When you think about it, the first inkling that director Spike Jonze wanted to use animatronic puppets for his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are was a warning sign. First of all, just look at Jonze's movies and sensibility and you know he's a maverick indie spirit, an artist. It's no shock that he ran into trouble making a mainstream studio movie with family appeal--especially at straight-arrow studio Warner Bros., which is better at making tentpoles than anything else. Which may be why they gave the guy $80 million??!!
While I applaud Warner chief Alan Horn for giving the director some time to figure things out, I agree with Patrick Goldstein that this may not have been an ideal match (much like the Wachowskis and Speed Racer) between director and subject. As exciting as it is to have Dave Eggers write the screenplay, again, Eggers + Jonze does not = family movie for all audiences.
That's what Warner Independent was supposed to be for, guys. (For a lot less money.)
One of my Internet spies sent me this post from a writers' forum: an uncredited screenwriter on Kung Fu Panda describes the fabled Jeffrey Katzenberg DreamWorks Animation script process. Needless to say, painful as it may be, the process works like a charm. (Something tells me the folks at Pixar, who work as a team, have more fun.) In just over a month, Kung Fu Panda (which scored 88 % fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) has grossed $346 million worldwide.
I'm sure nothing Rob and I contributed ended up in there. We wrote a bunch of scenes they kept not using because we were changing too much.
My hats off to anyone that can write a Dreamworks Animation film. They have a unique process.
First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.
Then Katzenberg watches an animatic of the boards and says, surprisingly, "this needs a lot of work. You have a month."
Then they hire their first writer. And spend that month changing as much of the storyboards as they can, which is about 20 to 30 percent.
If the 30 percent change isn't the right kind of change, people get fired. Maybe the director, maybe the writer, maybe both.
Sometimes, only the writer gets fired and an additional director is hired to help out. It all depends on who is better - at pointing a finger with one hand while covering their own ass with the other.
I came in about four writers into the process. It's kind of hard to write a "better" scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.
It's harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger "bucket" that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to ...beat up... a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to...try to beat him up, because that's the prophecy. And I won't spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn't win. Because he's not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn't win, and because there's 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it's kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.
That resonates, right? We've all been in that situation. Oh, yeah, but we weren't the "panda." We were the "bad" guys, walking from Nazareth to Jerusalem, hoping to help people, only to get nailed to a fucking cross by the "good" guys. For instance, I had this job once at Dreamworks Animation...
I tried to divide my time there between the tasks of writing 30 percent of scenes, being hazed by storyboard artists because I didn't know how to do 30 percent of my job, yet, and explaining to the producers that Messianic myths (like The Matrix, which seemed to have a slight impact on their story) usually resonate because in the beginning of the story, things are bad, not good, and the good guy is usually the one overcoming insurmoutable odds and attempting to reclaim something from systems that have the magical ability to beat the living shit out of them no mater what they do.
I said, could we please dedicate this month's 30 percent change to making the bad guy be the ruler of the town, and the prophecy is that this panda is supposed to dethrone him.
Well, the prison scene is already drawn. And Jeffrey really likes it.
All right, can we make it like Demolition Man or Austin Powers or Cat Ballou, have the bad guy break out and everyone's panicking and they go and get the guy that according to legend is the biggest bad ass, but he's out of shape, out of his element and kind of a dick.
Hmmm, okay, but in that case, why is he coming up a flight of stairs, and what's in the bucket?
I don't know. There's food in the bucket, because he loves food so much, and ...he keeps his food in the basement, and he's coming up to answer the door because the stork is knocking at it and beseeching him to be a hero.
Well, the stork never knocks on a door, though. And Jeffrey likes the stork not knocking on doors.
A screenplay has leaked on the Internet, of a recently unearthed Dark Knight script by writer-director Michael Bay. (It's a send-up.) Warners clearly opted to go another way.
Finally, I would have preferred to see The Dark Knight in 35 mm, not IMAX. (I will go see it again when it opens July 18.) While the sequences that were shot with giant cameras were stunning at the IMAX venue--especially the deep detailed helicopter shots over Gotham and the amazing car/truck chase filmed in Chicago's freeway tunnels--I found the movie overwhelming. My brain starts to shut down when it gets over-pixillated, and this film goes on for two and a half hours. (Here's Justin Chang's review.)
My instincts told me when I first saw The Dark Knight trailer: Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins follow-up would fall into the trap of the summer tentpole sequel. It's not entirely his fault. The studio gives him his marching orders: top the last one. Make it bigger, better, bolder, more FX, more action, more scale and scope and characters (read toys). What else should a poor boy to do with $180 million?
Nolan delivered on the first Batman reboot and he does it again here. The Dark Knight will work at the boxoffice and keep the franchise alive.
In many ways, this movie functions as a western, with an honorable sheriff (Gary Oldman's lovable police detective Gordon), a nasty outlaw (Heath Ledger's extraordinary, anarchistic Joker), a lone gunman hero operating outside the law (Christian Bale's Batman) with loyal veteran sidekick (Michael Caine as Alfred), and the lovely lass that the outsider cannot have (Rachel Dawes, the delightful and wily Maggie Gyllenhaal).
And then--here's where the movie starts to go off the tracks--we have Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent, the too-virtuous-to-be-true D.A. who is in love with Gyllenhaal, thus forming a love triangle, as well as another Batman accomplice, inventor Lucius Fox (read James Bond's Q), played by the over-exposed Morgan Freeman. Then add a bunch of mafia guys led by deliciously wicked Eric Roberts.
Somehow, David S. Goyer (who wrote the story), and screenwriter Nolan brothers Chris and Jonathan manage to play out all these plot strands. But they wind up with a half-hour finale on top of the two hour main movie, which is really about Batman vs. Joker, who wind up in an iconic face-off on a main street in Gotham. (Ledger dominates Dark Knight news coverage, natch. The LAT addresses the movie from that angle, while EW goes way overboard. Clearly, Warners is making an Oscar push for the film. Ledger's acting nomination is inevitable; while James Dean and others have been nominated after their deaths, only Network's Peter Finch has won a posthumous Oscar.)
Oddly, because The Dark Knight is busy servicing all these other characters, the movie doesn't spend enough time with its leading man, Bruce Wayne/Batman (BTW, Batman's basso-growly voice is silly).
After twists and turns aplenty, some more satisfying than others, the movie comes to a gratifying conclusion (setting up the next sequel). But while Eckhart is winning as Dent, his character detour as Two-Face does not pay off.
I suspect that the filmmakers should have figured out the shorter version of this movie before they shot it, not after, because by then they couldn't cut it, according to Nolan (the full Q & A from one of my Guild spies is on the jump). Nolan shot The Prestige before he came back to work on the final drafts of the script. And by then he was locked into studio-mandated start and delivery and release dates.
My fantasy of the ideal version of this movie doesn't matter a whit, because it will play. The complexities of the plot are more fun to talk about than anything since Wall-E or Iron Man, and that makes Dark Knight one of the best movies of the summer. Maybe some dark over-nourishment is better than a simpler, structurally perfect masterpiece, after all.
But what goes up, must come down. Michael Eisner, Mike Ovitz, Joel Silver and the Weinsteins are not what they once were. Haze your way up in this business, and it's rougher on the downward slope. Your friends can become your enemies. And when things are rough, as they are now for the Weinsteins--many folks are asking how long Goldman Sachs will support their company's current scale and scope--all the knives come out.
People in Hollywood love to jump gleefully on a once-fierce competitor when they aren't so strong anymore. But the Weinsteins have many friends in New York politics and publishing, so we shall see.
The would-be Weinstein book author attached a seven-minute audio file to his pitch to Page Six:
The recording is of a Dec. 12, 1996, phone call between Harvey and Joe Roth, then president of Walt Disney Studios, in which the two complain about the $138 million severance deal that Mike Ovitz negotiated to leave Disney after 16 months.
"Please fire me," Weinstein facetiously tells Roth. "I'll split whatever I get . . . I'll meet you in St. Barts. We'll buy both halves of the island . . . If you don't fire me, then I think we should make bad movies next year. Let's make a series of [bleep]y movies."
Roth replies: "I obviously made a mistake. I made good movies." Harvey says, "Joe, you are a success, so therefore you are a failure in this town." The two then name Peter Guber, Michael Fuchs and Jon Peters as having won huge golden parachutes.
"Everybody got wealthy on failure," Weinstein says. Roth replies: "You know what the problem is with you and me? We care about the movies." Weinstein laughs: "We have character flaws that must be overcome."
Here's the podcast (in California, isn't it illegal to record someone without their knowledge?), which is amusing and I see their POV, actually:
Speaking of Joel Silver, he does not come off so well, nor does producer Larry Gordon (Hellboy2), in screenwriter Larry Gross's juicily candid memoir of working on Walter Hill's 1982 48 HRS., which helped to define the Hollywood buddy comedy genre for decades to come, and made Eddie Murphy into a star. MCN is publishing the pieces in serial form; part four is up now. It's a must-read, and I understand that it is making Silver and Gordon none too happy. The person who emerges smelling like a rose is director Hill, whose Broken Trail and Undisputed should put him back on the must-hire list. Hill can do comedy, tragedy, action, and subtle character work. But does Hollywood have work for someone who doesn't do tentpoles? That is the question.
Baltimore filmmaker John Waters takes questions on USA Today's PopBlog from his fans, about his upcoming film Fruitcake, due at Christmas, and the DVD release of his true-crime DVD series, Till Death Do Us Part.
Universal threw yet another Westwood block party premiere Saturday night, this time for $100-million summer sequel Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the closer of the Los Angeles Film Fest, which lured some 100,000 attendees, up from last year. Hellboy 2 director Guillermo del Toro handed out two jury prizes worth $50,000 each to documentary filmmaker Darius Marder (Loot) and feature director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).
His "insanely ambitious movie" Hellboy 2, Del Toro said, "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."
True enough. Hellboy 2 is a hybrid of those two things. And thus some moviegoers, especially the core fanboys who loved the Dark Horse comics and the first installment, will embrace Hellboy 2's fantastic eccentricities, while others will be left behind, scratching their heads. I doubt the visually sumptuous pic will break out into wide acceptance, especially given the stiff summer competition. The first Hellboy was not a global hit in 2004 (it topped out at $98 million worldwide) but sold well over the years on DVD.
At the party, Del Toro admitted that the film's war between the ancient magical underground universe and modern humans is far from black-and-white. Like Del Toro himself, red-skinned warrior Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is ambivalent, caught between the rich primal forces that spawned him and his powerful human masters. Here's the trailer:
No matter how well this movie does, Del Toro is about to enter a new fantasy portal that will take four years of his life: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Working closely with producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, phase one will involve writing for three weeks in L.A., one week in Wellywood, phase two will reverse that (one week in L.A., three weeks in Wellywood) and then the directing and post-production phases will take Del Toro to New Zealand full time.
But the reason the movie plays so well has nothing to do with the leading man's paternal instincts; rather, it's rooted in del Toro's rococo instincts for the stylishly creepy and crawlingly macabre, his clockmaker's preoccupation with detail, and a flair for combining state-of-the-art technology with his taste for the antique, the gothic, the Catholic. Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in "Hellboy II" is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.
Based on seeing Hancock the other night, I can tell you this. Todd McCarthy's early negative review will be one of many. The knives are out, and they are sharp. When this movie opens July 2, it will be eviscerated.
But because Will Smith is in what I call the Fluke Zone, the movie will open great over the 4th of July weekend (five-day estimates are from $80 to 100 million), and will do robust business. But it won't be one of the top-grossers of the summer, because it is unlikely to please everybody, or generate repeat biz. It could do better overseas.
It's a movie that tried to be smart and weird and interesting, with gifted filmmakers behind it: producers Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman (who do cameos), edgy screenwriter Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom).
They created a fascinating damaged, alcoholic, homeless superhero, well-played by Smith, but their attempts to mix and match smart character-based drama (Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman also star) with superhero action adventure (VFX by Sony Pictures Imageworks) is a Frankenstein's Monster.
These are not cynical people. I don't know who to blame, so I'll start with the budget. If the movie cost, as I have been told, from $150 million (Sony's claim) to a rumored $180 million, then Sony and investor Relativity Media may have a tough time getting their money back. Studio-think dictates that you take elements like these filmmakers and Smith and spend tons of money on a big big movie. Which means the risk has to go down, and what's interesting and strange has to be mitigated by the usual series of second act action sequences that someone like Spielberg knows how to pull off without getting dopey, but this group could not.
Another problem, as Rachel Abramowitz points out, is superhero overload. Watch for Hancock's second weekend drop-off. If it's more than 60%, the movie could be in trouble.
I finally caught up with JK Rowling's June 5 commencement address at Harvard:
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination JUNE 5, 2008
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening scored a dismal 20 % on Rotten Tomatoes; it opened decently, but critics had a field day giving the Philly filmmaker the shaft. Fox didn't screen the pic for me; they focused their efforts on a sharp marketing campaign. In this case, clearly, critics were not going to be their friend.
I'm curious to see the pic, because Shyamalan (SHA-MA-LAN) is an anomaly--a writer-director who makes an original every time out, and tunes into the beat of his own drummer, with occasionally risible results. He needs someone like Nina Jacobson, who when she was at Disney--before she gave him the feedback that led him to take Lady in the Water to Warners-- kept him on the right path.
Producer Scott Rudin worked with him once on The Village--in that case the often grandiose Shyamalan was so optimistic about that picture that he wanted Rudin to help him cast it upscale with the likes of Bill Hurt and Sigourney Weaver in hopes of landing a few Oscars.
I enjoyed The Village, while recognizing the ways that it could have been better. I've liked all of Shyamalan's films except Lady in the Water. They go off the rails in ways that could easily be tweaked at the script stage, or in the editing room. He seems to have a tin ear for where something too serious might go over the edge into unintended humor.
Shyamalan is the perfect example of the hazards of making these movies entirely on your own. Where he goes from here is another question. He needs a good producer he can trust, who will buffer him. Even the utterly independent Coen Brothers have a Rudin or Eric Fellner to interface with the studios for them.
Ricky Gervais cast Brit chum Karl Pilkington in his new caveman "high concept" comedy This Side of the Truth. Pilkington suspects Gervais wants him around to keep him amused. Judging from this hilarious on-set podcast, he may be right.
The real question when looking at The Incredible Hulk--given all the sturm-and-drang in the media about Edward Norton--is what did he contribute to this movie?
Here's the real deal:
Zak Penn wrote the original script, which includes two pivotal scenes from his 16-year-old first screenplay for the Hulk, which was not used on the Ang Lee movie written by James Schamus. Marvel came back to Penn and wanted the two scenes in the movie: Bruce Banner jumping out of a helicopter to the earth below, not knowing whether or not he would morph into Hulk, and a lovemaking scene in a motel where Banner's rising heart rate becomes an issue. Both are among the best scenes in the final movie.
When Marvel approached Norton to do The Incredible Hulk, he initially declined. They asked him to meet with director Louis Leterrier (Transporter) to discuss his objections to doing the movie; there Norton offered some ideas as to where he'd want it to go. Marvel agreed to hire a screenwriter to work with him. This is totally normal. At this point Penn was off the movie.
Marvel realized they didn't have time to hire a new writer and asked Norton to do it, offering him an uncredited producer credit as well. With about two months to go before the movie started filming, Norton did a page one rewrite--knowing that he couldn't do anything radical, because sets were being built, locations found, etc. The entire Brazil sequence was already story-boarded.
So Norton mostly changed dialogue, filled in gaps of motivation and developed character. For example, the scenes in Brazil about finding a serum in the Amazon to cure him, and Banner's emails with Tim Blake Nelson, were Norton adds. Marvel agreed to shoot Norton's script.
The Incredible Hulk filming was well under way in Toronto when the team flew to San Diego to do a Comic-Con panel last July. When the panel moderator asked Norton to address his enhanced role on the film--which was supposed to be revealed on the panel, but not by him--both Norton and producer Gale Ann Hurd recognized that his announcing his own role as screenwriter would play badly. And so it did.
In post-production, when it came time to edit the movie, Marvel wanted a streamlined cut. Norton wanted more of his stuff, some 20 minutes worth. Norton is a serious actor who wants to be cool. Marvel convinced him to star in a movie on which he would have considerable input as writer-co-producer-star. A collision was inevitable. Their heated debate was leaked to Deadline Hollywood. Marvel had final cut, not Norton. He did not get his way. Some 50 minutes of outtakes will turn up on the DVD.
Post-Ang Lee, Marvel wanted the most commercial version of the movie, while Norton wanted something more nuanced.
As for the script, Marvel submitted both Penn and Norton (under his pseudonym, Edward Harrison) to the Writers' Guild; Penn (who had substantial economic incentives to want to win the arbitration) wrote an impassioned argument that Norton had not considerably changed his screenplay. The Guild tends to favor plot, structure and pre-exisiting characters over dialogue. Given the final version of the movie, they gave the sole credit to Penn. (Another early writer was seeking story by credit and didn't get anywhere.)
When it came to marketing the pic, Universal's Adam Fogleson talked with Norton about his schedule and what PR they wanted him to do. The studio wanted to sell the Hulk, not Norton, finally--they avoided the traditional print junket in favor of a more superficial Adam Sandler TV-friendly media sell (not opening up to lots of questions about what Norton wanted the movie to be). Norton did Access Hollywood, Jimmy Kimmel (see below), lots of Internet stuff and attended the L.A. premiere. Then, as planned, he went off to Africa for his own purposes--and will do Japan PAs later this month.
This LAT Norton story addresses his image problems, which are substantial. He is seen as a gifted writer and actor, but opinionated and persnickety.
This Jimmy Kimmel spoof heads in the right direction.
Finally, my sense is that Norton's issues were with Marvel, which misled him into believing that he would have more control over the picture than in fact he did. Norton didn't take his issues to the press. When told about Deadline Hollywood, he had never heard of the blog. He's fine with Universal. Here's EW, with Norton's statement. Whether Norton will play Hulk again remains to be seen.
It's probably time for Norton to take charge via directing. (He debuted with the 2000 relationship comedy Keeping the Faith and has been developing Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn as a directing vehicle.) The smartest movie stars--Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, Mel Gibson, Robert Redford, George Clooney and others--have figured out how to take control of their careers. Instead of fighting with studios over final cut, they earn it.
2929 owners Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner had hoped to land a domestic distributor for the $20-million Hollywood comedy starring Robert DeNiro at the Sundance Film Festival in January. What Just Happened? scored favorable reviews but the financeers were not able to close a distrib deal that they could live with.
So 2929 will just do it for themselves.
Magnolia has hired marketing-exec-turned-consultant Russell Schwartz, the former marketing prexy of New Line Cinema, to supervise the film’s release campaign. (He also works with National Geographic on such films as U23D.) At Cannes, Schwartz supplied marketing materials for What Just Happened? featuring the tag line, “In Hollywood, everyone can hear you scream.”
What Just Happened? was adapted by Linson from his own vitriolic Hollywood memoir. Studding the movie’s cast are Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, Robin Wright Penn, John Turturro, Michael Wincott, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn and Kristen Stewart. 2929 Productions and Linson produced with De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Productions.
One of my USC students tipped me to something I didn't register on: because of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, actor/writer Jason Segel is now writing a Muppet movie. Segal worked with Henson's Creature Shop on Sarah Marshall's Dracula puppet rock opera. Segel pitched the Hensons his Muppet movie idea, and he's now writing a script.
Summit Entertainment is doing cartwheels. That's because they're already in production on a movie, Twilight, based on the first book in a trilogy vampire saga by book phenom Stephenie Meyer.
The 34-year-old Mormon author just landed a takeout in Time Magazine calling her the new queen of fantasy with the head: The Next J.K. Rowling? The article praises Meyer's books for being about the "erotics of abstinence." She "rewrites stock horror plots as love stories."
She's basically the young adult Anne Rice, because Twilight is a romantic 17-year-old Romeo and Juliet with vampires and humans. Rising star Kristen Stewart (discovered by Jon Favreau in Zathura, Panic Room) plays a girl who falls for a handsome guy (Robert Pattinson, of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) who turns out to be a vampire. But he's a good vampire who has renounced sucking human blood. He and his mother coven feed on animals. His virtue--his psychological struggle against his lust for blood--makes him interesting. The movie, directed by thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke, is due December 12.
Vampires have fed Hollywood since its infancy, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu to Rice's Interview with a Vampire, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Underworld series. But this series has femme appeal.
When Summit slapped a teaser trailer up on MySpace on Monday at 11 AM, it pulled 1 million views in 36 hours and has now passed 2 million. The teaser will premiere on E.T. Friday, and will run in front of family-friendly Speed Racer (maybe that will boost its ticket sales). "I would have been happy with 500,000," says Summit chief Rob Friedman, who scooped up the rights to Twilight when it had sold 10,000 copies just after he started Summit's new production/distrib arm. Paramount had the option and let it go. Since then the first three Twilight books have sold over 6 million copies in the U.S. "I knew the book had a fan base but it's always good to see it's bigger than you think," says Friedman, who has a potential franchise on his hands. This is what any new company lusts after.
Suze Rotello, the iconic girl on the 1963 Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover, has long been a mysterious figure, until now. She's written a book, A Freewheelin' Time, about her four-year relationship with the young Dylan, whom she met at age 17, when he was 20. They were deeply in love, but the pressures of his rising fame broke them up, writes the LAT.
Check out these revealing clips a few years later at a party where Dylan and Donovan watch each other perform:
The movie that is likeliest to exceed expectations at the boxoffice this summer--and pass the $300-million mark domestically-- is the second Narnia pic, Prince Caspian, partly because the filmmakers have added more grown-up action and a more adult hero in Caspian himself. It's not only a sequel, but a family-oriented four quadrant Disney/Walden pic that has been embraced by the Christian community--and is tracking really well in advance of its May 16 opening.
Here's a new photo and excerpt on the cast from the film's gushy behind-the-scenes book, which is not surprising as it is written by the unit publicist on both Narnia pics, Ernie Malik:
Making a full-scale motion picture like Prince Caspian is a journey unto itself -- not only a physical one that took hundreds of filmmakers thousands of miles across two hemispheres, but also a spiritual and emotional voyage for the film's family members.
With mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives away from home for close to a full year, the film company's 600-plus members bonded closely, sharing in both work and play, to create not only a friendly on-set environment over the lengthy seven-month shoot, but hopefully something greater than the sum of its parts -- something all can hail proudly when the lights go down, the projector flickers, the film unspools, and their collective movie magic enchants audiences the world over.
As production began over a year ago on that mid-February morning in Auckland, there stood Andrew, the lanky director, alongside his Pevensie clan like a proud father with his children, home for the holidays. Even though it had been barely two years since the completion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, his film family had, indeed, matured, both physically and emotionally. Their patriarch grinned with pride at the progress.
[Posted by Pat Saperstein]
Reinventing Hollywood, but how to start? Whether at film festivals or book fairs, lately every film panel seems to turn into a whinefest about the good old days of musty arthouses. This weekend's L.A. Times Fest of Books panel "Reinventing Hollywood: The 1960s and Beyond" was no exception.
Moderator Leonard Maltin’s intro quickly pointed up a gulf between those who feel Hollywood has forsaken them and those who embrace comicbook fare. “I mean, am I supposed to really be excited about ‘Iron Man’?” he asked sarcastically. Half the audience and most of the panel immediately countered “We are!”
Discussion mostly focused on why, as LAT film critic Kenneth Turan put it, “even the loyal core audience for smaller films is staying home rather than seeing the films in theaters,” and whether there is “any glimmer of hope” to get fans of films targeted towards adults back to theaters.
Author Mark Harris (“Pictures at a Revolution”) pointed out that it’s nearly impossible anyway to find good films in theaters for the first eight months of the year — “After New Year’s Day, it’s goodbye to you and your snooty friends until Labor Day.”
And while panelists were wowed by several of last year’s pics including “No Country for Old Men,” “The Savages” and “Michael Clayton,” Peter Biskind (“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”) was chagrined that “The Assassination of Jesse James” was ignored at kudos time. Biskind also worried that this year’s crop of quality fare will be sparse due to the effects of the writers’ strike.
Harris said that the shift to home viewing means films can’t have the kind of wide cultural influence they had in the 1960s, when viewers knew they would likely never be able to see “The Graduate” uncut on their TVs.
“It puts movies at the center of the conversation when you can only see them in theaters,” Harris contends.
What will panelists find to discuss when day-and-date distribution of independent and foreign films directly onto large-screen TVs finally becomes commonplace?
I was fingering Michael Chabon's new book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands in a bookstore today, and instantly knew, as I looked in vain for a bio or blurbs on the gorgeous, attention-luring cut-out book jacket, that it was a McSweeney's publication. (The other book I was weighing in my hand was Dave Eggers' Lost Boys of Sudan novel What is the What, which I've heard is a must-read.) Here's a couple graphs from an essay from the Chabon. He's one of the most entertaining writers there is, along with Larry McMurtry and Tom Wolfe, which doesn't mean they shouldn't be taken seriously.
Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a "Street Fighter" machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life's lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you -- bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted -- indeed, we have helped to articulate -- such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
Amazingly, the dumb-male stoner comedy sequel Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Tina Fey's smart female comedy Baby Mama are earning equivalently middling reviews. Harold and Kumar is 53% Rotten on the Tomatometer, and so is Baby Mama. Here are Variety's reviews of Baby Mama and Harold and Kumar. At a Variety conference table meeting last week, one guy asked, "who wants to see Baby Mama?", clearly expecting universal agreement that it was a must-to-avoid. Several women, including me, instantly chimed up, "we do!"
The potboiler Deception, on the other hand, is in the Rotten Tomato doghouse, with a 9 % rotten critics rating.
Kevin Roderick of LA Observed will be discussing the Script Project Right of Way, the collaborative, serialized, noir drama being written by a group of writers online at La Observed, at 4:44 PM Friday on KCRW FM. It will be podcast online at KCRW.com. Right of Way has already moved into the second act with a head of steam. I joined up with the group on Facebook but haven't had the time--or the nerve--to contribute.
Nick Paumgarten's harrowing New Yorker piece details how Businessweek writer Nick White goes out for a smoke one day and is trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. It ruins his life. He wants to blame someone for negligence. He loses his job. And he's still unemployed.
The New Yorker is keeping its profile of the French New Wave's Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard behind its firewall, damn them. (I have a sub, but I can't link to the full profile.) Here's a slide show and audio interview with the writer Richard Brody.
I got a huge kick out of showing Godard's Alphaville to my USC film criticism class. Godard's reviews are fun to read, especially on Hitchcock. It's heady to see his pieces move from an enthusiastic embrace, appreciation and analysis of American movies to full-blown treatises on cinema, as Godard works out his ideas and starts to put them on film.
This ongoing debate about film criticism may be missing a crucial point. When the cinema was still a young medium--and the critics were figuring out their role in relation to it--everyone was making discoveries. The auteur theory was created so that critics addressing a backlog of movies accumulated over decades could codify and index them.
Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were battling over different ways to read movies. Sarris was the more learned and academic; he was really an historian. Kael was a popularizer and passionate advocate, and wrote far more entertaining prose.
We haven't seen their like since for several reasons. The explosion of movies in the 60s and 70s has subsided. Critics became more established, and they stopped arguing about their modes of discourse. In the end, Kael won the battle. Learned auteurist Dave Kehr is not a film critic at the NYT, although many point out that reviewing DVDs is a far better job. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is the quintessential reviewer as entertainer, where it's less about what he has to say than how he says it.
Long revered as a writer of graphic novels (V for Vendetta, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), British writer Alan Moore is going to continue to get more attention as the Warner Bros. movie Watchmen heads for the big screen.
We all know producer Judd Apatow has four movies coming up in 2008. But which ones will work at the boxoffice? By my guess, all of them. It's just a case of how high is high.
I forecast correctly that the musical biopic parody Walk Hard would fail. It was a smart comedy satire of narrow interest to a wide audience, and asked folks to spend entirely too much screen time with John C. Reilly, who is the original definition of a great actor who has to be cast in the right (co-starring) role.
Sight unseen, based on marketing materials and ShoWest reaction, I'm predicting the following:
BOFFO HOME RUN
Step Brothers R (dumb male comedy starring Will Ferrell and Reilly; trailer (below) is hilarious)
SMASH Drillbit Taylor PG-13 (Owen Wilson star power, may have family appeal)UPDATE: Boy was I wrong! Maybe Apatow and Wilson work best in the R-rated universe; also this was a familiar old plot. Bad reviews and poor opening.
Pineapple Express R (stoner comedy)
DOUBLE
Forgetting Sarah Marshall R (relationship comedy, may have femme appeal)
When you think about it, the first inkling that director Spike Jonze wanted to use animatronic puppets for his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are was a warning sign. First of all, just look at Jonze's movies and sensibility and you know he's a maverick indie spirit, an artist. It's no shock that he ran into trouble making a mainstream studio movie with family appeal--especially at straight-arrow studio Warner Bros., which is better at making tentpoles than anything else. Which may be why they gave the guy $80 million??!!
