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

Whip It (2009)
Directed by Drew Barrymore
Screenplay by Shauna Cross, based on her novel Derby Girl
Produced by Barry Mendel, Drew Barrymore
111 minutes

Whip It is like a Burt Reynolds redneck comedy spiked with female empowerment. In terms of consistency, it’s a brew that falls somewhere between The Longest Yard and Hooper, capturing the essence of Burt in the outtakes over the end credits and the realization that the people who made the movie had way more fun than the audience did watching it. A co-founder of the Los Angeles based Derby Dolls, screenwriter Shauna Cross amassed so much material that fellow scribe Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith compelled her to write about it. Cross pitched both a young adult book titled Derby Girl and a screenplay, which were optioned by Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen of Flower Films. Cross’s script nudged Barrymore into making her directorial debut. With Academy Award nominee Ellen Page attached to star, Mandate Pictures agreed to finance Whip It to the tune of $10 million.

Retaining the services of producer Barry Mendel, director of photography Robert Yeoman and editor Dylan Tichenor, Barrymore seems to have had the whimsy of Wes Anderson in her sights, but aiming for too many targets — sports comedy, high school comedy, mother/daughter comedy — she ends up hitting none. The compositions and set design are magnificent, but when it comes to writing about the misadventures of outcast teenage girls, Shauna Cross never gets around Diablo Cody’s Juno, which for better or worse, stood out from the pack, something Whip It never really manages. The consolation package includes the most talented cast any first time director could hope for. Set in the Lone Star State, proud Texans may be snake bit to realize that the picture was shot almost entirely in Michigan for tax breaks. In the end, setting the film in the 1970s might have given Whip It the glue it needed.

In the Texas Hill Country town of “Bodeen”, 18-year-old Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) takes the stage for a beauty pageant with radical blue highlights that her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) helped spike her hair with. The stunt upsets Bliss’s mother Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), a former beauty queen pushing her daughter to excel. While on a mother-daughter shopping trip in Austin, Bliss encounters three babes on wheels handing out flyers to an exhibition roller derby game. Bliss convinces Pash to sneak out with her to see the show. Her friend returns the favor by shoving Bliss into the arms of a young punk rock musician named Oliver (Landon Pigg). Once the show starts, Bliss finds new heroes in the tattooed, surly Hurl Scouts: Maggie Mayhem (Kristin Wiig), Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), Rosa Sparks (Eve) and Smashley Simpson (Drew Barrymore).

Speaking to Maggie after the show, Bliss is invited to do more than worship the Hurl Scouts by trying out for the team. Digging her old Barbie roller skates out of the attic, she begins training and on tryout day, impresses the team’s coach Razor (Andrew Wilson) with her speed. Adopting the name Babe Ruthless, Bliss discovers that bad attitudes are encouraged among her teammates but as a result, they’re consistently on the losing end of matches against the Holy Rollers and their sadistic captain Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis). Bliss refuses to change her can-do attitude and helps her team actually win a game. She keeps her roller derby activities secret from her mother and father (Daniel Stern) but as the Hurl Scouts head for the championship game, Bliss faces a dilemma when the beauty pageant that means so much to her mother falls on the same day.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 18,991 users: 73% for Whip It

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 68 for Whip It

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

Tess (1979)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski and John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Produced by Claude Berri
172 minutes

As a sum of its dialogue, casting, photography, editing and music, Roman Polanski’s screen version of the 1891 novel by Thomas Hardy tantalizes with how thrift of imperfection it seems. Once a passion of producer David O. Selznick — who wanted wife Jennifer Jones to play Tess — actress Sharon Tate handed the book to her husband two decades later. Dedicating the finished film to his slain wife, Polanski adapted the novel with Gérard Brach and tasked John Brownjohn to translate their script from French to English, tuning an ear to the Dorset dialect. In this expensive co-production between France’s Renn Productions and England’s Burrill Productions, Polanski cast in the title role 17-year-old Nastassia Kinski, the West German ingénue who Francis Coppola would call “the most beautiful woman in films today” when he cast her in One From the Heart a few years later.

Tess is worth viewing as a visual feast alone. Shot extensively during the “magic hour” of dusk by Geoffrey Unsworth (who died during production to be relieved by Ghislain Cloquet), the splendor of the landscape and the way sunlight reveals character is present in every frame. Much of the film’s success lies in the casting of Nastassia Kinski, who is on-screen much of the running time and exhibits an unusual power mostly foreign to actresses her age. What’s striking about Tess is the tender loving care Polanski takes to let scenes breathe, neither overwhelming the audience in period detail or racing through the events of the book. A whole world materializes in which an outsider struggles to find her place. Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, the playful yet majestic musical score by Philippe Sarde is a standout.

In rural Dorset of the late 19^th century, local girls assemble for their May dance. John Durbeyfield (John Collin) crosses paths with a new parson, who notifies the peasant that his research into local genealogy indicates the Durbeyfields descend from an old family, the d’Urbervilles. Though his ancestors have died off without any wealth, Durbeyfield and his wife (Rosemary Martin) dispatch their teenage daughter Tess (Nastassia Kinski) to call on a wealthy widow in the town of Trantridge who goes by the name d’Urberville. The farm girl encounters the widow’s playboy son Alec (Leigh Lawson) who takes a shine to Tess. Accepting a job on the property, she discovers the “d’Ubervilles” are not blood relatives at all but merely bought the name. Ultimately giving in to Alec’s salacious advances, she returns home bearing his illegitimate child.

When her child succumbs to illness and dies, Tess leaves home to take a job as a milkmaid. Just as her co-workers Izz (Suzanna Hamilton), Marian (Carolyn Pickles) and Retty (Caroline Embling) have, Tess falls in love with a young apprentice farmer named Angel Clare (Peter Firth). The son of a reverend, Angel is attracted to Tess’ earthy wisdom and announces to his family that he plans to marry the penniless girl. On their honeymoon, Tess reveals that she surrendered her maidenhood to a cousin and bore his child. Ruining her husband’s image of her, Tess is sent back to her destitute family while Angel leaves for Brazil to seek his fortune. Tess reunites with Izz to work on a farm owned by Alec d’Urberville. He offers to provide for Tess if she returns to him, but clinging to her pride, she chooses poverty instead. For a while.

Jeremy Richey’s ardor for Nastassja Kinski inspired him to name his blog Moon In the Gutter and in June 2009, he turned his attention to Tess.

This terrific behind the scenes article by Harlan Kennedy on the making of Tess appeared in the October 1979 issue of American Film.

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In the month of July, I take a look at films released in my very favorite film stock and aspect ratio: black & white in anamorphic. Unless they’re being financed with credit cards, movies are rarely shot like this anymore because they’re impossible to sell to television. Yet these dreams sneak onto Turner Classic Movies every now and again …

Hud (1963)
Directed by Martin Ritt
Screenplay by Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr., based on the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
Produced by Irving Ravetch, Martin Ritt
112 minutes

More of a chamber piece than a symphonic event, Martin Ritt’s lush adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s debut 1961 novel Horseman, Pass By is a finely tuned frontier opera, pitched against character, environment and morality rather than the stale conventions of the western genre. Screenwriter-producer Irving Ravetch adapted The Long, Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury with his wife Harriet Frank Jr. and pulled McMurtry’s novel off an airport paperback rack during a layover in Dallas. Along with Ritt and Paul Newman — his partners in Salem Productions — Ravetch sold Paramount on the project. Riffing off alternate titles suggested by McMurtry, the filmmakers selected Hud. Two weeks of location shooting would commence July 1962 in Amarillo, Texas while interiors and rear projection were shot on the Paramount lot in Hollywood over four weeks.

The remarkable thing about Hud is how grounded it is. The action is limited to a bar brawl, livestock quarantine and one character passing away. While changes were made to McMurtry’s novel — the role of the housekeeper was expanded and sexual tension heightened between her and Hud — the story feels natural as opposed to being hopped up with froth. It’s given an edge by Newman’s dedication to playing one of the screen’s great bad boys, an irredeemable bastard who starts out no-good and ends that way, without lessons or hugs. Elmer Bernstein’s musical score is sparse but powerful, relying on little more than a Spanish guitar, while nearly everyone else in the production received Academy Award nominations. Taking home richly deserved Oscars were Patricia Neal (Best Actress), Melvyn Douglas (Best Supporting Actor) and James Wong Howe (Best Cinematography).

As the sun rises in the Texas Panhandle, 17-year-old Lonnie Bannon (Brandon de Wilde) hitchhikes into town in search of his hell raising uncle Hud. Locating his uncle’s pink Cadillac parked outside the abode of a married woman, Lonnie rousts Hud Bannon (Paul Newman) with news that his grandfather needs to see him. Escaping just as the woman’s husband makes it home, Hud and Lonnie return to the family ranch, where live-in housekeeper Alma Brown (Patricia Neal) cares for the men. Hud’s father Homer Bannon (Melvyn Douglas) takes the boys out to inspect a heifer that’s been found dead. Homer is barely able to conceal contempt for his only surviving son — who’s more focused on his nightlife than the condition of their livestock — and remains watchful when young Lonnie starts spending more time with Hud.

Homer calls in a government vet to inspect the dead heifer and is instructed to start gathering his herd; if tests come back positive for foot and mouth disease, every animal on the ranch will have to be liquidated, even if it means a catastrophic financial loss for the Bannons. Hud suggests selling the herd before the results come back, but his father’s principles prevent him from even considering such a thing. Feeling embittered, Hud starts looking for legal means to wrest control of the ranch out from under the old man. He also turns his charm on Alma, a self-sufficient divorcee who hasn’t responded to Hud’s flirtations, but hasn’t exactly dissuaded them either. Waiting for the vet to decide on the fate of the ranch, Homer’s health declines, Hud and Alma draw closer to a confrontation and Lonnie struggles to become his own man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,934 users: 86% for Hud

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Gran Torino (2008)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Nick Schenk, story by Dave Johannson & Nick Schenk
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Robert Lorenz, Bill Gerber
116 minutes

Gran Torino belongs in the pocket full of great Clint Eastwood films. This story seems so tailored to his persona as an actor and his partialities as a filmmaker that it’s impossible to consider anyone else in the lead role. Paul Newman as Dirty Harry? Steve McQueen as Josey Wales? Tom Cruise as Frank Horrigan from In The Line of Fire? No way. And Walt Kowalski is a part that seems like it was just waiting there for Eastwood to age into at 78. Written on spec by an aspiring screenwriter in Minnesota named Nick Schenk who listened when old farts like Walt came into the liquor warehouse where he worked and who also had Hmong co-workers on a night shift with him at a videotape company, if Gran Torino is the last performance of Eastwood’s career, he couldn’t have picked a richer note to go out on.

Instead of a stock movie with a paint-by-numbers appeal, Schenk — who got writing help from a buddy named Dave Johannson — seems to have cut this raw but completely resonant drama from life, where men widowed by war, the auto plant and finally their wives find something that still needs the attention of their considerable knowledge and skills. The movie has the conviction not to wimp out on its characters, introducing Walt as more virulent than some actual racists, giving the movie both power and a point of view. The performances (particularly by Christopher Carley as a young Catholic priest and Ahney Her as the teenage daughter Walt sort of adopts) are a surprise and completely refreshing, while Eastwood’s visual palette and pacing marry shadow and substance (Tom Stern lit the picture) and are absolutely striking.

Following the funeral of his wife, retired Detroit auto assemblyman and Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) settles into a life of grizzled solitude, maintaining his vintage 1972 Ford Gran Torino in a neighborhood that much to Walt’s dismay has been abandoned by white flight and repopulated by Hmong immigrants from southeast Asia. Walt is hostile towards practically everybody, from the baby faced Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) his wife instructed to watch over him, to his two estranged sons, to his grandkids, to “zipperheads” and “spooks”. Walt is downright inhospitable to the young man of the house next door, Thao Lor (Bee Vang), a shy Hmong teenager badgered by his strong willed sister Sue (Ahney Her).

Pressured by his derelict cousin Spider (Doua Moua) to join a Hmong gang, Thao is sent to steal Walt’s Gran Torino as an initiation.  Walt scares the boy off by falling in his garage and discharging his M-1 service rifle. When Spider and his crew return to discipline their new recruit and a scuffle breaks out, Walt runs the gangbangers off with his rifle. Hailed as a hero by his neighbors and their people, Walt is gradually broken out of his bitter shell by Sue. To correct the disgrace he’s brought to the family, Thao is loaned out to Walt for odd jobs, but it’s Walt who takes the kid under his wing, helping him land a construction job and encouraging him to pursue a girl he’s interested in named Youa (Choua Kue). When Spider and his crew refuse to leave the family alone, Walt sees one last problem for him to fix.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 206 users: 80% for Gran Torino

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 72 for Gran Torino

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Honkytonk Man (1982)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Clancy Carlile, based on his novel
Produced by Clint Eastwood
122 minutes

The star attractions in Honkytonk Man are the roadhouses that chew up and spit out an endless cycle of musicians. The film was a rare — but in retrospect not really surprising — commercial letdown from Clint Eastwood while he reigned as the biggest movie star in the world. Instead of good guys and bad guys, this is a story about a country bluesman who lives and dies according to the rules of the songs he releases into the night. Not exactly Escape From Alcatraz. The smokehouse lighting by Bruce Surtees and antique world designed by Edward Carfagno recreate the pit stops of the Dust Bowl with a savage beauty unparalleled among films set against the Great Depression, but the dramatic tissue needed to connect the set pieces together disappears like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Directing his ninth film in 11 years, Eastwood assembled his finest cast yet. Verna Bloom and Matt Clark are the matriarch and patriarch of a farm family. Bette Ford, Barry Corbin, Tim Thomerson and Tracey Walter are characters encountered on the road, while country western legends Marty Robbins and Porter Wagoneer make appearances. The biggest gamble though was Eastwood casting his son Kyle — who’s grown into a successful career as a jazz bassist — as his character’s nephew. The junior Eastwood comes off more like a real kid than a coy child actor. Honkytonk Man has a subtle sort of grace and forces little, but at the same time, the material barely seems to warrant a feature film, with characters and incidents that come and go while the atmosphere is what stays in the air.

As a dust storm descends on a farm in Oklahoma, a Lincoln convertible swerves onto the property and knocks down a windmill. Emmy (Verna Bloom) recognizes the driver as her brother Red Stovall (Clint Eastwood), dead drunk. Her 14-year-old son Whit (Kyle Eastwood) has his sights set on life beyond that of a cotton picker and is beguiled by the automobile and the guitar case inside. Whit’s father (Matt Clark) discovers a letter that reveals Red has been invited to try out for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. When his driving is revealed to be an improvement over his uncle’s, Whit is permitted to take Red to a local honkytonk, where his uncle picks up extra cash for the road picking his guitar and singing. Red then enlists his nephew’s aid settling a debt by sneaking into a chicken coop and making off with the poultry.

With the family pulling up stakes for California, Red asks his sister if she’ll allow Whit to drive him to Nashville. Not wanting her reckless brother — stricken with tuberculosis — to be alone, she agrees. Along for the journey is Grandpa (John McIntire), who feels he’s too old to start over and prefers to die in his birthplace of Tennessee. On the road, Red and Whit are chased by a bull, visit a whorehouse in Tulsa where $2 buys Whit his first sexual experience, unwittingly rob a roadhouse to collect money owed Red by a smalltime hood (Barry Corbin) and pick up a starry eyed 16-year-old named Marlene (Alexa Kenin) who wants to be anywhere but Oklahoma. Arriving in Nashville, Red’s sickness cuts a promising radio career short, but fate has one more twist in store for the honkytonk man.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 14 users: 93% for Honkytonk Man

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Over the Edge (1979)
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
Screenplay by Charlie Haas & Tim Hunter
Produced by George Litto
95 minutes

If Harold and Maude, Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Boyz N The Hood all took the pulse of a particular generation’s youth, you’d have to look no further than Over the Edge to get an EKG reading on the 1970s. Maybe it was a sign of things to come that the movie changed its title from On the Edge to OVER the Edge by the time it was finished. By today’s standards, this film could be aired on the ABC Family network; teenage sex is absentee, what drug use we see is portrayed for comic effect and other than a police shooting, the violence is committed against parked cars. But this raucous little flick doesn’t depend on shock value to achieve greatness. Over the Edge rises above its B-movie roots and endures not only as dy-no-mite entertainment, but an invaluable social document of the American suburb. The film reports on where youth culture was in this country in 1978 and in terms of economic and social conditions, still resides in most communities.

Over the Edge is written and cast at a perfect pitch. Instead of herding the characters through some didactic ABC Afterschool Special story, the filmmakers realize that the characters and their environment was the story. The discovery of Matt Dillon was a major coup, but even among the young cast members never heard from again, none of them are caught acting. Even if most of them were simply playing themselves, the filmmakers took a major risk casting 14-year-olds as 14-year-olds. The effect is one of electrifying verisimilitude. Over the Edge also seems to pick up on the dissonant effect sprawling suburban architecture might have on American youth. Sol Kaplan composed a delightfully subtle and eerie musical score, while the songs of Cheap Trick, The Cars and The Ramones seamlessly transport us back to the days of vinyl, headphones and wanting to escape to anywhere else.

Two teens on a highway overpass open fire on a police car with a BB rifle. Sgt. Doberman (Harry Northup) loses the snipers in a chase and grabs 14-year-old Carl Willat (Michael Kramer) and his friend Richie White (Matt Dillon) walking home. On probation for breaking and entering, Richie refuses to cooperate with cops’ questions. Carl’s record is clean and his Cadillac salesman father (Andy Romano) wants to keep it that way so his son won’t end up in reform school on “The Hill.” All Carl wants to do is to listen to Cheap Trick on his headphones and get out of New Granada, where the kids are older than the buildings and their only social activity revolves around a rec center operated by a counselor (Julia Pomeroy) sympathetic to their alienation. With investors from Texas due to arrive in New Granada for a tour, Doberman stages a raid on the rec center and busts Carl’s friend Claude Zachary (Tom Fergus) for possession.

With nowhere else to go, Carl and Richie cross paths with Cory (Pamela Ludwig), a girl Carl likes who spends her spare time breaking into houses. Carl and Cory bond over their loathing of the town they’ve been uprooted to. A prank Carl pulls on the Texans succeeds in running them out of town and as punishment, his father forbids him from seeing his friends. Carl runs away with Richie, but an encounter with Doberman ends tragically for his pal. Trying to figure out what he should do, Carl hides out in an abandoned townhouse, which Cory visits to keep her new boyfriend from getting lonely. Meanwhile, the Richie White tragedy provokes the concerned parents of New Granada to hold a meeting at the high school “cafetorium” to discuss what’s happening to their children. With the town’s kids in a furor, Carl comes out of hiding and leads a march to the school for an evening the community won’t ever forget.

“Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree” was an expose on juveniles run amok in Foster City, California that ran in the November 11, 1973 edition of The San Francisco Examiner. Written by James Finefrock and Bruce Koon, the article caught the attention of Tim Hunter, son of blacklisted screenwriter Ian McClellan Hunter. Growing up in New York around the children of other cultural exiles, Hunter graduated Harvard in 1968 — where he served as film critic and arts director for The Crimson — and then the American Film Institute in 1970 before taking a post at University of California Santa Cruz as a film history professor. Hunter brought “Mouse Packs” to a student who’d graduated the year previous. Charlie Haas was a native of New York whose family had relocated to the Golden State when he was sixteen. After graduating UC Santa Cruz with a BA in creative writing, Haas went to work for Warner Bros. Records in Burbank, writing liner notes.

After interviewing residents of Foster City, Hunter presented their script to his father’s literary agent George Litto, who agreed to produce. Haas was friends with a film director he suggested for the job. Jonathan Kaplan was the son of film composer Sol Kaplan and actress Frances Heflin. Trained as an actor in his childhood, Kaplan ended up at NYU Film School, where as an undergrad, Martin Scorsese was one of his professors. With Scorsese as a personal reference, Kaplan pitched New World Pictures founder Roger Corman a movie titled Night Call Nurses. Corman would hire Kaplan to direct The Slams and Truck Turner next. Orion Pictures agreed to finance Mouse Packs, later Over the Edge, but fears of gang activity in theaters prompted the studio to shelve the film. Its honest depiction of teenage wasteland in the suburbs began winning it fans on HBO in the 1980s and is today regarded as one of the most realistic movies ever made about teenagers.

In a 30-year retrospective published in the September 2009 issue of Vice Magazine, Tim Hunter recalled the community that inspired the events portrayed in Over the Edge. “Foster City was supposed to be an ideal bedroom community. The designers built it with a master plan; it was threaded with little man-made canals and waterways. Outside of some houses were docks that people could use to boat to the grocery store. But there was nothing for the large percentage of teenage kids to do in that town — I think up to 25 percent of the population was below the age of 18. It had the highest percentage of juvenile crime of any comparable city in the country, and it just seemed to me like there might be a movie in that story somewhere.” Haas & Hunter spent three years exploring the geography of Foster City — which had been built on a reclaimed landfill — and talking to residents, particularly the kids, who confirmed that the article had been true.

Charlie Haas recalled, “These kids were bored out of their minds. There was literally nothing for them to do. It was like a theme park without the fun — you’d have these developments called ‘Whaler’s Cove’ and these fake pilings and these lame rec centers, with ropes and an airplane and a slide and a sculpture of a whale. Everything was new. Nothing was older than the kids themselves. The place made everyone feel a little disposable.” The research Haas & Hunter began in 1973 inspired a script that Hunter would pass to his father’s literary agent, George Litto. A veteran of the William Morris Agency in New York, Litto had formed his own agency in 1965, representing screenwriters and directors as well as negotiating distribution deals for Melvin van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song), Robert Altman (Images) and Brian DePalma (Sisters). Litto then became a film producer on DePalma’s Obsession and the comedy Drive-In.

Despite the studio’s preference for less violence and more of a young love story, Litto talked the newly formed Orion Pictures into financing Mouse Packs, with a director Haas & Hunter had suggested named Jonathan Kaplan on board. Kaplan recalled, “I was only 30 when I was hired to do Over the Edge, but I had some unique experience which helped. I had studied with Martin Scorsese when I was younger. And I had been the director of an infamous Sex Pistols movie called Who Killed Bambi? What I took away from that experience was the spark and the truth that I saw in the punk aesthetic. And I saw that same spark and truth in the Over the Edge script. I thought, ‘These kids are American punks. They’re not as articulate as the English punks, but they’re also in a rage.’ With that in mind, I decided to attack Over the Edge from a punk angle: keep it simple. No fancy camera moves, visual effects, nothing fancy. I remember when I first saw Super Fly. There were boom shadows, badly shot scenes, and mistakes. But there was a simplicity and an authenticity to it that I really appreciated.”

Priced out of shooting in California due to the state’s rigid child labor laws, Kaplan found eerily similar architecture in Aurora, Colorado, 10 miles from Columbine. Recording an audio commentary for the long awaited release of Over the Edge on DVD, the director recalled, “What had happened in Colorado is they’d gone into this big investment in architecturally cutting edge schools and the one in Greeley, Colorado had this great sort of pre-Frank Gehry, sort of waves and roof that was lower than the sides of the building, which presented a problem in a place where there’s a lot of snow and the roof had collapsed the first year. So the Greeley, Colorado school district was in desperate need of funds to repair their schools, and they’d not just designed one, I think they designed five on this principle, so they’d had five schools with collapsed roofs, so that’s why we were given permission.”

While Kaplan and casting director Vic Ramos auditioned the five leads in New York, casting scout Jane Bernstein was visiting a junior high school in Larchmont where she discovered a student named Matt Dillon. Various accounts have Dillon either being kicked out of school for smoking in the boys’ room or being discovered while ditching class. In any event, he would be offered his first professional acting job. Over 30 years later, Dillon mused, “When I look at that film now, I see myself as a little kid — I was 14. Of course, I didn’t think of myself as a kid when it was all happening. I just believed in that film and in my role from the beginning. Maybe I was naïve or whatever, but I always thought there was something great in the movie. It really resonated. I wasn’t a child actor — I didn’t come up that way. If I had gone in and auditioned for a Disney family movie, I wouldn’t have connected with that in any way, shape or form. But this role came very naturally for me.”

Meanwhile, the screenwriters had been given the rare privilege of actually helping cast the film they’d written. Haas & Hunter were tasked with searching Colorado for an ensemble of 40 additional kids to supplement the leads. Haas recalled, “It was a similar experience in terms of, just as Jonathan was sort of being shown commercial actors who were wrong for the thing, we would go around to junior high schools in Denver and Boulder and Aurora itself I think and these places and we’d explain ourselves, what we were doing there — looking for kids to be in a movie — and of course the schools always wanted to show us the kids who had been in Bye Bye Birdie the year before, their sort of actor kids, and we would politely excuse ourselves and go interview the kids getting stoned out on the hill behind the school. And those were the kids we ended up with.”

According to Kaplan, Over the Edge was shot in under a month, with most of the film’s night scenes hurriedly going before cameras first, forcing the young cast to sleep days and bond over long hours at night. Haas remembered, “There was a tremendous amount of stress among all of us. As so often happens with movies like that, the schedule was too short, the budget was too low, and everyone was under a lot of pressure. Tim and I were on the set every day, doing rewrites whenever necessary.” Matt Dillon recalled, “Jonathan was great. He was like a big kid; we just loved him, we really did. He was the perfect guy to direct that movie. He was fun. Whenever you were around him your mood just elevated. There was always a lift with him. He had a great energy, and a great personality. We were very direct with each other. He’d say, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ And I’d go, ‘No! Fuck you!’ That’s the way we related to each other.”

Orion Pictures was born in March 1978 when five top executives of United Artists resigned in a dispute with parent company Transamerica. They took a constellation with five main stars as the namesake of their new film finance and production company, Orion. Director George Roy Hill’s adolescent lark A Little Romance was slated to be the studio’s first release, Over the Edge its second. Then Orion got a look at Kaplan’s film. In an August 2001 interview with The Village Voice, the director revealed, “Two of the executives, Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, were big fundraisers for the Democratic Party. These guys were very conscious of their image. I don’t know if they ever read the script. It was budgeted at just a million dollars, and I think they thought they were going to get some kind of teenage high-jinks movie. While we were shooting, The L.A. Times did this article that said that the coming trend was gang movies. The movie got lumped in with The Warriors, The Wanderers, Boulevard Nights.”

The Warriors had been a surprise box office hit in February 1979, but was also blamed for a shooting death at a Palm Springs, California drive-in and a fatal stabbing the same night in a theater less than 200 miles away in Oxnard. Three nights later, another teen was stabbed to death — in Boston — by youths who’d come out of a screening of The Warriors. Pundits were busy debating whether the movie had been responsible for the violence. Kaplan continued, “So that was the environment in which the executives at Orion sat down to watch the first cut of Over the Edge. In the movie, one kid gets beat up, and one kid gets killed by a cop. That’s really it — most of the violence is done to cars. But the guys were scared.” He added, “They wanted this embarrassment to go away. It was one thing to have kids knifing each other in the cities, but they didn’t want to have their image soiled by this thing that might incite teenagers to go berserk in the suburbs and kill each other.”

With posters that made Over the Edge look like a child zombie movie of some sort, Orion gave the film the quietest U.S. theatrical release they could in the spring of 1979. George Litto had held private screenings of Over the Edge in New York and Los Angeles for friends and colleagues. He later recalled, “I had had two successful movies before, you know, and so they said, ‘Over the Edge is great! It’s gonna be a big hit, you’re gonna have three in a row, George.’ So for me it was a huge letdown, from like a three in a row to almost nobody saw the picture! But I think it was a series of unfortunate circumstances — even for the distributor — because the distributor always gets lots of pressure from the exhibitors that they don’t want another theater where they’re gonna rip up the seats and gangs creating hell and havoc, so there was vandalism in the film and that’s what they were afraid of. The distributor found it difficult to take the plunge.”

For a couple of years, Over the Edge didn’t exist. Then in December 1981, Joseph Papp — founder of The Public Theater in New York — booked the film for a two-week engagement as part of a series called “Off the Shelf.” Getting a look at the picture for the first time, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “Except for Carl and Richie, the teen-agers aren’t characters but a chorus of attitudes. Unlike other such films, though, Over the Edge dramatizes the boredom and pointlessness of their world with extraordinary conviction. New Granada is a nearly perfect visual representation of the built-in obsolescence that is supposed to keep the American economy going, but which creates junk faster than the junk can be recycled. If New Granada’s kids are zonked-out zombies, they are simply a little more rude and less self-satisfied than their zombielike parents.” Several more New York theaters ran the film in February 1982, but the largest audience for Over the Edge came when HBO started airing it that year.

Speaking to the Village Voice in 2001, Jonathan Kaplan lamented, “What’s so odd is that horror movies are readily distributed but something like Over the Edge is buried. It’s OK to kill two dozen teenagers and a couple of camp counselors, but smash up a couple of Cadillacs, no, no. No vandalism!” He added, “The fact that it was so highly visible in these New York circles was good for me; it was good for Tim Hunter, who co-wrote Over the Edge and then got financing for River’s Edge, which he directed and co-wrote; and of course it launched Matt Dillon’s career. But it never got the audience it was intended for. It was heartbreaking because I knew we’d captured something, and when it got that little burst of life there, it was thrilling, because people actually got it. It’s had a life of its own because of cable, though it’s not readily available at the Blockbusters and it’s not out on DVD and it was never out on laserdisc. They still don’t really know what they’ve got.” In 2005, Over the Edge was finally issued on DVD.

Lolita (1997)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Screenplay by Stephen Schiff, based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Produced by Mario Kassar, Joel B. Michaels
137 minutes

There’s a litany of reasons why the second film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is not something to enjoy. It’s based on a brilliant novel far too internal to put on film. It’s a remake of a film by Stanley Kubrick. It’s about a distasteful subject, so the film itself must be distasteful, if not banned outright. It’s too stylish, lacking in depth. It’s too cerebral, lacking in action. The case against Lolita is as fullproof as it’s ever been for director Adrian Lyne, who in spite of all of that, adds another entertaining, sometimes silly but always absorbing film to an impressive short list of credits. Far from great, it is great work, a haunting, skillfully made picture with terrific and unlikely performances from one of the few directors who can be relied upon for intelligent dirty movies. Sort of like John Woo, Lyne isn’t trying to win an Oscar here. He seems to know exactly the type of genre flick he wants to make, rarely gets delusions of grandeur and always delivers intense audience appreciation.

In terms of casting, this version of Lolita is on at least equal footing with Kubrick’s classic. In her first acting gig, Dominique Swain conveys the geeky exuberance of a clueless teenager without acting precocious; she seems closer in spirit to what Humbert lusted after, as opposed to Sue Lyon, who had the appeal of a 24-year-old stripper. Miscast in so many other films, Melanie Griffith really finds a niche here in the brusque Shelley Winters role of Lolita’s mother. Lyne shows a tin ear for wit, resisting savage satire with every fiber of his being to instead make a picturesque, European love story from Nabokov’s novel. Jeremy Irons is the ideal leading man for that movie, which I’m not sure I prefer to the one with an absurd sense of humor about its characters and underlying situations. Still, this Lolita is without question stunning to look at and listen to, with director of photography Howard Atherton handling the lighting and legendary composer Ennio Morricone providing the mournful musical score.

In New England of 1947, a professor of French literature named Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) decides to spend his summer in the town of “Ramsdale”, writing a textbook. Looking for a room to rent, Humbert arrives at the abode of the obnoxious Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith), whose manner doesn’t quite appeal to the fussy professor. Humbert changes his mind as soon as he lays eyes on Charlotte’s 14-year-old nymphet of a daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain), who unwittingly stirs feelings Humbert hasn’t felt since being with his very first girlfriend, who died of typhus when they were age 14. Obsessed with movie magazines, food and antagonizing her mother, Lolita becomes curious about what kind of rise she can get out of Humbert. Charlotte soon sends her wayward daughter away to summer camp before she’s to be enrolled in boarding school. Crushed at the prospect of losing Lolita, Humbert agrees to the lonely Charlotte’s marriage proposal.

Miserable in marriage, Humbert’s prayers are answered when Charlotte discovers his journal, which contains less than flattering descriptions of his new wife. Charlotte throws herself into the street, where she is struck by a car and killed. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, but rather than tell her about her mother’s death right away, takes cues from the girl’s incessant flirtations and checks them in to the Enchanted Hunters Inn. A Christian convention fails to deter them from consummating their love affair. Humbert breaks the news of Charlotte’s demise to Lolita the next day and takes her on a cross-country trek to spend more carefree time together. Reporting to his job at Beardsley Prep School, Humbert begins to suspect Lolita is socking away money to run away from him. His suspicions are validated by the appearance of the mysterious Clare Quilty (Frank Langella), a debauched playwright who seems to share his attraction to nymphets.

Stephen Schiff was a correspondent for the CBS news program West 57^th and a critic of theater, books and film for Vanity Fair magazine. Producer Lili Fini Zanuck had made an effort to steer Schiff toward screenwriting and in 1990, advised him that the estate of Vladimir Nabokov was optioning the film rights to various literary properties of the Russian born entomologist and author best known for his 1955 novel Lolita, which had been rejected by publishers in America due to the nature of it sexual content. Over the next 40 years – during which a controversial film adaptation starring James Mason was directed by Stanley Kubrick — many critics would rate Lolita as one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century. An admirer of the book, Schiff began an adaptation of his own. He would finish 40 pages before Zanuck told the budding screenwriter to forget it; in the current political climate, Lolita would never be made into a movie anyway.

Almost at the same time, Adrian Lyne reread Lolita. He mentioned his interest in a film adaptation that would hew closer to Nabokov’s work to the chairman of Carolco Pictures, Mario Kassar, who put up $1 million to purchase the film rights for the director of such highly stylized and hugely commercial forays into erotica as Flashdance, 9 ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction. Several notable screenwriters attempted an adaptation before Lili Fini Zanuck and her husband Richard Zanuck — who was producing the project — turned to Schiff to fashion a script. On the film’s way to completion, Carolco Pictures would go bankrupt, the budget would climb and the U.S. Congress passed a law that threatened to land the filmmakers in prison if they moved forward. Protected from legal prosecution, Lolita was nonetheless shunned by distributors in the U.S. due to its high cost and difficult subject matter. Lolita opened in Europe and became the highest budgeted film to hold its U.S. premiere on cable television.

Journalist Stephen Schiff was living in New York in 1990 when producer Lili Fini Zanuck — who’d been compelling Schiff to try screenwriting — notified him that the Vladimir Nabokov estate was optioning the film rights to its catalog. She thought that Schiff would be ideal to adapt one of those works in particular. In Lolita: The Book of the Film, Schiff wrote, “Lolita is one of the most beautiful, poignant, funny, splendidly designed, gorgeously written, and psychologically acute works in the English language. To my mind, it is the greatest American novel of the postwar era. So the opportunity — if opportunity this was — to create a coherent artistic response to it was irresistible. I got to work, but, I hasten to add, I did so idiotically: I wrote some forty pages of screenplay, but it was all dialogue, no ‘stage direction.’” Instead of writing off-screen directions, Schiff merely scribbled “TK”, journo jargon for “to come”. He added, “Still, I was somewhat saddened when, a few weeks later, Lili called me back and said, rather presciently, ‘Forget about it. In this political environment, any version of Lolita would be too controversial. It’ll never get made.’”

Adrian Lyne had picked up a copy of Lolita as a teenager. Flipping to the lascivious parts and putting the novel down when he saw there weren’t any, Lyne was shooing Jacob’s Ladder for Carolco Pictures in the fall of 1989 when he read Lolita properly. On a making-of featurette on the film’s DVD release, Lyne stated, “I like movies that create discussion. I love it when they haven’t forgotten about your movie by dinnertime afterwards, you know, and they’re still arguing about it the next day. That’s what a movie should do. It should make you argue and disagree.” He added, “I wanted to make a movie of Nabokov’s novel because it’s — I think — one of the great novels of this century. The movie is about a middle aged man’s obsession for a 14-year-old girl and it’s about all that that entails. In the end, it’s a love story. It’s a strange and awful love story.” When proposing Lolita to Mario Kassar, the co-founder and chairman of Carolco was eager enough to work with Lyne again that he ultimately snapped up the film rights for $1 million.

The first screenwriter Lyne approached was James Dearden, who’d written the screenplay for Fatal Attraction. Up next was the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter, whose draft was considered far too cold for Lyne’s tastes. In the fall of 1994, Stephen Schiff’s phone rang and Lolita producer Richard Zanuck — Lili Fini’s husband — inquired about the pages Schiff had written. He was summoned to Los Angeles for a chat. Schiff recalled, “The first thing he and Adrian wanted to know was whether I could see my way clear to setting the film in the present. (Unbeknownst to me, that was what Dearden’s script had done). The answer was ‘No’. A Lolita growing up in America in this day and age would have been warned about the Humberts of the world from the age of three; her teachers would have talked about pedophiles; her mother would have been on the lookout. Besides, to set Nabokov’s story in the present is to lose much of what it is about, for this was not just a novel about a grown man’s love affair with his twelve-year old stepdaughter, it was about the dawning impingement on the European mind of postwar America.”

David Mamet was commissioned, but unconvinced that the playwright’s knack for American machismo would produce a usable draft of Lolita, Schiff started writing on spec. He elaborated, “Humbert is thoroughly equipped for greatness, and yet he winds up in an ignominy of his own making. Part of his tragedy — and a large part of his comedy — is that his enormous intelligence is always defeated by his obsession. He can’t get outside that obsession to see who Lolita is, to see that she is actually a fairly ordinary little girl, more charming than some and probably more sexually precocious than most, but still a child.” With very little dialogue available in the novel, Schiff invented most of it. “Another thing. Because Nabokov’s Humbert lives in a kind of exalted subjectivity, Lolita herself is so much a figment of his imagination that she barely exists on the page. In effect, I had to reinvent her, piecing her together from my own adolescence and from adolescents I knew.” One of Schiff’s ideas was to have Lolita constantly eating bananas or candy or ice cream.

Schiff’s intuitions and efforts won him the job. Concerned that audiences would be unwilling to sympathize with Humbert Humbert, Lyne was adamant about restoring the character’s childhood love affair — which Stanley Kubrick excised in his film version — that attempted to explain the man’s obsession with Lolita. Of the actors considered for the part, Anthony Hopkins was deemed too old. Hugh Grant cited Lolita as his favorite book and didn’t want to see any film version made. Lyne claimed that Warren Beatty flirted with the role “for about five minutes” before Jeremy Irons was approached. Lyne had met Irons while visiting the set of Reversal of Fortune in 1989 and soothed the actor’s fears that Lolita was too politically incorrect to get involved with. Dominique Swain hadn’t gone on an audition in two years, but learning of the part from her manager, read Lolita and sent Lyne a videotape of herself performing scenes from the book. She responded, “It’s all through Humbert’s eyes. Lolita doesn’t have a point of view. I think I can give her one.” The 14-year-old won the role of Lolita.

With Carolco Pictures heading into the sunset of bankruptcy and selling off its assets in 1995, the production of Lolita was picked up by the French corporation Chargeurs, which agreed to finance the film through a media group it owned called Pathé. With plans for shooting to begin in June, the film’s budget had climbed from $41 million to roughly $50 million. This was in part due to Adrian Lyne’s preference to shoot on location. The flashback to Humbert’s youth would be filmed in Les Cedres in the south of France. “Ramsdale” would be filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina. The location for the Enchanted Hunters Inn was found in New Orleans, as was Humbert’s apartment. The production would also travel to Amarillo, Texas and Sonoma County, California to grab footage of Humbert and Lolita’s road trip. Perhaps balking at the price of what Richard Zanuck considered a $25 million or so production, the producer dropped out. Mario Kassar tapped Joel B. Michaels — producer of Universal Soldier and Stargate — to replace the Academy Award winning producer of Driving Miss Daisy.

Once shooting was underway in North Carolina in September 1995, weather delays, an illness to Melanie Griffith and the firing of director of photography Jeffrey Kimball (who was replaced by Howard Atherton) ballooned Lolita up to a budget of $58 million. In the background was the nature of the material. Invited to the set, Stephen Schiff noted, “At times I seemed to be the only one connected with the film who didn’t harbor visions of some small town sheriff descending on the set and carting us off to jail on obscenity charges, child pornography charges, or just general principle. During the shoot, we played by the strictest rules the film’s lawyers could devise. Any nudity required an adult body double for Dominique. If Dominique sat on Jeremy’s lap, a board was inserted between them. Dominique’s mother and tutor were on the set whenever she was. I often found myself in the position of reassuring everyone: We’re not going to be arrested, for Chrissake. This isn’t the ‘50s. We’re not making a pornographic film. We’re adapting one of the acknowledged great works of 20^th century literature. So I said. And so I thought.”

Coincidentally, while Lolita was in post-production, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) attached a rider known as the Child Pornography Act of 1996 onto a federal budget bill being passed through the U.S. Congress. The rider extended the definition of “child pornography” to cover anything that simulated a minor engaging in sexual activity. Critics charged that the law was so ambiguous that it was nearly impossible for filmmakers to know whether or not they were in compliance; at the risk of 15 years in prison, they would resort to self-censorship instead. A strict interpretation of the law would now classify such films as The Exorcist, Night Moves, Taxi Driver, Pretty Baby, Little Darlings and others as child pornography. Schiff recalled, “It was so vaguely worded that it seemed to me certifiably unconstitutional, although a judge later upheld it. Broadly interpreted, it could have resulted in the banning of any number of mainstream films, paintings, book covers, photographs, MTV videos, and so forth. We didn’t even know about it until Adrian read about it somewhere and went into a panic. And the panic was contagious.”

The firm that Pathé had contracted as production legal counsel before filming began — Troop Meisinger Steuber & Pasich of Los Angeles — suggested that the producers hire attorney John Weston to advise them on First Amendment issues. Weston was invited into the editing room to guarantee that Lolita was in compliance with the new law. Schiff admitted, “Sometimes, I thought, the cuts actually helped the film. Crotch shots had to go, and, indeed, there was a legal precedent for them to go, and their removal was fine with me. There was no legal precedent for the removal of breast shots, but we didn’t really need breast shots — in any case, they went.” But Weston also suggested that two pivotal scenes had to go; an encounter between Humbert and Lolita in a motel room in which we realize the pair are engaged in sex as she reads the comics, and a later scene in which an enraged Humbert pushes Lolita down on a bed and has sex with her. Neither scene was graphic enough to threaten the film’s R rating with the MPAA and when Lyne and Schiff challenged Weston on the exact wording of the new law, the attorney withdrew his objections.

In a February 1999 interview with The Bulletin, Lyne recalled, “I sat in a cutting room with a lawyer for six weeks. The law that came out said that essentially I couldn’t use any of the shots that I had shot with the body double; that I couldn’t have an adult imitating a juvenile. This law was aimed at the Internet and it was aimed at people putting children’s heads on mature bodies, if you see what I’m saying, and it carried over into films. So it was traumatic for me because, obviously, this lawyer was saying I had to take this out, I had to take that out … and I was hooting and hollowing and yelling and disagreeing with the guy but in the end, happily, I didn’t have to do much, actually. He was a fairly understanding man; but I did have to take out a few shots that I’d done with the body double, you know, her breasts or whatever. But I don’t think it affected the movie. It was a very unnerving period because we didn’t know, for example, where we stood in terms of legality with the film and at times we were worried about literally moving the film from California to New York. There was a lot of paranoia.”

Lolita was test screened three times in Los Angeles and according to Schiff, was well received. A screening was also arranged for Nabokov’s only child and executor of his late father’s estate, Dmitri, who enthusiastically supported the new film adaptation. In March 1997, the filmmakers began shopping for a U.S. distributor. Schiff recalled, “What happened next was very strange. One by one, the studios saw the film. Many of the executives went out of their way to congratulate Adrian, to tell him that it was his best film ever, to recount in detail their ravishment over it, to beg him to work with them on his next film. And then, one by one, they refused to distribute it.” Schiff believed the political climate had a lot to do with that. “Never in history had there been such a horrified awareness of the pedophilia lurking around the fringes of American life. The Megan Kanka case, the JonBenet Ramsay case, the Polly Klass murder, the Belgian sex murders — all these were in the air. The Christian right had been fulminating for years of the subject of family values, and no film courted controversy without running into efficiently organized watchdog groups run by zealots like Donald Wildmon and others of his ilk.”

Pressure never materialized from either Christian groups or from legislators, but no U.S. distributor wanted near Lolita. Pathé had hoped to sell U.S. distribution rights for $25 million, plus the cost of prints and advertising for an additional $20 million. That quote came down, but not even the so-called indies opened up a checkbook. Schiff revealed, “Miramax was part of Disney, and Disney, with its reputation and its stockholders, was never going to spring for Lolita. We heard that October Films, the distributors of Secrets and Lies and The Apostle, wanted it, but then they were bought by Universal, which was owned by Seagrams, which didn’t want a Lolita on its hands.” Pathé chose to release Lolita in Europe first, hoping positive response there might make an impression in Hollywood. Schiff added, “To me, this plan seemed naïve at best. Since when did American distributors look to Europe for guidance? Lolita would have to be a jawdropping blockbuster overseas to catch America’s attention, and I knew that, no matter how kindly it was received, it was never going to be Independence Day.”

Months after it premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain in September 1997, Showtime agreed to buy U.S. distribution rights and broadcast Lyne’s 137-minute cut of Lolita on both Showtime and the Sundance Channel in August 1998. Critics had mixed feelings about what they saw. Caryn James, The New York Times: “Mr. Lyne (whose commercial hits include Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal) was expected to have made a titillating Lolita. Instead, he has risen to the level of his material. His direction, and Stephen Schiff’s discerning, faithful screenplay, are sensitive to Nabokov’s wit as well as his lyricism.” Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly: “A glum, dull, witless affair buoyed only by the minor scandal of its failure, until recently, to secure U.S. distribution, this newest translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s still-shocking novel has the singular attraction of not only confirming Lyne’s aesthetic irrelevance, but of making Stanley Kubrick’s flawed if brilliant 1962 film seem like a paragon of literary adaptation.” Newsweek (Jack Kroll) and Time Magazine (Richard Schnickel) posted positive reviews. The Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) and Variety (David Rooney) did not.

Samuel Goldwyn Films agreed to give Lolita a limited theatrical release. In September 1998, it played one theater in Los Angeles for a weeklong Oscar qualifying run. Lolita received no nominations and managed $1 million in domestic box office receipts. Stephen Schiff remained convinced that the political climate had kept Americans from being able to see the film in theaters. “Had we released Lolita in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I believe that it would have easily made its way into distribution. But the culture has contracted since then. And even if it hasn’t, its gatekeepers believe it has. (Thus the gap between the alarm the gatekeepers expected us to feel over President Clinton’s sexual shenanigans and the meager alarm we actually did feel). Still, whether or not there would have been some vast surge of outrage upon the release of Lolita, the potential distributors certainly thought there would be. Every advance article about the film included threats from advocates of child welfare and family togetherness: newspaper columns railed against the project, sight unseen, from a vantage of laborious ignorance.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lolita Loses Her Chaperon” By Judy Brennan. The Los Angeles Times, 24 September 1995

“Girl Trouble” By Benjamin Svetkey. Entertainment Weekly, 9 August 1996

“Lolita Comes Again” By Elizabeth Kaye. Esquire, February 1997

“Lolita Reaches A U.S. Audience” By Bill Carter. The New York Times, 6 May 1998

“In Hollywood, Almost Anything Goes — Except For Lolita, That Is” By Claudia Eller. The Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1998

“Lawyers were forced to cut scenes from Lolita because of Vagueness in Obscenity laws” By Bob Van Voris. National Law Journal 17 August 1998

“Adrian Lyne: Lolita” By Andrew Urban. The Bulletin, 25 February 1999

Lolita: The Book of the Film. By Stephen Schiff. Applause Books (2000)

Lolita. DVD audio commentary by Adrian Lyne. Trimark (2001)

Laurel Canyon (2003)
Written by Lisa Cholodenko
Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Produced by Antidote Films/ Kuleshov Productions
MPAA rating: “R for sexuality, language and drug use”
Running time: 103 minutes

Should I Care?
Watching Lisa Cholodenko’s sophomore film the year it was released, I didn’t care much for it. Laurel Canyon never picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential or Boogie Nights, the modern day standard bearers of pop culture soaked decadence in the City of Angels. In a bummer, the characters actually seem intelligent and reasonably well-intentioned enough to keep from selling their souls to the devil. But what the movie lacks in visceral thrills it makes up for in a kind of finely honed reserve, recalling Five Easy Pieces or Shampoo, two ‘70s classics Cholodenko and her collaborators seem to be channeling here. Laurel Canyon is much better than generally given credit for at the time, a well crafted and strongly performed drama. This is one movie where the devil is definitely in the details.

The chief reason to see Laurel Canyon is Frances McDormand playing a record producer willing to own up to her failings while everyone around her traffics in bullshit. This includes her son, played by Christian Bale, before his earnestness as a master thespian got a bit ridiculous. Here, Bale’s scenes opposite McDormand are tense and poignant and ring true. Natascha McElhone and Alessandro Nivola — lonesome presences in the movies these days — are both insatiably watchable in supporting roles. Tip toeing away from exploitation, Cholodenko still delivers one of the most intensely erotic scenes between two clothed actors I’ve seen. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and production designer Catherine Hardwicke lend Laurel Canyon an exquisitely detailed look, one that needs a second viewing to appreciate.

So, What’s This About?
Leaving their lives in the Ivy League to begin promising careers in Los Angeles, Sam (Christian Bale) is to start a residency in psychiatry at a mental hospital, while his fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale) is finishing her Ph.D in genomics. They land at the Laurel Canyon enclave of Sam’s mother Jane Bentley (Frances McDormand), a record producer with a history of soured relationships, including the one with her son. Sam was under the impression that she’d vacated to her beach house in Malibu, but arrives to discover his uninhibited mom smoking a bong with four British pop rockers. Not only is Jane still at work on their album, she’s shacked up with the band’s charismatic frontman (Alessandro Nivola), a singer/songwriter her son’s age.

While Sam rejects the free wheeling environment he was raised and doesn’t approve of his mother’s choices, Alex loses interest in her dissertation and sits in on the band’s recording sessions, smoking some weed with Jane and being solicited for her musical opinion. Instead of looking for a house to rent, Alex begins spending more time with Jane and is drawn into that world. Meanwhile, an Israeli colleague named Sara (Natascha McElhone) starts giving Sam rides to work. His controlled, decisive nature attracts her, but Sam refuses to indulge his physical urges for his fellow psychiatrist. Realizing how distanced he’s become from his girlfriend, Sam heads to the band’s record release party at the Chateau Marmont. There, he finds out how deep his girlfriend has fallen into his mother’s orbit.

Who Made It?
Lisa Cholodenko grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Exposed to the experimental film program at San Francisco State as an undergrad, she lucked into a job as a post-production assistant on Boyz N the Hood and worked as an assistant editor on Used People. Cholodenko was accepted into the graduate film program at Columbia University, where director Milos Forman became one of her mentors. She wrote, produced and directed two acclaimed short films — Souvenir (1994) and dinner party (1997) — that dealt with the fractured love lives of female couples. Her feature film writing and directing debut High Art earned Cholodenko the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and revitalized the career of Patricia Clarkson, who co-starred with Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell.

Editor Amy Duddleston was cutting High Art with Cholodenko when she brought in Joni Mitchell’s 1970 LP “Ladies of the Canyon”. Inspired by what the songwriter’s life might have been like in that place and time, Cholodenko wrote a script, hoping to jump into her next film quickly. Reteaming with High Art producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover, the project took four years to get cast and financed. The director ultimately met Frances McDormand — game for a role that called for nudity — and once the Oscar winner was cast, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale became interested. Levy-Hinte raised roughly $5 million in financing and was able to accommodate McDormand’s family schedule as well as the Cannes Film Festival, with Laurel Canyon finished in time to screen at the Director’s Fortnight in May 2002.

How’d They Do It?
Lisa Cholodenko elaborated on the origin of her sophomore feature film. “I think the first germ of the story came when I was finishing up High Art. I was in the editing room in New York with my editor Amy Duddleston. We’d been cutting for a long time and to keep our energy up we took a lot of breaks and listened to a lot of music. One morning, Amy brought in the Joni Mitchell record ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. I hadn’t heard that record in a long time. We listened to it beginning to end. I was looking at the cover — a painting that Joni Mitchell did of a hillside up in Laurel Canyon where she lived at the time. We started spinning a yarn about people who lived up there: what their lives were like, what Joni Mitchell’s life must have been like.”

She continued, “Laurel Canyon is a strange island in the middle of Los Angeles: it’s a kind of time warp wedged between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. It has its own history and morality and culture that’s distinctive from anywhere else in L.A. It has a kind of hippie quality and it also has a timeless quality. It has a lawless quality to it as well, which seems to change each decade. Rumor has it was an outpost for Hollywood players to conduct their clandestine affairs and in the ‘60s and ‘70s it had the rock ‘n roll drug culture which gave way to a more seedy hard drug/ porno culture — the Boogie Nights era. Then recently there was a resurgence of the younger movie industry and nouveau music culture. I think it’s always been attractive to people who are less conventional or are interested in being identified with a culture that is less conventional.”

Cholodenko hoped to get her second feature off the ground as soon as possible. That process took four years. She recalled, “And I’d say those four years were about half of the writing stage. I’m a slow writer and I’m a detailed writer and I had to work in between drafts, I guess. I went and directed some television and did other rewrite jobs and whatever. So it was about two and a half years later and we were ready to try to get this film made and October Films — who originally had the movie, was developing it before it had become USA Films — and by the time that we were sort of ready to get it rolling, USA not only in trouble and soon to become Focus Features, but decided to put it in turnaround. They wanted to do much, you know, sort of broader and bigger films.”

After USA Films officially lost interest in the summer of 2001, the prospect of Laurel Canyon being produced was looking unlikely. “Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover and I, we were moving on from High Art to sort of create an environment we had created on High Art, which was done independently and anyway, we realized that was how we were going to have to go and around that time, there was supposed to be a strike in the industry, a writers strike and an actors strike. So not only were we kind of at a stalemate with sort of getting studio money to make this movie, but we were figuring we’d kind of missed the window of opportunity because everyone was shutting down and there was no cast that was going to work because they were going to strike and the rest of it, so it was a pretty dark season with Laurel Canyon for a while.”

Fortunately, the threatened 2001 actors strike never materialized. Then, the Academy Award winning Best Actress of Fargo read Cholodenko’s script and wanted to meet her. Frances McDormand recalled at the time, “I had this general idea that I wanted to do nudity. I’m 45 years old. A couple of years ago I decided, ‘All right, it’s time.’ I wasn’t really interested in that when I was 25. But now that I’m 45, I’m kind of pleased with myself.” She added, “There’s nothing wrong with middle-aged people expressing their sexuality on film. Lisa wrote a great part for a 45-year-old woman. It’s not because I get to be nude in a swimming pool, but because she’s an interesting person. Lisa was really conscientious in making her three-dimensional.” Once McDormand came aboard, other actors suddenly got interested.

Christian Bale appraised his collaboration with Lisa Cholodenko by stating, “The story seemed to be so highly personal to her. From working with Lisa, I know she has a great deal going on internally — always — even if she doesn’t think she’s communicating it. I found her face to be very easily readable, and I found myself kind of looking at her rather than listening to her. I would imagine that her real enjoyment comes through the writing of a film. I think she’s really more interested in the whole emotional side of it. You get some directors who fall in love with the whole technical side of it and the physical staging of things, but she is definitely someone whose first love is the whole emotional side of what’s happening.” With a cast finally coming together, producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Antidote Films was able to raise around $5 million in financing.

Director of photography Wally Pfister — heavily in demand after shooting Memento and Insomnia for Christopher Nolan — signed up to work with Lisa Cholodenko on Laurel Canyon. He recalled, “From the outset, Lisa and I had a common language that we wanted to use in the storytelling of this film. It was based in par on films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, by great filmmakers like Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman. Not so much in the look of the films, but more in the tone and spirit of the storytelling.” Cholodenko confessed, “The big inspiration for this film was The Graduate. And another film I adore is Five Easy Pieces. Those are two classic films of young-person-on-existential-journey to deal with family, and the trappings of expectation, and sort out their identity on their own terms, and those kinds of things.”

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte owned a property in Santa Monica Canyon designed by architect Richard Neutra that he was planning to tear down and restore to its original architecture; production designer Catherine Hardwicke helped transform the location into Jane’s house. In the search for the music Jane would been working on, music supervisor Karyn Rachtman and Cholodenko settled on two songs written by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse: “Someday I Will Treat You Good” and “Shade & Honey”. Alessandro Nivola lent his vocals to the tunes, while Lou Barlow, Imaad Wasif and Russ Pollard of Folk Implosion were cast as his bandmates. Production was scheduled to accommodate Frances McDormand, who lives in New York with husband Joel Coen and their (at that time) 8-year-old son. Laurel Canyon was finished in time for it to screen in the Director’s Fortnight of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

While the filmmakers beat the clock getting Laurel Canyon finished, critics praised the film’s star and little else. J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.” Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times: “There wasn’t a moment in the film that I didn’t enjoy, but neither was there anything that got my mind or heart racing. Cholodenko is clearly talented but it’s less clear whether she’s afraid to push harder or whether this is as far as she can go.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Not a successful movie — it’s too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive — but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.”

Following a screening at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics acquired domestic distribution rights to Laurel Canyon. A month later, Good Machine picked up international rights, but when the film opened March 2003 in the United States, it would tally only $3.6 million at the box office, adding $748,847 overseas. Cholodenko found the reaction very familiar. “What I find with High Art is people tell me they enjoy it a lot on the second and third viewing and I think with this film it’s sort of the same. There’s a lot of detail and I think it’s fun to go back and discover it after you’ve already seen the film, you’d be able to focus on different characters doing the different plotlines and stuff like that. The detailey stuff. That’s what I like in films. I’m kind of a detailey person.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Laurel Canyon – Press Kit

“Lisa Cholodenko” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 21 March 2003

“Interview with Lisa Cholodenko” By Marty Mapes. Movie Habit, 3 April 2003

“Lady of the Canyon” By Steve Bloom. High Times, 4 April 2003

Laurel Canyon. DVD audio commentary with Lisa Cholodenko. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2003)

“Cinematography Serves the Story” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

Coraline (2009)
Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Henry Selick
Produced by Pandemonium/ Laika Entertainment
Running time: 100 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) relocates from Pontiac, Michigan to the overcast Ashland, Oregon. While her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) write a gardening catalog, Coraline sets out to explore the Pink Palace Apartments, a 150-year old mansion that’s been rented out to three tenants. These include retired vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) and a Russian acrobat named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane). Coraline also meets the landlord’s grandson, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) whose great aunt disappeared in the house years ago. Wybie gives Coraline a doll that looks eerily like her.

Wakened at night by Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice, Coraline follows them through a door to an alternate reality, where her “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher again) offers Coraline everything she could possibly want: delicious food, nice clothes, a lavish room, wondrous gardens. She discovers a mangy black cat (Keith David) from home has the power of speech in this reality. Coraline’s Other Mother invites her to stay in this perfect world forever, if she’ll permit buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Trapped in a mirror when she refuses, Coraline meets the souls of other lost children and learns that her Other Mother is actually a creature who abducts and once she grows bored with them, devours children.

Who Made It?
Neil Gaiman — celebrated author of the DC Comics epic The Sandman and the novel Stardust – had his daughter to thank for planting the seeds of Coraline, written over a decade and published to great acclaim as a novella in 2002. Gaiman was a fan of Henry Selick, the stop-motion maestro behind The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and sent Selick a manuscript as early as 2000. Optioning the film rights for Selick was Bill Mechanic, former chairman of Fox and founder of the production company Pandemonium. Contractually prohibited from producing animated films by Disney — the studio where Mechanic had a deal — Coraline was initially developed as a live action feature, to no avail.

In May 2004, Selick accepted a job as supervising director with Vinton Studios, a Portland based animation company which found Coraline a little too dark for its tastes. But months later, Nike co-founder Phil Knight would move from an investor in Vinton Studios to buying the company outright and rebranding it as Laika Entertainment. Looking to make a move into feature films, Knight rolled the dice on Selick and Coraline with a production budget of between $60 and $70 million. The first stop-motion animated film shot in 3D, Coraline spent 18 months being meticulously filmed on 52 sets at Laika’s studio in Portland before opening to wide acclaim in February 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Neil Gaiman traced the origins of Coraline back to the unusual demand of a key demographic: his daughter. “It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten — she’d be about four or five years old — and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.”

Gaiman continued, “I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought, ‘I’ll write her one. I’ll write a story that Holly would like.’ And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline, which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed.” Gaiman found additional inspiration from Victorian Era author Lucy Clifford, whose 1882 short story The New Mother concerned two misbehaving children whose mother is replaced by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

Gaiman revealed, “I finished the first draft nine years ago in 2000 and I gave it to my agent and said: ‘Please give this to Henry Selick,’ because I had seen The Nightmare Before Christmas and even though it was called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas I was smart enough to understand that the main man was Henry Selick. I then saw James and the Giant Peach and thought Henry had something really interesting. Especially as a stop-motion director he was just beyond compare. He’s the best there is. I loved the fact that he seemed to understand that sometimes you can show sometimes bravery shines best in dark places.”

Published in 2002, Coraline was awarded that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Selick took the property to producer Bill Mechanic, who’d founded Pandemonium after being forced out as chairman of 20th Century Fox, where Mechanic had championed Fight Club, X-Men and Ice Age. Working on an adaptation, Selick resisted developing the material as a live action film, feeling there had been too many talking critter movies and that bringing Gaiman’s dark faerie tale to life through animation might make it less disturbing for younger audiences. But Mechanic’s deal with Disney prohibited him from making animated features.

Selick recalled, “And Bill liked it, but for about two years we had to pretend it was a live action film. I even met with Michelle Pfeiffer, to be possibly in the role of the Mothers, but she didn’t really want to have any buttons on her eyes. And I said, ‘But that’s, kinda the point of the … ‘ Anyway, that was the early days. We kinda hit a dead end. We weren’t going to get to make the film. A scary film for children — it wasn’t going to happen.” Selick moved on to animate sea creatures for the Wes Anderson comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and in May 2004, accepted an offer from Vinton Studios, the Portland based animation unit behind the California Raisins ad campaign and the Fox series The PJs.

Founded by stop-animation pioneer Will Vinton — who’d coined the term Claymation and supervised the stop-motion effects in Return To Oz (1985) — the studio was looking to land financing for animated features that might compete with Pixar. “They were growing, transforming. They had an idea for a short film, Moongirl, and they asked if I’d direct it, and flesh it out. And I said that I was only going to move up there from California if I could bring Coraline with me. And they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I moved up there, did this short for them, Moongirl, and then said, ‘Well, it’s time to do Coraline.’ And at that time, the guy in charge said, ‘Well, actually, it’s much too dark’, and what changed was, Travis Knight.”

Travis Knight is son of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. After a short-lived career as “Chilly Tee”, a Portland rapper in the early 1990s, Travis Knight found his niche as a stop-motion animator at Vinton Studios. After The PJs was canceled and advertising jobs dried up, his father invested in the studio. In September 2003, Phil Knight bought the company, naming Nike executive Dave Wahl CEO and hiring Selick as supervising animation director. Renaming the operation Laika Entertainment, Knight shifted the studio’s primary focus from commercials to feature films. One year later, it was announced that Laika would bankroll Coraline, with Henry Selick adapting a script and directing. Focus Features — the specialty film division of Universal Pictures — acquired worldwide distribution rights.

In adapting Gaiman’s novella, Selick revealed, “I added a character, this neighbor kid Wybie. I set it in the U.S., because I wasn’t as comfortable with British dialogue. And then, over the years that it took to get this thing off the ground, other elements of the story took on a life of their own. I guess the main thing is there’s a delicacy, a subtlety, that Neil can really exploit with his beautiful writing that can’t all get on the screen. You can go and describe the Other Mother and say that her teeth were just a tiny bit longer, her nails a tiny bit more red, but I had to go bigger and broader at times. I also had to dial back the darkness. I didn’t want to go to the darkest tones of the novel quite so soon. I wanted to go lighter and then descend into it.”

One concept that was floated was to open Coraline with computer-generated animation and transition into stop-motion when the story shifted into the parallel universe. Selick recalled, “It was a nice theory, we actually did a test, but putting the two side by side, it just didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have much to say, you know, crucial time we’re on the razor’s edge: which way do we go, CG or stop-motion? Travis Knight, who’s one of the lead animators, weighed in with his important vote and said, well, if he’s going to animate on one feature, he wanted to do stop-motion, so I owe him a huge debt. We went the right way. Travis had a lot to do with that.” Coraline commenced what became an 18-month shoot May 2006 at the Laika studio in Portland.

According to Selick, 90 percent of the film was done practical, without using CG imagery. “Coraline is about seven inches tall as a puppet. There’s an invisible line in her face that we’ve painted out, between her upper face and lower face. The animation of her face is done through replacement animation, just like Jack Skellington, Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, the old Pillsbury Doughboy. Martin Meunier — very talented artist/ fabrication person I’ve worked with — came up with a new system using rapid proto machines to build on handmade sculpts of her face and give her an ever greater range of expressiveness. Georgina Hayns — or George as we call her — head of puppet fabrication builds these puppets. The armature underneath metal skeleton was by Merri Cheney, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years.”

Critics generally loved the film. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline’s dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Coraline may not be for all tastes and it’s certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick’s animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.”

Opening February 2009 in the United States, Coraline earned $75.2 million domestically and added $46.3 million in theaters overseas. It also won the enthusiastic support of Neil Gaiman. “It’s what I hoped Henry would make, which is Henry’s film. It’s very much a film of my book and it hits all the beats of the book and it expands a little bit because it’s not a very big book. But he instilled it with Henry’s wonderful imagination and he doesn’t stop anything.” Gaiman added, “It’s so strange because I think adults have a lot more problems with this kind of story than children do. It’s true for the book. It’s always adults that say to me that they finish reading the book at three o’clock in the morning and go around the house turning on all the lights. I never get that from the kids.”

Should I Care?
Selick is an animation connoisseur and seems to understand that the state of the art only moves as far as animators are willing to challenge their audience. Earlier in his career, Selick was a storyboard artist for Disney and worked on Return To Oz, a dark, exquisitely made fable that critics disparaged for being too scary for kids(!) This as if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty — to name a few — were a trip to McDonald’s. With Neil Gaiman’s novella as a road map, Henry Selick has crafted his finest work yet. Less amusing than The Nightmare Before Christmas, the absence of musical numbers allows Selick and his team to descend into the imagination and angst of a child more vividly than any American animated film I can recall with the exception of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland.

Gaiman’s source material — liberally reworked by Selick — is a handsomely crafted narrative; there’s not a single dopey character or glib reference to be found here. The script doesn’t call for any cheap scares, but like Return To Oz, is a perilous and potent trip to the dark side. I don’t have any funny glasses and can’t comment about the film’s 3D attributes, but there’s no question that the handcrafted, slightly wonky effect of stop-motion animation — whether used in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Corpse Bride (2005) — is a shot into the nerve center of the brain. Bruno Coulais composed a delightfully spooky score, while alt rock kings They Might Be Giants — who composed four demos, only one of which Selick ended up being able to use — contribute a cool song.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Neil Gaiman Exclusive Interview — Coraline” By Matt Goldberg. Collider.com, 26 January 2009

“Coraline director Henry Selick on how not to mess up Neil Gaiman” By Ian Spelling. SciFi Wire, 26 January 2009

“Laika hangs dreams on Coraline” By Amy Reifenrath. Oregon Live, 4 February 2009

“Director Henry Selick on Coraline” By Debra Kaufman. Studio Daily, 6 February 2009

“Nike father-son duo lace up Coraline” By Peter Debruge. Variety, 6 February 2009

“Exclusive: Henry Selick on Coraline” By Michael Leader. Den of Geek, 7 May 2009

“Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Coraline. DVD audio commentary featuring Henry Selick & Bruno Coulais. Universal Home Entertainment (2009)

Trick ‘r Treat (2009)
Written by Michael Dougherty
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Produced by Legendary Pictures/ Bad Hat Harry Productions
Running time: 82 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In “Warren Valley, Ohio” on Halloween Night, a Yuppie couple (Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett) are paid a visit by a demonic trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head. In the first of four tongue-in-cheek horror tales to follow, a junior high school principal (Dylan Baker) poisons an obnoxious candy seeker and attempts to dispose of the body before his young son finds out. Three sexually aggressive party seekers (Lauren Lee Smith, Moneca Delain, Rochelle Aytes) get separated from their more precocious friend Laurie (Anna Paquin). Costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, she soon draws the attention of a psycho killer dressed in black.

Four adolescent trick ‘r treaters (Britt McKillip, Isabelle Deluce, Alberto Ghisi, Jean-Luc Bilodeau) let an outcast named Rhonda (Samm Todd) join their expedition to the local quarry. The trick ‘r treaters intend to make an offering of eight pumpkins to the eight children who as legend has it were driven off the quarry by a homicidal bus driver; their ceremony does not go as planned. Finally, the reclusive Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) wants to be left alone on Halloween, but receives a visit from the burlap headed trick ‘r treater, who’s been wandering in and out of all the stories. The imp seems to have retribution on its mind for All Hallow’s Eve.

Who Made It?
Michael Dougherty was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended New York University, graduating in 1996 from Tisch School of the Arts. Dougherty spent three years toiling on Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, while an animated short he’d written and directed titled Season’s Greetings made it to television. Director Bryan Singer read a spec script Dougherty had written titled Trick ‘r Treat — expanding the character and themes from Dougherty’s short — and introduced him to aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter Dan Harris. After moving to L.A. independent of each other, the duo won jobs writing X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006) for Singer.

Championed by late makeup effects maestro Stan Winston — originally slated to produce the film — Trick ‘r Treat was developed by Legendary Pictures, the Burbank based production company behind Superman Returns, Lady In the Water and 300, co-financing and co-producing in partnership with Warner Bros. Bryan Singer of Bad Hat Harry Productions came on board as a producer in the fall of 2006 and was present on the set of Doughtery’s live action directing debut in Vancouver. Despite overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, Warner Bros. backed away from giving Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release, finally rolling it out on DVD in October 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Seasons Greetings (1996) was a 4-minute, hand drawn and hand colored short film, which writer-director Michael Dougherty spent nine months drawing with pencils and paper at NYU. Each frame was colored with magic markers instead of paint with fellow film students helping him color many of the cels. The short — about a trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head being menaced by a stalker — was broadcast on MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Sci-Fi Channel and played a few film festivals. As Dougherty brainstormed ideas for short films or short stories he noticed they all ended up being about Halloween.

Dougherty recalled, “So I started thinking, well how neat would it be to put them all together into one movie and I guess it was kind of my way of cheating and saying here’s, look, here’s my feature film screenplay, it’s an anthology movie. But then they also started interweaving and it became one movie, just with a lot of characters whose lives start intersecting. I realized I could take this character and make him the next door neighbor of that character and make these trick-or-treaters show up at the door of this guy and so it all ended up coming together. And Sam became a character that wandered though all of their stories.”

He continued, “The first story is really just about a father and a son and introducing the son to the holiday and its traditions. The next one, it’s a group of kids who are between ages 12 and 15 and it’s when you break away from your parents and you’re walking around the town by yourself trick-or-treating. And then the next one, you’re in your twenties and the holiday becomes about nothing but partying and having sex and trying to find the hottest costume possible. The fourth one is the twilight years, when you’re old and alone and celebrating the holiday by yourself, which hopefully none of us end up like, but it’s kind of these weird four seasons of Halloween in a sense.”

Dougherty’s spec script — Trick ‘r Treat – became his calling card to meeting the director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men, Bryan Singer, in 2000. After working with his writing partner Dan Harris on drafts of X2 and Superman Returns, executive producers Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and William Fay of Legendary Pictures were prepared to give Dougherty a shot making the transition from screenwriter to director of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty revealed, “I think the transition was made easier by the fact that Bryan Singer always had me and my writing partner Dan Harris on set throughout X2 and throughout Superman Returns and it’s interesting to realize how much I picked up just from osmosis.”

Dougherty added, “In terms of preparing, interacting with the crew, knowing how to set up a shot, getting your coverage, etc. I think I’m blessed in that I’ve had Bryan to show me the ropes as well as my writing partner Dan who directed a feature film a few years ago called Imaginary Heroes. They’ve both been available to give me pointers and tips and help me out. As well as Alex Garcia; he’s been on the set of Bryan’s movies and produced his TV projects. It’s been good, but I definitely know that those two movies, Superman Returns and X2 were basically boot camp. I’d be twenty times more terrified doing this if I hadn’t been on set for 131 days on each of those two movies.”

With Bryan Singer and Alex Garcia of Bad Hat Harry Productions as producers, Trick ‘r Treat commenced filming November 2006 in Vancouver. Singer was reportedly on set throughout the film’s nine-week shoot. Also working with Dougherty was NYU alum Breehn Burns, who’d come on board as a concept artist and would also design the film’s comic book panel title sequence. Of Burns, Dougherty added, “He referred me to a storyboard guy named Simeon Wilkins, who’s a young guy who has an amazing resume. He worked on The Ring, Monster House, he just finished Beowulf for Bob Zemeckis, and we click really well too.”

Scheduled for release October 2007, Halloween came and went without Warner Bros. giving audiences Trick ‘r Treat. Legendary Pictures screened it December 2007 at the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, Texas, an invitation-only film festival hosted by the architect of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. Avid dispatches from film geeks who’d seen the movie would trickle through the popular website for the next two years. “Massawyrm”: “Horror fans are going to have a ton of fun with this and I fully expect this to take its rightful place as the holiday classic that gets pulled out every year, much the same way Halloween was for many of us in our youth. It is a film very much about the holiday and its spirit, and it captures that wonderfully.”

Warner Bros. began to license Trick ‘r Treat T-shirts, graphic novels and action figures, but the studio was at a loss over how to market the movie. Dougherty mused, “I remember having a conversation with, you know, an executive who shall remain nameless about this, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a horror movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He goes, ‘Well, we’ll target the Saw and the Hostel demographic.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not them.’ ‘Well but they’re the horror audience.’ ‘No, they’re not this horror audience.’ Horror itself isn’t just a genre. There’s so many subgenres to it, just like there’s so many types of comedy. You have your Wayans Brothers comedies and you have your Judd Apatow comedies. Very different audiences. And so, sometimes it can be difficult to try to explain horror as a genre to people.”

Despite successful screenings at Screamfest L.A. in October 2008, Comic Con in July 2009 and recently at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, Warner Bros. shuttled Trick ‘r Treat onto Video On Demand and DVD in October 2009. Reviewers were effusive with praise. Bill Gibron, Pop Matters: “Almost too clever for its own good, Trick ‘r Treat is a really good film. In fact, it’s so unusual in its practical F/X approach and retro direct to video charms that a second viewing is definitely needed before confirming its almost masterpiece status.” Alex Billington, First Showing.Net: “There hasn’t been a horror movie this original and this inventive since Wes Craven brought us Scream in 1996. I guess it only took twelve years to finally find the next great horror franchise.”

Commenting on his film’s winding road to release, Dougherty suggested it was caught between two business models, one dying out, the other taking its baby steps. “We’re reaching a day and age where the generation of kids growing up expect to have the option of going to the theater or watching a movie at home. I think that window is going to close completely, soon. But I think, in the meantime, I think it’s smart for distributors to look at that limited-release fan demand method of distribution.” He added, “Why not try to open it in two cities and let the fans post on Facebook or send out tweets about getting it in their hometown? I really wish we could have tried that model with Trick ‘r Treat, but by the time the decision had been made it was too late.”

Should I Care?
Here’s a movie stoked by such an outpouring of love from its target demographic that I’m left to ponder whether I even saw the same film the fanboys did. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t really for people who read reviews, it’s for the people who love those movies that aren’t screened for critics. It’s also blatantly the work of a first time screenwriter and director. At 82 minutes with credits, Doughtery gets in a hurry introducing too many characters without giving us a reason to care about a single one. Some of his ideas are sketchy and poorly executed. Burlap head — referred to as “Sam” in the credits for reasons that are never explained — never makes the leap from doodle to compelling screen creep.

There’s a segment here — the film’s best — about 13-year-olds trick ‘r treating that recalls those Saturday afternoon, kids on a mission movies I grew up with like The Goonies or The Monster Squad. That’s nice, and so is Breehn Burns’ gorgeous title sequence with comic book panels illustrated with scenes from the movie flipping by. Douglas Pipes supplements this with a fantastic musical score that easily surpasses anything Danny Elfman has composed in 16 years. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t a bad movie. I can name 10 recent horror movies that were a lot worse. But if this is destined to become a Halloween standard, I’ll be watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Superman Returns Writers Ride a Wave of Success” By Torquin Hedd. Moving Pictures Magazine, July 2006

“Quartet are in for Treat” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 9 November 2006

“Trick ‘r Treat: Writer/Director Michael Dougherty, On Set in Vancouver, BC Canada” BloodyDisgusting.com, 11 January 2007

“Director on what the long-delayed release has meant for Trick ‘r Treat” By Patrick Lee. Sci-Fi Wire, 28 July 2009

“Q&A: Trick ‘r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty” Heat Vision Blog. The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2009

Trick ‘r Treat. DVD audio commentary with Michael Dougherty. Warner Home Video (2009)