Roger Ebert can't stand Sarah Palin

It's no secret that everyone is weighing in on politics these days, from David Letterman to Barbara Walters and the esteemed ladies of "The View," who, as the New York Times pointed out, have had Barack Obama, John McCain and even Bill Clinton on their couch, with McCain clearly getting the toughest grilling. But should film critics be weighing in on the presidential race as well? America's leading film critic, the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert, certainly thinks so, and has been on quite a roll lately, writing a series of barbed commentaries about GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

Ebert leaped into the fray with an essay about Palin where he dubbed her the ''American Idol" candidate. Ebert said, in part: "There's a reason 'American Idol' gets such high ratings. People identify with the candidates. They think, 'Hey, that could be me up there on the show!' " Roger added that he didn't want a candidate who simply appointed people to study global warming long after the scientific consensus was in. Nor did he want someone, as he put it, who "sneers when referring to people who go to the Ivy League," noting that as a teenager, he dreamed of going to Harvard, but his dad, an electrician, didn't have the money to send him.

Ebert has also weighed in on Palin's interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson, which he said reminded him of being asked questions by a teacher when he didn't have the foggiest idea what to answer. He's now posted a clever questionnaire about creationism, which Palin believes should be taught alongside evolution in schools. Ebert's questionnaire appears to be a generic critique of the scientific limitations of strict creationism, but ends with an obvious nod to the moose-hunting Alaskan governor, by asking the question: "Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?" Ebert offers the answer: "In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself."

Ebert is hardly the only critic who's begun to focus on politics. When I was up at the recent Toronto Film Festival, I found myself seeing the festival in an entirely different light after reading a variety of posts from New York Post critic Kyle Smith, who had tons of fun mocking a number of lefty-minded films and launching an especially derisive assault on Barack Obama, whom he criticized for being the favored son of various Hollywood liberals, tying Hollywood's worship of Obama to Steven Soderbergh's gauzy-minded view of "Che."    

But back to my original question: Liberal or conservative, should film critics be at work on a second front, offering their take on America's politicians?

Rudin vs. Weinstein: Another clash of the titans?

Does Harvey Weinstein really need another Oscar movie this fall? That's the bottom-line question in what has become a widely discussed disagreement between Weinstein and producer Scott Rudin, who've been battling over whether to release "The Reader" this December, in time for the customary round of awards hoopla, or hold off until sometime next year. The Hollywood Reporter has a good summation of the skirmish today, though, as if often the case with Weinstein, there is probably more here than meets than the eye. Here's the lowdown:

Directed by Stephen Daldry and co-starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, the film is a David Hare adaptation of a Bernhard Schlink novel set in postwar Germany. The film's historical setting, coupled with its actor and filmmaker pedigree, make it prime Oscar bait in what looks like a relatively thin year for best picture material. The biggest problem is that the film isn't finished. Daldry is in the midst of post-production, but has more pressing issues on his plate: He's directing "Billy Elliot: The Musical," which debuts on Broadway in November but goes into previews next week. It would seem impossible for him to complete the film until his Broadway responsibilities are out of the way.

That hasn't stopped Weinstein from a ferocious--some might even say a desperate--lobbying campaign to put the film out this year. Why? As always, Weinstein lives and dies by having his films smack dab in the middle of the awards season horse race, and with his company in perilous financial shape, a big splash at the Oscars might help attract more capital and divert attention from his economic woes. Weinstein already has a film version of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" due in November to go with his recent Woody Allen success "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," but neither one is a best picture shoo-ins. "The Reader," as the Reporter points out, has the kind of pedigree that could put it front and center in the Oscar conversation.

Rudin isn't in such a rush. He genuinely doesn't see the film being ready in time and has plenty of Oscar contenders already at the starting gate, notably Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road" (which stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) and John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," which stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. With all that best acting talent already in the room, having a third Rudin-produced film could create a lot of unnecessary awards-season congestion.

I'm betting that cooler heads will prevail. On the other hand, the last time Weinstein and Rudin crossed swords--over Daldry's "The Hours"--all hell broke loose for a while, with Weinstein demanding editing fixes and going to Paramount behind Rudin's back to try to get the film's Philip Glass score tossed out. Rudin ended up being so furious with Weinstein that he sent the then-heavy smoker a giant cache of cigarettes, urging him to smoke away. Maybe all these machinations will melt away in good time, but you never know--sometimes where there's smoke, there's fire. 

Photo of Harvey Weinstein by Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images for IMG; photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times.

Jeffrey Katzenberg: Still the Harold Hill of 3-D

Ever since I weighed in a week ago on Jeffrey Katzenberg's grand pronouncement that someday soon all movies will be in 3-D (whether we want them to be or not), I've been deluged with an incredible array of impassioned and intelligent commentary on the subject from people far more learned on the subject than myself. But where is Jeffrey? He hasn't returned my calls for years, but that shouldn't stop him from writing a response to my critique.

As it turns out, he actually did write a response that his people sent along to my editors late last week. But alas, the response came with a series of non-negotiable demands, notably that The Times must run his response on the front page of the Calendar section, above the fold--i.e., in the same prominent position that my column originally ran. Although my editors assured him that no one, no matter how much of a Hollywood big shot, had ever dictated that their letter be run on the front page--in other words, not even Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey's old partner Steven Spielberg or the late Charlton Heston, who set the modern record for most letters-to-the-editor by a famous actor--Jeffrey took his marbles and went home.

I'm not allowed to run the letter or quote directly from it, but I will say it was awfully cute, in a sitcomish way--sort of like most of the dialogue in "Shrek 3," with Jeffrey joking that he doesn't have either Harold Hill's charisma or thick head of hair. He said he'd be willing to accept his inner Harold Hill if I'd admit that I was a Luddite when it came to technological change. I'd be eager to debate Jeffrey on the subject any time he wants, but until then, I'm happy to encourage more of my readers to weigh in with their own thoughts on the subject. On Friday, I gave time to Jim Miller, a big 3-D proponent who made an articulate defense of the new medium.

Today, I'm going to turn the mike over Rob Hummel, president of the Digital Cinema division of DALSA, a leading manufacturer of digital imaging components and Machine Vision cameras. Rob has a long resume, having overseen the restoration of "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," served as a senior technology executive at Warners and head of animation technology at DreamWorks. He's not so sure the 3-D boomlet will lead to great movies.

But keep reading--I'll let him speak for himself:

The Emmy Awards: Deja vu all over again

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

The 3-D controversy heats up

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I weighed in earlier this week on Jeffrey Katzenberg's eye-popping prediction that someday soon we will be watching all movies -- not just his DreamWorks animated films, not just Jim Cameron's long-awaited "Avatar," but presumably even films by Wes Anderson, Adam Sandler and Sidney Lumet -- in glorious 3-D. That might be great news for Katzenberg, who's trying to arm-wrestle theater owners into converting more screens to digital projection before "Monsters vs. Aliens" arrives next spring. And that might be great news for the big studio conglomerates, who'd love to have a new technology that allows them to boost ticket prices and promote something you can only experience -- at least for now -- in theaters, where attendance is inching downward. But do we really want to watch "Burn After Reading" or "Juno" or "The Kite Runner" with 3-D glasses on our head?

I've been getting some thoughtful response, both pro and con, to the post, which I plan to share in the coming days. I'd like to start with an especially impassioned reaction from one of my critics: Jim Miller, a partner in Stereo Pictures, a technology company specializing in 2-D to 3-D conversion of film and animation. For years, Miller was a top Warner Bros. executive who was largely responsible for the studio's deals with Arnon Milchan's Regency, Castle Rock and Village Road Show. It took me a little longer to realize that I knew Jim in a wholly different context -- we're both coaches in the same West L.A. Little League where our boys play baseball in the spring. If Jim were as persuasive on the baseball diamond as he was about 3-D, he might find a few more umpires' calls going his way.

He argues that 3-D is no longer a "House of Wax"-style gimmick, but a technology that offers an extraordinarily immersive audience experience. Here are a few excerpts of what he had to say:

DreamWorks is free, free at last!

It's official. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop that DreamWorks SKG is creating a new $1.2-billion company, having concluded its long-anticipated financing deal with Reliance, one of India's biggest entertainment conglomerates. The good news is that DreamWorks is now backed by a mega company that isn't caught up in the Wall Street meltdown of recent days. The new DreamWorks will be run by Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider, with longtime DreamWorks partner David Geffen bowing out of active participation in the company. The move ends a contentious two-year-plus marriage with Paramount Pictures, which was frequently at odds with the DreamWorks team.

So what happens next? DreamWorks still has two sets of closely watched negotiations to complete: a new studio distribution deal for its film product and a severance package with Paramount, which has a host of DreamWorks development projects in hand. (Paramount has been releasing DreamWorks films for the past two years since the company was purchased in 2006 by Viacom, Paramount's parent company.) As I've written in the past, there aren't many serious contenders for DreamWorks product, largely because of all the shrinkage in the marketplace. The most obvious candidate is Universal Pictures, which has had a long, looooong relationship with Spielberg -- he still keeps his Amblin offices on the Universal lot.

But Universal is no pushover. As my colleague Claudia Eller pointed out today, Universal had no problems saying no to Spielberg when he and Peter Jackson went to Universal, hoping for a partner to take some of the financial risk off of Paramount, which is financing their ambitious series of "Tintin" films. Universal would love to have DreamWorks product to beef up its home video pipeline, but the studio's production team might not want the headache of having to fight it out with Spielberg and Snider every year over whose movie gets a coveted 4th of July or Thanksgiving weekend release date.

But the rest of Hollywood is probably celebrating. With so many companies foundering, in a desperate search for funding or totally out of business, seeing DreamWorks back up and running with a nice chunk of cash in the bank is probably music to the ears of agents, producers and screenwriters everywhere. In Hollywood, where everyone is rooting for friends and enemies alike to fail, the one person who gets a big wet welcoming kiss is the new buyer in town.   

Photo: Steven Spielberg. Credit: DreamWorks.

Paging Obama supporters: What's your favorite liberal movie?

Call me crazy, call me irresponsible, call me just darned contrarian, but I'm a lefty who loves to read right-wing blogs. One of my favorites, Dirty Harry's Place, which is run by the screenwriter John Nolte, is the place to go if you want to read the strict conservative constructionist take on why Hollywood liberals are such dim bulbs and phonies. Hardly a week goes by without Dirty Harry taking a nasty shot at what he views as the American-hating excesses of Paul Haggis, Tim Robbins, Barack Obama, anyone involved with Steven Soderbergh's "Che" and -- did I already mention Paul Haggis? I rarely agree with DH's politics, but he writes with such verve and has such an unabashed love of movies that I'm willing to let most of his Sean Hannity-style rants pass.

But today Dirty Harry has something more fun going on. He's asking his readers to vote for their favorite liberal Hollywood film. When I visited the site this morning, "Dr. Strangelove" was winning, with 55 votes; "Apocalypse Now" was in 2nd place with 42 votes; "Planet of the Apes" (I'm assuming since DH is such a traditionalist that we're talking about the 1968 Charleton Heston version) was in 3rd place with 36 votes; "Full Metal Jacket" was 4th with 28 votes and "RoboCop" was 5th with 25 votes (I guess you have to be a real conservative to see "RoboCop" as a liberal movie).

But why should all of Dirty Harry's conservative readers have all the fun? Or unfairly ignore some worthy die-hard liberal entries? I think everyone should head over to Dirty Harry's Place and put some free-thinking cinematic energy into the voting. There are plenty of worthy candidates on his list, including (hint, hint) "MASH," "Three Days of the Condor" and "Thelma & Louise," a movie you'd never expect to see screened in the Alaska governor's mansion. There are also a host of liberal do-gooder films that are faring badly, with hardly any of Dirty Harry's fans voting for "Norma Rae" (no one likes a pushy union activist), "A Civil Action" (big corporations never knowingly poison the populace) and "Missing" (foreign dictators shouldn't be punished for any totalitarian excess). Needless to say, "Reds," Warren Beatty's admiring portrait of John Reed's involvement in the Russian Revolution, isn't faring so well either.

So get over there and vote. It's good practice for that "other" election coming up soon.   

Photo of Paul Haggis by Claudio Onorati/EPA.

Behind the scenes on 'The Express': Part 2

When I was writing the other day about Gary Fleder's "The Express," which tells the soulful story of Syracuse running back Ernie Davis, I mentioned that Fleder had spent a lot of time in recent years directing TV pilots. It's not exactly glamorous work, but I know several directors who say it's been an invaluable educational tool in terms of communicating with actors, experimenting with new technology and being more economical in their work. "If filmmakers would do more TV pilots, they'd probably make movies a lot faster," says Fleder. "It really helps you sharpen your craft."

It's also a great way to meet good screenwriters, which turned out to have a big impact on Fleder's work on "The Express." Although he heaps praise on Chuck Leavitt, who wrote the film's script, after Fleder cast Dennis Quaid as Syracuse football coach Ben Schwartzwalder, he felt he needed a fresh eye to do some rewrites, especially on the film's football scenes. So he turned to John Lee Hancock, the director of "The Rookie" and writer-director of "The Alamo." Hancock and Fleder were pals, having met -- natch -- working on the pilot of a short-lived 1998 TV show called "L.A. Doctors." (Hancock wrote the pilot episode, Fleder directed it.) Fleder turned to the Texas-born Hancock since he was not only a gifted writer but the son of a high-school football coach whose two brothers had played college football.

"John brought a lot of verisimilitude to the story," Fleder says. "He read the script and said, 'Everyone says Schwartzwalder is a great coach, but shouldn't we show it?' And he wrote a great sequence where you see why he's a good coach, drawing up a really innovative offense, as well as see how he worked with Ernie Davis and how Syracuse won football games. It was really good work. I shot the sequence exactly as he wrote it."

Fleder says Hancock also "vetted" all of the sports cliches in the original script. What exactly does that mean, you might wonder? I asked Hancock to explain:    

The Dude and the Spaceman: A new buddy picture?

I've always loved the idea of putting bigger-than-life people together with each other, sort of in the way Tom Stoppard's "Travesties" imagines James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara hanging out with one another in 1917-era Zurich, Switzerland. Today's equivalent? How would you like to roam around modern-day Boston with Jeff Dowd and Bill Lee?

Dowd, a.k.a. "the Dude,"is one of the great iconoclasts of the motion picture world, the wild-eyed film producer and marketing expert who inspired Jeff Bridges' Dude character in "The Big Lebowski." Lee, a.k.a. "the Spaceman," is the famously colorful Boston Red Sox pitcher from the 1970s who feuded with his managers, sang Warren Zevon songs in the locker room, touted Greenpeace and school busing in Boston and claimed that his marijuana smoking made him impervious to bus fumes while traveling to Fenway Park each day.

Is that a marriage made in hipster heaven or what? As it turns out, the Spaceman tracked down the Dude, who's been helping him work on a distribution plan for "High and Outside," a new documentary about Lee's exploits in baseball and afterward. But the guys hit it off so much that about a month ago they met up in Boston, where they filmed a video about the roots of the first American Revolution and the possibility of a new second American revolution. The film, now up on YouTube, shows them walking along Boston's Freedom Trail and offers a rambling portrait of two graying but eternally optimistic activists still eager to change the world.

How did it happen? Trying to get the Dude to offer a concise, focused explanation is a lot like trying to steer a Category 4 hurricane away from the Gulf Coast, but here's what he had to say:

Sex, drugs, nasty language: The world of red-band trailers

In the last couple of years, whenever I've asked studio marketing chiefs to send me trailers to show to my Summer Movie Posse (a group of teenagers who rate the summer flicks after watching their trailers), the smart marketers now say: Can we send you our red-band trailer? Always the last ones on the block to figure out the amazing viral energy of the Internet, studio marketers have finally realized that there's a huge Web audience for red-band trailers -- i.e. trailers that offer unrestricted content, meaning all the gore, drug references, bare breasts or foul language that have to be edited out of the typical trailers shown in theaters or cut down for 30-second TV spots.

The whole red-band trailer explosion isn't exactly a big secret anymore, with nearly every studio outside of Disney putting up racy red-band versions of their latest film ads. (Since we're a blog run by a family newspaper, I'm not allowed to host or link to this material. To watch hilarious new trailers for "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" and "Role Models," just go to YouTube and check them out). If you want to get up to speed on how the explosion happened, Slate's Josh Levin has done perhaps the best piece analyzing the trend, which makes a mockery of MPAA enforcement policy, since it only takes a click of the mouse for anyone on the Web (presumably including my 10-year-old son and all his pals) to find a thousand sites, starting with YouTube, that happily display all the racy trailers.

Levin correctly notes that red-band trailers are anything but deceptive -- in fact, they depict the actual content of a film far more accurately than a restricted green-band trailer. This summer's Judd Apatow comedy "Pineapple Express" was 95 minutes of jokes and gags about pot smoking. But you'd never have known that from the bowdlerized green-band trailer, in which the major concession to the film's subject matter was to show the stars coughing. The red-band trailer began with the line: " ... that's good weed."

As Universal Pictures marketing exec Maria Pekurovskaya told Levin, apropos of the Apatow films that Universal has made in recent years, "On the Judd films, they are the juxtaposition of the really raunchy with the very sweet, and when you can only show half of that equation, you're actually misrepresenting his films. You're doing a bit of a disservice to the audience."

I'd take the equation even further. With studios now able to show all their movie's raunchiest moments on the Web -- home to the key under-30 moviegoing audience -- I'm betting that studios will be more willing than ever to bankroll outrageous R-rated comedies. In the past (meaning last year), Paramount Pictures had trouble marketing the Farrelly brothers' "Heartbreak Kid," in part because the studio couldn't put any of the film's best jokes in its TV spots or green-band trailer. If the studio had a red-band trailer that fans could've passed along to their pals, maybe the movie wouldn't have stiffed quite so badly at the box office.

Don't expect theater owners to take this lying down. They're no dummies -- if their audience can see red-band trailers with one click on the Web, they'll start pushing the envelope in their theaters. The only reason theaters haven't shown red-band trailers in recent years is because the big chains put the kabosh on unrestricted trailers in 2000 after the Federal Trade Commission came down hard on studios for marketing violence to kids. But the ban was strictly voluntary. And as Levin points out in his piece, Regal Entertainment Group, which operates more movie screens that anyone else in the U.S., recently agreed to put red-band trailers on its screens. (The irony being that Regal is owned by family entertainment czar Phil Anschutz, whose film division wouldn't dream of making an R-rated film.) But the walls are coming down. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the popularity of red-band trailers will only encourage studios to make more movies that can take advantage of this renaissance in anything-goes marketing. 

Photo: Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson and Elizabeth Banks in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." Credit: Darren Michaels/The Weinstein Co.