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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Savages — Production Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dead Girl (2006)
Written by Karen Moncrieff
Directed by Karen Moncrieff
Produced by Pitbull Pictures/ Lakeshore Entertainment
MPAA rating: “R for language, grisly images and sexuality/nudity”
Running time: 85 minutes

Should I Care?
A somber mediation on all things death — physical, spiritual, emotional — The Dead Girl captures the vibe of a particularly joyless funeral. Whether or not that’s something to stand up and applaud isn’t something I’ve been able to figure out. Each of the inter-connected characters involved in some way to the corpse of the title dies a bit; a fine theme, but no matter how literate the ideas or how skillfully they’re executed, I don’t know if I can recommend anyone take this trip. The overriding plus is a dream cast, which doesn’t deliver one false performance. Kerry Washington and James Franco seem to make the most of their appearances, as a junkie whore peeking out of her own personal abyss and a boyishly goofy medical examiner, respectively.

Being an anthology film of sorts, certain moments tower above others. The movie is derailed quickly and completely by its Toni Collette segment, which can’t help but come off as over-the-top and degrading. I was finally won over when Washington made her entrance and was impressed with Brittany Murphy (who decided she needed to disappear from theaters?) Hailed by one critic as “the next John Sayles”, writer-director Karen Moncrieff demonstrates terrific finesse casting and working with actors. Unlike Sayles, Moncrieff doesn’t quite pull off the moments that require people relate to each other in a natural, unforced way, but not many screenwriters do. A sense of humor and some light would definitely be welcome in the future, but Moncrieff is a major league talent worth watching.

So, What’s This About?
On a stroll in the abandoned orchard near her home, Arden (Toni Collette) discovers the body of a dead girl. She notifies the police, but her bitter mother (Piper Laurie) harangues her daughter for it. A grocery store clerk (Giovanni Ribisi) obsessed with serial killers asks Arden out; desperate to escape her dismal home life, she accepts. Leah (Rose Byrne) is a medical examiner in grad school still haunted by the disappearance of her sister 20 years ago. While her mother (Mary Steenburgen) holds out hope that the missing girl will turn up alive, Leah becomes convinced that the dead girl is her sister. Coming out of her shell, she responds to the advances of a classmate (James Franco).

A neglected wife (Mary Beth Hurt) discovers an item in the self-storage facility she manages with her husband (Nick Searcy) that she believes may be connected to the dead girl. Meanwhile, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives in Los Angeles to identify the dead girl’s body as that of her runaway daughter. Collecting her daughter’s belongings, Melora meets the junkie prostitute (Kerry Washington) that her daughter was sharing a motel room with and learns that she has a granddaughter. Finally, we meet the dead girl, prostitute Krista Anne Kutcher (Brittany Murphy). She spends the last 24 hours of her life with a john/boyfriend (Josh Brolin) trying to get a ride to see her daughter on her birthday.

Who Made It?
Karen Moncrieff grew up in Rochester, Michigan. She attended Northwestern University in Chicago and studying theater there, met her future husband and producing partner Eric Karten. After earning a BS in Performance Studies in 1987, Moncrieff came to Los Angeles. Ten years acting in bad television demystified the directing process for Moncrieff. She signed up for screenwritng extension courses at UCLA and the AFI and got a big break winning the 1998 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for a coming-of-age script titled Blue Car. Seeking to protect her work by directing, Moncrieff completed a certificate program in film studies at Los Angeles City College, shooting a few short films on Super 8mm. She directed Blue Car on a $400,000 budget. Starring David Strathairn and Agnes Bruckner, Moncrieff’s debut feature film became a hit at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Jury duty on a murder trial provided the inspiration for a spec script Moncrieff wrote titled The Dead Girl. The screenwriter and her husband got the attention of Henry Winterstern, a Canadian financier who’d come to L.A. to invest in film companies. One of those companies was Lakeshore Entertainment, where producers Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucceshi quickly agreed to finance Moncrieff’s ambitious sophomore film at $4 million. Pre-production was underway when Moncrieff notified her producers that she was expecting. Though assured that her financing would be there after her pregnancy, Moncrieff was back at work three months after her delivery and shooting three months after that. But despite a stellar cast, The Dead Girl would barely see a theatrical release.

How’d They Do It?
In 2006, Karen Moncrieff recalled the genesis of The Dead Girl, stating, “I was a juror on a murder trial a few years ago. On the first day, it was revealed that the victim was a prostitute. I realized that I had certain preconceptions about her that were not positive. At the same time, I recognized my tendency to feel that — as the victim of a crime — she must be some kind of innocent. The testimony of the various witnesses–people who were there to corroborate the killer’s story, the victim’s mother; the woman who took care of her children, her johns, other prostitutes, and one woman who had been her lover — forced me to confront the complexities and the wholeness of her life. She was a series of contradictions: a passionate mother of her young daughters, and also an unmedicated bipolar, a drug addict, and a liar.”

Moncrieff continued, “She was neither sinner, nor saint. She was a troubled human being who didn’t deserve to die. After the month long trial, I found the tremendous waste of her life stayed with me.” Sketching out a 30-page outline, Moncrieff knocked out a first draft of The Dead Girl in two weeks. Three drafts later — in March 2005 — a script was finished. Her husband and partner in Pitbull Pictures brushed aside concerns that Moncrieff had written a downbeat female ensemble that would scare away buyers. Eric Karten recalled, “When I finished reading the first draft, I had two simultaneous responses. As a partner and collaborator, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a major step forward for Karen in scope and ambition.’ And it emerged fully formed with daring construction, cohesive narratives, vivid characterization, clear voices and smart dialogue.”

A multi-character format was always the design. Moncrieff elaborated, “From the beginning the structure was that these five sections do not intersect or overlap. The reason I chose this structure is because when I was on a jury, I was struck by the idea that there was this community that was created by the murder of this young woman. Many of us in this community — and I include myself as a juror sitting on her murder trial — didn’t know one another and would never meet again. Yet each of us in our own way was profoundly affected by this woman’s life and death.” Sending the script out to buyers, Moncrieff and Karten piqued the interest of Henry Winterstern. The former mortgage lender arrived in Los Angeles in 1999 on behalf of Canada’s largest pension fund to invest in the film industry.

What Winterstern really wanted to do was build a company, one that would produce and distribute its own films. At the time, he enthused, “Today, the studios are owned by media conglomerates. Because of that, and the amount of capital that needs to be returned to the shareholders, they need this big product. It’s [computer-generated imagery]-driven, and it takes a long time to produce and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. We can focus on the films that independent filmmakers are making, the films they want to make — those are big enough to return capital for us.” Winterstern financed Wassup Rockers (2005) for director Larry Clark and saw in Karen Moncrieff another indie filmmaker he wanted to be in business with.

Winterstern passed The Dead Girl to chairman Tom Rosenberg and president Gary Lucceshi of Lakeshore Entertainment and the producers agreed to $4 million in financing. But a month before she’d finished the script, Moncrieff learned that her and her husband’s attempt at in vitro fertilization had been a success. Breaking the news to Lakeshore that she was pregnant, it was suggested postponing the film until after she gave birth. Moncrieff wasn’t having it. “It had been such a struggle getting a movie off the ground since Blue Car, and The Dead Girl had sort of tumbled into place so quickly, I just thought, ‘Oh, they’ll lose interest.’” Assured that her financing would still be in place, Moncrieff took maternity leave. She gave birth in November 2005, was back in pre-production by February and shooting the film in April 2006.

Moncrieff picked cinematographer Michael Grady to collaborate with. “In general, I don’t like flashy camerawork and Michael Grady is capable of doing the flashiest, but he’s really tasteful and one of the things when I was looking at reels, one of the things that really struck me — I was looking at his work on Wonderland, for instance — is that he’s always in the right place emotionally and to have somebody who knows a lot of tricks but uses them in service of telling an emotional story, that’s what I’m always looking for. But in general, I want the camera to disappear. I don’t want the audience to be looking at my work, I want to get out of the way so that the audience can forge a bond with the characters and feel like there’s no separation, like they are in their skin.”

Once Toni Collette came aboard, an ensemble quickly fell into place. Moncrieff argued for Mary Beth Hurt in particular, whom the producers had worked with previously but felt would be too strong for the role of a put upon wife. Josh Brolin, Rose Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, James Franco, Brittany Murphy, Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Steenburgen and Kerry Washington also joined the cast. Moncrieff mused, “Each one of them said it was because of the script. I think the pattern is that they read the script and then, if they responded to it, they watched Blue Car. Some listened to the commentary. I always wondered who actually listens to the commentary, and I guess it’s the actors who listen to find out if you’re an absolute nincompoop or an egomaniac who will be impossible to work with on the set.”

Filmed around Los Angeles in only 25 days, the film’s original distributor intended to release The Dead Girl in 2007. Producer Tom Rosenberg strongly opposed that. “It’s a terrific film, and you want it to come out in the fall. What are we doing, we’re going to be waiting around for a full year? What is the point in not going? There was none. We had entered into this, and shot and edited, so we could come out this year. And we were determined to do it. Also, I didn’t want Karen waiting around for another year for people to see what she can do.” Instead, Henry Winterstern acquired First Look Pictures — the distributor of art house fare such as Antonia’s Line and Titus — with the ambition of making it over into a mini-studio, like Lionsgate.

Opening in a very limited release in December 2006, when screened for critics, the response was one of muted admiration. Jim Ridley, The Village Voice: “Moncrieff’s glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “The Dead Girl is bleak, sad, and depressing — which is exactly what Moncrieff intends it to be, although it would probably help the viewer to be apprised of that quality going in, since most of us do not head to the movies in search of a bad time.” Kevin Crust, The Los Angeles Times: “If the segments are uneven, Moncrieff — with the help of her excellent cast — nevertheless crafts a gripping overall narrative that exposes a shared dissonance among the protagonists.”

Never expanding beyond two theaters in the United States, The Dead Girl would gross only $19,875 domestically and add $885,416 internationally. Despite the limited commercial appeal of her film, Karen Moncrieff defended her take. “Somebody asked me if it would be better if the movie was uplifting. And I said, ‘Well, to me this is uplifting.’ To me what’s depressing is to see lies on-screen, to see lives sugar-coated, a fake version of life as I know it or I feel it. Anything less than that and I’d feel like I hadn’t done my job. There are other people who are much better at shining a light on what’s funny or what’s sweet. Maybe my calling is to feel deeply some aspects of human pain and grief. Maybe I’m working something out in my work, but it’s what I’m attracted to. People making choices, struggling to do better and change, to me is uplifting.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“First Look Studios at 25” By Scott Kirsner. The Hollywood Reporter, 18 January 2006

The Dead Girl – Press Notes

“Dead Girl Filmmaker’s Calling Is To Break Hearts” By Mark Olsen. The Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006

“Aftershocks” By Howard Feinstein. FilmMaker Magazine, Winter 2007

“The Facts of Life” By Shelley Gabert. Written By, January 2007

“An Aspiring Mogul’s Quick Rise and Fall” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 March 2007

The Dead Girl. DVD audio commentary with Karen Moncrieff. First Look Entertainment (2007)

Lost In Translation (2003)
Written by Sofia Coppola
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Produced by American Zoetrope/ Elemental Films
Running time: 101 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the Park Hyatt Hotel towering over Tokyo, two Americans meet. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a movie star drawing a $2 million paycheck to appear in a commercial for Suntory Whiskey. The deal includes jet lag, forgetting his son’s birthday and the realization that his wife — who Bob can barely hold a phone conversation with anymore — has learned to take care of the house without him being around. Unable to sleep, he hangs out in the bar, where Bob meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a melancholy young woman who accompanied her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) — a well meaning but attention deficient photographer — on assignment to Japan.

Bumping into each other over the next several days, Bob and Charlotte find a respite from their mutual loneliness. Charlotte reveals that she gave photography a try, then writing, but really hasn’t decided what she wants to do with her life as a post-graduate. She invites Bob to join her for a night out in Tokyo, where the language barrier with Charlotte’s Japanese friends doesn’t keep them from drinking, dancing, singing karaoke and feeling closer to home. After a bewildering experience on a Japanese talk show, Bob is set to return to the States, but finds his time with Charlotte more difficult to walk away from than he anticipated.

Who Made It?
Sofia Coppola first came to the attention of moviegoers in 1990 when her father — director Francis Coppola — cast her as Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III after Winona Ryder had to decline. Following her ill-fated acting debut, the 19-year-old Coppola took the advice of her mother Eleanor and enrolled in Cal Arts. She would drop out and pursue photography for a while before co-creating, co-writing and co-hosting (with Zoe Cassavetes) a short-lived, tongue-in-cheek news magazine for Comedy Central called Hi-Octane. Coppola then launched a highly successful clothing company called Milk Fed with her friend Stephanie Hayman. When in Tokyo, the women were fond of staying at the Park Hyatt Hotel.

By the age of 30, Coppola had a short (Lick the Star, 1998) and a critically praised feature film (The Virgin Suicides, 2000) under her belt as director. She’d written a mere 70-page script she wanted to shoot in Tokyo. Producer Ross Katz ignored the major studios and chased financing from overseas distributors. Unwilling to make the film with anyone other than Bill Murray, Coppola spent five months pursuing the prickly and reclusive star, using a social network that included her friend Wes Anderson and screenwriter Mitch Glazer to land the Bob Harris of her dreams. Lost In Translation would make history on its way to becoming a sleeper hit with audiences and a sensation with critics.

How’d They Do It?
Sofia Coppola was in her early 20s when a friend invited her to Japan to help produce a fashion show. Once there, she met Fumihiro Hayashi, a young writer and editor for Dune Magazine, who hired Coppola as a photographer. She’d visited the land of the rising sun with her parents as a child, but returning to Tokyo once a year for eight consecutive years provided the spark for Lost In Translation. Coppola recalled, “That was really the starting point for the story that I wanted. Just when I had spent time in Tokyo, I thought, ‘Oh, I really want to film this, and I love the way the neon at night looks.’ That was really the starting point of the story though. I never thought about setting it somewhere else.”

After finishing the promotional tour for The Virgin Suicides in 2000, Coppola returned home to Los Feliz, California and spent six months writing Lost In Translation. Her brother — director Roman Coppola — provided feedback on 20 pages she’d finished before Coppola returned to Tokyo to soak up the atmosphere. “It helped to remember what I had liked. I always loved the Park Hyatt. I wanted to shoot a movie in that hotel. I like the way you keep running into the same people over and over again, the camaraderie of foreigners.” The brief but intense dynamic between Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall in the 1946 classic The Big Sleep provided additional inspiration.

Coppola and ICM agent Bart Walker ignored the major studios and sold off distribution rights in various overseas territories instead. Creative control was one reason. Coppola explained, “I didn’t want to make something I’d have to change. I had an idea of what I wanted to make, and I wanted to not have a boss. It’s hard to get final cut, but it was very important to me to have the freedom to do the way I wanted.” After successfully selling the film to distributors in Japan (where The Virgin Suicides had been a hit), France and Italy, producer Ross Katz hooked Focus International to provide the rest of a roughly $4 million budget. Katz had entered the film industry as a grip on Reservoir Dogs and ascended to the rank of producer in 2001 with the critically acclaimed In the Bedroom.

What Coppola and Katz didn’t know was whether Bill Murray was going to do their movie. Coppola knew one of Murray’s close friends, screenwriter Mitch Glazer. She showed Glazer a 10-page treatment and asked him for help. Glazer recalled, ”Sofia is amazing because she’s such an artist, but she grew up in a family that gets things done. She knows how to be relentless. She’s completely genuine, but she is as driven and tough as anyone I’ve met in Hollywood. And she wanted Bill. She had written it for him.” He added, “In more than 20 years of friendship, I never said anything was perfect for Bill, and this time, I did. But Bill is difficult. He wouldn’t give anyone an answer.”

Coppola recalled, “People said, ‘You need to have a backup plan,’ and I said, ‘I’m not going to make the movie if Bill doesn’t do it.’ Bill has an 800-number, and I left messages. This went on for five months. Stalking Bill became my life’s work.” Director Wes Anderson joined the recruitment drive and in July 2002, Coppola met Glazer, his wife Kelly Lynch and Murray in New York for dinner. The actor had some concern about the script. Murray recalled, “The whole thing felt slight, which was a little troubling. But she had a way of saying her dream wouldn’t have come true unless I did the movie.” He added. “I got reeled in from way, way offshore, but Sofia’s very good on the phone, and she spent a lot of time getting me to be the guy. In the end, I felt I couldn’t let her down. You can’t ruin somebody’s dream.”

To play opposite Bill Murray, Coppola had in mind an 18-year-old who bore an uncanny physical resemblance to the filmmaker: Scarlett Johansson. “I first noticed her in Manny & Lo. I just thought she had a kind of a striking quality and that low, husky voice. There was something unique about her I liked so I wanted to work with her. When I was working on this I wanted to meet with her and see if she would play the part. Although she’s younger, you know the character’s in her early 20’s, I think she pulls it off because she has a sort of maturity. She’s not like a hyper kid. I just like the way that she’s able to convey feeling without doing much. She’ s subtle.”

Lost In Translation commenced a 27-day shooting schedule September 2002 in Tokyo, where Coppola discovered a culture very accommodating to location shooting. Her crew was able to take handheld Aaton cameras into the streets and subways without permits or without Tokyoites gawking at them. Ross Katz mixed American crew members — director of photography Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett, costume designer Nancy Steiner, line producer Callum Greene and a New York based assistant director named Takahide Kawakami — with a largely Japanese crew, which Kawakami translated English to. Roman Coppola contributed second unit photography.

Screenings at the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals were quickly followed by a limited theatrical release September 2003 in Los Angeles before Lost In Translation opened nationally in October. It was far and away the most critically acclaimed film of the year. The Return of the King — the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture — was up there, but The Austin Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Hollywood Reporter, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post all named Coppola’s film the best of 2003, while The New York Times and The Onion A.V. Club were among the many publications placing it on their annual Top 10 lists.

Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.” J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “Coppola evokes the emotional intensity of a one-night stand far from home—but what she really gets is the magic of movies.” Stephanie Zacharek, Salon: “The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.” The critical accolades and the awards buzz for Bill Murray propelled the low budget film to box office of $44.5 million in the United States and $75.1 million overseas.

Lost In Translation was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. Its sole Oscar went to Coppola for her script, but she became the first American woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, following Italy’s Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, 1976) and New Zealand’s Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993). Coppola summed up her genre defiant sophomore success by stating, “Well, I think it’s romantic in feeling. It’s not really a romance. It’s, I guess, more of a friendship. But I like those kind of relationships that are sort of in between and that you do have these memorable relations with people that don’t ever become a real thing.”

Should I Care?
I don’t know which section Lost In Translation ended up in at Blockbuster Video. It might have created a few new categories — short film, tone poem, travelogue, meditation — but whatever you call this, long after Blockbuster has bitten the dust, Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, romantic ode to gaijin will still be relevant. This isn’t a movie I loved at first sight and even now I hesitate to call it a “movie”, not in the sense that Peter Weir or Quentin Tarantino make “movies”. Light on dialogue, mysterious in intent, what Sofia Coppola knows well is jet lag in Tokyo, the moods, feelings and images of which are expressed with a precision and deep affection that is nothing short of brilliant.

The humor is so understated, but over time, appeals to me more and more. There’s something deviously witty about watching two fakers discover that they can drop their act and just be themselves around each other. Bill Murray has called this the favorite among all his films, and it’s hard to argue he’s ever given a better performance. The woozy and romantic vision Coppola seems steeped in when it comes to international travel serves her script well by refusing to follow a straight line. It leads to an ending that will stay with me longer than the tidy conclusions of so many other films. Lance Acord captures both the exhaustion of travel and its inherent wonders beautifully.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Coppola Smart Mob” By Lynn Hirschberg. The New York Times Magazine, 31 August 2003

“Sofia Coppola on Lost In Translation” By Fred Topel. Screenwriter’s Monthly. 23 September 2003

“Tokyo Story” By Anne Thompson. Filmmaker Magazine, Fall 2003

“Behind the Scenes of Lost In Translation with Sofia Coppola” By Rebecca Murray. About.com

The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
Screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler
Directed by Robin Swicord
Produced by John Calley Productions/ Mockingbird Pictures
Running time: 106 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In the urban trappings of Sacramento, mourners convene for the funeral of a hound dog. Jocelyn (Maria Bello) is a dog breeder whose affections have been directed toward her obedient canine companions. Her childhood friend Sylvia (Amy Brenneman) has taken a 20-year marriage to Daniel (Jimmy Smits) for granted until he notifies her that he’s leaving her for another woman. Their thrill seeking, college aged daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace) is a lesbian, while Bernadette (Kathy Baker) is a spirited yoga practitioner with six ex-husbands. While in line at a Jane Austen film festival, Bernadette meets a prissy high school English teacher named Trudie (Emily Blunt).

After Trudie commiserates the sad state of her marriage to the sports loving Dean (Marc Blucas), Bernadette hits upon the idea of a book club in which each of the six members will present a different novel by Jane Austen. Jocelyn meets a goofy young sci-fi enthusiast named Grigg (Hugh Dancy) and invites him to join, hoping to tie Sylvia with a new mate but oblivious that Grigg is clearly more interested in her. Trudie flirts with plunging herself into an affair with one of her students (Kevin Zegers) while each member of the book club interprets Austen through whatever obstacles they’re struggling to overcome in their personal lives.

Who Made It?
A native of Bloomington, Indiana, Karen Joy Fowler graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 with a bachelor of arts in political science and earned her masters in that field from UC Davis in 1974. Her first two novels — Sarah Canary (1991) and The Sweetheart Season (1996) — fused science fiction or fantasy with 19th century history, but it was the 2004 publication of a contemporary romantic comedy titled The Jane Austen Book Club that put Fowler on The New York Times Bestseller List, for 13 weeks. That same year, veteran producer John Calley optioned the film rights and turned to one of his longtime beneficiaries to adapt a screenplay and direct.

Robin Swicord grew up in the rural Gulf Coast of Florida. She studied English and theatre arts at Florida State University, where she also started writing and directing short films. This lead to a career producing educational films in New York City, where a play Swicord authored titled Last Days At The Dixie Girl Café was produced off-Broadway in 1979. Her original screenplay Shag was produced in 1989 starring Bridget Fonda, Annabeth Gish and Phoebe Cates. From there, Swicord became one of the top screenwriters in the film industry, adapting Little Women (1994), The Perez Family (1995), Practical Magic (1998) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). The Jane Austen Book Club is her directorial debut.

How’d They Do It?
Karen Joy Fowler recalled the genesis of her fourth novel by stating, “The idea for The Jane Austen Book Club came to me when I was in the middle of another project. In 2000, I started planning to write a book about chimps and sign language and psychologists, set in the 1950s. I’m still very interested and excited about it, but it keeps getting shunted aside. I had done a lot of the research on it, and then I went to Book Passage to hear Carter Scholz read from his novel Radiance. At the reading, I got this lightning flash idea for The Jane Austen Book Club, so I set the chimp book aside and wrote it — by my own pitiful standards — pretty quickly (in about a year). That’s the fastest I’ve ever written a book.”

By comparison, Robin Swicord spent a decade trying to direct a feature film. Eric Bogosian’s adaptation of Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia was put into turnaround when Paramount decided there were no stars young enough to open it. Swicord then spent six years trying to get a spec script she’d written titled The Mermaid Singing made. Jessica Lange, Evan Rachel Wood, Neve Campbell and Dougary Scott all agreed to star with Swicord set to shoot in Ireland using tax credits, but financing fell through. Swicord lamented, “I’m not a known director. I feel that if the movie had been about a young grandfather back in the U.S. going back to Ireland to claim his lost grandchild, the movie would have been made.”

Swicord turned to a project she’d been talking to Amy Pascal — chairman of Sony Pictures — about writing and directing for 15 years. “I had been at work on another project called The Jane Prize, which is about a family of Jane Austen scholars. I had spent a number of years just reading Austen, the letters, biographies, downloading academic treatises on Jane Austen — kind of preparing to write that.” Swicord had a blinking green light to start shooting in the fall of 2006, but The Jane Prize script found its way to John Calley, former CEO and president of Sony and a longtime supporter of the screenwriter.

Calley had optioned The Jane Austen Book Club. Swicord recalled, “I wanted to do this film — I would say that the strongest reason is that I love to read the novels of Jane Austen. This film, thematically, I was very interested in because I have been thinking a lot about how fractured our lives are and how difficult it is. We talked about how hard it is to achieve community when people live away from their families, and we commute in our cars and we’re isolated and so forth. But here we are in the middle of a time when we are ostensibly the most connected we’ve ever been by cell phones and the Internet. And what I felt was that it was a unique opportunity to make a film about how people overcome that.”

In her adaptation, Swicord made a number of drastic changes to Fowler’s bestseller. She swapped out different Jane Austen novels to be read by different characters in order to fit the narrative she had in mind. She admitted, “I saw different things in the novels. It was a challenge to move from something that had the slightest narrative thread connecting the stories to creating something with enough narrative power to actually be dramatic.” Swicord expanded the role of the group’s token male and realized the fantasies Prudie develops for a teenage student. The film version omitted the numerous flashbacks that colored Fowler’s novel.

When Swicord’s script was ready, Calley phoned Sony Classics co-presidents Tom Bernard and Michael Barker and won an agreement from the studio to finance and distribute The Jane Austen Book Club. Calley then contacted Maria Bello, who expressed interest in starring. Swicord recalled, “As the cast began to shape up, it became apparent that there was just a very strong ensemble that we were going for and we didn’t need to worry about whether or not, you know, Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts or you know, Big Movie Name needed to be in the film, that as long as we had a really strong ensemble of actors, I could pretty much cast who I wanted. And as soon as we had arrived at that point in time, I called up Amy Brenneman and said, ‘I want you to play Sylvia.’”

With a budget of just under $6 million, The Jane Austen Book Club was slated to begin shooting November 2006 in Los Angeles, covering 37 locations in 30 days. Swicord had been given just six weeks of prep time, but adequate rehearsal made all the difference. Swicord recalled, “I watched where the dialogue ran smoothly, and where actors hesitated or felt awkward, or when they seemed to need a line or a movement, and I’d pick up those cues and make adjustments. Even after we started shooting 12-hour days, I would always set aside an hour for rehearsal in the morning, knowing that we’d make up the time in richer performances and fewer takes.”

To serve as director of photography, Swicord picked Australian cinematographer John Toon. “I wanted the look of the film to be very real — very ‘here’s how we live now,’ just as Jane Austen gave us such a detailed portrait of how people lived day-to-day in her time. I admired John’s camera technique in Glory Road and Sylvia, because he draws the viewer in to feel like you’re right there, an immediate observer. He invented a camera rigging that’s just a bit looser, more like human movement — barely noticeable, not hand-held-jiggly, but not Steadicam-smooth either. He uses a lot of natural light, which strengthens that sense of immediacy.”

Once critics took a look, The Jane Austen Book Club met with qualified endorsements. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “The movie is a celebration of reading, and oddly enough that works, even though there is nothing cinematic about a shot of a woman (or the club’s one male member) reading a book.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “Capably, if not exactly artfully directed … Book Club is a widget carefully engineered to comfort, console and sell like hot cakes since it was but a gleam in the author’s eye, and Swicord doesn’t mess with the formula.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.”

Opening September 2007 in the United States, The Jane Austen Book Club kept a low profile at the box office. It never expanded beyond 1,200 U.S. theaters, grossing $3.5 million domestically and $3.5 million overseas. Swicord shrugged off suggestions that her film had limited appeal. “I think that anytime a woman makes a movie with a female protagonist, you run the risk of having people call it a chick flick. It’s just a way of marginalizing women. But in this particular case, I didn’t worry too much about whether it would be labeled one thing or another because I knew that I was making a film that was sort of a date movie in the best sense. We could watch it together and we would forget that the sort of consumer-marketing world likes to divide people off into these niches.”

Should I Care?
With the popular success of her novel, it’s easy to accuse Karen Joy Fowler of cranking out mass marketed pap, with Robin Swicord guilty by association for bringing it to the screen in a nice package. But The Jane Austen Book Club is quite the overlooked and underloved movie. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t want to win an Oscar, but here’s a film about women (mostly) over the age of 40. Instead of being bound together by bitterness, their commonality is a love of books. Their problems are nothing new, but they’re addressed with a degree of wit, sensuality and intelligence. In other words, neither Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl are involved.

Emily Blunt steals the show with her lovable brittleness, but Maria Bello, Amy Brenneman and even Kathy Baker (filling in for Ellen Burstyn) bring some sorely needed kinkiness, texture and aplomb to the standard issue rom-com. Hugh Dancy turns in a charming and very amusing performance and shares palpable chemistry with Bello. It’s also great to see Jimmy Smits back in a movie. There aren’t many surprises, but the cast is so good, revealing Robin Swicord to be a director of finesse and excellent taste. By focusing on the delayed gratification of literature — instead of wedding dresses or shopping — she’s made a women’s film that’s not only safe for men, but anyone with a mind.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” Locus Magazine, December 2004

“Swicord On the Map With Austen” By Anne Thompson. Variety, 31 August 2007

“Filming The Jane Austen Book Club” By Jacki Lyden. All Things Considered, 22 September 2007

“The Persuasion of Robin Swicord” By Omar P.L. Moore. PopcornReel.com, 16 September 2007

The Jane Austen Book Club. DVD audio commentary by Robin Swicord, Hugh Dancy, Maggie Grace, Maryann Brandon & Julie Lynn. Sony Pictures (2008)

The Jane Austen Book Club – Production Notes

The Promotion (2008)
Written by Steve Conrad
Directed by Steve Conrad
Produced by Dimension Films
Running time: 86 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“Hi, I’m Doug Stauber. I’m assistant manager at Donaldson’s Grocery, where customers come first. Even customers who are nuts,” explains Stauber (Seann William Scott) as a man babbling in some unknown language harangues him over a box of Teddy Grahams, slaps Stauber in the face and flees the store. Despite his unenviable job, Stauber tries to stay positive, hoping to earn a promotion to full manager of a new Donaldson’s. With assurances from his clueless boss (Fred Armisen) that he’s “a shoe-in”, Stauber buys a house so that he and his wife (Jenna Fischer) will no longer have to endure the banjo playing couple next door.

Trouble arrives from Quebec, where assistant manager Richard Wehlner (John C. Reilly) transfers from a Canadian store. With his Scottish wife (Lili Taylor) in tow, the born again, exceedingly nice Wehlner reveals he’s applied for the managerial position Stauber desperately needs. Neither man wins over their needling area manager (Gil Bellows): the tightly wound Stauber eventually blows his cool with a crew of antagonistic black kids who hang out in the parking lot, while Wehlner — an addict in recovery — seems a bit slow paced for Chicago. As their competition becomes more intense, niceties between the men quickly go out the window.

Who Made It?
Steve Conrad grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but ultimately made his way to Northwestern University, where he got involved with the media group Chicago Filmmakers and directed a few shorts. An exercise assigned to him in a creative writing class about two old men in a park became the basis for a screenplay Conrad wrote at the age of 19 titled Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. The script not only landed Conrad an agent, it was produced in 1993, with Robert Duvall and Richard Harris starring. The film was a commercial failure, but worse, Conrad struggled for the next 12 years, going into debt and falling out of the industry, unable to support himself as a writer.

A script Conrad banged out in 10 days titled The Weather Man brought him back, filmed in 2004 starring Nicolas Cage. It wasn’t a hit either, but a life story Conrad had been entrusted with adapting — The Pursuit of Happyness — was a blockbuster. While the Will Smith drama was still shooting in 2005, the heat around Conrad and his latest script — Quebec – got the attention of Chicago-based producer Steven A. Jones and an executive VP at Hyde Park Entertainment named Jessika Borsiczky Goyer. The pair optioned the script and when Seann William Scott agreed to play the lead, Dimension Films stepped up to bankroll Conrad’s directorial debut, which would change its title to The Promotion.

How’d They Do It?
Talking with AustinDaze correspondent Bree Perlman in June 2008, Steve Conrad recalled the genesis of The Promotion. “About six years ago I was just writing a lot about men and work and the different dramas and conflicts that happen in the work place. I felt like I had a few more things to say about work but I wanted to write from the perspective of a younger person who had reached a phase of life where they realize there are demands on them to provide for their loved ones. I wanted the character to be in his early 30s and not be exceptional; to not be able to play the violin or be a physician. He was one of those kids that didn’t buckle down in school. I wanted a C student to wake up one day and realize he is in a race to carve out some space in the world.”

“Anyway I watched some weird stuff happen in my neighborhood grocery store with this assistant manager. My neighborhood is strange and tense — it’s a mix of professionals and street gangs. There was this grocery store employee who is like 30 and he was on the far side of the parking lot, the other side of which was occupied by this gang. The gang was messing around and just slinging curses at the customers and I thought: ‘Wow, this kid is going to have to walk over there and ask these guys politely to leave.’ And I thought: ‘They aren’t going to listen to him.’ This is going to be good. He walks over and they completely ripped him to pieces. He was demeaned and humiliated. The only thing he had to represent his authority was this little yellow vest that said ‘Courtesy Patrol’ on it. And on the back it said, ‘Have a nice day.’”

Conrad continued, “Part of me thought it was the funniest thing but I was also moved to admire him greatly because he went back to work. He didn’t go jump in front of a bus or take off his uniform and walk home naked. He didn’t quit. I found that, after having laughed at it, I was overcome with total admiration for the strength of will for this kid to just go back to work — because you know tomorrow it’s going to be the exact same. And I thought I could make a movie that demonstrates that you win when you don’t quit like that. I also realized the landscape was great because you can make a smaller movie if you have the grocery store but get a bigger picture because you have the battleground for this. So started messing around with grocery store comedy.”

Jim Carrey spent time attached to the Richard Wehlner role and was interested in seeing Tom Cruise play the straight man opposite him. Neither of those options panned out and Conrad went to Seann William Scott instead. “I wanted Seann for The Promotion really, really early. He’s very good at making people laugh, which is beyond a knack: It’s a skill. I knew my movie wouldn’t go as broad as the things he’d done before, but if he could make me laugh in that setting, he could make me laugh in other settings for sure. He actually came recommended to me from Old School [director Todd Phillips], who said, ‘Look, he stole a scene from Will Ferrell, and that’s not easy to do. You should take him seriously.’”

With Seann William Scott on board, Dimension Films agreed to bankroll the picture at a budget of $6.4 million. John C. Reilly — finally getting attention as a comic actor — joined him and a 30-day shooting schedule commenced July 2006, with director of photography Lawrence Sher behind the camera. Conrad recalled, “We shot over the summer in Chicago, and our summers are as hard as our winters, just in the opposite way. It was hot outside, and then we went inside we couldn’t run the air conditioners because the sound of the machines kept killing our sound, so, we shot without any air conditioning. And it’s, you know, there’s harder jobs than that, but it was unpleasant for sure. We had food that was not being warmed and not being cooled and so after two days, it wasn’t edible, and became sort of an awful environment to work in.”

Screened March 2008 at the South By Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin, The Promotion went over great with an audience, but presented marketing challenges for Dimension. Conrad mused, “I think I stay in the awkward moment too long. I live in it. I make a scene around it. And there’s often an energy in watching films where some people just want to get to the ‘higher moment’ … But at some point — and this is another way I miss people — you know the pay-off, the fulfillment of what the character is trying to chase, can feel very, very modest, unless it’s you. Unless it’s you trying to make a difference in renting or buying your house. I think, at the end of the day, people don’t want it to be that small in the movies.”

Critics registered indifference. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “It’s one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “The Promotion edges toward some pretty bleak stuff. Then it steps back and laughs, like an office slacker.” Josh Rosenblatt, The Austin Chronicle: “Over and over again, The Promotion hints at the movie it might have been — slapstick comedy or social satire or relationship tragedy or, most promisingly, an exploration of the damaged, neutered American male psyche — if it had just bothered to decide which movie it wanted to be. Instead, it tries to be everything at once and ends up failing to be much of anything at all.”

Opening June 2008 in the United States, The Promotion never expanded beyond 81 theaters, where it only made $408,709. Conrad remained upbeat about his film’s reception. “My dear friends, the people who when I make laugh it means the most to me, they don’t even go to movies anymore. They rip ‘em or they watch ‘em on DVD. It’s hard to say. And it shouldn’t be that immediate. I think there’s time for movies to get under your bones and last more than two weekends. For me, just staying busy is my aim, just trying to keep a job. My aim in shooting it was just trying not to be fired, literally. I’m working for Harvey and Bob Weinstein — it’s not to be taken for granted. They care about their movies. They watch the dailies. They watch the auditions. So, they know what you’re up to. And if you’re ‘in it’, they know how deeply in it you are.”

Should I Care?
The Promotion is so sharp edged and so funny — I laughed three times in the first three minutes — that before you can really wonder if it’s going to stay this good, it doesn’t. First-time director Steve Conrad is all over the shop, veering from broad office satire to buddy movie to dark comedy to light drama and at its lowest point, a motivational seminar for the contemporary male. Despised equally by upper management and by their goofy employees, Scott and Reilly’s characters seem kicked in the balls far more often than really called for, while neither Jenna Fischer nor Lili Taylor (looking luminescent) are permitted to have much of an impact on the story at all.

While I was never able to get comfortable with the concept of Seann William Scott playing the straight man (part of the problem lies with Conrad for writing such a lackluster part), the reason to watch The Promotion is John C. (Motherfuckin’) Reilly. Perpetrating a pitch perfect Canadian accent and embodying all the good natured, White Bread goofiness our northern neighbors can exhibit, Reilly is so good, bringing wit and sympathy to the one character that seems to have excited Conrad: a loser trying to keep it together long enough to gain some respect out of life. Conrad had The King of Comedy in his sights here, but even if he misses the bullseye, the dude tries.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Long Road Back to the Big Screen” By Ed Koziarski. The Chicago Reader, 6 March 2008

“Seann William Scott and Steve Conrad” By David Wolinsky. The A.V. Club, 5 June 2008

“The Promotion writer/director Steve Conrad” By Bree Perlman. AustinDaze, 18 June 2008

The Promotion. DVD audio commentary by Steve Conrad, Jessika Borsiczky Goyer and Steven A. Jones. Dimension Home Video (2008)

“The Promotion’s Steve Conrad Promotes Himself” By Brian Tallerico. The DeadBolt

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

By Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

I Could Never Be Your Woman – Production Notes

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

Down to the Bone (2005)
Screenplay by Rich Lieske & Debra Granik, additional material by Jean-Michel Dissard and Anne Kugler and Alex MacInnis
Directed by Debra Granik
Produced by Susie Q Productions
Running time: 104 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In a rural area of upstate New York, Irene (Vera Farmiga) finishes another day’s work as a clerk at a big box retailer. She returns home to get her two sons (Jasper Moon Daniels, Taylor Foxhall) dressed for Halloween. As Irene takes a hit of cocaine in the bathroom, it’s not clear that she’s been able to keep her drug use much of a secret from her kids. Her dealer (Terry McKenna) draws the line when she tries to score using a personal check her mom mailed for her son’s birthday. Irene checks herself into a rehab program, where she meets a tattooed male nurse named Bob (Hugh Dillon) sympathetic to her struggles with addiction.

Despite the recreational marijuana use of her well-intentioned boyfriend Steve (Clint Jordan) and her performance at work suffering now that she’s sober, Irene manages to stay clean. To keep herself on the straight and narrow, she becomes intimate with Bob, who springs for the nose piercing Irene has always wanted, as well as a pet snake for her sons. Irene takes a housecleaning gig with a friend from rehab, Lucy (Caridad De La Luz), where even a whiff of glass cleaner becomes a temptation for the women to get high. A trip to the city with Bob puts Irene’s life into another tailspin, but offers her yet another opportunity to go straight.

Who Made It?
Debra Granik spent a decade shooting industrial films before entering the graduate film program at NYU. Assigned a 7-minute documentary, Granik traveled to a haunted hotel in upstate New York, but the only employee she could get on camera was a housecleaner named Corinne Stralka. Granik recalled, “She was at a tenuous and suspenseful crossroad in her life, being newly sober. Her boyfriend was in the midst of a pretty bad relapse. They also had children in tow, making it a very complicated set of circumstances. I was compelled about what was going to happen to her and how she was going to get through, and stayed with the story for quite a few years.”

Granik’s friendship with the couple resulted in a 23-minute short titled Snake Feed, in which Stralka, her two kids and her boyfriend Rich Lieske played themselves — filmed in their own home — in what Granik described as “narrative fiction” based on the family’s experiences. Nominated for a Short Film Award at the 1997 Austin Film Festival and winner of a Short Filmmaking Award the following January at the Sundance Film Festival, Snake Feed was so well received that Granik collaborated with her subjects on a feature length script. She whittled down a first draft “which was as thick as a phonebook” by focusing the narrative on Stralka.

How’d They Do It?
Using Snake Feed as her calling card on the festival circuit, Granik met producers Susan Leber and Anne Rosellini. Instead of hoping and waiting for studio financing, the producers brought in casting director Ellen Parks — whose work included Spanking the Monkey and Secretary — and began assembling a cast. Referring to Parks, Granik enthused, “She is a profound friend of independent films and will take risks with some stories she can get behind. That got the cogs rolling. We discovered a lead actress that massively inspired us, who is from the area the film was made. Vera Farmiga was willing to put her blood and soul into the film.”

Vera Farmiga — whose most visible role had been the Eastern European hairdresser who witnesses a murder in the Robert DeNiro flick 15 Minutes — stated “I love playing women with survival issues. This was the kind of role I would audition for, but always lose to Robin Wright Penn or one of the Kates.” With a working title of Down to the Bone and a budget of $500,000, Granik began a 24-day shooting schedule in Woodstock and surrounding Ulster County, New York in February 2003. Granik mused, “Enough positive things started to gel, and that helped us make the movie. It’s like that saying: if you keep showing up, you can do it. We kept showing up.”

Using a Sony PD-150 PAL, director of photography Michael McDonough resorted to a cinema vérité style. He recalled, “We wanted the look of the film to be realistic and had always planned to shoot mostly hand-held for it’s immediacy and it’s association with vérité. In the end we walked away from principal photography with a 95 percent hand-held movie. Our decision was also based upon the simplicity of the production in relation to the amount of filmmaking clutter around the actors and the sets. Where possible we lit the spaces in advance of shooting entire scenes and attempted to shoot 360 degrees when we could.”

At the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, Down to the Bone won Debra Granik a Dramatic Directing Award, while Vera Farmiga’s performance garnered the actress a Special Jury Prize. Critics would shower the film with praise. Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times: “The kind of movie most independent films strive in vain to be: a small, beautifully faceted gem.” Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times: “Down to the Bone emerges with an aura of authenticity so strong as to be mesmerizing, thanks to a superior script brought to life with infallibly natural performances.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Down to the Bone achieves what only the best independent films have: making life, at its most unvarnished, a journey.”

But despite the enthusiastic reception at film festivals, distributors ran away from Down to the Bone. Granik mused, “The reason why boils down to the word ‘dark’. It is the scariest four-letter word in American storytelling and in this culture. Our film had a strong reception in Europe and achieved distribution, but that was not the case here. We received so many responses like, ‘We love the film, but we cannot do anything with it or we’ll lose our shirts. We’re sorry.’” Finally, in February 2005, Laemmle/Zeller Films stepped up to distribute Down to the Bone in the United States. It was released in November on just two screens, where it tallied $30, 241.

Recording an audio commentary together for the release of Down to the Bone on DVD, Debra Granik and Vera Farmiga were thankful that that film garnered such positive word of mouth at screenings. But the actress admitted, “It’s disappointing though. It was really disappointing to me. I wanted people to see — I wanted a lay audience to see it — and not just privileged industry. It was disappointing.” Of the 1,400 screeners of Down to the Bone that Laemmle/Zeller Films sent to the Motion Picture Academy, one arrived in the mailbox of Martin Scorsese, who cast Farmiga as the police psychologist in his 2006 thriller The Departed.

Should I Care?
Down to the Bone is a type of movie I typically can’t stand. Whether in a bid for minimalism or as a cost shaving measure, scenes seem to start too late and end too early. The result is that not nearly enough of the film is allowed to unfold in a natural or unforced manner. What does someone who checks herself into a drug rehab center go through to get clean? I’m still not entirely sure on the basis of Down to the Bone, which features a little too much artifice for a documentary-styled film. Pain and discomfort are a part of life, but so is humor, which is virtually absent here, and music, which Granik also banned, forcing her feature debut to play out in awkward silences instead.

Vera Farmiga. Upstaged by blood squibs in The Departed, the actress comes across with illuminating intelligence and honesty, assets that make her one of the most exciting performers working in movies today. Debra Granik may have inflicted some beginner driver’s damage on Down to the Bone, but deserves credit for keeping the performances in the film low key. Hugh Dillon gives a terrifically nuanced performance. Natives of upstate New York, Granik and Farmiga convey what winter in these slush covered cow towns feels like. By examining the effects of drug use in a rural environment, the film on the whole is a novel entry in the rehab genre.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
Down to the Bone Press Kit. Laemmle/Zeller Films. 2005

“Cutting Close to the Bone” By Jeremiah Kipp. Filmmaker Magazine. 21 November 2005

Down to the Bone. DVD audio commentary with Debra Granik & Vera Farmiga. Arts Alliance America (2006)

What the *&#! Is This About?
“A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski,” says the voice of the Stranger (Sam Elliott) as he follows tumbleweed blowing through the streets of Los Angeles. Jeff Lebowski, alias the Dude (Jeff Bridges) shuffles through Ralph’s in his bathrobe and sandals in search of creamer for his White Russian. The Stranger continues, “And even if he’s a lazy man – and the Dude was most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide …” The Dude returns home to be attacked by goons that have confused him with another Jeff Lebowski. Seeking to collect a debt, one of the goons pees on a prized rug belonging to the Dude.

Two pals on the Dude’s bowling team – bitter Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman) and the child-like Donny (Steve Buscemi) – compel him to seek out the other Jeff Lebowski for compensation. After being given a tour of Lebowski’s mansion by his loyal personal assistant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), wheelchair bound industrialist Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) refuses to replace the Dude’s rug as a matter of principle. The Dude takes one anyway, and on his way out, meets Lebowski’s trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid). When Bunny is kidnapped, her husband employs the Dude to handle the ransom exchange in hopes he can identify the rug peers as her kidnappers.

The Dude sees fit to bring Walter along for the exchange, but his militaristic buddy only screws things up. The Dude leaves the ransom money in the backseat of his ‘73 Ford Torino, which is promptly stolen out of the bowling alley parking lot. Lebowski directs the kidnappers – German nihilists (Peter Stomare, Flea, Aimee Mann) – to take matters up with the Dude. Meanwhile, Lebowski’s daughter, an avant garde artist named Maude (Julianne Moore) with a strange continental speech inflection surfaces with an proposition of her own for the Dude. Juggling this intrigue with his Thai stick reefers and his bowling tournament proves exhausting, particularly with the Dude’s team being taunted by their rival, a Hispanic pederast named Jesus Quintana (John Turturro).

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Big Lebowski may have had its origins in a visit that filmmakers Ethan Coen & Joel Coen paid to the Los Angeles home of a producer’s assistant named Pete Exline in the mid-1980s, during the time they were scrounging financing for their first feature, Blood Simple. Tickled by Exline’s sense of humor, the Coen brothers would come to refer to him as “the Philosopher King of Hollywood” and “Uncle Pete”. As Ethan Coen recalled it, “We were at Pete’s house, which was, you know, kind of a dump. Uncle Pete was in a bad mood for some reason. He was feeling down. So, we complimented him on his place, and he told us how proud he was of this ratty-ass little rug he had in the living room and how it ‘tied the room together.’ So we told him that we too thought it ‘tied the room together.’ We just kept talking about how it ‘tied the room together.’ You know how you beat something to death.”

Ethan Coen continued, “Pete is a Vietnam vet. Very bitter. Whenever the subject of Vietnam comes up, he says, ‘Well, we were winning when I left.’ You know, after the Gulf War was over in a hundred hours, or whatever the fuck it was, Uncle Pete called up and said, ‘Look, it’s a lot different fighting in the desert and fighting in a canopy jungle.’ Defensive acrimony.” Exline had buddy named Lew Abernathy, who was also a vet, and had knocked around Hollywood as an actor and writer, as well as a private investigator. One of Uncle Pete’s favorite stories was Lew having his car stolen by joyriders. Retrieving the vehicle at the police impound, Lew discovered one of the perpetrators had left his homework in the back seat. Sealing the evidence in a baggie, the men tracked the juvenile down and confronted him.

Another character the Coen brothers ran across was Jeff Dowd, a movie marketing consultant – he helped finance Blood Simple – who’d been involved in the Seattle anti-war movement of the early 1970s. Dowd was referred to as “the Pope of Dope” as well as “the Dude”. On the opposite end of the political spectrum was producer/director John Milius, a military enthusiast whose gift of gab prompted the Coen brothers to offer him the role of the studio boss in Barton Fink. Ethan Coen recalled, “You sort of know these people and hear these stories and they all sort of figure together in nebulous ways. The character of Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is personally more like Jeff Dowd and Jeff’s whole way of seeing things. And, not that the character is based on him in any literal way, but John Milius is sort of like Walter Sobchak. Pete Exline is a bit of both. One of the early ingredients came in setting these two characters beside each other – the Dude and Walter – and these two characters somehow seeming promising.”

Once the Coen brothers paired the Dude with Walter – using the crime of a soiled rug in contemporary Los Angeles as a catalyst – a story began to crystallize, which the brothers loosely based on the narrative structure of a Raymond Chandler novel. Unlike their experience writing Miller’s Crossing, the filmmakers didn’t exactly beat their heads against the wall completing a script. Joel Coen recalled, “This one we sort of figured, you know, if things become a little bit too complicated and they’re unclear it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the plot is not – and again, this is similar to Chandler – the plot is sort of secondary to the other things that are sort of going on in the piece. I think, if people get a little bit confused, I don’t think really, necessarily, going to get in the way of them enjoying the movie. Um, yeah. You look at something like The Big Sleep, and nobody seemed to know – including the people who sort of wrote it – what the hell is going on in that plot either.”

Referring to the Dude, Ethan Coen added, “It just seemed interesting to us to thrust that character into the most confusing situation possible. The person who would seem – on the face of it – least equipped to deal with it. That’s sort of the conceit of the movie.” The Coen brothers had a script for The Big Lebowski finished by the time they wrapped The Hudsucker Proxy in 1993. Walter Sobchak had been written for John Goodman, but the actor’s hiatus from the sitcom Roseanne didn’t line up with the production schedule. The role of the Dude hadn’t been written with any particular actor in mind, but the filmmakers wanted Jeff Bridges playing the part. Bridges had committed to star in Wild Bill and wasn’t available either. Rather than consider other actors, the Coen brothers turned their attention to Fargo instead. The 1996 crime film became the critical and commercial pinnacle of their careers, winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

When the time came to turn their attention back to The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers had little difficulty assembling the cast they wanted. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I had heard, or they had told me, that they had written a script for me. And I was a big fan of theirs – I loved Blood Simple. And when they finally gave me the script, I was kind of surprised in a wonderful way. I loved the story and everything, but it was quite unlike anything I’d done before; and it seemed like they had spied on me at a couple of high school parties I was at.” Years later, John Goodman stated, “It’s just so well fucking written. It’s the writing. The writing, the detail. I’m not going to start making up words here, but it’s the noir quality of it, oh crap, it’s just funny. Jesus Christ, you know, my fondest wish is that we could do another one. But if we did, it would fuck everything up. It would just ruin everything.”

With Working Title picking up the roughly $15 million budget, The Big Lebowski commenced a thirteen week production schedule January 1997 in Los Angeles. To serve as director of photography, the Coen brothers reteamed with Roger Deakins, whom they’d met in 1990 – searching for a DP who was both non-union and established – to shoot Barton Fink. His preference for using a single camera and prime lenses suited the way in which the filmmakers liked to work: tightly. Deakins recalled, “It means you’re locked into shooting at 50mm or 32mm or whatever the lens’s focal length is, whereas with a zoom lens you can change the focal length during the shot. Which I think is a little bit of a sloppy way of shooting – pulling back on the lens as opposed to moving the camera. Using fixed lenses creates a sort of precision to your work. It forces you to think.” By 2009, Deakins had racked up eight Academy Award nominations, with four of those nods – Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country For Old Men – working with the Coen brothers.

When The Big Lebowski rolled into theaters March 1998 in the U.S., critical reaction was all over the map. Daphne Merkin, the New Yorker: “The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie’s core, but in the end there’s no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.” Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle: “It’s paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.” With box office receipts of $17.4 million in the States, the popular opinion at the time was that The Big Lebowski definitely did not measure up to Fargo.

A disjointed but diehard group of fans began to discover The Big Lebowski on their own and struck an opposing view. In July 2002, journalist Steve Palopoli wrote an article about the film for the Metro Santa Cruz in which he referred to The Big Lebowski as “either the last great cult film of the 20th century or the first great cult film of the 21st, depending on how you look at it.” Not long after, the Nickelodeon Theater in Santa Cruz, California started running The Big Lebowski on Friday and Saturday at midnight. Palopoli recalled, “The first weekend they played it, they turned away several hundred people. They held it over, which they had never done, for six weeks. It was like an old-fashioned movie experience. People were yelling quotes before it ever started. It sold out every weekend for a month.”

In October 2002, two buddies in Kentucky named Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell threw “The First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest” at a bowling alley in Louisville. 150 fans attended. A website was launched and since, Lebowski Fest has traveled to New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle and Chicago, drawing thousands of fans in a weekend bowling tournament/ costume party/ fan convention. In an interview with Mr. Media in December 2007, Shuffitt and Russell were asked how one movie could inspire such an outpouring of devotion. Shuffitt: “Man, that’s a good question. I don’t even know that I know. To the best of my knowledge, it’s just a film that a lot of people enjoy, and I think that a lot of people can relate to the characters. And I think that a lot of people want to be Dude-esque and just take it easy. It was written very, very well. It’s a really good comedy. It’s shot really well. The imagery is beautiful. So I guess you add all those things together, and we end up with what we have now, which is…” Russell: “ … out of control.”

Peter Stomare commented, “It’s like a homage to California. But at the same time, in my home country of Sweden, they love The Big Lebowski too, and in Germany and Italy – everywhere I’ve been. I didn’t know it was such a global thing. It’s a combination of the craziness of being a regular human being and ending up in such a mess. Everything’s so bizarre. It’s like California. I thought it would never take off in other parts of the U.S., but it definitely did, especially the DVD.” While the Coen brothers refuse to dwell on the film’s status as a cult classic, Pete Exline offered his take on the popularity of The Big Lebowski. “I really think that it’s just the humor. If anything, if I had to analyze it beyond the humor, it’s the perfect adolescent movie because the Dude is a guy who just refuses to grow up, and the other Lebowski is like the nightmare father. Here’s this guy who is just, like, doing what he wants to do, getting stoned and bowling and outsmarting the Man. It’s a movie that each viewing, I notice something that’s funny that I never noticed before. So in that way, it’s kind of a gold mine.”

Why Should I Care?
The short, strange trip that The Big Lebowski made from box office misfire to one of the most celebrated cult classics of all time has a mythic quality to it that the Stranger himself might even appreciate. Without test screenings, focus groups, an Oscar campaign or the endorsement of mainstream critics – Roger Ebert voted a lukewarm thumbs up, while Gene Siskel panned it, proclaiming “The Big Lebowski, a big disappointment” – this may end up being the Coen brothers feature that the filmmakers of tomorrow discover first. Goofing on the movie in altered states is enjoyable, but the real joy of The Big Lebowski comes to you in sobriety, where closer examination allows the film’s goofball universe, crackerjack visual composition, irreverence and most importantly, the performances of the cast to wash over you like a live action Merrie Melodies. This ain’t really comic perfection, but it is the perfect comedy.

If the second hour loses the characters somewhat to drags down in a convoluted haze of Thai stick, what’s beautiful about The Big Lebowski is its offbeat perspective and how the performers embody that perspective magnificently. The bowling alley diatribes featuring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and generous uses of the “fuck” word are brilliant in how each character is clearly off in their own oddball orbit, yet on the same plane as well. In addition to the acting, the recurring manners of speech (“In the parlance of our times … ”) grow more infectious the longer they have to bounce around the head. Even without the quips, this would be a triumph in cinematography (Roger Deakins), costume design (Mary Zophres) and music (Sons of the Pioneers, The Gipsy Kings, Kenny Rogers). The Coen brothers offer a sly mockery of Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and a goofy homage to it at the same time. This is their finest film to date.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. Text by William Preston Robertson, edited by Tricia Cookie.W.W. Norton & Company (1998)

I’m A Lebowski, You’re A Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You. By Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell & Scott Shuffitt. Bloomsbury USA (2007)

“The Making of The Big Lebowski” The Big Lebowski: 10th Anniversary Edition. Universal Home Video (2008)

Synopsis
In the city of Hermosa Beach, gun smuggler Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) entertains dim-witted prison buddy Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) with his knowledge of the firearms trade. Ordell’s girlfriend – an insolent, bong loving beach bunny named Melanie (Bridget Fonda) – is hardly impressed. “He’s just repeating shit he overheard. He ain’t any more of a gun expert than I am.” Ordell receives an urgent phone call from Beaumont – an associate who’s been arrested for drunk driving with a pistol. Ordell hires competent bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to post bail. A freed man, Beaumont (Chris Tucker) receives a visit from Ordell, who lures the compromised employee to his death using Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n Waffles as bait.

Meanwhile, stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is intercepted returning from Mexico by an LAPD detective (Michael Bowen) and a high charged ATF Special Agent named Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton). Caught with $50,000 and a bag of cocaine, Jackie remains mum on who the contraband belongs to. Hired by Ordell to bail the stewardess out of County, Max falls for Jackie at first sight. Ordell drops by Jackie’s apartment with the intent of silencing her as well, but Jackie is ready for him. Faced with a year in prison if she stands mute, or a walk if she rats on Ordell, she demands $100,000 for each year in prison she’s given. In return, she convinces Ordell that she’s worked out a plan to retrieve half a million dollars he’s amassed from an airport locker in Cabo.

Confiding to Max that she actually intends to cooperate with the authorities and set Ordell up, Jackie reveals her biggest fear: “And if I lose this job I gotta start all over again and I ain’t got nothin to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get.” With Max making up his mind that he’s tired of the bail bond business, he agrees to help Jackie scam not only Ordell, but get away with his money under the nose of the ATF. When the carefully orchestrated sting at Del Amo Mall culminates with Ordell’s half million disappearing, Ordell first blames Louis and Melanie, who the smuggler entrusted with making the pickup. To stay out of jail, Jackie has to convince Nicolette that she’s on his side. To stay alive, Max has to convince Ordell that Jackie was protecting him, and that she’s waiting to give him his money face to face.

Production history
Elmore Leonard was the first novelist Quentin Tarantino ever read. According to legend, Tarantino was caught shoplifting a copy of The Switch from K-Mart when he was 15 years old and was almost taken to jail. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in 1994, Tarantino revealed, “I love Elmore Leonard. In fact, to me True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie that he didn’t write, you know. And like, actually, I actually owe a big debt to like, kind of figuring out my style from Elmore Leonard because, you know, he was the first writer I’d ever read – and, but also like Charles Willeford did it as well – but he was one of the first writers I had ever read that just let mundane conversations actually inform the characters, you know, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boof!,’ you know, you’re into whatever story you’re telling.”

Published in 1992, Rum Punch was Leonard’s 29th novel. Recalling its genesis, the celebrated author stated, “I decided I wanted to do a book about a bail bondsman because of the kind of people he’s involved with every day. A story has to come out of that situation. My researcher found a bail bondsman for me who understood what we wanted to do. He was very willing to cooperate. So I learned about his business and started to write the book about a bondsman doing his job. I realized not too far into the book that he wasn’t my main character. The woman, Jackie, was the main character. The plot was happening to her. And then the other characters fall right into place on opposite sides of her. She’s caught in the middle and how does she get out?”

Tarantino and his producing partner Lawrence Bender read Rum Punch in galleys as they were getting ready to make Pulp Fiction. Bender attempted to option the book, but was rebuked by Leonard’s publisher. The situation changed once Pulp Fiction became a critical and commercial sensation. Miramax Films optioned four Elmore Leonard novels for the filmmaker: Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot and Rum Punch. At one time, Tarantino envisioned adapting, producing and co-starring in Killshot opposite Robert DeNiro for director Tony Scott, but the film was ultimately directed by John Madden with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Mickey Rourke (it first wrapped in 2005 but as of November 2008, still hasn’t been released by the Weinstein Company).

Lawrence Bender referred to Tarantino’s affinity for Rum Punch as “The thing that sort of rose to the top I think in terms of his consciousness, and I was really happy because I’ve always loved the book and I’ve always wanted to make it.” In his adaptation, Tarantino made key alterations. The action shifted from South Florida to the South Bay of Los Angeles – Hermosa Beach, Carson, Torrance – where Tarantino grew up. “I don’t know Miami at all, but I know South Bay like the back of my hand. This was a way for me to make this movie personal to myself and to be confident that I could keep it real. In a South Bay context I knew exactly where each of these people would live, how they would dress, what their apartments would look like. Shooting in Miami I would not have come to those things as naturally.”

Tarantino also changed the lead character from a white airline stewardess named Jackie Burke to a black stewardess named Jackie Brown, with Pam Grier in mind to play her. Grier had auditioned for the role in Pulp Fiction that ultimately went to Rosanna Arquette, but Tarantino had promised her they’d work together on something else. After Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda joined the cast, Tarantino was trying to settle on who would play Max Cherry, the bail bondsman. “I had Paul Newman in mind; I had Gene Hackman in mind; I had John Saxon in mind; and I had Robert Forster in mind. I was always leaning more towards Robert Forster than the other guys. I didn’t have to cast him right away. I had my options open.”

Robert Forster had gained notice starring in the 1969 cult classic Medium Cool before descending into short-lived TV series like Banyon and – with the exception of Alligator – one forgettable B-movie after another. The actor recalled, “The past five years, I hadn’t gotten a job for more than scale; and terrible, junky stuff that you take when you’ve got a kid in college and an ex-wife. Then Quentin comes along and says, ‘You’ve waited long enough. Now you’re going to work again.’ I can’t describe the feeling.” Receiving membership privileges in what Variety critic Michael Fleming referred to as “Tarantino’s Rediscovery Network,” Forster would receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and like John Travolta and David Carradine, never have to look for work again.

With a $12 million budget from Miramax and Guillermo Navarro serving as director of photography, Tarantino’s third film commenced shooting May 1997 in Los Angeles. “My cinematographer and I watched two movies: Hickey and Boggs, which was directed by Robert Culp and was shot in the 70’s – it’s a really good movie. And then we watched They All Laughed, by Peter Bogdanovich. Both were perfect for Jackie Brown. They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think. It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there. And we kind of used it. And then we watched Straight Time, one of the best L.A. crime movies ever. But I wanted Jackie Brown to look more like a movie than that. Straight Time is too gritty.”

With Tarantino and editor Sally Menke working on the film up to December 4, Jackie Brown snuck into theaters Christmas Day 1997. Critics responded coolly. Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times: “But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn’t sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don’t arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.” Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “A raunchy doodle, a leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.”

Jackie Brown grossed $39.6 million in the U.S., but compared to the $213 million Pulp Fiction made all over the globe and the celebration that followed in the press, Tarantino felt disconnected from his follow-up. In an interview with Sight & Sound in February 2008, he commented, “One of the things that is fun about reading books is it puts you in a complete different environment. If you read one of Ian Rankin’s books and you think you got a good excuse to go to Edinburgh and shoot this big Scottish thing that could be really fun. But I lost my stamina in the last quarter of the last lap of Jackie Brown and part of the reason was I wasn’t taking something I created from scratch from a blank piece of paper and turning it into a full project. When I finished the edit and got my cut the way I wanted, I was emotionally done. I believe people could say it’s my best movie, but there’s a slight once-removed quality, located somewhere in my balls where that doesn’t live.”

Opinion
For every member of the “Quentin Tarantino Is a Hack” Society, there’s probably something to dislike about Jackie Brown. Samuel L. Jackson is once again allowed to do too much and draws a spotlight on how pleased some of Tarantino’s dialogue is with itself. And at a notch above 2 ½ hours, it is too long. While Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill warranted epic running times, here, the story barely seems to warrant the excess. What ends up being so remarkable about Jackie Brown is that, while using the Blaxploitation genre of the ‘70s as a touchstone, Tarantino refuses to populate the film with pimps, prostitutes or private dicks and in a stunner, composes as subtle, mature and self-assured a modern love story as any director at any stage of his career.

Like all great cult classics, Jackie Brown offers little in the way of instant gratification. Four shootings each happen just out of frame. Instead of bullets, words are the primary weapon of choice. Plot device and style are almost invisible; it’s character and performance that take center stage and on that count, the film is brilliant. Pam Grier’s moments with Robert Forster soar. Bridget Fonda gives the performance of a lifetime as one of the goofiest vixens ever seen in a caper. Samuel L. Jackson’s scenes with DeNiro are monumental. While a remake of The Big Bird Cage might have passed for daring by a less gifted filmmaker, Tarantino demonstrates remarkable taste by recognizing what makes an Elmore Leonard novel special: human beings expressing their fears and desires, while stealing lots of money.

Richard Booth at DVD Times writes, “Jackie Brown is not over-indulgent or flawed, in fact it’s almost as good as his first two efforts. The more times you watch it, the more engrossing it gets, until there comes a point where it can proudly stand alongside Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It may not be quite as good, lacking the hip edge that defined his first two films, but the few flaws in the film actually shape it, and the more mature approach taken show that Tarantino possesses layers as a filmmaker.”

Dawn Taylor at The DVD Journal writes, “A more leisurely paced, less-violent film than his first two, Jackie Brown is a movie that improves with age. The performances are top-notch, the setting, clothes, music and other details are timeless, and the writing dazzles. However, at two hours, 31 minutes it’s far too long and starts to wear out its welcome before QT finally ties all of the pieces together. But despite that, there’s some moments of sheer genius in the picture, most notably when the climactic money exchange is shown from three different perspectives — each new version offers delicious, important details that were missed from the other characters’ point of view, and the sheer fun of it all reminds us of why we go to the movies in the first place: to be surprised, thrilled, and entertained.”

© Joe Valdez