L.A. Times “Oscar Beat” columnist Steve Pond, New York Post critic Lou Lumenick and yours truly are the first three Oscar Wise Guys to name favorites in the top three races — Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress — on Tom O’Neill‘s L.A. Times-sponsored “The Envelope” website. Nine other pundits willl soon join in.
O’Neill writes that Lumenick’s decision to put United 93‘s Ben Sliney on his Best Actor list is a thin out-on-a-limb call — I agree only in the sense that Sliney belongs in the Best Supporting Actor category. Otherwise, I think he gives one of the most convincing performances of the year in Paul Greengrass‘s 9/11 film. And my putting Factory Girl’s Sienna Miller on my Best Actress list isn’t out-on-a-limb either because I’ve seen a rough cut of that film and I know she kills in it.
I’ve finally seen all 54 minutes’ worth of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein‘s intensely absorbing The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair — half of it at the Royal Ontario Museum a couple of days ago, and the second half via a DVD screener that was graciously provided by publicist David Magdeal.
One of the things everyone loves about the Toronto Film Festival is that you sometimes out of nowhere you find yourself watching a political documentary that’s unusually smart and exceptional all around the track. The Prisoner is one of these.
It’s basically about a freelance Iraqi journalist named Yunis Khatayer Abbas telling Tucker and Epperlein his story of having been arrested by U.S. troops (the incident was originally seen in Tucker and Epperlein’s Gunner Palace) and subsequent imprisonment for plotting to kill the British Prime Minister
The charges against Abbas were total bullshit, but at the time his prosecutors and incarcerators weren’t kidding. Months after being cuffed and thrown in the slammer, Abbas was let go after U.S. officials finally realized that a mistake had been made. Sorry, dude, shit happens, etc.
The Prisoner is partly a tragedy, partly a comedy and a 100% metaphor for the daily parade of bogus accusations, poorly considered military maueuvers and adminstrative screw-ups that apparently are par for the course for U.S. and British officials and soldiers in Iraq these days. That’s my take, at least.
I especially enjoyed Tucker and Epperlein’s use of graphic-novel images to emphasize the story points. I suppose Iraq tragedy is a cartoon on some level these days, or at least seems that way to some.
Eduardo Porter and Geraldine Fabrikant have written a N.Y. Times piece titled called “A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make.” And we all know that to be true, but what is the ultimate bottom-line rule of thumb that any producer needs to accept when he/she pays big bucks for a star to play the lead role in a film?
Here’s what you get, and I swear to Krishna this is as much of a basic and fundamental rule as William Goldman‘s “nobody knows anything.” Pay for a big star or two and you’ll get people to pay attention to your movie when they first hear about it for ten seconds or less. During which time they will perk up and say to themselves, “Oh…what’s this one about?” And that’s all you’ll get. Six, seven or eight seconds worth of attention.
Without a big star’s name, chances are the average would-be moviegoer won’t pay attention at all. It would be nice if detections of stellar quality in a film (as initially confirmed by general advance buzz or film-festival consensus) mattered to people but it doesn’t seem to, for the most part. But a star’s name will get you those ten seconds or less with Joe Schmoe. I think that’s a completely reliable assessment.
And then the movie will pretty much sink or swim on its own. If people want to see it based on their own criteria (and not Kenneth Turan‘s or Hollywood Elsewhere’s or Scott Rudin‘s or anyone else’s…the ticket buyer decides solely according to his or her wits and gut instincts), and if they like the teasers or trailers and if there’s any kind of buzz in the air about it, they might give it a shot. Maybe.
So to underline this one more time, I think it’s fair to say that spending $10 or $12 or $15 million for a name-level star or two will persuade many millions of people to consider the idea of seeing your film for seven or eight or nine seconds.
But don’t kid yourself into thinking it means that they’ll show up. Because people really don’t give that much of a damn about you or your movie or what you spent to put it together and have it sold. A certain portion of the online generation will absorb the buzz about a film (and then pass the word along to their friends via text messaging). A microscopic portion of the public will re-consider seeing your film when the opening-day reviews are published.
But most people out there, I believe, are indifferent and/or don’t give a shit. This isn’t 1939 and they’re not movie loyalists, and they’re not your family or your childhood friends, and they don’t really care if you live or die or suffer a heart attack on the street. What they care about is doing the thing that they want to do on the spur of the moment when Friday night rolls around, and that’s all.
Year’s Best Trailer
Stop what you’re doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field‘s Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It’s probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I’ve seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it’s almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.
The trailer tells you right off that Little Children is a smart, A-level drama about suburban infidelity with a kind of John Cheever-ish guilt-trip atmosphere. It tells you it’s about Kate Winslet and her little red-headed daughter (who actually looks like her…amazing), and an extra-marital affair she has with Patrick Wilson, and how Jennifer Connelly, playing Wilson’s wife, fits into the general discomfort.
Fields’ script is based on Tom Perrotta‘s novel of the same name, and there’s more to the story than an extra-marital affair, but for the purposes of the trailer and the “sell,” it works beautifully. And with the train-horn effect and all (I used to listen to that lonely sound every night when I was a kid living in a sedate New Jersey suburb called Westfield), it feels exciting. As in original, grabby, exciting.
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The idea for the trailer came from Field in a meeting in…actually, there’s some debate about that. Two sources say that the first creative sitdown happened in very late 2005, and another says it happened in March or early April of 2006. That’s a huge discrepancy, but whatever.
The main thing is that Field said early on that he didn’t want the Little Children trailer to have music, dialogue or story. The guy he told this to was Mark Woollen, 35 year-old owner of the Santa Monica-based Mark Woollen & Associates, an agency known for creating smart atypical trailers for hip movies like About Schmidt, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The other agency guy in the room during that first meeting was Woollen’s top editor, Chad Misner. The third principal party was New Line executive vp creative advertising Laura Carrillo, who had brought Wollen and Misner in.
“The train horn came from something that Chad found,” says Woollen. “And we had a piece cut together by January ’06, which was pretty mich the version you’re seeing now.” Another source says Woollen’s train-horn trailer was delivered closer to early April 2006. (Are these discrepancies amazing or what?)
“So we showed it to Todd and he was very turned on,” Woollen says. The other source says Woollen’s first cut wasn’t quite as train-horn pure as the final version. Field and Little Children editor Leo Trombetta actually cut together a trailer of their own around this time, and I’m told that a fair portion of the elements in their version made it to the finish line.
“And then we spent several months revising,” says Woollen. [The New Line people] wanted to see how it would play with music, which we worked on in June. The final version was locked only just recently.”
As it turned out, the final version does have a few quiet lines if dialogue, but they’re spoken in almost a whispering way. I especially like Kate Winslet’s line about how almost everyone she knows has “a hunger for alternatives and a refusal to accept a life of unhappiness.”
From Carillo’s point of view the trailer was basically a Field-and-Woollen show. “Mark really wrapped his brain around this [piece],” she says. “He began as a trailer editor and has grown this company on his own. He likes to be away from the whole Hollywood thing but tends to be a very collaborative partner with filmmakers.
“I also know that early on, Todd brought up the metaphor of trains connecting all these towns in America. I wrote this down as a note. As you’ll see in the movie., there are trains and train sounds in it. Todd shot lots and lots of trains, although a lot fewer made it into the final cut.”
The operative phrase here is a famous one: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.
Woollen started his company in ’01. He’s been cutting trailers since he was 18. The first trailer he did that he was really proud of , he says, was one for Schindler’s List.
Mark Woollen and Associates also did the trailers for Crash, Brick, Syriana, March of the Penguins and Hard Candy.
Note: This piece was slightly re-written between the time it was posted early Friday evening and Saturday morning at 9:40 am, some 15 hours later.
This article by New York journalist Nicholas Stix (posted on Tuesday and updated today) could have been called “When Billy Shafted Bruno.” It’s not mentioned in the lead graph or the second or third graph, but the heart of the story provides indications and quotes supporting a thesis that Billy Crystal “made” the career of the late Bruno Kirby, who died last week, and then he un-made him.
Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby
Or so the indicators indicate. Crystal certainly seems to have had an indirect hand in limiting Kirby’s acting opportunities and may have been, in a sense, a “career- killing ogre” as far as Kirby was concerned. By all means read Stix’s article, but in a nutshell it says the following:
(a) “Kirby was one of the hottest character actors in Hollywood in the late 1980s, through 1991, the high point of which was Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), in which Kirby played the male second banana as the sportswriter- best friend of Crystal’s character. Sally would prove to be one of the greatest romantic comedies ever made, and the high point in the career of everyone involved in the production.”
(b) “In 1991, Kirby had an even more substantial role in City Slickers as Crystal’s character’s macho friend,. That same year, Kirby also won acclaim on Broadway, replacing Kevin Spacey as the male lead, playing the smallest of small-timers, would-be gangster ‘Uncle Louie’ in Neil Simon’s memory play, Lost in Yonkers which won four Tony awards.”
(c) “At that point, Kirby was one of the top character actors in the business, his career on a trajectory that was leading inexorably to Oscar nominations, and perhaps even a golden statuette. And then his career tanked. Following City Slickers, the names of most of the pictures he was in were so forgettable — obscure, direct-to-video duds that I had never even heard of — that I instantly forgot them.”
(d) “During or shortly after the making of City Slickers, Kirby and Crystal had a falling out, and not only would Crystal no longer work with Kirby, but neither would any of the many producers and directors associated with Crystal. As a result, while Kirby continued to work, he was cast in fewer movies and the ones he was cast in were, well … take a look for yourself: Golden Gate (1994), Heavenzapoppin’! (1996), A Slipping-Down Life (1999), History Is Made at Night (1999), One Eyed King (2001).
(e) “On 9.12.01, USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna interviewed Crystal as part of a press junket for America’s Sweethearts, and at one point asked for a worst-junket story: Wloszczyna: “The only thing I could come up with is that when you were making City Slickers II, you and Bruno Kirby had a falling out.” Crystal: “He wasn’t in City Slickers II.” Wloszczyna: “Yeah, I know, but there was some reason that he didn’t do it. Are you guys still friends?” Crystal: “I haven’t spoken to him — I think we are. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in a long time.” There’s an interlude and then back to the subject. Crystal: “This is a perfect situation. We’re here to talk about the movie, and you’re talking about something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago.” Wloszczyna: “But it’s about the movie, because the subject of the movie is the press and famous people.” Crystal:: “So now you’re my worst junket story.”
(f) “I think we are” still friends? “Something personal or whatever it is that happened, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago”? “Whatever”? With a guy you went from being practically vaudeville partner with, to not seeing or speaking with “in a long time”?
Two live diamondback rattlesnakes were set loose inside the AMC Desert Ridge theatre in a northern area of Pheonix, Arizona, during a recent showing of Snakes on a Plane, according to a Local 6 News video report. (Click here.) Apparently a couple fo young guys (teens, I’m guessing) snuck the rattlers into the theatre in their backpacks and let them slither out onto the floor while the New Line thriller was playing.
The Local 6 report says the two snakes “caused a panic in the dark theater.” Well, naturally, but for that to happen someone had to get up and yell “live snakes in the theatre!” If the theatre was even half-filled the panic would have been terrible. I wonder how crazy it was in there. If I were in the theatre I would have stepped from one row of seats to the next — my feet would have never touched the floor.
Somebody should do some shoe-leather reporting. This Local 6 report has no details, no emotion — a poor job. Who discovered the snakes and how? Was it an usher or a moviegoer? Who sounded the warning?
There’s a herpetological association rep named Tom Whiting who’s quoted as saying that the idea of live snakes in the theatre “is very scary…I would hate to be watching a movie about snakes and have a rattlesnake bite me.” My God…did this man take sound-bite lessons from Exhibitor Relations spokesperson Paul Dergarabedian? That quote captures the Dergarabedian style to a T. Could it be that the Dergarabedian method — keep your quotes plain and obvious and a little simple — be influencing others?
Wranglers were called in to collect the snakes, the report says. No one was bitten and the culprits haven’t been caught.
Three or four hours after being released from Century City Doctors Hospital early Saturday afternoon, the swollen bear-claw hand and the red interstate highway streaks on my left arm had returned. My resources drained by my 16 hours at CCDC, I had no choice but to check into the UCLA Olive View County hospital in Sylmar. I stayed there Saturday night and all-day Sunday and am leaving today. And I think things really are cured now. My hand was actually operated on yesterday and the infection has been removed and I’ve been told I’m over the hump.
Intravenous antibiotics administered for 16 hours at CCDH on Friday and Saturday morning had merely suppressed the infection for appearance’s sake. The chumps at CCDH didn’t want to actually attend to the swollen, senstive-to-touch, pus-filled wound on my left palm (they were afraid of something going badly — private medicine procedure today is all about fear of possible malpractice lawsuits ), and by 5 pm Saturday I realized I had to go back into another hospital for Round 2.
I’d been told by a doctor at a Beverly Hills walk-in clinic a couple of days earlier that Olive View was “nicer than USC County”, so I drove up the 405 and onto 5 and into Sylmar — right up against the mountains in the northernmost area of the San Fernando Valley. I eventually found the hospital and was admitted to the Olive View emergency room by 8:30 pm.
Right away I knew I was dealing with very smart, ultra-focused doctors and nurses — professionals of a much higher order than the ones I encountered at CCDH. The Olive View doctors and nurses are straight off ER and St. Elsewhere and other TV shows of that type, by which I mean they seemed to say and do the right professional thing at all times.
A friendly, youngish, no-b.s. ER doctor named Bloomfield anesthetized, lanced and excavated the wound, and I was given more doses fo antibiotics Saturday night and all day Sunday. Another doctor and a small team performed a 15-minute operation late Saturday afternoon (I was put to sleep with a general anesthetic), and staffers gave me all kinds of pain medication and more antibiotic drips after I got out.
So I’m out of here this morning, and thank goodness for the stirring George Clooney goodness of the doctors at Olive View. Bloomfield is going to be featured on an upcoming epsode of some Discovery channel show about unusual medical experiences, or something like that. (I’ll pass along the details later.)
Do not ever go to Century City Doctors Hospital for anything, including directions. All they do is sedate and placate and get as much money as they can from you. I wouldn’t exactly call them a disgrace to their profession, but they’re contenders for that distinction. What they did for me on Friday was equivalent to a guy going to a hospital with a broken leg and the doctors saying, “Well, we’re not too sure we want to get into the leg part, but here’s some pain medication and we’ll send a therapist to your room so you can discuss your feelings.”
I’m typing this from the Olive View hospital library. The only thing good about CCDC is that they have broadband computer hookups in each private room. But that aside, forget it. They even refused to give me a copy of my medical chart so I could give it to the Olive View people. Or rather, they said I could have a copy but I’d have to come back to the hospital and fill out a form and give them $23 dollars, and then they’d fax it to me within 2 to 10 business days. I was told this by a bitchy senior nurse named Linda, who works on the 4th floor.
We all need to bow our heads and observe a moment of silence for the dear & departed title of Clint Eastwood‘s second Iwo Jima movie, which up until recently was called Red Sun, Black Sand. It now has a much blander title — Letters from Iwo Jima.
The title change is revealed on page 64 of this week’s Entertainment Weekly (a “Fall Movie Preview” issue with Daniel Craig on the cover), and was confirmed this morning by a Paramount staff publicist.
The original title had a poetic tint with allusions to the flag of Japan and the black sand on the beaches of Iwo Jima. The new title uses the words “Iwo Jima” — very clear, that — but it has no alliteration and no sense of mood or tone. It could be the title of a PBS documentary about an American mother in Iowa receiving letters from her son Caleb. It suggests dullness, softness…and gives no hint that it’s a film with an all-Japanese cast. Which, of course, is a very scary concept for typical American filmgoers.
Based on a story by Paul Haggis and Iris Yamishita and a script by Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima was made as a kind of mirror-companion piece for East- wood’s Flags of Our Fathers (Paramount, 10.20), which is about the legacy as well as the reality of American troops fighting on Iwo Jima. Letters, which Warner Bros. is distributing domestically (Paramount is handling it internationally) in January ’07, deals with the battle for Iwo Jima as experienced by Japanese troops. It stars Ken Watanabe (Memoirs of a Geisha) as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who led the battle against American troops for several weeks.
The new title probably alludes to the details of the conflict being revealed by letters written by Japanese soldiers to loved ones back home. The Japanese translation of Letters from Iwo Jima, as provided by the IMDB, is Iou Jima kara no tegami. It sounds sucky either way.
Nothing happens on a Clint Eastwood movie without Clint’s approval, but this has the whiff of something pushed along by Warner Bros. marketing. I called Haggis this morning to get the scoop (no reply so far), but five’ll get you ten some- body at Warner Bros. thought Red Sun, Black Sand sounded vague and arty, or they tested it and Average Joes said the same thing.
I could also suppose that the WB marketers may have appealed to Eastwood by reminding him that a similar- sounding film that he directed and starred in — 1990’s White Hunter, Black Heart — bombed.
This is the same kind of bottom-line marketing call that led to Taylor Hackford‘s 1984 remake of Out of the Past being retitled as Against All Odds. The movie-title mantra is always “make them simple and plain — metaphor and alliteration have no currency any more.”
Don’t call that Alfred Hitchcock-Cary Grant movie North by Northwest — call it Framed Innocence or Run For Your Life. If that 1959 classic never existed and a producer wanted to use that title for a new movie today, the marketing guys would test it and people would probably scratch their heads and say, “North by northwest of what? I don’t get it.”
In such an environment what chance does a title with the words “red sun” have? I don’t know if Red Sun, Black Sand was tested, but if it was I’ll bet 95% of the people who responded said, “What does that mean? The movie takes place in a desert or something? But hold on…what kind of desert has black sand? I’m confused.” And I’ll bet 99.5% of the people out there don’t know or care what Japan’s flag looks like. Don’t kid yourself — we live in Moron Nation.
Ask Jay Leno about this. I saw him do a question segment with people on the street on the Tonight show a few years back, and he asked a young girl to give the last name of a recent president whose first name was “Jimmy.” She didn’t know. “He used to be a peanut farmer…” Leno hinted. The woman still didn’t know but she took a stab. “Jimmy Peanut?”, she said.
I always miss good movies at Sundance, every time, and one I missed last January is an intimate relationship drama called Off the Black. Directed and written by James Ponsoldt, the film has no website (a mistake) but ThinkFilm is releasing it on 12.1.06. I can’t seem to find a nice, tight little one-line description but it has something do with a high-school umpire (played by Nick Nolte) and a screwed-up kid (Trevor Morgan) and the kid’s not-very-nurturing father (Tim Hutton ).
I’m particularly interested because I’m a big Nolte fan (I thought he should have gotten more attention last year for his suporting performance in The Beautiful Country) and because I’ve been hearing that Off The Black might turn into a Best Actor Oscar shot for the guy in a small-time, limited-ad-budget, little-Oscar-campaign-that-could sort of way. Like Felicity Huffman managed to do with Transamerica, and Laura Linney managed with You Can Count on Me….one of those deals.
A guy named Matt Park wrote me this morning saying “this is the best performance Nolte has ever delivered. He said something about he and his girlfriend being choked up when the lights came up at the Eccles but you have to watch that stuff. Nolte’s umpire, he wrote, is “rough, vulgar, hilarious…he breaks your heart. And the film manages to be honest and emotional and funny without ever being overly sentimental. It felt like some of my favorite flicks from the 70’s.”
I’ve had to remind myself three times so far that Ponsoldt’s film isn’t called Into the Black. It’s a funny title. It doesn’t seem to “say” anything.
I’m going to be seeing it in two or three days, but the trades apparently liked it and so did MCN’s Stu Van Airsdale, and I’m wondering if anyone’s who’s seen it since has any reactions to share.
It took them several years, but Warner Home Video is finally about to release a big swanky DVD of the 1962 Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty. The film has been re-mastered from the original 65mm elements and will be presented in the original 2.76 to 1 Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio. This version hasn’t been seen by anyone since Bounty‘s big-city, reserved-seat showings some 44 years ago.
It’ll be part of a spiffy new Marlon Brando Collection box set hitting stores on 11.7.06. The set will also include a purist remastering of John Huston‘s Reflections in a Golden Eye (’67) that will recreate the golden pinkish hues that this disturbing film was presented with during its initial run. It’ll also include a remastered version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (’53), which I wrote an item about just a few days ago.
(l. to r.) Trevor Howard, Marlon Brando, Richard Harris and Percy Herbert in Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on the Bounty
The lesser titles in the set are Teahouse of the August Moon (’56), which features Brando’s strange performance as a cheerful Taiwanese translator named Sakini, and John Avildsen’s The Formula (’80), in which a fat, white-haired Brando plays a no-good oil company mogul.
Say what you will about the ’62 Bounty‘s problems — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Brando’s affected performance as Fletcher Christian, the floundering final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s.
Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84) is probably a better Bounty flick (certainly in terms of presenting the historical facts), but the ’62 version has more big-buck, oom-pah swagger. The sets seem flusher and more carefully varnished and arranged, Robert Surtees‘ widescreen photography is more vivid and precisely lit and generally more eye-filling than Arthur Ibbetson‘s for The Bounty, and Bronislau Kaper‘s orchestral score is more deep-down stirring than the quieter ’84 score by Vangelis.
The Brando Bounty is a dated film in some ways (okay, a lot of ways), but it has a flamboyant “look at all the money we’re spending” quality that’s half-overbaked and half-absorbing. It’s pushing a kind of toney, big-studio vulgarity that insists upon your attention.
There’s a way to half-excuse Bounty for doing this. It was made, after all, at a time when self-important bigness was regarded as a kind of aesthetic attribute unto itself, with large casts, extended running times, dynamic musical scores (overtures, entr’actes, exit music) and intermissions all par for the course. And there’s no denying that a lot of skilled craftsmanship and precision went into this manifestation.
The act that ignites the mutiny scene as Brando’s Fletcher Christian tries to give fresh H20 to a thirsty seaman, and Howard’s Cpt. Bligh expresses his opposition.
Bounty definitely has first-rate dialogue and editing, and three or four scenes that absolutely get the pulse going (leaving Portsmouth, rounding Cape Horn, the mutiny, the burning ship). And I happen to like and respect Brando’s performance — it gets darker and sadder as the film goes along — and you can’t say Trevor Howard‘s Captain Bligh doesn’t crack like a bullwhip. (I read a review that said his emoting was made from “wire and scrap iron”, and that Brando’s came from “tinsel and cold cream”.) And Richard Harris and Hugh Griffith are fairly right-on. And everybody likes the topless Tahitian girls.
You could argue that this Bounty is only nominally about what happened in 1789 aboard a British cargo ship in the South Seas. And you could also say that its prime fascination comes from a portrait of colliding egos and mentalities — a couple of big-dick producers (Aaron Rosenberg was one), several screenwriters, at least two directors (Lewis Milestone, Carol Reed) and one full-of-himself movie star (Brando) — trying to serve the Bounty tale in ’60, ’61 and ’62, and throwing all kinds of money and time and conflicting ideas at it, and half-failing and half-succeeding.
Seen in this context, I think it’s a trip.
I frankly expected WHV to go with a 2.55 to 1 aspect ratio. 2.76 to 1 is fairly radical. It means you’ll be looking at thicker-than-normal black bars above and below the image. (If you want an example, check out the most recent DVD of Ben-Hur.) This means you’d better watch it on a fairly large screen.
Here’s are four samples from Kaper’s score — the overture, an unused overture, a romantic idyll piece on Tahiti and a replay of the main theme.
The Bounty DVD is a two-disc affair, but apparently it won’t offer a “making of” documentary. (The doc on the second disc is called “After the Cameras Stopped Rolling: The Journey of the Bounty”, which obviously isn’t about what happened before and during the rolling of the cameras.) That’s a shame because Bounty‘s production history is one of the most tortured in Hollywood history, marked as it was by constant tempest (Reed was let go, Milestone quit), cost overruns and Brando’s brash big-star behavior. It was almost as costly and disastrous as the shooting of Cleopatra, which opened seven months after Bounty.
(Fox Home Video’s two-disc Cleopatra DVD has a doc that covers the making-of story in fascinating detail, and is actually much more engrossing and entertaining than the film.)
The DVD will also include a prologue and epilogue that was attached to the film for showings on TV in the late ’60s and/or ’70s, but never seen theatrically.
John Huston’s visual scheme for Reflections in a Golden Eye was created with cinematographer Oswald Morris, with whom he created the steely monochrome-ish color for Moby Dick and the rose-tinted, Toulouse Lautrec-ish color for Moulin Rouge.
It used a look of desaturated color with an emphasis on gold and pink. It was supposed to make you feel the perversity and the creepiness that permeates this adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel, which is about a gay, heavily repressed Army Major (Brando) who ignores his hot-to-trot wife (Elizabeth Taylor) but has a thing for a hunky young private (Robert Forster).
The color succeeded in complementing the vaguely icky mood. Too well, I mean. Viewers complained that it made them feel queasy, and so the color reverted to conventional tones later in the run. The “normal” color also turned up on the VHS version that was sold way back when. WHV’s DVD of the gold-and-pink version will be the first time anyone has seen it in nearly 40 years.
The black-and-white Mutiny stills were sent to me by Roy Frumkes, a friend of restoration guru Robert Harris.
Brando posing with Mutiny crew and costars aboard newly constructed Bounty ship during filming
Tarita Teriipia, Brando shooting love scene. Tarita later had two children with Brando, including a troubled daughter, Cheyenne, who committed suicide in 1995.
If I could clap my hands three times and rid the world of the Mozilla ActiveX plugin, I would clap my hands three times. You need to load the damn thing to watch trailers on the AOL Moviefone site but which it won’t load. The latest trailer I can’t watch because of this problem is one for Barry Levinson‘s Man of the Year (Universal, 10.13.06), an allegedly shrewd and restrained political comedy with Robin Williams, Laura Linney and Christopher Walken.
A friend who saw Man of the Year at a small screening a few months ago swore up and down it’s funny and corrosive and Levinson’s best since Wag the Dog. But I couldn’t accept her word (she’s not the most cultivated cineaste) so I called Barry’s reps and his producers to ask some questions about it, and they all said “who?…what?…too early.”
No director has swerved up and down and back and forth like Barry Levinson. Whenever a new movie of his comes along, everyone always asks, “Will it be a good Barry or a bad Barry?” There are actually two bad Barry’s — the guy who makes expensive commercial crap (Sphere, Indiana Holmes and the Temple of Doom) and modest, lower-profile commercial crap (An Everlasting Piece, Envy, Bandits). The good Barry, of course, makes films like
Man of the Year is about a talk show comedian named Tom Dobbs (Williams) who decides to run for president as a goof, but faces some major problems when he unexpectedly wins. Why would that be a problem, I wonder? Would Jon Stewart be in a pickle if he were to run and win? I don’t see why. Chris Rock handled the job okay. The lesson of George Bush is that anyone can be president these days. You don’t need wisdom, character, brains — you just need to win and the determination to try and apply your power. I for one would vote for Walken for president without even thinking about it. I would…really.
O’Toole Scores Again?
As everyone presumably knows, Miramax has swapped the release dates of Stephen Frears‘ The Queen, a drama about Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) grappling with the death of Lady Diana, and Roger Michell’s Venus, based on a script by Hanif Kureishi about septugenarian sex, romance and parenting. Queen was advanced up to 10.6, and Venus was pushed back to 12.15. The motive was to put Venus into a better position for an Oscar campaign, but not necessarily for the film itself.
The main beneficiary of the Venus campaign is going to be Peter O’Toole, who reportedly plays the lead role — a randy, very straight 70ish actor named Maurice — with exceptional gusto, tenderness and O’Toolean panache.
Peter O’Toole in two cruddy-looking stills from Roger Michell’s Venus (Miramax, 12.15)
However good O’Toole turns out to be, there’s a great comeback story to be told if and when he goes on the promotion trail.
A story about a great and colorful actor, 73, being back in the saddle with a good role after years of wandering in the desert. About his flamboyant past as one of the big-time acting kings of the early to mid ’60s (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket), and as one of the great party animals of that era. About going flat in the ’70s and then briefly resurging in the early ’80s with plum roles in Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man and Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year…before going flat again. About the legend who came close to refusing an honorary gold-watch award from the Academy’ in 2003 because he didn’t want to be thought of as over-the-hill, and then got lucky right after this and nabbed a juicy part and hit a home run with it.
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Or so I’ve heard and read. You never know and you can’t trust anyone.
A certain Dart Group publicist in the employ of Miramax has been pushing O’Toole’s Venus work, yes, but I came across some pretty encouraging stuff on my own last May from some IMDB posters who claimed they’d seen Venus at a Convent Garden screening in very late April and then at a Manhattan screening three or four days later.
These postings inspired me to call Charles McDonald of the London p.r. firm McDonald + Rutter just before leaving for Cannes. I was hoping to get information about any Cannes market screenings of Venus, but McDonald said he didn’t know of any.
O’Toole in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy
There are no prints of Venus in the States, I’m told, so maybe Michell and Kureishi have been adding or refining. It would be great to catch it in Toronto, but who knows?
The Venus log line reads, “Life for a pair of veteran actors gets turned upside down after they meet a brash teenaged girl.” Leslie Phillips, Jodie Whittaker (the young and the brash), Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths costar. The word on the film last spring is that it was good or pretty good (as in “good beginning and middle, so-so ending”). But the word on O’Toole was something else.
After seeing Venus at the Convent Garden showing, a Scottish-sounding guy named Phil Concannon wrote on 4.29 that “the real attraction [of the film] is the chance to see Peter O’Toole in a leading role once again, and he is very good indeed. He’s funny and touching, and occasionally uncomfortably lecherous, and it’s terrific to see him getting a role he can really sink his teeth into. There’s one scene in which O’Toole recites Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’, and his sheer charisma, along with that great voice, makes the scene breathtaking.”
You know what would help the O’Toole campaign, assuming he’s as good in Venus as everyone says? If that low-life, ass-dragging video company MPI Home Video would finally get it together and put out that restored Becket DVD they’ve been holding onto and embarassing themselves by not releasing for the last couple of years.
O’Toole in the opening moments of Peter Glenville’s Becket
If this Becket DVD were to hit the market in the mid-fall, say, people would obviously be reminded what a great performance O’Toole gave as Henry II (he should have won the 1964 Best Actor Oscar but Rex Harrison took it for My Fair Lady), and the general awareness about O’Toole having been a world-class actor for the last 45 years would be that much higher.
O’Toole’s Becket performance “is one of the most exciting ever seen in a main- stream movie,” I wrote early this year. “O’Toole takes your breath away half the time, and the other half he makes you grin with delight.”
O’Toole recorded a narration track for MPI in the fall of ’03 that lasts throughout the 149-minute film, and, according to MPI Home Video’s Gregg Newman, is quite entertaining to listen to. If I were a Miramax marketing exec I would contact MPI and ask them what the hold-up is and, you know, can Miramax help in some way?
Becket addendum: I didn’t even call the MPI Home Video people Wednesday about the Becket DVD situation. MPI reps have flown their colors with baldly disengenuous statements about their release plans for this DVD in the past, always saying they intend to have it out “later this year” or “soon” and never living up to these pledges. That said, an MPI spokesperson named Christie Hester ( I spoke to her during the writing of one of my previous Becket DVD articles) posted a message on an IMDB board on 5.30.06 that said “MPI Home Video intends to release Becket on DVD during the first quarter of 2007.”
Obviously, any prepared statement about a forthcoming company initiative that contains the word “intends” is not to be trusted. Hester was obviously qualifying in case things don’t pan out. (Trust me, Warner Home Video has never announced it “intends” to release anything — their p.r. releases always say flatly and unambiguously that WHV will release this or that title on this or that date, and no monkeying around .) Then again Hester’s “first quarter of 2007” is a more date-specific pledge than anything ever stated by any MPI Home Video exec about their Becket plans, so maybe the DVD will come out sometime before 12.31.07. Maybe.
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