“I remember being absolutely fearless because I was too young to know any better. I had no idea, I had never tasted failure — or pressure from the studio. You know, that film got made because Sean was very hot, Sean wanted me to direct it, and because he and I were so simpatico, we could do whatever we wanted because we held the power. I never appreciated that at the time, how important that was, so we literally did whatever we wanted and tried crazy things and didn’t care what other people thought — we didn’t have to care what other people thought.” James Foley interviewed by Walter Chaw for Film Freak Central, April 2003

At Close Range (1986)
Directed by James Foley
Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, story by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan
Produced by Elliott Lewitt, Don Guest
111 minutes

If the songwriting of Bruce Springsteen could conjure moving images, the result would be something very similar to At Close Range. Though The Boss didn’t supply any music for the soundtrack, echoes of “Thunder Road” or “Darkness on the Edge of Town” with their engines of discontented youth reverberate through this film, siphoned into a crime story and injected by an ensemble cast that makes a case for being one of the greatest ever assembled. Somewhere in the seemingly lawless farmland of Pennsylvania in 1978, Brad Whitewood Jr. (Sean Penn) trucks into town to pick up his knucklehead brother Tommy (Christopher Penn). Brad summons the guts to talk to a girl named Terry (Mary Stuart Masterson) hanging out in the square. Lacking a job or even reliable wheels, he ultimately convinces the 16-year-old to light out west with him for a better life together.

Brad Jr. seeks out his absentee father Brad Whitewood Sr. (Christopher Walken), who local gossip has it is a thief. Brad Sr. introduces the boy to his woman (Candy Clark), as well as the uncles (R.D. Call, J.C. Quinn) and the epileptic (David Straithairn) he disappears with in the dead of night. Wary of Brad Jr. getting mixed up in the schemes of his dim witted Uncle Patch (Tracey Walter), Brad Sr. gives his son a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle and sends him back to his mother (Millie Perkins). Seeking respect and some extra cash, Brad Jr. and Tommy gather their friends (Crispin Glover, Stephen Geoffreys, Kiefer Sutherland) and start stealing tractors. Brad Jr. compels his father to show him the ropes, but sees more than he bargained for one night and breaks away from his dad. When his son is arrested, the bonds of family buckle and Brad Sr’s self-preservation kicks in.

In August 1978, producer Elliott Lewitt came across an account in the Philadelphia Inquirer of two teenagers — a federal witness and his 15-year-old girlfriend — who’d been riddled with bullets in rural Chester County. Details emerged that the boy’s father Bruce Johnston Sr. was patriarch of family notorious for stealing tractors and anything else that wasn’t moving. Seeing potential for a modern day Greek tragedy, Lewitt hired Nicholas Kazan to adapt a screenplay based on these events. Titled At Close Range, Kazan’s script became one nearly every executive in Hollywood wanted to see made but none were willing to bankroll. That changed in 1985 when Sean Penn was being heralded as the most talented young actor in movies. Penn had befriended USC Film School grad James Foley and a script both men loved was At Close Range. Hemdale Film Corporation agreed to finance the project with Orion Pictures handling distribution.

Kazan let it be known how displeased he was with Foley’s work, cutting scenes the scribe felt pivotal to the plot, redacting the humor and giving the picture a visual sheen Kazan thought undermined its reality. It’ll never be known how great At Close Range might have been, but in Foley’s defense, what’s on screen is remarkable. Cast by Risa Bramon and Billy Hopkins, the ensemble is extraordinary and in his sophomore feature, Foley knew to let his actors act. The energy harnessed by Sean Penn, his brother Chris and their mother Eileen Ryan (playing the boys’ grandma) is palpable, while Walken and Masterson and the great Tracey Walter mesmerize in every moment of their screen time. The lightning by Juan Ruiz Anchia bleeds shadow, but in a fresh approach, this is film noir set knee deep in the boondocks. Madonna co-wrote and performed the ubiquitous theme song “Live To Tell”, which materializes throughout the film as its own atmospheric effect.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 8,017 users: 71% for At Close Range

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

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“I was angry about seeing so many movies with naked women and never seeing a naked guy. So when I shot the sex scene between Stacy and Damone in the poolhouse, I wanted it to be uncomfortable. She was naked, so I wanted to show the guy naked too. And the ratings board said, ‘You do that and you’ll get an X rating.’ I said, ‘How come you can see all these naked ladies in movies?’ And they said, ‘Because the female organ is not aggressive, but the male organ is.’ So what? Should we shoot it? Whatever. But I was a very cranky young lady, and the idea of compromising makes you crazy.” Amy Heckerling in Sean Penn: His Life and Times by Richard T. Kelly

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on his novel
Produced by Irving Azoff, Art Linson
90 minutes

A guerrilla handbook to growing up in America, Fast Times at Ridgemont High should have been the last word in high school movies for a while, just like The Outlaw Josey Wales put a nail in the pine box carting around the western genre in 1976. Fast Times didn’t set out to perform last rites on the teenager movie per se, but is such an exhilarating, A-to-Z tour of familiar landscapes that it’s a wonder John Hughes found any territory to carve out for himself. Rather than an incursion by adults into the world of teenagers, Fast Times feels like an inside job. The project was the brainwave of Cameron Crowe, a prodigal 22-year-old Rolling Stone reporter whose publisher David Obst suggested that the only way to uncover what high school kids were all about these days was to actually go back to high school.

So in the fall of 1979, Crowe returned home to his parents in San Diego and received front office permission from Clairemont High School to enroll as a student. Crowe’s surveillance culminated in six characters: a middle class brother and sister, her sexually experienced friend, a nerd, a music obsessed ticket scalper and a stoned surfer. At the end of the school year, Crowe approached his subjects and revealed he was writing a book. At the time, they were indifferent. Universal Pictures grabbed the film rights and put Crowe to work on a script with Art Linson, a producer Crowe had met reporting from the set of American Hot Wax in 1975. In the search for a director, Linson recalled an AFI student thesis he’d seen titled Getting It Over With and offered the job to Amy Heckerling, a 27-year-old who’d yet to direct a feature film.

What qualifies as a plot goes like this: Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works at Perry’s Pizza in the mall. When a foxy looking stereo salesman asks her out, Stacy’s friend Linda (Phoebe Cates) encourages her to be sexually aggressive with him. Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is assistant to the assistant manager of the movie theater and shares his ardor for Stacy with the smooth talking Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), who dispenses love advice to the geek. Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) is employee of the month at “All America Burger” but after blowing his cool with a customer, suffers the indignity of accepting work at “Captain Hook Fish ‘n Chips”. Stoner Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) rejects the concerns of his peers, but runs afoul with history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) in a battle of wills that spans the entire school year.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High shoves other high school movies aside like wimps because Crowe and Heckerling inject so much honesty into the film: laugh out loud honesty, quirky honesty, tender honesty, brutal honesty. It’s not a war documentary, but it sometimes feels like it could be. Rather than turn predictable, Fast Times samples from several  genres. The duels between Spicoli and Mr. Hand are like highlights from a stoner comedy, while Heckerling isn’t kidding around with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s sex scenes, opting for stark realism. What lingers through all of this is how court jester Spicoli suggests there may be more to growing up than consumerism and sex. Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards and Nicolas Cage (billed as Nicolas Coppola) made early career appearances.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 148,349 users: 76% for Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

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Logging in to Netflix Instant for a movie to watch is like being hungry and shown to a food replicator. It doesn’t solve my problem — it introduces one thousand new ones. Luckily, I can see which genres are rated higher in nutritional content, in this case, 4 or 4 ½ star ratings out of 5 stars. “Documentary” had a lot of those. So did “Anime & Animation”. In the month of November, I take another trip around the globe to sample recent animated feature films. Next stop: Paris, France.

Persépolis (2007)
Directed by Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
Screenplay by Vincent Paronnaud, based on the graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi
Produced by Marc-Antoine Robert, Xavier Rigault
96 minutes

Instead of racing on the cutting edge of technology, Persépolis looks backwards for its inspiration and proves as potent as anything requiring 3-D goggles to enjoy. Chronicling her coming of age during the Islamic Revolution, Paris based cartoonist Marjane Satrapi saw her graphic novel Persépolis published to critical acclaim in 2000. Marc-Antoine Robert of upstart French production company 2.4.7. Films convinced Satrapi that her story should be adapted into an animated feature film. To co-write a script and co-direct, Satrapi contacted her friend Vincent Paronnaud, a comic book artist and filmmaker. So uncomfortable with tech that Satrapi & Paronnaud wrote their script in pencil, financiers in France, Germany and the U.K. responded to the project and co-financed a budget of roughly $8 million. An animation unit of one hundred went to work at a studio in the Tenth District of Paris.

Persépolis would share the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Film. Pulling back a curtain to reveal to Western audiences the darkness of 20^th century Iran, the strength of the film is its hand drawn charm, which pokes and prods the imagination in ways a live action melodrama of this material never could. Instead of feeling familiar, this story of innocence and uncertainty, family ties and loss, is never at a loss to enthrall. The simplicity Satrapi & Paronnaud bring to a story that is anything but black & white is remarkable, while the wit and visual panache of the cartoonists proves a perfect compliment to film. Once Catherine Deneuve was cast as the mother, the actress’s then 33-year-old daughter Chiara Mastroianni lobbied to play the voice of Marjane.

Arriving at Paris-Orly Airport, 22-year-old Marjane Satrapi (Chiara Mastroianni) handles a severe case of culture shock by lighting a cigarette and reminiscing on her childhood in Tehran. As a child in 1978, “Marji” (Gabrielle Lopes Benites) obsesses over French fries with ketchup, Bruce Lee and Adidas sneakers. Her educated parents (Catherine Deneuve, Simon Abkarian) embrace the revolution that sweeps away the brutal regime of the Shah. Her beloved uncle Abouche (François Jerosme) — a Marxist-Leninist who spent nine years in prison — gains his freedom and predicts that justice will flourish in their country at long last. But when the new Islamic order begins to purge the country of dissidents, Abouche is taken into custody and executed. By 1982, Marji is matching his defiance, mocking the nationalistic rhetoric of her teachers and buying a contraband Iron Maiden tape on the black market.

Through air raids inflicted by Saddam Hussein and domestic crackdowns by the Guard Corps, Marji remains close to her grandmother (Danielle Darrieux), who tries to instill integrity in her granddaughter through uncertain times. Marji’s parents make the decision to send her to school in Vienna. She is accepted by a small group of punk teenagers fascinated by her tales of revolution, but Marji rebels against her Catholic benefactors as instinctively as she did her Islamic teachers. Longing for Iran, Marji returns home, where the streets have been renamed after war martyrs and her father admits times are more brutal than ever. Nearly succumbing to depression, Marji rededicates herself to school and even falls in love. Agreeing to a marriage of convenience at the age of 21, Marji believes she has life almost figured out.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 23,619 users: 92% for Persépolis

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 90 for Persépolis

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

Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Directed by Karyn Kusama
Written by Diablo Cody
Produced by Mason Novick, Daniel Dubiecki, Jason Reitman
102 minutes

Jennifer’s Body is the Heathers of horror comedies, which could be a checkered flag or a red one depending on how many grade levels you’ve completed. Screenwriter Diablo Cody began working on the script in the summer of 2006 as her first screen credit Juno was being directed by Jason Reitman. Obsessed with ‘80s horror movies like The Lost Boys, Cody wanted to write a genre film in her voice with female characters. 20^th Century Fox took Cody’s script off the market via their short lived genre label Fox Atomic, with Cody’s manager Mason Novick producing with Daniel Dubiecki & Jason Reitman. To direct, Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Aeon Flux) was hired. Financed by Fox in association with private equity partner Dune Entertainment at roughly $16 million, shooting commenced March 2008 in and around North Shore Studios in Vancouver.

As devoted as Diablo Cody may be to horror movies, Jennifer’s Body resembles Heathers more than anything else, laced with acidic wit pointed at high school and the hypocrisies of a community coping with tragedy. Energy is siphoned to poke fun at indie bands as well. While most mainstream horror movies these days are remakes starved for one good idea, Cody crams enough ideas for two or three movies into this one. The problem is none of the threads tie together, while Karyn Kusama isn’t up for the job of pulling together a dark comedy. Even Cody’s pop culture powdered dialogue reaches the point where you can see the tampon joke coming before the characters do. In one word, Jennifer’s Body is lame. Amy Sedaris is criminally underused as Amanda Seyfried’s mom, while Megan Fox — who may never appear in a movie with this much prestige again — is criminally miscast as a girl who speaks.

“Hell is a teenage girl,” reveals Anita “Needy” Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) from behind the walls of a mental institution. Needy reacts to a comment about Toastems by kicking the tooth out of an orderly’s mouth. Thrown in solitary confinement, she begins her story. In the town of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, the geeky Needy has remained loyal BFF to Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), the femme fatale of the flag corps, since they played in the same sandbox as girls. Jennifer pressures Needy to drop plans with her percussionist boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) and to go see an indie band called Low Shoulder perform at a local bar. The band’s pretty boy lead singer Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) sizes Jennifer up as the virgin they’ve been looking for and when the bar burns down in a blaze, makes off with a disoriented Jennifer in his van.

Needy is worried sick about her friend until Jennifer shows up at her house late that night, covered in blood and vomiting an evil black pool onto the kitchen floor. Arriving for the biology class of Mr. Wroblewski (J.K. Simmons) the next day looking fine, Jennifer acts as if Needy imagined the whole thing. Low Shoulder rockets to fame as a result of the fire and their song “Through the Trees” becomes the town anthem as people work to overcome the tragedy. Meanwhile, Jennifer begins luring horny boys to their death, turning into a demon and devouring their innards. She confides to Needy that the night of the fire, Low Shoulder sacrificed her to Satan, who apparently rejected the offering as far from virgin material and endowed Jennifer with the powers of a succubus. Needing to eat in order to stay beautiful, Jennifer sets her sights on Needy’s boyfriend Chip.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 129,517 users: 38% for Jennifer’s Body

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 47 for Jennifer’s Body

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

An Education (2009)
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the memoir by Lynn Barber
Produced by Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey
100 minutes

Recalling the entrance that an ingénue named Natalie Portman made with The Professional in 1994, Carey Mulligan radiates such ingenuity in An Education that it’s easy to overlook how terrific the coming-of-age tale that forms around her is. Author Nick Hornby discovered the material in the spring of 2003 in the British literary journal Granta. Sensing that the 10-page autobiographical essay by journalist Lynn Barber had the elements of a movie, Hornby mentioned it to his then girlfriend (later wife), producer Amanda Posey, who optioned film rights with her partner Finola Dwyer. Hornby wrote the first draft of An Education on spec in 2004. Rejected by several financiers due to its limited commercial appeal and the difficulty casting the lead role, two executives at BBC Films named David Thompson and Tracey Scoffield gambled on the project.

Preferring a woman behind the camera, Hornby lucked out when Danish director Lone Scherfig expressed interest in An Education. BBC raised a budget of roughly £4.5 million ($7 million USD) and shooting finally commenced in and around Twickenham Film Studios in March 2008. Lynn Barber’s memoir has the intimacy of a finely honed short story; it’s not so much what happens but who it happens to which is so captivating. In addition to its star making performance by Carey Mulligan, Hornby and Scherfig bring whimsy to material that could have easily gone too dark, too nostalgic or too pretentious. Impeccably well cast by Lucy Bevan and drenched in shades of a jazz LP cover by John de Borman, An Education was nominated for three Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay — but won none.

In the London suburb of Twickenham in 1961, 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) blazes an academic trail for Oxford, writing A+ papers in the English class of Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) and playing cello in youth orchestra. Waiting in the rain for a bus, Jenny is offered a ride by David (Peter Sarsgaard), a witty, considerate man. While the ambitions of Jenny’s classmate Graham (Matthew Beard) fail to pass the muster of Jenny’s father (Alfred Molina), David runs into Jenny again and invites her to a performance of Ravel. Introducing himself to Jenny’s father and mother (Cara Seymour), David charms them into allowing their daughter to go on the date. After the concert, David works in supper at a nightclub with his cosmopolitan friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike).

Having the time of her life, Jenny ditches school to attend an auction with David. His exact line of work remains mysterious — “property, a bit of art dealing” — but with a winning personality and a bit of cleverness, he convinces Jenny’s parents to allow her to spend the weekend in Oxford with him and his friends. Jenny makes clear to David she intends to keep her virginity until she turns 17. David respects this wish but during the weekend, it becomes clear to Jenny that her boyfriend’s occupation involves swindling and stealing. When David promises Jenny a birthday getaway to Paris, news of their adventures begins disrupting classes. Miss Stubbs warns her pupil not to throw away her education on David, but the life of an English teacher holds little appeal to the teenager, who wants to live it up while she can.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 14,719 users: 77% for An Education

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: 85 for An Education

What do you say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Part 1 of a bill featuring super heroines.

Supergirl (1984)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Screenplay by David Odell, based on the character appearing in comics and magazines published by DC Comics
Produced by Timothy Burrrill
124 minutes (international version)/ 114 minutes (U.S. theatrical version)

Years before anyone had heard of Comic Con or knew what a “fanboy” was, Alexander and Ilya Salkind gambled $35 million — roughly $140 million in today money — that audiences would welcome an expansion of the DC Comics universe with a girl powered spin-off of their Superman film franchise that starred Christopher Reeve. Warner Bros. changed their minds about producing Supergirl and though TriStar agreed to distribute the picture in the U.S., when critics and audiences got a look at it in November 1984 the response was so middling that the Salkinds got out of the Superman business. A trifle silly and very definitely flawed, Supergirl doesn’t fly as high as Richard Donner’s Superman or Superman II, but it stacks up as the best super heroine adaptation anyone’s made yet (Barbarella, Red Sonja, Catwoman and Elektra are the also-rans).

It isn’t required that you be an 8-year-old girl or collect My Little Pony to enjoy the charms of Supergirl, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. Those who venture further are likely to find Supergirl’s sorceress adversary and the hunk they covet to both be super silly. Mysteries such as how Supergirl changes into her costume are left unanswered, but director Jeannot Szwarc evokes some of the charm of Hans Christian Andersen; contrary to the line on Supergirl, it’s no more campy than The Little Mermaid is campy. The picture is as lavish as it is elegant, with a triumphant musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, a candy color look by Alan Hume and spectacular crane and wire work, each and every one as astounding as anything in Superman. 19-year-old Helen Slater and costume designed by Emma Porteous are a sight to stop a train.

On the satellite world of Argo City, Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) visits Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), an architect who has “borrowed” the city’s energy source, an orb known as an omegahedron that creates the illusion of life. When the orb is lost in the vastness of innerspace, Kara hops aboard an innerstellar capsule to retrieve it. On Earth, the omegahedron falls into the hands of a would-be sorceress named Selena (Faye Dunaway), who lives in an abandoned amusement park with her daffy sidekick (Brenda Vaccaro). On Earth, the blonde haired Kara discovers physical and intellectual abilities comparable to those of her cousin Superman. To fit in, she disguises herself as a brunette student named Linda Lee and enrolls in “Midvale High School” in Illinois.

Sharing a dorm room with Lucy Lane (Mauren Teefy) — kid sister of Lois Lane — Linda develops her powers of super strength, X-ray vision and super hearing. Meanwhile, Selena uses the omegahedron to throw a love spell on a beefcake landscaper named Ethan (Hart Bochner) and when he bumbles off, sends a bulldozer through Midvale to bring him back. Supergirl saves the town, but the witch’s spell makes Ethan fall in love with Linda. She traces the omegahedron to the old amusement park, but is unable to retrieve it from Selena when Ethan shows up and she has to protect him. Her powers growing stronger, Selena banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone. Reunited with the exiled Zaltar in the barren prison dimension, Supergirl looks for a way back to Earth to save both her adopted planet and her home world.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 192 users: 26% for Supergirl

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: Not available

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
Written by Amy Heckerling
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Produced by Bauer Martinez Entertainment/ Templar Productions
Running time: 97 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) — a single working mom in L.A. — is introduced rubbing wrinkle free moisturizer on her hands. Her nipped and tucked ex-husband (Jon Lovitz) drops off their precocious daughter (Saoirse Ronan), who has outgrown her Barbie dolls and now keeps her mom hip to the latest in teen slang. Rosie is writer/producer of a high school sitcom called You Go Girl!, whose 30-ish star (Stacey Dash) is passed off as a teenager. Rosie tussles with censors, a devious young secretary (Sarah Alexander) and a smarmy network executive (Fred Willard) more interested in makeover reality programs than Rosie’s show.

Casting for a fresh face to play a nerd on You Go Girl!, Rosie meets Adam (Paul Rudd), an exuberant, ultra-talented 29 year old actor. She accepts a casual date, first claiming to be 37, and after a kiss, coming clean that she’s 40. Adam scores points with Rosie’s daughter by helping her ace Sonic the Hedgehog on Nintendo. Complications arise when Adam’s expanded role on the show is attributed to his relationship with Rosie, whose secretary schemes to break the couple up. Rosie receives wisdom in the form of Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman), who maintains that Rosie’s generation is just fundamentally out of whack with natural order.

Who Made It?
Bronx native Amy Heckerling received her master’s degree from the AFI Institute, where her second year thesis Getting It Over With would help land her the job of directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High for Universal in 1981. A box office hit on its way to becoming a youth classic, the success of Fast Times put Heckerling in a select class: women directing feature films in Hollywood. Look Who’s Talking (1989) and a sequel in 1990 would follow before Heckerling wrote and directed a critical and commercial smash — Clueless — which won her Best Screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics in 1995. Heckerling executive produced the Clueless spin-off for the UPN Network from 1996-99.

It was during this time that Heckerling began sketching what became I Could Never Be Your Woman. The project spent six years in development at Paramount, whose CEO Sherry Lansing didn’t think audiences would much care for a woman who becomes involved with a younger man. Once Michelle Pfeiffer attached herself to the project and helped fight to get it made, financing and distribution was secured from French producer Philippe Martinez. Shooting wrapped in the fall of 2005, but the film became so mired in contract disputes that it surfaced February 2008 directly to DVD in the United States, an unusual fate for such a high profile movie.

How’d They Do It?
In 1996, Amy Heckerling was executive producing the Clueless spin-off for UPN. The writer/director was also a single mother raising a teenage daughter in L.A. These experiences formed a script that would become I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling recalled, “I started out just writing about a whole bunch of things that were going on and making a kind of Mrs. Robinson relationship movie. Later on, I decided, ‘Let’s lighten this up.’ So then I banged out the relationship between Mother Nature. Is Mother Nature a person who always wins? Do we all have to give in to her or is it okay to keep fighting?”

Heckerling added “I sort of doodled around with the idea and then put it down when I did Loser. Then I was writing something for Fox for a while and then I did another draft of it years later, and that was the one that was shown to Michelle. Then a year or so before we made the movie, she had come on and helped get it done.” To secure financing, Heckerling and Pfeiffer’s reps at Creative Artists Agency called Philippe Martinez, who’d made his bones helping bankroll B-pictures like The Ultimate Weapon (starring Hulk Hogan), Musketeers Forever (Michael Dudikoff and Lee Majors) and producing/directing Wake of Death starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Before he became a movie producer, Martinez operated an international sales company that was forced into receivership in L.A. A warrant for Martinez’s arrest was issued in France, stemming from complaints by his business partners. Martinez hid in Agoura Hills where he continued to work in the film industry. He ultimately spent 14 months in a detention center before his extradition to France, where Martinez served six months in prison. But by 2005, he triumphantly returned to Los Angeles with backing from Templar Film Investment Fund and $200 million per year for three years to finance and distribute films under his Bauer Martinez Entertainment banner.

Martinez fondly recalled, “An agent at Creative Artists Agency called me one day and he said, ‘Philippe I know you’re looking for a big movie to produce and here is a wonderful movie that Michelle Pfeiffer wants to do’, so I read the script in two hours which is very rare for me and I loved it and called him and said, ‘Let’s meet the director’. It was one of the funniest things we’d read and incredibly powerful and pertinent. Ironically of course one of the reasons Michelle was such a champion of the project is that there really are so few great roles for older women.” With a budget of $24 million, I Could Never Be Your Woman would commence filming August 2005 … in England.

Producer Cerise Hallam Larkin stated, “Our financing was British, so to qualify as a British film we had to spend all this money in England shooting a movie that was set in L.A., which was no mean feat.” The financing scheme explained why so many actors from the United Kingdom (Saoirse Ronan, Tracey Ullman, Sarah Alexander, Mackenzie Crook, Noah Margetts, O.T. Fagbenle) appeared in the cast. Director of photography Brian Tufano was also a Brit – he’d shot Quadrophenia — and Amy Heckerling was thrilled with the opportunity to work with him. Six weeks of shooting at Pinewood Studios outside London would be followed by three weeks of location work in L.A.

Bauer Martinez landed a distribution deal with MGM in January 2006 and I Could Never Be Your Woman was slated to be the first of five pictures (including Harsh Times, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj and The Flock) from the producer that would hit theaters. But when the studio discovered that Martinez had put them on the line to pay Michelle Pfeiffer 10% of its first-dollar gross and Amy Heckerling another 5% — and that lucrative DVD rights had been awarded to The Weinstein Company — MGM put the film on the shelf. Despite the fact that I Could Never Be Your Woman boasted two mainstream stars and had reportedly drawn positive response from test audiences, no distributor in the United States wanted to touch the movie.

Amy Heckerling lamented, “If this is independence, I’d rather go back to what they call ‘the devil you know.’ When I did Clueless, there was a big studio system that had marketing and distribution people who knew what they were doing, and had an idea of what TV shows movies should be advertised on, and did research into who liked which movie, and what they watch and what they read, and how much it costs to reach them. These people who knew how to make posters and advertisements. You know, I liked that machine. It worked.” I Could Never Be Your Woman managed $9.5 million in theaters overseas before being abandoned March 2008 direct-to-DVD in the United States.

Many Internet critics who picked up a copy of the much maligned film were favorable to what they found. Jesse Hassenger, filmcritic.com: “Sometimes you come across an interesting movie with too many flaws to recommend, but Woman is a flawed movie with too much good stuff to completely ignore. It’s smart and warm, and if Heckerling loses her grip a few times, it’s only because she’s squeezing so hard.” Christopher Kulik, DVD Verdict: “Controversy aside, I Could Never Be Your Woman scores highly, both as comedy and satire. Despite its tragic road to being dumped on DVD, it’s one of the best romantic comedies to come out in years.”

Jim Magovern, The Moviezzz Blog: “Rather than some disaster, it is actually a very good film. It may not be Heckerling’s best film, and I can understand why a studio wouldn’t have picked it up without the DVD rights (as it wouldn’t have been a huge blockbuster) but it deserved more.” Amy Heckerling summed up the experience by admitting, “It’s just bad. It’s just bad, bad, bad. There’s really no nice, interesting spin you can put on it from my point of view.” She added, “It just represents a lot of unhappiness to me. I loved working with Paul Rudd and Michelle Pfeiffer and Saoirse Ronan and all the other people, and I got to make some friends in England, where it was shot. But I’m not happy about what happened. I feel bad. But I feel bad about sadder things than this, too.”

Should I Care?
Dating rituals had evolved in the 17 years since White Palace to fully warrant a contemporary look at the love affair between a woman and younger man, and you couldn’t have asked for two more appealing lovers than Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. I Could Never Be Your Woman has little to do with a love affair, or men and women in general; instead, it free falls into a slapdash, superficial and bitter as hell UPN sitcom. This peek into the woes of a professional single mom re-entering the dating scene is so loaded with rage that it might have qualified as a guerilla manifesto against youth culture, if it wasn’t so witless and incompetently made.

Amy Heckerling has directed a masterpiece (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and written and directed a well-deserved blockbuster (Clueless). I Could Never Be Your Woman is mad as hell about plastic surgery, ex-husbands dating younger women, youth driven pop culture, soulless network executives, teenage body angst and aging. The movie stops short of beating an effigy of Britney Spears like a piñata. Any adult can identify with Heckerling’s rancor, but the film — which is all surfaces and lacks any real edge — is another story. The settings are generic, humor flat and characters shallow. Not only a mess, it’s a mean-spirited mess.

Paul Rudd acquits himself with some charming physicality, but Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t fare as well. When allowed to look her age, she’s a dangerous beauty. Trying to vamp it up as a woman 20 years younger, the versatile actress just embarrasses herself. The lighting seems weighed down with cake makeup, while the London-for-L.A. locations add a demented visual layer. There’s a nice cameo by Henry Winkler, but I Could Never Be Your Woman was so misconceived, misguided, mismanaged and misfortunate that there’s not much an appearance by Arthur Fonzarelli can do.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“His Plan: Conquest of Indie Hollywood” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 5 October 2005

“When Glitches Trump Glitz” By John Horn. The Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2007

“Would You Dump This Woman?” By Missy Schwartz. Entertainment Weekly, 1 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling’s DVD Premiere – Part II” By Laurence Lerman. Video Business, 22 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling” By Noel Murray. A.V. Club, 20 March 2008

I Could Never Be Your Woman – Production Notes

I Could Never Be Your Woman. DVD audio commentary by Amy Hecklering and Cerise Hallam Larkin. The Weinstein Company, 2008