Personal Velocity (2002)
Screenplay by Rebecca Miller, based on her book
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Produced by Blue Magic Pictures/ Goldheart Pictures/ InDigEnt
Running time: 86 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the first of three portraits of women in a state of flux, Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) leaves an abusive husband with her three children in tow. She moves into the garage of a childhood friend and takes a job as a waitress, where Delia gains control of her life by reasserting herself sexually. Greta (Parker Posey) is a moderately successful book editor plucked out of obscurity by a red hot novelist to work with him on his latest book. Her changing fortunes gain Greta the respect of a powerful attorney father (Ron Leibman) but further alienate her from an unremarkable husband (Tim Guinee).

Paula (Fairuza Balk) drives upstate in a daze with a mute teenage hitchhiker (Lou Taylor Pucci) in the passenger seat. She reaches the home of her mother (Patti D’Arbanville) whom Paula hasn’t seen since fleeing to New York City two years ago. Now expecting a baby with her compassionate Haitian boyfriend (Seth Gilliam), Paula is distraught by the death of a man she chatted up at a bar and was struck by a car while walking her down a sidewalk. Paula is pulled back to earth when she realizes her scarred passenger is in a far more damaged condition than she is.

Who Made It?
Rebecca Miller is the only child of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. A Yale graduate, Miller for a time chose painting over writing, but while on an art fellowship in Germany at the age of 21, discovered a love for filmmaking. She developed her craft by making short films and — with her father’s agent lining up auditions — earned a living as an actress, winning roles in Regarding Henry (1991) as Harrison Ford’s mistress and Consenting Adults (1992) as Kevin Spacey’s mysterious wife. Miller’s first feature film as a writer/director Angela won her a Dramatic Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, but her screenplays went unproduced.

Miller started a family with her husband Daniel Day-Lewis and turned away from screenwriting. Producer/director Gary Winick — whose New York based company InDigEnt financed low budget features to be shot on mini-DV — called Miller to see if she had any projects to contribute. While none of her scripts fit the InDigEnt mandate, Miller sent Winick three of seven short stories from her forthcoming book Grove Press was set to publish in 2002. Adapted into a screenplay and directed by Miller in 17 days and on a shoestring of only $150,000, Personal Velocity was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002 and would put her on the map as a filmmaker.

How’d They Do It?
The segueway Rebecca Miller took from painting to acting to screenwriting would change again in the late ‘90s. The writer-director recalled, “I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker’s Prize at Sundance.” She added, “Angela did well with some critics and things, but it didn’t make money. It was a very uncommercial film … So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn’t want to just wait and wait to make films and tell stories. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.”

Several years passed and Miller received a phone call from producer-director Gary Winick, who had launched a new production company. Winick recalled, “InDigEnt was inspired after I saw the Dogme film, The Celebration. And I also thought about how John Cassavetes worked in the ’60s, with the 16mm cameras and the repertoire of actors and the small crews. I thought with this new medium that there was an opportunity here, because in New York there’s this great theater and independent film community. My idea was to form a collective where everybody gets paid the same amount, but also owns a piece of the film.”

Winick added, “Creatively, I was interested in using these new tools for experienced filmmakers to tell stories they normally couldn’t tell, or to tell stories in a different way because of these tools. I went to John Sloss, my lawyer, and we became partners and we partnered with IFC. IFC was the perfect partner because they wanted to be a part of the DV movement.” Winick’s plan had been to produce 10 films a year for $1 million each. 19 InDigEnt films ended up being made from 2000 to 2007 for roughly $250,000 each, including Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001) starring Ethan Hawke & Uma Thurman and the award winning Pieces of April (2003) with Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson.

Miller recalled, “I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, I said, ‘If you want to look at the stories that I’m writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them.’ So I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He ended up giving them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green lighting the film. It was also Gary’s idea to use three stories at once and make a trilogy, and when he said that my mind took off.” After laboring intensely on her book for two years, Miller adapted a screenplay for Personal Velocity in two months.

“I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash; like I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying, and finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage.”

Producer Lemore Syvan — who’d founded Goldheart Pictures in 1995 and Blue Magic Pictures in 2002 – came aboard, with InDigEnt’s Gary Winick and Alexis Alexanian also serving as producers. While Winick maintained that the difficult subject matter Miller was exploring fit the intimacy and thrift of digital filmmaking perfectly, the format presented a host of challenges. Syvan admitted, “Well, the question came up every day when we were shooting Personal Velocity: why can’t we just shoot this on Super 16? But Personal Velocity was designed for video. The way the movie was born was by a mandate that was given to us by InDigEnt, which we all know is a company that makes movies on digital.”

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras recalled, “I had to talk to Rebecca about the limitations of the medium. Having worked on Bamboozled, I knew what we could and couldn’t get away with. On the wide-angle part of the lens, the image just falls apart, especially when you go to a 35mm blowup, so I told her that we really wanted to shoot on the longer part of the lens. You can’t verify the focus on the cameras; what’s on the viewfinder is not 1-to-1 with what you’re getting on the chip. The contrast is hard to deal with. And when you shoot at a certain shutter speed, you get this kind of stepping of the lines in the image.”

With a budget of $150,000, Personal Velocity commenced shooting May 2001 in New York using two Sony DSR-PD150P cameras. Ellen Kuras revealed, “I knew that creatively, my palette would be very limited. I just said, ‘You know what, I’m shooting with this mini DV medium, I’m going to think of these as a short story and I’m going to try to make it look and feel like a poem.’ And that would be my way of saying anything goes. ‘I’m making a poem so … ‘ That means I don’t have to form full sentences. That means I don’t have to put periods where you’re supposed to put periods at the end of sentences. That means I’m not going to do what everybody says you’re supposed to do. I’m just going to do what I think feels right for the movie.”

When screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, Personal Velocity was greeted as a sensation. Rebecca Miller was awarded the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Ellen Kuras the Cinematography Award. Miller would dedicate the film to her mother, who passed away days after the festival. She mused, “I probably will be thinking and talking and writing about my mother for the rest of my life. That’s one thing I find about having children — it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who’ve had children. There’s some basic feminist thing that’s the same for all women who’ve had children, it doesn’t matter what their class is or what their situation is.”

Opening November 2002 in the United States, Personal Velocity met a mixed response from critics. Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times: “The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller’s canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.” Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune: “Miller’s movie has its moments of impressive velocity, but it never quite takes off.” Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club: “Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration.”

Should I Care?
Never expanding beyond 43 theaters in the U.S., Personal Velocity grossed $811,299 domestically, but became Rebecca Miller’s calling card to the film industry, evenly demonstrating her unique voice as a writer and intuitiveness as a director, casting Parker Posey and enabling her to deliver the strongest performance of her career. This is a success as a project, but uneven and a bit appalling as a film. Miller’s prose — read by John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from The Sopranos) — has a simple clarity and keeps things interesting, but there’s no getting around how sloppy some of Miller’s narrative sensibilities pan out or how bad digital video makes them look.

The second segment — featuring Parker Posey as a daffy but distraught book editor who begins cutting the fat from her newly empowered life — is the best reason to see the film, with Posey coolly emitting the wit and sensuality that the other two segments desperately lack. If there was some confusion over how harried and unfocused this material was at its core, the Radio Shack technology imposed on the filmmakers by InDigEnt doesn’t help make Personal Velocity any more watchable. The fact that neither Miller nor her producer Lemore Syvan has made another movie on DV says everything about the limitations of the format.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Storytelling By Women Filmmakers Evolves with DV” By Philippa Bourke. MoviesByWomen.com, August 2002

“Digital Portraits” By John Calhoun. LiveDesign, 1 November 2002

“Miller’s Own Tale” By Gaby Woods. The Observer, 9 March 2003

“Crazy Like a Fox” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Bucking the Digital Trend” By Pat Thompson. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Rebecca Miller on Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” By John Gaspard. Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts, 20 November 2008

Lost In Translation (2003)
Written by Sofia Coppola
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Produced by American Zoetrope/ Elemental Films
Running time: 101 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the Park Hyatt Hotel towering over Tokyo, two Americans meet. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a movie star drawing a $2 million paycheck to appear in a commercial for Suntory Whiskey. The deal includes jet lag, forgetting his son’s birthday and the realization that his wife — who Bob can barely hold a phone conversation with anymore — has learned to take care of the house without him being around. Unable to sleep, he hangs out in the bar, where Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a melancholy young woman who accompanied her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) — a well meaning but attention deficient photographer — on assignment to Japan.

Bumping into each other over the next several days, Bob and Charlotte find a respite from their mutual loneliness. Charlotte reveals that she gave photography a try, then writing, but really hasn’t decided what she wants to do with her life as a post-graduate. She invites Bob to join her for a night out in Tokyo, where the language barrier with Charlotte’s Japanese friends doesn’t keep them from drinking, dancing, singing karaoke and feeling closer to home. After a bewildering experience on a Japanese talk show, Bob is set to return to the States, but finds his time with Charlotte more difficult to walk away from than he anticipated.

Who Made It?
Sofia Coppola first came to the attention of moviegoers in 1990 when her father — director Francis Coppola — cast her as Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III after Winona Ryder had to decline. Following her ill-fated acting debut, the 19-year-old Coppola took the advice of her mother Eleanor and enrolled in Cal Arts. She would drop out and pursue photography for a while before co-creating, co-writing and co-hosting (with Zoe Cassavetes) a short-lived, tongue-in-cheek news magazine for Comedy Central called Hi-Octane. Coppola then launched a highly successful clothing company called Milk Fed with her friend Stephanie Hayman. When in Tokyo, the women were fond of staying at the Park Hyatt Hotel.

By the age of 30, Coppola had a short (Lick the Star, 1998) and a critically praised feature film (The Virgin Suicides, 2000) under her belt as director. She’d written a mere 70-page script she wanted to shoot in Tokyo. Producer Ross Katz ignored the major studios and chased financing from overseas distributors. Unwilling to make the film with anyone other than Bill Murray, Coppola spent five months pursuing the prickly and reclusive star, using a social network that included her friend Wes Anderson and screenwriter Mitch Glazer to land the Bob Harris of her dreams. Lost In Translation would make history on its way to becoming a sleeper hit with audiences and a sensation with critics.

How’d They Do It?
Sofia Coppola was in her early 20s when a friend invited her to Japan to help produce a fashion show. Once there, she met Fumihiro Hayashi, a young writer and editor for Dune Magazine, who hired Coppola as a photographer. She’d visited the land of the rising sun with her parents as a child, but returning to Tokyo once a year for eight consecutive years provided the spark for Lost In Translation. Coppola recalled, “That was really the starting point for the story that I wanted. Just when I had spent time in Tokyo, I thought, ‘Oh, I really want to film this, and I love the way the neon at night looks.’ That was really the starting point of the story though. I never thought about setting it somewhere else.”

After finishing the promotional tour for The Virgin Suicides in 2000, Coppola returned home to Los Feliz, California and spent six months writing Lost In Translation. Her brother — director Roman Coppola — provided feedback on 20 pages she’d finished before Coppola returned to Tokyo to soak up the atmosphere. “It helped to remember what I had liked. I always loved the Park Hyatt. I wanted to shoot a movie in that hotel. I like the way you keep running into the same people over and over again, the camaraderie of foreigners.” The brief but intense dynamic between Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall in the 1946 classic The Big Sleep provided additional inspiration.

Coppola and ICM agent Bart Walker ignored the major studios and sold off distribution rights in various overseas territories instead. Creative control was one reason. Coppola explained, “I didn’t want to make something I’d have to change. I had an idea of what I wanted to make, and I wanted to not have a boss. It’s hard to get final cut, but it was very important to me to have the freedom to do the way I wanted.” After successfully selling the film to distributors in Japan (where The Virgin Suicides had been a hit), France and Italy, producer Ross Katz hooked Focus International to provide the rest of a roughly $4 million budget. Katz had entered the film industry as a grip on Reservoir Dogs and ascended to the rank of producer in 2001 with the critically acclaimed In the Bedroom.

What Coppola and Katz didn’t know was whether Bill Murray was going to do their movie. Coppola knew one of Murray’s close friends, screenwriter Mitch Glazer. She showed Glazer a 10-page treatment and asked him for help. Glazer recalled, ”Sofia is amazing because she’s such an artist, but she grew up in a family that gets things done. She knows how to be relentless. She’s completely genuine, but she is as driven and tough as anyone I’ve met in Hollywood. And she wanted Bill. She had written it for him.” He added, “In more than 20 years of friendship, I never said anything was perfect for Bill, and this time, I did. But Bill is difficult. He wouldn’t give anyone an answer.”

Coppola recalled, “People said, ‘You need to have a backup plan,’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to make the movie if Bill doesn’t do it.’ Bill has an 800-number, and I left messages. This went on for five months. Stalking Bill became my life’s work.” Director Wes Anderson joined the recruitment drive and in July 2002, Coppola met Glazer, his wife Kelly Lynch and Murray in New York for dinner. The actor had some concern about the script. Murray recalled, “The whole thing felt slight, which was a little troubling. But she had a way of saying her dream wouldn’t have come true unless I did the movie.” He added. “I got reeled in from way, way offshore, but Sofia’s very good on the phone, and she spent a lot of time getting me to be the guy. In the end, I felt I couldn’t let her down. You can’t ruin somebody’s dream.”

To play opposite Bill Murray, Coppola had in mind an 18-year-old who bore an uncanny physical resemblance to the filmmaker: Scarlett Johansson. “I first noticed her in Manny & Lo. I just thought she had a kind of a striking quality and that low, husky voice. There was something unique about her I liked so I wanted to work with her. When I was working on this I wanted to meet with her and see if she would play the part. Although she’s younger, you know the character’s in her early 20’s, I think she pulls it off because she has a sort of maturity. She’s not like a hyper kid. I just like the way that she’s able to convey feeling without doing much. She’ s subtle.”

Lost In Translation commenced a 27-day shooting schedule September 2002 in Tokyo, where Coppola discovered a culture very accommodating to location shooting. Her crew was able to take handheld Aaton cameras into the streets and subways without permits or without Tokyoites gawking at them. Ross Katz mixed American crew members — director of photography Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett, costume designer Nancy Steiner, line producer Callum Greene and a New York based assistant director named Takahide Kawakami — with a largely Japanese crew, which Kawakami translated English to. Roman Coppola contributed second unit photography.

Screenings at the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals were quickly followed by a limited theatrical release September 2003 in Los Angeles before Lost In Translation opened nationally in October. It was far and away the most critically acclaimed film of the year. The Return of the King — the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture — was up there, but The Austin Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Hollywood Reporter, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post all named Coppola’s film the best of 2003, while The New York Times and The Onion A.V. Club were among the many publications placing it on their annual Top 10 lists.

Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.” J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “Coppola evokes the emotional intensity of a one-night stand far from home—but what she really gets is the magic of movies.” Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: “The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.” The critical accolades and the awards buzz for Bill Murray propelled the low budget film to box office of $44.5 million in the United States and $75.1 million overseas.

Lost In Translation was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. Its sole Oscar went to Coppola for her script, but she became the first American woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, following Italy’s Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, 1976) and New Zealand’s Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993). Coppola summed up her genre defiant sophomore success by stating, “Well, I think it’s romantic in feeling. It’s not really a romance. It’s, I guess, more of a friendship. But I like those kind of relationships that are sort of in between and that you do have these memorable relations with people that don’t ever become a real thing.”

Should I Care?
I don’t know which section Lost In Translation ended up in at Blockbuster Video. It might have created a few new categories — short film, tone poem, travelogue, meditation — but whatever you call this, long after Blockbuster has bitten the dust, Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, romantic ode to gaijin will still be relevant. This isn’t a movie I loved at first sight and even now I hesitate to call it a “movie”, not in the sense that Peter Weir or Quentin Tarantino make “movies”. Light on dialogue, mysterious in intent, what Sofia Coppola knows well is jet lag in Tokyo, the moods, feelings and images of which are expressed with a precision and deep affection that is nothing short of brilliant.

The humor is so understated, but over time, appeals to me more and more. There’s something deviously witty about watching two fakers discover that they can drop their act and just be themselves around each other. Bill Murray has called this the favorite among all his films, and it’s hard to argue he’s ever given a better performance. The woozy and romantic vision Coppola seems steeped in when it comes to international travel serves her script well by refusing to follow a straight line. It leads to an ending that will stay with me longer than the tidy conclusions of so many other films. Lance Acord captures both the exhaustion of travel and its inherent wonders beautifully.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Coppola Smart Mob” By Lynn Hirschberg. The New York Times Magazine, 31 August 2003

“Sofia Coppola on Lost In Translation” By Fred Topel. Screenwriter’s Monthly. 23 September 2003

“Tokyo Story” By Anne Thompson. Filmmaker Magazine, Fall 2003

“Behind the Scenes of Lost In Translation with Sofia Coppola” By Rebecca Murray. About.com

Broken English (2007)
Written by Zoe Cassavetes
Directed by Zoe Cassavetes
Produced by Vox3 Films/ HDNet Films
Running time: 96 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Bachelorette Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) gets dressed and puts in an appearance at the anniversary party of her best friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo), celebrating five years of matrimony to a movie director (Tim Guinee) Nora introduced her to. At the party is Nora’s mother (Gena Rowlands), who gently asks her daughter why she hasn’t found a man for herself. A manager of guest relations at a boutique New York City hotel, Nora goes out for a drink with a VIP guest, a mohawked movie star (Justin Theroux). When that ends badly, Nora allows her mother to set her up with a recently single movie lover (Josh Hamilton), but this date goes awry as well.

At the insistence of a co-worker (Michael Panes), Nora drags herself to a party. Disgusted with herself and heading home, she meets an attentive young Frenchman named Julien (Melvil Poupaud) marking time in America after the actress girlfriend he accompanied overseas dumped him. Julien insists on showing Nora a good time, in spite of her brittle neuroses. After a few days together, he invites her to return to Paris with him. Nora demures, but faced with plenty of free time after quitting her job, she joins Audrey for a jaunt to the Eternal City. While her friend contemplates an affair, Nora discovers she’s lost Julien’s phone number. Rather than give up and go home, she sets out to explore Paris on her own.

Who Made It?
Zoe Cassavetes is the youngest child of late actor/director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands. Her siblings are directors Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) and Alexandra (Xan) Cassavetes, who helmed the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Zoe Cassavetes grew up in Los Angeles, where in 1994, she co-created, co-wrote and co-hosted — with Sofia Coppola — a fake news magazine for Comedy Central called Hi Octane. Cassavetes served as assistant director on Coppola’s short film Lick the Star (1998) and then moved to Manhattan, where she went into credit card debt to finance her own short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory (2000).

Cassavetes then wrote the script for a feature film titled Broken English. Parker Posey agreed to star and producer Andrew Fierberg agreed to raise financing, but it would take three and a half years for cameras to roll. Paris based Back Up Films secured part of a budget from Japanese distributor Phantom Films and brought French actors Melvil Poupaud and Bernadette Laffont (replacing Jeanne Moreau) on board. Five weeks before filming was set to begin, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban agreed to bankroll the rest of Broken English, distributing it via their Magnolia Pictures and on their high-def cable channel HDNet.

How’d They Do It?
When the allure of acting or television hosting lost their appeal, Zoe Cassavetes moved to New York. She took a job as a marketing executive at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo before working on a 20-minute short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory. Cassavetes recalled, “You know, I ate out of the quarter jar for a few months here and there while I was trying to make the movie, but having no money, and being incredibly destitute was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. eBay was huge for me at that moment.” Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, the film featured Aleksia Landeau recording a long winded, drunken answering machine message to a guy while soaking in the tub.

Cassavetes moved on to completing a script for a feature film. “When I thought of the idea for Broken English it was at a time when I was totally overwhelmed by people asking me whether I was married or had a boyfriend. I saw that it was happening to a lot of my friends as well. I think it comes at a certain age where society almost insists that you fall in love, get married and have children. However, it seems that we are all more confused about relationships than ever. I wanted to explore these themes about what it is like to be lonely and to be ashamed of that feeling.” She would add, “So I just wanted to make a nice, little portrait about what happens to someone when they get caught up in all of that.”

In 2002, Andrew Fierberg — producer of Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Secretary — was approached by Cassavetes to help finance Broken English. He recalled, “We had a number of conversations about the script, did some rewrites and got it off the ground about a year after that. We had several budgets in mind and several scenarios on how we would make the film based on how much money we would raise. We had a full cast and crew and were all geared up and ready to go. And we put a line in the sand. We said that regardless of how much money we can raise, we will make the movie.”

Cassavetes had received a verbal commitment from Parker Posey to star. The filmmaker recalled, “I did have a certain type of person in mind. I mean, I’m a huge fan of Parker’s work and always have been. But I saw Personal Velocity, and she played a role in that movie that was completely against her usual, well, I wouldn’t say ‘type,’ but that more comedic style that she does. I saw this other huge range in her. Then I met her, and we sat and gabbed for three hours. We didn’t even talk about the script. At the end of it I was like, ‘Oh, wait, are you going to do the movie?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, yeah, totally.’ And I thought, ‘If life could only be that easy.’”

Financing Broken English would take three and a half years. Cassavetes admitted, “It’s so hard to get the money for a movie. It’s so much harder to get $1 million than it is to get $100 million. I still don’t know why. But then once we got the money it went very fast. We had five weeks of pre-production. We shot for 20 days. We didn’t have the money, or most of it, when we started pre-production. We just kind of decided that we were going to make the movie no matter what. Everyone knew what we were going to do, how fast it was going to be or how fast things were going to change, and I’d heard all these great things about Parker, that she would do that, which was really a big deal.”

Andrew Fierberg recalled, “We took the project to HDNet about five weeks before we planned to start shooting, and we told them that if they wanted to come on board, we’d be happy to work with them. They said yes. We were already in preproduction as we were signing papers, and the deal took us to a budget level that made us feel more comfortable.” According to Fierberg, the budget for Broken English fell under the $2 million ceiling HDNet has set to finance their pictures. “It was more than $800,000 but less than $2 million.” Shooting would commence May 2006 in New York for two weeks before moving to Paris.

Facing a mandate from HDNet that the film shoot digitally, the producers reached an arrangement with Thomson Grass Valley, manufacturers of the Viper FilmStream. Director of photography John Pirozzi recalled, “One thing I really like about Viper compared to other HD cameras — like the VariCam and the F900 — is its highlights. The real benefit you have with no compression is that the camera holds highlights in a much more impressive way. You have so much detail. The giveaway with HD and video in general is always in the highlights. Testing the Viper against the other compressed cameras, you can see it. It’s very clear that it really stands up to highlights.”

Cassavetes drew on Cleo From 5 to 7 — directed by Agnes Varda in 1962 — for inspiration. “Strangely, it had kind of the perfect mood for what I wanted. I mean, the character in that movie is a little more self-centered than Parker Posey’s character, Nora, is in mine. But I liked that the film started out with the tarot-card reading, and there was something about the way the movie was shot. I was also really into watching Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen movies, because I felt like my movie was really talky.” Broken English was screened for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 before taking film fests in Philadelphia, Newport Beach, San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas by storm.

Critics would be divided over how good Broken English was. Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times: “A well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “A simple, empathetic script and calm, assured directing display a level of emotional honesty and character development that’s confoundingly rare these days, especially when it comes to female characters.” Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly really liked it. Andrew O’Hehir at Salon not so much.

Opening June 2007 in the United States, Broken English never expanded beyond 41 theaters, but totaled $956,919 domestically and added $987,281 internationally. Cassavetes shrugged off the suggestion that she’d taken her time — at the ripe old age of 36 — to follow in the footsteps of her filmmaking family. “Right before I started shooting, I realized my dad was exactly the same age I was when he made Faces [sic] in 1959. So that made me feel good. And my brother Nick said, ‘Don’t worry — I made my first film at that age, too.’ It took me a little bit longer to do what I wanted, but you have more to say the older you get.”

Should I Care?
Broken English begins with a delicate montage of its heroine Nora Wilder trying to decide what to wear on an evening out. She’s alone in her apartment and as she empties her closet or opens her medicine cabinet, I got the distinct feeling I was peeping into someone’s private space. That type of intimacy is fused throughout the film, which in its contemplative but understated way (it’s rated PG-13) tells the story of two New Yorkers spending a few days in Paris. This textured palette may turn off those expecting either John Cassavetes or Sex and the City, but it does announce the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker.

Zoe Cassavetes cans the cuteness, enabling the profusely witty Parker Posey to fashion an unusually strong dramatic performance. Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Josh Hamilton, Gena Rowlands, Peter Bogdanovich and Bernadette Lafont round out a terrific cast, while Paris duo Scratch Massive composed the off-beat electronic soundtrack. What I really liked was how the film, without needling America or its male population, suggests that a change of scenery can affect both your outlook and the people you attract for the better. Cassavetes guides us through New York and Paris with the knack of someone who seems to have explored these great cities while single.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Digital Pieces of Broken English” By Peter Caranicas. Videography, 2 May 2007

“Women With Indie Influence” By Brantley Bardin. New York Daily News, 17 June 2007

“Interview: Zoe Cassavetes On Broken English” By Ian Spelling. Latino Review, 21 June 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes on Broken English” By Aaron Hillis. IFC, 25 June 2007

Broken English – Production Notes

“The Family Business” By Sandy MacDonald. The Boston Globe, 1 July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes” By Wes Anderson. Interview, July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes & Parker Posey Interview, Broken English” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Screenplay by Kelly Reichardt & Jon Raymond, based on the short story Train Choir by Jon Raymond
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Produced by filmscience/ Glass Eye Pix
Running time: 80 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) treks through the woods near a town in Oregon with her dog, Lucy. They stumble onto some young hobos gathered around a campfire, and Wendy reveals that she’s headed to Ketchikan, Alaska for summer work. She spends the night in her ’88 Honda Accord in a Walgreens parking lot. Come morning, an elderly security guard (Walter Dalton) politely asks her to move along, but Wendy’s car stalls. Marking time until a mechanic opens shop, she makes a decision that lands her in jail for several hours. By the time Wendy returns to the spot where she left Lucy, she discovers her traveling partner is missing.

Wendy puts in a call to her brother-in-law and antagonistic sister in Indiana, but we learn little about her background except where she came from, where she’s headed and that she has very little cash to make it on her own much longer. When Lucy fails to turn up at the local pound, Wendy spreads “lost dog” notices all over town. She finds the kindness of strangers in the security guard, as well as an honest mechanic (Will Patton) who regrettably has bad news about her car. Wendy finally reunites with Lucy, but the difficulties on the road ahead prompt her to reconsider taking the dog along on the journey.

Who Made It?
Kelly Reichardt grew up in Miami. The daughter of homicide detective father and narcotics agent mother, she immersed herself in photography after borrowing her dad’s crime scene camera in the 5th grade. Reichardt would drop out of high school and move to Boston, where she enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Making non-narrative films on Super 8 led to a BFA. Reichardt returned to Florida in 1993 to shoot a feature film, River of Grass. Rather than making filmmaking her focus, Reichardt entered teaching — first at the School of Visual Arts in New York, later at Columbia and NYU. She returned to directing in 1999 with a 48-minute short she’d filmed in North Carolina titled Ode.

Reichardt met Portland based author Jon Raymond through her friend Todd Haynes. The positive experience on Ode led her to ask Raymond if he had any short stories they might adapt into a film together. Their collaboration resulted in Reichardt’s second feature: Old Joy (2006). They came up with the idea for another feature — Wendy and Lucy — together, with Reichardt working on a script while Raymond realized it as a short story titled Train Choir. Producer Anish Savjani secured financing and with Michelle Williams starring, Wendy and Lucy would prove Reichardt’s most critically and commercially successful work to date.

How’d They Do It?
After college, Kelly Reichardt worked as a property master and set dresser on Todd Haynes’ first live action feature, Poison. Reichardt went on to teach while Haynes rose to acclaim as director of Safe and Velvet Goldmine. Haynes later met Jon Raymond, editor of a Portland arts magazine called Plazm. Credited as “Slats Grobnik”, Raymond would serve as Haynes’ assistant on Far From Heaven in 2001 and publish a novel titled The Half Life in 2004. Haynes stated, “After reading The Half Life, I was amazed at Jon’s strong sense of regional identity, and then I spent some time around him and saw the sort of old-school way he related to his friends, the intimacy and warmth they shared.”

Raymond recalled, “I met Kelly through Todd, both here and then when I moved back East. Kelly was actively looking for a story to adapt for a new project. She had read a novel I had written called The Half Life, in 2004, and she liked that and was looking for something to do with people she knows. She wanted a story that had very few characters, largely took place out doors — so she would not have to deal with a lot of sets — and would have room for a dog to be written in. I had this story, Old Joy, although I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing a feature in it. But she did and went off and made it. It was an amazing surprise and blessing for me.”

Discovering Jon Raymond, Reichardt mused, “There is something elliptical about his writing. His stories are very open and leave a lot of room for the reader to bring their own experiences to the subject. This translates well to my approach to filmmaking. He also is very good at setting people into their environments so that whatever is going on with them internally is linked to where they happen to be. The landscape becomes more than just a place, but something like a character in the story. Which fits with my own long-term interest in representing the American landscape.” The success of Old Joy — a study of alienation between two friends on a camping trip — left Reichardt eager to collaborate with Raymond again.

Reichardt recalled, “It was very post-Katrina — what it was for everyone just to be watching, but also the conversation of, you know, ‘Those people, living in such peril,’ they wouldn’t be in the shape they’re in, the position they’re in. We just started pondering: If you don’t have a net and you’ve had a shitty education and you don’t have the benefit of family that’s in any better situation than you’re in, how does one improve their lot? Not even reaching the middle class, but how do you just get a toehold in the next level? That was the seed, and then Jon went off and wrote the story. The screenplay was just an adaptation of his story.”

Reichardt’s own traveling companion — a golden Labrador retriever mix named Lucy — had made her screen debut in Old Joy. The director added, “Two elements were there from the beginning: the dog and economics. We knew we had to have Lucy in the movie, since she came along anyway, and we felt like the times were right for a real financially driven plot-line. Jon wrote a few drafts of the story, with editing and commentary from me. And then I wrote the screenplay, making additions and subtractions, with editing and commentary from Jon. Once shooting began, the actors also made their own contributions to the dialogue and characterization.”

A former assistant to producer Scott Rudin named Anish Savjani established a production company — filmscience — in 2005. Producer of Old Joy, Savjani wanted to be involved in Kelly Reichardt’s next film as well. “With Old Joy, I came into the project during the post-production stage in order to raise money, and we stretched the budget. But Wendy and Lucy needed all encompassing financing, and the budget was a combination of financing from filmscience and private equity.” Todd Haynes again served as executive producer, putting Reichardt in touch with an actor he was eager to cast in I’m Not There – Michelle Williams.

Wendy and Lucy commenced an 18-day shooting schedule August 2007 in and around Portland on a budget of $300,000. Reichardt recalled, “It’s a small crew and we’re shooting on location so you just try and make the limits work for you aesthetically. That’s all you can do. Which it does, I think. I mean, we’re small enough that we can go shoot in these public places and nobody really notices us. I mean, it’s a struggle certainly, but the reward is that it’s a really private process. Jon and I, we don’t have anyone giving us script notes.” Reichardt then spent six months editing the film by herself in her apartment in Astoria, Queens. She added, “The process can continue and it’s just done when I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s done.’ There are very few hands in the pot and I’d say that it is the payoff.”

After screening Wendy and Lucy at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, Reichardt’s teaching semester was over and she was driving from New York to Portland when her “shitty cell phone” rang. Oscilloscope Laboratories — the film distributor founded and owned by Adam Yauch (alias MCA) of hip-hop pioneers The Beastie Boys — was calling. The company had distributed two documentaries — Dear Zachary and Flow: For Love of Water – but Wendy and Lucy would be their first narrative release. Reichardt recalled, “I sat in this parking lot, ironically, since the whole film takes place in parking lots and you know, it sounded like they just had a lot of energy and they seemed like they were really interested in focusing on theatrical. And that was really appealing to me.”

Premiering at New York’s Film Forum in December 2008 and expanding to other cities through January 2009, Wendy and Lucy was championed by critics. A.O. (Tony) Scott, The New York Times: “Much as Old Joy turned a simple encounter between two longtime friends into a meditation on manhood and responsibility at a time of war and political confusion, so does Wendy and Lucy find, in one woman’s partly self-created hard luck, an intimation of more widespread hard times ahead.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “If a Warner Bros. social-protest film from the early 1930s somehow got into bed with an American indie from the 1970s, how would the love-child turn out? Like this.”

Without expanding beyond 40 theaters in the United States, Wendy and Lucy grossed $865,695 domestically, and added $323,948 internationally. Kelly Reichardt remained humble about aspirations for her next film. “I don’t consider myself to be working in this industry. I didn’t find the industry that inviting. So to me it’s just been trying to figure out how to make films outside of it. Do it yourself. By any means necessary. And, you know, it’s nice. It’s been a really good ride.” She added, “I’m always prepared that I’ll go back to making smaller films at any given time. In between my two features I was making these sorts of films, but on Super 8. And when the well dries up, that’s where I’ll go back.”

Should I Care?
Wendy and Lucy stands apart from a lot of recent indie films by simply rejecting the quirk that has become standard issue for so many of them. This is a fine example of addition by subtraction. There’s no contrived romance with a young hunk Lucy meets at the laundromat. No local yokels are trotted out to provide laughs. There are no hugs, no lessons. There’s no hip music on the soundtrack. There isn’t any music, actually. As spare as this effort is, I can’t call it a great film, but it is great work, benefiting from the uncanny timing of the worst economic recession in anyone’s memory, as well as a beautiful performance by former teen soap opera star Michelle Williams.

Kelly Reichardt has the heart of a jazz artist, both to her credit and detriment. There’s a tremendous sense of freedom in setting her film outdoors, with shots of Michelle Williams lingering where it seems obvious the production had no permits to shoot. But like a lot of jazz, the movie is pretentious to the point of being anti-people. Will Patton is outstanding in his two scenes, but I would have preferred fewer shots of trains or trees and more time with the people Wendy encounters on her journey. In the plus column, Williams — who received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Brokeback Mountain — again conveys the restraint of an actor who’s at the top of her craft.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“By Any Means Necessary: Wendy & Lucy Director Kelly Reichardt” By Peter Knegt. indieWIRE, 10 December 2008

“Interview: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy” By Alison Willmore. IFC, 10 December 2008

“Writer Jon Raymond sees his work realized in Oregon films” By Jeff Baker. The Oregonian, 5 January 2009

“Interview with Anish Savjani, the producer of Wendy and Lucy” By Eren Gulfidan. Film Annex, 19 January 2009

“Filmmaker Eyes The Frayed Edge Of Social Fabric” By Laura Winters. The Washington Post, 25 January 2009

“Jon Raymond’s Portland” Film In Focus, 27 February 2009

Wendy and Lucy – Production Notes

Primer (2004)
Written by Shane Carruth
Directed by Shane Carruth
Running time: 77 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In suburban Dallas, Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) divide their time between jobs as software engineers with toiling in Aaron’s garage in a bid to develop a get-rich-quick gizmo. While their partners (Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya) seem content to fool around with the equipment, Aaron and Abe focus on creating a product that will dazzle investors and achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. They see promise in a miniaturized semi-conductor, but instead of merely reducing the weight of a weevil, in a matter of hours, their test object presents a coat of fungus that would typically take months to develop naturally.

Aaron hits upon building a box big enough to allow a person to also reverse the arrow of time, but Abe takes him to a U-Haul self-storage facility and from afar, shows him what appears to be another Abe entering the facility. The engineers discover that they’ve already built two coffin-sized boxes with the power to transport users several hours backwards in time, depending on how long the boxes are powered up and how long the traveler remains inside. Using their invention to double up on the stock market and in sports betting, Aaron becomes obsessed with traveling through time in an effort to control the events unfolding in his past.

Who Made It?
Shane Carruth studied mathematics and computer science at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. He spent a few days in the graduate program for math, but dropped out when he realized he’d mostly be doing research for other people. He recalled, “An entrepreneurial spirit took over, and I felt that whatever I did was going to be on my own terms, so I decided to make some money and apply that toward whatever venture I chose. I started writing software in C and C++ for a flight simulator at Hughes Aircraft and then got into Web work. I did back-end database design and then started consulting.”

Carruth had developed a love for narrative, penning a couple of short stories and getting half way through a novel. Realizing he had little taste for inner monologue and much preferred telling a story visually, Carruth spent three years in Dallas teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking. Following the example of Robert Rodriguez and his book Rebel Without a Crew, Carruth cast, shot, edited and scored a 77-minute feature for the price of $7,000. The resulting film — Primer – was the sensation of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize with its $20,000 purse.

How’d He Do It?
“I’ve been asked whether, why I wanted to tell a story about inventors, or garage level inventors and to be honest, I knew what the story was way beyond, or well before, it had anything to do with science or science fiction. I was very interested in trust and how it’s related to what’s at risk, and I knew that I was going to have a story with a group of people — or what winds up being Abe and Aaron — who at the beginning of the film, or the beginning of the story, have this pretty conventional relationship and because of the introduction of this device or this power, changes what’s at risk.” After reading lots of scripts, Carruth “went to town writing”.

“When it came to production, I went to the few production houses here in Dallas. I asked them what they did and how they fit into the general scheme of things. I just asked a lot of questions from end to end about, you know, which cameras do what. Once I found out that cinematography was really photography with a set shutter speed, I got an old 35mm Minolta and bought some tungsten slide film, because I knew that motion-picture film for the most part was tungsten, and I used it to storyboard the entire script. It took a long time, because I didn’t know about photography. I didn’t know anything about depth of field or how to get the look I wanted.”

Carruth added, “I had to learn everything through the pre-production process. So I storyboarded and I set up my lighting, which wasn’t elaborate — it was mostly available light. I had read Soderbergh stuff where they talk about him using available light, which is true for the most part. So I thought I could get away with that, but I found there were some situations where I had to buy some florescent bulbs from Wal-Mart and set up a rudimentary bank.” He also opted to shoot in 16mm format instead of going digital. “Because the story gets so fantastical, I didn’t want to be experimental when it came to the medium itself.”

When it came to casting, Carruth met with around 100 local actors, most of which he found either “a little too theatrical” or unprepared. “In the end, only one professional actor ended up in the movie. The rest were either family members, or friends-of-friends. It’s funny because I’ve heard several nice comments specifically about the acting.” After finding David Sullivan to play Abe, Carruth settled on playing Aaron himself. In the summer of 2001, Primer commenced a five-week shooting schedule around Dallas. With nearly 40 locations (and permission to shoot in about 10 of them) Carruth resorted to spaces he had access to, like his brother’s apartment.

Recounting his expenses, Carruth stated, “It was a few thousand for the camera rental, a couple of thousand for processing, and then, of course, the cost of film stock. I called around and managed to get a lot of expired stock donated.” $7,000 would not cover the transfer from Super 16 to 35mm; a friend loaned Carruth the cash for that. “I had a few offers from certain bodies to pay for the blow-up, but they demanded that they be credited as executive producers and that their credit show before everyone else’s. I didn’t think that was fair to me and everyone who worked on the film for free before it was a ‘Sundance’ film. Luckily, my friend Scott Douglass saved the day.”

Trying to find a movie in the footage Carruth had shot proved the most daunting task of getting Primer seen. He recalled, “It took two years to edit and compose and loop and Foley and all that.” He admitted, “It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.”

Screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Primer became a sensation in Park City and among critics as well. Dana Stevens, The New York Times: “At a certain point, Mr. Carruth’s fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “It’s hard to always know what Primer is saying or where it’s heading, but it looks fantastic while it unfolds and you won’t be able to forget what you’ve witnessed.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “Frustrating as I ultimately found it, Primer is undeniably geek heaven. For everyone else, it’s a nice antidote to big-budget bogusness.”

Primer won a North American distribution deal from THINKfilm and opened October 2004 in the United States. Never expanding beyond 31 theaters, it scooped up $424,760 domestically. Carruth commented on his debut film’s passionately baffled reception by stating, “My favorite films are the ones that can’t be tidily summed up, yet I walk away with a sense of the core. I wanted to make a film like that. As I was writing, my brother would say, ‘It’s confusing.’ I would ask, ‘Well, what do you think is happening? Just take a guess.’ He always got it right. He’d say, ‘No, no, I get it, I just don’t think anybody else would.’ But that’s exactly what I was going for. I wanted it to be right on that line.”

Should I Care?
If you had to prepare a primer on viewing Primer, the consensus Carruth and most of the audience reached was that watching the audacious, mind bending flick twice really seems to help. Really, really helps. Some have compared it to Memento in that respect, but I didn’t find it nearly as accessible. Carruth does a yeoman’s job resisting genre temptations or Hollywood bullshit by grounding the film with geek-speak in all its hyper focused and argumentative glory. Without the sci-fi, this is a striking portrait of garage inventors, right down to their sleeping habits, uniforms and paranoia once they strike on an innovation braced for huge success.

Carruth is a highly intelligent and skilled storyteller who in the middle of his tale, not only walks out on the audience, he shuts off the lights and leaves it up to us to find our way out of the story. The effect is either invigorating or insulting, depending on your personal taste. Regardless of how baffling the finished film, Primer is mandatory viewing for anyone flirting with the DIY aesthetic. The film looks stunningly sharp for the money, has good performances and a decent music track. If a software engineer with less than $10,000 can make a movie this successful in the suburbs of Dallas, anybody can.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Shane Carruth” MakingTheFilm.com, 7 March 2004

“Mad Math: Bending Time with Primer Director” By Polly Shulman. The New York Times, 19 October 2004

“Interview with Shane Carruth” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 22 October 2004

“From Math to Movies” By Steven Wallich & Wayne Slater. IEEE Spectrum, November 2004

“Primer: The New Whiz Kid on the Block” By Amy Taubin. Film Comment. 2004

Primer. DVD audio commentary by Shane Carruth. New Line Home Video, 2005.

Down to the Bone (2005)
Screenplay by Rich Lieske & Debra Granik, additional material by Jean-Michel Dissard and Anne Kugler and Alex MacInnis
Directed by Debra Granik
Produced by Susie Q Productions
Running time: 104 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In a rural area of upstate New York, Irene (Vera Farmiga) finishes another day’s work as a clerk at a big box retailer. She returns home to get her two sons (Jasper Moon Daniels, Taylor Foxhall) dressed for Halloween. As Irene takes a hit of cocaine in the bathroom, it’s not clear that she’s been able to keep her drug use much of a secret from her kids. Her dealer (Terry McKenna) draws the line when she tries to score using a personal check her mom mailed for her son’s birthday. Irene checks herself into a rehab program, where she meets a tattooed male nurse named Bob (Hugh Dillon) sympathetic to her struggles with addiction.

Despite the recreational marijuana use of her well-intentioned boyfriend Steve (Clint Jordan) and her performance at work suffering now that she’s sober, Irene manages to stay clean. To keep herself on the straight and narrow, she becomes intimate with Bob, who springs for the nose piercing Irene has always wanted, as well as a pet snake for her sons. Irene takes a housecleaning gig with a friend from rehab, Lucy (Caridad De La Luz), where even a whiff of glass cleaner becomes a temptation for the women to get high. A trip to the city with Bob puts Irene’s life into another tailspin, but offers her yet another opportunity to go straight.

Who Made It?
Debra Granik spent a decade shooting industrial films before entering the graduate film program at NYU. Assigned a 7-minute documentary, Granik traveled to a haunted hotel in upstate New York, but the only employee she could get on camera was a housecleaner named Corinne Stralka. Granik recalled, “She was at a tenuous and suspenseful crossroad in her life, being newly sober. Her boyfriend was in the midst of a pretty bad relapse. They also had children in tow, making it a very complicated set of circumstances. I was compelled about what was going to happen to her and how she was going to get through, and stayed with the story for quite a few years.”

Granik’s friendship with the couple resulted in a 23-minute short titled Snake Feed, in which Stralka, her two kids and her boyfriend Rich Lieske played themselves — filmed in their own home — in what Granik described as “narrative fiction” based on the family’s experiences. Nominated for a Short Film Award at the 1997 Austin Film Festival and winner of a Short Filmmaking Award the following January at the Sundance Film Festival, Snake Feed was so well received that Granik collaborated with her subjects on a feature length script. She whittled down a first draft “which was as thick as a phonebook” by focusing the narrative on Stralka.

How’d They Do It?
Using Snake Feed as her calling card on the festival circuit, Granik met producers Susan Leber and Anne Rosellini. Instead of hoping and waiting for studio financing, the producers brought in casting director Ellen Parks — whose work included Spanking the Monkey and Secretary — and began assembling a cast. Referring to Parks, Granik enthused, “She is a profound friend of independent films and will take risks with some stories she can get behind. That got the cogs rolling. We discovered a lead actress that massively inspired us, who is from the area the film was made. Vera Farmiga was willing to put her blood and soul into the film.”

Vera Farmiga — whose most visible role had been the Eastern European hairdresser who witnesses a murder in the Robert DeNiro flick 15 Minutes — stated “I love playing women with survival issues. This was the kind of role I would audition for, but always lose to Robin Wright Penn or one of the Kates.” With a working title of Down to the Bone and a budget of $500,000, Granik began a 24-day shooting schedule in Woodstock and surrounding Ulster County, New York in February 2003. Granik mused, “Enough positive things started to gel, and that helped us make the movie. It’s like that saying: if you keep showing up, you can do it. We kept showing up.”

Using a Sony PD-150 PAL, director of photography Michael McDonough resorted to a cinema vérité style. He recalled, “We wanted the look of the film to be realistic and had always planned to shoot mostly hand-held for it’s immediacy and it’s association with vérité. In the end we walked away from principal photography with a 95 percent hand-held movie. Our decision was also based upon the simplicity of the production in relation to the amount of filmmaking clutter around the actors and the sets. Where possible we lit the spaces in advance of shooting entire scenes and attempted to shoot 360 degrees when we could.”

At the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, Down to the Bone won Debra Granik a Dramatic Directing Award, while Vera Farmiga’s performance garnered the actress a Special Jury Prize. Critics would shower the film with praise. Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times: “The kind of movie most independent films strive in vain to be: a small, beautifully faceted gem.” Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times: “Down to the Bone emerges with an aura of authenticity so strong as to be mesmerizing, thanks to a superior script brought to life with infallibly natural performances.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.”

But despite the enthusiastic reception at film festivals, distributors ran away from Down to the Bone. Granik mused, “The reason why boils down to the word ‘dark’. It is the scariest four-letter word in American storytelling and in this culture. Our film had a strong reception in Europe and achieved distribution, but that was not the case here. We received so many responses like, ‘We love the film, but we cannot do anything with it or we’ll lose our shirts. We’re sorry.’” Finally, in February 2005, Laemmle/Zeller Films stepped up to distribute Down to the Bone in the United States. It was released in November on just two screens, where it tallied $30, 241.

Recording an audio commentary together for the release of Down to the Bone on DVD, Debra Granik and Vera Farmiga were thankful that that film garnered such positive word of mouth at screenings. But the actress admitted, “It’s disappointing though. It was really disappointing to me. I wanted people to see — I wanted a lay audience to see it — and not just privileged industry. It was disappointing.” Of the 1,400 screeners of Down to the Bone that Laemmle/Zeller Films sent to the Motion Picture Academy, one arrived in the mailbox of Martin Scorsese, who cast Farmiga as the police psychologist in his 2006 thriller The Departed.

Should I Care?
Down to the Bone is a type of movie I typically can’t stand. Whether in a bid for minimalism or as a cost shaving measure, scenes seem to start too late and end too early. The result is that not nearly enough of the film is allowed to unfold in a natural or unforced manner. What does someone who checks herself into a drug rehab center go through to get clean? I’m still not entirely sure on the basis of Down to the Bone, which features a little too much artifice for a documentary-styled film. Pain and discomfort are a part of life, but so is humor, which is virtually absent here, and music, which Granik also banned, forcing her feature debut to play out in awkward silences instead.

Vera Farmiga. Upstaged by blood squibs in The Departed, the actress comes across with illuminating intelligence and honesty, assets that make her one of the most exciting performers working in movies today. Debra Granik may have inflicted some beginner driver’s damage on Down to the Bone, but deserves credit for keeping the performances in the film low key. Hugh Dillon gives a terrifically nuanced performance. Natives of upstate New York, Granik and Farmiga convey what winter in these slush covered cow towns feels like. By examining the effects of drug use in a rural environment, the film on the whole is a novel entry in the rehab genre.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
Down to the Bone Press Kit. Laemmle/Zeller Films. 2005

“Cutting Close to the Bone” By Jeremiah Kipp. Filmmaker Magazine. 21 November 2005

Down to the Bone. DVD audio commentary with Debra Granik & Vera Farmiga. Arts Alliance America (2006)

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into the 7th floor New York apartment of a recently deceased old woman. They ignore the advice of a close friend, who tells them about the Bramford Building’s “unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century”, including a couple of notorious tenants who practiced witchcraft there, earning the building the nickname “Black Bramford”. Before they even meet their neighbors (the Castevets), the couple can hear them bickering through the thin walls. Rosemary later meets a reformed junkie named Terry who was cleaned up and taken in by the Castevets.

After Terry is found dead on the sidewalk of an apparent suicide, the nosy Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) invites her new neighbors to dinner with her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer). Guy is won over by the energetic couple, while Rosemary is suspicious of the strange potables and desserts Minnie tries to push on her. Guy’s acting career suddenly heats up and he suggests they have a baby. Following a strange dream the night they conceive, Rosemary is urged to leave her obstetrician for one the Castevets recommend. Weight loss and paranoia follow, leading Rosemary to believe those around her be to a coven of witches keenly interested in her baby.

While digging for antiquities in northern Iraq, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) unearths an ancient stone carving of a demon, strangely buried with a modern day St. Christopher medal. The discovery causes grave alarm for the priest. Across the world in Georgetown, Maryland, film actress and single mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears something strange in her attic, leading her to check and make sure her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is all right. Also in D.C., Father Karras (Jason Miller) wrestles with guilt over abandoning his elderly mother and questions whether he still has the faith to be a man of God.

Regan is diagnosed as hyperkinetic, which her mother is made to believe by doctors explains “lies” her daughter has been giving about her bed shaking at night. Chris experiences poltergeist activity as Regan’s behavior becomes more unsettling: spouting vile obscenities, running down the stairs backwards on her hands, and masturbating with a crucifix. A homicide detective (Lee J. Cobb) investigates a church desecration and the bizarre death of Chris MacNeil’s director, while Chris looks to the church for help. They turn to Father Karras, who reaches out to Merrin to help him expel whatever evil has taken hold of the child.

Writing
Bitten by a sting of commercial failures as a playwright, Ira Levin — whose debut novel A Kiss Before Dying was published to great acclaim in 1953 when Levin was 22 — found inspiration in his wife’s pregnancy for a second novel in 1967. Rosemary’s Baby would sell 5 million copies in the U.S. William Castle — the schlock movie director and promoter whose gimmicks included sending inflatable skeletons flying over the heads of audiences during House on Haunted Hill and rigging seats to shock moviegoers watching The Tingler – was sent the novel in galleys form and anticipated that a film version might be his bid for respectability.

Having already bet the farm acquiring the film rights to Rosemary’s Baby, Castle took on a partner in Paramount Pictures, whose young head of production Robert Evans loved the material, but had no interest in producing a William Castle cheesefest. Evans wanted Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski to direct. Knowing Polanski was an avid skier Evans lured him to the States under the ruse of directing Downhill Racer. Agreeing to adapt Rosemary’s Baby instead, Polanski consulted with production designer Richard Sylbert, a New York native who spent 30 days honing a shooting script with Polanski after he’d completed a first draft.

Ira Levin — who later authored The Stepford Wives — has been accused by some of being a hack, but for me, Rosemary’s Baby is a brilliantly executed study in paranoia; every character Rosemary encounters seems to have a vested interest in her pregnancy, or could they just be trying to help? Whether it was the fact that he was a committed agnostic, or just felt that it was better filmmaking, Roman Polanski also resisted supernatural thrills and instead, gave his adaptation an intense psychological edge, keeping us guessing until the end of the movie whether Rosemary is in danger from witches, or just experiencing some pregnancy related dementia.

William Peter Blatty was enrolled at Georgetown University in 1949 when his New Testament class covered a case he’d read about in the Washington Post, detailing the alleged exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainer, MD. A Catholic whose faith was wavering at the time, Blatty sold the idea of The Exorcist to paperback publisher Bantam Press, which commissioned a novel and ultimately sold it to Harper and Row. Published in 1971, The Exorcist was a runaway hit, selling 13 million copies in the U.S. alone. Blatty adapted a screenplay and attaching himself to the project as producer, saw every studio in Hollywood turn his bestseller down.

Warner Bros. had passed on The Exorcist when head of production John Calley was slipped a copy of the novel. So terrified reading it at night that he tried getting his dog to share the bed with him, Calley would pursue every major director of the day — Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, John Boorman — to helm the picture. Each turned it down for technical or personal reasons. Blatty even pleaded with Peter Bogdanovich to direct before arriving on William Friedkin, whose kinetic, documentary-like approach had helped The French Connection win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Blatty felt a realistic aesthetic was just what his fantasy/horror picture needed.

Not caring for a 226-page first draft full of flashbacks, Friedkin compelled Blatty to adopt a straight forward narrative. The resulting script may have won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but isn’t very cohesive. Father Merrin drifts into and out of the story, most of the characters share tenuous relationships and the dialogue is passable at best. Still, the result is one of the most visceral portraits of evil ever conjured. In addition to the phantasm of levitation, projectile vomiting and demonic possession, the story does deal with the crisis of faith and hopelessness in subtle and powerful ways, making the story that more unnerving.

Writing edge: Rosemary’s Baby

Casting
Seeking an all-American girl for the role of Rosemary, Roman Polanski wanted to cast Tuesday Weld. But Robert Evans — looking for a bigger name — preferred Mia Farrow, who was appearing on the popular TV show Peyton Place. While I think Weld would have been extraordinary, there’s no question that the nervy but beguiling Farrow went full throttle here and made Rosemary her own. Robert Redford was the first choice of both Evans and Polanski to play Guy and would also have been terrific, but legalities apparently kept him out of the cast. John Cassavetes brings much greater edge to the role of a struggling actor who might turn to the occult for career help.

In casting the supporting players — the sweet old faces who might possibly be witches — Rosemary’s Baby is in a class all its own. It’s impossible to imagine the film being as great without Ruth Gordon, who is nothing short of a force of nature in this; Minnie Castevet alternates between being one of the great little New York characters of all time, and the neighbor from hell. Gordon won a richly deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Elisha Cook Jr. plays a realtor, Ralph Bellamy is Rosemary’s suspect obstetrician and newcomer Charles Grodin appeared as a physician whose best intentions only end up harming his patient.

The first actress Blatty sent a script to had been Shirley MacLaine, who’d been his neighbor in California and provided the inspiration for Chris MacNeil. Once casting began in earnest, the writer-producer’s first choice for Father Karras had been Marlon Brando, but skittish that The Exorcist would become Brando’s show instead of his, Friedkin turned to a capable list of actors who were hardly matinee idols: Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow. This decision goes a long way to giving The Exorcist a realistic texture. Burstyn in particular seems cognizant of the frustrations and fears of a single mother and communicates both vividly.

The Exorcist wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is without two actors. Radio and film veteran Mercedes McCambridge supplied the voice of the demon and it’s her vocal work — sounding like an ancient woman with a glass bottle jabbed in their throat — that makes The Exorcist so terrifying. The entire movie hinged on the casting of Regan. An above average child actor might have been cast here and the results would have been laughable, but Linda Blair’s ferocious, no holds barred performance is a standard bearer for any actor working under makeup. Strangely, Blair seems to make a much more convincing demon than she does a 12-year-old.

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Roman Polanski’s aesthetic for Rosemary’s Baby has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades. In the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, cinematographer William Fraker relates a great anecdote about Polanski moving Fraker’s camera to the left so that only Ruth Gordon’s back would be visible during a shot where she’s in a room talking on the phone. When that scene went before an audience, 1,500 people actually craned their necks around to try to peek inside the room. I don’t subscribe to the notion of Director As God, but Robert Evans and Fraker have both credited Polanski with pushing the film’s look and finding unusual ways to create tension visually.

Intricately designed by Richard Sylbert, Rosemary’s Baby was shot in 14 weeks: two weeks in New York for exterior shooting around the Dakota Hotel were followed by 12 weeks of interiors on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. The dream sequences are like tiny art films in their own right. What surprised me watching this film again was how these sequences refuse to indulge in the psychedelia of the time. Watching Ken Russell flicks, I often feel like I’d enjoy them much better with pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, Rosemary’s Baby features some of the most textured dream sequences ever put to film, whether viewed sober or otherwise.

What began as a 105-day production schedule when shooting for The Exorcist commenced on a soundstage at 20th Century Fox studios in New York would stretch on for 200 days, back when it was considered insane to spend more than $1 million on a horror flick. But the bucks are on the screen. The opening sequence in Iraq gives the movie an ominous, almost epic feel, while William Friedkin’s decision to shoot a good portion of the film handheld certainly has a sense of immediacy to it. We’re constantly kept off balance and while the jarring approach has produced vomit in most of Friedkin’s films since, The Exorcist is a punch in the gut.

The makeup effects in The Exorcist were designed by Dick Smith, whose protégé Rick Baker also worked on the film and credits his mentor with being responsible for the state of the art of prosthetic makeup in film today. Beyond just making an actor look like a demon, Smith’s work was pioneering: the projectile vomit, the welts that appeared on Regan’s stomach spelling out HELP ME, or her head spinning around. None of that stuff had been done before and it holds up remarkably well. Smith’s work is so great that watching the movie again, it never really occurred to me that I was seeing special effects.

Production value edge: Even

Music
Neither Rosemary’s Baby nor The Exorcist feature the type of bombastic musical arrangements I’ve learned to endure in Jerry Bruckheimer type productions, thankfully. Instead of punctuating how we’re supposed to feel at any given moment, both films opted for very unconventional scores to eerie, even unsettling effect. Many people remember the lullaby that plays over the opening credits of Rosemary’s Baby, with a fine organ and string accompaniment floating underneath. There’s an elegance and bit of sadness in Krzysztof Komeda’s compositions for the film, subtle but extremely effective.

Lalo Schifrin was commissioned to compose the score for The Exorcist, but William Friedkin — who reportedly likened Schifrin’s score to “fuckin Mexican marimba music” — literally threw the reels out the door and brought in classical recordings he felt suited the movie better. These include “Night of the Electric Insects” by George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels and portions of the 1971 “Cello Concerto” by composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Stanley Kubrick would later use Penderecki to great effect in The Shining. The spine tingling theme is “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield and can be heard every Halloween in TV or radio advertising to conjure spookiness.

Music edge: Even

Cultural impact
Arriving in theaters June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby ultimately earned $15 million in the U.S. and finished the 7th highest grossing picture of the year. Today, it not only figures in debates over which horror films are the scariest ever made, but marked the beginning of a six year run for Robert Evans that would transform Paramount into the most prestigious movie studio in the world. The film was followed only by a forgettable made-for-TV movie in 1976 — Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby – in which Patty Duke played Rosemary and Ruth Gordon reprised her Oscar winning role, but does continue to be referenced in sitcoms and on cartoons.

No contest. The Exorcist was a box office sensation. Opening December 26, 1973, not even freezing weather kept audiences from lining up outside theaters on the East Coast. Through several re-issues, it would gross $232.6 million in the U.S. and $208.4 million overseas, making it the highest grossing R-rated movie ever in its day. Four sequels followed: John Boorman’s maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic (1975), the subpar Exorcist III (1990) written and directed by William Peter Blatty, Paul Schrader’s little seen Dominion (2005) and the version reshot by Renny Harlin, Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). The original is widely considered the scariest movie ever made.

Cultural impact edge: The Exorcist

Winner: Rosemary’s Baby

The Exorcist is the scarier movie. Rosemary’s Baby is the better film. I can watch it over and over and always find something new to savor — in the art direction, in the performances, in the story — while The Exorcist is not a movie I feel the need to revisit. Though in many ways superior, once The Exorcist is over, that’s all folks, it doesn’t resonate for me all that much.

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Los Angeles – overpopulated and choked in pollution – of the year 2019, the Tyrell Corporation leads the field of robot design with the “Replicant,” a being virtually identical to a human, but superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence. After a mutiny in an off-world colony, Replicants have been declared illegal on Earth, where they are tracked down and “retired” by special police known as blade runners. One of these blade runners administers an empathy test known as the Voight-Kampff to Tyrell employees in an attempt to screen out possible Replicants. One of his subjects – Leon (Brion James) – is pushed too far by the test and shoots the officer. Ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned by his old captain (M. Emmet Walsh) to hunt down four Replicants – two male and two female – who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown.

Paired with a cop (Edward James Olmos) who speaks an amalgam of French/German/Hungarian, Deckard goes to see Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). He learns that a new model of Replicant – the Nexus 6 – has been implanted with memories so real that it may actually believe itself to be human. Designed to develop its own emotional responses, the Nexus 6 has been engineered with a 4-year life span. Tyrell has Deckard administer the Voight-Kampff Test to his secretary Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard realizes that she’s a Nexus 6. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks Deckard out in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the other escaped Replicants – combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) – befriend a lonely robotics designer (William Sanderson) in attempt to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation, seeking reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Philip K. Dick capped a prolific decade that included 19 novels, 27 short stories and a Hugo Award in 1963 with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ in 1968. In a phone interview with Paul M. Sammon a little more than a year before his death in 1981, Dick discussed the novel’s genesis. “It stems from an interest on my part in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflux machine, which I call an android … Where for me, the word ‘android’ is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man In the High Castle and I was studying the Nazi mentality. And I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent, they were definitely deficient in some manner in appropriate affect, appropriate emotion that would accompany the intellectual process.”

After struggling as both a flamenco dancer and a screenwriter in the 1970s, Hampton Fancher thought he would take a shot at being a film producer. Fancher recalled, “I thought I would produce a movie. And this guy – Jim Maxwell – who’s a close friend, knows me well, said, ‘You might, I think science fiction’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Do you know who Philip K. Dick is?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Well there’s a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ And I said, okay, I’ll read that. I read it. I didn’t like it that much. But I thought, okay, that’s commercial. Here’s a thru-line: bureaucratic detective chasing androids. In ’78 or so, my friend Brian Kelly, he had $5,000. He said, ‘Maybe you could get an option and that might be a good commercial project that you could get behind, and, you know, make some money.’ That’s all we’re talking about, is making some money.”

Brian Kelly zeroed in on producer Michael Deeley with the project. Deeley recalled, “I’d been pursued for about two years by Brian Kelly – who’s a very close friend of mine – who had this idea in mind to make a movie, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I’d first read it and thought: this wasn’t very interesting.” Fancher’s take on the material was cerebral and dialogue driven, a cautionary tale of over population and ecological disaster that largely took place in rooms. Fancher pressed ahead anyway, first with a treatment, then several drafts of a screenplay. “The intellectual aspects of the screenplay were taken from my response to the death of animal life on this planet, and what that meant. That’s probably the thing that saw me through the first draft, was I had a passion about that, and so my affection for the project was consistent.”

On the strength of Hampton Fancher’s adaptation, Michael Deeley ultimately agreed to produce the film, opting for the title Dangerous Days. His first choice to direct was Ridley Scott, who was mixing Alien in England at the time. Scott recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t really want to do another science fiction, I’ve just finished one. So, but I’ll read it.’ I read the script, which was Hampton Fancher and it was called Dangerous Days. And I turned it down.” Scott’s friend and associate Ivor Powell had gotten a hold of the script and had a different reaction. Powell recalled, “And I said, ‘Listen, I think we should give this a second thought. I really think this is powerful and emotional and really interesting.” The idea stuck with Scott and when he was unable to crack an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune for producer Dino De Laurentiis agreed to direct Dangerous Days. Hampton Fancher had never cared for that title, and appropriated one from William S. Burroughs that he liked better: Blade Runner.

Filmways agreed to finance a budget, but Deeley recalled, “We’d spent about two and a half million by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building was much bigger than twelve and a half million dollars. Much, much bigger.” As sets were being constructed, Deeley brokered a three-way arrangement to secure alternate financing and keep the project alive. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. – who had a deal with Warner Bros. – put up $7.5 million for U.S. distribution rights. Singapore movie mogul Sir Run-Run Shaw also invested that sum, for the film’s foreign rights. Another $7 million came from producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, who received TV and home video rights and agreed to finance the completion budget, should Blade Runner go over schedule.

Meanwhille, Hampton Fancher was struggling to conceptualize what Ridley Scott wanted to see. Scott recalled, “The hunter falls in love with the hunted, except they never go outside the apartment. It’s very interior. I want to take them outside the door. Once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesis that she’s android, humanoid, robot.” He added, “We got up to a point where Hampton was just getting exhausted. Go back to the anvil, back to the anvil, back to the anvil.” David Peoples was approached to deliver a shooting script. Scott added, “Peoples I think is more – and I mean this in the best possible way – is simpler? Hampton is more cerebral. And for the most part this was very cerebral. And I thought, actually, bringing in something like Peoples would maybe create some fresh air in the corridors to make it move. Because my danger as a director is I tend to get very cerebral and get engaged with darkness and detail.” One of Peoples’ contributions ended up being the idea that Roy Batty would save Deckard’s life.

After Dustin Hoffman spent several months attached to the role of Deckard – moving further away from the filmmakers’ vision as time progressed – actress Barbara Hershey mentioned to Hampton Fancher the name Harrison Ford. A visit that Michael Deeley and Ridley Scott made to England to watch dailies from Raiders of the Lost Ark – then shooting at Pinewood Studios – won them over. Ford recalled, “I remember that I read a script, which I thought was interesting. At the first version that I read of it, of the film, had some issues, I had some issues with. There was a voiceover narration attached to the original script, and I said to Ridley that I played a detective who does no detecting. How about we take some of this information that’s in the voice-overs and put it into scenes, and so that the audience could discover the information, discover the character through seeing him in the context of what he does, rather than being told about it. And some of that survived, and some of it didn’t.”

With conceptual designer Syd Mead creating the industrial look of the film – cars, streets, buildings and neon – Blade Runner commenced shooting March 1981 on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. Working in the American film industry for the first time, Ridley Scott mused, “There’s nothing worse when you’ve done two and a half hours of commercials – and I know I’ve got a very good eye – in three seconds I can give you a set-up, having walked in the room without ever seeing it before. So I don’t like discussion. I know exactly what I want, and I want to walk in and say ‘Do it.’ That’s the director’s job. The director’s not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room.” In addition to Scott’s brusque communication skills, filming nights under heavy rain and smoke effects wore down the crew – many of whom quit – as well as some of the cast, with Harrison Ford seething through most of the shoot.

A test screening of Blade Runner was held in Dallas in March 1982. Production illustrator Tom Southwell recalled, “Everybody was expecting a heroic follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the way it was advertised on television – with only the visual effects shots of a flying car going over a futuristic city and sort of a fight sequence – doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film that kind of leaves you sort of broken.” Specific objections raised at the test screening were that the film was too confusing, too dark, too slow and ended too abruptly. Scott addressed these concerns by filming a brighter ending, with Ford and Sean Young escaping to the pristine countryside, and inserting voiceover narration by Ford to help audiences along with the plot.

While its visual design won acclaim, many critics were left with a bad taste to the overall film. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision. Even those without a taste for gadgetry cannot fail to appreciate the degree of effort that has gone into constructing a film so ambitious and idiosyncratic … But Blade Runner is a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have. And it’s also a mess, at least as far as its narrative is concerned.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “Blade Runner doesn’t engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Blade Runner is a stunningly interesting visual achievement, but a failure as a story.”

In June 1982 during its first weekend of release in the U.S., Blade Runner opened big; only E.T. was drawing a bigger crowd. But as word of mouth spread – and audiences flocked to Rocky III or Star Trek II - the film’s commercial prospects sank. Grossing $32.6 million in the U.S., Blade Runner was not only deemed a commercial disappointment, but a creative disappointment by some of the people who’d worked on it. In 2007, associate producer Ivor Powell recalled, “For me, it’s still – emotionally – falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.”

Accordingly, Blade Runner became a staple of midnight screenings on college campuses or at revival houses. Then in 1990, a work print seen only at test screenings in Denver and Dallas was briefly exhibited in Los Angeles. Popular demand for a definitive version of Blade Runner led to Ridley Scott being permitted to supervise a “Director’s Cut” in 1992. The much maligned voiceover narration and the upbeat ending were both removed and 12 cryptic seconds of Deckard dreaming of a unicorn was inserted. In addition to audiences who’d missed it, critics who’d seen Blade Runner and given it a lackluster appraisal started changing their assessment. By 2007, Roger Ebert had begrudgingly added Blade Runner to his list of Great Movies, amending his 1982 review by writing, “I have been assured that my problems in the past with Blade Runner represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he’s only human.”

Commenting in 2007 on the reception of Blade Runner, writer-director Frank Darabont mused, “’82 I think was owned by E.T. It’s a brilliant film, I’m taking absolutely nothing away from it, but it was definitely happy comfort food. It always will be. It’s one of the best examples of that kind of film ever. I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s wonderful. But I think that everyone was so plugged into the happy comfort food at that time that they weren’t giving movies like Blade Runner a chance, or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.” Also in 2007, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull summed up what he finds enduring about Blade Runner: “We’re in a movie business where most movies are disposable commodities. They’re the summer blockbuster. I’m not going to name what they are, but they come and go in weeks and, bye bye. Nobody wants to resurrect them. Nobody wants to see them again. So the ones that are really truly well made – the kind of Casablancas of science fiction – survive, and get seen over and over.”

Should I Care?
Instead of reassuring the audience with a hopeful vision of the future, Blade Runner is an emotional downpour. The atmosphere is choked with smoke and rain. Animal life is endangered. The background dialects are impenetrable. Citizens with the means have fled Earth. Those who’ve stayed behind struggle to relate to each other as humans because in the film’s vision of the future, we’ve replicated life beyond the point to retain what it means to be human. The strengths and weaknesses of Blade Runner come down to it being one of the grandest art films of all time, second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story never adheres to a straightforward detective mystery. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them is the least interesting business in the picture.

What Fancher and Peoples do so well in their script is pose questions about what it means to be human, and where we might be headed if we continue to lose sight of that. Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy perform some of the finest work of their careers as the Replicants – the real heroes of the film – as does Harrison Ford, who brings the right amount of downbeaten sleaze to his role. Blade Runner is deliberate and comes close to paralyzing the viewer with stimulus overload, but Ridley Scott’s eye for detail and his design genius are never in question. The stunning cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and haunting electronic score by Vangelis add immensely to the well-deserved re-evaluation of Blade Runner as a classic.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. By Paul M. Sammon. HarperPrism (1996)

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition). Warner Home Video (2007)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Castle Rock,” Maine, a powerful electrical storm sends a tree through the lakeside home of graphic designer David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his wife (Kelly Collins Lintz) and their nine-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Surveying the damage the next morning, David tells her, “It’s just stuff, you know. We’re safe, that’s all that matters.” His wife appears anxious about a strange mist drifting off the mountains and headed toward them across the lake. Father and son are more interested in a tree belonging to their obstinate attorney neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher) that has flattened the Drayton boathouse. The men put aside past differences when David offers Norton a ride into town for supplies. Taking Billy along, they pass an army convoy. The soldiers are stationed at a base in the mountains known to the locals only as “the Arrowhead Project”. The convoy appears to be in a hurry, prompting Norton to comment, “Maybe their power’s out too.”

At the Food House, David chats with a teenage clerk (Alexa Davalos), amiable assistant manager (Toby Jones), Castle Rock’s resident nutter Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) and realtor (Susan Watkins). David also observes an MP abruptly cancel leave for three soldiers. Everything at the store comes to a dead halt when an air raid siren sounds. A monstrous mist overtakes the town on the heels of a panic stricken local (Jeffrey DeMunn) who makes it to the store covered in blood. Warning the others to shut the doors and not to go outside, a shopper decides to make a break for his car. Disappearing in the mist, the last that’s heard of him are his terrified screams. One theory voiced is that the mist may be a chemical explosion from the local mill. Mrs. Carmody believes this is the end of days. Norton tries to keep the crowd calm, while David is more focused on trying to calm his hysterical son.

Searching for a blanket in the storeroom, David hears something outside attempt to rip down the loading dock door. A mechanic (William Sadler) copes with the disaster by trying to get the store’s generator working, with a bag boy (Chris Owen) eager to go outside and clear whatever’s blocking the duct. When David is unable to convince them that this is a bad idea, the door is raised; tentacles slither inside, tear into Norm’s skin and drag him into the mist. When confronting Norton with this, the attorney’s logic prevents him from accepting it. He organizes a group to venture outside for help, but a rope one of them ties to their waist only makes it 300 feet before returning a torso. As Mrs. Carmody begins spreading her Old Testament gospel of a stern and vengeful god – slowly converting frightened followers – David, a third grade teacher (Laurie Holden) and a few others start worrying more about the monsters inside the store than the ones in the mist.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Mist began with a phone call Stephen King received in 1980 from his literary agent Kirby McCauley. King recalled, “Kirby McCauley was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I said, ‘You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.’ And I hadn’t. I had just finished three books. There was Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in — because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.” The resulting story – The Mist – unblocked the author and a slightly re-edited version appeared in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. At 155 pages, it qualified as a novella.

A couple of years later, Frank Darabont was getting his feet wet as a screenwriter. He recalled, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was my very first credit as a writer and there was The Blob remake and there was The Fly II. I remember sitting on the set of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 one night and thinking I’d love to have something in my pocket that I could nurse along and try to get made as a director.” Darabont had taken advantage of Stephen King’s “Dollar Babies” initiative, in which the author makes available to student filmmakers the movie rights to select King short stories for the fee of only $1. In 1983, Darabont directed a short based on The Woman In the Room. Searching for a feature length project, it came down to either The Mist or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. In choosing the latter, the emotionally resonant 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman earned seven Academy Award nominations and set Darabont on the path to prestige.

Darabont’s company Darkwoods Productions entered into a first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures, which was where the filmmaker brought The Mist in 2004 when he was ready to return to his horror roots. Darabont recalled, “What always appealed to me about it was, okay, here’s this story about monsters, very basically, on the surface of it. Underneath, Steve King was telling a completely different story. He was telling a story about the fragility of human behavior under pressure. What he was saying was that civilization has a very thin veneer and it can crumble very quickly, especially when you apply fear. And people turn against one another when subjected to stress and fear. It winds up being great sociological context for how we are as a species, how screwed up we are, how fearful we are.” Paramount agreed to put up $30 million to produce The Mist, provided Darabont reconsider the ending he’d written, which was … downbeat, to say the least.

Darabont concluded, “Obviously not a studio movie. That’s the ultimate horror for a studio, is a horror movie that might actually horrify people. You give ‘em something that might upset the audience they run screaming in the other direction.” He added, “Through this whole set of circumstances I wound up with Bob Weinstein at Dimension. He was the only guy who said, who had the balls to say, ‘Yeah, I love this ending, I love this movie, let’s make it.’ With the understanding of course that it had to be done very quickly and very inexpensively. Let me put it this way: A lot of great horror movies that I love, that I grew up watching have a tradition of being done under extreme duress of time and on very, very low budgets. And I thought, okay, if we’re really going to embrace what I love – horror movies – let’s embrace that tradition as well. Let’s embrace the tradition of shoot it as fast as you can, shoot it as cheaply as you can.”

In October 2006, it was announced that Dimension Films would bankroll The Mist, with a spring 2007 start date. The budget was roughly $17 million. Casting the lead, Darabont’s first choice was Thomas Jane. “I had met him a few times and he read for The Green Mile I always remembered his work. I’ve seen roles that he’s done, smallish roles in other movies. He’s one of those guys that I just knew had way more depth that he’s generally been elicited to show in other roles that he’s done. So I called him and I said, ‘I got this script and I’d love for you to play the lead. Let’s read it and let’s discuss it.’ And our very first conversation once he’d read it was, ‘Tom I think you have more depth than something like Deep Blue Sea allowed you to show. What I don’t want is a square-jawed action hero here. What I want is a really flawed, well intentioned guy who loves his son and it’s a movie about a guy trying to protect his little boy. As far as you’re concerned that’s what the whole movie is about. Are you ready to take that leap?’ And indeed it was something he had been hungry to do.”

The rest of the cast quickly fell into place. Darabont recalled, “Jeff DeMunn and Bill Sadler, both of them were those roles, and Laurie Holden, she was also always in my head for the role of Amanda. Others you have to think about a little bit, and there’s where you really have to depend on a great casting director, is, okay, who’s going to play Mrs. Carmody? Who’s going to play Billy? Where do we find a nine-year-old boy who’s got that kind of ability? Deb Aquilla and her associates, they found Nathan Gamble and she brought him to my attention and we hired him immediately. It was Deb’s inspiration to cast Toby Jones as Ollie, which I couldn’t be more delighted with. Toby’s a brilliant guy and gave us a fantastic performance, but he’s not the obvious actor. I’m also the very grateful beneficiary of a lot of good will, so I get to work with people like Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden who wouldn’t necessarily be lookin’ for a horror movie to do, but suddenly, bam, they’re there.”

Darabont added, “We prepped the movie in six weeks, folks. I’ve never prepped a movie in less than five months, but this was part of the spirit of this movie: Get in, do it, don’t over think it, don’t second guess, do it fast, do it loose, and that’s pretty much the way it went.” Darabont signed up for a crash course in guerilla style filmmaking by directing an episode of the FX cop drama The Shield in late 2006. The experience proved so invigorating, Darabont tapped the show’s cinematographer – Rohn Schmidt – and camera operators Bill Gierhart and Richard Cantu to shoot The Mist. Filming commenced February 2007, mostly on a soundstage at StageWorks of Louisiana in downtown Shreveport. Nearby Cross Lake doubled for lakeside Maine, while the exteriors of the Food House were shot in the Louisiana town of Vivian.

Opening November 2007 in the U.S., even critics who admired The Mist seemed to object to it, in part. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “The Mist has extended passages that pause to preach, to demonstrate the dark impulses of irrationality, magical thinking, and mob mentality. Sadly, these interludes only take away from the magnificent moments in which the stunningly crafted beasties in the mist … come out to prey.” Justin Chang, Variety: “Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), Frank Darabont’s screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.”

In April 2008, Eugene Novikov – who ranked The Mist among the best films of 2007 – opened the floor on website Cinematical to a discussion of what viewers thought about that ending. John: “In regards to the ending: it’s one of the better twist endings I’ve seen in a while. Nowadays, I feel like twists or reveals have become cheapened by how frequent they have become in movies, and most of them just happen to trick the audience. But with The Mist, the twist ending was surprising AND thought-provoking.” Gary Triestman: “Balderdash and hogwash! I saw The Mist yesterday, and am utterly pissed at the ending. Pissed not such because it was bleak and useless, it was, but because it absolutely did NOT fit into the personalities, drives or character motivations of the people who allegedly assented to being sacrificed.” Okie: “I thought the ending was perfect. Its what made me recommend this movie to so many people. Most don’t like the ending because they don’t think they could ever do that to their child. But the alternative was definitely worse.”

The Mist would gross $25.5 million in the U.S. and $31.5 million overseas, then quickly dissipate from theaters. Even a two-disc DVD – which supplemented the theatrical version of the film with a black & white version closer to Frank Darabont’s retro vision of the material – did little to spark a reevaluation of the film. Less than enthralled with many of the flicks based on his work, Stephen King mused, “This movie has echoes of political and religious situations that we find ourselves in now, it raises a lot of interesting topics that have been debated in the press and current events over the last couple of years and all of those things obviously played a part when Frank got around to writing the screenplay and directing the movie, casting the movie – which is part of direction – but they’re not for me to say, other than to say he and I share some political convictions. As to what they are, the viewer who comes to the movie with an open mind and a clear eye will see that for themselves.”

Should I Care?
The Mist tries to be a provocative movie, one I was supposed to love or hate with a passion and occupy no middle ground on. While that’s true of he ending, as time passes, the film has actually inched into a twilight zone for me; not the failure I originally thought it was, but ultimately, not up to snuff with the nihilistic freakshows that inspired it, like Night of the Living Dead or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. But for all its flaws – and there are a gaggle here – it’s not easy to put The Mist out of your mind. For one thing, instead of the usual bag of bogeymen, Stephen King’s source material unleashes an ecosystem of hideous animals – equipped with tentacles, stingers, beaks, acid webs or giant pincers – that disturb on some primal level. Along with The Shining, this may be most terrifying story King has ever concocted.

Frank Darabont was inspired to adapt this material with the same thrift store economy Alfred Hitchcock brought to Psycho, but the results here are more amateurish than masterful. The abbreviated schedule not only handicaps the extensive makeup and digital effects, but turns what might have been an atmospheric and profoundly disturbing story about mass hysteria into a blunt, condescending and at times silly moral sermon. The Mist is short on B-movie nastiness and long on message. Ugh. Superbly cast in spite of the script’s high handedness – with local actors Robert Treveiler. Melissa Suzanne McBride and Kelly Collins Lintz doing outstanding work – the story might have been better realized with a more elegant, less in-your-face approach. The controversial ending is a failure simply because Darabont rushes headlong into a Big Message at the expense of credibility. The results are similar to trying on a bomb vest and plunging the detonator to see what happens.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Frank Darabont!” By Edward Douglas. Shock Till You Drop, 16 November 2007

“Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist” By Brad Balfour. Pop Entertaiment.com, 23 November 2007

“When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist” The Mist (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Genius Products (2008)