Drag Me To Hell (2009)
Written by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
Directed by Sam Raimi
Produced by Ghost House Pictures
Running time: 99 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In Pasadena, California, 1969, a migrant couple frantically seeks the help of medium Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) to dispel the demons that began harassing their son after he stole from a gypsy. 30 years later, Los Angeles loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) strives to overcome a few personal demons of her own. With her professor boyfriend (Justin Long) offering emotional support, Christine covets a management position at the bank where she works. Hoping to demonstrate to her boss (David Paymer) that she can make tough decisions, Christine denies a decaying gypsy named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her home loan.

After a violent encounter with Mrs. Ganush — in which the crone snatches a button from her coat and breathes a curse on it — Christine visits a storefront psychic named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) who sees an evil spirit haunting her. Following an attack by an unseen force at home and a freak sickness at the office, Christine revisits Rham and learns that her tormentor is the Lamia, a demon that will plague the owner of a cursed object for three days before dragging their soul into hell. He suggests Christine appease the Lamia with an animal sacrifice, but when that fails, she comes up with $10,000 for Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to vanquish the Lamia.

Who Made It?
Sam Raimi grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. While his older brother Ivan Raimi would go on to become a practicing doctor of osteopathic medicine, Sam dropped out Michigan State University after three semesters to raise money and shoot a feature version of a 32-minute horror movie demo Raimi had patched together with his roommate Bruce Campbell starring and brother Ted’s roommate Rob Tapert producing. Titled The Evil Dead (1981), the hyperkinetic no budget flick grew into a cult classic. Raimi helped inspire the careers of Joel & Ethan Coen, who co-wrote Crimewave (1985) with Raimi. The tongue-in-cheek Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), the superhero adventure Darkman (1990) and the special effects romp Army of Darkness (1992) followed.

Sam and his brother Ivan had written a short story about a gypsy hex they referred to simply as The Curse. As Sam Raimi’s directing career made a build toward prestige with A Simple Plan (1998), The Gift (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), Raimi hoped to produce The Curse through his production shingle Ghost House Pictures, with another director taking the reins. Unable to interest anyone, Raimi opted to direct the film, making a return to his low budget spooky roots with Nathan Kahane and Joe Drake of Mandate Pictures financing a comparatively low budget of around $30 million. Sneaking into theaters Memorial Day 2009 under the title Drag Me To Hell, the B-movie became one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Ivan Raimi pinned the genesis of Drag Me To Hell to an exercise he and his brother Sam gave themselves. “We started writing this so far back. We were working on Darkman, I believe, at the time. We’d reached some sort of impasse, and we had the weekend off, we decided to do something else. We challenged ourselves to write a short story in the time we had. It was something that might be meant for a half-hour TV show. That was the beginning of Drag Me to Hell. We wanted to write a gypsy curse story. A story of what somebody would do if they inadvertently got cursed and the lengths they would go to to remove the curse. I think I was dating a bank teller at the time and that’s how the woman became a bank teller.”

He continued, “It got shuffled to the bottom of the trunk, and we always wanted to work on it. Every now and then we’d dust it off and start working on it. Eventually, Sam had this company, Ghost House Pictures and said, ‘Yeah, we should work on it for Ghost House.’ So it became more earnest. It kept going in slightly different directions. It was always a little story. Every time we had a B-story, we’d work hard to integrate it into the A-story, but it never wanted to be that. It always wanted to be the very simple, nonstop story of a curse and the clock’s ticking and what to do to remove it. It went through a lot of permutations but eventually got back to what it was originally intended to be. It’s almost completely an A-story. There’s not much subplot or subtext.”

Sam Raimi recalled the origins of Drag Me To Hell by stating, “My brother, Ivan, and I had written this short story in 1989. Then just a few years ago, in 2002, we adapted it into a screenplay. I have a horror movie company called Ghost House Pictures, so I thought, why not make it into a full-fledged screenplay for the new company? We wrote it in mind with me to produce and for another director to come in and shoot it. Unfortunately that meant cutting the script so it could be made on a smaller budget. And as I started cutting, I realized that’s not why I was in it. I wasn’t there just to make a movie. I wanted to make this movie.”

He continued, “We did the most minor amount of research and discovered there are different demons that exist in many different cultures under the name of ‘Lamia’. In one culture, it’s this baby-eating God. In another, it’s a snake. In another, it’s a very sexy, but evil woman. And we thought, how interesting that they all have the same name, yet they’re all different. Maybe they’re just telling different stories about the same thing? Maybe we can tell our own story about that demon and call it The Lamia? What we really have at the core here is a timeless story concept that was used in this film, along with many others: the idea of a character that commits a sin of greed and has to pay the terrible price for it. It’s a morality tale that many churches have told, throughout the ages. So it’s a tried and true, old horror story in the book, basically.”

Ivan Raimi — who practices osteopathic medicine at Saint Joseph Mercy Livingston Hospital in Howell, Michigan — elaborated on his and his brother’s creative process. “When we write, we’ll have a project that’s assigned to us, or Sam and I will come up with some very basic concept that we try to turn into a couple pages, then together we’ll work it into a five-page story, then we’ll maybe make it into a ten-page story. Then we roughly outline it as well as our limited brains can, then give it a three act structure. But we’re not super structure guys.” He added, “Occasionally, he’ll write a little bit on his own, or I’ll write a little bit on my own, but when we write together, it’s sort of an extension of playing. It’s like being a kid when you’re making up stories. That’s the advantage of working with your brother.”

Sam Raimi commented on the partnership. “I’ve worked on many scripts with Ivan. He’s a doctor by day and a writer by night. We’ve actually spent a lot of time together, writing sometimes on the Spider-Man films, Darkman, Army of Darkness, and we have a great time being together. So it’s really both great family time and great work time for us. Unless he tries to rewrite me. The quality of that family time goes down a little bit, proportional to the amount he wants to rewrite me.” In December 2007, it was announced that Sam Raimi was returning to the horror genre by directing Drag Me To Hell for his Ghost House Pictures banner. The company had produced American remakes of The Grudge (2004) and The Grudge 2 (2006) and the vampire flick 30 Days of Night (2007).

Through Ghost House’s partnership with Mandate Pictures, roughly $30 million in financing was scared up. To play the cursed heroine, Ellen Page — who in December 2007 was being celebrated by critics and adored by moviegoers for her performance in Juno — was cast. Mandate had already booked the ingénue to play a supporting role in the mystery Peacock and the lead in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It. Despite efforts to get Drag Me To Hell rolling in mid-March to accommodate her schedule, a two-week delay in production forced Page to drop out. Alison Lohman — who’d experienced an Ellen Page year in 2002-03 with pivotal roles in White Oleander, Matchstick Men and Big Fish — was cast instead.

Drag Me To Hell commenced filming May 2008 in Tarzana, California, the site of an empty bank building that was transformed into “Wilshire Pacific Bank” by Steve Saklad, art designer of Spider-Man 2. Director of photography Peter Deming had shot Evil Dead 2 for Raimi before serving as David Lynch’s DP on Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Supervising the special makeup effects were Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX Group, who also met Raimi on Evil Dead 2; the company has since become the premiere makeup effects team in Hollywood. Nicotero commented, “Visual effects are fun, but there’s just something about a bunch of guys pulling cables and moving a puppet around. Sam is still enamored with that.”

Deming concurred. ““Sam loves B-movie stuff. He really embraces the wind out of nowhere and the camera shaking and the inventive, interactive lighting. He eats that up.” Raimi maintained he didn’t have other movies in mind specifically during the making of Drag Me To Hell. “I was just trying to make this story as dramatic and fun as I could. Our goal was never to follow any trends or even to try to give the audience what we thought they would want. We always tried to please ourselves — myself and my brother Ivan Raimi — when we were writing the script and in doing so, hoped that we would please the audience.” Additional scenes were filmed at Cal State Northridge and Union Station, while most of the interiors were shot on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles.

With Universal Pictures acquiring domestic and international distribution rights, Drag Me To Hell was screened March 2009 at the South By South Film Festival in Austin and at the Cannes Film Festival just before opening in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Israel in May. While more than a few horror buffs expressed reservations about the film’s PG-13 rating, Raimi explained, “I definitely, when I was writing the picture with my brother Ivan, didn’t want to rely on what I had relied on in the previous horror films, the Evil Dead films which was outrageous amounts of violence, blood and gore. I wanted to go in a slightly different direction with this one so I said, ‘Let’s try not to have any of that if we can, blood and violence and gore.’”

Critics jumped out of the theater praising the film. Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times: “At a time when horror is defined by limp Japanese retreads or punishing exercises in pure sadism, Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “This hellaciously effective B-movie comes with a handy moral tucked inside its scares, laughs and Raimi’s specialty, the scare/laugh hybrid.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Raimi pairs his love of Three Stooges-style physical comedy with moments of pure gross-out schtick and ends up with one of the purest and flat-out satisfying horror films in decades.”

Considered a marketing challenge — with a PG-13 rating that may have alienated horror fans and subject matter that definitely turned away families — Drag Me To Hell still grossed $42.1 million in the United States and $40.7 million overseas. Echoing the response of many who discovered the film, Sam Raimi enthused, “It was the most fun I’ve had in 20 years directing pictures. It was great to make a horror film where we had money to hire the best technicians in their fields. I had the luxury of not freezing to death when I was making the movie or filming it myself like in the first Evil Dead film, which was shot in 16mm and we didn’t have money for heat. I remember washing fake blood off my hands with hot coffee because we didn’t have running water there.”

Should I Care?
When watching a film directed by Sam Raimi, I almost expect to see characters depart in a puff of dust accompanied by rocket sound effects, like Looney Tunes. Whether your point of entry are the spastic Evil Dead trilogy, the Sharon Stone quickdraw epic The Quick and the Dead (1995) or the artificially flavored Spider-Man series, Raimi approaches movies less as art and more like a carnival funhouse, which over time, like the Looney Tunes, sort of makes them art. Drag Me To Hell is the latest coaster from a ride operator who’s had 30 years and over a billion dollars of expertise shelling out intense amusement. Never for a moment scary, this movie does have a moral, a mind and an old school style that gives the horror genre a desperately needed shot in the arm.

Framing a story against the economic recession, mining folklore for inspiration and delivering one of the best shock endings in recent memory, Drag Me To Hell has replaced A Simple Plan as my favorite Sam Raimi movie to date. Plenty goofy on the surface, there are strong ideas under the current here (Patton Oswalt theorized the movie was an allegory for anorexia!) I liked the suggestion that the westerners were seemingly oblivious of the supernatural world that the Mexican, Eastern European and South Asian characters had a hunting blind into. Whether there’s any subtext here or not, the movie is fun as hell, abetted by Christopher Young’s terrific musical score and an Oscar caliber sound mix that makes squishing gums, creaking gates or gust of wind outright characters in the film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Raimi Hell Bent on Thriller” By Michael Fleming. Variety, 19 December 2007

“Sam Raimi Interview for Drag Me to Hell” By Matt Elfman. ScreenCrave, 27 May 2009

“Sam Raimi has horror in his clutches” By Gina McIntyre. The Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2009

Drag Me To Hell – Production Notes

“Sam Raimi Interview, Drag Me To Hell” MoviesOnline

“The Script Doctor” By Denis Faye. Writers Guild of America

Nowhere In Africa (2001)
Screenplay by Caroline Link, based on the novel by Stefanie Zweig
Directed by Caroline Link
Produced by Constantin Film/ MTM Cineteve/ Bavaria Film International/ Media Cooperation One
Running time: 141 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In January 1938, Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze) lies stricken with malaria in a remote farmhouse in Rongai, Kenya. A lawyer disbarred from practice in his native Germany because he is a Jew, Walter is nursed back to health by a benevolent Luo cook named Owuor (Sidede Onyulo) and a neighboring farmer named Susskind (Matthias Habich), a Jew who had the foresight to make his exodus from Germany when emigrants could still get out with their money. Walter urgently sends for his pampered wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler) and 6-year-old daughter Regina (Lea Kurka) to flee their home in Leobschütz and join him at the arid farm he does his best to manage.

Regina bonds with Owuor and immerses herself in the customs of her new home. Her mother rejects the trappings of Kenya, hoping for a return to their cozy life, until news from Germany and of family still trapped there turns grim. When war breaks out, the British briefly intern Walter and Susskind at a camp for enemy aliens, while Jettel and Regina are housed with the German women and children at the posh Hotel Norfolk in Nairobi. Walter loses his job and home, but his wife’s liaison with a British officer gets him hired to run a lush farm in Ol Joro Orok. The opportunity enables the Redlichs to send Regina to boarding school, but adopting the farming life in a faraway land continues to strain their marriage.

Who Made It?
Stefanie Zweig spent 40 years as the arts editor of a daily newspaper in Frankfurt, Germany. She lost her job in 1988 — at the age of 56 — but buoyed by the success of a children’s book published to acclaim in 1994, Zweig turned her attention to a memoir chronicling her childhood as a German Jewish émigré growing up on the farms of Kenya. Nowhere in Africa would have no difficulty finding a publisher and arrived in bookstores in 1995. One of its earliest admirers was producer Peter Herrmann and his production company MTM Cineteve, which snagged the film rights as the novel went on to become a bestseller in Germany.

Three years later, Herrmann hooked German director Caroline Link — whose 1996 debut film Beyond Silence was nominated for an Academy Award — to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to visit the locations of Zweig’s coming-of-age story. They would reject pleas to shoot Nowhere in Africa in the film-friendly confines of South Africa and from January to April of 2001, marshal an $8 million budgeted production in Kenya. The German/Swahili/English language picture would become the highest grossing German film of 2002 and in March 2003, win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

How’d They Do It?
In June 1938, Stefanie Zweig arrived in Rongai, Kenya. Her 34-year-old father had been stripped of his job as an attorney and notary public by the Nazis and chose to immigrate to Kenya because the entry permit was only £50 per head. Without knowing anything about crops or cattle, he was managing a farm. With the help of the Jewish community in Nairobi, he sent for his wife and daughter. Zweig wrote, “Having learned Swahili with the speed and eagerness of a child longing to talk to people other than her parents, I loved everything about Kenya. I loved its beauty, sights and sounds, the animals and birds — but most of all the gentleness of the African heart, the people’s wit and their laughter.”

Zweig spent four decades as the chief editor of the arts section of the Abendpost-Nachtausgabe in Frankfurt. Yearning to be an author, she found solace writing children’s books in her spare time. She recalled her Kenyan experience with A Mouth Full of Earth in 1994, winning National Geographic Society’s best juvenile book in The Netherlands. Zweig then decided it was time for her to tell the mature version of her story. “I thought to myself, ‘You really are a fool to waste all your life in a children’s book, why don’t you tell the true story?’” She added, “I wrote the book in respect for my father, who told me very early in life not to hate, he taught me tolerance and not to give way to sentiments. I loved him very much and I wanted it to be his book.”

In 1993, producer Peter Herrmann helped establish (with Andreas Bareiss) the German television and film production company MTM Cineteve. MTM would produce Romuald Karmakar’s The Deathmaker, Germany’s submission for the 1997 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Two years previous, Herrmann was researching African ethnology when he came upon Stefanie Zweig’s then little known memoir Nowhere in Africa. Herrmann recalled, “I bought it very fast, and then the book became a bestseller so I was able to raise money for this movie. Then it was also difficult to find a director who was bankable enough to finance such a film. And then I met a young director, Caroline Link, and thought, ‘She is great, but nobody knows her.’”

Caroline Link grew up in Bad Nauheim, the town just north of Frankfurt where Elvis Presley served his Army stint. She followed high school with an internship at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich and study at the nearby University of Television and Film. Link wrote and directed the 45-minute short The Days of Summer there before graduating in 1990. She entered the German film industry as an assistant director and screenwriter-for-hire. Her critically acclaimed feature film debut — the drama Beyond Silence (1996) — would be Germany’s submission to the Academy Awards in 1998. Link’s sophomore film Annaluise & Anton (starring Juliane Köhler) was equally well received by Germans in 1999.

By the time Caroline Link was shooting Annaluise & Anton, Peter Herrmann deemed her name bankable enough to send Link a memoir he was seeking to produce. Link recalled, “When I first read the book Nowhere in Africa I was fascinated by it. I was caught up by the story it told of a woman from a protected Jewish family who suddenly has to live in the middle of the African desert. I’ve always loved to discover new worlds with my movies, but I remember thinking to myself: ‘Wow, can I do this? Will I really be able to shoot a movie in Kenya?’” Link agreed to adapt a screenplay and direct. In 1999, Herrmann and Link traveled to Kenya to inspect the locales described by Stefanie Zweig in her story.

The trip left little doubt among the filmmakers that in order to remain authentic to Zweig’s memoir, Nowhere in Africa had to be filmed in Kenya. Peter Herrmann mused, “People like to watch films about Africa. But I think that many films about Africa communicate the wrong things. Our decision to film in Kenya was kind of a risk. Kenya’s infrastructure is terrible. It’s difficult to organize things. Everyone in the industry told us to film it in South Africa. All films about Africa are made there. If the Americans — Hollywood — make a movie set in Kenya, they film it in South Africa. They can’t imagine organizing such a complicated thing as a big movie in a country like that and keeping costs low.”

Herrmann added, “Caroline and I were convinced right from the beginning that it was our desired aim to represent things the way they really are. And I think it makes a big difference that the Africans that are shown really are Kenyans, Kikuyus or Pokots or whatever and that they aren’t just South Africans playing them.” In the spring of 2000, Link began assembling a cast. Theater actress Juliane Köhler agreed to play Jettel. (Link offered, “Juliane is not afraid to play a part that is at first unsympathetic.”) Merab Ninidze — a Georgian actor who’d lived in Vienna for 10 years — was chosen to play Walter. Kenya’s Sidede Onyulo was cast as Owuor, while two German schoolgirls — 9-year-old Lea Kurka and 12-year-old Karoline Eckertz — were cast to play Regina at different ages.

With Munich based Constantin Film helping finance the $8 million budget, Nowhere in Africa opened an office in Nairobi in August 2000. Kenya was gripped in a potentially catastrophic drought. Peter Herrmann recalled, “Even in Nairobi, the crisis was felt. The entire city was filled with Massai and their flocks. The animals were feeding on the sad remains of the few plants still growing along the streets. Nairobi was on the brink of disaster. We had already invested too much to turn back, and wouldn’t be able to relocate. It didn’t rain until November. By then we had already started the construction of the farmhouses and planted artificially irrigated cornfields. We had already put our trust in the gods of Africa that they would look favorably upon the country and upon our film.”

In her adaptation — which took two years to finish — Link chose to focus on the relationship between Walter and Jettel. “Stefanie Zweig tells the story from the perspective of a child. She describes her own experiences and memories. But for me, Regina’s mother Jettel is the most exciting character. What is most fascinating is her development into an independent and mature woman, who not only has to rethink her own position and priorities in life but also her relationship towards her family.” Zweig would endorse the film, but differed with Link’s approach. “My mother was a very spoilt woman but she was also very charming and warm-hearted. The actress does not convey that. She is a rather cold and tough woman and, at the time, you did not know what tough women were. My father would have murdered her on the spot if she had been like that.”

Nowhere in Africa commenced filming January 2001 in Rongai. 140 members of the cast and crew spent three weeks camped in a small tent town near Lolldaiga, with guards from the Kenya Wildlife Service posted to watch for lions or cheetahs. Caroline Link admitted to The New York Times the location made her nervous. “And yet I’m surprised that I wasn’t more so. Every night we came to our tents and took showers, and snakes would come out, attracted by the water. I should have been afraid. But I’d just stand there barefoot in the dark, completely distracted, thinking about the next day’s scenes.” Other locations for the four-month shoot included Ol Joro Orok, Nairobi and Mukutani, a community northeast of Lake Baringo which the production built a road in order to access.

Peter Herrmann recalled, “Filming in Mukutani proved to be the greatest challenge. We planted cornfields that had to have three different grades of maturity during the shoot. In order to show on screen that time had elapsed we had to have young, low corn plants, green corn plants and the mature yellow corn plants. One of the highlights of the movie, the attack/plague of the locusts was filmed in the field of ripe corn. The first seeds had already been sown in November so that there would be ripe corn in March. To supervise the growth of the corn we had a ‘corn commissioner’ who traveled once a week 100 km from Nakuru to Mukutani.”

Premiering December 27, 2001 in Germany, Nowhere in Africa became the country’s highest grossing film of 2002. It swept the German Film Awards (the Lolas) in June with five wins: Outstanding Feature Film, Direction (Caroline Link), Cinematography (Gernot Roll), Music (Niki Reiser) and Supporting Actor (Matthias Habich). Germany named Nowhere in Africa its submission to the Academy Awards and in March 2003, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the United States that same month, Nowhere in Africa never expanded beyond 78 theaters, but its Academy Award propelled it to $6.1 million at the domestic box office. Overseas, it racked up $18.1 million in tickets.

Critics responded enthusiastically. David Ansen, Newsweek: “This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times: “It is so rare to find a film where you become quickly, simply absorbed in the story. You want to know what happens next. Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa is a film like that.”

Link mused on her decision to take a nuanced approach to Nowhere in Africa, stating, “This is the only chance we have compared to these big Hollywood film studios. When they come up with all the technical equipment and the brilliant quality of their perfect images, to compete, we can only create films that are authentic and lifelike with a genuineness that can’t be bought. It’s more like feeling the things. Trying to direct in a lifelike manner. We tried to be very direct with the camerawork. We didn’t want it to be too stylized and arranged. It was a deliberate decision. We never tried to copy Out of Africa, on the contrary, we wanted something totally different.”

Should I Care?
Imagining the Hollywood version of Nowhere in Africa, I can picture a pleasant travelogue with major stars playing nice characters. There would be a hot and bothered love triangle — standard for movies like Legends of the Fall – and a subplot in which the European parents react against their daughter bringing home a Kenyan boy. While opportunities for retarded storytelling are plentiful in this exotic coming-of-age tale, it isn’t the American version, it’s the German one, and for once, moviegoers are better off for it. Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s vibrant memoir skips over its impulses for brain dead melodrama and swims in historic texture, warm atmosphere and simple, emotionally resonant power.

Nowhere in Africa opens with a bleak, thirsty Africa as seen through the eyes of Europeans who have arrived there against their will. The cinematography by Gernot Roll — shot mostly with the majestic, handheld Steadicam — is worthy of an Oscar nomination, growing more mysterious and lush as the story progresses. In her riveting third film, Link focuses on the trials of a marriage that is anything but ideal, but increases in strength the more Walter and Jettel overcome. The performances are uniformly terrific, particularly Matthias Habich as the bachelor farmer, Lea Kurka as the 6-year-old Regina and the many native Kenyans in the cast. Niki Reiser composed the rousing musical score to what is one of the most satisfying film experiences I’ve had in a while.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“In the African Sun While Dark Came Over Europe” By Laura Winters. The New York Times, 23 February 2003

“Strangers In a Strange Land” By Stefanie Zweig. The Guardian, 21 March 2003

“Germany’s Road to the Oscar” BBC News, 24 March 2003

“African Love Affair Inspires Oscar” By Rebecca Thomas. BBC News, 4 April 2003

Production Notes – Nowhere in Africa

“Making of Nowhere in Africa” Nowhere in Africa DVD. Sony Home Entertainment (2003)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis
Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) – a peddler of bootleg tapes who lives with his family in the housing projects on the north side of Dublin – is approached by his friends Outspan (Glen Hansard, guitar) and Derek (Kenneth McCluskey, bass) to take over management of their band. “You had the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album before anyone had ever heard of ‘em. And you were the first to realise they were shite,” Outspan tells him. Jimmy accepts and announces they’re going to be playing “Dublin soul.” His musical aspirations are ribbed by Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. (Colm Meaney), but Jimmy’s newspaper ad brings every musical wanna-be in the neighborhood to the Rabbitte home for auditions. Dean (Félim Gormley, sax), Billy (Dick Massey, drums), Steven (Michael Aherne, piano) and a bus conductor Jimmy heard belting out drunken tunes at a wedding named Declan Cuffe (Andrew Strong) join the band.

Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the most beautiful girl in town, and her friends (Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are enlisted as backup singers. The final piece becomes a trumpet player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy). Old enough to be their dad, Joey wins over the kids by claiming to have jammed with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Otis Redding to The Beatles. Joey christens their band The Commitments. Tensions arise when Declan develops a star sized ego, the girls seduce Joey the Lips one at a time, and Billy quits before he kills their lead singer. Jimmy replaces the drummer with a skinhead named Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), a psycho who earns a promotion from the band’s doorman. As The Commitments build a local following, Joey promises he can deliver Wilson Pickett – in town performing – to jam with them at their next gig. Stardom appears inevitable.

Production history
In the mid-1980s Roddy Doyle was teaching secondary school (high school) in the Kilbarrack neighborhood of north Dublin, where he’d grown up. He’d written a satiric novel called Your Granny’s A Hunger Striker that publishers he’d submitted it to didn’t even bother opening. Kicking around ideas for a better book, Doyle recalled, “I decided I wanted to write about the type of kids I taught and had become charmed by, really, and whose company I enjoyed, who are typical of the type of place I came from. I didn’t want it to be a school story. I wanted to see them a few years after they would leave school, still young, but adult. Forming a band just struck me as being a good excuse to bring them together. It could have been a football team because I’m also very fond of football, but I can’t see football being funny – or amusing on paper. Also, it would have been restricted to one sex.”

Launching what he dubbed King Farouk Press in 1987, Doyle printed 3,000 copies of The Commitments, dispersed them to local bookstores and built a cult following in Dublin. London publishing firm Heinemann picked up the rights and published the novel to critical and commercial success. It was so well received that interest in a movie began to filter in. Doyle recalls, “They said they loved the book and the first thing they do before your arse is warm on the seat is to tell you how to pull it apart and give it a happy ending. I was kind of frightened by this. I’d two questions I put to would-be producers and Lynda Myles was the only one to answer them correctly. Would the film have stars, because it didn’t seem to make sense to have stars in a film about unknown people? She agreed. I asked then would the language remain intact; not necessarily the expletives but the rhythm of the language, would it be Dublin? And she said yeah, of course.”

London based producer Lynda Myles recalls, “One of the things that was very important to him was he would be allowed to write the script. He wasn’t interested in signing away the rights. And what we agreed was we would start working with him and take it as far as we could go – given that he had never written a screenplay before.” While Doyle kept his day job teaching in Kilbarrack, Myles and her partner Roger Randall Cutler coached the novelist through the finer art of screenplay adaptation, instructing Doyle how to condense scenes. Their patience produced a completed draft, but Cutler admitted, “It somehow was just a wee bit short of the experience of reading the novel. One wanted to have a screenplay that did that and more, if you like.” The producers passed the book to British screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for help.

Dick Clement recalls, “Roger had shown it to us in London. We came back to Los Angeles. We thought we had money to develop movies, had lunch with Alan Parker just to sort of talk about what we were all doing, which we did fairly often. He said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ We called Roger Randall Cutler and said, ‘Now, this will make it more expensive, and it will probably become Alan’s movie, not yours, but at the end of it you’ll have an Alan Parker movie, which is pretty tempting. It took some convincing that this was actually for real. I mean, you can’t blame him, because these things don’t normally happen that way.” In terms of their rewrite, Ian La Frenias added, “It wasn’t a punch-up job. It needed to be rethought to just as a film. And I think Roddy – there was all that wonderful dialogue and characters – but it just had to be retold in a form that made a more dramatic and that more actually happened and there were bigger beats and the growth and the development of the band and their characters.”

Alan Parker – director of Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Mississippi Burning – remembers, “The first time I heard about Roddy Doyle’s book was Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais – who are old friends of mine and are quite wonderful writers – they gave me the book. And I loved the book, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a very slim volume. And I found myself laughing out loud. It’s a wonderful book because it’s mostly dialogue and all of the descriptions really are in the beauty of language, and if you’re laughing out loud at a book then you think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe the movie’d be all right.’” With the principals of Beacon Communications – Armyan Bernstein and Tom Rosenberg – locking down financing, Parker worked with Clement & La Frenais on the screenplay adaptation. Once a script was ready, casting convened in Dublin.

Andrew Strong (Deco) was discovered after his father – vocalist Rob Strong – was hired to give Parker an idea of what Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett were going to sound like interpreted by an Irish soul band. Strong was 16 when he was offered the part. Robert Arkins was an accomplished trumpet player and frontman of his own band, but was ultimately was offered the part of Jimmy Rabbitte. Of the ten leads, only Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie) and Johnny Murphy (Joey the Lips) had acted before. After five weeks of rehearsals, a 53-day shooting schedule commenced in Dublin. Parker recalls, “Barrytown – which is the mythical place where Roddy has set his book – obviously was based on Kilbarrack, where Roddy was a schoolteacher. And I just found it cinematically a little dull, Kilbarrack, I have to admit.” Parker ended up shooting the film in 44 different locations spread throughout Dublin.

Opening August 1991, critics in the U.S. did anything but applaud The Commitments. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “As in his earlier Fame, Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Parker never promises us a profound human drama here, and the band is so good that maybe music was the best way to go. But I was left with sort of an empty feeling, as if after the characters were developed into believable people, Parker couldn’t find anywhere to go with them.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Parker gives Dublin’s poverty the same misplaced gloss he brought to the Japanese refugee camps in Come See the Paradise. And the predictable way in which the band’s nine men and three women argue about music, sex and fame robs the story of urgency.”

The Commitments only managed $14.9 million at the box office in the U.S., and while the film swept the British Academy Awards in 1992, it notched only one Oscar nomination, for Best Editing (Gerry Hambling). A decade after its release, Parker mused, “This film really was quite inexpensive to make for its time. I think it cost $12 million and bear in mind that all the music was done within that budget, and recorded and everything. And it’s the kind of film, I suppose it’s the music which gives it its chance of success as a movie, particularly in the United States, which is, you know, audiences in the States are not really very tolerant of films that are not filmed in the American language. The Irish accent could have been difficult; I don’t think it’s that difficult to follow.” In addition to winning many fans on home video, The Commitments did become a sensation as a two-volume soundtrack album. By 2008, the CDs had sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the soundtrack has enabled Kenneth McCluskey and Dick Massey to tour the world with a band calling themselves The Stars of The Commitments. Glen Hansard – who performs and records with his band The Frames – returned to acting in Once (2007) and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová. Soundtrack sales remained brisk enough to get the attention of Miramax Films. In 2000, the studio flew playwright Warren Leight to Dublin to sound out a sequel. But according to McCluskey, “Miramax bought the rights to make a sequel, they commissioned a script writer and he came to Dublin. We got him very drunk and sent him back to New York with a hangover, but nothing ever happened.” Roddy Doyle has maintained that he has no interest whatsoever in a Commitments reunion. “It’s a better story if they break up. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if they went on became the biggest band in the world.”

Opinion
The Commitments is one of those special movies that just hit at the right place and right time. Within a few short years, construction cranes and venture capital would have made a film about a working class band on the skids in Dublin laughable. But in either a stroke of genius, case of first timer’s luck, or both, the movie caught everyone involved at the peak of their creativity. The audience gets to experience lighting in a bottle in what is probably the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen featuring actors I’d never heard of. Roddy Doyle’s source material has a sharp ear for the vernacular of the north side of Dublin, but more importantly, contains a self-depreciating wit that slashes through the cheesy melodrama of the musical genre. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. – an absentee character in the novel – acts as a partial observer in the movie, bringing even greater doses of humor and vitality to the story.

Alan Parker belongs to a class of British directors whose commercials won lots of citations in the 1970s, but unlike most of his films, The Commitments is focused on its characters, its dialogue and its ideals as opposed to lighting effects or trick editing. And unlike a lot of shitty musicals (or worse, American Idol) the emphasis here isn’t on how music can transform you into a superstar, but on what music can do for your dignity. Music supervisor G. Marq Roswell is one of many who deserve credit along with Parker for the four-star soundtrack. The Commitments’ versions of “Mustang Sally”, “Slip Away” and “Try A Little Tenderness” have stood up against the original recordings by Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding. The amateur cast is equal parts energetic and natural, particularly Robert Arkins, whose self-conducted interviews in the tub should resonate with anyone who ever dreamed of rising above their surroundings.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle” By Karen Sbrockey. Interview Literary Review, Summer 1999

“When Roddy Met Trudy” By Ciaran Carty. Sunday Tribune, February 25, 2001

The Commitments. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2004)

Synopsis
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of the year 1870 – which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) – assembles in a massive auditorium to hear a speech by their class orator, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals mapped out by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. Twenty years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is now sheriff of Johnson County, mountainous and pristine territory in which more settlers – mostly Polish, German or Ukrainian immigrants – are pouring into every day.

Averill can’t help but notice Casper is teeming with mercenaries. By the time he drops by a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, Averill has learned that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient of the assassins is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County hunting down and executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who manages a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall – Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating – Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion – who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is in love with her – offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay. Three of the killers make their way to Ella’s bordello and rape her. Averill arrives in time to dispatch the men with his pistols, while Champion rides to Canton’s camp and kills the mercenary who planned the raid. After debating the matter, the town chooses to stand their ground and repel the invasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To get it right, Cimino was shooting many, many, many takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing 57 takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current rate, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

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

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

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalls, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was 5 hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now – which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through – was suddenly gone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion
Some academics still accuse Heaven’s Gate of vaporizing the Golden Age of the director and putting the controls of Hollywood back in the hands of the studio, a process that was under way long before Michael Cimino ever got to Montana. What ultimately matters here is what’s on screen and what isn’t. On that basis, it’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. It has nothing to live up anymore – making a fresh eyed and open minded reappraisal a win-win situation – but the movie is really that good. For all its excesses, what Cimino does is capture a lyrical beauty virtually missing in filmmaking since the days of David Lean. Heaven’s Gate is all at once one of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, terrific performances and haunting grandeur.

Micahel Cimino’s screenplay not only visualizes the Old West in a way I imagine it really was – crowded and sparse, violent and peaceful, ugly and beautiful – but features dialogue of surprising depth and pathos. The cast featured no stars, but Kristofferson, Walken, Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur all do outstanding work. Few films recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, assisted by majestic cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a heartbreakingly beautiful musical score by David Mansfield. Unlike so many cinematic turkeys of the last 30 years that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, for all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, there’s never any question of where those bucks ended up.

@ Joe Valdez

Sources
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)
Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
As an old man threads a fishing line on the Big Blackfoot River, a narrator (Robert Redford) begins: “Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me, ‘Norman, you like to write stories.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ Then he said, ‘Some day when you are ready, you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened, and why.’” Moving back in time to 1910 and the town of Missoula, Montana, the Reverend Maclean (Tom Skerritt) teaches his sons fly fishing the Presbyterian way, against a metronome. Seven years later, the strong willed Norman (Craig Sheffer) and the charismatic Paul (Brad Pitt) test their mortality by shooting a rowboat down the local falls.

Graduating from Dartmouth six years later, Norman returns to Montana. His mother (Brenda Blethyn) apologizes for his brother’s absence from the homecoming, while his father presses Norman for details of what he plans to do with his life. Norman seeks out Paul, now a reporter with a taste for staying out late, drinking and gambling. Though his brother is perilously in debt, Norman seems unsure how to best extend help. They bond over a shared love of fly fishing. When his relationship with a feisty Methodist named Jessie (Emily Lloyd) turns serious and he accepts a teaching job in Chicago, Norman asks Paul to come with them. His troubled brother makes the decision to stay.

Production history
Retiring from teaching English literature at the University of Chicago in 1973, Norman Maclean wrote a book that had been gestating for thirty-eight years. Titled A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, it wasn’t fiction – tracing Maclean’s relationship with his brother Paul between 1910 and 1935 in Montana – but it wasn’t quite a memoir either, devoting more print to the art of fly fishing than to family history. Published in 1976, the book was embraced by critics. Four years later, author Tom McGuane sent a copy to actor Robert Redford, citing the book as an example of fine western writing. Redford recalled, “I read it, and the arrow went in right away. I thought, ‘I really want to do something about this.’”

“There were such deep parallels to my own life. And the ethic that shaped these people’s lives shaped early America’s life. It was a sort of Christian ethic of stoicism in the face of adversity, a sense of honor and grace, not asking for help, not complaining. This was a slightly troubled family that, like so many others, dealt with silence as a virtue and strength as a weapon. They had enormous difficulty expressing feelings and emotion.” Despite winning an Academy Award in 1981 for directing his first film – Ordinary People – Redford discovered that Maclean had no intention of seeing his book turned into a movie.

Redford recalls, “I think the reason Norman resisted for so long was that he was fearful the book would be turned into pornography, a story of a brother going bad, gambling and whoring and then getting killed. He also was afraid that his deeply loving family would be portrayed as disturbed. I assured him that was not my intention.” Redford offered to come to Chicago on three occasions – letting two weeks pass between each visit – to talk to the author. “He kept challenging me. Asked me how I could really understand the Scots ethic since I was really Scots-Irish.” Maclean ultimately agreed to option film rights for A River Runs Through It to Redford.

Following a pass by William Hjortsberg – a literary contemporary of Tom McGuane’s – Redford turned to Richard Friedenberg to adapt a screenplay. Friedenberg had won an Emmy in 1986 for scripting the Hallmark Hall of Fame production Promise, which also dealt with brothers whose relationship is forged by fishing. Friedenberg moved some of Maclean’s events up ten years to when the brothers were becoming men, while strengthening the character of Jessie, whom the screenwriter saw as a strong-willed, Roaring Twenties flapper. Maclean’s daughter Jean Snyder recalls, “Friedenberg worked very hard to get real events into the film. He drew on other writings of my father and on research into my mother’s family as well.”

A five year struggle to secure financing ended when Columbia Pictures agreed to a reduced budget of $12 million. With Redford in the director’s chair, shooting commenced June 1991 in Montana. The fishing scenes were filmed south of Bozeman on the Gallatin River, south of Livingston on the Yellowstone River, and south of Big Timber on the Boulder River. The film premiered quietly at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1992. Opening in theaters the following month, critics responded favorably, while word of mouth among moviegoers unaffected by the film’s measured pace propelled A River Runs Through It to grosses of $43 million in the U.S.

Opinion
As a filmmaker and as a chairman of the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford has been called out by the left as being stodgy and attacked from the right as being self-important, and while A River Runs Through It did little to silence his critics, the film remains Redford’s finest work as a director, rising to the status of a classic for its pure storytelling craft, which is as natural and deeply affecting as the Big Blackfoot is to the Macleans. With a meager budget (by Hollywood standards,) it’s also more majestic in its design and far richer in its humanity than Redford haters may have wanted to admit at the time.

It can be said that neither Craig Sheffer or Brad Pitt – who doesn’t look a day older than the 27 years he was here – ever break out and make these roles their own, but stillness and the space between words is what Maclean’s book was all about and what makes the film so powerful. Both actors are superb in their performances. There’s a great deal of wit here, namely during a disastrous fishing expedition Jessie pressures Norman to take her vain Hollywood brother (Stephen Shellen) on. The film captures all sorts of natural moments that pass between families through the years, while cinematographer Philippe Rousselot won a well deserved Academy Award for his pristine outdoor lighting.

Don Willmot at Filmcritic.com writes, “A River Runs Through It is part travelogue and part tragedy, and running right through the middle of it, of course, is the river, a painfully obvious yet still touching metaphor for time’s inexorable flow. The impact does build, and no one will mock you if you find yourself in floods of tears as Redford reads Maclean’s final haunting words and gives us one final sparkling river vista. It’s beautiful, it’s sentimental, it’s nostalgic, it’s the West. Just let it wash over you.”

“The on-location filming in the Montana wilderness is breathtaking, and the scenes of the fly-fishing were exceptional. However, partial nudity, an overabundance of profanity, and an excessive amount of drinking and smoking ruin this film. A River Runs Through It is based on a true life story, but it isn’t even exciting. The movie drags is in many parts, just plain boring,” writes Ryan Kelly at Christian Spotlight In Entertainment.

Margo Reasner at DVD Verdict writes, “The slow pace of this film is going to lose some viewers looking for more action and the middle part of the film dealing with Norman’s love interest may lose viewers that like the rest of the film. However, if you like drifting down a river and watching the scenery float by on a warm sunny afternoon then this film will be for you; if you like shooting the rapids while hanging on for dear life then you might want to pass on this one.”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In present day London, a tin box is opened in a bank vault revealing the personal effects of Dr. John H. Watson. This includes “other adventures, for reasons of discretion, I have decided to withhold from the public until this much later date. They involve matters of a delicate and sometimes scandalous nature, as will shortly become apparent.” Moving back in time to August 1887, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) return to 221-B Baker Street from a case in Yorkshire.

Unable to find a case to engage his mind, Holmes indulges in his “seven percent solution” of cocaine. Watson accepts an invitation for them to attend a performance of Swan Lake, where a Russian ballerina (Tamara Toumanova) requests an unusual service from Holmes. He turns her down by insinuating that he and Watson have a relationship. Watson is livid at the scandal that might erupt, but before long, a challenge presents itself: Gabrielle Valladon (Genevieve Page), who arrives at Baker Street with no memory of how she came to London or what she wants of Holmes.

Distrustful of women, Holmes devotes himself to a quick resolution to the case so he can get rid of Valladon. He discovers she’s in search of her husband, an engineer who was brought to England on an assignment. His disappearance involves canaries, seven missing midgets, a sect of Trappist monks, the Loch Ness monster and the powerful Diogenes Club, a shadowy government organization which includes Holmes’ brilliant older brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee). Traveling to Scotland, Holmes finds himself drawn to Valladon, but all is not what it seems.

Production history
A lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries by Arthur Conan Doyle, Billy Wilder felt the social climate of the mid-1960s was ripe for a big screen, tell-all musical based on the sleuth. Wilder thought of Lerner & Loewe to create lyrics and music, while Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers could possibly star. The plan never got off the drawing board. In 1968, Wilder revived the project – this time as a non-musical – and worked on a script with Harry Kurnitz. Unhappy with the results, Wilder waited for his frequent collaborator and screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond to become available.

Wilder & Diamond conceived The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a 165-minute epic that would include an intermission and tour the country as a roadshow. This meant that the film would be screened at only one of the best movie palaces in each city it played in, charging a higher admission price, but offering moviegoers souvenir programs and reserved seating. Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady were among the many films presented in this format during the 1950s and ‘60s to great success.

Wilder described the 220-page screenplay he and Diamond spent over a year writing as “a symphony in four movements.” A modern day prologue featured Dr. Watson’s grandson (also played by Blakely) arriving in London to open a lockbox containing four Holmes cases unpublished by the doctor due to their personal nature. “The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room” concerned Watson concocting an odd crime scene to distract Holmes from his cocaine habit.

In “The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners,” Watson investigates a murder abroad a cruise liner, while Holmes observes the disastrous results. “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina” toyed with possibility of Holmes’ homosexuality. All three episodes were intended to be humorous, followed by an intermission and “The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective,” a mystery that leads to Loch Ness and Holmes’ feelings for Gabrielle Valladon, concluding the film on a more serious note.

With a budget of $10 million, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was Wilder’s most ambitious film to date. Shooting commenced in May 1969 in Pinewood Studios outside London and lasted through November. Wilder then screened his symphony to United Artists. It clocked in at three hours and twenty minutes. In the time since Wilder had conceived of his roadshow, one Hollywood extravaganza after another had flopped; Star!, Paint Your Wagon, Doctor Doolittle. Believing the roadshow was out of fashion with audiences, UA urged Wilder cut the film down to two hours.

The director was so discouraged by the reception that rather than insist on his contractual right of final cut, he departed for Paris to work on another project, entrusting editor Ernest Walter and producers at The Mirisch Company to make the necessary subtractions. The prologue, two of the first three episodes and a flashback to Holmes’ college days at Oxford – which illustrated his distrust of women – were all left on the cutting room floor. Wilder was left despondent. “When I saw the way they had cut it, I had tears in my eyes. It seemed longer when they had made it shorter.”

Released November 1970 in the wake of Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was dismissed by critics at the time, many who felt neither the plot, nor the postmodern take measured up to Doyle’s literary mysteries. Wilder’s confidence that youth audiences would embrace a great story – regardless of the changing times – never panned out. The film was a box office failure. In ensuing years, some critics and scholars have rediscovered it and hailed the film as an overlooked masterpiece.

Opinion
Tempting as it might be to ponder Peter O’Toole & Peter Sellers possibly playing Holmes and Watson, or at the very least, an hour and fifteen minutes restored to its running time, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes retains the magnificence of a jewel retrieved from a safety deposit box. The film comes from a time when event movies weren’t produced by a computer, but were rendered even more impressively with story, character and dialogue. It absolutely belongs in a discussion of Wilder’s best comedies, including Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.

While the plot requires a degree of patience and lacks a strong villain (Professor Moriarty is mentioned, but never appears to threaten London) what’s striking about the film is how Wilder & Diamond refresh a 19th century literary icon by infusing that world with contemporary attitudes about men, women, society and friendship. The cast is terrific, particularly Colin Blakely as Watson. Miklós Rózsa – whose violin concertos Wilder had listened to while writing the script – composed one of the most beautiful film scores of all time.

Bill Chambers at Film Freak Central writes, “That alliance of comedy and drama which proved so pivotal to the success of Wilder’s The Apartment keeps The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes afloat through the sinking realization that we are watching the I’ll Do Anything of its generation (and I would argue that I’ll Do Anything’s director James L. Brooks, much more than Brooks’ protégé Crowe, is the modern Wilder), a feature-length retraction of romantic ambition too poignant in its own right to discount.”

“Sherlock Holmes comes just behind Dracula as the most portrayed fictional character on the movie screen, but few films about the great sleuth hold claim to greatness. One of the few is Billy Wilder’s elegiac The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. It was a dismal flop on release even after being shortened drastically from its original three hours plus, which is a true pity, as it stands as probably Wilder’s best post-The Apartment work in his unique genre of films, so ruthless in observing human nature but so deeply sympathetic to it,” writes Roderick Heath at Ferdy on Films, etc.

Glenn Erickson at DVD Savant writes, “Viewers who haven’t seen The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are in for a big surprise, for it is a loving valentine to old-fashioned moviemaking. The photography of the lush Scottish landscape is beautiful, and the scenes backstage at the ballet are a riot of soft colors and balalaika music. The script is a witty delight, with Wilder and Diamond decorating their mystery plot with a constant stream of arcane clues and character-driven jokes … Even in this shortened form, it’s a movie gem hiding in plain sight.”

© Joe Valdez