Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933 in Paris. The sordid details of his flight from the United States in 1978 have often overshadowed discussion of the director’s work, which at the age of 77, includes one of the best films of 2010. Is he a world class filmmaker? In the month of August, I take a look at ten directed by Roman Polanski.

The Ghost Writer (2010)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Robert Harris & Roman Polanski, based on the novel The Ghost by Robert Harris
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
128 minutes

Humming with gleeful malevolence, The Ghost Writer could be considered a throwback to ‘70s political thrillers like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor if it wasn’t so much fun. Robert Harris had wanted to write about the relationship between a ghostwriter and a politician for 15 years. He found a story in 2006 when Tony Blair became dogged by war crimes accusations on his way out of 10 Downing Street. Moving one step further, the author imagined a British prime minister who was installed by the CIA and the truth being stumbled onto by the ghostwriter of his memoirs. Envisioned briefly as a stageplay along the lines of Sleuth, it became a novel instead. When Roman Polanski’s $130 million production of the author’s historical thriller Pompeii was shelved in 2007 over financing, Harris sent the director his manuscript for The Ghost.

Harris & Polanski adapted the novel in Paris and Polanski and his producers were able to raise financing from private funding sources in Europe at a budget of €32 million (roughly $45 million). Collaborating with cinematographer Pawel Edelman for the third consecutive film and editor Hervé De Luze for the sixth, Polanski’s expertise with the thriller chimes The Ghost Writer along like a Swiss clock that strikes cuckoo at the top of the hour. Shot at Studio Babelsberg for the interiors and the German island of Sylt for exteriors, the compound and the coastal wilderness where much of the action takes place sets the film apart visually, but it’s insidious wit that makes The Ghost Writer so enjoyable. Not many directors of political thrillers would pause to focus on a Filipino gardener raking leaves in a windstorm. Alexandre Desplat composed the film’s playful musical score.

An unnamed British writer we’ll know only as The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) lunches with his agent (Jon Bernthal) and is put up for the job of rewriting the memoirs of former prime minister Adam Lang when the body of the previous ghostwriter — a loyal aide to the politician — washes up on the shores of New England. A political novice, The Ghost passes the scrutiny of publishing exec John Maddox (James Belushi) and Lang’s D.C. attorney Sidney Kroll (Timothy Hutton) when he promises a memoir that the layperson can relate to. Dispatched to the desolate island of “Old Haven”, where Lang’s publisher has lent him his American vacation compound, The Ghost meets Lang’s personal assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall), his cunning wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and the charismatic Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) himself.

As The Ghost interviews Lang — a student actor who became interested in politics when he met his wife — the International Criminal Court announces an investigation into the ex-prime minister on charges he approved the kidnap and torture of four terror suspects from Pakistan. As media and human rights activists descend on the island, The Ghost is moved onto the compound for security. He discovers proof that Lang was politically active two years earlier than he claims and that the previous ghostwriter was the one who leaked the human rights scandal to British Prime Minister Richard Rycart (Robert Pugh). Sneaking onto the mainland to interview Lang’s mysterious college mentor Paul Emmett (Tom Wilkinson), The Ghost unravels a plot indicating that Lang may have been recruited and run by the CIA.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 7,950 users: 70% for The Ghost Writer

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 77 for The Ghost Writer

What do you say?

In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Tank Girl (1995)
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Tedi Sarafian, based on the comic strip created by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett
Produced by Richard B. Lewis, Pen Densham, John Watson
104 minutes

To say that everything about Tank Girl works except for the script and the casting is another way to say that the movie doesn’t work at all, but this $25 million adaptation of the cutting edge British comic strip conjures a punk rock anarchy that not many big budget movies have the balls to go for. Director Rachel Talalay optioned the film rights to the Tank Girl comic strip appearing in the U.K.’s Deadline magazine, later published in the States by Dark Horse Comics. She pitched the property to Lightstorm Entertainment, then Amblin Entertainment, but neither James Cameron nor Steven Spielberg’s bunch were hip to the material. Talalay found a fan at MGM/UA in Alan Ladd, but by the time her picture began test screening, new studio management plucked the “hate me” pedal off the Tank Girl flower. It’s since cultivated a much deserved cult following on DVD.

The optimal audience for Tank Girl may be teenagers discovering punk rock or ska for the first time; the soundtrack featuring Devo, Iggy Pop, Björk and Hole is superlative. Where the movie suffers is casting. Despite the presence of Naomi Watts, the likes of Lori Petty, Ice-T and Malcolm McDowell indicates that filling roles became an act of desperation. Petty was a last minute replacement for Emily Lloyd, an OCD sufferer who refused to shave her head for the part. Out on a limb for its time, the riot grrrl heroine of Tank Girl and her gleeful irreverence are more cogent today as a unique blend of Gwen Stefani and Bart Simpson. Rachel Talalay’s lively mash-up of live action and animation pushes the set design by Catherine Hardwicke and costumes by Arianne Phillips into the foreground — Tank Girl has 27 wardrobe changes — while incidentals like story get shoved off a cliff, just like the comic.

In the year 2033, the cataclysmic impact of a comet has transformed the Earth into a giant sandbox. Survivors are at the mercy of the WP, an evil conglomerate that controls the planet’s water. WP’s interests are threatened by an elusive band of mutant kangaroo/human hybrids known as Rippers. Out of this wasteland on the back of a yak rides Rebecca (Lori Petty), a blonde skinhead with whirlwind fighting skills and a motormouth to match. Rebecca lives in a commune with her surrogate daughter Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower) siphoning water illegally. Raided by WP commandos, Rebecca kills eight and is taken before Keslee (Malcolm McDowell), the megalomaniac who runs WP. Offered a job, Rebecca declines colorfully and is sentenced to hard labor in the WP mines, where she meets a mousy jet mechanic named Jet (Naomi Watts).

Freed from captivity after a Ripper raid, Rebecca and Jet confiscate a tank and a fighter jet respectively. A visit to an abandoned water park leads to an encounter with Sub Girl (Ann Cusack), who allows the ladies to customize their vehicles. Tank Girl and Jet Girl are born. Discovering that Sam is alive and in the custody of WP, the dynamic duo plots a rescue mission. They seek the help of the Rippers (Ice-T, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey) whose base is revealed to be an old bowling alley. Tank Girl and Jet Girl pass their initiation rites and Tank Girl even falls in love with one of the mutant kangaroos, the dim witted Booga (Jeff Kober). Meanwhile, the evil Keslee has recovered from the raid by the Rippers with a new cybernetic arm and face and is revealed to be luring Tank Girl into a trap.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 326 users: 37% for Tank Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Supergirl (1984)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Screenplay by David Odell, based on the character appearing in comics and magazines published by DC Comics
Produced by Timothy Burrrill
124 minutes (international version)/ 114 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)

Years before anyone had heard of Comic Con or knew what a “fanboy” was, Alexander and Ilya Salkind gambled $35 million — roughly $140 million in today money — that audiences would welcome an expansion of the DC Comics universe with a girl powered spin-off of their Superman film franchise that starred Christopher Reeve. Warner Bros. changed their minds about producing Supergirl and though TriStar agreed to distribute the picture in the U.S., when critics and audiences got a look at it in November 1984 the response was so middling that the Salkinds got out of the Superman business. A trifle silly and very definitely flawed, Supergirl doesn’t fly as high as Richard Donner’s Superman or Superman II, but it stacks up as the best super heroine adaptation anyone’s made yet (Barbarella, Red Sonja, Catwoman and Elektra are the also-rans).

It isn’t required that you be an 8-year-old girl or collect My Little Pony to enjoy the charms of Supergirl, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. Those who venture further are likely to find Supergirl’s sorceress adversary and the hunk they covet to both be super silly. Mysteries such as how Supergirl changes into her costume are left unanswered, but director Jeannot Szwarc evokes some of the charm of Hans Christian Andersen; contrary to the line on Supergirl, it’s no more campy than The Little Mermaid is campy. The picture is as lavish as it is elegant, with a triumphant musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, a candy color look by Alan Hume and spectacular crane and wire work, each and every one as astounding as anything in Superman. 19-year-old Helen Slater and costume designed by Emma Porteous are a sight to stop a train.

On the satellite world of Argo City, Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) visits Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), an architect who has “borrowed” the city’s energy source, an orb known as an omegahedron that creates the illusion of life. When the orb is lost in the vastness of innerspace, Kara hops aboard an innerstellar capsule to retrieve it. On Earth, the omegahedron falls into the hands of a would-be sorceress named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who lives in an abandoned amusement park with her daffy sidekick (Brenda Vaccaro). On Earth, the blonde haired Kara discovers physical and intellectual abilities comparable to those of her cousin Superman. To fit in, she disguises herself as a brunette student named Linda Lee and enrolls in “Midvale High School” in Illinois.

Sharing a dorm room with Lucy Lane (Mauren Teefy) — kid sister of Lois Lane — Linda develops her powers of super strength, X-ray vision and super hearing. Meanwhile, Selena uses the omegahedron to throw a love spell on a beefcake landscaper named Ethan (Hart Bochner) and when he bumbles off, sends a bulldozer through Midvale to bring him back. Supergirl saves the town, but the witch’s spell makes Ethan fall in love with Linda. She traces the omegahedron to the old amusement park, but is unable to retrieve it from Selena when Ethan shows up and she has to protect him. Her powers growing stronger, Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone. Reunited with the exiled Zaltar in the barren prison dimension, Supergirl looks for a way back to Earth to save both her adopted planet and her home world.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192 users: 26% for Supergirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

Idiocracy (2006)
Directed by Mike Judge
Screenplay by Mike Judge & Etan Cohen, story by Mike Judge
Produced by Mike Judge, Elysa Koplovitz
84 minutes

Should I Care?
In a case as mysterious as lightning striking twice, the long awaited follow-up from Austin based animator and filmmaker Mike Judge was wrapped in a blanket and abandoned on a church doorstep by Fox, who committed the same offense on Judge’s previous film. Like Office Space, Idiocracy is an unpolished gem whose cult status has multiplied the more moviegoers find it. Thrusting a regular Jack and Jill from the present into a future where human evolution has regressed to the point where Beavis and Butt-Head would be considered the minds of their time, Judge whips up another potent and laugh-out-loud cultural satire. Its faults are glaring, but Idiocracy is funny, smart, dumb and unnerving all at the same time. Much of its ragged charm is generated by how low Fox set the bar on this film. Considering that its ideal presentation is a living room or laptop computer — where at most you’re investing a couple of bucks and 80 minutes of your time — the studio might have even known what they were doing.

Watching Idiocracy without socks not only boosts its entertainment value, it gives the viewer the ability to pause and process the data mine of comic material hidden in family trees, TV menus and billboards. The film is embarrassingly shy of post-production value, with special effects that look more abandoned than finished, as well as narration that suggests the movie was put in the rearview mirror by all those involved as quickly as possible. Idiocracy almost qualifies as a student thesis, but if that’s the case, this is the most hilarious and intelligently sketched student thesis of all time. Gently mocking the greed and consumption depended on by corporations, Judge avoids a smug or angry tone; like Office Space, his heart lies with the common man. But underneath the sight gags and occasional toilet humor lurks an acidic satire of those further down the evolutionary ladder, too lazy, dumb or irresponsible for planned parenthood and how that — at its most ridiculous extreme — could alter the future.

So, What’s This About?
In the year 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is reassigned from an Army library and volunteered for “a human hibernation experiment” in which the military will revive him after one year of cryogenic sleep. Chosen due to his lack of family and how average he is, the army is unable to find a comparable female test subject and selects one from the private sector: Rita (Maya Rudolph), whose pardon for criminal charges and an arrangement with her pimp have secured her cooperation. When the army base is scuttled and replaced by a Fuddrucker’s, Joe and Rita lie dormant until the year 2505, when one of the many mountains of garbage mankind has left to accumulate crumbles. Joe crashes into the living room of Frito Pendejo (Dax Shepard), who we later learn earned his law degree at Costco. While Joe is able to understand everyone — whose English has devolved into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, street slang and grunts featuring the words “ass” or “shut up” — Joe’s voice strikes those of the future as “pompous and faggy” and provokes them.

Joe discovers that in the future, water has been replaced by a sports drink called Brwando (“The Thirst Mutilator”), a dust bowl has decimated the economy and the number one movie in the country is Ass, which consists of nothing more than 90 minutes of a guy’s naked ass (“It won eight Oscars that year, including Best Screenplay”). Arrested for inability to pay his hospital bill, Joe escapes from prison by notifying a guard that he’s supposed to be getting out. His abnormally high intelligence brings Joe to the attention of President Camacho (Terry Crews), a five-time Ultimate Smackdown champion and porn superstar. Now the smartest man on earth, Joe is named Secretary of the Interior and tasked with fixing the economy in exchange for a full pardon. Employing the help of Tina and Frito, Joe figures out that irrigating crops with Brwando is the cause for the dust bowl. The practice is banned, but when his decision bankrupts Brawndo, Joe is sentenced to “rehabilitation” as the center attraction at a gigantic tractor pull.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Mike Judge was raised in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from UC San Diego in 1985 and embarked on a series of dull engineering jobs. Relocating to Dallas to pursue his musical career as a bass guitar player, Judge’s love for animation led him to create a two-minute short; titled Office Space, it featured a neurotic paper pusher named Milton being tormented by his smarmy boss. Office Space was screened at Animation Celebration, which was being held that year in Dallas. Judge’s work began appearing on MTV’s Liquid Television, which launched another animated short Judge had come up with titled Beavis and Butt-Head into its own program. The mega success of the show — vilified by pundits as everything dumb about TV and praised by David Letterman, Stephen King and others as anything but — led to a hugely successful animated film released in 1996, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

A live action version of Office Space written and directed by Judge was ignored in theaters, building a big cult following on DVD instead. Convinced that a high concept idea was needed to go over well at the box office, Judge came back with a sci-fi comedy titled 3001. Written with a gofer turned writer on Beavis and Butt-Head named Etan Cohen, Fox agreed to bankroll Judge’s next film at a budget of roughly $30 million. Shooting commenced at Austin Studios in May 2004, with Judge and Elysa Koplovitz — former VP of MTV Films who’d worked on the Beavis and Butt-Head feature — producing under Judge’s Austin-based Ternion banner. Once 3001 went before test audiences, the lukewarm response failed to garner the financial support from Fox to properly finish the film, which was shelved. Discarded into a handful of U.S. cities in September 2006 without any promotional campaign whatsoever, the bizarre saga of Idiocracy remained a mystery until Judge broke his silence during the press junket for Extract three years later.

How’d They Do It?
Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in August 2009, Mike Judge confirmed that the idea for what became Idiocracy began in 1995, while he was writing Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. “I guess I was just thinking about evolution and now that there’s no predators and everybody survives — where would it go? But, so I’d written down something about this idea. And then it was in 2001, I was at Disneyland and I was waiting in line at the Alice In Wonderland ride with my daughter and somebody — or both daughters I guess — and somebody behind me had a stroller and two little kids and her and this other woman with two little kids was passing by. I guess they’d had an altercation and they just start getting in this cussing match with each other, just, you know, ‘bitch’ this. But you know, just yelling and like ‘I’ll kick you ass and I’ll’ and I was just sitting there thinking wow, the Disneyland of that was envisioned, way back in the ’50s and, to right now.”

Judge elaborated in a July 2004 interview with The Dallas Morning News, “There was an article that didn’t get a lot of attention about how the crime-rate drop corresponded to about 17 years after Roe v. Wade. The theory was that a lot of unwanted kids weren’t born who would have been coming of criminal age.” Judge admitted this debate wasn’t one that was necessarily politically correct. “It gets into eugenics. To me, it’s just like all the people on The Jerry Springer Show, who’ve knocked up, like, five girls, and then their sons knocked up five and the responsible people waited to have kids.” Judge turned to Etan Cohen, who’d spent his term at Harvard pursuing a degree in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and writing for Beavis and Butt-Head, where Cohen started out as a summer gofer his freshman year. Upon graduation in 1997, Cohen moved to Los Angeles and landed a job on the ABC sitcom It’s Like, You Know before joining the writing staff of Judge’s award winning animated series for Fox, King of the Hill.

Etan Cohen — in a June 2006 interview with Variety — recalled, “Mike called me up and asked me to write Idiocracy – about a man who signs on for a sleep experiment and wakes up 500 years later, but a quirk in evolution has left him the smartest guy on the planet — which was insane. It was almost like film school, except Mike Judge was teaching the class.” Cohen suggested that in five centuries of devolution, the National Art Museum would have morphed into the National Fart Museum. In the world of Judge & Cohen’s script, every available space is covered with advertising — even clothing — while the Secretary of State ends each sentence with “ … brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” because he’s been well compensated. Nurses too dumb to speak diagnose patients with a console where pictures depict various ailments. Cash resembles a hillbilly version of a Master P album cover. Starbucks is still around, but has changed its name to “Starbuck’s Exotic Coffee for Men” to lure more customers.

In a September 2009 interview with Slashfilm, Judge admitted, “I realize that a lot of the things I’m doing don’t fit into the category so easily that people are comfortable with. You know, when we were writing the first draft, we’d start coming up with this stuff. And I think one of the first things that I had written, even when it was a treatment, was the billboard that said, ‘If you don’t smoke Carlton’s, Fuck You.’ Because there’s the billboard: ‘If you smoke, please try Carlton’s.’ So, when I was thinking about this idea, I thought one of the most fun things to do would be the advertising, you know? And when I moved to Austin, maybe a little before I moved to it, I had seen this sign that said, ‘Erotic Tan for Men.’ So, I was like, god, now there are tanning salons that are like, brothels or something. So, I just started thinking what if all these other places started sexualizing things, because people in advertising are always using sex to sell things. There’s already, like, ‘Sexy Scissors’ and Hooters and all of this stuff. And I thought, what if you just cut these people loose and they literally used sex to sell things.”

Judge continued, “It became really fun to write. And you know, looking back, I can see how it can look like an odd movie to come out of Fox I guess. But you know, they were pretty supportive of it up until the end. They also, they didn’t know how to give notes on something like this.” While Carlton Cigarettes and Wal-Mart did not permit their logos to be lampooned, they were the exception. “And as far as the products stuff, I remember writing it and going, ‘Oh man, there’s no way we’re going to clear all of this stuff.’ And I had a meeting with the lawyers, who were actually really cool and really liked the script. And in the Beavis & Butt-Head movie I couldn’t even have a bottle that was shaped like a Jack Daniel’s bottle. I couldn’t have, there was more, it was just ridiculous on that. But on Idiocracy, when we were talking about Starbucks, the lawyers said, ‘Well, it would help if you didn’t pick on just one company and if you did more than one.’ So, I was like okay, and that’s why there’s the whole red light district with Starbucks and there’s an H&R Block with ‘Tax Return and Relief,’ and all of that. But the other stuff, Carl Jr’s, that was all in the script, and I couldn’t believe it all cleared.”

Once Judge decided to cast Luke Wilson, he rewrote the script with the actor from Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums in mind. “Luke is really funny. I think because he’s so good looking, casting people in Hollywood tend to want to put him in boyfriend roles. But he’s really funny. He does really good imitations. He could have been in sketch comedy.” Auditioning performers for the female lead, Judge saw Maya Rudolph and was concerned that the Saturday Night Live cast member might go over the top in a bid for laughs. Rudolph ended up winning the part. “I thought her acting was very much like real movie acting. She definitely gets the big picture. She was really fun to work with and this is her first big part in a movie.” Dax Shepard — from the MTV series Punk’d — wasn’t the physical type Judge was looking for in the part of the dim witted Frito. “I was imagining this big, heavy guy, but it wasn’t working and then Dax came in and read for it. Driving home I was thinking about how funny he was … He has no fear of the camera or of being in a movie. He lets it all hang out in a really funny way.”

With roughly $30 million in financing from Fox, what was then titled 3001 began shooting May 2004 at Austin Studios. Two still photographs emerged online and as of February, a release date of August 2005 was scheduled. Little was made public about the film, even when it finally escaped into theaters September 2006. There were no trailers, no press junket and no major ad campaign of any kind. There was no mention of Idiocracy on the Fox Movies website and if moviegoers who somehow knew about the film dialed Moviefone for show times, there was no listing for Idiocracy but for something called The Untitled Mike Judge Project. Fox opened Idiocracy in seven cities — Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Toronto — on a limited number of screens. Waiting to see the box office returns before expanding Idiocracy to other markets, the studio never did. Limited to 130 theaters, the new comedy from the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space managed $444,093 in the U.S. and $51,210 internationally.

The press began speculating about what had happened. There were several theories. One was that Idiocracy was so awful that no one involved wanted to be associated with it. Mike Judge could not be reached for comment. Publicists for Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph maintained that their clients were unavailable for interviews. In August 2005, a reader giving the name “Delicious” had submitted to the website Ain’t It Cool News a review of a test screening he/she claimed to have attended several months previous. “Not only is it not funny, the acting is atrocious. I’ll give it to Mike Judge for trying something completely different for this movie, trying not to copy Office Space, but man, I can’t see this movie coming out into theatres, if not just straight to DVD.” A self-professed fan of Office Space who’d been looking forward to the screening, the scooper added, “I must also say that I wasn’t alone in the audience I was at. People sitting around us were saying things, and not mincing words, about how bad the movie was. People were actually MAD about seeing a movie that was FREE!”

Another theory was that Fox buckled under pressure from corporate sponsors. Kim Morgan — a contributor for MSN’s film blog The Hitlist — posted a rave review of Idiocracy on her blog Sunset Gun and speculated the cause of its media blackout.“No one knows for sure, but I’m thinking that attacking Starbucks, Fuddruckers, Carl’s Jr. and Costco had something to do with it. Oh yes, and Fox News, can’t forget that beacon of ‘fair and balanced’ broadcast journalism. Fittingly, this is exactly the kind of DEVO inspired treatment Idiocracy is mocking — that big business rules and there’s very little we can do about it. So, like Judge’s Beavis and Butt-head, his now classic Office Space and his TV Show King of the Hill, Idiocracy (and the predicament it fell into) is both darkly hilarious and deeply sad.” Luke Thompson — who also posted a positive review, for E! Online — told Fishbowl L.A., “It was obvious the studio killed it. Usually, movies that don’t screen for the press are promoted up the wazoo with misleading trailers, posters, etc., but this wasn’t promoted at all. It’s possible Mike Judge or somebody else pissed somebody important off.”

Still another theory was that Judge might have had a dispute with Fox over final cut. In retaliation, the studio might have slashed his post-production budget and dumped the film into theaters to fulfill their contractual obligation. Tim League, founder of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Texas, supported this theory by revealing to the website Cinematical that his exhibition contract only specified Idiocracy be run for one week — two weeks is the standard for a new release — at only a 35% share for Fox, which League considered uncommonly low for what distributors typically ask for in the first two weeks of a major release. He added that in spite of requests he’d fielded from film festivals seeking permission to screen Idiocracy, Fox had apparently turned those requests down. League commented, “I’ve never seen anything like this. A studio releases a movie and then doesn’t want anyone to see it. Marketing it should be a no-brainer, with Mike Judge’s pedigree and Luke Wilson starring.”

In a chat with Chud.com in November 2006, Dax Shepard was stumped about the fate of Idiocracy. “I don’t know. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding it now, but there are a couple of issues. One is that it tested poorly, and they base all their P&A funds on how well it tests. But what they didn’t step back and think about is that the people who go see a free test screening on a Saturday night are the people being made fun of in the movie, so of course it didn’t test well. And then I think there are also issues with all the corporate attacks and Rupert [Murdoch, founder of News Corp., which owns Fox] being a very immersed guy in the corporate world, globally. That has to do something to do with it.” Shepard added, “The only perplexing thing about the Mike Judge movie is, why did they make it? The ballsy thing, in my opinion, was making the movie. The movie was the script — they knew what it was going to be. I don’t understand them making it in the first place. It doesn’t shock me that they didn’t know how to market it, but I’m shocked they made it.”

Promoting Extract on Collider.com in September 2009, Judge offered his theory on who or what killed Idiocracy. “I think it was a combination of — I don’t think anyone was out to get me — I think the combination was just kind of incompetence and just not knowing what to do with it. They tried a few ads, it didn’t look very good, and then I think what happened is they said, ‘Okay, Office Space made a lot of money on DVD. Didn’t do a lot at the box office. This is like that, what did we do wrong on Office Space? Well, we spent money promoting it. That was a waste of money because everyone found it on their own anyway, so let’s not spend anything. Let’s not even call Moviefone and give ‘em a title.’” Judge added, “So I just said, well, I’m not going to lift a finger to do any press. I don’t want to talk about it to anybody. ‘Cause I really don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t own it. It didn’t bug me as much as it does some people because I just kind of, in a way, I ended up getting — without doing any interviews — getting a lot of press about how it didn’t get any press. So maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. I don’t think that was their plan. I don’t think it was a master plan to dump it on purpose. I mean, they did dump it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Beavis Creator Sees a Funny Future and Films It” By Jane Sumner. The Dallas Morning News, 30 July 2004

“Mike Judge Is Getting Screwed (Again)” By Brian Rafferty. Esquire, June 2006

“Etan Cohen” By Steven Kotler. Variety, 22 June 2006

“Sooner or Later, Mike Judge Extracts Success” By Lisa Rosen. The Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2009

“The Mike Judge Interview” By Hunter Stephenson. Slashfilm.com, 9 September 2009

“IndieSeen: Time For Mike Judge To Go Indie” By Jette Kernion. Cinematical, 22 October 2006

“Dax Shepard Ponders Fox’s Idiocracy” By Devin Faraci. Chud.com, 15 November 2006

“Mike Judge, Finding A Comic Extract in the Office” By Terry Gross. Fresh Air, 25 August 2009

“Mike Judge talks Office Space, Idiocracy and Extract” By Steve Weintraub. Collider.com, 1 September 2009

Dogma (1999)
Directed by Kevin Smith
Written by Kevin Smith
Produced by Scott Mosier
130 minutes

Should I Care?
Hijacking various Judeo Christian symbols and myths to comment on the hypocrisies of religion, Kevin Smith’s fourth film certainly isn’t lacking in ambition. What it does lack is the resources and craftsmanship to pull any of its ambitions off. But en route to the kind of bug-eyed badness rarely seen in major motion pictures, Dogma hits a few bumps in the road: it’s provocative, it’s fearless, it’s in a class by itself. This cultural satire seems infused with the reckless abandon of the Delta fraternity from National Lampoon’s Animal House, who’ve decided they’re going to be thrown off campus anyway, so they mind as well take as many members of the status quo down with them as possible. That’s not to say Dogma is funny or should even be muttered in the same breath as Animal House, but you almost have to give it an incomplete grade. It’s all attitude — with some sound arguments directed toward religious lemmings — in search of a movie. “Incomplete” sums it up.

There seem to be endless pages of myth Smith forces his characters to explain for purposes of plot; none of it’s funny and none of it really moves the story anywhere. For the female lead, the filmmakers lobbied for and were saddled with Linda Fiorentino, whose barroom languor is a laugh killer (Janeane Garafalo would have been ideal). Smith’s trademark Jay & Silent Bob characters — fixtures at the corner store in laughers like Clerks — seem awkwardly dropped into a film that takes place around churches and engages in spiritual debate. As in any Kevin Smith film, the ones oriented around brutally honest and wackadoo dialogue (Chasing Amy) are quite good, while the ones with characters exchanging gunfire (Mallrats) are woefully bad. For a film with spurts of intelligence and the determination to inspire discussions of God, Dogma is inexplicably a member of the gun club. This approach ends up being a bullet to the head of what might have been a great film.

So, What’s This About?
After successfully persuading a nun in an airport that religion is a fraud, Loki (Matt Damon), the Angel of Death, cast down from heaven by God, and his buddy Bartleby (Ben Affleck), a journalist who got Loki drunk centuries ago and convinced him to quit his job, learn that a Catholic church in Red Bank, New Jersey looking to boost attendance has offered to forgive the sins of all who pass under its arches. This is the loophole in religious dogma that the renegade angels have been waiting for in order to escape banishment in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, an Illinois abortion clinic worker named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) struggling with her faith is visited by the Metatron (Alan Rickman), the herald who does the Supreme Being’s talking because to hear the actual voice of God would cause human beings to explode. The Metatron gives Bethany the task of stopping Loki and Bartleby, whose return to heaven would invalidate the word of God and destroy all existence.

Accompanying Bethany in her journey are two “prophets”, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), New Jersey dope peddlers on a business trip to suburban Illinois in search of the town from the John Hughes movies. Dropping naked from the sky is Rufus (Chris Rock), the thirteenth apostle still upset he was omitted from the Bible; among Rufus’ revelations is that Jesus was black. In a strip club, the gang meets Serendipity (Salma Hayek), the muse. Bethany learns that she was chosen to save mankind because she is the Last Scion, the last surviving heir of Jesus Christ. Plotting against her is the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) who God cast out of heaven for refusing to take sides against Lucifer; as Azrael sees it, the end of existence beats spending any more time in hell. Azrael is assisted by the Stygian Triplets, who under the guise of street hockey punks have incapacitated God, a skeeball fanatic who took human form and was caught by the imps on the New Jersey boardwalk. The fate of mankind now rests in Bethany’s hands.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Kevin Smith was working in a convenience store in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey when on his 21^st birthday, he went to see a movie: Slacker. Impressed that Richard Linklater made a critically acclaimed film in his hometown for next to no money, Smith answered an ad for an eight-month program at Vancouver Film School. There, he met Scott Mosier. Dissatisfied that the course was all theory, Smith dropped out after four months, but made a deal with Mosier that whoever finished writing a script first would get help from the other to make the movie. The result was Clerks, which Mosier produced and Smith wrote, directed and co-starred. It was shot in Smith’s workplace on a budget of roughly $27,000, self-financed using eight credit cards, portions of Smith’s college fund, the sale of his comic book collection and insurance money he and his buddy Jason Mewes collected when a flood damaged their car. Nearly rated NC-17 for its sexually frank dialogue, the comedy was acquired by Miramax Films and launched Smith’s film career.

Smith had already begun scribbling notes for another script. Titled God, he was influenced not only by certain comic books or standup comedians who commented on spirituality, but his own irreverence for his Catholic school education. Retitled Dogma, the technical challenges of the project spurred Smith and Mosier to get more experience before producing it. A poorly received mainstream comedy for Gramercy Pictures (Mallrats, 1995) and an enthusiastically received indie romantic comedy distributed by Miramax (Chasing Amy, 1997) followed. With the cache to attract an all-star cast and as much as $10 million in financing from Miramax, Smith finally produced Dogma. But the work in progress received such an outcry from the Catholic League that Disney sold the picture back to Miramax. Lions Gate Films stepped in and pushed Dogma to respectable box office and the best reviews of Smith’s career.

How’d They Do It?
During his stint at Vancouver Film School and before he wrote Clerks, Kevin Smith was scribbling notes for a script he hoped would spread the word of God in the way Smith knew best. In the liner notes for the special edition DVD of Dogma, he wrote, “All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the differences between religion and faith, and that I had to employ the Plenary Indulgence loophole as a plot device. The idea of the Plenary Indulgence had fascinated me since childhood, when my parish celebrated a Centennial. We received a special dispensation from the Pope decreeing that on the day of the parish’s hundredth anniversary, those who walked through the front door of the church would have all sins erased from their souls, giving them a clean slate, as it were. You might not think this would mean much to an eleven year old kid, because how much sin could he possibly be steeped in? But being educated in a Catholic school can make a kid feel like even the Venial sins (the tiny transgressions like white lies and hurtful sentiments expressed behind your parents’ backs) are one-way tickets to Hell.”

Smith cited his Catholic education as an influence, as well as the comic book Mage by Matt Wagner and the comedy of George Carlin and Sam Kinison, who reached into their Catholic roots for material. The initial idea was for the protagonist of God to be a high school jock. Rufus the 13^th Apostle and Serendipity the Muse were also there. In the summer of 1994 — after Miramax picked up Clerks but before it was in theaters — Smith started a first draft of what he was now calling Dogma. “A high school jock no longer, Bethany became a woman, and she was a stripped in a nudie booth joint, where she met Jay and Silent Bob (enthusiastic clients, to say the least; hilarity ensues). Arazael was introduced only in the last thirty pages of the script, after having been referred to as ‘the Shadowy Figure’ most of the time. At the end of the flick, in an effort to keep Bartleby and Loki from passing through the archway, Bethany blew up the church (imagine the shit I would’ve gotten from the Catholic League for that). But aside from those major differences (and pages and pages of dialogue; the first draft — dated Aug. 4, 1994 — was 148 pages long), everything’s pretty much the same as it is in the finished film.”

As far back as Clerks — when Smith slipped a title card into the end credits that read: “Jay and Silent Bob will return in Dogma” — he planned on making the film. It didn’t happen right away. “Scott Mosier (my producer) and I decided, after reading the first draft, that this was not a flick we wanted to tackle as our sophomore foray. We agreed that it was beyond us (probably still is), and that it’d be best to let it sit on the back burner, until we had enough talent to handle it properly. So we went ahead and made Mallrats in ’95, and during the course of that year, I took another pass at Dogma — this time adding an orangutan for Jay and Bob to hang out with, as well as shifting Bethany’s job from a strip club to an abortion clinic. In ’96, I took another pass at the script, this time dropping the orangutan and rewriting the flick to include Joey Lauren Adams as Bethany (we were dating at the time). Following that pass, I started writing Chasing Amy, and summoned Ben Affleck to Jersey (you could do that in those days) to read the first thirty pages of the script. He asked for something else to read on his way back to Boston, as thirty pages of Amy wouldn’t cover the trip. I gave him Dogma.”

Ben Affleck became vocal about playing Bartleby in Dogma. Smith polished the script with that in mind, as well as Jason Lee performing opposite him as Loki. Chasing Amy would be screened to raves at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997 and Miramax gave a green light to Dogma at a budget of roughly $6.5 million. By that time, Jason Lee’s schedule had filled up. Smith turned to a buddy of Affleck’s named Matt Damon, who’d shown chemistry with Affleck in the dailies of a yet to released film Smith had godfathered at Miramax titled Good Will Hunting. Linda Fiorentino took a break from the press tour for Men In Black in the summer of 1997 to campaign for the part of Bethany. Impressing Smith and Scott Mosier with her grasp of Catholicism, the role was rewritten for an actress in her mid 30s. Smith offered Holly Hunter the role of God, but having just portrayed an angel in A Life Less Ordinary, the actress demurred. Alan Rickman was a fan of Chasing Amy and once he joined the cast, suggested his friend Emma Thompson play the Supreme Being. Thompson agreed.

Assuming he’d cast Samuel L. Jackson as Rufus, Smith was sold on Chris Rock after meeting the comedian. For the role of Serendipity, Miramax encouraged Smith to meet with Salma Hayek. “Salma Hayek was a meeting that I initially didn’t want to take. Serendipity had to be whip-smart, and I wasn’t sure if Salma was that at all. Imagine how stupid I felt when I found out she was a Poli-Sci major who could quote the Bible, chapter and verse. Add to that the fact that she was incredibly adorable and very sweet, and I went from resistant to slavishly devoted.” Smith chased George Carlin to appear as Cardinal Glick. The comedian’s manager maintained that the part was just too small for Carlin to work into his busy schedule. Booked with Carlin on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Smith slipped him the script; Carlin would agree to join the production. Emma Thompson chose to stay in England and have a baby. With God uncast, Smith would offer the role to Alanis Morissette, who had turned down the part of Bethany coming off a concert tour but was now game to join the cast.

In addition to loading the picture with bankable names — actors the studio expected to slash their fees for the creative privilege of working on cutting edge material at a prestige company like Miramax — Smith and Mosier were given an experienced director of photography. They had met David Klein at Vancouver Film School and used him to shoot Smith’s previous three pictures, each of which were savaged in various corners for looking terrible. No one accused Wes Anderson of making shoddy looking films and his director of photography Robert Yeoman came on board Dogma. Smith recalled, “Yeoman was really kind about the other films. Because I was like, ‘What did we do wrong? Why do they look so bad?’ And he was like, ‘Well it’s not like you did anything wrong, you just shoot everything against the wall. You know, and like, you line up people and shoot ‘em against a wall. If you just kind of go to the right, go to the left, you’re getting some depth and suddenly it opens up a little bit more.’ And he said, ‘That’s something we should definitely go for on this movie. More depth, left and right.’”

Dogma commenced shooting April 1998 in Pittsburgh, a city the filmmakers were drawn to for St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which served as location for the climax. In addition to the challenges of shooting a 165-page script in roughly 50 days, Linda Fiorentino and Kevin Smith would both admit difficulties working together. Smith commented on the message boards of his View Askewniverse website, “The interesting thing is, I never had to give a line reading to Alan Rickman unless he asked (which was maybe once or twice). Instinctively, the man knew how things should sound. We never had a problem. Linda, however, would sometimes read a line from another movie altogether, and for the first few days of shooting, her energy didn’t match the text nor anyone else’s in the cast. It was like she was in a different flick.” Smith added, “And while, as I’ve said, I don’t regret casting her, like Chief Brody said in Jaws 2 I never need to go through that hell again. Honestly, I gave very few line readings on Dogma. Linda was the only person who complained about it because she was pretty much the only recipient.”

A pair of Dogma test screenings were held December 1998 in Philadelphia. The only major criticism was that at two and a half hours, the film was running too long. A screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999 compelled Smith to cut two scenes: a musical routine in a strip club where Serendipity inspires her customers to break into the theme from Fat Albert, and a speech by Jason Lee, who’d agreed to appear as the evil Azrael. While Smith’s fan base eagerly awaited his fourth film, the New York based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights — which opposes “anti-Catholic” depictions in the media and counted 350,000 parishioners as members at the time — were not amused. President William Donohue commenced a petition drive to pressure Disney to sever its affiliation with Miramax Films due to the studio’s perceived track record of insulting their faith.. The Catholic League had targeted ABC with one million signatures in opposition to Nothing Sacred, a sitcom about a hip priest played by Kevin Anderson. The series was canceled in 1998 after 20 episodes.

In April 1999, Disney CEO Michael Eisner sold Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein back their political hot potato for $14 million, allowing them to seek another distributor. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Smith lamented, “We had Matt and Ben following Good Will Hunting, a movie that made $125 million, plus won them a writing Oscar. MGM watched it and passed. Columbia watched it and passed. Universal watched it and passed. Edgar Bronfman Jr. watched it himself, and was just like, ‘There’s no way we can put out this movie without seeing our stock drop.’ The unsung villain of all this is Blockbuster Video. Because Blockbuster has made it their mandate that they won’t shelve an NC-17 film, and then you have a company that takes up 85 percent of the video business, maybe more, it’s tough. Every distributor who’s looking to the ancillary market to make money or make up what the film didn’t make theatrically, has to take that into consideration.” Lions Gate Films — gambling on prestige films like Gods and Monsters or Affliction deemed uncommercial by Hollywood — agreed to distribute Dogma.

Promoting his film on The Charlie Rose Show in November 1999, Smith elaborated, “The Catholic League I think is upset because it was a Disney movie initially. This is my feeling. The film was a Miramax movie and by virtue of that it was a Disney film. The Catholic League as you know is an organization, they’re heat seekers; they love to go after stuff that raises their profile. Doesn’t necessarily go after things that are really, intentionally attacks on the faith, or the church, they go after things that they feel attacks them as Catholics. They feel that Disney attacks Catholics constantly, whether it’s with Nothing Sacred — the TV show that was on ABC a little while ago — or Priest — the Miramax movie that was out a few years ago — or Disney’s same-sex health benefits policy, or the alleged gay day they have at Disney World every year. Always going after Disney. And we were just the ripe, luscious opportunity for them to go after Disney, that week. We were kind of the target du jour.” When the film was screened at the New York Film Festival, hundreds of Catholic demonstrators picketed the Lincoln Center.

Critics returned the best reviews of Kevin Smith’s career. Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Dogma is like an underground comics version of the eternal struggle among the inhabitants of heaven, earth, and the hell below. As the writer and director, Smith adopts a ‘what if’ stance, skewing some of the tenets of Catholic theology to create a storyline that looks at the religion from the other side of the rabbit hole. The film is funny, contentious, blasphemous, and surreal.” Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: “The screenplay is another foul-mouthed rehearsal of Smith‘s near-Dickensian genius for the slacker patter of his generation. Yet though Dogma plays like a live-action comic book for boys, it’s also shot through with wisdom at once juvenile and wizened, coupled with a sweetness of temper…” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Like George Bernard Shaw, he loves to involve his characters in long witty conversations about matters of religion, sexuality and politics. Dogma is one of those rare screenplays, like a Shaw playscript, that might actually read better than it plays; Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.”

Kevin Smith’s fans and the free publicity pushed Dogma to $30.6 million at the U.S. box office. Smith credited his cast for that. “At least in that first weekend, because we had, like, almost a nine million dollar opening weekend on only twelve hundred screens, you know, we didn’t have the typical kind of two thousand, twenty five hundred screen opening most films have. But this is a niche film. You know, this is a true independent film, which is why it sucks so hard to see it kind of get snubbed at the Spirit Awards this year. This represents everything that independent film is: It was shot on the cheap. It was a movie that lost its distributor and had to find another distributor, a distributor that is a very — a true independent distributor, not owned by somebody else, Lions Gate. People were working inexpensively and the content is not subject matter that appeals to everybody. Yeah, it’s very funny — hopefully — it’s entertaining, but it’s still about religion for God’s sakes, and who goes to see movies about religion anymore? Particularly ones that aren’t big budget.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dogma (Special Edition). DVD audio commentary by Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier and Vincent Pereira. Columbia Tristar Home Video (2001)

Down and Dirty Pictures. By Peter Biskind. Simon & Schuster (2004)

“OnFilm Interview: A Conversation With Kevin Smith and David Klein” By Bob Fisher. Kodak, November 2008

JFK (1991)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Screenplay by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar, based on the books On The Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs
Produced by Oliver Stone, A. Kitman Ho
Running time: 189 minutes (theatrical version)/ 206 minutes (director’s cut)

Should I Care?
Before Michael Moore came along, columnists representing all the colors of the political spectrum looking forward to the day they could be outraged again had to wait eighteen months for Oliver Stone to make another movie. Irked by the dramatic license Stone took to make entertainment amid the social turmoil of Central America (Salvador) or Wall Street (Wall Street), pundits got their bowties in a bundle when Stone started muddying the waters of history in movies dealing with the antiwar protest (Born on the Fourth of July), the life and times of Jim Morrison (The Doors) and most notoriously, the JFK assassination in JFK. Whatever your favorite conspiracy theory, this epic re-examination of the crime of the century from every conceivable angle — plus seven or eight you probably never conceived of — is nothing short of cinematic Cirque du Soleil, unfolding flashbacks within flashbacks through film editing and sound in a controlled demolition of sorts.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback JFK and question some of the audibles. Kevin Costner seems a bit wholesome to play a district attorney in the Big Easy and some of the oratory typed up for him gets almost as stiff as Costner does. In terms of both the murder mystery at the heart of the material and the technique employed to bring it to the screen, the film has few peers. Drafting top craftsmen — from director of photography Robert Richardson to composer John Williams on down — Stone juggles archive footage with fabrication, black & white with color, Tommy Lee Jones with Joe Pesci. The assassination is initially presented as it was understood at the time, slowly unraveling until an alternate, much more insidious version is proposed. This becomes the stuff great thrillers are made. Critics who argue that it’s all propaganda haven’t really watched the movie. Stone never declares who he believes killed the president and why. That’s ultimately left up to the audience to discuss and decide on our own.

So, What’s This About?
On November 22, 1963, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is notified that the president has been shot. A family man, World War II veteran and popular anti-corruption crusader, Garrison and his staff (Jay O. Sanders, Michael Rooker, Laurie Metcalf, Wayne Knight, Gary Grubbs) watch live on TV as Dallas police apprehend a suspect in Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) who in a press conference coolly maintains his innocence. Oswald is shot in a parking lot the next day by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle Murray). Alerted that Oswald spent the summer before the assassination in New Orleans, Garrison summons a known associate named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) for an interview on a tip he might have been a getaway pilot for Oswald. The FBI questions and releases Ferrie mysteriously. Four years later, a candid chat with Senator Russell Long (Walter Matthau) and glaring inconsistencies in the Warren Commission Report prompt Garrison to reopen the murder of President Kennedy.

The case begins on the night of the assassination when private eye Guy Bannister (Ed Asner) pistol whipped his friend Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon). Martin links David Ferrie and Oswald to Bannister, who was involved in a CIA scheme to train Cuban exiles for another invasion of the island. Garrison follows the trail to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where witnesses report hearing shots fired from a grassy knoll in front of the president’s motorcade, as well as intimidation from federal agents. Garrison’s suspicion falls onto New Orleans industrialist Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) who has CIA ties and discussed an assassination plot with Ferrie and Oswald months before the murder. Scrutinized, attacked and discredited, Garrison’s own wife Liz (Sissy Spacek) begins to question her husband’s case. Garrison is summoned to Washington by a retired Air Force colonel who gives the name X (Donald Sutherland). X confirms that Garrison is closer to the truth than he thinks; Kennedy was killed by a military coup d’état opposed to the president’s intent to end the Cold War.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In May 1988, Oliver Stone attended the Latin American Film Festival in Havana to accept an award for Salvador. In an elevator, a publisher named Ellen Ray introduced herself and told the filmmaker about a book by Jim Garrison that she was publishing titled On The Trail of the Assassins. Headed to the Philippines to shoot the Vietnam sequences for Born on the Fourth of July, Stone read the galleys within days and quickly optioned the film rights out of his own pocket. In search of a writer who could get to work on a first draft, Zachary Sklar, editor of Jim Garrison’s book, was recommended. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy and hire a researcher named Jane Rusconi to lead a team that poured over a hundred more books and documents examining the Kennedy assassination in detail. Arriving on the structure for a murder mystery spanning three cities — New Orleans, Dallas and Washington — Stone successfully pitched his concept to the heads of Warner Bros. in December 1989 and found a home for JFK.

With a screenplay ambitious enough for two movies and a budget that doubled what Stone initially proposed at $40 million, producer Arnon Milchan came on board with financial support from investors based in France (Le Studio Canal+) and Germany (Alcor Films). Stone and casting director Risa Bramon Garcia considered virtually every name actor for a role in the film and doggedly pursued Kevin Costner to take the role of Jim Garrison. The script was kept under wraps until filming was set to get underway in Dallas, but by May 1991 the first scathing attack on the film’s historical inaccuracies appeared in The Washington Post. Many more newspapers and magazines picked up on the furor and despite Stone’s repeated attempts to conduct articulate damage control, JFK and its director were assailed in the media leading up to a hurried release in December. A critical and commercial success and nominated for eight Academy Awards, pundits would continue to attack JFK as propaganda for months.

How’d They Do It?
Ellen Ray was the publisher of a newsletter called CovertAction Information Bulletin and meeting Oliver Stone in a hotel in Havana, began telling him about a book by former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison she was set to publish. In Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker by James Riordan, Stone recalled, “It was at this socialist hotel where it takes like thirty minutes for the elevator to get to the twelfth floor. We were on this creaky elevator and at first I thought she was another of the three thousand crusaders that go to these things around the world, who would talk my ear off about her pet peeve. But Ellen Ray is an extraordinary person in her own right. Back in 1967 she went down to New Orleans to volunteer her services to work with Garrison. She’s one of the most courageous women I’ve met in my life. She has a small printing press with her husband, Bill, and they publish that bulletin. She’s amazingly accurate about some things. And she said, ‘Read this book.’”

Stone ended the conversation by telling Ray to forward the galleys of On The Trail of the Assassins to his office at Fox. Two days later, Ray received a phone call from Stone. Interviewed for a Texas Monthly cover story in December 1991, Ray recalled, “He said, ‘It’s a great book, but I can’t do it. I’m on my way to the Philippines to film Born on the Fourth of July. But you won’t have any trouble selling it.’ Two days later, he called from Hawaii, saying, ‘I just read the book again on the plane. I can’t do it. I’m overloaded.’ Three days later, he called from the Philippines, saying, ‘I’m hooked. I’m going to option it.’” Stone was initially drawn into the material for the film noir aspects that seemed to leap off the page of Garrison’s book. “This pistol whipping occurs on the night of November 22, 1963 on a rainy night in which this guy Jack Martin gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Bannister, and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale of international intrigue — a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.”

Oliver Stone was 17 on the day the president was assassinated. “The Kennedy murder was one of the signal events of the postwar generation, my generation. Vietnam followed, then the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the Pentagon Papers, the Chile affair, Watergate, going up to Iran-Contra in the eighties. We’ve had a series of major shocks. I think the American public smells a rat that’s been chewing on the innards of the government for years.” He added, “As an adolescent, I was self-absorbed with other problems, but I still felt like there was something wrong with the official version of the assassination.” Rather than engage a studio to option On The Trail of the Assassins, Stone kept his interest as quiet as possible by putting up his own money. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He contracted a recent Yale grad named Jane Rusconi to head a research team and assemble as much information on the assassination as they could compile.

Stone’s technical advisers included Larry N. Howard, founder and coordinator of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas. Howard left no bones about why he believed the president was murdered. “John F. Kennedy committed suicide, political suicide. He was getting out of Vietnam, getting rid of the Mafia, dumping Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He fired Allen Dulles from the CIA, said he was going to break up the CIA into a million pieces, make peace efforts with Castro and Krushchev, sign the nuclear test ban treaty. Civil rights was going strong. He had Bobby to succeed him; he had Teddy after Bobby. So the real people who had the power in this country, the military industrial complex, decided that Kennedy was soft on communism and was a threat to national security and worldwide peace. So they got rid of him through rogue elements of the CIA, with the Mafia as a junior partner. And from that point on, they covered it up from the top — the Warren Commission, which Johnson set up with Dulles on the panel.”

Also advising Stone was Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. Prouty had provided logistical support for clandestine CIA operations from 1955-63. He gave Stone a declassified document that he had helped draft: National Security Action Memorandum 263, in which President Kennedy called for the recall of 1,000 advisers from Vietnam by 1963 and a complete withdrawal of U.S. personnel by 1965. As Prouty saw it, this is what got Kennedy killed. “Who did it? I would go to Lyndon Johnson for reference, when he said shortly before he died, ‘We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.’ That’s an enormous statement coming from President Johnson. He was convinced that Oswald did not do it as an individual, that there was a conspiracy, and that the government had the capabilities to do it.” Prouty didn’t believe LBJ was involved in the assassination, but that the president kept his suspicions to himself after the fact.

In December 1989 — with Born on the Fourth of July in theaters and Stone prepping to shoot The Doors in March 1990 — the filmmaker and his agent Paula Wagner met with Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Robert Daly, president Terry Semel and production executive Bill Gerber. Stone revealed that he was writing a script about the JFK assassination. Semel recalled, “My reaction was we should do it. It was entertaining and intriguing, a great murder mystery, something we cared about and grew up thinking about. It took me two minutes to be totally engrossed with the whole idea.” Warner Bros. agreed to put up $20 million in financing for worldwide distribution rights. Stone recalled, “The film had a home. I know I could have made a better overall deal by selling off the international market separately, but I wanted to sell the whole thing to Warners because I didn’t want the script going all over the world to be bid on and read. I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted one entity to finance the whole thing. Given Terry Semel’s record of political films, Warners was my first choice.”

Stone hired Zachary Sklar to adapt Jim Garrison’s book into a screenplay. Sklar clarified, “I had not been what you call an assassination researcher –I was fifteen when the assassination occurred, and of course it deeply affected me, as did the other assassinations that followed. I didn’t take any particular research interest in it, I did become a journalist, and I edited a number of books about the CIA for Sheridan Square Press, which publishes books by former CIA agents who have become disillusioned with the agency. Sheridan Square Press approached me in 1987 with a manuscript from Jim Garrison that had been rejected by another publishing house. I worked on that book for about a year and a half with Jim Garrison, we re-structured and re-wrote it, and that book became On the Trail of the Assassins, that’s how I got into the assassination.” While Sklar focused on the Jim Garrison story, Stone worked on the Lee Harvey Oswald angle, the events at Dealey Plaza and the Mr. X story in Washington.

By July 1990, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe were on Stone’s short list to play Jim Garrison, but also being considered were Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, Michael Douglas, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, John Malkovich, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Quaid, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Marlon Brando. In the end, scripts went out simultaneously to Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner. Ford reportedly backed away from the material because he didn’t believe there was any conspiracy. Costner — a conservative tilting supporter of George H.W. Bush — may have had similar reservations, but Stone wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Costner was a big break for us. I chased him and got him. Mike Ovitz was instrumental in that. It helped that he was a strong fan of the movie and was strongly urging Costner, his client, to be in it. He kept saying, ‘He’s gonna do it, don’t worry. It’ll happen.’”

Whether Dallas was ready to move beyond 11-22-63 or were just happy to see Stone — who had shot most of Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas and was now bringing $5 million to the local economy — for the most part, the city welcomed JFK. In an open audition that drew 11,000 to the Dallas Convention Center, locals were cast as the Kennedys and Connellys, as well as in sixty other bit parts. Shooting was scheduled to begin April 1991. The trouble began two months earlier. Assassination researcher Harold Weisberg had dispatched an angry letter to Stone disparaging the Jim Garrison investigation. Weisberg failed to draw a response, but did get a hold of a script, a first draft that he passed along to George Lardner Jr. of The Washington Post. Stone recalled, “When Lardner showed up at our offices and walked down the fucking hall uninvited, I knew we had a problem. He’s an old CIA investigative reporter and has many contacts in the agency. He was snooping around, and we escorted him off the set. And he wrote the worst possible story he could write.”

Many columnists would blast Stone for playing fast and loose with history at best, misleading the public at worst. Stone later commented, “I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a countermyth. No one really knows what happened on November 22, 1963, or who did it, but there sure are an abundance of flaws in the official investigation. I wanted to use Garrison as a vehicle for a larger perspective, a metaphoric protagonist who would stand in for about a dozen researchers. Filmmakers make myths. D.W. Griffith did it in Birth of a Nation. In Reds, Warren Beatty probably made John Reed look better than he was, but remained true to the spiritual truth of Reed’s life. I knew this would make Garrison somewhat better than he was and, in that sense, we’d be making him more of a hero. I knew I would catch a lot of flak for that, but I figured it was worth it to communicate, really get across, some truth in an area that had been steeped in lies for nearly thirty years.”

Filming wrapped in July 1991 and post-production supervisor Bill Brown highlighted the technical challenges of assembling the film Oliver Stone had in mind. “A show like Return of the Jedi would maybe have four to five hundred opticals. For JFK, we had two thousand opticals. Of course, the shots in something like Return of the Jedi would generally be much more complicated than the opticals we used in JFK, but the sheer volume of the JFK material made it very difficult. We smashed all the records at the optical house.” He added, “A line in the script would say, ‘A C-130 transport plane flies over the South Pole’ and we would have to find that shot. Now there’s a warehouse sitting out in Van Nuys with Air Force footage in it and there’s probably hundreds of thousands of feet of C-130s, but the Air Force has to read the script for you to get it. Obviously, we’re not going to turn the script of JFK over to the U.S. government armed forces, so we have to scrounge it from other places. Or he would ask for a shot of Robert Bissell, who was a CIA agent. Well, these guys are spooks; they’re not supposed to have their picture taken.”

In an interview with Cineaste in 1992, Stone explained “I wanted to do the film on two or three levels — sound and picture would take us back, and we’d go from one flashback to another, and then that flashback would go inside another flashback, like the Lee Bowers thing. We’d go to Lee Bowers at the Warren Commission, and then Lee Bowers at the railroad yard, all seen from Jim’s point of view in his study. I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission Report is like drowning. The levels and the consciousness of reality created through sound — the work done by Wylie Stateman and Michael Minkler is incredible — was also in the script. But Warner Bros. was confused by the script — you can imagine 158 pages filled with flashbacks like that and I think there are some 2,800 shots in the movie — so I took all the flashbacks and I gave them a simpler script which they liked. Then I and the editors — Joe Hutshing, Pietro Scalia and Hank Corwin — ended up putting all the flashbacks back in the editing room, and adding quite a few new ones in a sort of prismatic structure.”

Arriving in U.S. theaters in December 1991, JFK dazzled critics. Desson Howe, The Washington Post: “Despite its three hours, JFK is almost always absorbing to watch. It’s not journalism. It’s not history. It is not legal evidence. Much of it is ludicrous. It’s a piece of art or entertainment. Stone, who has acknowledged his fusing of the known and the invented, has exercised his full prerogative to use poetic license. He should feel more than mere craftsman’s satisfaction at the result.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer’s complacency. Stone’s picture is, in both meanings of the word, sensational: it’s tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.“ Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory. Or, at least, he sets the stage for a good argument. And that’s where JFK’s real power lies — in stirring the national debate.”

On Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both delivered a ringing endorsement for JFK and debated the media furor it had stirred up. Roger Ebert: “I think intelligent moviegoers are capable of looking at this movie and knowing exactly what Stone did. He took real footage, he took fictional footage and a lot of it is speculative; in other words, Garrison’s imagining different ways the same thing could have happened and it’s exhilarating for us to follow that thought process through to the end, even if in the end, we still don’t know who killed Kennedy.” Gene Siskel: “I think what he is saying really, I think that included in the conspiracy is the American public, in the sense of not demanding more. Here’s a guy who feels, ‘Hey look it, I went to Vietnam, I have reason to believe that the whole Vietnam experience was caused, or could have been averted if Kennedy had lived. Not sure, but could have been — maybe a better chance than LBJ running the ship — and therefore, I laid my life on it, I have the right to make a film about it too.’”

Stone took the airwaves to discuss and defend JFK, appearing on Nightline, City Desk and The Oprah Winfrey Show for starters. He accepted an invitation to mix it up with Dan Rather on the CBS news magazine 48 Hours. “On Nightline they aired something like a six-minute clip and raised all kinds of charges, but then didn’t allow me to answer any of them. Because of that kind of prejudice, I was wary about the CBS News interview. When we did it, I was very painstaking about my answers. I left the Q&A session after every question to consult with my research assistants and then I’d come back and lay out the answer. That seemed to upset Dan Rather a bit. In the end, the interview took two hours and must have included twenty questions, but when they aired it they cut all by one question, the most innocuous one. They simply would not allow me to get my point across.” Four months after its release, MPAA president Jack Valenti, a former top aide to Lyndon Johnson, joined the chorus denouncing the film, comparing JFK to Triumph of the Will as a “propaganda masterpiece” and “hoax”.

Nevertheless, JFK drew box office receipts of $70.5 million in the United States and $135 million overseas. It would be nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Looking back on the media firestorm years later, Stone was still snakebit. “When Anthony Lewis would come out with a strong criticism about the film — and he was so one-sided in some of the statements he made — I would try to correct it and I couldn’t get the letter published. I had to go to the mat several times with Warners backing me to say we’re gonna take a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing this unfair practice unless you publish this letter. It was that way with several publications. The moment I entered that arena I regretted it in a sense because it’s an endless battle — you’re attacked, and if you reply, they attack you again. They leave stuff out of your letter to make you look bad. The attacks became a major newspaper event. It was like Tommy Lee Jones said, everybody and their dog got to write an article about it and got paid for it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Can Hollywood Solve JFK’s Murder” By Mark Seal. Texas Monthly, December 1991

“Interview with Zachary Sklar, Co-Writer of the Movie JFK” By Frank Morales and Paul DeRienzo.14 January 1992

“Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview With Oliver Stone” By Gary Crowdus. Cineaste, 1992

Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker. By James Riordan. Hyperion (1995)

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Steven Spielberg, screen story by Ian Watson, based on the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss
Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Bonnie Curtis
Running time: 146 minutes

Should I Care?
There are science fiction films that improve with age — Blade Runner tops the list and Donnie Darko is right behind it — and then there’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s ambitious tribute to his friend, the late Stanley Kubrick. The good news for Kubrick fans is that unlike the master filmmaker’s aborted Napoleon project circa 1970, we’ll never have to ponder what Kubrick’s future faerie tale would have looked like had he lived long enough to figure out the story and direct it himself. The bad news is that despite the streamlined elegance of its industrial look — production designer Rick Carter and his team were nominated by the Art Directors Guild for an Excellence in Production Design Award, while Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Stan Winston and Michael Lantieri were robbed of an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects — the conceit of an artificial boy who longs to be real after his adoptive mother reads him Pinocchio is artificially sweetened at best, tedious at worst.

The landscape A.I. spirits us across — an energy efficient single family home, an anti-robot carnival of destruction, a sin city over the Delaware River, the ruins of a Manhattan deluged by the rising tides — is as visually compelling as any you’d expect from the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But Spielberg’s screenplay spins its wheels trying to engender sympathy for an artificial boy and validate its childish perceptions of the world. The script squanders opportunities to fully explore humanity and the direction we’re headed and seems devoted instead to pushing the comforts of fantasy. The result is less E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and more Harry and the Hendersons. Jude Law fills in for Bigfoot as comic relief, but doesn’t seem to even be acting in the same movie as the hapless Haley Joel Osment, who does the best he can with a role that would have better realized fifteen years later as a completely digital character. The vibrant and penetrating musical score by John Williams is perfect as is.

So, What’s This About?
In an unspecified future, greenhouse gases have melted the polar ice caps, submerged the coastal regions of the world and displaced millions of people. To assist mankind with labor without draining resources, artificial beings referred to as “mecha” have been created. Unlike organic beings, mecha require no food, no sleep and will never grow old. The latest mechas even look human, but lack our emotional responses. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) challenges his colleagues at New Jersey based Cybertronics to develop a mecha child with the capacity to love, the ideal product for families unable to acquire a license for children. Hobby approves a test family consisting of Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) who views the mecha child as something of a toy. His wife Monica (Frances O’Connor) grieves the loss of their biological son Martin (Jake Thomas), suspended in a cryogenic state for the last five years while doctors attempt to cure a rare illness.

The arrival of the artificial surrogate David (Haley Joel Osment) upsets Monica at first, but after growing attached to the mecha, she chooses to initiate its imprinting protocol, emotionally coupling David to her forever. When Martin recovers and returns home, David finds the love of his mother elusive. Sibling rivalry increases tensions in the Swinton home and David is soon seen as a threat. Rather than send him to Cybertronics for destruction, Monica sets David loose with a walking and talking teddy bear (voiced by Jack Angel) for companionship. David falls in with a group of castaway mecha including Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure model framed for murder by the husband of one of his clients. The pair escapes a Flesh Fair, a futuristic tractor pull where humans celebrate the destruction of artificial beings. Having been read Pinocchio by his mother, David believes he can win her love back by finding the Blue Fairy, who will turn him into a real boy. With Joe’s help, David embarks on a journey to meet his creator.

Who Made It?
Supertoys Last All Summer Long was a short story by British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss published in 1969. Four years later, Aldiss co-authored a history of sci-fi titled Billion Year Spree that included a flattering reference to Stanley Kubrick, the master filmmaker of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Having settled in the village of St. Albans north of London, Kubrick invited Aldiss to lunch in 1976 and latched onto the idea of adapting Supertoys into a feature film. Aldiss agreed to sell Kubrick the film rights in 1982 and worked with him on a screenplay, but when Kubrick insisted on incorporating elements of Pinocchio to tell the story of an android yearning to be a real boy, the partnership stalled. Failing to respark their collaboration in 1990, Kubrick turned to sci-fi author Ian Watson to draft a story based on Aldiss’ concepts. Working with Watson, Kubrick fashioned a 90-page treatment for a “robot version of Pinocchio”, which Kubrick was calling A.I.

Kubrick commissioned hundreds of illustrations from graphic artist Chris Baker and even shot some test footage, but unable to make the film with the technology that existed at that time, the director put A.I. on the shelf. Jurassic Park compelled Kubrick to revive the project in 1993, but he convinced himself that the ideal director for the material would be Steven Spielberg, who Kubrick had discussed A.I. with as early as 1984. Envisioning a Stanley Kubrick production of a Steven Spielberg film, Kubrick temporarily got the director on board before Spielberg insisted that Kubrick direct A.I. himself. Kubrick’s death in March 1999 threatened to keep A.I. on the drawing board, until his brother-in-law Jan Harlan and widow Christiane proposed to Warner Bros. revive A.I. with Spielberg at the helm. The finished product — with Spielberg adapting Kubrick’s treatment and designs into his own script — would sharply divide critics and moviegoers when released two years later.

How’d They Do It?
In an interview with BBC News in September 2001, Brian Aldiss recalled the genesis of Supertoys Last All Summer Long, published in Harper’s Bazaar 32 years previous. “I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now — they were lodged in laboratories. At that time possibly, because of their novelty, there was a theory that the human brain was roughly like a computer; it calculated in the same way and moreover the dreams we dreamt at night were indications that the computer was downloading data. If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it — the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love. And that was what I think attracted Stanley Kubrick to the story.”

Aldiss made a passing reference to the master filmmaker in a sci-fi history he wrote with David Wingrove titled Billion Year Spree, in which Kubrick was described as “a great science fiction writer of the age”. Kubrick invited the author to the first of several lunches in 1976. In conversations about what type of movie Aldiss thought would be successful, the author suggested Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. Kubrick was interested in Supertoys and in 1982 purchased the film rights. By November ‘82, Aldiss went to work with the director at his estate in St. Albans, attempting to expand the 2,000-word short story into a screenplay. Aldiss recalled, “Kubrick always told me that if you had a six or eight-part episodic structure, then you’d got the film made. He kept saying to me, ‘Look, Brian, forget about narrative. What we want are six non-submersible units.’ That was his philosophy. You can really see it working well in 2001, with these disparate elements that don’t quite connect, and that’s what gives the film its mystery.”

Aldiss continued, “You have to work to make the connection yourself; the most brilliant one, of course, being when the ape-man throws the femur up into the air and Kubrick cuts to the space vehicle. If ever you want to prove Kubrick’s genius, then you only need look at the juxtaposition of those two shots.” But Aldiss was uncomfortable with where Kubrick wanted to go with the source material. “Stanley was set upon making a modernized version of Pinocchio in which David the android boy meets the Blue Fairy and becomes transformed into a real boy. I hoped that Stanley would create another future myth and not really look back. In the end we weren’t seeing eye to eye and things were not moving forward and I got the push.” In 1990, Kubrick phoned Aldiss and briefly invited him back in an effort to jumpstart Supertoys. Kubrick had arrived on the melting of the polar ice caps and the flooding of New York as a non-submersible unit, but Aldiss’ unwillingness to work the Blue Fairy into the script put him on the outs.

British science fiction author Ian Watson then entered the picture. In a memoir published in The New York Review of Science Fiction ten years later, Watson recalled, “Early in 1990, in my cottage in a little English village sixty miles north of London, the phone rang. Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Tony Frewin, introduced himself and said that Stanley wished to talk to me. Why me? It transpired that Tony had phoned various specialist SF book dealers to ask who they rated as a writer with lots of bright ideas, and several of my story collections, such as Slow Birds and Evil Water, were duly delivered to Stanley. A few hours later the courier arrived and handed over a package containing nine sheets of flimsy fax paper bearing the text of Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, faded as if retrieved from an ancient file.” Describing the movie Kubrick had in mind as “a picaresque robot version of Pinocchio”, Watson was put under contract to Warner Bros. and from May 1990 to January 1991, huddled with Kubrick to produce a 90-page treatment for A.I.

As early as 1984, Kubrick confided in Steven Spielberg his plans for A.I., which inched closer to reality once he saw the advances in visual effects that Industrial Light & Magic made in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Kubrick shot test footage of oil rigs in the North Sea, imagining that he could digitally replace them with skyscrapers. Discussing A.I. in a behind-the-scenes featurette for the film’s DVD release, Spielberg revealed, “Stanley investigated several things. He actually built a complete mechanical child that was a complete disaster. The mechanics of what we can do today cannot simulate the liquid movements of let’s say of computer graphics animation, but CGI has also not yet reached a state of the art where it can replicate a human being. We mixed it a bit in Jurassic Park where the animals were CGI and the people of course were not and Shrek is all CGI and that’s an art form onto itself, but to put a digital boy in amongst a cast of human beings photographed on 35 millimeter, we’re still years away from that technologically.”

In 1994, Kubrick summoned Spielberg to St. Alban’s for a chat. Interviewed by Mark Kermode for The Culture Show in November 2006, Spielberg revealed, “He didn’t want to make A.I. I mean, he developed it, for himself and then he said, ‘This is more you than me.’ And he began to produce it for me to direct. We actually made a deal with Warner Bros. for Stanley to produce it, for me to direct it based on Stanley’s script with Ian Watson. And it was great. It was going to be a great relationship and then I kept getting faxes from Stanley all night long.” Spielberg added, “And the amount of information he was giving me, including shots and where the camera should go was so extraordinarily precise and detailed that I finally called him on the phone and said, ‘Stanley, I can’t direct this movie. These faxes are crying out to me to say to you, you have to direct it. This is your movie.’ And I withdrew from the project.” Kubrick put A.I. on the backburner once again and began a five-year odyssey to get Eyes Wide Shut on the screen. It would be Kubrick’s final film.

Kubrick passed away suddenly at his home in March 1999. Several months later, Kubrick’s wife Christiane and his associate producer Jan Harlan contacted Warner Bros about reviving A.I. under a new director. Harlan recalled, “It simply would have disappeared into the archives if Steven Spielberg had not taken it.” With an April 2000 start date for Minority Report looming, the director poured over Watson’s 90-page treatment and some 600 storyboards that graphic artist Chris Baker had drawn for Kubrick.“So many of the visual iconic moments in the film were based on ideas that Stanley had — like the Flesh Fair, the moon with the gondola underneath it, the whole concept of Teddy, which was part of the original Brian Aldiss five-page short story that he wrote back in the late 1970s. But Stanley left behind boxes of his notes and I could read his handwriting because I had eighteen years of learning how to read his faxes mostly in longhand and it was just interesting little tidbits and not really philosophical but mainly ways that he wanted the picture to feel and look.”

In March 2000, it was announced that Spielberg had chosen to push Minority Report back a year to direct A.I. from a screenplay he’d adapted himself. Budgeted at roughly $90 million, shooting commenced that August. Other than a jaunt up to Gresham, Oregon to film the forest scenes, A.I. was mostly shot over 68 days on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. For a 2001 TV documentary produced in the U.K. titled Steven & Stanley, the director confided, “The hard thing about making A.I.: I didn’t want to lose myself and you know, just slave and service Stanley’s vision. I had to put as much of myself in this project as I could to also make it my while.” He added, “Stanley wanted to put the Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story in synchronocity with Brian Aldiss’ story of David, Monica and Henry. As a matter of fact, Brian Aldiss called me when he found out that I was in the picture to beg me to drop the entire Pinocchio idea. He said, ‘Pinocchio’s one story and my story is another. You should make my story and not Pinocchio’s story.’ And I explained to him that I was really making Stanley’s story at this point.”

Opening June 2001, A.I. divided critics almost evenly as a movie could. A.O. Scott, The New York Times: “A.I. is the best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy’s adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made. Once again he asks us to identify with a young boy, exiled from the only home he knows and forced to find his way in a strange and unsympathetic world.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Greatness and miscalculation fight for screen space in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a movie both wonderful and maddening. Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years, filled with wondrous sights and provocative ideas, but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character that is, after all, a machine.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “What is of note is the fact that what we’re left with — Kubrick or no — is a muddled, messy disaster of a film, something that seems more like a drastically edited miniseries, cut down to incomprehensible levels with whole sections missing. You may wonder what’s going on more that once. You’re not alone.”

With box office receipts leveling off at $78.6 million in the United States, A.I. was a blockbuster overseas, grossing $157.3 million. Confiding to Mark Kermode five years later, Spielberg addressed the criticism heaped on the film, namely, that it was either too long, too candy coated or both. “All the blame I get for destroying Stanley’s vision are scenes that Stanley actually came up with. You know, the scenes that people can’t believe Stanley conceived — and would have directed himself — are the scenes I’m most credited with spoiling A.I. You know, the whole ending, where after, where David and Teddy are actually rescued underwater, and when it turns to ice and brought into their own future of super mecha. This was Stanley and Ian’s treatment. It was their 97 page treatment that I adapted into my screenplay.” He admitted, “But I think what’s also interesting is I think one of the things that scared Stanley away from A.I. was it was too much of a film for me and too little of the kind of movie he is known for, as a great cineaste.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Plumbing Stanley Kubrick” By Ian Watson. New York Review of Science Fiction, May 2000

“Regarding Stanley” By Rachel Abramowitz. The Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2001

“The Steven & Stanley Story” By Jenny Cooney Carrillo. Urban Cinefile, 6 September 2001

“Brian Aldiss: Kubrick, Spielberg and Me” By Matthew Sweet. The Independent, 14 September 2001

“The Mind Behind AI” BBC News. 20 September 2001

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition. DreamWorks Video (2002)

“An Interview with Steven Spielberg” By Mark Kermode. The Culture Show, 4 November 2006

Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

Dark City (1998)
Screenplay by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, story by Alex Proyas
Directed by Alex Proyas
Produced by Andrew Mason, Alex Proyas
Running time: 103 minutes (theatrical version)/ 111 minutes (Director’s Cut)

Should I Care?
In the sub-genre of alternate universe movies, Dark City demands to be seen with almost as much energy as it begs to be forgotten. As close to a passion project as you get in Hollywood, Alex Proyas cashed in the chips he earned directing a box office hit (The Crow) without the participation of a lead actor in Brandon Lee, who was killed during filming. Contrary to its intense ambitions, this unique hybrid of special effects phantasmagoria and existential detective mystery isn’t undone by doing too much, but by doing not nearly enough. Much like three films that would follow it into theaters — The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998) and The Matrix (1999) — Dark City deals with the inhabitants of a parallel world who begin to question the fabric of what they know as reality. Unlike those films, modern classics all, Dark City is not nearly as inventive in depicting its world or the beings controlling it as the filmmakers probably dreamed.

Proyas deserves style points for attempting something different here, as opposed to drawing a paycheck on Casper the Friendly Ghost. At its best, Dark City is drenched in the nocturnal shades of an Edward Hopper painting, with sensational lighting by Tim Burton’s cinematographer of late, Dariusz Wolski, evoking the wee small hours of the morning. Trevor Jones composed the rousing musical score, perfect for a monster movie of some sort, but not this one. The poorly sketched antagonists are more silly than sinister, while the entire cast seems to have been coaxed into sleepwalking through their performances. Maybe what’s missing most here is wit, either in a visual sense, like Terry Gilliam might have attempted, or in a spark from the characters themselves, who come across as figures in a mildewed comic book panel. If that’s what Proyas intended, the results are a big miscalculation.

So, What’s This About?
At the stroke of midnight, in a city fused with elements of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in a hotel room where a young woman has been murdered. He has no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) telephones claiming to be Murdoch’s physician and warns that others are coming for him. The appearance of boogeymen known as The Strangers — who wield supernatural power over the inhabitants of the city — compels Murdoch to go on the run. Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) heads the manhunt and like Murdoch, the detective is haunted by an inability to remember much of his past, like the last time he actually saw daylight. His ex-partner (Colin Friels) has gone insane trying to unravel questions like this. Bumstead works with Murdoch’s estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) in an effort to bring him in safely, but his pursuit is complicated by Murdoch’s newfound ability to alter reality.

Dr. Schreber reveals to Murdoch that he is the focus of a massive experiment by The Strangers — led by Mr. Book (Ian Richardson) and his apprentice Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) — to distill what makes the soul unique. The Strangers have the power to put the city’s inhabitants to sleep and at midnight each day, “tune” their experiment by changing the identities and social status of their unsuspecting test subjects, as well as the physical reality of the city itself. Murdoch has been given the identity of a murderer to play, but The Strangers learn that with the ability to “tune”, he has the power to undermine their control.  Rejecting what Schreber has told him, Murdoch becomes obsessed with finding Shell Beach, the coastal village he vaguely remembers growing up in, but no one in the city seems to recall how to get to. With Bumstead’s help, Murdoch travels to the known boundaries of the city, where the secret of his existence is finally revealed to him.

Who Made It?
Alex Proyas was a freshman at the Australian Film and Television School when an 8-minute thriller he wrote and directed titled Groping (1982) made the film festival circuit. Proyas served as a director of photography on a short by classmate Jane Campion before dropping out of school in his third year to form a production company with two friends. Proyas began directing music videos for artists like INXS and Mike Oldfield, but his work on the Crowded House hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (1987) won him notice in the United States. Commercial work for Coca-Cola, Swatch and American Express followed, but Proyas was already scribbling ideas for a movie titled Dark City. When he finally accepted an offer to direct a feature film — The Crow (1994) — it was due largely to similarities the projects shared in mood and setting. The success of The Crow vaulted Proyas into the class of David Fincher and Michael Bay, music video directors who’d also made the leap to features.

Proyas wanted to direct Dark City next. Disney developed it, hiring Lem Dobbs to work with Proyas, but the studio’s befuddlement with their story would prompt them to drop the project. Fox was up next and brought in David S. Goyer to help Proyas & Dobbs iron out the script. Casting differences with Proyas would ultimately compel Fox to put Dark City into turnaround as well. New Line Cinema gave Proyas casting approval and roughly $27 million to produce his dream project, which shot in the Commemorative Pavilion at Sydney Showgrounds — now the site of Fox Studios Australia — far from the gaze of the studio. After drawing mixed reception at a test screening, New Line urged Proyas to make several commercial concessions, clarifying the story with a voice-over introduction, for one. Dark City was swept aside by Titanic at the box office, but a decade since its release, it has emerged as one of the most highly regarded cult movies of the 1990s.

How’d They Do It?
Intrigued with the potential for combining the hardboiled detective yarn with a science fiction story, Alex Proyas began writing a script around 1990. He recalled, “Basically I had the first draft — or I’d done many drafts but I had an early draft of Dark City — ready to go after The Crow opened and was quite successful. And basically I was asked to, people presented themselves, studios presented themselves and wanted to know whether I had a project I wanted to do next and Dark City was the one I started showing people. And at that stage it was even more unusual than the final film, even more challenging, to be made as a feature. So, you know, it was a slow process and you know, we went through several studios because there were always disagreements with where they wanted the script to go, where I didn’t want the script to go. I had a very specific idea about what I didn’t want to develop the screenplay into.”

Proyas was interested in working with Lem Dobbs, author of perhaps the most highly regarded screenplay never made into a movie: Edward Ford. Dobbs recalled, “A lot of people assume I got this job — or that Alex came to me — because I had written Kafka, which is not the case at all. Alex is not a particular admirer of the film Kafka, nor should he be. He in fact had read another script of mine, and then Disney, who’d actually hired me to work on Dark City, when my name came up they said, ‘Oh, but he’s too dark.’ I think one of their problems was Alex’s script Dark City was that they felt it should be lightened up a little. And the producer of Dark City, Andrew Mason, had read a rather romantic comedic love story that I had written. And it was that script that encouraged them to hire me. And it never for one minute occurred to me that this film was Kafkaesque. I recognized right away that Alex’s script had superficial similarities to the film Kafka, but in terms of Kafka the writer and the world that he evokes and the issues and themes that he was dealing with? No.”

Dobbs revealed, “I think he pretty much hired me based on the notes I’d written and our initial phone conversation. We seemed to hit it off and be thinking along the same lines and also I had a contract in hand by the time I got on a plane and went to Australia. So that’s pretty amazing, to be hired sight unseen. Particularly when you, I remember in my notes I said, I sort of indicated certain things in the script I thought were clichés. So that’s how you get hired in Hollywood, is by telling your director that his script is full of clichés and has certain pretentious elements that should be removed! I remember the first thing was that the character was called Walker in his original script and I said, ‘You can’t call him Walker.’ It’s just been done to death and it’s been taken so famously by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, but by this point you see the name Walker and it’s meant to symbolize an existential everyman trying to find his place in the world.”

Touchstone’s executive vice president Donald De Line didn’t see a movie he wanted to produce. Dobbs mused, “In Hollywood — in any screenplay — the suits wanna know what the rules are. They want to know, they want to do the math, and it’s terribly irritating to filmmakers because we often don’t care about the math. Like I’ve been saying, I don’t care about the story, the plot. I care about the man in search of himself, and other things. And when you have meetings in Hollywood, quite often, all people can really talk about is the actual plot: How does he get from A to B, who are these aliens, where do they come from. They want everything answered. And as we know, often the best movies don’t answer everything. They leave room for interpretations. They leave room for discovery on the part of the viewer. You don’t want total confusion, obviously. You don’t want the viewer to be lost or to get bored or to be mystified, completely, but you don’t want everything spelled out. You want it to be ambiguous here and ambivalent there and have mysteries.”

Fox picked up Dark City next. The only screenwriter both studio and director agreed on bringing in was David S. Goyer, who’d been sent an early draft by Proyas before The Crow was even in theaters. Goyer recalled, “And I remember the first day we were talking about kind of the genesis of the ideas and he said that he had had these dreams when he was a kid with these tall, dark figures pursuing him. And I had had a similar recurring nightmare when I was a kid about being pursued by this character called the Midnight Man, and it was just this silhouetted figure that would chase me and I remember the two of us talking about that in our first meeting and from that point on we just kind of clicked.” Goyer and Proyas spent a month in Australia working on a first draft, which Fox responded to favorably. After talking with Johnny Depp among others, Proyas narrowed his choice for leading man down to Ralph Fiennes, who the studio rejected due to how poorly Strange Days (1995) fared at the box office. Reaching an impasse with Proyas, Fox put Dark City into turnaround.

Proyas lamented, “The genesis of Dark City — even once we got involved with the studio — was a really slow and ponderous one, because I wanted this thing to be just completely off the wall. And I think this is where I finally discovered the principle that functions in Hollywood, which is the bigger the budget of a project the smaller the ideas. That’s a direct correlation.” New Line Cinema — the mini-studio that had rolled the dice on Seven (1995) and Boogie Nights (1997)  — was confident enough in Proyas to grant the freedom and financing for him to make the version of Dark City he wanted. By this time, Proyas had settled on Rufus Sewell to play the role of Murdoch. A 65-day shooting scheduled commenced August 1996 in Sydney, with Dariusz Wolski serving as cinematographer and Patrick Tatopoulos as production designer. George Liddle came on board during pre-production to help construct the fantastic cityscape.

Put before a test audience, Dark City drew a middling response. The rX offered by New Line was for the filmmakers to come up with a voice-over introduction that might explain what was going on. Goyer recalled, “All throughout production we had fought that battle, because we wanted the audience to be confused at the beginning of the movie.” Though Proyas had kept The Crow true to the gothic spirit of the comic book it was based on, Dark City met so much bewilderment that the director made concessions. Proyas elaborated, “In Dark City’s case, the pressure that was brought to bear on me is simply that the film wasn’t appealing to as many, as great a percentage of the audience as a studio would like for it to appeal to in order for them to make their money back. And the reality is, they were right to a certain extent. We perhaps made a film with a greater budget than it merited for that type of story. But unfortunately, by trying to distill it down to something it wasn’t, I feel in the end you risk losing your core audience.”

Critics returned from their visit to Dark City with a myriad of views. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “At its best, the movie feels like a magician’s trick, a gleefully improvised demonic fantasy of ominous evil genies conjured out of bottles and stirred into a steamy swirl that brings in everything from Franz Kafka to Vincent Price, from Fritz Lang to Star Trek.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “What they have done is taken a few second-hand ideas from noir and speculative fiction and mixed them in occasionally striking ways, even if, in the end, the result isn’t all that much fun.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Proyas’ ability to make a twilight cityscape look menacing is like no one else’s. But apart from the sensory input he throws at you, Dark City is a curiously unengaging experience. It’s like the CD-ROM games Myst or Riven blown up to huge cinematic proportions while the critical ideas driving the play are left behind. For all its dark splendor, nothing much happens to make you squirm or gasp or weep, as in The Crow. It flatlines before it ever begins.”

Leaving no doubt where he stood, Roger Ebert heralded Dark City as the best movie of 1998 — ahead of Pleasantville, Saving Private Ryan and A Simple Plan — and reserved some of the most effusive praise of his career in support of it. He wrote, “I responded so strongly to the film because it was intelligent, intriguing, darkly atmospheric, and most of all because it was visually breathtaking. Werner Herzog tells us we need new images or we will die. Alex Proyas’ Dark City was visionary in the tradition of Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 2001 and Blade Runner. It was a daring act of the imagination.” Ebert loved the movie so much that a decade later, in declining health, he volunteered to record an exhaustive audio commentary track for a Director’s Cut DVD. In this expanded edition of Dark City — very similar to the version Proyas test screened — the studio mandated voice-over introduction by Kiefer Sutherland was nixed. Proyas also extended several scenes, adding depth to the characters and giving viewers more time in the world he created.

Sneaking into U.S. theaters in February 1998, Dark City was virtually ignored by audiences, tallying $14.3 million domestically and $12.8 million overseas. Looking back ten years, Alex Proyas summed up the reaction to his film. “The main criticism of Dark City still to this day with some critics is, it looks really nice but it’s all style and no substance, which I take as an enormous misunderstanding of what the film is. You cannot say it’s no substance. If anything, it’s all substance, you know. I mean, you can certainly criticize it on many other levels, but you would certainly never criticize it on that level. It’s almost that there’s too much substance for some people, and they’re not prepared to invest that level of thought into something, to sort of understand what it’s trying to do.” He added, “It’s far from a perfect film and I’d be the last person to call any of my films perfect because I’m my greatest critic, but I know the level of thought that was put into that film, and it certainly does not suffer from lack of ideas or thought. That’s the one thing it doesn’t suffer from.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dark City — Director’s Cut. Audio commentary by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. New Line Home Video (2008)

The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003