Adventureland (2009)
Written by Greg Mottola
Directed by Greg Mottola
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the summer of 1987, Oberlin College grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is notified by his parents (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin) that money he was depending on to help pay for a European backpacking trip will no longer be available. Unable to help their son pay rent when he enrolls at Columbia in the fall, James returns to Pittsburgh for the summer looking for work. A comparative literature and Renaissance studies major, the only job he finds he’s really qualified for is at the scruffy amusement park Adventureland, where his childish neighbor Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) works.

James is passed over for a position in Rides when the couple that runs the park (Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig) concludes that he’s more of a Games man. His co-workers include the mopey Joel (Martin Starr) and a streetwise girl named Em (Kristen Stewart) who saves James from getting knifed by a customer. Em reveals a similar taste in music (The Replacements, Big Star) and that she’s headed for NYU in the fall. But James’ affection for Em is tempered when he discovers she’s been sleeping with Adventureland’s 30-year-old married maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds).

Who Made It?
Greg Mottola grew up in Dix Hills, a town on Long Island, New York. After receiving a BFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mottola earned an MFA in film at Columbia. His debut feature film The Daytrippers (starring Hope Davis, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber) won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Mottola envisioned an auteur’s career for himself like that of Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen, writing and directing his own material. But when Columbia Pictures put Mottola’s planned sophomore film – The Life of the Party, a road trip ensemble to feature John Cusack — into turnaround in 1999, Mottola fell into a funk that resulted in little if any writing.

Desperate to get back behind the camera in 2001, Mottola accepted an offer from producer Judd Apatow to direct episodes of Fox’s coed dorm comedy Undeclared. Surrounded by a cast and crew much younger than himself, Mottola started thinking about writing a film about first love. Working with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey of This Is That Productions, Mottola was ready to send his script Adventureland out to investors when Apatow offered Mottola the job of directing a feature: Superbad. The teen comedy’s runaway critical and commercial success in 2007 led to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Miramax Films agreeing to split financing for Adventureland.

How’d They Do It?
Greg Mottola had moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on Undeclared when the idea for what became Adventureland began to percolate. Mottola recalled, “I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there. I thought, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.”

He added, “I was a very naïve young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.” During a conversation with a member of the Undeclared writing staff — Jenny Connor — about the worst jobs anyone had ever had, Mottola mentioned his stint working at a Long Island amusement park called Adventureland in the summer of ’84.

“So I had a friend working at this amusement park I applied and soon found myself wearing a ‘Games’ shirt and being a carnival barker for the summer. And it was just demeaning, you know, I was pretentious, I was an art student at the time, I thought it was beneath me … You know, and I wanted to find people who could sit and talk about the abstract expressionists and Rothko you know, and it was these animals vomiting around me and eating cotton candy. But, you know, it quickly turned into one of those kind of super fun summers.” While directing episodes of Fox’s Arrested Development and HBO’s The Comeback, Mottola continued to work on his script.

Once Mottola had a draft of Adventureland he was happy with, he sent it to producer Ted Hope. A partner in the indie film production company Good Machine, Hope had produced Ride With the Devil for Ang Lee, Storytelling for Todd Solondz and Human Nature for Michel Gondry before agreeing to sell Good Machine to Universal and founding This Is That Productions with Anne Carey. Hope recalled, “Years back when I was struggling to get Nicole Holofcener’s Walking & Talking financed, Nicole said in a fit of despair that I should be working with someone who will actually make a lot of movies, like the guy who had just won best film at Columbia Film School, Greg Mottola.”

Hope added, “He already had a producer relationship so we just got to know each other, but life wasn’t as Nicole had predicted for him. By the time five or so years had passed since Daytrippers, his agents, who were also our agents, submitted the script to us as a ready-to-go project. We loved it but had some thoughts on how to enhance it and make it more resonant in the marketplace. Greg agreed but it took us over two years to get it right, and then he got what initially looked like a direct-to-DVD feature, but that turned out to be Superbad and the rest is history.” Confident of his take on Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s teen comedy, Mottola put his moody take on first love on the backburner.

With the massive success of Superbad, Mottola found plenty of investors willing to bankroll Adventureland, if he could only change it a bit. “You know, it was hard to get the film set up, even after Superbad. People who wanted to make it made a condition that I had to rewrite it as a contemporary film, and I refused. That may have been very stubborn of me. But I didn’t know what the equivalent to this film would be for a 21-year-old just coming into college. I could research it, but it wouldn’t be as fun to me as a film that came from personal experiences. There was just something about a movie that’s looking back — it has a slightly more melancholy strain. And a part of it was because life did seem simpler before the Internet and before cell phones.”

Sidney Kimmel — a garment magnate who built Jones Apparel Group into a publicly traded company worth $5 billion — had quietly assembled a film production and finance company in Beverly Hills in 2005. With indie film vets Jim Tauber and William Horberg on his team, Kimmel rolled the dice on a number of offbeat comedies (Death at a Funeral, Lars and the Real Girl) and socially conscious dramas (United 93, Talk To Me) that were anything but safe commercial bets. SKE financed Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York and decided to go into business with Greg Mottola, splitting $10 million or so in financing with Miramax Films. In August 2007 it was announced that Adventureland would be Mottola’s next picture.

Ted Hope recalled, “We were ready to go out with the script for financing and casting a few weeks before Superbad came out. Interest in Greg was high, but time to put together a summer movie was short. Luckily Greg had thought hard about whom he wanted in the film prior and they were all accessible. Jesse & Kristen were pretty much whom he always wanted. Kristen had yet to get Twilight so she was still considered a virtual unknown. Greg knew Bill Hader from Superbad and wanted him and Kristen Wiig from the get-go too. Ryan Reynolds may have been the first person Greg had met for the role; he just happened to be in NYC right when we started.”

Hope continued, “And Martin Starr just slayed it in an early audition and changed our conception of the character. Similarly Margarita Levieva came to the audition in full character and makeup. Both of them became the archetype so there was no one else we could cast. Perhaps most fortunate, was that our financing partners agreed with our vision for the roles and that allowed Greg to lock his cast quickly by his taste and not some Chinese Menu of what may work in different markets or with specific demographics.” To get the summer romance rolling before winter set in, Mottola ended up with two weeks of prep time. The director admitted some mistakes were made as a result.

“Well, like, a prop guy thought they didn’t have those pop tags on soda cans in 1987. And I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure they did.’ And it’s hard to find ‘80s cars. People will preserve and treasure their ‘70s muscle cars, but not treasure their K-cars. It was weird; we couldn’t find cars that ran. But I grew up in a really modest suburban community in Long Island and a lot of my neighbors didn’t have a lot of money, and their houses were still filled with furniture from the ‘70s and the ‘60s, even. It’s not as though everyone switched to an ‘80s aesthetic because that’s what was on TV. This is a modest world where the film takes place, and it’s okay if there’s a mish-mash of ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The search for an amusement park that hadn’t changed much in 20 years came down to Playland in Rye, NY and Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. Mottola recalled, “The tax rebates in Pennsylvania were better than New York state, plus it seemed like we could get a better deal with Kennywood, so the choice was arrived at pretty quickly. Plus, I have a fondness for poor maligned Pittsburgh. We didn‘t have the budget to build or create very much, although my production designer Stephen Beatrice did a very nice job of creating the specific booths that I needed and scuzzying up the park a bit so it wasn‘t quite as quaint as Kennywood is in reality.” Shooting in the 111-year old park during the week — before Kennywood went into Phantom Fright Nights mode on the weekends — Adventureland commenced filming September 2007.

An Adventureland employee in 1984, Mottola bumped the film’s timeline up to 1987 to take advantage of songs he wanted to use to tell his life story. Collaborating with music supervisor Tracy McKnight — who had worked at an amusement park in Seaside Heights, NJ in her youth — Mottola exchanged iPod playlists and mix tapes. Accustomed to licensing 15 to 20 songs for a movie, McKnight arrived on 40 tunes, including “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” by Husker Du and “I’m In Love With a Girl” by Big Star. Mottola joked that the fee paid to Van Halen to use “Panama” in Superbad “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.” To compose a score, Mottola turned to another favorite band, the Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, Adventureland opened nationwide April 2009. Critics fell in love with the movie. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “A confident return to the kind of teen comedy that’s funny without being raunchy, youthful without being juvenile, and reflective without hitting you over the head.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.”

Never expanding beyond 1,876 U.S. screens, Adventureland sold $16 million in tickets domestically and added $1 million overseas. Acknowledging the challenges of marketing a period movie to kids who might feel it wasn’t about them and to adults who might feel it was just about kids, Greg Mottola sounded pleased with the results. “There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me. I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.”

Should I Care?
Quickly hailed as one of the year’s best films by critics and too easily dismissed by casual viewers as lacking in laughs (Kristen Wiig fans expecting more than a token cameo will probably be disappointed), Adventureland is a little of both, a small but perfect gem that gets better the more I think about it. Without painting a rose colored portrait of the late ‘80s, Greg Mottola’s writing genuinely pines for the days when people somehow met without the Internet and expressed themselves without cell phones. It’s a gentler coming-of-age drama than something from Noah Baumbach and recalls Wes Anderson’s early work in its understated wit.

One sign we’re in the hands of a talented filmmaker is the casting. Jesse Eisenberg does what Michael Cera couldn’t have done, playing a boy growing into a man. Kristen Stewart has an alluring scruffiness that I can’t recall seeing another young actress emulate as convincingly. It takes time before we know how to feel about either character. The soundtrack — a sublime blend of kitsch played at the park and the ‘70s or ‘80s music its couple shares via mix tapes — refrains from explaining the scenes, supplying mood instead. What’s most rewarding about Adventureland is how Mottola smarts the movie up — instead of dumbing it down — by rejecting raunch and taking a slow turn toward brutal honesty.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Film Producer Guided More by His Heart Than by His Calculator” By David Halbfinger. The New York Times, 12 December 2007

“When Hollywood Comes Calling” By Daniel McGuire. IAAPA, February 2008

“Greg Mottola Interview, Adventureland, Sundance 2009” By Kevin Kelly. SpoutBlog, 22 January 2009

“Sundance 2009 — Adventureland — Greg Mottola” The Hollywood Podcast starring Tim Coyne. 19 February 2009

“Directing to an ’80s Playlist” By Larry Rother. The New York Times, 20 March 2009

“Five Questions for Ted Hope (Adventureland)” By Matt Dentler. indieWIRE, 31 March 2009

“After The Daytrippers …” By Peter Keough. The Boston Phoenix, 31 March 2009

“Director Greg Mottola on Keeping Adventureland Eighties Appropriate” By Lane Brown. New York Magazine, 3 April 2009

“Some Kind of Love” By Nick Dawson. Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2009

Talk to Me (2007)
Screenplay by Michael Genet and Rick Famuyiwa and Kasi Lemmons (uncredited), story by Michael Genet
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Produced by Pelagius Films/ Mark Gordon Company/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 118 minutes

So, What’s This About?
At Lorton Reformatory in 1966, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) grudgingly puts in a visit to his convict brother (Mike Epps), fulfilling a promise he made to their mother. Dewey — the enterprising station manager of WOL-AM in Washington D.C. — is intercepted in the waiting room by the loquacious Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). Immensely popular as the prison disc jockey, Petey is serving a 10 year sentence for armed robbery, but doesn’t let this stop him from asking Dewey for a job, while he waits for a conjugal visit from his sassy girlfriend Vernell (Taraji Henson). Dewey dismisses Petey as a “miscreant” and brushes the con off by telling Petey to look him up when he gets out.

Petey wins an early release by talking a prisoner off a water tower, and with Vernell at his side, storms WOL, where his rap doesn’t go over well with Dewey or his boss (Martin Sheen). After being kicked out, Petey organizes a community protest against WOL. Recognizing the potential to tap into the prevailing anti-establishment mood, Dewey gives Petey a shot as a morning deejay. Off-the-cuff remarks about Berry Gordy get him yanked off the air, but Dewey refuses to give up on Petey. Through a successful radio program, a TV talk show and comedy albums, Petey becomes the voice of D.C.’s black community. Dewey gets him booked on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where stardom appears inevitable for Petey Greene.

Who Made It?
Lurma Rackley met Petey Greene in 1981 when she was hired to write an article on the broadcast legend for the Washington North Star. Greene looking for someone to pen his autobiography and was pleased enough with Rackley’s piece to offer her the job. Greene would pass away a year later, long before any book could be finished. Rackley was friends with Dewey Hughes, who by 1991 was a successful TV producer in Los Angeles. Hughes offered to take the material she’d finished and see if he could interest anyone in Hollywood on a Petey Greene biopic. He ultimately hooked producer Joe Fries with the idea. Producer Mark Gordon came on board as well and in June 2000, it was announced that Martin Lawrence had agreed to play Petey Greene.

Unable to reach a deal with Rackley, Joe Fries ignored her research and chose to center the film on Petey Greene’s relationship with Dewey Hughes. Titled Petey Greene’s Washington, a spec script by Hughes’ son Michael Genet was written and set up at Fox. Rick Famuyiwa was brought in for revisions, then Kasi Lemmons, who became more enamored with the project over time and aspired to direct it herself. After several directors in front of her passed, Lemmons — who’d made a big splash in 1997 writing and directing Eve’s Bayou — won the job, suggesting Don Cheadle for the lead. Talk to Me was put into turnaround by Fox and after several starts and stops, was financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

How’d They Do It?
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. was an ex-con, a disc jockey, a two-time Emmy Award winning host of Petey Greene’s Washington on WDCA, a Washington D.C. community organizer, guest of the White House and in 1981, the subject of an article that freelance writer Lurma Rackley was assigned. When the interview was over, Greene asked Rackley if she’d ever written a book. Greene was looking to pen his autobiography, but collaborations with two or three other writers hadn’t worked out. Rackley had never attempted a book, but Greene was sufficiently impressed with her article and gave Rackley the job. A year into their interviews, Greene would be stricken with liver cancer and pass away at the age of 52.

Rackley recalled, “When he was in the hospital on his final days, he really couldn’t talk anymore — he could just listen; a relative put the phone to his ear so he could hear. I told him I promised I would get the story out.” According to Rackley, Greene’s attorney lost interest in a book, leaving the writer with 60 hours of taped interviews. By 1991, Rackley was press secretary for Mayor Marion Barry and working on the book part-time when she received a call from her friend Dewey Hughes. The conversation got around to Rackley’s work-in-progress. Hughes offered to take what she had so far — an outline, prologue, five chapters — and shop it around Hollywood.

Seven years later, Hughes hooked producer Joe Fries, who’d grown up in Bethesda watching Petey Greene’s Washington. Fries — who helped launch The Learning Channel — recalled, “I was completely the cultural opposite of Petey. Yet I was drawn to this character on television.” Fries offered to buy Rackley’s unfinished manuscript and her taped interviews, but concerned about how her candid interviews with Greene would be used, Rackley held out for the opportunity to join the movie as a consultant. “Joe and his people didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted me to sign that contract or they didn’t want to work with me at all … It was one of those all-or-nothing things.”

With Lurma Rackley no longer involved — she would self-publish her book, Laugh If You Like, Ain’t A Damn Thing Funny, in 2004 — and without Petey Greene’s life story, Joe Fries backed into the idea of a movie about the friendship between Greene and Dewey Hughes. He compelled Hughes’ son — screenwriter Michael Genet — to write a spec script. Genet recalled, “Joe Fries and executive producer Joey Rappa called and told me they wanted to do a movie about Petey and Dewey. As Joe started talking through the story with me, it all came rushing back like a raging river because I had lived it; my father and his best friend were two powerful brothers and the talk of our town, D.C.”

In writing a script about Petey Greene, Michael Genet turned not only to his father’s memories, but his own personal remembrances of Greene. “Whenever he opened his mouth and spoke, I would jump. As funny as he was, even as a boy I could hear the pain in his voice. Listening to him on the radio, I didn’t always understand what he was speaking about. But I couldn’t change that dial; he had me and an entire city mesmerized and hypnotized.” Genet added, “What I found in telling their story was that there is a love shared between black men that we almost never hear tell of. You wont find it defined in any textbooks or dictionaries, yet it exists.”

The script found a fan in Josh McLaughlin at The Mark Gordon Company, who’d also grown up in D.C. McLaughlin recalled, “Hearing Petey’s name, I remembered that there was a community center office dedicated to him. I found it was very difficult, though, to remember a non-blaxploitation movie about an urban city in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. The three Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movies, beginning with Uptown Saturday Night, did depict that period, and of course there was that great documentary concert film Wattstax. There were also several civil rights pictures, but those were Southern-oriented. Those are all good films, but the Black Is Beautiful era in a world of change has largely gone unexplored. Petey’s story, about speaking your mind, was a window into there.”

Writer-director phenom Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) took a crack at the script next. He stated, “What drew me in first was Petey. He was an iconoclast, and a torchbearer of the oral tradition that is an integral part of African-American culture. To me, he represented a bridge between the orators of the civil rights movement and the orators of today, hip-hop musicians. Like a rapper, he was the voice of people who didn’t have a say. What he had to say wasn’t always what people wanted to hear both inside the community and out but it represented a truth he felt had to be expressed. I felt he could be contemporary and relatable to today’s hip-hop-reared generation.”

Kasi Lemmons began her career as an actress — appearing in Candyman and Fear of a Black Hat most memorably — but seeking a challenge beyond just paying the bills, went back to school, enrolling in the film program at the New School for Social Research. She also started writing. Lemmons followed her critically acclaimed gem Eve’s Bayou in 1997 with a disquieting adaptation of George Dawes Green’s novel The Caveman’s Valentine starring Samuel L. Jackson in 2001. She then labored for four years trying to get an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Napoleonic romance The Passion made, but even with Miramax poster girl Gwyneth Paltrow committed, tumultuous times at the studio ultimately squashed the project.

Petey Greene’s Washington came to Lemmons from The Mark Gordon Company as a rewrite. “I read the script years ago, and I respected it, but it didn’t speak my language.” Over time, the material begin speaking to Lemmons. ”I started to hear Petey’s voice in my ear. He was saying: ‘You better direct this thing. Don’t let this out of the house.’ I suddenly fell passionately in love, head over heels. One of the things that happened was the Iraq War. We were invading. People had strong opinions, and they were afraid to say anything. There was fear, you could feel it. People were afraid. I was. So I was attracted to a character who spoke loudly, without censoring, who let the chips fall where they would. There was something about a loud, uncensored, brave voice that attracted me.”

To get the directing job, Lemmons had to wait in line until Fox exhausted the names of the directors in front of her, prestige-wise. She recalled, “Finally I got a meeting. I went in über-prepared. I was very clear in how I wanted it to feel — very alive, very dynamic, immediate. Which is, I believe, how it feels. Instead of looking at the past, have it feel that you could enter it. It would have a movement, a beat. And to put Don Cheadle in it. I knew what people were afraid of — that it might be pretty. I said, ‘I want it to be gorgeous, without being pretty.’ I had to say without saying that I wouldn’t make it feminine. Once I had the movie I never thought about it again.”

Flush from the success of Hustle & Flow, Terrence Howard was briefly attached to play Petey Greene before agreeing to switch parts with Don Cheadle and take on Dewey Hughes instead. Fox ultimately put Talk to Me into turnaround, but Focus Features picked it up and tentatively agreed to provide financing. Lemmons flew to Toronto in September 2005 and with producer J. Miles Dale, started scouting locations. Lemmons recalled, “When I got to Toronto to shoot the movie we worked for 12 to 14 days, but we started getting a bad feeling around Day 10. We kept it together a few more days, but then things unraveled. There were legal issues in transferring the film from Fox to Focus. It was not a pretty feeling.”

With filming pushed back at least until April 2006, Don Cheadle remained on board, but Terrence Howard had to drop out. Chiwetel Ejiofor read for the role of Dewey Hughes and clicked with Cheadle so well that Lemmons used a rehearsal tape between the actors to secure a new financier. Lemmons recalled, “It’s extremely difficult to get money for films with a predominantly black cast. We were independently financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment because a producer there, Bill Horberg, felt passionately about the story but we were extremely lucky.” On a budget of $12.5 million, Talk to Me commenced shooting July 2006 in Hamilton, Canada, which was not only less expensive and less restrictive than D.C., but featured architecture locked in the 1960s.

After being screened at Cannes in May and the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Talk to Me opened in limited release July 2007 in the United States. Critics were mostly supportive. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it’s fresh and revelatory.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem, reminding audiences that once upon a time media personalities used to fight The Man, not be The Man.”

Distributed by Focus Features, Talk to Me never expanded beyond 193 U.S. theaters, where it was held to $4.5 million at home and $245,115 overseas. Disappointed with the box office, Lemmons was energized by her Petey Greene experience. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, people felt scared to say anything because you were going to be labeled ‘unpatriotic.’ People were very, very cautious and I felt like saying, ‘Wake up, goddamitt!’ I felt like screaming at people all the time. Talk to Me is this perfect anti-censorship film in a way. You’ve got this character that is going to tell it. Whether or not that’s a mistake, he’s going to have to judge later — but at the moment that he is speaking it, nothing is censoring him. I thought that was kind of exciting.”

Should I Care?
Talk to Me is at least five different movies and four of them range in quality from “really good” to “great”. There’s a 15-year friendship between two men from different worlds who become hugely successful by trusting each other. There’s a fantastic social document of an urban community in the late ‘60s. There’s a hugely entertaining story about a community radio station — with Cedric the Entertainer (as “Nighthawk” Bob Terry), Vondie Curtis-Hall (as Sunny Jim Kelsey) and Martin Sheen as progressive owner E.G. Sonderling — that rivals anything on WKRP in Cincinnati. There’s also a good story in here about events that overtake an R&B station on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

By living so many lives in 52 years, the story of Petey Greene was probably never going to gel as a movie, taking creative license with history and losing focus in the last half hour, when Petey’s rise to celebrity isn’t very compelling. That said, Don Cheadle & Chiwetel Ejiofor — two of our best actors — have remarkable chemistry together. The sensational Taraji Henson figures somewhat less into their story, but Cheadle and Taraji can star in every movie as far as I’m concerned. Amid the clashing tones here, one Kasi Lemmons rings truest is how endangered we’ve allowed our speech to become in an effort not to offend anyone. Talk to Me is a testament to a time when even the people who had a lot to lose didn’t back down from challenging the status quo.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Remembering Petey” By Kathryn Sinzinger. The Common Denominator, 8 March 2004

“City core subs for Washington D.C.” By Doug Foley. The Hamilton Spectator, 6 July 2006

“The Ready Return of a True Believer” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 July 2007

“Talk to Her” By Amanda S. Miller. The Washington City Paper, 1 August 2007

“Talk to Me Kasi Lemmons” By Emanuel Levy

“Kasi Lemmons Finds the Voice to Speak Out in Talk to Me” By Lily Percy. MovieMaker Magazine, 15 October 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Velocity (2002)
Screenplay by Rebecca Miller, based on her book
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Produced by Blue Magic Pictures/ Goldheart Pictures/ InDigEnt
Running time: 86 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the first of three portraits of women in a state of flux, Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) leaves an abusive husband with her three children in tow. She moves into the garage of a childhood friend and takes a job as a waitress, where Delia gains control of her life by reasserting herself sexually. Greta (Parker Posey) is a moderately successful book editor plucked out of obscurity by a red hot novelist to work with him on his latest book. Her changing fortunes gain Greta the respect of a powerful attorney father (Ron Leibman) but further alienate her from an unremarkable husband (Tim Guinee).

Paula (Fairuza Balk) drives upstate in a daze with a mute teenage hitchhiker (Lou Taylor Pucci) in the passenger seat. She reaches the home of her mother (Patti D’Arbanville) whom Paula hasn’t seen since fleeing to New York City two years ago. Now expecting a baby with her compassionate Haitian boyfriend (Seth Gilliam), Paula is distraught by the death of a man she chatted up at a bar and was struck by a car while walking her down a sidewalk. Paula is pulled back to earth when she realizes her scarred passenger is in a far more damaged condition than she is.

Who Made It?
Rebecca Miller is the only child of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. A Yale graduate, Miller for a time chose painting over writing, but while on an art fellowship in Germany at the age of 21, discovered a love for filmmaking. She developed her craft by making short films and — with her father’s agent lining up auditions — earned a living as an actress, winning roles in Regarding Henry (1991) as Harrison Ford’s mistress and Consenting Adults (1992) as Kevin Spacey’s mysterious wife. Miller’s first feature film as a writer/director Angela won her a Dramatic Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, but her screenplays went unproduced.

Miller started a family with her husband Daniel Day-Lewis and turned away from screenwriting. Producer/director Gary Winick — whose New York based company InDigEnt financed low budget features to be shot on mini-DV — called Miller to see if she had any projects to contribute. While none of her scripts fit the InDigEnt mandate, Miller sent Winick three of seven short stories from her forthcoming book Grove Press was set to publish in 2002. Adapted into a screenplay and directed by Miller in 17 days and on a shoestring of only $150,000, Personal Velocity was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002 and would put her on the map as a filmmaker.

How’d They Do It?
The segueway Rebecca Miller took from painting to acting to screenwriting would change again in the late ‘90s. The writer-director recalled, “I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker’s Prize at Sundance.” She added, “Angela did well with some critics and things, but it didn’t make money. It was a very uncommercial film … So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn’t want to just wait and wait to make films and tell stories. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.”

Several years passed and Miller received a phone call from producer-director Gary Winick, who had launched a new production company. Winick recalled, “InDigEnt was inspired after I saw the Dogme film, The Celebration. And I also thought about how John Cassavetes worked in the ’60s, with the 16mm cameras and the repertoire of actors and the small crews. I thought with this new medium that there was an opportunity here, because in New York there’s this great theater and independent film community. My idea was to form a collective where everybody gets paid the same amount, but also owns a piece of the film.”

Winick added, “Creatively, I was interested in using these new tools for experienced filmmakers to tell stories they normally couldn’t tell, or to tell stories in a different way because of these tools. I went to John Sloss, my lawyer, and we became partners and we partnered with IFC. IFC was the perfect partner because they wanted to be a part of the DV movement.” Winick’s plan had been to produce 10 films a year for $1 million each. 19 InDigEnt films ended up being made from 2000 to 2007 for roughly $250,000 each, including Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001) starring Ethan Hawke & Uma Thurman and the award winning Pieces of April (2003) with Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson.

Miller recalled, “I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, I said, ‘If you want to look at the stories that I’m writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them.’ So I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He ended up giving them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green lighting the film. It was also Gary’s idea to use three stories at once and make a trilogy, and when he said that my mind took off.” After laboring intensely on her book for two years, Miller adapted a screenplay for Personal Velocity in two months.

“I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash; like I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying, and finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage.”

Producer Lemore Syvan — who’d founded Goldheart Pictures in 1995 and Blue Magic Pictures in 2002 – came aboard, with InDigEnt’s Gary Winick and Alexis Alexanian also serving as producers. While Winick maintained that the difficult subject matter Miller was exploring fit the intimacy and thrift of digital filmmaking perfectly, the format presented a host of challenges. Syvan admitted, “Well, the question came up every day when we were shooting Personal Velocity: why can’t we just shoot this on Super 16? But Personal Velocity was designed for video. The way the movie was born was by a mandate that was given to us by InDigEnt, which we all know is a company that makes movies on digital.”

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras recalled, “I had to talk to Rebecca about the limitations of the medium. Having worked on Bamboozled, I knew what we could and couldn’t get away with. On the wide-angle part of the lens, the image just falls apart, especially when you go to a 35mm blowup, so I told her that we really wanted to shoot on the longer part of the lens. You can’t verify the focus on the cameras; what’s on the viewfinder is not 1-to-1 with what you’re getting on the chip. The contrast is hard to deal with. And when you shoot at a certain shutter speed, you get this kind of stepping of the lines in the image.”

With a budget of $150,000, Personal Velocity commenced shooting May 2001 in New York using two Sony DSR-PD150P cameras. Ellen Kuras revealed, “I knew that creatively, my palette would be very limited. I just said, ‘You know what, I’m shooting with this mini DV medium, I’m going to think of these as a short story and I’m going to try to make it look and feel like a poem.’ And that would be my way of saying anything goes. ‘I’m making a poem so … ‘ That means I don’t have to form full sentences. That means I don’t have to put periods where you’re supposed to put periods at the end of sentences. That means I’m not going to do what everybody says you’re supposed to do. I’m just going to do what I think feels right for the movie.”

When screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, Personal Velocity was greeted as a sensation. Rebecca Miller was awarded the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Ellen Kuras the Cinematography Award. Miller would dedicate the film to her mother, who passed away days after the festival. She mused, “I probably will be thinking and talking and writing about my mother for the rest of my life. That’s one thing I find about having children — it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who’ve had children. There’s some basic feminist thing that’s the same for all women who’ve had children, it doesn’t matter what their class is or what their situation is.”

Opening November 2002 in the United States, Personal Velocity met a mixed response from critics. Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times: “The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller’s canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.” Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune: “Miller’s movie has its moments of impressive velocity, but it never quite takes off.” Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club: “Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration.”

Should I Care?
Never expanding beyond 43 theaters in the U.S., Personal Velocity grossed $811,299 domestically, but became Rebecca Miller’s calling card to the film industry, evenly demonstrating her unique voice as a writer and intuitiveness as a director, casting Parker Posey and enabling her to deliver the strongest performance of her career. This is a success as a project, but uneven and a bit appalling as a film. Miller’s prose — read by John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from The Sopranos) — has a simple clarity and keeps things interesting, but there’s no getting around how sloppy some of Miller’s narrative sensibilities pan out or how bad digital video makes them look.

The second segment — featuring Parker Posey as a daffy but distraught book editor who begins cutting the fat from her newly empowered life — is the best reason to see the film, with Posey coolly emitting the wit and sensuality that the other two segments desperately lack. If there was some confusion over how harried and unfocused this material was at its core, the Radio Shack technology imposed on the filmmakers by InDigEnt doesn’t help make Personal Velocity any more watchable. The fact that neither Miller nor her producer Lemore Syvan has made another movie on DV says everything about the limitations of the format.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Storytelling By Women Filmmakers Evolves with DV” By Philippa Bourke. MoviesByWomen.com, August 2002

“Digital Portraits” By John Calhoun. LiveDesign, 1 November 2002

“Miller’s Own Tale” By Gaby Woods. The Observer, 9 March 2003

“Crazy Like a Fox” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Bucking the Digital Trend” By Pat Thompson. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Rebecca Miller on Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” By John Gaspard. Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts, 20 November 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken English (2007)
Written by Zoe Cassavetes
Directed by Zoe Cassavetes
Produced by Vox3 Films/ HDNet Films
Running time: 96 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Bachelorette Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) gets dressed and puts in an appearance at the anniversary party of her best friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo), celebrating five years of matrimony to a movie director (Tim Guinee) Nora introduced her to. At the party is Nora’s mother (Gena Rowlands), who gently asks her daughter why she hasn’t found a man for herself. A manager of guest relations at a boutique New York City hotel, Nora goes out for a drink with a VIP guest, a mohawked movie star (Justin Theroux). When that ends badly, Nora allows her mother to set her up with a recently single movie lover (Josh Hamilton), but this date goes awry as well.

At the insistence of a co-worker (Michael Panes), Nora drags herself to a party. Disgusted with herself and heading home, she meets an attentive young Frenchman named Julien (Melvil Poupaud) marking time in America after the actress girlfriend he accompanied overseas dumped him. Julien insists on showing Nora a good time, in spite of her brittle neuroses. After a few days together, he invites her to return to Paris with him. Nora demures, but faced with plenty of free time after quitting her job, she joins Audrey for a jaunt to the Eternal City. While her friend contemplates an affair, Nora discovers she’s lost Julien’s phone number. Rather than give up and go home, she sets out to explore Paris on her own.

Who Made It?
Zoe Cassavetes is the youngest child of late actor/director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands. Her siblings are directors Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) and Alexandra (Xan) Cassavetes, who helmed the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Zoe Cassavetes grew up in Los Angeles, where in 1994, she co-created, co-wrote and co-hosted — with Sofia Coppola — a fake news magazine for Comedy Central called Hi Octane. Cassavetes served as assistant director on Coppola’s short film Lick the Star (1998) and then moved to Manhattan, where she went into credit card debt to finance her own short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory (2000).

Cassavetes then wrote the script for a feature film titled Broken English. Parker Posey agreed to star and producer Andrew Fierberg agreed to raise financing, but it would take three and a half years for cameras to roll. Paris based Back Up Films secured part of a budget from Japanese distributor Phantom Films and brought French actors Melvil Poupaud and Bernadette Laffont (replacing Jeanne Moreau) on board. Five weeks before filming was set to begin, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban agreed to bankroll the rest of Broken English, distributing it via their Magnolia Pictures and on their high-def cable channel HDNet.

How’d They Do It?
When the allure of acting or television hosting lost their appeal, Zoe Cassavetes moved to New York. She took a job as a marketing executive at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo before working on a 20-minute short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory. Cassavetes recalled, “You know, I ate out of the quarter jar for a few months here and there while I was trying to make the movie, but having no money, and being incredibly destitute was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. eBay was huge for me at that moment.” Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, the film featured Aleksia Landeau recording a long winded, drunken answering machine message to a guy while soaking in the tub.

Cassavetes moved on to completing a script for a feature film. “When I thought of the idea for Broken English it was at a time when I was totally overwhelmed by people asking me whether I was married or had a boyfriend. I saw that it was happening to a lot of my friends as well. I think it comes at a certain age where society almost insists that you fall in love, get married and have children. However, it seems that we are all more confused about relationships than ever. I wanted to explore these themes about what it is like to be lonely and to be ashamed of that feeling.” She would add, “So I just wanted to make a nice, little portrait about what happens to someone when they get caught up in all of that.”

In 2002, Andrew Fierberg — producer of Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Secretary — was approached by Cassavetes to help finance Broken English. He recalled, “We had a number of conversations about the script, did some rewrites and got it off the ground about a year after that. We had several budgets in mind and several scenarios on how we would make the film based on how much money we would raise. We had a full cast and crew and were all geared up and ready to go. And we put a line in the sand. We said that regardless of how much money we can raise, we will make the movie.”

Cassavetes had received a verbal commitment from Parker Posey to star. The filmmaker recalled, “I did have a certain type of person in mind. I mean, I’m a huge fan of Parker’s work and always have been. But I saw Personal Velocity, and she played a role in that movie that was completely against her usual, well, I wouldn’t say ‘type,’ but that more comedic style that she does. I saw this other huge range in her. Then I met her, and we sat and gabbed for three hours. We didn’t even talk about the script. At the end of it I was like, ‘Oh, wait, are you going to do the movie?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, yeah, totally.’ And I thought, ‘If life could only be that easy.’”

Financing Broken English would take three and a half years. Cassavetes admitted, “It’s so hard to get the money for a movie. It’s so much harder to get $1 million than it is to get $100 million. I still don’t know why. But then once we got the money it went very fast. We had five weeks of pre-production. We shot for 20 days. We didn’t have the money, or most of it, when we started pre-production. We just kind of decided that we were going to make the movie no matter what. Everyone knew what we were going to do, how fast it was going to be or how fast things were going to change, and I’d heard all these great things about Parker, that she would do that, which was really a big deal.”

Andrew Fierberg recalled, “We took the project to HDNet about five weeks before we planned to start shooting, and we told them that if they wanted to come on board, we’d be happy to work with them. They said yes. We were already in preproduction as we were signing papers, and the deal took us to a budget level that made us feel more comfortable.” According to Fierberg, the budget for Broken English fell under the $2 million ceiling HDNet has set to finance their pictures. “It was more than $800,000 but less than $2 million.” Shooting would commence May 2006 in New York for two weeks before moving to Paris.

Facing a mandate from HDNet that the film shoot digitally, the producers reached an arrangement with Thomson Grass Valley, manufacturers of the Viper FilmStream. Director of photography John Pirozzi recalled, “One thing I really like about Viper compared to other HD cameras — like the VariCam and the F900 — is its highlights. The real benefit you have with no compression is that the camera holds highlights in a much more impressive way. You have so much detail. The giveaway with HD and video in general is always in the highlights. Testing the Viper against the other compressed cameras, you can see it. It’s very clear that it really stands up to highlights.”

Cassavetes drew on Cleo From 5 to 7 — directed by Agnes Varda in 1962 — for inspiration. “Strangely, it had kind of the perfect mood for what I wanted. I mean, the character in that movie is a little more self-centered than Parker Posey’s character, Nora, is in mine. But I liked that the film started out with the tarot-card reading, and there was something about the way the movie was shot. I was also really into watching Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen movies, because I felt like my movie was really talky.” Broken English was screened for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 before taking film fests in Philadelphia, Newport Beach, San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas by storm.

Critics would be divided over how good Broken English was. Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times: “A well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “A simple, empathetic script and calm, assured directing display a level of emotional honesty and character development that’s confoundingly rare these days, especially when it comes to female characters.” Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly really liked it. Andrew O’Hehir at Salon not so much.

Opening June 2007 in the United States, Broken English never expanded beyond 41 theaters, but totaled $956,919 domestically and added $987,281 internationally. Cassavetes shrugged off the suggestion that she’d taken her time — at the ripe old age of 36 — to follow in the footsteps of her filmmaking family. “Right before I started shooting, I realized my dad was exactly the same age I was when he made Faces [sic] in 1959. So that made me feel good. And my brother Nick said, ‘Don’t worry — I made my first film at that age, too.’ It took me a little bit longer to do what I wanted, but you have more to say the older you get.”

Should I Care?
Broken English begins with a delicate montage of its heroine Nora Wilder trying to decide what to wear on an evening out. She’s alone in her apartment and as she empties her closet or opens her medicine cabinet, I got the distinct feeling I was peeping into someone’s private space. That type of intimacy is fused throughout the film, which in its contemplative but understated way (it’s rated PG-13) tells the story of two New Yorkers spending a few days in Paris. This textured palette may turn off those expecting either John Cassavetes or Sex and the City, but it does announce the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker.

Zoe Cassavetes cans the cuteness, enabling the profusely witty Parker Posey to fashion an unusually strong dramatic performance. Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Josh Hamilton, Gena Rowlands, Peter Bogdanovich and Bernadette Lafont round out a terrific cast, while Paris duo Scratch Massive composed the off-beat electronic soundtrack. What I really liked was how the film, without needling America or its male population, suggests that a change of scenery can affect both your outlook and the people you attract for the better. Cassavetes guides us through New York and Paris with the knack of someone who seems to have explored these great cities while single.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Digital Pieces of Broken English” By Peter Caranicas. Videography, 2 May 2007

“Women With Indie Influence” By Brantley Bardin. New York Daily News, 17 June 2007

“Interview: Zoe Cassavetes On Broken English” By Ian Spelling. Latino Review, 21 June 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes on Broken English” By Aaron Hillis. IFC, 25 June 2007

Broken English – Production Notes

“The Family Business” By Sandy MacDonald. The Boston Globe, 1 July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes” By Wes Anderson. Interview, July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes & Parker Posey Interview, Broken English” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

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

By Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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

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

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

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) — accountant for Consolidated Life, or more specifically, “Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861” — has made his West 60s apartment available to four executives who treat Baxter’s home as their extramarital playground. His neighbors, a Jewish physician and his wife, form the impression that Baxter is “a notorious sexpot” who scores with a different woman each night. Baxter is so accommodating with the arrangement that he sleeps on a bench in Central Park when an admin manager (Ray Walston) calls from a bar around the corner and requests use of the bachelor pad.

Baxter’s cooperation earns such high marks at the office that personnel director J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) learns about the apartment. In exchange for membership in the key club, he decides Baxter is executive material. To celebrate his promotion, Baxter works up the nerve to ask out kooky but alluring elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) completely unaware she’s the girl Sheldrake intends to take back to his place. Baxter finds out and receives a coveted promotion in return for his discretion, but has to choose between his climb up the corporate ladder and his feelings for Miss Kubelik.

Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise), a top agent at Sports Management International — “I handle the lives and dreams of 72 clients and get on average 264 phone calls a day” — is stricken with a bout of conscience late one night. He authors a “mission statement” calling on his peers to take fewer clients and make less money for the greater good. His vision inspires single mom Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger), the only member of SMI who volunteers to leave with Jerry when he’s fired by his smarmy protégé (Jay Mohr). Jerry manages to take two clients with him, including the #1 pick of the forthcoming NFL Draft: Frank Cushman (Jerry O’Connell).

When Cushman defects on the eve of the draft, Jerry & Dorothy focus on their remaining client — a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals named Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) — and the contract extension the irascible athlete and his wife (Regina King) need for the future of their family. Jerry calls off an engagement to his driven fiancée (Kelly Preston) and to keep her from leaving L.A., rewards Dorothy’s loyalty by marrying her, much to the disconcert of her divorced sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt). While his friendship with Rod empowers both men professionally, Jerry realizes his missteps with Dorothy threaten to make all of it meaningless.

Writing
The Apartment had fermented in the mind of writer-director Billy Wilder since 1945, when he wrote himself a note after seeing Brief Encounter. David Lean’s classic dealt with the affair between a married man and a married woman, but Wilder was more intrigued by the character that lends the lovers the use of his apartment and had to crawl back into a warm bed all alone. Unable to get around the Production Code or the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency in 1948 or 1949, Wilder found tolerances had shifted dramatically in the wake of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Little Richard. By the 1960s, audiences were ready for a movie with implicit sexual content.

Eager to make another film with Jack Lemmon following the success of Some Like It Hot, Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond dug out their ideas for The Apartment. According to Diamond, the story was drawn from the Hollywood scandal in which producer Walter Wanger shot talent agent Jennings Lang when he discovered Lang was sleeping with his wife, Joan Bennett; an employee at MCA had provided the apartment where his boss and mistress were shacking up. Wilder & Diamond brought The Apartment to producer Walter Mirisch, with United Artists footing a budget. A script was finished only four days before filming began November 1959 in New York.

Many consider The Apartment to be the best comedy Billy Wilder ever made. It is, but it’s still one black cup of coffee. While at his peak in the 1950s (Sunset Blvd., Ace In the Hole) Wilder was not content writing jokes; he wrote films about murder and deceit that had a lot of humor in them. The Apartment turns on lies, a suicide attempt and the corruption of the American dream, but the vital wit in Wilder & Diamond’s script make it all go down with a teaspoon of sugar. Their structure is waterproof — nothing is introduced that isn’t paid off later — and arrives at a happy, Hollywood ending without threatening to insult the intelligence of the audience.

Jerry Maguire came in the wake of writer-director Cameron Crowe’s poorly received second feature, Singles. By the time Warner Bros. released it in the fall of 1992, even some of Crowe’s friends accused him of exploiting the Seattle music scene. The disconnect Crowe felt from people he’d once known well would bleed into his next script. He’d been studying the work of master filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. The film that impacted Crowe the most was The Apartment, which he loved so much — in its comic yet biting portrait of a working stiff and his love for an elevator operator — it quickly became Crowe’s favorite film.

After spending a year researching “stiffs with briefcases”, a friend showed Crowe a photo in the L.A. Times of a sports agent and his client. Far from a jock growing up, Crowe was drawn to the frenzied, big money backdrop of professional sports and with the help of sports attorney Leigh Steinberg, spent the next three years interviewing agents, athletes and owners in the pros. Along the way, producer James L. Brooks suggested they begin Jerry Maguire where an ‘80s movie would have ended: the guy who finds “the religion of goodness.” That guy would then spend the rest of the movie dealing with the consequences of his new philosophy.

The beauty of Jerry Maguire is in the dexterity of Cameron Crowe’s screenplay, which is about a bachelor romancing a single mom, the bonding of an agent and his male client, and a look at the business of pro sports in the 1990s. With Crowe’s perfectionist attention to detail, heartfelt wit, and ambition, any one of those stories would have probably made a good film. Here, we get all three. It’s also funny, with supporting characters of supporting characters entering and exiting to tremendous effect. The movie may have too much heart, but that’s just Crowe; he doesn’t pour sugar on for effect, but seems to really feel as much as his film does.

Writing edge: Jerry Maguire

Casting
After Jack Lemmon agreed to reteam with Billy Wilder in the role of C.C. Baxter, the director chose Shirley MacLaine to play Fran Kubelik, who accepted on the basis of a plot synopsis and the 30 script pages that had been finished. MacLaine was perhaps best known for the Rat Pack comedies Some Came Running and Can-Can, but Wilder hoped to push her dramatically. Paul Douglas — who’d appeared in A Letter To Three Lives — was cast as Mr. Sheldrake, but a couple of days before filming began, died of a heart attack. Wilder & Diamond both arrived on Fred MacMurray, who’d worked for Wilder on Double Indemnity in 1940.

Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine have an undeniable chemistry on film. The only contemporary equivalent I can think of is Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan, except that Ryan has little emotional range and annoys me greatly. Like Hanks, Lemmon beautifully plays the dreams and struggles of an average guy with impeccable comic skill and without making him seem like a loser. MacLaine is a superb comedienne in her own right; this might be the finest role of her career. As for the limited supporting cast, it is fun to see Fred MacMurray play a rat bastard, as opposed to driving a flying car for Disney, while Ray Walston turns in terrific work as the conniving Mr. Dobisch.

Cameron Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire for Tom Hanks, who graciously declined in part because he didn’t buy Jerry’s marriage to Dorothy. Winona Ryder was a frontrunner to play the Shirley MacLaine part, but after four months of auditions, Ryder, Bridget Fonda, Marisa Tomei and Mira Sorvino were all passed over. The offbeat and melancholy quality of the virtually unknown Renée Zellweger sold her to the filmmakers. Crowe and Cruise made a personal plea to Billy Wilder to accept the part of Jerry’s mentor Dicky Fox, but the 89-year-old retired director brusquely declined. An executive VP of Intellectual Property at Sony Pictures named Jared Jussim filled the role.

It sure is hard to enjoy Jerry Maguire these days. Some ill-advised media outbursts have transformed Tom Cruise into the most despised movie star in the land. Renée Zellweger has been branded with mousy parts and Cuba Gooding Jr. has gone from Academy Awards to Daddy Day Camp. As celebrities, they get thumbs down, but as actors, each turn in fine performances. Credit goes to Crowe, James L. Brooks and casting director Gail Levin for filling the other roles. Bonnie Hunt, Jay Mohr, Regina King, Kelly Preston and Beau Bridges are amazing to watch here. Todd Louiso is a laugh riot as Chad the Nanny, while Jonathan Lipnicki (the kid) turned the whole movie. A parade of pro athletes appear as themselves to neat effect.

Casting edge: Even

Production value
While Billy Wilder initially shot exteriors for the apartment on West 69th Street, autumn in New York proved so chilly and unreliable after dark that the footage was reshot on a soundstage at Goldwyn Studios in Culver City. The artifice of the apartment and its sidewalk doesn’t detract from the story one bit, perhaps because in black & white, they don’t look nearly as phony as they would have in color. Production designer Alexander Trauner did a magician’s job creating the illusion of spectacular depth inside Consolidated Life by constructing desks and chairs that got smaller and smaller the further into the background they were positioned.

No style looks more dazzling to me in a movie than black & white film stock framed in anamorphic format. La dolce vita, The Hustler, Jules et Jim and The Haunting are just a few titles from the early 1960s that I can watch over and over just in terms of their presentation. The shadows of black & white film just have a dreamlike quality that resonates deep within the imagination, while the epic vertical horizon of anamorphic scope seems inherently suited to movies, even intimate dramas like The Apartment. If I was a big time film director in the ‘60s like John Frankenheimer, I would have shot in nothing but black & white anamorphic. Joseph LaShelle lit The Apartment.

Jerry Maguire commenced filming March 1996 in more than 70 locations in the Los Angeles area, as well as in Tempe, Arizona. Janusz Kaminski — who became Steven Spielberg’s preferred DP starting with Schindler’s List – lit the film. Production designer Stephen Lineweaver constructed two major sets at Sony Studios in Culver City: Dorothy Boyd’s home and the interior of Sports Management International. Costume designer Betsy Heimann does a yeoman’s job doing what I typically ignore unless it’s a period film — costume design — finding the right wardrobe for sports agents, single moms, a kid and others in the same film.

Cameron Crowe is not a filmmaker who has ever seemed concerned with camera lenses or effects, but Jerry Maguire was directed with a tremendous amount of finesse. Beyond the script and casting, what I like most about Jerry Maguire was how neatly it encapsulates worlds that on the surface would seem totally exclusive to each other — locker rooms and broadcast booths, suburban living rooms and backyards, hotels and airplanes — and makes them feel alive. Jerry’s journey as a character is how he navigates each of these worlds and how he comes out on the other side. Crowe does an underrated job of taking us on that journey visually.

Production value edge: The Apartment

Music
The Apartment and Jerry Maguire are films of different eras. Other than the fact that one is in black & white and the other in color, in no other area is the year they were made more obvious than in the musical arrangements. Billy Wilder turned to Adolph Deutsch to compose the musical score for The Apartment. The results — other than a fine piano theme, “The Jealous Lover” written by Charles Williams — are undistinguishable from any other movie made 20 years prior. In fact, I would be hard pressed to recall music from any Wilder film of the period.

Next to Quentin Tarantino, no filmmaker today has a better vinyl record collection than Cameron Crowe. Jerry Maguire marked the first time in his career he really started putting the stamp of his personal tastes in rock ‘n roll or folk music on his films. “Magic Bus” by The Who, “I’ll Be You” by The Replacements, “Secret Garden” by Bruce Springsteen, “Shelter From the Storm” by Bob Dylan and “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann are all used to great effect. Singer/ songwriter Nancy Wilson would compose two acoustic guitar themes: “We Meet Again (Theme from Jerry Maguire)” and “Sandy”.

Music edge: Jerry Maguire

Cultural impact
Opening June 1960, The Apartment would earn $6.5 million in the U.S. and $2.7 million overseas, making it the 8th highest grossing movie released in 1960. It would earn ten Academy Award nominations and win five: Best Art Direction (Alexandre Trauner, Edward G. Boyle), Best Editing (Daniel Mandell), Best Original Screenplay (Wilder & Diamond), Best Director (Wilder) and Best Picture. A musical comedy based on the film — Promises, Promises — ran on Broadway for four years beginning in 1968, while Wilder’s sophisticated brand of human comedy and drama continues to inspire filmmakers. The Apartment was even Billy Wilder’s favorite among his own films.

Hitting theaters December 1996, Jerry Maguire was a blockbuster. It tallied box office of $153.9 million in the U.S. and $119.6 million overseas. After Singles, Cameron Crowe wanted to make a movie that people would want to watch on TV at night, and TNT has granted him that wish with repeat broadcasts of Jerry Maguire over the years, minting “Show me the money!” in the popular consciousness. This was the peak of Tom Cruise’s popularity: Rosie O’Donnell devoted an hour of her daytime talk show to her adoration of Cruise and his latest film, which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (only Cuba Gooding Jr. took home an Oscar).

Cultural impact edge: Even

Winner: The Apartment

The Apartment is, was and always will be a beautifully made motion picture. To the credit of Cameron Crowe, when it comes to comedy, a love story or a read on the fine print of the American Dream, Jerry Maguire is actually a slightly better written and directed film. But for reasons mostly beyond anyone’s control, it’s become bloated with the baggage that massive success can bring. I much prefer watching Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine in beautiful black & white widescreen than hearing “Show me the money!” one more time.

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
Walking through the planned suburban development of “New Granada,” 14-year-old Carl Willat (Michael Kramer) and his buddies – Richie White (Matt Dillon), Claude Zachary (Tom Fergus) and Claude’s mute brother Johnny (Tiger Thompson) – debate whether a girl that Carl likes named Cory (Pamela Ludwig) is a “fox” or stuck up. Meanwhile, two kids on the highway open fire on a police car with a BB rifle. Sgt. Doberman (Harry Northup) loses the snipers in a chase and grabs Carl and Richie instead. On probation for breaking and entering, Richie refuses to cooperate with cops’ questions. “I only got one law. A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid.” 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. He wanders over to a basement party, where he finds the juvenile punk (Vincent Spano) who shot at the cops making out with Cory. “You could do a lot better,” he tells her, and gets pummeled on the way home as a result. With investors from Texas arriving in town for a tour, Doberman stages a raid on the rec center where the kids hang out after school and busts Claude for possession. Carl and Richie end up crossing paths with Cory, who spends her spare time breaking into houses and has scored a pistol. While Richie confiscates the weapon and uses it for target practice, Carl and Cory bond over their shared loathing of the town they’ve been uprooted to.

When Carl pulls a prank on the Texans that successfully runs them out of town, his parents forbid him from seeing his friends. Carl opts to run away with Richie, but an encounter with Doberman ends tragically for his friend. 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 into holding a meeting at the high school “cafetorium” to discuss what’s happening to their children. With the town’s kids in a furor over what Doberman did to Richie, Carl comes out of hiding and leads a march to the school for an evening the community won’t ever forget.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
“Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree” was a feature story by Charlie Haas appearing in the San Francisco Examiner in 1974. It chronicled the Bay Area bedroom community of Foster City, which in a two-year span had the highest percentage of juvenile crime equivalent to any area in the country. Haas had a friend named Tim Hunter who read the article and told him, “What you have here is a classic exploitation picture, in the best sense.” The pair spent three years talking to people in Foster City and writing a screenplay together. Hunter – son of blacklisted screenwriter Ian McClellan Hunter – took the script to George Litto, his father’s literary agent. When Litto agreed to produce the film, Hunter introduced the producer to Jonathan Kaplan, who had directed drive-in pictures like The Student Teachers and Truck Turner for Roger Corman.

Unable to shoot in California due to its child labor laws, Kaplan found eerily similar architecture in Aurora, Colorado, ten miles from Columbine. Kaplan 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.”

Kaplan auditioned the five leads in New York. 15-year-old Matt Dillon was found at a high school in Larchmont being thrown out for smoking in the boys’ room. He was cast in his first movie. Haas & Hunter searched Colorado for an ensemble of 40 additional kids. 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.”

George Litto recalled, “Well I was blown away because we were doing a story about 12, 13, 14-year-old kids and we were using 12, 13, 14-year-old kids instead of 22-year-old actors who looked 14.” Newly formed Orion Pictures agreed to finance what was then being called On the Edge. Shooting had wrapped by the end of 1978. Then the studio got a look at the film. Kaplan recalled, “Over the Edge was slated as Orion’s second release. 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 was a surprise hit in February 1979, but it was also blamed for a stabbing in Oxnard and a shooting at a Palm Springs drive-in. 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. They did a test campaign in a couple of cities, with this kind of Children of the Damned marketing campaign – the kids had empty eye sockets with fire shooting out … 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.” Orion made the decision not to release Over the Edge in theaters.

Screening the film for his peers in New York and Los Angeles, George Litto 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.”

Undeterred, the Public Theater in New York heard about Over the Edge and in December 1981, booked it for a two week engagement as part of a series it called “Off the Shelf.” Getting a look at the film 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 – four years before Over the Edge would finally receive a long awaited DVD release – Jonathan Kaplan mused, “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.”

Should I Care?
If Rebel Without A Cause, The Graduate, Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Boyz N The Hood all charted exactly where teenage angst was at in every decade from the ‘50s to the end of the century, then Over the Edge would represent that point in the graph for the 1970s and occupy space in the same holding cell as those classics. While positively innocent by today’s standards – the sex is absentee and what drug use there is comes across as trifling – the movie endures as a wildly entertaining exploitation picture, a social document of the American suburbs, and as a daring independent film that has a lot to observe about where the country was at the time and in many respects, still is.

Jonathan Kaplan deserves a lot of credit for the casting – not a single one of the kids ever gets caught “acting” – while also recognizing the peculiar effects that the monstrous architecture would have on the kids. The climactic riot is audacious in its scale and execution, yet the style of the movie never threatens to get sensational. The filmmakers instead have enough respect for the kids to simply follow them around, watching and listening to how they interact, as opposed to herding them through any well worn plot. The director’s father Sol Kaplan composed a delightfully subtle and eerie musical score, while the songs of Cheap Trick, The Cars and The Ramones effortlessly transport us back to the days of vinyl records and headphones.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Edged Out” By Jessica Winter. The Village Voice, 14 August 2001

Over the Edge. Warner Home Video (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).