The Namesake (2007)
Screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Directed by Mira Nair
Produced by Mirabai Films/ Cine Mosaic
Running time: 122 minutes

So, What’s This About?
En route by train from Calcutta to Dungarpur in the year 1974, Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) is pried away from Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat by a passenger who implores the bookworm to see the world while he’s young and free. Three years later, Ashoke returns from New York, where he’s earning a PH.d in fiber optics. He participates in a family arranged marriage to a spirited classical singer named Ashima (Tabu), who accepts because she likes Ashoke’s shoes. Uprooted to suburban New York — where gas is available 24 hours a day, but she misses her family — Ashima bares a son, who Ashoke blesses with the “pet name” of his favorite writer: Gogol.

At the age of 4, their son makes the unconventional choice of going by his pet name in America, but years later, on the verge of entering Yale, Gogol (Kal Penn) rejects his “paranoid, suicidal, friendless, depressed” poet namesake and reverts to a variation on his “good name”: Nick. A family vacation to India and a visit to the Taj Mahal convince Gogol to major in architecture. He later introduces his parents to his very loving, very blonde girlfriend (Jacinda Barrett), but a sudden death in the family pulls Gogol closer to his Bengali roots. He marries a Bengali in New York — the heady Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson) — but only faces more questions about his cultural identity.

Who Made It?
Born in London, raised in Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College and three M.A.’s and her PH.d (in Renaissance Studies) from Boston University. Her first book — the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies — was published in 1999. On its way to becoming a bestseller, New York Magazine named it the Book of the Year and Lahiri became the first writer of Asian descent to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her first novel — The Namesake — arrived in 2003. After reading it by chance on a flight from New York to India, filmmaker Mira Nair optioned the novel, putting two other projects aside to direct a film adaptation.

Mira Nair attended Delhi University to study sociology, but soon became active in political theater. Attending Harvard, her focus shifted to photography and finally, filmmaking. Her 1979 Harvard thesis — Jama Masjid Street Journal — documented Muslim family life in Delhi. A critically acclaimed feature film debut — Salaam Bombay! (1988) — earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Moving between features and documentaries, Nair scored a critical and commercial success with the low budget Monsoon Wedding in 2001. The Namesake reunited her with producer Lydia Dean Pilcher — founder of Cine Mosaic — and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, author of three of Nair’s previous films.

How’d They Do It?
A note Jhumpa Lahiri wrote to herself in 1997 during one of her visits to extended family in Calcutta would form the basis for her debut novel, The Namesake. Lahiri recalled, “The names we have — we think they’re so much about who we are and that they are the one word that exists that represents us, and yet, we don’t choose them. They’re from our parents. And I knew that Bengalis loved to name children after artists and writers. I literally wrote down on a piece of paper: a boy named Gogol.” Working on the novel for the next six years, Lahiri researched Russian author Nikolai Gogol and train wrecks, but relied mostly on experiences she’d made during her stays in India.

Published to great acclaim in 2003, Mira Nair read The Namesake on a flight from New York to India six months after purchasing the novel. “I was committed making two other films — they were already financed and everything — when I read The Namesake by chance on a plane. At first it was really being inspired by grief: I was in mourning for a parent I had lost — my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me — and burying her in the snow of New York when she was an African woman was so shocking and so devastating, and also the first time in my life to be confronted with the finality of loss. I felt Jhumpa really distilled this and like I had found a sister or someone who understood exactly what I was going through.”

Nair continued, “But then as I got more involved with it, it was obviously not your classic reductive immigrant story of the mail-order bride who comes from the dirt poor to the shiny sparkling new world. None of those stories do justice to the complexities of our lives, of our parents and us and so on. And I have to get visually engaged or inspired and both these cities, New York and Calcutta, I know so well, and I have lived in that state between them for so long. What I love in filmmaking in general is the circus of life and that subject matter just gave me so much, so many places to go.” Arriving in Jodhpur to shoot the finale of Vanity Fair, Nair phoned her agent and was told that the film rights to The Namesake were available.

A week later, Nair was back in New York to sit with Jhumpa Lahiri and discuss her vision for The Namesake. Adapting a screenplay, Nair turned to Sooni Taraporevala, who’d written Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala with the director. The screenwriter recalled, “The vital thing, I think, is that Mira and I connected with the emotional landscape. On both levels. I connected with Gogol because I too studied in America, and, when I came back after six years, my parents didn’t really recognize me. And I connected with the parents, because, well, I’m one myself now. It’s a story that reaches out to all the generations, and I think this adaptation came at a time I was ready for it, when I could completely relate to all of the characters.”

With Mira Nair in New York corresponding with the Mumbai-based Sooni Taraporevala via email in March 2004, a first draft was knocked out in “an insane 11 days” according to the screenwriter. Though Nair’s agent at Creative Artists Agency — Bart Walker — initially pushed for a script they could present to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Nair opted to work with Taraporevala through six drafts and take the necessary time to discover the world of The Namesake. The director revealed, “One of the first things I asked Jhumpa to do was to invite me home to her family. And I photographed their house and also photographed their photograph album. A lot of the fashion, a lot of the kind of ideas of what the parents will wear and so on would emerge from these pictures.”

Producer Lydia Dean Pilcher arrived on a budget of $9.6 million and split financing three ways: Ronnie Screwvala of Bombay-based UTV Motion Pictures, Taka Ichise of Tokyo-based Entertainment Farm and Fox Searchlight Pictures each invested $3.2 million in financing. Fox Searchlight was interested in distributing the picture worldwide, but Nair added, “I felt with The Namesake that I needed an Indian investor who was invested in it in the beginning so that I would have somebody homegrown who would then exploit this film — even though it’s not going to be made like a Bollywood film, or like a commercial Indian film in any way — but I want somebody on the turf there who knows the systems and who can be invested enough in it to give me a really substantial distribution.”

Konkona Sen Sharma was initially cast in the role of Ashima, but when filming was pushed back, the actress had to drop out. Two weeks before cameras rolled, the National Film Award winning Tabu was cast instead, making her Hollywood debut. Nair added, “Irrfan Khan who plays Ashoke was someone I discovered when he was 18 years old and I was what, 29, in a basement in the National School of Drama, where he was a student. And he came out and worked with me in my first film Salaam Bombay! and since then, I’ve longed to give him a part that deserves his extraordinary, extraordinary talent.” Interested in casting an Indian actor in the role of Gogol, Nair settled on Abhishek Bachchan.

Kal Penn had been given a copy of The Namesake by his Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle co-star John Cho. Penn recalled, “As soon as I read it we talked about trying to get the rights. We placed calls to our respective lawyers and in the interim said we don’t know anybody other than Mira Nair who could do justice to the intimacy of the novel. And then we got the phone call back saying, ‘You can’t have the rights. Mira Nair beat you to it.’” Undeterred, Penn wrote Nair a letter, crediting Mississippi Masala for his pursuit of acting. He received an invitation to fly to Calcutta to audition. With the lobbying efforts of Nair’s 13-year-old son as a bonus, Penn won the part. A 28-day shooting schedule would commence March 2005 in New York, followed by 11 days in Kolkata, India.

The Namesake screened at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals in September 2006 before opening in the United States, India, France and the U.K. in March 2007. Critics were effusive with praise. Toddy Burton, The Austin Chronicle: “Reminiscent of Jim Sheridan’s masterly In America, The Namesake delivers such a tactile presence that it’s difficult not to leave feeling as if you’ve just struggled through a New York winter, attended an Indian wedding, and returned from a Calcutta holiday.” Dennis Lim, The Los Angeles Times: “Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri’s novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.”

Earning $13.5 million at the U.S. box office and adding $6.5 million overseas, The Namesake became another gem in Mira Nair’s growing filmography. The director stated, “I made this film to take families to because as a mother of a 15-year-old, it is an insult to my intelligence those family films. There’s no film I can take my whole family to and enjoy — it’s very rare. So I wanted to make a film where I could take my grandparents and my teenager, and we could all get something from it that wouldn’t insult us, that would actually jam us and take us somewhere. So it would be seen like that as a film for the family.”

Should I Care?
I’ve never read Jhumpa Lahiri’s bestseller, but if The Namesake isn’t one of the richest, most deeply affecting adaptations of print to film in recent memory, I can’t imagine what is. Powered by the same currents that make a good novel so rewarding, Mira Nair’s jewel of a film offers no instant gratification — no plot twists, no special effects, no jokes — but through the narrative skills and confidence of a filmmaker firing on all cylinders, is crafted into a great story of both intimacy and scope. Spanning 25 years and two cities on opposite ends of the globe, The Namesake is one of the best ‘70s films of the 21st century, touching The Godfather Part II and Five Easy Pieces with varying degrees of subtle brilliance.

An embarrassment of technical riches — cinematographer Frederick Elmes, editor Allyson Johnson and composer Nitin Sawhney deserved Oscar nominations for their textured work — what’s magnificent about The Namesake is the atmosphere, sensuality and mystique that drip from the film. Watching this, it’s clear Warner Bros. knew what they were doing offering Mira Nair the fourth Harry Potter installment: in addition to drawing excellent performances from actors both young and old, she understands the magic of film. Growing up outside the U.S., it’s Nair — along with Peter Weir, Alfonso Cuarón and Hayao Miyazaki, among a growing list — who seem to be making the most original, thought provoking and grown up films today.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Catching Up With Pulitzer Prize Winner Jhumpa Lahiri” By Matthew Sloan. Poets & Writers, October 2003

“Nair’s The Namesake: A Life Between Two Worlds” NPR, 9 March 2007

“Mira Nair: Q&A” By Ben Walters. Time Out London, 27 March 2007

“Godmothers of The Namesake” By Craig Lambert. Harvard Magazine, March 2007

“From Salaam Bombay to Little Zizou” Rediff News, April 2007

“The Anatomy of The Namesake with Mira Nair” The Namesake. 20th Century Fox (2007)

“Mira Nair Interview, The Namesake” By Sheila Roberts. Movies Online

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?
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the school year at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiations. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose older sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her brother. The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation.

One of the 8th grade pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around looking for something else to do with all the other kids. This includes Slater (Rory Cochrane), a stoner whose access to party favors makes him a VIP presence at whatever party is in the offing, and the beatnik Michelle (Milla Jovovich) who steals two bronze statues to paint them in the likeness of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his social circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Born in Houston and raised in the town of Huntsville, Richard Linklater would drop out of local Sam Houston State University and take work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico instead of finishing college. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began making short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature film that Linklater shot in the summer of 1989 for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals two years later. This got the attention of producer Jim Jacks, who – with partner Sean Daniel – had a development deal with Universal Pictures. Linklater recalled, “I told him I had this teenage rock and roll film that I felt was my next movie.”

Richard Linklater added, “I’d always had this idea for a strange high school film. I remember being a high school freshman in Huntsville and driving around all night with three or four guys in a Le Mans, listening to an eight-track tape of ZZ Top’s ‘Fandango’. Eight-tracks never ended; a song would get quiet, you would hear a click, and then it would pick back up. So I wanted the film to start with a close-up shot of ‘Fandango’ sliding into the eight-track player and then have a whole movie in this car, meeting people who drove up next to you, going through the drive-through, getting out and getting beer – basically always in and around the car. But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.”

To assemble a cast, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel brought in Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met virtually every up and coming actor and actress during the auditions in Los Angeles. Phillips recalled, “Vince Vaughn was there, but he was competing with Cole and Ben, and he didn’t get it. Neither did Claire Danes, whom Rick Linklater and I loved but was more of an Eastern-school type. And poor Ashley Judd – she never even got to meet Rick. Then I get to Austin, and that’s when I met Renée Zellweger. I went, ‘Isn’t this girl interesting?’ When Rick and I saw her together, we read her and thought, ‘Ahh, man! Too bad that everybody’s set, because she would have been perfect.’ So we gave her that teeny part in the parking lot.” Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay convinced him to audition for a part; the 15-year-old ended up cast as Mitch.

Due to graduation ceremonies at the University of Texas, Don Phillips was making due with a room at the Hyatt and hanging out in the bar. A part-time waiter named Matthew McConaughey strolled in with his girlfriend. When the bartender mentioned that Phillips was in town to produce a movie, McConaughey went over to introduce himself. He’d appeared in a music video and a beer commercial, but had never acted in a movie. After drinking and talking golf with Phillips for hours, the casting director proposed McConaughey come in and read for the role of Wooderson. Linklater recalled, “I thought he was too good-looking. Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy. I thought, ‘Okay, don’t cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?’

After Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel had convinced Universal that Richard Linklater might be another George Lucas and Dazed and Confused could be the next American Graffiti, shooting commenced July 1992 in Austin on a budget of $6.9 million. In terms of style, Linklater wanted to make a movie that felt like it had actually been shot in 1976. He recalled, “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

With a 38 day shooting schedule, cast and crew worked on the fly. Linklater recalled, “I wanted a montage sequence at the beer bust to give the essence of the party. But it’s hard to script the essence of a party, and if you don’t have it in the script, you don’t have it on the shooting schedule. So we had about thirty minutes and a couple of cameras to get it. We cranked up the music, asked people to move, and followed them around. I’d run up to Rory Cochrane and whisper, ‘Okay, you’re trying to score some weed off somebody,’ and he’d go with it and we’d film.” When a scripted crush between Tony and Cynthia failed to spark much chemistry between Anthony Rapp and Marissa Ribisi, the director suggested maybe her character should go for Wooderson instead. Ribisi recalled, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is genius.’ He’s everything she’s against. She’s this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she’s into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She’s so smitten she can’t speak.”

One of Richard Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The real battle came over the soundtrack. In need of a $300,000 advance to begin obtaining the clearances for the songs he’d selected, the studio suggested that Linklater instead consider using contemporary bands singing cover versions. This was seen as a way to get the movie exposure on MTV. Linklater recalled, “At that moment we didn’t have any money, and I still needed it to finish the film. There was a threat that I’d have to start cutting songs. Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ alone cost $80,000. Finally the studio said, ‘Okay, we’ll come up with the money, but only if you give up all your royalties from the soundtrack.’ I said, ‘Fine. Just don’t screw with my movie. You can rob me, take everything I have. Just don’t kill my family.’”

When released September 1993 in the U.S., critics were unequivocal in their praise. Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “Dazed and Confused is one of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It’s smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed. The movie is structured as a period ensemble piece about a specific group of teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. But it also functions as a timeless social study of high school character types and a disclosure of commonplace abuses of power in this social system.” Peter Ranier, the Los Angeles Times: “It’s a highly enjoyable spree that doesn’t add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don’t necessarily want it to add up to anything – that’s part of its charm.” Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “No film whose plot involves the quest for Aerosmith tickets can take itself too seriously. So Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.”

Unfortunately, Dazed and Confused had its box office fate sealed months earlier, when it went before test audiences in Los Angeles. Linklater recalled, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.” Never expanding beyond 214 theaters in the U.S., Dazed and Confused scored only $7.9 million at the box office. Over time though – as the film’s reputation among college students blossomed – sales of VHS tapes and DVDs would ultimately top $30 million. Two volumes of the soundtrack – Dazed and Confused and Even More Dazed and Confused – have sold more than two million copies.

Looking back on Dazed and Confused ten years later, Richard Linklater contrasted the experience to the one he had working independently on Slacker. “It was probably the biggest leap I’ve ever made. Like doing a film where someone else paid for it. It was technically my third film, I had done one film completely alone, then I did one film with a crew of about six or seven and that’s a big leap there, to communicate with a crew and throw your ideas out there. This was a bigger leap even still, like how you make it within the system with a really tight schedule with all the previews and all that stuff. A lot of people fall apart at that level. I think the studio was sick of me and didn’t like me by the end, but I was pretty happy to get out alive with the film that I wanted to make. If I had listened to them and done everything that they wanted, we wouldn’t be talking today, I’ll put it that way.”

Should I Care?
Gramercy Pictures – the short lived distributor launched in 1993 as a venture between Universal Pictures and PolyGram – had apparently exhausted their marketing ideas by the time they arrived on the High Times approach, issuing posters with taglines like “See It with a Bud”. The MPAA objected to the drug references and ordered Gramercy make alterations. Richard Linklater – who had no input into the campaign – lamented, ”They were marketing it for dumb teenagers, but what are you gonna do?” Ultimately, this is a movie that stoners just don’t deserve. Half Baked, they deserve. Dazed and Confused on the other hand is a film whose token toker ends up with maybe three lines of dialogue, tops. Instead of jokes, what Linklater seems to be going for is a brutally honest reevaluation of 18 hours of his childhood. Banned substances play a role, but so do music, clothes, healthy doses cynicism and the relationships recalled by someone who remembers being there.

While the script digs no more than skin deep into its characters, when it comes to casting, Dazed and Confused is a master class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, but Linklater gets terrific performances from both the pros (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Parker Posey, Cole Hauser) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this madness. Linklater’s take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the experience is alive and fun, enabling us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth. Dazed and Confused feels like one of the most truthful expositions on high school ever made. This is Linklater’s best film.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Smoke Got In Their Eyes” By Jessica Shaw. Entertainment Weekly, 8 October 1993

“The Spirit of ‘76” By John Spong. Texas Monthly, October 2003

“Making Dazed – Catch You Later Dude, Ten Years Later” By Emily Christianson. Film Radar, 14 September 2005

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

Synopsis
Supercop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) responds to a hostage situation involving the axe wielding Ripper (Tom Noonan). Slater saves the city, but loses his son in the standoff, which is all revealed to be the set-up for Jack Slater III, an action spectacle that 11 year old Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) sits through for the sixth time rather than go to school. Danny’s friend is a retiring projectionist (Robert Prosky) who invites the kid back to the theater at midnight to check the print of the latest Jack Slater epic. Danny gets through English class by imaging Slater machine gunning his way through Denmark as Hamlet. He promises his widowed mother (Mercedes Ruehl) to get his head out of the clouds, but instead, sneaks out to the theater, where Nick presents him with a magic ticket Houdini gave to him when he was a kid.

During the projection of Jack Slater IV, the ticket transports Danny into the middle of a car chase in the move. Slater is on the trail of a Sicilian drug lord (Anthony Quinn) and his wily henchman Benedict (Charles Dance). Danny tries to convince Slater that they’re in a movie: all the women look like models, everyone’s phone number begins with 555, and at LAPD headquarters, cops are paired with their polar opposites, including a cartoon cat named Whiskers (voiced by Danny DeVito). Danny is introduced to Slater’s sexy daughter Meredith (Bridgette Wilson) but his encyclopedic knowledge of the movie world attracts the attention of Benedict, who confiscates the ticket and moves through the screen into Danny’s world, where bad guys can actually win. Slater follows Danny through the screen to stop him.

Production history
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1990, Zak Penn & Adam Leff were trying to break into the film industry as screenwriters. Their first script was about a giant rat run amok in Manhattan. Next they wrote a noirish thriller about blackmail in the Hamptons, but after that first effort failed to interest an agent or a buyer, Penn recalls, “The smart thing we did was having the foresight not to send out the second one.” For their third effort, Penn & Leff rented dozens of action movies and produced a list of plot conventions, like “What holiday is the film taking place on?” “Do the hero’s wife and child get kidnapped?” “Does he have a Vietnam buddy? (Because your war buddy always betrays you.)” Their script – titled Extremely Violent - was about a fatherless 15-year-old who steps through a crack in a movie screen to enter the cartoonish world of his idol, LAPD cop Arno Slater, who the boy assists with his inexhaustible knowledge of movie clichés.

In October 1991, Penn & Leff and several of their friends took to the phones to get the word out on Extremely Violent. The script landed in the read pile of Chris Moore, an ambitious agent at Intertalent who agreed to represent the screenwriters. The first buyer Moore approached was Carolco, the company behind Total Recall and Terminator 2. Carolco passed. Before word of mouth soured, Moore submitted the script to five other buyers. One was producer Steve Roth, who had a development deal at Columbia Pictures. Speaking to the New York Times about the project in May 1993, Roth recalled, “It had a wonderful first act when this disenfranchised kid is sucked into the movie.” Within 24 hours, Roth passed Extremely Violent to Barry Josephson, Columbia’s vice president of production. After six days of negotiating with Moore, Columbia optioned Penn & Leff’s script for $100,000 against $350,000 if it ever got made into a movie, which was now going by the title The Last Action Hero.

The only actor anyone could imagine playing Arno Slater was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2, “Arnold” was now the biggest movie star on the planet. The front-runner for his next picture was the comedy Sweet Tooth, in which Schwarzenegger was to play the Tooth Fairy, with Ron Underwood standing by to direct. Other contenders included Crusade (a medieval epic to be directed by Paul Verhoeven), Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip (ultimately starring Nicolas Cage and released as It Could Happen To You), Sgt. Rock for producer Joel Silver and Curious George for Imagine Entertainment. The Last Action Hero found a place at the front of the pack. Schwarzenegger recalled, “Having a kid come into a movie awakened certain fantasies I had as a kid in Austria. What would it be like to sit on John Wayne’s saddle, or have him come with this huge horse right out of the screen? The script had a great concept, but it wasn’t executed professionally.”

Columbia shelled out $1 million for Shane Black – author of Lethal Weapon – to rewrite the script. Black brought in a USC buddy named David Arnott to work with him. Arnott stated, “Usually, someone wants you to rewrite something because it’s bad. This script was a gold mine of an idea. The writers played four variations on a theme. We thought, ‘Wow, there are 400 more possibilities.’” While Black & Arnott got to work in February 1992, Columbia slipped the Penn & Leff draft to director John McTiernan, who didn’t find it very good. Taking a look at the rewrite in July, McTiernan changed his mind. “What drew me is the wacko sense of humor Shane Black & David Arnott brought. Shane had done enough service in the salt mines of action movies to ridicule them in an acid way. The script had so much venom that I loved it. I called Arnold and said: ‘This thing is great. You have to read it.’ Arnold was about to commit to the Tooth Fairy, and he held up.”

McTiernan and Schwarzenegger both expressed reservations about the third act of the Black & Arnott draft. Schwarzenegger recalled, “They had created rhythm and pace and staggering action scenes. What I felt was missing was bonding between this kid and his hero.” The star agreed to commit to Last Action Hero if Columbia could add an emotional layer to the script by putting William Goldman on the payroll. Goldman – one of the most respected script doctors in Hollywood – declined, finding the script too violent for his taste. After a personal plea from Schwarzenegger that he was off the movie unless Goldman intervened, the scribe accepted a fee of $750,000 for four weeks work. Among his contributions was changing the boy’s age from 15 to 11, and making Jack Slater more vulnerable. Or as McTiernan quipped, “Goldman gave Arnold a character to play, and he excised 150 toilet jokes.”

In addition to Black & Arnott revising Goldman’s work. McTiernan turned to Larry Ferguson to provide some additional dialogue, while Carrie Fisher came in to flesh out the character of the boy’s single mother. With a budget of $60 million – which Columbia anticipated would ultimately settle in the $80 million range – Last Action Hero commenced shooting November 1992 in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger had been lobbied by Joel Silver to produce the film, but Barry Josephson and Columbia chairman Mark Canton took a hands-on role producing Last Action Hero themselves. Canton’s faith in the project was so huge that he wrote NASA a $500,000 check to affix the studio’s logo and Schwarzenegger’s name to an unmanned rocket that was to be fired into space. Canton also settled on June 18, 1992 as a release date. Even after Universal announced it was opening a picture they had called Jurassic Park one week ahead of that date, Columbia boldly stood its ground.

Halfway through a frantic 10-week post-production schedule, Columbia scheduled a test screening of Last Action Hero for May 1. Buoyed by a rough cut he’d seen on the Sony lot, Mark Canton eagerly assembled the studio’s top brass at Pacific’s Lakewood Center Theatre in L.A. McTiernan was on hand and as the lights went down, Schwarzenegger slipped into the back of the theater with his wife Maria Shriver. What the audience experienced was little more than an assembly. Running 2 hours 18 minutes, it had a temporary sound dub, as well as a temp score and unfinished effects shots. McTiernan recalls, “I had great trepidation about showing the movie. It was literally in a state that you don’t even show the studio executives. What we were showing was what the editors show the director ten days after finishing the shoot.”

A source who was there told Premiere Magazine, “The movie laid there like a big fried egg.” Another audience member described Last Action Hero to Entertainment Weekly as ”Willy Wonka with guns.” Schwarzenegger and McTiernan had both suggested to Columbia as early as November 1992 that the release be postponed to give them more time to work on the film, or at the very least, get out of the way of Jurassic Park. Even in the wake of the poor test screening, that idea was nixed. McTiernan recalls, “The studio folks assured us that the movie was more likely to make money this way, that the amount of money that the studio would see would decrease by about $10 million per week of the summer than you cut off. I’m not about to argue with things like that.” Shane Black came in the next day to punch up an action scene in the third act and to clarify some story points, like what Benedict was doing in the real world. Additional shooting was under way just seven weeks before Last Action Hero was due in theaters.

Though Mark Canton had confiscated the test screening cards and refused to release the score, the Hollywood rumor mill quickly filled the vacuum. Word spread that Last Action Hero was a disaster. The rocket launch scheduled for May was postponed, then cancelled. On June 4, gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells wrote an article for the L.A. Times titled “Phantom Screening: You Haven’t Heard the Last of Action Hero.” Wells credited unnamed sources from a screening he alleged took place late May in Pasadena. Columbia denied the screening ever happened and retaliated against the Times by barring all employees from speaking to the newspaper. Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal – which ran a story titled “Pundits Predict Losing Battle For Last Action Hero” – all weighed in on the film’s misfortunes before its June 18 release.

Critics actually waited to see Last Action Hero before rendering a negative appraisal. Though both Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert pointed thumbs down on At The Movies, Siskel conceded, ” … this is a most ambitious project that works quite well in fits and starts and then drags on for what seemed to me like an extra thirty minutes, wearing out its welcome.” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times: “Last Action Hero is something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one. It tries to be too many things to too many different kinds of audiences, the result being that it will probably confuse, and perhaps even alienate, the hard-core action fans.” Last Action Hero was not the box office calamity many had predicted, pinching out $50 million in the U.S. and hitting $87.2 million overseas. The final budget was $87 million, with marketing costs of $30 million.

According to John McTiernan, Schwarzenegger took the reception of Last Action Hero especially hard because the star had been developing his chops as a real actor by learning to sustain long takes. “He could never have done that before. It made him very vulnerable, and he was very proud of it. I only know about it because I had spent a year trying to figure out what every twitch of an eyebrow meant on his face. And to be rejected so soundly when he had allowed himself to be so naked, it sort of, like, broke his heart, but I suppose that’s too flowery a phrase. It broke him up terribly.” Late that summer, Schwarzenegger was candid about the film’s reception. “First, I learned that in my case, if you don’t give the people a very clear comedy or a very clear action movie, somehow the two don’t mix together. It was clear that Twins was a comedy; it was never promoted as action.”

Speaking to Hollywood Interview in March 2008, McTiernan offered his post-mortem on Last Action Hero. “It’s largely unedited and large portions of it still appear exactly as it was when it left the camera. It wasn’t ready yet. I don’t know that I’ll ever get the chance to go back to it. It’s like having a model with an extra 20 pounds on her. There’s a really neat movie in there. In order to get a sense of fun that was clear to the audience, it needed tightening, and it needed another month in editing to do that.” In January 2005, Zak Penn mused to UGO.com, “The irony about Last Action Hero is that two kids wrote a movie that was making fun of Hollywood movies that was about an audience member going into the movie and destroying it because it was so stupid, then was rewritten and directed by the same people that it was parodying. I hated it when I first saw it because it was so painful, but I think it actually plays better now.”

Opinion
It’s high time that Last Action Hero had its status upgraded from “turkey” to at the very least, “work in progress”. While the film is most definitely flawed, it’s so imaginative at turns that I’d go as far to say this is a must-see for movie fans, particularly lovers of ‘80s action cinema. Its exuberant wit is most evident in Slater’s lieutenant (Frank McRae) whose hysterical exclamations include, “I got the Chamber of Commerce doin’ cartwheels in my cocoa factory!” Danny pulls Slater into a video store at one point, where no one seems to know who “Arnold Schwarzenegger” is because Sylvester Stallone played the Terminator. In another funny bit, Danny scribbles the f-word on a piece of paper, and when Slater is unwilling to say it out loud, the boy notifies him the reason he can’t is because they’re in a PG-13 movie.

Even in its unfinished state, John McTiernan seems to have a much better sense for what’s amusing than most action directors trying their hands at comedy (Steven Spielberg comes to mind). But the longer the straight on action stuff plows ahead without making fun of itself, the more listless Last Action Hero becomes. The movie grinds to a halt once it crosses back into the real world, where it’s just too overcast to jibe with the tom foolery that came before (Ian McKellan stepping down off the screen as Death from The Seventh Seal is quite cool, at least). This is worth a look purely out of appreciation for what the potential of the film medium can be. Michael Kamen composed a terrific, self-aware musical score, while Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick reprise their roles from Basic Instinct and Terminator 2 in cameos that come and go almost too fast to fully register.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Five Writers + One Star = A Hit?” By Aljean Harmetz. The New York Times, May 26, 1993

“How They Built the Bomb” By Nancy Griffin. Premiere Magazine, September 1993

Buyer Beware!
The versions of Last Action Hero available for rental on both Netflix and Greencine subscription services are delivered in the dreaded “Pan and Scan” format, which distorts the frame of the movie to fit television screens. Movie lovers who want to see Last Action Hero in its 2.35 : 1 theatrical aspect ratio will have better luck at their local video store.

Synopsis
Mild mannered Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) arrives for an interview at the luxurious Overlook Hotel in Colorado. General manager Mr. Ullman (Barry Nelson) explains his duties as caretaker will be to maintain the hotel when it shuts down for six months during the winter. Jack maintains that the isolation will give him time to outline a novel. Ullman feels obligated to mention a tragedy that occurred in 1970 when their winter caretaker killed his wife and two daughters with an axe before shooting himself. This fails to deter Jack, who proclaims that his wife – a fan of “ghost stories and horror films” – will be thrilled.

Back in Boulder, Jack’s passive wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) watches cartoons with their 7-year-old son Danny (Danny Lloyd). Danny is hyper intuitive, and though he keeps his abilities secret from his parents, receives glimpses of the future. He attributes these to “Tony,” a little boy he says lives in his mouth. “Tony” shows him a terrifying, bloody vision of what waits for him at the Overlook Hotel, and Danny blacks out. Arriving at the hotel, Jack and Wendy are shown through the hallways, lounges, kitchen and boiler room that will soon be completely deserted. The hotel also features a 13-foot tall hedge maze outside.

Head cook Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) senses that Danny and he share the same ability. He tells the boy that his grandmother called this “shining,” the ability to see things that haven’t happened yet. Danny feels that there’s something bad in the Overlook Hotel, particularly in Room 237. Hallorann orders him to stay out of there. With the coming of snow, Jack grows more annoyed by Wendy, and more withdrawn. Danny knows something’s wrong. Moaning in his sleep, Jack is awakened from a nightmare by Wendy. He tells her, “I dreamed that I killed you and Danny. But I didn’t just kill ya. I cut you up in little pieces.” Nightmare and reality soon become blurred for the Torrances.

Production history
Following the publication of Carrie and Salem’s Lot, Stephen King felt he needed a change of scenery. Relocating his family from Maine to Colorado for a year, King’s wife Tabitha ultimately suggested a Halloween getaway to the Stanley Hotel. The resort was closing for the season, and the Kings were the only guests. The author recalls, “That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire hose … I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”

Titled Darkshine at one point, later The Shine, the novel was published in 1977 as The Shining. Printed in a hard cover edition of only 50,000 copies, the book went on to become a bestseller in paperback. Producers Robert Fryer, Mary Lea Johnson and Martin Richards of The Producer Circle optioned the film rights. During this time, director Stanley Kubrick had spent the two years since completing Barry Lyndon combing through newspapers and magazines piled around his home in England, searching for a story for his next film. Warner Bros. president John Calley knew that Kubrick had an interest in the paranormal, and sent him a galleys copy of The Shining.

Kubrick was not moved by King’s prose. “I had seen Carrie, the film, but I have never read any of his novels. I should say that King’s greatest ingenuity lies in the construction of the story. He does not seem to be very interested in writing itself. They say he wrote, read over, rewrote maybe once and sent everything to the editor. What seems to interest him is invention and I think that is his forte.” King was contractually guaranteed the right to adapt a screenplay and turned in a first draft, but Kubrick didn’t read it. He turned to American novelist Diane Johnson, who impressed Kubrick when he learned she was teaching a course on the gothic novel at UC Berkeley.

Johnson recalled, “Kubrick was thinking of making either the Stephen King or my novel, The Shadow Knows. And, you know, he ultimately decided on the King. The Shadow Knows had some problems like being a first person narrative . . . he and I, in talking about it got along better than he and Stephen King, I guess … And I spent, oh, I don’t know, a couple of months, I guess eleven weeks all together, so almost three months in London, working everyday with him.” Kubrick had never directed a horror film. He was a studious viewer of movies, and when asked in 1980 which ones were his favorites, the reclusive director offered The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.

Kubrick had wanted to work with Jack Nicholson for close to a decade and cast him as Jack Torrance. King stated in an interview that he much preferred an everyman like Jon Voight to play Jack. “To me, he would have been much more convincing as an ordinary man going crazy.” Kubrick’s first and only choice for Wendy Torrance was Shelley Duvall. A six-month search for a child actor to play Danny culminated in 5,000 boys being interviewed in Chicago, Denver and Cincinnati. Danny Lloyd was chosen. Kubrick hoped to round out the cast with Slim Pickens as Hallorann, but the Dr. Strangelove vet had no desire to reunite with Kubrick. Scatman Crothers was ultimately rewarded the part.

With a budget of $13 million, shooting commenced at Elstree Studios outside London in May 1978. The exteriors of The Overlook Hotel were done later at The Timberline Lodge, located on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. The interiors – including the hedge maze – were all built on a soundstage. Kubrick’s obsessive attention to detail slowed what had been scheduled as a 17-week shoot to a grind. Nicholson stated in 1980, “He’ll do a scene fifty times and you have to be good to do that. There are so many ways to walk into a room, order breakfast or be frightened to death in a closet. Stanley’s approach is, how can we do it better than it’s ever been done before? It’s a big challenge.”

The Shining took 200 days to shoot. Elstree Studios waited anxiously for Kubrick to clear out so Raiders of the Lost Ark and Reds could move in. The intense lighting that Kubrick and director of photography John Alcott poured through the windows of the set was so intense, temperatures climbed to 110 degrees. With filming nearly completed in February 1979, the Colorado Lounge set burst into flames and was destroyed. Elstree hoped Kubrick would pack it in, but he ordered the soundstage rebuilt and the set reconstructed to finish his close-ups. Steven Spielberg used the soundstage to shoot the Well of Souls sequence for Raiders.

Warner Bros.’ strategy was to open The Shining Memorial Day weekend 1980 in New York and L.A. – in ten theaters and one drive-in – with the intent of going wide to 750 theaters two weeks later, after word of mouth started to build. But after playing for five days, Kubrick was still honing the film, cutting an epilogue in which the hotel manager Mr. Ullman visited Wendy in the hospital. “After several screenings in London the day before the film opened in New York and Los Angeles, when I was able to see for the first time the fantastic pitch of excitement which the audience reached during the climax of the film, I decided the scene was unnecessary.”

Critics were split on The Shining. While Newsweek gushed that it was “the first epic horror film, a movie that is to other horror movies what 2001: A Space Odyssey was to other space movies,” Variety countered, “The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks. Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric.” The New Yorker (Pauline Kael), Time Magazine (Richard Schickel) and the Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) were supportive of Kubrick, but the critical reaction at the time was that the director hadn’t watched enough horror movies.

In an interview with Playboy in 1983, Stephen King stated: “The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from beginning to end, from plot decision to the final scene – which has been used before on The Twilight Zone.” Despite its lukewarm reviews, The Shining opened to the biggest grosses in the history of Warner Bros. It ultimately minted $44 million in the U.S. When King wrote and produced his own adaptation of The Shining as a four-hour mini-series for ABC in 1997 – with Steven Weber and Rebecca DeMornay – critics assailed it for being nowhere near as good as Kubrick’s “classic.”

Opinion
While Kubrick departs radically from King’s text – jettisoning among other things the backstory that explains where the specters that haunt the hotel come from – The Shining remains one of the great entertainments in the history of the movies, so exquisitely designed, so well cast and so filled with gothic terror that other filmmakers have been trying to top it for decades. The tedious mini-series demonstrated that many of the devices King felt were spooky – animal shaped shrubs, a fire hose, a boiler – are nothing compared to a child’s primal fear of a parent turning into a monster. The magnificence of the film is how the film exploits this dread viscerally.

Kubrick’s chilly aesthetic and his photographic work with Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown – gliding the camera through the corridors of the hotel – is noteworthy, but the film was destined to be a classic from the moment it was cast. Jack Nicholson, in perhaps the most iconic performance of his career, is breathlessly lunatic, while Shelley Duvall’s emotional depth charge is nothing short of brilliant. Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers are sublime as well. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind provided electronic sound elements, which Kubrick sourced with music from classical composers György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki to create one of the more unique scores ever created.

Gregory Dorr at The DVD Journal writes, “The beauty of Kubrick is that each of his films, with the exception of maybe Barry Lyndon, can be appreciated on several different levels: aesthetically, viscerally, and intellectually. Stanley Kubrick is also a master at including tiny moments, minuscule details that enrich his films beyond the scope of films not by Stanley Kubrick. Such moments in The Shining include: The sound of Danny’s Big Wheel rolling on the hard floor of the Overlook Hotel and then rolling over a rug and then over the hard floor again, etc.; The twin ghosts of murdered twin daughters who both eerily resemble dwarfish twin Christina Riccis … The red bathroom that looks like a set from 2001 … Every look, gesture, smile, frown, glance, and spoken word from Jack Nicholson.”

“The Shining (1980) is creative director Stanley Kubrick’s intense, epic, gothic horror film and haunted house masterpiece – a beautiful, stylish work that distanced itself from the blood-letting and gore of most modern films in the horror genre … Kubrick deliberately reduced the pace of the narrative and expanded the rather simple plot of a domestic tragedy to over two hours in length, created lush images within the ornate interior of the main set, added a disturbing synthesized soundtrack (selecting musical works from Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki), used a Steadicam in groundbreaking fashion, filmed most of the gothic horror in broad daylight or brightly-lit scenes, and built an unforgettable, mounting sensation of terror, ghosts, and the paranormal,” writes Tim Dirks at The Greatest Films.

Graeme Clark at The Spinning Image writes, “Although a long film, especially for its genre, it never drags due to the obvious precision of the technique – every part of it is assembled with the attention to detail of a Swiss watchmaker … The Overlook is a time trap, where it makes sense that Jack has always been mad, Wendy always scared, and Danny always the possessor of powers that alarmingly fit right in there. It’s up to Wendy and Danny, with the help of a suspicious Hallorann, to break the cycle. An absolute joy from start to finish for those with a taste for the sardonic side of the macabre, The Shining is one of the best horrors of its time.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Resorting to a fantasy in which a stranger accosts her in the shower, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) gets through a thoroughly unsatisfying round of sex with her husband. Revealing this to her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), she’s advised to think about where her anger is going and to confront her husband with her sexual frustrations. Kate visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art and after a prolonged game of gallery tag with an amorous stranger, climbs into a cab and indulges in a quickie in the backseat with him. Leaving his apartment, Kate is cornered in the elevator and slashed to death by a blonde with a straight razor.

Call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) witnesses the slaying and is hauled before the crass cop (Dennis Franz) leading the investigation. Kate’s geeky teenaged son Peter (Keith Gordon) eavesdrops on the interrogation electronically, hoping to nab the killer himself. Meanwhile, “Bobbi” – a disturbed patient who feels he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body – leaves a message for Dr. Elliott in which he reveals he’s taken the shrink’s razor. Peter follows Liz on the subway and saves her from Bobbi’s razor. Liz and Peter then hatch a plan to snoop through Dr. Elliott’s appointment book to learn who “Bobbi” is and stop her before she kills one of them.

Production history
Brian DePalma spent a year working on an adaptation of Robert Daley’s book Prince of the City when Orion Pictures balked at where the script was headed and dismissed the director. DePalma returned to an unproduced screenplay he’d adapted from the novel Cruising. Taking the idea of a character engaging in random sex, DePalma married it to a woman who gets picked up in an art gallery, something he’d tried in his college days. Seeing a transsexual interviewed on The Phil Donahue Show gave him the idea of a psychiatrist whose female side murders the women arousing his male side. This formed the basis for Dressed To Kill.

DePalma sent the script to his former agent George Litto, whose response was, “If you and I can’t agree that I can produce the movie, I’ll kill ya.” Litto knew that Samuel Z. Arkoff was an admirer of DePalma’s and set the project up at Filmways, which provided $6.5 million in financing and gave DePalma full creative control. His first choice to play Kate Miller was Liv Ullmann. The esteemed Norwegian actress turned the part down. Sean Connery was asked to play the psychiatrist and also passed. DePalma talked Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine into filling the roles, joining DePalma’s wife Nancy Allen, who the role of Liz Blake had been written for.

The first crisis arrived when DePalma submitted Dressed To Kill to the MPAA. The film was stamped with an X rating. To ensure that the theater chains would exhibit the film and that newspapers would run ads, the director reluctantly toned down the nudity in the shower scene and the bloodshed of Kate’s death to win an R rating. DePalma recalls, “I had an impression that because it so effective I was being penalized by being effective, not because I showed so much, but because it was so scary and so violent.” Audiences in Europe were able to see DePalma’s uncut version, while in the United States, they had to wait for home video.

Arriving in theaters July 1980, Dressed To Kill received some of the most enthusiastic critical notices of the year. The New York Times (Vincent Canby), the New Yorker (Pauline Kael) and New York magazine (David Denby) went out of their way to praise the film. Andrew Sarris dissented, calling it “soft-core porn and hard-edged horror” and citing DePalma for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. An even more hostile reaction came from Women Against Pornography, which organized protests outside theaters in New York, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco. One of the group’s leaflets read, “If this film succeeds, killing women may become the greatest turn-on of the Eighties!”

The picket lines amounted to free publicity and vaulted Dressed To Kill past Airplane! and The Empire Strikes Back to the number one grossing movie in the country its second week of release. It went on to earn $31.8 million in the United States. Looking back on the furor in 2001, DePalma commented, “All those movies that they were trashing in the ‘60s and the ‘70s or ‘80s are the ones that people are writing about now and the ones that seem to have some kind of life. The revisionism will start basically and you basically as an artist, you just have to just do what you feel is what you’re doing and not get crushed by the particular establishment in place at the time.”

Opinion
Whether you’re an academic taking notes in the aisle with a pen light, a jackass up in the balcony with a box of Goobers, or a regular moviegoer somewhere in between, Dressed To Kill is a classic because it has something to marvel over regardless of which demographic you fall into. It’s my favorite Brian DePalma film, one that absolutely has to be considered on any list of top five achievements in the director’s infamous yet prodigious career. It is gruesome (the DVD features the film in both its theatrical and “unrated” versions,) but in a way that’s more electric than upsetting, soused on a pure intoxication for cinema and eliciting a visceral response from the audience. And does it ever.

From the opening chord of Pino Donaggio’s billowing musical score, the movie is too far over the top to be taken seriously as a drama. As an orchestration of camera movement, film and sound editing and art design, even the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock would have to admit that DePalma knows how to utilize the medium. Michael Caine sort of looks like he came in on his time off between Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Blame It On Rio, but Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon have never been more engaging in a movie. Terrifying in parts, the film is also hilarious in others, courtesy Dennis Franz, who takes off running with the full range of New York cop talk, without ever looking back.

Gary Militzer at DVD Verdict writes, “Stylish psycho-shock films don’t come any better than this. Talented acting, superb direction, shocking twists, taut suspense – it’s all here. Sure, there is style to burn here – Brian De Palma is a filmmaker in love with his camera, after all – but De Palma sprinkles in just enough lingering substance to gel it all together into a memorable suspense classic that only gains in stature with repeat viewings. And it’s not just a one-trick, gimmick-twist of a film that insults your intelligence in the end… This is the real deal; Dressed to Kill is an essential De Palma masterwork that is not to be missed.”

“It has some genuinely creepy sequences and some really well-shot scenes, but De Palma strays too often into gratuitous violence and sensationalism. De Palma was one of the major voices in the 1970s-1980s school of filmmaking that wanted to see how far they could push the envelope. What they learned (or, at least, what the audiences learned) is that being able to show everything that classic Hollywood had to cover up is not necessarily a good thing, especially if the films exist only to see how far they could go,” writes Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Daniel Stephens at DVD Times writes, “The brilliance of the movie begins at its core: the script. De Palma has managed to create a taut thriller filled to the gills with false avenues, red herrings and ambiguity. It is much more original than it may look at first glance, combining visual scenes driven by the camera rather than dialogue, and for all intents and purposes throws out any remnants of genre conventions. For all its worth as a thrilling psychological drama, it has true connotations of gothic horror, romance, comedy and porn.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In the town of “Scottsville,” the life of bank lending officer and single mom Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) becomes exciting again when her wayward brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) sends word that he’s coming for a visit. Orphaned at a young age when their parents were killed, Sammy responded to the trauma by trying to lead a tidy life, while Terry has moved around, but still doesn’t have any idea where he’s going. He notifies Sammy that he needs money to help a young girl he’s involved with. When he receives news that the girl tried to kill herself, Terry decides to stay in town for a while.

Sammy’s 8-year-old son Rudy (Rory Culkin) loves his uncle because he treats the boy as an adult, sneaking him into a bar to shoot pool, and answering questions about his father – who Rudy has never met – with brutal honesty. Sammy feels her brother would benefit by going with her to church and talking things over with the minister (Kenneth Lonergan), but when she has a fling with her married boss (Matthew Broderick), Sammy doesn’t endear herself as much of a moral authority. When Terry takes Rudy to meet his father, Sammy’s patience with her brother reaches the end of its rope.

Production history
Kenneth Lonergan studied dramatic writing at NYU and later worked with the theater company Naked Angels. Tasked with writing a one-act play on the theme of faith, the playwright arrived on two siblings meeting for lunch; the brother is a screw-up, but his sister refuses to give up hope in him. Lonergan liked the characters and when he saw a play featuring a young boy, hit on the idea of making the sister a single mother. The brother’s relationship with the boy would have both a positive and negative impact, forcing the sister to choose between helping her brother, or protecting her son.

Producer John Hart acquired the film rights to Lonergan’s first play – This Is Our Youth – after catching a performance in a small theater on 42nd Street. Hart and his partner Jeff Sharp hired Lonergan to adapt a screenplay, but the show became so successful that plans for a movie were held back. During the wait, Lonergan showed the producers his script You Can Count On Me. Hart and Sharp were impressed enough with the material to seek financing, with Lonergan – who had sold a spec screenplay for what became the comedy Analyze This! – making his directorial debut.

Hart pitched the story to Larry Meistrich of The Shooting Gallery and secured the backing of the New York based production company. Martin Scorsese and his producing partner Barbara De Fina of Cappa Films heard about the project next, and were also eager to lend support. Scorsese in particular had followed Lonergan’s work for years. “He has a basic element which a lot of people try to attain and never do – his understanding of the human being and his ability to convey that in writing. What I admire about Kenny is the irony and humor and ultimately the truth of what he expresses.”

With $1.5 million in financing, shooting commenced June 1999 around the town of Phoenicia in the Catskills Mountains of upstate New York. Lonergan wrapped the film in 28 days and had it ready to screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it split the Grand Jury Prize with Girlfight and won Lonergan the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Paramount Classics acquired distribution, and when You Can Count On Me was released in November 2000, critics were equally effusive with praise. Industry peers of Laura Linney and Kenneth Lonergan nominated them both for Academy Awards.

On the DVD audio commentary, Lonergan attributed the uniqueness of the film to its characters. “I don’t think I could have made the movie at a major studio without pasteurizing certainly some of Terry’s personality, which is too bad because a lot of the people in the movie business who have seen the movie really like it just for the reasons they would have objected to before it got made. I think that’s a really evil trend – that there’s such a terror that the characters won’t be absolutely lovable from start to finish – that they all become extremely boring.”

Opinion
Even with a naturalistic look (Lonergan cites Coal Miner’s Daughter as one of his inspirations style wise) and a cast that would shame the first time efforts of most directors, You Can Count On Me remains a cut above the best independent films of the ‘00s because of its screenplay, which is about as perfect as you could hope to have in a movie. Lonergan doesn’t let one artificial moment slip into the film for the sake of entertainment value, but builds a story that manages to be both enjoyable to watch, and uncompromising in its depiction of relationships.

Instead of coming off as caricatures with lots of goofy quirks, the characters in You Can Count On Me are thinking, living adults who remain comically fallible in spite of their best intentions to do things right. The film is so unique because it develops a moral conscience without preaching to the audience, questioning whether Terry is doing more harm than good, and whether this is acceptable or not. The brother/sister chemistry between Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney is something special, as is the nuanced performance of Rory Culkin, who made his film debut here at the age of ten.

Lisa Skrzyniarz at Crazy For Cinema writes, “You Can Count On Me may be a small, independant film, but the emotions and relationships it reveals are anything but. This is a powerful film about the ties that bind family and how tragedy shapes the lives of those it leaves behind. It’s a well-acted film that deserves more attention and one that will leave you feeling glad you spent the time…as long as your family isn’t as crazy as this one. Otherwise, it might hit a little too close to home.”

“Only a person with no interest in or understanding of human beings could find this film slow. It’s as fucking true a film as you will ever see. Terry, the mildly self-destructive and aimless wanderer with firm convictions and Sammy, who depends on anchors, but does not accept confinement are two of cinema’s best characters this side of Robocop. They deal with the problems faced by thoughtful people in all walks of life and in all situations, mainly about how to live and finding a place in the world,” writes Erich Schulte at Ruthless Reviews.

Harold Gervais at DVD Verdict writes, “You Can Count On Me is one of those films that make me glad I do what I do. It is a gem of a movie that speaks with a voice that is consistent and truthful; exploring characters that are real and discovering emotions that almost anyone can relate to. In a sparkling directorial debut, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan has fashioned a movie that simply does not exist in the high concept, big budget world of today’s Hollywood. It is a film of small joys and profound pains. It has humor, warmth, sex and love. It moves along at a pace that is both comfortable and immediate; never losing sight of the people within it or the world they exist in.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Hung over from a wine tasting, Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) oversleeps and hits the road late from San Diego to L.A. to pick up his crass buddy Jack Lopate (Thomas Haden Church). Miles has finished a novel. Jack is an actor about to be married. To celebrate, Miles has planned a week in Santa Barbara County. “We’re gonna drink a lot of good wine, we’re gonna play some golf, we’re gonna eat some great food, we’re going to enjoy the scenery and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.”

After stopping for the night in Oxnard to visit Miles’ mother (Marylouise Burke) – and to steal some cash – Miles and Jack arrive in Buellton for dinner. A waitress named Maya (Virigina Madsen) recognizes Miles from his previous visits. Jack claims they’re in town to celebrate Miles’ book being published. Despite her attention, Miles acts uninterested in Maya. Jack reads his buddy the riot act: “I am going to get my nut on this trip, Miles, and you are not going to fuck it up for me with all your depression and anxiety and neg-head downer shit.”

On a grape tour, the men meet a bohemian winery employee named Stephanie (Sandra Oh). Miles dislikes the Cabernet Franc they sample, but Jack likes her service enough to arrange them a dinner date with her and Maya. Being back in Santa Ynez Valley reminds Miles of being there with his ex-wife, Victoria. Jack breaks the news that Victoria has remarried and will be attending the wedding with her new husband. Miles falls into a deep funk and before dinner, his friend has to remind him to behave. “I don’t want you passing out or going to the dark side.”

Miles is unable to resist stumbling to a phone and drunk dialing his ex-wife in despair. While the evening turns amorous between Jack and Stephanie, Miles is only able to express his feelings for Maya by talking about his love for Pinot. Jack neglects to mention to his latest conquest that he’s getting married, and ditches Miles to hang out with Stephanie and her daughter. While spending more time with Maya, Miles lets it slip that Jack is getting married. This results in some serious pain for Jack in the short term. Miles takes him home for the wedding, but is unable to get Maya out of his mind.

Production history
Rex Pickett had spent twenty years as a screenwriter and aspiring filmmaker. By 1998 he was divorced, nearly broke and ready to walk away from Hollywood. He tried remaking himself as a novelist and landed agents on both coasts, but fifteen different publishers rejected his first manuscript. Desperate, Pickett had one last idea for a novel. It was based on a road trip he’d taken to Santa Barbara County, “introducing my friend to wine and telling him all these crazy stories.” Pickett’s friend urged him to write about it.

Pickett based the self-loathing novelist and wine connoisseur Miles on himself and the self-possessed actor Jack on his own friend. His agent felt the manuscript read so much like a movie that he tried submitting to producers. Pickett passed a draft to producer Michael London, a college friend. London felt the material might interest writer-director Alexander Payne. “I knew he would like the idea of two guys who go to such an idyllic place on what should be a very happy trip only to find pain and misery as a result of their self-induced misadventures.”

Payne was busy promoting Election, but when he finally got around to reading Pickett’s manuscript in August 1999, “went nuts for it.” Already in pre-production on About Schmidt, Payne split the cost of an option on Sideways with London and committed to making it later. Adapting a spec screenplay with his collaborator Jim Taylor, Payne pooled $10,000 with a matching sum from London, opened an office, hired a casting director and started meeting actors.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Cusack and Russell Crowe were among those who either loved the material or wanted to work with Payne, but through the audition process, the director was most impressed by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Virginia Madsen – who also made an impression on Payne with her reading – joined the director’s wife Sandra Oh as the female leads. Even with the opportunity for a bigger budget with bankable movie stars, Payne stuck with his cast.

Fox Searchlight liked the package enough to commit $16 million in financing and shooting commenced in September 2003. St. Martin’s published Pickett’s book the following spring, but considered its commercial potential so bleak that the author had to promote it out of his own pocket. The movie’s box office prospects seemed almost as dim, but when released October 2004, Sideways received nearly unanimous critical praise and five Academy Award nominations on its way to grossing a surprising $71 million in the U.S.

Sideways not only rocketed veteran actors Giamatti, Church and Madsen to the top of casting lists, it defied expectations by drawing audiences in spite of its unsympathetic male characters. Payne commented on the film’s appeal by stating, “Perhaps too many films in this current era have eschewed humanity for slickness. I’m interested in revitalizing the American cinema of the ‘70s with its emphasis on real people and real struggles, and I think we desperately need human movies right now.”

Opinion
While the look and feel of the film has its foothold the ‘70s – particularly the work of Hal Ashby – the reason Sideways is a classic has everything to do with its commitment to its characters. When it comes to big screen hilarity witnessed in the ‘00s, two sequences in the last half hour rank at the top, but Payne & Taylor aren’t working for laughs or trying to make a hip comedy. Their screenplay explores the questionable decisions and bad taste of its characters with the sophistication and finesse only the best writing can summon.

The casting – which garnered Oscar nominations for Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen, and cut Paul Giamatti loose in the most flammable role of his career – is an ingenious complement to Rex Pickett’s source material, which fluctuates between the exterior beauty of Santa Ynez Valley and the rancor of its central character’s inner life. Payne imbues the film with a tremendous sense of freedom, particularly in the jazz score by Rolfe Kent, which like everything else in the film, is pitch perfect.

Steve Evans at DVD Verdict writes, “Payne and his marvelous cast deliver a superb entertainment—intelligent, provocative, heartfelt, and funny as hell. No more observant a comedy about male-female relationships has been released in the last 25 years, which is as much a wistful observation as it is cause for celebration. Like a perfect Pinot Noir, Sideways hits the spot.”

“As much as Payne lampoons the haughty language of the tasting elite, he also uses wine as a natural metaphor for aging gracefully and seizing peak moments before they crest. Though his unpretentious style and generous sense of humor could be mistaken for a lack of artistry, Payne’s knack for broad, crowd-pleasing comedy fails to do justice to how much thought and feeling goes into the tiniest details in his movies,” writes Scott Tobias at The Onion A.V. Club.

Michelle Thomas at Future Movies Reviews writes, “Sideways will speak to anyone who has ever thought themselves a bit of a failure or gazed into the abyss between the mountain of their ambitions and the slag heap of their actual achievements … It’s also really refreshing to see women in a movie who are the right age to be with these men – both Oh and Madsen are extremely attractive, but they look real, they have wrinkles, they also have charm and stories to tell and a bit of life experience. Hurrah! Directors, take note.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Celebrating his 7th birthday in a park near Washington Square, Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) discovers benches full of men playing chess for cash. Though Josh’s father Fred (Joe Mantegna) is a sportswriter, his son loses interest in baseball and fixates on a chess piece he recovered in the park. Josh surprises his mother Bonnie (Joan Allen) by later asking her if they can go back to see “the men in the park.” Then he stuns her by taking a seat at one of the benches and competing with a wizened Russian in a game of chess.

Fred is skeptical that his son knows how to play. He asks for a demonstration, but Josh loses intentionally, not wanting to beat his dad. After realizing what his son is capable of, Fred seeks out a chess player once highly regarded named Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley) and hires him to tutor Josh. Bruce tries to teach his pupil a regimented, cerebral approach to the game, while Josh’s mentor from the park, Vinnie (Laurence Fishburne) favors a fast paced and aggressive style used by hustlers to intimidate their opponents.

Josh proves so adept at the game that Fred enters his son in a tournament. Bruce advises against this, believing that “winning and losing” has nothing to do with chess. Caught up in his son’s gift and the thrill of competition, Fred pushes Josh to excel. Josh’s weakness as a sportsman is his kindness, which Bonnie fears Fred will beat out of him in his efforts to make his son a winner. When he encounters another prodigy (Michael Nirenberg) who dispatches his opponents with cold-blooded efficiency, Josh has to decide for himself how important winning and losing is.

Production history
Published in 1989, Searching For Bobby Fischer: The World of Chess, Observed by the Father of a Child Prodigy was a collection of essays by journalist Fred Waitzkin dealing with the chess world, primarily, Waitzkin’s role as “caddy and coach” to his prodigious son, Josh. Producer Scott Rudin purchased the screen rights, and the book ended up in a stack that the producer sent to screenwriter Steven Zaillian. Rudin felt that Zaillian wrote like a director and had been urging him to get behind the camera for years.

When Zaillian picked up the book for the first time, he recalled, “It was the photograph on the cover that really got my attention, It was of a kid studying a chess position on a board. He was only seven years old, yet he was so adult and intense. This prompted questions in my head. Why was this kid doing an adult job? What kind of pressure does that put on the kid?” Zaillian – who knew little about chess – conducted his own research, hanging out in Washington Square, attending a national scholastic chess championship and meeting characters in both worlds that ended up in his screenplay.

Searching For Bobby Fischer had very little commercial potential, but Rudin enjoyed a relationship with Paramount Pictures, having produced The Addams Family for the studio to great commercial success. Shooting of Zaillian’s directorial debut commenced in June 1992 under the modest budget – for a studio picture – of $17 million. 8-year-old Max Pomeranc had been discovered several months earlier at a chess tournament in New York. According to Zaillian, “He had no acting experience, but we decided to gamble. It turned out that he was so natural that he’s incapable of a false moment.”

By the time the film was finished, the regime at Paramount had shifted from the late Brandon Tartikoff to Sherry Lansing, but executives were so moved by the picture, they threw their support behind it. Released in August 1993, the movie drew rave reviews, but failed to connect with audiences, grossing a mere $7 million in the U.S. Some questioned the studio’s release strategy, but Rudin didn’t fault Paramount for the film’s reception, “It’s just what it is. It doesn’t play down to the audience. The real question is, ‘Can you make a movie for families that’s not dumb, that doesn’t necessarily have to aim low and works for adults as well as children?’”

Opinion
The uniqueness of this film lies in its ability to reject the notion that the 1970s was the last golden age of Hollywood, that studios have lost the craftsmanship necessary to make great movies. The 1990s belongs in that equation and here’s one movie that demonstrates why. There’s no mistaking Searching For Bobby Fischer for anything other than a Hollywood product, but it’s one in which every major element – writing, directing, casting, photography, music – is perfectly in tune, exploring the nature of competition with humor, intelligence and depth.

Zaillian’s superb script attracted one of the greater casts in recent memory: Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Ben Kingsley and Laurence Fishburne are supported in minor roles by David Paymer, William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub, Dan Hedaya, Laura Linney and Austin Pendleton. Of all those names, 8-year old non-actor Max Pomeranc gives the most mesmerizing performance. Renowned cinematographer Conrad Hall lit the film in what he called “magical naturalism” – conveying a child’s sense of imagination – while James Horner’s music reflects that spirit with equal mastery.

Sheila O’Malley at The Sheila Variations says, “All of these characters are beautifully drawn, and perfectly played. And the story itself … I don’t care if it’s a formula. What – you think there are a gazillion different stories to tell? There aren’t. There are maybe 10 stories – told over and over and over – in different ways. Formulas can WORK if they are imbued with life, humanity, surprise. This film is one of my favorite films ever made. It just works.”

“I realize that I’m in the minority of people who don’t think this isn’t really that good of a movie, although I’ll admit, it did hold my interest enough for me to think it still worthwhile, which for a film about chess means it deserves at least some props. Still, Zaillian’s film is like the professional class of chess, rather than the game played out in the park — disciplined, but too rigid to allow for much freedom for expression, with every turn pre-determined well in advance,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Sean McGinnis at DVD Verdict writes, “The film is riddled with small moments, which put a HUGE smile on your face … Suffice it to say that director Zaillian nails a lot of moments. Personally, this film falls right next to The Princess Bride on the McGinnis-Richter Scale. Both succeed for reasons you can’t quite comprehend. Both are terrific family fun with a few life lessons to be learned along the way. Both represent, in my view, the best of what moviemaking is all about.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
As Sputnik orbits Earth in the year 1957, something from outer space plummets through the eye of a storm and lands in the waters off the coast of “Rockwell,” Maine. The next day, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) visits his mother (Jennifer Aniston) at the diner where she works. A local salt (M. Emmet Walsh) is convinced he saw “an invader from Mars” crash into the sea. When he’s ridiculed, a beatnik named Dean (Harry Connick Jr.) sticks up for him, befriending Hogarth in the process.

With his mother working late, Hogarth stays up watching a sci-fi movie. Hearing something in the woods, he wanders outside and encounters a one hundred foot tall robot tangled in power lines. Hogarth saves the giant. The government sends the hyper vigilant Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) to investigate the weird goings-on in Rockwell. Hogarth returns to the woods the next day and befriends the giant, which doesn’t speak, but seems to understand the boy. When it accidentally causes a train derailment, Hogarth hides the giant in a barn.

Mansley discovers Hogarth was at the scene of the accident and rents a room from his mother to find out what the boy knows. Hogarth moves the giant into the junkyard managed by the beatnik Dean, an aspiring iron sculptor. Their ruse works, until the giant’s awesome defense system mistakes Hogarth’s toy gun for a threat and almost vaporizes him. The giant runs away, and when the U.S. Army discovers it, attacks. Mansley is so zealous he orders a nuclear strike on Rockwell. As the town awaits their destruction, the giant realizes it can choose whether to destroy life, or protect it.

Production history
The Iron Man was a 1968 children’s book by British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Published in the U.S. as The Iron Giant, the book concerned a giant robot that surfaces from the ocean and befriends a young boy. Hughes originated the story to console his two children following the suicide of their mother, poet Sylvia Plath in 1963. Pete Townsend of The Who was later searching for material to adapt into a rock opera and in 1986, settled on The Iron Man. A concept album was spawned three years later and in 1993, a stage musical in London.

With The Lion King a sensation at the box office and Hollywood studios all racing to set up their own feature animation units, Townsend’s collaborator – theater producer Des McAnuff – sold the property to Warner Bros. The studio was eager to work with Brad Bird, a 39-year-old animator best known for directing a very well received animated episode of Amazing Stories called Family Dog and serving as an executive consultant on The Simpsons and King of the Hill.

Bird looked at the projects the studio had in development and saw a drawing of a young boy and a robot. He read The Iron Man and ultimately pitched his own version to Warner Bros. “Hughes’ book is a great story that tries to show kids about the cycle of life. Even though there is death, life has a continuity. My version is based around a question I asked the execs at Warner Bros. What if a gun had a soul and chose not to be a gun? Basically I wanted to honor the book, but also take it in a new direction.”

In January 1997, Tim McCanlies and Brent Forrester were hired to work from Bird’s story treatment and to adapt a screenplay with the director. Working at Warner Bros. Feature Animation in Glendale – with “one-third of the money of a Disney or DreamWorks film, and half of the production schedule” according to Bird – the filmmakers received a green light for production. Tony Fucile was chosen as head of animation and hired the team to design the movie. While drawn mostly in traditional two-dimensional animation, the Iron Giant proved so difficult to visualize that CGI was employed to give the character mass and solidity.

Working from sketches by Joe Johnston, Bird, production designer Mark Whiting and supervising CGI animator Steve Markowski also incorporated visual cues from ‘50s sci-fi classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still for the look and feel of the Giant. Bird rejected the idea of designing the characters around whichever movie stars they could cast. Instead, he looked for voices that fit his concept of who the characters were. Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel and Christopher Macdonald were selected.

The film scored high with test audiences and began to build enthusiastic word of mouth, but Warner Bros. was reeling from a disastrous experience producing an animated film called The Quest For Camelot. Their feature animation unit was already being scaled back and the decision was made to market The Iron Giant strictly to kids. None of its actors were booked on talk shows. No magazine ads were taken out. Bird wasn’t even permitted to cut his own trailer. Both Danny Elfman and John Williams were considered to score the picture, but the studio opted for Michael Kamen instead.

Arriving in theaters August 1999, The Iron Giant went on to gross $23 million in the U.S. It added another $80 million overseas, but the film was pronounced a box office failure. President of production Lorenzo di Bonaventura would later state, “People always say to me, ‘Why don’t you make smarter family movies?’ The lesson is, every time you do, you get slaughtered.” Bird maintained that disarray at the studio actually enabled him to make the film he wanted, and he remained grateful to Warner Bros. for giving him the opportunity to direct his first feature.

Opinion
By producing an animated film without talking animals, musical numbers or smug pop culture references, Bird’s directorial debut would’ve towered over recent fare from Disney or DreamWorks merely because it does something creative in its medium. The reason The Iron Giant is a classic is its unwavering devotion to story and character, qualities you rarely see most live action movies. The film isn’t an excuse to sell toys or commercial tie-ins to kids. This is a film that engages the emotions of the audience and engages them beautifully.

Bird’s passion for comic book mythology, domestic situation comedy and science fiction – the sequence where the Giant unleashes his alien weaponry against the Army is any film geek’s dream – is ideally suited for this material. The film is loaded with visual wit, like a Duck and Cover newsreel, or the yin and yang icon on the back of Dean’s bathrobe. Beyond it’s visceral excitement and humor, the film’s characters are invested with heart, and the story has something relevant to say about humanity. The Iron Giant has it all and stand as one of the great animated films of the ‘90s.

Angus Wolfe Murray at Eye For Film writes, “The film works on almost every level, particularly its central relationship. The animators, scriptwriter (Tim McCanlies) and Vin Diesel, who creates a mode of speech for the giant, have succeeded in giving the massive Meccano model a heart and soul, without resorting to those special Spielberg moments.”

“The Iron Giant is one of those rare, truly magical animated movies that has a heart as big as Mount Everest, but never becomes too saccharine sweet. There’s a fabulous voice cast, including Jennifer Aniston in (for this reviewer) her first un-annoying role ever as Hogarth’s mom … Add to this a soundtrack that gives that extra zing to proceedings and we’re left with a near-perfect melding of computer graphics and traditional cel animation that presents to us a truly moving story that never drags,” writes Amy Flower at DVD Net.

Jen Walker at AboutFilm.com writes, “The Iron Giant offers a look back into an era fondly remembered. It is steeped in 1950s paranoia and naivete, a story whole and separate from the world in which millenial children currently exist. In a decade full of extreme advertising, extreme sports, and even extreme snacks, modern children may not appreciate a movie such as The Iron Giant. But if we can get them to slow down long enough to give it a chance, they will be treated to something truly special in this day and age: a damn good story.”

© Joe Valdez