The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Produced by Barbara De Fina
Running time: 164 minutes

Should I Care?
It was a long shot that Martin Scorsese’s passion project The Last Temptation of Christ — filmed after almost five years of false starts and dashed hopes — was going to live up to its immense expectations. Then on its way to a theater relatively near you, the film ignited a culture battle between a splinter group of evangelical Christians and their old adversary Hollywood. The dust settled some time ago, but the movie that sparked a public outcry is an ambitious failure at best, a laborious art film at worst. Envisioned as a contemporary revitalization of the message of Christ — love for all creatures, even if it means turning the other cheek against your enemy — the disappointment of the picture is that it remains mired in the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, which was born out of the author’s experience living in Nazi occupied Greece. The film feels lost in that time, deeply philosophical, swimming in abstraction. Instead of making Jesus more palatable, the effect is it more distancing than the filmmakers probably intended.

Willem Dafoe — between Platoon and Mississippi Burning and all but promising to break out as a leading man — was great casting, combing all the vulnerability and strength you’d imagine from a Biblical prophet. Right to left the film is supremely well cast, with Harry Dean Stanton as Paul and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate in particular doing beautiful work. Peter Gabriel composed the musical score, drawing from North African, Turkish, Greek and Armenian instrumentation in keenly subtle, introspective and evocative ways. There are bursts of visual energy scattered through the film, with the camera sweeping through a fig orchard for the memorable opening shot, but much of the 164-running time feels like what it probably was, a long, dry crawl to get the movie — any movie about Jesus — made. As much as inner monologue, theatrical staging and supernatural imagery dull the film, it did make me think longer and deeper about the life and legacy of Jesus than just about any Biblical film ever made.

So, What’s This About?
Awakened from a nap by a powerful migraine, Jesus (Willem Dafoe) experiences physical pain manifested from a spiritual struggle raging inside him. A Jewish carpenter plying his trade building crucifixes for the Roman occupying forces in Israel, he incurs the wrath of Judas (Harvey Keitel), who accuses Jesus of being a disgrace, a “Jew killing Jews”. Self-flagellating himself before carrying wood to the crucifixion site, Jesus is cursed and hit with rocks by the people of Nazareth. The prostitute Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey) spits in his face despite the attempts of his mother Mary (Verna Bloom) to protect her son. The execution of Lazurus (Tomas Arana) — nailed to the cross on charges of sedition — tortures Jesus, and he leaves home to determine whether it’s God or the devil plaguing him. He visits Mary Magdalene at a brothel and asks her forgiveness, but after being rejected by Jesus in her youth, Mary is not yet able to forgive him.

On the edge of the desert, Jesus comes to a monastery, where an aging master (Roberts Blossom) invites him to stay the night. The following morning, Jerobeam (Barry Miller) informs Jesus that the man he spoke to had already died; the monk interprets this as a communication from God. Judas intercepts Jesus on orders to kill him, but claiming to have been purified, Jesus is unafraid. Judas asks what the secret is and is told “Pity for man. I feel pity for everything.” In order to understand, Judas accompanies Jesus on his travels. He begins to build followers by proposing that justice is what they’re hungry for. A preacher baptizing Jews in the River Jordan, John the Baptist (Andre Gregory) is convinced that Jesus is a true prophet, but tells him that love is not enough. If a tree is poisonous, you have to take an ax and cut it down. While Judas is also unwilling to turn the other cheek on his enemies, Jesus comes to believe that spiritual salvation is not in war, but in his own self-sacrifice.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
A psychological examination of the self-doubts that might have plagued Jesus while he was a man, Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel The Last Temptation survived attempts by the Greek Orthodox Church to ban it the author’s native country. Published in the United States in 1960 under the title The Last Temptation of Christ, the novel was embraced as a counterculture text by Americans moving away from religious dogma and searching for their own spiritual answers. One of the book’s fans was Barbara Hershey, who in 1971 was shooting a B-movie in Arkansas titled Boxcar Bertha when she realized her director was working through some of his own spiritual struggles by making films. Hershey gave him a copy of the book. A slow reader, Martin Scorsese took until the decade’s end to finish it, but was already determined to adapt the book into a film. In 1976, his agent Harry Ufland acquired the film rights from Kazantzakis’ widow. Paul Schrader — who adapted Raging Bull for Scorsese — turned in a first draft in 1981.

Paramount Pictures agreed to finance The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese polished the script with Jay Cocks, Aidan Quinn cast as Jesus and sets were constructed in Israel for the production, slated to begin shooting January 1984. But as the budget escalated to $16 million and the studio was pestered with letters from evangelical Christians upset about the book, Paramount pulled the plug. Efforts to set the project up elsewhere faltered for the next three years, until Michael Ovitz — head of Creative Artists Agency — took over as Scorsese’s agent. Universal Pictures quickly agreed to distribute the picture, partnering with Cineplex Odeon to finance the reduced budget of $6.5 million. With Aidan Quinn unavailable, Willem Dafoe took over the role of Jesus and shooting finally commenced October 1987 in Morocco. Met with open hostility by a relatively small number of evangelical and Catholic groups, The Last Temptation of Christ opened in August 1988 to the most intense protests ever leveled at a movie in the United States.

How’d They Do It?
Martin Scorsese heard about The Last Temptation of Christ while attending NYU, but it was after he’d wrapped Boxcar Bertha 1972 that Barbara Hershey handed Scorsese the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. During the sound mix for Taxi Driver, Scorsese instructed his agent Harry Ufland to negotiate an option for the film rights. Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler — producing New York, New York for Scorsese and lining up Raging Bull — would produce and to adapt a script, Scorsese had in mind Paul Schrader. In Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings, the screenwriter recalled, “The greatness of the book is its metaphorical leap into the imagined temptation; that’s what separates it from the Bible and makes it a commentary upon it. If I could have come up with a similar kind of inspiration I would have loved to do something like that myself — if I had written a Christ film from the Bible I would have come up with something similar to keep it fresh, some hook. The great hook of The Last Temptation of Christ is the idea of the reluctant God — the person whom God is imposing himself on — that’s pure Kazantzakis.”

Schrader recalled, “As soon as I read it I knew that it had to open with narration, and with a description of a migraine. And as soon as I knew that, I knew the tone — there is this kid with these vicious headaches and he just doesn’t know what to make of them. It’s a 600 page novel and a 100 page script, so I had to throw out a lot, and then I added new scenes as well. Essentially what I did was to make a long list of everything that happens in the novel, every single event, and then put a check mark beside the events that related to things I was interested in — how they related to the struggle ‘What does God want of me?’; or how they related to the central triangle of the film, which is Jesus, Judas and Magdalene — and just focus on these elements.” Schrader ended up with about thirty-five scenes. He added, “It’s really much more of a psychological film about the inner torments of the spiritual life; it’s not trying to create a holy feeling. That’s what the book is like, that’s what Marty wanted and that’s the script I wrote.”

In March 1982, Schrader turned in a first draft. Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of production at Paramount Pictures, was so eager to work with producer Irwin Winkler that he expressed interest in Scorsese’s passion project. Winkler was dubious that a studio with movies like Grease 2 and Airplane II: The Sequel on its slate would want to make The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese recalled, “I had one meeting with Barry Diller, the head of the company, along with Jeff Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, and when I was asked why I wanted to make this film, I replied ‘So I can get to know Jesus better.’” He added, “In a way all my life I wanted to do that: first I was going to be a priest, but it didn’t work out. The idea of loving and forgiving one’s enemies seemed so obvious and Gandhi had shown that it could be put into practice. I felt that maybe the process of making this film would make me feel a little more fulfilled. Their reaction was very sweet, but they didn’t want that answer.” When Scorsese added that he saw the film as a low budget character drama, Paramount opened up its checkbook.

Scorsese, Robert Chartoff & Irwin Winkler landed in Israel for a location scout in January 1983. Art director Boris Leven began designing sets. Casting began that summer. Schrader revealed, “You know, originally this was written, again, with DeNiro in mind. But DeNiro didn’t want to play it, and as he said at the time, he said, ‘No one will believe me in a sheet.’ And I suspect that maybe he was right. Although I would have liked to have seen him take up the challenge.” Christopher Walken, John Malkovich, Jonathan Pryce and Eric Roberts auditioned for the role of Jesus reading opposite Harvey Keitel’s Judas. Aidan Quinn — set to make his screen debut in a teen exploitation flick called Reckless — was the actor both Scorsese and the studio agreed to cast. Once transportation and various permits were factored in, a schedule of 100 days and a budget of $16 million was forecast. Dubious about flagging support at Paramount, as well as the daunting prospect of shooting in Israel, Irwin Winkler dropped out. The studio tapped Jon Avnet to replace him and with a reduced budget of $11.5 million, shooting was scheduled to begin January 1984.

The first religious leader to target The Last Temptation of Christ was Reverend Donald Wildmon, a United Methodist preacher from Tupelo, Mississippi. A group of Lutheran nuns headquartered in Arizona calling themselves The Sisters of Mary — who’d condemned the play Godspell as being blasphemous — also launched a crusade against the film, which the sisters pegged a “gross distortion of the actual Biblical account of Jesus’ life up to the Crucifixion”. By October, 5,000 pieces of mail a week were being delivered to the corporate headquarters of Paramount’s parent company Gulf + Western in New York. Many of the letters suspiciously featured the same passages and postmarks in calling for The Last Temptation of Christ to be stopped from being made. But citing both the escalating production costs and the evangelical outcry coming through the mail, on Thanksgiving Day, Barry Diller summoned Scorsese and Ufland to his office and informed them that Paramount was canceling the production.

Scorsese returned to his low budget roots in New York and directed After Hours (1985), but Last Temptation was still on his mind. In 1986, Harry Ufland made overtures to Island Films, Vestron, United Artists, Imagine Films and Hemdale about financing the picture. Scorsese took a job directing The Color of Money, and was introduced to Paul Newman’s agent, the co-founder and head of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz. Agreeing to let Ovitz represent him, Scorsese was asked what he wanted most. The director replied, The Last Temptation of Christ. Ovitz turned to Tom Pollock, the new chairman of Universal Pictures. Ovitz suggested that a multi-picture deal with Scorsese would be good for the studio. All Pollock had to do first was figure out how to get Last Temptation made. Universal had acquired a 49.7% stake in Canadian based theater chain Cineplex Odeon. Pollock proposed that if the exhibitor came in as a 50% equity partner to finance The Last Temptation, Cineplex Odeon would attain distribution rights both in Canada and in U.S. markets where they currently had theaters.

In March 1987, Universal gave Scorsese and his wife Barbara De Fina — now producing — the go-ahead to commence location scouting in Morocco for their stripped down version of Last Temptation budgeted at $6.5 million. With Aidan Quinn busy filming Crusoe in the Seychelles Islands, to play Jesus, Scorsese turned to Willem Dafoe, who months earlier had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Platoon. Casting director Cis Corman stated, “There was an innocence about Aidan, and a charm, you know, and Willem I always thought of as being stronger and deeply emotional.” In addition to Quinn, a number of cast members assembled for the 1984 version of Last Temptation were not coming back. Paul Sorvino was committed to the CBS cop show The Oldest Rookie; Tomas Arana took the role of Lazurus instead. Kathy Baker was busy shooting Clean and Sober, so the role of Lazurus’ sister Martha went to Peggy Gormley. Sting was busy on an Amnesty International concert tour; David Bowie took the role of Pontius Pilate. To the dismay of the studio, one actor who was back in the movie was Harvey Keitel as Judas, whose Lower East Side accent was too thick for Tom Pollock’s taste.

Recording an audio commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD in 1997, Scorsese stated, “When you saw the old spectaculars, you know, the curtains would open up and a big screen would come on, stereophonic sound would come up and you’d have this extraordinary music, very glorious, and everybody would pretty much speak with a British accent and beautiful poetry in a way, as much as possible, beautifully written dialogue, like in Ben Hur, which is some excellent dialogue. Even in The Robe, the very first Cinemascope film has that. King of Kings, Nicholas Ray’s film, and that sort of thing. These are pictures I always loved as a child. I always wanted to make one. But what I understood — by the time we got to make this picture — what I understood is that if the audience heard that language and heard a British accent, they could be safe, they could turn off, they could say it’s just a Biblical epic movie. Here, if they hear the language spoken by Keitel, by other people in the film, it’s like somebody standing on a street corner and engaging you in this argument.” He added, “The idea was that it should be Jesus like on 8^th Avenue and 42^nd Street, you see.”

After five years of preparations, The Last Temptation of Christ commenced a 55-day shooting schedule October 1987 in Morocco. There was no second unit. Collaborating with director of photography Michael Ballhaus for the third film in a row, Scorsese ended up shooting most of the film on dusty streets or hillsides, or among ruins. The only sets constructed were the monastery huts in the desert; the monastery interiors were built in a stable in the town of Meknes. Jay Cocks believed that the aesthetic actually benefited the picture. “When you’re working at that kind of energy, under that kind of time structure, you really can get a kind of a boldness that might not come through otherwise if you’re a little fatter and a little slower.” Scorsese’s only comments to the press were a brief statement he issued in January 1988 reaffirming his passion for the story both as a filmmaker and Christian, and urging viewers to withhold judgment until they got a look at the film.

Though Scorsese — huddled with editor Thelma Schoonmaker in New York — assembled 40 minutes of footage for Tom Pollack and Universal executive Sean Daniel in January, as the director’s custom, Scorsese did not grant interviews while immersed in post-production. By April 1988, rumors were swirling on talk radio that The Last Temptation of Christ was some kind of sex film about Jesus. Reverend Donald Wildmon was among those evangelical Christians who’d campaigned against the project in 1983 now clamoring to get a look at the film. He procured what he believed was a copy of the shooting script, but was later verified to be an early draft Paul Schrader had written and was used during the audition process in ’83. Wildmon later wrote, “Never in almost 12 years of fighting the media’s bias against Christian values had I ever come across a more blatant attack on Christianity than this movie. I realized that if there ever were a time for Christians to let the Hollywood elite know that the entertainment industry’s constant Christian-bashing should stop, this was it.”

In June, Wildmon was making headlines by demanding that CBS remove three seconds of a Mighty Mouse cartoon by animator Ralph Bakshi that allegedly showed cocaine being snorted. Now Wildmon spearheaded a campaign to punish Universal’s parent company MCA with a boycott by the estimated 330,000 evangelical Christians who subscribed to his American Family Association (AFA) Journal. Ministries like Campus Crusade For Christ, and Focus on the Family that had struck a far more conciliatory tone in the past now sided with Wildmon, believing that Universal had acted in bad faith by barring Christian groups from the screening process. On July 16, about 200 members of a fundamentalist Baptist church in downtown Los Angeles assembled outside Universal Studios with banners and signs picketing the studio. Four days later, a smaller contingent protested outside MCA chairman Lew Wasserman’s home in Beverly Hills. Then on July 20, KKLA-FM talk show host John Stewart organized a rally outside Universal Studios estimated at 2,500 people.

Paul Schrader later commented, “You have to understand that most of the people who attacked the movie didn’t bother to see it. You know, perhaps rightly so because their attack really wasn’t based on the film itself but the idea of the film. There was never an attack on the film where it wasn’t combined with an appeal for money. You know, one of the easiest ways to raise money is to say ‘Hollywood is against our Lord, we are defending our Lord. Please send us money to help us in this fight’. So it was an economic engine for those who were opposed to the film. I’m not saying they had purely cynical motives, but it certainly helps when you can latch onto a cause that not only brings you media attention but it also brings you income.” The original plan was to premiere The Last Temptation of Christ at the New York Film Festival in September. Realizing that whether the protests grew in strength or fizzled out that neither option bode well for the film, Universal chose to open it a month early, in August 1988.

The first exhibitors to back away from The Last Temptation of Christ were the smaller chains: Premiere Theaters in Texas, Wometco Theatres in Florida, Greater Huntington Theatres in West Virginia. Wisconsin’s biggest theater chain Marcus Theatre refused to screen the film. Carmike Cinemas — the nation’s fifth largest chain — declined. Edwards Cinemas, with half the screens in Orange County and another 60 elsewhere in Southern California, announced that they would not screen Last Temptation. General Cinemas — the third largest theater chain, with headquarters in Boston — buckled under pressure from Cardinal Law, the archdiocese who’d called for a boycott of the film. Tom Pollock conceded that part of the problem was that exhibitors were given a window of only two days to see the film, speculate how unpopular it was going to be with their customers and decide whether they wanted to book it or not. Most of the country’s major theater chains — AMC, United Artists, Mann’s — agreed to book the new Scorsese picture in select markets.

The Last Temptation of Christ drew mixed reviews, evoking positive and negative reactions often from the same critic. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “In contrast with the real spiritual torment conveyed by many of Mr. Scorsese’s other characters, his version of Jesus is a controlled, slightly remote figure, despite the screenplay’s many allusions to his pain. Fortunately, Willem Dafoe has such a gleaming intensity in this role, so much quiet authority, that the film’s images of Jesus are overwhelming even when the thoughts attributed to him are not.” Hal Hinson, The Washington Post: “Watching it, you feel as if you’re trapped inside a hallucination, the meaning of which is only partly comprehensible. Yet you can sense Scorsese’s commitment to his message and his passion for his art in every frame. He is working out of the center of his talents — and his obsessions — as a filmmaker. And undeniably, there’s a prodigious greatness on display here. But just as undeniably, it is failed work.”

On Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert strongly endorsed the picture. Siskel commented, “The effect — at least on me — was not to trash Jesus, but rather to make His message more accessible; for if He has doubts and fears, we can be more comfortable with our own. It’s a very simple construction and it works beautifully.” Ebert added, “And this movie is a devout movie that does Jesus the compliment of taking Him more seriously than any other movie ever made, so that’s it’s an ironic, I think, contradiction that people who worship Jesus and haven’t seen the film are attacking this film, which is actually more of a religious experience than any other movie they could think of.” Siskel retorted, “The controversy is quite silly. I mean, people can have their objections based on what they’ve seen, of course. But if they haven’t seen it, then it’s just so silly.” Siskel would later place The Last Temptation of Christ #1 on his list of the year’s best films.

Looking back at the furor in 1997, Scorsese decalred, “We didn’t throw this out into theaters for people to be upset, you know. I believe certain things about Christianity and about Jesus and I think it’s just as valid as the person who believes in the fundamental word of the Gospel. I know lots of priests who are for this picture, lots of priests who are not. I’m a Roman Catholic and very often even though we have stipulations of dogma, there’s lots of discussion, open discussion about the relationship with God, to man, vice versa, etcetera, Jesus, all of this, the nature of Jesus, lots of discussion. It’s discussion.” He added, “But we were very disappointed when a very small percentage of people in America were able to skew it in such a way that a lot of people refused to see the film, and that a place like Blockbuster Video to this day does not stack this picture in its racks. In this country you’re supposed to be able to say what you want to say — it’s a free country to do that — but what they did by being so vociferous about it and so loud about it and so strident about it was to make people afraid to go to the theater to see it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Scorsese on Scorsese. Edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie. Faber and Faber (1989)

Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings. Edited by Kevin Jackson. Faber and Faber (1990)

The Last Temptation of Christ. DVD audio commentary by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader and Jay Cocks and Willem Dafoe. The Criterion Collection (1997)

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, The Religious Right and Culture Wars. By Thomas R. Lindlof. The University Press of Kentucky (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’d You Get All of This?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Savages — Production Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurel Canyon (2003)
Written by Lisa Cholodenko
Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Produced by Antidote Films/ Kuleshov Productions
MPAA rating: “R for sexuality, language and drug use”
Running time: 103 minutes

Should I Care?
Watching Lisa Cholodenko’s sophomore film the year it was released, I didn’t care much for it. Laurel Canyon never picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential or Boogie Nights, the modern day standard bearers of pop culture soaked decadence in the City of Angels. In a bummer, the characters actually seem intelligent and reasonably well-intentioned enough to keep from selling their souls to the devil. But what the movie lacks in visceral thrills it makes up for in a kind of finely honed reserve, recalling Five Easy Pieces or Shampoo, two ‘70s classics Cholodenko and her collaborators seem to be channeling here. Laurel Canyon is much better than generally given credit for at the time, a well crafted and strongly performed drama. This is one movie where the devil is definitely in the details.

The chief reason to see Laurel Canyon is Frances McDormand playing a record producer willing to own up to her failings while everyone around her traffics in bullshit. This includes her son, played by Christian Bale, before his earnestness as a master thespian got a bit ridiculous. Here, Bale’s scenes opposite McDormand are tense and poignant and ring true. Natascha McElhone and Alessandro Nivola — lonesome presences in the movies these days — are both insatiably watchable in supporting roles. Tip toeing away from exploitation, Cholodenko still delivers one of the most intensely erotic scenes between two clothed actors I’ve seen. Cinematographer Wally Pfister and production designer Catherine Hardwicke lend Laurel Canyon an exquisitely detailed look, one that needs a second viewing to appreciate.

So, What’s This About?
Leaving their lives in the Ivy League to begin promising careers in Los Angeles, Sam (Christian Bale) is to start a residency in psychiatry at a mental hospital, while his fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale) is finishing her Ph.D in genomics. They land at the Laurel Canyon enclave of Sam’s mother Jane Bentley (Frances McDormand), a record producer with a history of soured relationships, including the one with her son. Sam was under the impression that she’d vacated to her beach house in Malibu, but arrives to discover his uninhibited mom smoking a bong with four British pop rockers. Not only is Jane still at work on their album, she’s shacked up with the band’s charismatic frontman (Alessandro Nivola), a singer/songwriter her son’s age.

While Sam rejects the free wheeling environment he was raised and doesn’t approve of his mother’s choices, Alex loses interest in her dissertation and sits in on the band’s recording sessions, smoking some weed with Jane and being solicited for her musical opinion. Instead of looking for a house to rent, Alex begins spending more time with Jane and is drawn into that world. Meanwhile, an Israeli colleague named Sara (Natascha McElhone) starts giving Sam rides to work. His controlled, decisive nature attracts her, but Sam refuses to indulge his physical urges for his fellow psychiatrist. Realizing how distanced he’s become from his girlfriend, Sam heads to the band’s record release party at the Chateau Marmont. There, he finds out how deep his girlfriend has fallen into his mother’s orbit.

Who Made It?
Lisa Cholodenko grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Exposed to the experimental film program at San Francisco State as an undergrad, she lucked into a job as a post-production assistant on Boyz N the Hood and worked as an assistant editor on Used People. Cholodenko was accepted into the graduate film program at Columbia University, where director Milos Forman became one of her mentors. She wrote, produced and directed two acclaimed short films — Souvenir (1994) and dinner party (1997) — that dealt with the fractured love lives of female couples. Her feature film writing and directing debut High Art earned Cholodenko the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and revitalized the career of Patricia Clarkson, who co-starred with Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell.

Editor Amy Duddleston was cutting High Art with Cholodenko when she brought in Joni Mitchell’s 1970 LP “Ladies of the Canyon”. Inspired by what the songwriter’s life might have been like in that place and time, Cholodenko wrote a script, hoping to jump into her next film quickly. Reteaming with High Art producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover, the project took four years to get cast and financed. The director ultimately met Frances McDormand — game for a role that called for nudity — and once the Oscar winner was cast, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale became interested. Levy-Hinte raised roughly $5 million in financing and was able to accommodate McDormand’s family schedule as well as the Cannes Film Festival, with Laurel Canyon finished in time to screen at the Director’s Fortnight in May 2002.

How’d They Do It?
Lisa Cholodenko elaborated on the origin of her sophomore feature film. “I think the first germ of the story came when I was finishing up High Art. I was in the editing room in New York with my editor Amy Duddleston. We’d been cutting for a long time and to keep our energy up we took a lot of breaks and listened to a lot of music. One morning, Amy brought in the Joni Mitchell record ‘Ladies of the Canyon’. I hadn’t heard that record in a long time. We listened to it beginning to end. I was looking at the cover — a painting that Joni Mitchell did of a hillside up in Laurel Canyon where she lived at the time. We started spinning a yarn about people who lived up there: what their lives were like, what Joni Mitchell’s life must have been like.”

She continued, “Laurel Canyon is a strange island in the middle of Los Angeles: it’s a kind of time warp wedged between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. It has its own history and morality and culture that’s distinctive from anywhere else in L.A. It has a kind of hippie quality and it also has a timeless quality. It has a lawless quality to it as well, which seems to change each decade. Rumor has it was an outpost for Hollywood players to conduct their clandestine affairs and in the ‘60s and ‘70s it had the rock ‘n roll drug culture which gave way to a more seedy hard drug/ porno culture — the Boogie Nights era. Then recently there was a resurgence of the younger movie industry and nouveau music culture. I think it’s always been attractive to people who are less conventional or are interested in being identified with a culture that is less conventional.”

Cholodenko hoped to get her second feature off the ground as soon as possible. That process took four years. She recalled, “And I’d say those four years were about half of the writing stage. I’m a slow writer and I’m a detailed writer and I had to work in between drafts, I guess. I went and directed some television and did other rewrite jobs and whatever. So it was about two and a half years later and we were ready to try to get this film made and October Films — who originally had the movie, was developing it before it had become USA Films — and by the time that we were sort of ready to get it rolling, USA not only in trouble and soon to become Focus Features, but decided to put it in turnaround. They wanted to do much, you know, sort of broader and bigger films.”

After USA Films officially lost interest in the summer of 2001, the prospect of Laurel Canyon being produced was looking unlikely. “Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Susan Stover and I, we were moving on from High Art to sort of create an environment we had created on High Art, which was done independently and anyway, we realized that was how we were going to have to go and around that time, there was supposed to be a strike in the industry, a writers strike and an actors strike. So not only were we kind of at a stalemate with sort of getting studio money to make this movie, but we were figuring we’d kind of missed the window of opportunity because everyone was shutting down and there was no cast that was going to work because they were going to strike and the rest of it, so it was a pretty dark season with Laurel Canyon for a while.”

Fortunately, the threatened 2001 actors strike never materialized. Then, the Academy Award winning Best Actress of Fargo read Cholodenko’s script and wanted to meet her. Frances McDormand recalled at the time, “I had this general idea that I wanted to do nudity. I’m 45 years old. A couple of years ago I decided, ‘All right, it’s time.’ I wasn’t really interested in that when I was 25. But now that I’m 45, I’m kind of pleased with myself.” She added, “There’s nothing wrong with middle-aged people expressing their sexuality on film. Lisa wrote a great part for a 45-year-old woman. It’s not because I get to be nude in a swimming pool, but because she’s an interesting person. Lisa was really conscientious in making her three-dimensional.” Once McDormand came aboard, other actors suddenly got interested.

Christian Bale appraised his collaboration with Lisa Cholodenko by stating, “The story seemed to be so highly personal to her. From working with Lisa, I know she has a great deal going on internally — always — even if she doesn’t think she’s communicating it. I found her face to be very easily readable, and I found myself kind of looking at her rather than listening to her. I would imagine that her real enjoyment comes through the writing of a film. I think she’s really more interested in the whole emotional side of it. You get some directors who fall in love with the whole technical side of it and the physical staging of things, but she is definitely someone whose first love is the whole emotional side of what’s happening.” With a cast finally coming together, producer Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s Antidote Films was able to raise around $5 million in financing.

Director of photography Wally Pfister — heavily in demand after shooting Memento and Insomnia for Christopher Nolan — signed up to work with Lisa Cholodenko on Laurel Canyon. He recalled, “From the outset, Lisa and I had a common language that we wanted to use in the storytelling of this film. It was based in par on films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, by great filmmakers like Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman. Not so much in the look of the films, but more in the tone and spirit of the storytelling.” Cholodenko confessed, “The big inspiration for this film was The Graduate. And another film I adore is Five Easy Pieces. Those are two classic films of young-person-on-existential-journey to deal with family, and the trappings of expectation, and sort out their identity on their own terms, and those kinds of things.”

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte owned a property in Santa Monica Canyon designed by architect Richard Neutra that he was planning to tear down and restore to its original architecture; production designer Catherine Hardwicke helped transform the location into Jane’s house. In the search for the music Jane would been working on, music supervisor Karyn Rachtman and Cholodenko settled on two songs written by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse: “Someday I Will Treat You Good” and “Shade & Honey”. Alessandro Nivola lent his vocals to the tunes, while Lou Barlow, Imaad Wasif and Russ Pollard of Folk Implosion were cast as his bandmates. Production was scheduled to accommodate Frances McDormand, who lives in New York with husband Joel Coen and their (at that time) 8-year-old son. Laurel Canyon was finished in time for it to screen in the Director’s Fortnight of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

While the filmmakers beat the clock getting Laurel Canyon finished, critics praised the film’s star and little else. J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.” Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times: “There wasn’t a moment in the film that I didn’t enjoy, but neither was there anything that got my mind or heart racing. Cholodenko is clearly talented but it’s less clear whether she’s afraid to push harder or whether this is as far as she can go.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Not a successful movie — it’s too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive — but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.”

Following a screening at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics acquired domestic distribution rights to Laurel Canyon. A month later, Good Machine picked up international rights, but when the film opened March 2003 in the United States, it would tally only $3.6 million at the box office, adding $748,847 overseas. Cholodenko found the reaction very familiar. “What I find with High Art is people tell me they enjoy it a lot on the second and third viewing and I think with this film it’s sort of the same. There’s a lot of detail and I think it’s fun to go back and discover it after you’ve already seen the film, you’d be able to focus on different characters doing the different plotlines and stuff like that. The detailey stuff. That’s what I like in films. I’m kind of a detailey person.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Laurel Canyon – Press Kit

“Lisa Cholodenko” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 21 March 2003

“Interview with Lisa Cholodenko” By Marty Mapes. Movie Habit, 3 April 2003

“Lady of the Canyon” By Steve Bloom. High Times, 4 April 2003

Laurel Canyon. DVD audio commentary with Lisa Cholodenko. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2003)

“Cinematography Serves the Story” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rocket Science (2007)
Written by Jeffrey Blitz
Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Produced by B&W Films/ Duly Noted, Inc./ HBO Films
Running time: 101 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
While arguing against farm subsidies at the New Jersey State High School Policy Debate Championships, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto) — the greatest public speaker that Plainsboro High School has ever known — suddenly loses his voice. Back in Plainsboro, high school sophomore Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) and his kleptomaniac older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) watch as their exasperated father (Denis O’Hare) walks out on their mother. The stutter that makes it impossible for Hal to order pizza in the school cafeteria, much less talk to other students, leaves his special needs counselor (Maury Ginsberg) wildly grasping at solutions.

Hal is “ferreted” by the stunningly articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) to join the debate team. After her ex-partner Ben washed out at state and mysteriously dropped out of school, Ginny covets a championship trophy and believes that beneath Hal’s “deformity” lies a deep resource of anger that can help her win. Studying their debate topic — abstinence — with Ginny, or spying on her from the bedroom of her goofy adolescent neighbor (Josh Kay), Hal falls in love. But after sharing a whirlwind kiss in the janitor’s room, the relationship between the academic partners sours. To get revenge on the debate stage, Hal goes in search of Ben Wekselbaum.

Who Made It?
Jeffrey Blitz and his producer/sound recordist Sean Welch financed their debut feature — the spelling bee documentary Spellbound — by piling up debt on 14 credit cards. After Spellbound received some of the best reviews of 2002 and was nominated for an Academy Award, Blitz and Welch didn’t have to apply for more plastic to get their next film going. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Blitz met Effie Brown, who was accepting a Producers Award for Real Women Have Curves. Brown had a deal at HBO Films and initially worked with Blitz on the script for a spelling bee movie.

How’d They Do It?
Brown stated, “He has such a wicked sense of humor; and that’s something that people don’t nail. His humor is smart and not malicious, but it’s definitely a bit self-effacing. That’s what drew me to him. His film, Spellbound, completely had me riveted. I was trying to spell words and I was so rooting for all those kids.” The idea of scripting a spelling bee movie didn’t work out, but in talking with Maud Nadler — the senior VP of theatrical films at HBO — Blitz shared his experiences attending high school in central New Jersey with a serious speech impediment and how he attempted to overcome it as a member of the debate team.

Everyone agreed that the high school debate script was the one Blitz should be writing. The filmmaker recalled, “Teen movies don’t interest me, is the thing. They don’t interest me at all, so the only way I was going to do a teen movie is if I felt like I could try to be more honest about what the actual experience of being a teenager is like. I guess teen movies want to be escapist fantasies for high school students, but to me they’re bullshit because they’re all formulaic. As soon as you can predict where the movie is going, which is the first 10 seconds of any teenage movie, you know exactly how it’s going to resolve. It’s completely uninteresting to me.”

Blitz continued, “I wanted to feel like I could create a story that felt like it follows the contours the world a little more, but at the same time it’s not strictly a piece of realism. There’s absurdist comedy that I wanted to bring into it also and try to find that balance. That’s why for me people like Billy Wilder and Hal Ashby are the guys that I look towards to figure out how to bring realism, naturalism into a movie that still has outlandish characters and people who do things that are really funny!” Brown added, “Jeff created fabulous, well-rounded characters that you don’t get to see everyday. But no one’s made fun of. You root for them all.”

After another actor dropped out over scheduling, Vancouver native Reece Daniel Thompson was spotted on an audition tape; he was flown to Baltimore to audition and won the role of Hal. Anna Kendrick had auditioned in L.A. Blitz recalled, “She’s just about the only person who came in to read who could actually handle the dialogue. Jinny talks so fast, I mean, she just sort of blazes through it, but the person saying those lines needs to understand what she’s saying, even though she’s going, you know, a million miles an hour. And Anna just nailed it.” Budgeted at $6 million, Rocket Science began a 30-day shooting schedule July 2005 in Baltimore.

To serve as director of photography, Blitz turned Jo Willems, who’d collaborated with Blitz on “spec” commercials the director had used to break into the industry. Blitz hoped the Belgian cinematographer’s European sensibility would balance the emotional side of the movie with its deadpan humor. The result was a drably lit and everyday high school look. Yana Gorskaya — who had cut Spellbound – was brought in as editor. While cutting, Blitz and Gorskaya used temp tracks from the band Clem Snide, whose singer/ songwriter Eef Barzelay ultimately wrote the film’s instrumental score.

Rocket Science was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, where Blitz won the Dramatic Directing Award for his work. Critics were also effusive with praise. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as Welcome to the Dollhouse or as much as Clueless, but whichever it does, it’s in the same league.” Justin Chang, Variety: “This unusually voluble comedy is as eloquent about love, self-realization and adolescent angst as its protagonist is endearingly tongue-tied.”

Distributed by Picturehouse, Rocket Science opened August 2007. Audiences ignored it completely. Never expanding beyond 59 screens, the film grossed only $714,943 in the United States. Blitz would muse, “I think sometimes marketing campaigns hit and the whole thing works and sometimes they don’t at all. Some of this has to do with knowing the audience and really understanding to whom you’re marketing.” He added, “I think in the future I’ll try to be stronger in sharing my sense of the audience and the right tone of the marketing. But it’s hard to say. Each project seems like it comes with its own fresh set of challenges.”

Should I Care?
No stars. Low budget. Content that left me to shift nervously on my sofa. These were elements that Jeffrey Blitz’s debut Spellbound and his sophomore effort Rocket Science both share. The follow-up isn’t nearly as good because of several defects in its script. There’s an attempt at a storybook feel in the form of a narrator, which not only chills the film a bit emotionally, but calls attention to how much better Wes Anderson is at whimsical mood setting. As hilarious it is at turns — I busted out laughing three or four times — just as many bits stop the movie cold, especially a subplot involving a Korean judge (Stephen Park) dating Hal’s mom that falls totally flat.

While Blitz made a few rookie missteps as a screenwriter, he’s without a doubt a director to watch. The performances in Rocket Science are wonderful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick and Vincent Piazza are all stars 10 years from now. Piazza sorta reminds me of Matt Dillon. Kendrick recalls Reese Witherspoon’s hilarious performance in Election, while Thompson superbly captures every awkward impulse — romantic or otherwise — we all had in high school. The joy of Rocket Science is that it gets those growing pains absolutely right.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Rocket Science: An Interview with producer Effie Brown” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, 6 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz on Rocket Science” By Max Evry. ComingSoon.net, 8 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz Practices Rocket Science” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker. 15 January 2008

“The Making of Rocket Science” Rocket Science. HBO Home Video (2008)

So, What’s This About?
Teenaged Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes to find himself in the middle of a road overlooking “Middlesex, Virginia.” Donnie bikes back to his suburban home, where his older sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) stuns their father (Holmes Osborne) with news that she’s voting for Michael Dukakis. Brother and sister start bickering and she urges Donnie to explain to their mom (Mary McDonnell) why he’s stopped taking his medication. Mom later questions her sullen boy about where it is he goes at night. “What happened to my son? I don’t recognize this person today.” That night, a supernatural voice wakes Donnie and lures him outside, where he encounters a six-foot tall figure wearing a demonic-looking rabbit costume.

Answering to the name “Frank,” the rabbit shares some vital information with Donnie: “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. That is when the world will end.” While Donnie is out wandering Middlesex in his sleep, a jet engine plummets out of the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Federal officials are at a loss to explain this; they can’t seem to locate the plane that the engine belonged to. At school, Donnie’s English teacher Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) pairs him with a bright transfer student (Jena Malone) whom Donnie becomes smitten with. There is no love lost between Donnie and a gym instructor (Beth Grant) who forces her class to watch the cheesy self-help videos of a local guru named Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze).

Cunningham preaches that all human decisions fall on a lifeline between love and fear. Donnie refuses to believe that life can be lumped into two categories at the expense of everything else. Meanwhile, his nocturnal encounters with Frank continue. When Donnie asks the rabbit where he comes from, Frank replies, “Do you believe in time travel?” Donnie’s science teacher (Noah Wyle) gives him a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by a neighborhood spinster the kids call Grandma Death. The book appears to corroborate the mind bending visions Donnie has been having. His psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) believes that the boy may be a paranoid schizophrenic. Donnie keeps marking the days until the end of the world.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
A native of Midlothian, Virginia, Richard Kelly became interested in movies due to a music video that made an impression on him as a teenager in 1989: Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got A Gun,” directed by David Fincher. Accepted to USC four years later on an art scholarship, Kelly ultimately applied to and was accepted into the university’s popular film school. Graduating in 1997, he found work at a post-production house, but had larger ambitions than 3-D animation. Kelly recalled, “I came out of film school and I was broke, so started writing. I set out to write something ambitious, personal, and nostalgic about the late ‘80s. I thought about a jet engine falling onto a house, and no one knowing where it came from — it seemed to represent a death knell for the Reagan era — and I built the story around that.”

The resulting screenplay was Donnie Darko and it was written over a six-week period in late 1997. With the help of Kelly’s producing partner — an office temp at New Line Cinema named Sean McKittrick — the script was passed around and generated enough buzz to get Kelly representation by Creative Artists Agency. Meetings with potential buyers did not go very well. Kelly recalled, “A lot of people were responding to the script, but when they heard I wanted to direct it, they were like, ‘No.’ It was, ‘This is a great writing sample. This is un-producible. Come rewrite Valentine.’ They wanted to me write 13 slasher films. ‘Great writing sample, come write I Know What You Did Last Summer 3.’ That kind of thing.”

Donnie Darko was dead for about a year, until Kelly and McKittrick heard that actor Jason Schwartzman was interested. McKittrick recalled, “And we finally just heard through the grapevine that Schwartzman wanted to do it. So we immediately called his agent and said well listen, if he wants to do this and we attach him, it’s going to get made. He just came off of Rushmore. Obviously, he is very talented. When Jason came aboard then out of nowhere Nancy Juvonen and Drew Barrymore — they were obsessed with Jason — they wanted to know what Jason was doing or what Jason was planning on doing, because they just thought he was great. So Sharon Sheinwold, Jason’s agent at UTA, sent the script over to Nancy, and Nancy read it and just flipped out for it.”

As producer Nancy Juvonen recalled, “I read the script that night, was riveted, and Drew read it the next day. The part of Karen Pomeroy was originally written for a 46-year-old woman, but she felt like a teacher with such passion and conviction to change the system that she must be younger, at an age where she still thought those changes could occur. So Richard quickly rewrote her as a 28-year-old character and we had our first piece of talent attached. By the end of the week we met with Richard Kelly and Sean McKittrick, his producing partner. They also brought along a guy named Adam Fields who was later asked to step aside from the project, although he took money and arguably a part of our souls with him upon his exit. During that meeting we were convinced Rich should direct his own story, and from there we set about getting financing.”

Adam Fields had landed $4.5 million from Paris-based Pandora Films — a specialty division of Gaylord Entertainment — but Barrymore’s schedule necessitated Kelly be shooting in three months, by July 2000. The accelerated time frame came into conflict with Schwartzman’s availability, and a frantic two-week search for a new lead commenced. 19-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal won the role of Donnie Darko. In no particular order, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle, Mary McDonnell, Patrick Swayze and Katharine Ross joined the cast. Kelly explained, “All of the other actors, because of Drew mostly, felt comfortable working with a first-time director. She kind of stepped up to the plate. It takes one actor to break the ice or to RSVP to the party, then everyone feels comfortable RSVPing.”

In the hunt for a director of photography, A-list cinematographers were rejected due to budgetary restraints, while promising novices from the music video industry were passed over by Pandora due to the inexperience that Kelly was already bringing to the table. Going through resumes, Sean McKittrick found journeyman Steven Poster, who stood out because he’d shot Someone to Watch Over Me for director Ridley Scott. The producer commented, “Steven’s a brilliant guy and he’s one of the main reasons why the movie looks like it does. Right now he’s actually the President of the ASC … He’s just kind of like this living working legend within the cinematography community and he just did a brilliant job. He’s the nicest, sweetest guy you’ll ever meet in your life. He was just a Godsend. Sometimes things just completely work out and that was the biggest of them all.”

As Richard Kelly put it, Donnie Darko was equally blessed when it came to hiring a composer. “I was very lucky that I didn’t have a crew forced upon me by the financiers. A lot of times they force you to hire people because they want the music to sound like music from ‘that’ movie. But with $4.5 million, you can’t afford Thomas Newman or Danny Elfman or any of these guys. You’ve got to just go find somebody who is young and hungry, and really talented. Nancy Juvonen’s brother recommended Mike Andrews. He’s from San Diego, actually. Gary Jules, who did the ‘Mad World’ cover with him, is also from San Diego. Jim Juvonen, he’s really good at knowing who’s the shit before anyone else knows who’s the shit. He said, ‘This is the guy. This guy is a genius; you’ve got to work with this guy. No one knows about him.”

Filmed in the Los Angeles area — where Loyola High School stood in for Donnie’s alma mater — in 28 days, a hastily edited cut was playing at the Sundance Film Festival just a few months later, in January 2001. The traditional lack of special effects oriented films at the indie film showcase and the picture’s buzz combined to make the screening much anticipated. Those in attendance were muted in their response; gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells reported the mood “subdued (if mostly respectable)”. Donnie Darko would leave Park City without a distributor. Kelly mused, “Sundance is a dangerous kind of marketplace because if you don’t strike at the right time and you don’t get an initial interest in your film, all of a sudden, it’s over. People like to dismiss it as something that doesn’t work. So after Sundance we sort of deemed it as a failure, an impressive, interesting failure, but as an experimental film that just doesn’t work.”

Production executive Aaron Ryder of financing company Newmarket offered a slightly different perspective on the film’s Sundance verdict. “We saw the movie and we really liked it. Everybody thought, ‘It’s a good film but it’s going to be hard to market. It’s too long and it’s got problems.’ So we didn’t buy it at Sundance, nobody did. At this time we hadn’t yet released Memento. However our aspirations were to build a distribution company so we put an offer on it saying that we needed to talk about re-cutting the film with the director as it was well over two hours. We spent six months editing, allowing Richard to have the cut he was proud of.” Through a service deal with IFC Films, Newmarket agreed to distribute and promote Donnie Darko. In turn, Kelly was obligated to cut 10 minutes from the running time and make do with ‘80s pop tunes whose clearances would be less expensive.

Opening October 2001 in the United States, Donnie Darko notched plenty of positive reviews. J. Hoberman, The Village Voice: “The events of September 11 have rendered most movies inconsequential; the heartbreaking Donnie Darko, by contrast, feels weirdly consoling. Period piece though it is, Kelly’s high-school gothic seems perfectly attuned to the present moment. This would be a splendid debut under any circumstances; released for Halloween 2001, it has uncanny gravitas.” Kimberly Jones, The Austin Chronicle: “Donnie Darko is an unnerving, electrifying debut film from 26-year-old writer/director Kelly, one that elucidates the universal traumas of growing up, but does so with a startling uncommonness. So much here is equally baffling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “Donnie Darko is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it’s fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that’s about human beings and not images.”

The critical raves fell on deaf ears. Donnie Darko failed to expand beyond 58 screens in the United States, where it grossed $515,375. Aaron Ryder admitted “We put it out at the wrong time as it was just after 9/11. We thought we could make an alternative Halloween movie, which is a bad idea. I think that we learned a lesson. If you have a film starring a young protagonist or young people in it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that film will attract a younger audience. The core audience for Donnie Darko is the same as Memento, which is an older audience. We probably should have released the film in February. There were just too many films out at the time and people weren’t going to the movies at that time … Everybody loved that movie and they think, ‘Wow, he’s such a good filmmaker, but boy did they fuck up the distribution of that movie.’”

In January 2002, Phil Hartman – co-owner of the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s East Village – was looking for a movie to program at midnight screenings. He stated his criteria: “You need something that is a visual trip, that works on repeated viewings and is open to reinterpretations, something that you can watch in altered states.” His son recommended Donnie Darko. Far from a blockbuster – filling on average half the theater’s 100 seats – the late night engagement ran for 28 straight months. Revival houses in Washington and Boston caught on and when the film opened in England that fall, it was a modest box office hit, grossing $2.5 million USD. The Mike Andrews/ Gary Jules cover of “Mad World” even cracked the U.K. top ten pop charts. When released on DVD, Donnie Darko would sell $15 million in units.

Popular demand prompted Newmarket to approach Richard Kelly for a “new and improved” version of Donnie Darko. An investment of $290,000 enabled the filmmaker to restore 20 minutes of footage, substitute new musical cues, touch up the sound mix and add chapter headings from The Philosophy of Time Travel, which were inserted to enhance the science fiction aspects. Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut opened in limited theatrical release July 2004. Kelly mused, “The first release just wasn’t meant to be. I feel like the film was meant to fail before it could succeed. It was meant to be this cult item before it could be more mainstream. There are always people who want Donnie Darko to be the cult film, the one they discovered. If there’s any way this film could ever cross over a bit more to the mainstream it would just allow me to continue to make these kinds of films. I think any time a counterculture piece of art infiltrates the mainstream, that’s a good thing.”

Why Should I Care?
Of all the ways you can approach Donnie Darko – as a portrait of teenage angst, a psychological horror movie, a nostalgic trip through the ’80s, a science fiction tale concerning time travel, or a satire of all of the above – what’s most exciting about Richard Kelly’s debut is how the audience ends up being empowered to give the movie its form and definition. It doesn’t barrel its way down any one genre or crib from other filmmakers for its inspiration. This is a movie truly in a class of its own. The screenplay is teeming with wonderful details – a Bush/Dukakis debate, a dance troupe called Sparkle Motion, a debate over The Smurfs – that may be part of a larger puzzle, or might not mean anything at all.

The writing features much sharp wit – laced with barbs toward the public school system – while engaging all sorts of cool ideas about time travel and alternate universes in the process. An alternate title might have been It’s A Miserable Life, as the novel approach could be summed up as It’s A Wonderful Life in reverse. The cast is stronger than any first time director could possibly hope to ask for, particularly the Gyllenhaals, Patrick Swayze, and Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonnell as Donnie’s sympathetic parents. Steven Poster lends the cinematography a vivid, dreamlike feel, while the original music by Michael Andrews compliments that mood as well. I doubt that Kelly has any better fucking idea what’s going on in this movie than anyone watching for the first time will, but your guess will be at least as good as the person sitting next to you.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Interview with Sean McKittrick” By Chadwick Clough. Script P.I.M.P., 19 July 2002

“Richard Kelly” By Jason Korsner. BBC, 21 October 2002

“Interview with Nancy Juvonen” Richard-Kelly.net, 25 May 2004

“Getting Inside Donnie Darko with Writer/Director Richard Kelly” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 27 May 2004

“The Resurrection of Donnie Darko” By Robert Levine, 18 July 2004

“How Donnie Darko Refused To Die” By Nathan Lee. The New York Sun, 20 July 2004

“Richard Kelly’s Second Chance” By Jennifer Soong. Moviemaker, 21 June 2004

“Donnie Darko The Director’s Cut: The Strange Afterlife of an Indie Cult Film” By Adam Burnett. indieWIRE, 22 July 2004

The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook. By Genevieve Jolliffe, Chris Jones. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004

Synopsis
Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) lies in bed unable to sleep. Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) confides to Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) that it’s been six months since the tornado, and all the girl does is talk about some place that doesn’t exist. On their farm in turn of the century Kansas, Dorothy finds a key with the word “Oz” emboldened on it. Aunt Em tells her it’s just the key to the old house, but Dorothy refuses to believe it. Leaving Toto behind, Dorothy is checked into a hospital run by the pompous Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) and the nefarious Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh). When a storm knocks out the clinic’s electricity, Dorothy escapes with the help of another young patient (Emma Ridley). The girls fall into a river and are swept away.

When Dorothy regains consciousness, she finds herself in the company of a talking chicken named Billina, stranded in the Deadly Desert of Oz, which turns any living thing that touches it to sand. They escape and locate the house that fell on the Wicked Witch of the East, but the Munchkins are nowhere to be found, and the Yellow Brick Road is in ruin. Walking to the Emerald City, Dorothy finds the citizens of Oz – including the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion – turned to stone. All that’s left are the bizarre Wheelers, hoodlums who have wheels for feet and hands.

Dorothy activates a mechanical soldier named Tik Tok, who grabs one of the Wheelers and learns that the Nome King conquered the Emerald City, stealing back his emeralds and imprisoning the Scarecrow. To find him, Dorothy and Tik Tok are directed to Mombi (Jean Marsh again), a witch who changes heads as easily as wigs. Imprisoned by the witch, Dorothy befriends Jack Pumpkinhead, a stick man with a pumpkin for a head, who Mombi created with a Powder of Life. Dorothy steals the powder and is able to escape by bringing to life a flying sofa with the head of a moose. Dorothy and her new friends head to the mountain of the Nome King (Nicol Williamson again) to save Oz.

Production history
In the mid-1930s, Walt Disney was searching for a follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He inquired about the first in L. Frank Baum’s best-selling fantasy series. The Baum estate had sold the film rights to Samuel Goldwyn for $60,000, and Disney just missed out being able to make an animated version of what became The Wizard of Oz. Disney never lost enthusiasm for Oz. When eleven of Baum’s books became available in 1957, Disney bought them. At one point, he intended for The Rainbow Road to Oz to become a live action musical with the Mousketeers filling many of the major roles. For a myriad of possible reasons – too expensive, too inexperienced a cast, a weak script or a lackluster book of songs – that never happened, and Oz languished.

In 1980, the studio’s young production chief Tom Wilhite contacted Walter Murch, a sound designer and film editor who won an Academy Award for Apocalypse Now. Murch recalls, “it was just a fishing expedition on both of our parts. But one of the questions he asked was, ‘What are you interested in that you think we might also be interested in?’, and I said, ‘Another Oz story.’ … And Tom sort of straightened up in his chair because it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that Disney owned the rights to all of the Oz stories. And they were particularly interested in doing something with them because the copyright was going to run out in the next five years.”

Working with Gill Dennis, Murch wrote a treatment based on Baum’s The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz and when the studio responded favorably, the pair returned with a script in the spring of 1982. Darker than what the studio anticipated, Wilhite moved forward on what was then known simply as Oz, footing the bill for art director Norman Reynolds to begin designing sets, and work to begin on animatronic puppets. $6 million had been spent when in November 1983, Disney’s new head of production Richard Berger pulled the plug on Oz. He cited the film’s $27 million price tag, along with the failure of that summer’s dark and costly Something Wicked This Way Comes, which Disney had produced and had not gone over well with audiences. Shaving the budget down to $25 million by shooting the film on five soundstages at Elstree Studios in England – with the Salisbury Plains standing in for Kansas – Murch revived the project and filming commenced February 1984.

Murch recalls, “There were 114 days of shooting, which is a lot, and the character of Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk, is in almost every shot. She was absolutely great, a fantastic ally in the making of the film, but there are laws in England and the United States that limit the amount of time you can shoot with a child actor, so it put great strains on how much we could do each day. Add on top of that all of the creatures she was with: puppets and claymation and animals. That old adage about never making a film with a child or an animal; we had not only a child and animals – talking chickens and dogs and all of that – but also puppets, each operated by three or four people, radio controlled devices, front projection, and claymation (for the nomes) that wasn’t there at the time of shooting.”

Return to Oz proceeded so slowly that Murch was fired after five weeks. After George Lucas guaranteed he’d step in for his friend the first time director if needed, the studio rehired Murch after a few days. But by the time the film was in post-production, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had arrived to manage Disney. Murch recalls, “And they were not really interested in Return, probably because it was so dark, and not a musical, and particularly because it had been started by an executive two generations earlier, and so they mostly ignored it after it did not do so well in previews, which was both good and bad. The good part was that I was able to complete the film I wanted to make, the bad part was that they didn’t really get behind its release. Having said that, it was a difficult film to distribute, as we found out, given the zeitgeist of the mid-’80’s. Maybe any zeitgeist.”

Opening June 1985 with a lavish premiere at Radio City Music Hall, Return to Oz was blasted by critics. From the Los Angeles Times (Sheila Benson) to the New York Times (Janet Maslin) to At The Movies, the overwhelming consensus was that the film did not measure up to The Wizard of Oz, and was too intense for children. Gene Siskel: “Kids under six are gonna get nightmares from this picture. Kids over six, they’ll just have a bad time at the movies.” Roger Ebert: “Somebody should have thought at the very first when they were starting out with Return To Oz. somebody should have had this thought: ‘It oughta be fun, it oughta be upbeat, it oughta be sweet, it oughta be wondrous. It shouldn’t be scary.’” Return To Oz grossed a dismal $11 million in the U.S.

Murch – who would win two Academy Awards in 1996 as both the film editor and sound designer for The English Patient – never directed after Return To Oz. In 2000, he mused, “We knew going in that it was going to be risky, but it had been 45 years since the original film came out, and I thought enough time had passed for a different sensibility to have a chance, to present a somewhat more realistic view about Dorothy and her life on the farm, and have the film not be a musical … I definitely felt that if we had tried to really do a sequel, which is to say, do something in the style of an MGM musical, we would have been in even greater trouble, because there’s just no way you can reinvent that particular combination of people, technology, and attitude, which really reached a peak in the late 1930s and never recovered after the war.”

Opinion
The two components of this film’s disastrous reception were probably its title – Oz might have led to a little less buyer’s remorse among moviegoers – and the fact that Murch was simply ahead of his time here. In the 1980s, E.T. and its message of hope and reassurance were what most ticket buyers needed. Return To Oz is one dark, perilous and morally complex place to venture into. It’s also as majestically rendered a fantasy as you’re ever likely to see, grander than anything Jim Henson would produce in the same period, as textured and thrilling as the Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings franchises, but black as gunpowder. It’s the quintessential adaptation of L. Frank Baum, striking out from the lighthearted, vaudevillian approach of The Wizard of Oz and right into the heart of darkness.

Just as much – if not more – genuine love went into the making of Return To Oz as the 1939 original. The screenplay is even more inventive in the way it establishes each character Dorothy will meet in Oz; the wheel of a gurney becomes a Wheeler, a wicked nurse becomes Mombi. That’s cool. The film is peerless in terms of set design and camera movement and spares no expense in its grandeur. Fairuza Balk – nine years old at the time she was cast – does a sublime imitation of Judy Garland’s voice, while matching Baum’s vision of Dorothy when it comes to her age; Balk gives a terrific performance. David Shire’s musical score is just as enthralling. Critics condemning the movie for being scary apparently forgot all about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Return To Oz, much maligned, is just as much a classic.

Jenny Jediny at Not Coming To A Theater Near You writes, ”While it is highly emphasized in The Wizard of Oz that Dorothy is purely in the midst of a dream, the argument is more ambiguous in Return to Oz; Murch has stated he never intended for this to be a sequel, but instead a version more akin to the vision in the Frank L. Baum novels, a decision that enhances the film and sets it apart from the shadow of the 1939 classic, bringing instead an edge of terror that is found in many fairy tales, particularly those of the Brothers Grimm. Having viewed Return to Oz at least a dozen times by this point in my life, I have to express my penchant for this vision of Oz.”

Matt Gamble at Where The Long Tail Ends writes, “Return to Oz is a decidedly different children’s film, with its dark themes and horrific moments it is not the typical candy coated fare released in American theaters. But it is this unique aspect of the film that makes it both so memorable and endearing. Return to Oz is a film that challenges its viewers, both young and old, and attempts to create a fascinating fantasy world that will be both remembered and revisited by the viewer. And while some special effects driven children’s fantasy films of the 80’s haven’t held up well over time, I’m looking at you The Neverending Story, Return to Oz is a film that has not only aged well, but has become even more enjoyable with each viewing.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) receives a message from his estranged father that his mother has died. Wrapped in a cocoon of anti-depressant drugs, a sterile Los Angeles apartment and a thankless job waiting tables at a chic Vietnamese restaurant, “Large” returns to suburban New Jersey for the funeral. Confiding to his icy psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) that he’s been getting headaches, Large is booked an appointment with a neurologist. An actor whose claim to fame was playing a mentally retarded football player on a TV movie, Large reunites with a buddy named Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a funeral park worker who spends his time smoking pot.

Even with street drugs he’s given at a party, Large is unable to relate to the people back home, including a buddy (Armando Riesco) who got rich off his patent for “silent Velcro.” Large remains in his stupor until he meets a patient at the neurologist’s office named Sam (Natalie Portman). With her taste in music (The Shins), messy family and manic affinity for lying, Large emerges from his funk. He opens up to Sam about why he got as far away from his family as soon as he could. Obsessed with tracking down the perfect going away gift for Large, Mark takes the couple on a wild goose chase that ends in an infinite abyss dug into the suburbs.

Production history
Zach Braff graduated Northwestern University film school in 1997 and made his way to Los Angeles, where he went out on acting auditions. Cast in the NBC sitcom Scrubs in 2000, Braff quit his day job waiting tables and spent the four months before he was due to start work finishing a script he’d been scribbling since college. “I’ve been to maybe a dozen funerals in my life and I was always struck by how there’d be all the people mourning the death at the gravesite and twenty yards away, there’d be two guys on a tractor checking their watch. That was always really upsetting to me. It also showed how different two people can be as far as where they are in their minds. So that was one of the seeds for the idea of the movie.”

With Scrubs, Braff became a client of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, which circulated his script – Large’s Ark – through the industry. Braff recalled, “Almost everyone had passed on it. They all said, ‘Make it a three-act structure movie.’ If I submitted it to a screenwriting class, I would have failed.” A 28-year-old president of production at Jersey Films – Garden State native Pamela Abdy – read the script and championed it. She introduced Braff to her bosses Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, whose producing pedigree helped attract Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm to the cast, with Braff both starring in and making his directorial debut.

Dropping the cryptic title Large’s Ark and renaming the film Garden State, the search for financing came next. Braff recalled, “I had envisioned in my head that being in Scrubs, having Natalie Portman starring and Danny DeVito producing that it would be a cinch. I was like, ‘I’m not asking for that much money. C’mon!’ I couldn’t find anyone that wanted to take a risk. It was a risk. The screenplay is not a traditional three act structure and it’s not a movie a studio would ever generate … People then said, ‘Okay, if you do this to it, if you do that to it.’”

“One thing that freaked them out, for example, was introducing a character that doesn’t come back. I’m like, ‘Well that’s life. I go home for four days. I meet somebody. They’re not going to teach me a lesson by the time I leave.’” With time running out, Gary Gilbert & Dan Halsted of Camelot Pictures agreed to finance a budget of $2.5 million. A 25-day shooting schedule commenced April 2003 in Braff’s hometown of South Orange, New Jersey, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher and production designer Judy Becker – stalwarts of indie film – giving Garden State its ethereal look.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, the film was so well received that Fox Searchlight and Miramax put up $5 million to acquire worldwide distribution. Released in July, the reviews were favorable; while Keith Phipps wrote at The Onion A.V. Club, “Garden State coasts on this considerable charm until it hits a brick wall in its final segments,” Roger Ebert added, “This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it’s smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.” Generating enthusiastic word of mouth among many who discovered it, Garden State went on to gross $26 million in only a limited release in the U.S.

Opinion
Too early to tell whether Garden State will affect the generational impact of The Graduate, Harold and Maude or The Breakfast Club, this is the first comedy/drama in years that warrants a comparison with the classics of disaffected youth. The reason is Braff’s righteously offbeat screenplay which – maybe out of ignorance for how most movies are written – ignores commandments carved into stone by Robert McKee and finds its own voice. In addition to introducing characters with no relevancy whatsoever to the plot, the story develops in loosely connected episodes. The couple likes each other as soon as they meet. Somehow, it all works.

While the chemically imbalanced Large and Sam don’t really seem like they would last 72 hours together, much less happily ever after, Braff evokes the right moods to patch over gaps in logic. Garden State feels truthful. Just as good, it’s hilarious, due to an inspired cast featuring Jean Smart as Mark’s stoner mom, Michael Weston as a miniature cop and Geoffrey Arend as a retail employee who harangues Large with his get rich scheme. And after being lost in so many big movies, the plucky Natalie Portman seems tailored for this type of treehouse production. The much praised autumnal soundtrack – cueing Coldplay, Frou Frou and Nick Drake – avoids sounding trendy and holds up well.

Matt Cale at Ruthless Reviews rants, “Garden State literally made my skin crawl. I hated it as much as I’ve hated anything all year, and only an unexpected Adam Sandler film festival will keep it off my Worst of the Year list … rather than tell a story or develop interesting characters, the filmmaker throws together dozens of scenes that make no sense within the context of the film, largely because they were conceived by a young prick who collected random thoughts in a dog-eared notebook over several years in the hope that one day his bloated smattering of paper would find a buyer.”

“Garden State is far from perfect, but the things that do work exceed any excesses in Braff’s tendency to overreach in trying to inject heavy-handed pathos into his silly comedy. A little less angst would go a long way, but for viewers who tend to attribute meaning though mood over substance, you will probably come away thinking this to be a deeper experience than is warranted. Still, it is original and perversely clever at times, and in the world of romantic comedies, if you can call this one, that alone puts it head and shoulders above almost all of them,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Mike Long at Jackass Critics writes, “The real standout in the film is Sarsgaard, who seems to get better with every role. He plays a character who is both likable and despicable at the same time, and thus, the audience hangs on his every move as we attempt to decide how we feel about him. Garden State is the best Kevin Smith movie that I’ve seen since Chasing Amy. However, Smith had nothing at all to do with this film and Garden State only proves the difficulty in making a quirky film which is both moving and funny.”

© 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