JFK (1991)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Screenplay by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar, based on the books On The Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs
Produced by Oliver Stone, A. Kitman Ho
Running time: 189 minutes (theatrical version)/ 206 minutes (director’s cut)

Should I Care?
Before Michael Moore came along, columnists representing all the colors of the political spectrum looking forward to the day they could be outraged again had to wait eighteen months for Oliver Stone to make another movie. Irked by the dramatic license Stone took to make entertainment amid the social turmoil of Central America (Salvador) or Wall Street (Wall Street), pundits got their bowties in a bundle when Stone started muddying the waters of history in movies dealing with the antiwar protest (Born on the Fourth of July), the life and times of Jim Morrison (The Doors) and most notoriously, the JFK assassination in JFK. Whatever your favorite conspiracy theory, this epic re-examination of the crime of the century from every conceivable angle — plus seven or eight you probably never conceived of — is nothing short of cinematic Cirque du Soleil, unfolding flashbacks within flashbacks through film editing and sound in a controlled demolition of sorts.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback JFK and question some of the audibles. Kevin Costner seems a bit wholesome to play a district attorney in the Big Easy and some of the oratory typed up for him gets almost as stiff as Costner does. In terms of both the murder mystery at the heart of the material and the technique employed to bring it to the screen, the film has few peers. Drafting top craftsmen — from director of photography Robert Richardson to composer John Williams on down — Stone juggles archive footage with fabrication, black & white with color, Tommy Lee Jones with Joe Pesci. The assassination is initially presented as it was understood at the time, slowly unraveling until an alternate, much more insidious version is proposed. This becomes the stuff great thrillers are made. Critics who argue that it’s all propaganda haven’t really watched the movie. Stone never declares who he believes killed the president and why. That’s ultimately left up to the audience to discuss and decide on our own.

So, What’s This About?
On November 22, 1963, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is notified that the president has been shot. A family man, World War II veteran and popular anti-corruption crusader, Garrison and his staff (Jay O. Sanders, Michael Rooker, Laurie Metcalf, Wayne Knight, Gary Grubbs) watch live on TV as Dallas police apprehend a suspect in Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) who in a press conference coolly maintains his innocence. Oswald is shot in a parking lot the next day by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle Murray). Alerted that Oswald spent the summer before the assassination in New Orleans, Garrison summons a known associate named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) for an interview on a tip he might have been a getaway pilot for Oswald. The FBI questions and releases Ferrie mysteriously. Four years later, a candid chat with Senator Russell Long (Walter Matthau) and glaring inconsistencies in the Warren Commission Report prompt Garrison to reopen the murder of President Kennedy.

The case begins on the night of the assassination when private eye Guy Bannister (Ed Asner) pistol whipped his friend Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon). Martin links David Ferrie and Oswald to Bannister, who was involved in a CIA scheme to train Cuban exiles for another invasion of the island. Garrison follows the trail to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where witnesses report hearing shots fired from a grassy knoll in front of the president’s motorcade, as well as intimidation from federal agents. Garrison’s suspicion falls onto New Orleans industrialist Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) who has CIA ties and discussed an assassination plot with Ferrie and Oswald months before the murder. Scrutinized, attacked and discredited, Garrison’s own wife Liz (Sissy Spacek) begins to question her husband’s case. Garrison is summoned to Washington by a retired Air Force colonel who gives the name X (Donald Sutherland). X confirms that Garrison is closer to the truth than he thinks; Kennedy was killed by a military coup d’état opposed to the president’s intent to end the Cold War.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In May 1988, Oliver Stone attended the Latin American Film Festival in Havana to accept an award for Salvador. In an elevator, a publisher named Ellen Ray introduced herself and told the filmmaker about a book by Jim Garrison that she was publishing titled On The Trail of the Assassins. Headed to the Philippines to shoot the Vietnam sequences for Born on the Fourth of July, Stone read the galleys within days and quickly optioned the film rights out of his own pocket. In search of a writer who could get to work on a first draft, Zachary Sklar, editor of Jim Garrison’s book, was recommended. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy and hire a researcher named Jane Rusconi to lead a team that poured over a hundred more books and documents examining the Kennedy assassination in detail. Arriving on the structure for a murder mystery spanning three cities — New Orleans, Dallas and Washington — Stone successfully pitched his concept to the heads of Warner Bros. in December 1989 and found a home for JFK.

With a screenplay ambitious enough for two movies and a budget that doubled what Stone initially proposed at $40 million, producer Arnon Milchan came on board with financial support from investors based in France (Le Studio Canal+) and Germany (Alcor Films). Stone and casting director Risa Bramon Garcia considered virtually every name actor for a role in the film and doggedly pursued Kevin Costner to take the role of Jim Garrison. The script was kept under wraps until filming was set to get underway in Dallas, but by May 1991 the first scathing attack on the film’s historical inaccuracies appeared in The Washington Post. Many more newspapers and magazines picked up on the furor and despite Stone’s repeated attempts to conduct articulate damage control, JFK and its director were assailed in the media leading up to a hurried release in December. A critical and commercial success and nominated for eight Academy Awards, pundits would continue to attack JFK as propaganda for months.

How’d They Do It?
Ellen Ray was the publisher of a newsletter called CovertAction Information Bulletin and meeting Oliver Stone in a hotel in Havana, began telling him about a book by former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison she was set to publish. In Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker by James Riordan, Stone recalled, “It was at this socialist hotel where it takes like thirty minutes for the elevator to get to the twelfth floor. We were on this creaky elevator and at first I thought she was another of the three thousand crusaders that go to these things around the world, who would talk my ear off about her pet peeve. But Ellen Ray is an extraordinary person in her own right. Back in 1967 she went down to New Orleans to volunteer her services to work with Garrison. She’s one of the most courageous women I’ve met in my life. She has a small printing press with her husband, Bill, and they publish that bulletin. She’s amazingly accurate about some things. And she said, ‘Read this book.’”

Stone ended the conversation by telling Ray to forward the galleys of On The Trail of the Assassins to his office at Fox. Two days later, Ray received a phone call from Stone. Interviewed for a Texas Monthly cover story in December 1991, Ray recalled, “He said, ‘It’s a great book, but I can’t do it. I’m on my way to the Philippines to film Born on the Fourth of July. But you won’t have any trouble selling it.’ Two days later, he called from Hawaii, saying, ‘I just read the book again on the plane. I can’t do it. I’m overloaded.’ Three days later, he called from the Philippines, saying, ‘I’m hooked. I’m going to option it.’” Stone was initially drawn into the material for the film noir aspects that seemed to leap off the page of Garrison’s book. “This pistol whipping occurs on the night of November 22, 1963 on a rainy night in which this guy Jack Martin gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Bannister, and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale of international intrigue — a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.”

Oliver Stone was 17 on the day the president was assassinated. “The Kennedy murder was one of the signal events of the postwar generation, my generation. Vietnam followed, then the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the Pentagon Papers, the Chile affair, Watergate, going up to Iran-Contra in the eighties. We’ve had a series of major shocks. I think the American public smells a rat that’s been chewing on the innards of the government for years.” He added, “As an adolescent, I was self-absorbed with other problems, but I still felt like there was something wrong with the official version of the assassination.” Rather than engage a studio to option On The Trail of the Assassins, Stone kept his interest as quiet as possible by putting up his own money. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He contracted a recent Yale grad named Jane Rusconi to head a research team and assemble as much information on the assassination as they could compile.

Stone’s technical advisers included Larry N. Howard, founder and coordinator of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas. Howard left no bones about why he believed the president was murdered. “John F. Kennedy committed suicide, political suicide. He was getting out of Vietnam, getting rid of the Mafia, dumping Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He fired Allen Dulles from the CIA, said he was going to break up the CIA into a million pieces, make peace efforts with Castro and Krushchev, sign the nuclear test ban treaty. Civil rights was going strong. He had Bobby to succeed him; he had Teddy after Bobby. So the real people who had the power in this country, the military industrial complex, decided that Kennedy was soft on communism and was a threat to national security and worldwide peace. So they got rid of him through rogue elements of the CIA, with the Mafia as a junior partner. And from that point on, they covered it up from the top — the Warren Commission, which Johnson set up with Dulles on the panel.”

Also advising Stone was Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. Prouty had provided logistical support for clandestine CIA operations from 1955-63. He gave Stone a declassified document that he had helped draft: National Security Action Memorandum 263, in which President Kennedy called for the recall of 1,000 advisers from Vietnam by 1963 and a complete withdrawal of U.S. personnel by 1965. As Prouty saw it, this is what got Kennedy killed. “Who did it? I would go to Lyndon Johnson for reference, when he said shortly before he died, ‘We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.’ That’s an enormous statement coming from President Johnson. He was convinced that Oswald did not do it as an individual, that there was a conspiracy, and that the government had the capabilities to do it.” Prouty didn’t believe LBJ was involved in the assassination, but that the president kept his suspicions to himself after the fact.

In December 1989 — with Born on the Fourth of July in theaters and Stone prepping to shoot The Doors in March 1990 — the filmmaker and his agent Paula Wagner met with Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Robert Daly, president Terry Semel and production executive Bill Gerber. Stone revealed that he was writing a script about the JFK assassination. Semel recalled, “My reaction was we should do it. It was entertaining and intriguing, a great murder mystery, something we cared about and grew up thinking about. It took me two minutes to be totally engrossed with the whole idea.” Warner Bros. agreed to put up $20 million in financing for worldwide distribution rights. Stone recalled, “The film had a home. I know I could have made a better overall deal by selling off the international market separately, but I wanted to sell the whole thing to Warners because I didn’t want the script going all over the world to be bid on and read. I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted one entity to finance the whole thing. Given Terry Semel’s record of political films, Warners was my first choice.”

Stone hired Zachary Sklar to adapt Jim Garrison’s book into a screenplay. Sklar clarified, “I had not been what you call an assassination researcher –I was fifteen when the assassination occurred, and of course it deeply affected me, as did the other assassinations that followed. I didn’t take any particular research interest in it, I did become a journalist, and I edited a number of books about the CIA for Sheridan Square Press, which publishes books by former CIA agents who have become disillusioned with the agency. Sheridan Square Press approached me in 1987 with a manuscript from Jim Garrison that had been rejected by another publishing house. I worked on that book for about a year and a half with Jim Garrison, we re-structured and re-wrote it, and that book became On the Trail of the Assassins, that’s how I got into the assassination.” While Sklar focused on the Jim Garrison story, Stone worked on the Lee Harvey Oswald angle, the events at Dealey Plaza and the Mr. X story in Washington.

By July 1990, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe were on Stone’s short list to play Jim Garrison, but also being considered were Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, Michael Douglas, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, John Malkovich, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Quaid, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Marlon Brando. In the end, scripts went out simultaneously to Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner. Ford reportedly backed away from the material because he didn’t believe there was any conspiracy. Costner — a conservative tilting supporter of George H.W. Bush — may have had similar reservations, but Stone wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Costner was a big break for us. I chased him and got him. Mike Ovitz was instrumental in that. It helped that he was a strong fan of the movie and was strongly urging Costner, his client, to be in it. He kept saying, ‘He’s gonna do it, don’t worry. It’ll happen.’”

Whether Dallas was ready to move beyond 11-22-63 or were just happy to see Stone — who had shot most of Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas and was now bringing $5 million to the local economy — for the most part, the city welcomed JFK. In an open audition that drew 11,000 to the Dallas Convention Center, locals were cast as the Kennedys and Connellys, as well as in sixty other bit parts. Shooting was scheduled to begin April 1991. The trouble began two months earlier. Assassination researcher Harold Weisberg had dispatched an angry letter to Stone disparaging the Jim Garrison investigation. Weisberg failed to draw a response, but did get a hold of a script, a first draft that he passed along to George Lardner Jr. of The Washington Post. Stone recalled, “When Lardner showed up at our offices and walked down the fucking hall uninvited, I knew we had a problem. He’s an old CIA investigative reporter and has many contacts in the agency. He was snooping around, and we escorted him off the set. And he wrote the worst possible story he could write.”

Many columnists would blast Stone for playing fast and loose with history at best, misleading the public at worst. Stone later commented, “I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a countermyth. No one really knows what happened on November 22, 1963, or who did it, but there sure are an abundance of flaws in the official investigation. I wanted to use Garrison as a vehicle for a larger perspective, a metaphoric protagonist who would stand in for about a dozen researchers. Filmmakers make myths. D.W. Griffith did it in Birth of a Nation. In Reds, Warren Beatty probably made John Reed look better than he was, but remained true to the spiritual truth of Reed’s life. I knew this would make Garrison somewhat better than he was and, in that sense, we’d be making him more of a hero. I knew I would catch a lot of flak for that, but I figured it was worth it to communicate, really get across, some truth in an area that had been steeped in lies for nearly thirty years.”

Filming wrapped in July 1991 and post-production supervisor Bill Brown highlighted the technical challenges of assembling the film Oliver Stone had in mind. “A show like Return of the Jedi would maybe have four to five hundred opticals. For JFK, we had two thousand opticals. Of course, the shots in something like Return of the Jedi would generally be much more complicated than the opticals we used in JFK, but the sheer volume of the JFK material made it very difficult. We smashed all the records at the optical house.” He added, “A line in the script would say, ‘A C-130 transport plane flies over the South Pole’ and we would have to find that shot. Now there’s a warehouse sitting out in Van Nuys with Air Force footage in it and there’s probably hundreds of thousands of feet of C-130s, but the Air Force has to read the script for you to get it. Obviously, we’re not going to turn the script of JFK over to the U.S. government armed forces, so we have to scrounge it from other places. Or he would ask for a shot of Robert Bissell, who was a CIA agent. Well, these guys are spooks; they’re not supposed to have their picture taken.”

In an interview with Cineaste in 1992, Stone explained “I wanted to do the film on two or three levels — sound and picture would take us back, and we’d go from one flashback to another, and then that flashback would go inside another flashback, like the Lee Bowers thing. We’d go to Lee Bowers at the Warren Commission, and then Lee Bowers at the railroad yard, all seen from Jim’s point of view in his study. I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission Report is like drowning. The levels and the consciousness of reality created through sound — the work done by Wylie Stateman and Michael Minkler is incredible — was also in the script. But Warner Bros. was confused by the script — you can imagine 158 pages filled with flashbacks like that and I think there are some 2,800 shots in the movie — so I took all the flashbacks and I gave them a simpler script which they liked. Then I and the editors — Joe Hutshing, Pietro Scalia and Hank Corwin — ended up putting all the flashbacks back in the editing room, and adding quite a few new ones in a sort of prismatic structure.”

Arriving in U.S. theaters in December 1991, JFK dazzled critics. Desson Howe, The Washington Post: “Despite its three hours, JFK is almost always absorbing to watch. It’s not journalism. It’s not history. It is not legal evidence. Much of it is ludicrous. It’s a piece of art or entertainment. Stone, who has acknowledged his fusing of the known and the invented, has exercised his full prerogative to use poetic license. He should feel more than mere craftsman’s satisfaction at the result.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer’s complacency. Stone’s picture is, in both meanings of the word, sensational: it’s tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.“ Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory. Or, at least, he sets the stage for a good argument. And that’s where JFK’s real power lies — in stirring the national debate.”

On Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both delivered a ringing endorsement for JFK and debated the media furor it had stirred up. Roger Ebert: “I think intelligent moviegoers are capable of looking at this movie and knowing exactly what Stone did. He took real footage, he took fictional footage and a lot of it is speculative; in other words, Garrison’s imagining different ways the same thing could have happened and it’s exhilarating for us to follow that thought process through to the end, even if in the end, we still don’t know who killed Kennedy.” Gene Siskel: “I think what he is saying really, I think that included in the conspiracy is the American public, in the sense of not demanding more. Here’s a guy who feels, ‘Hey look it, I went to Vietnam, I have reason to believe that the whole Vietnam experience was caused, or could have been averted if Kennedy had lived. Not sure, but could have been — maybe a better chance than LBJ running the ship — and therefore, I laid my life on it, I have the right to make a film about it too.’”

Stone took the airwaves to discuss and defend JFK, appearing on Nightline, City Desk and The Oprah Winfrey Show for starters. He accepted an invitation to mix it up with Dan Rather on the CBS news magazine 48 Hours. “On Nightline they aired something like a six-minute clip and raised all kinds of charges, but then didn’t allow me to answer any of them. Because of that kind of prejudice, I was wary about the CBS News interview. When we did it, I was very painstaking about my answers. I left the Q&A session after every question to consult with my research assistants and then I’d come back and lay out the answer. That seemed to upset Dan Rather a bit. In the end, the interview took two hours and must have included twenty questions, but when they aired it they cut all by one question, the most innocuous one. They simply would not allow me to get my point across.” Four months after its release, MPAA president Jack Valenti, a former top aide to Lyndon Johnson, joined the chorus denouncing the film, comparing JFK to Triumph of the Will as a “propaganda masterpiece” and “hoax”.

Nevertheless, JFK drew box office receipts of $70.5 million in the United States and $135 million overseas. It would be nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Looking back on the media firestorm years later, Stone was still snakebit. “When Anthony Lewis would come out with a strong criticism about the film — and he was so one-sided in some of the statements he made — I would try to correct it and I couldn’t get the letter published. I had to go to the mat several times with Warners backing me to say we’re gonna take a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing this unfair practice unless you publish this letter. It was that way with several publications. The moment I entered that arena I regretted it in a sense because it’s an endless battle — you’re attacked, and if you reply, they attack you again. They leave stuff out of your letter to make you look bad. The attacks became a major newspaper event. It was like Tommy Lee Jones said, everybody and their dog got to write an article about it and got paid for it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Can Hollywood Solve JFK’s Murder” By Mark Seal. Texas Monthly, December 1991

“Interview with Zachary Sklar, Co-Writer of the Movie JFK” By Frank Morales and Paul DeRienzo.14 January 1992

“Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview With Oliver Stone” By Gary Crowdus. Cineaste, 1992

Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker. By James Riordan. Hyperion (1995)

The Limey (1999)
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Produced by John Hardy, Scott Kramer
Running time: 89 minutes

Should I Care?
Taking a look at a movie, stepping back and taking a look at it again benefits few films as thoroughly as The Limey, the fractured, hard boiled egg that director Steven Soderbergh whipped up on break between two studio assignments near the end of the first decade of his career. Pocketing some well earned critical cache for thrusting two stars of the 1960s — Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda — back into the limelight with screen roles they could sink their chops into, a non-linear timeline that reduces the story and characters to sketches could be described as an acquired taste at best. But like the director’s glacially paced remake of Solaris (2002) and the eccentric double feature Che (2008), The Limey is a movie whose suggested usage recommends time to chew it over. That’s the ideal approach for a film about time. Focusing on a British career criminal past his expiration date whose trip to L.A. conjures memories — and finally regrets — of what his life might have been, this is intricately well made, poignant and exciting filmmaking.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs — who had Richard Stark paperback novels like The Hunter on his brain when he initially wrote the script in his early 20s — has reason to snipe about what Soderbergh came out of the editing room with. Supporting characters perfectly cast in Lesley Ann Warren, Nicky Katt and Barry Newman are shouldered out of the movie, while Ann-Margret’s entire performance hit the cutting room floor. At 89 minutes, it’s hard to see how restoring 10 minutes to the running time would have lost anybody. Entire layers of the story feel unexposed: contrasts between L.A. and London, upper and working class, the ‘60s and the ‘90s. Soderbergh seems after a little less conversation and instead juxtaposes moving images, moving adroitly through a man’s memory to examine all these subjects and more. Employing footage of a 27-year-old Stamp from the film Poor Cow (1967) for flashbacks was an inspired choice, while the low key piano score by Cliff Martinez haunts the action beautifully.

So, What’s This About?
A taciturn stranger (Terence Stamp) who speaks at times in rhyming Cockney slang and gives the name of “Wilson” exits Los Angeles International Airport. He seeks out Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman), an acting class friend of his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) and sender of the letter notifying Wilson that his daughter has died. Refusing to believe that her neck was broken in a car accident on Mulholland Drive, Wilson pays a visit to the drug traffickers Jenny confronted when she discovered her boyfriend was doing business with them. Unaware that Wilson has spent half of his life in British prisons for armed robbery, the petty thieves pay dearly for their rudeness. Word reaches Jenny’s ex, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a music producer who built a fortune capturing the allure of Southern California on vinyl records in the late 1960s. Valentine now lives in a house suspended over the Hollywood Hills with his current baby-faced flame Adhara (Amelia Heinle).

Spending time with Jenny’s best friend and acting instructor Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), Wilson reveals that his daughter often threatened to dial the police on him during his wilder days in London. This was her way to showing her love for him. Wilson believes a similar occurrence with her ex-boyfriend led to Jenny’s death. Crashing a party at Valentine’s, Wilson throws one of the record producer’s muscle men into the canyon and narrowly evades a loaded for bear security consultant named Jim Avery (Barry Newman) who protects Valentine. Avery outsources the hit on Wilson to a pool hall punk (Nicky Katt) who blows his assignment when the narcs monitoring Valentine intervene. Unable to prove Valentine is involved in drug smuggling, a DEA agent (Bill Duke) instead provides Wilson with the location of their quarry. Wilson, Eduardo and Elaine head up the coast to Big Sur, where Valentine is hiding out and Wilson seeks the truth about his daughter’s death.

Who Made It?
The son of American painter R.B. Kitaj, Anton Lemuel Kitaj was born in Oxford and grew up in London in the 1960s. He settled in Los Angeles toward the end of the 1970s, adopted the pen name Lem Dobbs (a nod to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of his favorite films) and started cranking out screenplays. One in particular was influenced by the pulp fiction of Donald Westlake, whose novel The Hunter (written under the non de plume Richard Stark) and its vengeance wrecking anti-hero would coincidentally inspire at least two movies with fractured timelines: Point Blank (1967) and later Payback (1999). Titled The Limey, nothing much became of Dobbs’ script, but a decade later, the screenwriter found a fan in director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed a screenplay Dobbs had written as homage to German horror movies of the 1920s. Dobbs became a vocal critic of Kafka (1991), but was approached by Soderbergh with the prospect of making The Limey as soon as the director finished his third film, King of the Hill (1993).

Wrapping an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight (1998) for Universal Pictures, Soderbergh wanted to go back to work, as well as experiment with techniques he was tempted to workshop on his $48 million studio assignment. Dobbs was game to help remodel The Limey less in the style of a straightforward crime thriller and into something deeper. At a much earlier stage, Dobbs had Michael Caine in mind for the role of Wilson, but Terence Stamp was chosen as the ‘60s screen icon they wanted to build the film around. Basking in the warmest reviews of his career for Out of Sight, Soderbergh approached upstart, filmmaker friendly Artisan Entertainment in June 1998 with a script and a cast for The Limey. The mini-studio agreed to finance a roughly $9 million budget and nine months later, the dexterous filmmaker would turn in his cut of the film. Shunned by audiences, the fragmented film noir would come to be regarded by many critics and filmgoers as a career best for both Dobbs and Soderbergh.

How’d They Do It?
Emigrating from London to Los Angeles permanently at the age of 18, one of the earliest scripts Lem Dobbs finished was The Limey. “I remember when I first wrote this script, and I was living in my little apartment in Hollywood, a block from Paramount Studios. Around the corner there was an office building on Larchmont and I was walking by and I looked at the directory outside and it said, ‘Aldrich and Associates’. And the minute this script — the original, naïve, adolescent version — was hot off the Xerox machine I took a copy around to Robert Aldrich’s office and gave it to his secretary and said, ‘This is for Mr. Aldrich’ and I’d written a letter or something and I still think to this day if one thing had led to another and he’d read it and liked it and called me and somehow the movie had gotten made it would have added years to his life, it would have resurrected his critical reputation.” Dobbs added, “But it shows you how long it can be before a movie comes together and it’s strange to think that I’m saying now that you brought a script to Robert Aldrich. You might as well be invoking the name of D.W. Griffith.”

Leaning heavily on the novels of Richard Stark and action movies directed by Walter Hill, as well as British film noir  — Dobbs cites Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971) and the TV mini-series Out (1978) starring Tom Bell as influences — the script made its way to Steven Soderbergh, whose debut film sex, lies and videotape (1989) won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival when the director was 26 years old. Soderbergh recalled, “This is the script he had for a while, and that we talked about doing after King of the Hill. But we sort of let it drop. After Out Of Sight, I called him up again: I really wanted to go back to work immediately, but I wanted to do something small where I could continue to experiment a little with narrative. There were things I thought of during Out of Sight where I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you could go a lot further with some of these ideas if you had a piece of material that could withstand it.’ So I called Lem. I said, ‘Look, let’s think about this again, but I want to come at it a different way. I want to make it more of a mosaic and sort of deconstruct it a little bit, and let’s figure out now who the actor is that we’re going to design this around, because there aren’t a lot of choices.’”

Promoting The Limey in 1999, Soderbergh revealed, “I thought, I would love to see a movie in which Terence Stamp is the lead character, so that’s what I was thinking. But I also knew that we had a movie in which 95 percent of the dialogue was spoken by characters 50 and older, and that’s not exactly where the core demographic is lately. One of the things that I liked about the script was that Terence Stamp’s daughter, Jenny, had a really close friend who was not her age. Lem Dobbs, the writer and I were talking about that and he was saying, ‘You know, I have friends of all different ages, but I feel like when I go to see a movie, everybody’s friend is exactly the same age.’ We became very enamored of the idea of Jenny’s closest friend being a woman who was much older than her, because that seemed absolutely right for it.” Dobbs and Soderbergh considered Susan Clark, Lauren Hutton, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, Blair Brown, Jill Clayburgh, Susan Blakely, Linda Pearl, Brooke Adams, Mackenzie Phillips, Katharine Ross, Adrienne Barbeau, Peggy Lipton, Glynnis O’Connor, Kathleen Quinlan, Annette O’Toole and Kay Lenz before Lesley Ann Warren was cast.

The Limey was pitched to Santa Monica based film financier Artisan Entertainment in June 1998. Cameras were rolling in locations around Los Angeles by October 1998. John Hardy — collaborator with Soderbergh on six of his seven previous films — was producing with Scott Kramer. To serve as director of photography, the director tapped Ed Lachman, who’d finished shooting The Virgin Suicides for Sofia Coppola only weeks previous. As for what Soderbergh had in mind in terms of influences and intent, he revealed, “For this film especially, I’d say Petulia and Point Blank, but I love the early Alain Resnais films. Those had a huge impact on me when I saw them. Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are both still astonishing to me to this day. There are more ideas in the first fifteen minutes of Hiroshima, Mon Amour than in the last ten movies you’ve seen. And he was, like, the first guy to do this stuff. You look at what he was doing and it’s just jaw-dropping. I haven’t done anything nearly that adventurous yet.” He added, “I kept saying, ‘Look, if we do this right, it’s Alain Resnais makes Get Carter.”

One innovation by Soderbergh was to sneak in archive footage of his lead actor from a much older film. Lem Dobbs gave Soderbergh his bootleg copy of a 1967 crime drama starring Terrence Stamp and Carol White titled Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s debut feature film as director. Dobbs enthused, “The thing about Poor Cow is that it’s a Ken Loach film, so it had the famous Ken Loach grainy, documentary look to it, so it’s almost as if it’s not clips from another film. It’s almost as if it is memories or home movies of an actual past. It’s also the only film where Terence Stamp looks normal in. So many of the films from his heyday he has kind of strange dyed blonde hair or he’s got a period moustache or there’s something odd or it’s Modesty Blaise — it’s some wacky film. Poor Cow is the one film where Terence Stamp looks like he probably looked at that time. Like himself.” Soderbergh met Ken Loach and received the director’s blessing to poach Poor Cow, but negotiating legal clearances with two separate copyright holders stretched well into post-production.

With help from editor Sarah Flack, Soderbergh experimented with a disjointed editing style. A scene between Wilson and Elaine jumps between her apartment, a boardwalk and a diner, but unfolds as one conversation, making it unclear whose point of view we’re experiencing and how reliable it is. Soderbergh explained, “Editing is a very intensive and collaborative period. It’s where the film is finally being made, in a way. And in this case, there was a lot of experimentation. Some of our early versions went too far and resulted in something that was almost incoherent to people who had worked on the film. And we ended up backing off a little bit, and finding a better balance between the sort of abstract impressionistic side of the movie and the straightforward narrative side. That just required a bit of trial and error. That’s normal, but there was more in this film than a lot of other films I’ve made. But editing was really fun.”

One casualty in the editing of The Limey became Ann-Margret. Soderbergh explained, “She had a scene as Peter Fonda’s ex-wife when he shows up at the house in Big Sur. It was a scene that culminated in a lengthy monologue that I really liked, that I had asked Lem to write. I remember one day, I told him I had recently seen Network. And I said, ‘Gosh, you know, people used to have monologues in movies. I don’t feel like they have monologues any more.’ And Lem wrote this scene with Peter Fonda’s ex-wife doing a lengthy tirade about Peter and his lifestyle. And it all turned out very well. The problem is it had to be all or nothing. It was an eight-minute sequence. If it’s Ann-Margret, you can’t just have it be a minute. I decided, based on the rhythm of the movie and my sense that Peter’s character didn’t really need much more backstory than it had, that I just had to pull the whole thing out. That was a difficult call to make. But I felt that an eight-minute sequence right there really brought the film to a halt. And I decided to keep it going.”

Instead of screening The Limey to a test audience recruited at a mall, Soderbergh took an alternate approach. “In this case, the only screenings I had were for friends. I had called Artisan and said that in my opinion, we would be throwing our money away to do formal previews on this movie, because it’s never going to score very well. It’s the type of film that will not benefit from having these screenings. What I preferred to do was screen it for the most intelligent group of friends I could put together, and get ideas that way. They agreed. So I did just three or four screenings where I invited a different group of friends each time. It was writers, directors, actors, some other friends who are not in the film business, people who are reasonably intelligent and have a relationship with me that allows them to speak very frankly. Sometimes it would be brand new people, and sometimes it would be people who had seen it before, so I could get a balance of opinions from people who were watching the film change. I think in this case, that was a good thing to do.”

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Toronto Film Festival in September, The Limey opened October 1999 in the United States to very favorable reviews.  Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey is the story of two older guys who hire their killers, and another who is a do-it-yourselfer. In its quiet and murderous way, it is like the delayed final act of an old movie about drugs, guns and revenge.” Charles Taylor, Salon.com: “Like Point Blank, The Limey is an art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Above all, Soderbergh is a master of narrative economy, stripping down images and information to their essential components, always searching for the most efficient and visually frugal means of telling his stories. The Limey continues in the vein he established with his previous film Out of Sight — straightforward genre pieces that he treats as anything but straightforward.”

The Limey was ignored in theaters, but $3.2 million at the U.S. box office did little to erase Soderbergh’s experimental streak. “I respect my audience, and I assume they come to the theater with a certain level of intelligence, but I don’t pander to them. I feel like, ‘Look, I’m going to take you somewhere, you can go or not go, but here is where we’re going’. I like that attitude when I see movies. We’re doing our thing. When we tested Out of Sight, it didn’t score very well. People wrote down, ‘I hate stories that are told this way’. There are people that just can’t stand a narrative that doesn’t go A-B-C-D. Do I think the average moviegoer today is a little less discerning than they were thirty years ago? Yeah, maybe. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the U.S., people seemed more willing to go to a movie to have an unexpected experience. Today, people tend to want to know what they’re going to experience before they go, and they get upset if they don’t get what they wanted.” One year later, Soderbergh would win an Academy Award for Best Director with Traffic (2000), a fragmented exploration of the war on drugs that ran away with grosses of $207.5 million worldwide.

Where’d You Get All of This?
The Limey. DVD audio commentary with Steven Soderbergh & Lem Dobbs. Artisan Home Entertainment (1999)

“Independent Means: Getting Closer — With The Limey, Steven Soderbergh continues to break down the barriers between actor and director” By Jamie Painter. Back Stage West, 7 October 1999

“Soderbergh Finds Success Is No Sellout” By Rene Rodriguez. The Miami Herald, 10 October 1999

“Steven Soderbergh Interview” By Keith Phipps. The Onion

“Soderbergh Brings Past, Present Together in The Limey” By Elif Cercel. Directors World, 15 November 15, 1999

“Dan Schneider Interview 21: Lem Dobbs” By Dan Schneider. Cosmetica, 25 January 2009

Black Book (2006)
Written by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Produced by San Fu Maltha, Jens Meurer, Teun Hilte, Jeroen Beker, Frans van Gestel, Jos van der Linden
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
At the age of 67, Paul Verhoeven got his filmmaking groove back by following the flight plan taken by so many Hollywood émigrés before him. He bought a plane ticket home — Holland, in this case — and made the Dutch/German language World War II action thriller Black Book, his first film outside the studio system in fifteen years. A similar approach worked wonders for the careers of Neil Jordan, Alfonso Cuarón and Mira Nair among others, but what Verhoeven comes back with needs almost too many qualifiers to work as a movie. “Yes, it’s got all the realism of a soap opera. No, it’s not meant to be taken as history. Yes, it’s ridiculous and laughable at times, but…” But this isn’t a very good film. A favorite among lovers of cinema and cable movie T&A alike, Black Book stubbornly refuses to take anything it pretends to be about seriously. The end product is watchable, but difficult to get hot and bothered about in any way.

To the credit of Verhoeven and his casting directors, Black Book boasts lead performances that make international stars out of Dutch actress Carice van Houten and Sebastian Koch, a German best known for his sympathetic performance in the Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006). Van Houten & Koch spark a warm and sensual and adult dynamic that isn’t too far removed from the one shared by Jane Fonda & Donald Sutherland in Klute. They’re good enough to watch in just about anything, including a cheeseball action farce that makes The Dirty Dozen feel like a documentary. The problem with Black Book isn’t how much it resembles a comic book, but how it swerves between two completely different movies: a stylish historical drama exploring war, genocide and anti-Semitism, and a popcorn action flick with killings and boobies. Verhoeven aims for both dartboards and hits neither.

So, What’s This About?
In October 1956, a sightseeing bus reaches a kibbutz on the Dead Sea in Israel. Music draws a Dutch tourist named Ronnie (Halina Reijn) to a classroom, where she recognizes the songstress as a woman she knew during the war: Ellis de Vries (Carice van Houten). The discovery that Ellis is Jewish comes as a surprise to Ronnie and once she departs, “Ellis” — whose real name is Rachel Stein — returns in memory to occupied Holland of September 1944. Hidden from the Germans by a farmer who demands Bible study in exchange for room and board, Rachel loses her sanctuary when an American bomber dumps its ordinance on the farm. A Dutch police inspector with sympathies to the resistance tracks Rachel down and agrees to arrange passage for her across enemy lines. After visiting the family attorney (Dolf de Vries) to extract what she can in cash and jewels, Rachel is reunited with her brother, mother and father aboard a barge headed for Belgium.

Rachel’s party is intercepted by a patrol led by the Obersturmführer (Waldemar Kobus) whose stormtroopers gun down everyone on board. Rachel escapes and is spirited by the resistance into The Hague. She accepts work in a produce factory whose owner (Derek de Lint) leads a communist cell. He ultimately offers Rachel a different line of work: using her femininity to assist a valiant resistance fighter (Thom Hoffman) smuggling contraband across Holland. Evading capture aboard a train, Rachel meets Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), a handsome stamp collector who happens to command the S.S. in Holland. Making an impression on the benevolent German officer, Rachel is tasked with using any means at her disposal to gain his trust. Muntze awards her a clerical position at S.S. headquarters, where Rachel uncovers a plot between the Nazis and their collaborators to murder and rob Jewish refugees. Rachel finds herself entangled in loyalties to her country, her faith and her lover.

Who Made It?
Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam one year before the outbreak of World War II. Spending a segment of his childhood in Nazi occupied Holland, he transitioned from studying mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden to the Royal Dutch Navy, where a hobby in filmmaking became his predominant interest. A career in Dutch television as creator of the swashbuckler Floris — starring Rutger Hauer — led to several acclaimed films in Holland: Soldier of Orange (1977), Spetters (1980), The Fourth Man (1983). Outgrowing his native land, Verhoeven immigrated to Los Angeles and found success juggling sex and violence with flashes of social commentary: RoboCop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), Starship Troopers (1997). His experiences with the  special effects extravaganza Hollow Man (2000) proved a career catharsis for Verhoeven, who turned to Dutch collaborator Gerard Soeteman to draft potential projects set in historical Europe.

During the research phase of Soldier of Orange, Soeteman & Verhoeven had amassed enough material for another movie on the Dutch resistance during World War II, but it took two decades for Soeteman to realize that what the story needed to gel was a female protagonist. Titled Zwartboek (Black Book), the script was the consensus favorite among investors Verhoeven had reached out to in Europe for his next film. Securing a budget of roughly 16 million euros (21 million dollars) through a myriad of financiers in Holland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium, Verhoeven collaborated with a German director of photography, Dutch art designer, British composer and actors completely unknown to most Americans. The Dutch/German language action thriller drew some of the most positive critical notices of Verhoeven’s career and was even named official entry of The Netherlands for Best Foreign Film at the 2007 Academy Awards.

How’d They Do It?
Hollow Man lifted off to the biggest box office of Paul Verhoeven’s career, but landed with a thud among critics and moviegoers alike. Waiting on Hollywood to send him material, the director lamented, “The scripts that have come to my office have all been, let’s say, pretty tame. The scripts that really interest me are a little bit edgy and have a little tension between the audience and the film itself. Those kinds of scripts have not been written much, or at least they didn’t get to me. There has been, mostly because of 9/11, an enormous amount of escapism. I mean, if you see the big successes of the last five or six years, they are all highly into fantasyland. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man — they’re all basically things that are not true and are not dealing with the reality of the world.” He added, “American movies in the last years have gone in the direction of non-confrontational, easy on the audience, pleasant to the audience, escapist, not confronting reality much, or not integrating reality to a strong and harsh degree, like life is.”

Screenwriter Gerard Soeteman had labored over three projects for Verhoeven to direct and each was set in the Old World. An adaptation of Boris Akunin’s bestselling 19^th century detective novel The Winter Queen was at the top of the list, while a return to the grounds Soeteman & Verhoeven had sowed in Soldier of Orange was stuck in neutral. The director recalled, “That material was already there in 1978 and we thought it was great, but it showed more the shadows than the light. We could not solve the script immediately. It took us twenty years to solve it! Soldier of Orange brought us this material, and we couldn’t use it.” He added, “We put the material aside and thought about it for twenty years. And then we changed protagonists. The original protagonist of the movie was the young boy in the sailboat. It’s a very small part now, but it was the main part. We could never figure out how he would be able to infiltrate the German headquarters. Whatever we came up with, it seemed contrived. When Gerard changed it around, well, she uses her sexuality to get inside.”

Verhoeven elaborated on the collaboration. “Gerard sets out the structure and the general drift. He monitors story development and character development. He writes the first draft and the next drafts. I then add things and change things, scenes as well as characters. If my memory serves, I came up with Ronnie, as I did with Maja in Spetters. The scenes at the end in the prison camp are mostly mine. I have made a significant contribution to the script. For most films I made with Gerard, the script was mostly his so I didn’t get a credit. But this time my contribution was such that Gerard and I both felt that we should share the writing credits.” He added, “Gerard and I have always clicked. We are from a similar background, even though our characters are very different. Gerard is only two years older than me. We were both children in the war, we went to grammar school, studied at Leiden University, and both did our national service. And then we met on the TV series Floris. With such similar backgrounds it’s easier to work together than when you are from different worlds.”

By Verhoeven’s estimation, between 700 and 800 documents were referenced to form the basis of the script, notably a report by a member of the Dutch Nazi Party named H.W. van der Vaart Smit, who was imprisoned after the war. “We have weaved some of those stories into Black Book. This is what makes the film so provocative, because nobody has yet shown how we treated our prisoners in 1945. But that wasn’t our only source of inspiration for the film. Picture archives were another. For instance pictures of the camp guards. Members of the provisional army and resistance people. After all, after the war everybody claimed to have been in the resistance. There were lots of dubious people there. If you look at those pictures, you wouldn’t have wanted to be at their mercy. They way they strut when they had arrested a Dutch Nazi, makes you fear the worst.” Rachel Stein was modeled after three Dutch women who lived under Nazi occupation: resistance fighters Esmée van Eeghen and Kitty van der Have and singer Dora Paulsen.

With a script for Black Book in hand by the end of 2003, Verhoeven reached out to Jos van der Linden, production manager on Spetters. Van der Linden introduced the director to San Fu Maltha, former head of acquisitions for Polygram International who’d launched Fu Works, an Amsterdam based production company. Verhoeven enthused, “San Fu felt right immediately; because of his collaboration with Jos, because he’s increasingly putting himself on the map as a producer, and because he’s got this international air about him. He’s got lots of contacts abroad, and that was important for this film. After all, Black Book is a big international production. And I my intuition didn’t lie, because San Fu has made some excellent financial deals.” By the closing of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Verhoeven’s next film was lined up with Maltha and producers Jens Meurer (for Berlin based Egoli Tossell), Teun Hilte (London based Clockwork Pictures) and Jeroen Beker & Frans van Gestel (Amsterdam based Motel Films). German private media fund VIP Mediafonds came on board as majority financier.

Verhoeven mused, “Financially, a disaster, getting money from all these different sources, about fifteen, and with the distribution deals, then you have thirty deals or something like that. But it’s a co-production with Germany, England, Holland, and Belgium, and all the post-production had to be done in England. In Babelsburg, we used all the interiors there, and there was a lot of extra German funding because there were three very important German parts. Then, of course, we had the Dutch funds, television funds, and then there is this European fund, situated in Strasbourg, I think, so to keep that money going parallel to how much money you’ve spent is — well, it’s not parallel at all. So from that point of view, the United States is ten times easier. Certainly if you work for a studio, that’s not a concern in any way. Artistically, of course, it was paradise, because nobody told me ‘This is too violent or too sexy, too many breasts, too much this, too much that, morally too ambiguous.’ Or ‘That’s not possible — a Jewish girl and a Nazi officer — it’s morally unacceptable,’ et cetera. None of that. We had the script, and the producers said, ‘Good, let’s shoot this.’”

When it came to casting, Verhoeven found himself out of sorts on native soil. “I had lived for twenty years in the United States so when I came back to Holland I had to catch up a little bit on the Dutch film industry. I used some of the actors I worked with before I came to America like Derek de Lint and Thom Hoffman. But the movie was mostly about younger people. I had seen a movie called Minoes where Carice played a cat. So I must say that I dismissed her immediately, but my casting director felt that that was probably not representative of her and brought her in on the first day of the auditions. Even though we did auditions for two months after that it was clear that on the day we met her that she was right for the part. She is phenomenal. She’s a real big talent. She does all her own singing. Often I was forced to back off as director and say to her, ‘Forget my instructions. Do what you want.’ She is probably the most talented actor that I’ve ever worked with.” For Black Book, Verhoeven reunited with his Dutch casting director Hans Kemna.

Filming was underway in The Hague, Netherlands by August 2005, with director of photography Karl Walter Lindenlaub lighting sets designed by Wilbert Van Dorp. Verhoeven explained, “I was never sure that I would shoot the next week because the money would not come in. You’re working with a crew that has not been paid for months and they do it because they like that I did this movie and that it was a big movie and a European movie so they stayed. Otherwise they would have left. Now that is not a pleasant feeling, to work with a crew that is partially not paid, and to go do it. So I felt that was a bit nightmarish and I feel it’s the case with every independent movie, and there are many of them that you start and they fall apart.” After wrapping interior scenes at Studio Babelsburg in December 2005, Verhoeven lobbied producers for a prologue in Israel.  “I tried to convince them that it was absolutely necessary that this way: Israel at the beginning and the end what happened to her. How did she evaluate the situation with the Dutch? And of course, she evaluated it by turning her back on Holland and going to Israel.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival in September 2006, Black Book opened later that month in The Netherlands. Arriving April 2007 in the United States, critics seemed shocked how much they enjoyed it. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “Mr. Verhoeven’s cartoon realism, accentuated by the sitcom lighting, the primitively staged gun battles, the gnashing teeth, whizzing bullets and thundering score, has its hard-surface appeal. Designed for distraction (the frequently timed gunfights suggest as much), Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to ‘true events’ notwithstanding.” Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle: “The action set-pieces, double crosses, and narrow escapes are handsomely mounted and suspenseful as a Saturday matinee. In the production notes, Verhoeven cites David Lean as an influence, and the film has Lean’s epic scope and crackerjack timing, if not his mannerly refinement.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com: “It’s a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it’s a Verhoeven movie.”

Rounding up $4.3 million in the United States, Black Book sold $22.3 million in tickets overseas. Hailed as a comeback for Verhoeven, Black Book was submitted by The Netherlands to vie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The director reported, “The reviews in Europe have been very positive in general. Well, except in Holland. Many reviews in Holland were negative. It’s been the biggest R-rated hit there in twenty-five years, the audience has embraced it. The last one that was that successful was my own movie, Spetters. But the critics have been very tough. Some of them feel I have been Americanized, and I think it’s true that I have used my American experience to create a more driving narrative. Which is often absent in European films, even the greatest ones. In La Dolce Vita, a classic of European filmmaking, the story is nearly zero. There is no compelling narrative. Working in the American film industry has made me want to make movies with compelling, driving narratives. But Holland has always been, well, like it says in the New Testament, no prophet is honored in his own country.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Conversation With Director Paul Verhoeven” By Bill Hunt. The Digital Bits, 29 December 2000

“Verhoeven’s Black Book Cranks Up In The Hague” By Robbert Blokland. ScreenDaily.com, 29 August 2005

Black Book — Production Notes

“Director Paul Verhoeven Discusses Black Book” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 31 March 2007

“Paul Verhoeven” By Scott Tobias. The A.V. Club, 3 April 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Gets Real”By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon.com, 6 April 2007

“Verhoeven’s Dutch Comeback” By Karl Rozemeyer. Premiere Magazine, April 2007

“Back To Basics: Talking to Paul Verhoeven” By Damon Smith. Bright Lights Film Journal, August 2007

“Paul Verhoeven Interview” By Daniel Robert Epstein. UGO.com

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by the novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Produced by Stanley Kubrick
Running time: 159 minutes

Should I Care?
Even with its question marks, the thirteenth and final film from Stanley Kubrick — director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket — is a declaration of what movies for grownups can and should aspire to, in a perfect universe. It’s the return of the intelligent dirty movie, a genre that Showgirls forced into hiding in 1995. It’s a visual marvel. It’s has the power of both restraint and of shock. These qualities are abundant throughout Eyes Wide Shut, which may be one of the purest cinematic taste tests available to the general public, separating moviegoers of all strides into a Coke camp or Pepsi camp with brutal efficiency. You may not be able to express why you like or dislike this unique brand of erotic thriller, but you’ll know which group you belong to. One of the most dry, least entertaining films Kubrick made, it’s also one to savor and resample, with the effects of time illuminating the film’s strange currencies much better.

It’s debatable whether Kubrick — a committed perfectionist who yanked The Shining out of limited release to tinker with it in 1980 — would have made alterations to this 159-minute cut had he not passed away four months before its release. After wrestling with the source material for 25 years before taking a year and a half to get it all on film, expectations got the better of Eyes Wide Shut and continue to. Instead of generating sexual titillation, the film emits an ominous, low voltage discontent that begs to be regarded less as a sexual escapade and more like a dream. Nothing about the artificial staging or pacing suggests the waking world, giving each kinky nuance a deeper interpretation. Lighting cameraman Larry Smith collaborated with Kubrick on the film’s jewelry box look, while Austrian composer György Ligeti’s piano cycle “Musica ricercata” is used to maximum effect, a nod to how brilliantly Kubrick utilized classical music to score his pioneering films.

So, What’s This About?
Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his unemployed art curator wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) get dressed in their West Central Park apartment. They leave their young daughter with a sitter and head out for the annual Christmas party of one of Bill’s patients: Victor Zeigler (Sydney Pollack). Working the lavish soiree is a piano player Bill attended medical school with named Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). While Bill is summoned by Zeigler to attend to a hooker (Julienne Davis) overdosed in his bathroom, Alice has too much champagne and dances with a suave Hungarian. His efforts to get Alice upstairs go unrewarded when she maintains that she’s married. The lack of jealously Bill displays over the solicitation spurs a fight between the couple the following evening. Feeling that her fidelity has been taken for granted, Alice reveals she entertained the fantasy of running off with a naval officer they met while on vacation in Cape Cod.

Troubled by his wife’s confession, Bill puts in a visit to the jazz club in Greenwich Village where Nick is wrapping up a gig. The piano man reveals that he’s on his way to another gig, one whose location changes every time, requires a password to gain entry and a blindfold while he performs. Nick has taken enough of a peek to report that the women at these parties are not to be believed. Equipped with the address, Bill procures the necessary attire — tux, cape with hood, mask — from a rental shop whose nutty owner (Rade Serbedzija) pimps his underaged daughter (Leelee Sobieski) out of the back. Arriving at a mansion in the countryside, the password “Fidelio” opens doors Bill has only dreamed of: a ritualistic orgy with gorgeous masked women serving as party favors for the masked guests. One of these ladies of the night warns Bill that he’s in great danger. Ignoring her, Bill is confronted with the mystery of how much of what he saw that night was actually real.

Who Made It?
After the completion of Full Metal Jacket in 1987, Stanley Kubrick spent years deliberating where his next project would come from. He’d acquired the film rights to Patrick Susskind’s novel Perfume, about a serial murdering perfumer in 18^th century France, before deciding he didn’t want to direct it next. Several screenwriters labored with the director over an adaptation of a Brian Aldiss short story titled Super Toys Last All Summer Long, about an artificial boy who yearns to be real. In April 1993, Warner Bros. announced that Kubrick’s next film would be an adaptation of the Louis Begley novel Wartime Lies. The story concerned a Jewish boy orphaned during the German invasion of Poland who escapes an Auschwitz bound train with his young aunt; they evade recapture by assuming Catholic identities. Shooting was scheduled to begin in February 1994. Kubrick got as far as location scouting before his interest waned in the groundswell to Steven Spielberg’s definitive Holocaust tale Schindler’s List (1993).

Kubrick turned to a property he’d acquired over twenty years previous: Traumnovelle (Dream Novella), published in 1926 from Austrian physician turned author Arthur Schnitzler. In the summer of 1994, Kubrick contacted screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who’d won an Oscar for his original screenplay Darling (1965) and written Two For the Road (1967). Updating the tale of jealousy and sexual obsession from turn of the century Vienna to modern day New York, Raphael was instructed to keep Schnitzler’s century old narrative. Kubrick arrived on the title Eyes Wide Shut and in December 1995, Warner Bros. announced that the husband and wife tandem of Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman would star. Filmed under a veil of secrecy in the London area where Kubrick lived, the $65 million production would stretch on for 17 months, so long that two cast members were replaced for reshoots. In March 1999, a mere week after screening his cut to his studio and his stars, Kubrick passed away suddenly. Released that summer, his final film would polarize critics, befuddle American audiences and go ignored during awards season.

How’d They Do It?
Stanley Kubrick may have been mulling over a screen adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle – also published under the title Rhapsody — since reading it in 1968, the year the South Bronx native made the decision to permanently relocate to England with his family. Interviewed by Gene Siskel in 1987, Kubrick attempted to shed some light on his dramatic change of address. “There have been all sorts of stories about why I live in London, but it’s really very simple: In order to be at home some of the time, I have to live in a production center, and there are only three places in the world that fulfill this requirement in a practical sense. If you want to make English-language movies, it has to be done in Los Angeles, New York, or London. I love New York City, though my wife doesn’t. But it would rank third in the list of cities with the best production facilities, London being second. Hollywood of course has the best facilities, but I have never enjoyed living there. I found the sense of insecurity and the whiff of malevolence that surrounds you there unsettling.”

Kubrick obtained the film rights to Traumnovelle through his brother-in-law and associate producer Jan Harlan in 1972. That same year, he met Frederic Raphael at the home of director Stanley Donen. In 1994, Kubrick would telephone the author and screenwriter — who lives in France — to inquire whether Raphael would be available to collaborate on a project. Clearing his schedule, Raphael received a package from FedEx containing a photocopied novella. The title and the author’s name had been removed, though Raphael claims to have guessed that either Arthur Schnitzler or Stefan Zweig had written it. He found much of the work silly and pretentious, with overwrought dream sequences. Nonetheless, there was something compelling about it. “As I waited for Kubrick to call, I went back over the text and marked the key elements. I could imagine a movie somewhat like Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, which calmly juxtaposed the plausible and the extravagant, the dated and the modern.”

From November 1994 to March 1995, Raphael worked on a first draft adaptation of Traumnovelle for Kubrick. The director was explicit about not wanting to make a feature length dream, which prompted Raphael to lobby for greater cohesion to the story. “I began to fear that Kubrick might make another movie like Full Metal Jacket, in which the brilliant elements failed to bond into unity. Was he going to be so determined to confound routine expectations that that was all he did? The denial of conclusive satisfaction to the audience would be a twist without savor. Obedient dissidence was my only available response. In the days that followed, I wrote, and rewrote, and reverted tactfully to my point that the movie could not end as mysteriously as it began without leaving a sense of frustration. Kubrick listened, but he did not yet change his point of view.” In May 1995, Raphael faxed Kubrick a title for their project, which had been referred to merely as “Schnitzler”. Raphael proposed The Female Subject. Kubrick never acknowledged it and a few days later, suggested his own title.

On December 31, 1995, it was announced that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman would star in Eyes Wide Shut. Production was scheduled to touch off November 1996 in England, where Kubrick had shot all of his films dating back to Lolita (1962). Once cameras began rolling, they didn’t seem to stop. Nicole Kidman recalled, “The whole process of the film was a discovery. It was never about the result. It was never about, ‘Um, well, we have a week to shoot this scene, so quick quick quick, we have to do it. Let’s see, uh, we may not fully explore it, but we’ll get something good.’ Stanley wanted to explore every avenue and then make his decisions based on that. And Stanley was not restricted by time. He refused to be. And that is a great luxury that only somebody like he could afford, because of what he’d achieved through his career to be able to, say, ‘You wanna know what’s gold, with filmmaking? Time is gold.’ Not having to walk away from a scene before you feel like you really perfected it.”

Cast as the daughter of Dr. Harford’s recently deceased patient, Jennifer Jason Leigh filmed her scene opposite Cruise, but months later, not entirely satisfied with the results, Kubrick called for a reshoot. With Leigh busy filming eXistenZ for director David Cronenberg in Canada, Swedish actress Marie Richardson replaced her. Harvey Keitel was cast as Zeigler and got to participate in some filming, until it became apparent that Kubrick’s pace would overlap the actor’s commitment to Finding Graceland. Director/actor Sydney Pollack — a friend of Kubrick’s — agreed to take over the role. Pollack recalled, “He always would say when we would talk about it, ‘Isn’t it silly, you know, the cheapest part of all of this is do another take.’ Do another take. You’ve spent millions of dollars preparing and building sets, hiring people, doing costumes and months and months writing a script, years sometimes. And then you get there and you quit on take five. Or take six. Or take seven. Isn’t that silly. You don’t know what’s going to happen if you try three or four or five more.”

Frederic Raphael elaborated on Kubrick’s laborious work methods. “Some people claim that Stanley is very indecisive, but I think his attitude was much more professional than that. He had a tendency to put off making a decision until he had a clear understanding of the options available, very similar in this sense to a chess player, which he was. Very good chess players have far fewer options than bad players because the bad ones have to take into account a large number of moves, while good players know that 99.99 out of 100 moves are useless. With Stanley, it was ‘wait and see’ and I think when you’re working with someone as interesting and dedicated as Nicole, you don’t simply say, ‘Here’s the text, learn it.’ From this point of view I feel the screenplay, quite correctly, offered opportunities for improvisation. That’s the way Stanley liked to work, for there were two sides to him. One side was very careful about framing the shots, placing each element on the set with care, and the other was astonishingly ready to be surprised.”

Eyes Wide Shut wrapped production March 1998, 17 months after filming was underway. Nicole Kidman maintained that with breaks for holidays, filming only took place for roughly 12 of those months. After a year of editing, Kubrick’s cut was screened in New York for Cruise, Kidman and Warner Bros. co-chairmen Terry Semel and Robert Daly. By all accounts, reception was positive. Jan Harlan would later recount, “When Eyes Wide Shut was finally shown for the very first time in New York on March 1, 1999 to Tom and Nicole and the heads of the studio, the response was very enthusiastic. Stanley was very, very happy and a great, heavy weight was lifted from his shoulders. I think this change of his being caused almost a physical change in his body, because he had lifted this enormous responsibility for a very expensive film which was long in the shooting for a long time, for two years. And suddenly it was all gone. And he died a week later.” Christiane Kubrick found her husband in their estate north of London. At the age of 70, Kubrick had died in his sleep.

Opening July 1999 in the United States, Canada and Japan, no two critics had the same reaction to Eyes Wide Shut. Marv Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Rarely, if ever, have I seen a film (and certainly not in this decade) that has been so visually compelling, from Kubrick’s choice of granular stock to the brilliant, burnished ambers and frosty blues that make up the film’s palette. If this film were a meal, I shudder to think of the damage it might do to one’s vitals.” Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly: “Kubrick doesn’t put out in Eyes Wide Shut, and it’s hard to know why. Although he was contracted to deliver a movie to Warner Bros. that could secure an R rating, there’s a restraint, almost a demureness to the sex that has nothing to do with the MPAA.” Desson Howe, The Washington Post: “Whether or not this is a masterpiece or a semi-masterpiece is hard to say. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the resolution, for instance. But after the titillation has died down — and whether or not America embraces this one-of-a-kind experience — time will eventually smile on this movie, I believe.”

On The Charlie Rose Show, critics raked over the pros and cons of Kubrick’s last movie. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “It’s very subtle and hypnotic and it just drags you into this dream. And you don’t realize how powerful it is until after it’s over. I mean, it’s a Rorschach — I think — of a lot of things about relationships between men and women, and honesty and dishonesty and it’s very full in a way. I find it fascinating, I really do.” David Ansen, The New Yorker: “At this point I can only say that the guy stages the most pompous orgy in the history of movies. I think — I’m sorry, more in sorrow than anger — I think it’s a dud. I don’t think it works, on any level, really. I think it falls into some uneasy limbo between reality and fantasy and the style just doesn’t have the authority that he’s had on earlier occasions.” Premiere Magazine’s James Meigs credited Kubrick for rehabilitating B-movie genres, from sci-fi in 2001: A Space Odyssey to horror with The Shining. “And maybe this is his reimagining of the softcore cable porn movie, in a sense. I’m really not entirely kidding here. In many ways, if you look at those clips, there’s some really silly stuff in there.”

Eyes Wide Shut paced to box office of $55.6 million in the United States and $106.4 million overseas. Its only notable awards citation was a Golden Globe nomination for Jocelyn Pook’s musical score. But filmmaker Martin Scorsese was one of many who rose to the defense of Eyes Wide Shut. “Many people were put off by the film’s unreality — the New York streets were too big, the orgy scene was a total fantasy, the action was slow and deliberate. All of this is true, and if the movie were designed to be realistic, it would be absolutely reasonable to judge these as failings. But Eyes Wide Shut is based on a Schnitzler novella called Dream Story, the story of a rift in a marriage told with the logic of a dream. And as with all dreams, you never know precisely when you’ve entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off.” Scorsese compared Eyes Wide Shut to Roberto Rossellini’s maligned 1954 romance Viaggio in Italia. “Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Mystery Movie” By Josh Young. Entertainment Weekly, 2 October 1998

The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick & Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. By Frederic Raphael. Ballantine Books (1999)

Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Edited by Gene D. Phillips. University Press of Mississippi (2001)

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. Directed by Jan Harlan. Warner Bros. Home Video (2001)

Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. By Michel Ciment.  Macmillan (2003)

Dark City (1998)
Screenplay by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, story by Alex Proyas
Directed by Alex Proyas
Produced by Andrew Mason, Alex Proyas
Running time: 103 minutes (theatrical version)/ 111 minutes (Director’s Cut)

Should I Care?
In the sub-genre of alternate universe movies, Dark City demands to be seen with almost as much energy as it begs to be forgotten. As close to a passion project as you get in Hollywood, Alex Proyas cashed in the chips he earned directing a box office hit (The Crow) without the participation of a lead actor in Brandon Lee, who was killed during filming. Contrary to its intense ambitions, this unique hybrid of special effects phantasmagoria and existential detective mystery isn’t undone by doing too much, but by doing not nearly enough. Much like three films that would follow it into theaters — The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998) and The Matrix (1999) — Dark City deals with the inhabitants of a parallel world who begin to question the fabric of what they know as reality. Unlike those films, modern classics all, Dark City is not nearly as inventive in depicting its world or the beings controlling it as the filmmakers probably dreamed.

Proyas deserves style points for attempting something different here, as opposed to drawing a paycheck on Casper the Friendly Ghost. At its best, Dark City is drenched in the nocturnal shades of an Edward Hopper painting, with sensational lighting by Tim Burton’s cinematographer of late, Dariusz Wolski, evoking the wee small hours of the morning. Trevor Jones composed the rousing musical score, perfect for a monster movie of some sort, but not this one. The poorly sketched antagonists are more silly than sinister, while the entire cast seems to have been coaxed into sleepwalking through their performances. Maybe what’s missing most here is wit, either in a visual sense, like Terry Gilliam might have attempted, or in a spark from the characters themselves, who come across as figures in a mildewed comic book panel. If that’s what Proyas intended, the results are a big miscalculation.

So, What’s This About?
At the stroke of midnight, in a city fused with elements of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in a hotel room where a young woman has been murdered. He has no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) telephones claiming to be Murdoch’s physician and warns that others are coming for him. The appearance of boogeymen known as The Strangers — who wield supernatural power over the inhabitants of the city — compels Murdoch to go on the run. Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) heads the manhunt and like Murdoch, the detective is haunted by an inability to remember much of his past, like the last time he actually saw daylight. His ex-partner (Colin Friels) has gone insane trying to unravel questions like this. Bumstead works with Murdoch’s estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) in an effort to bring him in safely, but his pursuit is complicated by Murdoch’s newfound ability to alter reality.

Dr. Schreber reveals to Murdoch that he is the focus of a massive experiment by The Strangers — led by Mr. Book (Ian Richardson) and his apprentice Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) — to distill what makes the soul unique. The Strangers have the power to put the city’s inhabitants to sleep and at midnight each day, “tune” their experiment by changing the identities and social status of their unsuspecting test subjects, as well as the physical reality of the city itself. Murdoch has been given the identity of a murderer to play, but The Strangers learn that with the ability to “tune”, he has the power to undermine their control.  Rejecting what Schreber has told him, Murdoch becomes obsessed with finding Shell Beach, the coastal village he vaguely remembers growing up in, but no one in the city seems to recall how to get to. With Bumstead’s help, Murdoch travels to the known boundaries of the city, where the secret of his existence is finally revealed to him.

Who Made It?
Alex Proyas was a freshman at the Australian Film and Television School when an 8-minute thriller he wrote and directed titled Groping (1982) made the film festival circuit. Proyas served as a director of photography on a short by classmate Jane Campion before dropping out of school in his third year to form a production company with two friends. Proyas began directing music videos for artists like INXS and Mike Oldfield, but his work on the Crowded House hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (1987) won him notice in the United States. Commercial work for Coca-Cola, Swatch and American Express followed, but Proyas was already scribbling ideas for a movie titled Dark City. When he finally accepted an offer to direct a feature film — The Crow (1994) — it was due largely to similarities the projects shared in mood and setting. The success of The Crow vaulted Proyas into the class of David Fincher and Michael Bay, music video directors who’d also made the leap to features.

Proyas wanted to direct Dark City next. Disney developed it, hiring Lem Dobbs to work with Proyas, but the studio’s befuddlement with their story would prompt them to drop the project. Fox was up next and brought in David S. Goyer to help Proyas & Dobbs iron out the script. Casting differences with Proyas would ultimately compel Fox to put Dark City into turnaround as well. New Line Cinema gave Proyas casting approval and roughly $27 million to produce his dream project, which shot in the Commemorative Pavilion at Sydney Showgrounds — now the site of Fox Studios Australia — far from the gaze of the studio. After drawing mixed reception at a test screening, New Line urged Proyas to make several commercial concessions, clarifying the story with a voice-over introduction, for one. Dark City was swept aside by Titanic at the box office, but a decade since its release, it has emerged as one of the most highly regarded cult movies of the 1990s.

How’d They Do It?
Intrigued with the potential for combining the hardboiled detective yarn with a science fiction story, Alex Proyas began writing a script around 1990. He recalled, “Basically I had the first draft — or I’d done many drafts but I had an early draft of Dark City — ready to go after The Crow opened and was quite successful. And basically I was asked to, people presented themselves, studios presented themselves and wanted to know whether I had a project I wanted to do next and Dark City was the one I started showing people. And at that stage it was even more unusual than the final film, even more challenging, to be made as a feature. So, you know, it was a slow process and you know, we went through several studios because there were always disagreements with where they wanted the script to go, where I didn’t want the script to go. I had a very specific idea about what I didn’t want to develop the screenplay into.”

Proyas was interested in working with Lem Dobbs, author of perhaps the most highly regarded screenplay never made into a movie: Edward Ford. Dobbs recalled, “A lot of people assume I got this job — or that Alex came to me — because I had written Kafka, which is not the case at all. Alex is not a particular admirer of the film Kafka, nor should he be. He in fact had read another script of mine, and then Disney, who’d actually hired me to work on Dark City, when my name came up they said, ‘Oh, but he’s too dark.’ I think one of their problems was Alex’s script Dark City was that they felt it should be lightened up a little. And the producer of Dark City, Andrew Mason, had read a rather romantic comedic love story that I had written. And it was that script that encouraged them to hire me. And it never for one minute occurred to me that this film was Kafkaesque. I recognized right away that Alex’s script had superficial similarities to the film Kafka, but in terms of Kafka the writer and the world that he evokes and the issues and themes that he was dealing with? No.”

Dobbs revealed, “I think he pretty much hired me based on the notes I’d written and our initial phone conversation. We seemed to hit it off and be thinking along the same lines and also I had a contract in hand by the time I got on a plane and went to Australia. So that’s pretty amazing, to be hired sight unseen. Particularly when you, I remember in my notes I said, I sort of indicated certain things in the script I thought were clichés. So that’s how you get hired in Hollywood, is by telling your director that his script is full of clichés and has certain pretentious elements that should be removed! I remember the first thing was that the character was called Walker in his original script and I said, ‘You can’t call him Walker.’ It’s just been done to death and it’s been taken so famously by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, but by this point you see the name Walker and it’s meant to symbolize an existential everyman trying to find his place in the world.”

Touchstone’s executive vice president Donald De Line didn’t see a movie he wanted to produce. Dobbs mused, “In Hollywood — in any screenplay — the suits wanna know what the rules are. They want to know, they want to do the math, and it’s terribly irritating to filmmakers because we often don’t care about the math. Like I’ve been saying, I don’t care about the story, the plot. I care about the man in search of himself, and other things. And when you have meetings in Hollywood, quite often, all people can really talk about is the actual plot: How does he get from A to B, who are these aliens, where do they come from. They want everything answered. And as we know, often the best movies don’t answer everything. They leave room for interpretations. They leave room for discovery on the part of the viewer. You don’t want total confusion, obviously. You don’t want the viewer to be lost or to get bored or to be mystified, completely, but you don’t want everything spelled out. You want it to be ambiguous here and ambivalent there and have mysteries.”

Fox picked up Dark City next. The only screenwriter both studio and director agreed on bringing in was David S. Goyer, who’d been sent an early draft by Proyas before The Crow was even in theaters. Goyer recalled, “And I remember the first day we were talking about kind of the genesis of the ideas and he said that he had had these dreams when he was a kid with these tall, dark figures pursuing him. And I had had a similar recurring nightmare when I was a kid about being pursued by this character called the Midnight Man, and it was just this silhouetted figure that would chase me and I remember the two of us talking about that in our first meeting and from that point on we just kind of clicked.” Goyer and Proyas spent a month in Australia working on a first draft, which Fox responded to favorably. After talking with Johnny Depp among others, Proyas narrowed his choice for leading man down to Ralph Fiennes, who the studio rejected due to how poorly Strange Days (1995) fared at the box office. Reaching an impasse with Proyas, Fox put Dark City into turnaround.

Proyas lamented, “The genesis of Dark City — even once we got involved with the studio — was a really slow and ponderous one, because I wanted this thing to be just completely off the wall. And I think this is where I finally discovered the principle that functions in Hollywood, which is the bigger the budget of a project the smaller the ideas. That’s a direct correlation.” New Line Cinema — the mini-studio that had rolled the dice on Seven (1995) and Boogie Nights (1997)  — was confident enough in Proyas to grant the freedom and financing for him to make the version of Dark City he wanted. By this time, Proyas had settled on Rufus Sewell to play the role of Murdoch. A 65-day shooting scheduled commenced August 1996 in Sydney, with Dariusz Wolski serving as cinematographer and Patrick Tatopoulos as production designer. George Liddle came on board during pre-production to help construct the fantastic cityscape.

Put before a test audience, Dark City drew a middling response. The rX offered by New Line was for the filmmakers to come up with a voice-over introduction that might explain what was going on. Goyer recalled, “All throughout production we had fought that battle, because we wanted the audience to be confused at the beginning of the movie.” Though Proyas had kept The Crow true to the gothic spirit of the comic book it was based on, Dark City met so much bewilderment that the director made concessions. Proyas elaborated, “In Dark City’s case, the pressure that was brought to bear on me is simply that the film wasn’t appealing to as many, as great a percentage of the audience as a studio would like for it to appeal to in order for them to make their money back. And the reality is, they were right to a certain extent. We perhaps made a film with a greater budget than it merited for that type of story. But unfortunately, by trying to distill it down to something it wasn’t, I feel in the end you risk losing your core audience.”

Critics returned from their visit to Dark City with a myriad of views. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “At its best, the movie feels like a magician’s trick, a gleefully improvised demonic fantasy of ominous evil genies conjured out of bottles and stirred into a steamy swirl that brings in everything from Franz Kafka to Vincent Price, from Fritz Lang to Star Trek.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “What they have done is taken a few second-hand ideas from noir and speculative fiction and mixed them in occasionally striking ways, even if, in the end, the result isn’t all that much fun.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Proyas’ ability to make a twilight cityscape look menacing is like no one else’s. But apart from the sensory input he throws at you, Dark City is a curiously unengaging experience. It’s like the CD-ROM games Myst or Riven blown up to huge cinematic proportions while the critical ideas driving the play are left behind. For all its dark splendor, nothing much happens to make you squirm or gasp or weep, as in The Crow. It flatlines before it ever begins.”

Leaving no doubt where he stood, Roger Ebert heralded Dark City as the best movie of 1998 — ahead of Pleasantville, Saving Private Ryan and A Simple Plan — and reserved some of the most effusive praise of his career in support of it. He wrote, “I responded so strongly to the film because it was intelligent, intriguing, darkly atmospheric, and most of all because it was visually breathtaking. Werner Herzog tells us we need new images or we will die. Alex Proyas’ Dark City was visionary in the tradition of Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 2001 and Blade Runner. It was a daring act of the imagination.” Ebert loved the movie so much that a decade later, in declining health, he volunteered to record an exhaustive audio commentary track for a Director’s Cut DVD. In this expanded edition of Dark City — very similar to the version Proyas test screened — the studio mandated voice-over introduction by Kiefer Sutherland was nixed. Proyas also extended several scenes, adding depth to the characters and giving viewers more time in the world he created.

Sneaking into U.S. theaters in February 1998, Dark City was virtually ignored by audiences, tallying $14.3 million domestically and $12.8 million overseas. Looking back ten years, Alex Proyas summed up the reaction to his film. “The main criticism of Dark City still to this day with some critics is, it looks really nice but it’s all style and no substance, which I take as an enormous misunderstanding of what the film is. You cannot say it’s no substance. If anything, it’s all substance, you know. I mean, you can certainly criticize it on many other levels, but you would certainly never criticize it on that level. It’s almost that there’s too much substance for some people, and they’re not prepared to invest that level of thought into something, to sort of understand what it’s trying to do.” He added, “It’s far from a perfect film and I’d be the last person to call any of my films perfect because I’m my greatest critic, but I know the level of thought that was put into that film, and it certainly does not suffer from lack of ideas or thought. That’s the one thing it doesn’t suffer from.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dark City — Director’s Cut. Audio commentary by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. New Line Home Video (2008)

Miami Vice (2006)
Screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the TV series created by Anthony Yerkovich
Directed by Michael Mann
Produced by Michael Mann, Pieter Jan Brugge
Running time: 134 minutes (theatrical version)/ 140 minutes (Unrated Director’s Cut)

Should I Care?
Vice cops masquerading as drug smugglers and trafficking through that world in all its glamour and tragic inevitability as envisioned by Michael Mann — executive producer and style maestro of the groundbreaking 1984-89 TV series — is Miami Vice for you, nothing more, nothing less. Sorry for those expecting something else. Darker and less romantic than the version we last saw during the twilight of the Reagan years, but ten times more visually enthralling, the beauty of Miami Vice (2006) is how it expresses life in the fast lane of the South Florida underworld; not through an original story, compelling characters or an ability to make us really care about either, but by evoking mood. This is ultimately more a movie about fast boats, sports cars, designer sunglasses, sniper rifles and Santeria shrines than it is about people, but its detail is so serrated and spirit so intoxicating, it becomes a richer experience than most movies about people.

Shot almost completely in digital high definition, Miami Vice has such a deep focus feel — putting the viewer at a meet and greet in a Haitian slum or in a jaunt to Havana for mojitos — that you forgive it for not including a scene where Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx have a Heineken to talk about their characters’ feelings. The fact that Mann prefers moving images to talk — at least with dialogue worth retyping — only makes the movie stand apart from the plot heavy/brain dead cops ‘n robbers thriller du jour. It’s true that Naomie Harris, Justin Theroux, Dominick Lombardozzi, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Barry Shebaka Henley all warrant a lot more screen time than Mann gave them here, but John Ortiz, Luis Tosar and Gong Li are utilized particularly well as Crockett & Tubbs’ adversaries. A second or third viewing, where the story and characters can be pushed aside and the world Mann illuminates becomes the focus, is highly recommended.

So, What’s This About?
A prostitution sting staged by vice detectives — charming rogue James “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the cooler headed of the pair, until violence against a woman is introduced — is interrupted at a Miami nightclub when Crockett receives a frantic phone call from an informant named Alonzo (John Hawkes). Driving like a speed demon, Alonzo alerts Crockett that a case he’s working has gone very bad and asks the detective to look after his wife. Patched through to the FBI, Crockett is notified by special agent in charge Fujima (Ciaran Hinds) that the deep cover feds Alonzo is cooperating with are about to conduct a “meet and greet” without backup. He’s unable to pull his people before the Aryan Brotherhood types they’re meeting obliterate the feds with Barrett M82 sniper rifles. Alonzo and his wife quickly join them as collateral damage.

Meeting with Fujima and their superior, Lt. Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley), Crockett & Tubbs learn that Alonzo was part of an interagency task force attempting to infiltrate the white supremacists, whose operations in South Florida put them on the receiving end of cocaine produced and smuggled out of Colombia. Unable to trust his people, Fujima turns to Crockett & Tubbs to find out how FBI security was breached. Assisted by fellow vice cops Zito (Justin Theroux), Switek (Dominick Lombardozzi), Gina Calabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and an intel officer Tubbs is living with named Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris), Crockett & Tubbs sabotage the transporters being contracted by the Aryans to run product into Miami. They then fabricate deep criminal backgrounds for themselves as transporters and pressure another snitch (Eddie Marsan) to get them a meeting with Jose Yero, the Colombian the feds suspect is supplying the Aryan Brotherhood with cocaine.

Crockett & Tubbs fly to Haiti and learn that despite his vast resources, Yero (John Ortiz) is merely middle management, tasked with logistics and security for someone even higher up the food chain. Initially passing Yero’s scrutiny, the vice cops are taken to his boss Montoya (Luis Tosar), who after a brief introduction awards them a $3 million deal to transport 1,000 kilos of cocaine from Colombia to Miami. Montoya advises the pair “In this business with me, I do not buy a service. I buy a result. If you say you will do a thing, you must do exactly that thing. Then you will prosper beyond your dreams.” Montoya’s financial officer and lover Isabella (Gong Li) — a Chinese woman raised in Cuba — becomes their business contact. Though Isabella presents Crockett & Tubbs an opportunity to crack Montoya’s operation, Crockett jeopardizes it by getting romantically involved with her.

Who Made It?
Legend has it that Miami Vice was born on a notepad that NBC president of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff was scribbling program ideas on. One of his brainstorms supposedly read “MTV cops”. Tartikoff shared that concept with Anthony Yerkovich, a writer-producer on the network’s landmark police drama Hill Street Blues. Yerkovich maintains that he had already started compiling research on Miami and that vice cops operating in “a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk” was his idea. Conceived as a feature film, Yerkovich was contracted by NBC to expand his idea into a two-hour television pilot he titled Gold Coast, later Miami Vice. Yerkovich supervised the pilot and five subsequent episodes, while Michael Mann — co-writer and director of an acclaimed TV movie (The Jericho Mile, 1979) and moody feature film (Thief, 1981) — was named the show’s executive producer and served as primary style authority.

Debuting in September 1984, Miami Vice introduced a vibe for music, fashion and design that had never been seen on network TV before. The novelty began to wear off after Season 2 and Michael Mann moved on to a career as one of the more visionary directors in film, with The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Heat (1995). In 2004, Mann agreed to direct a $120 million feature film based on Miami Vice for Universal Pictures, with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx taking over the roles played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the ‘80s. Utilizing digital camera equipment that Mann and director of photography Dion Beebe had experimented with on Collateral (2004), the production would be beset by tropical storms, security threats and cost overruns before the director’s gritty, R-rated take on the pastel colored TV series opened in the summer of 2006 to fair weather reviews and disappointing box office.

How’d They Do It?
In 2001, Michael Mann and Jamie Foxx attended a birthday party for Muhammad Ali, where Foxx cajoled the director to make Miami Vice: The Movie. Mann recalled, “My initial reaction was, you’ve got to be kidding me, why would I want to go back to Miami Vice? Then I looked again at the pilot and some of the early episodes and I got kind of captured afresh by the deep currents and the emotional power of those stories, and I’m talking here about the first two seasons. The way the issues were brought in from the outside world into the lives of Crockett and Tubbs and the way the stories impacted on them. To me, these stories summed up Miami Vice as it originally was. Secondly, Miami has always had a real allure for me, in the same way maybe as Las Vegas had in the 1970s, it was really sexy and beautiful and really dangerous and deadly and tragic at the same time. I love those kinds of places, those Twilight Zones, you know.”

Mann’s impulse had always been to try Miami Vice as a movie. “When Tony Yerkovich wrote the pilot for this show — I read it in 1984, 1985 — and when I first read it, my first instinct was to have us not go forward as a pilot for television series, but to make this as a feature film that I would direct. That was impossible and it was already at NBC and we went ahead and did it as a television series.” He added, “Someone said, ‘Well what exactly is it about Miami Vice that compels you to do it as a film?’ I think the answer to that is that it contained in what Tony wrote a combination of large, very dramatic events in which people’s lives are changed, violence occurs, deals are made, deals are broken. The environment in which it’s happening is almost like an opiate. It’s almost too beautiful. That combination of drama happening in this very lush, romantic place, those two things together made everything poignant and magnified. That was the allure. That was the real attraction to me in why I wanted to make it in a film in 1984 and ‘85 and eventually did in 2006.”

In May 2002, it was announced that Michael Mann would write and produce a Miami Vice feature film for Universal Pictures. While the studio was highly receptive to the idea of remaking Miami Vice as an event movie, Mann saw an opportunity to push the material past its prime time television roots. “I felt strongly that nobody wanted to see some nostalgic version of Miami Vice, like the other movie versions of TV shows that have been made, with the same elements and cameos from the original cast and all that stuff. Not putting those kinds of movies down, you know, but why would you bother? If you want to see the Miami Vice from 1984, we’ve got a whole rack of really beautiful DVDs you can buy, so you can get your nostalgia trip that way.” After Mann officially came on board as director, Universal agreed to a production budget of roughly $120 million. Filming was scheduled to begin in April 2005, with Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell as leads.

Mann’s drive to simulate the experiences of real undercover cops pulled Miami Vice away from the confines of South Beach to locations in the Dominican Republic (standing in for Haiti), Uruguay (for Cuba) and Ciudad del Este in the notorious tri-border region of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. Stephen Donehoo — managing director for international strategic advisory firm Kissinger-McLarty Associates — was added to the payroll as political advisor. Donehoo’s job was to negotiate the production safe passage into areas of the world where few tourists could tread without serious concern for their safety. Mann asserted, “There are things you can’t artificially create. As good as our crews are, you can’t duplicate the texture, the fabric of the neighborhoods. Audiences know when you’re making it up, and they know when you visually deliver an animated environment for the actors that makes it feel like they are truly here.”

Given the complexities of what Mann wanted, production setbacks might have been inevitable. Colin Farrell dislocated a rib while weight training and had to be hospitalized during a research trip to Cuba, of all places. The actor’s injury pushed filming back six weeks, to June 2005, into what became the worst hurricane season anyone in the Gulf of Mexico had ever seen. Tropical storm Dennis, Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina each hit South Florida during the course of what stretched into a 105-day shooting schedule. In October, Hurricane Wilma slammed into a Miami highrise where a production office was located. At the same time, cast and crew were in Santo Domingo, the rowdy capital of the Dominican Republic, where security traded gunfire with an off-duty policeman who barged onto the set one day. The incident reportedly spurred Jamie Foxx to refuse to work overseas and forced Mann to scrap an elaborate climax to be filmed in Ciudad del Este.

Collaborating with director of photography Dion Beebe, Mann sought a texture he felt was best captured by shooting in digital high definition, as opposed to film. “We shot this film digitally and we shot Collateral digitally, actually for two different reasons. Collateral because I wanted to see into the night. For Miami Vice, yes we had a lot of the scenes that take place at night, but the primary reason for doing it had to do with what I wanted you to feel about daylight. About how light hits the water. How light hits these people. How intensely saturated and vivid everything you’re looking at becomes.” Bebee added, “Something we pursued was a very deep, dark definition in our clouds and in sky. And Miami has very dramatic sky, and weather. So some of the early testing were about how do we really bring that about into a 3-D quality on screen. There are times you look at these images of the sky and it does feel like you could reach out and touch the clouds.”

Co-producer Bryan Carroll calculated that about 4% of Miami Vice was shot on 35mm film, for slow motion or visual effects purposes. 75% of the digital footage was made on Thomson Viper cameras, like those used in Collateral. Additional footage was captured with more flexible Sony HDW-F950 or HDW-F900 cameras. Mann explained, “The requirements of shooting in Hi Def are very difficult and it’s difficult for a lot of cameramen because it’s an inversion of everything you do when you’re working with photochemical, meaning motion picture film. On film, you use light to illuminate areas that are dark and you try and protect the blacks by making blacks stay black. And Hi Def is a complete inversion in which you’re protective of the whites and you’re trying to make it so they don’t clip and there’s quite a different learning curve.” While Universal claimed that the final budget rested at $135 million, speculation in the film industry was that Miami Vice cost at least $180 million to produce.

Opening July 2006 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, Miami Vice spread critics all over the map. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. Miami Vice is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “It’s filled with Mann’s signature macho verisimilitude, but essentially it’s the stuff of what, in saner fiscal times, would have been a B movie. Miami Vice delivers the thrills, atmosphere and romance it promises, but it doesn’t resonate like major Mann.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Perhaps vice isn’t what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren’t all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you’ll have at the movies all summer.”

With domestic box office of $63.4 million, Miami Vice was pronounced a commercial dud, despite adding $100.3 million in theaters overseas. The Los Angeles Times took Mann to task as much for failing to appeal to young moviegoers as for brokering a deal paying him close to $6 million to write, direct and produce, plus a cut of the box office gross. Mann maintained that Universal knew full and well what they were getting into. “My idea was that you do Miami Vice for real, make it a hard R-rated movie with real violence, real sexuality and using the language of the streets. That took them aback more than a little and there was a series of meetings where I had to make my point. But they knew what I wanted from the outset, and in sitting around the table it’s my job, in part, to convince them that this is the right way to go. We all have to feel that we are making the same movie, and that we want to make that movie. And to their credit, I brought my perspective on Miami Vice to them and they endorsed it completely”.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Cool Cops, Hot Show” By Richard Zoglin. Time Magazine, 16 September 1985

“Miami Heat” By Daniel Fierman. Entertainment Weekly, 21 July 2006

Miami Vice — Production Notes

“Michael Mann Interview: Miami Vice” By John Maguire. Confessions of a Film Critic, 27 July 2006

“Digital Vision” By Michael Goldman. Millimeter, 1 August 2006

“Miami Vice Far Less Than a Universal Thriller at the Box Office” By Lorenza Munoz. The Los Angeles Times, 6 September 2006

Miami Vice (Unrated Director’s Cut). DVD audio commentary by Michael Mann. Universal Studios Home Entertainment (2006)

Humpday (2009)
Written by Lynn Shelton
Directed by Lynn Shelton
Produced by Lynn Shelton
MPAA rating: “R for some strong sexual content, pervasive language and a scene of drug use”
Running time: 94 minutes

Should I Care?
Lynn Shelton provoked more than one journalist to crown her “the female Judd Apatow” in the summer of ‘09. Her micro budget coming out as a filmmaker has little in common with The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up. Humpday is more like the female version of The Blair Witch Project. Instead of two dudes and a girl getting terrorized in the woods, Shelton explores the relationship between two college buddies and how wide open the window is on the possibility they would actually take that relationship to the next level. That’s scary. In spite of its abrasive premise, this is a surprisingly tasteful movie, smart, spot-on emotionally, superbly performed and funny. Whether Shelton will be any more successful than The Blair Witch bros at applying her DIY touch to another film remains to be seen, but she catches lightning in a bottle here.

Working from a budget she scraped together from grants and donations, Shelton wasn’t left with much else to put on screen except frank dialogue about sex and the evolving nature of adult relationships. It’s a target that she hits dead on. With a script workshopped in collaboration with her actors (Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard & Alycia Delmore), the results are like a much less jokey or pop culture obsessed Clerks (1994), with Humpday coming close to being as amusing as Kevin Smith’s debut. Shelton smartly avoids fanning a debate between straight versus gay and focuses on her honestly drawn characters. Instead of jumping from one location to the next, scenes are permitted to play out with the natural pace of a dinner conversation, growing more revealing the longer they’re allowed to continue. The result is a small but perfect comedy.

So, What’s This About?
The plans of Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) to conceive a child go awry when Ben’s buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard) drops in for a visit at two thirty in the morning. While Ben has added a few pounds employed as a transportation planner, Andrew has been in Mexico, working with locals on an art project of some sort. In an effort to get to know her husband’s bohemian friend, Anna cooks them dinner the next evening, but Andrew lures Ben to dine at the home of a polyamorous couple (Lynn Shelton and Trina Willard) that he just met. There, conversation turns to an amateur porn festival called Humpfest. Scoffing at Andrew’s ambition to make his own “erotic art film”, Ben gets challenged to expand his suburban horizons. Stuffed on fettuccini, wine and weed, the guys agree to have sex with each other and film it.

Not buying that her husband needed to chaperone Andrew all night, Anna urges Ben to explain why he left her at home with pork chops. He apologizes, but maintains that even though they’re starting a family, they shouldn’t close themselves off from having new experiences either. Sobered up, Andrew lets his buddy off the hook for their art project by claiming he doesn’t want to wreck any havoc in Ben’s newly domesticated life. Being stereotyped only makes Ben more determined to go through with it. He feels confident his wife will let him participate in the porn movie, but chickens out giving her full details of his planned participation. Having a drink with Anna later that night, Andrew unknowingly fills that information in. Explaining to his wife that this is something he feels he has to get out of his system, Ben books a hotel room for him and Andrew to go through with their business.

Who Made It?
Lynn Shelton was born and raised in Seattle. An interest in stage acting led her to the University of Washington, where Shelton graduated in 1987 with a B.A. in theater. She spent the next nine years in New York City, discovering that instead of acting, her true passion was photography. Shelton earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she started making short films. Opting to raise her son in Seattle, she returned to The Evergreen State with her husband. Without really knowing anyone in the Seattle filmmaking community, Shelton was awarded a grant from 911 Media Arts to complete a short film, about a miscarriage. She learned to craft narrative films by working as an editor-for-hire on a couple of shorts, as well as a feature titled Outpatient (2002).

Shelton’s feature film writing and directing debut We Go Way Back (2006) — financed by The Film Company, a Seattle non-profit film studio — concerned a 23-year-old nagged by her former 13-year-old self.  It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival, but Shelton’s experiences working with a large crew spurred her to create a looser, faster, more actor friendly environment on her sophomore film, My Effortless Brilliance (2008). Employed as a still photographer, Shelton met an actor named Mark Duplass. Inspired to create a movie with him, Shelton pitched an idea about two straight buddies who attempt to have sex for an adult film fest. Self-financed with grants and favors and shot over 10 breezy days in Seattle — with actors using a structured premise to base their improvisations — Humpday became a sensation at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Prize.

How’d They Do It?
Humpday had its genesis in Lynn Shelton’s desire to collaborate with actor/filmmaker Mark Duplass on a movie of some sort. The two had known of each other through mutual contacts in the Do It Yourself filmmaking community and finally met in the summer of 2007, when Shelton volunteered her services as a still photographer on a low budget movie titled True Adolescents that was shooting in Seattle with Duplass in the cast. Shelton recalled, “We just had a lot to talk about and knew we wanted to work with each other in some capacity. And then watching him act on that set was just completely inspiring — I just loved the way he worked as an actor. Not only was he tremendously talented but the specific style that he worked in and [how] generous he was with the other actors and how he seemed to bring the best out of everybody and make everybody go deeper than they might have gone otherwise.”

At the 2006 Maryland Film Festival, Shelton became friends with Joe Swanberg, director of the micro budget LOL (2006) and Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007). Visiting Shelton and Duplass in Seattle, Swanberg related his experiences at their city’s amateur erotica festival, HUMP! Shelton recalled, “He said that long ago he’d become completely desensitized to straight porn — growing up in the age of the internet, a young guy just watching it all the time — and had never sought out gay porn before, so here he was sitting in this theater being forced to watch gay porn and he just found it absolutely compelling. He could never describe exactly why.” She added, “It wasn’t as if Joe was like, ‘I need to have sex with a man!’ but it was fascinating that this very straight guy was just like, ‘Boy, that was really an interesting sight to see!’ Some little switch was flipped for him, and at that point I thought, ‘Well, this just seems very amusing to me that this straight guy is so interested in gay porn,’ and that was what got me going in that direction of straight guys and gay porn and gay sex.’”

Duplass sent Shelton a script he was hoping she’d direct starring his wife, Katie Aselton. That never came to pass, but about a month later, Shelton called Duplass with an idea. “It took me a little while to get the nerve up because I was a little worried about how he would react, I wanted to pitch it just right, but basically I said: ‘The idea is two best friends from college, ten years later their lives have sort of diverged, but the basic premise is they decide they have to try and have sex together, two straight friends.’ He sort of paused for half a second and then said, ‘Okay! Sounds great!’ The interesting thing was that I originally had seen him in the other role, this idea of the wild, adventuring nomadic artist, very charismatic. He immediately said, ‘I’ve got to play the domesticated dude. That’s just where I am in my life right now and that would be more interesting for me.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to need help finding the other guy because I don’t know anybody as charismatic as you and he needs to be at least as charismatic as you.’”

Mark Duplass had met Joshua Leonard at the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival, where he and his brother Jay Duplass were screening their film The Puffy Chair (2005) and Leonard — best known for his role in The Blair Witch Project (1999) — was presenting a short he’d directed. Duplass revealed, “I knew enough that [there] are two essential ingredients that I wanted out of someone playing opposite me. The first being that we just have great natural chemistry and it looks like we’re buddies, and that we have an affection for each other, and you really would believe that they’re long-time friends. I knew we had that. We had instant chemistry when we met. What I also wanted in there was someone who could match me, because I’m a very dominant Type A aggressive person, and when I knew we were going to be improvising, I knew I needed someone who was my match, essentially. I knew that about Josh. He’s just very intelligent, very Type A. We both have big tempers and we would have explosiveness together, so it was like a totally natural fit.”

Shelton enthused, “The thing that was so beautiful is that when I first gave Mark the idea — it took me a few days to build up the courage to actually pitch it to him, the whole idea, because I totally didn’t see how he would say yes — and not only did he say yes, he said, ‘I don’t see how we can succeed doing this.’ We didn’t want to make a movie that was going to be just sort of a broad farce or slapstick comedy, we really wanted to make it only if we could do it in a believable way.” Duplass claimed, “I honestly didn’t have any hesitations. I mean, when we made this project, the bromance and that sort of zeitgeist wasn’t really around as much. It’s happened. I guess we lucked out making a movie about a subject that was interesting and that people were talking about at the time. That really wasn’t at the forefront of our brains, and in terms of me being maybe hesitant or reserved, the only concern I really had was that we would make a movie that was flippant with the sexual politics, and I didn’t want to trivialize any of that stuff.”

In addition to taking a chance on content that fell outside the norms of mainstream film, Shelton committed to trying a radically new approach to production. “After experiencing the traditional model of filmmaking with my first feature, I wanted to try creating a totally actor-centered atmosphere on set with my second feature film. It was really an experiment to see if I could capture a level of naturalism that would be so high, it would almost feel like a documentary. So instead of writing predetermined dialogue for characters that I thought up in my head, I decided to start with the people I wanted to work with and then handcraft characters custom designed just for them. I invite the actors in very early on in the process, when the film is still a loose story, because the actors will be heavily involved in the development of their own characters and I need to know who those characters are before I can cement how they will behave in each scene of the film.”

She continued, “The film organically evolves from that point on. By the time we get to the set, everyone has a detailed backstory and they are all intimately acquainted with their own characters. Instead of a proper script, we have a detailed outline of all the scenes. We know the point of every scene, and the emotional map of every scene, but the actors come up with the actual words on their own. With the right casting (as well as a very high skill level in the editing room), I have found that this kind of highly structured, highly directed improvisation can give me both the naturalism that I crave as well as the structure that I love.” With a day job was teaching part-time at the Art Institute of Seattle’s digital filmmaking program, Shelton applied for grants and collected donations from friends and family to self-finance Humpday. She claimed her budget ended up “less than a million dollars but more than 10 dollars.”

Collaborating with director of photography Ben Kasulke — who’d shot each of Shelton’s previous films — Humpday rolled June 2008 in Seattle. Utilizing two Panasonic HVX-200 digital camcorders, a schedule of no more than 12 days was allotted. To accomplish this, Shelton realized she needed help. An assistant director was hired and two co-producers — Steven Schardt and Jennifer Maas — were brought aboard to run the set. Shelton explained, “You’ve basically got two camera operators, you’ve got your DP and you’ve got a second camera operator, and eighty percent of the time I was the second camera operator, and you’ve got one sound person and then you’ve got maybe a couple of other people in the next room, basically that’s it on set along with your actors.” Editor Nat Sanders — who Shelton had met on the festival circuit — came up from Los Angeles to cut Humpday with the director over two and a half months. Sound department head Vince Smith would be tasked with composing the film’s sparse but quirky musical score.

Humpday would be invited to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it notched a nomination for Grand Jury Prize. Critics marveled over the movie as well. Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “That Humpday is able to avoid standard-issue homosexual panic jokes almost entirely for something more thematically pointed — the bumpy humor of men who crave intimacy and change but can only articulate it as a ridiculous challenge — is a testament to Shelton’s filmmaking intelligence.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Funny, yes, but also observant and thought-provoking.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “It is all the more remarkable for having been conceived by an empathetic woman with no apparent ax to grind and a sensibility tuned to the minutiae of straight-male bonding rituals. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but some observant Venusians understand the brute fundamentals of Martian psychology.”

Magnolia Pictures acquired worldwide distribution rights and planned a national on-demand release via their Ultra VOD platform. In a limited theatrical release in the United States July 2009, Humpday got enough ink to run up $407,377 at the domestic box office. Lynn Shelton remained grounded about her future plans. “Aside from doing right by this film and hoping it gets out into the world, I just want to keep making movies. It’s really as simple as that. I don’t have any specific goals — I don’t want to leap into the studio system, I just want to be able to stay in Seattle and keep making movies and not bankrupt my family. If it provides me with a broader range of options for budgets and a broader range of people, that would be a lovely side effect. Frankly, I’m a very actor-centric director, so my biggest fantasy would be for actors that I respect to see this film and want to work with me.”

Where’d You Get All of This?

“Humpday. Sundance 2009 Preview w/Director Lynn Shelton” By Karina Longworth. Spoutblog, 15 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton: Humpday” FilmMaker Magazine, 30 January 2009

“Lynn Shelton and the cast of Humpday” Comingsoon.net, 6 July 2009

“Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Humpday” By Melissa Silverstein. The Huffington Post, 8 July 2009

“Interview: Lynn Shelton on Humpday” By Sean Axmaker. Parallax View, 9 July 2009

“Mark Duplass Talks Humpday and Future Projects” By Hayley Hosman. The Daily Californian, 22 July 2009

Humpday. DVD audio commentary by Mark Duplass & Joshua Leonard and Lynn Shelton. Magnolia Home Entertainment (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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