions or personal philosophies, and that she hasn’t read his book. Barely Political is ultimately about Ettinger trying to hook herself up with everybody and everything and wind up with a divorce, a Porsche SUV and a McMansion. And yet something tells me she’s probably helping the Obama campaign.
