Was that a shocking 'Moneyball' end to the regular baseball season?

After the last home run was hit and the last save was blown during a string of amazing comeback victories and heartbreaking collapses on perhaps the most astounding final night of regular season in baseball history, my son turned to me and said, "Dad, as much as I liked 'Moneyball,' it didn't have an ending anywhere as cool as this."

For a baseball fan, Wednesday night was the ultimate baseball movie, played out on TV in real time. If the Atlanta Braves' collapse was enormous, the breakdown of the Boston Red Sox was even more complete. The Sox started September with a nine-game lead in the race for the American League wild-card birth. They frittered that away until it all came down to Wednesday night, when Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon was about to close out a 3-2 victory, then gave up three straight two-out hits to lose the game.

Just minutes later, the Tampa Bay Rays finished an amazing stretch drive by rallying from a 7-0 deficit against the AL East-leading New York Yankees to win the game, knocking the Red Sox out of the playoffs and making the Rays the most unlikely wild card team. They came back to tie the game with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, thanks to a home run by Dan Johnson, a nobody who had zero hits in September and was batting a lowly .108 overall. The Rays won it in the 12th inning with a home run from Evan Longoria, who is one of the brightest young stars in the game but is paid relatively modestly; the behemoth Red Sox and Yankees each have 13 players on their roster making more than he does. 

If there's a Billy Beane-style "Moneyball" team in baseball these days, it is the Rays. Just as the 2002 Oakland A's celebrated in "Moneyball" were made up of castoffs whose value had gone unappreciated by other teams, this year's Rays are plucky underdogs. Stuck in a tiny media market and saddled with perhaps the worst ballpark in the majors, they are 29th out of 30 teams in payroll, paying their 2011 roster $41.9 million, compared with $196.8 million for the Yankees and $160.2 million for the Red Sox.

The Rays lost a slew of their top stars--and virtually their entire bullpen--to free agency last winter. But the team rebuilt its roster virtually overnight, using many of the precepts pioneered by Beane and sabermetrician Bill James--i.e. finding players who had hidden value. If Hollywood ever wanted to make a "Moneyball" sequel, there would be no more worthy successor to the Beane saga than the unlikely rise to prominence of Rays General Manager Andrew Friedman. Only 34, he was a scrappy Little Leaguer who went to Tulane on a baseball scholarship. After he got hurt and left the game, he ended up as a financial analyst for a variety of investment banking firms, including Bear Stearns.

When the Rays ownership plucked him out of obscurity to help run the team, old-time baseball people scoffed, just as they had when Beane brought in Paul DePodesta to help him make personnel decisions. But Friedman has made so many shrewd moves that his skeptics have been silenced. It remains to be seen how far the Rays can go in the playoffs, but they have such a well-stocked group of young talent coming up from the minor leagues that they could be a force to be reckoned with for years to come, even playing in the same division as the Yankees and Red Sox.

And when it comes to comebacks, nothing may ever equal what the Rays did Wednesday night. If anything could do justice to the spirit of "Moneyball," it was seeing the Rays celebrate on the field, knowing they had overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve victory. We often pay tribute to the great moments of suspense and surprise in our movies, but no cinematic storyteller could top the drama that unfolded at Tropicana Field. 

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Photo: Tampa Bay Rays swarm around Evan Longoria following his 12th inning home run to beat the New York Yankees at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla. Credit: Brian Blanco/European Pressphoto Agency 

 

'Moneyball's' Michael De Luca: Rick Perry not ready for prime time

When Michael De Luca was on the film-festival circuit earlier this month, touting two films he'd produced -- "Moneyball," which just opened this weekend, and the upcoming political satire "Butter" -- he managed to lose his California driver's license. When he finally went to the DMV to apply for a new one, he also was given the option to update his voter registration, and was asked to declare his political party affiliation.

He opted for Democrat. In la-la-liberal Hollywood, this would hardly be a shock, except for the fact that in recent years, De Luca had been a vocal convert to the Republican cause. A longtime political junkie, De Luca had abandoned the Democrats after 9/11, believing that the GOP had the right muscular approach to national defense at a time when the country was engaged in a war on terrorism. When I staged a mock Hollywood debate during the 2004 election, De Luca happily argued for George W. Bush, with fellow producer Lawrence Bender taking the liberal position. De Luca cast his presidential ballot in 2004 for Bush. And when Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor in 2006, De Luca voted for him too.  

In 2008, even though his foreign policy views were more in line with those of John McCain, he voted for Barack Obama, believing he could steer the country out of the Great Recession. But even though De Luca remains skeptical of Obama -- "I still think he's a hopeless amateur in a lot of ways" -- he is even more disenchanted by the Republican presidential field. Call him a political contrarian. At a time when so many liberals are disenchanted with Obama that The Hollywood Reporter just ran a big story headlined "Disappointed Hollywood Giving Obama Cold Shoulder," De Luca is willing to give Obama a second chance.

The recent Republican debates were the clincher. "Watching them on stage, there were just too many Republicans saying crazy things that didn't make any sense," he told me Monday. "I just couldn't connect with anyone there. Normally I'd be attracted to Romney, but he doesn't even seem willing to stand behind his own ideas. I have a lot of problems with Obama's health care plan, which in some ways offers up the worst of all worlds, but we're really in a bizarre alternate universe when Romney can't brag about what he did to help people out with his own health care program in Massachusetts just because it goes against the party's orthodoxy."

De Luca is also appalled by what he calls a Republican "jihad" against government spending designed to get the economy back on track. "Obama may have taken a real wet noodle approach," he says. "But at least he's trying to do something. [Mitt] Romney and the other Republicans are buying into this deficit-reduction craziness, which is a disastrous scenario in the middle of what's becoming a double-digit recession. And at the debate, they seemed to care a lot more about social issues than getting America back on track. The country is melting down and they're arguing about the HPV vaccine."

He wasn't impressed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry; De Luca said that, judging from his debate performance, the candidate was "clearly not ready for prime time." 

So isn't De Luca worried about being labeled another latte-sipping Hollywood liberal? "Not me," he said. "I'm still not comfortable being around all the hard-core lefties who believe that America was conceived in original sin. I believe in American exceptionalism. Our experiment in democracy, as constructed by the founding fathers, is better than any form of government in any other place in the world."

If New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were in the presidential race, De Luca -- who grew up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn -- might still end up voting Republican. But for now, he's on the Obama team. "Call me a flip-flopper, but as long as the Republicans are going to use the economy as a political football at a time when jobs and people's livelihoods are at stake, I'm going to hold my nose and vote for Obama. I guess that makes me a conservative Democrat, but right now, that's better than being a nutty Republican."

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-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Michael De Luca, right, with producer Lawrence Bender, photographed after a mock presidential debate in Los Angeles in 2004. Credit: Los Angeles Times

'Moneyball's' biggest believers? Hint: The entertainment business

One of the biggest misconceptions about the book “Moneyball,” the Michael Lewis bestseller about the low-budget Oakland A’s’ pathway to baseball success, is that it was about the triumph of statistical analysis. Now that the book has been turned into a film, with Brad Pitt starring as the A’s iconoclastic General Manager Billy Beane, many critics are making the same mistake, viewing the film as an endorsement of the idea that if you’ve run the numbers long enough at business school, you can use statistics to make smart bets.

But “Moneyball” is really about something even more fundamental: how being an outsider encourages innovation. Beane got the idea of using arcane information like a player’s on-base percentage to build a better baseball club from reading the groundbreaking writing of sabermetrician Bill James. But what Beane grasped was a truth that transcended statistics. As Lewis puts it in the book: “James had something to say to Billy, or any other general manager of a baseball team who had the guts, or the need, to listen: If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.”

This is something people in the entertainment business discovered nearly a century ago. In fact, the history of the movie, TV and music business is crowded with characters not unlike Beane, restless mavericks whose willingness to embrace new ideas was far more crucial to success than having unlimited financial resources. In other words, if you study the most successful companies in showbiz, they started out looking a lot more like the scrappy Oakland A’s than the deep-pocketed New York Yankees.

As the film illustrates, Beane was faced with a stark choice when it came to running his business. In 2002 the A’s, with a payroll of roughly $40 million, were competing against the New York Yankees, who had a payroll of $126 million. Today in baseball, as in the rest of America, the disparities between the rich and the poor have grown even wider. At the beginning of the 2011 season, the Yankees had a payroll of $211 million while a small-market team like the Kansas City Royals had a payroll of $36 million.

To compete with the fat cats, the little guys had to be willing to take risks. In fact, if you were looking for a striking parallel to the way Beane found success with the A’s, go back to the 1920s, when a small group of companies controlled most of the movie business. One of the most aggressive outsiders was a small, underfunded operation called Warner Bros., whose biggest box-office draw was a dog, Rin Tin Tin.

Jack Warner was looking for something — the 1920s equivalent of on-base percentage — that would give him an edge over the competition. He found it via a new technology — equipment that would usher in, via Warners’ smash hit “The Jazz Singer,” the era of sound films.

The established studios — the Yankees of the time — were content to embrace the status quo, worried that experimenting with sound might lead to years of financial upheaval. But Warner viewed sound as an opportunity to break into the top echelon of the industry.

In “Moneyball,” Beane clashes with his veteran baseball scouts, who were up in arms when he decided to risk a first-round draft choice on a tubby catcher just because he had a knack for getting on base. The reaction was pretty much the same when Warner decided to roll the dice with the untried new technology of synchronized sound. As he told an interviewer: “Every worthwhile contribution to the advancement of motion pictures has been made over a howl of protest from the standpatters, whose favorite refrain has been, ‘You can't do that.’ When we hear that chorus now, we know we must be on the right track.”

Since then, small companies have been at the forefront of nearly every major every artistic breakthrough in the entertainment business. On the music side, for example, tiny Sun Records spearheaded the revolution that ushered in the rock era. After spending years promoting black blues artists, Sun founder Sam Phillips had a Beane-style revelation: To reach the huge untapped market of white teenage America, he needed a white singer — Elvis Presley, of course — who could embody the seductive sexual energy of the African American artists Phillips had been recording in his Memphis studio. Nearly every music movement since has been shepherded by outsiders who outhustled their corporate competition.

No one knows this better than “Moneyball” producer Mike De Luca, who was the longtime president of production at New Line Cinema. One of the last studios to be operated by its founder, Bob Shaye, New Line was for years the movie industry’s equivalent of the A’s, having survived by being more nimble and daring than its media conglomerate rivals.

Just as the A’s drafted ballplayers who were undervalued by other teams, New Line made deals with talent, especially young, unheralded comedians, who had little appeal for big studios. “The whole ‘Moneyball’ idea was our mandate at New Line, in the sense that we saw value in people that the studios didn’t want or had overlooked,” says De Luca. “That's how we ended up making movies with Jim Carrey, who was an unknown, or Mike Myers, who was coming off a big flop, or Adam Sandler, who Universal had dropped.”

New Line grabbed filmmakers who were undervalued as well, which is how it ended up with “Lord of the Rings” Svengali Peter Jackson, who was virtually unemployable after directing a bomb called “The Frighteners.” New Line also made profits by marketing comedies such as “Friday” and “House Party” to African American moviegoers, who were often ignored by the bigger studios.

“We’d often lose our best filmmakers and stars to big contracts at the studios, just as Beane lost Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon to the Yankees and the Red Sox,” says De Luca. “But being the little guy forced us to be more entrepreneurial.”

In fact, after being sold to Ted Turner, who then sold his company to Warners, New Line ended up being a cog in a big media conglomerate itself.

“Moneyball” is being released by Sony, yet another big media entity. Today’s studios and TV networks all look a lot more like the Yankees than the A’s, being media giants whose products are aimed at global consumption. You don't see many restless mavericks beating down the doors of the movie business anymore. Many of the people running today’s studios are Ivy League grads and MBAs — in other words, managerial types, not shoot-from-the-hip Beane-style dreamers. For now, the mavericks have gravitated to places like Apple, Google and Facebook, which are more open to imagination and innovation.

Nonetheless, “Moneyball” is a fascinating example of a movie that while on one level is about our national pastime is also a story that illustrates something equally American — the embrace of an unconventional new idea.

--Patrick Goldstein

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Photo: Brad Pitt, right, posing with current Oakland A's designated hitter Hideki Matsui, at the premiere of "Moneyball" in Oakland earlier this month. Credit: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

 

The virus of 'Contagion': What are moviegoers really scared of?

Is it really a big surprise to discover that while America is enduring its worst economic downturn in 70 years and experiencing a paroxysm of partisan political infighting that the No. 1 movie last weekend was “Contagion,” which depicts a planet overwhelmed by a mysterious virus threatening the lives of millions? When people are beset by anxiety, they often turn to movies that allow them a vicarious release. As the crafty marketers at Warner Bros. put it on their movie poster: “Nothing Spreads Like Fear.”

It is probably no coincidence that these times of economic gloom and doom have also spawned a wave of alien invader films, including such hits as “District 9,” “Battle: Los Angeles” and “Super 8.” There is more to come, with a remake of “The Thing” arriving in theaters next month. Of course, it’s easy to shrug off an alien invasion as a popcorn fantasy. What makes “Contagion” so potent is its knockout punch of plausibility — the movie’s story is so deeply rooted in actual scientific research that screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who began writing the movie several years ago, held off finishing the script until he could follow the outcome of the 2009 swine flu epidemic.

What I found most intriguing about the Steven Soderbergh movie was how closely it resembled “Panic in the Streets,” an equally unsettling thriller made in 1950 by the fabled Elia Kazan. Shot on location in New Orleans with boogie-woogie piano and blowzy jazz blaring in every dockside cafe, “Panic in the Streets” is about the desperate efforts of a public health officer, played by Richard Widmark, to stop the spread of pneumonic plague before it infects the city’s populace and perhaps the entire world.

Photos: Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard and Michael Douglas at the 'Contagion' premiere

Although the movies are separated by 60 years and all sorts of scientific advances, they have a lot in common, both in terms of what they tell us about their filmmakers and the eras when they were made.

Though we look back at it as a time of tranquillity, we were equally alarmed at the dawn of the 1950s, when America was unnerved by Cold War anxieties sparked by the spread of communism throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. Just as “Contagion” arrived in the same year as a host of alien invader films, “Panic in the Streets” came at roughly the same time as a string of paranoid thrillers, including 1949’s “DOA” and 1951’s “The Thing From Another World.”

By the time “Panic in the Streets” was released, Hollywood was in turmoil as well. The era of loyalty oaths and House Committee on Un-American Activities investigations had arrived, with stars and filmmakers forced to disassociate themselves from any links with left-wing activities. This hit especially close to home for Kazan, a onetime communist who’d just finished making a number of unabashedly socially conscious films. When Cecil B. DeMille tried in 1950 to pass a Directors Guild bylaw that would institute a loyalty oath for the guild, it was Kazan who helped edit the speech delivered by guild chief Joseph Mankiewicz that turned the tide against DeMille’s crusade.

One of the best performances in “Panic in the Streets” is delivered by Zero Mostel, who was already in trouble for his associations with left-wing organizations. Kazan told 20th Century Fox that he wouldn’t make the film without Mostel, who was later named as a communist at a HUAC hearing and didn’t work again in the movies until the mid-1960s. (Kazan himself became a pariah with the Hollywood left for naming names when he testified before Congress in 1952.)

Made in such an anxious time, “Panic in the Streets” shares a number of affinities with “Contagion.” Both movies feature unflappable health officials — Widmark in “Panic,” Laurence Fishburne in “Contagion” — who are flawed heroes, each man making mistakes of judgment during the crush of crisis. Both films show the press covering the epidemic but in ways that offer very different perceptions of the media. The reporter character in “Panic” is just a working stiff doing his job. In “Contagion,” the media character is far more unsympathetic, a reckless tech blogger, played by Jude Law, who posts preposterous half-truths and promotes a worthless herb as a virus antidote.

The movies are products of their times. “Panic in the Streets” reflects a post-World War II liberal ideal. Even though Widmark, as a college-educated health officer, initially clashes with the blue-collar New Orleans police captain overseeing the case, the men overcome their differences and work together to squelch the outbreak. Although it would be a stretch to call “Contagion” a “tea party” movie, it does reflect much of today’s anti-government and anti-corporate sentiment.

After all, Gwyneth Paltrow, who is the movie’s Patient Zero, works for the sort of soulless global conglomerate that you can imagine taking American jobs overseas to places like Hong Kong, where the contagion begins. It is also telling that in the frenzied scramble to identify the virus, the person who finally hits pay dirt is not a government expert but an independent virologist.

As artists, Soderbergh and Kazan have a lot in common, both being fiercely personal filmmakers who managed to craft enough hits to survive in Hollywood. Although Soderbergh launched the indie film movement with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” most of his idiosyncratic films since (“Solaris,” “Bubble” and “The Girlfriend Experience”) have been so chilly that they have rarely connected with anyone outside of a few art-house cognoscenti. His most assured work has been Hollywood genre fare, notably the thriller “Out of Sight,” the star-studded “Ocean's” heist series, the uplifting “Erin Brockovich” and now “Contagion.”

Kazan was as critically respected as Soderbergh when he made “Panic in the Streets,” perhaps even more so, since he was also the country’s top theater director at the time. But the film marked a breakthrough for Kazan, not only because it introduced him to the streetwise energy of location shooting that he later used to great effect in “On the Waterfront,” but it inspired him to embrace the same kind of genre filmmaking that has inspired Soderbergh’s best work.

As Kazan told writer-producer Jeff Young in the book “The Master Director Discusses His Films,” “I decided that since 'Panic' wasn't deep psychologically, not to pretend that it was. It was a big lesson to me. That's what hamminess is, pretending there is more in something than there really is. There's no harm in saying, 'This isn't very deep. It has other virtues. It has lightness of foot, it has surprise, it has suspense, it's engaging.' “

Six decades later, “Panic in the Streets” remains just as engaging as “Contagion,” in part because it was intended as suspenseful entertainment, not message-oriented drama. The movies that linger the longest in our imagination are the ones in which the messages are buried beneath the surface. We are afraid, very afraid today — of losing our jobs, of living in a country caught in a downward spiral. When we see movies like “Contagion” or “Panic in the Streets,” where people work together to defeat an insidious virus, it gives us a dose of optimism about fending off all the other insidious forces at work in our lives. At the movies, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

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Photo: Steven Soderbergh at the Sept. 7 premiere of "Contagion" at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Credit: Evan Agostini/Associated Press

A Hollywood Riddle: Why do we always think current movies are worse than ever?

In the middle of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” Owen Wilson’s character finds himself mysteriously transported to the Paris of the 1920s, which is populated with a host of cultural icons, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The awestruck Wilson tells a lovely Parisian woman how lucky she is to be living amid so much artistic royalty. But she is only impressed when they travel even further back in time, to an 1890s-era salon where they rub elbows with Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin.

There’s nothing special about the ’20s, she says with a jaded shrug. The 1890s — ah, that’s when culture was really artistically thrilling. In a nutshell, that’s been our attitude toward most pop culture, especially Hollywood movies. No matter what era we live in, we always see the present as a cultural junkyard, littered with flotsam and dreck that couldn’t hold a candle to the glory days of the past.

That’s why it should have been no surprise to hear DreamwWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg say this summer that the movies from the past eight months were “the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.” He bluntly added: “They suck. It’s unbelievable how bad movies have been.”

While it may have felt a bit jarring to hear one of the industry’s most powerful personages offer such a bleak assessment of today’s films, it turns out that Katzenberg is just the latest in a long line of doomsayers. It was barely a year ago that Joe Queenan took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to where he argued that “2010 very possibly is the worst year in the history of motion pictures.”

In fact, even if you return to the supposed golden eras of filmmaking, you can find all sorts of influential critics and industry notables striking an equally gloomy note. In 1980, Pauline Kael bemoaned the state of filmmaking in Hollywood in a New Yorker essay titled “Why Are Movies So Bad?” Even though in 1979, the year before Kael penned her piece, Hollywood had produced such films as “Apocalypse Now,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Manhattan,” “Being There,” “All That Jazz,” “Norma Rae” and “The China Syndrome,” she wrote: “The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience — they’re inheriting an audience.”

In the early 1950s, the fabled producer David O. Selznick was just as dispirited about Hollywood’s track record, saying “Thirty years — and one good movie in three years is the record.” In January 1945, looking back at the previous year’s releases, the noted critic James Agee said it had been “a sorry year” for filmmaking, even though 1944 had produced such classics films as “Laura,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” “Double Indemnity,” “To Have and Have Not” and “Going My Way.”

As far back as 1928, when Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Josef von Sternberg were at the height of their powers, the Film Spectator’s Conrad Nagel sounded like he’d just emerged from a 2011 multiplex, writing: “Stories have become such familiar formulas and casts so stereotyped that a picture-wise audience can tell what will happen after seeing just the first reel of the average production.”

So why is everyone always so despondent about the movies? One reason is cultural nostalgia, a longing for a time of sturdier values that is hardly limited to the realm of film. The past always looks rosier than the present, which is why generations of politicians have promised to return voters to a simpler, gentler time when it was, to use Ronald Reagan’s artful phrase, morning in America again. Although it would be hard to imagine a time when we had a lower opinion of our political system’s ability to solve the country’s problems, when H.L. Mencken returned from the 1924 Republican National Convention he was appalled by the “vulgarity, imbecility and pathological stupidity” of the politicians on view, especially when he compared them with the “urbane and civilized” politicians of the past.

In fact, the more you think about it, movies aren’t the only objects of cultural nostalgia. Broadway has never been more commercially successful, but it would be hard to find a theater critic who would claim that Broadway’s current assembly line of glitzy remakes and revivals could hold a candle to the mid-20th century glories of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. Ditto for pop music, which most critics would say is at a low ebb of artistic innovation today, especially compared to the burst of creativity and experimentation that the medium enjoyed first in the 1960s and then again in the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Age is a big factor. I have a young teenager in my house, and he likes modern-day movies, music and TV shows just fine. Most of the people who think movies are worse than ever are, ahem, old — at least old enough to remember exactly when movies felt special, which is usually when they were young themselves. Everyone I’ve quoted grousing about the movies was middle-aged when they were grousing. We have a special emotional bond with the cultural artifacts of our youth, which is probably why I can still remember the lyrics to every song, good or bad, that was on the Top 40 when I was in seventh grade.

“It’s hard to break out of the nostalgia we have for the movies of our youth, probably because the movies that feel the most fresh and special are the ones you saw when you first learned to love movies,” admits Peter Rainer, the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor. “Intellectually, you grow out of it, but not emotionally. I grew up seeing crummy Hollywood movies from the early 1960s, so I have to admit it — I still like ‘Cleopatra.’ ”

Ask baseball fans to name their favorite player of all time and they’ll inevitably choose someone from their youth. Albert Pujols and C.C. Sabathia may be rolling up incredible career statistics, but would anyone over 40 pick them over Willie Mays or Sandy Koufax? I doubt it. The same logic applies for movies. Film junkies love to point to 1939 or 1969 and marvel at the amazing glut of dazzling films. It’s true. Those were great years for movies. Of course, no one mentions all the dreck, conveniently forgetting that in 1969, “The Love Bug” was a bigger hit than “Easy Rider.”

In pop culture, we have a selective collective memory, savoring the gems, forgetting the junk. As we get older, we grow fonder of the artistic joys of our youth. So maybe the movies are worse than ever, but I’m betting that it won’t be too many years long before some grumpy critic, faced with another horrifying assemblage of reboots and super-hero extravaganzas, comes to the conclusion that 2011 wasn’t such a bad year at all.

— Patrick Goldstein

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Photo: Daniel Craig, left, with director Jon Favreau on the set of "Cowboys & Aliens." Credit: Zade Rosenthal / Universal Pictures / Associated Press

 

Rick Perry biopic watch: Which actor can fill his cowboy boots?

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it today, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's now running for president, is "the conservative id made flesh." He's got swagger, backbone, core convictions and a killer instinct. In other words, he's another bigger-than-life Texan, somewhere between John Wayne in "Red River," Paul Newman in "Hud" and Larry Hagman in "Dallas."  

When a new out-sized politician shows up on the national scene, it's always tempting to try to  imagine who could play him in a movie, the way Josh Brolin handled George W. Bush in "W" and John Travolta did Bill Clinton (disguised as Jack Stanton) in "Primary Colors." With Perry, who grew up in the hardscrabble West Texas town of Paint Creek before becoming a yell leader (translation: male cheerleader) at Texas A&M, it would have to be a real Texan.

More importantly, if you know anything about Texas, it would have to be someone who understands the brooding restlessness of the flat lands of West Texas, which has been the locale for so many terrific movies, including "The Searchers," "Hud," "The Last Picture Show," "Tender Mercies" and "No Country for Old Men."

There are a whole lotta Texans in show business, but most of 'em are what we might call modern Texans--folks like Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, T-Bone Burnett, Rick Linklater and Tift Merritt, who are just as sophisticated as any high-brow types from the Upper East Side or Beverly Hills. Even if Perry could probably name a few tunes by local boys like Willie Nelson and ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, he's a throwback to the kind of breezy self-made hustlers from "Dallas" and the rough 'n tumble cowboys who populated a lot of Larry McMurtry's early novels. Perry would be right at home with big-hat Texans like natural gas tycoon T. Boone Pickens, Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.   

With that kind of natural-born bluster, Perry would be easy to caricature, especially in the hands of some unsympathetic Hollywood liberal. But I think the one actor who could capture Perry without turning him into a cartoon figure would be Tommy Lee Jones. He's a few years older than Perry, but he has the right kind of physicality to play the governor, who like a good actor has a knack for taking over a room.

Jones grew up in West Texas himself, where he still has a couple of big ranches. And he has the same kind of roughneck charm that seems to have made Perry an instant hit on the GOP presidential circuit. Would Jones ever do it? Perhaps not. After all, despite his Texas bona fides, he was also Al Gore's roommate at Harvard and a longtime supporter of Democratic causes. But Jones has the same kind of Texas orneriness that led Perry to once flirt with the idea of seceding from the rest of the country.

No one is as ornery as a long, tall Texan, so I expect that we're going to be seeing a lot of Rick Perry over the next year. Politically, I'm no fan of a governor who has presided over a state that's dead last in a bunch of education categories--like kids who've earned high school diplomas by the time they're 25. But no one should underestimate Perry. Like him or not, he's a lot like the character Jones played in "Lonesome Dove"--he's one tough hombre.

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Photo: Texas Gov. Rick Perry on his first presidential campaign trip to Iowa at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images 

No hacking at the N.Y. Post, says former N.Y. Post hack

Jared Paul Stern certainly doesn’t have the warm fuzzies for his old employer, the New York Post. The one-time contributor to the Page Six gossip column was driven out of the tabloid after accusations, never proven, that he tried to extort money to keep one high-profile magnate out of the headlines.

But despite his estrangement from his former employer, Stern said in an interview this week that he doubts Rupert Murdoch’s rambunctious  U.S. publication has employed the phone hacking and police payoffs that were endemic at its British cousin, the now-shuttered News of the World.

“Their whole game is more sort of intimidating people or cozying up to people to get information,” Stern said the other day of gossip reporters at the Post. In more than a decade contributing to Page Six he said he never saw or heard of phones being improperly accessed. The only payments, minimal ones, went to public relations types who acted as virtual stringers for Page Six, Stern said.

Not that Stern attributes the failure to employ the so-called “dark arts” on any particularly high motives on the part of Post gossip writers.

“They couldn’t hack an electric toothbrush there,” Stern said. “There are no techno-whizzes to figure it out and they don’t have anything like the budget of those British papers. The Post hemorrhages money. They don’t have the budget for any extras.”

The Post has been reported to lose tens of millions of dollars a year. News Corp. leader Murdoch is said to keep the paper going because of his love of tabloids and because of the political leverage it gives him in America’s biggest city.

Stern experienced a brief and unwanted celebrity in 2006 when one-time supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, a close friend of former President Clinton, accused the tabloid reporter of trying to pry money out of him in exchange for keeping Burkle out of the Post.

Burkle videotaped a couple of his meetings with Stern and federal prosecutors investigated the case as a possible extortion before deciding not to file charges against Stern. The writer subsequently sued Burkle, Clinton and others, claiming that they had tried to ruin his reputation. A judge tossed the lawsuit out.

Now Stern said he is working on various projects, though he declined to go into much detail. His website on style had new entries as recently as this summer. And he suggests that his proposed memoir on life in the tabloid lane, dropped by one publisher, might have new life given the scandals sweeping the industry.

“The stuff going on now is breathing some new life into it, so I am reworking it,” Stern said of the book. “It definitely has a lot more relevance and appeal.”

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-- James Rainey

Twitter.com/latimesrainey

Photo: One-time New York Post gossip writer Jared Paul Stern, who contributed to the paper's Page Six column, said he never heard of phone hacking or big-money payoffs while he worked for the tabloid. The paper's British cousin, News of the World, was closed after its use of the "dark arts" caused a scandal in Britain. Credit:  Shiho Fukada / Associated Press.

 

'Smurfs' producer's other job? Film school dean

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

Veteran movie producer Jordan Kerner spent nearly 10 years finding a way to make “The Smurfs,” which earned $35.6 million in its U.S. opening last weekend. But it’s not his long track record in Hollywood, which includes producing everything from “Less Than Zero” to “The Mighty Ducks,” that interests me most. It’s his other job: dean of the school of filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

I went to film school myself at Northwestern University, back in the stone age, when we still shot with 16mm cameras, lugged around Nagra sound recorders and edited footage on ancient Moviolas. We'd occasionally be treated to lectures from visiting filmmakers, who'd regale us with tall tales about their exploits. But if you wanted any real-life experience, you had to move to Los Angeles and find a job. Thanks to Kerner’s innovative ideas, undergrads at UNCSA are getting an education not just in theory and production, but in the often less-than-glamorous aspects of life in the trenches of Hollywood.

Kerner has recruited a host of faculty members who still have their day jobs, which helps give students a grounding in the kind of pragmatic problem-solving necessary to survive on a film set. Through a shadowing program, students get to spend weeks at a time on movie sets, seeing their professor (or in the case of Kerner, their dean) in action. Nearly 80 students spent time on “Smurfs.”

“We set it up as part of our internship program, but not just to get coffee, but to see how movies are really made,” he told me the other day, sitting in his office on the Sony lot. Every two weeks, a new group of students would establish residency on the film, listening to budget discussions he would have with the studio or sitting in on script revision meetings among Kerner, the screenwriters and director Raja Gosnell.

“During the shoot, if Raja went up to talk to an actor, our kids would be right there with him. They also got to spend time with our editors, visual effects supervisor, sound designers and other crew members. Sometimes the discussions were difficult, but that was the whole point--it's a way to learn the whys and why nots of filmmaking.” (It being 2011, students had to sign release forms promising not to blog about what they saw.)

From the point of view of Andrew Porter, a 2010 graduate of the school's screenwriting program, the shadowing experience on “Smurfs” was an eye-opener. “It was pretty amazing to watch the drafts of all the scripts come through, and see what stayed and what was replaced,” he recalls. “The script really evolved a lot. In one draft you'd see some part of the story that you thought for sure would stay, and then it would be gone. But after you got to hear all the discussions, you'd realize why they'd made the changes.”

Tom Ackerman, a veteran director of photography on such films as “Anchorman” and “Balls of Fury,” has been teaching cinematography at UNCSA for three years. He's also a big believer in the shadowing process, having brought a flock of students to spend time with him on “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked,” which will hit theaters this Christmas. He also has his students listen in on his conversations with his agent so they can develop an understanding of the demands of the marketplace.

When he was back in Los Angeles, doing a quick music video shoot, Ackerman had students sit in on his production meetings, via Skype, so they could follow the flow of the production. “It makes their teacher more relevant, because you're teaching something that you're still practicing,” he says. “It's great to teach theory, but the students need to see that theories often evaporate under the pressure of trying to get a movie made. Everyone knows that cinematographers try to create great images, but you also have to exercise leadership and be able to manage the resources that you're given.”

Kerner never imagined himself being a film school dean – in fact, he never went to film school himself. But after surviving a freak staph infection and enduring the disappointing showing of a pet project, 2006’s “Charlotte’s Web,” Kerner was looking for a new challenge. He became dean in 2007, agreeing to split his time between Los Angeles and Winston-Salem, where his wife and three daughters now live.

UNCSA, a state school with 270 film students and tuition far below institutions like USC or AFI, has its share of prominent young alums, notably director David Gordon Green (“Pineapple Express”), writer-director Jody Hill (“Observe and Report”) and screenwriter Travis Beacham (“Clash of the Titans”), who often return to share their experiences. But Kerner felt the school needed more outside professionals on the faculty, so he recruited a host of industry pros, including producer Bob Gosse, who co-founded The Shooting Gallery and Peter Bogdanovich, who teaches a freshman film class.

Eager to broaden the students' horizons, Kerner has everyone taking art history, which he believes will help students “see the world composed in a way that stimulates individual expression.” Students in the producing program will soon start studying Mandarin since Kerner is convinced that China is “where much of the funding for film is going to come from.”

My biggest concern with today's film schools is that they tend to offer students far more instruction in technique than in actual ideas, which is perhaps one reason why we see a generation of filmmakers who seem to value box office success far more than artistic accomplishment. The star directors in today's studio system, from Todd Phillips to Michael Bay, operate more as careerists than auteurs.

But the student films I watched from UNCSA were loaded with strong ideas, wit and imagination – which may come as a bit of a surprise, given that the dean is the guy producing commercial fare like “The Smurfs.” Kerner, though, sees his work as dean as contributing to enhancing the business more than any one movie he might make.

“When I arrived, we had way too many student films that were full of close-ups of smoking guns, employing the imagery of video games,” Kerner says. “Filmmaking isn't just about coolness and pose--you need bigger subjects to tell.” So Kerner started an American Immersion project, where students gain a deeper understanding of character and story by spending several weeks at places like the Veterans Artificial Limb Hospital in Philadelphia and Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans.

“They can't take cameras or recording devices--just a pad and pen,” says Kerner. “The whole idea is to go out and get to know people, hear their stories and get under their skin. The whole idea is to find ways to take what they've learned and adapt it to their work.”

As much as Kerner would enjoy seeing his students make lofty art, he is enough of a realist to realize that they also need what it takes to actually land a job. Since much of the job market today is geared toward the web, animation and TV commercials, Kerner is a proponent of short-form storytelling.

“Our kids are going to have to think clearly in short bursts, because that's where the action is,” he says. “But we want them to have their own voice, because having a unique voice is what sets you apart from everyone else.”

[For the record, 12:55 p.m. Aug. 5: An earlier version of this post used a photo of "Smurfs" director Raja Gosnell but identified him as Jordan Kerner.]

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-- Patrick Goldstein

Top photo:  "The Smurfs" director Raja Gosnell, left, and producer Jordan Kerner. Credit: Mark Renders / Getty Images

Lower photo: Jordan Kerner in New York City in July. Credit: Cindy Ord / Getty Images

Liberal Hollywood gives a big Emmy bouquet to 'The Kennedys'

The conservative blogosphere loves to weep and moan and gnash its teeth about la-la-liberal Hollywood thumbing its nose at right-wing America, whether it's in the form of showbiz types making fun of family values, discriminating against openly conservative actors or trashing the new Sarah Palin documentary "The Undefeated" (Rotten Tomatoes initially had the movie listed in the "fantasy and science fiction" category).

But what are Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood and its fellow conservative websites going to say now that the TV Academy has given a whopping 10 Emmy nominations to "The Kennedys," the miniseries from conservative "24" producer Joel Surnow? As you may recall, the show was unceremoniously booted from the History Channel after a host of liberal activists and historians complained about it being an inaccurate and ideologically biased portrayal of the Kennedy family. (The miniseries ended up being broadcast this spring on ReelzChannel.)

So far Big Hollywood is surprisingly silent, since it would have to engage in all sorts of Newt Gingrich-like verbal contortions to offer a whoop of victory without having to concede that all those liberals in the TV Academy were being surprisingly fair-minded when it came to showing some love for "The Kennedys."

The biggest winner in terms of Emmy nominations was, of course, HBO's much-acclaimed "Mildred Pierce" miniseries, which earned a staggering 21 nominations, including best actress for Kate Winslet and best director for Todd Haynes. The period drama, which offered an uncannily authentic retelling of the original James M. Cain novel, is just the latest example of the talent exodus from Hollywood filmmaking.

Haynes has been making evocative "Mildred Pierce"-style movies for years in the indie film world, but the financing for indie movies has become such a crapshoot that Haynes, like so many other filmmakers, was happy to defect to HBO, where directors are given extraordinary creative freedom and are protected from worries about their projects' box-office expectations.     

It's telling that HBO's other big drama series nomination came for "Boardwalk Empire," which was produced by Martin Scorsese, who surely realized that he couldn't possibly find a way to make such an ambitious period gangster drama as a feature film anymore, certainly not if he wanted someone as quirky as Steve Buscemi in the leading role. HBO also landed a best miniseries/made for television movie nomination for "Too Big to Fail," which was directed by Curtis Hanson, who despite his stellar track record as a feature director ("L.A. Confidential" and "8 Mile") has found it difficult to get work in today's comic-book crazed industry.

"Too Big to Fail" also provided plenty of screen time for the kind of dramatic actors (James Woods, William Hurt and John Heard) who are rarely seen today on the big screen, where good jobs for serious older actors are in short supply, unless you want a bit part in "Transformers" or -- if you're British -- enjoy hanging out around Hogwarts. 

So the Emmy nominations were cause for great celebration in many quarters -- the one glaring snub, as with the Oscars nominations earlier this year, being that the leading role drama nominations all went to white actors, except for Taraji P. Henson, who earned a nomination for her role in the made-for-TV movie "Taken From Me: The TIffany Rubin Story." But no one snubbed "The Kennedys," which goes to show that even in liberal Hollywood, if you make a controversial miniseries about a glamorous American family beset by tragedy, you can still smell the roses at Emmy time.

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--Patrick Goldstein

Photo:  Greg Kinnear, right, as John F. Kennedy and Barry Pepper as Robert F. Kennedy in a scene from the Emmy-nominated miniseries "The Kennedys." Credit: Zak Cassar / Kennedys Productions/ReelzChannel

Summer in the '60s: When being totally square was still cool [Video]

I don't know if it's because I finally got around to reading Andrew Loog Oldham's memoir, "Stoned," or because so many of my friends on Facebook -- hey, my real friends -- have been putting up these wonderful video clips of bands from the British Invasion, but I thought it was time to celebrate summer by reveling in the sound and style of the '60s. (I'll be posting videos that capture the pop spirit of the time, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to share.) There's no better place to start than this clip of Peter & Gordon crooning their biggest hit, "World Without Love," which topped the U.S. charts in the summer of 1964.

There's all sorts of mythology surrounding the song, which was written by Paul McCartney and apparently rejected, first by John Lennon, who thought it too squishy for the Beatles, and then by Billy J. Kramer, a pop star of the time, even though nearly all of his hits were songs given to him by Lennon and McCartney. That's how it ended up in the hands of Gordon Waller and Peter Asher -- Asher being the brother of Jane Asher, who was McCartney's main squeeze at the time.

If you check out the close-up of Asher at about the 35-second mark, you'll see that it's all too clear who was the inspiration (red hair, nerdy glasses, bad teeth) for Mike Myers' "Austin Powers." But for my money, the most '60-ish parts of the clip are the bizarre art sculptures that turn up in the background (and often the foreground) of the shots, looking like they were hastily borrowed from some gallery down the street from the studio.

The duo has zero charisma -- their one big theatrical move is to stand up and walk around in a circle in the middle of the song. But it's a lovely song, which in its simplicity serves as a reminder of how much McCartney remained under the influence of Buddy Holly throughout the early days of his career. In fact, maybe that's who Asher got his glasses from!

 -- Patrick Goldstein