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

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
In the mines of the Roman province of Libya, slave Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) sinks his teeth into the ankle of a guard, earning himself a death sentence. Recognizing an unbroken spirit he could mold into something great, slave merchant Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) purchases the condemned and returns with him to the city of Cupua, where Batiatus operates a gladiator school. Spartacus proves as agile intellectually as he is physically, though fellow slave Draba (Woody Strode) refuses his friendship, given that they may have to fight each other one day. Granted time alone with slave girl Varinia (Jean Simmons), Spartacus becomes enraptured with her.

Roman general Marcus Crassus (Laurence Olivier) arrives with a small party and requests to see two pairs of gladiators fight to the death. After the blood spectacle, Crassus buys Varinia, so outraging Spartacus that he launches a slave revolt. Moving from town to town, the rebellion grows in strength. In the Roman Senate, Gracchus (Charles Laughton) shrewdly dispatches the garrison of Rome to extinguish the uprising, paving the way for Julius Caesar (John Gavin) to take control of Rome and hold the ambitions of Crassus in check. Reunited with Varinia and befriending an escaped slave (Tony Curtis), Spartacus moves on Rome.

Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons in Spartacus

In the year 180 A.D., General Maximus (Russell Crowe) leads 5,000 Legionaries in a spirited victory over the last Germanic tribe holding out against the Roman Empire in northern Europe. Visiting the battlefront, the aging caesar Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) bequeaths protection of Rome to Maximus in the hopes that the people will resume control of the Senate from corrupted politicians. When hearing of the secession, the caesar’s ambitious male heir Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) murders his father, while his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) aligns herself with Commodus in order to protect her young son Lucious (Spencer Treat Clark) from harm.

Maximus escapes execution in the forest, but is unable to save his wife and son from crucifixion. Taken for a deserter, he ends up in Zucchabar, the property of a freed gladiator and merchant named Proximo (Oliver Reed). Expected to meet a quick death in the gladiatorial pits of Morocco, Maximus, along with slaves Juba (Djimon Hounsou) and Hagen (Ralf Moeller) survives and becomes a favorite of provincial crowds. In Rome, Commodus assumes power by reviving the spectacle of gladiatorial contests in the Roman Coliseum. There, Maximus wins over the urban mob and vows to stay alive long enough to have his revenge over Commodus.

Russell Crowe and Djimon Hounsou in Gladiator

Writing
The genesis of Spartacus was with author Howard Fast — a member of the American Communist Party — who in 1950 was sentenced to three months in a federal prison for contempt of Congress, refusing to name suspected Communist contributors to a home for orphans of Spanish Civil War veterans. Once a prisoner, Fast used the prison library and his newfound sympathy for the disempowered to research the Roman slave rebellion of 71 BC. Fast would self-publish Spartacus in 1951. The book came to the attention of the wife of producer Edward Lewis in late 1957. Lewis was the business partner of Kirk Douglas in the actor’s Bryna Productions.

Douglas took Spartacus to United Artists, which was moving ahead with their own Spartacus project: The Gladiators, set to star Yul Brenner. Undeterred, Douglas renegotiated a 60-day extension on the property with Fast. When the author was unable to turn in a suitable draft quickly enough, Lewis and Douglas turned to Dalton Trumbo, the highly regarded screenwriter who’d spent 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress. On the strength of an adaptation Trumbo cranked out in three weeks, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton signed on, The Gladiators folded and Universal Pictures stepped up to finance Spartacus.

Kirk Douglas and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus

Dalton Trumbo had been in steady employment since his prison term — working on Roman Holiday, among others — but Kirk Douglas insisted that Trumbo receive screen credit, breaking the decade long Hollywood blacklist against talent with former ties to the Communist Party. Douglas, Olivier, Ustinov nor Laughton treated Trumbo’s dialogue as scripture, allegedly generating much of their own. Regardless of who what wrote line, Trumbo’s craftsmanship is evident. The unyieldly source material is given powerful dramatic momentum throughout, while a strong sense of character is never lost amid the tremendous and tremendously expensive set pieces.

David Franzoni became interested in gladiators after he’d dropped out of grad school. Bumming around the world, he was in Baghdad when he swapped a book on the Irish revolution with one titled Those About To Die, a 1958 study of the Roman Coliseum by Daniel Mannix. 20 years later, a biopic Franzoni had written on George Washington came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. While adapting Amistad for the director in Rome, Franzoni began researching what became Gladiator. Franzoni took some of his research to producer Douglas Wick, who saw contemporary parallels to a society distracted from the important issues by entertainment.

Connie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator

Franzoni’s pitch to Spielberg and DreamWorks executives Walter Parkes & Laurie MacDonald for a movie set in the gladiatorial pits of the Roman Coliseum was enthusiastically received. The “sword and sandal” genre had been dead in the 40 years since Spartacus, but Franzoni and Wick thought the ancient world could be brought to life not just by computer imagery, but developing the story as a modern day morality play. Though Franzoni had provided a blueprint for Gladiator, playwright John Logan was brought in to improve the characters. Logan was credited with crafting most of the best dialogue that made it into the film.

After a cast reading at Shepperton Studios two weeks before the start of shooting, it was felt the script still wasn’t ready. Douglas Wick reached out to playwright William Nicholson, who streamlined the plot and made the characters more likable. Instead of a revenge story, Nicholson hinged Gladiator on the love Maximus felt for his family and highlighted his transience toward a pagan afterlife. “Script by committee” is usually a recipe for disaster, but Gladiator is an exception. The toil of numerous scribes, producers and studio executives resulted in exciting action sequences, terrific dialogue, complex characters and a story with a deep emotional core.

Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Writing edge: Gladiator

Casting
Howard Fast was not thrilled about Kirk Douglas playing Spartacus — finding the actor and some of his choices lacking in nobility — but along with the star, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton were always the first choices for their roles. Searching for a female lead with a Germanic look after Ingrid Bergman and Jeanne Moreau passed, Douglas settled on Sabine Bethmann, who lost the role of Varinia after three weeks of filming, replaced by Jean Simmons. The supporting cast is just as notable: Woody Strode, Herbert Lom (as a Sicilian pirate) and Charlie McGraw as the freed gladiator who proves Spartacus’ tormentor in particular.

Tony Curtis and his Brooklyn accent are not the easiest to buy as an escaped slave who becomes Spartacus’ most trusted advisor. The rest of the main cast is one for the ages. Some of the greatest screen actors in Hollywood history were available when Spartacus went into production and at least three are in the movie. Olivier and Laughton show no conscience gobbling up the scenery as longtime foes in the Roman Senate. Ustinov brings much needed wit and humility to the role of the slave merchant Batiatus. The athleticism and intensity of Kirk Douglas seem better suited to the role of Spartacus than perhaps any in his stoic film career.

John Hoyt and Laurence Olivier in Spartacus

There was some talk of Mel Gibson being offered the role of Maximus, but Russell Crowe was quickly settled on as a better fit for the part. After leading roles in two critically acclaimed films — L.A. Confidential and The Insider – Crowe was more familiar in Hollywood than by name in the general public. Casting Commodus, Jude Law was screen tested, but director Ridley Scott had worked with Joaquin Phoenix on a movie he’d produced called Clay Pigeons and was intrigued enough to push for him as the morally bankrupt caesar. Connie Nielsen and Djimon Hounsou bring strength and agility with their obvious physical attributes as performers.

Louis Di Giaimo was the casting director and to whatever degree he was responsible for filling out the supporting roles, Gladiator was extraordinarily well cast. Richard Harris seemed reinvigorated on screen as the dying emperor; his moments with Crowe and his death scene are tremendous. Oliver Reed returned from 20 years of anonymity and steals the film as the charismatic slave merchant, the last father any of his men will have. Reed unfortunately died of a heart attack at the age of 62 with three weeks of shooting to go. Derek Jacobi, Ralf Moeller and bodybuilding legend Sven-Ole Thorsen (as the tiger gladiator) give commendable performances.

Ralf Moeller, Djimon Hounsou and Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Spartacus went into production January 1959 in Death Valley under the direction of Anthony Mann, who’d shot a number of successful westerns for Universal. Good with action and crowds, Mann was overwhelmed by Douglas, Olivier and Ustinov, prima donna writer-directors each pushing to do things their way. After three weeks, Mann asked to be let go. Douglas called up a promising 30-year-old director under contract to his production company. Busy developing a screen adaptation of Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita, Stanley Kubrick agreed on a Friday night to take over the $12 million budgeted Spartacus. He arrived on the set Monday morning.

Unable to make changes to the script he’d inherited, Kubrick did benefit from the work of Saul Bass, the acclaimed graphic designer who’d created title sequences for Anatomy of a Murder and North By Northwest. In addition to the majestic title sequence he would design for Spartacus, Bass had also been tasked with location scouting and with designing the gladiator school. Three weeks of second unit photography took place in Spain — utilizing the Spanish army for the shots of thousands of marching soldiers — though most of the battle was actually shot on the Universal backlot. Russell Metty served as director of photography.

Peter Ellenshaw was a matte artist on Spartacus

Stanley Kubrick would sever his business relationship with Kirk Douglas following Spartacus, resenting his lack of creative control over the production. After decades of disowning the blockbuster, the visionary director conceded late in life that Spartacus turned out better than he felt at the time. In spite of being a director for hire, Kubrick did replace Sabine Bethmann with Jean Simmons and insisted on playing classical music during a number of key scenes, heightening the performances of Douglas, Simmons and Woody Strode. Elegantly composed visually, Spartacus has a more humane feel than any picture Kubrick would ever direct.

Ridley Scott was on the short list of directors whose finesse for creating worlds and spectacle was well suited for Gladiator. Knowing that Scott was a graphic designer, Douglas Wick and Walter Parkes presented him with a 19th century painting by Jean-Léon Gérômeen titled “Thumbs Down”. More so than their pitch or the script, it was the gladiatorial painting that won Scott over. The exacting director was used to taking his time, but seemed reinvigorated by his experience with Gladiator. At one point, Scott wanted Maximus to fight a rhinoceros and storyboarded the sequence, before the reality of working with either live rhinos or a $1 million CG facsimile scotched the idea.

John Nelson and Mill Film supervised visual effects for Gladiator

Gladiator commenced shooting February 1999 in Surrey, England, in an area the Royal Forestry Commission had slated for deforestation. Collaborating with director of photography John Mathieson, Scott had the entire German front sequence — the first act of the film — finished in just over three weeks. For the provincial scenes, production designer Arthur Max built an arena into the side of an ancient village at Ait Ben Haddou, Morocco. The third act of the film was shot in Malta, where the Roman Coliseum was partially rebuilt out of plaster and plywood at a cost of $1 million, with the upper tiers and other elements added in with CG.

I didn’t care for Gladiator when it opened. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon had the narrative elegance and emotional power and Gladiator was buttered popcorn to me. But the 155-minute theatrical version of Gladiator has been supplemented on DVD with an extended cut clocking in at 171 minutes. Reinserted are a conspiratorial scene between Lucilia and Graccus, Commodus hacking away at a bust of his father and a terrific scene where Commodus supervises the execution of two Centurions. As with Kingdom of Heaven, the extended cut of Ridley Scott’s epic contains more texture and intelligence than the box office friendly version.

Kirk Douglas and Charles McGraw in Spartacus

Production value edge: Gladiator

Music
With the exception of Stanley Kubrick, the greatest contributor to the success of Spartacus would be Alex North, who composed the vibrant musical score. For the film’s preservation on laserdisc by the Criterion Collection in 1991, Peter Ustinov would comment that the only thing that ages the film for him is its music. It is hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick going with something so romantic if he’d had his way, but North’s marvelous score is Old Hollywood at its finest. It doesn’t punctuate the action as music by John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith would have years later, but sets the table for a big time movie going experience.

Again, time has evened out the grouchy reaction I had of Gladiator after it swept the Academy Awards over Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, particularly where music is concerned. Normally a big time hater of the bombastic scores Hans Zimmer turns in for Jerry Bruckheimer productions, I’m actually enamored of his work on Gladiator. Instead of coming on like a psychic jackhammer, Zimmer’s score is mysterious and majestic, the soundtrack I would have between my ears if transported to the Roman Empire. Zimmer collaborated here with Australian vocalist Lisa Gerrard, whose Mediterranean flavor is used in just the right doses.

Kirk Douglas and Woody Strode in Spartacus

Music edge: Gladiator

Cultural impact
Through its original theatrical run, re-release in 1967 and restoration in 1991, Spartacus would earn $11.1 million in the U.S. That was enough to make it the third highest grossing film released in 1960, back when tickets were 25 cents. Nominated for six Academy Awards, it won four: Best Supporting Actor (Peter Ustinov), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Beyond its legacy as one of the most entertaining roadshow epics of the 1960s, Spartacus defied social conservatives like the American Legion, which vilified the film for giving two “Commies” a writing credit. As a result, Spartacus broke the Hollywood blacklist.

Opening May 2000, Gladiator was a global blockbuster, grossing $187.7 million in the U.S. and $269.9 million overseas. A hit all over the world, the film definitely had its impact felt in Hollywood, which quickly greenlit Master and Commander, The Last Samurai, Cold Mountain, Troy, King Arthur and finally, Kingdom of Heaven, briefly restoring the historical epic to prominence among studio production slates. Gladiator would be nominated for 12 Academy Awards and win five: Best Picture (Douglas Wick, David Franzoni, Branko Lustig), Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Costume Design (Janty Yates), Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

Cultural impact edge: Spartacus

Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Winner: Gladiator

Spartacus will always be one of the grand entertainments of the 1960s and significant for breaking the Hollywood blacklist along the way. Gladiator won lots of awards and made some people very rich. Both were being written as they were being filmed, an early indicator of total fucking disaster. Yet both have achieved status as classics. Personally, I find Gladiator to be the better film, the state of the art in story, casting, music and of course, visual effects. Maybe in 40 years, it will look as dated as Spartacus, but today, it reigns supreme among historical epics, with Master and Commander in its rearview mirror.

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden,” narrates a young man we will come to know only as the Narrator (Edward Norton) as someone holds a gun barrel in his mouth. Minutes before he’s to witness dozens of office buildings explode in controlled demolition, The Narrator explains how he got here. Sleepwalking through life as an insurance claims adjuster for a major car company and gripped in what he refers to as “the Ikea nesting instinct,” he comments, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” Unable to sleep, the Narrator crashes support groups for testicular cancer, blood parasites or sickle cell anemia, finding that when people think you have a terminal disease, they listen to you.

The Narrator’s catharsis is threatened by the appearance of another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who attends group therapy because “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.” The Narrator’s day job sends him across the country investigating fatal car crashes to determine if a recall would be cost effective for his company. He dreams of a midair collision to break the monotony, while seated next to him, a dapper soap peddler named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) demonstrates how ridiculous the emergency landing procedures on an airliner are. When he returns home to find his apartment has mysteriously exploded, the Narrator meets Tyler for a drink. His new buddy points out the Narrator’s dependence on consumer culture. “The things you own end up owning you.”

In the parking lot, Tyler asks the Narrator for a favor. “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” If for no other reason than they’ve never been in a fight, the men wail on each other before calling it a night. The Narrator is invited to crash at the decrepit house Tyler occupies between jobs as a renegade caterer and film projectionist. The boys’ nocturnal fisticuffs start drawing the attention of other disaffected young men. Tyler gives it a name – Fight Club – and sets some ground rules. “The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.” Marla re-enters the Narrator’s life when she and Tyler meet and engage in round the clock, rambunctious sex in the house. Tyler then hatches a plan to expand the social anarchy of Fight Club from the basement to the streets.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
After graduating the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, Chuck Palahniuk returned to his hometown of Portland and wrote for a local newspaper (The Oregonian) for a time. He ended up having to take work writing service procedures for freight trucks. It was during a trip to the Pacific Coast Trail that Palahniuk got into a dispute with some campers. The author recalled, “The other people who were camping near us wanted to drink and party all night long, and I tried to get them to shut up one night, and they literally beat the crap out of me. I went back to work just so bashed, and horrible looking. People didn’t ask me what had happened. I think they were afraid of the answer. I realized that if you looked bad enough, people would not want to know what you did in your spare time. They don’t want to know the bad things about you. And the key was to look so bad that no one would ever, ever ask. And that was the idea behind Fight Club.”

Palahniuk used his newfound affinity for brawling to write Fight Club over a three-month period in 1995. He later mused, “I never expected the book to be published. I had been rejected so many times because my work was seen as too dark and depressing, that when I sent off Fight Club, I thought it was just a fuck off to New York publishing. It was my last gesture.” But within weeks of sending a first draft to his agent, the galleys came to the attention of Raymond Bongiovanni, a literary scout for Fox 2000 in New York. He phoned president of production Laura Ziskin, who recalled, “He was very excited about it, not sure it was a movie, but sure he had read the work of an exciting new voice. Thirty six hours later I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night reading passages of the book out loud to my husband.”

Big name producers had passed on the book before it got to Joshua Donen and Ross Bell, who were enthusiastic about the material. Donen ultimately zeroed in on David Fincher – the director of Seven – imploring him to read Fight Club. Amid protests that he was too busy, Fincher finally cracked open the book. He later recalled, “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny. I knew Marla. I knew the Narrator, I knew the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I knew his need for Tyler. I knew why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.” Much to the amazement of everyone involved with the project at that point, Fox expressed interest in actually producing Fight Club. Ross Bell reportedly told friends, “This is a seditious movie about blowing up people like Rupert Murdoch.” Fincher had sworn never to make a movie at the Murdoch owned studio again after the ordeal he’d gone through over his first feature film, Alien³.

David Fincher recalled, “I didn’t have a very good time with Fox the first time, so I was basically going thinking, ‘Oh, no that’s over with.’ But Josh called and told me to just go in and talk with Laura Ziskin, and tell her that I wanted to make it. So I do – I go in and talk with Laura Ziskin and I told her, ‘Here’s the movie I’m interested in making and I’m not interested in watering any of this shit down. I’m not interested in explaining, but I think I can make a movie that you don’t need to have read the book in order to understand what’s going on. I have no interest in making this anything other than what this book is, which is kind of a sharp stick in the eye.’ She was very cool with it. We could have made it a three million dollar or five million dollar Trainspotting version, or we could do the balls-out version where planes explode and it’s just a dream and buildings explode and it’s for real – which is the version I preferred to do – and she backed it.”

Fincher proposed developing a script on his own, without taking a fee, but also without studio executives needling him with notes. After eight months working with screenwriters Jim Uhls and Andrew Kevin Walker and producer Art Linson, Fincher came back with a script, a $60 million budget, a schedule – including stages on the studio lot that Fincher wanted to shoot in – and two leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Norton recalled, “Fincher sent me the novel, and I read it in one sitting. It’s obviously a surreal piece that operates at an almost allegorical level within someone’s madness, and I felt immediately that it was on the pulse of a zeitgeist I recognized. It speaks to my generation’s conflict with the American material values system at its worst. I guess I’ve felt for a long time that a lot of the films that were aimed at my generation were some baby boomer perception of what Gen-X was about. They seemed to be tailored to a kind of reductive image of us as slackers and to have a banal, glib, low-energy, angst-ridden realism, none of which I or anyone I know relates to.”

After presenting their package, Fincher and Linson gave Fox three days to decide whether they were in or out. The next day, the studio agreed to produce Fight Club. Studio chairman Bill Mechanic had become an advocate of the project. To afford Fincher’s vision, he reached out for $25 million from Arnon Milchan and his New Regency Enterprises. In order for Fincher to get his budget – which had climbed to $67 million – the director surrendered final cut to his financiers, but Milchan still wanted the director to bring his budget down to $62 million, arguing that Rupert Murdoch – the media tycoon who owned Fox – would not see this as a good investment. Fincher dug in, reportedly saying, “That $5 million is not going to come from Eastman Kodak, it’s not going to come from Teamsters, it’s going to come from visual effects, it’s going to come from sets, from costumes, it’s going to come right off the screen. It’s going to come from the moments they want in the fucking trailer.” Milchan passed on co-financing the picture.

In June 1998, Fight Club commenced a 100-day shooting schedule around Los Angeles. Once he got a look at three weeks of footage Fincher had shot, Arnon Milchan changed his mind about getting involved in the film; he agreed to split the risk with Fox. In early 1999, after 10 weeks of editing, Fincher screened a cut of Fight Club for the top brass at the studio. The screening was not met with enthusiasm. Mechanic delivered the news to Fincher: the movie was simply too long and too violent. Laura Ziskin elaborated on the concern at Fox. “I was afraid of it. I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it, and that’s hard. I was afraid. Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Many at the studio had a far stronger reaction. Mechanic recalled, “There were people who abhorred it. They’d walk up to me and say, ‘I hated it.’”

When Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999, the bad taste was amplified among critics. Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance.” Anita Busch, the Hollywood Reporter: “The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun Times that Tyler Durden came off “sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He’s a bully – Werner Erhard plus S&M, a leather club operator without the decor.”

Bill Mechanic later mused, “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today – and there isn’t one – to provide a context for understanding the film. Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.” Laura Ziskin was also one of the few supporters of Fight Club left in the film industry. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.” Fight Club came and went from theaters in the U.S. with $37 million in grosses. Even after adding $63.8 million overseas, it was deemed a commercial failure.

But on college campuses and in repertory theaters, screenings of Fight Club were selling out. A few journalists started rethinking their reaction to the film. In the independent student newspaper of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Samuel McKewon wrote, “Fight Club is an essential movie for the 21st Century – one of the few out there – that skewers materialism with such a bold, fierce bravado, and certainly, you wonder what all the fuss over American Beauty was for. The latter has ice water running through its veins; it’s detached, damning, judgmental. Fight Club has hot, black blood running through its two-hour-plus running time. It judges by showing.” By the time the DVD arrived – with four commentary tracks and subversive menus – even Entertainment Weekly ranked Fight Club #1 on its list of “The 50 Essential DVDs.”

While Fight Club was dying a quick death at the box office, Edward Norton offered his take on whether the film was socially irresponsible. “You can’t not pursue a creative statement because of the fear it will be misinterpreted. If you did, nothing of any substance would get done.” He added, “Many of the things that have been called subversive are regarded as classics now, including much of Oscar Wilde. Because some men pursue their sexual obsessions with young girls, does that mean Nabokov shouldn’t have written Lolita? Should Martin Scorsese not have made Taxi Driver because there was the potential that someone like John Hinckley would use it as the excuse for his particular pathology? I think the answer to that is definitely no. Art has an important role in holding up a mirror to the things that are unhealthy in a culture.”

Should I Care?
Mixing brooding atmosphere, wildly inappropriate information – “Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?”- perversely twisted black comedy and a wry mockery of the consumer culture that most of the audience participated in daily, Fight Club was the film version of a Molotov cocktail. 10 years later, it’s still riled up about the state of the planet; the only difference is that after 9/11, Enron, Martha Stewart’s fall from grace and Britney Spears’ ascension to near royalty, audiences seem to have caught on with what Chuck Palahniuk was getting at in the mid-1990s. Going back to watch Fight Club again is like downloading Nostradamus to a techno vibe.

From screenplay to David Fincher’s visionary direction, casting to music (The Dust Brothers composed the groovy synthesizer score), editing (James Haygood) to sound, the film delivers a 9.0 to a 9.5 in virtually every routine it puts on the floor. There’s not really a flaw exposed in the entire movie. Marla Singer may be the only female character of consequence, but this morbidly creative heroine is anything but eye candy, expressing herself in wonderfully kooky ways, like talking on the phone with the cord wrapped around her throat. Gleefully sardonic moments like that demand the film be seen more than once, if for no other reason than to savor the terrific plot twist 1 hour and 50 minutes in and how it rewires the viewing experience. If Fight Club isn’t a masterpiece, I’m not sure what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Fighting Talk” By Graham Fuller. Interview, November 1999

“Todd Doogan Interviews Director David Fincher” By Todd Doogan. The Digital Bits, May 2000

“Bruise Control” By Stuart Jeffries. The Guardian, 12 May 2000

Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. By Sharon Waxman. HarperCollins (2005)

What the *&#! Is This About?
Moving through a movie studio lot in a single take, several stories unfold. Executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) listens to a pitch from screenwriter Buck Henry for The Graduate Part 2. The banker who owns the studio has dispatched his playboy son (Randall Batinkoff) to appraise operations, sending nervous ripples across the lot. Security chief Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) chats with Henry on his way out about the greatest single takes of all time (“My old man worked for Hitchcock. Rope was a masterpiece. Story wasn’t that good; shot the whole thing without cuts. I hate all this cut, cut, cut.”) While listening to a pitch from director Alan Rudolph for a political thriller, Griffin receives a threatening postcard in the mail. Development executive Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson) dresses down her assistant (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Rudolph, while Griffin hovers outside the office of his boss (Brion James) upon hearing rumors that Griffin might be on his way out of a job.

Griffin and Bonnie are a couple, but rather than spend quality time with her, he takes his girlfriend to a power party at the house of his attorney (Sydney Pollack). As Jack Lemmon plays piano and Harry Belafonte is among the movers and shakers, Griffin confides to his attorney that he’s been receiving ominous postcards from “some writer I must have brushed off.” He arrives on a suspect and after snooping outside the home of the writer’s girlfriend, an artist named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), Griffin tracks down the tempestuous David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) at a theater in Pasadena showing The Bicycle Thief. Griffin offers Kahane a development deal, but the writer displays nothing but contempt for the corporate hatchet man. When a scuffle breaks out in the parking lot, Griffin is overcome with rage and kills Kahane. Before fleeing the scene, he makes it appear as if it was a mugging gone awry.

Walter discovers that Griffin may have been the last person to see Kahane alive and preps the executive for his interview with a wily police detective (Whoopi Goldberg). Her suspicion of Griffin intensifies when her kooky partner (Lyle Lovett) tails him and discovers that he’s romancing Kahane’s icy ex-girlfriend. But without motive, evidence or a reliable witness, the detectives are unable to tie him to the murder. Griffin is much more concerned that a young executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. Hatching a Machiavellian scheme, Griffin pursues a death row tearjerker titled Habeas Corpus from a hack director (Richard E. Grant) and pestering producer (Dean Stockwell). Their insistence on “no stars, just talent” and a realistic ending convinces Griffin that the movie will be a colossal disaster and backfire on Levy, enabling the player to rescue the studio.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Michael Tolkin had show business in his blood. His father was an Emmy Award winning writer for Your Show of Shows, while his mother was senior VP of legal affairs at Paramount. Tolkin struggled as a writer, starting with Delta House – the short-lived TV spin-off of Animal House - in 1979. It took a decade for him to get credit on a feature, the Christian Slater skateboarding flick Gleaming the Cube. Tolkin recalled, “I must have been in a couple of meetings when I was looking at producers or the executives of producers and I saw how bored they were with me. And I realized that they had hard jobs; that they had to listen to a lot of bad ideas. I wasn’t happy in there and I was uncomfortable and I think that they could see that and I wasn’t helping them. And they were desperate for good ideas, because they couldn’t advance if they didn’t have them. I was listening to all of us complain. And I thought we were complaining just because we were frustrated. And we weren’t necessarily right; maybe our ideas weren’t as good as we thought they were. And somehow in that, this idea began to take hold.”

A motion picture executive whose morals – or lack thereof – empower him to murder a screenwriter became the basis of a novel Tolkin started writing in 1984. “When I finished the book, I sold it to Atlantic Monthly Press, and then an editor at a magazine called Manhattan Inc took the book and went through the manuscript and took out the whole Larry Levy story, and put just a little bit of editing and a little pasting, put together the Larry Levy story as a short story and published it in Manhattan Inc. Ned Chase – who was a book editor and is Chevy Chase’s father – read that and was interested in who I was, he liked the writing. And somehow, talked about this to David Brown, the great producer, and one day, my agent told me David Brown had called and wanted to talk to me about buying the novel.”

David Brown – producer of Jaws, The Verdict and Cocoon – recalled, “I have been an avid magazine reader ever since I began as a magazine editor. There was a magazine I was reading called Manhattan Inc and inside there was a little story called The Player, which was an excerpt from a novella. I read it and felt that the author, Michael Tolkin, really knew what he was talking about in relation to Hollywood. I had read many stories, spent decades in Hollywood and felt that this was the real stuff. Unfortunately, I felt it was impossible to make because of all the internal monologue of the characters. I hadn’t given it any further thought until I had lunch with a publisher at Time Books who said, ‘We are publishing a little book that might interest you called The Player.’” Brown read the book and still didn’t think it would translate into a movie. No one else in Hollywood did either, which enabled Brown to option the film rights for a pittance of $2,500.

David Brown brought Michael Tolkin on board The Player as a producer and commissioned him to adapt his novel to a screenplay. Tolkin recalled, “To my surprise it only took about six or eight weeks to write the script, which was in the fall of – I guess – probably by now we’re probably talking about 1989. And then I finished the script, with David’s notes, back and forth, after about three months I think we were really done and then the script went out into the world. And David tried to set it up.” Brown recalled, “Tolkin and I had a series of humiliating meets at studios with people one-third my age. They said, ‘We don’t do stories about Hollywood. You’ve got a totally unsympathetic character here, a man who gets away with murder.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’” Sidney Lumet spent several weeks attached as director, but wanted more money – for the budget and his salary – than Brown could afford.

Around the time that producer Cary Brokaw and Avenue Pictures stepped up to finance The Player, director Robert Altman signed with the William Morris Agency, which also represented Michael Tolkin. The acclaimed director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville had gone sixteen years between hits and had hit a brick wall trying to get a personal project off the ground. Altman recalled, “I’d written Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver short stories, and I was trying to get that picture financed. That’s what I was really working on; I just couldn’t quite get the financing to make the film. The Player was offered to me as a picture they were gonna make. I was a director for hire. I needed the job. I saw it as an easy shoot and I kind of liked the idea of it, so I did it.”

Brokaw had mixed feelings about Altman. “I had known Bob when I was a marketing guy at Fox and he was tough to deal with. He was brash. When things didn’t go well, it was inevitably our fault. He always had the studio earmarked as the enemy and, from the corporate, conventional Hollywood point of view, Bob was a kind of loose cannon.” Altman stated, “All this thing about me being outside of Hollywood is simply, the truth of the matter is, I can’t make the kind of movies they wanna make, and the kind of movies I can make and like to make and make are not the kind of films that they know how to distribute. So we just basically aren’t in the same business. There’s no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes.” Brokaw added, “We talked very openly about how we would work together. We talked about how this was a structured thriller at heart. My concerns were overcome. This is, after all, a movie that Bob was born to direct. He’s a very charismatic guy who, once he began casting, got just about everyone he wanted.”

Within a month, Tim Robbins agreed to star and in June 1991, shooting commenced in Los Angeles on a budget of $8 million. Altman felt that instead of fabricating celebrities, it would be more realistic to populate The Player with the real deal. “I began calling movie stars. Calling and saying, ‘I’m doing a film about a movie executive who murders a writer and gets away with it.’ They laughed when I said it was a happy ending. They said, ‘You’re going after Hollywood?’ and I said, ‘No, but I’m certainly going to give Hollywood the opportunity to go after itself.’ They said, ‘I’m in.’” To play the couple in the climactic movie-within-a-movie, Altman contacted Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis. To his surprise, without asking to read a script, both said yes. At least 64 more celebrities joined the production. Some – like Cher – appeared only as faces in the party scenes, while others – Angelica Huston & John Cusack, Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin & Scott Glenn, Burt Reynolds – had speaking parts, which they were left free to improvise. Each received scale wage for a day’s work and donated their salary to the Motion Picture Home.

When The Player began screening for distributors in the winter of 1992, it became the talk of Hollywood. David Brown kidded to Newsweek that Barry Diller – then chairman of Fox – laughed so hard that Brown thought he might go into cardiac arrest. Universal’s chairman Tom Pollock was equally boisterous. Studio executives pleaded with Altman to run the film for them at their homes. The director flatly refused, but was tickled by the reaction in the executive suites. “The fact that we came out and said it, it’s like the fool in the court of the king; you can get away with real criticism. And of course it gives them a chance to talk about themselves, their favorite topic.” The only row Altman got into was with Mark Canton – chairman of Columbia Pictures – when the executive reportedly asked a projectionist to skip to the last reel. All but two of the major studios put in a bid to distribute The Player. Fine Line – the specialty division of New Line Cinema – won out.

Opening April 1992 in the U.S., The Player drew some of the best critical notices of Altman’s career. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “As a satire, The Player tickles. It doesn’t draw blood. It says nothing about Hollywood that Hollywood insiders don’t say with far more venom in their hearts. Mr. Altman’s most subversive message here is not that it’s possible to get away with murder in Hollywood, but that the most grievous sin, in Hollywood terms anyway, is to make a film that flops.” Steve Davis, Austin Chronicle: “From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that’s wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who’s been there.” Variety: “Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Five years later, Michael Tolkin mused, “When I wrote The Player, I had absolutely no intention of selling it as a movie. I thought the book was too internal and that since the whole novel really takes place in Griffin Mill’s head, and since it’s about a killer who gets away with murder, I didn’t expect it to sell to the movies and I didn’t intend to sell it to the movies. Everybody said that Hollywood was too tough a topic and that like baseball that was just one of these things that you’re not supposed to make a movie about because nobody wants to see it.” The industry praise culminated in three Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Robert Altman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Michael Tolkin) and Best Editing (Geraldine Peroni). Though The Player enabled Altman to direct nine more features – including Short Cuts – before his death in 2006, audiences steered clear of the movie, buying only $21.7 million in tickets at the U.S. box office.

While Robert Altman maintained that Hollywood had given him more than his fair share of breaks, no love was lost between the director and the Griffin Mills of the world. “The Player is my take on a lot of things, but Hollywood, what is Hollywood, anyway? A guy like Paul Newman starts a company, makes $54 million in profits last year, and it all goes into a charity; you don’t hear a lot about that. A guy like Steve Ross makes $63 million a year, a guy like Michael Eisner, Lee Iacocca, Barry Diller, these guys don’t feed that money back. They gather as much as they can, and the profits don’t have any real meaning. They can’t spend that money. All they’ve got, they can say on their record they have the most chips in front of them when they die.” Altman added, “Hollywood doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t exist anymore. My film, nobody’s even upset about it. One guy, Mark Canton, is the only one who got pissed off, because he’s a fool. Most of these guys, they’re sitting there doing a job, they’re making money – they don’t even have a sense of shame.”

Why Should I Care?
The TV pilot it inspired in 1997 – starring Patrick Dempsey as a moodier Griffin Mill and Jennifer Garner as his boss’s daughter – may have been too dry for ABC to pick up, but over on HBO, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm all gleefully ran with the conceit of celebrities spoofing themselves and Hollywood with terrific success. The Player is nowhere near as barbed or as funny as any of those sitcoms proved to be, and they also seem to have a lot more conviction than Robert Altman’s cool take on Michael Tolkin’s droll source material. What neither director or writer manage to do is get a handle on Greta Scacchi’s character, who comes off as vaguely superficial with little or nothing to add to the story. Equally flat is director of photography Jean Lepine’s smudgy lighting, an unfortunate reminder of how poorly funded this movie actually was.

Even if The Player doesn’t stand up all that well, it still has to be respected as a statement, as a reminder of what movies can achieve both in technical craftsmanship and moral resonance. The masterful opening tracking shot – which at 8 minutes 5 seconds is one of the longest in film history – is a small work of art, while the movie-within-a-movie that climaxes the film is as clever as Griffin Mill’s curtain call. Altman gets excellent mileage from his cast, with Tim Robbins, Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant virtually disappearing amid the silly power brokers they portray. The novelty of the celebrity cameos tilts disproportionately in favor of faces from the ‘70s, and also seem passé when viewed today, but in 1992, The Player was terrifically innovative. Its strike against an economic system that places corporate profit above personal decency still has bite.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Hollywood Is Talking” By Jack Kroll, David Ansen and John Leland. Newsweek, 2 March 1992

“When Hollywood Is a Killer” By Bernard Weintraub. The New York Times, 1992 April 5

The Player (Special Edition). New Line Home Video (1997)

Robert Altman: Interviews. Edited by Davd Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi (2000)

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

What the *&#! Is This About?
“A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski,” says the voice of the Stranger (Sam Elliott) as he follows tumbleweed blowing through the streets of Los Angeles. Jeff Lebowski, alias the Dude (Jeff Bridges) shuffles through Ralph’s in his bathrobe and sandals in search of creamer for his White Russian. The Stranger continues, “And even if he’s a lazy man – and the Dude was most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide …” The Dude returns home to be attacked by goons that have confused him with another Jeff Lebowski. Seeking to collect a debt, one of the goons pees on a prized rug belonging to the Dude.

Two pals on the Dude’s bowling team – bitter Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman) and the child-like Donny (Steve Buscemi) – compel him to seek out the other Jeff Lebowski for compensation. After being given a tour of Lebowski’s mansion by his loyal personal assistant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), wheelchair bound industrialist Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) refuses to replace the Dude’s rug as a matter of principle. The Dude takes one anyway, and on his way out, meets Lebowski’s trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid). When Bunny is kidnapped, her husband employs the Dude to handle the ransom exchange in hopes he can identify the rug peers as her kidnappers.

The Dude sees fit to bring Walter along for the exchange, but his militaristic buddy only screws things up. The Dude leaves the ransom money in the backseat of his ‘73 Ford Torino, which is promptly stolen out of the bowling alley parking lot. Lebowski directs the kidnappers – German nihilists (Peter Stomare, Flea, Aimee Mann) – to take matters up with the Dude. Meanwhile, Lebowski’s daughter, an avant garde artist named Maude (Julianne Moore) with a strange continental speech inflection surfaces with an proposition of her own for the Dude. Juggling this intrigue with his Thai stick reefers and his bowling tournament proves exhausting, particularly with the Dude’s team being taunted by their rival, a Hispanic pederast named Jesus Quintana (John Turturro).

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Big Lebowski may have had its origins in a visit that filmmakers Ethan Coen & Joel Coen paid to the Los Angeles home of a producer’s assistant named Pete Exline in the mid-1980s, during the time they were scrounging financing for their first feature, Blood Simple. Tickled by Exline’s sense of humor, the Coen brothers would come to refer to him as “the Philosopher King of Hollywood” and “Uncle Pete”. As Ethan Coen recalled it, “We were at Pete’s house, which was, you know, kind of a dump. Uncle Pete was in a bad mood for some reason. He was feeling down. So, we complimented him on his place, and he told us how proud he was of this ratty-ass little rug he had in the living room and how it ‘tied the room together.’ So we told him that we too thought it ‘tied the room together.’ We just kept talking about how it ‘tied the room together.’ You know how you beat something to death.”

Ethan Coen continued, “Pete is a Vietnam vet. Very bitter. Whenever the subject of Vietnam comes up, he says, ‘Well, we were winning when I left.’ You know, after the Gulf War was over in a hundred hours, or whatever the fuck it was, Uncle Pete called up and said, ‘Look, it’s a lot different fighting in the desert and fighting in a canopy jungle.’ Defensive acrimony.” Exline had buddy named Lew Abernathy, who was also a vet, and had knocked around Hollywood as an actor and writer, as well as a private investigator. One of Uncle Pete’s favorite stories was Lew having his car stolen by joyriders. Retrieving the vehicle at the police impound, Lew discovered one of the perpetrators had left his homework in the back seat. Sealing the evidence in a baggie, the men tracked the juvenile down and confronted him.

Another character the Coen brothers ran across was Jeff Dowd, a movie marketing consultant – he helped finance Blood Simple – who’d been involved in the Seattle anti-war movement of the early 1970s. Dowd was referred to as “the Pope of Dope” as well as “the Dude”. On the opposite end of the political spectrum was producer/director John Milius, a military enthusiast whose gift of gab prompted the Coen brothers to offer him the role of the studio boss in Barton Fink. Ethan Coen recalled, “You sort of know these people and hear these stories and they all sort of figure together in nebulous ways. The character of Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is personally more like Jeff Dowd and Jeff’s whole way of seeing things. And, not that the character is based on him in any literal way, but John Milius is sort of like Walter Sobchak. Pete Exline is a bit of both. One of the early ingredients came in setting these two characters beside each other – the Dude and Walter – and these two characters somehow seeming promising.”

Once the Coen brothers paired the Dude with Walter – using the crime of a soiled rug in contemporary Los Angeles as a catalyst – a story began to crystallize, which the brothers loosely based on the narrative structure of a Raymond Chandler novel. Unlike their experience writing Miller’s Crossing, the filmmakers didn’t exactly beat their heads against the wall completing a script. Joel Coen recalled, “This one we sort of figured, you know, if things become a little bit too complicated and they’re unclear it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the plot is not – and again, this is similar to Chandler – the plot is sort of secondary to the other things that are sort of going on in the piece. I think, if people get a little bit confused, I don’t think really, necessarily, going to get in the way of them enjoying the movie. Um, yeah. You look at something like The Big Sleep, and nobody seemed to know – including the people who sort of wrote it – what the hell is going on in that plot either.”

Referring to the Dude, Ethan Coen added, “It just seemed interesting to us to thrust that character into the most confusing situation possible. The person who would seem – on the face of it – least equipped to deal with it. That’s sort of the conceit of the movie.” The Coen brothers had a script for The Big Lebowski finished by the time they wrapped The Hudsucker Proxy in 1993. Walter Sobchak had been written for John Goodman, but the actor’s hiatus from the sitcom Roseanne didn’t line up with the production schedule. The role of the Dude hadn’t been written with any particular actor in mind, but the filmmakers wanted Jeff Bridges playing the part. Bridges had committed to star in Wild Bill and wasn’t available either. Rather than consider other actors, the Coen brothers turned their attention to Fargo instead. The 1996 crime film became the critical and commercial pinnacle of their careers, winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

When the time came to turn their attention back to The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers had little difficulty assembling the cast they wanted. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I had heard, or they had told me, that they had written a script for me. And I was a big fan of theirs – I loved Blood Simple. And when they finally gave me the script, I was kind of surprised in a wonderful way. I loved the story and everything, but it was quite unlike anything I’d done before; and it seemed like they had spied on me at a couple of high school parties I was at.” Years later, John Goodman stated, “It’s just so well fucking written. It’s the writing. The writing, the detail. I’m not going to start making up words here, but it’s the noir quality of it, oh crap, it’s just funny. Jesus Christ, you know, my fondest wish is that we could do another one. But if we did, it would fuck everything up. It would just ruin everything.”

With Working Title picking up the roughly $15 million budget, The Big Lebowski commenced a thirteen week production schedule January 1997 in Los Angeles. To serve as director of photography, the Coen brothers reteamed with Roger Deakins, whom they’d met in 1990 – searching for a DP who was both non-union and established – to shoot Barton Fink. His preference for using a single camera and prime lenses suited the way in which the filmmakers liked to work: tightly. Deakins recalled, “It means you’re locked into shooting at 50mm or 32mm or whatever the lens’s focal length is, whereas with a zoom lens you can change the focal length during the shot. Which I think is a little bit of a sloppy way of shooting – pulling back on the lens as opposed to moving the camera. Using fixed lenses creates a sort of precision to your work. It forces you to think.” By 2009, Deakins had racked up eight Academy Award nominations, with four of those nods – Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country For Old Men – working with the Coen brothers.

When The Big Lebowski rolled into theaters March 1998 in the U.S., critical reaction was all over the map. Daphne Merkin, the New Yorker: “The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie’s core, but in the end there’s no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.” Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle: “It’s paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.” With box office receipts of $17.4 million in the States, the popular opinion at the time was that The Big Lebowski definitely did not measure up to Fargo.

A disjointed but diehard group of fans began to discover The Big Lebowski on their own and struck an opposing view. In July 2002, journalist Steve Palopoli wrote an article about the film for the Metro Santa Cruz in which he referred to The Big Lebowski as “either the last great cult film of the 20th century or the first great cult film of the 21st, depending on how you look at it.” Not long after, the Nickelodeon Theater in Santa Cruz, California started running The Big Lebowski on Friday and Saturday at midnight. Palopoli recalled, “The first weekend they played it, they turned away several hundred people. They held it over, which they had never done, for six weeks. It was like an old-fashioned movie experience. People were yelling quotes before it ever started. It sold out every weekend for a month.”

In October 2002, two buddies in Kentucky named Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell threw “The First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest” at a bowling alley in Louisville. 150 fans attended. A website was launched and since, Lebowski Fest has traveled to New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle and Chicago, drawing thousands of fans in a weekend bowling tournament/ costume party/ fan convention. In an interview with Mr. Media in December 2007, Shuffitt and Russell were asked how one movie could inspire such an outpouring of devotion. Shuffitt: “Man, that’s a good question. I don’t even know that I know. To the best of my knowledge, it’s just a film that a lot of people enjoy, and I think that a lot of people can relate to the characters. And I think that a lot of people want to be Dude-esque and just take it easy. It was written very, very well. It’s a really good comedy. It’s shot really well. The imagery is beautiful. So I guess you add all those things together, and we end up with what we have now, which is…” Russell: “ … out of control.”

Peter Stomare commented, “It’s like a homage to California. But at the same time, in my home country of Sweden, they love The Big Lebowski too, and in Germany and Italy – everywhere I’ve been. I didn’t know it was such a global thing. It’s a combination of the craziness of being a regular human being and ending up in such a mess. Everything’s so bizarre. It’s like California. I thought it would never take off in other parts of the U.S., but it definitely did, especially the DVD.” While the Coen brothers refuse to dwell on the film’s status as a cult classic, Pete Exline offered his take on the popularity of The Big Lebowski. “I really think that it’s just the humor. If anything, if I had to analyze it beyond the humor, it’s the perfect adolescent movie because the Dude is a guy who just refuses to grow up, and the other Lebowski is like the nightmare father. Here’s this guy who is just, like, doing what he wants to do, getting stoned and bowling and outsmarting the Man. It’s a movie that each viewing, I notice something that’s funny that I never noticed before. So in that way, it’s kind of a gold mine.”

Why Should I Care?
The short, strange trip that The Big Lebowski made from box office misfire to one of the most celebrated cult classics of all time has a mythic quality to it that the Stranger himself might even appreciate. Without test screenings, focus groups, an Oscar campaign or the endorsement of mainstream critics – Roger Ebert voted a lukewarm thumbs up, while Gene Siskel panned it, proclaiming “The Big Lebowski, a big disappointment” – this may end up being the Coen brothers feature that the filmmakers of tomorrow discover first. Goofing on the movie in altered states is enjoyable, but the real joy of The Big Lebowski comes to you in sobriety, where closer examination allows the film’s goofball universe, crackerjack visual composition, irreverence and most importantly, the performances of the cast to wash over you like a live action Merrie Melodies. This ain’t really comic perfection, but it is the perfect comedy.

If the second hour loses the characters somewhat to drags down in a convoluted haze of Thai stick, what’s beautiful about The Big Lebowski is its offbeat perspective and how the performers embody that perspective magnificently. The bowling alley diatribes featuring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and generous uses of the “fuck” word are brilliant in how each character is clearly off in their own oddball orbit, yet on the same plane as well. In addition to the acting, the recurring manners of speech (“In the parlance of our times … ”) grow more infectious the longer they have to bounce around the head. Even without the quips, this would be a triumph in cinematography (Roger Deakins), costume design (Mary Zophres) and music (Sons of the Pioneers, The Gipsy Kings, Kenny Rogers). The Coen brothers offer a sly mockery of Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and a goofy homage to it at the same time. This is their finest film to date.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. Text by William Preston Robertson, edited by Tricia Cookie.W.W. Norton & Company (1998)

I’m A Lebowski, You’re A Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You. By Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell & Scott Shuffitt. Bloomsbury USA (2007)

“The Making of The Big Lebowski” The Big Lebowski: 10th Anniversary Edition. Universal Home Video (2008)