SherryBaby (2006)
Written by Laurie Collyer
Directed by Laurie Collyer
Produced by Elevation Filmworks/ Big Beach Films
MPAA rating: “R for strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug content”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up a Golden Globe nomination (her second) for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama” in SherryBaby and it’s a citation that doesn’t come close to giving the film the cred it deserves. SherryBaby is one of the better ‘70s movies to be released in the last decade. Tracing the ups and downs of a recently paroled young woman, the movie is an assured, refreshingly candid answer to Straight Time (1978). Instead of Dustin Hoffman reasserting himself on the streets of L.A. following parole, SherryBaby uses the suburbs as its arena and focuses on the reconciliation between an ex-con and her daughter. The narrative feature film debut of writer-director Laurie Collyer avoids cheap moral lessons, with an actress game to explore less than flattering aspects of her dysfunctional character.

As acutely as Straight Time portrayed the temptations available to an ex-con on the streets, SherryBaby traffics in the domestic minefield that awaits a woman trying to piece her life back together following time behind bars. Collyer manages to convey a high degree of tension with little or no violence and if it all feels small in scale, the movie surpasses expectations by rooting itself in reality. Russell Lee Fine — serving as director of photography between stints shooting MTV’s The Real World and HBO’s The Wire — lends the docudrama a rich look. As for Maggie Gyllenhaal, her salience has less to do with any ability to transform into character, but to come across as real and spontaneous and transform the audience into seeing the world from the point of view of that character. This is her best work yet.

So, What’s This About?
Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) climbs off a bus somewhere in New Jersey and makes her way to a halfway house. After checking in with parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), Sherry uses her feminine wiles to urge a male employment coordinator to overlook a drug history and give her the job she covets: working with kids in an afterschool program. She’s visited by her gentle brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) who drives Sherry to the suburbs for a reunion with her 4-year-old daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). Sherry’s honesty and hard luck story are lost on her sister-in-law Lynette (Bridget Barkan), who has raised Alexis as if she were her own daughter and does not approve of an ex-con coming into the child’s life.

Unable to cope with the halfway house and refused quarter by Lynette, Sherry moves into a motel. She attends rehab meetings and meets a steady Native American named Dean Walker (Danny Trejo) who remembers Sherry from her topless dancer days as a teenager. Enduring a sexually abusive relationship with her father (Sam Bottoms) and unable to reach her daughter, Sherry relapses into heroin use. A surprise visit from Hernandez compels Sherry to ask him for help; the p.o. offers her the choice of getting clean at an in-patient rehab facility or getting clean in prison. With her life falling apart, Sherry convinces Bobby to let her spend the day with her daughter. Sherry breaks parole, crossing the New Jersey-Delaware border with Alexis for destinations unknown.

Who Made It?
Laurie Collyer grew up in the suburban idyll of New Jersey. Graduating from Oberlin College with the ambition of translating German literature for a living, she moved to San Francisco instead and went to work at a residential treatment center for disturbed children. Social work burned Collyer out within six years, but her love of filmmaking brought her to a film production class, where an assignment to make a 3-minute short about a chair turned into a 25-minute film about a girl confined to a wheelchair. Titled Thanh, Collyer’s short was enthusiastically received when screened at the annual benefit concert for the Bay Area’s non-profit Bridge School. She enrolled in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her thesis film Nuyorican Dream chronicled the life of a Puerto Rican family in New York. The documentary would compete at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

Nuyorican Dream won Collyer an invitation to the 2001 Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. Assisted by research she’d conducted with both ex-cons and the social workers in charge of them, Collyer wrote SherryBaby. Using her Sundance connections, Collyer got the script to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’d just broken out in the cult hit Secretary (2002). With Gyllenhaal attached, producer Lemore Syvan of New York based Elevation Filmworks got involved. After a year and a half, Syvan finally snared financing in producer Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner of Big Beach Films, who agreed to bankroll SherryBaby at a budget of roughly $2 million. Shot in Collyer’s old stomping grounds of Mountainside, NJ in the summer of 2005, her narrative feature film debut would be acquired by Netflix and garner critical accolades when released a year later.

How’d They Do It?
Laurie Collyer recalled the origins of SherryBaby by stating, “I grew up in New Jersey in this very sort of sleepy, suburban town where there wasn’t much going on, and when I was in late elementary school, I met this girl who I thought was just the coolest thing ever, and she was really smart and used big words like ‘premonition’ and ‘tribulation.’ But she could also really throw down in the schoolyard with the boys. She was pretty tough so I really admired her and we got to be close and my life became much more interesting, but then as time went on, the partying got more intense and I switched to a private school and she just became more intensely into partying and drugs and stuff like that. So when I went to college, she was pretty much on the path to doing time in prison.”

After her NYU thesis documentary Nuyorican Dream (1999) was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, Collyer was invited back to Park City the following year to participate in the prestigious Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. She began workshopping a 30-page short script that she’d drafted as early as 1994 titled Shall Not Want. Like Nuyorican Dream, the material drew heavily on Collyer’s interest in people living on the margins of society. “I had a mentor early in the process of writing Sherrybaby, a gentleman named Richard Stratton, who is a producer and a writer but also spent 10 years in a penitentiary. He introduced me to a lot of ex-convicts and people working with ex-convicts in New York and helped me get the realness of the script by introducing me to this world. I just interviewed a ton of people — but it was through Richard opening that door for me.”

A friend of Collyer’s would inform the character of Sherry. “Some of the language, actually, from letters he wrote to me. When she talks to the women in the halfway house, she’s sort of talking street. I just sort of picked that up from the way he talked. But it was more of a temperament. The combination of the self-destruction with the — I don’t want to say narcissism but self-absorbed combined with the self-destruction. That whole thing. You know, when you’ve been on drugs since you were 14 or 16 years old and then in prison or on the streets on or off the rest of the time, you haven’t really lived as an adult, so there’s a certain amount of childhood you carry into your adulthood. It’s like you stopped living, you know? So Sherry in a lot of ways is like a 16 year old.”

Collyer began the odyssey of securing the financing to turn her script SherryBaby into a film. She revealed, “I knew and I was told, I was advised a lot at the Sundance Lab actually by my wonderful advisors and consultants there to get an actor attached first before trying to raise the money. They told me also at the lab that it was the sort of a part that actors love to play so that it wouldn’t be that hard but you know at the same time, I was very picky. There are all these TV shows that have young women actors on them but I didn’t really want a TV actress.” One of Collyer’s advisors at the Sundance Lab was screenwriter Naomi Foner, whose daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal was attracting notice opposite James Spader in the edgy Secretary (2002).

With Maggie Gyllenhaal interested, SherryBaby appeared on the radar of producer Lemore Syvan. Collyer recalled,“It was hard to find the money. Lemore Syvan came on as producer, but it took about a year-and-a half to find the financing. In the meantime she made a couple of movies and I wrote a couple of other scripts. Another challenge is trusting your collaborators. If you are new at the game, you are not used to giving your creative work over for others to translate and/or modify.” Syvan ultimately locked a financial backer in Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner — with Jeb Brody and Peter Saraf — of New York based Big Beach Films. Turtletaub agreed to finance SherryBaby at roughly $2 million.

With a 25-day shooting schedule kicking off in May 2005, SherryBaby was filmed entirely in suburban New Jersey. Collyer stated, “It all takes place in a very middle-class milieu. That was actually very important to me, to place the story in a suburban context. I wanted to explore more what happens to the family that leads people to make these sort of choices.” The filmmaker’s old neighborhood of Mountainside was the site of Sherry’s brother and sister-in-law’s home. Collyer mused, “I always had a love-hate relationship about having grown up in such a white-bread sort of environment. The thing about shooting where I grew up, I think it was my way to make peace with it once and for all.”

Coming less peacefully for Collyer would be getting along with Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We would have differences of opinion quite a bit. Sometimes she would pick on me so I would make her mad on purpose, too. It sounds so premeditated, but we did have differences of opinion about the work sometimes and sometimes she would win and sometimes I would. There was a lot of battling over the little girl that plays Sherry’s daughter. She didn’t want me to direct her; she knew best, everything about the girl. But that was her being Sherry in the most classic form, because that’s Sherry’s conflict. She’s the child’s mother and nobody else should tell the child what to do.” Collyer added, “I think all directors and actors, when there’s material that’s dramatic, maybe even with comedies, if you’re taking your job seriously, there’s going to be conflict. I think it’s natural. It’s sort of built into the relationship.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal later admitted, “When you’re the lead in a movie, when you’re in every moment of the movie, it’s hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work.” She added, “So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.”

Critics posted rave reviews. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “What screenwriters call the arc of the story is visible from the outset, and some of the scenes in Sherrybaby have a familiar look and feel. But what distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing — which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats — and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “There’s a schematic, workshopped quality to Collyer’s script, detailing the intertwined setbacks and small triumphs in one woman’s struggle to recover a life for herself. Yet the film works. It doesn’t go soft or inspirational in its later stages, when most films would. It doesn’t pump up the redemption or the melodrama.” Dennis Harvey, Variety: “Gyllenhaal, in her most substantial role since Secretary, does a fine, unshowy job of lining Sherry’s faults without alienating the viewer or pleading for sympathy.”

In January 2006, SherryBaby screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In May, it was announced that Netflix had acquired North American distribution rights under their Red Envelope Entertainment banner. The Silicon Valley based distributor has picked up a number of low budget films on the bet that one — like Capturing the Friedmans (2003) — will hit with audiences. SherryBaby would not be one of those sleepers. Opening September 2006 in the United States, it grossed only $199,176 domestically and $423,630 overseas. But Laurie Collyer summed up the experience by admitting, “I really didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t expect that it would get bought. It was just a lot of hope: I hoped that it would make the producer’s money back; I hoped that people would like it; and I hoped that Maggie would feel good about having done it. All those hopes have been realized, and then some.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Director Shows You Can Go Home Again” By Anita Gates. The New York Times, 27 August 2006

“indieWIRE Interview: Laurie Collyer, director of Sherrybaby” By Brian Brooks. indieWIRE, 7 September 2006

“Hollywood Loves You, Baby” By Daniel Robert Epstein. Film Stew, 19 January 2007

“Second Chances” By Jason Guerrasio. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

“Interview: Laurie Collyer” By Ric Gentry. Post Script, Fall 2007

“Maggie Gyllenhaal” By Tim Blanks. Interview, May 2008

“Interview Laurie Collyer, Director SherryBaby” By Sheila Roberts, MoviesOnline

The Savages (2007)
Written by Tamara Jenkins
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Ad Hominem/ Cooper’s Town Productions/ Lone Star Film Group/ Fox Searchlight
MPAA rating: “R for some sexuality and language”
Running time: 113 minutes

Should I Care?
In Slums of Beverly Hills — the feature film writing and directing debut of Tamara Jenkins — Marisa Tomei’s character is introduced wandering down a road late at night, naked, as someone who’d sprung herself from a mental facility might do. In The Savages, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) has an even more disturbing introduction, or for anyone who came in late, one of the characters later exclaims that “death is gaseous and gruesome and it’s filled with shit and piss and rotten stink!” Jenkins’ second feature — a sad but inherently funny film — veers into some hard truths about aging parents and their legacy: the relationship between their equally dysfunctional offspring. It’s carried off imperfectly and is not an always easy film to watch, but is as nuanced and profound a statement about aging as your likely to see made today.

Like Slums of Beverly Hills, The Savages is uncompromising. Its view of family dysfunction — with little regard for the comfort level of the audience — knocked me out of the truck a few times. The shock value wears off on a second viewing, when the performances and the humanity of Jenkins’ writing reveal themselves with greater clarity. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character seems to loiter through much of the story, but where the film really takes off is with Laura Linney, given her most beautifully fucked up and neurotic character since You Can Count On Me (2000). Childless and barely able to take care of a ficus, a dying father provides her character with the excuse to pull herself together. The script is edgy, surgical in its cutting insight and has the balls to deal out loud with its subject matter: we Americans are not going to live forever.

So, What’s This About?
Living in the retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) crudely rebels against the caregiver (David Zayas) hired by the family of Lenny’s live-in girlfriend the only way he has left. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a New York City temp seeking a grant to finish her latest play, “inspired by the work of Jean Genet, the cartoons of Lynda Barry and the family dramas of Eugene O’Neill”. She gets the call relaying her father’s erratic behavior. Referring to the incident as an “alarm” rather than a “crisis” is Wendy’s brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a PH.d who’s teaching drama in Buffalo and working on a book about Bertholt Brecht. When Lenny’s girlfriend dies, the siblings fly to Arizona to be notified that their father has no legal right to remain in the house.

Uncomfortable at first with the proposition of putting their father in a nursing home, Wendy is left with Lenny — combative, disoriented and unable to take care of himself — while Jon secures him a bed at a hospice in Buffalo. Under the impression he’s been taken to a hotel, Lenny does not react well to the news that he’s actually in a nursing home. Wendy sets her sights on upgrading Lenny to a senior living facility, but Jon accuses his sister of caring more about absolving her own guilt than helping their dad. Working through some depression and a breakup with his Polish professor girlfriend (Cara Seymour), Jon invites Wendy to stay with him Buffalo until their father gets settled. Helping her adjust is Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), a Nigerian orderly with acute observations about life and death.

Who Made It?
Tamara Jenkins grew up in Philadelphia. Her father would receive custody of Jenkins and her three brothers and move them around the low rent areas of Beverly Hills, an experience that the filmmaker would chronicle in her feature writing and directing debut. Jenkins ended up in New York’s East Village to pursue a career in performance art. Transitioning into film, she enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Her black & white short Fugitive Love (1991) was so well received that it screened at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Independent TV Service commissioned a black & white short from Jenkins; titled Family Remains (1993) it won a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Short Filmmaking at Sundance in 1994. This earned Jenkins an invitation to the Sundance Institute, where she developed Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) with the support of Robert Redford. Alan Arkin and Natasha Lyonne starred in the dysfunctional family comedy.

Producer Ted Hope — co-founder of New York indie film company Good Machine — signed Jenkins to a blind deal. Under conditions her script be contemporary and be considered a comedy, Jenkins took some elements from her life — a father suffering dementia, a nursing home in the East Village — and wrote The Savages. She arrived on Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the leads, but when Good Machine was sold to Universal and rebranded Focus Features, the studio felt that neither Linney or Hoffman were big enough names. Hope agreed to develop The Savages at This Is That Productions, the company he’d built with former Good Machine execs Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman. Fred and Erica Westheimer of Lone Star Film Group agreed to split the roughly $8 million budget with Fox Searchlight and Jenkins’ sophomore feature went on to become one the most critically acclaimed films of 2007.

How’d They Do It?
After spending at least two years adapting Diane Arbus: A Biography — a project that was scuttled when the Arbus estate refused to license the artist’s photographs for a movie — Tamara Jenkins went into business with the prestigious Ted Hope. His batting record as a film producer featured 23 entries in the Sundance Film Festival, including The Wedding Banquet (1993), The Brothers McMullen (1995), Walking and Talking (1996), In the Bedroom (2001) and American Splendor (2003). In 2002, Hope sold the company — Good Machine — that had co-produced most of those films to Universal Pictures, where it was renamed Focus Features. Former Good Machine executives Anne Carey and Anthony Bregman would later join Hope to launch This Is That Productions in New York. Their first two movies were the critically acclaimed 21 Grams (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

Jenkins recalled of Hope, “He created this environment where I had this blind deal through some discretionary money that he had via Focus Features, and a blind deal means that you don’t have to tell the financier what you’re writing about. It’s blind, essentially, but the person who gave us the deal, the people at Focus, said, ‘There’s only two stipulations: one, that it’s a contemporary story, so it can’t be a period piece, and two, that it’s funny.’ Then I said, ‘Oh, you mean like it’s a comedy?’ and he said, ‘No, it doesn’t have to be a straight comedy but there has to be humor in it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Phew!’ I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. I knew the material that I was approaching, but I was grateful that it wasn’t a comedy with a capital C.”

As with Slums of Beverly Hills, Jenkins’ personal life began to inform her script. “I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person.” She continued, “And then around me, around my friends, it’s starting to happen — we’re all in our mid-40s, in some cases older, and they’re starting to deal with their parents becoming less well, and elder-care things. So all those things were just percolating, and they all just started pushing me in this direction. And I was very interested in writing about grown-up siblings, so it just started mushing into this idea.”

Once Jenkins struck the idea for her sophomore feature film, she invited Ted Hope to hear her perform in a spoken word series at The Moth, a theater in Gramercy Park. Hope remembered, “At the performance, Tamara told the story of taking her dad who was suffering from dementia on an airplane cross-country. She had the audience in hysterics. It was incredibly moving and heartfelt, and it had these real characters that were unique and fascinating to watch.” Anne Carey added, “Tamara is somebody who always finds either the funny sadness or the sad funniness in situations. In this story, you feel like you’re parting the curtains and getting an incredibly intimate look into a private world. It’s a heartbreaking world, yet the movie is also incredibly funny and hopeful. It’s about two people who didn’t even think they really had a family coming to understand the importance of family.”

Jenkins met with Philip Seymour Hoffman in New York and flew to Colorado — where Laura Linney was living — to get their commitment to play the Savages, but couldn’t get Focus Features CEO James Schamus to sign off the casting. Jenkins recalled, “And when I finally hunkered down and said, ‘I think these guys are great,’ then I met Laura individually and I met Phil, and I went back, and after other discussions about other actors, and meetings, and going through the chain of the process, I at one point just came back and said, ‘These guys are great.’ And they said, ‘Well, if that’s the decision, then we should let you go.’ But they were kind enough to let me go with the material. They didn’t put it in a vault and say ‘Too bad!’” She added, “Their foreign sales were a factor, meaning stars have to have a certain price on their head in European territories, or something? But really, I don’t know. It was mysterious to me.”

“So then I went knocking on other people’s doors for money, and it did not come easily. It’s not a movie that you can pitch well, frankly. Financiers are risk-averse. They’re scared, and the film was dealing with a subject matter that people don’t want to deal with anyway.” One person open to dealing with The Savages was producer Fred Westheimer, who’d spent 35 years as an agent at William Morris, representing John Travolta and Candice Bergen for a time before heading WMA’s motion picture talent for the last six years of his tenure. Westheimer departed the talent agency in 2005 to form Lone Star Film Group, an independent film financier funded by private equity and based in Beverly Hills. To head production, he turned to his 32-year-old daughter Erica Westheimer, who’d spent ten years working in the New York film industry, first as a costumer, later as Laura Linney’s personal assistant.

Jenkins was in touch with producer Jim Burke, her husband Jim Taylor’s & Alexander Payne’s business partner in Ad Hominem. A fan of the script, Burke kept Jenkins’ spirits up via email while she and Ted Hope & Anne Carey struggled to get The Savages financed. Of Burke, Taylor & Payne, Jenkins mused, “I felt like they were my male back-up singers. They were my guardian angels, they were just this formidable group of men that were standing behind it. Granted, one of them happened to be my husband, but hopefully, people would take their support seriously despite the nepotistic set-up. They kind of came on board that way, and obviously watched various cuts of the movie and threw in their two cents and stuff, but it was kind of guardianship.” With Taylor, Payne & Burke involved, Lone Star agreed to finance half of the roughly $8 million budget. In January 2006, Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice agreed to put up the other half.

Explaining what attracted her to The Savages, Laura Linney stated, “What I like about it is its very odd, eccentric sense of humor, and the fact that it’s these three people in this situation. Subject matter like this could be very sentimentalized and not be good material to be told cinematically. But I loved the script. I know it’s always a good barometer if I’m reading a script and I start working on it as I go along, subconsciously connections are made, ideas are coming. A lot of times scripts don’t give you that and you really have to work hard to create something. This just sort of lifted right off the page.” She added, “I think if you scratch the surface on all good drama it’s either about family, sex or religion. Any one you scratch it’s going to be about one of those three topics. They’re sort of intertwined, you can’t really get away from any of them. I think we’re all a little self-obsessed at the moment, everybody’s looking inward at who we are and why we are, and that tends to lead back to the family.”

Joining Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be stage, TV and film veteran Philip Bosco. Jenkins revealed, “My casting director, Jeanne McCarthy, said, ‘What about Phil Bosco?’ and I said, ‘Oh, he’s that guy who does all that pshaw and he always plays these well-heeled patriarchs and lawyers and stuff. He’s too fancy!’ That was my fear and directors can be really stupid and literal and forget the people are actually actors and just because he plays well-heeled judges, that doesn’t mean that’s all he’s able to do, so we actually auditioned him. He came into the room and read. I was very anxious because it was very important to me that whoever played the part, that the character was not sentimentalized, that there wasn’t that, I kept saying, ‘I don’t want the old bastard with the twinkle in his eye. I don’t want the twinkle.’ I’m saying this to my casting director Jeannie and being anxious that I don’t want him to turn into that cliché of the old codger with that twinkle thing.”

Three months after being greenlit by Fox Searchlight, a 30-day shooting schedule was underway in New York. Jenkins exclaimed, “We were very lucky — it snowed in April in front of the nursing home in Buffalo! So we managed to have a winter movie in April and it worked out okay. The 30-day aspect of it wasn’t fun. Five more days would have made life easier. But the adrenaline can be kind of great.” She added, “As much as I can complain and wish I had more time, there’s something about that capturing of life, and that’s the most important thing — that sort of lived-in feeling among these characters, a messy, imperfect aliveness. Just having it feel alive.”  The Hudson Senior Residence in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Westchester Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in Mount Vernon and the Concord Division of Staten Island University hospital and the St Agnes Hospital in White Plains were used as locations.

The Savages would screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 and fests in Toronto and Austin in the fall before opening November 2007 in the United States. Critics framed it with the best films of the year. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “For a tender, uncommonly perceptive look at sibling relationships and a profound meditation on death and the meaning we draw from experience, The Savages is singularly funny and seriously moving.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Jenkins’ superlative work proves her first film was no fluke; let’s hope it doesn’t take another nine years to hear from her again.” Ella Taylor, The Village Voice: “Jenkins is no sentimentalist, and she won’t patronize her benighted losers or her audience with epiphanies, apologies, or blinding insights. Yet the movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo’s liberation.”

A wash at the box office with $6.6 million in the United States and $4 million overseas, The Savages would be nominated for two Academy Awards, Laura Linney (Best Actress) and Tamara Jenkins (Best Original Screenplay). While its heavy subject matter had challenged financiers, for Jenkins, the film was about the broken dynamic between Wendy and Jon. “A friend of mine remarked that you just don’t see male-female intimacy that isn’t sexualized. But I was really interested in sibling relationships. I have three brothers in real life. It’s a strange thing to be siblings, to grow up under the exact same circumstances and adapt in completely opposite ways. Wendy is so emotive and reactive, and Jon is this brutal rationalist. It’s like some strange, humanist buddy picture, but it’s brother and sister, and they’re dealing with putting their father in a nursing home, instead of robbing a bank.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Lone Star makes a leap” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 21 November 2005

The Savages — Production Notes

“Unblinking Look at Death Without Nobility” By Dennis Lim. The New York Times, 4 November 2007

“Exclusive Interview: The Savages’ Tamara Jenkins” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 26 November 2007

“Tamara Jenkins” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 29 November 2007

“Family Matters” By Katrina Onstad. CBC News, 20 December 2007

“Senior Moments” By Ray Pride. FilmMaker, 8 February 2008

“Giving The Savages a touch of class” By Amber Wilkinson. Eye For Film

2 Days in Paris (2007)
Written by Julie Delpy
Directed by Julie Delpy
Produced by Tempête Sous un Crâne/ Polaris Films/ 3L Filmproduktion/ Rezo Films
MPAA rating: “R for sexual content, some nudity and language”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
As someone who vaguely admires the walking and talking travelogues Julie Delpy starred in with Ethan Hawke for director Richard Linklater — Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) — it took me weeks to get around to watching Delpy’s feature film directing debut 2 Days in Paris, which on appearance, looked like a fairly flaccid copy. But what Delpy divines from a somewhat used and abused premise not only kept me entertained, but impressed the hell out of me. Unlike the Before films — or Linklater’s oeuvre following Dazed and Confused — Delpy’s relationship comedy not only maintains a coherent point of view throughout, but introduces a filmmaker with both a funny bone and balls, firing some hilarious flak at both her motherland and her adopted country in the twilight of the Bush Years.

2 Days in Paris bears one mark of a terrific movie: Delpy makes it all look easy. Plugging friends and family into roles and shooting largely at her parent’s home in Paris, there’s a handmade, organic texture that was mandated by the budget, but in a welcome surprise, the movie is also a laugh riot. Delpy has a terrific ear for the way heated conversations play out, beginning innocuously, then growing more contentious, until your taxi driver is calling you a cunt. Goldberg & Delpy have chemistry that would have been palpable in Iowa, but in Paris, their relationship is stuffed in a pressure cooker. Shot in digital high-def, 2 Days in Paris doesn’t look a penny more than it cost, but that home movie vibe enhances the edginess and unadulterated passion Delpy seems to have been after. Bravo.

So, What’s This About?
A New York couple returns from a Venetian getaway to pick up the woman’s cat and visit her family and friends in Paris before flying home. Marion (Julie Delpy) is a photographer, gutsy and open minded, qualities that have enabled her to co-exist with Jack (Adam Goldberg), an interior designer with neuroses about everything from food to mold to public transit. Barely able to comprehend French, he’s introduced to Marion’s family. Her dramatic mother (Marie Pillet) has overfed Marion’s cat, prompting fears the airline will deny the beloved pet passage in the cabin. Marion’s father (Albert Delpy) takes pleasure in keying cars that park too close to the sidewalk and uses his ribald sense of humor to make Jack uncomfortable.

Marion’s sister (Alexia Landeau) is a special education teacher who hates kids; she sides with Jack in disgust over Marion sharing nude photos of her boyfriend with the family. Jack expresses a desire to visit the Catacombs — which end up being closed — and Jim Morrison’s gravesite, even though he doesn’t really like The Doors. Whether on the sidewalk or at a party, the morose Jack endures being introduced to one amorous ex-boyfriend of Marion’s after another. Bewildered by French customs and language, he grows suspicious of his girlfriend’s fidelity. Meanwhile, Marion begins to realize how little she knows about her boyfriend of two years and questions whether she can continue to put up with his act.

Who Made It?
Julie Delpy — the only child of actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet — grew up in Paris, where she made her acting debut at the age of 5. She was 14 when cast in a movie (Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective) and received a César nomination for her work in Bertrand Tavernier’s Béatrice at age 18. Delpy moved to the United States in 1989 to study film and screenwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She won wide acclaim for her role as a Nazi teenager in Europa Europa (1990) and went on to star in White (1994) and Before Sunrise (1995). After graduating college in 1993, Delpy moved to Los Angeles and between acting jobs, wrote and directed three short films over the next decade. She earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing Before Sunset (2004) with Richard Linklater & Ethan Hawke.

Delpy dubbed her production company Tempête Sous un Crâne, wrote several unproduced scripts over the years and had ideas for many more. One was about a French/American couple and their 48-hour nightmare visit to Paris. A producer named Christophe Mazodier — who Delpy was working with on a movie that never came together — liked the idea. With his French based Polaris Films supporting her, Delpy was finally able to land financing from Germany’s 3L Filmproduktion and France’s Rezo Films, who agreed to split the roughly $2.5 million budget for Delpy to make her feature film directing debut. Family and friends comprised much of the cast and 2 Days in Paris was such a crowd pleaser at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2007 that it quickly sold to exhibitors in over 40 territories.

How’d They Do It?
Julie Delpy hit upon the idea for what became her feature film directing debut some time before she helped author Before Sunset. “I thought about it for the first time in 2001, and I thought it would be funny to have a movie about a relationship over 48 hours in Paris that falls apart. An American guy with a lot of neuroses, and a fearless French woman who doesn’t have any neuroses. I actually originally started writing a short story or a novel, but I can’t write novels, I’m not capable of doing it. It always ends up that I start doing the dialogue, and as it goes along I transfer it from Word to Final Draft and it turns into a screenplay. Then Richard Linklater called me for writing Before Sunset, so I was like, ‘OK, forget that one! Why don’t we set Before Sunset in Paris?’ They were like, ‘OK, let’s do that.’”

Five years later, the actress mentioned the idea to producer Christophe Mazodier, who was working with Delpy on another project. The founder of Polaris Film Production (with Thierry Potok and Hubert Toint) recalled, “She talked to me about the story of 2 Days in Paris, which attracted my interest right away. In January 2006, she asked me to help her find a team for a challenging shoot with a very small budget, but I thought it a pity to make the film in this way and I suggested to her that I’d take care of it. We barely had 20 pages of dialogue, but Julie wrote the rest very quickly, even if there were still gaps. The aim was to leave enough room for improvisation on the set and especially to go very quickly while keeping our editorial freedom, not having to look at all costs for television backing.”

Mazodier and Delpy arrived on a sum of €1.7 million (roughly $2.5 million USD) needed to produce the film they had in mind. The producer revealed, “2 Days in Paris was based on a clear and very personal idea of Julie’s. So we needed to develop trust in its ability to attract audiences. The Anglo-Saxon, German or European audiences had no problem in imagining that, probably because they’re more receptive to films like Before Sunset and Before Sunrise. But the French still see Julie as the young 16 year-old actress of Tavernier and investors traditionally like very written scripts, where every comma is thought out, very far from Julie’s conceptual approach. Our approach is certainly a little unsettling for the French market because we said we would shoot the film in June 2006 with or without backing.”

Adam Goldberg — the energetic character actor best known as Mellish from Saving Private Ryan — had been approached by Delpy years ago with the prospect of playing Jack. “I used to read scripts of hers, and it always seemed nuts to me that she wasn’t directing. I thought we had a very strange and funny dynamic, and I definitely liked the idea of at least attempting to put that on film.” Delpy enthused, “I knew him for a long time and I always thought he’d be great as a lead — an offbeat romantic lead. But he’d never had that chance because maybe he’s a different kind of personality that people didn’t dare to hire him to play a whole film.” She added, “The sadder and more angry he looks, the funnier he is. There were times he didn’t even want to be funny but he just had that quality.”

In February 2006, Germany’s 3L Filmproduktion and France’s Rezo Films stepped up to finance 2 Days in Paris. Delpy admitted, “The biggest stress was not getting the money we thought we were going to get. The producer thought we were going to get money from the French government; and then he thought we were going to get money from Paris, because Paris gives people money when they shoot in the city; then we thought we were going to get money from a French-German fund, but we didn’t get it because some director didn’t like the screenplay and fought against it, like, violently — and gave the money to his best friend! So we got no help whatsoever, and we made the film with very little money.” With filming already delayed one week while Adam Goldberg wrapped a role in Deja Vu, cameras rolled in June 2006 only 12 hours after the actor landed in Paris.

Working with French cinematographer Lubomir Bakchev and shooting in digital high definition using the Sony HDW-750 camera, Delpy’s visual palette was dictated by a 20-day schedule. “I think the fact that we didn’t have too much money to do those wonderful shots of Paris — we were shooting in HD and wide shots don’t look that great in HD. Daytime in Paris is not that pretty in HD.” She added, “It was a choice but it was also because I had no choice. I would have loved to have been able to do a few shots in 35mm but we didn’t have the money to do that. We limited it but I think it works for the film in the way that I played with it — your limitations can be a strength, in a way. I like that look. One of my favorite movies is Fat City, which is all done with long lenses. I love those long-lens things where things are blurry in the background and only the people are in focus.”

With no one to compose a musical score, Delpy — who wrote and produced a well received, self-titled folk/pop album in 2003 — considered not using any music. “My boyfriend is a composer, Marc Streitenfeld, and he was watching the film with me and I asked if he thought it was missing music and he thought it was, so I went to my room and I have an entire file in my computer of film music that I wrote. It’s themes and other little odd bits that I wrote for fun. So I picked one and it worked, I rearranged another and wrote something new for the ‘Jealously Theme’. I think the music actually adds comedy to the film, which I think is great.” She added, “It helped a lot that I was editing the film in my house, so I could just go to my room and write it out, then put it into the film. Some worked and some didn’t. But the processes felt quite organic.”

Christophe Mazodier stated, “We never doubted that the film would interest the whole world, but we very quickly got confirmation of that at Cannes 2006 when the title was pre-sold to Japan. The script had the potential to do really well abroad because it had, with a lot of humor and without taking itself seriously, everything that foreigners think about the French. And it wasn’t only one-sided because the Americans aren’t spared either. It’s a fake romantic comedy.” A screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2007 was so well received that Rezo Films successfully sold 2 Days in Paris to exhibitors in 40 territories. Delpy mused, “Maybe the appeal is the dysfunction of it. Maybe every family is dysfunctional and that’s the only thing in common throughout the world.”

Opening May 2007 in Germany and Austria, August 2007 in the United States, the U.K. and Canada, the fake romantic comedy was well reviewed by critics. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early ’90s, she’s revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Delpy in fact has made a smart film with an edge to it; her Jack and Marion reveal things about themselves they never thought they’d tell anybody, and we wonder why they ever went out on a second date.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “2 Days in Paris provides a smart and funny respite from most of what passes for romantic comedy these days.”

Delpy’s directorial debut quietly grossed $4.4 million in the United States and $15.2 million overseas. The actress/ writer/ producer/ director/ composer set 2 Days in Paris apart from her other work by revealing, “A friend of mine suggested that I should try to make something that might seem from afar to be like Before Sunset since I had just had some success with that, and then do something totally different in tone and style. Apart from Paris and a French-American couple, there is nothing in it that resembles that film. It is more of a comedy than a romantic movie while Before Sunset was more of a romantic movie — it is light but it is not a comedy. This one is more of a straightforward comedy. I love Before Sunset, don’t get me wrong, but it is just a different film. I think it turns out to be kind of a romantic film in the end but throughout the film, it is more harsh and funny with a twisted side.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Christophe Mazodier: Producer” By Fabien Lemercier. CineEuropa, 9 July 2007

“A French Actress’s Life on Screen. Kind Of” By Kristin Hohenadel. The New York Times, 5 August 2007

“Interview: Julie Delpy” By Benjamin Crossley-Marra. IonCinema.com, 6 August 2007

“2 Days In Paris Director Julie Delpy” By Erica Abel. indieWIRE, 9 August 2007

“Julie Delpy, 2 Days In Paris” By Nick Dawson. FilmMaker Magazine, 10 August 2007

“Interview: 20 Minutes In Julie Delpy’s Head” By Peter Sobczynski. efilmcritic.com, 29 August 2007

“Two Days In Paris: Julie Delpy Interview” By Ron Carnevale. indieLondon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowhere In Africa (2001)
Screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
Directed by Caroline Link
Produced by Constantin Film/ MTM Cineteve/ Bavaria Film International/ Media Cooperation One
Running time: 141 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In January 1938, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) lies stricken with malaria in a remote farmhouse in Rongai, Kenya. A lawyer disbarred from practice in his native Germany because he is a Jew, Walter is nursed back to health by a benevolent Luo cook named Owuor (Sidede Onyulo) and a neighboring farmer named Susskind (Matthias Habich), a Jew who had the foresight to make his exodus from Germany when emigrants could still get out with their money. Walter urgently sends for his pampered wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler) and 6-year-old daughter Regina (Lea Kurka) to flee their home in Leobschütz and join him at the arid farm he does his best to manage.

Regina bonds with Owuor and immerses herself in the customs of her new home. Her mother rejects the trappings of Kenya, hoping for a return to their cozy life, until news from Germany and of family still trapped there turns grim. When war breaks out, the British briefly intern Walter and Susskind at a camp for enemy aliens, while Jettel and Regina are housed with the German women and children at the posh Hotel Norfolk in Nairobi. Walter loses his job and home, but his wife’s liaison with a British officer gets him hired to run a lush farm in Ol Joro Orok. The opportunity enables the Redlichs to send Regina to boarding school, but adopting the farming life in a faraway land continues to strain their marriage.

Who Made It?
Stefanie Zweig spent 40 years as the arts editor of a daily newspaper in Frankfurt, Germany. She lost her job in 1988 — at the age of 56 — but buoyed by the success of a children’s book published to acclaim in 1994, Zweig turned her attention to a memoir chronicling her childhood as a German Jewish émigré growing up on the farms of Kenya. Nowhere in Africa would have no difficulty finding a publisher and arrived in bookstores in 1995. One of its earliest admirers was producer Peter Herrmann and his production company MTM Cineteve, which snagged the film rights as the novel went on to become a bestseller in Germany.

Three years later, Herrmann hooked German director Caroline Link — whose 1996 debut film Beyond Silence was nominated for an Academy Award — to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to visit the locations of Zweig’s coming-of-age story. They would reject pleas to shoot Nowhere in Africa in the film-friendly confines of South Africa and from January to April of 2001, marshal an $8 million budgeted production in Kenya. The German/Swahili/English language picture would become the highest grossing German film of 2002 and in March 2003, win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

How’d They Do It?
In June 1938, Stefanie Zweig arrived in Rongai, Kenya. Her 34-year-old father had been stripped of his job as an attorney and notary public by the Nazis and chose to immigrate to Kenya because the entry permit was only £50 per head. Without knowing anything about crops or cattle, he was managing a farm. With the help of the Jewish community in Nairobi, he sent for his wife and daughter. Zweig wrote, “Having learned Swahili with the speed and eagerness of a child longing to talk to people other than her parents, I loved everything about Kenya. I loved its beauty, sights and sounds, the animals and birds — but most of all the gentleness of the African heart, the people’s wit and their laughter.”

Zweig spent four decades as the chief editor of the arts section of the Abendpost-Nachtausgabe in Frankfurt. Yearning to be an author, she found solace writing children’s books in her spare time. She recalled her Kenyan experience with A Mouth Full of Earth in 1994, winning National Geographic Society’s best juvenile book in The Netherlands. Zweig then decided it was time for her to tell the mature version of her story. “I thought to myself, ‘You really are a fool to waste all your life in a children’s book, why don’t you tell the true story?’” She added, “I wrote the book in respect for my father, who told me very early in life not to hate, he taught me tolerance and not to give way to sentiments. I loved him very much and I wanted it to be his book.”

In 1993, producer Peter Herrmann helped establish (with Andreas Bareiss) the German television and film production company MTM Cineteve. MTM would produce Romuald Karmakar’s The Deathmaker, Germany’s submission for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years previous, Herrmann was researching African ethnology when he came upon Stefanie Zweig’s then little known memoir Nowhere in Africa. Herrmann recalled, “I bought it very fast, and then the book became a bestseller so I was able to raise money for this movie. Then it was also difficult to find a director who was bankable enough to finance such a film. And then I met a young director, Caroline Link, and thought, ‘She is great, but nobody knows her.’”

Caroline Link grew up in Bad Nauheim, the town just north of Frankfurt where Elvis Presley served his Army stint. She followed high school with an internship at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich and study at the nearby University of Television and Film. Link wrote and directed the 45-minute short The Days of Summer there before graduating in 1990. She entered the German film industry as an assistant director and screenwriter-for-hire. Her critically acclaimed feature film debut — the drama Beyond Silence (1996) — would be Germany’s submission to the Academy Awards in 1998. Link’s sophomore film Annaluise & Anton (starring Juliane Köhler) was equally well received by Germans in 1999.

By the time Caroline Link was shooting Annaluise & Anton, Peter Herrmann deemed her name bankable enough to send Link a memoir he was seeking to produce. Link recalled, “When I first read the book Nowhere in Africa I was fascinated by it. I was caught up by the story it told of a woman from a protected Jewish family who suddenly has to live in the middle of the African desert. I’ve always loved to discover new worlds with my movies, but I remember thinking to myself: ‘Wow, can I do this? Will I really be able to shoot a movie in Kenya?’” Link agreed to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to inspect the locales described by Stefanie Zweig in her story.

The trip left little doubt among the filmmakers that in order to remain authentic to Zweig’s memoir, Nowhere in Africa had to be filmed in Kenya. Peter Herrmann mused, “People like to watch films about Africa. But I think that many films about Africa communicate the wrong things. Our decision to film in Kenya was kind of a risk. Kenya’s infrastructure is terrible. It’s difficult to organize things. Everyone in the industry told us to film it in South Africa. All films about Africa are made there. If the Americans — Hollywood — make a movie set in Kenya, they film it in South Africa. They can’t imagine organizing such a complicated thing as a big movie in a country like that and keeping costs low.”

Herrmann added, “Caroline and I were convinced right from the beginning that it was our desired aim to represent things the way they really are. And I think it makes a big difference that the Africans that are shown really are Kenyans, Kikuyus or Pokots or whatever and that they aren’t just South Africans playing them.” In the spring of 2000, Link began assembling a cast. Theater actress Juliane Köhler agreed to play Jettel. (Link offered, “Juliane is not afraid to play a part that is at first unsympathetic.”) Merab Ninidze — a Georgian actor who’d lived in Vienna for 10 years — was chosen to play Walter. Kenya’s Sidede Onyulo was cast as Owuor, while two German schoolgirls — 9-year-old Lea Kurka and 12-year-old Karoline Eckertz — were cast to play Regina at different ages.

With Munich based Constantin Film helping finance the $8 million budget, Nowhere in Africa opened an office in Nairobi in August 2000. Kenya was gripped in a potentially catastrophic drought. Peter Herrmann recalled, “Even in Nairobi, the crisis was felt. The entire city was filled with Massai and their flocks. The animals were feeding on the sad remains of the few plants still growing along the streets. Nairobi was on the brink of disaster. We had already invested too much to turn back, and wouldn’t be able to relocate. It didn’t rain until November. By then we had already started the construction of the farmhouses and planted artificially irrigated cornfields. We had already put our trust in the gods of Africa that they would look favorably upon the country and upon our film.”

In her adaptation — which took two years to finish — Link chose to focus on the relationship between Walter and Jettel. “Stefanie Zweig tells the story from the perspective of a child. She describes her own experiences and memories. But for me, Regina’s mother Jettel is the most exciting character. What is most fascinating is her development into an independent and mature woman, who not only has to rethink her own position and priorities in life but also her relationship towards her family.” Zweig would endorse the film, but differed with Link’s approach. “My mother was a very spoilt woman but she was also very charming and warm-hearted. The actress does not convey that. She is a rather cold and tough woman and, at the time, you did not know what tough women were. My father would have murdered her on the spot if she had been like that.”

Nowhere in Africa commenced filming January 2001 in Rongai. 140 members of the cast and crew spent three weeks camped in a small tent town near Lolldaiga, with guards from the Kenya Wildlife Service posted to watch for lions or cheetahs. Caroline Link admitted to The New York Times the location made her nervous. “And yet I’m surprised that I wasn’t more so. Every night we came to our tents and took showers, and snakes would come out, attracted by the water. I should have been afraid. But I’d just stand there barefoot in the dark, completely distracted, thinking about the next day’s scenes.” Other locations for the four-month shoot included Ol Joro Orok, Nairobi and Mukutani, a community northeast of Lake Baringo which the production built a road in order to access.

Peter Herrmann recalled, “Filming in Mukutani proved to be the greatest challenge. We planted cornfields that had to have three different grades of maturity during the shoot. In order to show on screen that time had elapsed we had to have young, low corn plants, green corn plants and the mature yellow corn plants. One of the highlights of the movie, the attack/plague of the locusts was filmed in the field of ripe corn. The first seeds had already been sown in November so that there would be ripe corn in March. To supervise the growth of the corn we had a ‘corn commissioner’ who traveled once a week 100 km from Nakuru to Mukutani.”

Premiering December 27, 2001 in Germany, Nowhere in Africa became the country’s highest grossing film of 2002. It swept the German Film Awards (the Lolas) in June with five wins: Outstanding Feature Film, Direction (Caroline Link), Cinematography (Gernot Roll), Music (Niki Reiser) and Supporting Actor (Matthias Habich). Germany named Nowhere in Africa its submission to the Academy Awards and in March 2003, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the United States that same month, Nowhere in Africa never expanded beyond 78 theaters, but its Academy Award propelled it to $6.1 million at the domestic box office. Overseas, it racked up $18.1 million in tickets.

Critics responded enthusiastically. David Ansen, Newsweek: “This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: “It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story. You want to know what happens next. Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a film like that.”

Link mused on her decision to take a nuanced approach to Nowhere in Africa, stating, “This is the only chance we have compared to these big Hollywood film studios. When they come up with all the technical equipment and the brilliant quality of their perfect images, to compete, we can only create films that are authentic and lifelike with a genuineness that can’t be bought. It’s more like feeling the things. Trying to direct in a lifelike manner. We tried to be very direct with the camerawork. We didn’t want it to be too stylized and arranged. It was a deliberate decision. We never tried to copy Out of Africa, on the contrary, we wanted something totally different.”

Should I Care?
Imagining the Hollywood version of Nowhere in Africa, I can picture a pleasant travelogue with major stars playing nice characters. There would be a hot and bothered love triangle — standard for movies like Legends of the Fall – and a subplot in which the European parents react against their daughter bringing home a Kenyan boy. While opportunities for retarded storytelling are plentiful in this exotic coming-of-age tale, it isn’t the American version, it’s the German one, and for once, moviegoers are better off for it. Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s vibrant memoir skips over its impulses for brain dead melodrama and swims in historic texture, warm atmosphere and simple, emotionally resonant power.

Nowhere in Africa opens with a bleak, thirsty Africa as seen through the eyes of Europeans who have arrived there against their will. The cinematography by Gernot Roll — shot mostly with the majestic, handheld Steadicam — is worthy of an Oscar nomination, growing more mysterious and lush as the story progresses. In her riveting third film, Link focuses on the trials of a marriage that is anything but ideal, but increases in strength the more Walter and Jettel overcome. The performances are uniformly terrific, particularly Matthias Habich as the bachelor farmer, Lea Kurka as the 6-year-old Regina and the many native Kenyans in the cast. Niki Reiser composed the rousing musical score to what is one of the most satisfying film experiences I’ve had in a while.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“In the African Sun While Dark Came Over Europe” By Laura Winters. The New York Times, 23 February 2003

“Strangers In a Strange Land” By Stefanie Zweig. The Guardian, 21 March 2003

“Germany’s Road to the Oscar” BBC News, 24 March 2003

“African Love Affair Inspires Oscar” By Rebecca Thomas. BBC News, 4 April 2003

Production Notes – Nowhere in Africa

“Making of Nowhere in Africa” Nowhere in Africa DVD. Sony Home Entertainment (2003)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Signal,” Wyoming in 1963, two ranch hands arrive and are put to work by a rancher (Randy Quaid) whose sheep need to pasture on “Brokeback Mountain.” The camp tender, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) doesn’t say much to his new partner at first, only that he used to come from ranch people. The herder, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the son of a rodeo rider. As time passes, the two men grow more comfortable with each other. Jack confides that his father was actually a well-known bull rider, but he kept his expertise to himself and never came to see Jack ride. Ennis reveals that his parents died and after a year of high school, he struck out on his own. When Jack complains about having to sleep up on the mountain with the sheep, Ennis offers to switch jobs with him.

Drunk and bunking down at the campsite, Ennis takes shelter with Jack in the tent to get out of the freezing cold. During the middle of the night, Jack initiates what escalates into an intense bout of sex between the men. “This is a one shot thing we got goin’ on here,” Ennis tells Jack the next day, adding “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack responds, “Me neither.” As the summer draws on, the experience turns out to be anything but a one shot deal, but when the job is over, Ennis forces himself to part ways with Jack. He marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams) and starts a family. Jack drifts back into rodeo, where he catches the eye of Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a hotshot circuit rider whose father owns an equipment company.

Ennis receives a postcard from Jack, who drops by on his way through Riverton. Alma catches her husband greeting his old friend intimately, but keeps this to herself for the time being. Taking off on what become annual fishing trips to Brokeback Mountain, Jack fails to convince Ennis to go in with him on a ranch somewhere where they can live together. Ennis shares a childhood memory of “two old guys ranched up together” and what ended up happening to one of them. Even after Alma divorces him, Ennis keeps his feelings for Jack private. When Jack asks for how long they have to go on like this, Ennis replies, “As long as we can ride it. There ain’t no reins on this one.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Following the publication of her third novel Accordion Crimes in 1991, Annie Proulx found herself drawn to writing about life in small town America, specifically Wyoming, where the author had moved in 1994 after living in Vermont for thirty years. Proulx recalled, “I am interested in landscape, folkways and rural problems. There is an endless conflict of values, lifestyles, the way people make their livings and social networks. I find the lives of country people far more interesting than the lives of city folk who are less connected to landscape and the natural world.” In 1997, Proulx started writing a short story she doubted would ever be printed; it concerned two young ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming whose sexual and emotional relationship spans twenty years. Published in the October issue of The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain would ultimately be named an O. Henry Prize Story and win a National Magazine Award.

A couple of years prior, Larry McMurtry – the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove – was recuperating from heart surgery in the home of a friend named Diana Ossana. McMurtry wrote his 1993 novel Streets of Laredo on Ossana’s kitchen counter, which she keyed into her computer and edited. McMurtry had received offers from Steven Spielberg, John McTiernan and others to write various screenplays and had rejected them all, but when Warner Bros. contacted the author about scripting a movie about gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, Ossana jumped into action. She recalled, “I went out and did a bunch of research on it. I had ten legal-sized pages of interesting facts about Pretty Boy, and sat down with him and said, ‘These are all the reasons that you ought to write this script.’ He was kind of amused by that, and by the time I was done reading him that list, he said, ‘Ok, I’d like to write the screenplay, but will you write it with me?’”

By October 1997, McMurtry & Ossana had written a script for Pretty Boy Floyd as well as two teleplays based on McMurtry’s work: Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. The duo was back in Texas, where a friend gave Ossana a copy of that month’s issue of the New Yorker, which featured Brokeback Mountain. Ossana recalled, “Two-thirds of the way through reading the story, I began to sob, and I sobbed all the way to the end. I was floored.” Ossana took the magazine to McMurtry, who recalled, “I don’t read fiction much anymore, so I was reluctant. But in her tenacious way, she asked that I humor her and read it. After I was finished reading it, the first thing I thought was that I wished I had written it. It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told, and Annie finally wrote it. It is one of the finest short stories I’ve read. The place, the landscape, the men and the way they speak are drawn precisely and convincingly.”

Diana Ossana recalled, “He read it and said it was the best short story ever published in the New Yorker. ‘Well, do you think it would make a screenplay,’ I asked. And he replied, ‘I think it might.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we write Annie a letter?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’” Within a week, Proulx had optioned her short story to the writing tandem. Paying her out of their own pockets, McMurtry & Ossana started writing and three months later, finished a screenplay. Producer Scott Rudin would option the script and ultimately brought Gus Van Sant on board to direct. Despite interest from Joaquin Phoenix to play Jack Twist, McMurtry believed that actors were getting cold feet. “They’d say it was the best thing they’d ever read, and then they’d waver and anguish. Their agents were afraid and steered them away from it.” Unable to lock a cast, Gus Van Sant had to pass on directing Brokeback Mountain.

In 2001, producer James Schamus took out an option on Brokeback Mountain. Schamus presented it to his longtime collaborator, director Ang Lee, who read the short story, felt the screenplay was a great adaptation, but opted to direct The Hulk instead. Schamus had no luck getting a studio to take a chance on the material. He took a job developing films for Universal’s specialty unit Focus Features, where it dawned on him that now, he had the cache to greenlight Brokeback Mountain himself. By this time, Ang had finished The Hulk. The director recalled, “Two years later, I asked James, ‘What happened with Brokeback Mountain? Did it get made yet?’ He said, ‘We haven’t been able to make that movie.’ Lucky for me. I said, ‘You know, it’s stuck with me over the years. I can’t get it out of my mind.’” Ang continued, “James got the rights, and I started thinking about making the movie right away. Before I knew I could physically do it, I jumped on. I just knew, in the bottom of my heart, if I let it go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.”

With Ang Lee behind the camera, a cast for Brokeback Mountain quickly fell into place. Jake Gyllenhaal had met Gus Van Sant about taking on the role of Jack when he was only 16. The actor recalled, “I was immediately drawn to Brokeback Mountain because love stories haven’t been told this way in a long time. Movies I’ve seen in recent years have avoided the struggles and the trials that it takes to actually be in love and keep that going. When I heard that Ang Lee was going to make it, I thought, ‘I have to do this movie.’” Heath Ledger committed to the project without meeting or even speaking to the director. “I trusted that story in Ang’s hands. I loved the script because it was mature and strong, and such a pure and beautiful love story. I hadn’t done a proper love story, and I find there’s not a lot of mystery left in stories between guys and girls. It’s all been done or seen before.”

Diana Ossana elaborated on the writing process. “Adapting Annie’s story was extremely easy and yet extremely difficult. It was easy in the sense that we had the blueprint right there with her writing – of the story itself, of the characters, of the specific way they speak, of the specific place they were from, and the landscape that formed them. The difficult part was to stay true to all that while turning this into a feature-length film. First we scripted the entire short story, and then we imagined and proceeded to flesh out the female characters so they would have depth and a presence on-screen. We also continued to build upon the stories of Ennis and Jack, many times creating an entire scene based upon a single sentence in the story.” On the strength of the screenplay, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris all joined the cast in supporting roles.

Shooting commenced May 2004 in Alberta, Canada on a budget of $12 million, Ang’s least expensive since making Eat Drink Man Woman in Taiwan. Impressed with his work for Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ang hired cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Production designer Judy Becker was also hired. She recalled, “Ang and I, and Rodrigo, talked about how the towns would be a strong contrast to the mountains – colorless and cluttered. We didn’t have the resources to build a huge amount of the sets. The biggest challenge was finding the right locations.” She added, “I looked at imagery of small towns. One thing that struck me, which Ang and I discussed early on, was that although the movie takes place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, the towns still looked like they could be in earlier decades. We went to Wyoming and Texas to do some research and, even now, so much detail and architecture is left over from pre-World War II. Change happened very, very slowly in small towns in the West.”

Following screenings at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, talk in Hollywood was whether paying audiences would have any desire to see a movie about the love between two men. Diana Ossana recalled, “As human beings we tend to put labels on everything as a way to sort of categorize and feel safe about something. ‘That script is about gay cowboys, well, I’m not going to give that thing the time of day. I’m not going to waste my time on it.’ It’s a way to reduce it to something very simple, when it’s something that isn’t simple at all. At one point I remember somebody saying to me, ‘You know, Diana, this movie would get made a heck of a lot faster if it were about a man and a woman.’ That wouldn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t make that movie.”

Opening December 2005 in the U.S., critics greeted Brokeback Mountain with near universal acclaim. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “There’s neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain – just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “It’s possible to point to some weak spots in Brokeback – its seeming multiple endings, the lack of clarity about certain images, some digressions – but there is no movie this year that has moved my heart more than Brokeback Mountain.”

Not every community in the world was ready to embrace Brokeback Mountain. The Chinese government refused to add it to a list of foreign films deemed suitable to be shown in mainland theaters. Despite the fact that the city’s two major newspapers carried ads, the late owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz franchise – Larry Miller – withdrew Brokeback Mountain from exhibition in the Salt Lake City suburb where he owned an entertainment complex. Many conservative Christian groups in the U.S. – anticipating noisy protests would only help promote the film, as they had in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ – stayed quiet, predicting that rural audiences would likely reject the subject matter anyway. Strongly favorable word of mouth and eight Academy Award nominations instead had the opposite effect. Brokeback Mountain was propelled to box office receipts of $83 million in the U.S. and $95 million overseas.

The month of its release, Annie Proulx was asked whether straight men would watch Brokeback Mountain. The author replied, “They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn’t they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much, he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it, and they’re not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that’s usually young men who haven’t figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.” She added, “It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that’s true. It’s an old, old story. We’ve heard this story a million times; we just haven’t heard it quite with this cast.”

Should I Care?
Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana and composer Gustavo Santaolalla all won Oscars, while – in yet another awards show “moment” – the racial melodrama Crash was voted Best Picture, but one of the more lasting impressions made by Brokeback Mountain is that instead of angling for awards or trying to send a message, the film reveals genuine empathy for its characters and their experiences, portraying both realistically without Hollywood glamour or spin. It’s not a film that casts judgments its characters, in spite how the politics of the time may or may not have judged the movie, developing a timeless quality by depicting its setting with honesty, and its emotional range with complexity. In the process, it cuts deep through just about every demographic to leave its mark as a great love story.

With Annie Proulx’s short story running 11 pages, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t cover a whole lot of ground, but the power of what’s on film is hard to ignore. The opening scenes convey the beauty and solitude of the country as memorably as any of Larry McMurtry’s movie adaptations, particularly Hud. Material is rarely matched so perfectly to the sensibility and skills of a particular director as this story is for Ang Lee. The combination of writing and directing obviously attracted one of the finest casts assembled in recent memory. Each time I watch the movie, I come away thinking another actor gave the best performance: Michelle Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anne Hathaway. There’s nothing more to say about Heath Ledger except that his work as Ennis Del Mar passes into legend.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Ang Lee’s Brokeback Explores ‘Last Frontier’” By Anne Thompson. The Hollywood Reporter, 11 November 2005

“Annie Proulx discusses the origins of Brokeback Mountain” By Sandy Cohen. Associated Press, 18 December 2005

“New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians; Reviews, Not Protests” By John Leland. The New York Times, 26 December 2005

“Annie Proulx Interview” By Deepanjana Pal. Time Out Dubai, 23 March 2009

Brokeback Mountain – Production Notes. Focus Features

Brokeback Mountain – 2-Disc Collector’s Edition. Universal Studios Home Video (2006)

Synopsis
In the waters surrounding Jamaica of 1668, pirate Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) – daughter of buccaneer Black Harry Adams (Harris Yulin) – escapes the latest attempt by authorities to capture her. Rowing out to rejoin her father aboard his ship the Morning Star, Morgan discovers her uncle, the nefarious Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), has commandeered the vessel and forced Black Harry onto the edge of the plank. Dawg seeks Black Harry’s fragment of a treasure map their father divided and left each of his three sons. Morgan’s efforts to rescue her father come up short, but before he dies, Black Harry reveals to her the location of his piece of the map: his scalp.

Morgan assumes command of the Morning Star and sails to Port Royal, where she seeks a Latin translator to decipher the clues on her dead father’s scalp. Meanwhile, pickpocket William Shaw (Matthew Modine) is arrested trying to lift jewels from polite society and is sold into slavery. Morgan rescues him from the auction block as naval authorities led by Governor Ainless (Patrick Malahide) fire on them. The crew of the Morning Star locates Morgan’s other uncle and obtaining the second map fragment – which Shaw discovers inside a barrel of moray eels – narrow the location of the family fortune to Cutthroat Island. A typhoon, double crosses, sword duels, a naval battle and a monkey complete the tale.

Production history
In the late 1980s, producer Jon Peters optioned a book by John Carlova titled Mistress of the Seas. It was based on the incredible true life adventures of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, 18th century women who disguised themselves as pirates to take to the high seas, where they became intimate with their captain, “Calico” Jack Rackham. By the summer of 1993, Peters had enlisted Paul Verhoeven to direct the torrid tale. Entertainment Weekly quoted an unnamed source as saying, “What he had in mind was a sex film that, oh, by the way, had a couple of ships in it.” Geena Davis and Harrison Ford were interested, but Columbia Pictures – wary of a big budget sex film – pressed Verhoeven to focus on a conventional love triangle between two male buccaneers and Anne Bonny. Davis reluctantly dropped out and Mistress of the Seas never made it out of the harbor.

In the estimation of Mario Kassar – owner of Carolco Pictures – Columbia’s interest in pirates legitimized a rival swashbuckling script he had in his pocket titled Cutthroat Island. Written by Michael Frost Beckner & James Gorman, the project was one of two lavish period action pictures Kassar intended to produce. The other was the highly anticipated Crusade, with Arnold Schwarzenegger signed to play a knight carrying Christ’s cross back to Rome (with Paul Verhoeven navigating the journey). Carolco had spared no expense producing lavish fare from Total Recall to Chaplin, The Doors to Basic Instinct, many of them hits, but by the end of 1994, the company was $43 million in debt. Kassar made the decision to cancel Crusade – writing off $13 million in pre-production costs – and bet the fate of Carolco on Cutthroat Island.

Renny Harlin – director of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger – committed to Carolco’s pirate movie, and after a rewrite by Raynold Gideon & Bruce Evans, Michael Douglas accepted a $13 million offer to star as William Shaw, a gambler who falls into servitude to pay off a debt. Geena Davis – who had recently married Harlin – was not a fan of the script, but once Douglas came aboard, she agreed to play Morgan Adams, a bookkeeper who seduces Shaw into the company of her fellow pirates. While Douglas was finishing Disclosure in Seattle, Harlin and Davis brought in screenwriter Susan Shilliday to bolster the female lead. Douglas got a look at the changes and was not happy with what he saw. “They had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go. I was feeling uncomfortable, and I wanted out.”

Geena Davis would later refute the notion that Michael Douglas got cold feet because a leading lady was upstaging him, but admitted that once the star dropped out, Cutthroat Island should have folded. “I, of course, assumed the whole project would be canceled. It was all based on Michael Douglas’s being in it. To my horror, I learned not only would they not cancel, but that I had a legal obligation to go ahead, unlike Michael. I tried desperately to get out of this movie.” A senior executive at Carolco later told the New York Times, “We knew that if we shut it down it was certain Chapter 11. If we made the film, there was at least some chance we could survive. It was a classic case of going forward when you have no other choice.”

Budgeted at $65 million, Cutthroat Island was set to film on the Mediterranean isle of Malta. A crew had been assembled and as of the spring of 1994 was on location building sets. As of July, Harlin was still in Los Angeles searching for someone to replace Michael Douglas. Jeff Bridges, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Keanu Reeves, Ralph Fiennes, Kurt Russell, Michael Keaton and even Charlie Sheen were offered the part. All passed. In a memo intended to pump up his crew, Harlin wrote, “When the casting concerns have been resolved and I arrive in Malta, I want to see the most spectacular and eye-popping sets, the most interesting and unusual props, and especially weapons and special effects that leave the audience gasping in awe and stunts that no one thought possible before. No sequence or setting that you’ve seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea that has been previously used has to be reinvented and cranked up 10 times.”

The casting merry go round stopped at Matthew Modine when the wholesome actor accepted the role of Shaw. Though Modine’s fee was a $12 million savings over Michael Douglas, screenwriter Robert King had to be brought in to reconfigure Cutthroat Island in one month as a vehicle for Geena Davis. Six weeks before principal photography was to begin, Harlin arrived on location. Production delays had spiked the budget to $80 million and the script was still considered unworkable. Script doctor Marc Norman was added to the payroll at a cost of $800,000. His job entailed being rousted at 1 am, driven to the set and using a legal pad to write whatever scene was being filmed that morning. Norman recalled, “I was the guy in Malta stuck with trying to make that work. I did get paid well. But it was really hell.”

By the time Cutthroat Island commenced filming October 1994, the film’s balance sheet included some 2,000 costumes, 309 firearms, 620 swords, 250 daggers and at least 100 axes. Several dozen horses needed for a carriage chase had to be flown from Hungary with their grooms at double the cost due to EU regulations that prohibited the transport of animals in boats. Two full sized pirate ships were constructed at a cost of $1 million each, one of which caught fire during filming, forcing production to shut down for three days. Wrapping second unit photography off the coast of Thailand in March 1995, Harlin was confident he could meet a release date of July 4. The director confided to Variety’s Army Archerd: “The smartest thing I ever did was to go to the tank in Malta. All the complicated stuff was controlled. I can’t image doing it on the ocean where you can’t control waves, winds, currents. It would have been impossible.”

Deciding the film was not ready, Carolco pushed Cutthroat Island back to December. MGM/UA – intending to spend $30 million to distribute and market the picture – downgraded to $18 million as the release date neared. Once critics weighed in, word of mouth went from dismal to worse. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “So Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction.” Desson Thomson, the Washington Post: “It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Younger teen audiences might be carried away by the escapades up to a point, but there is little flair or grace on display, as the sheer effort of capturing the tumultuous doings on camera is all too apparent. No one in the film seems to be having much fun, and the effect is contagious.”

The cost of producing, marketing and distributing the film totaled $115 million. Its box office take was $10 million in the United States, $4 million overseas, grosses which officially made Cutthroat Island the biggest commercial disaster in movie history, the first film to lose $100 million. Carolco – which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection a month before the film was even in theaters – lost about $47 million in the debacle. The rest of the loss was divided among the overseas distributors Kassar had pre-sold the film to: Pioneer Electronic Corporation of Japan, Canal Plus of France and Rizzoli Editore of Italy. The I.R.S. was at the front of the line to collect $15 million in unpaid taxes, claiming that Carolco concealed profits through its tangled deals with overseas corporations.

In an interview with IGN FilmForce in 2001 – three years after he had filed for divorce from Geena Davis – Renny Harlin offered his post mortem on Cutthroat Island. “We had an essential flaw, which maybe wouldn’t be such a problem today, but in those days, a female heroine in sort-of a young boy’s fantasy action movie just didn’t gel. Certainly the movie has flaws, but on the other hand, it has some pretty big production values and pretty fun action sequences that I think – in the right atmosphere with the right marketing and so on – could have turned out much better. At the same time, you have to realize that you can’t succeed every time and – even with the best intentions – we make mistakes and things don’t work out so great.”

Opinion
While Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World would engage audiences with its character pathos and historical detail – and the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks would at least offer up buckets of intense audience appreciation – Cutthroat Island is like a Mad Lib filled out by a mental defect who can’t get enough pirates in his life. Every single cliché of the swashbuckling genre is on display here – a monkey, a plank, a peg leg and a treasure map appear within the first 10 minutes – but what’s missing is even one scene that rises to the spectacular edict laid down by director Renny Harlin to his crew. Instead of reinventing and cranking up the genre by ten times, it doesn’t even feel like anybody bothered to wake up and hit the fucking snooze bar.

The only aspect of Cutthroat Island handled with any feeling of conviction are the explosions, which is what the movie lives and dies by. Though Geena Davis would go on to be a semifinalist for the women’s Olympic archery team in 1999, it’s painful to watch how disinterested she is at being an action hero. The wry, brainy and at times very sexy ingénue is just about laughable as a pirate. Her chemistry with Matthew Modine is non-existent, the action choreography clumsy and the seven writers who drew a paycheck seem to relish their work like it was slave labor. The location scouts and visual effects technicians earned their lunch money at least, while the high throttled musical score by John Debney probably has more fans than this wreck of a movie does.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Debacle on the High Seas”. By James Sternhold. The New York Times, March 31, 1996.
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops. By James Robert Parish (2006)

Synopsis
Winding down a shopping spree at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Julie (Deborah Foreman) reports on her social situation to friends Suzi (Michelle Meyrink), Loryn (Elizabeth Daily) and Allyson (Camille Calvet). When her ex Tommy (Michael Bowen) corners her on the escalator, Julie reads him the riot act: “It’s like I’m totally not in love with you anymore, Tommy. I mean, it’s so boring!” At the beach, Julie catches the eye of a punk rocker from Hollywood, Randy (Nicolas Cage). His buddy Fred (Cameron Dye) overhears the girls talking about a party that night in the Valley. “I’m not in the mood to go to the Valley,” Randy responds.

Before heading to the party, Julie checks in with her parents (Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp), ‘60s radicals who have gone from peace marches in Washington to running a health food diner in the suburbs. At the party, Suzi finds herself competing for the attention of a boy she likes with her stepmother (Lee Purcell). Tommy tries to take revenge on his ex by getting it on with Loryn. Randy and Fred show up and try their best to mingle with the girls from the suburbs. Randy locks eyes with Julie and strikes up a conversation. Love at first sight is interrupted when Julie’s ex returns to the party and throws the punks out.

Randy returns to the party, sneaking into the bathroom to get some time alone with Julie. With her friend Stacey (Heidi Holicker) in tow, he takes her to his world in Hollywood to hang out in a dive club. The couple becomes inseparable, but Julie’s friends are not supportive. “You know, Tommy’s going to look real good after six groddie bus rides in Hollywood.” With prom approaching, peer pressure takes effect and Julie breaks it off with her punk rocker. Randy drowns his grief with his grungy ex (Tina Theberge) but hearing his and Julie’s song in a club – “A Million Miles Away” by The Pimsouls – he decides to put in appearance at the prom.

Production history
Frank Zappa’s satirical tune “Valley Girl” – featuring vocals by his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit – was the only single from the avant-garde musician to ever crack Billboard’s Top 40. It became a phenomenon in the summer of 1982, spawning merchandise and landing on the cover of Time Magazine. Universal, United Artists and even Norman Lear approached Zappa with offers to make a movie, which the musician thought Moon Unit would naturally star in. Nothing came of the idea. Zappa’s reaction to the fad was, “It was a joke. It just goes to show that the American public loves to celebrate the infantile. I mean, I don’t want people to act like that. I think Valley Girls are disgusting.”

Writers-producers Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane saw gold anyway and without Zappa’s song or his approval, cranked out a screenplay in ten days. Securing investors for a movie, the writers realized they didn’t know much about teenage girls. Lane asked a friend named Martha Coolidge to read the script. Coolidge had attended grad school at NYU Institute of Film and Television and came to Los Angeles in 1976 to intern with director Robert Wise. She’d directed a feature in Toronto called City Girl, the producers of which had run out of money. Coolidge was editing it on her own, living in a room over a friend’s garage when Lane asked her to direct Valley Girl.

Coolidge recalls, “Wayne Crawford and Andy Lane had this great script which reminded me of Romeo and Juliet. And I came in and said I’ve really got to differentiate the Valley from Hollywood because there really is a kind of spiritual difference, one being more urban and more hardcore, and the other being more suburban. And put in the scene where they fell in love and put in the scene where they break up. Those two scenes weren’t in the picture.” The financiers Crawford & Lane had found were worried about a woman directing their teen exploitation flick. They made Coolidge vow to show naked breasts four times during the movie. She replied that wasn’t a problem as long as she could do it her way.

Coolidge convinced NYU classmate Frederick Elmes to serve as cinematographer and her friend Mary Delia Javier – set decorator for Apocalypse Now – to be production designer. To obtain wardrobe, crew members raided their own closets. To star, Coolidge liked Judd Nelson and Eric Stoltz. With Nelson unavailable, 18-year-old Nicolas Cage was cast in his first leading role, opposite Cameron Dye. With a production budget of $325,000, Valley Girl commenced filming October 1982 in Los Angeles. The entire movie was shot in 20 days. Coolidge recalls, “Almost everything was made with one take. The most was three. It was a movie I had no extra film, so we had to really be ready and really do it right when we did it.”

While Amy Heckerling lost her battle to fill the soundtrack of Fast Times At Ridgemont High with punk and New Wave, Coolidge cast Josie Cotton (singing “Johnny Are You Queer?”) and The Plimsouls (performing ”A Million Miles Away”) in the movie. X had been approached to appear, but was worried about alienating their fans in the Valley. Coolidge was listening to KROQ when she heard a song she felt would be perfect for her movie. All she remembered were the words “melt with you.” Singing it to music supervisor Michael Papali, he tracked down the tune, “I Melt With You” by Modern English. The song hadn’t gone anywhere on the pop charts, but exploded after being used in Valley Girl.

When executive producers Thomas Coleman and Mark Rosenblatt saw a work print, they were so ecstatic that Coolidge had made a real movie, they turned down bids from the major studios and released the film themselves, even renting a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. One person not happy with Valley Girl was Frank Zappa. He sought $100,000 for “false designation of origin, unfair competition and dilution of trademark.” One month before Valley Girl was released, a federal judge ruled against Zappa, finding that there would be no confusion between his song and the film. Andy Lane responded, “He did have something to do with creating the fad, but the song did not create the persona.”

Opening in April 1983, Valley Girl was dismissed by most critics at the time, but grew into one of the more profitable movies ever made, grossing $17 million in the U.S. Coolidge became one of a handful of women directing feature films. She recalls, “This movie was made with a lot of love, a lot of generosity. Enormous number of people worked free and those that were paid were basically working for free. It was a chance for everyone and all the crew members to make a movie that they were proud of and that really depicted a time, certain time in history which we had all loved and participated in. And I knew that movies do preserve the culture that we live in and I think that this movie has really shown that.”

Opinion
The premise behind this movie is so old – teen love from the wrong side of the tracks – that Peter Case of The Plimsouls suggested their tune “The Oldest Story In The World” as an alternate title. But Valley Girl is a classic because of how well it captures the period it was made, a time before punk rock in Los Angeles went up in a puff of pyrotechnic smoke detonated by heavy metal hair bands. You couldn’t find a better cast, cooler tunes or a more heartfelt approach to make this movie today, even with twenty times the money Martha Coolidge had. Her first time really out of the gate, she delivered the best film of her career.

Instead of making a visual parody based on Zappa’s silly pop hit, Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane took the plights of their teenage characters to heart, while Coolidge colored the moods of the film with those of her own life. The punk and New Wave soundtrack is about as authentic as you could hope for – without this movie, “Melt With You” would never have been heard again, much less become the anthem of a generation – while Nicolas Cage turns in an inspired performance as a geek in love. Equally impressive are the adults, with Frederic Forrest & Colleen Camp a riot as Julie’s Age of Aquarius parents, and Lee Purcell sexy and sharp as a would-be Mrs. Robinson.

Noel Murray at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “Before John Hughes became the auteur of mature teen angst, Cage and Foreman’s romance had a reputation as the best the genre had to offer (a title that rightly should have gone to Fast Times At Ridgemont High). Valley Girl holds up pretty well, thanks to Cage, some anthropologically valuable shots of shopping malls and the Sunset Strip, and the sensitive illustration of adolescent self-consciousness provided by director Martha Coolidge. It almost doesn’t matter that Cage and Foreman’s differences seem ridiculously slight; what matters is that they feel like they’re being judged.”

“Valley Girl is one of those quintessential 80s flicks that actually stands up pretty well over time, and that’s because it isn’t really about Valley-speak or hot trends, although there’s plenty of that in the mix. It’s about two people that want to be together, even though everyone tells them they can’t, and the agony that all of this implies. It’s probably not the deepest or most profound telling of this oft-utilized theme, but it didn’t need to be. As purely an entertainment piece, the unique blend of music, wardrobe, and kooky characters sets it apart enough to have its own special flavor,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Rebecca Taylor at DVD Active writes, “Two decades after its release, Valley Girl certainly offers major nostalgia value, if nothing else, for some viewers. The fashion, the music and the vernacular are pure early ‘80s goodness. But because the film relies on a classic star crossed lovers story and Cage and Foreman exhibit abundant chemistry in their scenes together, Valley Girl retains a certain freshness and originality that makes it much more than just simply another 80s teen flick … I have seen it too many times to count and to me it is as much a masterpiece of cinema as The Breakfast Club, or any of the other 80s teen films that have gained mythical status in the public consciousness.”

© Joe Valdez