Coraline (2009)
Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Henry Selick
Produced by Pandemonium/ Laika Entertainment
Running time: 100 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) relocates from Pontiac, Michigan to the overcast Ashland, Oregon. While her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) write a gardening catalog, Coraline sets out to explore the Pink Palace Apartments, a 150-year old mansion that’s been rented out to three tenants. These include retired vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) and a Russian acrobat named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane). Coraline also meets the landlord’s grandson, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) whose great aunt disappeared in the house years ago. Wybie gives Coraline a doll that looks eerily like her.

Wakened at night by Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice, Coraline follows them through a door to an alternate reality, where her “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher again) offers Coraline everything she could possibly want: delicious food, nice clothes, a lavish room, wondrous gardens. She discovers a mangy black cat (Keith David) from home has the power of speech in this reality. Coraline’s Other Mother invites her to stay in this perfect world forever, if she’ll permit buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Trapped in a mirror when she refuses, Coraline meets the souls of other lost children and learns that her Other Mother is actually a creature who abducts and once she grows bored with them, devours children.

Who Made It?
Neil Gaiman — celebrated author of the DC Comics epic The Sandman and the novel Stardust – had his daughter to thank for planting the seeds of Coraline, written over a decade and published to great acclaim as a novella in 2002. Gaiman was a fan of Henry Selick, the stop-motion maestro behind The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and sent Selick a manuscript as early as 2000. Optioning the film rights for Selick was Bill Mechanic, former chairman of Fox and founder of the production company Pandemonium. Contractually prohibited from producing animated films by Disney — the studio where Mechanic had a deal — Coraline was initially developed as a live action feature, to no avail.

In May 2004, Selick accepted a job as supervising director with Vinton Studios, a Portland based animation company which found Coraline a little too dark for its tastes. But months later, Nike co-founder Phil Knight would move from an investor in Vinton Studios to buying the company outright and rebranding it as Laika Entertainment. Looking to make a move into feature films, Knight rolled the dice on Selick and Coraline with a production budget of between $60 and $70 million. The first stop-motion animated film shot in 3D, Coraline spent 18 months being meticulously filmed on 52 sets at Laika’s studio in Portland before opening to wide acclaim in February 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Neil Gaiman traced the origins of Coraline back to the unusual demand of a key demographic: his daughter. “It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten — she’d be about four or five years old — and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.”

Gaiman continued, “I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought, ‘I’ll write her one. I’ll write a story that Holly would like.’ And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline, which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed.” Gaiman found additional inspiration from Victorian Era author Lucy Clifford, whose 1882 short story The New Mother concerned two misbehaving children whose mother is replaced by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

Gaiman revealed, “I finished the first draft nine years ago in 2000 and I gave it to my agent and said: ‘Please give this to Henry Selick,’ because I had seen The Nightmare Before Christmas and even though it was called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas I was smart enough to understand that the main man was Henry Selick. I then saw James and the Giant Peach and thought Henry had something really interesting. Especially as a stop-motion director he was just beyond compare. He’s the best there is. I loved the fact that he seemed to understand that sometimes you can show sometimes bravery shines best in dark places.”

Published in 2002, Coraline was awarded that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Selick took the property to producer Bill Mechanic, who’d founded Pandemonium after being forced out as chairman of 20th Century Fox, where Mechanic had championed Fight Club, X-Men and Ice Age. Working on an adaptation, Selick resisted developing the material as a live action film, feeling there had been too many talking critter movies and that bringing Gaiman’s dark faerie tale to life through animation might make it less disturbing for younger audiences. But Mechanic’s deal with Disney prohibited him from making animated features.

Selick recalled, “And Bill liked it, but for about two years we had to pretend it was a live action film. I even met with Michelle Pfeiffer, to be possibly in the role of the Mothers, but she didn’t really want to have any buttons on her eyes. And I said, ‘But that’s, kinda the point of the … ‘ Anyway, that was the early days. We kinda hit a dead end. We weren’t going to get to make the film. A scary film for children — it wasn’t going to happen.” Selick moved on to animate sea creatures for the Wes Anderson comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and in May 2004, accepted an offer from Vinton Studios, the Portland based animation unit behind the California Raisins ad campaign and the Fox series The PJs.

Founded by stop-animation pioneer Will Vinton — who’d coined the term Claymation and supervised the stop-motion effects in Return To Oz (1985) — the studio was looking to land financing for animated features that might compete with Pixar. “They were growing, transforming. They had an idea for a short film, Moongirl, and they asked if I’d direct it, and flesh it out. And I said that I was only going to move up there from California if I could bring Coraline with me. And they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I moved up there, did this short for them, Moongirl, and then said, ‘Well, it’s time to do Coraline.’ And at that time, the guy in charge said, ‘Well, actually, it’s much too dark’, and what changed was, Travis Knight.”

Travis Knight is son of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. After a short-lived career as “Chilly Tee”, a Portland rapper in the early 1990s, Travis Knight found his niche as a stop-motion animator at Vinton Studios. After The PJs was canceled and advertising jobs dried up, his father invested in the studio. In September 2003, Phil Knight bought the company, naming Nike executive Dave Wahl CEO and hiring Selick as supervising animation director. Renaming the operation Laika Entertainment, Knight shifted the studio’s primary focus from commercials to feature films. One year later, it was announced that Laika would bankroll Coraline, with Henry Selick adapting a script and directing. Focus Features — the specialty film division of Universal Pictures — acquired worldwide distribution rights.

In adapting Gaiman’s novella, Selick revealed, “I added a character, this neighbor kid Wybie. I set it in the U.S., because I wasn’t as comfortable with British dialogue. And then, over the years that it took to get this thing off the ground, other elements of the story took on a life of their own. I guess the main thing is there’s a delicacy, a subtlety, that Neil can really exploit with his beautiful writing that can’t all get on the screen. You can go and describe the Other Mother and say that her teeth were just a tiny bit longer, her nails a tiny bit more red, but I had to go bigger and broader at times. I also had to dial back the darkness. I didn’t want to go to the darkest tones of the novel quite so soon. I wanted to go lighter and then descend into it.”

One concept that was floated was to open Coraline with computer-generated animation and transition into stop-motion when the story shifted into the parallel universe. Selick recalled, “It was a nice theory, we actually did a test, but putting the two side by side, it just didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have much to say, you know, crucial time we’re on the razor’s edge: which way do we go, CG or stop-motion? Travis Knight, who’s one of the lead animators, weighed in with his important vote and said, well, if he’s going to animate on one feature, he wanted to do stop-motion, so I owe him a huge debt. We went the right way. Travis had a lot to do with that.” Coraline commenced what became an 18-month shoot May 2006 at the Laika studio in Portland.

According to Selick, 90 percent of the film was done practical, without using CG imagery. “Coraline is about seven inches tall as a puppet. There’s an invisible line in her face that we’ve painted out, between her upper face and lower face. The animation of her face is done through replacement animation, just like Jack Skellington, Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, the old Pillsbury Doughboy. Martin Meunier — very talented artist/ fabrication person I’ve worked with — came up with a new system using rapid proto machines to build on handmade sculpts of her face and give her an ever greater range of expressiveness. Georgina Hayns — or George as we call her — head of puppet fabrication builds these puppets. The armature underneath metal skeleton was by Merri Cheney, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years.”

Critics generally loved the film. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline’s dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Coraline may not be for all tastes and it’s certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick’s animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.”

Opening February 2009 in the United States, Coraline earned $75.2 million domestically and added $46.3 million in theaters overseas. It also won the enthusiastic support of Neil Gaiman. “It’s what I hoped Henry would make, which is Henry’s film. It’s very much a film of my book and it hits all the beats of the book and it expands a little bit because it’s not a very big book. But he instilled it with Henry’s wonderful imagination and he doesn’t stop anything.” Gaiman added, “It’s so strange because I think adults have a lot more problems with this kind of story than children do. It’s true for the book. It’s always adults that say to me that they finish reading the book at three o’clock in the morning and go around the house turning on all the lights. I never get that from the kids.”

Should I Care?
Selick is an animation connoisseur and seems to understand that the state of the art only moves as far as animators are willing to challenge their audience. Earlier in his career, Selick was a storyboard artist for Disney and worked on Return To Oz, a dark, exquisitely made fable that critics disparaged for being too scary for kids(!) This as if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty — to name a few — were a trip to McDonald’s. With Neil Gaiman’s novella as a road map, Henry Selick has crafted his finest work yet. Less amusing than The Nightmare Before Christmas, the absence of musical numbers allows Selick and his team to descend into the imagination and angst of a child more vividly than any American animated film I can recall with the exception of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland.

Gaiman’s source material — liberally reworked by Selick — is a handsomely crafted narrative; there’s not a single dopey character or glib reference to be found here. The script doesn’t call for any cheap scares, but like Return To Oz, is a perilous and potent trip to the dark side. I don’t have any funny glasses and can’t comment about the film’s 3D attributes, but there’s no question that the handcrafted, slightly wonky effect of stop-motion animation — whether used in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Corpse Bride (2005) — is a shot into the nerve center of the brain. Bruno Coulais composed a delightfully spooky score, while alt rock kings They Might Be Giants — who composed four demos, only one of which Selick ended up being able to use — contribute a cool song.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Neil Gaiman Exclusive Interview — Coraline” By Matt Goldberg. Collider.com, 26 January 2009

“Coraline director Henry Selick on how not to mess up Neil Gaiman” By Ian Spelling. SciFi Wire, 26 January 2009

“Laika hangs dreams on Coraline” By Amy Reifenrath. Oregon Live, 4 February 2009

“Director Henry Selick on Coraline” By Debra Kaufman. Studio Daily, 6 February 2009

“Nike father-son duo lace up Coraline” By Peter Debruge. Variety, 6 February 2009

“Exclusive: Henry Selick on Coraline” By Michael Leader. Den of Geek, 7 May 2009

“Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Coraline. DVD audio commentary featuring Henry Selick & Bruno Coulais. Universal Home Entertainment (2009)

Adventureland (2009)
Written by Greg Mottola
Directed by Greg Mottola
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the summer of 1987, Oberlin College grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is notified by his parents (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin) that money he was depending on to help pay for a European backpacking trip will no longer be available. Unable to help their son pay rent when he enrolls at Columbia in the fall, James returns to Pittsburgh for the summer looking for work. A comparative literature and Renaissance studies major, the only job he finds he’s really qualified for is at the scruffy amusement park Adventureland, where his childish neighbor Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) works.

James is passed over for a position in Rides when the couple that runs the park (Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig) concludes that he’s more of a Games man. His co-workers include the mopey Joel (Martin Starr) and a streetwise girl named Em (Kristen Stewart) who saves James from getting knifed by a customer. Em reveals a similar taste in music (The Replacements, Big Star) and that she’s headed for NYU in the fall. But James’ affection for Em is tempered when he discovers she’s been sleeping with Adventureland’s 30-year-old married maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds).

Who Made It?
Greg Mottola grew up in Dix Hills, a town on Long Island, New York. After receiving a BFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mottola earned an MFA in film at Columbia. His debut feature film The Daytrippers (starring Hope Davis, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber) won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Mottola envisioned an auteur’s career for himself like that of Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen, writing and directing his own material. But when Columbia Pictures put Mottola’s planned sophomore film – The Life of the Party, a road trip ensemble to feature John Cusack — into turnaround in 1999, Mottola fell into a funk that resulted in little if any writing.

Desperate to get back behind the camera in 2001, Mottola accepted an offer from producer Judd Apatow to direct episodes of Fox’s coed dorm comedy Undeclared. Surrounded by a cast and crew much younger than himself, Mottola started thinking about writing a film about first love. Working with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey of This Is That Productions, Mottola was ready to send his script Adventureland out to investors when Apatow offered Mottola the job of directing a feature: Superbad. The teen comedy’s runaway critical and commercial success in 2007 led to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Miramax Films agreeing to split financing for Adventureland.

How’d They Do It?
Greg Mottola had moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on Undeclared when the idea for what became Adventureland began to percolate. Mottola recalled, “I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there. I thought, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.”

He added, “I was a very naïve young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.” During a conversation with a member of the Undeclared writing staff — Jenny Connor — about the worst jobs anyone had ever had, Mottola mentioned his stint working at a Long Island amusement park called Adventureland in the summer of ’84.

“So I had a friend working at this amusement park I applied and soon found myself wearing a ‘Games’ shirt and being a carnival barker for the summer. And it was just demeaning, you know, I was pretentious, I was an art student at the time, I thought it was beneath me … You know, and I wanted to find people who could sit and talk about the abstract expressionists and Rothko you know, and it was these animals vomiting around me and eating cotton candy. But, you know, it quickly turned into one of those kind of super fun summers.” While directing episodes of Fox’s Arrested Development and HBO’s The Comeback, Mottola continued to work on his script.

Once Mottola had a draft of Adventureland he was happy with, he sent it to producer Ted Hope. A partner in the indie film production company Good Machine, Hope had produced Ride With the Devil for Ang Lee, Storytelling for Todd Solondz and Human Nature for Michel Gondry before agreeing to sell Good Machine to Universal and founding This Is That Productions with Anne Carey. Hope recalled, “Years back when I was struggling to get Nicole Holofcener’s Walking & Talking financed, Nicole said in a fit of despair that I should be working with someone who will actually make a lot of movies, like the guy who had just won best film at Columbia Film School, Greg Mottola.”

Hope added, “He already had a producer relationship so we just got to know each other, but life wasn’t as Nicole had predicted for him. By the time five or so years had passed since Daytrippers, his agents, who were also our agents, submitted the script to us as a ready-to-go project. We loved it but had some thoughts on how to enhance it and make it more resonant in the marketplace. Greg agreed but it took us over two years to get it right, and then he got what initially looked like a direct-to-DVD feature, but that turned out to be Superbad and the rest is history.” Confident of his take on Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s teen comedy, Mottola put his moody take on first love on the backburner.

With the massive success of Superbad, Mottola found plenty of investors willing to bankroll Adventureland, if he could only change it a bit. “You know, it was hard to get the film set up, even after Superbad. People who wanted to make it made a condition that I had to rewrite it as a contemporary film, and I refused. That may have been very stubborn of me. But I didn’t know what the equivalent to this film would be for a 21-year-old just coming into college. I could research it, but it wouldn’t be as fun to me as a film that came from personal experiences. There was just something about a movie that’s looking back — it has a slightly more melancholy strain. And a part of it was because life did seem simpler before the Internet and before cell phones.”

Sidney Kimmel — a garment magnate who built Jones Apparel Group into a publicly traded company worth $5 billion — had quietly assembled a film production and finance company in Beverly Hills in 2005. With indie film vets Jim Tauber and William Horberg on his team, Kimmel rolled the dice on a number of offbeat comedies (Death at a Funeral, Lars and the Real Girl) and socially conscious dramas (United 93, Talk To Me) that were anything but safe commercial bets. SKE financed Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York and decided to go into business with Greg Mottola, splitting $10 million or so in financing with Miramax Films. In August 2007 it was announced that Adventureland would be Mottola’s next picture.

Ted Hope recalled, “We were ready to go out with the script for financing and casting a few weeks before Superbad came out. Interest in Greg was high, but time to put together a summer movie was short. Luckily Greg had thought hard about whom he wanted in the film prior and they were all accessible. Jesse & Kristen were pretty much whom he always wanted. Kristen had yet to get Twilight so she was still considered a virtual unknown. Greg knew Bill Hader from Superbad and wanted him and Kristen Wiig from the get-go too. Ryan Reynolds may have been the first person Greg had met for the role; he just happened to be in NYC right when we started.”

Hope continued, “And Martin Starr just slayed it in an early audition and changed our conception of the character. Similarly Margarita Levieva came to the audition in full character and makeup. Both of them became the archetype so there was no one else we could cast. Perhaps most fortunate, was that our financing partners agreed with our vision for the roles and that allowed Greg to lock his cast quickly by his taste and not some Chinese Menu of what may work in different markets or with specific demographics.” To get the summer romance rolling before winter set in, Mottola ended up with two weeks of prep time. The director admitted some mistakes were made as a result.

“Well, like, a prop guy thought they didn’t have those pop tags on soda cans in 1987. And I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure they did.’ And it’s hard to find ‘80s cars. People will preserve and treasure their ‘70s muscle cars, but not treasure their K-cars. It was weird; we couldn’t find cars that ran. But I grew up in a really modest suburban community in Long Island and a lot of my neighbors didn’t have a lot of money, and their houses were still filled with furniture from the ‘70s and the ‘60s, even. It’s not as though everyone switched to an ‘80s aesthetic because that’s what was on TV. This is a modest world where the film takes place, and it’s okay if there’s a mish-mash of ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The search for an amusement park that hadn’t changed much in 20 years came down to Playland in Rye, NY and Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. Mottola recalled, “The tax rebates in Pennsylvania were better than New York state, plus it seemed like we could get a better deal with Kennywood, so the choice was arrived at pretty quickly. Plus, I have a fondness for poor maligned Pittsburgh. We didn‘t have the budget to build or create very much, although my production designer Stephen Beatrice did a very nice job of creating the specific booths that I needed and scuzzying up the park a bit so it wasn‘t quite as quaint as Kennywood is in reality.” Shooting in the 111-year old park during the week — before Kennywood went into Phantom Fright Nights mode on the weekends — Adventureland commenced filming September 2007.

An Adventureland employee in 1984, Mottola bumped the film’s timeline up to 1987 to take advantage of songs he wanted to use to tell his life story. Collaborating with music supervisor Tracy McKnight — who had worked at an amusement park in Seaside Heights, NJ in her youth — Mottola exchanged iPod playlists and mix tapes. Accustomed to licensing 15 to 20 songs for a movie, McKnight arrived on 40 tunes, including “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” by Husker Du and “I’m In Love With a Girl” by Big Star. Mottola joked that the fee paid to Van Halen to use “Panama” in Superbad “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.” To compose a score, Mottola turned to another favorite band, the Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, Adventureland opened nationwide April 2009. Critics fell in love with the movie. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “A confident return to the kind of teen comedy that’s funny without being raunchy, youthful without being juvenile, and reflective without hitting you over the head.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.”

Never expanding beyond 1,876 U.S. screens, Adventureland sold $16 million in tickets domestically and added $1 million overseas. Acknowledging the challenges of marketing a period movie to kids who might feel it wasn’t about them and to adults who might feel it was just about kids, Greg Mottola sounded pleased with the results. “There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me. I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.”

Should I Care?
Quickly hailed as one of the year’s best films by critics and too easily dismissed by casual viewers as lacking in laughs (Kristen Wiig fans expecting more than a token cameo will probably be disappointed), Adventureland is a little of both, a small but perfect gem that gets better the more I think about it. Without painting a rose colored portrait of the late ‘80s, Greg Mottola’s writing genuinely pines for the days when people somehow met without the Internet and expressed themselves without cell phones. It’s a gentler coming-of-age drama than something from Noah Baumbach and recalls Wes Anderson’s early work in its understated wit.

One sign we’re in the hands of a talented filmmaker is the casting. Jesse Eisenberg does what Michael Cera couldn’t have done, playing a boy growing into a man. Kristen Stewart has an alluring scruffiness that I can’t recall seeing another young actress emulate as convincingly. It takes time before we know how to feel about either character. The soundtrack — a sublime blend of kitsch played at the park and the ‘70s or ‘80s music its couple shares via mix tapes — refrains from explaining the scenes, supplying mood instead. What’s most rewarding about Adventureland is how Mottola smarts the movie up — instead of dumbing it down — by rejecting raunch and taking a slow turn toward brutal honesty.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Film Producer Guided More by His Heart Than by His Calculator” By David Halbfinger. The New York Times, 12 December 2007

“When Hollywood Comes Calling” By Daniel McGuire. IAAPA, February 2008

“Greg Mottola Interview, Adventureland, Sundance 2009” By Kevin Kelly. SpoutBlog, 22 January 2009

“Sundance 2009 — Adventureland — Greg Mottola” The Hollywood Podcast starring Tim Coyne. 19 February 2009

“Directing to an ’80s Playlist” By Larry Rother. The New York Times, 20 March 2009

“Five Questions for Ted Hope (Adventureland)” By Matt Dentler. indieWIRE, 31 March 2009

“After The Daytrippers …” By Peter Keough. The Boston Phoenix, 31 March 2009

“Director Greg Mottola on Keeping Adventureland Eighties Appropriate” By Lane Brown. New York Magazine, 3 April 2009

“Some Kind of Love” By Nick Dawson. Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis
At the Rustic Motel somewhere in the flatlands of Oklahoma, Agnes White (Ashley Judd) begins receiving strange phone calls at night. All she hears is breathing, and assumes it’s her ex Jerry, who’s just been paroled. Cigarettes and wine do little to calm her nerves. After her shift as a waitress at a gay bar is over, Agnes’ co-worker R.C. (Lynn Collins) comes over to get high. R.C. brings along a quiet stranger who goes by the name Peter (Michael Shannon).

Peter claims to be able to “pick up on things”. Such as that Agnes is lonely, and that she lied to him about not having kids. Agnes tells him she used to have a son, but he disappeared from a grocery store years ago. Without any place to go, Peter gets permission to sleep on the sofa. In the morning, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.) drops by. He smacks his ex-wife around and lets her know he’ll be back. Not wanting to be alone, Agnes invites Peter to stay.

Peter wakes in the middle of the night claiming a bug bit him. He finds what he calls an “aphid” in the bedsheets. Agnes can’t really see what he’s talking about. Peter gets spooked, stating there are people after him. He claims that while serving in the Middle East, the Army experimented on him and he went AWOL. Agnes accepts Peter’s schizophrenia as reality. Together, they take measures to repel the bugs they believe have infested the place.

Production history 
Written by Oklahoma native Tracy Letts, Bug had its stage premiere in London in 1996. It debuted off-Broadway eight years later, with Shannon Cochran taking over at the last minute for Amanda Plummer in the role of Agnes, and Michael Shannon reprising his role as Peter from the London production. The play won four Lucille Lortel Awards (including Best Play) and two Obie Awards for its acting company and design team.

Director William Friedkin saw the play in New York, and felt as if it had been written for him. Friedkin was so compelled that in June 2004, he optioned the film rights, with Letts adapting the screenplay. Friedkin approached Ashley Judd to star. Judd’s agent advised her that the material might be too dark, but that only intrigued her. Friedkin also insisted Michael Shannon reprise the role he’d been playing on stage for a decade.

With a budget of $4 million, a 20-day shooting schedule commenced in July 2005. The motel exterior was a real location in Olancha, California, while the interiors were shot on a stage built inside a high school gym in Metairie, Louisiana. Bug was awarded the International Film Critics Award for the promotion of new cinema at the Cannes Film Festival, and was widely touted as Friedkin’s best film in over 20 years when released in May 2007.

Opinion 
The film not only performed relatively well at the box office, but found admirers among critics. I agree that this is Friedkin’s best movie in two decades, but that’s nothing to celebrate with a parade when you consider what his output has been reduced to. The Guardian (not the Kevin Costner/Ashton Kutcher one, the druid one), Rampage, Blue Chips, Jade and The Hunted were virtually unwatchable movies.

Bug runs 102 minutes, and one hour of that is watchable. The film begins with a spectacular aerial shot that glides from the night sky and floats down onto the motel. Friedkin establishes a tense Gothic mood, while Letts has a fine ear for dialogue. The casting is strong, with Ashley Judd giving an even grittier performance than the one she gave for Come Early Morning. Michael Shannon and Lynn Collins are terrific finds that I hope will get a lot more work in movies.

Unfortunately, the last 40 minutes are so broad minded, so over the top, and so repellent that it’s easy to understand why a director like Friedkin thought Bug might make an interesting movie. Letts evokes some spot-on cultural paranoia, but backs away from writing a compelling narrative to have his characters revel in a freak show antics instead. Ashley Judd is terrific, but the movie ends up being far more laughable than it is intense.

Nick Schager at Lessons of Darkness writes, “Bug is William Friedkin’s best film in at least two decades, a compliment that must be tempered by the disclaimer that, after its first thirty minutes, this adaptation of Tracy Letts’ stage play begins to lose its sure-footing. Those first thirty minutes, though, are something else, achieving an exhilarating sense of foreboding and unease.” He gives it a B.

“This is a bleak, harrowing look into an unhealthy relationship so nasty, only the jet-black comedy aspects manage to save it from being too unpalatable for anyone. You might love it, you might hate it, but one thing’s for sure – it takes risks, and it commands your attention throughout,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Tom Becker at DVD Verdict writes, “This film certainly has its champions, and it is unquestionably unlike anything out there from a ‘name’ director and starring a ‘name’ actress. Both Judd and Shannon give courageous performances here, and much of the film is actually very funny. Some people will find this edgy, riveting, and unique. I just don’t happen to be among them.”

“This spring, from the Academy Award winning director of The Exorcist, comes the movie the Chicago Tribune calls ‘one of the most disturbing horror movies imaginable.’” View the theatrical trailer for Bug.

© Joe Valdez

This is my contribution to the Action Heroine blog-a-thon being hosted by Nathaniel over at The Film Experience.

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), lone survivor of the space freighter Nostromo, is discovered drifting through the outer reaches of space by a salvage crew. Revived after spending 57 years in hypersleep, her employer is skeptical that she scuttled the freighter because a hostile alien (with acid for blood) got on board and killed her crew.

The moon where Ripley claims to have discovered the alien is now the site of a terraformed colony, and they haven’t reported any hostile aliens. But a pencilnecked case officer with the Company named Burke (Paul Reiser) later notifies her that they’ve lost contact with the colonists. He requests Ripley accompany him and a unit of colonial Marines to investigate.

Ripley’s flight license has been revoked, her daughter has aged and died, and her ordeal in space has left her with nightmares. “I’m not going back there. And I wouldn’t be any good to you if I did.” She receives assurances from Burke that he can get her reinstated as a flight officer, and that the Marines are packing “state of the art firepower” and that there’s nothing they can’t handle.

A unit that includes the green Lt. Gorman (William Hope), quiet Cpl. Hicks (Michael Biehn), loud mouthed Pvt. Hudson (Bill Paxton), two bad ass gunners (Jeanette Goldstein, Mark Rolston) and an “artificial person” called Bishop (Lance Henriksen) wake from hypersleep and are ferried by dropship to the colony. Most of them disregard Ripley’s dire assessment of what they might be up against.

The colonists are all missing, with the exception of a traumatized little girl named Newt (Carrie Henn) found crawling through the ventilation ducts. Ripley is reminded of her daughter, and in order to find out what happened, gains Newt’s trust. “These people are soldiers, they’re here to protect you.” “It won’t make any difference,” the kid responds.

It becomes clear that the aliens Ripley warned the Marines about are here. Gorman leads the unit into an ambush that even the heavily armed Marines are ill-equipped to get out of. Reacting quickly, Ripley rescues what’s left of the unit, but bad goes to worse, and they find themselves stranded on a moon infested with hundreds of the ferocious title creatures.

James Cameron was waiting for financing to come through so he could shoot a low budget sci-fi movie he had written called Terminator. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill had read Cameron’s script and were interested in working with him. Cameron pitched several ideas, none of which went over well. As he was leaving, the producers mentioned that they were thinking of doing a sequel to Alien. That got Cameron’s attention.

Cameron submitted a 40 page treatment of ideas he’d employ for Alien II. Giler and Hill loved it and after developing the story with him, commissioned Cameron to write a screenplay. He was able to turn in 90 pages before going off to direct Terminator. Based on the quality of what he’d read so far, Walter Hill made the decision not to hire another writer, but wait until Cameron could finish.

The Terminator blew away expectations by making its budget back many times over at the box office. Cameron accepted an offer to direct Aliens, contrary to advice he was hearing. If the sequel was any good, he was told, it would only be because Ridley Scott did such a great job on the original. If it was bad, it would be Cameron’s fault. He ignored this and went off to Pinewood Studios in England to prep the film.

The shoot did not go smoothly. No one in the crew had seen The Terminator and they assumed the demanding Cameron didn’t know what he was doing. The first assistant director was so antagonistic towards Cameron’s decisions that he had to be fired, but not before instigating a mass walkout from the prickly crew.

James Remar was cast as Hicks, but Cameron replaced him less than a week into filming. Michael Biehn was offered the role on a Friday night, and by Monday, was in England working. Director of photography Dick Bush was let go a month into filming because Cameron hated the lighting. Derek Vanlint – who lit Alien – was asked to take over. Vanlint wasn’t interested, but recommended his focus puller Adrian Biddle for the job.

Aliens is one of the most exhilarating, no holds barred action pictures ever made, for starters. Cameron wrote this while also penning Rambo: First Blood Part II on assignment, and the script is not only well versed in military hardware and tactics, but filled with subtle reminders of Vietnam, with an advanced fighting force systematically cut up by a terrifying indigenous enemy in the shadows.

Cameron gets mocked for Titanic, but his script for Aliens is a work of genius. The good android and Ripley’s mistrust of it. The terraformed colony and its unfortunate ability to function as a thermal reactor. The handheld motion trackers. The alien queen. The Caterpillar loader, used brilliantly in the finale. None of that stuff had ever been conceptualized in a sci-fi movie before and it works beautifully.

The casting – particularly Henriksen, Paxton and Goldstein, who all became part of Cameron’s repertory company – is great, but until the reticent Sigourney Weaver joined the cast, no action film with a substantial budget had ever centered on a heroine. Ripley’s inner fortitude, coupled with vulnerability, maternal instinct, and the fact that she goes through a visceral wringer, stood out and earned Weaver an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

An extended version released on laserdisc in 1992 restored 17 minutes not seen in theaters. This includes the subplot involving Ripley’s deceased daughter – which Weaver was livid about being cut – as well as a terrific sequence that shows how the colony became infested with the aliens. Weaver also has a moment with Michael Biehn late where the two exchange first names that I loved. The 154-minute special edition is the one now available on DVD.

“What can I say about Weaver. The role of Ripley, at least in this film, is a once in a lifetime part and she gives it everything she’s got. Her fear oozes from every pore and muscle, as does her determination to beat these creatures. There is no option. Cameron seems to really understand how to create well-rounded, strong female characters. For that, and his obvious prowess in filming out-of-this-world action sequences, he usually gets my butt in the seat every time,” says Crazy 4 Cinema.

Ruthless Reviews raves, “Off the Hook Motherfucking Amazing!! As a film, Aliens is incredible. As an 80s Action entry, it destroys the genre.”

“Aliens also happens to be a pro-woman film. Think about it. An entire compliment of battle hardened bug hunters failed, but one strip miner from the backwaters of the galaxy manages to take out one of the most vicious and destructive creatures in the universe,” says DVD In My Pants.

View the 1:48 teaser trailer that beats up all other trailers. No dialogue, no pitchman. This is how you sell a movie, marketing knuckleheads.