Category: making movies

Guess J. Lo Was Busy, or The Adaptation of About Schmidt

Louis Begley spoke before a screening of About Schmidt last night. An extremely genteel guy, he explained why he’s quite pleased with the film, even though it differs significantly from his novel. For Begley, “write what you know” means Schmidt (“known as Schmittie to one and all”) is an Upper East Side lawyer, recently retired to Bridgehampton, something, presumably, a vast majority of the screening audience knows well, too. Consistently for Alexander Payne, “film what you know” means a studied exploration of the middle of Middle America: Schmidt is an Omaha actuary whose retirement plans involve a Winnebago.

Kathy Bates lettin' it all hang out in About Schmidt, from the official site
image: aboutschmidtmovie.com

The only disappointment Begley voiced was the elimination of his saucy Puerto Rican waitress character who (brace yourself) teaches Schmidt to love again. Or, more precisely, she “teaches Schmittie the transformative power of sex. [audience titters] You laugh. It’s true. Maybe you’re just too young to understand.” But then he gamely allowed that Payne may have been poking fun at this idea with Kathy Bates’ hand-painted clothing-shedding hot-tubber. Um, yeah.
While I’ve heard it described as a comedy, the laughs were all at things that are quite real outside the culture capitals; if you’ve been there, or are honest about being from there, your laughter is slightly embarassed and at yourself. (I’m not talking about my own proto-mullet here.) Begley sounded a little resigned when he said he couldn’t see the future holding anything good for Payne’s Schmidt. As I did in September, I have disagree and side with Payne. If taken at the most superficial level, you could argue that Schmidt’s transformative experience at the end is a pretty meager reward for all that preceded it. Why, it’s practically a, um, a money shot. What it may be is the difference between sex and love.
[12/12 update: Alexander Payne will be on Studio 360 this weekend. AND he will be given the Work In Progress award by the MoMA Department of Film and Media next February. Stay tuned.]

Director’s Cut? That, My Friend, is TMI


Three clothing-optionalists and one writer on the set of Starship Troopers
On the set of Starship Troopers: DP Jost Vocano,
director Paul Verhoeven, star Casper Van Dien, writer Ed Neumeier

Yesterday’s NY Times Magazine is a veritable toolbox (and I use that word deliberately) for film, all you want to know, and more. First, what you want to know: There’s the Cinderella-story of indie director Joe Carnahan’s tremendous success on the Bel-Air Circuit, where Narc, his ignored-at-Sundance cop flick became the favorite film of (among others) Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.
And the more: The “How to…” section provides expert opinion on potentially tricky subjects, all in a neat little package. Here’s a quote from Paul Verhoeven’s How to Shoot a Nude Scene:

When I did Starship Troopers, the cast was balking about going through with a group shower scene. So I took off all my clothes. And my director of photography did also. It worked, because everybody started laughing, and then they got naked. And we didn’t hear anymore complaints.

You can read reviews of Verhoeven’s piece at CNdb, the Celebrity Nudity Database.

Some Quotes and Links

“Asbury’s book is a tribute to the magical power of naming: long stretches of ‘Gangs [of New York]’ are taken up by lists of gangs and villains and even fire engines, and, like the lists of ships in the Iliad, they are essential to the effect…We read of Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, Slaughter Housers, Short Tails, Patsy Conroys, and the Border Gang, of Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, and Shirt Tails, and we melt.”
— Adam Gopnik discussing Herbert Asbury’s cult-fave 1928 book in the New Yorker
“What you really are afraid of is that you’re competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don’t ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much.”
— media mogul John Malone, in an interview with Ken Auletta at NewYorker.com
“Just as Italians don’t translate Johnny Cash as ‘Giovanni Soldi,’ and we don’t take Federico Fellini and rename him ‘Freddy Cats,’ so the term Arte Povera has to stand unchanged and unexplained.”
— Blake Gopnik, brother, writing (entertainingly but incorrectly) about the Hirshhorn Gallery’s latest show in the Washington Post
“Then sometimes you’re given the chance to make a memory for someone, give them a pleasant moment to remember, which is the greatest thing you can ever do. Keep the Oscar and all that.”
— Rod Steiger, Oscar winner, on Jon Favreau’s Dinner for Five on IFC
“We’re a little tired of the thin-skinned whining, which is much of what we get from north of the border…
— Pat Buchanan, defending his comment about “Soviet Canuckistan” on the CBC’s As It Happens [Pat’s about 12:00 into the stream.]

On Seeing Jackass: The Movie; Souvenir (November 2001) Press Updates


Whatever else it may be, Jackass is possibly the purest cinema experience ever. It is undiluted, unadulterated and unambiguous. It will make you run. You certainly don’t need me to tell you, though, if you should run toward or away from the theater; whatever your pre-existing inclination, you will do well to follow it. Jackass will not mislead you.
Hustled out to Queens to get press screening tapes of Souvenir (November 2001) to MoMA’s Film Department. Falling a little behind on delivering the printed press kits; it’s going to be a working weekend.

‘Well, you have to be a nut, kid.’

isabella_blow_garbage_cunningham.jpg
image of Isabella Blow in Yoshiki Hishinuma, by bill cunningham, via nyt 2002
“To be contemporaine de tout le monde–that is the keenest and most secret satisfaction that fashion can offer a woman.”
– The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
Apparent egalitarianism is the great appeal of the Street Fashion concept, especially in New York, and especially in the street photos of Bill Cunningham in the NYTimes. If you just be yourself –and that self is someone who’s got a bit of the trend radar that puts you in cargo pants about six weeks before it shows up in Cunningham’s Sunday street collages– your embroidered jeans-wearing booty may just surprise you by turning up in the paper. Bill never put your name under your photo, not even if yours is recognizable; credit goes to the man with the camera, and your just appearing is reward enough.
But when someone like Isabella Blow –who’s got “Muse” printed on her carte de visite –walks down the street, it’s the street fashion equivalent of George Bush making a speech in a national park: the setting says “See, I < heart > nature,” but be surprised if the clearcutters wait till FoxNews cuts back to the studio before revving up their chainsaws. Blow’s not on just anyone on any street any time. She’s a Muse. In Paris. During The Shows. Walking (or wafting, in this case) amidst photographers, designers, editors, stylists, and groupies. Fashion industry types. Just like her.
One of the designers Blow muses for is Jean-Paul Gaultier, who I once sat next to on the Concorde [that was totally uncalled for, I know]. Nice guy. And a brilliant miner of both the street-as-walkway and the street-as-runway. The Mixture, a new culture site with an old-school appreciation of editing, is streaming Gaultier’s latest show in its entirety. It’s worth watching.
Benjamin called the flaneur “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers.” If so, in the lead of France’s fashion industry (an “occult science of industrial fluctuations” if ever there was one. The Arcades Project is like a can of Pringles: once it’s open, you can’t stop at just one.) is just where Gaultier belongs.
France’s fashion week definitely has an industrial air, with trade associations, official this and that, and weighty government sanction. It’s like the Expositions Universelles that made Paris the center of the 19th century world, where innovations were unveiled: things like “electricity” (“The City of Lights”) and “Photography,” which debuted there in 1855. Benjamin again, on the group that re-defined the term, avant-garde:

The Saint Simonians, who envision the industrialization of the earth, take up the idea of world exhibitions…[They] anticipated the development of the global economy, but not the class struggle…World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity.

Nice work, if you can get it. Nobody knows better than Benjamin that the image and (the street) reality have a very complicated (business) relationship. When Bill Cunningham takes Isabella Blow’s picture on the street in Paris, we have to know that the image is manufactured, constructed in a myriad of ways, some obvious and some not, by all parties involved. (Isabella, even the panhandling woman in my neighborhood changes into her garbage bag before starting work.)
And I found the same issues face the filmmaker, even/especially the documentary filmmaker. To what extent do you just “let something happen” and you “happen” to film it? To what extent to you “make something happen,” or stage it? Can’t stage it? Wouldn’t be prudent? Wouldn’t have street cred? Well, how about if you just go to the spots where you know what you want to shoot is gonna happen? Then, you can just “happen” to film it. It all involves choices; editing before, during, and after the fact; having an eye (and a camera), and deciding what to do with it. All things being equal, then, some things just look better. And that can make all the difference.
The Age of Street Fashion [nyt]

1979 Star Trek, or The Thin Line Between (Punch-Drunk) Love and Hate

punch-drunk love poster

I’m watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture right now, and it’s blowing me away. It’s the first movie, the one with the original crew, the bald chick, and V’Ger, a cloud-like alien vessel with the Voyager space probe at its core. Anyway, wide swaths of the movie are a nearly psychedelic trance, which I never remembered. There’s an incredible 10+ minute abstract FX sequence of the Enterprise entering the vessel. It’s similar to Jeremy Blake’s digital work and the passages he did for Punch-Drunk Love. Or, it’s as abstract, at least. A very unexpected place for such a confluence.
Syd Mead's rendition of V'Ger

[The visual effects on STTMP were originally led by Richard Taylor, then Douglas Trumbull took over after overruns in the chaotic production’s budget. So far, I think the V’Ger sequence was John Dykstra‘s and Trumbull’s realization of Syd Mead‘s concepts. An interview with Taylor survives for now in Google’s cache: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. Charles Barbee wrote about lighting and shooting the V’Ger Flyover, including accounts of 10-pass in-camera composited shots and finding just the right “glare angle.” Syd Mead discusses creating V’Ger.]
While I mentioned before that elements of the Star Trek IV story inspired the latest script for the AYUAM, it turns out that several ideas from this Star Trek worked in as well. I’m not unaware that these are considered two of the lamest Star Trek films made (“The V’Ger flyby was interminable.”). Combine this with the fact that I don’t like musicals, and I find myself deeply engaged in something I should be hating, but instead, I’m loving it. Can someone explain this to me?

Porn (‘n Chicken) on the Internet? What’ll they think of next?

James “Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp” Ponsoldt was a co-founder of Porn ‘n Chicken, a Yale timekiller-cum-media spoof-cum-Comedy Central movie. (If that sentence doesn’t get this weblog banned by your corporate firewall, it’ll at least get you a reprimand at your performance review.) Tad Friend’s New Yorker piece contains Jimmy’s description of his latest project:

“It’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ set in rural Appalachia,” he said, “with themes of rifts between generations, loneliness, becoming a man, and OxyContin addiction.”

Sound familiar? It took me a second, but it’s Cyan Pictures’ Coming Down the Mountain. Despite what the title may lead you to believe, it has nothing to do with Porn or Chicken. [For fun, try and match the other porny aliases in the article with the crew at Cyan!}

Great Minds, etc etc

santa_croce_basilica.jpg
Arnolfo di Cambio et al, Basilica di Santa Croce, 1294-1442 [img via]
As the Artforum.com discussion of Nico Israel’s Spiral Jetty travelogue turned from my smug fact-checking to the romanticisation of contemporary art, E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View popped into my head. Just as Forster’s English followed Baedekers around Italy–from this altarpiece to that fresco, from Firenze to Rome to Venice to Ravenna–a Contemporary Art Grand Tour has taken shape where Artforum pilgrims can demonstrate their faith.

judd_marfa_milled.jpg
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1982-6 [image via]

In addition to Spiral Jetty, the CAGT includes: The Rothko Chapel; Walter deMaria’s Lightning Field; Michael Heizer’s Double Negative; Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation; James Turrell’s work-in-progress Roden Crater; the Guggenheim Bilbao; and my own heretical favorite, Richard Serra’s Afangar.
With Merchant/Ivory’s version of ARWAV firmly entrenched in my own movie worldview, I saw a vision of a hipster artist roadtrip remake. Sort of Basquiat meets Thelma & Louise, with Reese Witherspoon as Helena Bonham-Carter, Josh Hartnett as Julian Sands and Daniel Day-Lewis as, well, himself.
ANYWAY, it turns out the fashion world’s own Forster, English Vogue-er (and faux twin) Plum Sykes, may beat me to the intersection of Art & Film. Hintmag.com leaked the outline of Sykes’ book, Bergdorf Blondes (which just got picked up by Talk/Miramax Books for $625,000, not including movie rights).
The hot narratrix (calls herself “Moi”) dates, gets engaged to, and breaks up with the hot it-boy painter “Dan” (“Our heroine consoles herself that there is one thing worse than being disengaged to a person in a GAP ad, and that’s being married to someone in a GAP ad.”) [NB: Sykes dated, etc. painter/Gap ad star Dam(ian) Loeb.]; receives confidence-boosting advice as she pines for the hot LA filmmaker (“You are not superficial, you just look like you are because you wear a lot of Gucci.”) ; and hightails it home to En-ge-land, perchance to marry the Earl-next-door (“after bonking at the SoHo Grand”). Sounds pretty much like my movie idea.
Should I go ahead and develop it? Or would it be like when there were those two Dalai Lama movies out at the same time?

keep the curvoisier, pass the maker’s mark

Congratulations to the guys at Cyan Pictures for getting their rough cut fedexed to Sundance just in time. [Technically, they could’ve eked out a whole other day by flying the tape to the festival office in person, so they had a huge time cushion, but hey, that’s enough dramatic tension.]
Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, is set and was shot in/around Hazard, Kentucky, which is near Troublesome Creek. Last night, on plasticbag.org, I read about the Fugate family, aka The Blue People of Troublesome Creek. John Stacy married into the clan and said of his father-in-law:

[Levy Fugate was] part of the family that showed blue. All them old fellers way back then was blue. One of em – I remember seeing him when I was just a boy – Blue Anze, they called him. Most of them old people we [called] by that name – the blue Fugates. It run in that generation who lived up and down Ball Creek.

What you really want to do is direct??

Dateline, Malibu: Directin’ ain’t easy, even for Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, a man who has Steven Soderbergh on his Buddy List (and IM’s him for advice on “Super-35 blown up to anamorphic” or not). He writes about his unblinking-but-not-too-pity-inducing directorial debut in the NYTimes. Gaghan also tells a good story (ahem, surprised? He’s an O-winning screenwriter.) on the Criterion DVD for Traffic.

On Robert Smithson, film, and finding the way

The Spiral Jetty is back. Although it was submerged when we checked in July, my college senior sister said it was visible from the hill above it when she took a first date out to see it a couple of weeks ago (talk about a litmus test; it’s a 3+ hour drive one way, half on rutty dirt paths.) Sure enough, the SL Tribune has an article about it (Thanks, Artforum.) Read Smithson’s own comments on making the Jetty here.
Underwater or not, Geocachers have logged Spiral Jetty; it’s not surprising, given its off-the-mapquest.com obscurity, limited-but-not-prohibitive access, and non-mainstream nature. Geocaching would suit Smithson fine, I think:

After a point, measurable steps…descend from logic to the “surd state.” The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the unexpected event…The flowing mass of rock and earth of the Spiral Jetty could be trapped by a grid of segments, but the segments would exist only in the mind or on paper. Of course, it is also possible to translate the mental spiral into a three-dimensional succession of measured lengths that would involve areas, volumes, masses, moments, pressures, forces, stresses, and strains; but in the Spiral Jetty the surd takes over and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality.

Geocaching examines the gap between the natural and the rational worlds, too, coming at if from the grid side. Spiral Jetty is locatable in grids, of course, including USGS satellite photos and via latitude/longitude coordinates, translated from GPS orbital data. But for geocachers, getting there is more than half the fun; the rush comes from “mapping” the “distance” between the two worlds.
Back in New York, Smithson sat down with friends to make his film about the Jetty.

Film strips hung from the cutter’s rack, bits and pieces of Utah, outtakes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage… And the movie editor bending over such a chaos of “takes” resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels…[Editor Bob] Fiore pulled lengths of film out of the movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling intestines from a slaughtered mammoth. Outside his 13th Street loft window one expected to see Pleistocene faunas, glacial uplifts, living fossils, and other prehistoric wonders. Like two cavemen we plotted how to get to the Spiral Jetty from New York City.

Smithson uses the road, going forward and backward (in time as well as place) to tie his film together. “The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture. Nevertheless, all the improbabilities would accommodate themselves to my cinematic universe.”
When I went to Spiral Jetty in 1994 (it’s first reappearance in 24 years), I was overwhelmed by how different experiencing the work in person (glistening salt crystals, cotton candy pink water, and that drive…) was from seeing it in pictures (aerial B&W on the last page of the art history text). Now it seems that that was the point. Mapping the distance between two worlds is what filmmaking’s all about.

On Scripted vs Ad-libbed or Improvised in re Full Frontal and the President of the United States

This weekend, after seeing Full Frontal, we discussed the dialogue at length. My (grew-up-on-the-stage) wife spotted a lot of weak improv, or weakly directed improv–actors left to figure it out for themselves and, more often than not, not pulling it off. Besotted Soderbergher that I am (nothing like three DVD commentaries in the last two weeks to make you feel like you know the director.), I’d argued that surely Soderbergh knew what’s up; he’s shooting a script that’s written to sound like this. It’s all artificial, after all. Get it?
Rather than address the fact that I was just wrong [Fine. I’ll address it. Nerve.com has an excerpt of the script which differs notably from the scene in the movie. The actors seem to have recreated and expanded on the type of conversation written in the script. A FoxNews interview with Blair Underwood settles on “workshop” as the best way to describe the film.], I’d rather deflect the whole issue toward something “serious.” Here’s Joel Klein in a New Yorker column about Hilary Clinton’s strong showing at that Democratic meeting in NYC last week:

But political deftness and ease of delivery were not the most impressive things about the Senator’s turn: Clinton was the only speaker who didn’t make an advance text available to the press. Apparently, she winged it. A day later, in response to a call to the Senator’s office requesting a copy of the speech, a press aide said, “Sorry, but it’s still being transcribed.”

Don’t contrast this with the seemingly adlibbed (and immediate Moment of Zen) George Bush comment I mentioned yesterday. Contrast it with the most distracting thing about listening to Bush read his speeches, the way he always pauses at what seem to be linebreaks on his index cards. It’s almost like listening to Christopher Reeves on a respirator or to a lighthouse keeper who’s conditioned to pause every five seconds, whether the foghorn’s on or not. I mentioned this several months ago to a friend with very close ties to the Bush speechwriters, but I haven’t been detained yet. All the same, I couldn’t find any articles online talking about this Cageian Bushism. Am I the only one who hears this bomb’s tic?

The Look of DV: Tadpole vs. Full Frontal

“The advantage of [shooting on digital video] is that nobody knows, or at least cares, that you’re making a movie; the disadvantage…is that the end product appears to have been filmed through a triple layer of bubble wrap.”
– from Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Tadpole, the latest from IFC Productions’ InDigEnt.
Compare this to the complicated process Steven Soderbergh used to get “enhanced graininess” on his new DV movie, Full Frontal (from an apple.com article):

Finish
FotoKem received the final cut of the original movie in PAL video, de-interlaced it and converted it to files using a disk array. The files were shipped across the network to their film recorder, which had been calibrated to shoot on 5298 film to enhance graininess. A two-stop push during negative processing further enhanced grain and contrast. A double chrome-reversal process was used to create the final negative and print. The 4:3 images were matted and converted to a1:66:1 (European) widescreen aspect ratio for theatrical projection. Fine-grade bubble wrap was then placed over the projector lens at the press preview.