Thompson On Hollywood on Variety.com

September
1 There Will Be Blood: Giant Meets Deadwood? (If We're Lucky)

Daniel Day-Lewis In answer to my earlier question about the There Will Be Blood sneak preview rumored to be happening at Telluride, Mike Jones (who writes Variety's fest-centric Circuit blog) reports:

The 20 minutes ... established the mysterious film finally as a frontier epic. ... In a series of well-cut scenes, the Telluride audiences watched rabid oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), manipulative and shrewd, work to buy the oil-rich land off of ignorant homesteaders. ... Day-Lewis’ performance both repulses and attracts. He’s a wonderfully successful snake charmer. His words are like Norman Rockwell painting –- promising the American Dream to the scared locals he buys out.

This is the first public screening of footage from Anderson's much-anticipated new film, a clear departure from his earlier ensemble work, although secrets have been sneaking out lately. Last week, Entertainment Weekly offered just a tease in their Fall Movie Preview:

''I was really sick of the way I was writing,'' [Anderson] says. ''Everything looked as though I had written it, and that was a horrible feeling.'' Purely as an exercise, Anderson decided to adapt a scene from a novel he had just discovered: Oil!, Upton Sinclair's 1927 take on the grueling, greedy business of prospecting for black gold in California. ... And so out trickled Blood, which hews close to the first 100 pages of Sinclair's book before going its own way as it tracks the relationship between a silver miner-turned-oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis, who was interested after reading only half the script) and his son (Dillion Freasier).

And the Anderson fan site Cigarettes and Red Vines unearthed a projectionist's notes that the print (in whatever current form this guy handled it) is 8 reels long: "That means it's definitely under 3 hours, but probably still pretty long. The average 2 hour movie is about 6 reels." For the rest of us, all we have to go on in the meantime is this teaser, which Anderson posted to YouTube back in June:

—Posted by Peter Debruge