Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

Lords of Dogtown (2005)
Written by Stacy Peralta and Catherine Hardwicke (uncredited)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
Produced by Linson Films/ Indelible Pictures
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In Venice Beach, California of 1975, three local teens converge on the ruins of the Pacific Ocean Park. Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk) — perhaps the greatest skateboarder anyone’s ever seen — lives under the strict watch of his father (Julio Oscar Mechoso). Stacy Peralta (John Robinson) wears a wristwatch, the only member of the clique holding down a day job. Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) is a hyperactive goofball whose single mother (Rebecca DeMornay) has an even tougher time holding it together than he does. “The P.O.P.” is so fiercely protected that not even the youngsters are allowed in the water until their elders issue their approval.

At the nearby Zephyr Surf Shop — run by surfer Skip Engblom (Heath Ledger) more like a members only club than a business — the introduction of the urethane wheel offers skateboards far more radical maneuverability. Skip assembles a skateboarding team featuring Tony, Jay and eventually Stacy, who’ve mastered revolutionary new skateboarding techniques by sneaking into backyards and practicing in dried out swimming pools. Team Zephyr propels skateboarding to a lifestyle nationwide and attracts big league sponsors to the various kids, but fame and money fracture the relationships between the lords of Dogtown.

Who Made It?
Stacy Peralta grew up in Ocean View, a middle class area of Mar Vista, California. After rising to fame alongside Tony Alva on the skateboarding circuit, he formed Powell Peralta Skateboards in 1978. Peralta lasted a semester at Santa Monica College. By 1984 he was making videos to help promote his company’s products and skateboarding team: the Bones Brigade, which featured Tony Hawk. Peralta branched off into TV in the 1990s and began writing screenplays, but it was a Spin Magazine cover story in March 1999 that put Peralta and his buds back in the spotlight, tracing the explosion of freestyle skating to their Venice Beach crew of the 1970s.

Producers John and Art Linson optioned the magazine story, but as they obtained the necessary life rights from the participants, Peralta was the lone holdout. Rather than hoping Hollywood got their story right, Peralta secured full financing from Vans and directed a critically acclaimed documentary on the phenomenon: Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). Its success compelled the Linsons to hire Peralta to pen a screenplay for their big budget version, and also convinced Sony Pictures to distribute it. After several potential directors came and went, Peralta suggested Catherine Hardwicke — the production designer and Venice resident who’d just made her directorial debut with the gritty teen drama Thirteen — to direct.

How’d They Do It?
Stacy Peralta pinned the birth of freestyle skating to the Venice Beach area where he grew up. “Back in the ’70s, it was the only place with an urban mix of surfing and skating. You’d go to San Diego and you’d have avocado groves. Here you had liquor stores and people getting high under the pier.” In the 1970s, Peralta helped propel skateboarding globally as an athlete, then a business owner. His interest in filmmaking began in 1984. When a crew he’d hired to shoot a skateboarding video for Powell Peralta Skateboards proved a bit too contemptuous of the product, Peralta started making videos with his childhood bud Craig Stecyk.

Peralta continued, “In 1990, my company became really successful — $30 million a year, 115 employees. But I was getting more and more opportunities in Hollywood. I felt it was turning into a hamster wheel, so I left skateboarding to work in TV.” He cranked out a half-dozen screenplays, but when a Spin Magazine cover story by Greg Beato titled “The Lords of Dogtown” hit newsstands in March 1999, Hollywood came looking for Peralta. Producer John Linson had grown up in Santa Monica and felt the article “really hit a nerve”. He was working for Fox, where his father Art Linson — producer of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Untouchables and Fight Club — had a deal.

The Linsons optioned story rights from Greg Beato and secured life rights from Jay Adams, Skip Engblom, Craig Stecyk and Tony Alva. Stacy Peralta held out. “When Hollywood got to the story before any of us did — it really knocked me out. I decided to tell the real story before somebody else screwed it up, so in March 2000, I started making the documentary.” Co-written with Craig Stecyk, Peralta had a rough cut of Dogtown and Z-Boys ready to submit to the Sundance Film Festival by October. The documentary — featuring present day interviews with Team Zephyr, vintage 8mm film footage and narration by Sean Penn — was the hit of the festival when screened in January 2001.

Peralta had withheld signing away his life rights to the Linsons for the opportunity to be involved in the writing of their script. The success of Dogtown and Z-Boys gave him that chance. Peralta admitted, “I’ve been a professional athlete, I’ve directed films, I’ve run a company with 150 employees, and nothing compares to writing a screenplay. Just the second I think I know what I’m doing, the rug gets pulled out and I have no idea what I’m doing. Because there are so many problems to solve, and especially in a thing like this where there is an ensemble. Every character has to balance off each other, and every time you solve one problem, you knock that squirrel head down, and six more pop up.”

With David Fincher, the Linsons and their Indelible Pictures producing and Senator International financing, it was announced that rock/rap buffoon Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit would be making his directorial debut with Lords of Dogtown. Despite being a protégé of Fincher’s, as the budget rose, Durst’s paper thin directing resume forced him out. In January 2003, it was announced that David Fincher was stepping in as director, with Sony Pictures distributing. Peralta recalled, “I don’t want to sound lofty, but the documentary was an immense help to the studio because they could see visually what the movie was going to look like, what the characters looked like, what the music looked like.”

While screenwriter Roger Avary huddled with Fincher rewriting the script, the director of Seven and Fight Club made plans to reconstruct a full-scale version of Pacific Ocean Park in Mexico. A budget of at least $70 million started looking too rich for Senator’s taste, and by August 2003, Fincher dropped out as director. Doug Liman and Jonas Akerlund were mentioned as replacements. Peralta admitted, “My fear of the whole movie from Day 1 was it would be juvenile. Or it would be a macho Jerry Bruckheimer film, and wouldn’t be the character film I thought it should be. In the wrong hands, it could’ve been sap.” He suggested a production designer who’d just made her directorial debut with an ode to teenage angst titled Thirteen.

Texas native Catherine Hardwicke had graduated the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in architecture, but took the advice of her professors and looked to more creative fields for her career. “I went to UCLA Film School in the late ’80s and started making my own movies, which I loved. I made little short films but, since I had an undergraduate degree in architecture, people said to me, ‘Hey why don’t you production design my film?’ So that’s how I made my living. In between jobs, I would write screenplays and do budgets and storyboards and try to get my movies made but none of them happened until Thirteen.” In October 2003, it was announced that Hardwicke’s sophomore feature film would be Lords of Dogtown.

Hardwicke recalled, “David was imagining doing it as a much bigger budget movie because he mostly does really big budget movies. Thirteen was a very low budget movie, so I said, ‘Oh no, I think I can do it for a really low budget.’ They were more amenable to that because I think the studio knew what was found to be true, that there wasn’t going to be a giant audience for this.” Hardwicke went back to the original draft by Stacy Peralta, adding her own touches to his script. These included inserting more girls into the Dogtown scene and fleshing out the domestic lives of the characters. She also wrote Tony Alva’s sister Kathy — who’d been romantically involved with both Stacy and Jay — into the story.

Hardwicke drew inspiration from three films in particular. “I watched A Woman Under the Influence, Mean Streets and Five Easy Pieces. I confess, I haven’t even seen Kids since it came out. It’s funny, because I’m the exact opposite of many of my favorite filmmakers. Richard Linklater, for example — he’ll watch a film over and over again, seeing it 10 times and talking about it, and then referencing it in one of his movies. He’ll reference other films and bits of pop culture extensively — and that makes for incredible movies. But I tend to see things about once, and then, though it’s sunk in somewhere in my consciousness, don’t think about it very carefully when I’m actually in production. I just try to think about the best way to tell the story.”

On a budget of $25 million, shooting commenced April 2004 in Imperial Beach, California, where production designer Chris Gorak recreated the ruins of Pacific Ocean Park. Filming shifted to Venice Beach, where during a rehearsal, Hardwicke would suffer a serious fall into an empty pool, one of three incidents in which ambulances were called to the set. According to Hardwicke, that paled to her experience on the 1986 skateboard flick Thrashin’. “We had 11 kids leave in ambulances! So skateboarding can be dangerous. There’s a scene where they’re trying pools for the first time, and they hit their heads. Everybody laughs, but I know how much it hurts. All the skaters, they had no sympathy for me. Even the nice ones. ‘So you know what it feels like.’ I earned my stripes.”

Hitting theaters June 2005 in the United States, Lords of Dogtown received mixed reviews. Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Hardwicke’s film doesn’t have a lot of plot to go around, but Lords of Dogtown works best when it seems like it’s not working at all.” Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: “There are times when even a director’s worst impulses aren’t enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke’s heavy-handed storytelling.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Although Catherine Hardwicke, the director of Lords of Dogtown, has a good sense for the period and does what she can with her actors, we’ve seen the originals, and these aren’t the originals.”

Lords of Dogtown underwhelmed at the box office with $11.2 million in the United States and $2.1 million overseas, but Stacy Peralta and others involved in the film had few complaints. “When all of us were growing up during the Dogtown days, surfing Bay Street and skateboarding Bicknell Hill and the local school playgrounds, we were always being told by outsiders, especially East Coasters, that there was no culture in Los Angeles. It was felt that L.A. was a cultural wasteland. Lords of Dogtown is a testament to how wrong they all were. There was a culture out here. The problem was that it was unrecognizable at the time because it was a new form of urban culture. It was something people hadn’t yet seen.”

Should I Care?
If you’ve ever dreamed of seeing the Dogtown scene — or any skateboarding scene — lavishly restaged as a major motion picture, it’s hard to imagine a much better recreation than the one Stacy Peralta and Catherine Hardwicke labored over for Lords of Dogtown. Cinematographer Elliot Davis evokes Star Wars in the action scenes, with freestyle skaters swooping through a concrete gully like X-Wing fighters zooming through the Death Star. The problem is that even the most radical carves get pretty boring after two minutes, and in attempting to not make a cheesy movie, the filmmakers plumb forgot to make a movie.

Lords of Dogtown plays like two hours of outtakes that were deemed too tedious to make the cut of an actual film. Character, dialogue and atmosphere are so inert that when the credits ran, I didn’t even recall seeing certain actors in the movie. The exception is Heath Ledger, swaggering his way through scenes with all the sobriety of Jim Morrison. The rest of the cast turns in passable impressions of American youth we’re led to believe desperately yearn to escape, but if the intention was to accurately document the Dogtown scene for future generations, Peralta accomplished that and more with Dogtown and Z-Boys. The limp Hollywood version can’t help but be anything but the limp Hollywood version.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Surf, Skate Culture in Sony Sights” By Marc Graser/ Jonathan Bing. Variety, 23 January 2003

“Beyond Dogtown” By Dennis Romero. Los Angeles City Beat, 17 June 2004

“The Z-Boys Are Back In Town” By Rachel Abramowitz. The Los Angeles Times, 20 March 2005

“Recounting Skateboarding’s Upstart Days” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 23 May 2005

“The Original Lords of Dogtown” By Fred Topel. Movieweb, 31 May 2005

“Wheels, Reinvented” By Matthew Hays. The Montreal Mirror, 2 June 2005

Behind the Scenes: Lords of Dogtown. Compiled by Catherine Hardwicke. Concrete Wave Editions (2005)

“Even Sweeter The Second Time Around” By Nancy Hendrickson. Moviemaker, 3 February 2007

“Catherine Hardwicke Interview” By Daniel Robert Epstein. UGO.com

The Namesake (2007)
Screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Directed by Mira Nair
Produced by Mirabai Films/ Cine Mosaic
Running time: 122 minutes

So, What’s This About?
En route by train from Calcutta to Dungarpur in the year 1974, Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) is pried away from Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat by a passenger who implores the bookworm to see the world while he’s young and free. Three years later, Ashoke returns from New York, where he’s earning a PH.d in fiber optics. He participates in a family arranged marriage to a spirited classical singer named Ashima (Tabu), who accepts because she likes Ashoke’s shoes. Uprooted to suburban New York — where gas is available 24 hours a day, but she misses her family — Ashima bares a son, who Ashoke blesses with the “pet name” of his favorite writer: Gogol.

At the age of 4, their son makes the unconventional choice of going by his pet name in America, but years later, on the verge of entering Yale, Gogol (Kal Penn) rejects his “paranoid, suicidal, friendless, depressed” poet namesake and reverts to a variation on his “good name”: Nick. A family vacation to India and a visit to the Taj Mahal convince Gogol to major in architecture. He later introduces his parents to his very loving, very blonde girlfriend (Jacinda Barrett), but a sudden death in the family pulls Gogol closer to his Bengali roots. He marries a Bengali in New York — the heady Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson) — but only faces more questions about his cultural identity.

Who Made It?
Born in London, raised in Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College and three M.A.’s and her PH.d (in Renaissance Studies) from Boston University. Her first book — the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies — was published in 1999. On its way to becoming a bestseller, New York Magazine named it the Book of the Year and Lahiri became the first writer of Asian descent to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her first novel — The Namesake — arrived in 2003. After reading it by chance on a flight from New York to India, filmmaker Mira Nair optioned the novel, putting two other projects aside to direct a film adaptation.

Mira Nair attended Delhi University to study sociology, but soon became active in political theater. Attending Harvard, her focus shifted to photography and finally, filmmaking. Her 1979 Harvard thesis — Jama Masjid Street Journal — documented Muslim family life in Delhi. A critically acclaimed feature film debut — Salaam Bombay! (1988) — earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Moving between features and documentaries, Nair scored a critical and commercial success with the low budget Monsoon Wedding in 2001. The Namesake reunited her with producer Lydia Dean Pilcher — founder of Cine Mosaic — and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, author of three of Nair’s previous films.

How’d They Do It?
A note Jhumpa Lahiri wrote to herself in 1997 during one of her visits to extended family in Calcutta would form the basis for her debut novel, The Namesake. Lahiri recalled, “The names we have — we think they’re so much about who we are and that they are the one word that exists that represents us, and yet, we don’t choose them. They’re from our parents. And I knew that Bengalis loved to name children after artists and writers. I literally wrote down on a piece of paper: a boy named Gogol.” Working on the novel for the next six years, Lahiri researched Russian author Nikolai Gogol and train wrecks, but relied mostly on experiences she’d made during her stays in India.

Published to great acclaim in 2003, Mira Nair read The Namesake on a flight from New York to India six months after purchasing the novel. “I was committed making two other films — they were already financed and everything — when I read The Namesake by chance on a plane. At first it was really being inspired by grief: I was in mourning for a parent I had lost — my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me — and burying her in the snow of New York when she was an African woman was so shocking and so devastating, and also the first time in my life to be confronted with the finality of loss. I felt Jhumpa really distilled this and like I had found a sister or someone who understood exactly what I was going through.”

Nair continued, “But then as I got more involved with it, it was obviously not your classic reductive immigrant story of the mail-order bride who comes from the dirt poor to the shiny sparkling new world. None of those stories do justice to the complexities of our lives, of our parents and us and so on. And I have to get visually engaged or inspired and both these cities, New York and Calcutta, I know so well, and I have lived in that state between them for so long. What I love in filmmaking in general is the circus of life and that subject matter just gave me so much, so many places to go.” Arriving in Jodhpur to shoot the finale of Vanity Fair, Nair phoned her agent and was told that the film rights to The Namesake were available.

A week later, Nair was back in New York to sit with Jhumpa Lahiri and discuss her vision for The Namesake. Adapting a screenplay, Nair turned to Sooni Taraporevala, who’d written Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala with the director. The screenwriter recalled, “The vital thing, I think, is that Mira and I connected with the emotional landscape. On both levels. I connected with Gogol because I too studied in America, and, when I came back after six years, my parents didn’t really recognize me. And I connected with the parents, because, well, I’m one myself now. It’s a story that reaches out to all the generations, and I think this adaptation came at a time I was ready for it, when I could completely relate to all of the characters.”

With Mira Nair in New York corresponding with the Mumbai-based Sooni Taraporevala via email in March 2004, a first draft was knocked out in “an insane 11 days” according to the screenwriter. Though Nair’s agent at Creative Artists Agency — Bart Walker — initially pushed for a script they could present to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Nair opted to work with Taraporevala through six drafts and take the necessary time to discover the world of The Namesake. The director revealed, “One of the first things I asked Jhumpa to do was to invite me home to her family. And I photographed their house and also photographed their photograph album. A lot of the fashion, a lot of the kind of ideas of what the parents will wear and so on would emerge from these pictures.”

Producer Lydia Dean Pilcher arrived on a budget of $9.6 million and split financing three ways: Ronnie Screwvala of Bombay-based UTV Motion Pictures, Taka Ichise of Tokyo-based Entertainment Farm and Fox Searchlight Pictures each invested $3.2 million in financing. Fox Searchlight was interested in distributing the picture worldwide, but Nair added, “I felt with The Namesake that I needed an Indian investor who was invested in it in the beginning so that I would have somebody homegrown who would then exploit this film — even though it’s not going to be made like a Bollywood film, or like a commercial Indian film in any way — but I want somebody on the turf there who knows the systems and who can be invested enough in it to give me a really substantial distribution.”

Konkona Sen Sharma was initially cast in the role of Ashima, but when filming was pushed back, the actress had to drop out. Two weeks before cameras rolled, the National Film Award winning Tabu was cast instead, making her Hollywood debut. Nair added, “Irrfan Khan who plays Ashoke was someone I discovered when he was 18 years old and I was what, 29, in a basement in the National School of Drama, where he was a student. And he came out and worked with me in my first film Salaam Bombay! and since then, I’ve longed to give him a part that deserves his extraordinary, extraordinary talent.” Interested in casting an Indian actor in the role of Gogol, Nair settled on Abhishek Bachchan.

Kal Penn had been given a copy of The Namesake by his Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle co-star John Cho. Penn recalled, “As soon as I read it we talked about trying to get the rights. We placed calls to our respective lawyers and in the interim said we don’t know anybody other than Mira Nair who could do justice to the intimacy of the novel. And then we got the phone call back saying, ‘You can’t have the rights. Mira Nair beat you to it.’” Undeterred, Penn wrote Nair a letter, crediting Mississippi Masala for his pursuit of acting. He received an invitation to fly to Calcutta to audition. With the lobbying efforts of Nair’s 13-year-old son as a bonus, Penn won the part. A 28-day shooting schedule would commence March 2005 in New York, followed by 11 days in Kolkata, India.

The Namesake screened at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals in September 2006 before opening in the United States, India, France and the U.K. in March 2007. Critics were effusive with praise. Toddy Burton, The Austin Chronicle: “Reminiscent of Jim Sheridan’s masterly In America, The Namesake delivers such a tactile presence that it’s difficult not to leave feeling as if you’ve just struggled through a New York winter, attended an Indian wedding, and returned from a Calcutta holiday.” Dennis Lim, The Los Angeles Times: “Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri’s novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.”

Earning $13.5 million at the U.S. box office and adding $6.5 million overseas, The Namesake became another gem in Mira Nair’s growing filmography. The director stated, “I made this film to take families to because as a mother of a 15-year-old, it is an insult to my intelligence those family films. There’s no film I can take my whole family to and enjoy — it’s very rare. So I wanted to make a film where I could take my grandparents and my teenager, and we could all get something from it that wouldn’t insult us, that would actually jam us and take us somewhere. So it would be seen like that as a film for the family.”

Should I Care?
I’ve never read Jhumpa Lahiri’s bestseller, but if The Namesake isn’t one of the richest, most deeply affecting adaptations of print to film in recent memory, I can’t imagine what is. Powered by the same currents that make a good novel so rewarding, Mira Nair’s jewel of a film offers no instant gratification — no plot twists, no special effects, no jokes — but through the narrative skills and confidence of a filmmaker firing on all cylinders, is crafted into a great story of both intimacy and scope. Spanning 25 years and two cities on opposite ends of the globe, The Namesake is one of the best ‘70s films of the 21st century, touching The Godfather Part II and Five Easy Pieces with varying degrees of subtle brilliance.

An embarrassment of technical riches — cinematographer Frederick Elmes, editor Allyson Johnson and composer Nitin Sawhney deserved Oscar nominations for their textured work — what’s magnificent about The Namesake is the atmosphere, sensuality and mystique that drip from the film. Watching this, it’s clear Warner Bros. knew what they were doing offering Mira Nair the fourth Harry Potter installment: in addition to drawing excellent performances from actors both young and old, she understands the magic of film. Growing up outside the U.S., it’s Nair — along with Peter Weir, Alfonso Cuarón and Hayao Miyazaki, among a growing list — who seem to be making the most original, thought provoking and grown up films today.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Catching Up With Pulitzer Prize Winner Jhumpa Lahiri” By Matthew Sloan. Poets & Writers, October 2003

“Nair’s The Namesake: A Life Between Two Worlds” NPR, 9 March 2007

“Mira Nair: Q&A” By Ben Walters. Time Out London, 27 March 2007

“Godmothers of The Namesake” By Craig Lambert. Harvard Magazine, March 2007

“From Salaam Bombay to Little Zizou” Rediff News, April 2007

“The Anatomy of The Namesake with Mira Nair” The Namesake. 20th Century Fox (2007)

“Mira Nair Interview, The Namesake” By Sheila Roberts. Movies Online

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

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?
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the school year at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiations. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose older sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her brother. The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation.

One of the 8th grade pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around looking for something else to do with all the other kids. This includes Slater (Rory Cochrane), a stoner whose access to party favors makes him a VIP presence at whatever party is in the offing, and the beatnik Michelle (Milla Jovovich) who steals two bronze statues to paint them in the likeness of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his social circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Born in Houston and raised in the town of Huntsville, Richard Linklater would drop out of local Sam Houston State University and take work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico instead of finishing college. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began making short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature film that Linklater shot in the summer of 1989 for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals two years later. This got the attention of producer Jim Jacks, who – with partner Sean Daniel – had a development deal with Universal Pictures. Linklater recalled, “I told him I had this teenage rock and roll film that I felt was my next movie.”

Richard Linklater added, “I’d always had this idea for a strange high school film. I remember being a high school freshman in Huntsville and driving around all night with three or four guys in a Le Mans, listening to an eight-track tape of ZZ Top’s ‘Fandango’. Eight-tracks never ended; a song would get quiet, you would hear a click, and then it would pick back up. So I wanted the film to start with a close-up shot of ‘Fandango’ sliding into the eight-track player and then have a whole movie in this car, meeting people who drove up next to you, going through the drive-through, getting out and getting beer – basically always in and around the car. But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.”

To assemble a cast, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel brought in Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met virtually every up and coming actor and actress during the auditions in Los Angeles. Phillips recalled, “Vince Vaughn was there, but he was competing with Cole and Ben, and he didn’t get it. Neither did Claire Danes, whom Rick Linklater and I loved but was more of an Eastern-school type. And poor Ashley Judd – she never even got to meet Rick. Then I get to Austin, and that’s when I met Renée Zellweger. I went, ‘Isn’t this girl interesting?’ When Rick and I saw her together, we read her and thought, ‘Ahh, man! Too bad that everybody’s set, because she would have been perfect.’ So we gave her that teeny part in the parking lot.” Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay convinced him to audition for a part; the 15-year-old ended up cast as Mitch.

Due to graduation ceremonies at the University of Texas, Don Phillips was making due with a room at the Hyatt and hanging out in the bar. A part-time waiter named Matthew McConaughey strolled in with his girlfriend. When the bartender mentioned that Phillips was in town to produce a movie, McConaughey went over to introduce himself. He’d appeared in a music video and a beer commercial, but had never acted in a movie. After drinking and talking golf with Phillips for hours, the casting director proposed McConaughey come in and read for the role of Wooderson. Linklater recalled, “I thought he was too good-looking. Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy. I thought, ‘Okay, don’t cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?’

After Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel had convinced Universal that Richard Linklater might be another George Lucas and Dazed and Confused could be the next American Graffiti, shooting commenced July 1992 in Austin on a budget of $6.9 million. In terms of style, Linklater wanted to make a movie that felt like it had actually been shot in 1976. He recalled, “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

With a 38 day shooting schedule, cast and crew worked on the fly. Linklater recalled, “I wanted a montage sequence at the beer bust to give the essence of the party. But it’s hard to script the essence of a party, and if you don’t have it in the script, you don’t have it on the shooting schedule. So we had about thirty minutes and a couple of cameras to get it. We cranked up the music, asked people to move, and followed them around. I’d run up to Rory Cochrane and whisper, ‘Okay, you’re trying to score some weed off somebody,’ and he’d go with it and we’d film.” When a scripted crush between Tony and Cynthia failed to spark much chemistry between Anthony Rapp and Marissa Ribisi, the director suggested maybe her character should go for Wooderson instead. Ribisi recalled, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is genius.’ He’s everything she’s against. She’s this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she’s into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She’s so smitten she can’t speak.”

One of Richard Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The real battle came over the soundtrack. In need of a $300,000 advance to begin obtaining the clearances for the songs he’d selected, the studio suggested that Linklater instead consider using contemporary bands singing cover versions. This was seen as a way to get the movie exposure on MTV. Linklater recalled, “At that moment we didn’t have any money, and I still needed it to finish the film. There was a threat that I’d have to start cutting songs. Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ alone cost $80,000. Finally the studio said, ‘Okay, we’ll come up with the money, but only if you give up all your royalties from the soundtrack.’ I said, ‘Fine. Just don’t screw with my movie. You can rob me, take everything I have. Just don’t kill my family.’”

When released September 1993 in the U.S., critics were unequivocal in their praise. Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “Dazed and Confused is one of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It’s smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed. The movie is structured as a period ensemble piece about a specific group of teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. But it also functions as a timeless social study of high school character types and a disclosure of commonplace abuses of power in this social system.” Peter Ranier, the Los Angeles Times: “It’s a highly enjoyable spree that doesn’t add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don’t necessarily want it to add up to anything – that’s part of its charm.” Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “No film whose plot involves the quest for Aerosmith tickets can take itself too seriously. So Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.”

Unfortunately, Dazed and Confused had its box office fate sealed months earlier, when it went before test audiences in Los Angeles. Linklater recalled, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.” Never expanding beyond 214 theaters in the U.S., Dazed and Confused scored only $7.9 million at the box office. Over time though – as the film’s reputation among college students blossomed – sales of VHS tapes and DVDs would ultimately top $30 million. Two volumes of the soundtrack – Dazed and Confused and Even More Dazed and Confused – have sold more than two million copies.

Looking back on Dazed and Confused ten years later, Richard Linklater contrasted the experience to the one he had working independently on Slacker. “It was probably the biggest leap I’ve ever made. Like doing a film where someone else paid for it. It was technically my third film, I had done one film completely alone, then I did one film with a crew of about six or seven and that’s a big leap there, to communicate with a crew and throw your ideas out there. This was a bigger leap even still, like how you make it within the system with a really tight schedule with all the previews and all that stuff. A lot of people fall apart at that level. I think the studio was sick of me and didn’t like me by the end, but I was pretty happy to get out alive with the film that I wanted to make. If I had listened to them and done everything that they wanted, we wouldn’t be talking today, I’ll put it that way.”

Should I Care?
Gramercy Pictures – the short lived distributor launched in 1993 as a venture between Universal Pictures and PolyGram – had apparently exhausted their marketing ideas by the time they arrived on the High Times approach, issuing posters with taglines like “See It with a Bud”. The MPAA objected to the drug references and ordered Gramercy make alterations. Richard Linklater – who had no input into the campaign – lamented, ”They were marketing it for dumb teenagers, but what are you gonna do?” Ultimately, this is a movie that stoners just don’t deserve. Half Baked, they deserve. Dazed and Confused on the other hand is a film whose token toker ends up with maybe three lines of dialogue, tops. Instead of jokes, what Linklater seems to be going for is a brutally honest reevaluation of 18 hours of his childhood. Banned substances play a role, but so do music, clothes, healthy doses cynicism and the relationships recalled by someone who remembers being there.

While the script digs no more than skin deep into its characters, when it comes to casting, Dazed and Confused is a master class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, but Linklater gets terrific performances from both the pros (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Parker Posey, Cole Hauser) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this madness. Linklater’s take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the experience is alive and fun, enabling us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth. Dazed and Confused feels like one of the most truthful expositions on high school ever made. This is Linklater’s best film.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Smoke Got In Their Eyes” By Jessica Shaw. Entertainment Weekly, 8 October 1993

“The Spirit of ‘76” By John Spong. Texas Monthly, October 2003

“Making Dazed – Catch You Later Dude, Ten Years Later” By Emily Christianson. Film Radar, 14 September 2005

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

What the *&#! Is This About?
Teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes to find himself sleeping in the middle of a road overlooking “Middlesex, Virginia.” He bicycles back to his suburban home, where Donnie’s older sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) stuns their father (Holmes Osborne) with news that she’s voting for Michael Dukakis. Brother and sister start bickering and she urges Donnie to explain to their mom (Mary McDonnell) why he’s stopped taking his medication. Mom later questions her sullen boy about where it is he goes at night. “What happened to my son? I don’t recognize this person today.” That night, a supernatural voice wakes Donnie and lures him outside. There he encounters a six-foot tall figure wearing a demonic-looking rabbit costume.

Answering to the name “Frank,” the rabbit shares some additional information with Donnie: “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. That is when the world will end.” While Donnie is out wandering Middlesex in his sleep, a jet engine plummets out of the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Federal officials are at a loss to explain this; they can’t seem to locate the plane that the engine belongs to. At school, Donnie’s English teacher Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) matches him with a bright transfer student (Jena Malone) whom Donnie becomes smitten with. There is no love lost between Donnie and a gym instructor (Beth Grant) who forces her class to watch the cheesy self-help videos of a local guru named Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze).

Cunningham preaches that all human decisions fall on a lifeline between love and fear. Donnie refuses to believe that life can be lumped into two categories at the expense of everything else. Meanwhile, his nocturnal encounters with Frank continue. When Donnie asks the rabbit where he comes from, Frank replies, “Do you believe in time travel?” Donnie’s science teacher (Noah Wyle) gives him a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by a neighborhood spinster the kids call Grandma Death. The book appears to corroborate the mind bending visions Donnie has been having. His psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) believes that the boy may be a paranoid schizophrenic. Donnie keeps marking the days until the end of the world.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
A native of Midlothian, Virginia, Richard Kelly became interested in movies due to a music video that made an impression on him as a teenager in 1989: Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got A Gun,” directed by David Fincher. Accepted to USC four years later on an art scholarship, Kelly ultimately applied to and was accepted into the university’s popular film school. Graduating in 1997, he found work at a post-production house, but had bigger ambitions than 3-D animation. Kelly states, “I came out of film school and I was broke, so started writing. I set out to write something ambitious, personal, and nostalgic about the late ‘80s. I thought about a jet engine falling onto a house, and no one knowing where it came from – it seemed to represent a death knell for the Reagan era – and I built the story around that.”

The resulting script – Donnie Darko – was written in a six week period in late 1997. With the help of Kelly’s producing partner – an office temp at New Line Cinema named Sean McKittrick – the script was passed around and generated enough buzz to get Kelly representation by the powerful Creative Artists Agency. Meetings with potential buyers did not go so swell. Kelly recalls, “A lot of people were responding to the script, but when they heard I wanted to direct it, they were like, ‘No.’ It was, ‘This is a great writing sample. This is un-producible. Come rewrite Valentine.’ They wanted to me write 13 slasher films. ‘Great writing sample, come write I Know What You Did Last Summer 3.’ That kind of thing.”

Donnie Darko was dead for about a year, until Kelly and McKittrick heard that Jason Schwartzman was interested. McKittrick recalls, “And we finally just heard through the grapevine that Schwartzman wanted to do it. So we immediately called his agent and said well listen, if he wants to do this and we attach him, it’s going to get made. He just came off of Rushmore. Obviously, he is very talented. When Jason came aboard then out of nowhere Nancy Juvonen and Drew Barrymore – they were obsessed with Jason – they wanted to know what Jason was doing or what Jason was planning on doing, because they just thought he was great. So Sharon Sheinwold, Jason’s agent at UTA, sent the script over to Nancy, and Nancy read it and just flipped out for it.”

As producer Nancy Juvonen recalls, “I read the script that night, was riveted, and Drew read it the next day. The part of Karen Pomeroy was originally written for a 46-year-old woman, but she felt like a teacher with such passion and conviction to change the system that she must be younger, at an age where she still thought those changes could occur. So Richard quickly rewrote her as a 28-year-old character and we had our first piece of talent attached. By the end of the week we met with Richard Kelly and Sean McKittrick, his producing partner. They also brought along a guy named Adam Fields who was later asked to step aside from the project, although he took money and arguably a part of our souls with him upon his exit. During that meeting we were convinced Rich should direct his own story, and from there we set about getting financing.”

Adam Fields had netted $4.5 million from Paris-based Pandora Films – a specialty division of Gaylord Entertainment – but Barrymore’s schedule necessitated Kelly be shooting in three months, by July 2000. The accelerated time frame came into conflict with Schwartzman’s availability, and a frantic two week search for a new lead commenced. 19-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal won the role of Donnie Darko. In no particular order, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle, Mary McDonnell, Patrick Swayze and Katharine Ross joined the cast. Kelly stated, “All of the other actors, because of Drew mostly, felt comfortable working with a first-time director. She kind of stepped up to the plate. It takes one actor to break the ice or to RSVP to the party, then everyone feels comfortable RSVPing.”

In the hunt for a director of photography, A-list cinematographers were rejected due to budgetary restraints, while promising novices from music video were passed over by Pandora due to the inexperience that Kelly was already bringing to the table. Going through resumes, Sean McKittrick found journeyman Steven Poster, who stood out because he’d shot Someone to Watch Over Me for director Ridley Scott. The producer commented, “Steven’s a brilliant guy and he’s one of the main reasons why the movie looks like it does. Right now he’s actually the President of the ASC … He’s just kind of like this living working legend within the cinematography community and he just did a brilliant job. He’s the nicest, sweetest guy you’ll ever meet in your life. He was just a Godsend. Sometimes things just completely work out and that was the biggest of them all.”

As Richard Kelly put it, Donnie Darko was equally blessed when it came to hiring a composer. “I was very lucky that I didn’t have a crew forced upon me by the financiers. A lot of times they force you to hire people because they want the music to sound like music from ‘that’ movie. But with $4.5 million, you can’t afford Thomas Newman or Danny Elfman or any of these guys. You’ve got to just go find somebody who is young and hungry, and really talented. Nancy Juvonen’s brother recommended Mike Andrews. He’s from San Diego, actually. Gary Jules, who did the ‘Mad World’ cover with him, is also from San Diego. Jim Juvonen, he’s really good at knowing who’s the shit before anyone else knows who’s the shit. He said, ‘This is the guy. This guy is a genius; you’ve got to work with this guy. No one knows about him.”

Filmed in the Los Angeles area – where Loyola High School stood in for Donnie’s alma mater – in 28 days, a hastily edited cut was playing at the Sundance Film Festival just a few months later, in January 2001. The traditional lack of special effects films at the festival and the picture’s buzz made the screening much anticipated. But it was greeted with a mixed reaction; gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells reported the mood “subdued (if mostly respectable)”. Donnie Darko left Park City without a distributor. Kelly mused, “Sundance is a dangerous kind of marketplace because if you don’t strike at the right time and you don’t get an initial interest in your film, all of a sudden, it’s over. People like to dismiss it as something that doesn’t work. So after Sundance we sort of deemed it as a failure, an impressive, interesting failure, but as an experimental film that just doesn’t work.”

Production executive Aaron Ryder of financing company Newmarket recalled, “We saw the movie and we really liked it. Everybody thought, ‘It’s a good film but it’s going to be hard to market. It’s too long and it’s got problems.’ So we didn’t buy it at Sundance, nobody did. At this time we hadn’t yet released Memento. However our aspirations were to build a distribution company so we put an offer on it saying that we needed to talk about re-cutting the film with the director as it was well over two hours. We spent six months editing, allowing Richard to have the cut he was proud of.” Through a service deal with IFC Films, Newmarket agreed to distribute and promote Donnie Darko. In turn, Kelly was obligated to cut 10 minutes and make do with ‘80s pop tunes that were less expensive.

Released October 2001 in the U.S., Donnie Darko notched plenty of positive reviews. J. Hoberman, the Village Voice: “The events of September 11 have rendered most movies inconsequential; the heartbreaking Donnie Darko, by contrast, feels weirdly consoling. Period piece though it is, Kelly’s high-school gothic seems perfectly attuned to the present moment. This would be a splendid debut under any circumstances; released for Halloween 2001, it has uncanny gravitas.” Jan Stuart, the Los Angeles Times: “If you let it be what it is, Donnie Darko will knock you flat.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “Donnie Darko is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it’s fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that’s about human beings and not images.”

The critical raves fell on deaf ears. Donnie Darko failed to expand beyond 58 screens in the U.S., where it grossed $515,375. Aaron Ryder commented on the film’s handling, “We put it out at the wrong time as it was just after 9/11. We thought we could make an alternative Halloween movie, which is a bad idea. I think that we learned a lesson. If you have a film starring a young protagonist or young people in it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that film will attract a younger audience. The core audience for Donnie Darko is the same as Memento, which is an older audience. We probably should have released the film in February. There were just too many films out at the time and people weren’t going to the movies at that time … Everybody loved that movie and they think, ‘Wow, he’s such a good filmmaker, but boy did they fuck up the distribution of that movie.’”

In January 2002, Phil Hartman – co-owner of the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s East Village – was looking for a movie to program at midnight screenings. He stated his criteria: “You need something that is a visual trip, that works on repeated viewings and is open to reinterpretations, something that you can watch in altered states.” His son recommended Donnie Darko. Far from a blockbuster – filling on average half the theater’s 100 seats – the late night engagement ran for 28 straight months. Revival houses in Washington and Boston caught on and when the film opened in England that fall, it was a modest box office hit, grossing $2.5 million USD. The Mike Andrews/ Gary Jules cover of “Mad World” even cracked the U.K. top ten pop charts. When released on DVD, Donnie Darko would sell $15 million in units.

Popular demand prompted Newmarket to approach Richard Kelly for a “new and improved” version of Donnie Darko. An investment of $290,000 enabled the filmmaker to restore 20 minutes of footage, substitute new musical cues, touch up the sound mix and add chapter headings from The Philosophy of Time Travel, which were inserted to enhance the science fiction aspects. Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut opened in limited theatrical release July 2004. Kelly mused, “The first release just wasn’t meant to be. I feel like the film was meant to fail before it could succeed. It was meant to be this cult item before it could be more mainstream. There are always people who want Donnie Darko to be the cult film, the one they discovered. If there’s any way this film could ever cross over a bit more to the mainstream it would just allow me to continue to make these kinds of films. I think any time a counterculture piece of art infiltrates the mainstream, that’s a good thing.”

Why Should I Care?
Of all the ways you can approach Donnie Darko – as a portrait of teenage angst, a psychological horror movie, a nostalgic trip through the ’80s, a science fiction tale concerning time travel, or a satire of all of the above – what’s most exciting about Richard Kelly’s debut is how the audience ends up being empowered to give the movie its form and definition. It doesn’t barrel its way down any one genre or crib from other filmmakers for its inspiration. This is a movie truly in a class of its own. The screenplay is teeming with wonderful details – a Bush/Dukakis debate, a dance troupe called Sparkle Motion, a debate over The Smurfs – that may be part of a larger puzzle, or might not mean anything at all.

The writing features much sharp wit – laced with barbs toward the public school system – while engaging all sorts of cool ideas about time travel and alternate universes in the process. An alternate title might have been It’s A Miserable Life, as the novel approach could be summed up as It’s A Wonderful Life in reverse. The cast is stronger than any first time director could possibly hope to ask for, particularly the Gyllenhaals, Patrick Swayze, and Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonnell as Donnie’s sympathetic parents. Steven Poster lends the cinematography a vivid, dreamlike feel, while the original music by Michael Andrews compliments that mood as well. I doubt that Kelly has any better fucking idea what’s going on in this movie than anyone watching for the first time will, but your guess will be at least as good as the person sitting next to you.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Interview with Sean McKittrick” By Chadwick Clough. Script P.I.M.P., 19 July 2002

“Richard Kelly” By Jason Korsner. BBC, 21 October 2002

“Interview with Nancy Juvonen” Richard-Kelly.net, 25 May 2004

“Getting Inside Donnie Darko with Writer/Director Richard Kelly” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 27 May 2004

“The Resurrection of Donnie Darko” By Robert Levine, 18 July 2004

“How Donnie Darko Refused To Die” By Nathan Lee. The New York Sun, 20 July 2004

“Richard Kelly’s Second Chance” By Jennifer Soong. Moviemaker, 21 June 2004

“Donnie Darko The Director’s Cut: The Strange Afterlife of an Indie Cult Film” By Adam Burnett. indieWIRE, 22 July 2004

The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook. By Genevieve Jolliffe, Chris Jones. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004

What the *&#! Is This About?
In 1980 – following the expulsion by Fidel Castro of 125,000 Cubans, many less than desirable – U.S. immigration officials question Tony Montana (Al Pacino). His bid for asylum falls short when the scar on his cheek and the prison tattoo on his hand brand him less than desirable. Tony explodes. “What do you want me to do, stay there and do nothing? I’m no fucking criminal, man. I’m no puta or thief. I’m Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba. And I want my fucking human rights, now! Just like the president Jimmy Carter say. Okay?” Tony is interned at Freedomtown with the other Cuban refugees, including his best friend Manny (Steven Bauer), who secures them green cards by agreeing to kill a Castro lackey who arrives at the camp for their new benefactor. A job at a sandwich stand in Miami awaits, but Tony has his sights set on bigger fish.

Tony & Manny’s ragged but effective work as drug couriers gain the respect of their humble boss, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). With cash in his pocket, Tony attempts to reconcile with his mother (Miriam Colon) and his adoring kid sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who Tony harbors intense feelings for. He also sets Manny straight about America. “This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Coveting Lopez’s glassy eyed girlfriend Elvira (Michelle Pfeiifer), Tony takes the initiative on a business trip to Bolivia and negotiates a $75 million cocaine deal with the powerful Sosa (Paul Shenar). Lopez warns his protégé that the guys who last in their business are the ones who keep a low profile, but Tony has one ambition: “The world, chico. And everything in it.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The genesis of Scarface was with Al Pacino. In 1974, the actor was performing in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire on fascism that the playwright had modeled on the American gangster movie, particularly the 1932 classic Scarface, starring Paul Muni. Pacino recalled, “So I was one day walking along Sunset Boulevard of all places and there was – I believe it’s the Tiffany Theater now – and it was playing on a double bill with something else, I forget. And it was Scarface, and it was a few of us, so I said, well why don’t we just go and take a look at it. And we went in and it was, you know, an astounding movie, astounding. And the performance of Paul Muni’s was astounding and inspiring. And I thought after that, that I just wanted to, yeah, I wanted to imitate him, I wanted to do something and was inspired by that performance. And I called Marty Bregman, who then put together some people and they started working on developing this as a film.”

Producer Martin Bregman – Pacino’s former manager and producer of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon – has also claimed credit for the idea. “The reason I did Scarface - or how it came to my attention – was I was watching the old Paul Muni film about three o’clock one morning when I couldn’t sleep … and it occurred to me that a film like that, a film like Scarface – the rise and fall of an American gangster – had not been done, certainly had not been done recently. Hadn’t been done since Scarface.” To direct, Bregman approached Brian DePalma, who in 1981 was in post-production on Blow Out. Collaborating with playwright David Rabe, DePalma attempted to retain the setting of the original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and adapted by Ben Hecht. When the results failed to meet with anyone’s satisfaction, DePalma dropped out and Bregman turned to director Sidney Lumet.

Academy Award winning screenwriter Oliver Stone – uninterested in remakes – had already turned down an offer from Bregman to adapt a script. He changed his tune once Sidney Lumet came aboard and Stone heard his take. “It was not until Sidney Lumet came into the picture – I think shortly thereafter – we had another conversation and he told me Sidney Lumet was very anxious to do the movie and wanted to do it Cuban, Miami, 1980, ’81, the Mariel Boat Lift. I started into the research of Miami. I went to Miami extensively and I got to know both sides. I got to know the law enforcement side, the attorney generals, the attorney’s office, the gangster elements through the lawyers, the ex-gangster elements. And then eventually I wanted more. I plunged into the Caribbean. I went down to Bimini. On another trip – a separate trip – I went to Ecuador and to Bolivia.”

Stone’s self-confessed “drug period” – beginning during his adaptation of Conan the Barbarian, which was written on cocaine and downers, and continuing through The Hand, which Stone also directed – was in full swing during his research on the drug cartels. Ultimately, the screenwriter absconded to Paris for six months in December 1981, went cold turkey and wrote Scarface. Sidney Lumet – who had hoped to explore the geopolitical ramifications of the cocaine trade, including what he suspected was the involvement of the CIA – didn’t care for what Stone turned in. He commented, “I didn’t want to do it on just a gangster or cop level. As it stood, it was a comic strip.” Stone maintained, “Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.” When Lumet dropped out, the producer went back to his first choice for director.

Brian DePalma recalled, “When I had first started with David Rabe, we had more or less tried to start with the original Scarface. Italian. Chicago. The script that came to me ultimately that Bregman had developed with Stone was completely different. Nothing that I had ever envisioned, and that’s why I liked it so much, ‘cause it was a whole new way of approaching this material. And those elements were in the original script. I liked the material specifically because to me it was sort of like a modern metaphor for The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where cocaine becomes gold and it’s kind of the American dream gone crazy, where you have this product that can turn into millions of dollars but in the process you destroy your life. And it’s sort of like the capitalist dream gone bizarre and berserk and is crazy as you get and completely self-destructive.”

After an ingénue named Michelle Pfeiffer flew to New York on her own dime and gave an intense audition with Pacino, both Bregman and DePalma were unanimous that she would play Elvira. Pacino was holding out for a leading lady with a bit more experience: Glenn Close. Bregman recalled, “I had a long, old relationship with Al, and I told him he didn’t know what the hell he was thinking. I told him he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. I said this character is partly a courtesan, and she has to be half a hooker. Glenn Close is many things, but she is not half a hooker.” In addition to warming up to Pfeiffer, Pacino worked with dialect coach Robert Eastson and co-star Steven Bauer – who was born in Cuba – to nail his character’s accent. Pacino became so immersed, he asked director of photography John Alonzo to speak to him only in Spanish throughout the shoot.

Under a budget of $21.5 million, Scarface was scheduled to roll September 1982 in Miami. The bullet riddled city did not celebrate. Fearing that the movie was set to portray Cuban Americans in a negative light, Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. introduced a resolution to City Council to deny permits to the production. The effort failed, but two weeks into filming, threats of demonstrations forced Bregman to shut down and move to Southern California. Costume designer Patricia Norris recalled, “I did think they’d have killed us if we stayed in Miami. There were members of the community who hated us because they thought we were doing a pro-Castro movie, which was absurd, but their anger was very serious. And then there were real drug people around, Colombians who came on the set. The day a fellow sat down in the chair next to me, and crossed his legs, and I saw a gun strapped to his ankle, I knew I wanted to get back to Los Angeles.”

The internment camp sequence was shot underneath the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways in downtown L.A. The sandwich stand where Tony & Manny work was also shot in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo. Tony & Elvira’s wedding was filmed at a 35-acre mansion in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, while Sosa’s Bolivian hacienda was also shot in Montecito. Many of the elaborate interiors were staged on the Universal Studios lot. To snag the Miami Beach exteriors, DePalma snuck back into town with a small crew for two weeks in April 1983. The director later stated, “It’s difficult enough to make a movie without adding more complications. Afterward, the governor and the mayor were upset, realizing that the company would have provided a lot of jobs in Florida. When we went back, there were no problems.” The delays added two months and $5 million to the budget.

When Scarface went before the MPAA, it returned with an X rating four times. Efforts by DePalma to trim the violence had no effect on the rating, which would have dissuaded exhibitors in many parts of the U.S. from booking the film. In early November 1983, Bregman called for a hearing, in which the producer joined DePalma, Universal distribution chief Robert Rehme and Broward County law enforcement official Nick Navarro to plead their case to the ratings board. DePalma maintained to Playboy at the time, “I didn’t take anything out except for the arm that was chainsawed off. You don’t really see it, just about twelve frames. I took it out, anyway. I sent the censors four versions and kept taking things out, and finally I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ and all four versions got an X for ‘cumulative violence,’ whatever that is. So I figured, ‘Hey, if we’re getting an X, let’s go with our first version.’” By a vote of 17-3, Scarface received an R rating and was clear to open December 1983 across the U.S.

Critics didn’t condemn Scarface, not completely. The New York Times (Vincent Canby) and Time Magazine (Richard Corliss) posted rave reviews. But the boo birds came out in equal force. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “The whole feeling of the movie is limp. This may be the only action picture that turns into an allegory of impotence.” Walter Goodman, in a New York Times op-ed: “Brian DePalma evidently believed that enough gore and mayhem could save a plate of cold fried bananas fifty years after it has been served up piping hot.” Dave Kehr, the Chicago Reader: “Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.”

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert flew into debate over Scarface, with Siskel turning thumbs down over what he perceived to be lack of character development. Ebert: “You think there’s some rule that says a guy has to be good at the beginning and bad at the end?” Siskel: “No, I say it’s more interesting.” Ebert: “He’s a criminal when he gets off the boat …” Siskel: “That’s exactly right, an uninteresting criminal.” Ebert: “He has a criminal’s version of the American dream, which is get a lot of money, build a big house and marry this blonde. And then he falls into drugs and because of his own fatal flaws it all comes crashing down, so it’s the story of a guy who’s bad at the beginning and bad in the middle and worse at the end. What’s wrong with that?” Siskel: “Who cares? I didn’t care about him in the slightest. His life meant nothing to me.” Ebert: “There are a lot of people like this guy, I think.” Siskel: “All of the famous gangster films are not about louses who got lousier. Some of them are about interesting characters who got lousier.”

Scarface grossed a subpar $45.4 million in the U.S. and $20.4 million overseas. But instead of going away, audiences remained fixated on Tony Montana. Al Pacino mused, “You make a lot of pictures, and you realize some don’t have it. I knew there was a pulse to this picture; I knew it was beating. And then I kept getting residuals from the movie, kept getting checks. And wherever I was filming, in Europe, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Tony Montana.’ In Israel the Israelis came up to me and wanted to talk about Scarface. The Palestinians wanted to talk about Scarface.” Due to popular demand, Universal has granted more than forty licenses for merchandisers in the U.S. to crank out Tony Montana T-shirts, action figures, belt buckles or money clips. When Universal announced the Scarface Two-Disc Anniversary Edition DVD in 2003, advance orders swelled to 2 million, the highest of any title in the studio’s library.

Tony Montana has even been resurrected as a video game – Scarface: The World Is Yours – allowing xBox and Wii users to rampage through Miami. Oliver Stone summed up the enduring appeal of the film by stating, “A lot of young businessmen quote me the dialogue and when I ask them why they remember it, they say, ‘It’s exactly like my business.’ Apparently, the gangster ethic hit on some of the business ethics going on in this country. Scarface has probably got me more free champagne than any film I’ve ever worked on. I’ve bumped into Spanish and Jamaican gangsters throughout the Caribbean and South America and gay gangsters in Paris, who bought me champagne all night long. I’ve even read reports in newspapers where gangsters have modeled themselves on Tony Montana.”

For the film’s 20th anniversary, Def Jam met with Brian DePalma to propose Scarface be re-released, updating the Giorgio Moroder score with a hip-hop soundtrack. Bregman and Pacino had given a blessing to the idea of a rap music reboot. DePalma scotched it. The director stated, “If this is the ‘masterpiece’ you say, leave it alone. I fought them tooth and nail and was the odd man out, not an unusual place for me. I have final cut, so that stopped them dead.” Def Jam pressed a tribute CD instead, compiling tracks by Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G. and others, loosely connected to the gangster classic. DePalma noted, “The hip-hop community was seeing all around them what was happening in the film: that cocaine makes you feel all powerful, and you surround yourself with entourages and palaces and outrageous clothes and women, and you lose all touch with reality; you become numb. Ultimately you divorce yourself from the people you knew in the past. You ultimately explode, you perish because of your own excess.”

Why Should I Care?
With characters exiting the movie almost as tissue paper thin as they were when they came in, only someone with a Tony Montana hoodie would say this picture is perfect. But one of the reasons it’s become enormously popular all over the world is how well it plays regardless of its audience. Arthouse, grindhouse, bootleg VHS, mall crowd or country club set, no matter what your setting, there is something to marvel over in Scarface, undeniably one of the greatest shoot ‘em ups of all time, as well as one of the most hilarious satires of that same excess. The visual palette of the picture is unmatched, with the finest possible recreations of early ‘80s Miami high life, courtesy production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. When it comes to Technicolor violence, the film is gruesome in a way that few Hollywood action movies are, with the possible exception of The Untouchables, also directed by DePalma.

What makes Scarface so potent isn’t its carnage or how well it was photographed, but the penetrating script by Oliver Stone. Bursting with lively one-liners – “Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy!” – and street corner sagacity about the nature of power, the film is full of color and excitement at the beginning before slowly taking a turn toward darker territory. Written as a swan song to cocaine, Scarface is the personal best screenplay Stone has ever cranked out of his own typewriter. Second best might be Wall Street, another warning about the blind alleys of capitalism that instead of being taken as a cautionary tale has become a training video for would-be entrepreneurs who completely miss the point. If Al Pacino’s lunatic raving about banking, trust and pelicans while immersed in a giant bubble bath isn’t the centerpiece of a great black comedy, I don’t know what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Al Pacino: A Life on the Wire. By Andrew Yule. Dutton Adult (1991)

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

“The Healing of Scarface” By Elaine Dutka, Los Angeles Times, 17 September 2003

“A Foul Mouth With a Following; 20 Years Later, Pacino’s Scarface Resonates With a Young Audience” By Bernard Weinraub. New York Times, 23 September 2003

Scarface (Platinum Edition). Universal Home Video (2006)

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America. By Ken Tucker. St. Martin’s Griffin (2008)

Synopsis
Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) – a peddler of bootleg tapes who lives with his family in the housing projects on the north side of Dublin – is approached by his friends Outspan (Glen Hansard, guitar) and Derek (Kenneth McCluskey, bass) to take over management of their band. “You had the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album before anyone had ever heard of ‘em. And you were the first to realise they were shite,” Outspan tells him. Jimmy accepts and announces they’re going to be playing “Dublin soul.” His musical aspirations are ribbed by Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. (Colm Meaney), but Jimmy’s newspaper ad brings every musical wanna-be in the neighborhood to the Rabbitte home for auditions. Dean (Félim Gormley, sax), Billy (Dick Massey, drums), Steven (Michael Aherne, piano) and a bus conductor Jimmy heard belting out drunken tunes at a wedding named Declan Cuffe (Andrew Strong) join the band.

Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the most beautiful girl in town, and her friends (Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are enlisted as backup singers. The final piece becomes a trumpet player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy). Old enough to be their dad, Joey wins over the kids by claiming to have jammed with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Otis Redding to The Beatles. Joey christens their band The Commitments. Tensions arise when Declan develops a star sized ego, the girls seduce Joey the Lips one at a time, and Billy quits before he kills their lead singer. Jimmy replaces the drummer with a skinhead named Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), a psycho who earns a promotion from the band’s doorman. As The Commitments build a local following, Joey promises he can deliver Wilson Pickett – in town performing – to jam with them at their next gig. Stardom appears inevitable.

Production history
In the mid-1980s Roddy Doyle was teaching secondary school (high school) in the Kilbarrack neighborhood of north Dublin, where he’d grown up. He’d written a satiric novel called Your Granny’s A Hunger Striker that publishers he’d submitted it to didn’t even bother opening. Kicking around ideas for a better book, Doyle recalled, “I decided I wanted to write about the type of kids I taught and had become charmed by, really, and whose company I enjoyed, who are typical of the type of place I came from. I didn’t want it to be a school story. I wanted to see them a few years after they would leave school, still young, but adult. Forming a band just struck me as being a good excuse to bring them together. It could have been a football team because I’m also very fond of football, but I can’t see football being funny – or amusing on paper. Also, it would have been restricted to one sex.”

Launching what he dubbed King Farouk Press in 1987, Doyle printed 3,000 copies of The Commitments, dispersed them to local bookstores and built a cult following in Dublin. London publishing firm Heinemann picked up the rights and published the novel to critical and commercial success. It was so well received that interest in a movie began to filter in. Doyle recalls, “They said they loved the book and the first thing they do before your arse is warm on the seat is to tell you how to pull it apart and give it a happy ending. I was kind of frightened by this. I’d two questions I put to would-be producers and Lynda Myles was the only one to answer them correctly. Would the film have stars, because it didn’t seem to make sense to have stars in a film about unknown people? She agreed. I asked then would the language remain intact; not necessarily the expletives but the rhythm of the language, would it be Dublin? And she said yeah, of course.”

London based producer Lynda Myles recalls, “One of the things that was very important to him was he would be allowed to write the script. He wasn’t interested in signing away the rights. And what we agreed was we would start working with him and take it as far as we could go – given that he had never written a screenplay before.” While Doyle kept his day job teaching in Kilbarrack, Myles and her partner Roger Randall Cutler coached the novelist through the finer art of screenplay adaptation, instructing Doyle how to condense scenes. Their patience produced a completed draft, but Cutler admitted, “It somehow was just a wee bit short of the experience of reading the novel. One wanted to have a screenplay that did that and more, if you like.” The producers passed the book to British screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for help.

Dick Clement recalls, “Roger had shown it to us in London. We came back to Los Angeles. We thought we had money to develop movies, had lunch with Alan Parker just to sort of talk about what we were all doing, which we did fairly often. He said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ We called Roger Randall Cutler and said, ‘Now, this will make it more expensive, and it will probably become Alan’s movie, not yours, but at the end of it you’ll have an Alan Parker movie, which is pretty tempting. It took some convincing that this was actually for real. I mean, you can’t blame him, because these things don’t normally happen that way.” In terms of their rewrite, Ian La Frenias added, “It wasn’t a punch-up job. It needed to be rethought to just as a film. And I think Roddy – there was all that wonderful dialogue and characters – but it just had to be retold in a form that made a more dramatic and that more actually happened and there were bigger beats and the growth and the development of the band and their characters.”

Alan Parker – director of Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Mississippi Burning – remembers, “The first time I heard about Roddy Doyle’s book was Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais – who are old friends of mine and are quite wonderful writers – they gave me the book. And I loved the book, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a very slim volume. And I found myself laughing out loud. It’s a wonderful book because it’s mostly dialogue and all of the descriptions really are in the beauty of language, and if you’re laughing out loud at a book then you think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe the movie’d be all right.’” With the principals of Beacon Communications – Armyan Bernstein and Tom Rosenberg – locking down financing, Parker worked with Clement & La Frenais on the screenplay adaptation. Once a script was ready, casting convened in Dublin.

Andrew Strong (Deco) was discovered after his father – vocalist Rob Strong – was hired to give Parker an idea of what Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett were going to sound like interpreted by an Irish soul band. Strong was 16 when he was offered the part. Robert Arkins was an accomplished trumpet player and frontman of his own band, but was ultimately was offered the part of Jimmy Rabbitte. Of the ten leads, only Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie) and Johnny Murphy (Joey the Lips) had acted before. After five weeks of rehearsals, a 53-day shooting schedule commenced in Dublin. Parker recalls, “Barrytown – which is the mythical place where Roddy has set his book – obviously was based on Kilbarrack, where Roddy was a schoolteacher. And I just found it cinematically a little dull, Kilbarrack, I have to admit.” Parker ended up shooting the film in 44 different locations spread throughout Dublin.

Opening August 1991, critics in the U.S. did anything but applaud The Commitments. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “As in his earlier Fame, Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Parker never promises us a profound human drama here, and the band is so good that maybe music was the best way to go. But I was left with sort of an empty feeling, as if after the characters were developed into believable people, Parker couldn’t find anywhere to go with them.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Parker gives Dublin’s poverty the same misplaced gloss he brought to the Japanese refugee camps in Come See the Paradise. And the predictable way in which the band’s nine men and three women argue about music, sex and fame robs the story of urgency.”

The Commitments only managed $14.9 million at the box office in the U.S., and while the film swept the British Academy Awards in 1992, it notched only one Oscar nomination, for Best Editing (Gerry Hambling). A decade after its release, Parker mused, “This film really was quite inexpensive to make for its time. I think it cost $12 million and bear in mind that all the music was done within that budget, and recorded and everything. And it’s the kind of film, I suppose it’s the music which gives it its chance of success as a movie, particularly in the United States, which is, you know, audiences in the States are not really very tolerant of films that are not filmed in the American language. The Irish accent could have been difficult; I don’t think it’s that difficult to follow.” In addition to winning many fans on home video, The Commitments did become a sensation as a two-volume soundtrack album. By 2008, the CDs had sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the soundtrack has enabled Kenneth McCluskey and Dick Massey to tour the world with a band calling themselves The Stars of The Commitments. Glen Hansard – who performs and records with his band The Frames – returned to acting in Once (2007) and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová. Soundtrack sales remained brisk enough to get the attention of Miramax Films. In 2000, the studio flew playwright Warren Leight to Dublin to sound out a sequel. But according to McCluskey, “Miramax bought the rights to make a sequel, they commissioned a script writer and he came to Dublin. We got him very drunk and sent him back to New York with a hangover, but nothing ever happened.” Roddy Doyle has maintained that he has no interest whatsoever in a Commitments reunion. “It’s a better story if they break up. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if they went on became the biggest band in the world.”

Opinion
The Commitments is one of those special movies that just hit at the right place and right time. Within a few short years, construction cranes and venture capital would have made a film about a working class band on the skids in Dublin laughable. But in either a stroke of genius, case of first timer’s luck, or both, the movie caught everyone involved at the peak of their creativity. The audience gets to experience lighting in a bottle in what is probably the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen featuring actors I’d never heard of. Roddy Doyle’s source material has a sharp ear for the vernacular of the north side of Dublin, but more importantly, contains a self-depreciating wit that slashes through the cheesy melodrama of the musical genre. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. – an absentee character in the novel – acts as a partial observer in the movie, bringing even greater doses of humor and vitality to the story.

Alan Parker belongs to a class of British directors whose commercials won lots of citations in the 1970s, but unlike most of his films, The Commitments is focused on its characters, its dialogue and its ideals as opposed to lighting effects or trick editing. And unlike a lot of shitty musicals (or worse, American Idol) the emphasis here isn’t on how music can transform you into a superstar, but on what music can do for your dignity. Music supervisor G. Marq Roswell is one of many who deserve credit along with Parker for the four-star soundtrack. The Commitments’ versions of “Mustang Sally”, “Slip Away” and “Try A Little Tenderness” have stood up against the original recordings by Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding. The amateur cast is equal parts energetic and natural, particularly Robert Arkins, whose self-conducted interviews in the tub should resonate with anyone who ever dreamed of rising above their surroundings.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle” By Karen Sbrockey. Interview Literary Review, Summer 1999

“When Roddy Met Trudy” By Ciaran Carty. Sunday Tribune, February 25, 2001

The Commitments. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2004)

Synopsis
As a new school year begins at Ridgemont High, six students are introduced. Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works at Perry’s Pizza in the mall. When a foxy looking stereo salesman gives her his card, Stacy’s friend Linda (Phoebe Cates) implores her to be aggressive. “You’re fifteen years old. I did it when I was thirteen. It’s no big thing, it’s only sex.” Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is assistant to the assistant manager of the movie theater and laments his pathetic social situation to his friend, smooth talking ticket scalper Mike Damone (Robert Romanus). Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) is a jock and Employee of the Month at “All America Burger.” He blows his cool with a customer, gets fired, and suffers the indignity of accepting work at “Captain Hook Fish ‘n Chips.” Stoner Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) rejects the concerns of his peers, declaring “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.”

On the first day of school, Spicoli runs afoul with his strict history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) by wandering in late for class. Their battle of wills continues all the way to the night of the prom, when Mr. Hand unveils a unique system for paying back students who waste his time. After Stacy loses her virginity to the stereo salesman in a baseball dugout, her phone calls to him go unreturned. Harboring a crush throughout the semester in biology class, Ratner works up the nerve to ask Stacy out; to his amazement, she says yes. Seeking dating advice, Ratner is given a five-step plan from Damone that culminates with, “When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on Side One of Led Zeppelin IV.” Too awkward to take their relationship to that level, Ratner stands by while Damone plies his charms on the lovesick Stacy.

Production history
Cameron Crowe launched his auspicious journalism career at the age of 15, writing articles on rock ‘n roll that ended up in Creem and Rolling Stone magazines. In the introduction to what would become his first and only novel in 1981, Crowe recounted, “For seven years I wrote articles for a youth culture magazine, and perhaps not a day went by when this term wasn’t used: ‘the kids.’ Editors assigned certain articles for ‘the kids.’ Music and film executives were constantly discussing whether a product appealed ‘to the kids.’ Rock stars spoke of commercial concessions made ‘for the kids.’ Kids were discussed as if they were some huge whale, to be harpooned and brought to shore. It began to fascinate me, the idea of The Kids. They were everywhere, standing on street corners in their Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts, in cars, in the 7-Eleven. Somehow this grand constituency controlled almost every adult’s fate, yet no adult really knew what it was nowadays – to be a kid.”

When Rolling Stone moved offices from L.A. to New York, a colleague named David Obst went to work for Simon & Schuster. Obst agreed to become Crowe’s publisher, suggesting that if his client really wanted to find out about “the kids,” he should go back to high school and put those experiences in a book. So in the fall of 1979, a 22-year-old Crowe moved in with his parents in San Diego and got permission from the principal of Clairemont High School to enroll as a student named Dave Cameron.”The object, I told him, was to write a book about real, contemporary life in high school.” Crowe’s friendships – or “research” – culminated in six characters: a middle class brother and sister, her sexually experienced best friend, a nerd, a music loving ticket scalper and a stoned surfer. At the end of the school year, Crowe approached his subjects and revealed he was writing a book. At the time, they were largely indifferent.

The president of Universal Pictures – Thom Mount - was familiar with Crowe’s articles and had a feeling his novel might be a modern day Catcher In The Rye. Before the book was even finished, he optioned the film rights. Fast Times At Ridgemont High: A True Story was published in October 1981 to mostly positive reviews and decent sales. Mount got Crowe together with producer Art Linson, who the writer had met during a visit to the set of American Hot Wax in 1975. “Art and Thom Mount decided that I would be the cheapest guy to adapt my own book. They gave me the job of writing the screenplay, figuring it probably would never get made or some other writer would come in. But, as time went on, they protected me, and I went through several drafts of that script, and I began to fall in love with screenwriting.”

Linson recalled the collaboration with Crowe. “He came to New York, and I tried to sort of supervise him writing the screenplay, because he had never written one before. But he did a fantastic job. Cameron was painstakingly into the detail of what he was trying to do. He took the slightest moments very seriously: how the kids look at each other, how they feel about each other.” Mount felt that he knew the perfect director for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Crowe recalls, “So we sent the script to David Lynch who read it in about a day or two and said, ‘Well, this is funny, not really my material.’” Linson remembered a thesis film by a 27-year-old AFI grad student named Amy Heckerling called Getting It Over With. Heckerling had been lined up to make her feature film debut with a youth comedy she’d written for MGM, but three weeks before shooting was set to begin, the studio changed its mind. Efforts by the rookie director to set it up someplace else had gone nowhere.

Heckerling recalled, “Art showed me Cameron’s script, and I really liked it and I told him various thoughts I had. Then he showed me the book, and I loved the book, and I really thought they had been doing a disservice to it. Cameron knew all these people, and in the book he’d recorded very accurately everything that was going on with them, and it was very funny because of that, whereas I felt like Universal were possibly trying to make more of a regular teen movie.” With Heckerling and Linson working alongside casting director Don Phillips, every up and coming actor read for roles: Ralph Macchio, Ally Sheedy, Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer, even Scott Baio. Sean Penn was also there and did not impress anyone with his initial reading. But Linson stated, “There was something special about Sean, you can always tell that in the room. ‘Maybe he’s not right for Spicoli, but he’s obviously great, let’s put him in something.’ But he made it known Spicoli was what he wanted to do. And so we went, ‘Fuck it.’”

On a budget of $4.5 million, Fast Times At Ridgemont High commenced an eight-week shooting schedule November 1981 around Los Angeles. The Sherman Oaks Galleria stood in for the mall, while the classroom scenes were shot over eight days at Van Nuys High School. Then there were the two sex scenes. Heckerling recalls, “I was angry about seeing so many movies with naked women and never seeing a naked guy. So when I shot the sex scene between Stacy and Damone in the poolhouse, I wanted it to be uncomfortable. She was naked, so I wanted to show the guy naked too. And the ratings board said, ‘You do that and you’ll get an X rating.’ I said, ‘How come you can see all these naked ladies in movies?’ And they said, ‘Because the female organ is not aggressive, but the male organ is.’ So what? Should we shoot it? Whatever. But I was a very cranky young lady, and the idea of compromising makes you crazy.”

As a release of August 1982 neared, Universal was far from high on Fast Times. Art Linson recalls, “Before this picture came out, the studio hated the picture. Let’s just, for the record: the studio thought the picture was going to bomb. We got an R rating – we almost got an X rating – they didn’t like the picture and in fact, right before it came out, they decided not to release it on the East Coast, and it took 400 theaters away because they didn’t want to have to spend the kind of advertising money to support the picture on the East Coast, ’cause they thought it was going to be a huge bomb. That’s the facts. Now, part of the reason for that is that they had an R-rated high school movie with, you know, masturbation, abortion, dope smoking, tough language – albeit funny – and they figured, first of all, kids under 17 might not be able to get in – although I never met one under 17 that didn’t see the picture – and I think they thought, ‘This is just going to be another one of those nasty little high school movies that wasn’t nice,’ like American Graffiti was nice.”

The reaction to Fast Times from critics was definitely not nice. Joe Baltake, Philadelphia City News: “The problem with Fast Times is that it has no central nervous system because the idea about an ‘undercover’ student has been eliminated. Without this device, the movie is merely a pointless expose. It is also singularly unfunny and curiously listless. Heckerling’s pacing is way off and uninspired, to say the least.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “It clunks to a halt now and then for some heartfelt, badly handled material about pregnancy and abortion. I suppose that’s Heckerling paying dues to some misconception of the women’s movement. But for the most part this movie just exploits its performers by trying to walk a tightrope between comedy and sexploitation.” Daily Variety: “The nice thing is that Crowe and director Amy Heckerling have provided something pleasant to observe in all of these characters though they really are sadly lacking in anything gripping.”

Cameron Crowe needed to get out of L.A. for a while. With a buddy in tow, he took a road trip to Arizona for the wedding of a fellow journalist and recalls, “I was really depressed because they sort of dumped the movie out. There were a few bad reviews that came out from the establishment press, and I just wanted to get out of town. I just wanted to drive across the country. We stopped in Arizona, and it was a Saturday night after the Friday the movie had come out and it was like, yeah, let’s just go by this theater that’s running it and see what it’s like. Let’s see what that empty theater will be like. Well, we drove by the theater, and it was packed. We went inside, and there were kids that had already seen the movie two or three times. They had checkerboard Vans like Sean Penn’s. They were talking like Sean Penn. People were laughing their ass off at stuff that I didn’t even know was funny.” Popular demand prompted Universal to expand the film to over 700 theaters its fourth week of release. The box office for Fast Times would total $27 million in the United States.

Looking back at Fast Times at Ridgemont High almost twenty years later, Heckerling mused, “I love the theme about these kids having to deal with sex and jobs and things that people twenty years older than them are still dealing with. They were pushed into such a grown-up world and they were still children basically. Everything was going too fast for them. It was about growing up too quickly and having to deal with these things at a very early age and how these kids pulled through it or didn’t pull through it.” Linson offered, “And again, everybody misjudging Cameron’s script, because it read so funny and light that when you get underneath it you got into the truth of it … it had some great edgy truth to it. So, I think that’s why the picture survived for so many years, because even today, people can see it fifteen years later or twenty years later and it’s still got that like, kind of edgy, like ‘whoa’.”

Opinion
Even the most crotchety critics of Fast Times would probably amend their 1982 reviews to admit how innocuous the movie plays today, while also allowing how exceptional the cast became (Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and in bit parts, Forest Whitaker, Anthony Edwards, Eric Stoltz and Nicolas Cage). But to stop there – as the film continues to win fans that weren’t even born when the movie was in theaters – would be sprinkling it with faint praise. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a masterpiece for one clear reason: because Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling infuse just about every scene with an honesty – laugh out loud, quirky, tender, brutal – that few movies trying to appeal to teenagers ever aspire to. Factor in those career defining moments from the cast, dialogue that’s come to define a generation and one classic moment after another and it’s difficult to overstate the impact the film continues to have for me.

Now, the soundtrack is a pretty ragged mix of the ‘70s rock (Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne) the producers felt “the kids” were still listening to and the New Wave (The Cars, The Go-Go’s, Oingo Boingo) that Heckerling saw coming; I still don’t think it’s a very intelligible playlist. But like all the great films, Fast Times offers something new with each viewing. The duels between Sean Penn and Ray Walston are like highlights from a great stoner comedy, but Heckerling and Jennifer Jason Leigh refuse to soft peddle the sex, opting for stark realism. Small details – like students sniffing fresh mimeographs – stand out as much as showstopper moments, like a topless Phoebe Cates rising out of a pool in one of the great fantasy sequences of all time. Hilarious. Smart. Cutting edge. Most impressive is how the filmmakers use Spicoli’s class clown to ultimately suggest there might be more to growing up than sex and consumerism.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Reliving Our Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. MCA/Universal Home Video. 1999

“Fast Times Strives Hard for the Right Teen Touches” By Dale Pollock. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1982

The Directors: Take Four. By Robert J. Emery. 2003

Sean Penn: His Life and Times. By Richard T. Kelly. 2006