“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 interviewed for Terror Takes Shape in 2002 on The Thing: Collector’s Edition [DVD]

The Thing (1982)
Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman
109 minutes

Look up the word “doom” in the Encyclopedia Britannica and you won’t find mention of John Carpenter‘s The Thing, but a wave of barometric pressure hangs over this masterpiece of science fiction horror. Beyond the doom its characters are infected with, this remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World was damned by waves of nausea, hostility and derision upon its release. It faltered at the box office, altered the career of its director and alerted studios there was a toll to pay for bankrolling movies that weren’t nice, like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was nice. Developed by Universal Studios, The Thing was a dream car of sorts for Carpenter, who’d directed one mean, lean low budget machine after another and was offered the keys to adapt one of his favorite movies for a mass audience.

Elegant in its simplicity and overwhelming in its foreboding, The Thing takes place on an American research station isolated in Antarctica. A Norwegian chopper appears on the horizon and a sniper fires at a Siberian husky racing across the ice. When one of the Americans is wounded, the station manager Garry (Donald Moffat) returns fire, killing the Norwegians. To investigate, pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) and physician Doc Copper (Richard Dysart) helicopter to the Norwegian camp. They encounter a last stand from hell and even more startling, something contorted in a burn pile outside. Biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley), dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), mechanic Childs (Keith David) and the nine other Americans don’t know what to make of the specimen at first, but quickly learn it isn’t dead yet.

Even more so than the 1950s monster movie he was a fan of, Carpenter was fascinated by themes creeping through the original John W. Campbell Jr. short story, published by Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938: A hostile alien is awakened and reveals a tenacity to assume the shape and memory of anything it devours, generating rampant paranoia among the men over who is still human and who isn’t. A screenplay by Bill Lancaster ran with these ideas and to visualize them, a 20-year-old makeup effects prodigy named Rob Bottin was entrusted with delivery. Bottin hit on the concept that The Thing wasn’t one monster, but could transform into any lifeform in the universe it had imitated, with gut wrenching effect. Critics and audiences initially felt that the film had gone too far in that regard.

The irony is that Carpenter could have scaled back the violence he was heavily censured for at the time, but with unremittingly stark chords and a pulsating doomsday pace, The Thing is just a dark fucking movie, one that audiences weren’t prepared for at the time. The Thing refuses to favor good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what’s disturbing about it, as well what makes it great. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone all feel perfectly in synch. That the special effects hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without him, the movie would not be the nightmare it turned out to be. As for Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 113,449 users: 80% for The Thing

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

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“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

O. Henry’s Full House (1952)
Directed by Henry Koster (segment: The Cop and the Anthem), Henry Hathaway (segment: The Clarion Call), Jean Negulesco (segment: The Last Leaf), Howard Hawks (segment: The Ransom of Red Chief), Henry King (segment: The Gift of the Magi)
Screenplay by Lamar Trotti (segment: The Cop and the Anthem), Richard Breen (segment: The Clarion Call), Ivan Goff & Ben Roberts (segment: The Last Leaf), Nunnally Johnson (segment: The Ransom of Red Chief), Walter Bullock (segment: The Gift of the Magi), based stories by O. Henry
Produced by Andre Hakim
117 minutes

Packed with as much caramel, fudge and peanuts as the chocolate bar that has nothing to do with him, O. Henry’s Full House works as a treat and a fine course on the author and his work. William Sydney Porter grew up in Texas of the mid-19^th century. He spent time as a ranch hand, pharmacist, cartographer, bank teller, Houston Post columnist, fugitive and convict. Serving a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement in 1899, Porter met almost every type of human there was to meet. While behind bars, his first short story was published. A freed man, Porter settled in New York, where the author chose among the dozen literary pseudonyms he’d employed and arrived on “O. Henry” as a pen name. O. Henry went on to publish one novel (Cabbages and Kings) and over 600 short stories, where a person’s deeds — good or bad — seldom went unreturned.

O. Henry died in 1910. Forty years later, 20^th Century Fox put several contract screenwriters to work adapting five of the author’s stories, which the studio doled out to five of its contract directors. With John Steinbeck appearing on camera, cigarette in hand, to introduce each tale, O. Henry’s Full House is thick with a certain formality that might bore some viewers while delighting others. The stories range from the lighthearted to the somewhat obtuse. The Cop and the Anthem is the sharpest, with Charles Laughton orchestrating a virtuoso performance. Howard Hawks, one of cinema’s masters, directs the lousiest segment of the bunch, the comically inert The Ransom of Red Chief. Richard Widmark, Anne Baxter and Jeanne Crain acquit themselves very nicely, while the mere presence of 27-year-old Marilyn Monroe in a walk-on part is the definition of a showstopper.

Surrounded by bound editions of O. Henry stories, author John Steinbeck introduces five tales by the American populist. In The Cop and the Anthem, Soapy Throckmorton (Charles Laughton) seeks warmer accommodations than Madison Square offers in winter and assures fellow bum Horace Truesdale (David Wayne) that he can beat the elements by having himself arrested, a proposition that proves easier said than done. In The Clarion Call, NYPD detective Barney Woods (Dale Robertson) traces a pen recovered at a murder to his childhood pal Johnny Kernan (Richard Widmark), a sniveling hood who calls in an old debt to remain free; to turn the tables, Barney gets some help from a newspaper, the Clarion Call. In The Last Leaf, the heartbroken Joanna Goodwin (Anne Baxter) wanders through Greenwich Village in a blizzard, nearly dying.

Seeking refuge with her older sister Susan (Jean Peters), Joanna resigns her will to live, announcing that she’ll hang on only as long as the last leaf dangles from a tree outside the window, a deal their landlord Mr. Behrman (Gregory Ratoff), a frustrated painter, has the last word on. In The Ransom of Red Chief, fugitive con men Sam “Slick” Brown (Fred Allen) and Bill Peoria (Oscar Levant) stop in Alabama to plot a kidnapping, but selecting the terrible J.B. Dorset (Lee Aaker), alias “Red Chief”, as hostage, they realize they’re doing the town a favor. In The Gift of the Magi, penniless New York City bank clerk Jim Young (Farley Granger) and his pregnant wife Della (Jeanne Crain) celebrate Christmas by selling off their most cherished possessions to buy each other a gift. Stripped of their prospective treasures, the couple realizes the true meaning of the holiday.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 227 users: 55% for O. Henry’s Full House

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Short Cuts (1993)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Robert Altman & Frank Barhydt, based on writings by Raymond Carver
Produced by Cary Brokaw
187 minutes

Misogynistic. Realistic. Bleak. Reassuring. The worst movie Robert Altman ever directed. His best. No two opinions of Short Cuts quite cotton, but in one word, the late filmmaker’s 30^th feature is exhilarating. Raymond Carver never published a novel before dying of lung cancer at the age of 50 in 1988, but he left behind 11 volumes of short stories and poems, many hinging on simple twists of fate in working class America. Altman had been sacked from a movie in Italy and on a flight home, discovered Carver’s literary world. Seeing his type of film on those pages, the director of M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye and Nashville met Carver’s widow, poet Tess Gallagher, who optioned nine of her husband’s short stories and one poem to Altman. With Paramount Pictures footing the bill, he teamed with Frank Barhydt on an adaptation. The studio read it and hated it.

Unable to get financing for what he was calling L.A. Short Cuts, Altman took a gig directing a low budget black comedy titled The Player. Embraced at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival as Altman’s comeback, producer Cary Brokaw stepped in to help raise roughly $12 million for Altman to make Carver’s world a reality. At a bare minimum, Short Cuts employs an expansive yet organic cast that rates as one of the finest ever assembled. Each of the 22 players is thrown the ball at some point and — given something special to do — score. But Altman’s spry touch keeps Short Cuts from sinking under the weight of any moral imperative, a lesson lost on portmanteau films like Crash. Ebbing between light drama and dark comedy, this orchestration of human behavior is a monumental achievement. Doc Pomus & Dr. John and Elvis Costello & Cait O’Riordan wrote the sumptuous jazz numbers performed by Annie Ross in the film.

Helicopters dusting for the medfly fill the skies above Los Angeles. A news anchor (Bruce Davison) and his wife (Andie MacDowell) are concerned by the chemicals, yet their 8-year-old son Casey is allowed to walk to school in the morning. A waitress (Lily Tomlin) upset by her boozehound boyfriend (Tom Waits) accidentally slams her car into Casey, who shrugs off the accident and returns home. The boy’s neighbor (Lori Singer) is a sensitive cellist whose jazz vocalist mother (Annie Ross) is past the point of giving a damn. At the nightclub where she performs, a financially strapped couple (Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr.) receives instructions from bourgeois neighbors whose apartment they’ve agreed to housesit. They’re friends with another couple: a pool man (Chris Penn) increasingly frustrated by the lack of attention from his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a stay-at-home phone sex operator.

Casey ends up in intensive care, where his dad is visited by the father (Jack Lemmon) he hasn’t seen in 30 years. Neglecting to pick up a cake they ordered, Casey’s parents are harassed by the baker (Lyle Lovett). Casey’s doctor (Matthew Modine) suspects that his artist wife (Julianne Moore) broke their wedding vows three years ago and tries to get to the bottom of it. The artist befriends a professional clown (Anne Archer). She’s pulled over in full makeup by a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) who hits on her. Unfaithful to his wife (Madeline Stowe), the cop’s lover (Frances McDormand) has cut ties with her ex (Peter Gallagher), a pilot who dusts for the medfly and refuses to accept that his marriage is over. The clown’s husband (Fred Ward) goes fishing with his buddies (Buck Henry, Huey Lewis). The men discover a female corpse in the river and debate how soon they need to alert anyone.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,693 users: 87% for Short Cuts

Metacritic “Metascore” average among 22 leading critics: 79 for Short Cuts

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Cat’s Eye (1985)
Directed by Lewis Teague
Screenplay by Stephen King, based on the short stories Quitters, Inc. and The Ledge by Stephen King
Produced by Martha Schumacher
94 minutes

Less inspired than the portmanteau horror comic Creepshow (1982) but way more fun than it needed to be, Cat’s Eye is for Stephen King fans what a trick ‘r treat grab bag is for the kiddies; no good for you, yet delectable. After working with Drew Barrymore on a big screen version of King’s novel Firestarter, Dino De Laurentiis felt that the 8-year-old was going to be a star. The producer flew to Bangor to propose that King work Barrymore into pieces that De Laurentiis held film rights to, short stories appearing in the author’s 1978 terror anthology Night Shift. King adapted two of those stories — Quitters, Inc. and The Ledge — and added an original one about a little girl and a troll. The segments would be connected by the misadventures of a cat. To direct, De Laurentiis tapped Lewis Teague, who’d shot Fighting Back (1982) for the producer and knocked out an adaptation of King’s Cujo (1983).

Cat’s Eye was filmed in Wilmington, where the economics of shooting a movie in a right-to-work state like North Carolina had enticed De Laurentiis to make Firestarter there in 1983 and convinced him to build a production facility in the town. By the time it hit U.S. screens in April 1985, nine feature films had been distributed under the Stephen King brand name and in a change of pace, Quitters, Inc. and The Ledge dispense with ghosts and goblins to showcase King’s gift for pure suspense, as well as a gleeful black wit that so few of the movies based on his work have bothered with. Whether rushed for time, or realizing that the customer needed to be served, King wheels in the freak for the third segment and the result is one of the goofiest things he’s written. Deflating an hour in, Cat’s Eye is still one of King’s more satisfying forays in Hollywood: artfully written, capably cast and most of all, a good time.

After evading a rabid St. Bernard and a cherry red 1958 Plymouth Fury, a stray cat seeks refuge in a moving van and ends up in New York City, where a man picks it up off the street. In the first of three segments, nicotine addict Dick Morrison (James Woods) visits Quitters, Inc. to help him kick the habit. Not long after meeting company president Mr. Donatti (Alan King), Dick realizes Quitters, Inc. is a mafia operated tax dodge that has adopted a few of its time honored, brass knuckled tactics to help clients quit smoking. Watched day and night, or led to believe he is, Dick’s inevitable relapse has interesting consequences for his wife (Mary D’Arcy). The cat next hops a ferry to Atlantic City, where it becomes the object of a bet between casino boss Mr. Cressner (Kenneth McMillan) and one of his men when the feline is caught in the middle of a street.

Fallen tennis pro Johnny Norris (Robert Hays) attempts to flee town with the boss’s wife (Patricia Kalember), but is intercepted by Cressner’s goon (Mike Starr) and dragged to a penthouse. Norris is given a choice: prison time for heroin that’s been planted in his white Mustang … or a wager. Cressner bets cash and his wife against the athlete’s ability to walk the outside of the building using little more than a five-inch ledge. Left with no choice, Norris is game. Once the cat escapes Cressner’s clutches, it arrives in Wilmington, where a girl (Drew Barrymore) adopts it in spite of resistance by her mother (Candy Clark), who doesn’t trust the animal. The bigger problem for our girl is the troll that lives in her wall. Emerging after dark to pinch the girl’s nose shut and steal her breath, her only hope is an intervention by the cat, which she’s named General.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 6,007 users: 51% for Cat’s Eye

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

“Portmanteau” is French for “coat rack”. Lewis Carroll appropriated the word in 1871 for Through The Looking Glass to explain two words merged into one; “chortle” is a portmanteau Carroll invented, while “Internet”, “blog” and “sexploitation” are three he did not. In the month of January, I’ll take a look at portmanteau films, where we find different coats hanging in the same closet, whether tailored by one filmmaker or the collaborative effort of several.

Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Directed by Dan Curtis
Teleplay by William F. Nolan (segments: Julie, Millicent and Therese) and Richard Matheson (segment: Amelia), based on the short stories The Likeness of Julia, Needle in the Heart and Prey by Richard Matheson
Produced by Dan Curtis
81 minutes

Like the Zuni fetish doll that appears in one of its segments and sent American kids diving behind furniture during prime time, Trilogy of Terror is a relic best left in a box. Producer/ director Dan Curtis and screenwriter Richard Matheson scored the highest Nielsen rating of all time with a made-for-TV movie titled The Night Stalker for ABC in 1972. Matheson notified Curtis that he had three stories he was willing to package for the boob tube. Matheson’s 1962 short story The Likeness of Julia had appeared in the author’s anthology Alone By Night; Needle in the Heart was published in the October 1969 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; Prey in the April 1969 issue of Playboy. At Matheson’s request, his friend William F. Nolan was hired to adapt the first two stories. Knowing he had an ace in his sleeve, Matheson held onto the third story to adapt himself.

Despite lobbying by her manager, Oscar nominated actress Karen Black had no interest in doing what was going by the title Trilogy in Terror. Black gave in on the condition that her then husband, an aspiring actor named Robert Burton, was thrown a part. Premiering March 4, 1975 as an ABC Movie of the Week, Trilogy of Terror was another ratings smash for Matheson, who’d written the teleplay for Duel (1971), the feature length debut from a promising director named Steven Spielberg. Trilogy of Terror is not engineered with much precision, a pedestrian effort by one of the more prolific genre writers of the 20^th century and reminder of a time when TV was mostly junk. Segments 1 and 2 are as thin and disposable as Kleenex, while the beloved Segment 3 is some impressive snot, at least. The kooky Karen Black is no better than the material, sadly, all leftovers.

Mild-mannered literature professor Julie Eldridge (Karen Black) finds herself pursued by Chad Foster (Robert Burton), a photography enthusiast who suddenly develops the hots for teacher. Following the advice of her roommate Anne (Kathryn Reynolds), Julie agrees to a date with Chad at the local drive-in, unaware he’s been prowling around her home. A drugged beverage and a set of amateur photos put the professor in a compromising position with her pupil, until one of them realizes they’re way over their head. In the second story, a spinster named Millicent Larimore (Karen Black) laments the wild ways of her twin sister Therese (Karen Black), who she blames for her father’s death.Millicent succeeds in warning away of one Therese’s suitors, but the evil one retaliates by ripping up the doll of a neighbohood girl.

Millicent’s therapist Dr. Chester Ramsey (George Gaynes) pays his patient a house call, fighting off the advances of her blonde twin. At the end of her rope, Millicent elects to use Therese’s own black magic against her. In the third and final story, Amelia (Karen Black) returns to her apartment with a present she picked up at a curio shop: a Zuni fetish doll. According to the instructions, spirit and doll will become one if the gold chain around its waist is removed. Distraught after a phone conversation with her mother, Amelia is tormented by noises in her apartment. Finding the doll has disappeared, her calf is slashed with a carving knife wielded by the malevolent doll, possessed in a bloodthirsty rage. Amelia barricades herself in her bedroom, until the little Zuni bastard demonstrates a troubling ability to open doors.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,293 users: 57% for Trilogy of Terror

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Albert S. Ruddy, Tom Rosenberg, Paul Haggis
132 minutes

This Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 2004 seemed to forge an unholy backlash of conservative pundits (claiming to be upset over the moral implications of the story), haters who had a problem with Hilary Swank and hipsters who perhaps felt critics over praised this boxing movie. The hipsters come closest to having an intelligent criticism, but what becomes apparent evaluating Million Dollar Baby on its own terms is that Eastwood is simply making the best ‘60s movies released in the 2000s. There’s no sex, no graphic violence, no special effects. The story is so modest — scaled to human beings — as to almost be considered a B-movie and the color is so unsaturated, it looks like it was shot in black & white. Earning every emotion it extracts, it’s also a film of power and beauty and worth every award it was handed.

Based on the short stories of trainer and cutman Jerry Boyd (writing under the pen name F.X. Toole), the picture is rich with distinctions. The adaptation by Paul Haggis has depth and vitality, with the outcome of a boxing card revealing more than winners and losers, but a lifetime of struggle rewarded or unrewarded for both the fighter and their trainers. Morgan Freeman’s narration has a bittersweet sagacity to it while detailing what makes boxing and its fans unique. The moral equation the film dials up had been sitting there for a while, waiting to be dealt with honestly and maturely in a movie; Eastwood answers that call. What enriches Million Dollar Baby most is the delicate, peaceful music composed by Eastwood, with Gennady Loktionov arranging and conducting a 25 piece orchestra — 23 strings, one piano and one spellbinding acoustic guitar picked by Bruce Forman.

Following a boxing match in which trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) inches his fighter “Big” Willie Little (Mike Colter) closer to a long awaited title bout, he’s approached by a girl named Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) and asked to train her. Frankie brushes her off, even after she claims that people who’ve seen her fight say she’s tough. “Girlie, tough ain’t enough.” When Frankie isn’t haranguing his community priest (Brian O’Byrne) or mailing his estranged daughter letters that are sent back “return to sender”, he runs a boxing gym in downtown Los Angeles called The Hit Pit. Employed as maintenance man and sleeping in the back is Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), blind in one eye from a fight 23 years ago that Frankie blames himself for being unable to stop when he was a cutman.

Watching her work out religiously at The Hit Pit, Eddie throws Maggie a few pointers and lets her mess around with a speedbag that belonged Frankie, who ultimately gives in and agrees to train the girl how to fight. When Maggie questions Frankie about his relationship with his daughter, he passes her off on a manager who throws Maggie into the ring before she’s ready. Learning to listen to Frankie, Maggie TKOs a trail of female boxers in the first round of her early fights. Taking Frankie to Missouri to visit her obtuse welfare recipient mother (Margo Martindale), Maggie surprises her family with keys to a house, but fails to win a shred of gratitude in return. Playing up Maggie’s Irish heritage, Frankie promotes her as “Mo Chuisle” and accepts a title fight in Las Vegas with a million dollar purse. A world championship seems within their reach.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 223 users: 91% for Million Dollar Baby

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 86 for Million Dollar Baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

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

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

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

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

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)