“At the end of the day I can only do what I can do,” Clerks 2 director-writer Kevin Smith says to L.A. Times writer Mark Olsen in a 7.16 piece. “You read a lot of reviews where people say, ‘You should stretch. He should learn to stretch as a filmmaker.’ After a dozen years now, don’t they get it? This is what I do, this is the storyteller I am.
“Do I let myself off the hook by saying, ‘I’m just not that talented?’ Probably. But also I think it’s important to know your limitations. I’ve kind of embraced mine. And I’ve had seven films’ worth of practice to figure that out.”
I don’t entirely believe this. The reason Smith is great on the college-lecture cricuit is that he’s excellent at au contraire-ing — arguing, debating, puncturing balloons. And to me that means he could write a really superb play about a GenX marriage gone bad — a latter-day “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with a little 2006 “My Dinner with Andre” thrown in. Smith is married and has gone through some trying married-couple stuff…this has to have happened. All he has to do is put it into shape. A play first, and then a low-budget film.
Smith has said he’s too content with his life and too mild-mannered go to in this direction, but as Montgomery Clift’s Pvt. Prewittt says to Burt Lancaster’s Sgt. Warden in From Here to Eternity, “A man should be what he can do.”
“We’ve had Life is Beautiful and Jakob the Liar,” a 7.12 Guardian item reads, “and now the list of movies mixing clowning with the Holocaust is to grow with Adam Resurrected, a Paul Schrader film that will adapt a book by Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk.” The item says “the story [is about] on a Jewish circus clown” — to be played by Jeff Goldblum — “who is kept alive by the Nazis to entertain his fellow Jews as they march to the gas chambers.”
Jerry Lewis (l.) in a faked photo (I think) suggesting it was taken on the set of the unreleased The Day The Clown Cried (1972); (r.) Paul Schrader, who is reportedly looking to direct Adam Resurrected, which sounds very similar to Lewis’ film.
“Obviously-no-shit-Sherlock, this calls to mind that early ’70s Jerry Lewis fiasco called The Day the Clown Cried, an unseen, never-distributed film that Lewis starred in and directed. The dark drama is described by a Jerry Lewis website as being “about a German clown who was arrested by the Gestapo, interred in a concentration camp, and used to march Jewish children into the ovens.”
But maybe they’re not quite so similar. An Amazon.com description of the Kaniuk book says it’s about “a former circus clown named Adam Stein who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths,” but it takes place after World War II and is about how Stein “is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors…alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Stein struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been irreversibly blurred.”
Lewis’s Clown flick has long been regarded as on the worst all-time debacles and pratfalls ever suffered by a major “name” director, which Lewis definitely was in the late ’50s and ’60s.
“In 1971, producer Nate Waschberger asked Lewis to direct and star in The Day the Clown Cried, based on Joan O’Brien’s book by the same name, about a German clown who was arrested by the Gestapo, interred in a concentration camp, and used to march Jewish children into the ovens,” tjhe site’s description reads.
“Jerry lost close to 40 pounds to play the role. The shooting began in Stockholm, but Wachsberger not only ran out of money to complete the film, but he failed to pay Joan O’Brien the money she was owed for the rights to the story. Jerry was forced to finish the picture with his own money.
“The film has been tied up in litigation ever since, and all of the parties involved have never been able to reach an agreeable settlement. Jerry hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation.”
According to Film Buff Online, Harry Shearer, one of the very small handful of people who has actually seen Clown in rough-cut form, described it thusly in an interview on “The Howard Stern Show”: “If you say `Jerry Lewis is a clown in a concentration camp’ and you make that movie up in your head, it’s so much better than that. And by better I mean worse. You’re stunned.”
The 2006 Toronto Film Festival will run from 9.7 (a little more than seven weeks from now) through 9.16, and I guess I’ll be running some kind of preliminary rundown sometime around August 7th (maybe a week later). Wait…here’s something definitive: the poster looks cool. It’s all part of a gathering desire to extract my head from the summer mentality. If only Clint Eastwood ‘s Flags of our Fathers and Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto had stuck to their August release dates….water under the bridge.
One reason — perhaps the main reason — this London Daily Mail story about Brandon Routh being unhappy with his moisturizer shade is getting attention is because the tide has turned on Superman Returns and it’s been dismissed as a failure. If SR was going gangbusters at the box-office…I’ve said it. But that said, it’s not cool for new-to-the-scene actor to be identified as the guy who ripped into his assistants for giving him the wrong shade of moisturizer. Look at him here…he’s fine.
Vice Session
A Miami Vice press conference happened at the Four Seasons late Friday afternoon. I rode down on my bike and arrived about 25 minues in front. I was talking to a couple of friends before the show began about all the cottonball questions that always get asked at these things. So with 15 minutes to go (or around 4:25 pm), I walked up to the conference table where the talent would be sitting, picked up one of the little black mikes and addressed the 30 or 40 journalists in the room.
“I’d like to make a brief announcement,” I said. “I’m just one guy and you guys ask what you want, but since we’ll only have 30 minutes with the talent it would be nice, just speaking for myself, if everyone here would cut back a bit on the typical Us magazine softball questions in order to leave time for more substantive ques- tions. I’m just saying…you know, it would be nice if that happened.”
Miami Vice director-writer-producer Michael Mann (center, shortish gray hair) with stars (l. to. r.) Naomie Harris, Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li and Li’s interpeter at today’s Universal-sponsored press conference at Four Seasons hotel — 7.16.06, 4:40 pm.
Miami Vice director Michael Mann and stars Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li and Naomie Harris walked in around 4:40 pm, the press conference began, and the first seven or eight or nine questions were almost all cottonball stuff. A fair portion of the these questions came from a cluster of female African-American journalists with a certain ampleness of phsyique. They were partly the reason I made my little speech beforehand. One look and I knew.
The softballers asked questions about the ’80s TV series, about why didn’t Mann use the TV theme song, how did Foxx and Harris handle their sex scenes and how did Farrell and Gong Li handle their sex scenes? And then more questions about comparisons to the film and the ’80s TV series and how come the movie was so dark and not warmer and funnier, like the TV series was on occasion?
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Foxx answered every question with charm and humor. He’s a natural entertainer, and everyone in the first two rows was making goo-goo eyes at him and having fits of laughter every time he did a bit (which was often). I’m not saying he’s not funny — he is — but you could take the obsequiousness and the obeisance-before-power in that room and cut it with a knife.
I asked Foxx the one semi-tough question of the day, which I put as follows: “Jamie, you’re a good guy in person and you obviously play one of the good guys in the film, but in the world of Kim Masters’ article that went up on Slate today, you’re kind of the bad guy. That’s how you’re portrayed, I mean. And it’s out there and people are reading it, and it seems fair to ask if the piece is accurate. Is it?”
Foxx kind of rolled his shoulders and smiled and eyeballed me and shrugged. He might have said something but I don’t remember what it was. Six or seven seconds passed, and then Mann stepped into the breach. “I think it’s ridiculous…really ridiculous,” he said. It’s wrong? I asked. The article is inaccurate? And then Mann started in about the “process” and the hurricanes and particulars about the guy that got shot and how he always makes sure that his sets are extra-safe.
But he didn’t get into the thing about Jamie Foxx and his entourage leaving the Dominican Republic location after the shooting, and how, according to Masters’ article, this abrupt departure forced Mann to end the film in Miami rather than an earlier ending that was set in Paraguay. Then Foxx chimed in and then Farrell did also, and they were all locked and unified in their view that shit happens, the process is the process, we made this film together and we’re standing (or at least sitting) together right now, and we’re not getting into Kim Masters’ view of it.
I spoke to Mann later in front of the hotel, and said, “I just realized what you meant when you said Kim’s piece was ridiculous. You meant that her way of looking at the shoot was ridiculous.” He kind of nodded and went into an extension of that earlier complex thought about the totality of the process and the ebb and flow of creativity (while briefly alluding to a factual wrongo or two that I didn’t question him about), and so on.
Pics: (a) Looking northeast at Beverly Hills and West Hollywood from the 14th floor balcony of the Four Seasons hotel — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:25 pm; (b) Colin Farrell (l. blue shirt) being questioned by Boston Herald‘s Stephen Schaefer with Gong Li in-between after this afternoon’s press conference; (c) Post-press conference chit-chat with Gong Li — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:15 pm; (d) Jamie Foxx signing autographs (yes, journalists ask for them after these events) — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:17 pm; (3) Jamie Foxx’s silver Lamborghini outside Four Seasons hotel after Miami Vice press conference — Friday, 7.14.06, 5:40 pm.
