the making of, by greg allen
Errol Morris, you just won an Oscar and an Indpendent Spirit Award. Where are you going next?
“I’m going to Nordstrom! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.”
Buy Sperry Top-Sider ‘Stripers’ like the ones Morris wore to both award ceremonies– and our interview— at Nordstrom.
Rebecca Traitser, oft of the NYO and some online zine called Salon, notes in the NYT that the studios haven’t quite ironed out all the details of that post-Chicago musical revival we’ve all been waiting for. Ignoring that Miramax-spun history of contemporary musicals for a moment (Moulin Rouge? South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut? 8 Mile?), it seems musicals need a certain studios ne savent quoi to escape development hell.
Some examples: Broadway films [Do we know that Joel Schumacher’s Phantom won’t bring on the Apocalypse?], classic musical remakes, hip-hop musicals, pop stars performing, and –shockingly–something original. [I would add animated anime-style thriller to that list if I’d moved forward with it at all in the last three months…]
The only musical in the article that doesn’t already bore me to tears is John Turturro’s Romance and Cigarettes, starring James Gandolfini and Susan “Rocky Horror” Sarandon. The producers call it “Pennies from Heaven meets The Honeymooners,” and say it’ll include covers of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Man Without Love” and Tom Jones’s “Delilah” along with original music and choreography. [Christopher Walken’s in it, and as Spike Jonze’s Weapon of Choice video proves, the man can dance.]
R&C is currently in post-production. Back in 2002, it was a Coen Brothers joint, they dropped out and left Turturro to direct. Greene Street Films is producing, and my boy Bingham Ray’s UA is distributing.
It’s like ur-machinima. The Citizen Kane of 8-bit filmmaking. Little movies set in Marioland, but made in Flash, that combine classic cinematic devices like flashbacks, dramatic pullbacks and closeups with authentic 8-bit graphics. Oh, and a melodramatic score that incorporates game sounds. And atmospheric perspective. And DVD-esque chapter menus.
The 3-part story (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) is by AlexanderLeon.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. And if you play it in the same room with a sleeping baby, she’ll cry. [via boingboing]
Related from May 2003: Buddy Icon Cinema, and comparing Donkey Kong to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3.
Related links: NY artist Cory Arcangel‘s 80’s video-game-inspired works at Filmmaker Magazine’s blog and at the upcoming Whitney Biennial [shabby website, Whit]
[Thank Hugh] “Memory and the Monument after 9/11: Deliberations at Ground Zero” is the title of the presentation by WTC Memorial Juror, Prof. James Young, at Dartmouth College. Young is as close as we’ve got to a professional memorialist; he’s a veteran juror and adviser to memorial design processes around the world, and he is the author of several incisive books on remembering the Holocaust, including The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find an opportunity for a more articulate account of the WTC Jury’s experience.
Young will speak Tuesday, March 2, 5:30 PM, at Dartmouth’s Loew Auditorium.
While the NYT‘s Sharon Waxman finds plenty of righteous indignance among (anonymous) studio executives over ever working with Mel Gibson again, the scales have fallen from Endeavor agent John Lesher’s eyes. As a result, he wins the award for best Passion-related quote of the week:
“People here will work with the anti-Christ if he’ll put butts in seats.”
Lynda Obst gives Slate‘s David Edelstein a juicy piece of Lost in Translation gossip, that Sofia’s father gave her three pages of notes on the film, which she stuffed. Edelstein calls the movie “Chekhovian,” which is high praise in his book. Sofia, you’ve come a long way, baby. Good luck.
Meanwhile, at Edelstein’s other gig, Fresh Air, Terry Gross ran a 1999 interview with LIT star Bill Murray, while the site promises an upcoming interview with Ms Coppola herself.
March 30 or so, MoMA’s Film Department is giving Sofia Coppola its Work In Progress Award. They called it early last year, by the way, no dogpiling there. Stay tuned for more greg.org coverage.
My favorite Bill Murray story goes like this: when somebody recognized him on the street in NYC, Murray walked up to him and popped him on the forehead. Then he bent over to the stunned man and whispered, “no one’ll ever believe you,” and walked away. Maybe that’s what happened to Scarlett Johansson’s character at the end of LIT.
At this house Saturday, we’ll be watching the IFP Independent Spirit Awards, which are a lot more fun. Assuming we’re not sacked out from exhaustion, that is. Oh, and no sooner did I post about Cassavetes’ Shadows, that it turned up in my mailbox, a forgotten gift to myself from my DVD rental queue.
related: my interview with Sofia. My hanging with Alexander Payne and David O. Russell, previous MoMA honorees. My own Edelstein-inspired Chekhov reference. Me me me me me.
BU professor Ray Carney tells about his maniacal decades-long search for a copy of the “original version” of John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows, in a riveting, suspenseful, and enlightening Guardian article. It feels like he doesn’t leave out a single twist or turn (i.e., it’s both entertaining and long).
Here’s the trailer: Cassavetes was so displeased with audience reaction to late 1958 screenings of Shadows, he re-shot much of the footage in early 1959 and re-edited it with some “original” footage to make the version we know today, aka the “second version.”
With little more than a passing mention of a single, existing print of the “original version” to go on, Carney embarked on an increasingly ridiculous search for “the holy grail of Independent Cinema.” When that wore thin, he took to reconstructing the original “from the inside” by interviewing all the cast, crew, and audience members he could find, and by scouring the second version for minute forensic evidence–including, literally, comparing the length of shadows in each shot to determine the time of day–of Cassavetes’ shooting and editing choices. The result: Carney’s now the go-to guy for Cassavettes’ process, and at least he published a book in 2001 with BFI.
Whatever of the outcome; the article makes for great reading.
Buy Shadows–the second version–on DVD. Check out Carney’s acadamn fine fan site, cassavetes.com.
Just let me program your whole Monday viewing schedule for you.
6:30 – MoMA curator Barbara London screening classic video art and talking about how to collect it. (email for details)
9:00 See Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, Wittgenstein, at Passerby, the used-to-be-a-gallery/bar on WWW 15th St.
Then head to SoHo house for some kidney pie with Fammke Jensen or whoever. You’re welcome.
Tom Ford has signed with CAA agent (and longtime friend) Brian Lourd to find films to direct. The NYPost’s Suzanne Kapner pitches him a really edgy story:
Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Morris’s films are best known for the intensity of the interviews he conducts. He invented the Interrotron, a teleprompter setup that gets the interviewee to look and speak straight into the camera. I, in the mean time, didn’t have a digital recorder, so I decided to use a DV camera, the Sony VX-1000, to record our discussion. (Plus, that’d give me a chance to drop it off at the Sony Service Center downstairs to get the viewfinder fixed when I was done.)
I set the camera on the coffee table. Not only did I not get Morris looking directly into the camera, I ended up with an entire tapeful of Morris’s bouncing sneaker. Just as he did in The Fog of War, I structured our discussion around eleven lessons. [OK, fine. I went through the transcript and stuck eleven smartass lessons in as an editorial conceit. Close enough.]
Lesson One: Start an interview with an Academy Award-nominated director you’ve admired for fifteen years by sucking up. Big time.
Greg Allen: First congratulations on the film and the nomination. I should tell you, seeing Thin Blue Line in college was one of the reasons I wanted to become a filmmaker. It was so powerful and so not what you’d expect a documentary to be, especially at that time. So, thank you.
Errol Morris:
Thank you.
GA: With The Fog of War, a great deal of attention has been focused on the interview footage itself and what McNamara did or didn’t say, and was he going to take responsibility for the war or were you going to grill him about this or that. But your films have such a strong aesthetic and dramatic sense, which you achieve with other elements. I’d really like to hear more about how you go about making a film and what your process is for the putting those other elements together.
Lesson Two: I am a babbling sycophant.
Barbara London, Associate Curator of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, will screen some seminal works of video art and talk about the ins and outs of showing and collecting. Among the artists she’ll be showing: Nam June Paik, Bill Wegman, Joan Jonas, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Laurie Anderson, Wang Jianwei and others.
The discussion will be Monday evening at 6:30 in midtown. It’s not open to the public, but
Shooting the Courier
I find Tom Vanderbilt’s Slate story about the State Department’s dropping Courier New 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14 as its official typeface timely for two reasons.
1) Courier’s appearance in The Fog of War is evidence of the font’s status as both “the herald of all stripes of dignified officialdom,” and FOIA-driven government conspiracy. [He credits Rob Poynor, of Design Observer. All of a sudden, these guys are everywhere.]
2) I just spent several hours last weekend researching the history and modern use of typewriter typefaces for a new website I’m working on. After growing tired of the clogged upX-files-style fonts that are an empty cliche of “edginess,” I turned to the mechano-corporate precision of the IBM Selectric-era fonts: serifs like Courier, Prestige Elite, and my favorites, the sleek sans-serif Letter Gothic and Script, the “handwriting” of the can-do-no-wrong IBM of the 60’s and 70’s.Che Sera
Doin’ it for the children of the revolution: Malick’s directing
another movie before these kids graduate from college.
Production is set for four months, starting in July–this July, 2004– for Terrence Malick’s next film, Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as the world’s most logo-friendly marxist. Malick’s writing and directing. Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh (I thought he was taking a year off?) will produce the $40 million picture, which comes–if you calculate by Malick-Time– almost 14 years ahead of schedule (i.e., six, not twenty years after his last movie, The Thin Red Line).
[a Guardian/ Variety story.]