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)

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)

Trick ‘r Treat (2009)
Written by Michael Dougherty
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Produced by Legendary Pictures/ Bad Hat Harry Productions
Running time: 82 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In “Warren Valley, Ohio” on Halloween Night, a Yuppie couple (Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett) are paid a visit by a demonic trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head. In the first of four tongue-in-cheek horror tales to follow, a junior high school principal (Dylan Baker) poisons an obnoxious candy seeker and attempts to dispose of the body before his young son finds out. Three sexually aggressive party seekers (Lauren Lee Smith, Moneca Delain, Rochelle Aytes) get separated from their more precocious friend Laurie (Anna Paquin). Costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, she soon draws the attention of a psycho killer dressed in black.

Four adolescent trick ‘r treaters (Britt McKillip, Isabelle Deluce, Alberto Ghisi, Jean-Luc Bilodeau) let an outcast named Rhonda (Samm Todd) join their expedition to the local quarry. The trick ‘r treaters intend to make an offering of eight pumpkins to the eight children who as legend has it were driven off the quarry by a homicidal bus driver; their ceremony does not go as planned. Finally, the reclusive Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) wants to be left alone on Halloween, but receives a visit from the burlap headed trick ‘r treater, who’s been wandering in and out of all the stories. The imp seems to have retribution on its mind for All Hallow’s Eve.

Who Made It?
Michael Dougherty was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended New York University, graduating in 1996 from Tisch School of the Arts. Dougherty spent three years toiling on Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, while an animated short he’d written and directed titled Season’s Greetings made it to television. Director Bryan Singer read a spec script Dougherty had written titled Trick ‘r Treat — expanding the character and themes from Dougherty’s short — and introduced him to aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter Dan Harris. After moving to L.A. independent of each other, the duo won jobs writing X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006) for Singer.

Championed by late makeup effects maestro Stan Winston — originally slated to produce the film — Trick ‘r Treat was developed by Legendary Pictures, the Burbank based production company behind Superman Returns, Lady In the Water and 300, co-financing and co-producing in partnership with Warner Bros. Bryan Singer of Bad Hat Harry Productions came on board as a producer in the fall of 2006 and was present on the set of Doughtery’s live action directing debut in Vancouver. Despite overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, Warner Bros. backed away from giving Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release, finally rolling it out on DVD in October 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Seasons Greetings (1996) was a 4-minute, hand drawn and hand colored short film, which writer-director Michael Dougherty spent nine months drawing with pencils and paper at NYU. Each frame was colored with magic markers instead of paint with fellow film students helping him color many of the cels. The short — about a trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head being menaced by a stalker — was broadcast on MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Sci-Fi Channel and played a few film festivals. As Dougherty brainstormed ideas for short films or short stories he noticed they all ended up being about Halloween.

Dougherty recalled, “So I started thinking, well how neat would it be to put them all together into one movie and I guess it was kind of my way of cheating and saying here’s, look, here’s my feature film screenplay, it’s an anthology movie. But then they also started interweaving and it became one movie, just with a lot of characters whose lives start intersecting. I realized I could take this character and make him the next door neighbor of that character and make these trick-or-treaters show up at the door of this guy and so it all ended up coming together. And Sam became a character that wandered though all of their stories.”

He continued, “The first story is really just about a father and a son and introducing the son to the holiday and its traditions. The next one, it’s a group of kids who are between ages 12 and 15 and it’s when you break away from your parents and you’re walking around the town by yourself trick-or-treating. And then the next one, you’re in your twenties and the holiday becomes about nothing but partying and having sex and trying to find the hottest costume possible. The fourth one is the twilight years, when you’re old and alone and celebrating the holiday by yourself, which hopefully none of us end up like, but it’s kind of these weird four seasons of Halloween in a sense.”

Dougherty’s spec script — Trick ‘r Treat – became his calling card to meeting the director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men, Bryan Singer, in 2000. After working with his writing partner Dan Harris on drafts of X2 and Superman Returns, executive producers Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and William Fay of Legendary Pictures were prepared to give Dougherty a shot making the transition from screenwriter to director of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty revealed, “I think the transition was made easier by the fact that Bryan Singer always had me and my writing partner Dan Harris on set throughout X2 and throughout Superman Returns and it’s interesting to realize how much I picked up just from osmosis.”

Dougherty added, “In terms of preparing, interacting with the crew, knowing how to set up a shot, getting your coverage, etc. I think I’m blessed in that I’ve had Bryan to show me the ropes as well as my writing partner Dan who directed a feature film a few years ago called Imaginary Heroes. They’ve both been available to give me pointers and tips and help me out. As well as Alex Garcia; he’s been on the set of Bryan’s movies and produced his TV projects. It’s been good, but I definitely know that those two movies, Superman Returns and X2 were basically boot camp. I’d be twenty times more terrified doing this if I hadn’t been on set for 131 days on each of those two movies.”

With Bryan Singer and Alex Garcia of Bad Hat Harry Productions as producers, Trick ‘r Treat commenced filming November 2006 in Vancouver. Singer was reportedly on set throughout the film’s nine-week shoot. Also working with Dougherty was NYU alum Breehn Burns, who’d come on board as a concept artist and would also design the film’s comic book panel title sequence. Of Burns, Dougherty added, “He referred me to a storyboard guy named Simeon Wilkins, who’s a young guy who has an amazing resume. He worked on The Ring, Monster House, he just finished Beowulf for Bob Zemeckis, and we click really well too.”

Scheduled for release October 2007, Halloween came and went without Warner Bros. giving audiences Trick ‘r Treat. Legendary Pictures screened it December 2007 at the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, Texas, an invitation-only film festival hosted by the architect of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. Avid dispatches from film geeks who’d seen the movie would trickle through the popular website for the next two years. “Massawyrm”: “Horror fans are going to have a ton of fun with this and I fully expect this to take its rightful place as the holiday classic that gets pulled out every year, much the same way Halloween was for many of us in our youth. It is a film very much about the holiday and its spirit, and it captures that wonderfully.”

Warner Bros. began to license Trick ‘r Treat T-shirts, graphic novels and action figures, but the studio was at a loss over how to market the movie. Dougherty mused, “I remember having a conversation with, you know, an executive who shall remain nameless about this, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a horror movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He goes, ‘Well, we’ll target the Saw and the Hostel demographic.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not them.’ ‘Well but they’re the horror audience.’ ‘No, they’re not this horror audience.’ Horror itself isn’t just a genre. There’s so many subgenres to it, just like there’s so many types of comedy. You have your Wayans Brothers comedies and you have your Judd Apatow comedies. Very different audiences. And so, sometimes it can be difficult to try to explain horror as a genre to people.”

Despite successful screenings at Screamfest L.A. in October 2008, Comic Con in July 2009 and recently at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, Warner Bros. shuttled Trick ‘r Treat onto Video On Demand and DVD in October 2009. Reviewers were effusive with praise. Bill Gibron, Pop Matters: “Almost too clever for its own good, Trick ‘r Treat is a really good film. In fact, it’s so unusual in its practical F/X approach and retro direct to video charms that a second viewing is definitely needed before confirming its almost masterpiece status.” Alex Billington, First Showing.Net: “There hasn’t been a horror movie this original and this inventive since Wes Craven brought us Scream in 1996. I guess it only took twelve years to finally find the next great horror franchise.”

Commenting on his film’s winding road to release, Dougherty suggested it was caught between two business models, one dying out, the other taking its baby steps. “We’re reaching a day and age where the generation of kids growing up expect to have the option of going to the theater or watching a movie at home. I think that window is going to close completely, soon. But I think, in the meantime, I think it’s smart for distributors to look at that limited-release fan demand method of distribution.” He added, “Why not try to open it in two cities and let the fans post on Facebook or send out tweets about getting it in their hometown? I really wish we could have tried that model with Trick ‘r Treat, but by the time the decision had been made it was too late.”

Should I Care?
Here’s a movie stoked by such an outpouring of love from its target demographic that I’m left to ponder whether I even saw the same film the fanboys did. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t really for people who read reviews, it’s for the people who love those movies that aren’t screened for critics. It’s also blatantly the work of a first time screenwriter and director. At 82 minutes with credits, Doughtery gets in a hurry introducing too many characters without giving us a reason to care about a single one. Some of his ideas are sketchy and poorly executed. Burlap head — referred to as “Sam” in the credits for reasons that are never explained — never makes the leap from doodle to compelling screen creep.

There’s a segment here — the film’s best — about 13-year-olds trick ‘r treating that recalls those Saturday afternoon, kids on a mission movies I grew up with like The Goonies or The Monster Squad. That’s nice, and so is Breehn Burns’ gorgeous title sequence with comic book panels illustrated with scenes from the movie flipping by. Douglas Pipes supplements this with a fantastic musical score that easily surpasses anything Danny Elfman has composed in 16 years. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t a bad movie. I can name 10 recent horror movies that were a lot worse. But if this is destined to become a Halloween standard, I’ll be watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Superman Returns Writers Ride a Wave of Success” By Torquin Hedd. Moving Pictures Magazine, July 2006

“Quartet are in for Treat” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 9 November 2006

“Trick ‘r Treat: Writer/Director Michael Dougherty, On Set in Vancouver, BC Canada” BloodyDisgusting.com, 11 January 2007

“Director on what the long-delayed release has meant for Trick ‘r Treat” By Patrick Lee. Sci-Fi Wire, 28 July 2009

“Q&A: Trick ‘r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty” Heat Vision Blog. The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2009

Trick ‘r Treat. DVD audio commentary with Michael Dougherty. Warner Home Video (2009)

Surveillance (2008)
Written by Jennifer Lynch & Kent Harper
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Produced by Lago Film/ Arclight Films/ Blue Rider Pictures
Running time: 97 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Following a gruesome murder, FBI Special Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) arrive at a rural police station to interview three witnesses. A drug whore (Pell James) recounts driving out to the middle of nowhere with her boyfriend (Mac Miller) to score; the couple stops to assist a family station wagon stranded by a flat tire. The family’s only surviving member — an observant 8-year-old (Ryan Simpkins) — recounts noticing a strange van earlier in the day, but her mother (Cheri Oteri) and stepfather (Hugh Dillon) ignored her when The Violent Femmes tune “Day After Day” came on the radio.

Officer Bennett (Kent Harper) is a wreck following the murder of his partner out on the road. Under questioning, Bennett admits that his partner (French Stewart) and he liked to pass their time shooting out the tires of passing motorists and victimizing the drivers. Each surviving witness recounts the arrival of two masked killers along the roadside differently. Also participating in the investigation is Captain Billings (Michael Ironside), a receptionist (Caroline Aaron) with intimate access to coroner’s reports, an eager to please rookie cop (Charlie Newmark) and another local policeman (Gill Gayle) hostile towards the FBI.

Who Made It?
Jennifer Lynch is the daughter of painter Peggy Reavey and filmmaker David Lynch. Growing up in Michigan, she would serve as a PA on the set of Blue Velvet and adapt The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the bestselling book tie-in to her father’s heralded TV mini-series Twin Peaks. Lynch made her screenwriting and directorial debut at the age of 23 with the critically reviled Boxing Helena (1993). The gothic drama about a surgeon (Julian Sands) who kidnaps the object of his desire (Sherilyn Fenn) and amputates her arms and injured legs incurred a frenzy of bad press when producers took the picture’s original star — Kim Basinger — to court for backing out of the film at the behest of her agents.

Taking time to recuperate from several spinal surgeries, kick drug and alcohol addiction and raise a daughter by herself, Lynch paired with a friend — Kent Harper — to rework a script he’d written about witches into a Rashomon-like take on the serial killer genre. After numerous rejections, David Lynch agreed to lend his name to his daughter’s project as an executive producer. Germany’s Lago Film agreed to finance Jennifer Lynch’s second feature film at a budget of $10 million. American audiences got a look at Surveillance in May 2009 on video-on-demand, followed by a limited theatrical release the following month.

How’d They Do It?
Jennifer Lynch recalled the genesis of the Boxing Helena fiasco. “I was reading poetry at a fucking nightclub before I was old enough to drink. This person came up to me and said ‘I have this screenplay I’d like you to write about a woman who is cut up and put into a box.’ I said ‘I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘What would you like to do?’ I said ‘I’ve always had a fascination with the Venus de Milo, who has no legs and no arms. I have a story I’d like to tell based on that.’ But I didn’t think in a million fucking years — I mean I was reading goddamn poetry, which is the most schmaltzy fucking thing you can do in L.A. — and I never fucking thought it would go anywhere.”

18 years old when given the idea, 19 when she wrote the script, Lynch’s directing experience was limited to watching her dad work. To her amazement, Madonna expressed interest in starring in Boxing Helena. The pop icon would graciously back out to do Evita for Alan Parker and Andrew Lloyd Webber instead, but Kim Basinger came on board to replace her. Four weeks before shooting was to begin, Basinger’s reps at CAA coaxed her into dropping out as well. Main Line Pictures would retaliate with a breach of contract suit carried out in a televised trial. The jury awarded the producers $8.1 million in damages, but the ruling was later overturned.

Lynch recalled the tumult with Kim Basinger by stating, “If the creative folks had been left to themselves, it would have been settled over a dinner. But because suits got involved, they decided they were going to wipe the slate clean. You don’t bring an army sergeant into a sandbox with kids. She was ordered not to speak to me. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her. The whole thing was stupid. It became a nightmare for all of us. None of us look back on it well.” Scathing reviews, three surgeries to repair critical spinal injuries (suffered in an auto accident at age 19), getting clean from drugs and alcohol and raising a daughter as a single parent all kept Lynch from jumping behind a camera again.

Surveillance began when a friend of Lynch’s — actor/ producer/ screenwriter Kent Harper — approached her with a script he’d written. “It was called Three Witches, Tres Brujas, and it was a really great story, but I didn’t want to do something about witches and I wasn’t quite sure what had happened and this conversation was born about things that happen in the middle of nowhere and what terrifies you. We just started throwing things out on the table and he did have two very corrupt cops in the story. I said, ‘That interests me, and the clarity with which children see interests me, and I haven’t seen a serial killer film the way I want to see a serial killer film and I want to confuse people about what good and bad look like.”

Jennifer Lynch sent a rough draft of Surveillance to actor Bill Pullman. He turned it down, but Lynch remained a big enough fan to recommend her father cast the actor in Lost Highway (1997). Lynch would finally share her script with her dad, prompting an urgent late night phone call. Lynch was aghast at the way his daughter wrapped up the story and challenged her to write a more optimistic ending. Even after Jennifer heeded the fatherly advice, no one expressed much interest in bankrolling the movie. She recalled, “This was very hard to get off the ground. My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, ‘You’re the sickest bitch I know!’”

She added, “But he called ages later and said, ‘What’s happening with your movie?’ and I said ‘Zilch.’ I told him I don’t know if it’s the material, if it’s the 15 years raising a kid, if it’s Boxing Helena, but nobody’s interested. And he said, ‘What if I put my name on it?’ I’m like, ‘C’mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.’ Because, believe me, it’s a big issue for me. But that day I typed: ‘Executive producer: David Lynch’, and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write ‘Steven Spielberg’ on their script. Who’s checking?” Kent Harper traveled to Germany and in November 2005, it was announced that he’d hooked producer Marco Mehlitz and Lago Film to provide $10 million in financing.

Nine months later, actor Billy Burke (Twilight) agreed to take the lead role and Surveillance was slated to begin shooting in October 2006. But Burke became the latest actor to get cold feet with Lynch and dropped out. Lynch phoned Bill Pullman and begged him to give her script another read. Lynch recalled, “He said, ‘Why did I say no?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. You never told me. Can I send it to you?’ He said, ‘Do it right now.’ And two hours later he called me and said, ‘I’m in.’ And Julia actually found me. She read the script and called and I said, ‘The Julia Ormond? You’re so classy and beautiful and awesome.’ And then I thought, that’s a genius idea. That’s the perfect FBI agent.”

Surveillance commenced a 22-day shooting schedule April 2007 in Saskatchewan, Canada near the town of Regina. “They call it the town that rhymes with fun. It’s just outside Big Beaver too so it’s just crude joke after crude joke.” Lynch had envisioned shooting the film in Santa Fe, but the New Mexico Film Office did not embrace the script. Lynch added, “There we were in Regina where they give amazing tax breaks because it’s Canada, incredible crews, incredible production facilities, and their prairies look like middle America and really afforded me the opportunity to aim the camera in any direction and just see that vast nothingness and feel how everything is seen and yet there’s nowhere to go. It’s like there’s all this space but you can’t go anywhere.”

Critics were not favorable to what they saw. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.” Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch’s films, little is explained, yet because he’s so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.” Scott Mendelson, Film Threat: “In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.”

After playing in Europe summer 2008, Americans got a look at Surveillance on HDNet Ultra VOD in May 2009 and in a limited theatrical release in June. Playing only three theaters, it took in $27,349 at the U.S. box office and grossed $974,522 overseas. Jennifer Lynch appeared content to have finished a film after her 15-year hiatus. “The good news is: everybody can make a film. The bad news is: everybody can make a film. And everyone should. It’s just really tricky so it makes those available spots and moments of financing really hard to get and you really earn it. Making a film is hard enough. Starting it’s hard, doing it’s hard, finishing it’s hard, and so I champion everyone who gets it done whether they’re doing it themselves or through a studio or independent financing.”

Should I Care?
Loaded with enough gore to win Best Director for Jennifer Lynch at the 2008 New York City Horror Film Festival — and to get her the job directing Nagin: The Snake Woman, a straight-up horror flick — Surveillance is more coherent than I remember Natural Born Killers being, so as Joe Bob Briggs might opine, if you liked that, you’re gonna love this. Lynch keeps the blood flowing, but her film is dry as a bone everywhere that counts. If you expect suspense, interesting characters, atmosphere or passable dialogue, don’t waste your time on this. Lynch is a fine person, I’m sure, but after two films in 15 years, she’s yet to demonstrate why she should be making movies.

Like The Boondock Saints — which was also ridiculous past the point of being watchable — Lynch is either unable or unwilling to involve the audience in anything emotionally and in an effort to compensate, goes for farce. Instead of Dennis Hopper or Robert Blake, Lynch’s boogeyman is played by … French Stewart, TV’s French Stewart, the guy most likely to be confused for Fred Schneider of The B-52s and least likely to terrorize anyone. Like the ultraviolence, Stewart’s mere appearance seems to be the joke. I didn’t laugh. What’s least amusing about Surveillance is seeing Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond — two actors still rolling strikes and not working near enough in film — wading through garbage like this.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Jennifer Lynch: Life with David and the Turkey of the Decade” By James Mottram. The Independent, 22 February 2009

“Even Hitler Deserved To Be Loved” By John Patterson. The Guardian, 27 February 2009

“Director Jennifer Lynch Interview Surveillance” By Sheila Roberts. The Collider, 22 June 2009

“Jennifer Lynch” By Alex Simon. The Hollywood Interview, 25 June 2009

“LiC Interview: Jennifer Lynch — Surveillance” By Craig Kennedy. Living in Cinema, 25 June 2009

Synopsis
On the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, Jenny (Mya) drags her skeptical pal Becky (Shannon Elizabeth) to have her palm read. The young fortune teller (Portia de Rossi) takes one look at the girls and notifies them of blood in their future. In Hollywood, Ellie (Christina Ricci) gets off work and visits her boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson), a promoter finishing a monster themed club to be called Tinsel. This makes Ellie late to pick up her brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg), a nerdy high schooler whose moment with a classmate (Kristina Anapau) is ruined when her jock boyfriend (Milo Ventimiglia) shows up to torment him. Heading home on Mulholland Drive, Ellie and Becky smash into each other when an animal darts across the road. Becky is yanked out of the wreckage by the beast and ripped in two, while the siblings walk away from the attack with nasty scratches.

Jimmy wakes in the morning to find himself outdoors and naked. Ellie – a producer for The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn – now finds herself able to sniff out blood at a distance. At a PETA event, a fellow producer (Judy Greer) schedules Ellie time to pre-interview Scott Baio (as himself) for the show; not even Charles In Charge is immune to Ellie’s weird energy. Jenny is also at the event and after coming on to Ellie’s boyfriend, is stalked through a parking garage by what turns out to be a bipedal and hungry werewolf. Jimmy’s research on Google leads him to believe that the pentagrams forming on his and his sister’s palms are the sign of a curse. As the siblings try to control their new powers and keep from wolfing out at work or school, Ellie comes to believe that the werewolf that bit them may be in her midst.

Production history
In August 2000, Kevin Williamson had an idea for a movie. The idea found a home at Dimension Films, which had produced nearly all of the screenwriter’s thrillers, some hits (Scream and its two sequels), some misses (Teaching Mrs. Tingle). Williamson’s treatment – titled Cursed – was described “as being in the vein of Silence of the Lambs“, with a serial killer on the loose in New York City, but with a twist. Originally fast tracked to shoot before an anticipated writer’s strike in the spring of 2001, the coals were really put to studio’s feet two years later, when Warner Bros. optioned Kelley Armstrong’s werewolf novel Bitten as a vehicle for Angelina Jolie. To beat their competition into theaters, Dimension co-founder Bob Weinstein announced in October 2002 that Cursed would “reinvent the werewolf genre,” that Wes Craven would direct and that the movie was coming to multiplexes August 2003.

Christina Ricci, Skeet Ulrich and Jesse Eisenberg were cast as three strangers attacked by a werewolf after a car crash in the Hollywood Hills. With a budget of $38 million, Cursed commenced shooting March 2003 in Los Angeles. Academy Award winning makeup effects maestro Rick Baker was hired to design the werewolf. But reviewing dailies as shooting progressed, Dimension became increasingly worried over the state of the special effects, and was sweating the film’s third act, which hinged on Scott Baio (playing Scott Baio) being unveiled as the werewolf. Having recently sent Scary Movie 3 back to Vancouver – where director David Zucker shot 25 minutes of new material after his comedy fell flat at test screenings – the studio prescribed even more radical triage to rescue Cursed.

Dimension took the unusual step of putting Cursed on “an extended hiatus”, shutting down production with 11 weeks of footage in the can and another 4 weeks to go. In a comment to the Hollywood Reporter, Weinstein stated, “In the car business, General Motors comes out after five years in the planning and research and development with a new model. And it gets reviewed and everybody says ‘Tremendous.’ Our attitude’s the same with filmmaking. If it comes out right, it’s a miracle. If it doesn’t, we have enough faith in these filmmakers to keep going and fix what we need to fix. The middle process is just the process. And if we weren’t in the movie business and we were in the car business, this wouldn’t even be a story.” The studio brought in screenwriter Sean Hood – whose credits included Halloween: Resurrection (the one with Busta Rhymes) – to unravel the problematic script.

Interviewed by the New York Times in May 2007 – as his new TV series Hidden Palms struggled to get on the schedule of the CW Network – Kevin Williamson lamented, “That werewolf movie. That was 20 years out of my life. You can’t just be asked to do a werewolf movie and then expect it to be good. I wasn’t the guy who should ever have been writing a werewolf movie.” Craven estimated that 70% of what he’d already shot had to be ditched, while new director of photography Robert McLachlan – replacing John Bailey – recalled, “They planned to save about 10 minutes from the first go around which was little enough that we had carte blanche in terms of the look. The only request from Wes and the studio was to shoot a much darker, scarier movie with the goal of ‘less is more’ for the werewolf sequences.”

Skeet Ulrich was not happy with the new approach and declined to participate, while Mandy Moore (who’d shot a cameo as the first victim), Omar Epps, Illeana Douglas, Robert Forster, Scott Foley and James Brolin were either unable to resume work or not asked to. Version 2.0 of Cursed began shooting in December 2003 with Joshua Jackson, Portia de Rossi, Michael Rosenbaum and pop singer Mya joining the cast. Shannon Elizabeth, Judy Greer and Milo Ventimiglia came back, while Scott Baio was reduced to a walk-on cameo. Rick Baker had walked all the way off the show; Greg Nicotero and his K.N.B. EFX Group came on to execute the werewolf effects. In terms of story, the serial killer angle had been dropped to focus on a pair of siblings (Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg) bitten by a werewolf on Mulholland Drive. Even after the ending had to be rewritten and reshot, Wes Craven was confident Cursed would be in theaters October 2004.

As Dimension put Cursed before test audiences in the fall of 2004, the studio followed what was then a popular trend and – in a bid to sell more tickets in the U.S. – cut the film for a PG-13 rating. The blood and guts were trimmed, neutering the film’s two most visceral moments: the gloriously over the top death of Shannon Elizabeth, and the discovery of Mya’s body after she shares an elevator with the werewolf. Speaking to the New York Post, Wes Craven would comment, “The contract called for us to make an R-rated film. We did. It was a very difficult process. Then it was basically taken away from us and cut to PG-13 and ruined. It was two years of very difficult work and almost 100 days of shooting of various versions. Then at the very end, it was chopped up and the studio thought they could make more with a PG-13 movie, and trashed it … I thought it was completely disrespectful, and it hurt them too, and it was like they shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun.”

Sneaking into theaters February 2005 without press screenings, Cursed was batted around like a piñata once critics got a hold of it. Kim Morgan, L.A. Weekly: “Poor special effects, a silly looking werewolf and clunky comic writing help to spoil what should have been a fun B-movie.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn’t a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing), and Craven directs as if he could barely rouse himself to stage one of those bulging-bladder-and-elongated-fang transformation scenes that revived the lycanthrope genre in its early-’80s acidhead baroque phase.” Dana Stevens, the New York Times: “It’s not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.”

Grossing $19.2 million in the U.S. and $10.3 million overseas – on a relatively modest budget – Cursed never threatened Dimension with bankruptcy. But speaking with Ain’t It Cool News in August 2008, Wes Craven mused, ” … the Cursed experience was so screwed up. I mean, that went on for two-and-a-half years of my life for a film that wasn’t anything close to what it should have been. And another film that I was about to shoot having the plug pulled – Pulse - so it was like, I did learn from the Cursed experience not to do something for money. They said, ‘We know you want to do another film, we’ll pay you double.’ And we were 10 days from shooting, and I said fine. But I ended up working two-and-a-half years for double my fee, but I could have done two-and-a-half movies, and done movies that were out there making money. In general, I think it’s not worth it and part of the reason my phone hasn’t rung is that that story is pretty well known.”

Opinion
The R-rated version of Cursed available on DVD is watchable for two reasons: some interesting actors were cast and Wes Craven – director of Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which you can rent now before they’re remade – knows how to construct a suspense sequence, of which this flick has two that work pretty well. And now that the demolition derby resembling film production is public record, Cursed is actually in the position of having nowhere left to go but up. Ultimately though, the movie is every bit as fucked as you’ve heard, starting off on the wrong foot and staying there: Hyperactive opening titles transition into what amounts to a music video for pop band Bowling For Soup. Then, characters start talking and the whole enchilada lapses into one of the weakest excuses for a movie in recent history, one deserving the title Cursed.

The cast members who have done terrific work in better films – Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer, Portia di Rossi, even Shannon Elizabeth – acquit themselves of embarrassment, while Christina Ricci, who has hit a career wall playing believable adults, at least has a kookiness and physical prowess that bubbles to the surface every now and again. But like many of Miramax’s movies that went into the editing room and came out scarred for life, this damned thing is neither fish nor fowl. Lacking an atmosphere of tension or dread, Cursed is too mild to really appeal to horror fans, while werewolves and the odd mauling make it too gnarly for kids. The only thing scary about the film is how desperate it feels, as if Kevin Williamson was sending out an encrypted S.O.S. that he was so over writing about high school and murder sprees.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
After taking part in a sting netting fugitives by luring them into what they think is an event for the New York Yankees, Detective Frank Keller (Al Pacino) celebrates twenty years on the NYPD by getting drunk and calling his ex-wife. He responds to a murder scene on the west side of Manhattan – a male shot in the back of the head in bed – with the detective (Richard Jenkins) who’s moved in with his ex. Keller notifies his lieutenant (John Spencer) that the victim must have known his killer because a sentimental tune he was playing for her on a record player: “Sea of Love.” A detective from Queens named Sherman Touhey (John Goodman) approaches Keller with a case eerily similar.

When the detectives learn that their victims placed a rhyming ad in a singles magazine, Keller proposes writing their own ad, arranging dates at a restaurant and taking prints off a wine glass until they get a match. One of the suspects, a headstrong blonde named Helen Cruger (Ellen Barkin) walks out on Frank before he can get her prints. “I believe in animal attraction, I believe in love at first sight. I believe in this [snaps fingers] and I don’t feel it with you.” While a lead puts the detectives on the trail of a male shooter, Frank bumps into Helen at a grocery store, where she has second thoughts about him. Touhey urges Frank to walk away, but the couple begins a torrid affair, even as evidence mounts to her as their killer.

Production history
In the mid-1980s, novelist Richard Price was working on his first original screenplay – Sea of Love – which Dustin Hoffman had attached himself to star in. Hoffman was so enamored with Price’s writing that he asked the Bronx native to doctor the script for Rain Man, a troubled project that three different directors would ultimately tackle and withdraw from. Six weeks of work with the exacting star led to Price quitting as well. Hoffman responded by dropping out of Sea of Love. The project was dead for a year, until Price hand delivered the script to Al Pacino, whose interest suddenly made it a hot property again.

Pacino showed Sea of Love to Martin Bregman, his former manager and the producer of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface. Bregman set the project up at Universal, but the studio had concerns. Price recalls, “I spent nine months shoehorning that script into a thriller, which I never meant it to be. I wanted it to be this moody, mopey thing, a character study. The worst thing you can say in a meeting with the studios is, ‘This movie about I’m about to pitch to you fellas, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’ They immediately say, ‘Well, in that case, get the fuck out of here.’ You sell a movie by its bloodlines, like you sell a racehorse. You tell them, ‘This is sired by Die Hard out of Do The Right Thing.’ Or, ‘It’s The Crying Game meets Jurassic Park, dinosaurs and transsexuals.’”

To direct, Bregman hired Gregory Hoblit, whose experience at that time was limited to episodes of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. Disagreements with the producer over the script and over the crew he wanted to hire led to Hoblit being fired days before filming was to begin. Bregman turned to Harold Becker, whose credits included The Onion Field, Taps and The Boost. Becker recalled, “This Richard Price script, interestingly enough, had been around for many, many years. I had seen it in an earlier incarnation, it must have been about three, four years earlier and I think had probably been seen by a lot of people. It had made the rounds, so to speak. It’s hard to believe, such an interesting piece of material wouldn’t have been grabbed up right away, but that happens sometimes.”

With a budget of $16 million, Sea of Love commenced shooting May 1988. The production filmed in Toronto for eight weeks before moving to New York for another eleven weeks. Becker recalls, “This was a very difficult film to do. It was difficult because first of all, it was so intense. It also had so many different shades to it. Everything from the comedic to the darkest moments to murder. Also an intense erotic relation, it really covered the bases. So it was a big film and it also a very long shoot because we had a lot of night shooting – also always tough – shooting on the streets of New York during the summertime.” Ironically, Richard Price, Martin Bregman and Harold Becker all had grown up in the Bronx, as had the stars. Ellen Barkin even lived on the same block as Al Pacino when she was six.

Released September 1989, the picture was praised by critics, mostly. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “It has the manner of a heavily fiddled-with work, something that, after all the suggestions have been incorporated, finds itself in a corner from which it can’t plausibly be extricated.” David Denby retorted in New York Magazine, “Sea of Love is both an exciting murder mystery and a wonderful Manhattan love story – all lust and paranoia. It has a powerful erotic pull to it.” Siskel & Ebert gave it two thumbs up, with Siskel noting, “It’s Al Pacino’s best performance since The Godfather Part II.” Pacino had been absent from movie screens for four years, but Sea of Love brought him back in a big way, grossing $58.5 in the U.S. and another $52.3 million overseas.

To introduce Ellen Barkin’s character sooner, several scenes had been dropped, including a performance by Lorraine Bracco as Keller’s ex-wife. Despite the wholesale changes made to his script, Richard Price recalled, “What do they say? Comedy is Tragedy plus Time? Everybody’s telling me I’ve got to turn my movie into Fatal Attraction. Next thing I know, about a year later, I’m at a party and I run into James Dearden, the guy that wrote Fatal Attraction. And I said, ‘Oh. So you’re the prick that wrote that thing. I can’t tell you how miserable that made my life. I had to make my story like yours.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’ve just got a job directing a movie and everybody’s telling me I’ve got to make it like Sea of Love.’”

Opinion
After a decade in which Hollywood seemed to crank out a sleazy thriller from the pen of Joe Eszterhas every year – each a bigger dose of stupid than the last – the class act of that cycle and the one that’s endured is Sea of Love. With very little violence and a near aversion to dwell on any business beneath the sheets, the film is a classic due to its well-drawn characters, as well as its vibe, which conjures a classic sense of nocturnal desperation and edginess. Instead of taking its whodunit all that seriously, the film is more interested in exploring the desires, connections and dangers that lurk beneath urban affairs.

Richard Price – who would script the remake of Shaft and episodes of The Wire – knows his way around cops, and cuts into prime rib like few writers with the NYPD operation that opens the movie, as well as the intricacies of the Miss Lonelyhearts sting. Pacino remains scruffy and immensely watchable, but where the film lights up is with the entrance of Ellen Barkin, who capped a decade of gutsy screen performances with working class verve. Harold Becker imbues the film with a robust kinkiness that never overwhelms the characters, but stays strongly rooted in their reality. Trevor Jones assists this with a stark, jazzy musical score.

Johnny Web at Movie House Commentary writes, “Sea of Love is not a major movie, but is a solid little thriller with deep character development. Pacino’s cop is more than just a cardboard cut-out. He’s flawed; he’s an ass; he’s lonely; he’s a drunk. The key point is that he’s somebody who is known to us. We can probably answer questions about elements of his life than have not been specifically covered on screen. That kind of character development allows the audience to think of him as a member of the family, maybe a cousin who’s a pretty decent guy but needs to slack off the booze. We get deeper into the thrills because we’re into him.”

Andrew Wickliffe at The Stop Button writes, “Sea of Love is a great film. Richard Price’s writing is beautiful. For the first three quarters of the film, until the mystery takes over for a half hour, the nuance is unbelievable. Characters saying things, the meanings involved, just beautiful. Sea of Love is, I think, the last film written by the novelist Richard Price, everything after was by screenwriter Richard Price, who was still good, but reserved the good stuff for his novels (Clockers, incidentally, came from the research he did for Sea of Love).”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Disc jockey Dave Garver (Clint Eastwood) opens his show at jazz station KRML in Carmel by promising “a little verse, a little talk, and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by.” A regular female caller phones in and purrs, “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Winding down at his favorite watering hole, Dave attracts the attention of a brunette at the end of the bar. Introducing herself as Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), she tells Dave that she’s been stood up on a date. He gives Evelyn a ride home, but feels he knows the woman from somewhere. She reveals she’s his “Misty” caller.

Dave tells Evelyn he doesn’t want to complicate his life. She doesn’t see why this is any reason they shouldn’t sleep together. He sneaks off in the morning, but Evelyn shows up unannounced at Dave’s house to make him dinner. The disc jockey establishes a few boundaries before sleeping with her again. Dave is more interested in patching things up with his artsy ex-girlfriend (Donna Mills) when he discovers she’s moved back from Sausalito. But Evelyn tracks Dave down, asking why he hasn’t taken her calls. He’s not amused. “Where does it say I’ve got to drop what I’m doing and answer the phone every time it rings?”

Evelyn continues to smother Dave – banging on his door in the middle of the night and professing her love for him – until he makes it clear he doesn’t feel the same way. She responds by slashing her wrists in his bathroom and drawing out her recovery so he won’t send her home. When he finally leaves his house for a business meeting, Evelyn follows him to the restaurant and has a fit. Dave breaks it off with his schizophrenic woman for the last time, unaware she’s copied his house key and considers the affair far from over.

Production history
Jo Heims met Clint Eastwood while working at Universal as a legal secretary in the early 1960s. She wanted to be a screenwriter. He was a TV star taking acting classes with aspirations to be a serious actor. Some years later, Heims wrote a sixty-page treatment called Play Misty For Me. Eastwood read it and recalled, “I liked the Alfred Hitchcock kind of thriller aspect, but the main thing I liked about it was beyond that, the story was very real. The story was believable because these kind of commitments or misinterpretations thereof go on all the time.”

Eastwood optioned the treatment and took the project to CBS, to Universal and to United Artists, but with his feature film career limited to the spaghetti westerns he’d done in Europe, none of the studios were interested. While in England shooting Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood received a call from Heims. She had an offer from Universal to purchase Play Misty For Me. Unsure when he’d ever get around to the project, Eastwood told Heims to sell it. When Universal later signed him to a three-picture deal, Eastwood asked what had happened to that “odd little story about a disc jockey.”

He was shown a script the studio had commissioned, but didn’t care for it. Eastwood worked with Heims on a new draft – changing the setting from L.A. to Monterey County – then approached Dean Riesner to do a polish. Studio VP Jennings Lang was dubious. He tried to talk the star out of the project by mentioning that the woman had the best part, but Eastwood had already made up his mind that Play Misty For Me was going to be his directorial debut. Studio chief Lew Wasserman approved of the idea immediately, but notified Eastwood’s agent that he’d only be paid the DGA minimum for his services behind the camera.

With a budget of $700,000, Misty commenced shooting September 1970 in the area of Carmel, where Eastwood lived. He cast his mentor Don Siegel in the role of Murph the bartender, but ended up not needing the directorial guidance, bringing his first film in on budget. Despite an enthusiastic preview in San Jose a year later, Universal showed little inclination to support the picture. It performed well at the box office anyway, so well, that Eastwood received a call from the manager of the Cineramadome in Hollywood, asking if he could stop Universal from pulling the film after only four weeks. “The audience just keeps coming.”

Opinion
In the 1980s, Brian DePalma and John Carpenter were both approached to direct a potential blockbuster about an obsessive affair, but turned it down – in part – because they felt it was too similar to Eastwood’s directorial debut. Play Misty For Me is not only superior to Fatal Attraction as a thriller – slowly building dread and paying off with a couple of sharp, unexpected shocks – but remains a classic because it actually has something relevant to say about men and women; specifically, how flirtations can easily ignite into obsessions.

While not a model of perfection – the bar scenes are too bright and some of the casting is on the level of a nighttime soap – shooting on real location lends the film a terrific energy. Jessica Walter and Clint Eastwood are the chief reason the movie works as well as it does. Equally impressive is the fact that Dave Garver never picks up a weapon, but is left completely at the mercy of his conquest. Bruce Surtees provided the stark cinematography and Dee Barton – who Eastwood met at an L.A. nightclub where his band was performing – composed the moody score, his first.

Scott Weinberg at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “I doubt many people would argue against Eastwood’s skill on both sides of the camera. It’s a film that’s achieved cult status worldwide and was also the inspiration for the blockbuster hit Fatal Attraction. Regardless of the box office receipts, this one is easily the better film. As a cautionary tale on the benefits of monogamy or as a straight ‘psycho-girlfriend-from-Hell’ thriller, it’s worth your investment of time and money.”

“I could’ve easily gone without the Jazz concert bit. Felt trivial, self indulgent or/and there to ‘kill time’. Overall though Play Misty for Me was a tight, suspense laced little ditty that sported a couple of nasty surprises along the way and ended it off in a refreshingly grounded fashion. No overlong and flashy finale for this film! It capped off the way it should; “to the freaking point”. You going to Play Misty For Her or run for your life? This bitch is nuts!” writes John Fallon at Arrow In the Head.

Earl Cressey at DVD Talk writes, “Even though Play Misty for Me is highly regarded as one of the top films in the suspense thriller genre, I had overlooked it until now. However, when it came up for review, I was glad to correct this oversight. And it’s a good thing, as Misty is a terrific film. Though it was Eastwood’s first time directing, viewers will be hard pressed to notice, as everything looks and comes together great. The acting is all top-notch as well, especially on the parts of Eastwood and Walter. Though the movie slows down in the second half, it really is a great film that no fan of the genre should miss.”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Following a tragic automobile accident, Royal Australian Navy captain John Ingram (Sam Neill) and his wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) isolate themselves aboard a yacht, the Saracen. Rae doubts she can get rid of the terrors in her head, but her husband assures her, “We’ve got weeks and weeks. Calm days, calm seas. And we’re gonna get strong, and when you’re strong, we’ll go home and start again.” With the exception of their dog Ben, the couple is completely alone. This changes when John spots a schooner on the horizon, the first boat they’ve seen in three weeks.

A man in a dinghy rows over. Behaving erratically, an American introduces himself as Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane) and states that his boat is taking on water. He claims five others were aboard, but died of food poisoning. Too traumatized to go back, Hughie is confined to one of the cabins while John rows to the battered schooner to investigate. Uncovering mutilated corpses, John races back to his wife, but not before Hughie escapes and takes control of the yacht, leaving John marooned.

John attempts to make the schooner ship shape in an attempt to head after his wife. Meanwhile, Rae tries to gain a psychological edge over her increasingly paranoid captor. Gaining use of the ship’s radar, she establishes the location of the schooner and communicates with her husband through Morse code. To give John time to catch up, she throws the yacht’s keys into the ocean, but her dog unwittingly hops into the water to fetch them. Learning that the schooner will sink in six hours, Rae resorts to more aggressive means to turn the yacht around and rescue him.

Production history
Dead Calm began as a 1963 novel by Charles Williams. The story followed John and Rae Ingram, a couple enjoying a South Seas honeymoon when they intercept a drowning ship. They retrieve a survivor, Hughie. John rows over and discovers the situation is shockingly different from what Hughie described, but the psychopath takes command of the couple’s yacht. A battle of wills ensues between Rae and Hughie, while her marooned husband struggles to catch them. Orson Welles optioned the film rights, casting Michael Bryant & Oja Kodar as the couple and Laurence Harvey as their tormentor.

Welles began shooting off the coast of Yugoslavia in 1968 under the title The Deep. Unable to secure financing to complete the film as he intended, the maverick director for all practical purposes abandoned it. He cut several trailers and short assemblages in a bid to raise more money, but the film never made it out of the vault of Welles’ estate. Over a decade later, Australian director Phillip Noyce was visiting America for the release of his well-received film Newsfront. He met with producer Tony Bill, who had taken an active interest in Dead Calm and threw Noyce a copy of the book as he was leaving.

Three months passed before Noyce got around to reading the book. Once he did, he flew back to Los Angeles and told Bill that he had to make the movie. The producer revealed that Welles had already tried and that his de facto widow – Oja Kodar – not only controlled the rights, but wasn’t inclined to sell them to the Hollywood establishment that had shunned Welles throughout his career. Several months later, Noyce repeated the story to George Miller, who was about to leave Australia to direct The Witches of Eastwick for the Hollywood establishment.

Miller and his producing partner Byron Kennedy had taken profits from the Mad Max trilogy and invested in the local film industry. They built their own studio in Kings Cross, grooming directors like John Duigan, Chris Noonan and Noyce on several “domestic movies” airing on Australian television. After obtaining permission from Tony Bill, Miller paid a visit to Oja Kodar and convinced her that his take on the material would be faithful to what Orson Welles intended, not a Hollywood studio. He left with the rights for Kennedy Miller to produce Dead Calm.

Terry Hayes adapted a screenplay, using the basic story and mood of the book, but making alterations. These included reducing the cast of characters to three – not counting the couple’s dog – and jettisoning a backstory that explained why Hughie went psychotic. The first actor cast was Sam Neill. For the role of Rae, Noyce approached Sigourney Weaver and Debra Winger among others, but each actress turned the part down. Hayes lobbied for a 20-year-old Australian performer named Nicole Kidman. Noyce screen tested forty actors for the part of Hughie and picked Billy Zane to round out the cast.

After months spent surveying waters around the world, fourteen weeks of shooting commenced on and off the coast of Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday Passage of the Great Barrier Reef. Due to the barrier reef, waters remained mostly flat throughout the schedule. The production used one yacht to stand in for the Saracen and two boats to substitute for the Orpehus. For the interiors, the production built a seventy-by-forty foot tank, buoying the sets on empty oil drums to generate the effect of being a sea.

Warner Bros. picked up distribution rights to the film. Test audiences voted thumbs down on the original climax, in which Rae knocked Hughie on the head with a speargun and left him on an inflatable raft. Noyce shot a new ending, which left little ambiguity to the bad guy’s future. Opening April 1989 in the U.S., Dead Calm received generally favorable reviews; Siskel & Ebert gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up, with Gene Siskel noting, “I liked the minimal approach of this picture; which is three people, two boats and they made an interesting movie out of it.”

Opinion
Director Phillip Noyce and actors Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and even Billy Zane spent the next decade heavily in demand due to the craftsmanship they displayed here, but no matter how many generic mainstream movies they’ve worked on since, Dead Calm remains a classic for how unremittingly gothic it is in both structure and mood. The filmmakers take the water wing floaties off in the very first scene and commit the movie to a hard R-rating – dark and unsettling all the way through – with plenty of exciting twists along the way.

While the ending does have that familiar Fatal Attraction psycho killer disposal vibe to it, the previous 90 minutes are taut and spooky. By limiting the cast to three characters – often isolated from each other – the claustrophobia of their environment is heightened. Noyce makes fantastic use of the nautical setting and the importance of bearings, radar, radio, ships logs and basic seamanship to survival. Further demonstrating that Australians ranked among the finest filmmakers in the world, Dean Semler provided the eerie lighting and Graeme Revell – on his first ever film score – composed the ominous music.

Joshua Smith at Oz Cinema writes, “Just as Hitchcock often employed elements of both surprise and suspense in his riveting thrillers, Noyce (and George Miller, who allegedly directed the second unit and the opening sequence) have successfully utilised both elements, and defied various conventions to create a thriller that will have you holding your breathe until the very last revelation.”

“The really good parts of the movie are the scenes that rely on action, rather than dialogue, between the characters. The camera work and scenery are exhilarating and had me wanting more … In paying more attention to the action elements of the story, some of the performances suffer. Billy Zane’s performance is too exaggerated to be believable,” writes Dan Kelly at The Digital Bits. He gives the flick a C+.

Lisa Skryniarz at Crazy For Cinema writes, “Suspense films rarely gets better than this. The plot is not what you’d call complicated and yet I guarantee you will be glued to the edge of your seat. Dead Calm is a perfect example of an average story taken to a whole different level by the stellar performances of its’ stars.”

© Joe Valdez