Everyone knows that there's often less than six degrees of separation among most celebrities in Hollywood, but if you ever wanted to stump your film-buff friends with a great trivia question, just try this one on for size: What do writer-director Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption"), Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, Iggy Pop, writer-director Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner, director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and producer Michael De Luca have in common?
They all, at one time or another, worked on one of the films in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, the low-budget 1980s horror franchise that transformed New Line Cinema from an obscure store-front film distributor into the movie industry's leading independent film studio. Having successfully relaunched two other classic franchises -- "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th" -- New Line, now an in-house production company at Warner Bros., is amid rebooting its seminal "Nightmare" series with a new film that just finished shooting in Chicago last Friday.
Using the same title as the original Wes Craven film, it is a revamped, souped-up version of the old series, with Jackie Earle Haley replacing Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, the menacing, disfigured and claw-gloved figure who had the power to stalk and kill his victims from within their own dreams. The film, slated for release in the first half of 2010, also marks another collaboration between New Line and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production firm, which also partnered with New Line on the successful updating of "Chainsaw Massacre" and "Friday the 13th."
The new film comes with its own set of built-in risks and challenges. The original "Nightmare" series, which was launched in 1984 and ended up -- if you count all the sequels and spin-offs -- spawning at least eight movies, was a low-budget, low-risk enterprise. All of the original films in the series cost under $8 million to make, with perhaps the most lucrative being 1987's "Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," which cost $5 million and made nearly $45 million at the box office.
But much has changed in the horror movie landscape in the last two decades. The movies have become both more sophisticated, certainly in terms of visual effects, as well as more graphic in terms of "Saw"-like brutality and mayhem. For most of today's young horror moviegoers, the "Nightmare" series is something of a barely noticeable video store relic. So why does New Line believe it can make lightning strike twice? And what exactly did all those famous folks I mentioned before do for the franchise? Keep reading:
There's an inevitable arc to the media's insatiable desire to over-cover a story that sells newspapers, scores website hits or earns big TV ratings. I wish I could say that the press has sunk to new lows in its Michael Jackson frenzy, but you could probably track pretty much the same arc in the media's coverage of the early 1920s Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal or Marilyn Monroe's overdose of pills in the 1960s. To put a new spin on the take of a pioneering media critic: Never underestimate the salaciousness of the American people.
So while the first days of the media's wall-to-wall absorption in All Things Michael were largely respectful, culminating with the wide-eyed coverage of what appeared to be a state funeral, the all-seeing media eye has slowly but surely become more skeptical, more trivialized and more bizarre, with even supposedly respectable network news anchors taking us on ghoulish tours of the dead star's deserted Neverland Ranch. And, of course, all of this comes before the arrival of the autopsy findings, which will surely unleash a torrent of revisionism, with media scolds coming out of the woodwork to admonish Jackson for his self-indulgent lifestyle -- and no doubt admonish the rest of us for somehow aiding and abetting his excesses.
So how low have we sunk already? Here's a few juicy current examples:
1) Michael's loyal sibling LaToya gave a truly outlandish interview to the tawdry News of the World (first question: Did she get paid? If not, why talk to a scuzzy tabloid?) In the interview, she claims that "Michael was murdered," offering the inevitable conspiracy angle by adding, "We don't think just one person was involved. Rather it was a conspiracy of people." This, of course, is great stuff. If the Kennedy assassination had a one bullet theory, soon the Michael Jackson death will have a one syringe theory.
2) An obscure Michael Jackson biographer (meaning a guy no one had ever heard of before last week) bounds forward to claim that Jackson was gay, presenting as evidence two men he says he interviewed who both said they had sex with the singer. The great touch of telling detail is that the biographer -- Ian Halperin -- identifies one source as a waiter (which, of course, is a euphemism for aspiring actor), the other as (surprise!) an aspiring actor named Lawrence, only supplying his first name (even though the spelling is a tad different, could we say Lawrence as in Olivier?).
3) The same biographer surfaces in another story, in which he claims that Joe Jackson, the late singer's notoriously all-controlling stage dad, was trying to get Michael's children to brush up on their performing skills and hit the road, going on a world tour in 2010 as the Jackson 3 -- presumably with a record deal to follow.
I'll be watching to see who pops up next, wondering who will tempt the always-easy-to-seduce media with some new fanciful fable of Jackson excess or eccentricity. As in all things media, the only operative question is: How low can we go?
Photo: Michael Jackson at the 2006 World Music Awards. Credit: Dave Hogan / Getty Images.
No one has done more to keep documentaries in the spotlight in America than HBO's indefatigable Sheila Nevins, who's at it again with the launch of HBO's second annual weekly summer documentary series, which begins Monday night with the airing of "Teddy: In His Own Words." The documentary, helmed by Peter Kunhardt, has an especially autumnal feel with Kennedy having been away from the Senate as he continues his battle against brain cancer. The film is clearly an authorized look at the aging liberal icon, who's been a senator since 1962, when Barack Obama was just a toddler. But it doesn't pull all its punches, taking time to show almost as many of Kennedy's missteps as his triumphs.
For me, the best moments are the ones that often get lost in appreciations of the big events of Kennedy's career. The camera rarely lies, so if you watch the grainy footage of the virile young Teddy, running for the Senate for the first time at age 30, you see a man who looks altogether unprepared for higher office, much less the family tragedies still to come. Kennedy tells a revealing story of visiting his brother at the White House when Teddy is preparing for his debut appearance on "Meet the Press," clearly slated to pave the way for the announcement of his Senate run. Worried about his younger brother's lack of experience, JFK, the old pro, grills Teddy, asking the kind of tough questions he expects Teddy will have to answer on the show. It's a sign of Teddy's self-deprecating charm that, to hear him tell the story, JFK was so unimpressed by his answers that he told him to skip going out to dinner, insisting that stay home and come up with some better responses. (The film's footage from the "Meet the Press" appearance allows us to see for ourselves that, early on, Teddy was largely getting by on the strength of his family name.)
One of the other great, rarely seen moments from the film shows Teddy returning to the Senate in the mid-1960s after he'd suffered a broken back in an airplane crash. His brother, Robert Kennedy, then a senator himself from New York, is standing outside, waiting to greet him. What we get to see is RFK spotting Teddy pulling up to the curb, so excited that he starts to dance a little jig, then sprints over to greet his baby brother with a big hug. The documentary has other striking moments. We see Teddy on "The Dick Cavett Show" just days after the Watergate break-in, with Cavett joking that it sounds like a James Bond-style caper; Kennedy campaigning for healthcare legislation way back in 1979, being introduced by an impossibly young Bill Clinton; and the post-JFK and RFK assassination Teddy, surrounded by his family as he announces yet another reelection campaign, looking somber and forlorn, as if he were wishing he could be somewhere--anywhere--else, the mantle of Kennedy-dom looking as if it were far more of a burden than a blessing.
Oddly enough, Kennedy is one of the few politicians who actually looks more comfortable, not to mention more energetic, as he has aged. When you see him in his later years, the young Adonis gone all doughy and white-haired, he finally seems at ease and comfortable in his own skin. He certainly knows how to deliver a roundhouse punch, as he does when he eviscerates some of the Reagan-era cuts in poverty programs by saying, as he shakes his fist in the air: "Ronald Reagan must love poor people because he's creating so many more of them." Once a young idealist, now a lion in winter, Kennedy is someone who was often underestimated, even more often envied, but who turns out to have lived long enough to emerge as a master of the craft of politics. It's nice to see a film that gives us such an intimate view of his life and gives him his due as well.
"Teddy" airs Monday at 9 p.m., again at 10:30 a.m. July 19, 7:30 a.m. July 21, 2:30 p.m. July 25 and 3 p.m. July 29. (Check out our TV critic Mary McNamara's full review of it in Monday's Calendar.)
Photo: A young Ted Kennedy shakes hands with his father Joseph Kennedy in 1938 in London, where the elder Kennedy served as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Photo credit: Hulton-Deutch Collection.
Aaron Sorkin is best known in Hollywood as a screenwriter and TV producer supreme, having put his high-style signature on everything from “The West Wing” and “Sports Night” to “Charlie Wilson’s War.” But now, as Variety first reported Thursday, Sorkin has a new role—he’s the closer on “Moneyball,” the much-ballyhooed baseball movie at Sony Pictures that the studio shut down just days before shooting was scheduled to begin late last month.
The movie, which had Brad Pitt slated to star as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A’s who was the focus of Michael Lewis’ bestselling “Moneyball” book, had its plug pulled after director Steven Soderbergh turned in a last-minute script revision that the studio felt took the film in a radically different, not to mention wildly uncommercial, new direction. But the news that Sorkin has appeared in the bullpen—get used to it, we’re going to employ a lot of baseball lingo here—sends a clear message that Sony is determined to keep the movie alive. The studio has also brought in producer Scott Rudin, who will serve as an executive producer on the project, which already has two producers, Michael De Luca and Rachael Horovitz.
Although I managed to get Amy Pascal to explain her decision to stop production in a post earlier this month, no one at Sony is talking about this new wrinkle, since the studio clearly believes the troubled project has already received far too much media attention. The same goes for Rudin and Sorkin, though Sorkin did acknowledge, via e-mail, that he is “the pinch hitter who’s been called in to start the late-inning rally.”
So why would Sony hire Sorkin when the studio already had a perfectly good shooting script, penned by the Oscar-winning writer Steve Zaillian? The most likely reason: The studio wanted to send a message to Brad Pitt that it was still absolutely, incontestably behind the picture. If Pitt were to walk away from the project, it could deal a fatal blow to the picture, which is already considered something of a commercial risk, since baseball movies have zero appeal outside of the U.S., meaning that the movie would have to make its investment back solely on the strength of its domestic box-office performance. Pitt is considered indispensable, since the studio has always known it had an extremely short list of A-list stars who could be both believable and bankable as the real-life Beane, a charismatic, fortysomething ballplayer turned crafty but cerebral baseball theoretician. When it comes to potential stars, the drop-off after Pitt is steep.
The best way to keep a movie star on the hook with a project is to surround him with enviable, top-flight talent who exude an aura of class and respectability. Hence, the arrival of Sorkin, who isn’t just a gifted writer, but having worked in theater and TV as well as film, brings along an aura of writerly glamour and sophistication to any project. Ditto for Rudin, who has been the producer of a string of classy films, most notably “No Country for Old Men,” the 2007 Coen brothers film that won a best picture Oscar. As executive producer, Rudin brings a level of gravitas to the project, allowing everyone involved—starting with Pitt—to feel that this film could be a player at award season as well as with the masses at the multiplexes.
While Rudin is a canny judge of material, having stockpiled many of the best new novels available, his strength in recent years has also been as a marketing maven, being especially adept at positioning films and helping sculpt their images as critical successes. So it's expected that he would assume the role of the film's godfather, acting as a trouble-shooter, advisor and hand-holder whenever needed, especially during the post-production process.
The true test of the film's viability will be what happens after Sorkin turns in his new draft sometime in August. His script will have to satisfy three key parties: the Sony production brass, Pitt and any potential A-list filmmaker who would be stepping in as Soderbergh's replacement. Sony already believes in the material and it's easy to imagine a host of top filmmakers who'd be eager to work with a major movie star. The real closer will ultimately be Pitt, who has director approval on all his films, but even more important will be judging the script, not just on its intrinsic value, but by how many top filmmakers it brings to the table.
Studio chiefs greenlight movies, deciding which ones end up in the starting lineup and which ones are relegated to the bench. But when it comes to the complicated process of keeping "Moneyball" alive, the ultimate umpire will be Pitt, who will make the biggest call about whether this film, having made it around third base, ends up being safe at home.
Congress manages to waste more time arguing about ridiculously featherweight issues than any other deliberative body known to man. So it's somehow reassuring that the House of Representatives, which normally prefers speechifying over legislative action, especially when it comes to important matters like climate change or healthcare, has pulled the plug on a misbegotten resolution that would have honored Michael Jackson as an American legend and world-class humanitarian.
As the Associated Press reports, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) quashed an effort by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) to honor Jackson with a House resolution. At a news conference today, Pelosi said that "a resolution, I think, would open up to contrary views to--that are not necessary at this time to be expressed in association with a resolution whose purpose is quite different." By the way, if you read, well try to read that sentence again, with its exquisite mangling of the English language, you would have to wonder whether Pelosi and Sarah Palin were schooled by the same public speaking instructor--or just taught how to speak English by Yogi Berra.
At any rate, Lee's resolution now looks like the longest of long shots to ever come up to a vote, especially with the House being full of Jackson critics like Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who has pledged to block any vote, having blasted Jackson as a "pervert and a pedophile."
I appreciate all the cards and letters, wondering if I had flown the coop for good. I guess my editors were too lazy busy to actually alert everyone that I was taking a little vacation time, but it's amazing when you're away for a few days how much you can miss in the always topsy-turvy world of media, sports and pop culture. So let's see, what sort of nutty stuff happened? A few favorites:
1) Rev. Al Sharpton spoke at Michael Jackson's memorial service, telling Jackson's children that "there was nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what he had to deal with," apparently forgetting all of Jackson's strange behavior, obsession with young boys, costumes, masks and plastic surgery--not to mention, when it comes to all-surpassing strangeness, his naming the aforementioned children Prince Michael, Paris and Prince Michael II.
2) Sarah Palin, by way of justifying her abrupt decision to quit her job as governor of Alaska, explained: "Only dead fish go with the flow."
3) Manny Ramirez got kicked out of a Dodgers game, not for tossing his helmet or his bat, but for--gasp!--throwing his elbow pad after getting called out on strikes.
4) Republican Congressman Peter T. King, who usually spends his time praising the IRA or attacking illegal immigrants and Muslims--he once said "there are too many mosques in this country"--lambasted the news media for its fawning Michael Jackson coverage, issuing a statement on Youtube saying, "Let's knock out the psychobabble. He was a pervert, a child molester, he was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what does it say about our country?"
5) Kobe Bryant showed up at Jackson's memorial at Staples Center--did he think the playoffs were still going on?
6) The "Transformers" and "Ice Age" sequels actually ended up in a tie for first place in the Monday morning box-office estimate stories, which of course is the strangest occurrence of all, since what are the odds of two different studios both wildly inflating their weekend box-office and coming up with exactly the same imaginary number? (In the final tally, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" ended up No. 1, with $42.3 million.)
7) Adding to what any Cubs fan will tell you is surely the longest list of bizarre injuries known to man (including the time one of our pitching prospects was hurt after being beaten up by a homeless man at a CIrcle K), starting pitcher Ryan Dempster went on the DL after breaking his toe attempting to vault the dugout railing at Wrigley Field after the team had defeated the Milwaukee Brewers.
Photo of Usher, Rev. Al Sharpton and Brooke Shields at the Staples Center memorial service for Michael Jackson by Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times
When conservatives complain, as they often do, that pop culture is dominated by liberals, lefties and all sorts of eco-nuts, I always feel like responding by saying -- well, how do conservatives ever expect to make a dent if they always seem hostile to virtually every new artist trend or movement, clinging to only what was popular decades ago.
If there were ever a case in point: The Wall Street Journal has launched De Gustibus, a new weekly column today by Eric Felten, which will apparently offer a new take on arts and culture. Felten, who had been writing the "How's Your Drink?" column in the paper's Weekend Journal, offers his take on the motion picture academy's recent move to avoid giving out a best song Oscar unless enough nominees receive a certain minimum amount of votes.
Instead of debating the move on its merits, Felten uses it to take a stroll down memory lane, reliving all the great years -- like 1936 -- when there were tons of great show tunes available for consideration. Even worse, he goes out of his way to disparage modern music, in particular hip-hop, which is compared unfavorably to the wondrous melodies of yesteryear. At one point, he lists a variety of classic songs like "Over the Rainbow" and "All the Way," then saying: "Compare them to the deathless melody honored for best movie song of 2005: 'It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp.' All together now, let's all hum a few bars ... anybody?"
He also takes a shot Eminem, suggesting that no one in years to come will remember "Lose Yourself," the hip-hop artist's best original song winner in 2002, He seems entirely unimpressed by the medley of songs Beyonce sang at this year's Oscars. Once again, it's a lost opportunity for conservatives in their attempt to somehow be relevant in the always turbulent pop culture affairs of the moment. When the right was at its political height, it was because it offered provocative new thinkers with a fresh, unorthodox take on the issues of the day. If the right wants to have the same influence on pop culture, it has to be just as engaged. For a start, it has to get out of the nostalgia business.
Photo of an Oscar by Paul Hawthorne / Getty Images
For most of the 1960s, Hollywood was the last place you'd go to find the pulse of the pop culture. Movie attendance had reached all-time lows. The studios were crumbling -- most film lots were either up for sale, being rented out or looked like decaying junkyards. The movies were so archaic and out of touch with the times that for a three-year period in the mid-1960s, the Oscars for best picture (supposedly marking the best movies Hollywood could offer) went to a string of cobwebby costume musicals and dramas: "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons."
The real excitement was over on the Sunset Strip, where an exciting new generation of bands -- the Byrds, the Doors, Love, the Buffalo Springfield and the Mamas and the Papas, just to name a few -- were popping up on practically every block.
But in 1969, everything started to change. In that year, between April and December, an amazing swell of groundbreaking films opened in Los Angeles and eventually across the rest of the country. They included "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch," "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," "Medium Cool," "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Take the Money and Run" and "Goodbye Columbus." A host of young unknowns became stars overnight, notably Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford, Jon Voight, Ali MacGraw, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould.
Ten years ago, I spent a few weeks digging through the archives and interviewing a host of stars and filmmakers -- some of whom are now deceased -- to try to capture some of the spirit of the times. As the summer goes on, I'll periodically revisit some of the highlights of what these mavericks and rebels had to say about their efforts to topple the old, established order.
If any one incident captured the Young Turks' attitude toward their elders, it would be "Easy Rider" director Dennis Hopper's encounter with the venerable George Cukor at a swank Beverly Hills dinner party. Unhappy with what he perceived as Cukor's dismissive attitude toward his much-celebrated new film, Hopper poked a finger in Cukor's chest and snarled, "We're gonna bury you. You're finished."
So here, in their own words, are some memories from the people who helped change the face of the movie business. Today we hear about the outrageous goings-on during the making of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," Paul Mazursky's 1969 film that offered a breezy, satirical look at the new sexual mores of the time:
When I spent an afternoon talking with Michael Mann about "Public Enemies" last month -- you can see the whole story here -- I asked him, half-jokingly, if he had a technical advisor that helped him with the details of John Dillinger's bank robberies.
Mann is a famously intense stickler for detail. When he shot "Ali," for example, he filmed the scenes of the young champion at home at the boxer's actual house in Miami. In "Public Enemies," Mann shot as many scenes as possible in the spots where they occurred, including the legendary shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in southern Wisconsin, which the filmmaker says looks virtually unchanged, the walls still plastered with yellowing Chicago American newspaper headlines from the Dillinger era.
"I couldn't believe it," Mann told me. "It's exactly the way it was back then. We had Johnny Depp in John Dillinger's real bedroom, lying on the same bed, walking past the same toilet, escaping in exactly the same way Dillinger had. It wasn't just out of same slavish commitment to authenticity. It was just that -- you couldn't dream up anything better than that."
Having grown up in Chicago, Mann knows the city's fertile history of criminal behavior backward and forward. But Mann wanted to imagine what it was like inside a bank robber's psyche, figuring that bank robbing was such a timeless endeavor that even a criminal from today would have a pretty good sense of what the experience felt like 70 years ago. As it turned out, Mann knew a guy who knew a guy named Jerry Scalise, a member of the Chicago Crew, a loosely affiliated crime syndicate that has been involved in all sorts of illegal activity in the Second City dating back to the days of Al Capone.
"Jerry is an armed robber -- he once stole the Marlborough Diamond, which was as big as a grapefruit," Mann explains. "He's a real Chicago guy. He comes from the Near Northwest side, what they call 'The Patch.' We met through mutual friends and you won't find a more articulate, well-read guy, especially when it comes to what Dillinger was thinking about when he was pulling all these heists."
So what did Mann learn from him about the criminal mind-set? "I asked him all kinds of questions. What's the high point of setting up a score? How do you go in strong? I'd say to Jerry, 'If you're planning a score, what's the most tense time? The most anxious moment? How do you feel if you're out in the street and see trouble? Or if something goes wrong and you're the lobby man? What does it feel like when you're going inside, knowing the money is there waiting for you?' "
To hear Mann tell it, the adrenaline high is pretty serious. "After you make a big score, you feel like a king. There's no high like it, walking out, feeling all that money, like it's already in your pocket. People who do it successfully never find anything to replace it. I guess that fits their behavior pattern, since they want to score, and then score again, yet they're never self-aware enough to recognize the pathology of it all. But that's what Jerry was able to help me understand, that the whole thing is such a thrill that you just want to have that feeling, right here, right now. You certainly don't ever think about tomorrow."
There is an art to writing a great headline, one that has found its apogee at the New York tabloids, which has over the years produced such classics as "Headless Body in Topless Bar," "Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye" (upon a narrow miss between Earth and a renegade meteor) and "Close But No Cigar" (commemorating Bill Clinton's wriggling out of a Senate impeachment).
But the British papers aren't far behind. The Guardian has a wacky story about the always-wacky Tippi Hedren (who apparently still hasn't recovered from being in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"). In 2005, the veteran actress adopted Michael Jackson's two pet tigers, Thriller and Sabu, after Jackson had closed his private zoo at the Neverland ranch. They now live with Hedren at her Shambala Preserve, along with 60-odd tigers, lions and other big cats.
So, what happened? I'd say the headline says it all:
"TIPPI HEDREN TELLS MICHAEL JACKSON'S FORMER PET TIGERS OF HIS DEATH"
Hedren says she informed the tigers about the singer's death late last week. "I went up and sat with them for a while and let them know that Michael was gone," she explained. "You don't know what mental telepathy exists from the human to the animal. But I hope they understood."
All I can say is that I hope it was someone with equal sensitivity who broke the news to Bubbles. (A tip of the cap to Kris Tapley for spotting this gem).
Photo of Tippi Hedren from Kevork Djansezian / Associated Press
It's no surprise that many critics are swooning over Michael Mann's new "Public Enemies" thriller (with my colleague Kenny Turan's rave right up at the front of the pack). But now Mann has a new heavyweight critic in his corner: Harvey Weinstein. In a post on today's Daily Beast, the man who has masterminded more Oscar campaigns than anyone else on the planet gives the film the ultimate accolade, saying that after seeing the film, "I can tell you the Oscar race is officially on."
What's especially intriguing about the review, from the vantage point of veteran Harvey watchers, is that Weinstein sees Johnny Depp's portrayal of John Dillinger through the prism of -- surprise! -- marketing savvy. As Weinstein writes about Depp's portrayal of Dillinger:
"It's the character actor as the leading man, it's the awareness, the silences ... but it's also the flinty, self-aware John Dillinger who knows what good public relations is, who knows what his public persona is, who knows what is characteristic of what he would do and what he wouldn't do is, and knows whether an action is something 'that the people would like.' "
Weinstein also compares the film to several other cinema classics, arguing that "Public Enemies," along with "The Godfather," "Scarface" and "The Good Shepherd," are "not only biographies of criminals, but in a way a biography of America -- a more overt biography -- where 'Citizen Kane' is a biography of the American rogue.... This is Michael Mann at the height of his height."
I know I should probably be making some sarcastic remark right about now, wondering if this review is Harvey's audition for a new gig when his company finally runs out of dough. But I think The Big Man actually has a pretty savvy take on one of the film's most intriguing underlying themes.
Harvey, if you're reading this, the next time you want you put on your critic's cap, call us -- we'd be happy to print your reviews right here.
Photo of Harvey Weinstein by Daniel Acker / Bloomberg News
In a move that would finally mean full employment for every great British character actor over the age of 50 in a single franchise, Bill Nighy is telling the British press that he's finally gotten a gig in the long-running "Harry Potter" film series. As reported on Empire magazine's website, Nighy is apparently set to play Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour in the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," which is due out in two parts, starting in November 2010.
In the world of cheeky, insouciant character actors, no one is more wonderful than Nighy, who has enlivened every movie he's ever been in, whether he's playing Davy Jones in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," a brilliant, dissolute newspaper editor in the original "State of Play" British miniseries or flouncing around as a thinly veiled drug-addled Rod Stewart-esque character in Richard Curtis' "Love Actually." Nighy would be a perfect fit for Scrimgeour, who's described in the book as looking like an old lion with bushy eyebrows, tawny hair, yellow eyes and wire-rimmed specs.
True to form, when asked if he was a big Potter fan, Nighy admitted that he hadn't actually -- ahem -- read any of the books yet.
Photo of Bill Nighy by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times
As anyone who's seen "Public Enemies" can tell you, Johnny Depp looks great in a mustache. It worked for George Clooney too. Matt Damon? Not so much. Check out the new trailer for "The Informant!," his upcoming comedy about being an over-eager agribusiness whistle blower:
It's never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down "Moneyball," a $58-million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland A's who almost singlehandedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.
The movie, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, wasn't just in pre-production. It was literally five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film's producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the talent, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made? Will Pitt stick with the project? And what exactly went wrong?
Although stories about the film's abrupt demise have appeared everywhere -- with Variety getting the original scoop -- Pascal hasn't talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a dramatic re-creation than a feature film.
"I've wanted to work with Steven forever, because he's simply a great filmmaker," Pascal told me today. "But the draft he turned in wasn't at all what we'd signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I'd still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did."
Soderbergh's last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like "Entourage's" Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A's couldn't afford.
Soderbergh wouldn't talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian's inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn't happen in real life, it wasn't going to be in the movie. That might make for an intriguing art film, but it clearly was no longer a film that any studio would spend $58 million to make, especially with baseball films having virtually no appeal outside of the U.S.
"Steven wanted to tell the story through these interviews with the real people, as they commented on Beane," Pascal explains. "But there are lots of ways to tell a true story. We were just more comfortable with what we thought was a wonderful draft from Steve Zaillian."
What did Soderbergh do that managed to get Sony to pull the plug on a go movie? Keep reading:
As the Hollywood Reporter reports today, 20th Century Fox has put the brakes on "Unstoppable," the studio's Denzel Washington and Chris Pine-starring thriller that was supposed to start production this fall. The reason: Fox is worried about the film's costs. This may simply be Fox's way of pressuring the stars -- and filmmaker Tony Scott -- into making budgetary concessions. But it hit a big nerve in the talent community, coming after the quick hook Sony Pictures gave "Moneyball" last week, despite the presence of Brad Pitt in the lead role.
What's going on? As my colleague Claudia Eller has astutely pointed out, this summer has been something of a bloodbath for movie-star-driven films. The summer's biggest duds have been films that were carried -- make that supposedto be carried -- by movie stars. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell, "Land of the Lost" is a huge flop, perhaps the year's biggest money-loser. Eddie Murphy was the drawing card for "Imagine That," which bombed at the box office. The presence of Washington and John Travolta did nothing to steer moviegoers into seeing "The Taking of Pelham 123," which surely has played a role in Fox's concerns over bankrolling another Washington-starring thriller.
The lesson? You don't really need movie stars to play in the summer movie sandbox. The summer is becoming a magnet for high-concept comedies ("The Hangover") special-effects extravaganzas ("Star Trek" and "Transformers") and well-crafted computer animation ("Up") that work just fine without any help from expensive star talent.
I suspect this is simply the beginning of a new trend that will only put a bigger squeeze on high-cost talent, who have already been in the process of retooling their back-end money deals as studios have become increasingly wary of doling out millions to stars before they break even on their investments. But here's the real interesting question: What are the movie-star projects due out in the second half of the year that are the biggest commercial question marks?
Here's a list of the films that could prompt anxious studio executives to pop fistfuls of Prozac over the next six months. Keep reading:
Whether it turns out that he died of heart disease, a cocktail of potent prescription drugs or just years of indulgence and excess, one verdict is inescapable -- what really killed Michael Jackson was an overdose of showbiz values. Like so many child stars before him, from Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr. to Tatum O'Neal and River Phoenix and Lindsay Lohan, with about a thousand fifteen-minute one-hit wonders in between, Jackson never found himself a home in the real world.
For Jackson, like so many child stars, show business was his safe haven, the place that shaped his hopes and his dreams, only to drag him into a hellish black hole of unquenchable ego gratification, anxiety, vanity, arrested development, strange obsessions and rampant insecurity. It happens every day -- just look at how oh-so-many Hollywood types measure their self-worth by their weekend grosses, but it's always worst when you find yourself on the cover of Rolling Stone when you're 10. Although his father ruled the family with an iron fist, from the time Michael was 6 he was the acknowledged star of his family's burgeoning music empire, displaying the kind of exhilarating stage persona that helped make the Jackson 5 Motown's last great crossover music act.
It came out only later that Michael bitterly resented being the family meal ticket. Bullied by his father -- he called him his Bad Daddy -- teased by his brothers, who made fun of his big nose, which Michael quickly set about whittling away to practically nothing -- he was, like so many child stars, robbed of any real childhood. He had no friends, only handlers. His only validation was the applause and the acclaim. That's the problem with child stardom -- too often, your only fundamental values are showbiz values, the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd and the amount of zeroes in the grosses.
When your life is defined by showbiz success, you develop a huge hole in your soul, a hole that often gets filled with drugs, booze or other self-destructive behavior. It happens with depressing regularity, whether to O'Neal (who won an Oscar at 10, then descended into a prolonged battle with drugs), Drew Barrymore (booze at 11, coke at 14), Lohan (a Disney star at 12 before a steep descent into DUI arrests, coke and rehab), Macaulay Culkin (from "Home Alone" stardom to abuse of prescription pills) and Corey Feldman (the young star of "Goonies" who quickly became a poster boy for booze, drugs and excess). Not everyone survives, with Phoenix dying of a speedball overdose at 23 and Brad Renfro succumbing to a heroin OD at 25.
Could anything have saved Jackson from his untimely end? Keep reading:
Sacha Baron Cohen operates a bit like the titular character in "The Wizard of Oz": The secrets should remain hidden behind the curtain. When Baron Cohen's "Borat" was released three years ago, the British comedian and his filmmaking team protected their production process the way Coca-Cola guards its recipe. On Monday, however, "Brüno" producer and distributor Universal Pictures released production notes that provided a rare glimpse into how Baron Cohen assembled his July 10 release over the course of 19 weeks of filming.
The notes reveal that there were numerous clashes with authorities, police pursuits, various disguises and a dangerous mob at the film's concluding scene at a mixed martial arts event. Their mantra, learned making "Borat": “Know and obey the law, and always have an escape plan.” If the production information is to be believed, Baron Cohen barely got out alive from any number of threatening situations. "The crew found themselves receiving calls from the FBI warning of death threats and dodging clenched fists, angry mobs and loaded guns at every step of the way," the notes say.
Here are some edited highlights:
Early in the film, Baron Cohen's flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion journalist interrupts the Milan Fashion Week by wearing a Velcro-covered suit that sticks to everything, ultimately sending his character sprawling on the runway during a fashion show. Here's how the filmmaking team snuck in:
"Baron Cohen insisted that they change everyone’s appearance and create an entirely new crew. Director [Larry] Charles shaved his beard and modified his hairstyle; likewise, producer [Dan] Mazer cut his hair, as did other members of the Milanese camera crew. Everyone involved in the final stunt changed his or her outfits....The team secured him the proper credentials, and he walked in…in the guise of an Italian photographer in a fabulous new outfit....Baron Cohen found a hidden nook backstage and transformed into Brüno. He attempted to reduce his rapid breathing as, inches away, models and security walked by him .... Baron Cohen sprinted past stunned models and lunged by waiting security guards. ... Just as the team caught the footage they needed, security shut the lights off and dragged Baron Cohen off the stage. Police cuffed the actor and hauled him to jail while his fellow crewmembers chased him down."
Later in the movie, Baron Cohen and costar Gustaf Hammarsten pretend to be gay lovers with a proclivity for bondage wear. From their hotel room, they call the front desk claiming they have lost the keys to their handcuffs and need to be freed:
"...[W]ord arrived that the police were in the lobby. As Kansas City’s finest rode up the elevator, both men made a mad dash down the emergency exit staircase. To their alarm, they discovered the staircase ended at the second story. They were trapped. It was time to choose between facing the police (read: possible arrest and deportation for the Europeans) and a 15-foot leap to freedom. Both men took the plunge and fled into the escape vehicle."
Baron Cohen and Charles also visited Israel to see how the locals might react to his appearance. The answer was, not kindly:
"Among this conservative community, men and women are forbidden from showing much skin (including legs and arms). In retaliation for his offenses, furious members of the crowd chased Baron Cohen after Brüno took a stroll in skin-tight short shorts and a Little Debbie-inspired bonnet. They were out for blood. A large, angry crowd of Hasidic Jews began to gather, intent upon harming Baron Cohen for his actions. The performer was forced to hide in the store of a compassionate shopkeeper until a van could reach him and assist his getaway. Only then could he hunch down on the floor of the getaway vehicle and avoid the growing potential riot situation."
The film's concluding scene unfolds at an Arkansas arena hosting a mixed martial arts fight card. The first attempt at capturing the crowd's reaction to two men kissing in the ring didn't go quite as planned:
"Moments after the first embrace between the two men, chairs were pulled up and tossed, a fighter who had been watching from the audience climbed into the cage and challenged Baron Cohen to a fight. Director Charles got none of the footage he needed, but Baron Cohen and the crew escaped just in time."
But they found another fight card in a different town, and invited local police along:
"Seconds after the kiss, attendees became furious. Soon after, one member of the crowd unwired a chair and threw it at Baron Cohen’s head. At that point, it was a near riot and the performers were rushed from the premises. Audience members and other fighters alike were screaming epithets and surrounding the bus and the field team. It ended after a stand off that lasted many hours, with 40 police officers from the Fort Smith division helping to rescue the cast and crew and quell the angry mob."
-- John Horn
Photo: Sacha Baron Cohen as Brüno. Credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
There's a great old Mose Allison song called "Your Mind Is on Vacation, But Your Mouth Is Working Overtime" that pretty much captures what happens when people in show business, either through sheer pathological cluelessness or plain old blind arrogance, say incredibly, outrageously dumb things, oblivious to just how idiotic they sound to the naked ear.
I thought it would be fun to collect some of the biggest whoppers of the week, present them for your consideration, and let you weigh in on which remark seems the most preposterous.
We have so many worthy candidates, but here are a few doozies (with some reaction of my own):
Asked to answer Megan Fox's charge that he didn't present her with any acting opportunities in the new "Transformers" film, director Michael Bay said: "You roll your eyes when you see statements like that. I 100% disagree with her. Nic Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in 'Armageddon.' "
Comment: Talk about an eye roller! Nic Cage wasn't a big actor before he met Michael Bay? No, he'd only won a best actor Oscar (for "Leaving Las Vegas") and worked with everyone from Francis Coppola to the Coen Brothers. And Ben Affleck. Oh yeah, he'd already been in "Good Will Hunting," which earned seven Oscar nominations (with Affleck taking home an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Matt Damon). Judging from their post-Bay career trajectory, I'd argue that neither guy ever recovered from working with Mr. Transformers.
Defending his client's mega flop "Imagine That" this week, Eddie Murphy's publicist Arnold Robinson told the New York Times that the movie was not a failure at all, saying, "Paramount Pictures will make money on 'Imagine That' when all is said and done, because it was not an expensive film to make."
Comment: It's one thing to stick up for your client. It's another thing to take a flying leap off an 80-story building without a parachute. As the Times pointed out, Wall Street analysts have already said the movie was such a disaster that the studio may forced to take a write-off because of its dismal performance. If you're a good publicist, when forced to choose between credibility and loyalty, pick credibility every time.
Although she was supposedly a good friend of Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli told CBS' "The Early Show" that Jackson's autopsy results won't be pretty, saying, "All of us who knew him well really know what he was like. And I'm sure that now the accolades are going, and I'm sure when the autopsy comes, all hell's going to break loose."
Comment: With friends like that, who needs enemies? It almost sounds like Liza is relishing the notion of Jackson being dragged through the dirt. Divorced four times, in and out of the tabloids for years for all sorts of erratic, truly strange behavior, Minnelli is the last person who should be tastelessly talking trash about Jackson's messy private life and drug-related problems. Liza, all I can say is: It takes one to know one.
My father loves to brag to his friends that while his son is a big-shot Hollywood reporter, it was his father who actually met Michael Jackson. Until he retired a few years ago, my dad had a store called the 24 Collection on the Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach that specialized in fashion, jewelry, art and one-of-a-kind oddities (I still have a clock set into a Cuban cigar box with a portrait of Fidel Castro on the clock face). One day Brett Ratner, who grew up in Miami and whose mother was a regular customer at the store, called my dad and asked if he could bring his pal Michael Jackson by to look around. As he often did as a courtesy for celebrities who might be annoyed or hounded, my father closed the store that afternoon and put the staff at Jackson's disposal.
"Michael walked around every inch of the store, feeling things, smelling things," my father remembers. "He'd ask questions about what this was or that was, where it was from, how we found it. I made sure the staff didn't intrude on him, although one person did ask for an autograph, which made them an ex-employee right away. But Michael was just off in his own world, curious about everything he saw."
I think my dad got his hopes up when he saw that Jackson was also accompanied by an aide who had a zippered envelope full of cash. But the King of Pop never bought anything. After spending an hour in the store, he just thanked everyone for letting him look around and left.
I called Ratner this morning to ask him how he became such fast friends with Jackson. It turns out that they met in 1998 when Ratner was finishing his first "Rush Hour" picture. One day, Chris Tucker was doing a scene and broke into a wild, Michael Jackson-style dance. The sequence was so funny that when Ratner had test screenings of the film, it got one of the biggest laughs in the picture. But because it was an obvious Jackson impression, Ratner knew he had to clear it with the pop star before he could put it in the movie.
That presented a problem, since Jackson was so reclusive that even Ratner, one of the great celebrity schmoozers of our time, couldn't get to him. He even called Jackson's Neverland ranch but never got anywhere. Then he got lucky. "My editor was talking to the projectionist who ran the final screening and it turned out that he was Michael's personal projectionist," Ratner told me today. "So I gave him the print and asked him to play the beginning of the second reel for Michael, which had Chris' dance in it."
Two days later Ratner picked up the phone and heard the soft, feathery voice of Michael Jackson. So what did Michael say? Keep reading.
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is a fearless, equal-opportunity
offender, but when it comes to jokes about Michael Jackson in Cohen's
new film "Bruno" (July 10), there apparently are limits: at the last minute,
"Bruno's" filmmakers have cut out a sequence about Jackson and his
sister, La Toya.
When the film was shown to audiences several weeks ago, "Bruno"
included a scene where Cohen's title character -- a flamboyant Austrian
fashion journalist -- conducts staged interviews with C-list
celebrities, including Paula Abdul and La Toya Jackson. When Cohen's
Bruno character is interviewing La Toya, he asks about Michael Jackson
and then takes La Toya's personal digital assistant and begins looking
for Michael's telephone number.
Cohen then begins dictating some numbers in German to an assistant
(the suggestion is that they are Michael's phone number) as La Toya
becomes increasingly alarmed by Cohen's conduct, which includes using
kneeling Mexican laborers as chairs). Soon thereafter, La Toya leaves
in the middle of the interview.
But when "Bruno" was shown to Hollywood insiders at the film's
Thursday night premiere, the scene was nowhere to be found. The
sequence was apparently deleted between Michael Jackson's death in the
middle of the afternoon and the commencement of the screening around 8
p.m.
"Out of respect for the Jackson family, the
filmmakers have decided to remove a small scene involving La Toya
Jackson," a Universal spokesperson said Friday.
Patrick Goldstein
has been a film writer for The Times’ Calendar section since 1998 and a contributing writer to the paper since 1979.
His column, “The Big Picture,” offers news and insight on the currents and underpinnings of the film industry.
He also has been a contributing writer to major publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Vogue, the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and British GQ.
He received a master’s degree in English literature in 1976 and a bachelor’s degree in film studies in 1975, both from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
