A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Steven Spielberg, screen story by Ian Watson, based on the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss
Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Bonnie Curtis
Running time: 146 minutes

Should I Care?
There are science fiction films that improve with age — Blade Runner tops the list and Donnie Darko is right behind it — and then there’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s ambitious tribute to his friend, the late Stanley Kubrick. The good news for Kubrick fans is that unlike the master filmmaker’s aborted Napoleon project circa 1970, we’ll never have to ponder what Kubrick’s future faerie tale would have looked like had he lived long enough to figure out the story and direct it himself. The bad news is that despite the streamlined elegance of its industrial look — production designer Rick Carter and his team were nominated by the Art Directors Guild for an Excellence in Production Design Award, while Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Stan Winston and Michael Lantieri were robbed of an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects — the conceit of an artificial boy who longs to be real after his adoptive mother reads him Pinocchio is artificially sweetened at best, tedious at worst.

The landscape A.I. spirits us across — an energy efficient single family home, an anti-robot carnival of destruction, a sin city over the Delaware River, the ruins of a Manhattan deluged by the rising tides — is as visually compelling as any you’d expect from the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But Spielberg’s screenplay spins its wheels trying to engender sympathy for an artificial boy and validate its childish perceptions of the world. The script squanders opportunities to fully explore humanity and the direction we’re headed and seems devoted instead to pushing the comforts of fantasy. The result is less E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and more Harry and the Hendersons. Jude Law fills in for Bigfoot as comic relief, but doesn’t seem to even be acting in the same movie as the hapless Haley Joel Osment, who does the best he can with a role that would have better realized fifteen years later as a completely digital character. The vibrant and penetrating musical score by John Williams is perfect as is.

So, What’s This About?
In an unspecified future, greenhouse gases have melted the polar ice caps, submerged the coastal regions of the world and displaced millions of people. To assist mankind with labor without draining resources, artificial beings referred to as “mecha” have been created. Unlike organic beings, mecha require no food, no sleep and will never grow old. The latest mechas even look human, but lack our emotional responses. Professor Hobby (William Hurt) challenges his colleagues at New Jersey based Cybertronics to develop a mecha child with the capacity to love, the ideal product for families unable to acquire a license for children. Hobby approves a test family consisting of Cybertronics employee Henry Swinton (Sam Robards) who views the mecha child as something of a toy. His wife Monica (Frances O’Connor) grieves the loss of their biological son Martin (Jake Thomas), suspended in a cryogenic state for the last five years while doctors attempt to cure a rare illness.

The arrival of the artificial surrogate David (Haley Joel Osment) upsets Monica at first, but after growing attached to the mecha, she chooses to initiate its imprinting protocol, emotionally coupling David to her forever. When Martin recovers and returns home, David finds the love of his mother elusive. Sibling rivalry increases tensions in the Swinton home and David is soon seen as a threat. Rather than send him to Cybertronics for destruction, Monica sets David loose with a walking and talking teddy bear (voiced by Jack Angel) for companionship. David falls in with a group of castaway mecha including Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a pleasure model framed for murder by the husband of one of his clients. The pair escapes a Flesh Fair, a futuristic tractor pull where humans celebrate the destruction of artificial beings. Having been read Pinocchio by his mother, David believes he can win her love back by finding the Blue Fairy, who will turn him into a real boy. With Joe’s help, David embarks on a journey to meet his creator.

Who Made It?
Supertoys Last All Summer Long was a short story by British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss published in 1969. Four years later, Aldiss co-authored a history of sci-fi titled Billion Year Spree that included a flattering reference to Stanley Kubrick, the master filmmaker of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Having settled in the village of St. Albans north of London, Kubrick invited Aldiss to lunch in 1976 and latched onto the idea of adapting Supertoys into a feature film. Aldiss agreed to sell Kubrick the film rights in 1982 and worked with him on a screenplay, but when Kubrick insisted on incorporating elements of Pinocchio to tell the story of an android yearning to be a real boy, the partnership stalled. Failing to respark their collaboration in 1990, Kubrick turned to sci-fi author Ian Watson to draft a story based on Aldiss’ concepts. Working with Watson, Kubrick fashioned a 90-page treatment for a “robot version of Pinocchio”, which Kubrick was calling A.I.

Kubrick commissioned hundreds of illustrations from graphic artist Chris Baker and even shot some test footage, but unable to make the film with the technology that existed at that time, the director put A.I. on the shelf. Jurassic Park compelled Kubrick to revive the project in 1993, but he convinced himself that the ideal director for the material would be Steven Spielberg, who Kubrick had discussed A.I. with as early as 1984. Envisioning a Stanley Kubrick production of a Steven Spielberg film, Kubrick temporarily got the director on board before Spielberg insisted that Kubrick direct A.I. himself. Kubrick’s death in March 1999 threatened to keep A.I. on the drawing board, until his brother-in-law Jan Harlan and widow Christiane proposed to Warner Bros. revive A.I. with Spielberg at the helm. The finished product — with Spielberg adapting Kubrick’s treatment and designs into his own script — would sharply divide critics and moviegoers when released two years later.

How’d They Do It?
In an interview with BBC News in September 2001, Brian Aldiss recalled the genesis of Supertoys Last All Summer Long, published in Harper’s Bazaar 32 years previous. “I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now — they were lodged in laboratories. At that time possibly, because of their novelty, there was a theory that the human brain was roughly like a computer; it calculated in the same way and moreover the dreams we dreamt at night were indications that the computer was downloading data. If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it — the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love. And that was what I think attracted Stanley Kubrick to the story.”

Aldiss made a passing reference to the master filmmaker in a sci-fi history he wrote with David Wingrove titled Billion Year Spree, in which Kubrick was described as “a great science fiction writer of the age”. Kubrick invited the author to the first of several lunches in 1976. In conversations about what type of movie Aldiss thought would be successful, the author suggested Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. Kubrick was interested in Supertoys and in 1982 purchased the film rights. By November ‘82, Aldiss went to work with the director at his estate in St. Albans, attempting to expand the 2,000-word short story into a screenplay. Aldiss recalled, “Kubrick always told me that if you had a six or eight-part episodic structure, then you’d got the film made. He kept saying to me, ‘Look, Brian, forget about narrative. What we want are six non-submersible units.’ That was his philosophy. You can really see it working well in 2001, with these disparate elements that don’t quite connect, and that’s what gives the film its mystery.”

Aldiss continued, “You have to work to make the connection yourself; the most brilliant one, of course, being when the ape-man throws the femur up into the air and Kubrick cuts to the space vehicle. If ever you want to prove Kubrick’s genius, then you only need look at the juxtaposition of those two shots.” But Aldiss was uncomfortable with where Kubrick wanted to go with the source material. “Stanley was set upon making a modernized version of Pinocchio in which David the android boy meets the Blue Fairy and becomes transformed into a real boy. I hoped that Stanley would create another future myth and not really look back. In the end we weren’t seeing eye to eye and things were not moving forward and I got the push.” In 1990, Kubrick phoned Aldiss and briefly invited him back in an effort to jumpstart Supertoys. Kubrick had arrived on the melting of the polar ice caps and the flooding of New York as a non-submersible unit, but Aldiss’ unwillingness to work the Blue Fairy into the script put him on the outs.

British science fiction author Ian Watson then entered the picture. In a memoir published in The New York Review of Science Fiction ten years later, Watson recalled, “Early in 1990, in my cottage in a little English village sixty miles north of London, the phone rang. Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Tony Frewin, introduced himself and said that Stanley wished to talk to me. Why me? It transpired that Tony had phoned various specialist SF book dealers to ask who they rated as a writer with lots of bright ideas, and several of my story collections, such as Slow Birds and Evil Water, were duly delivered to Stanley. A few hours later the courier arrived and handed over a package containing nine sheets of flimsy fax paper bearing the text of Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, faded as if retrieved from an ancient file.” Describing the movie Kubrick had in mind as “a picaresque robot version of Pinocchio”, Watson was put under contract to Warner Bros. and from May 1990 to January 1991, huddled with Kubrick to produce a 90-page treatment for A.I.

As early as 1984, Kubrick confided in Steven Spielberg his plans for A.I., which inched closer to reality once he saw the advances in visual effects that Industrial Light & Magic made in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Kubrick shot test footage of oil rigs in the North Sea, imagining that he could digitally replace them with skyscrapers. Discussing A.I. in a behind-the-scenes featurette for the film’s DVD release, Spielberg revealed, “Stanley investigated several things. He actually built a complete mechanical child that was a complete disaster. The mechanics of what we can do today cannot simulate the liquid movements of let’s say of computer graphics animation, but CGI has also not yet reached a state of the art where it can replicate a human being. We mixed it a bit in Jurassic Park where the animals were CGI and the people of course were not and Shrek is all CGI and that’s an art form onto itself, but to put a digital boy in amongst a cast of human beings photographed on 35 millimeter, we’re still years away from that technologically.”

In 1994, Kubrick summoned Spielberg to St. Alban’s for a chat. Interviewed by Mark Kermode for The Culture Show in November 2006, Spielberg revealed, “He didn’t want to make A.I. I mean, he developed it, for himself and then he said, ‘This is more you than me.’ And he began to produce it for me to direct. We actually made a deal with Warner Bros. for Stanley to produce it, for me to direct it based on Stanley’s script with Ian Watson. And it was great. It was going to be a great relationship and then I kept getting faxes from Stanley all night long.” Spielberg added, “And the amount of information he was giving me, including shots and where the camera should go was so extraordinarily precise and detailed that I finally called him on the phone and said, ‘Stanley, I can’t direct this movie. These faxes are crying out to me to say to you, you have to direct it. This is your movie.’ And I withdrew from the project.” Kubrick put A.I. on the backburner once again and began a five-year odyssey to get Eyes Wide Shut on the screen. It would be Kubrick’s final film.

Kubrick passed away suddenly at his home in March 1999. Several months later, Kubrick’s wife Christiane and his associate producer Jan Harlan contacted Warner Bros about reviving A.I. under a new director. Harlan recalled, “It simply would have disappeared into the archives if Steven Spielberg had not taken it.” With an April 2000 start date for Minority Report looming, the director poured over Watson’s 90-page treatment and some 600 storyboards that graphic artist Chris Baker had drawn for Kubrick.“So many of the visual iconic moments in the film were based on ideas that Stanley had — like the Flesh Fair, the moon with the gondola underneath it, the whole concept of Teddy, which was part of the original Brian Aldiss five-page short story that he wrote back in the late 1970s. But Stanley left behind boxes of his notes and I could read his handwriting because I had eighteen years of learning how to read his faxes mostly in longhand and it was just interesting little tidbits and not really philosophical but mainly ways that he wanted the picture to feel and look.”

In March 2000, it was announced that Spielberg had chosen to push Minority Report back a year to direct A.I. from a screenplay he’d adapted himself. Budgeted at roughly $90 million, shooting commenced that August. Other than a jaunt up to Gresham, Oregon to film the forest scenes, A.I. was mostly shot over 68 days on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. For a 2001 TV documentary produced in the U.K. titled Steven & Stanley, the director confided, “The hard thing about making A.I.: I didn’t want to lose myself and you know, just slave and service Stanley’s vision. I had to put as much of myself in this project as I could to also make it my while.” He added, “Stanley wanted to put the Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story in synchronocity with Brian Aldiss’ story of David, Monica and Henry. As a matter of fact, Brian Aldiss called me when he found out that I was in the picture to beg me to drop the entire Pinocchio idea. He said, ‘Pinocchio’s one story and my story is another. You should make my story and not Pinocchio’s story.’ And I explained to him that I was really making Stanley’s story at this point.”

Opening June 2001, A.I. divided critics almost evenly as a movie could. A.O. Scott, The New York Times: “A.I. is the best fairy tale — the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy’s adventure story — Mr. Spielberg has made. Once again he asks us to identify with a young boy, exiled from the only home he knows and forced to find his way in a strange and unsympathetic world.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Greatness and miscalculation fight for screen space in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a movie both wonderful and maddening. Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years, filled with wondrous sights and provocative ideas, but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character that is, after all, a machine.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “What is of note is the fact that what we’re left with — Kubrick or no — is a muddled, messy disaster of a film, something that seems more like a drastically edited miniseries, cut down to incomprehensible levels with whole sections missing. You may wonder what’s going on more that once. You’re not alone.”

With box office receipts leveling off at $78.6 million in the United States, A.I. was a blockbuster overseas, grossing $157.3 million. Confiding to Mark Kermode five years later, Spielberg addressed the criticism heaped on the film, namely, that it was either too long, too candy coated or both. “All the blame I get for destroying Stanley’s vision are scenes that Stanley actually came up with. You know, the scenes that people can’t believe Stanley conceived — and would have directed himself — are the scenes I’m most credited with spoiling A.I. You know, the whole ending, where after, where David and Teddy are actually rescued underwater, and when it turns to ice and brought into their own future of super mecha. This was Stanley and Ian’s treatment. It was their 97 page treatment that I adapted into my screenplay.” He admitted, “But I think what’s also interesting is I think one of the things that scared Stanley away from A.I. was it was too much of a film for me and too little of the kind of movie he is known for, as a great cineaste.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Plumbing Stanley Kubrick” By Ian Watson. New York Review of Science Fiction, May 2000

“Regarding Stanley” By Rachel Abramowitz. The Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2001

“The Steven & Stanley Story” By Jenny Cooney Carrillo. Urban Cinefile, 6 September 2001

“Brian Aldiss: Kubrick, Spielberg and Me” By Matthew Sweet. The Independent, 14 September 2001

“The Mind Behind AI” BBC News. 20 September 2001

Steven and Stanley (2001). Kensington Television Productions

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition. DreamWorks Video (2002)

“An Interview with Steven Spielberg” By Mark Kermode. The Culture Show, 4 November 2006

Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Written by Michael Cimino
Produced by Joann Carelli
Running time: 219 minutes (original cut)

Should I Care?
As the 1970s came to a close, five runaway film productions loomed on the horizon, piling up doom and gloom courtesy of the mainstream news media. Suffering from fiscal recklessness at best, studio mismanagement at worst, if the poor buzz was to be believed, these five big budget movies were determined to bankrupt Hollywood: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1941, The Blues Brothers and Heaven’s Gate. Four of these would-be disasters quickly recouped their heavy costs at the box office. The one that didn’t make it into the black seems to have been conveniently lost in time along with its infamous director. That would be Michael Cimino and the movie would be Heaven’s Gate, a 3 ½ hour western of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, outstanding performances and haunting grandeur. For all his excesses and notoriety, Cimino captures a certain lyrical beauty missing in epic filmmaking since the passing of David Lean.

It’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. Cimino’s screenplay not only paints the Old West with the contours I imagine actually existed there — crowdedness and expanse, serenity and violence, beauty and ugliness – but fills that landscape with intriguing characters and dialogue of surprising depth. Kris Kristofferson leads a fairly overlooked cast of talented character actors, all of whom are elevated above the din and clamor of the massive production and are enabled to deliver excellent performances. Few movies recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, with Vilmos Zsigmond overseeing the majestic cinematography and David Mansfield composing a staggering musical score. Unlike so many turkeys that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, the craftsmanship here is never in question. For all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, we can see exactly where the bucks ended up and why.

So, What’s This About?
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of 1870 — which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) — assembles to hear their class orator Billy Irvine (John Hurt) speak. Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals sewn by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his fellow classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. 20 years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is sheriff of Johnson County, pristine territory which more Polish, German and Ukrainian immigrants seem to be pouring into every day.

By the time Averill visits a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, the sheriff learns that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient assassin on the cattleman’s payroll is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Meanwhile, Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who operates a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall — Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating — Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion, who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is also in love with her, offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay in Sweetwater. Three mercenaries intercept Ella at her place of business and attempt to scratch her name off the death list. Standing behind Averill and Champion, the rest of the town elects to stay their ground and attempt to repel the invaders.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of — putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines — wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists, who later recalled, “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter — I don’t know how many weeks before it was released — and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film — The Johnson County War — to United Artists. The studio’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and responded coolly it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the United States government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard 20 years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park in Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After 12 days, Heaven’s Gate was 10 days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, Steven Bach recounted the expenses that began accumulating: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking — and retaking — time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting as many as 30 takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing fifty seven takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of thirty-two takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current pace, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

The studio got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about 30 minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges later offered his recollection of the production by stating, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October 1979 and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would naturally bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalled, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was five hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now — which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through — was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered viewing his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Michael Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate fails so completely, you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalled, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s — I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing — I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate was given in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the United States. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, the movie hadn’t steered UA away from disaster either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times — whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters — Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino — who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus — had this to say in 1990:  “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Where Are You Getting This?
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)

Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miami Vice — Production Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dead Girl – Press Notes

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

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe) stops on his way to deliver his fellow cops booze for a Christmas party. He visits a recently paroled wife beater and settles the thug’s latest domestic assault out of court. Sgt. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is introduced at a cast party for the TV program Badge of Honor, for which he serves as a technical advisor. He’s approached by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), publisher of gossip rag L.A. Confidential, who offers the detective $100 to bust a starlet for marijuana possession so Hudgens will have fresh scandal to print. Sgt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) serves as watch commander at Hollywood station. Exley’s ambition is to make detective, but Lt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) counsels his protégé, “You’re a political animal. You have the eye for human weakness, but not the stomach.”

When four Mexicans assault two officers, several drunken cops – including White’s partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) – drag the suspects out of their cells and beat them. The incident makes the front page under the headline “Bloody Christmas.” Exley volunteers to testify to a grand jury against White and Stensland, winning the promotion he eagerly covets. Lt. Smith gets White off the hook so the capable officer can serve on a special detail to strong-arm organized crime from moving in on L.A. The bodies of gangsters start piling up all over the city. Vincennes is demoted to vice for his role in the brawl and told the only way to get his job at narcotics back is to make a major case. He investigates a mysterious escort service known as “Fleur-De-Lis.”

Exley – despised as a rat by the cops he now works with – rushes to the scene of a massacre, six victims shotgunned at the Nite Owl Coffeeshop. One of the victims is Dick Stensland. Lt. Smith takes authority of the case, but allows Exley to serve as his second in command. Meanwhile, White has become infatuated with the mysterious Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a call girl who’s been made up to look like Veronica Lake. Her manager (David Strathairn) is a millionaire investor with ties throughout the city. The Night Owl Massacre is pinned on three Black youths, but Exley begins to doubt they were responsible. The investigations of White, Vincennes and Exley soon intersect. In each case, the trail leads them back to the LAPD.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1989, L.A. Confidential was the third volume of what novelist James Ellroy was referring to as “an epic pop history of my smog bound fatherland.” At 500 pages, over 100 characters, a timeline that spanned eight years and a labyrinth of a plot that unfolded in the minds of its three protagonists, when Ellroy’s publisher Otto Penzler notified him that Warner Bros. had purchased the film rights, the men broke into hysterical laughter. Ellroy wrote, “I figured some movie biz fuckhead would option the book. I figured he’d blow smoke up my ass about what a great film it would make. Movieland self-delusion was a major theme of the novel. It was only fitting that I should profit from its exercise. I knew my book was movie-adaptation-proof. The motherfucker was uncompressible, uncontainable and unequivocally bereft of sympathetic characters. It was unsavory, unapologetically dark, untamable and altogether untranslatable to the screen.”

One of Ellroy’s fans was a screenwriter named Brian Helgeland. “The weird thing was, I had gotten a hold of these pulpy novels he’d done in like ‘88 or something like that. I just tore through these things and I thought they were just great. Then when The Big Nowhere came out, I bought that right away and I read somewhere he was going to be signing it at some L.A. bookstore. I’d never gone to any book signings, but I was like, it’s Ellroy. I gotta go see him. It was really depressing because there were like, eight people there, this was probably in like ‘89 or so. So I talked to him for like half an hour, until he probably started to think I was a deranged fan or something like that, and he told me how he was going to write books that could never be made into movies. And I was like, ‘Cool, cool.’” When Helgeland heard that Warner Bros. had purchased the screen rights to L.A. Confidential, the screenwriter began a yearlong lobbying effort for the job of adapting the book. Helgeland was ultimately notified that the job had gone to someone else.

Curtis Hanson had toiled in Hollywood for close to twenty years as a screenwriter and director for hire. His latest film – The River Wild – starred Meryl Streep and was considered a step up in prestige. Hanson was thinking about his next project. “I’d always been interested in L.A. fiction from growing up here, authors like James M. Cain, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler. When I read L.A. Confidential, I just got hooked on the characters, got caught up emotionally in their individual struggles with their personal demons. I wanted to capture that in a movie. Also, I found that the way I felt about the characters was near to the way I felt about the city of Los Angeles. I’d always wanted to make a movie about L.A., to deal with this city at that magic moment in the ‘50s when the dream of L.A. was being bulldozed to make way for all the people that were coming here in pursuit of the very dream that was being destroyed. So I got really excited about it as a movie project and made a deal to write and direct it.”

Undeterred, Helgeland’s manager Missy Malkin got her client a lunch meeting with Curtis Hanson. Helgeland wrote, “We met in an old bungalow on the Universal lot that had been pink slipped – scheduled to be torn down to make way for the Jurassic Park portion of the studio tour. I thought this was a good sign, as much of the L.A. we would need to bring to life had suffered a similar fate.” Helgeland and Hanson discovered that they both shared a passion for Ellroy’s fiction, and thought they had the key to adapting L.A. Confidential. Hanson added, “If Bud, Ed or Jack wasn’t involved in a scene, it went by the board. Some were too good to let go of: the shootout at the abandoned auto court in San Berdoo that begins the novel, for example. We took it, moved it and let two of our trio take part.” It would take Helgeland & Hanson ten drafts and three years to complete their adaptation.

Meanwhile, the signals being sent from Warner Bros. were less than supportive. Hanson recalled, “The immediate strikes against it: Period, number one. Which of course every financier is afraid of, you know, on a commercial level, is that a contemporary audience won’t connect with the past. Multi-character, number two. Why are there three guys? Could you get rid of Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes, so that the movie is built around Bud White and then we could have a big star play Bud White? And I responded by saying how important Ed Exley was and why, and I was then cut off and they said, ‘Well what about getting rid of Bud White then and Jack Vincennes and build it all around Ed Exley, and then we could have a big star play Ed Exley.’ And number three, that it was in this period of film noir, which they’re extremely negative about because noir movies almost never do well, commercially. As you go through the history of the noirs made over the last few decades, very few of them did well enough to even earn their money back.”

Seeking a financier, Hanson turned to Regency Enterprises, whose head of production Michael Nathanson had long been an advocate of the filmmaker. Nathanson later recalled, “As years progressed, and I went on and became the president and chief operating officer of MGM, the irony was that if I had come into my office to say, ‘Will you make L.A. Confidential?’ I would have said, ‘No.’ This movie got willed to get made against incredible odds and against a business environment that said, ‘This is the kind of movie that should not be made.’” Nathanson set a meeting between Hanson and the principal of New Regency, Arnon Milchan. Instead of showing the producer a script, Hanson presented his elaborate vision of L.A. Confidential. Hanson recalled, “Arnon said, ‘Let’s go.’ Depending on the casting, depending on the budget, I’m in. So I had a sort of tentative blinking green light, let us say. And now we had to get the cast.”

New Regency suggested Hanson work with a casting director they knew well named Mali Finn. Hanson stated, “I wanted unknowns for Bud White and Ed Exley because with unknowns, the audience wouldn’t know who they liked, who they didn’t like, who would live, who would die. Anything could happen. I wanted these characters to be discovered, the way you discover characters in a novel. Your feelings evolve as you go along.” An Australian actor Hanson had seen in a movie called Romper Stomper flew to L.A. to read through some scenes, one of which Hanson decided to tape and show to Arnon Milchan and Michael Nathanson. After getting approval to cast Russell Crowe as Bud White, Hanson chose another virtual unknown – Guy Pearce – to play Ed Exley. The fact that Pearce also happened to be Australian was not immediately relayed by Hanson to his financiers.

For the role of Jack Vincennes, Hanson understood he needed someone audiences would be familiar with. Kevin Spacey met with the director to talk about the role and recalled, “I said to him, ‘All right, if it was really the 1950s and you were really directing this movie, who would you cast as Jack Vincennes?’ I kind of expected he would have said, like, William Holden. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Dean Martin.’ I thought, Dean Martin. And he said, ‘Well, watch Some Came Running. Watch Rio Bravo again, and you’ll see the quality that I’m talking about. It is a man who on the surface has all this ring-a-ding, you know, he’s slick and he’s cool and he’s on top of it but just underneath the surface is a man who’s going through changes and going through a moral eruption and that will ultimately lead him to the place where he realizes he can no longer behave the way he’s behaved.”

Hanson & Helgeland had held off paying a courtesy call to James Ellroy. The author recalled, “I had heard that Hanson was involved throughout the process and was impressed with the fact that he didn’t contact me. When he and Brian Helgeland had gone through seven drafts of the script they let me read what they had. I found it interesting and compelling and a good job of retaining the essential narrative integrity of my book, i.e. the dramatic lives of the three main characters. From that point on Hanson and I became friendly and I became an informal consultant. Chiefly, Curtis would call me up and ask me questions pertaining to L.A. in the ‘50s and the police corps then. ‘Do you turn left off the rotunda at City Hall to get to the detective bureau in 1953?’ Things like that.”

On a budget of roughly $35 million, L.A. Confidential commenced shooting May 1996 in Los Angeles. Producer Michael Nathanson remembered, “I think we had eighty something locations, in sixty-five days? Something like that. And we were all over greater Los Angeles. And we were shooting lots of nights. There was inclement weather, both written – where we created a few times – and there was inclement weather we ran into and tried to make it work for the movie. And we would go from Baldwin Hills to Pasadena to Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.” Pockets of 1950s architecture were found still standing in Elysian Park. Pierce Patchett’s home was located in Los Feliz, where architect Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House permitted filming on their grounds for the first time ever. In Hollywood, the Formosa Café and the Frolic Room were both utilized as locations.

Editor Peter Honess may have been one of the first to realize just how great L.A. Confidential was going to be. “It’s such a well crafted piece of filmmaking, from A to Z, actually. And I thought it was terribly brave of Curtis Hanson to cast Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe – two virtually unknown actors in the States – to play very American roles. I thought actually that their accents are really good. It also gave the audience an opportunity to see a film that you cannot make about modern times. You had to set it in another period because of the racism, because of the language, because of the bigotry of some of the characters in the piece, and that’s fascinating too, because it actually seems like it is of the modern era, but it isn’t, and I don’t think you could make a film about the social situation now of the way of L.A. Confidential. And it was just a very well crafted piece.”

Following enthusiastic reception at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, L.A. Confidential opened September 1997 in the U.S. With the possible exception of The Sweet Hereafter, it received the best reviews of any film released that year. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Curtis Hanson’s resplendently wicked L.A. Confidential is a tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “L.A. Confidential serves as an almost overwhelming reminder of the pleasures of deeply involving narratives in the old Hollywood sense … This picture restores the primacy of the dramatic line, which tends to make the violence even more startling when it comes.”

The Academy Awards returned nine nominations, but in a year that featured the highest grossing motion picture of all time, Hollywood saw fit to honor Titanic instead. Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Helgeland & Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay) were the only L.A. Confidential nominees to receive Oscars. The awards consideration did nudge the film to box office of $64.6 million in the U.S. and $61 million overseas. Naming the 25 best Los Angeles based movies of the last quarter century, the staff of the L.A. Times ranked L.A. Confidential #1 on their list in August 2008. Curtis Hanson mused, “The movie truly started with L.A. I wanted to capture the city of my childhood memories. And I wanted to take a hard look at the dark side – the booming economy, the exploding population, the corruption and racism – as well as certain problems that are still with us. I wanted to capture the spirit of this place. The optimism and energy was real. It still is.”

Why Should I Care?
The fact that a brooding, politically incorrect, character driven murder mystery set in 1953 was made without any real movie stars and proved a terrific success would be worthy of praise in itself, but the best news for movie lovers is that more than a decade after it reaped all those rave reviews, L.A. Confidential has actually appreciated in value as a screen classic. You don’t realize what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and after a couple of so-called Best Pictures have proven to be little more than hocus pocus Hollywood bullshit – Titanic had a better grip on reality than Crash did – James Ellroy’s complex, gratuitously violent and ceaselessly entertaining detective yarn stands out as prime rib among the fast food, what Hollywood filmmaking can aspire to be.

Top to bottom, the craftsmen behind L.A. Confidential are operating at the top of their game. In collaboration with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, production designer Jeannine Oppewall and costume designer Ruth Myers, Curtis Hanson went to great lengths to avoid the stereotypical look and feel of mysteries set in the ‘30s or ‘40s, opting instead to recreate a postwar Los Angeles that was looking ahead to its future. Scenes burst with vitality, as well as complexity. Helgeland & Hanson’s colorful adaptation sidesteps nearly every known cliché of the detective genre, moving at breakneck pace from a sleazy journalist to freeway construction to an uptight detective questioning Johnny Stompanato & Lana Turner to an LAPD hit squad. Somewhere in there, the portrait of a metropolis takes shape in all its glamour and deceit. Jerry Goldsmith composed the robust, brooding musical score.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!
L.A. Confidential: The Screenplay. By Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson. Warner Books (1997)

“Curtis Hanson” By Alex Simon. Venice Magazine, 1997 September

“Helgeland the Happy Heretic” By Rob Blackwelder. Splicedwire, 2001 April 17

Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft. By Lawrence Grobel. Da Capo Press (2001)

“Hollywood’s James Ellroy Enigma” By Scott Timberg. Los Angeles Times, 6 April 2008

“The Top 25 of the Last 25: L.A. Is A Complicated City, But They Got It” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 2008

L.A. Confidential (Two Disc Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2008)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the San Fernando Valley of 1977, busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), maker of “adult films, exotic pictures” at the nightclub where Eddie works. Jack lives in Reseda with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a coke sniffing adult film star whose line of work has cost her custody of her son. After Jack sends another one of his performers – the legendary Rollergirl (Heather Graham) – to inspect Eddie’s stuff up close, the troupe takes him for a cup of coffee. Jack expresses his vision to make an adult film where the story is so compelling the audience can’t get up and leave until they find out how it ends. Once Eddie’s spiteful mother (Joanna Gleason) kicks him out, Eddie finds a home with Jack.

Eddie’s new family includes the exuberant Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), actor/stereo salesman/cowboy Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), a grip (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who develops a crush on Eddie and The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely) who puts up the money for all of Jack’s films and urges Eddie to think about changing his name, “some name that makes you happy, or something with a little pizzazz.” Coming up with the handle “Dirk Diggler” while lounging in Jack’s hot tub, Dirk makes his film debut having sex with Amber. His physical endowments and charisma propel Dirk Diggler to the top of the adult film world, a position he solidifies with the character of Brock Landers, super agent and super lover whose debut Angels Live In My Town prompts Jack to declare, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

Dirk’s fortune takes a detour in 1980, after Amber introduces her “baby boy” to cocaine and the adult film industry transitions from film to the much cheaper format of video tape, ushering in an era of amateurism in the industry. Dirk’s drug use effects his acting and his ego gets him tossed off Jack’s set. Dirk and Reed take a shot at becoming rock stars, but shoot so much cash up their noses that they can’t pay the recording studio to retrieve their pathetic master tapes. On his way to rock bottom, Dirk falls in with desperado Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) who hatches a scheme to rob Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), a drug smuggler with a fondness for mix tapes and firecrackers. Reaching a new low in life, Dirk Diggler realizes he has nowhere left to go but up.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Dirk Diggler Story was a 30-minute short Paul Thomas Anderson made when he was seventeen years old. Shooting on video and using two VCRs to edit, he was inspired not only by the porn movies he was obsessed with, but by fake documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap. Anderson chronicled the rise and fall of a porn star he based loosely on John Holmes, as well as a performer he’d seen profiled on A Current Affair named Shauna Grant. Anderson recalls, “There was some humor that I saw in it, I guess in a sick twisted way, maybe because it was the first time I was recognizing that a lot of these people in this story on A Current Affair were people I’d seen peripherally around the Valley, just in an area where I grew up, which is not a real shady area or anything, but there’s a lot of kind of goofy characters. So maybe it was just kind of being tickled by that.” Anderson ultimately wrote a feature length script based on The Dirk Diggler Story that ran 300 pages.

A 26-minute short Anderson made starring Philip Baker Hall opened doors for the filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. When Samuel L. Jackson agreed to join the cast of a feature Anderson had written – ultimately titled Hard Eight – financing was secured from Rysher Entertainment. Anderson enthused, “I remember on day two of shooting, calling my agent and saying, ‘After I’ve finished this movie, I wanna go right away and make Boogie Nights, ’cause I’m here with four actors and I LOVE IT! But I need more! I need fucking more! I need 80 of them!’ I knew it would be cool to consciously make a small movie – and a big fucking epic sloppy huge movie.” In the summer of 1995, Anderson went back to The Dirk Diggler Story, jettisoning the documentary approach and honing his script to a straightforward narrative of 185 pages.

One of the first people to get a look at Anderson’s script for Boogie Nights was the 31-year-old president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca. Anderson’s pitch to DeLuca was that this was a four hour movie with a disco intermission. He talked about the opening shot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and how he wanted to open with something similar: a black screen with disco music thumping underneath, which would then explode into a club marquee with the film’s title. Anderson described a long tracking shot that would descend into the club and introduce nearly every character, without cutting. DeLuca – thinking this sounded like Lawrence of Arabia, with disco – was hooked. He signed on immediately, regardless of the running time. “I would do Berlin Alexanderplatz with Paul. He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.”

New Line chairman Robert Shaye had reservations about the thick script, which DeLuca assured his boss that Anderson could cut. Other executives remained dubious. VP of Marketing Karen Hermelin recalled, “I remember Mike DeLuca asking me to read it and I thought, ‘Who would watch this? You can’t make this.’ But DeLuca was totally passionate, he believed in Paul. And Paul believed in himself.” Hermelin came around. “And he was totally uncompromising. He had this five-thousand page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it.” Shaye struck a deal with Anderson: He could make Boogie Nights with the freedom to cast whoever he wanted, provided he kept the budget below $15 million, secured an R-rating from the MPAA and delivered a running time of no more than three hours, which New Line would ultimately retain final cut over. Anderson agreed.

The first actor Anderson seriously considered for Jack Horner was Warren Beatty, who had phoned to flirt with the role. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1997, Anderson revealed, “I think what I eventually, I started to figure out was that Warren wanted to play Dirk Diggler, you know? ‘You don’t really want to play Jack Horner. You want to be the kid on this movie. He said, ‘Yeah.’” Anderson felt Beatty’s reticence had something to do with morality. “I think what he might have been looking for, which maybe some other people were looking for, was a clear kind of moment or a clear moment when someone stands up and says, ‘What we are doing is wrong,’ you know?” After considering Jack Nicholson, Anderson made an offer to Sydney Pollack, but the director/actor blanched over the subject matter. Once they saw the film, Beatty and Pollack both regretted saying no. Burt Reynolds had said yes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the role of Dirk Diggler, but weeks before shooting was to begin, the rising star was talked into taking the lead in Titanic. On his way out the door, DiCaprio recommended one of his co-stars from The Basketball Diaries – Mark Wahlberg – for the job. Joining him were most of the cast from Hard Eight - John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall – as well as actors that Anderson was eager to collaborate with. Don Cheadle had previously worked with Julianne Moore in a production of Jean Genet’s The Screens at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “I called her and said, ‘What’s up with this script? Are you down with this?’ And she told me she got a real good feeling from Paul. I did too, but I was still nervous about how the film would come off. I didn’t want to be naked and exploited. I wanted the film to take a deep look at these people. And it does.”

A twelve week shooting schedule commenced in July 1996. The perfect house for Jack Horner had been found, but the location ended up being in West Covina, a 45 minute commute. Little about the production was a breeze. Producer John Lyons recalls, “Boogie Nights was a truly grueling shoot. It was made for basically no money, $12 million. It was a period piece and we shot a lot of it in the San Fernando Valley and West Covina. It was very hot and we shot so many days where it was 104 or 105 degrees. We shot a lot at night, which was really exhausting. When we made that movie, there was a lot of talk about workers in the sex industry and how it was a liberating thing. The reality was that I think we all got sort of depressed during the making of the film. It was intense and the reality of the lives of those people were leading are far from glamorous.”

Screened for the executives at New Line, Boogie Nights met with enthusiasm, for the most part. At 165 minutes, Robert Shaye felt the picture was just too long. While Anderson hemmed and hawed at trimming anything, Shaye brought in his own editor to cut the movie. When test screened, New Line’s 140 minute version somehow scored even lower than Anderson’s version, which was generating a miserable 30% among recruited audiences. New Line marketing chief Mitch Goldman explained, “The truth was – people didn’t want to say they liked it, even if they did. That’s the fallacy of testing a picture like this. They’d applaud, laugh, cry at the right places. Then the cards would come in shitty. When they put pencil to paper they’d say, ‘I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to’ because it was a distasteful subject. But you could tell they loved it.”

The MPAA’s reaction to Boogie Nights was predictable. Anderson recalled, “When we submitted the movie, it was NC-17. I said, ‘I can’t argue with you.’ What they said next surprised me: ‘We just want you to know we love this movie, and we want it to be NC-17.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘We created that rating for movies like this, movies that deal with explicit material but that are also legitimate films. Then Showgirls came along and made us look like girls, sort of wiped the rating back to an X. So we need a movie like this.’ That changed my mind. I understood, but I said, ‘I can’t be the guinea pig.’” After recutting and resubmitting the film at least six times to no avail, Anderson reshot the sequence in which William H. Macy discovers his wife nonchalantly enjoying sexual relations at a New Year’s Eve party. “The MPAA broke it down like this: you can either hump or talk. You cannot hump and talk.”

Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1997. By late October, it had opened in the U.S. to nearly universal critical acclaim. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Some of the most distinctive American films of recent years – Pulp Fiction, The People vs. Larry Flynt, L.A. Confidential and now this one – have invoked a sleaze-soaked Southern California as an evilly alluring nexus of decadence and pop culture. Boogie Nights further ratchets up the raunchiness by taking porn movies and drug problems entirely for granted, and by fondly embracing a collection of characters who do the same.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets.” Emmanuel Levy, Variety: “Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.”

Far from a blockbuster – grossing $26.4 million in the U.S. and another $16.7 million overseas – Boogie Nights did receive three Academy Award nominations (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Anderson’s script were up for Oscars). Anderson trumpeted his magnum opus in one of many interviews by stating, “It’s about finding a family, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds kinda preposterous, ’cause it’s about porno! You know, and that’s a really kinda weird thing, is that you want to say ‘Well, it’s about the pornography industry’ and then you want to quickly say well, not really. And then maybe people might look at you sideways and go, ‘Come on, which is it?’ But I think ultimately, the thing that I really liked most and really focused on is that it’s about a lot of people searching for their dignity, and trying to find any kind of love and affection they can get. And they find it in really fucked up and twisted ways – but they get it, you know?”

Why Should I Care?
Just about every minute of Boogie Nights – which clocks in at 155 minutes – looks, sounds and feels almost exactly like I’ve imagined that movies should look, sound and feel. Photographed by Robert Elswit, we’re dazzled on a technical level. Karyn Rachtman – music supervisor for Pulp Fiction – deserves some kind of special award for mixing up The Chico Hamilton Quintet and Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band with the usual suspects like The Commodores and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. In his script, Anderson tackles challenging subject matter and takes on big, sloppy ideas, while swinging back and forth between darkness and light. If the picture has a flaw, it’s in the two dimensional portrait of just about every single character, who speak, act but very seldom it seems, think. Rollergirl flies out of the movie almost as thinly sketched as when she flew in.

Great insight is not a service Anderson offers. Where Boogie Nights succeeds masterfully is as a document of a moment in show business history and how the camaraderie of the players binds them together after the show is over. As a pure entertainment, it features plenty of ‘70s kitsch, a consistently twisted black wit, a ceaselessly mesmerizing visual palette, and that ass kicking retro soundtrack. Musician Jon Brion pitches in with a sparse but wonderfully kooky musical score. The cast – which includes Luis Guzman, Melora Walters, Nicole Ari Parker and Ricky Jay – has to be one of the finest groups of character actors ever assembled under one tent. What’s most admirable is how Anderson resists making a crowd pleasing, derivative comedy and instead, has the maturity to explore the darkness in each his characters, redeeming the ones still left standing.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Don” By Justine Elias. Interview, 1997 August

“The Innocent Approach to an Adult Opus” By Margy Rochlin. The New York Times, 12 October 1997

Boogie Nights (New Line Platinum Series). New Line Home Video, 1997

“Q & A with PTA” By Matt Grainger. Cinemattractions. 1998 February

“20 Questions” By David Rensin. Playboy, 1998 February

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

Rebels on the Backlot. By Sharon Waxman. Harper Entertainment (2005)

Synopsis
On the 6th of January 1917, five condemned French soldiers are brought to a trench in Somme: a once cheerful carpenter, who accidentally shot himself scattering away rats; a welder so disillusioned by the war that he burns his hand in an attempt to win a discharge; a brave farmer (Clovis Cornillac) who wounds himself in shame after murdering a superior officer; a Corsican pimp whose self-inflicted wound fails to win him a reprieve from combat, and a young lighthouse keeper named Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) who cracks under the horror of trench warfare. Each are sentenced to be thrown over the front lines, to starve or be shot by the Germans.

Though three years have passed without word from Manech, Mathilde Donnay (Audrey Tautou) refuses to believe that her lover died at the trench. Mathilde is a limp orphan who lives with her uncle (Dominique Pinon) and aunt (Chantal Neuwirth) on the Brittany coast. A veteran who escorted the condemned soldiers to their deaths meets with Mathilde, but can’t say whether he saw Manech killed. Presented with a box containing personal effects belonging to each soldier, Mathilde uses the clues to begin her own investigation. Her first lead involves a Corsican prostitute named Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard) who may have news about the prisoners’ fates.

Hiring a diligent private detective (Ticky Holgado) to pick up the trail of the mysterious Tina Lombardi, Mathilde resorts to her own guile to steal government documents and fan out across France in search of those who may hold a piece of the puzzle in her mystery. These include the carpenter’s girlfriend (Julie Depardieu), the Mess Hall Marauder (Albert Dupontel) who served Manech his last meal, and a war widow named Elodie Gordes (Jodie Foster) who was engaged in an extramarital affair with one of the condemned. Unknown to Mathilde, the vengeful Tina Lombardi is conducting her own investigation, tracking down military officers implicit in her pimp’s execution and killing them.

Production history
Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles was a 1991 novel by Sébastien Japrisot. The hybrid storybook romance, detective mystery and social commentary on the Great War had been awarded the Prix Interallia by French authors and journalists on its way to becoming an international bestseller. Among its fans was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had just co-directed his first feature, Delicatessen. Jeunet was fascinated by the era of World War I and intrigued with the possibilities of recreating 1920s Paris on a massive scale. Jeunet recalls, “When I was a teenager I read everything about the First World War, every book. I wasted a lot of holidays because they gave me nightmares, even today it’s very difficult to read some of that stuff.”

Warner Brothers was eager to work with Jeunet following his 2001 magical romantic comedy Amelie, which had become the highest grossing French language film in history. The studio purchased the screen rights to A Very Long Engagement, wooing the director away from French studio UGC, which had hoped to produce Jeunet’s next project. He again collaborated with his Amelie co-writer Guillaume Laurant on a screenplay. Laurant recalls, “First we worked together to agree on what had to be kept and what discarded and decide upon a structure. Then Jean-Pierre wrote a 30-page synopsis. On the basis of that, I wrote a first version of the script. After that, it was a constant to-and-fro between myself and Jean-Pierre until we came up with a final version. I really enjoyed working with Jean-Pierre because of his constant concern for simplicity and efficiency.”

Jeunet had a few requests from Warner Bros. He wanted to make A Very Long Engagement a French language picture, in France, with a French cast and crew. He also wanted final cut. Jeunet recalls, “At every point they said, ‘Yes, OK.’ I said, ‘When are the troubles going to start?’ And they never did. I had as much freedom as I had doing Amelie. One hundred percent.” Warner Brothers set up a company it called 2003 Productions, financing a third of the film’s $56.5 million USD budget, the second highest ever for a French language film at that time. A five and a half month shooting schedule commenced in August 2003 in Corsica, before moving to the Paris area, then to Brittany for the coastal scenes and the Poitiers area for the trench warfare sequences. Interiors were shot at Bry-sur-Marne Studios.

The troubles started when Jeunet finished A Very Long Engagement and submitted it to the French government for subsidies awarded to films made in France. This raised a furor by two unions of French film producers, who argued that the film wasn’t French because it had been financed by Warner Bros. Jeunet felt that the three major producers in France – Gaumont, UGC and Pathe – were wary of Hollywood intruding on their turf. “It’s quite simple. There are three supermarkets and a fourth opens; the other three are not too happy about it and do everything they can to block it. Warner Bros. wants to be a fourth supermarket but making French films. I defend those who make movies. We gave work to 600 technicians, 80 actors and 2,000 extras; we saved Duboi, which was in trouble; and we spent €35 million in France. We didn’t delocalize.”

Opening October 2004 in France, A Very Long Engagement was a hit, ultimately selling $63.5 million in tickets outside the U.S. Arriving in the States in November, the response was not as stellar. Critics who liked the film had a peculiar way of communicating it. Carina Chocano, the Los Angeles Times: “A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it’s as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair – if you like that sort of thing.” Ken Tucker, New York Magazine: “When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.” Variety: “Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.” Expanding to 219 screens, it managed only $6.5 million in the U.S.

Opinion
For anybody suffering withdrawal over director Terry Gilliam’s seeming inability to finance a movie that lives up to the droll vision displayed in Time Bandits or Brazil, A Very Long Engagement is the magic show you’ve been waiting for. A plot summary really can’t do any more justice to Sébastien Japrisot’s richly intricate novel than it can to Jeunet’s immensely whimsical vision of it. This is a cinematic dessert tray, with French digital animation studio Duboi recreating 1920s Paris on an eye popping scale and rendering some 300 trick shots to make the treats even richer. But underneath the visual sheen are reminders of wartime loss, regret and futility that only a European filmmaker would hint at in an enterprise this lavish.

Because this story is so dependent on exposition – with lots of subtitles for non-French speakers to keep pace with – A Very Long Engagement is challenging. And unlike Amelie, it doesn’t rate as a gigglefest. As a visceral experience, it’s beyond peer. Jeunet and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel borrowed a warm color palette from the Little Italy sequences of The Godfather Part II and much of the film resembles less a movie than it does a painting. The digital effects add depth to this world, instead of overwhelming it. In terms of the cast, watching Audrey Tautou, Marion Cotillard and Jodie Foster (speaking impeccable French she studied at the Lycée Français prep school in L.A. as a teen) is a treat. Jeunet lets enough light into the cellar to keep the film from being overwhelming, creating one of the finest anti-war movies in recent memory.

Noel Megahey at DVD Times writes, “All of this fabulous spectacle however is at the cost of any real feeling or emotion, it being smothered under the next spectacular, beautifully lit scene. Even when Mathilde visits what she believes is the grave of her fiancé it should be a solemn private moment, but Jeunet can’t resist filling every inch of the full scope ratio of the screen with as many crosses as will fit. Visually impressive, yes – emotionally resonant, no.”

Chris Luedtke at Passport Cinema writes, “Basically, this is what we call in the business ‘some good stuff.’ A lot of directors nowadays could take some cues from Jeunet’s originality in his displays of characters and plot drive … Jeunet has no problem making you believe that her long lost love may be alive one minute and then dead the next. For those willing to pop this in, you’ll be pleasantly delighted with it. Don’t expect some overly sappy romance story but do be prepared for a character driven mystery that’ll keep you guessing.”

© Joe Valdez