Four Billy Wilder Screenwriting Tips: (a) The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer; (b) If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act; (c) Let the audience add up two plus two — they’ll love you forever; and (d) The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

A friend who’s seen Woody Allen‘s Scoop…naaah, let it go. But his comments weren’t entirely in synch with those of New York magazine writer Logan Hill, who declares in the new issue that Allen’s two films with Scarlett Johansson — not just Match Point but also his forthcoming Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28) — “have been his best in years.”

Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson in posed shot for New York magazine.

Hill calls it “an old-school Allen comedy — a murder mystery solved by an aging magician (guess who) and a na√É∆í√ǬØve young blonde (Johansson) — peppered with vintage-Woody one-liners. On how he maintains his svelte figure, his character responds, ‘I never gain an ounce. My anxiety acts like aerobics.’ And then there’s his religious biography: ‘I was born into the Hebrews, but as I got older, I converted to narcissism.'”

Here’s a reasonable-sounding analysis piece by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Josh Young that explains the Paramount/ DreamWorks “trojan horse” scenario, which boils down to Paramount chairman Brad Grey and president Gail Berman getting capped not too far down the road and DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider being brought in to run the whole Paramount/DreamWorks shebang. (I was told about this very scenario this morning before reading Young’s piece. I was told, in fact, that (a) “it’s gonna happen” and (b) “if it weren’t an embarassment [for Tom Freston], they’d be gone already.”) Young quotes “a top talent manager” calling this scenario “a reverse acquisition”, adding that “Paramount is (in) turnaround and they are being picked up by DreamWorks…the writing is on the wall.” The reasons for the rumored change, Young explains, are that (a) Snider could handle the top job herself and probably better than Grey and Berman have done so far, and (b) DreamWorks already runs marketing at Paramount so why not harmonize and universalize the attitude and direction of Dreamamount? Obviously the press is being nudged into running this speculation by enemies of Grey and Berman, but who are they and what are their precise motives?

The Islander guys — i.e., the creators and cast of Ian McCrudden and Thomas Hildreth’s Maine-based drama prior to its L.A. Film Festival showing on Sunday evening, 6.25 (l. to r.): composer Billy Mallory, star-producer Hildreth, producer Forrest Murray, director-cowriter McCrudden, co-producer Melissa Davis, costar Amy Jo Johnson

(a) I met the great Eliott Gould, the greatest Phillip Marlowe of all time, at a SAG party in Westwood last night, and I was struck by how amazingly thin he’s become since I last saw him as Reuben Tishkoff in Ocean’s 12….Gould actually looks a good deal thinner that he does in this photo — somewhere between this and his semi-emaciated Long Goodbye appearance…he said he’s taken the weight off because “I’ve accepted supervision”…I said there will obviously have to be some kind of explanation in Ocean’s 13 to explain his changed appearance, and Gould said “Yeah, there will be”, and I asked what it will be, and he said, “See the movie”; (b) Islander rep Jeff Dowd, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson, L.A. Film Festival director of programming Rachel Rosen at Sunday’s steamed lobster, melted butter, cole slaw and potatoes party for Islander — Sunday, 6.2.06, 5:55 pm; (c) Marc and Marla Halperin of Magic Lantern, at same lobster-bib party.

Stanley Nelson‘s Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple may seem like a provocative L.A. Film Festival film to catch this evening. (It’s at the Majestic Crest at 7:15 pm, and tomorrow night at 9:30 pm at the Laemmle Sunset 5.) But having seen this well-meaning doc at the Seattle Film Festival, I can tell you it pulls too many punches.

A story of a warped predatory looney who persuaded over 900 people to kill themselves with cyanide Kool-Aid should not be afraid to look at the horror straight in the face. Jim Jones began as an inspired preacher but ended his days as a diseased psychotic. One of his last acts as a bringer of God’s message was to persuade his followers to murder their children. The people who followed Jones’ orders were obviously insane also at that particular moment, and yet Nelson’s film refuses to get angry about any of this. It’s way too moderate.
It tells Jones’ story, all right. It’s well-written (by Marcia Smith), well researched, professionally edited and it uses first-rate footage. But the talking heads are all relatives, parents and former wives-and-husbands of those who died in Jonestown, and Nelson’s big error is trying to show too much respect for the living and the dead. He wants them to have a measure of dignity, and so he goes easy on the followers and what they did, and in so doing winds up going half-easy on Jones.
Tonally, emotionally, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple could almost be a documentary about a dramatic soccer championship match in which the favored home team lost. It was a shame that Jones was so charismatic and imbued and yet so terribly screwed up, the doc seems to say. And how very unfortunate that all those lost people followed him to the jungles of Guyana and wound up offing themselves. A very tragic story, but….well, shit happens.
The point seems to be the victims deserve our respect and sympathy, and I say the hell with that.
The Jonestown tragedy was essentially a San Francisco story, as the Peoples Temple had been based in San Francisco from 1974 until the move to Guyana. The suicides happened only about nine days after the shootings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk by ex-supervisor Dan White, and there’s just no comparing the neutered impact of Nelson’s doc and Rob Epstein‘s masterful The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), one of the most impassioned and heartbreaking docs ever made about a tragic, untimely death.
What happened in Jonestown was NC-17, but Nelson’s doc is strictly PG-13. There’s no anger or fire in it…no ghastly details, none of the horror, not enough particulars about Jones’ sleazy seducer tendencies, etc. That 1980 Powers Boothe TV movie about Jones (Guayana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones) had a lot more intrigue in this regard.

Is the Tomkat structure cracking at the foundations? Roger Friedman has a story about how the bidding for photos of Suri Cruise didn’t go anywhere with the celebrity magazines (i.e., the pics didn’t attract a high-enough bid, or “not more than $3 million”). If this is more or less true, it’s interesting as a kind of roadside zeitgeist indicator. “If you think you’re still the Tom Cruise of the mid-to-late ’80s and ’90s”….”with your power and money and popularity all at peak levels”…”ask not for whom the bell tolls”…”it tolls for thee”…”Burma Shave.”

Amber Tamblyn was awfully good in Hilary Brougher‘s Stephanie Daley, an unsettling but definitely-better-than-decent melodrama that played at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. Nobody expects that (or Tamblyn’s performance in it) will attract anything like the press interest in her starring role in Takashi Shimizu‘s forthcoming The Grudge 2, but according to the IMDB Daley doesn’t even have a distributor lined up. So it’s going to…what?…turn up some day on DVD and that’s all? Small indie-type dramas with provocative subjects used to get at least some attention. Now, it seems, they’re not even managing that.

I’m not understanding Kevin Spacey‘s declaration that he based his Lex Luthor portrayal in Superman Returns on convicted Enron ogre Kenneth Lay. Read any of Lay’s statements during the Enron trial or watch him in Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and it’s all who-me? and equivocations and various modes of shoulder-shrugging. There’s no rage in the man…nothing but a calculated front. Spacey’s Luthor is nothing at all like Lay. If you ask me, he seems to have based his performance on John McEnroe.

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” — T.S. Eliot

It appears that Superman Returns is being marketed to Christians after all. Here’s a Bryan Singer interview in today’s Christianity Today, written by Mark Moring. Singer’s money quote: “I think that [Superman as a Christ figure] is kind of a natural evolution, because he began as kind of a Moses figure, of the child sent by the parents down the river to fulfill a destiny. Superman’s a savior. And even more so in my film, because he’s gone for a period of time, and then he returns. For me to say that those messianic images don’t exist in the movie would be absurd.” I’ve been told by a “fundie” reader that another Singer interview/profile will post tomorrow on Crosswalk.com.

I talked to a critic friend yesterday who said he had a great time with the new Pirates, although he admitted it’s a bit of slog during the first act or hour (whichever comes first). And now here’s David Poland saying that “like Superman Returns, Pirates 2 is too long by about 30 minutes, and the script tends to bog down every time the story gets a bit complex for its own good….it gets too confusing.” On top of which critic #1 said it’s an adventure fantasy “on steroids.” I know what “steroids” means and it doesn’t mean seductive or enticing. It means bigger, louder, crankier…a heavy boot. (Poland says one of the film’s charms is about Johnny Depp “pushing the envelope a little further.”) Anyone who felt un-levitated by the original Pirates should probably keep this Poland passage in mind: “Pirates 2 will never be as fresh” as the original…”that first film was expected to be a complete disaster in the mold of Kangaroo Jack and Treasure Planet…and then it turned out not only to be good, but a wonderful film .” Amazing…a movie that had me loudly exhaling, shifting positions in my seat, leaning forward with my hands covering my face, and escaping out to the lobby three times — one bathroom break, one soda refill, and one just to get the hell out of the theatre for a couple of minutes — was a “wonderful” film. Poland and I live on the same planet but the Pirates disconnect couldn’t be more profound. “Like the best of Spielberg (which this is one small step behind), [Pirates 2] really speaks to children of all ages,” Poland continues. “If your inner child died in a mine shaft disaster a few years back, you are part of the small group that won’t enjoy this movie.” Could that last statement possibly be amended to, “If you’re one of those who was theoretically into and wanted very much to drink the Verbinski-Bruckheimer Kool-Aid but found yourself involuntarily choking and gagging, you may find yourselves deja-viewing”? I love Poland’s admission that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio‘s script “has none of the suspense of The Empire Strikes Back…the difference between this film and, say, Star Wars, is that there is not the big picture driving the emotional weight of the middle movie. The world is not about to fall to the evil empire. The lives and happiness of our heroes is really what drives these films and it isn’t as powerful.” And yet Pirates 2 “sends you out of the theater smiling, laughing, and applauding.” Everyone I’ve spoken to has said more or less the same thing and you can’t fight City Hall, I guess. But in the rascally spirit of Jack Sparrow…

Warner Bros. marketers have been too classy (or clueless) to try and sell Bryan Singer‘s Superman Reborns to Christian righties as a kind of Jesus-metaphor movie, the way Disney sold Narnia, etc. But maybe they should have? When those righties come out for a movie, they come out in force.