The Limey (1999)
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Produced by John Hardy, Scott Kramer
Running time: 89 minutes

Should I Care?
Taking a look at a movie, stepping back and taking a look at it again benefits few films as thoroughly as The Limey, the fractured, hard boiled egg that director Steven Soderbergh whipped up on break between two studio assignments near the end of the first decade of his career. Pocketing some well earned critical cache for thrusting two stars of the 1960s — Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda — back into the limelight with screen roles they could sink their chops into, a non-linear timeline that reduces the story and characters to sketches could be described as an acquired taste at best. But like the director’s glacially paced remake of Solaris (2002) and the eccentric double feature Che (2008), The Limey is a movie whose suggested usage recommends time to chew it over. That’s the ideal approach for a film about time. Focusing on a British career criminal past his expiration date whose trip to L.A. conjures memories — and finally regrets — of what his life might have been, this is intricately well made, poignant and exciting filmmaking.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs — who had Richard Stark paperback novels like The Hunter on his brain when he initially wrote the script in his early 20s — has reason to snipe about what Soderbergh came out of the editing room with. Supporting characters perfectly cast in Lesley Ann Warren, Nicky Katt and Barry Newman are shouldered out of the movie, while Ann-Margret’s entire performance hit the cutting room floor. At 89 minutes, it’s hard to see how restoring 10 minutes to the running time would have lost anybody. Entire layers of the story feel unexposed: contrasts between L.A. and London, upper and working class, the ‘60s and the ‘90s. Soderbergh seems after a little less conversation and instead juxtaposes moving images, moving adroitly through a man’s memory to examine all these subjects and more. Employing footage of a 27-year-old Stamp from the film Poor Cow (1967) for flashbacks was an inspired choice, while the low key piano score by Cliff Martinez haunts the action beautifully.

So, What’s This About?
A taciturn stranger (Terence Stamp) who speaks at times in rhyming Cockney slang and gives the name of “Wilson” exits Los Angeles International Airport. He seeks out Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman), an acting class friend of his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) and sender of the letter notifying Wilson that his daughter has died. Refusing to believe that her neck was broken in a car accident on Mulholland Drive, Wilson pays a visit to the drug traffickers Jenny confronted when she discovered her boyfriend was doing business with them. Unaware that Wilson has spent half of his life in British prisons for armed robbery, the petty thieves pay dearly for their rudeness. Word reaches Jenny’s ex, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a music producer who built a fortune capturing the allure of Southern California on vinyl records in the late 1960s. Valentine now lives in a house suspended over the Hollywood Hills with his current baby-faced flame Adhara (Amelia Heinle).

Spending time with Jenny’s best friend and acting instructor Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), Wilson reveals that his daughter often threatened to dial the police on him during his wilder days in London. This was her way to showing her love for him. Wilson believes a similar occurrence with her ex-boyfriend led to Jenny’s death. Crashing a party at Valentine’s, Wilson throws one of the record producer’s muscle men into the canyon and narrowly evades a loaded for bear security consultant named Jim Avery (Barry Newman) who protects Valentine. Avery outsources the hit on Wilson to a pool hall punk (Nicky Katt) who blows his assignment when the narcs monitoring Valentine intervene. Unable to prove Valentine is involved in drug smuggling, a DEA agent (Bill Duke) instead provides Wilson with the location of their quarry. Wilson, Eduardo and Elaine head up the coast to Big Sur, where Valentine is hiding out and Wilson seeks the truth about his daughter’s death.

Who Made It?
The son of American painter R.B. Kitaj, Anton Lemuel Kitaj was born in Oxford and grew up in London in the 1960s. He settled in Los Angeles toward the end of the 1970s, adopted the pen name Lem Dobbs (a nod to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of his favorite films) and started cranking out screenplays. One in particular was influenced by the pulp fiction of Donald Westlake, whose novel The Hunter (written under the non de plume Richard Stark) and its vengeance wrecking anti-hero would coincidentally inspire at least two movies with fractured timelines: Point Blank (1967) and later Payback (1999). Titled The Limey, nothing much became of Dobbs’ script, but a decade later, the screenwriter found a fan in director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed a screenplay Dobbs had written as homage to German horror movies of the 1920s. Dobbs became a vocal critic of Kafka (1991), but was approached by Soderbergh with the prospect of making The Limey as soon as the director finished his third film, King of the Hill (1993).

Wrapping an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight (1998) for Universal Pictures, Soderbergh wanted to go back to work, as well as experiment with techniques he was tempted to workshop on his $48 million studio assignment. Dobbs was game to help remodel The Limey less in the style of a straightforward crime thriller and into something deeper. At a much earlier stage, Dobbs had Michael Caine in mind for the role of Wilson, but Terence Stamp was chosen as the ‘60s screen icon they wanted to build the film around. Basking in the warmest reviews of his career for Out of Sight, Soderbergh approached upstart, filmmaker friendly Artisan Entertainment in June 1998 with a script and a cast for The Limey. The mini-studio agreed to finance a roughly $9 million budget and nine months later, the dexterous filmmaker would turn in his cut of the film. Shunned by audiences, the fragmented film noir would come to be regarded by many critics and filmgoers as a career best for both Dobbs and Soderbergh.

How’d They Do It?
Emigrating from London to Los Angeles permanently at the age of 18, one of the earliest scripts Lem Dobbs finished was The Limey. “I remember when I first wrote this script, and I was living in my little apartment in Hollywood, a block from Paramount Studios. Around the corner there was an office building on Larchmont and I was walking by and I looked at the directory outside and it said, ‘Aldrich and Associates’. And the minute this script — the original, naïve, adolescent version — was hot off the Xerox machine I took a copy around to Robert Aldrich’s office and gave it to his secretary and said, ‘This is for Mr. Aldrich’ and I’d written a letter or something and I still think to this day if one thing had led to another and he’d read it and liked it and called me and somehow the movie had gotten made it would have added years to his life, it would have resurrected his critical reputation.” Dobbs added, “But it shows you how long it can be before a movie comes together and it’s strange to think that I’m saying now that you brought a script to Robert Aldrich. You might as well be invoking the name of D.W. Griffith.”

Leaning heavily on the novels of Richard Stark and action movies directed by Walter Hill, as well as British film noir  — Dobbs cites Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971) and the TV mini-series Out (1978) starring Tom Bell as influences — the script made its way to Steven Soderbergh, whose debut film sex, lies and videotape (1989) won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival when the director was 26 years old. Soderbergh recalled, “This is the script he had for a while, and that we talked about doing after King of the Hill. But we sort of let it drop. After Out Of Sight, I called him up again: I really wanted to go back to work immediately, but I wanted to do something small where I could continue to experiment a little with narrative. There were things I thought of during Out of Sight where I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you could go a lot further with some of these ideas if you had a piece of material that could withstand it.’ So I called Lem. I said, ‘Look, let’s think about this again, but I want to come at it a different way. I want to make it more of a mosaic and sort of deconstruct it a little bit, and let’s figure out now who the actor is that we’re going to design this around, because there aren’t a lot of choices.’”

Promoting The Limey in 1999, Soderbergh revealed, “I thought, I would love to see a movie in which Terence Stamp is the lead character, so that’s what I was thinking. But I also knew that we had a movie in which 95 percent of the dialogue was spoken by characters 50 and older, and that’s not exactly where the core demographic is lately. One of the things that I liked about the script was that Terence Stamp’s daughter, Jenny, had a really close friend who was not her age. Lem Dobbs, the writer and I were talking about that and he was saying, ‘You know, I have friends of all different ages, but I feel like when I go to see a movie, everybody’s friend is exactly the same age.’ We became very enamored of the idea of Jenny’s closest friend being a woman who was much older than her, because that seemed absolutely right for it.” Dobbs and Soderbergh considered Susan Clark, Lauren Hutton, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, Blair Brown, Jill Clayburgh, Susan Blakely, Linda Pearl, Brooke Adams, Mackenzie Phillips, Katharine Ross, Adrienne Barbeau, Peggy Lipton, Glynnis O’Connor, Kathleen Quinlan, Annette O’Toole and Kay Lenz before Lesley Ann Warren was cast.

The Limey was pitched to Santa Monica based film financier Artisan Entertainment in June 1998. Cameras were rolling in locations around Los Angeles by October 1998. John Hardy — collaborator with Soderbergh on six of his seven previous films — was producing with Scott Kramer. To serve as director of photography, the director tapped Ed Lachman, who’d finished shooting The Virgin Suicides for Sofia Coppola only weeks previous. As for what Soderbergh had in mind in terms of influences and intent, he revealed, “For this film especially, I’d say Petulia and Point Blank, but I love the early Alain Resnais films. Those had a huge impact on me when I saw them. Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are both still astonishing to me to this day. There are more ideas in the first fifteen minutes of Hiroshima, Mon Amour than in the last ten movies you’ve seen. And he was, like, the first guy to do this stuff. You look at what he was doing and it’s just jaw-dropping. I haven’t done anything nearly that adventurous yet.” He added, “I kept saying, ‘Look, if we do this right, it’s Alain Resnais makes Get Carter.”

One innovation by Soderbergh was to sneak in archive footage of his lead actor from a much older film. Lem Dobbs gave Soderbergh his bootleg copy of a 1967 crime drama starring Terrence Stamp and Carol White titled Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s debut feature film as director. Dobbs enthused, “The thing about Poor Cow is that it’s a Ken Loach film, so it had the famous Ken Loach grainy, documentary look to it, so it’s almost as if it’s not clips from another film. It’s almost as if it is memories or home movies of an actual past. It’s also the only film where Terence Stamp looks normal in. So many of the films from his heyday he has kind of strange dyed blonde hair or he’s got a period moustache or there’s something odd or it’s Modesty Blaise — it’s some wacky film. Poor Cow is the one film where Terence Stamp looks like he probably looked at that time. Like himself.” Soderbergh met Ken Loach and received the director’s blessing to poach Poor Cow, but negotiating legal clearances with two separate copyright holders stretched well into post-production.

With help from editor Sarah Flack, Soderbergh experimented with a disjointed editing style. A scene between Wilson and Elaine jumps between her apartment, a boardwalk and a diner, but unfolds as one conversation, making it unclear whose point of view we’re experiencing and how reliable it is. Soderbergh explained, “Editing is a very intensive and collaborative period. It’s where the film is finally being made, in a way. And in this case, there was a lot of experimentation. Some of our early versions went too far and resulted in something that was almost incoherent to people who had worked on the film. And we ended up backing off a little bit, and finding a better balance between the sort of abstract impressionistic side of the movie and the straightforward narrative side. That just required a bit of trial and error. That’s normal, but there was more in this film than a lot of other films I’ve made. But editing was really fun.”

One casualty in the editing of The Limey became Ann-Margret. Soderbergh explained, “She had a scene as Peter Fonda’s ex-wife when he shows up at the house in Big Sur. It was a scene that culminated in a lengthy monologue that I really liked, that I had asked Lem to write. I remember one day, I told him I had recently seen Network. And I said, ‘Gosh, you know, people used to have monologues in movies. I don’t feel like they have monologues any more.’ And Lem wrote this scene with Peter Fonda’s ex-wife doing a lengthy tirade about Peter and his lifestyle. And it all turned out very well. The problem is it had to be all or nothing. It was an eight-minute sequence. If it’s Ann-Margret, you can’t just have it be a minute. I decided, based on the rhythm of the movie and my sense that Peter’s character didn’t really need much more backstory than it had, that I just had to pull the whole thing out. That was a difficult call to make. But I felt that an eight-minute sequence right there really brought the film to a halt. And I decided to keep it going.”

Instead of screening The Limey to a test audience recruited at a mall, Soderbergh took an alternate approach. “In this case, the only screenings I had were for friends. I had called Artisan and said that in my opinion, we would be throwing our money away to do formal previews on this movie, because it’s never going to score very well. It’s the type of film that will not benefit from having these screenings. What I preferred to do was screen it for the most intelligent group of friends I could put together, and get ideas that way. They agreed. So I did just three or four screenings where I invited a different group of friends each time. It was writers, directors, actors, some other friends who are not in the film business, people who are reasonably intelligent and have a relationship with me that allows them to speak very frankly. Sometimes it would be brand new people, and sometimes it would be people who had seen it before, so I could get a balance of opinions from people who were watching the film change. I think in this case, that was a good thing to do.”

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Toronto Film Festival in September, The Limey opened October 1999 in the United States to very favorable reviews.  Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey is the story of two older guys who hire their killers, and another who is a do-it-yourselfer. In its quiet and murderous way, it is like the delayed final act of an old movie about drugs, guns and revenge.” Charles Taylor, Salon.com: “Like Point Blank, The Limey is an art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Above all, Soderbergh is a master of narrative economy, stripping down images and information to their essential components, always searching for the most efficient and visually frugal means of telling his stories. The Limey continues in the vein he established with his previous film Out of Sight — straightforward genre pieces that he treats as anything but straightforward.”

The Limey was ignored in theaters, but $3.2 million at the U.S. box office did little to erase Soderbergh’s experimental streak. “I respect my audience, and I assume they come to the theater with a certain level of intelligence, but I don’t pander to them. I feel like, ‘Look, I’m going to take you somewhere, you can go or not go, but here is where we’re going’. I like that attitude when I see movies. We’re doing our thing. When we tested Out of Sight, it didn’t score very well. People wrote down, ‘I hate stories that are told this way’. There are people that just can’t stand a narrative that doesn’t go A-B-C-D. Do I think the average moviegoer today is a little less discerning than they were thirty years ago? Yeah, maybe. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the U.S., people seemed more willing to go to a movie to have an unexpected experience. Today, people tend to want to know what they’re going to experience before they go, and they get upset if they don’t get what they wanted.” One year later, Soderbergh would win an Academy Award for Best Director with Traffic (2000), a fragmented exploration of the war on drugs that ran away with grosses of $207.5 million worldwide.

Where’d You Get All of This?
The Limey. DVD audio commentary with Steven Soderbergh & Lem Dobbs. Artisan Home Entertainment (1999)

“Independent Means: Getting Closer — With The Limey, Steven Soderbergh continues to break down the barriers between actor and director” By Jamie Painter. Back Stage West, 7 October 1999

“Soderbergh Finds Success Is No Sellout” By Rene Rodriguez. The Miami Herald, 10 October 1999

“Steven Soderbergh Interview” By Keith Phipps. The Onion

“Soderbergh Brings Past, Present Together in The Limey” By Elif Cercel. Directors World, 15 November 15, 1999

“Dan Schneider Interview 21: Lem Dobbs” By Dan Schneider. Cosmetica, 25 January 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SherryBaby (2006)
Written by Laurie Collyer
Directed by Laurie Collyer
Produced by Elevation Filmworks/ Big Beach Films
MPAA rating: “R for strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug content”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up a Golden Globe nomination (her second) for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama” in SherryBaby and it’s a citation that doesn’t come close to giving the film the cred it deserves. SherryBaby is one of the better ‘70s movies to be released in the last decade. Tracing the ups and downs of a recently paroled young woman, the movie is an assured, refreshingly candid answer to Straight Time (1978). Instead of Dustin Hoffman reasserting himself on the streets of L.A. following parole, SherryBaby uses the suburbs as its arena and focuses on the reconciliation between an ex-con and her daughter. The narrative feature film debut of writer-director Laurie Collyer avoids cheap moral lessons, with an actress game to explore less than flattering aspects of her dysfunctional character.

As acutely as Straight Time portrayed the temptations available to an ex-con on the streets, SherryBaby traffics in the domestic minefield that awaits a woman trying to piece her life back together following time behind bars. Collyer manages to convey a high degree of tension with little or no violence and if it all feels small in scale, the movie surpasses expectations by rooting itself in reality. Russell Lee Fine — serving as director of photography between stints shooting MTV’s The Real World and HBO’s The Wire — lends the docudrama a rich look. As for Maggie Gyllenhaal, her salience has less to do with any ability to transform into character, but to come across as real and spontaneous and transform the audience into seeing the world from the point of view of that character. This is her best work yet.

So, What’s This About?
Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) climbs off a bus somewhere in New Jersey and makes her way to a halfway house. After checking in with parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), Sherry uses her feminine wiles to urge a male employment coordinator to overlook a drug history and give her the job she covets: working with kids in an afterschool program. She’s visited by her gentle brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) who drives Sherry to the suburbs for a reunion with her 4-year-old daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). Sherry’s honesty and hard luck story are lost on her sister-in-law Lynette (Bridget Barkan), who has raised Alexis as if she were her own daughter and does not approve of an ex-con coming into the child’s life.

Unable to cope with the halfway house and refused quarter by Lynette, Sherry moves into a motel. She attends rehab meetings and meets a steady Native American named Dean Walker (Danny Trejo) who remembers Sherry from her topless dancer days as a teenager. Enduring a sexually abusive relationship with her father (Sam Bottoms) and unable to reach her daughter, Sherry relapses into heroin use. A surprise visit from Hernandez compels Sherry to ask him for help; the p.o. offers her the choice of getting clean at an in-patient rehab facility or getting clean in prison. With her life falling apart, Sherry convinces Bobby to let her spend the day with her daughter. Sherry breaks parole, crossing the New Jersey-Delaware border with Alexis for destinations unknown.

Who Made It?
Laurie Collyer grew up in the suburban idyll of New Jersey. Graduating from Oberlin College with the ambition of translating German literature for a living, she moved to San Francisco instead and went to work at a residential treatment center for disturbed children. Social work burned Collyer out within six years, but her love of filmmaking brought her to a film production class, where an assignment to make a 3-minute short about a chair turned into a 25-minute film about a girl confined to a wheelchair. Titled Thanh, Collyer’s short was enthusiastically received when screened at the annual benefit concert for the Bay Area’s non-profit Bridge School. She enrolled in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her thesis film Nuyorican Dream chronicled the life of a Puerto Rican family in New York. The documentary would compete at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

Nuyorican Dream won Collyer an invitation to the 2001 Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. Assisted by research she’d conducted with both ex-cons and the social workers in charge of them, Collyer wrote SherryBaby. Using her Sundance connections, Collyer got the script to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’d just broken out in the cult hit Secretary (2002). With Gyllenhaal attached, producer Lemore Syvan of New York based Elevation Filmworks got involved. After a year and a half, Syvan finally snared financing in producer Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner of Big Beach Films, who agreed to bankroll SherryBaby at a budget of roughly $2 million. Shot in Collyer’s old stomping grounds of Mountainside, NJ in the summer of 2005, her narrative feature film debut would be acquired by Netflix and garner critical accolades when released a year later.

How’d They Do It?
Laurie Collyer recalled the origins of SherryBaby by stating, “I grew up in New Jersey in this very sort of sleepy, suburban town where there wasn’t much going on, and when I was in late elementary school, I met this girl who I thought was just the coolest thing ever, and she was really smart and used big words like ‘premonition’ and ‘tribulation.’ But she could also really throw down in the schoolyard with the boys. She was pretty tough so I really admired her and we got to be close and my life became much more interesting, but then as time went on, the partying got more intense and I switched to a private school and she just became more intensely into partying and drugs and stuff like that. So when I went to college, she was pretty much on the path to doing time in prison.”

After her NYU thesis documentary Nuyorican Dream (1999) was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, Collyer was invited back to Park City the following year to participate in the prestigious Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. She began workshopping a 30-page short script that she’d drafted as early as 1994 titled Shall Not Want. Like Nuyorican Dream, the material drew heavily on Collyer’s interest in people living on the margins of society. “I had a mentor early in the process of writing Sherrybaby, a gentleman named Richard Stratton, who is a producer and a writer but also spent 10 years in a penitentiary. He introduced me to a lot of ex-convicts and people working with ex-convicts in New York and helped me get the realness of the script by introducing me to this world. I just interviewed a ton of people — but it was through Richard opening that door for me.”

A friend of Collyer’s would inform the character of Sherry. “Some of the language, actually, from letters he wrote to me. When she talks to the women in the halfway house, she’s sort of talking street. I just sort of picked that up from the way he talked. But it was more of a temperament. The combination of the self-destruction with the — I don’t want to say narcissism but self-absorbed combined with the self-destruction. That whole thing. You know, when you’ve been on drugs since you were 14 or 16 years old and then in prison or on the streets on or off the rest of the time, you haven’t really lived as an adult, so there’s a certain amount of childhood you carry into your adulthood. It’s like you stopped living, you know? So Sherry in a lot of ways is like a 16 year old.”

Collyer began the odyssey of securing the financing to turn her script SherryBaby into a film. She revealed, “I knew and I was told, I was advised a lot at the Sundance Lab actually by my wonderful advisors and consultants there to get an actor attached first before trying to raise the money. They told me also at the lab that it was the sort of a part that actors love to play so that it wouldn’t be that hard but you know at the same time, I was very picky. There are all these TV shows that have young women actors on them but I didn’t really want a TV actress.” One of Collyer’s advisors at the Sundance Lab was screenwriter Naomi Foner, whose daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal was attracting notice opposite James Spader in the edgy Secretary (2002).

With Maggie Gyllenhaal interested, SherryBaby appeared on the radar of producer Lemore Syvan. Collyer recalled,“It was hard to find the money. Lemore Syvan came on as producer, but it took about a year-and-a half to find the financing. In the meantime she made a couple of movies and I wrote a couple of other scripts. Another challenge is trusting your collaborators. If you are new at the game, you are not used to giving your creative work over for others to translate and/or modify.” Syvan ultimately locked a financial backer in Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner — with Jeb Brody and Peter Saraf — of New York based Big Beach Films. Turtletaub agreed to finance SherryBaby at roughly $2 million.

With a 25-day shooting schedule kicking off in May 2005, SherryBaby was filmed entirely in suburban New Jersey. Collyer stated, “It all takes place in a very middle-class milieu. That was actually very important to me, to place the story in a suburban context. I wanted to explore more what happens to the family that leads people to make these sort of choices.” The filmmaker’s old neighborhood of Mountainside was the site of Sherry’s brother and sister-in-law’s home. Collyer mused, “I always had a love-hate relationship about having grown up in such a white-bread sort of environment. The thing about shooting where I grew up, I think it was my way to make peace with it once and for all.”

Coming less peacefully for Collyer would be getting along with Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We would have differences of opinion quite a bit. Sometimes she would pick on me so I would make her mad on purpose, too. It sounds so premeditated, but we did have differences of opinion about the work sometimes and sometimes she would win and sometimes I would. There was a lot of battling over the little girl that plays Sherry’s daughter. She didn’t want me to direct her; she knew best, everything about the girl. But that was her being Sherry in the most classic form, because that’s Sherry’s conflict. She’s the child’s mother and nobody else should tell the child what to do.” Collyer added, “I think all directors and actors, when there’s material that’s dramatic, maybe even with comedies, if you’re taking your job seriously, there’s going to be conflict. I think it’s natural. It’s sort of built into the relationship.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal later admitted, “When you’re the lead in a movie, when you’re in every moment of the movie, it’s hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work.” She added, “So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.”

Critics posted rave reviews. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “What screenwriters call the arc of the story is visible from the outset, and some of the scenes in Sherrybaby have a familiar look and feel. But what distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing — which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats — and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “There’s a schematic, workshopped quality to Collyer’s script, detailing the intertwined setbacks and small triumphs in one woman’s struggle to recover a life for herself. Yet the film works. It doesn’t go soft or inspirational in its later stages, when most films would. It doesn’t pump up the redemption or the melodrama.” Dennis Harvey, Variety: “Gyllenhaal, in her most substantial role since Secretary, does a fine, unshowy job of lining Sherry’s faults without alienating the viewer or pleading for sympathy.”

In January 2006, SherryBaby screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In May, it was announced that Netflix had acquired North American distribution rights under their Red Envelope Entertainment banner. The Silicon Valley based distributor has picked up a number of low budget films on the bet that one — like Capturing the Friedmans (2003) — will hit with audiences. SherryBaby would not be one of those sleepers. Opening September 2006 in the United States, it grossed only $199,176 domestically and $423,630 overseas. But Laurie Collyer summed up the experience by admitting, “I really didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t expect that it would get bought. It was just a lot of hope: I hoped that it would make the producer’s money back; I hoped that people would like it; and I hoped that Maggie would feel good about having done it. All those hopes have been realized, and then some.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Director Shows You Can Go Home Again” By Anita Gates. The New York Times, 27 August 2006

“indieWIRE Interview: Laurie Collyer, director of Sherrybaby” By Brian Brooks. indieWIRE, 7 September 2006

“Hollywood Loves You, Baby” By Daniel Robert Epstein. Film Stew, 19 January 2007

“Second Chances” By Jason Guerrasio. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

“Interview: Laurie Collyer” By Ric Gentry. Post Script, Fall 2007

“Maggie Gyllenhaal” By Tim Blanks. Interview, May 2008

“Interview Laurie Collyer, Director SherryBaby” By Sheila Roberts, MoviesOnline

The Savages (2007)
Written by Tamara Jenkins
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Ad Hominem/ Cooper’s Town Productions/ Lone Star Film Group/ Fox Searchlight
MPAA rating: “R for some sexuality and language”
Running time: 113 minutes

Should I Care?
In Slums of Beverly Hills — the feature film writing and directing debut of Tamara Jenkins — Marisa Tomei’s character is introduced wandering down a road late at night, naked, as someone who’d sprung herself from a mental facility might do. In The Savages, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) has an even more disturbing introduction, or for anyone who came in late, one of the characters later exclaims that “death is gaseous and gruesome and it’s filled with shit and piss and rotten stink!” Jenkins’ second feature — a sad but inherently funny film — veers into some hard truths about aging parents and their legacy: the relationship between their equally dysfunctional offspring. It’s carried off imperfectly and is not an always easy film to watch, but is as nuanced and profound a statement about aging as your likely to see made today.

Like Slums of Beverly Hills, The Savages is uncompromising. Its view of family dysfunction — with little regard for the comfort level of the audience — knocked me out of the truck a few times. The shock value wears off on a second viewing, when the performances and the humanity of Jenkins’ writing reveal themselves with greater clarity. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character seems to loiter through much of the story, but where the film really takes off is with Laura Linney, given her most beautifully fucked up and neurotic character since You Can Count On Me (2000). Childless and barely able to take care of a ficus, a dying father provides her character with the excuse to pull herself together. The script is edgy, surgical in its cutting insight and has the balls to deal out loud with its subject matter: we Americans are not going to live forever.

So, What’s This About?
Living in the retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) crudely rebels against the caregiver (David Zayas) hired by the family of Lenny’s live-in girlfriend the only way he has left. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a New York City temp seeking a grant to finish her latest play, “inspired by the work of Jean Genet, the cartoons of Lynda Barry and the family dramas of Eugene O’Neill”. She gets the call relaying her father’s erratic behavior. Referring to the incident as an “alarm” rather than a “crisis” is Wendy’s brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a PH.d who’s teaching drama in Buffalo and working on a book about Bertholt Brecht. When Lenny’s girlfriend dies, the siblings fly to Arizona to be notified that their father has no legal right to remain in the house.

Uncomfortable at first with the proposition of putting their father in a nursing home, Wendy is left with Lenny — combative, disoriented and unable to take care of himself — while Jon secures him a bed at a hospice in Buffalo. Under the impression he’s been taken to a hotel, Lenny does not react well to the news that he’s actually in a nursing home. Wendy sets her sights on upgrading Lenny to a senior living facility, but Jon accuses his sister of caring more about absolving her own guilt than helping their dad. Working through some depression and a breakup with his Polish professor girlfriend (Cara Seymour), Jon invites Wendy to stay with him Buffalo until their father gets settled. Helping her adjust is Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a Nigerian orderly with acute observations about life and death.

Who Made It?
Tamara Jenkins grew up in Philadelphia. Her father would receive custody of Jenkins and her three brothers and move them around the low rent areas of Beverly Hills, an experience that the filmmaker would chronicle in her feature writing and directing debut. Jenkins ended up in New York’s East Village to pursue a career in performance art. Transitioning into film, she enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Her black & white short Fugitive Love (1991) was so well received that it screened at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Independent TV Service commissioned a black & white short from Jenkins; titled Family Remains (1993) it won a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 1994. This earned Jenkins an invitation to the Sundance Institute, where she developed Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) with the support of Robert Redford. Alan Arkin and Natasha Lyonne starred in the dysfunctional family comedy.

Producer Ted Hope — co-founder of New York indie film company Good Machine — signed Jenkins to a blind deal. Under conditions her script be contemporary and be considered a comedy, Jenkins took some elements from her life — a father suffering dementia, a nursing home in the East Village — and wrote The Savages. She arrived on Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the leads, but when Good Machine was sold to Universal and rebranded Focus Features, the studio felt that neither Linney or Hoffman were big enough names. Hope agreed to develop The Savages at This Is That Productions, the company he’d built with former Good Machine execs Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman. Fred and Erica Westheimer of Lone Star Film Group agreed to split the roughly $8 million budget with Fox Searchlight and Jenkins’ sophomore feature went on to become one the most critically acclaimed films of 2007.

How’d They Do It?
After spending at least two years adapting Diane Arbus: A Biography — a project that was scuttled when the Arbus estate refused to license the artist’s photographs for a movie — Tamara Jenkins went into business with the prestigious Ted Hope. His batting record as a film producer featured 23 entries in the Sundance Film Festival, including The Wedding Banquet (1993), The Brothers McMullen (1995), Walking and Talking (1996), In the Bedroom (2001) and American Splendor (2003). In 2002, Hope sold the company — Good Machine — that had co-produced most of those films to Universal Pictures, where it was renamed Focus Features. Former Good Machine executives Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman would later join Hope to launch This Is That Productions in New York. Their first two movies were the critically acclaimed 21 Grams (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

Jenkins recalled of Hope, “He created this environment where I had this blind deal through some discretionary money that he had via Focus Features, and a blind deal means that you don’t have to tell the financier what you’re writing about. It’s blind, essentially, but the person who gave us the deal, the people at Focus, said, ‘There’s only two stipulations: one, that it’s a contemporary story, so it can’t be a period piece, and two, that it’s funny.’ Then I said, ‘Oh, you mean like it’s a comedy?’ and he said, ‘No, it doesn’t have to be a straight comedy but there has to be humor in it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Phew!’ I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. I knew the material that I was approaching, but I was grateful that it wasn’t a comedy with a capital C.”

As with Slums of Beverly Hills, Jenkins’ personal life began to inform her script. “I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person.” She continued, “And then around me, around my friends, it’s starting to happen — we’re all in our mid-40s, in some cases older, and they’re starting to deal with their parents becoming less well, and elder-care things. So all those things were just percolating, and they all just started pushing me in this direction. And I was very interested in writing about grown-up siblings, so it just started mushing into this idea.”

Once Jenkins struck the idea for her sophomore feature film, she invited Ted Hope to hear her perform in a spoken word series at The Moth, a theater in Gramercy Park. Hope remembered, “At the performance, Tamara told the story of taking her dad who was suffering from dementia on an airplane cross-country. She had the audience in hysterics. It was incredibly moving and heartfelt, and it had these real characters that were unique and fascinating to watch.” Anne Carey added, “Tamara is somebody who always finds either the funny sadness or the sad funniness in situations. In this story, you feel like you’re parting the curtains and getting an incredibly intimate look into a private world. It’s a heartbreaking world, yet the movie is also incredibly funny and hopeful. It’s about two people who didn’t even think they really had a family coming to understand the importance of family.”

Jenkins met with Philip Seymour Hoffman in New York and flew to Colorado — where Laura Linney was living — to get their commitment to play the Savages, but couldn’t get Focus Features CEO James Schamus to sign off the casting. Jenkins recalled, “And when I finally hunkered down and said, ‘I think these guys are great,’ then I met Laura individually and I met Phil, and I went back, and after other discussions about other actors, and meetings, and going through the chain of the process, I at one point just came back and said, ‘These guys are great.’ And they said, ‘Well, if that’s the decision, then we should let you go.’ But they were kind enough to let me go with the material. They didn’t put it in a vault and say ‘Too bad!’” She added, “Their foreign sales were a factor, meaning stars have to have a certain price on their head in European territories, or something? But really, I don’t know. It was mysterious to me.”

“So then I went knocking on other people’s doors for money, and it did not come easily. It’s not a movie that you can pitch well, frankly. Financiers are risk-averse. They’re scared, and the film was dealing with a subject matter that people don’t want to deal with anyway.” One person open to dealing with The Savages was producer Fred Westheimer, who’d spent 35 years as an agent at William Morris, representing John Travolta and Candice Bergen for a time before heading WMA’s motion picture talent for the last six years of his tenure. Westheimer departed the talent agency in 2005 to form Lone Star Film Group, an independent film financier funded by private equity and based in Beverly Hills. To head production, he turned to his 32-year-old daughter Erica Westheimer, who’d spent ten years working in the New York film industry, first as a costumer, later as Laura Linney’s personal assistant.

Jenkins was in touch with producer Jim Burke, her husband Jim Taylor’s & Alexander Payne’s business partner in Ad Hominem. A fan of the script, Burke kept Jenkins’ spirits up via email while she and Ted Hope & Anne Carey struggled to get The Savages financed. Of Burke, Taylor & Payne, Jenkins mused, “I felt like they were my male back-up singers. They were my guardian angels, they were just this formidable group of men that were standing behind it. Granted, one of them happened to be my husband, but hopefully, people would take their support seriously despite the nepotistic set-up. They kind of came on board that way, and obviously watched various cuts of the movie and threw in their two cents and stuff, but it was kind of guardianship.” With Taylor, Payne & Burke involved, Lone Star agreed to finance half of the roughly $8 million budget. In January 2006, Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice agreed to put up the other half.

Explaining what attracted her to The Savages, Laura Linney stated, “What I like about it is its very odd, eccentric sense of humor, and the fact that it’s these three people in this situation. Subject matter like this could be very sentimentalized and not be good material to be told cinematically. But I loved the script. I know it’s always a good barometer if I’m reading a script and I start working on it as I go along, subconsciously connections are made, ideas are coming. A lot of times scripts don’t give you that and you really have to work hard to create something. This just sort of lifted right off the page.” She added, “I think if you scratch the surface on all good drama it’s either about family, sex or religion. Any one you scratch it’s going to be about one of those three topics. They’re sort of intertwined, you can’t really get away from any of them. I think we’re all a little self-obsessed at the moment, everybody’s looking inward at who we are and why we are, and that tends to lead back to the family.”

Joining Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be stage, TV and film veteran Philip Bosco. Jenkins revealed, “My casting director, Jeanne McCarthy, said, ‘What about Phil Bosco?’ and I said, ‘Oh, he’s that guy who does all that pshaw and he always plays these well-heeled patriarchs and lawyers and stuff. He’s too fancy!’ That was my fear and directors can be really stupid and literal and forget the people are actually actors and just because he plays well-heeled judges, that doesn’t mean that’s all he’s able to do, so we actually auditioned him. He came into the room and read. I was very anxious because it was very important to me that whoever played the part, that the character was not sentimentalized, that there wasn’t that, I kept saying, ‘I don’t want the old bastard with the twinkle in his eye. I don’t want the twinkle.’ I’m saying this to my casting director Jeannie and being anxious that I don’t want him to turn into that cliché of the old codger with that twinkle thing.”

Three months after being greenlit by Fox Searchlight, a 30-day shooting schedule was underway in New York. Jenkins exclaimed, “We were very lucky — it snowed in April in front of the nursing home in Buffalo! So we managed to have a winter movie in April and it worked out okay. The 30-day aspect of it wasn’t fun. Five more days would have made life easier. But the adrenaline can be kind of great.” She added, “As much as I can complain and wish I had more time, there’s something about that capturing of life, and that’s the most important thing — that sort of lived-in feeling among these characters, a messy, imperfect aliveness. Just having it feel alive.”  The Hudson Senior Residence in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Westchester Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in Mount Vernon and the Concord Division of Staten Island University hospital and the St Agnes Hospital in White Plains were used as locations.

The Savages would screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 and fests in Toronto and Austin in the fall before opening November 2007 in the United States. Critics framed it with the best films of the year. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “For a tender, uncommonly perceptive look at sibling relationships and a profound meditation on death and the meaning we draw from experience, The Savages is singularly funny and seriously moving.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Jenkins’ superlative work proves her first film was no fluke; let’s hope it doesn’t take another nine years to hear from her again.” Ella Taylor, The Village Voice: “Jenkins is no sentimentalist, and she won’t patronize her benighted losers or her audience with epiphanies, apologies, or blinding insights. Yet the movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo’s liberation.”

A wash at the box office with $6.6 million in the United States and $4 million overseas, The Savages would be nominated for two Academy Awards, Laura Linney (Best Actress) and Tamara Jenkins (Best Original Screenplay). While its heavy subject matter had challenged financiers, for Jenkins, the film was about the broken dynamic between Wendy and Jon. “A friend of mine remarked that you just don’t see male-female intimacy that isn’t sexualized. But I was really interested in sibling relationships. I have three brothers in real life. It’s a strange thing to be siblings, to grow up under the exact same circumstances and adapt in completely opposite ways. Wendy is so emotive and reactive, and Jon is this brutal rationalist. It’s like some strange, humanist buddy picture, but it’s brother and sister, and they’re dealing with putting their father in a nursing home, instead of robbing a bank.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lone Star makes a leap” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 21 November 2005

The Savages — Production Notes

“Unblinking Look at Death Without Nobility” By Dennis Lim. The New York Times, 4 November 2007

“Exclusive Interview: The Savages’ Tamara Jenkins” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 26 November 2007

“Tamara Jenkins” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 29 November 2007

“Family Matters” By Katrina Onstad. CBC News, 20 December 2007

“Senior Moments” By Ray Pride. FilmMaker, 8 February 2008

“Giving The Savages a touch of class” By Amber Wilkinson. Eye For Film

Nowhere In Africa (2001)
Screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
Directed by Caroline Link
Produced by Constantin Film/ MTM Cineteve/ Bavaria Film International/ Media Cooperation One
Running time: 141 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In January 1938, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) lies stricken with malaria in a remote farmhouse in Rongai, Kenya. A lawyer disbarred from practice in his native Germany because he is a Jew, Walter is nursed back to health by a benevolent Luo cook named Owuor (Sidede Onyulo) and a neighboring farmer named Susskind (Matthias Habich), a Jew who had the foresight to make his exodus from Germany when emigrants could still get out with their money. Walter urgently sends for his pampered wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler) and 6-year-old daughter Regina (Lea Kurka) to flee their home in Leobschütz and join him at the arid farm he does his best to manage.

Regina bonds with Owuor and immerses herself in the customs of her new home. Her mother rejects the trappings of Kenya, hoping for a return to their cozy life, until news from Germany and of family still trapped there turns grim. When war breaks out, the British briefly intern Walter and Susskind at a camp for enemy aliens, while Jettel and Regina are housed with the German women and children at the posh Hotel Norfolk in Nairobi. Walter loses his job and home, but his wife’s liaison with a British officer gets him hired to run a lush farm in Ol Joro Orok. The opportunity enables the Redlichs to send Regina to boarding school, but adopting the farming life in a faraway land continues to strain their marriage.

Who Made It?
Stefanie Zweig spent 40 years as the arts editor of a daily newspaper in Frankfurt, Germany. She lost her job in 1988 — at the age of 56 — but buoyed by the success of a children’s book published to acclaim in 1994, Zweig turned her attention to a memoir chronicling her childhood as a German Jewish émigré growing up on the farms of Kenya. Nowhere in Africa would have no difficulty finding a publisher and arrived in bookstores in 1995. One of its earliest admirers was producer Peter Herrmann and his production company MTM Cineteve, which snagged the film rights as the novel went on to become a bestseller in Germany.

Three years later, Herrmann hooked German director Caroline Link — whose 1996 debut film Beyond Silence was nominated for an Academy Award — to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to visit the locations of Zweig’s coming-of-age story. They would reject pleas to shoot Nowhere in Africa in the film-friendly confines of South Africa and from January to April of 2001, marshal an $8 million budgeted production in Kenya. The German/Swahili/English language picture would become the highest grossing German film of 2002 and in March 2003, win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

How’d They Do It?
In June 1938, Stefanie Zweig arrived in Rongai, Kenya. Her 34-year-old father had been stripped of his job as an attorney and notary public by the Nazis and chose to immigrate to Kenya because the entry permit was only £50 per head. Without knowing anything about crops or cattle, he was managing a farm. With the help of the Jewish community in Nairobi, he sent for his wife and daughter. Zweig wrote, “Having learned Swahili with the speed and eagerness of a child longing to talk to people other than her parents, I loved everything about Kenya. I loved its beauty, sights and sounds, the animals and birds — but most of all the gentleness of the African heart, the people’s wit and their laughter.”

Zweig spent four decades as the chief editor of the arts section of the Abendpost-Nachtausgabe in Frankfurt. Yearning to be an author, she found solace writing children’s books in her spare time. She recalled her Kenyan experience with A Mouth Full of Earth in 1994, winning National Geographic Society’s best juvenile book in The Netherlands. Zweig then decided it was time for her to tell the mature version of her story. “I thought to myself, ‘You really are a fool to waste all your life in a children’s book, why don’t you tell the true story?’” She added, “I wrote the book in respect for my father, who told me very early in life not to hate, he taught me tolerance and not to give way to sentiments. I loved him very much and I wanted it to be his book.”

In 1993, producer Peter Herrmann helped establish (with Andreas Bareiss) the German television and film production company MTM Cineteve. MTM would produce Romuald Karmakar’s The Deathmaker, Germany’s submission for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years previous, Herrmann was researching African ethnology when he came upon Stefanie Zweig’s then little known memoir Nowhere in Africa. Herrmann recalled, “I bought it very fast, and then the book became a bestseller so I was able to raise money for this movie. Then it was also difficult to find a director who was bankable enough to finance such a film. And then I met a young director, Caroline Link, and thought, ‘She is great, but nobody knows her.’”

Caroline Link grew up in Bad Nauheim, the town just north of Frankfurt where Elvis Presley served his Army stint. She followed high school with an internship at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich and study at the nearby University of Television and Film. Link wrote and directed the 45-minute short The Days of Summer there before graduating in 1990. She entered the German film industry as an assistant director and screenwriter-for-hire. Her critically acclaimed feature film debut — the drama Beyond Silence (1996) — would be Germany’s submission to the Academy Awards in 1998. Link’s sophomore film Annaluise & Anton (starring Juliane Köhler) was equally well received by Germans in 1999.

By the time Caroline Link was shooting Annaluise & Anton, Peter Herrmann deemed her name bankable enough to send Link a memoir he was seeking to produce. Link recalled, “When I first read the book Nowhere in Africa I was fascinated by it. I was caught up by the story it told of a woman from a protected Jewish family who suddenly has to live in the middle of the African desert. I’ve always loved to discover new worlds with my movies, but I remember thinking to myself: ‘Wow, can I do this? Will I really be able to shoot a movie in Kenya?’” Link agreed to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to inspect the locales described by Stefanie Zweig in her story.

The trip left little doubt among the filmmakers that in order to remain authentic to Zweig’s memoir, Nowhere in Africa had to be filmed in Kenya. Peter Herrmann mused, “People like to watch films about Africa. But I think that many films about Africa communicate the wrong things. Our decision to film in Kenya was kind of a risk. Kenya’s infrastructure is terrible. It’s difficult to organize things. Everyone in the industry told us to film it in South Africa. All films about Africa are made there. If the Americans — Hollywood — make a movie set in Kenya, they film it in South Africa. They can’t imagine organizing such a complicated thing as a big movie in a country like that and keeping costs low.”

Herrmann added, “Caroline and I were convinced right from the beginning that it was our desired aim to represent things the way they really are. And I think it makes a big difference that the Africans that are shown really are Kenyans, Kikuyus or Pokots or whatever and that they aren’t just South Africans playing them.” In the spring of 2000, Link began assembling a cast. Theater actress Juliane Köhler agreed to play Jettel. (Link offered, “Juliane is not afraid to play a part that is at first unsympathetic.”) Merab Ninidze — a Georgian actor who’d lived in Vienna for 10 years — was chosen to play Walter. Kenya’s Sidede Onyulo was cast as Owuor, while two German schoolgirls — 9-year-old Lea Kurka and 12-year-old Karoline Eckertz — were cast to play Regina at different ages.

With Munich based Constantin Film helping finance the $8 million budget, Nowhere in Africa opened an office in Nairobi in August 2000. Kenya was gripped in a potentially catastrophic drought. Peter Herrmann recalled, “Even in Nairobi, the crisis was felt. The entire city was filled with Massai and their flocks. The animals were feeding on the sad remains of the few plants still growing along the streets. Nairobi was on the brink of disaster. We had already invested too much to turn back, and wouldn’t be able to relocate. It didn’t rain until November. By then we had already started the construction of the farmhouses and planted artificially irrigated cornfields. We had already put our trust in the gods of Africa that they would look favorably upon the country and upon our film.”

In her adaptation — which took two years to finish — Link chose to focus on the relationship between Walter and Jettel. “Stefanie Zweig tells the story from the perspective of a child. She describes her own experiences and memories. But for me, Regina’s mother Jettel is the most exciting character. What is most fascinating is her development into an independent and mature woman, who not only has to rethink her own position and priorities in life but also her relationship towards her family.” Zweig would endorse the film, but differed with Link’s approach. “My mother was a very spoilt woman but she was also very charming and warm-hearted. The actress does not convey that. She is a rather cold and tough woman and, at the time, you did not know what tough women were. My father would have murdered her on the spot if she had been like that.”

Nowhere in Africa commenced filming January 2001 in Rongai. 140 members of the cast and crew spent three weeks camped in a small tent town near Lolldaiga, with guards from the Kenya Wildlife Service posted to watch for lions or cheetahs. Caroline Link admitted to The New York Times the location made her nervous. “And yet I’m surprised that I wasn’t more so. Every night we came to our tents and took showers, and snakes would come out, attracted by the water. I should have been afraid. But I’d just stand there barefoot in the dark, completely distracted, thinking about the next day’s scenes.” Other locations for the four-month shoot included Ol Joro Orok, Nairobi and Mukutani, a community northeast of Lake Baringo which the production built a road in order to access.

Peter Herrmann recalled, “Filming in Mukutani proved to be the greatest challenge. We planted cornfields that had to have three different grades of maturity during the shoot. In order to show on screen that time had elapsed we had to have young, low corn plants, green corn plants and the mature yellow corn plants. One of the highlights of the movie, the attack/plague of the locusts was filmed in the field of ripe corn. The first seeds had already been sown in November so that there would be ripe corn in March. To supervise the growth of the corn we had a ‘corn commissioner’ who traveled once a week 100 km from Nakuru to Mukutani.”

Premiering December 27, 2001 in Germany, Nowhere in Africa became the country’s highest grossing film of 2002. It swept the German Film Awards (the Lolas) in June with five wins: Outstanding Feature Film, Direction (Caroline Link), Cinematography (Gernot Roll), Music (Niki Reiser) and Supporting Actor (Matthias Habich). Germany named Nowhere in Africa its submission to the Academy Awards and in March 2003, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the United States that same month, Nowhere in Africa never expanded beyond 78 theaters, but its Academy Award propelled it to $6.1 million at the domestic box office. Overseas, it racked up $18.1 million in tickets.

Critics responded enthusiastically. David Ansen, Newsweek: “This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: “It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story. You want to know what happens next. Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a film like that.”

Link mused on her decision to take a nuanced approach to Nowhere in Africa, stating, “This is the only chance we have compared to these big Hollywood film studios. When they come up with all the technical equipment and the brilliant quality of their perfect images, to compete, we can only create films that are authentic and lifelike with a genuineness that can’t be bought. It’s more like feeling the things. Trying to direct in a lifelike manner. We tried to be very direct with the camerawork. We didn’t want it to be too stylized and arranged. It was a deliberate decision. We never tried to copy Out of Africa, on the contrary, we wanted something totally different.”

Should I Care?
Imagining the Hollywood version of Nowhere in Africa, I can picture a pleasant travelogue with major stars playing nice characters. There would be a hot and bothered love triangle — standard for movies like Legends of the Fall – and a subplot in which the European parents react against their daughter bringing home a Kenyan boy. While opportunities for retarded storytelling are plentiful in this exotic coming-of-age tale, it isn’t the American version, it’s the German one, and for once, moviegoers are better off for it. Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s vibrant memoir skips over its impulses for brain dead melodrama and swims in historic texture, warm atmosphere and simple, emotionally resonant power.

Nowhere in Africa opens with a bleak, thirsty Africa as seen through the eyes of Europeans who have arrived there against their will. The cinematography by Gernot Roll — shot mostly with the majestic, handheld Steadicam — is worthy of an Oscar nomination, growing more mysterious and lush as the story progresses. In her riveting third film, Link focuses on the trials of a marriage that is anything but ideal, but increases in strength the more Walter and Jettel overcome. The performances are uniformly terrific, particularly Matthias Habich as the bachelor farmer, Lea Kurka as the 6-year-old Regina and the many native Kenyans in the cast. Niki Reiser composed the rousing musical score to what is one of the most satisfying film experiences I’ve had in a while.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“In the African Sun While Dark Came Over Europe” By Laura Winters. The New York Times, 23 February 2003

“Strangers In a Strange Land” By Stefanie Zweig. The Guardian, 21 March 2003

“Germany’s Road to the Oscar” BBC News, 24 March 2003

“African Love Affair Inspires Oscar” By Rebecca Thomas. BBC News, 4 April 2003

Production Notes – Nowhere in Africa

“Making of Nowhere in Africa” Nowhere in Africa DVD. Sony Home Entertainment (2003)

Stop-Loss (2008)
Written by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Produced by Peirce Pictures/ Scott Rudin Productions/ MTV Films
Running time: 112 minutes

So, What’s This About?
While manning a checkpoint in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, a U.S. Army infantry unit is sucked into an ambush in which three of its men are killed and one critically wounded. Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) finishes his service and returns home to “Brazos, Texas” with two busloads of men on leave. These include his friends Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Steve is a marksman going on five years of promises to his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) that he’s coming home. Tommy is unable to cope as a soldier or civilian and his fiancée (Mamie Gummer) calls off their wedding.

Brandon is notified that he is to be shipped back to Iraq under a clause known as a stop-loss. Challenging the legality of this with his CO (Timothy Olyphant) earns Brandon a trip to the stockade. Overpowering the MPs and going AWOL, Brandon’s mother (Linda Emond) urges him to head to Mexico, while his veteran father (Ciarán Hinds) feels his son should turn himself in. Brandon hopes a senator he knows might help and Michelle drives him to D.C. Along the way, they visit one of Brandon’s men, the disabled and blinded Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk). Brandon comes to realize his options are Canada or Iraq, with the possibility of never coming home from either.

Who Made It?
Kimberly Peirce grew up in South Florida and bounced all over the globe after high school. She moved to the Windy City to enroll at the University of Chicago. Running low on money, Peirce landed in Kobe, Japan next, where she worked as an English instructor (to mob lawyers) and as a model. She also began taking photographs, until a motorcycle accident in Thailand prompted her return to the United States. She completed her bachelor’s degree at U of C — in English and in Japanese literature — and enrolled at Columbia University Film School, where Peirce became absorbed with the murder of Teena Brandon. This became the focus of her first feature film: the award winning Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

After being offered projects from virtually every major film studio, Peirce began dealing with the events of 9/11 and subsequent deployment of her brother to Iraq by interviewing hundreds of soldiers and combing through videos they’d shot within their unit. She considered a documentary, before funneling her research into a screenplay about an AWOL soldier, which she wrote with Texas novelist Mark Richard. With producer Scott Rudin and a 5-minute trailer consisting of soldier videos helping make her pitch, Paramount bought the script and immediately greenlit Stop-Loss, one of six politically charged dramas that would be released around the same time and go largely ignored by audiences.

How’d They Do It?
Kimberly Peirce considers herself a New Yorker and was there on September 11, 2001. She recalled, “New York was in a state of crisis and mourning. There were people still looking for their loved one wondering, ‘Did he miss going to work that day?’ For us, we were in that state of mind and then, it was like, suddenly the country is going to war and I realized we were in the middle of a seismic change here. I became immediately interested why soldiers were signing up, what their experiences in combat were and what was going to happen when they got home. As I started thinking about all that as a movie, that’s when my little brother enlisted.”

She continued, “It wasn’t that I had a problem with him enlisting. I understood the whole patriotic response, the whole wanting to get the guys who did this. I was just very curious what the experience was going to do. My brother is significantly younger than me. I brought him home from the hospital as a baby. This was literally like it was my little baby and he’s pure innocence. Who is he going to be? What’s he going to do?” After Peirce’s first feature film — Boys Don’t Cry — won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for Best Actress and Chloë Sevigny a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Peirce was deluged with offers from the major studios.

Warner Bros. hired David Mamet to pen a script about John Dillinger for Peirce, which she loved, but the studio got cold feet with. Peirce was attached to direct an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Universal, but that project never got off the ground either. She traveled to the Middle East to research the life and death of Israeli spy Eli Cohen; Columbia enthusiastically bought her pitch and hired Andrew Davies to pen a script, which didn’t work. DreamWorks offered her Memoirs of a Geisha, but Peirce didn’t cotton to the idea of directing a big budget, PG-13 movie about a Japanese courtesan.

Peirce spent years exhaustively researching the case of William Desmond Taylor, the silent film director whose 1922 murder was covered up by the film studios. Titled Silent Star, it almost became Peirce’s sophomore film. “I’d cast that movie: Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley, Evan Rachel Wood, a dream cast. The studios said, ‘We love this movie.’ I was on the one-yard line. We were going to shoot it and they said, ‘We would love to shoot a $30 million version of this movie, but we would like to pay for the $20 million version.’ I was like, ‘Should I cut $10 million?’ They were like, ‘No, we want to see the $30 million version, but we want to pay for the $20 million version.’”

Peirce mused, “This is the thing that people should understand about directors’ careers. Unfortunately, if you want to do stuff that you really believe in and really love, it can take longer than you would like it to take. I was offered millions of dollars and I was offered a number of projects. As I would go down the road with them, for me, it really is about telling stories that I love and that are meaningful to me. I couldn’t just pick up a script and do it if I didn’t believe in it because every day of my life is living and breathing the movie.” On her own dime, Peirce had already begun interviewing soldiers and military families with her friend Reid Carolin.

Brett Peirce enlisted in the Army at the age of 18 and kept in touch with his sister through instant messaging. She recalled, “He came home on his first leave and he brought soldier’s homemade videos. It was shocking. It was like anthropology. It was like archeology. It was discovery. It was Thanksgiving 2003 and I was in my bedroom and I heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.’ Came out the door to pounding rock music to see my brother just sitting there, staring at these images.” Peirce hit on the idea of a soldier-made video documentary and buying cameras to send to soldiers in Iraq. Participant Productions was willing to finance it, but Peirce’s research pulled her toward a fictional approach.

Peirce had met Mark Richard in 2005 to work on an adaptation of his short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World. That project never came to pass, but when Peirce made the decision to write a spec script about soldiers coming back from Iraq, she contacted Richard, who would quit his day job on the Showtime series Huff and move in with Peirce to work on their script full-time. By his count, they went through 65 drafts. Richard recalled, “I’m this Southern conservative, she’s this incredibly intense liberal, but I think by the end of the process, the scales had fallen off both our eyes. I’ve always respected soldiers’ sense of honor, duty, service to the country. Stop-loss abuses the faith of these guys. You can’t keep sending them back and chewing them up.”

What began as a soldier’s story for the YouTube generation coalesced when a soldier Peirce was instant messaging with in Iraq told her about the stop-loss clause, referring to it as a backdoor draft. After 11 weeks, Richard & Peirce had draft ready to present to buyers, along with a 5-minute DVD trailer Peirce had cut together with Reid Carolin consisting of interviews with soldiers and their self-made videos. Peirce’s experiences in the studio trenches compelled her to seek an ally in producer Scott Rudin and in November 2005, it was announced that Paramount Pictures had outbid several other studios for Stop-Loss, promising a $25 million budget and a start date of April 2006.

Peirce enthused, “I don’t know if it’s ever happened before, but we greenlit a movie off of a script. That was a different experience than the one I’d had on the last movie, and to me it was a corrective experience. It will never take me that long to make another movie because I’ve already learned that lesson. Don’t put the things that are most precious to you in the hands of people who may not make them, whatever the cost.” Working with casting director Avy Kaufman, Peirce spent months auditioning actors and assembling the right cast: Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish. Shooting commenced August 2006 in Lockhart, Texas. Morocco stood in for Iraq in the opening sequence.

Stop-Loss came on the heels of a slew of politically themed films in the fall of 2007: In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Redacted, Lions For Lambs. Each divided critics and was ignored by audiences. But hitting the road for a screening tour and Q&A, Kimberly Peirce wasn’t buying that audiences had Iraq War fatigue. “If you tell them the movie is going to be non-stop warfare they’re not going to go, it’s too threatening. But when you deliver a movie about people coming home and human emotions, they’ll go and they’ll love it. There is an appetite for that. I think that the reporting on Iraq and not making the stories personal has numbed the audience out.”

Screened at the South by Southwest Music & Film Festival in March 2008, Stop-Loss opened in the United States that month. Critics nudged it to the head of its class. David Edelstein, New York Magazine: “Stop-Loss doesn’t come together, but in its ungainly way it evokes the anguish of American shit-kickers who’ve lost all sense of autonomy.” Jessica Reaves, The Chicago Tribune: “While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.” David Denby, The New Yorker: “Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.”

While Stop-Loss managed $10.9 million in the United States and $291,386 overseas, Peirce remained buoyed by how well her film had been received on the road. “We went to 24 cities, I showed it to soldiers who were both pro-the-mission and anti-the-mission at this point, wounded warriors, soldier’s families, and over and over what I got was: ‘Thank you for making an emotional movie. Thank you for making a movie that got it right. Thank you for making a movie that’s emotionally moving.’ Because it’s very cathartic for them to see reflections of themselves in the movies, and what they said is that people don’t always take the time to make it from a soldier’s point of view. That’s what was really satisfying — to bring it back to the community of soldiers.”

Should I Care?
With Boys Don’t Cry and now Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce has already demonstrated the empathy of a documentarian, the curiosity of a journalist and the eye of a first class filmmaker. Barely mentioning other movies in interviews, Peirce seems less keen on recreating her experiences as a film geek and more interested in answering questions nagging her as a human being. Peirce’s sophomore feature film isn’t bad; it’s exquisitely well made and very well cast, but feels like it needed to be run through the typewriter at least a few more times. Flying either too far over-the-top or so under-the-radar it barely registers as a blip, it’s also fatally flawed at its core.

Cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission), production designer David Wasco (Kill Bill) and editor Claire Simpson (Platoon) each deliver Oscar caliber work. The movie features star making performances by Abbie Cornish and Channing Tatum. Ryan Phillippe almost had me convinced he was a rugged Texan, so the film totally loses credibility by having his character suddenly disobey stop-loss orders and go AWOL. The film just doesn’t earn this conceit and I didn’t buy it. The melodrama gets poured on too thick at times, while the story and characters just never hit me on a gut level. Victor Rasuk’s role as a disfigured vet committed to staying positive is a standout, but sadly, Stop-Loss never ascends good work to become a great film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Phenom Director Goes To War” By Katrina Onstad. The New York Times, 23 March 2008

“War and Peirce” By Karen Valby. Entertainment Weekly, 28 March 2008

“A Soldier’s Story” By Sarah Michelle Fetters. MovieFreak.com, 28 March 2008

“Interview: Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Monika Bartyzel. Cinematical, 8 July 2008

“Interview with Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Melissa Silverstein. Huffington Post, 8 July 2008

“Kimberly Peirce Interview Stop-Loss” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

“Unstoppable: An Interview with Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce” By Gregg Shapiro. Chicago Free Press

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

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
Screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler
Directed by Robin Swicord
Produced by John Calley Productions/ Mockingbird Pictures
Running time: 106 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In the urban trappings of Sacramento, mourners convene for the funeral of a hound dog. Jocelyn (Maria Bello) is a dog breeder whose affections have been directed toward her obedient canine companions. Her childhood friend Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) has taken a 20-year marriage to Daniel (Jimmy Smits) for granted until he notifies her that he’s leaving her for another woman. Their thrill seeking, college aged daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace) is a lesbian, while Bernadette (Kathy Baker) is a spirited yoga practitioner with six ex-husbands. While in line at a Jane Austen film festival, Bernadette meets a prissy high school English teacher named Trudie (Emily Blunt).

After Trudie commiserates the sad state of her marriage to the sports loving Dean (Marc Blucas), Bernadette hits upon the idea of a book club in which each of the six members will present a different novel by Jane Austen. Jocelyn meets a goofy young sci-fi enthusiast named Grigg (Hugh Dancy) and invites him to join, hoping to tie Sylvia with a new mate but oblivious that Grigg is clearly more interested in her. Trudie flirts with plunging herself into an affair with one of her students (Kevin Zegers) while each member of the book club interprets Austen through whatever obstacles they’re struggling to overcome in their personal lives.

Who Made It?
A native of Bloomington, Indiana, Karen Joy Fowler graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 with a bachelor of arts in political science and earned her masters in that field from UC Davis in 1974. Her first two novels — Sarah Canary (1991) and The Sweetheart Season (1996) — fused science fiction or fantasy with 19th century history, but it was the 2004 publication of a contemporary romantic comedy titled The Jane Austen Book Club that put Fowler on The New York Times Bestseller List, for 13 weeks. That same year, veteran producer John Calley optioned the film rights and turned to one of his longtime beneficiaries to adapt a screenplay and direct.

Robin Swicord grew up in the rural Gulf Coast of Florida. She studied English and theatre arts at Florida State University, where she also started writing and directing short films. This lead to a career producing educational films in New York City, where a play Swicord authored titled Last Days At The Dixie Girl Café was produced off-Broadway in 1979. Her original screenplay Shag was produced in 1989 starring Bridget Fonda, Annabeth Gish and Phoebe Cates. From there, Swicord became one of the top screenwriters in the film industry, adapting Little Women (1994), The Perez Family (1995), Practical Magic (1998) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). The Jane Austen Book Club is her directorial debut.

How’d They Do It?
Karen Joy Fowler recalled the genesis of her fourth novel by stating, “The idea for The Jane Austen Book Club came to me when I was in the middle of another project. In 2000, I started planning to write a book about chimps and sign language and psychologists, set in the 1950s. I’m still very interested and excited about it, but it keeps getting shunted aside. I had done a lot of the research on it, and then I went to Book Passage to hear Carter Scholz read from his novel Radiance. At the reading, I got this lightning flash idea for The Jane Austen Book Club, so I set the chimp book aside and wrote it — by my own pitiful standards — pretty quickly (in about a year). That’s the fastest I’ve ever written a book.”

By comparison, Robin Swicord spent a decade trying to direct a feature film. Eric Bogosian’s adaptation of Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia was put into turnaround when Paramount decided there were no stars young enough to open it. Swicord then spent six years trying to get a spec script she’d written titled The Mermaid Singing made. Jessica Lange, Evan Rachel Wood, Neve Campbell and Dougary Scott all agreed to star with Swicord set to shoot in Ireland using tax credits, but financing fell through. Swicord lamented, “I’m not a known director. I feel that if the movie had been about a young grandfather back in the U.S. going back to Ireland to claim his lost grandchild, the movie would have been made.”

Swicord turned to a project she’d been talking to Amy Pascal — chairman of Sony Pictures — about writing and directing for 15 years. “I had been at work on another project called The Jane Prize, which is about a family of Jane Austen scholars. I had spent a number of years just reading Austen, the letters, biographies, downloading academic treatises on Jane Austen — kind of preparing to write that.” Swicord had a blinking green light to start shooting in the fall of 2006, but The Jane Prize script found its way to John Calley, former CEO and president of Sony and a longtime supporter of the screenwriter.

Calley had optioned The Jane Austen Book Club. Swicord recalled, “I wanted to do this film — I would say that the strongest reason is that I love to read the novels of Jane Austen. This film, thematically, I was very interested in because I have been thinking a lot about how fractured our lives are and how difficult it is. We talked about how hard it is to achieve community when people live away from their families, and we commute in our cars and we’re isolated and so forth. But here we are in the middle of a time when we are ostensibly the most connected we’ve ever been by cell phones and the Internet. And what I felt was that it was a unique opportunity to make a film about how people overcome that.”

In her adaptation, Swicord made a number of drastic changes to Fowler’s bestseller. She swapped out different Jane Austen novels to be read by different characters in order to fit the narrative she had in mind. She admitted, “I saw different things in the novels. It was a challenge to move from something that had the slightest narrative thread connecting the stories to creating something with enough narrative power to actually be dramatic.” Swicord expanded the role of the group’s token male and realized the fantasies Prudie develops for a teenage student. The film version omitted the numerous flashbacks that colored Fowler’s novel.

When Swicord’s script was ready, Calley phoned Sony Classics co-presidents Tom Bernard and Michael Barker and won an agreement from the studio to finance and distribute The Jane Austen Book Club. Calley then contacted Maria Bello, who expressed interest in starring. Swicord recalled, “As the cast began to shape up, it became apparent that there was just a very strong ensemble that we were going for and we didn’t need to worry about whether or not, you know, Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts or you know, Big Movie Name needed to be in the film, that as long as we had a really strong ensemble of actors, I could pretty much cast who I wanted. And as soon as we had arrived at that point in time, I called up Amy Brenneman and said, ‘I want you to play Sylvia.’”

With a budget of just under $6 million, The Jane Austen Book Club was slated to begin shooting November 2006 in Los Angeles, covering 37 locations in 30 days. Swicord had been given just six weeks of prep time, but adequate rehearsal made all the difference. Swicord recalled, “I watched where the dialogue ran smoothly, and where actors hesitated or felt awkward, or when they seemed to need a line or a movement, and I’d pick up those cues and make adjustments. Even after we started shooting 12-hour days, I would always set aside an hour for rehearsal in the morning, knowing that we’d make up the time in richer performances and fewer takes.”

To serve as director of photography, Swicord picked Australian cinematographer John Toon. “I wanted the look of the film to be very real — very ‘here’s how we live now,’ just as Jane Austen gave us such a detailed portrait of how people lived day-to-day in her time. I admired John’s camera technique in Glory Road and Sylvia, because he draws the viewer in to feel like you’re right there, an immediate observer. He invented a camera rigging that’s just a bit looser, more like human movement — barely noticeable, not hand-held-jiggly, but not Steadicam-smooth either. He uses a lot of natural light, which strengthens that sense of immediacy.”

Once critics took a look, The Jane Austen Book Club met with qualified endorsements. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “The movie is a celebration of reading, and oddly enough that works, even though there is nothing cinematic about a shot of a woman (or the club’s one male member) reading a book.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “Capably, if not exactly artfully directed … Book Club is a widget carefully engineered to comfort, console and sell like hot cakes since it was but a gleam in the author’s eye, and Swicord doesn’t mess with the formula.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.”

Opening September 2007 in the United States, The Jane Austen Book Club kept a low profile at the box office. It never expanded beyond 1,200 U.S. theaters, grossing $3.5 million domestically and $3.5 million overseas. Swicord shrugged off suggestions that her film had limited appeal. “I think that anytime a woman makes a movie with a female protagonist, you run the risk of having people call it a chick flick. It’s just a way of marginalizing women. But in this particular case, I didn’t worry too much about whether it would be labeled one thing or another because I knew that I was making a film that was sort of a date movie in the best sense. We could watch it together and we would forget that the sort of consumer-marketing world likes to divide people off into these niches.”

Should I Care?
With the popular success of her novel, it’s easy to accuse Karen Joy Fowler of cranking out mass marketed pap, with Robin Swicord guilty by association for bringing it to the screen in a nice package. But The Jane Austen Book Club is quite the overlooked and underloved movie. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t want to win an Oscar, but here’s a film about women (mostly) over the age of 40. Instead of being bound together by bitterness, their commonality is a love of books. Their problems are nothing new, but they’re addressed with a degree of wit, sensuality and intelligence. In other words, neither Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl are involved.

Emily Blunt steals the show with her lovable brittleness, but Maria Bello, Amy Brenneman and even Kathy Baker (filling in for Ellen Burstyn) bring some sorely needed kinkiness, texture and aplomb to the standard issue rom-com. Hugh Dancy turns in a charming and very amusing performance and shares palpable chemistry with Bello. It’s also great to see Jimmy Smits back in a movie. There aren’t many surprises, but the cast is so good, revealing Robin Swicord to be a director of finesse and excellent taste. By focusing on the delayed gratification of literature — instead of wedding dresses or shopping — she’s made a women’s film that’s not only safe for men, but anyone with a mind.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” Locus Magazine, December 2004

“Swicord On the Map With Austen” By Anne Thompson. Variety, 31 August 2007

“Filming The Jane Austen Book Club” By Jacki Lyden. All Things Considered, 22 September 2007

“The Persuasion of Robin Swicord” By Omar P.L. Moore. PopcornReel.com, 16 September 2007

The Jane Austen Book Club. DVD audio commentary by Robin Swicord, Hugh Dancy, Maggie Grace, Maryann Brandon & Julie Lynn. Sony Pictures (2008)

The Jane Austen Book Club – Production Notes

Quid Pro Quo (2008)
Written by Carlos Brooks
Directed by Carlos Brooks
Produced by Sanford-Pillsbury Productions/ HDNet Films
Running time: 82 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you. I only know what the police and coroner reports said.” So begins a personal remembrance from Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl), correspondent for “Public Radio New York”. His editor (Jessica Hecht) shares with him a tip from an anonymous caller — known only as Ancient Chinese Girl — who claims a man entered a bayside hospital and tried bribing an intern to chop off his leg. The tipster wants to meet Isaac, who’s been paralyzed and restricted to a wheelchair since the age of eight, the only survivor of a car accident that killed his parents in upstate New York.

After Ancient Chinese Girl dispatches him to a clandestine gathering of “wannabes” — able bodied men and women who share the unusual desire to be disabled — Isaac finally meets his wily tipster, an art conservator named Fiona (Vera Farmiga). Fascinated by why someone would want to be paralyzed who isn’t, Fiona agrees to tell Isaac what she knows about this underworld if, quid pro quo, he helps her understand what it’s like being disabled. Daffy and unpredictable, Fiona’s complicated feelings for the reporter change when a pair of antique spectators shoes suddenly give Isaac the ability to walk.

Who Made It?
Carlos Brooks attended Western Washington University as an English major and was later accepted into USC on a merit scholarship to study film and writing. Brooks would win an Abraham Polonsky Award for screenwriting at USC and marry classmate Helen Childress, who was hot as a bottle rocket after authoring the 1994 Winona Ryder/Ethan Hawke flick Reality Bites. Brooks spent the next decade carving out a career as a screenwriter. Among his scripts was a spec called Empire – which Robert Zemeckis was to produce through his company Imagemovers — that took place amid construction of the Empire State Building.

In 2004, Brooks appeared to finally be getting his shot at the director’s chair through HDNet Films, a division of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment. Mark Cuban is the billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and once spent a day managing a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas after Cuban accused a game referee of being unfit to run a DQ. Sticking his big toe into film financing, Cuban has had an energetic run, producing Good Night and Good Luck, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bubble, among many others. HDNet Films was launched to develop, finance and produce feature films to be shot in High Definition.

How’d They Do It?
The idea that would become Quid Pro Quo began germinating in 2000 with Carlos Brooks, whose focus of study at USC had been Alfred Hitchcock. “I wrote the script just to write. I didn’t write it to direct or anything; I just wanted to write something different. I’ve always wanted to write a detective story, and what this really is is a detective story in disguise. It’s an investigative journalistic piece, and the best detective stories are the ones where the detective ultimately realizes he’s been investigating himself. I would never write an actual detective story — at least I don’t think I would — but that’s what this secretly is.”

Brooks’ original idea involved an agoraphobic and a pair of headphones that gave him access to the outside world, Rear Window style. Googling through disabilities, Brooks stumbled upon the wannabe subculture. “I kind of vectored in on them. I’ve never met anybody who had Body Dysmorphic Disorder — that’s what it’s really called, I guess. I just kind of lurked, and I was fascinated by the tone of their writing. They knew they sounded quote, unquote ‘crazy.’ It’s entirely different talking about something we think is crazy without knowing you’re crazy. They were incredibly self-aware, painfully self-aware and wanted acceptance despite what they were saying.”

Intended as a writing sample, Quid Pro Quo started attracting interest from directors. Brooks decided he could do no worse himself and working with producers Midge Sanford & Sarah Pillsbury, landed a $2 million commitment from HDNet for his directing debut. He faced a long slog after being greenlit in 2004. Pre-production was shut down for 11 months after Brooks reached an impasse with the producers over casting. For the female lead, Brooks was set on an unknown named Vera Farmiga. “To find an actress who can make that role sympathetic and living and breathing was too good to pass up. When you find the right actor, you stick by them.”

Vera Farmiga mused, “I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote and Love Boat. Quirky detective stories and oddball romances. I imagine initially that’s what drew me. I love romance. I am always on the quest for an unusual romance, and this was it. There always has to be something about the character in the script that really turns my head and Fiona — I have a stiff neck from craning at this one. My initial response was she’s that woman in your life that you are absolutely terrified of but at the same time have to be around. She fascinated me. And the fact that it is just an unusual detective love story, and also a taboo subject that you don’t hear anything about.”

Quid Pro Quo began rolling October 2005 for an 18-day shoot in New Jersey. Brooks revealed, “I shot on a Sony 900 camera, and we used the 950 for a few scenes where it was a tight space. My production designer, Roshelle Berliner, and the DP Michael McDonough, and I experimented with shiny metallic surfaces to trick the video lens into thinking it’s film. I don’t know why this works, but it does. It tricks the chip in the video camera into softening those hard video lines and edges. If you walked on the set, you would think it’s the strangest looking place because Isaac’s apartment was full of wallpaper with metallic inlays. But on video, it looks like film. It gives it this Sidney Lumet-circa-The Verdict look, and that’s what I wanted.”

Joining Vera Farmiga was Nick Stahl, the best John Connor (in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and the lead in the HBO series Carnivale. Stahl elaborated on the film’s difficult journey. “We actually ended up re-shooting some stuff, and adding a couple of scenes. I think it was the kind of thing that, it was so clear on the page, the story, and the tone of it was so clear, but, for whatever reason, it’s such a different process once you actually film it and then you actually go to start editing it.” He added, “A lot of people didn’t get it, and that was the reason why we had to go back and retool some stuff. Carlos Brooks worked endlessly for so long. He kept cutting it and working at it.”

Screened January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, critics went along with Quid Pro Quo, for the most part. Justin Chang, Variety: “An exceedingly odd meeting of the minds (and bodies) occurs in Quid Pro Quo, a strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters’ feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.” Jenni Miller, Premiere: “Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.”

Should I Care?
Quid Pro Quo has been unfortunate to draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash, but I didn’t find anything disturbing about the movie. It’s edgy and a bit dark, but immensely fresh, sharp witted, impeccably well cast and I would even describe this as a film David Fincher might have shot if given only $1.6 million. I don’t care for the title and wonder why Mark Cuban is producing so many movies that barely see the light of day. Distributed by his Magnolia Pictures in June 2008, Quid Pro Quo never expanded beyond four theaters in the United States, grossing $11,864. This movie deserved an attentive publicity campaign and a much better commercial fate.

I liked how Quid Pro Quo defies categorization — if I had to, I’d label it an unusual romantic comedy with mystery — and forced me to both pay attention and react to it, as opposed to just watching passively. The dialogue has a lot of crackle and pop, and for a film with such a grotesque sounding premise, is pretty funny. Rachel Black puts in a cute performance as Stahl’s office buddy. But the chief reason to see this is the daffy Vera Farmiga, who once again spins through a movie like a punk ballerina. Carlos Brooks demonstrates a sharp ear, a terrific eye and great taste not only delivering a solid debut, but executing a film with such a high degree of difficulty.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Carlos Brooks, Quid Pro Quo” The Reeler, 20 January 2008

“Local Film School Drop-out Gets into Sundance” By Sam Vicchrilli. The Seatle Times, 25 January 2008

“Nick Stahl” By Terry Keefe. Venice Magazine, March 2008

“Vera Farmiga Offers up Quid Pro Quo” By Jenni Miller. Premiere, June 2008

“Interview: Carlos Brooks on Quid Pro Quo” By Matt Singer. IFC. Com, 13 June 2008