Q: “You were working in a special niche of your own in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders and Southern Comfort — lean, elegiac films which, I’m guessing, benefited from modest budgets and expectations, as well as low producer interference.”

A: “Yes, that niche no longer exists. The middle ground has largely fallen out of the studio system.”

Patrick McGilligan interviewing Walter Hill for Film International in September 1996

The Long Riders (1980)
Directed by Walter Hill
Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith and Stacy Keach & James Keach
Produced by Tim Zinneman
99 minutes

If crowd pleasers like Tombstone are pop music renditions of the Old West, The Long Riders is like vintage bluegrass. With the well earned authenticity of a musician jamming for the pure love of his craft, the first western directed by Walter Hill is a master class in how atmosphere, pacing and performance can elevate a B-movie programmer into something greater than a plot synopsis might indicate. In Missouri after the Civil War, hard put and desperate men looking to make a living under the heel of Reconstruction rob a bank. Led by the steely Jesse James (James Keach) and his brother Frank James (Stacy Keach), the gang includes the deadly Cole Younger (David Carradine), dapper Jim Younger (Keith Carradine) and dorky Bob Younger (Robert Carradine). Along for the job is Clell Miller (Randy Quaid) who’s as dependable as his brother Ed (Dennis Quaid) is unreliable.

The bandits return home to contemplate settling down. Jesse marries his sweetheart (Savannah Smith) while Jim courts a redhead (Amy Stryker) engaged to the no count Ed Miller. Cole Younger hesitates to make an honest woman out of Belle Shirley (Pamela Reed) and the vivacious whore settles in Texas, where she marries hotheaded Sam Starr (James Remar) and takes the name Belle Starr. The success of the James-Younger gang against trains of the Union Pacific Railroad puts them in the crosshairs of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose agents draw the wrath of the entire region when they gun down a 15-year-old Younger and firebomb the home of Jesse James’ mother (Fran Ryan). The gang meet their Waterloo in Northfield, Minnesota, forcing Jesse to recruit the oily Ford brothers Bob (Nicholas Guest) and Charlie (Christopher Guest). Their betrayal earns the Fords a spot in history alongside Jesse James.

Stacy Keach and his brother James Keach were cast as Wilbur and Orville Wright for a public television drama that aired in 1971. They kidded that after playing the Wright brothers, their next project together should focus on “the wrong brothers”. Taking their joke seriously, the Keaches arrived on outlaws Frank & Jesse James and spent nine years struggling to get The Long Riders into production, with playwright Bill Bryden, screenwriter Steven Phillip Smith and the Keaches writing scripts. The actor brothers had David, Keith & Robert Carradine set to join them as the Youngers, Randy & Dennis Quaid as the Millers and Beau & Jeff Bridges as the treacherous Fords. Cast in Hurricane, James Keach met producer Tim Zinneman, who saw a movie there and helped attach Walter Hill as director. Guitarist Ry Cooder would be entrusted by Hill to compose and arrange the music, beginning a collaboration that would span two decades.

In spite of its casting scheme, the real star of The Long Riders is Ry Cooder, who utilizes Civil War ballads and rapturous bluegrass to provide texture to the tough, contentious world of Jesse James. It’s a place where strangers become friends by sharing that they served under the Stars and Bars and conversely, playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” can get a guitar player shot. The Long Riders makes little effort to document who James was and the film is so much better off for it. The loosely sewn narrative tested audiences at the time, yet the approach fits the material seamlessly: defeated but dangerous men drifting through the postwar South. Highlights include David Carradine and James Remar locked in an epic knife duel, while the scenes between Carradine and Pamela Reed crackle with wit and sexual energy. As action films go, this is one that genuinely loves women.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,017 users: 70% for The Long Riders

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

What do you say?

“I remember being absolutely fearless because I was too young to know any better. I had no idea, I had never tasted failure — or pressure from the studio. You know, that film got made because Sean was very hot, Sean wanted me to direct it, and because he and I were so simpatico, we could do whatever we wanted because we held the power. I never appreciated that at the time, how important that was, so we literally did whatever we wanted and tried crazy things and didn’t care what other people thought — we didn’t have to care what other people thought.” James Foley interviewed by Walter Chaw for Film Freak Central, April 2003

At Close Range (1986)
Directed by James Foley
Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, story by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan
Produced by Elliott Lewitt, Don Guest
111 minutes

If the songwriting of Bruce Springsteen could conjure moving images, the result would be something very similar to At Close Range. Though The Boss didn’t supply any music for the soundtrack, echoes of “Thunder Road” or “Darkness on the Edge of Town” with their engines of discontented youth reverberate through this film, siphoned into a crime story and injected by an ensemble cast that makes a case for being one of the greatest ever assembled. Somewhere in the seemingly lawless farmland of Pennsylvania in 1978, Brad Whitewood Jr. (Sean Penn) trucks into town to pick up his knucklehead brother Tommy (Christopher Penn). Brad summons the guts to talk to a girl named Terry (Mary Stuart Masterson) hanging out in the square. Lacking a job or even reliable wheels, he ultimately convinces the 16-year-old to light out west with him for a better life together.

Brad Jr. seeks out his absentee father Brad Whitewood Sr. (Christopher Walken), who local gossip has it is a thief. Brad Sr. introduces the boy to his woman (Candy Clark), as well as the uncles (R.D. Call, J.C. Quinn) and the epileptic (David Straithairn) he disappears with in the dead of night. Wary of Brad Jr. getting mixed up in the schemes of his dim witted Uncle Patch (Tracey Walter), Brad Sr. gives his son a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle and sends him back to his mother (Millie Perkins). Seeking respect and some extra cash, Brad Jr. and Tommy gather their friends (Crispin Glover, Stephen Geoffreys, Kiefer Sutherland) and start stealing tractors. Brad Jr. compels his father to show him the ropes, but sees more than he bargained for one night and breaks away from his dad. When his son is arrested, the bonds of family buckle and Brad Sr’s self-preservation kicks in.

In August 1978, producer Elliott Lewitt came across an account in the Philadelphia Inquirer of two teenagers — a federal witness and his 15-year-old girlfriend — who’d been riddled with bullets in rural Chester County. Details emerged that the boy’s father Bruce Johnston Sr. was patriarch of family notorious for stealing tractors and anything else that wasn’t moving. Seeing potential for a modern day Greek tragedy, Lewitt hired Nicholas Kazan to adapt a screenplay based on these events. Titled At Close Range, Kazan’s script became one nearly every executive in Hollywood wanted to see made but none were willing to bankroll. That changed in 1985 when Sean Penn was being heralded as the most talented young actor in movies. Penn had befriended USC Film School grad James Foley and a script both men loved was At Close Range. Hemdale Film Corporation agreed to finance the project with Orion Pictures handling distribution.

Kazan let it be known how displeased he was with Foley’s work, cutting scenes the scribe felt pivotal to the plot, redacting the humor and giving the picture a visual sheen Kazan thought undermined its reality. It’ll never be known how great At Close Range might have been, but in Foley’s defense, what’s on screen is remarkable. Cast by Risa Bramon and Billy Hopkins, the ensemble is extraordinary and in his sophomore feature, Foley knew to let his actors act. The energy harnessed by Sean Penn, his brother Chris and their mother Eileen Ryan (playing the boys’ grandma) is palpable, while Walken and Masterson and the great Tracey Walter mesmerize in every moment of their screen time. The lightning by Juan Ruiz Anchia bleeds shadow, but in a fresh approach, this is film noir set knee deep in the boondocks. Madonna co-wrote and performed the ubiquitous theme song “Live To Tell”, which materializes throughout the film as its own atmospheric effect.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 8,017 users: 71% for At Close Range

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

What do you say?

Promoting I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1988, Steve James, who appeared as “Kung Fu Joe” in the blaxploitation spoof, commented: “I always hated that label ‘blaxploitation.’ I wondered, why couldn’t there just be films with black stars? You know, you’d go around the corner from a theater showing one of them, and there’d be Dirty Harry. And nobody was calling it ‘whitesploitation.’” Right on, Steve! So in February, I’ll take a look at ten films featuring black stars from a certain era.

The Mack (1973)
Directed by Michael Campus
Written by Robert J. Poole and Max Julien (uncredited)
Produced by Harvey Bernhard
110 minutes

Helping graft the message and style of hip hop, there’s room to argue that The Mack is flat out the best “blaxploitation” movie ever made. Robert J. Poole was a convict who — according to legend — wrote a 40-page treatment for a movie on prison toilet paper. Titled Black Is Beautiful, Poole ultimately got his material to producer Harvey Bernhard. Fascinated with the concept of a street Svengali, Bernhard hired a young (white) filmmaker named Michael Campus, who’d shot a few documentaries for ABC, to direct. To play the title role, Max Julien was approached. Julien had written the screenplay for Cleopatra Jones and given the go-ahead to fill in Poole’s blueprint, got on board. Traveling to Oakland, Campus and Julien sought the help of the Ward brothers, the four men who ran the bay city’s underworld. Frank Ward agreed to take the filmmakers into his world, provided they took Ward into theirs.

In addition to being granted a cameo, Frank Ward inspired the title character as Campus and Julien fleshed out the script. Murdered during its production, Ward had the film dedicated to him. Financed by the soon to be defunct Cinerama Releasing Corp., The Mack was shot on a substantially low budget, yet endures because nearly every frame seems infused with a pure love for movies. Julien and co-star Richard Pryor bring star level magnetism to this low down dirty B-movie, while the necessities of shooting on the fly gives the film the power of a documentary on 1970s Oakland. The Mack is still a shoot ‘em up at heart and does get repetitive, but it’s also politically hip to the conflict between capitalism and the greater good of the community. If that’s too much to ponder, Willie Hutch wrote and performed nine killer tunes, including “I Choose You,” “Theme of The Mack” and “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out”.

John “Goldie” Mickens (Max Julien) and his partner Slim (Richard Pryor) shoot it out with gunmen who’ve ambushed them in a junkyard. Unable to escape, Goldie is taunted by two cops (Dan Gordon, William Watson) who debate whether to finish the hustler off or not. Enduring almost five years in prison, Goldie returns to the streets of Oakland. He visits his mentor, The Blind Man (Paul Harris) who ruminates about pimping and the opportunity there for the taking if his protégé adopts the right mental angle. Goldie runs into an old girlfriend named Lulu (Carol Speed), an “outlaw” turning tricks; she implores Goldie to manage her. The ex-con next reunites with his brother Olinga (Roger Mosley), a political organizer dedicated to black empowerment and to running the pimps and pushers out of the community.

Announcing to his brother that he’s down with self-empowerment — while keeping the true nature of his business secret from his Mother (Juanita Moore) — Goldie dedicates himself to becoming “the meanest mack who ever lived.” He reteams with Slim and with Lulu’s help, Goldie’s “professional ladies of leisure” are drilled in the finer points of shoplifting and grand larceny. To control their minds, Goldie rents a planetarium and lays down his rules under the cosmos. Rising to such success that he wins Mack of the Year honors at the annual Players Ball, Goldie spurns an offer from his former employer Fatman (George Murdock) to return to work for him. The vile cops who busted Goldie five years ago resurface next, intent on taking him down. To get out of the game with his life intact, Goldie turns to his brother for help.

What do you say?

This month’s theme was hatched after yet another person with better taste than me recommended that I add the 2005 romantic drama Shopgirl to my queue. Looking for nine more films with similar themes, “Cat Food”, “Rain” and “Corset” were all considered and rejected before I settled on “May December Romance”. So in the month of December, I’ll take a look at love separated by much more than just six months on the calendar.

Beautiful Girls (1996)
Directed by Ted Demme
Written by Scott Rosenberg
Produced by Cary Woods
112 minutes

Like a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer for Generation X, Beautiful Girls has carved its niche as holiday comfort food that tastes great every year. Following his first produced screenplay Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, Scott Rosenberg signed a deal with Touchstone Pictures. He submitted a treatment for his first assignment Con Air and waiting for word in Boston while snowplows dug through a blizzard, it occurred to Rosenberg that the real action was in his hometown, where friends were dealing with commitment as they hit their third decade. Rosenberg emerged from his room five days later with a script. Brian Grazer, Ridley Scott and Mace Neufeld were interested, but producer Cary Woods and Miramax Films won the bidding. Rosenberg worked on a dozen drafts with James L. Brooks before the director decided he didn’t relate much with blue collar 30-year-olds and dropped out.

Ted Demme wasn’t much older than the characters in the script and was ultimately hired to direct. His aesthetic influence was The Deer Hunter and preferring “Knight’s Ridge” to look as worn down and as frozen in time as possible, opted to shoot the film in Minnesota. With 17 characters packed into a 1 hour 50 minute movie, there are segments of Beautiful Girls that work much better than others: Michael Rapaport as a local yokel obsessed with fashion models, a Neil Diamond sing-along and (no joke) Rosie O’Donnell chart high, while the “romance” between Natalie Portman and Timothy Hutton remains the #1 reason to see the movie, an episodic comedy drama that never spells out its intentions or dumbs itself down. The script is a series of insights in search of a story, but after a few years, you not only feel you know these characters, but look forward to spending time with them.

Lounge playing piano man Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton) scrapes together enough cash for bus fare from New York City back home to the town of “Knight’s Ridge” for his 10-year high school reunion. Willie discovers that his friends never really left. Tommy (Matt Dillon) runs a plowing company and clings to his glory days by sleeping with ex-cheerleader Darian (Lauren Holly). Tommy’s loyal girlfriend Sharon (Mira Sorvino) copes with his behavior by focusing on her weight, which her brassy pal Gina (Rosie O’Donnell) sees as a perpetuation of male fantasy. Paul (Michael Rapaport) pushes away his girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton) by refusing to accept she isn’t cheating on him with the meat cutter. He buys her  a brown engagement ring and when she refuses to marry him, Paul buries Jan’s driveway in snow.

The quiet Kev (Max Perlich) also shovels snow for a living but aspires to do little more than work all day and drink all night. Husband and father Mo (Noah Emmerich) seems to be the only genuine grownup among the group. The weekend takes a detour with the entrance of Andrea (Uma Thurman), a beautiful and cool import from Chicago visiting Knight’s Ridge to see her cousin “Stinky” (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who runs the tavern the boys drink at. Each of the guys take turns trying to impress her, to little avail. Willie’s girlfriend and possible fiancée (Annabeth Gish) soon joins him, but the 29-year-old musician confides his commitment fears to a kindred spirit, the soulful 13-year-old who lives next door, Marty (Natalie Portman). She suggests Willie wait to get married until he meets someone who excites him. By Willie’s math, when Marty turns 23, he’ll only be 39.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 4,746 users: 79% for Beautiful Girls

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 64 for Beautiful Girls

What do you say?

The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured the female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten movies that pass.

Summer Hours (2008)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Written by Olivier Assayas
Produced by Marin Karmitz, Nathanaël Karmitz, Charles Gillibert
103 minutes

Taking the scenic route through a story with remarkably deep and affecting ideas, Summer Hours books us passage with the most ordinary family seen on film or television all year. The film leapt from notes filmmaker Olivier Assayas scribbled about how art that once meant something very tangible to an artist inevitably ends up locked in the exhibit case of a museum. Ironically, the project was intended as a short to be sponsored by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. When the Ministry of Culture pulled financing, Assayas got his script to veteran producer Marin Karmitz. With Summer Hours meeting the approval of the typically fussy French film industry — it was French language, with French actors, shot exclusively in France — a budget of €5.6 million ($7.6 million USD) was raised with much less grief than Assayas’s previous feature Boarding Gate.

Premiering March 2008 in France, Summer Hours screened at the Toronto Film Festival in September and the New York Film Festival in October. Despite receiving some of the best reviews of the year, the film received a very limited release May 2009 in the U.S. While its idyllic pace and seeming lack of earth shattering drama didn’t go over well with distributors, Summer Hours paints a bittersweet portrait of a family moving so fast that only the very old and very young seem to notice something being lost. Assayas demonstrates enough confidence in his cast and in the quiet observations of his script that the everyday nature of the film becomes its strength. Director of photography Eric Gautier helps lend a home movie intimacy, while the Musée d’Orsay opened its doors to filming as well as loaning the production its cultural artifacts.

At her country estate, Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob) welcomes her children and their families for her 75^th birthday. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is an economics professor who lives in Paris. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is an art designer who now resides in New York while Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), his wife and three children have relocated to China for his job with Puma. They’re heirs to a handful of artifacts — including the house and two priceless paintings by Corot — that belonged to their great-uncle Paul Berthier, a renowned artist. Hélène annoys Frédéric by instructing him what to do with each object once she’s gone. The son announces his intent to keep the house and its items in the family, which Hélène sees as improbable. Housekeeper Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan) confides to Frédéric that despite her energy, his mother has been depressed lately.

When Hélène passes away, her children reunite for the funeral. As their mother suspected, Adrienne expresses no desire to live in France while Jérémie has been promoted and in need of money, also prefers to sell the house and its treasures. Frédéric laments the verdict to his wife (Dominique Reymond), particularly the loss of the Corot paintings, which he envisioned passing down to his children Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) and Pierre (Emile Berling), teenagers who express little interest in bric-a-brac from another era. Donating several pieces to the Musee d’Orlay to avoid estate taxes, Frédéric doubts whether a vase that once held flowers still means anything locked in an exhibition case. He grants his teens permission to throw a graduation party at the country house before its lease expires and even Sylvie begins to sense something is being lost.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 3,670 users: 60% for Summer Hours

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 84 for Summer Hours

What do you say?

The Bechdel Test was named for Allison Bechdel, whose comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 measured the female presence in movies by employing three criteria: Are there two or more women in it, with names? Do the women talk to each other? About something other than a man? Far too many mainstream movies flunk this test, but in the month of September, I take a look at ten movies that pass.

The Burning Plain (2008)
Directed by Guillermo Arriaga
Written by Guillermo Arriaga
Produced by Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald
107 minutes

Pouring on the melancholy and infinite sadness, The Burning Plain has major credibility problems as well as a title problem, but nearly erases both with a cast and a visual sheen that would be the envy of just about any first-time director. After writing Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga ended his collaboration with director Alejandro González Iñárritu after Iñárritu let it be known that Arriaga had taken too much credit for the success of those films. Arriaga submitted his script The Burning Plain to Walter F. Parkes & Laurie MacDonald, the husband-wife team who once presided over film production at DreamWorks Pictures. Proposing that he be the one sitting in the director’s chair this time, Arriaga won financing from Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, whose 2929 Productions, in association with Costa Films, put up the budget.

Shot over eight weeks in Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico and in Portland for a budget of under $20 million, The Burning Plain screened September 2008 at the Venice Film Festival. It opened in Italy weeks later and was available in the United States via On-Demand cable in August 2009. In a few years, this film might become known as the screen debut of Jennifer Lawrence, who broke out in Winter’s Bone and gives a haunted performance years beyond her age. The stoic Charlize Theron is equally possessed, while directors of photography Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and John Toll (Vanilla Sky, who Elswit recommended shoot the Portland sequences) bend light and shadow with technique that is nothing short of majestic. When it comes to the script, Arriaga has squeezed all the juice out of these solemn, multi-arc, multi-lingual melodramas and leaves fruit pulp.

A trailer parked on a deserted plain is consumed by fire. Sylvia (Charlize Theron) manages a seafood restaurant perched along the Pacific Coast, where she marks time in an emotionless affair with a cook (John Corbett). Shuttled to work by a friend (Robin Tunney), Sylvia notices a stranger watching her. Back in the southwest, teenager Santiago (J.D. Pardo) inspects the remains of the trailer, where his father and mistress were burned alive. Santiago’s mother (Rachel Ticotin) sits out the funeral while the husband (Brett Cullen) of his late father’s mistress shows up to vent at the “wetbacks”. Santiago is much more interested in Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), the teenage daughter in that family. Meanwhile, crop duster Santiago (Danny Pino), his 10-year-old daughter Maria (Tessa Ia) and partner Carlos (José María Yazpik) fly to a job.

Moving back in time, Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) reconnects with his mistress Gina (Kim Basinger). Sneaking away to a trailer Nick’s cousin has loaned them, Gina is still sensitive about her body following the loss of a breast to cancer. Back in what we believe to be the present, teenaged Santiago and Mariana overcome resistance by their families and get to know one another. Meanwhile, the crop duster suffers a crash. Moving back in time again, Mariana follows her mother to the trailer where she rendezvous with her lover. Recovering in the hospital, the crop duster dispatches Carlos to reunite Maria with her mother. In Portland, Carlos locates the woman, who has changed her name from Mariana to Sylvia and wants nothing to do with Maria. Moving back in time again, Mariana attempts to end her mother’s affair by setting fire to the trailer.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 6,129 users: 57% for The Burning Plain

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 45 for The Burning Plain

What do you say?

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

The Pianist (2002)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the book The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman
Produced by Roman Polanski, Robert Benmussa, Alain Sarde
150 minutes

A tale of an urban castaway that’s as powerful as it is restrained, The Pianist was Roman Polanski’s finest work in two decades. Originally published in 1946 under the title Death of a City, Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of survival detailed the classical pianist’s six years under Nazi occupation in Warsaw. Seizing upon the book as his next film, Polanski selected South African born playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood — whose play Taking Sides also featured a composer caught in the maelstrom of World War II — to adapt a screenplay. France’s Le Studio Canal largely financed the €38 million (roughly $33 million) production in association with England’s Cadre Films and after Joseph Fiennes declined the role in order to remain on the British stage, Polanski arrived on Adrien Brody to portray Szpilman. The actor went from 160 to 130 pounds in six weeks to prepare for the part.

Filmed at Babelsburg Studios in Berlin, with additional shooting in the Braga district outside Warsaw, what sets The Pianist apart from WWII dramas like Saving Private Ryan or Enemy At the Gates is its simplicity and grace. Written immediately after the occupation, Szpilman’s story is resplendent in detail and confident enough in its truth not to employ artificiality or unearned sentiments. Turning genre conventions on their head, we meet Jews who are less than virtuous and at least one German who is more than pure evil, creating a landscape that provokes thought and feeling. A tale of genocide, the irony is that Polanski’s craftsmanship is so solid we wish the story kept going. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Adrien Brody (Best Actor), Ronald Harwood (Best Adapted Screenplay) and Roman Polanski (Best Director) all won Oscars.

In Warsaw of September 1939, pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is performing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp minor for Polish radio when German artillery shells hit the city. Szpilman’s violinist father (Frank Finlay), mother (Maureen Lipman), younger brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard) and two grown sisters (Julia Rayner, Jessica Kate Meyer) rejoice with the news that Britain and France have declared war on Germany, but Poland quickly falls under Nazi control. Szpilman has time to take an adoring cellist named Dorota (Emilia Fox) for coffee before the city’s 360,000 Jews are evicted from their homes and sealed inside a ghetto in October 1940. Szpilman finds employment as a piano player in an upper class Jewish café and along with Henryk, rejects an offer from a family friend named Heller (Roy Smiles) to join the Jewish Ghetto Police.

When Henryk is arrested, Szpilman appeals to Heller’s ego to secure his brother’s release. He keeps his family from being deported by obtaining employment certificates for them, but these prove worthless when in August 1942, the Szpilmans are herded onto trains bound for Treblinka. Heller pulls Szpilman off the line, sparing his life, but the pianist never sees his family again. He survives by joining a Jewish work detail and buys enough time to arrange for his escape. Harbored by friends, Szpilman is reunited with Dorota, now married and expecting a child. Once the Polish uprising begins in August 1944, he’s near the brink of famine. Scrounging for food in the deserted city, Szpilman comes to face to face with Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann). Instead of being shot, the pianist is rewarded by an act of kindness after the German officer hears his music.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 107,318 users: 94% for The Pianist

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 85 for The Pianist

What do you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

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

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

Rocket Science (2007)
Written by Jeffrey Blitz
Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Produced by B&W Films/ Duly Noted, Inc./ HBO Films
Running time: 101 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
While arguing against farm subsidies at the New Jersey State High School Policy Debate Championships, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto) — the greatest public speaker that Plainsboro High School has ever known — suddenly loses his voice. Back in Plainsboro, high school sophomore Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) and his kleptomaniac older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) watch as their exasperated father (Denis O’Hare) walks out on their mother. The stutter that makes it impossible for Hal to order pizza in the school cafeteria, much less talk to other students, leaves his special needs counselor (Maury Ginsberg) wildly grasping at solutions.

Hal is “ferreted” by the stunningly articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) to join the debate team. After her ex-partner Ben washed out at state and mysteriously dropped out of school, Ginny covets a championship trophy and believes that beneath Hal’s “deformity” lies a deep resource of anger that can help her win. Studying their debate topic — abstinence — with Ginny, or spying on her from the bedroom of her goofy adolescent neighbor (Josh Kay), Hal falls in love. But after sharing a whirlwind kiss in the janitor’s room, the relationship between the academic partners sours. To get revenge on the debate stage, Hal goes in search of Ben Wekselbaum.

Who Made It?
Jeffrey Blitz and his producer/sound recordist Sean Welch financed their debut feature — the spelling bee documentary Spellbound — by piling up debt on 14 credit cards. After Spellbound received some of the best reviews of 2002 and was nominated for an Academy Award, Blitz and Welch didn’t have to apply for more plastic to get their next film going. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Blitz met Effie Brown, who was accepting a Producers Award for Real Women Have Curves. Brown had a deal at HBO Films and initially worked with Blitz on the script for a spelling bee movie.

How’d They Do It?
Brown stated, “He has such a wicked sense of humor; and that’s something that people don’t nail. His humor is smart and not malicious, but it’s definitely a bit self-effacing. That’s what drew me to him. His film, Spellbound, completely had me riveted. I was trying to spell words and I was so rooting for all those kids.” The idea of scripting a spelling bee movie didn’t work out, but in talking with Maud Nadler — the senior VP of theatrical films at HBO — Blitz shared his experiences attending high school in central New Jersey with a serious speech impediment and how he attempted to overcome it as a member of the debate team.

Everyone agreed that the high school debate script was the one Blitz should be writing. The filmmaker recalled, “Teen movies don’t interest me, is the thing. They don’t interest me at all, so the only way I was going to do a teen movie is if I felt like I could try to be more honest about what the actual experience of being a teenager is like. I guess teen movies want to be escapist fantasies for high school students, but to me they’re bullshit because they’re all formulaic. As soon as you can predict where the movie is going, which is the first 10 seconds of any teenage movie, you know exactly how it’s going to resolve. It’s completely uninteresting to me.”

Blitz continued, “I wanted to feel like I could create a story that felt like it follows the contours the world a little more, but at the same time it’s not strictly a piece of realism. There’s absurdist comedy that I wanted to bring into it also and try to find that balance. That’s why for me people like Billy Wilder and Hal Ashby are the guys that I look towards to figure out how to bring realism, naturalism into a movie that still has outlandish characters and people who do things that are really funny!” Brown added, “Jeff created fabulous, well-rounded characters that you don’t get to see everyday. But no one’s made fun of. You root for them all.”

After another actor dropped out over scheduling, Vancouver native Reece Daniel Thompson was spotted on an audition tape; he was flown to Baltimore to audition and won the role of Hal. Anna Kendrick had auditioned in L.A. Blitz recalled, “She’s just about the only person who came in to read who could actually handle the dialogue. Jinny talks so fast, I mean, she just sort of blazes through it, but the person saying those lines needs to understand what she’s saying, even though she’s going, you know, a million miles an hour. And Anna just nailed it.” Budgeted at $6 million, Rocket Science began a 30-day shooting schedule July 2005 in Baltimore.

To serve as director of photography, Blitz turned Jo Willems, who’d collaborated with Blitz on “spec” commercials the director had used to break into the industry. Blitz hoped the Belgian cinematographer’s European sensibility would balance the emotional side of the movie with its deadpan humor. The result was a drably lit and everyday high school look. Yana Gorskaya — who had cut Spellbound – was brought in as editor. While cutting, Blitz and Gorskaya used temp tracks from the band Clem Snide, whose singer/ songwriter Eef Barzelay ultimately wrote the film’s instrumental score.

Rocket Science was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, where Blitz won the Dramatic Directing Award for his work. Critics were also effusive with praise. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as Welcome to the Dollhouse or as much as Clueless, but whichever it does, it’s in the same league.” Justin Chang, Variety: “This unusually voluble comedy is as eloquent about love, self-realization and adolescent angst as its protagonist is endearingly tongue-tied.”

Distributed by Picturehouse, Rocket Science opened August 2007. Audiences ignored it completely. Never expanding beyond 59 screens, the film grossed only $714,943 in the United States. Blitz would muse, “I think sometimes marketing campaigns hit and the whole thing works and sometimes they don’t at all. Some of this has to do with knowing the audience and really understanding to whom you’re marketing.” He added, “I think in the future I’ll try to be stronger in sharing my sense of the audience and the right tone of the marketing. But it’s hard to say. Each project seems like it comes with its own fresh set of challenges.”

Should I Care?
No stars. Low budget. Content that left me to shift nervously on my sofa. These were elements that Jeffrey Blitz’s debut Spellbound and his sophomore effort Rocket Science both share. The follow-up isn’t nearly as good because of several defects in its script. There’s an attempt at a storybook feel in the form of a narrator, which not only chills the film a bit emotionally, but calls attention to how much better Wes Anderson is at whimsical mood setting. As hilarious it is at turns — I busted out laughing three or four times — just as many bits stop the movie cold, especially a subplot involving a Korean judge (Stephen Park) dating Hal’s mom that falls totally flat.

While Blitz made a few rookie missteps as a screenwriter, he’s without a doubt a director to watch. The performances in Rocket Science are wonderful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick and Vincent Piazza are all stars 10 years from now. Piazza sorta reminds me of Matt Dillon. Kendrick recalls Reese Witherspoon’s hilarious performance in Election, while Thompson superbly captures every awkward impulse — romantic or otherwise — we all had in high school. The joy of Rocket Science is that it gets those growing pains absolutely right.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Rocket Science: An Interview with producer Effie Brown” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, 6 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz on Rocket Science” By Max Evry. ComingSoon.net, 8 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz Practices Rocket Science” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker. 15 January 2008

“The Making of Rocket Science” Rocket Science. HBO Home Video (2008)

Synopsis
After whipping a trio of Russian mobsters in a pub brawl, Irish Catholic twins Connor McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy McManus (Norman Reedus) are paid a visit by their pissed off foes. Mopping up the bodies of the Russians afterward, Boston police are aided by outrageous FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), who theorizes the deaths were personal; one of them had a toilet bowl dropped on him. The McManus boys – fluent in seven languages and plying their intelligence as meat packers – turn themselves in and plead self-defense. But after receiving a vision from God to destroy all that is evil so that good may flourish, they embark on a vigilante murder spree against the Boston underworld. The boondock saints have so much fun that they let their dense buddy Rocco (David Della Rocco) in on the team. To retaliate, the mob turns to Irish super assassin Il Duce (Billy Connolly).

Production history
After spending childhood in Exeter, New Hampshire amid a large, lower middle class Irish American family, Troy Duffy was accepted into the premed program at Colorado State University. Realizing his dream was rock ‘n roll, he dropped out of school and headed for Los Angeles in 1993. By day, Duffy served coffee in Westwood and by night, flipped burgers at a titty bar. After taking on odd jobs in home repair, Duffy found himself tending bar at a watering hole on Melrose called J. Sloan’s. With his brother Taylor and two buddies he’d put together a band they called The Brood, but Duffy’s primary occupation soon became movies. He recalled, “The straw that broke the camel’s back was Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death. All I could think was, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

Titled The Boondock Saints, the script Duffy wrote concerned two Irish brothers who embark on a spiritual crusade to cleanse Boston of “evil men”, putting a flamboyant FBI agent on their trail. Duffy recalls, “The idea for the script was just borne out of poverty and frustration. Me and my brother living in Hollywood in this freaking crackhouse, apartment vandalized and his truck broken into, and just living in shit. Getting frustrated and wondering why no one ever does anything about this, and the police just have no real control over it. We had that fantasy. You know who broke into your apartment, and you see that guy in the halls, and you just want to take a baseball bat to his head, but something stops you. I think we had that question in our heads of, ‘What if something didn’t?’”

A friend named Chris Binder who’d gotten a job as an assistant at New Line Cinema made sure The Boondock Saints was passed up the food chain. The heat around Duffy and his writing sample began to build; producer Robert Fried dropped by Sloan’s to meet him. In February 1997, the William Morris Agency took Duffy on as a client. Within a month, they’d inked a $500,000 deal for Duffy to write two original screenplays for Paramount Pictures. That got the attention of Harvey Weinstein, chairman of Miramax Films. Two weeks after the Paramount deal – while in town for the Academy Awards – Weinstein put in an appearance at Duffy’s workplace. Weinstein stated, “I loved the script that he wrote. Then he told me all the ideas for other films that he had, and I said, ‘A guy who thinks like this won’t be around on a one-shot deal.’ The proof is in the words. I read a lot of scripts that get near Boondock Saints but that don’t close the deal. They’re imitations. They’re mechanical. These characters come from Troy Duffy’s soul.”

In a deal celebrated in newspapers around the globe, Weinstein purchased The Boondock Saints for the following terms: $300,000 for Duffy’s script, $150,000 for Duffy to make his directorial debut. The film would carry a budget of $15 million. Duffy’s band The Brood would produce the music. Duffy would retain casting approval and final cut over the film. Last but not least, Weinstein agreed to buy J. Sloan’s outright and split ownership of the bar with his new discovery. No sooner than Duffy was throwing a backyard barbecue to celebrate, Mark Wahlberg dropped by to discuss starring in the movie. Jake Busey, Jerry O’Connell, Billy Zane, Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum and Emilio Estevez were among the actors who showed up at Sloan’s to hold court with Duffy.

Over at Miramax, it was hoped The Boondock Saints would follow the blueprint established by Pulp Fiction and followed by Cop Land: edgy, character driven crime dramas with roles so rich that name actors would waive their salaries for the chance to participate. Duffy had written the nutty FBI agent with Jim Carrey in mind. When the superstar comic passed, Miramax suggested Bill Murray, Mike Myers or Sylvester Stallone. Duffy countered with Patrick Swayze. When the studio proposed making an offer to Brad Pitt to play one of the title characters, Duffy shot that idea down too, reportedly telling friends he didn’t think much of Pitt’s Irish accent in The Devil’s Own. Duffy rejected Matt Damon for not being gritty enough. In private, he called Keanu Reeves a “punk” and Ethan Hawke “a talentless fool.”

Ewan McGregor was interested enough in The Boondock Saints to take a meeting with Duffy. Tony Montana – a co-manager of The Brood, who was shooting a documentary about the Troy Duffy phenomenon – remembered, “Troy thought he could go out, meet with Ewan and get drunk, have a Scottish-Irish love affair, as he called it, and sign him lickety-split. That’s what he said. So he went to New York, and when he came back, things got very quiet. It turned out that they had a bad meeting, got into an argument over the death penalty, and Ewan wasn’t interested. And at that time, Ewan was really one of Miramax’s rising stars.” Unable to lock a cast, Duffy found it harder to get Weinstein on the phone. In November 1997, the studio notified Duffy’s agents that they would not be producing The Boondock Saints.

Duffy recalls, “I told them I’ll jibe with them on every other domain. If you want to cut my budget, if you want to film half of it in Toronto and half in Boston, I’ll jibe with you everywhere except when it comes to casting. So they said, ‘Well, Troy, we just can’t deal with that.’ ” Duffy was permitted to keep his writing fee, but potential buyers were on the hook to reimburse Miramax $700,000 for development costs, plus the $150,000 they’d promised for Duffy to direct. Producer Robert Fried mused, “Troy was very raw and outspoken, and it hurt him. When actors met with him, he didn’t always sound like a polished filmmaker, and it put some people off. But that’s part of what makes such an original. He’s not fake – he’s the real thing.”

Riding to the rescue was Elie Samaha, a former nightclub owner whose Franchise Pictures had carved out a niche bankrolling the pet projects of major stars – Bruce Willis (The Whole Nine Yards), John Travolta (Battlefield Earth), Kevin Costner (3000 Miles To Graceland) – that no one was else wanted to finance. After attaching Sean Patrick Flanery and Jon Bon Jovi to the title roles, Duffy met with Willem Dafoe in April 1998 at the actor’s experimental theater company in New York. As soon as Dafoe signed on to play the FBI agent and Franchise had a name actor they could use to sell the picture, The Boondock Saints commenced shooting August 1998 in Toronto on a budget of $6 million (Norman Reedus became available and was cast in Bon Jovi’s place.)

The München Fantasy Filmfest in Germany was where The Boondock Saints held its world premiere August 1999. It also played theaters in Denmark before a limited release January 2000 at five theaters in the United States. During its three-week run, The Boondock Saints grossed $30,471. But in what may have been the first viral marketing outbreak in Hollywood history, many who discovered the movie on DVD told a friend, who told another friend, who told more friends. Ultimately, more than 430,000 units were sold. The official website boasts a fan section (whose devout members refer to themselves as The Flock) and a store, which sells merchandise from Boondock Saints shot glasses to rosary beads. The DVD grew popular enough for Duffy to secure financing for Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Day, which commenced shooting October 2008 in Toronto. Peter Fonda, Judd Nelson and Julie Benz join Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus and Billy Connolly in the sequel.

At “The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time: Boondock Saints” on videogum, viewers submitted their opinions. H.F.G.: ”My ex-boyfriend loved this movie and tried to get me to watch it. I got half-way through this movie before I just looked at him and said ‘If you wanted to break-up with me, you should have said so.’” jess: “It is poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written, non-sensical, and stupid. I love violent movies AND stupid movies, for that matter. But Boondock Saints definitely represents one of those weird cultural phenomenon moments for me when everyone is saying, ‘You’re going to DIE this movie is so awesome.’ And then, it’s clearly not awesome. Not at all.” Manvnature: “I hate this movie. I hate the people who made it. I hate the cameras that were used to shoot it. I used to love Willem Dafoe. Then I saw this movie. I try not to judge people too much for their personal artistic taste, but I definitely use this film as a litmus test. If you like it, our paths shant cross again.”

Talking Boondock Saints in an interview with attrition.org, Duffy declared, “Yes, it has become a ‘cult’ film. Do you know what that is? It’s simple. A cult flick is a film that Hollywood missed. They made a mistake, plain and simple. After people’s love of the film is expressed the number one comment I hear is, ‘Why wasn’t this in theaters?’ I had my industry screenings a few weeks after Columbine occurred, when the president was forming judiciary committees against violent film. Studios were pulling back and Boondocks was black listed. If anybody had the nuts, we could have seen exactly what this movie could have done in theaters. But, fuck it. I have received mail from fans all over the world. The raw fact is, Boondocks hit the public and they loved it … I am sure in my heart that what happened here happened the way it was supposed to. I love this film. I am proud of this film.”

Opinion
If you let it slip that you’ve never actually seen The Boondock Saints and somebody gets in our face to demand that you watch it, these are the steps to follow: 1) Change the subject by asking them how they’re doing in school, 2) Remind them not to drink and drive, 3) Thank them for their recommendation, 4) Do not see the movie. The Boondock Saints is a gangsta rap demo recorded on film, a bro revenge fantasy that attempts to mix the symbolism of The Deer Hunter with the bullet worship of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The result is feature length masturbation with an admittedly intriguing hook, but wretched execution all the way down the line, from writing to casting to editing. It’s so unwatchable you’ll want to snap the DVD in half and send Guy Ritchie a note on Facebook, apologizing for anything bad you ever said about his movies.

Troy Duffy should be congratulated for getting The Boondock Saints made and mesmerizing the crowd the movie seems designed for: 15 to 22 year old bros who always wanted to hang a neon beer sign in their room. For the sober moviegoer, there’s nothing to recommend about the film at all. Unable or unwilling to involve us in anything dramatically, Duffy tries to compensate by going wildly over the top and making a cheeseball action farce: Ron Jeremy has a cameo, a cat is shot, Willem Dafoe performs in drag. If Duffy had followed the example of Jon Favreau, channeling his Hollywood frustrations into a script about his barstool buddies wondering whether they should get a life, it might not have been as funny as Swingers, but at least it would have been honest. The Boondock Saints is so high on its own supply that the sequel may be the only picture with any chance of topping it as the worst ever made.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Hollywood’s Suddenly Drunk on a Bartender’s Idea”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 14, 1997

“The Two Faces of Hollywood”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 10, 1998

“Back Behind the Bar”. Patrick Goldstein, the Los Angeles Times. April 13, 1998

“Boondock Saints”. Amy Finch, the Boston Phoenix. November 2, 1998

Overnight (2003), directed by Brian Mark Smith & Tony Montana