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

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Screenplay by Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Ira Levin
Produced by William Castle
136 minutes

Crafted with elegance and wit so assured that its style is nearly invisible, Rosemary’s Baby has earned its spot in discussions of the scariest film ever made. Ira Levin — whose debut novel A Kiss Before Dying was published to acclaim in 1953 — found inspiration in his wife’s pregnancy for a second novel in 1967. Film rights were obtained by William Castle, the director whose in-theater gimmicks for movies like House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler involved rubber skeletons flying over the audience or electrified seats. Unable to raise financing for Rosemary’s Baby, Castle partnered with Paramount Pictures, whose production chief Robert Evans agreed to split the profits with Castle, but refused to let the shlockmeister direct. Castle accepted the role of producer as Evans convinced Roman Polanski to adapt and direct Rosemary’s Baby.

One of Polanski’s few revisions to the novel was a brilliant one: embracing psychological horror and leaving it to the viewer decide whether Rosemary was the victim of witchcraft or her own prenatal paranoia. Richly designed by Richard Sylbert, the film was shot in 14 weeks: two weeks in New York for exterior shooting around the Dakota Hotel were followed by 12 weeks of interiors on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. Urban legends supported by Castle that the picture was cursed neglect how gripping Rosemary’s Baby ultimately is without using elaborate special effects to generate unease. The dream sequences are effective because like the film, they unlock irrational fears we keep locked in our subconscious. Skillfully adapted and wonderfully cast, the ending ranks among the most gloriously black of all time.

Looking for an apartment to rent, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) follow a leasing agent (Elisha Cook) up to a 7^th floor unit of the “Bramford Building” in New York. The couple ignores the stories their erudite friend “Hutch” (Maurice Evans) shares about the building’s “unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century”, including tenants whose preoccupation with witchcraft earned it the name “Black Bramford”. Rosemary and Guy hear their new neighbors — bickering through the thin partition wall — before they see them. In the basement laundry room, Rosemary meets reformed junkie Terry Gionoffrio  (Angela Dorian) who was taken in by Rosemary’s neighbors and given a new lease on life. Not long after, Terry is found on the sidewalk, dead from an apparent suicide.

Rosemary finally meets her elderly neighbors Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) when the couple invite her and Guy to dinner. While her husband is quickly won over by the magnetic Castevets, Rosemary is suspicious of the strange potables and desserts Minnie pushes on her. Good fortune finds Guy when another actor suddenly goes blind, landing him the leading role in a play. With his career taking off, he suggests they have a baby. The night they conceive, Rosemary feels faint and experiences a strange dream. At the urging of the Castevets, she leaves her obstetrician for one the Castevets recommend, Dr. Saperstein (Ralph Bellamy). Alarmed by her weight loss and abdominal pain, Hutch delivers Rosemary a book that leads her to suspect those closest to her belong to a coven of witches who are keenly interested in her baby.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average 26,945 users: 83% for Rosemary’s Baby

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Directed by Don Siegel
Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring and Richard Collins (uncredited) and Sam Peckinpah (uncredited), based on the magazine serial by Jack Finney
Produced by Walter Wanger
80 minutes

One of the most beloved of the science fiction B-movies that attacked the 1950s, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a testament to how a powerful story and an appealing cast can elevate an otherwise awful mess into a classic. Originally published in Collier’s Magazine as a three-part serial beginning in November 1954, Jack Finney’s source material captured the imagination of producer Walter Wanger, who was coming off a personal scandal, prison term and even worse, a commercial calamity in 1948 with Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman. Languishing in a deal at Allied Artists for Walter and Harold Mirisch, Wanger and director Don Siegel made box office lemonade with a prison reform picture titled Riot On Cell Block 11. When Wanger pitched the studio The Body Snatchers, AA purchased the screen rights.

Shot in 19 days on a $300,000 budget — $2 million in today money — Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a hit in spite of its studio, which hoping to sell more tickets, mangled Ellsworth Fredericks’ 1.33:1 compositions by cropping the frame to fit RKO’s “SuperScope” format of 2:1. They also inserted a prologue and epilogue that gave the film a resolution far more upbeat than what Siegel intended. The conceit of alien pods stripping human beings of their individuality while they sleep is seductive in how easily it can apply to any number of social or political paranioas, while Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter appear to have a blast as the doomed couple. A stiff voiceover narration kills the suspense and makes it difficult to stay on edge about anything in the film, but with so little money for special effects, the original Body Snatchers plays like a drum tight film noir as opposed to a silly sci-fi movie.

A psychiatrist (Whit Bissell) is summoned in the middle of the night to treat to a raving lunatic being held by police at a local hospital. The wild-eyed Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) insists that he is not insane and begging to be listened to, begins his story. Returning from a two-week conference to his practice in the idyllic town of “Santa Mira”, Dr. Bennell’s nurse Sally Withers (Jean Wiles) reports that several of his patients have demanded to see the doctor, only to later cancel their appointments as if everything was fine. On their way back from the train depot, Dr. Bennell almost mows down a boy running away from his mother; apparently, he’s scared to go to school. At his office, Dr. Bennell is reunited with a recently divorced college flame named Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter).

Becky is troubled by a cousin who claims Becky’s uncle is no longer her uncle. Santa Mira’s psychiatrist Dr. Kauffman (Larry Gates) reveals that he’s had a dozen patients suffering the same hysteria, which he theorizes is due to stress over world events. Dr. Bennell and Becky have their romantic evening cut short when his writer friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) and wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones) summon them to their home, where the body of a strange being with a resemblance to Jack is laid out on a pool table. Dr. Bennell later discovers imitations of them hatching from seed pods in the Belicec greenhouse, where it becomes clear that aliens lacking emotion have replaced townsfolk while they sleep. With the phone company and police already fallen victim, the couples try to stay awake long enough to get help.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,280 users: 81% for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
Screenplay by W.D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
115 minutes

Whether drawing up a ballot of Best B-Movies, Best Science Fiction Films, Best Remakes or even Super Cinema of the ‘70s, oddly enough, the intoxicating 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers would land on any of those lists. Based on a 1954 novel by Jack Finney, the 1956 film version hit multiple zeitgeists in its day, arriving at a moment when Americans seemed obsessed with invasion, whether from outer space or the U.S.S.R. Directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted by W.D. Richter, the remake boasts far more insidious wit, characters as contemporary as they are compelling and a brilliantly pitch black ending that in its own way, puts a stake through the heart of the ‘60s. It’s gleefully written, perfectly cast, jarringly made and more than three decades later, looks a lot like a minor masterpiece.

The Body Snatchers beautifully exploits a paranoia that seems wired into the American psyche: fear that others are coming to eliminate your way of life. The 1978 version could be interpreted as a warning against feminism or urban alienation, take your pick. Kaufman cast thoroughly offbeat performers in Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and too cool for school Leonard Nimoy; as opposed to movie stars, their survival is far from assured. Kaufman employs discordant camera angles and sound effects but instead of horror, focuses on the characters and their doomed love affair, making the story intense without much in the way of gore or cheap scares. Michael Chapman handled the stark lighting while Thomas Burman and Edouard Henriques executed the unsettling makeup effects.

Seeking escape from the surface of a dying world, alien spores drift into space and reach the Earth’s atmosphere, raining down on the city of San Francisco. Taking home one of the strange pink flowers than begin to bloom, biologist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) recognizes the pollinization of two different species to create a third. Unable to pry her dentist boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) away from TV sports, Elizabeth shares her discovery with Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), a health inspector and her close colleague at the Department of Health. Geoffrey’s alienated behavior the next morning prompts Elizabeth to follow him. Distraught by the sinister changes she begins to detect in her boyfriend and in the city around them, Elizabeth is assured by Matthew that a friend — pop psychologist Dr. David Kibner — will have a logical explanation.

At Kibner’s book signing party, Matthew and Elizabeth meet up with another one of his friends, struggling poet Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum). While Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) reveals that six of his patients swear that loved ones have changed into something less human, the doc believes our fear of commitment is at the root of the hysteria. Returning to the mud baths he operates with his New Age spouse Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), Jack drifts off to sleep and is wakened to his wife’s screams when she discovers a dormant being with an uncanny resemblance to her husband growing in one of the stalls. Matthew rushes to Elizabeth’s house and wakes her before she too crumbles to dust and is replaced by an imitation. The two couples realize that most of San Francisco is no longer who they appear to be and fight to stay awake long enough to escape.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 404 users: 89% for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring our friends the pod people.

Body Snatchers (1993)
Directed by Abel Ferrara
Screenplay by Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. John, screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Produced by Robert H. Solo
87 minutes

With a mean and lean resume that included Ms. 45, the pilot episode of Crime Story, King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant, director Abel Ferrara was as bold a bet as any to bring a point of view to the third film adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1954 sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers. With Warner Bros. footing a $13 million bill, shooting wrapped in April 1992 … then nothing happened. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival in May 1993, Body Snatchers opened later that year in France and Germany before the studio snuck it into a dozen U.S. theaters in January 1994. According to Ferrara, the film fell victim to new studio management that had no stake in its success. At 87 minutes, it’s easy to imagine outtakes laying in a vault somewhere that might give the movie depth, but with few exceptions, it’s a flat, lazy effort given a shoddy release platform to match.

Body Snatchers isn’t so much a clunker as it just moseys around the block before the driver puts it back in the garage. Making a military base the landing site of the pods this time around, the script ignores what might have been a potent examination of the nuclear family and its meltdown to focus instead on faceless men in uniform who were acting like pods to begin with. Dinner table concerns in Smallville, USA seem as alien to Ferrara as alien beings and not much energy or thought is put into making either of them very compelling.  The makeup effects by the father and son tandem of Thomas & Barney Burman are excellent. There’s also pleasure in watching the shit hit the fan without a single computer generated image, but casting an actor as gifted off-the-cuff as R. Lee Ermey is indicative of how poorly managed this entire project was.

When her father Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is dispatched to a U.S. Army base to inspect chemical and biological weapons containment for the EPA, teenager Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is welcomed by a wild-eyed infantryman who grabs her in a gas station bathroom and warns “They get you when you sleep” before he disappears. Ill at ease with her stepmother Carol (Meg Tilly), Marti marks time on base befriending a heavy metal girl (Christine Elise). At work, Steve is approached by Captain Collins (Forest Whitaker) head of the base medical corps, who reports patients with extreme delusional fixations in his infirmary. Some of them are afraid to sleep. Marti’s 4-year-old half brother Andy (Reilly Murphy) even bolts his preschool when everyone in his class but him produces the same finger painting.

Retrieving Andy and bringing him home to his sister is chopper pilot Tim Young (Billy Wirth). Before the flyboy and the new girl in town can get better acquainted, Andy walks in on his mom decaying in bed, replaced by an imitation exhibiting zero emotion. Marti is almost replicated by an alien pod sprouting in the attic above her. Steve grabs his children and bolts on foot, despite the growing realization that almost everyone on the base has been replaced by an alien invader. This includes General Platt (R. Lee Ermey) who has trucks loaded with pods bound for army bases all over the country. The survivors attempt to stay awake long enough to do something about it.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 170 users: 62% for Body Snatchers

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

What do you say?

In the month of June, Joe Valdez “takes over” programming of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles with a series of double features on his favorite film themes.

Here’s Part 2 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Tank Girl (1995)
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Tedi Sarafian, based on the comic strip created by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett
Produced by Richard B. Lewis, Pen Densham, John Watson
104 minutes

To say that everything about Tank Girl works except for the script and the casting is another way to say that the movie doesn’t work at all, but this $25 million adaptation of the cutting edge British comic strip conjures a punk rock anarchy that not many big budget movies have the balls to go for. Director Rachel Talalay optioned the film rights to the Tank Girl comic strip appearing in the U.K.’s Deadline magazine, later published in the States by Dark Horse Comics. She pitched the property to Lightstorm Entertainment, then Amblin Entertainment, but neither James Cameron nor Steven Spielberg’s bunch were hip to the material. Talalay found a fan at MGM/UA in Alan Ladd, but by the time her picture began test screening, new studio management plucked the “hate me” pedal off the Tank Girl flower. It’s since cultivated a much deserved cult following on DVD.

The optimal audience for Tank Girl may be teenagers discovering punk rock or ska for the first time; the soundtrack featuring Devo, Iggy Pop, Björk and Hole is superlative. Where the movie suffers is casting. Despite the presence of Naomi Watts, the likes of Lori Petty, Ice-T and Malcolm McDowell indicates that filling roles became an act of desperation. Petty was a last minute replacement for Emily Lloyd, an OCD sufferer who refused to shave her head for the part. Out on a limb for its time, the riot grrrl heroine of Tank Girl and her gleeful irreverence are more cogent today as a unique blend of Gwen Stefani and Bart Simpson. Rachel Talalay’s lively mash-up of live action and animation pushes the set design by Catherine Hardwicke and costumes by Arianne Phillips into the foreground — Tank Girl has 27 wardrobe changes — while incidentals like story get shoved off a cliff, just like the comic.

In the year 2033, the cataclysmic impact of a comet has transformed the Earth into a giant sandbox. Survivors are at the mercy of the WP, an evil conglomerate that controls the planet’s water. WP’s interests are threatened by an elusive band of mutant kangaroo/human hybrids known as Rippers. Out of this wasteland on the back of a yak rides Rebecca (Lori Petty), a blonde skinhead with whirlwind fighting skills and a motormouth to match. Rebecca lives in a commune with her surrogate daughter Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower) siphoning water illegally. Raided by WP commandos, Rebecca kills eight and is taken before Keslee (Malcolm McDowell), the megalomaniac who runs WP. Offered a job, Rebecca declines colorfully and is sentenced to hard labor in the WP mines, where she meets a mousy jet mechanic named Jet (Naomi Watts).

Freed from captivity after a Ripper raid, Rebecca and Jet confiscate a tank and a fighter jet respectively. A visit to an abandoned water park leads to an encounter with Sub Girl (Ann Cusack), who allows the ladies to customize their vehicles. Tank Girl and Jet Girl are born. Discovering that Sam is alive and in the custody of WP, the dynamic duo plots a rescue mission. They seek the help of the Rippers (Ice-T, Reg E. Cathey, Scott Coffey) whose base is revealed to be an old bowling alley. Tank Girl and Jet Girl pass their initiation rites and Tank Girl even falls in love with one of the mutant kangaroos, the dim witted Booga (Jeff Kober). Meanwhile, the evil Keslee has recovered from the raid by the Rippers with a new cybernetic arm and face and is revealed to be luring Tank Girl into a trap.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 326 users: 37% for Tank Girl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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Idiocracy (2006)
Directed by Mike Judge
Screenplay by Mike Judge & Etan Cohen, story by Mike Judge
Produced by Mike Judge, Elysa Koplovitz
84 minutes

Should I Care?
In a case as mysterious as lightning striking twice, the long awaited follow-up from Austin based animator and filmmaker Mike Judge was wrapped in a blanket and abandoned on a church doorstep by Fox, who committed the same offense on Judge’s previous film. Like Office Space, Idiocracy is an unpolished gem whose cult status has multiplied the more moviegoers find it. Thrusting a regular Jack and Jill from the present into a future where human evolution has regressed to the point where Beavis and Butt-Head would be considered the minds of their time, Judge whips up another potent and laugh-out-loud cultural satire. Its faults are glaring, but Idiocracy is funny, smart, dumb and unnerving all at the same time. Much of its ragged charm is generated by how low Fox set the bar on this film. Considering that its ideal presentation is a living room or laptop computer — where at most you’re investing a couple of bucks and 80 minutes of your time — the studio might have even known what they were doing.

Watching Idiocracy without socks not only boosts its entertainment value, it gives the viewer the ability to pause and process the data mine of comic material hidden in family trees, TV menus and billboards. The film is embarrassingly shy of post-production value, with special effects that look more abandoned than finished, as well as narration that suggests the movie was put in the rearview mirror by all those involved as quickly as possible. Idiocracy almost qualifies as a student thesis, but if that’s the case, this is the most hilarious and intelligently sketched student thesis of all time. Gently mocking the greed and consumption depended on by corporations, Judge avoids a smug or angry tone; like Office Space, his heart lies with the common man. But underneath the sight gags and occasional toilet humor lurks an acidic satire of those further down the evolutionary ladder, too lazy, dumb or irresponsible for planned parenthood and how that — at its most ridiculous extreme — could alter the future.

So, What’s This About?
In the year 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is reassigned from an Army library and volunteered for “a human hibernation experiment” in which the military will revive him after one year of cryogenic sleep. Chosen due to his lack of family and how average he is, the army is unable to find a comparable female test subject and selects one from the private sector: Rita (Maya Rudolph), whose pardon for criminal charges and an arrangement with her pimp have secured her cooperation. When the army base is scuttled and replaced by a Fuddrucker’s, Joe and Rita lie dormant until the year 2505, when one of the many mountains of garbage mankind has left to accumulate crumbles. Joe crashes into the living room of Frito Pendejo (Dax Shepard), who we later learn earned his law degree at Costco. While Joe is able to understand everyone — whose English has devolved into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, street slang and grunts featuring the words “ass” or “shut up” — Joe’s voice strikes those of the future as “pompous and faggy” and provokes them.

Joe discovers that in the future, water has been replaced by a sports drink called Brwando (“The Thirst Mutilator”), a dust bowl has decimated the economy and the number one movie in the country is Ass, which consists of nothing more than 90 minutes of a guy’s naked ass (“It won eight Oscars that year, including Best Screenplay”). Arrested for inability to pay his hospital bill, Joe escapes from prison by notifying a guard that he’s supposed to be getting out. His abnormally high intelligence brings Joe to the attention of President Camacho (Terry Crews), a five-time Ultimate Smackdown champion and porn superstar. Now the smartest man on earth, Joe is named Secretary of the Interior and tasked with fixing the economy in exchange for a full pardon. Employing the help of Tina and Frito, Joe figures out that irrigating crops with Brwando is the cause for the dust bowl. The practice is banned, but when his decision bankrupts Brawndo, Joe is sentenced to “rehabilitation” as the center attraction at a gigantic tractor pull.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Mike Judge was raised in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from UC San Diego in 1985 and embarked on a series of dull engineering jobs. Relocating to Dallas to pursue his musical career as a bass guitar player, Judge’s love for animation led him to create a two-minute short; titled Office Space, it featured a neurotic paper pusher named Milton being tormented by his smarmy boss. Office Space was screened at Animation Celebration, which was being held that year in Dallas. Judge’s work began appearing on MTV’s Liquid Television, which launched another animated short Judge had come up with titled Beavis and Butt-Head into its own program. The mega success of the show — vilified by pundits as everything dumb about TV and praised by David Letterman, Stephen King and others as anything but — led to a hugely successful animated film released in 1996, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

A live action version of Office Space written and directed by Judge was ignored in theaters, building a big cult following on DVD instead. Convinced that a high concept idea was needed to go over well at the box office, Judge came back with a sci-fi comedy titled 3001. Written with a gofer turned writer on Beavis and Butt-Head named Etan Cohen, Fox agreed to bankroll Judge’s next film at a budget of roughly $30 million. Shooting commenced at Austin Studios in May 2004, with Judge and Elysa Koplovitz — former VP of MTV Films who’d worked on the Beavis and Butt-Head feature — producing under Judge’s Austin-based Ternion banner. Once 3001 went before test audiences, the lukewarm response failed to garner the financial support from Fox to properly finish the film, which was shelved. Discarded into a handful of U.S. cities in September 2006 without any promotional campaign whatsoever, the bizarre saga of Idiocracy remained a mystery until Judge broke his silence during the press junket for Extract three years later.

How’d They Do It?
Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in August 2009, Mike Judge confirmed that the idea for what became Idiocracy began in 1995, while he was writing Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. “I guess I was just thinking about evolution and now that there’s no predators and everybody survives — where would it go? But, so I’d written down something about this idea. And then it was in 2001, I was at Disneyland and I was waiting in line at the Alice In Wonderland ride with my daughter and somebody — or both daughters I guess — and somebody behind me had a stroller and two little kids and her and this other woman with two little kids was passing by. I guess they’d had an altercation and they just start getting in this cussing match with each other, just, you know, ‘bitch’ this. But you know, just yelling and like ‘I’ll kick you ass and I’ll’ and I was just sitting there thinking wow, the Disneyland of that was envisioned, way back in the ’50s and, to right now.”

Judge elaborated in a July 2004 interview with The Dallas Morning News, “There was an article that didn’t get a lot of attention about how the crime-rate drop corresponded to about 17 years after Roe v. Wade. The theory was that a lot of unwanted kids weren’t born who would have been coming of criminal age.” Judge admitted this debate wasn’t one that was necessarily politically correct. “It gets into eugenics. To me, it’s just like all the people on The Jerry Springer Show, who’ve knocked up, like, five girls, and then their sons knocked up five and the responsible people waited to have kids.” Judge turned to Etan Cohen, who’d spent his term at Harvard pursuing a degree in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and writing for Beavis and Butt-Head, where Cohen started out as a summer gofer his freshman year. Upon graduation in 1997, Cohen moved to Los Angeles and landed a job on the ABC sitcom It’s Like, You Know before joining the writing staff of Judge’s award winning animated series for Fox, King of the Hill.

Etan Cohen — in a June 2006 interview with Variety — recalled, “Mike called me up and asked me to write Idiocracy – about a man who signs on for a sleep experiment and wakes up 500 years later, but a quirk in evolution has left him the smartest guy on the planet — which was insane. It was almost like film school, except Mike Judge was teaching the class.” Cohen suggested that in five centuries of devolution, the National Art Museum would have morphed into the National Fart Museum. In the world of Judge & Cohen’s script, every available space is covered with advertising — even clothing — while the Secretary of State ends each sentence with “ … brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” because he’s been well compensated. Nurses too dumb to speak diagnose patients with a console where pictures depict various ailments. Cash resembles a hillbilly version of a Master P album cover. Starbucks is still around, but has changed its name to “Starbuck’s Exotic Coffee for Men” to lure more customers.

In a September 2009 interview with Slashfilm, Judge admitted, “I realize that a lot of the things I’m doing don’t fit into the category so easily that people are comfortable with. You know, when we were writing the first draft, we’d start coming up with this stuff. And I think one of the first things that I had written, even when it was a treatment, was the billboard that said, ‘If you don’t smoke Carlton’s, Fuck You.’ Because there’s the billboard: ‘If you smoke, please try Carlton’s.’ So, when I was thinking about this idea, I thought one of the most fun things to do would be the advertising, you know? And when I moved to Austin, maybe a little before I moved to it, I had seen this sign that said, ‘Erotic Tan for Men.’ So, I was like, god, now there are tanning salons that are like, brothels or something. So, I just started thinking what if all these other places started sexualizing things, because people in advertising are always using sex to sell things. There’s already, like, ‘Sexy Scissors’ and Hooters and all of this stuff. And I thought, what if you just cut these people loose and they literally used sex to sell things.”

Judge continued, “It became really fun to write. And you know, looking back, I can see how it can look like an odd movie to come out of Fox I guess. But you know, they were pretty supportive of it up until the end. They also, they didn’t know how to give notes on something like this.” While Carlton Cigarettes and Wal-Mart did not permit their logos to be lampooned, they were the exception. “And as far as the products stuff, I remember writing it and going, ‘Oh man, there’s no way we’re going to clear all of this stuff.’ And I had a meeting with the lawyers, who were actually really cool and really liked the script. And in the Beavis & Butt-Head movie I couldn’t even have a bottle that was shaped like a Jack Daniel’s bottle. I couldn’t have, there was more, it was just ridiculous on that. But on Idiocracy, when we were talking about Starbucks, the lawyers said, ‘Well, it would help if you didn’t pick on just one company and if you did more than one.’ So, I was like okay, and that’s why there’s the whole red light district with Starbucks and there’s an H&R Block with ‘Tax Return and Relief,’ and all of that. But the other stuff, Carl Jr’s, that was all in the script, and I couldn’t believe it all cleared.”

Once Judge decided to cast Luke Wilson, he rewrote the script with the actor from Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums in mind. “Luke is really funny. I think because he’s so good looking, casting people in Hollywood tend to want to put him in boyfriend roles. But he’s really funny. He does really good imitations. He could have been in sketch comedy.” Auditioning performers for the female lead, Judge saw Maya Rudolph and was concerned that the Saturday Night Live cast member might go over the top in a bid for laughs. Rudolph ended up winning the part. “I thought her acting was very much like real movie acting. She definitely gets the big picture. She was really fun to work with and this is her first big part in a movie.” Dax Shepard — from the MTV series Punk’d — wasn’t the physical type Judge was looking for in the part of the dim witted Frito. “I was imagining this big, heavy guy, but it wasn’t working and then Dax came in and read for it. Driving home I was thinking about how funny he was … He has no fear of the camera or of being in a movie. He lets it all hang out in a really funny way.”

With roughly $30 million in financing from Fox, what was then titled 3001 began shooting May 2004 at Austin Studios. Two still photographs emerged online and as of February, a release date of August 2005 was scheduled. Little was made public about the film, even when it finally escaped into theaters September 2006. There were no trailers, no press junket and no major ad campaign of any kind. There was no mention of Idiocracy on the Fox Movies website and if moviegoers who somehow knew about the film dialed Moviefone for show times, there was no listing for Idiocracy but for something called The Untitled Mike Judge Project. Fox opened Idiocracy in seven cities — Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Toronto — on a limited number of screens. Waiting to see the box office returns before expanding Idiocracy to other markets, the studio never did. Limited to 130 theaters, the new comedy from the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space managed $444,093 in the U.S. and $51,210 internationally.

The press began speculating about what had happened. There were several theories. One was that Idiocracy was so awful that no one involved wanted to be associated with it. Mike Judge could not be reached for comment. Publicists for Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph maintained that their clients were unavailable for interviews. In August 2005, a reader giving the name “Delicious” had submitted to the website Ain’t It Cool News a review of a test screening he/she claimed to have attended several months previous. “Not only is it not funny, the acting is atrocious. I’ll give it to Mike Judge for trying something completely different for this movie, trying not to copy Office Space, but man, I can’t see this movie coming out into theatres, if not just straight to DVD.” A self-professed fan of Office Space who’d been looking forward to the screening, the scooper added, “I must also say that I wasn’t alone in the audience I was at. People sitting around us were saying things, and not mincing words, about how bad the movie was. People were actually MAD about seeing a movie that was FREE!”

Another theory was that Fox buckled under pressure from corporate sponsors. Kim Morgan — a contributor for MSN’s film blog The Hitlist — posted a rave review of Idiocracy on her blog Sunset Gun and speculated the cause of its media blackout.“No one knows for sure, but I’m thinking that attacking Starbucks, Fuddruckers, Carl’s Jr. and Costco had something to do with it. Oh yes, and Fox News, can’t forget that beacon of ‘fair and balanced’ broadcast journalism. Fittingly, this is exactly the kind of DEVO inspired treatment Idiocracy is mocking — that big business rules and there’s very little we can do about it. So, like Judge’s Beavis and Butt-head, his now classic Office Space and his TV Show King of the Hill, Idiocracy (and the predicament it fell into) is both darkly hilarious and deeply sad.” Luke Thompson — who also posted a positive review, for E! Online — told Fishbowl L.A., “It was obvious the studio killed it. Usually, movies that don’t screen for the press are promoted up the wazoo with misleading trailers, posters, etc., but this wasn’t promoted at all. It’s possible Mike Judge or somebody else pissed somebody important off.”

Still another theory was that Judge might have had a dispute with Fox over final cut. In retaliation, the studio might have slashed his post-production budget and dumped the film into theaters to fulfill their contractual obligation. Tim League, founder of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Texas, supported this theory by revealing to the website Cinematical that his exhibition contract only specified Idiocracy be run for one week — two weeks is the standard for a new release — at only a 35% share for Fox, which League considered uncommonly low for what distributors typically ask for in the first two weeks of a major release. He added that in spite of requests he’d fielded from film festivals seeking permission to screen Idiocracy, Fox had apparently turned those requests down. League commented, “I’ve never seen anything like this. A studio releases a movie and then doesn’t want anyone to see it. Marketing it should be a no-brainer, with Mike Judge’s pedigree and Luke Wilson starring.”

In a chat with Chud.com in November 2006, Dax Shepard was stumped about the fate of Idiocracy. “I don’t know. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding it now, but there are a couple of issues. One is that it tested poorly, and they base all their P&A funds on how well it tests. But what they didn’t step back and think about is that the people who go see a free test screening on a Saturday night are the people being made fun of in the movie, so of course it didn’t test well. And then I think there are also issues with all the corporate attacks and Rupert [Murdoch, founder of News Corp., which owns Fox] being a very immersed guy in the corporate world, globally. That has to do something to do with it.” Shepard added, “The only perplexing thing about the Mike Judge movie is, why did they make it? The ballsy thing, in my opinion, was making the movie. The movie was the script — they knew what it was going to be. I don’t understand them making it in the first place. It doesn’t shock me that they didn’t know how to market it, but I’m shocked they made it.”

Promoting Extract on Collider.com in September 2009, Judge offered his theory on who or what killed Idiocracy. “I think it was a combination of — I don’t think anyone was out to get me — I think the combination was just kind of incompetence and just not knowing what to do with it. They tried a few ads, it didn’t look very good, and then I think what happened is they said, ‘Okay, Office Space made a lot of money on DVD. Didn’t do a lot at the box office. This is like that, what did we do wrong on Office Space? Well, we spent money promoting it. That was a waste of money because everyone found it on their own anyway, so let’s not spend anything. Let’s not even call Moviefone and give ‘em a title.’” Judge added, “So I just said, well, I’m not going to lift a finger to do any press. I don’t want to talk about it to anybody. ‘Cause I really don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t own it. It didn’t bug me as much as it does some people because I just kind of, in a way, I ended up getting — without doing any interviews — getting a lot of press about how it didn’t get any press. So maybe it wasn’t a bad idea. I don’t think that was their plan. I don’t think it was a master plan to dump it on purpose. I mean, they did dump it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Beavis Creator Sees a Funny Future and Films It” By Jane Sumner. The Dallas Morning News, 30 July 2004

“Mike Judge Is Getting Screwed (Again)” By Brian Rafferty. Esquire, June 2006

“Etan Cohen” By Steven Kotler. Variety, 22 June 2006

“Sooner or Later, Mike Judge Extracts Success” By Lisa Rosen. The Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2009

“The Mike Judge Interview” By Hunter Stephenson. Slashfilm.com, 9 September 2009

“IndieSeen: Time For Mike Judge To Go Indie” By Jette Kernion. Cinematical, 22 October 2006

“Dax Shepard Ponders Fox’s Idiocracy” By Devin Faraci. Chud.com, 15 November 2006

“Mike Judge, Finding A Comic Extract in the Office” By Terry Gross. Fresh Air, 25 August 2009

“Mike Judge talks Office Space, Idiocracy and Extract” By Steve Weintraub. Collider.com, 1 September 2009

Dogma (1999)
Directed by Kevin Smith
Written by Kevin Smith
Produced by Scott Mosier
130 minutes

Should I Care?
Hijacking various Judeo Christian symbols and myths to comment on the hypocrisies of religion, Kevin Smith’s fourth film certainly isn’t lacking in ambition. What it does lack is the resources and craftsmanship to pull any of its ambitions off. But en route to the kind of bug-eyed badness rarely seen in major motion pictures, Dogma hits a few bumps in the road: it’s provocative, it’s fearless, it’s in a class by itself. This cultural satire seems infused with the reckless abandon of the Delta fraternity from National Lampoon’s Animal House, who’ve decided they’re going to be thrown off campus anyway, so they mind as well take as many members of the status quo down with them as possible. That’s not to say Dogma is funny or should even be muttered in the same breath as Animal House, but you almost have to give it an incomplete grade. It’s all attitude — with some sound arguments directed toward religious lemmings — in search of a movie. “Incomplete” sums it up.

There seem to be endless pages of myth Smith forces his characters to explain for purposes of plot; none of it’s funny and none of it really moves the story anywhere. For the female lead, the filmmakers lobbied for and were saddled with Linda Fiorentino, whose barroom languor is a laugh killer (Janeane Garafalo would have been ideal). Smith’s trademark Jay & Silent Bob characters — fixtures at the corner store in laughers like Clerks — seem awkwardly dropped into a film that takes place around churches and engages in spiritual debate. As in any Kevin Smith film, the ones oriented around brutally honest and wackadoo dialogue (Chasing Amy) are quite good, while the ones with characters exchanging gunfire (Mallrats) are woefully bad. For a film with spurts of intelligence and the determination to inspire discussions of God, Dogma is inexplicably a member of the gun club. This approach ends up being a bullet to the head of what might have been a great film.

So, What’s This About?
After successfully persuading a nun in an airport that religion is a fraud, Loki (Matt Damon), the Angel of Death, cast down from heaven by God, and his buddy Bartleby (Ben Affleck), a journalist who got Loki drunk centuries ago and convinced him to quit his job, learn that a Catholic church in Red Bank, New Jersey looking to boost attendance has offered to forgive the sins of all who pass under its arches. This is the loophole in religious dogma that the renegade angels have been waiting for in order to escape banishment in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, an Illinois abortion clinic worker named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) struggling with her faith is visited by the Metatron (Alan Rickman), the herald who does the Supreme Being’s talking because to hear the actual voice of God would cause human beings to explode. The Metatron gives Bethany the task of stopping Loki and Bartleby, whose return to heaven would invalidate the word of God and destroy all existence.

Accompanying Bethany in her journey are two “prophets”, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), New Jersey dope peddlers on a business trip to suburban Illinois in search of the town from the John Hughes movies. Dropping naked from the sky is Rufus (Chris Rock), the thirteenth apostle still upset he was omitted from the Bible; among Rufus’ revelations is that Jesus was black. In a strip club, the gang meets Serendipity (Salma Hayek), the muse. Bethany learns that she was chosen to save mankind because she is the Last Scion, the last surviving heir of Jesus Christ. Plotting against her is the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) who God cast out of heaven for refusing to take sides against Lucifer; as Azrael sees it, the end of existence beats spending any more time in hell. Azrael is assisted by the Stygian Triplets, who under the guise of street hockey punks have incapacitated God, a skeeball fanatic who took human form and was caught by the imps on the New Jersey boardwalk. The fate of mankind now rests in Bethany’s hands.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Kevin Smith was working in a convenience store in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey when on his 21^st birthday, he went to see a movie: Slacker. Impressed that Richard Linklater made a critically acclaimed film in his hometown for next to no money, Smith answered an ad for an eight-month program at Vancouver Film School. There, he met Scott Mosier. Dissatisfied that the course was all theory, Smith dropped out after four months, but made a deal with Mosier that whoever finished writing a script first would get help from the other to make the movie. The result was Clerks, which Mosier produced and Smith wrote, directed and co-starred. It was shot in Smith’s workplace on a budget of roughly $27,000, self-financed using eight credit cards, portions of Smith’s college fund, the sale of his comic book collection and insurance money he and his buddy Jason Mewes collected when a flood damaged their car. Nearly rated NC-17 for its sexually frank dialogue, the comedy was acquired by Miramax Films and launched Smith’s film career.

Smith had already begun scribbling notes for another script. Titled God, he was influenced not only by certain comic books or standup comedians who commented on spirituality, but his own irreverence for his Catholic school education. Retitled Dogma, the technical challenges of the project spurred Smith and Mosier to get more experience before producing it. A poorly received mainstream comedy for Gramercy Pictures (Mallrats, 1995) and an enthusiastically received indie romantic comedy distributed by Miramax (Chasing Amy, 1997) followed. With the cache to attract an all-star cast and as much as $10 million in financing from Miramax, Smith finally produced Dogma. But the work in progress received such an outcry from the Catholic League that Disney sold the picture back to Miramax. Lions Gate Films stepped in and pushed Dogma to respectable box office and the best reviews of Smith’s career.

How’d They Do It?
During his stint at Vancouver Film School and before he wrote Clerks, Kevin Smith was scribbling notes for a script he hoped would spread the word of God in the way Smith knew best. In the liner notes for the special edition DVD of Dogma, he wrote, “All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the differences between religion and faith, and that I had to employ the Plenary Indulgence loophole as a plot device. The idea of the Plenary Indulgence had fascinated me since childhood, when my parish celebrated a Centennial. We received a special dispensation from the Pope decreeing that on the day of the parish’s hundredth anniversary, those who walked through the front door of the church would have all sins erased from their souls, giving them a clean slate, as it were. You might not think this would mean much to an eleven year old kid, because how much sin could he possibly be steeped in? But being educated in a Catholic school can make a kid feel like even the Venial sins (the tiny transgressions like white lies and hurtful sentiments expressed behind your parents’ backs) are one-way tickets to Hell.”

Smith cited his Catholic education as an influence, as well as the comic book Mage by Matt Wagner and the comedy of George Carlin and Sam Kinison, who reached into their Catholic roots for material. The initial idea was for the protagonist of God to be a high school jock. Rufus the 13^th Apostle and Serendipity the Muse were also there. In the summer of 1994 — after Miramax picked up Clerks but before it was in theaters — Smith started a first draft of what he was now calling Dogma. “A high school jock no longer, Bethany became a woman, and she was a stripped in a nudie booth joint, where she met Jay and Silent Bob (enthusiastic clients, to say the least; hilarity ensues). Arazael was introduced only in the last thirty pages of the script, after having been referred to as ‘the Shadowy Figure’ most of the time. At the end of the flick, in an effort to keep Bartleby and Loki from passing through the archway, Bethany blew up the church (imagine the shit I would’ve gotten from the Catholic League for that). But aside from those major differences (and pages and pages of dialogue; the first draft — dated Aug. 4, 1994 — was 148 pages long), everything’s pretty much the same as it is in the finished film.”

As far back as Clerks — when Smith slipped a title card into the end credits that read: “Jay and Silent Bob will return in Dogma” — he planned on making the film. It didn’t happen right away. “Scott Mosier (my producer) and I decided, after reading the first draft, that this was not a flick we wanted to tackle as our sophomore foray. We agreed that it was beyond us (probably still is), and that it’d be best to let it sit on the back burner, until we had enough talent to handle it properly. So we went ahead and made Mallrats in ’95, and during the course of that year, I took another pass at Dogma — this time adding an orangutan for Jay and Bob to hang out with, as well as shifting Bethany’s job from a strip club to an abortion clinic. In ’96, I took another pass at the script, this time dropping the orangutan and rewriting the flick to include Joey Lauren Adams as Bethany (we were dating at the time). Following that pass, I started writing Chasing Amy, and summoned Ben Affleck to Jersey (you could do that in those days) to read the first thirty pages of the script. He asked for something else to read on his way back to Boston, as thirty pages of Amy wouldn’t cover the trip. I gave him Dogma.”

Ben Affleck became vocal about playing Bartleby in Dogma. Smith polished the script with that in mind, as well as Jason Lee performing opposite him as Loki. Chasing Amy would be screened to raves at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1997 and Miramax gave a green light to Dogma at a budget of roughly $6.5 million. By that time, Jason Lee’s schedule had filled up. Smith turned to a buddy of Affleck’s named Matt Damon, who’d shown chemistry with Affleck in the dailies of a yet to released film Smith had godfathered at Miramax titled Good Will Hunting. Linda Fiorentino took a break from the press tour for Men In Black in the summer of 1997 to campaign for the part of Bethany. Impressing Smith and Scott Mosier with her grasp of Catholicism, the role was rewritten for an actress in her mid 30s. Smith offered Holly Hunter the role of God, but having just portrayed an angel in A Life Less Ordinary, the actress demurred. Alan Rickman was a fan of Chasing Amy and once he joined the cast, suggested his friend Emma Thompson play the Supreme Being. Thompson agreed.

Assuming he’d cast Samuel L. Jackson as Rufus, Smith was sold on Chris Rock after meeting the comedian. For the role of Serendipity, Miramax encouraged Smith to meet with Salma Hayek. “Salma Hayek was a meeting that I initially didn’t want to take. Serendipity had to be whip-smart, and I wasn’t sure if Salma was that at all. Imagine how stupid I felt when I found out she was a Poli-Sci major who could quote the Bible, chapter and verse. Add to that the fact that she was incredibly adorable and very sweet, and I went from resistant to slavishly devoted.” Smith chased George Carlin to appear as Cardinal Glick. The comedian’s manager maintained that the part was just too small for Carlin to work into his busy schedule. Booked with Carlin on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Smith slipped him the script; Carlin would agree to join the production. Emma Thompson chose to stay in England and have a baby. With God uncast, Smith would offer the role to Alanis Morissette, who had turned down the part of Bethany coming off a concert tour but was now game to join the cast.

In addition to loading the picture with bankable names — actors the studio expected to slash their fees for the creative privilege of working on cutting edge material at a prestige company like Miramax — Smith and Mosier were given an experienced director of photography. They had met David Klein at Vancouver Film School and used him to shoot Smith’s previous three pictures, each of which were savaged in various corners for looking terrible. No one accused Wes Anderson of making shoddy looking films and his director of photography Robert Yeoman came on board Dogma. Smith recalled, “Yeoman was really kind about the other films. Because I was like, ‘What did we do wrong? Why do they look so bad?’ And he was like, ‘Well it’s not like you did anything wrong, you just shoot everything against the wall. You know, and like, you line up people and shoot ‘em against a wall. If you just kind of go to the right, go to the left, you’re getting some depth and suddenly it opens up a little bit more.’ And he said, ‘That’s something we should definitely go for on this movie. More depth, left and right.’”

Dogma commenced shooting April 1998 in Pittsburgh, a city the filmmakers were drawn to for St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which served as location for the climax. In addition to the challenges of shooting a 165-page script in roughly 50 days, Linda Fiorentino and Kevin Smith would both admit difficulties working together. Smith commented on the message boards of his View Askewniverse website, “The interesting thing is, I never had to give a line reading to Alan Rickman unless he asked (which was maybe once or twice). Instinctively, the man knew how things should sound. We never had a problem. Linda, however, would sometimes read a line from another movie altogether, and for the first few days of shooting, her energy didn’t match the text nor anyone else’s in the cast. It was like she was in a different flick.” Smith added, “And while, as I’ve said, I don’t regret casting her, like Chief Brody said in Jaws 2 I never need to go through that hell again. Honestly, I gave very few line readings on Dogma. Linda was the only person who complained about it because she was pretty much the only recipient.”

A pair of Dogma test screenings were held December 1998 in Philadelphia. The only major criticism was that at two and a half hours, the film was running too long. A screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999 compelled Smith to cut two scenes: a musical routine in a strip club where Serendipity inspires her customers to break into the theme from Fat Albert, and a speech by Jason Lee, who’d agreed to appear as the evil Azrael. While Smith’s fan base eagerly awaited his fourth film, the New York based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights — which opposes “anti-Catholic” depictions in the media and counted 350,000 parishioners as members at the time — were not amused. President William Donohue commenced a petition drive to pressure Disney to sever its affiliation with Miramax Films due to the studio’s perceived track record of insulting their faith.. The Catholic League had targeted ABC with one million signatures in opposition to Nothing Sacred, a sitcom about a hip priest played by Kevin Anderson. The series was canceled in 1998 after 20 episodes.

In April 1999, Disney CEO Michael Eisner sold Miramax co-chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein back their political hot potato for $14 million, allowing them to seek another distributor. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Smith lamented, “We had Matt and Ben following Good Will Hunting, a movie that made $125 million, plus won them a writing Oscar. MGM watched it and passed. Columbia watched it and passed. Universal watched it and passed. Edgar Bronfman Jr. watched it himself, and was just like, ‘There’s no way we can put out this movie without seeing our stock drop.’ The unsung villain of all this is Blockbuster Video. Because Blockbuster has made it their mandate that they won’t shelve an NC-17 film, and then you have a company that takes up 85 percent of the video business, maybe more, it’s tough. Every distributor who’s looking to the ancillary market to make money or make up what the film didn’t make theatrically, has to take that into consideration.” Lions Gate Films — gambling on prestige films like Gods and Monsters or Affliction deemed uncommercial by Hollywood — agreed to distribute Dogma.

Promoting his film on The Charlie Rose Show in November 1999, Smith elaborated, “The Catholic League I think is upset because it was a Disney movie initially. This is my feeling. The film was a Miramax movie and by virtue of that it was a Disney film. The Catholic League as you know is an organization, they’re heat seekers; they love to go after stuff that raises their profile. Doesn’t necessarily go after things that are really, intentionally attacks on the faith, or the church, they go after things that they feel attacks them as Catholics. They feel that Disney attacks Catholics constantly, whether it’s with Nothing Sacred — the TV show that was on ABC a little while ago — or Priest — the Miramax movie that was out a few years ago — or Disney’s same-sex health benefits policy, or the alleged gay day they have at Disney World every year. Always going after Disney. And we were just the ripe, luscious opportunity for them to go after Disney, that week. We were kind of the target du jour.” When the film was screened at the New York Film Festival, hundreds of Catholic demonstrators picketed the Lincoln Center.

Critics returned the best reviews of Kevin Smith’s career. Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Dogma is like an underground comics version of the eternal struggle among the inhabitants of heaven, earth, and the hell below. As the writer and director, Smith adopts a ‘what if’ stance, skewing some of the tenets of Catholic theology to create a storyline that looks at the religion from the other side of the rabbit hole. The film is funny, contentious, blasphemous, and surreal.” Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: “The screenplay is another foul-mouthed rehearsal of Smith‘s near-Dickensian genius for the slacker patter of his generation. Yet though Dogma plays like a live-action comic book for boys, it’s also shot through with wisdom at once juvenile and wizened, coupled with a sweetness of temper…” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “If the film is less than perfect, it is because Smith is too much in love with his dialogue. Like George Bernard Shaw, he loves to involve his characters in long witty conversations about matters of religion, sexuality and politics. Dogma is one of those rare screenplays, like a Shaw playscript, that might actually read better than it plays; Smith is a gifted comic writer who loves paradox, rhetoric and unexpected zingers from the blind side.”

Kevin Smith’s fans and the free publicity pushed Dogma to $30.6 million at the U.S. box office. Smith credited his cast for that. “At least in that first weekend, because we had, like, almost a nine million dollar opening weekend on only twelve hundred screens, you know, we didn’t have the typical kind of two thousand, twenty five hundred screen opening most films have. But this is a niche film. You know, this is a true independent film, which is why it sucks so hard to see it kind of get snubbed at the Spirit Awards this year. This represents everything that independent film is: It was shot on the cheap. It was a movie that lost its distributor and had to find another distributor, a distributor that is a very — a true independent distributor, not owned by somebody else, Lions Gate. People were working inexpensively and the content is not subject matter that appeals to everybody. Yeah, it’s very funny — hopefully — it’s entertaining, but it’s still about religion for God’s sakes, and who goes to see movies about religion anymore? Particularly ones that aren’t big budget.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dogma (Special Edition). DVD audio commentary by Kevin Smith, Scott Mosier and Vincent Pereira. Columbia Tristar Home Video (2001)

Down and Dirty Pictures. By Peter Biskind. Simon & Schuster (2004)

“OnFilm Interview: A Conversation With Kevin Smith and David Klein” By Bob Fisher. Kodak, November 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

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

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

Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003