Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett will be in Toronto to flog the TIFF showings of Alejando Gonzalez Innaritu’s Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27), as will Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott for the screenings of A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). And a publicist friend called today about setting up an interview with a client.
But nothing can be scheduled, of course, because the Toronto Film Festival hasn’t made the schedules of press and public screenings available.
Remember that exchange from Beat the Devil when the ship’s captain announces that an engine part has cracked and the ship can’t leave port until a replacement arrives. “Now see here,” says an irate English passenger. “This vessel is schedued, most definitely scheduled, to leave port at midnight tonight.” And the captain says, “Scheduled, sir, but not, I fear, destined to do so.” (Dialogue by Truman Capote.)

I was into this for a few seconds based on the headline and the illustration, but the poor spelling and grammar queered it.

It’s my humble opinion that L.A. Times reporters John Horn and Rachel Abramowitz have written more enthralling analysis pieces that this one, a sum-up about the increasingly strained relations between studios, producers and eccentric talent like Tom Cruise, Lindsay Lohan and M. Night Shyamalan, blah, blah. This mp3 of Mark Ebner‘s mouthing off about Cruise’s situation on a Calgary radio station on Wednesday, 8.23, is a livelier absorption. Ebner naturally embraces the Sumner-was-right scenario (Ebner and Andrew Breitbart’s Hollywood Interrupted book prophesized the Age of Celebrity Meltdowns) and he’s certainly not as measured or cautious as Horn and Abramowitz, but I prefer his take all the same.

Hatfields vs. McCoys

I spoke last night with someone we’ll call Talent Guy, who just got back to town from a vacation and who spent most of yesterday soaking up the whole brouhaha about the way Viacom chief Sumner Redstone cut Paramount’s ties with Tom Cruise. And he had some pretty bold things to say.
I’m not saying his thoughts are the sum total of mystical godly wisdom out there, but I know his views reflect what a lot of big-time talent types are saying amongst themselves.

Before I get into Talent Guy’s words, bear with me for the last next six graphs. For others who are only just now getting up to speed, the 82 year-old Redstone blew a lot of minds Tuesday by telling the Wall Street Journal that Paramount was ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s C/W Prods. because of the actor’s “off-screen behavior”, which “was unacceptable to the company.”
As I wrote that day, it’s astonishing that Redstone would say this because it wasn’t really necessary to spell things out. The usual Hollywood routine in explaining a parting of the ways (creative or otherwise) is to use polite respectful terms, which Redstone obviously decided against.
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In a New York Times story out today, various industry insiders were described as being “flabbergasted” at the manner in which Redstone lowered the boom.
Some have said why axe Cruise and his partner, Paula Wagner, for Cruise’s eccentric behavior now when the really loopy stuff (apart from the ongoing tabloid perception that Cruise is a manic control freak keeping Katie Holmes and daughter Suri under lock and key) happened in the summer of ’05?
Wagner put it to the Times that Redstone’s diss had put Paramount chairman Brad Grey and Viacom CEO Tom Freston in a “lose-lose” situation.

Sumner Redstone

“If you didn’t know anything about this [statement in advance], how effective are you at running a studio?” Wagner said of the two executives. “Would anyone want to work with management that’s ineffectual? And if you’re complicit in it, would anyone work with a studio that devours its own?”
Talent Guy thinks that Redstone is getting old and stepped into this controversy partly because of the malady that 83 year-old guys all over tend to suffer from, which is that they can be blunt and cranky and intemperate. (My father isn’t far from this age, and he’s much snippier and ruder than he used to be.)
And yet, Talent Guys says, that doesn’t mean Redstone isn’t expressing what a lot of suits are thinking these days, which is “let’s make the big-dollar talent guys sweat — they’re still one of the biggest reason movies cost so much, they don’t necessarily justify the investment, they make too much back-end, they’ve overplayed their hand and it’s time for those of a strong corporate disposition to step up and swat ’em down and herd them back into the corral where they can be restrained and made to see reason.”
As one insider “suit” puts it, “Studios are making very little money on the big movies because talent deals are taking up too much of the back end. Gross players have to be trimmed down. Tom Cruise is the only one who made money on M:I:3, Peter Jackson is the only one who made out like a bandit on King Kong and Bryan Singer is the only one who came away rich, clean and cash-flush on Superman Returns. Back-end deals of this sort are fiscally imprudent and stupid in this environment.”

And yet Talent Guy, who knows a lot of others in his realm (A’s, B-plusses, B’s), says that the A-list people in Hollywood feel that “the suits have overplayed their hand, they’ve overbuilt their companies, staffed them with too many executives whose salaries are too high, and they need to be swatted down. They’ve turned this industry into a monopoly. They’re all in collusion and getting together and flattening it all down.
“This is the start of a whole Hatfield vs. McCoy war,” Talent Guys says. “Suits vs. top- and mid-level talent. There’s a lot of whispering and mumbling and grumbling at parties all over town, and I’m telling you it’s about much, much more than ‘is Tom Cruise a nutbag?’ or ‘is Sumner Redstone a nutbag?’ It’s really a fight for the soul and the future of this business.
“First off, let me tell you without a doubt that Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, Cameron Crowe, Robert Zemeckis and a lot of other guys are close, close friends of Tom Cruise’s and they love him… they’ve all seen his baby, they all know he’s really in love, they all know it’s a crock of bullshit…they all know he shouldn’t have laid into Brooke Shields but guess what? So does Tom…he’s apologized for what he said.
“And I’m telling you that these people I’ve just named — the ten or twelve really big talents in this town that the studios need to worry about and keep happy — are not happy about how this went down, and they’re not happy about the Bigger Picture.

“From the talent side of view, we didn’t turn all these studios into these massive corporate conglomerates,” Talent Guy argues. “We didn’t make it a business in which it takes 200 executives to make 20 movies a year…they’re the ones who’ve created a business in which the cost of making movies is so expensive that there’s only a 5 to 7% return during a good time…if there was a purity to this business with the DVD money and foreign sales, this would be a huge cash business.
“The A-level talent guys in this town aren’t interested in playing this war out in the press, but the suits have decided that the way to beat these people down is through the press…but I’m telling you, we feel strongly about this. The suits have fucked this business up, not us. Quit laying the blame on movie stars. Don’t say it like that, don’t sell it like that.
“This Tom Cruise-Sumner Redstone thing is like a 9/11 flashpoint almost…maybe it’s more like the bombing of the Marine barracks but it’s one of those flare-ups that has a lot of people talking and getting mad. And it’s going to kick off a long war that’s going to play out over the next 10 to 15 years. And I promise you that in the end the studios as we know them now are going to crumble.”
Talent Guy and his brethren basically foresee a world in which it’ll eventually cost less to make and market movies, with a lot of the studio deadweight being jettisoned. They see a world with high-speed internet delivery of movies and direct-to-viewer marketing in which movies can be made and sold more efficiently than they are now, and in which they’ll own significant percentages of these films and therefore won’t need to demand huge upfront fees.
A world, in short, with the big machinery of developing and selling movies by studio executives sharply reduced in its size, impact and importance. Because they always push for the wrong kind of movies and they’re deadweight functionaries in many respects. And because studio accountants are liars.

C/W Prods. partner Paula Wagner

“If the studios had been honest about their share of the profits, you never would have talent costing what they cost,” he says. “But they lie so much and apply humungous fees and pay for their massive buildings and parking structures and charge ridiculous sums back to their own budgets for things they already own and are already getting incomes from…it’s ridiculous.
“And the bottom line is that eventually the studios won’t be able to afford their huge infrastructure, and they’ll start downsizing themselves and laying more and more people off, and they’ll become smaller and smaller distribution companies and releasing only their big tentpole movies. We don’t need all these executives…we really don’t.
“But the suits need the big stars and the big writer-directors much more than they think they do. Right now they don’t think they need them….they don’t have any respect for talent because of who they are, because they see movies as more of an animated CG music-video form with stars and directors and writers brought into the mix, at best, as seasoning.
“We didn’t bring on this culture of marketing running everything, and the movies talking down to audiences…of bringing the whole movie culture down to the interest levels of a typical 17 year-old high school boy or girl…or placing so much empha- sis on visual pizazz and special effects in movies and the letting the concept of marketing budgets hitting $40 or $50 or $60 million dollars become the norm…we didn’t do any of this, they did.

“I can see what people are talking about when they say some big movie stars make too much money, but they’re just getting what they feel is a fair and justified cut of a pie that’s been growing by leaps and bounds over the last 10 or 15 years.
“The far more pernicious element to me is the way the synthetic, quarter-of-an- inch-deep hugeness of movies today — their manic, pogo-stick, look-at-our- latest-cheap-trick mentality, the hyper-glossy aspect of everything they put out today — has become a kind of monster…a world in which guys like Peter Jackson and McG and Michael Bay and Brett Ratner are kings.
“Not altogether, thank fortune — not with guys like Chris Nolan and Alexander Payne and Steven Soderbergh and even Sofia Coppola and movies like Little Miss Sunshine…there are heart movies, personal movies out there, but the good things have happened and prospered in this town in spite of what the suits have been doing for years, which is playing it safe and low and shallow and trying to turn the whole magic-of-movies alchemy into something synthetic and shit-level and poisoned with CG.”
As for the problem of Sumner Redstone himself, Talent Guy thinks the only way for Paramount to restore itself in the eyes of the community is to gradually put him out to pasture.
First, put the word out now among agents and producers that, privately, Grey and Freston think Redstone has started to lose his bearings, and that they’re going to start making moves to take him out of the loop. And then wait four to six months and quietly announce that Redstone is going to devote himself to some new charitable foundation while lessening his day-to-day duties as Viacom chief.

“Devil Anse” Hatfield, Randel McCoy

Of course, Talent Guy is leaping aboard the sentiment bandwagon voiced by guys like CAA agent Richard Lovett telling the N.Y. Times that “Paramount has no credibility right now…it is not clear who is running the studio and who is making the decisions.” And Cruise’s lawyer Bert Fields calling Redstone’s comments “disgusting” and suggested that “he’s lost it completely, or he’s been given breathtakingly bad advice.”
For what it’s worth, my insider “suit” feels that Redstone said it plain and straight. He feels that Cruise has melted down and is damaged goods, and that Steven Spielberg, for one, doesn’t see Cruise in warm friendly terms. “He thinks Cruise is eccentric and borderline irrational,” he says. “Spielberg always reacts to the bottom line, to the greed factor…and he thought he was robbed of millions and millions of dollars when War of the Worlds underperformed…he knows Cruise cost him a lot of money going public on Scientology the way he did.”
(Talent Guy says he knows that Spielberg takes money very seriously, but says his years-long friendship with Cruise is alive and well and undiminished.)
This source also says that Wagner has been talking to other studios for a while now about taking C/W Prods. to one of their lots for a housekeeping deal and “nobody bit. If anyone was interested somebody would have stepped up to the plate by now. Everybody knows C/W Prods. is looking and available, and if there had been a clamor, somebody would have stepped up. And in this climate, they haven’t. And that’s the bottom line.”

There’s apparently been some feelings of hesitancy among Lucasfilm staffers about the transfers of the original versions of the Star Wars flicks on those upcoming DVDs (due 9.12). This message recently went out from Fox Home Video: “Due to an internal decision from the [George] Lucas camp, we unfortunately will not be distributing any screeners for these three releases.”

Did they do some kind of half-assed job (I’ve been reading all along that the DVDs would just be taken from the masters of the old Star Wars laser discs) that needed some last-minute tweaks or something? I mean, why not send out screeners? What’s the upside strategy in keeping the DVDs under wraps until 9.12? One assumes/presumes it’s because they’re afraid that the DVD reviewers will say the transfers look like shit. What other reading can I take from this? (Three calls to Fox Home Video this morning went to voicemail and yielded no callbacks.)

“These days [Tom Cruise] is like a charlatan who can’t manage to dupe anybody. He seems desperate to maintain his stature as one of the world’s biggest movie stars, even as he morphs into something no movie star can afford to be: a guy you wouldn’t want to know,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James in today’s edition. “[Viacom chief Sumner] Redstone soon fell into the usual showbiz doublespeak when he said of Mr. Cruise, “As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal.” He got that backward, at least from the moviegoers’ perspective. Tom Cruise’s real problem is: We just don’t like him anymore.”

Stirring praise for Factotum star Matt Dillon from critic Anthony Lane: “The beautiful joke of Factotum” — Bent Hamer‘s adaptation of Charles Bukowski‘s novel — “is that Dillon is nobility itself.
“He may also be savage, swiping Lily Taylor off her barstool with a backhand smack, and he is certainly wounded, rising from his bed to throw up and then swig his first beer of the day, yet there is something graven and classical in the brow and bearded chin which speaks of disappointed hauteur; he is like a leftover Roman, beaten up by the places he once aimed to conquer and falling, inch by inch, on his sword. In the words of one onlooker, ‘You look like you√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve been around. You look like you√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve got class.’
“Of all the pretty boys of the 1980s, Dillon has not just ripened most convincingly; he has discovered that the weatherings of age were exactly what he was waiting for.
“His racist cop was the best thing in Crash, and his rescue of Thandie Newton from an upturned car, with the flames crawling closer, has rightly burned a hole in viewers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ minds. A sloppy actor would have made the scene redemptive; he would have smiled upon the woman as he dragged her free, and his enfolding hug would have told of lessons learned. Instead, Dillon was aghast, stiffened with something unredeemable, and he clutched at Newton as if he, not she, had been trapped inside the fire.”
I first saw Factotum at the May 2005 cannes Film Festival. I wrote last February after speaking to Dillon at Sundance tat his performance “as Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski isn’t just more nuanced and naturalistic than Mickey Rourke’s riff on the boozy writer-poet in Barfly and Ben Gazarra’s in Tales of Ordinary Madness — it exudes an exceptional dignity.”

This London Times Online piece about the most audacious and penetrating envelope-pushers in terms of sex, drugs violence and religion is old and crumpled and covered in dust — it was published last Saturday, 8.19 — but it’s a pretty good rundown.

It doesn’t mention what a ground-breaker Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff was in 1966 for its first-time-ever use of terms like “screw you” and “up yours”. It sounds comically lame in today’s context but no studio- funded film had used coarse street dialogue before.
Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs (’71) is mentioned for the Susan George rape scene, which for years has made compassionate and senstive people feel guilty when they watch it because it delivers a kind of dark twisted turn-on. (Yes, yes…Peckinpah was a sexist dog but the arousal factor is still there.)
And I’ve never even heard of No Orchids for Miss Blandish (’48), a crime drama about a relationship between a gangster and an unsullied woman in her 30s. The film isn’t on DVD or even VHS, but the Times piece says that one British critic called it “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.”

I’ve seen the initial one-sheet poster for Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s close to awful. It’s not Herzog’s doing but the film’s producers, Gibraltar Films (or perhaps its distributor, Conquistador Worldwide Media), and it’s utter mediocrity. The decision to allow the poster be dominated by Christian Bale‘s fleshy, overfed, clean-shaven face sends exactly the wrong message.

Bale’s puss is overbearing and the concept has no soul, no texture, no implication of poetry — nothing that suggests that the movie being sold is a Werner Herzog creation, which is as close of a guarantee of something layered and profound as you can find anywhere.
In fact, the poster says nothing except for the fact that Bale (represented with a photo that has nothing to do with how he looks in the film) is the star. It looks precisely like the kind of Cannes market screening poster/trade ad that a low-life distributor looking to cash in on Bale’s Batman popularity would throw together in a state of huckster desperation. There’s a coarse mentality at work here — you can smell it 100 yards off.
Rescue Dawn is an “action drama” (i.e., the producers wish it would simply be that) costarring Bale and Steve Zahn. Based on Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it’s about German-born Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. military pilot who was shot down over Vietnam/Laos in ’65 and captured and then escaped from a jungle prison camp and eventually made it back to safety.
Here, apparently, is a black-and-white shot of Herzog speaking with Marlton — the hulking sumo wrestler-type gentleman with the black toupee/wig in the black sunglasses standing to the right. It’s a photo taken from the Gibraltar Films website.

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming Mean magazine interview with director Chris Nolan, Better than Fudge columnist Josh Horowitz gets Nolan to say two clear-cut things about his second Batman flick, to wit:

The green-haired, jut-jawed Joker, as he appears in the pages of “The Killing Joke”.

(a) “The title of the film” — The Dark Knight — “has been chosen very specifically… it’s quite important to the film”, and that (b) Heath Ledger‘s Joker will be less Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson than the Joker portrayed in a comic like “The Killing Joke.” Or, as Nolan puts it, “I would certainly point to ‘The Killing Joke’ but I also would point very much to the first two appearances of the Joker in the comic. If you look at where the Joker comes from there’s a very clear direction that fits what we’re doing very well.”

Roger Friedman‘s analysis of the Cruise-vs.-Paramount fallout covers a lot of ground, but a lot of it sounds like follow-the-bouncing-ball speculation.
Did Paramount allegedly being in some kind of temporary cash-poor position have anything to do with Sumner Redstone’s announcement that the studio wasn’t renewing its deal with Cruise/Wagner Prods.? (This sound especially questionable.)
Doesn’t Redstone’s stated reason for Paramount severing ties with Cruise — “unacceptable” off-screen behavior — smack of hypcocrisy considering the various bad behaviors (including studio chief Brad Grey‘s past dealings with Anthony Pellicano) that have been tolerated at Paramount? (Deadline Hollywood‘s Nikki Finke raised this point also in her column about the mess.)
What impact, if any, did the alleged rift between Cruise and Paramount/ DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg (which stems from Spielberg’s alleged concern that Cruise’s summer of ’05 Scientology antics hurt the War of the Worlds box-office) have on Paramount’s attitude about maintaining its ties with C/W Prods.?
Is Warner Bros. the studio most likely to extend a new housekeeping deal to Cruise/Wagner?

You’re Fired, Tom!

Paramount Pictures has shown Tom Cruise the door, and it’s top executive has explained why in a blunt and unflattering way. “Lo, how the mighty have fallen” is one way of reacting to this, but the real question is why has Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone spoken so curtly and dismissively of a once all-powerful superstar?

The Wall Street Journal has a story up about Paramount severing ties with Cruise/Wagner Prods., and it’s a whopper. The money quote is Redstone explanation for why Paramount is ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise’s film production company, to wit: because the actor’s “offscreen behavior” which “was unacceptable to the company.”
It’s astonishing that Redstone would say this because it wasn’t really necessary to spell things out. The usual Hollywood routine in explaining a parting of the ways (creative or otherwise) is to use polite respectful terms, which Redstone obviously decided against. He’s clearly disdainful of Cruise’s eccentric Scientology-driven antics and has made a very public show of flipping him the bird.
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Why didn’t Redstone just say “we wish Cruise and Paula Wagner well” and let it go at that?” What could have brought this on? “It seems as if Redstone is acting on a belief that Cruise has become box-office poison, or is starting to become that,” an insider with ties to Paramount said this afternoon.
Cruise’s partner Paula Wagner told Variety earlier today that Redstone’s comments about Cruise were “outrageous and disrespectful.” Wagner also asserted that CAA, which reps Cruise, terminated discussions with Paramount earlier in the week. The studio had had been offering a sharply reduced annual funding commitment for C/W Prods., down from $10 million to something like 20% of that, according to an earlier report.
It was also annouced that Cruise and Wagner have raised $100 million from two hedge funds and are striking out as indies while looking for a housekeeping deal at another studio. “‘This is a dream of Tom and mine,’ Wagner told the Wall Street Journal.
Still, could anyone have imagined even two or three years ago that Cruise would be in effect be pushed off the Paramount lot? It’s one thing for Paramount to cut C/W’s annual deal down from $10 million to $2 million, but for its chairman to effectively say “you’re fired’ is a mind-blower.
Between Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic wipeout of a few weeks ago and Cruise being booted off a big-studio lot due to “unacceptable behavior”, we’re once again reminded that studio chiefs are being less and less accomodating to big-star salaries.
And also that big-star meltdowns are becoming more and more common these days. The difference this time is that a major corporate figure has given this bizarre syndrome as a reason for ending a deal. This is significant. And it seems fair to re-acknowledge that Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner‘s “Hollywood Interrupted” called this syndrome a long ways back.
Free Katie. Free Suri.