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

The following is my contribution to the “Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon” being held at Ferdy on Films, Etc. May 4-10. Marilyn Ferdinand has called on the Internets to write about dance and film to commemorate the birthday of Fred Astaire.

Synopsis
Following the death of her mother, high school student Sara Johnson (Julia Stiles) leaves rural Illinois to live with her musician father (Terry Kinney) on the south side of Chicago. Sara gives up her dream to become a ballet dancer and tries to adapt to her new school, which features metal detectors, security guards and is almost entirely black. On her first day, she speaks out in English class, only to have another student, Derek Reynolds (Sean Patrick Thomas) ridicule her comment about Truman Capote.

Sara picks up a survival tip from Chenille (Kerry Washington), who later rescues her from sitting with the geeks in the cafeteria. She brings the new girl into her clique, even after Sara voices disgust over Derek, who she learns is Chenille’s brother. Sara impresses Chenille and her friend Diggy (Elisbeth Oas) with her balance beam skills in the gym and when they find out she used to dance, offer to get her into a club they go to called Stepps. Sara’s wardrobe turns out to be a disaster, but Chenille helps her reaccessorize on the spot.

When her ability to dance hip-hop proves tragic, Derek offers to help Sara with her steps. She finds out he’s studying to be a pediatrician. She agrees to go out with him, and his taken aback when they arrive at the ballet. Sara opens up about why she chose to give up ballet, but Derek encourages her to stop blaming herself for her mother’s death. He supports her dream of getting into Juilliard and helps her practice. The pair becomes a couple, but when Chenille finds out that her white friend is dating her brother, she raises an issue with the relationship.

Production history
Developing ideas for a new project, producers Robert W. Cort and David Madden started by thinking about genres that hadn’t been seen in a while. The one to really jump out at them was the dance movie. While the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had seen one dance themed blockbuster after another – Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, Footloose – the last successful one had been Dirty Dancing in 1987. The producers were also intrigued by the idea of an interracial romance, how a mixed race couple in high school would deal with the social restraints of their relationship.

The producers hired Duane Adler, whose script Chasing the Game – about Adler’s experience as the only white player on a black high school basketball team – had been a semifinalist in the 1994 Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship. After revisions by Toni-Ann Johnson, the producers sent the script to Thomas Carter, who’d gotten his start as an actor on the NBC series The White Shadow and had gone on to direct Swing Kids. Carter didn’t like the script, but liked its context; white girl comes to a predominantly black school. He’d also been looking to direct an interracial love story.

Cort and Madden had purchased a spec script called Against the Ropes by Cheryl Edwards and asked her to rewrite something for them. Edwards found Save the Last Dance the most appealing, but explained what needed to be fixed when she met with Carter. “The main problem that I found in the original script is that it was over the top in the way that it handled the racial issues … Rather than have the whole school react to this white girl coming, I brought it down to her relationships with the black kids with whom she was hanging out, didn’t bang people over the head with it.”

Before shooting commenced in November 1999 in Lemont, Illinois, choreographers Fatima Robinson and Richmond Talauega spent a month working with Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas. Even after production shifted to Chicago, the actors spent eight hours each weekend in the dance studio. When released over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in January 2001, Save the Last Dance was a sleeper hit, ultimately grossing $91 million in the U.S. and another $40 million overseas. Critics largely dismissed it as another cliché ridden teen exploitation flick.

Opinion
What sets Save the Last Dance apart from the fraternity of dance movies that have come along in its wake are its rich performances and its remarkable sophistication dealing with race and interracial romance. While the script does occasionally cozy up to clichés, overall, this is a film that actually has something on its mind, addressing the concerns of real teens in the real world with the ambition of a good novel, as opposed to a teen flick with breakdancers flying through the air on trampolines.

In addition to Stiles and Thomas – who have terrific chemistry – Kerry Washington was a find as a teen mother split between love for her friend and her racial insecurities. Very few movies acknowledge the feelings black women have for black men dating white women, but Save the Last Dance doesn’t run from the subject. The dance sequences are choreographed with a tasteful sensuality, while the melodic soundtrack – featuring Donell Jones’ “U Know What’s Up” and “Get It On Tonite” by Montell Jordan – ultimately lends the film a joyous and upbeat vibe.

J. Robert Parks at The Phantom TollBooth writes, “This earnest movie, which feels like an after-school special, only with swearing and extended dance sequences, takes on the usual themes of modern-day teen movies: tolerance for other races, violence and drugs, and the importance of following your dreams. That the movie deals with any of these credibly seems a testament to Stiles’s integrity and acting chops rather than the pedestrian script, though I fully admit my own bias on the matter.”

“We’ve seen plenty of movies about young women adjusting to life in the big city. And we’ve certainly had enough teen romances to last a lifetime. Not to mention dance films … On the surface, at least, it’s difficult to understand why director Thomas Carter would try to do it all again. But if you dig beneath the surface – and give Save the Last Dance a chance – you’ll learn that there’s something slightly different here, and at least modestly good reason to take it in,” writes Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide.

Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “Save The Last Dance is particularly perceptive about the ways people in difficult situations create mental body armor just to survive, how they suppress their vulnerability to avoid being swallowed up by their surroundings … Though far from perfect – the dance aspects are far clumsier and more predictable than the central romance – a fine cast and Carter’s perceptive direction make Save The Last Dance the rare teen film in which substance far outstrips style.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette), a freckled faced and overweight geek, lives in the Gold Coast town of “Porpoise Spit” with her father (Bill Hunter), a politician who blames his “useless” family for ruining his chance at higher office. While Muriel’s brothers and sisters do little but smoke and watch TV all day, Muriel is singled out for spending two years in secretarial school and graduating without learning how to type. Her only enjoyments in life are listening to Abba songs and dreaming about getting married.

Muriel’s “friends” (Sophie Lee, Roz Hammond, Belinda Jarrett, Pippa Grandison) go on holiday but leave Muriel because she doesn’t fit partying their image. Muriel’s father gets her a job selling cosmetics, but she embezzles money from the family’s bank account and follows the girls to Hibiscus Island. There, she meets Rhonda Epinstalk (Rachel Griffiths), a feisty outcast who shares Muriel’s love of ‘70s music, and says and does all the things Mariel wishes she could.

Rather than return to Porpoise Spit, Muriel moves to Sydney with her new best friend. She starts a new life, changing her name to “Mariel” and losing weight. Her dreams appear to come true when she agrees to marry a South African swimmer trying to get Australian citizenship. But in her eagerness to become a bride, Muriel begins to neglect Rhonda and severs ties with her dysfunctional family. This prompts her to examine what it is she’s changing into.

Production history
P.J. Hogan was an aspiring filmmaker living in Sydney. He’d been working on a script for two or three years only to have financing evaporate at the last minute. His wife Jocelyn Moorhouse rose to critical acclaim in 1991 with a debut film called Proof that featured an unknown Hugo Weaving and Russell Crowe in the cast. But the couple didn’t have much money, and Hogan felt nobody would ever make one of his films.

Hogan found inspiration in his sister, who had a stormy relationship with their father. The family had gotten her a job selling cosmetics, but she’d forged their father’s name on a check, drained his bank account and disappeared for a year. Hogan felt that was a good beginning for a movie. Sitting in a café – wishing he could be transformed into a filmmaker – Hogan noticed girls entering a bridal shop and trying on clothes in an effort to transform themselves into brides. This became the basis for Muriel’s Wedding.

Hogan outlined a 30-page treatment and sent it to the Australian Film Commission. He was told his story was terrible. With help from a smaller financier, Hogan finished a script in three months. Everyone Hogan and Moorhouse approached to finance the film turned them down. While French company CiBy 2000 deliberated their decision, Hogan called director Jane Campion and asked her to write him a letter of recommendation. Campion’s letter convinced CiBy to finance the picture.

After 21-year-old Toni Collette was chosen to play Muriel and the producers spent months cajoling Abba to license their music for the film (the Swedish pop icons had resisted all other overtures in the past), Muriel’s Wedding premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994. It was released in Australia in September alongside Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Both films were blockbusters and revitalized the Australian film industry, with Muriel’s Wedding making the loudest splash with critics and audiences in the U.S.

Opinion
While the film has big laughs – the slacker Heslop siblings are a riot, while a seduction scene where Muriel’s date confuses the zipper on a beanbag for zipper of her skirt is a terrific screwball moment – it bares little resemblance for what passes for “romantic comedy” in Hollywood. Muriel’s Wedding actually looks at marriage without rose tinted glasses. It’s very funny, but dares to be brutally honest and at times uncomfortable, portraying a woman who feels unwanted and is desperate for any type of acceptance in life.

While Hogan demonstrates considerable finesse balancing his debut film between dark comedy and light drama, much of that credit goes to Toni Collette, who not only gained 40 pounds in seven weeks for her role, but gives one of great comedic performances of the last quarter century. By the end of the picture, we truly get a sense of how much these women love each other, a credit to Collette and Rachel Griffith’s vibrant acting, as well as the four Abba tunes selected for memorable effect.

Edwin Jahiel at Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel writes, “Collette plays Muriel as a sort of simpleton, but she is no freak a la Forrest Gump. It may not be obvious, but Collette’s role was every bit as demanding as Tom Hanks’s. And while you cannot identify with Muriel, her lust for life, the changes within her one-dimensionality, and her new confidence in herself will make you root for her.”

“I really enjoyed this movie. I was expecting a very feel-good oriented movie but once again, Australian directors give you something different to the norm we are fed out of Hollywood,” writes Steve Koukoulas at DVD.net.

James Berardinelli writes, “One of the most pleasant aspects of Muriel’s Wedding is the distinctly unconventional third act. No one seeing this movie will confuse it with a Hollywood picture, as it continually flouts the “feel good” formulas that typically characterize this sort of romantic comedy. The ending is far-from-perfect, but it’s a great deal better than several obvious alternatives.”

“Oh, by the way, I’m not alone. I’m with Muriel.” View Rachel Griffiths and Toni Collette in a really funny scene from Muriel’s Wedding.

Synopsis
Retired master chef Chu (Sihung Lung) spends Sunday laboring in the kitchen, preparing a restaurant-sized meal for his daughters. Jia-Jen (Kuei-Mei Yang) is a high school teacher who has devoted her life to Jesus Christ since her college boyfriend broke up with her years ago. Jia-Chien (Chien-Lien Wu) is a busy corporate executive who indulges in some afternoon sex with an ex-boyfriend. The youngest – Jia-Ning (Yu-Wen Wang) – works at Wendy’s.

The women live with their father in Taipei, but Jia-Chien announces that she’s put a deposit on a condo and is moving out. Before Chu can react, he departs to rescue his former employer from a banquet party disaster. He confides to his friend Old Wen (Jui Wang) that he wishes all his daughters would move out so that he could lead a quiet life. They believe their father has remained a widower out of obligation to them, oblivious to his feelings for Jin-Rong (Sylvia Chang), a young single mother and friend of the family.

Chu’s daughters are even more repressed when it comes to love than he is. Jia-Chien is attracted to a hotshot negotiator (Winston Chao) at work and debates taking a promotion that would send her to Amsterdam. Jia-Jen becomes fixated on a men’s volleyball coach and soon begins receiving anonymous love letters at school. Jia-Ning develops feelings for the on-again/off-again boyfriend of one of her fast food co-workers.

As her platonic relationship with the negotiator deepens, Jia-Chien reveals that her dream was to become a master chef like her father. She resents him sending her to college instead. The only means of communication between father and daughter is food. Chu makes an impression on Jin-Rong’s daughter by taking her gourmet meals to school each day, while her grandmother (Ah Lei Gua) zeroes in on the widower romantically, unaware of whom he truly loves.

Production history 
After the international success of The Wedding Banquet, director Ang Lee was suddenly in demand by Hollywood. Ang preferred to establish himself as a Chinese filmmaker and accepted an invitation to shoot his next project in Taiwan instead. He’d developed a script with Hui-Ling Wang titled Eat Drink Man Woman, which would again focus on a classical Chinese father – again played by Sihung Lung – who is gradually brought out of his shell by changes in family values.

As with his previous film, Ang turned to associate producer and co-writer James Schamus to rewrite the script. Schamus had never been to Taipei and went to the library to bone up on his Chinese culture. Ang was not happy with the rewrites, which seemed artificial to him. Schamus responded by giving the characters Jewish names and rewriting the script as if it was a big Jewish family. Schamus changed the names back and when Ang read the script, the director responded that it finally sounded like a Chinese family.

In addition to a $1.5 million budget – twice that of The Wedding Banquet – Ang also had the luxury of shooting in a country without union regulations. Without the pressure of a tight schedule, the film was shot over a relaxed 60-day period. With much more time to think about the film, the result was by far the most refined work of Ang’s young career. It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and became a crossover hit at the U.S. box office.

Opinion 
If there were an award for Greatest Food Movie of All Time, Eat Drink Man Woman would be one of the nominees. This would have been a good film with its culinary delights alone – five chefs were employed by the production – but what makes it great is how food is used as a substitute for a father unable to express feelings to his daughters any other way. The result is a work of sensuality and wit that avoids becoming a junk food course, or pandering down to the clichés of your typical drama/comedy.

The script has the density of a novel in the way each character is given a secret inner life separate from their family. Like a novel, it also has the tendency to run on, but the film is exceptionally well cast. Sihung Lung is remarkable as the repressed chef, while Chien-Lien Wu has tremendous verve as his middle – and perhaps favorite – daughter. Nearly every scene resonates with so much life. Remade in 2001 as Tortilla Soup, shifting the family to a Mexican American one and starring Hector Elizondo as the patriarch.

Joe Shieh at KFC Cinema writes, “Perhaps the biggest forte of this film is Ang Lee’s ability to take his camera and capture the beauty of Taiwan. He shows us the streets of Taiwan, the kitchens of Taiwan, the apartments of Taiwan, the countrysides of Taiwan, and so much more. Being from Taiwan myself, the scenery gave me a fresh taste of something I had seen so many times in my life, yet it was served to me with such delicacy, it was like a new experience.”

“Even if it weren’t a good movie, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman would still be a mouth-watering advertisement for Chinese food: The only way this film won’t make you hungry is if you’ve gorged yourself on dim sum before you pop it in the DVD player,” writes Betsy Bozdech at The DVD Journal.

Edwin Jahiel at Movie Reviews by Edwin Jahiel writes, “Much of the story is like a soap opera, or should I say a soup opera. But unlike soaps or melodramas, it has a rather charming aloofness, a kind of delicate attitude that seems to mistrust Hollywoodian or European histrionics and emoting. With discreet humor and no traces of fanfare or grandiloquence, the film conveys beautifully the difficulties of being oneself and of being part of a family.”

“Hello? Have you eaten? Not yet?” View the opening credits sequence for Eat Drink Man Woman, one of the best adverts for Chinese cuisine ever made.

© Joe Valdez