Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

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

Broken English (2007)
Written by Zoe Cassavetes
Directed by Zoe Cassavetes
Produced by Vox3 Films/ HDNet Films
Running time: 96 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Bachelorette Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) gets dressed and puts in an appearance at the anniversary party of her best friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo), celebrating five years of matrimony to a movie director (Tim Guinee) Nora introduced her to. At the party is Nora’s mother (Gena Rowlands), who gently asks her daughter why she hasn’t found a man for herself. A manager of guest relations at a boutique New York City hotel, Nora goes out for a drink with a VIP guest, a mohawked movie star (Justin Theroux). When that ends badly, Nora allows her mother to set her up with a recently single movie lover (Josh Hamilton), but this date goes awry as well.

At the insistence of a co-worker (Michael Panes), Nora drags herself to a party. Disgusted with herself and heading home, she meets an attentive young Frenchman named Julien (Melvil Poupaud) marking time in America after the actress girlfriend he accompanied overseas dumped him. Julien insists on showing Nora a good time, in spite of her brittle neuroses. After a few days together, he invites her to return to Paris with him. Nora demures, but faced with plenty of free time after quitting her job, she joins Audrey for a jaunt to the Eternal City. While her friend contemplates an affair, Nora discovers she’s lost Julien’s phone number. Rather than give up and go home, she sets out to explore Paris on her own.

Who Made It?
Zoe Cassavetes is the youngest child of late actor/director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands. Her siblings are directors Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) and Alexandra (Xan) Cassavetes, who helmed the 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Zoe Cassavetes grew up in Los Angeles, where in 1994, she co-created, co-wrote and co-hosted — with Sofia Coppola — a fake news magazine for Comedy Central called Hi Octane. Cassavetes served as assistant director on Coppola’s short film Lick the Star (1998) and then moved to Manhattan, where she went into credit card debt to finance her own short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory (2000).

Cassavetes then wrote the script for a feature film titled Broken English. Parker Posey agreed to star and producer Andrew Fierberg agreed to raise financing, but it would take three and a half years for cameras to roll. Paris based Back Up Films secured part of a budget from Japanese distributor Phantom Films and brought French actors Melvil Poupaud and Bernadette Laffont (replacing Jeanne Moreau) on board. Five weeks before filming was set to begin, Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban agreed to bankroll the rest of Broken English, distributing it via their Magnolia Pictures and on their high-def cable channel HDNet.

How’d They Do It?
When the allure of acting or television hosting lost their appeal, Zoe Cassavetes moved to New York. She took a job as a marketing executive at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo before working on a 20-minute short, Men Make Women Crazy Theory. Cassavetes recalled, “You know, I ate out of the quarter jar for a few months here and there while I was trying to make the movie, but having no money, and being incredibly destitute was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. eBay was huge for me at that moment.” Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, the film featured Aleksia Landeau recording a long winded, drunken answering machine message to a guy while soaking in the tub.

Cassavetes moved on to completing a script for a feature film. “When I thought of the idea for Broken English it was at a time when I was totally overwhelmed by people asking me whether I was married or had a boyfriend. I saw that it was happening to a lot of my friends as well. I think it comes at a certain age where society almost insists that you fall in love, get married and have children. However, it seems that we are all more confused about relationships than ever. I wanted to explore these themes about what it is like to be lonely and to be ashamed of that feeling.” She would add, “So I just wanted to make a nice, little portrait about what happens to someone when they get caught up in all of that.”

In 2002, Andrew Fierberg — producer of Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Secretary — was approached by Cassavetes to help finance Broken English. He recalled, “We had a number of conversations about the script, did some rewrites and got it off the ground about a year after that. We had several budgets in mind and several scenarios on how we would make the film based on how much money we would raise. We had a full cast and crew and were all geared up and ready to go. And we put a line in the sand. We said that regardless of how much money we can raise, we will make the movie.”

Cassavetes had received a verbal commitment from Parker Posey to star. The filmmaker recalled, “I did have a certain type of person in mind. I mean, I’m a huge fan of Parker’s work and always have been. But I saw Personal Velocity, and she played a role in that movie that was completely against her usual, well, I wouldn’t say ‘type,’ but that more comedic style that she does. I saw this other huge range in her. Then I met her, and we sat and gabbed for three hours. We didn’t even talk about the script. At the end of it I was like, ‘Oh, wait, are you going to do the movie?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, yeah, totally.’ And I thought, ‘If life could only be that easy.’”

Financing Broken English would take three and a half years. Cassavetes admitted, “It’s so hard to get the money for a movie. It’s so much harder to get $1 million than it is to get $100 million. I still don’t know why. But then once we got the money it went very fast. We had five weeks of pre-production. We shot for 20 days. We didn’t have the money, or most of it, when we started pre-production. We just kind of decided that we were going to make the movie no matter what. Everyone knew what we were going to do, how fast it was going to be or how fast things were going to change, and I’d heard all these great things about Parker, that she would do that, which was really a big deal.”

Andrew Fierberg recalled, “We took the project to HDNet about five weeks before we planned to start shooting, and we told them that if they wanted to come on board, we’d be happy to work with them. They said yes. We were already in preproduction as we were signing papers, and the deal took us to a budget level that made us feel more comfortable.” According to Fierberg, the budget for Broken English fell under the $2 million ceiling HDNet has set to finance their pictures. “It was more than $800,000 but less than $2 million.” Shooting would commence May 2006 in New York for two weeks before moving to Paris.

Facing a mandate from HDNet that the film shoot digitally, the producers reached an arrangement with Thomson Grass Valley, manufacturers of the Viper FilmStream. Director of photography John Pirozzi recalled, “One thing I really like about Viper compared to other HD cameras — like the VariCam and the F900 — is its highlights. The real benefit you have with no compression is that the camera holds highlights in a much more impressive way. You have so much detail. The giveaway with HD and video in general is always in the highlights. Testing the Viper against the other compressed cameras, you can see it. It’s very clear that it really stands up to highlights.”

Cassavetes drew on Cleo From 5 to 7 — directed by Agnes Varda in 1962 — for inspiration. “Strangely, it had kind of the perfect mood for what I wanted. I mean, the character in that movie is a little more self-centered than Parker Posey’s character, Nora, is in mine. But I liked that the film started out with the tarot-card reading, and there was something about the way the movie was shot. I was also really into watching Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen movies, because I felt like my movie was really talky.” Broken English was screened for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 before taking film fests in Philadelphia, Newport Beach, San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas by storm.

Critics would be divided over how good Broken English was. Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times: “A well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “A simple, empathetic script and calm, assured directing display a level of emotional honesty and character development that’s confoundingly rare these days, especially when it comes to female characters.” Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly really liked it. Andrew O’Hehir at Salon not so much.

Opening June 2007 in the United States, Broken English never expanded beyond 41 theaters, but totaled $956,919 domestically and added $987,281 internationally. Cassavetes shrugged off the suggestion that she’d taken her time — at the ripe old age of 36 — to follow in the footsteps of her filmmaking family. “Right before I started shooting, I realized my dad was exactly the same age I was when he made Faces [sic] in 1959. So that made me feel good. And my brother Nick said, ‘Don’t worry — I made my first film at that age, too.’ It took me a little bit longer to do what I wanted, but you have more to say the older you get.”

Should I Care?
Broken English begins with a delicate montage of its heroine Nora Wilder trying to decide what to wear on an evening out. She’s alone in her apartment and as she empties her closet or opens her medicine cabinet, I got the distinct feeling I was peeping into someone’s private space. That type of intimacy is fused throughout the film, which in its contemplative but understated way (it’s rated PG-13) tells the story of two New Yorkers spending a few days in Paris. This textured palette may turn off those expecting either John Cassavetes or Sex and the City, but it does announce the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker.

Zoe Cassavetes cans the cuteness, enabling the profusely witty Parker Posey to fashion an unusually strong dramatic performance. Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Josh Hamilton, Gena Rowlands, Peter Bogdanovich and Bernadette Lafont round out a terrific cast, while Paris duo Scratch Massive composed the off-beat electronic soundtrack. What I really liked was how the film, without needling America or its male population, suggests that a change of scenery can affect both your outlook and the people you attract for the better. Cassavetes guides us through New York and Paris with the knack of someone who seems to have explored these great cities while single.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Digital Pieces of Broken English” By Peter Caranicas. Videography, 2 May 2007

“Women With Indie Influence” By Brantley Bardin. New York Daily News, 17 June 2007

“Interview: Zoe Cassavetes On Broken English” By Ian Spelling. Latino Review, 21 June 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes on Broken English” By Aaron Hillis. IFC, 25 June 2007

Broken English – Production Notes

“The Family Business” By Sandy MacDonald. The Boston Globe, 1 July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes” By Wes Anderson. Interview, July 2007

“Zoe Cassavetes & Parker Posey Interview, Broken English” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

The Tao of Steve (2000)
Screenplay by Greer Goodman & Jenniphr Goodman and Duncan North, story by Duncan North
Directed by Jenniphr Goodman
Produced by Good Machine
Running time: 87 minutes

So, What’s This About?
At his 10-year high school reunion in Santa Fe, a chubby slouch named Dex (Donal Logue) and his married conquest (Ayelet Kaznelson) get it on in the library. Shuffling back to the festivities, Dex uses his knowledge of world religion to charm a student bartender (Dana Goodman), but it’s the avid blonde drummer in a band who catches his eye. Dex’s married friends (David Aaron Baker, Nina Jaroslaw) introduce the drummer as their friend Syd (Greer Goodman) staying with the couple while in town to design an opera set. Articulate, intelligent and confident, Dex neglects to recall Syd from a philosophy class they took in college.

Dividing his time between playing Frisbee golf with his buddies, teaching kindergarten part-time and bong smoking, Dex advises a goofy pal (Kimo Wills) on the art of seducing women if you don’t have good looks to fall back on: Eliminate your desires. Do something spectacular in their presence. Retreat. Dex refers to his dating philosophy as the Tao of Steve, as in the cool American male: “Steve McGarrett”, “Steve Austin” and Steve McQueen. With their motorcycles both out of commission, Dex plies his charms on Syd while sharing rides to work, but learns he’s dug himself a hole with Syd by completely forgetting he slept with her in college.

Who Made It?
Jenniphr Goodman received her BA in creative writing and filmmaking from Pitzer College in 1984. She returned to her hometown of Cleveland to teach preschoolers art before earning a master’s degree from NYU Film School. In 1994, Goodman moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband, who was earning his teaching credential. For two years, the couple stayed with a buddy her husband had befriended at St. John’s College named Duncan North. Goodman observed North — overweight and underemployed — seduce two of her friends using a set of unique philosophies on life and dating. She began thinking about making a film about him.

Her younger sister Greer Goodman — who’d been involved with North briefly before graduating Yale Drama School — considered giving up acting and going back to school for a degree in forensic psychology when she offered to help Jenniphr on her script, thinking there might be a role for her. After two and half years of writing, the Goodmans went into pre-production in 1998. Cinematographer and NYU alum Teodoro Maniaci took their script to New York based production company Good Machine, which was able to secure financing. When screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000, The Tao of Steve proved one of the biggest crowd pleasers in the festival’s history.

How’d They Do It?
Duncan North recalled the origins of the Tao of Steve by stating, “When I was a teenager I was really into Eastern philosophy and had read about Taoism and its emphasis on desirelessness and waiting for things to come to you and not pursuing them. And I went to a bar when I was 16 with a bunch of friends of mine who were all thinner and better looking and a beautiful woman came in and they all started to hit on her, and I knew I didn’t have a chance of scoring with this woman. So I let go of my desire to score with her and later I got into an argument with her about politics, which I know something about.”

He continued, “And after the argument I left, went outside to smoke a cigarette and a few minutes later she came outside and gave me her phone number. And then like the apple falling out of the tree onto Isaac Newton’s head, I sort of discovered the Tao of Steve. Much like gravity I discovered if you let go of your desire and do something excellent in front of a woman and then get the hell out of there, then there’s a good chance she’ll be interested.” Jenniphr Goodman had known North for six years and never considered his life story to have movie potential. That changed when she spent two years sharing his house, watching the O.J. Simpson trial and talking philosophy.

Jenniphr Goodman recalled, “I knew Duncan was smart and witty and charming, but there was a depth there that I didn’t suspect. When I lived with him, he and I spent a lot of time talking and hanging out, talking about a wide range of topics from evolutionary psychology to why women are women and why men are men. We talked about God a lot. I had never really had that experience, because, you know, I never really talked about God with my friends.” Greer Goodman added, “Here’s a guy who sleeps with married women. And then he’s so wonderful with children, and so wonderful with animals. He challenges your idea of what it means to be a good person.”

Capturing North’s act in a documentary was Jenniphr Goodman’s initial idea. Once Greer became involved, the sisters considered a one-man play before arriving on a feature film. Jenniphr Goodman recalled, “The hardest part was coming up with some kind of story. We knew we had a very compelling character, but we had no real story. Duncan wanted to make a car chase, drug deal, cops-and-guns road movie. We wanted to make a more personal odyssey film. We dragged him screaming into the personal journey story. And then we dragged him even further into the romantic comedy.” Jenniphr Goodman spent two and a half years conferring with North on a script while emailing her sister back and forth in New York.

Jenniphr Goodman had a friend from NYU named Teodoro Maniaci who’d shot a Good Machine production titled Luminous Motion. On his own, the cinematographer passed the Goodmans’ script to Good Machine VP of Production Anthony Bregman, who offered to secure financing if the sisters would bump production back and work on their script. Refusing at first, Jenniphr Goodman would reconsider. Bregman recalled, “We went through more than 10 drafts. That’s one of the luxuries about independent film, you often have time to make the script perfect. You’re always waiting for something — an actor’s schedule to free up, more money to appear — so you have lots of time to reschedule, re-budget, and rewrite.”

To star as Dex, Jenniphr Goodman had her sights set on Donal Logue. Initially ignored because he was deemed too thin, Goodman’s casting directors mentioned Logue, who’d appeared memorably in MTV promos as a yik-yakking cabbie and in Blade as a pesky vampire. Goodman recalled, “I remembered him as the cab driver, and then I saw his reel and it’s extraordinarily diverse. He plays just sick creepos with the same ease he plays doctors. He’s sensitive and really funny, and he’s charming and sexy.” Goodman waited until Logue wrapped a role in Reindeer Games for director John Frankenheimer before starting production on The Tao of Steve.

With Donal Logue packing on 30 pounds for the part– as well as performing in extra padding — and Greer Goodman making her screen debut starring opposite him, The Tao of Steve commenced filming July 1999 in Santa Fe on a budget of $1.2 million. The production utilized a local crew, as well as locations the director was familiar with. Jenniphr Goodman recalled, “Dex’s house is Duncan’s house. Dex’s friends’ house is my house. Our mother’s house is the rich people’s house. Our friends’ driveway is in it. We called in all the favors.” When screened at Sundance the following January, the romantic comedy was a crowd favorite, winning Donal Logue a Special Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance.

North American distribution rights were awarded to Sony Pictures Classics. Greer Goodman admitted, “I think Sony Classics really wanted to get the film, but they didn’t know how to market it. Men like the movie and women like the movie, from what we’ve seen at the festivals. There’s no stars in it, and the protagonist is, uh, a heavy guy. So they didn’t know how they’d get people into the movie theater to see this movie. We know once we get them in, they’ll like it. But how do you get them in? We tried to find the right balance. There’s print campaign and it’s a platform release and it’s going to all the major cities.”

Maybe because it had been so hyped at Park City, critics were mixed on The Tao of Steve. A.O. (Tony) Scott, The New York Times: “Maybe too many movies celebrate extended adolescence, but Mr. Logue’s breezy and innocent hedonism gives Tao a roughhouse affability … If he has been biding his time and waiting for the chance to prove he can carry a movie, Tao shows he is up to the challenge.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “It’s the kind of film you feel like watching twice — not because you found it that engaging to begin with, but because you didn’t, and everyone else did.” Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times: “A constant, idiosyncratic pleasure that leaves us eager to see what the Goodmans and Logue will do next.”

Opening August 2000 in the United States and playing 189 theaters in its widest release, The Tao of Steve tallied $4.3 million at the box office. The Goodmans have yet to write or direct a new film. Jenniphr Goodman had no apologies in the fall of 2001 when stating, “There were offers to direct TV shows and commercials that I didn’t seize. My agent would tell me that so-and-so wants to meet me, or this other one wants to meet me — there were a lot of opportunities I probably squandered by living in Santa Fe and by having children. But I look at people like Richard Linklater and Victor Nuñez and think: ‘They work from Austin, they work from Florida, and they still make the kinds of movies they want to make.’ They are my role models.”

Should I Care?
At A.V. Club in 2008, Noel Murray and Scott Tobias ranked The Tao of Steve #7 on a list of movies that ignited audiences at Sundance and were extinguished by audiences everywhere else, alluding that between Clerks in 1994 and Napoleon Dynamite in 2004, this indie slacker comedy fell between a crack in the couch. In hindsight, the first and perhaps final film by Jenniphr & Greer Goodman deserves to be remembered more fondly. In defiance of its adult subject matter, the movie does play things safe, lacking any real edge and making it easy to put out of mind. But it’s smartly written, well cast and handsomely shot on very limited resources. Hardly great, it pulls off a great feat: it does slackers everywhere proud.

The Goodman sisters deserve credit for making a movie the Goodman brothers might not have, giving the dick and fart jokes a rest and studying their enigmatic protagonist, or, why a dude with such lax ambitions and exercise routine could be so desirable. The Goodmans — and their subject Duncan North — obviously had library cards. Their script is intelligent and articulate, breezy and enjoyable. A supporting cast of local actors and friends of the Goodmans may not have set the screen world afire, but they work just fine. The reason to watch this is Donal Logue. Late of many a failed sitcom, Logue exhibits more than enough unassuming charisma to be doing comedies with Paul Rudd.

Where’d You Get All of This?
The Tao of Steve – Production Notes

“The Tao of Donal Logue” By Susan King. The Los Angeles Times, 3 August 2000

“The Goodman Sisters’ Tao of Steve” By Beth Pinsker. indieWIRE, 4 August 2000

The Tao of Steve. DVD audio commentary with Jenniphr Goodman, Greer Goodman, Duncan North and Donal Logue. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2000)

“Don’t You Forget About Me” Filmmaker Magazine, Fall 2001

I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
Written by Amy Heckerling
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Produced by Bauer Martinez Entertainment/ Templar Productions
Running time: 97 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) — a single working mom in L.A. — is introduced rubbing wrinkle free moisturizer on her hands. Her nipped and tucked ex-husband (Jon Lovitz) drops off their precocious daughter (Saoirse Ronan), who has outgrown her Barbie dolls and now keeps her mom hip to the latest in teen slang. Rosie is writer/producer of a high school sitcom called You Go Girl!, whose 30-ish star (Stacey Dash) is passed off as a teenager. Rosie tussles with censors, a devious young secretary (Sarah Alexander) and a smarmy network executive (Fred Willard) more interested in makeover reality programs than Rosie’s show.

Casting for a fresh face to play a nerd on You Go Girl!, Rosie meets Adam (Paul Rudd), an exuberant, ultra-talented 29 year old actor. She accepts a casual date, first claiming to be 37, and after a kiss, coming clean that she’s 40. Adam scores points with Rosie’s daughter by helping her ace Sonic the Hedgehog on Nintendo. Complications arise when Adam’s expanded role on the show is attributed to his relationship with Rosie, whose secretary schemes to break the couple up. Rosie receives wisdom in the form of Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman), who maintains that Rosie’s generation is just fundamentally out of whack with natural order.

Who Made It?
Bronx native Amy Heckerling received her master’s degree from the AFI Institute, where her second year thesis Getting It Over With would help land her the job of directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High for Universal in 1981. A box office hit on its way to becoming a youth classic, the success of Fast Times put Heckerling in a select class: women directing feature films in Hollywood. Look Who’s Talking (1989) and a sequel in 1990 would follow before Heckerling wrote and directed a critical and commercial smash — Clueless — which won her Best Screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics in 1995. Heckerling executive produced the Clueless spin-off for the UPN Network from 1996-99.

It was during this time that Heckerling began sketching what became I Could Never Be Your Woman. The project spent six years in development at Paramount, whose CEO Sherry Lansing didn’t think audiences would much care for a woman who becomes involved with a younger man. Once Michelle Pfeiffer attached herself to the project and helped fight to get it made, financing and distribution was secured from French producer Philippe Martinez. Shooting wrapped in the fall of 2005, but the film became so mired in contract disputes that it surfaced February 2008 directly to DVD in the United States, an unusual fate for such a high profile movie.

How’d They Do It?
In 1996, Amy Heckerling was executive producing the Clueless spin-off for UPN. The writer/director was also a single mother raising a teenage daughter in L.A. These experiences formed a script that would become I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling recalled, “I started out just writing about a whole bunch of things that were going on and making a kind of Mrs. Robinson relationship movie. Later on, I decided, ‘Let’s lighten this up.’ So then I banged out the relationship between Mother Nature. Is Mother Nature a person who always wins? Do we all have to give in to her or is it okay to keep fighting?”

Heckerling added “I sort of doodled around with the idea and then put it down when I did Loser. Then I was writing something for Fox for a while and then I did another draft of it years later, and that was the one that was shown to Michelle. Then a year or so before we made the movie, she had come on and helped get it done.” To secure financing, Heckerling and Pfeiffer’s reps at Creative Artists Agency called Philippe Martinez, who’d made his bones helping bankroll B-pictures like The Ultimate Weapon (starring Hulk Hogan), Musketeers Forever (Michael Dudikoff and Lee Majors) and producing/directing Wake of Death starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Before he became a movie producer, Martinez operated an international sales company that was forced into receivership in L.A. A warrant for Martinez’s arrest was issued in France, stemming from complaints by his business partners. Martinez hid in Agoura Hills where he continued to work in the film industry. He ultimately spent 14 months in a detention center before his extradition to France, where Martinez served six months in prison. But by 2005, he triumphantly returned to Los Angeles with backing from Templar Film Investment Fund and $200 million per year for three years to finance and distribute films under his Bauer Martinez Entertainment banner.

Martinez fondly recalled, “An agent at Creative Artists Agency called me one day and he said, ‘Philippe I know you’re looking for a big movie to produce and here is a wonderful movie that Michelle Pfeiffer wants to do’, so I read the script in two hours which is very rare for me and I loved it and called him and said, ‘Let’s meet the director’. It was one of the funniest things we’d read and incredibly powerful and pertinent. Ironically of course one of the reasons Michelle was such a champion of the project is that there really are so few great roles for older women.” With a budget of $24 million, I Could Never Be Your Woman would commence filming August 2005 … in England.

Producer Cerise Hallam Larkin stated, “Our financing was British, so to qualify as a British film we had to spend all this money in England shooting a movie that was set in L.A., which was no mean feat.” The financing scheme explained why so many actors from the United Kingdom (Saoirse Ronan, Tracey Ullman, Sarah Alexander, Mackenzie Crook, Noah Margetts, O.T. Fagbenle) appeared in the cast. Director of photography Brian Tufano was also a Brit – he’d shot Quadrophenia — and Amy Heckerling was thrilled with the opportunity to work with him. Six weeks of shooting at Pinewood Studios outside London would be followed by three weeks of location work in L.A.

Bauer Martinez landed a distribution deal with MGM in January 2006 and I Could Never Be Your Woman was slated to be the first of five pictures (including Harsh Times, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj and The Flock) from the producer that would hit theaters. But when the studio discovered that Martinez had put them on the line to pay Michelle Pfeiffer 10% of its first-dollar gross and Amy Heckerling another 5% — and that lucrative DVD rights had been awarded to The Weinstein Company — MGM put the film on the shelf. Despite the fact that I Could Never Be Your Woman boasted two mainstream stars and had reportedly drawn positive response from test audiences, no distributor in the United States wanted to touch the movie.

Amy Heckerling lamented, “If this is independence, I’d rather go back to what they call ‘the devil you know.’ When I did Clueless, there was a big studio system that had marketing and distribution people who knew what they were doing, and had an idea of what TV shows movies should be advertised on, and did research into who liked which movie, and what they watch and what they read, and how much it costs to reach them. These people who knew how to make posters and advertisements. You know, I liked that machine. It worked.” I Could Never Be Your Woman managed $9.5 million in theaters overseas before being abandoned March 2008 direct-to-DVD in the United States.

Many Internet critics who picked up a copy of the much maligned film were favorable to what they found. Jesse Hassenger, filmcritic.com: “Sometimes you come across an interesting movie with too many flaws to recommend, but Woman is a flawed movie with too much good stuff to completely ignore. It’s smart and warm, and if Heckerling loses her grip a few times, it’s only because she’s squeezing so hard.” Christopher Kulik, DVD Verdict: “Controversy aside, I Could Never Be Your Woman scores highly, both as comedy and satire. Despite its tragic road to being dumped on DVD, it’s one of the best romantic comedies to come out in years.”

Jim Magovern, The Moviezzz Blog: “Rather than some disaster, it is actually a very good film. It may not be Heckerling’s best film, and I can understand why a studio wouldn’t have picked it up without the DVD rights (as it wouldn’t have been a huge blockbuster) but it deserved more.” Amy Heckerling summed up the experience by admitting, “It’s just bad. It’s just bad, bad, bad. There’s really no nice, interesting spin you can put on it from my point of view.” She added, “It just represents a lot of unhappiness to me. I loved working with Paul Rudd and Michelle Pfeiffer and Saoirse Ronan and all the other people, and I got to make some friends in England, where it was shot. But I’m not happy about what happened. I feel bad. But I feel bad about sadder things than this, too.”

Should I Care?
Dating rituals had evolved in the 17 years since White Palace to fully warrant a contemporary look at the love affair between a woman and younger man, and you couldn’t have asked for two more appealing lovers than Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. I Could Never Be Your Woman has little to do with a love affair, or men and women in general; instead, it free falls into a slapdash, superficial and bitter as hell UPN sitcom. This peek into the woes of a professional single mom re-entering the dating scene is so loaded with rage that it might have qualified as a guerilla manifesto against youth culture, if it wasn’t so witless and incompetently made.

Amy Heckerling has directed a masterpiece (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and written and directed a well-deserved blockbuster (Clueless). I Could Never Be Your Woman is mad as hell about plastic surgery, ex-husbands dating younger women, youth driven pop culture, soulless network executives, teenage body angst and aging. The movie stops short of beating an effigy of Britney Spears like a piñata. Any adult can identify with Heckerling’s rancor, but the film — which is all surfaces and lacks any real edge — is another story. The settings are generic, humor flat and characters shallow. Not only a mess, it’s a mean-spirited mess.

Paul Rudd acquits himself with some charming physicality, but Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t fare as well. When allowed to look her age, she’s a dangerous beauty. Trying to vamp it up as a woman 20 years younger, the versatile actress just embarrasses herself. The lighting seems weighed down with cake makeup, while the London-for-L.A. locations add a demented visual layer. There’s a nice cameo by Henry Winkler, but I Could Never Be Your Woman was so misconceived, misguided, mismanaged and misfortunate that there’s not much an appearance by Arthur Fonzarelli can do.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“His Plan: Conquest of Indie Hollywood” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 5 October 2005

“When Glitches Trump Glitz” By John Horn. The Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2007

“Would You Dump This Woman?” By Missy Schwartz. Entertainment Weekly, 1 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling’s DVD Premiere – Part II” By Laurence Lerman. Video Business, 22 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling” By Noel Murray. A.V. Club, 20 March 2008

I Could Never Be Your Woman – Production Notes

I Could Never Be Your Woman. DVD audio commentary by Amy Hecklering and Cerise Hallam Larkin. The Weinstein Company, 2008

Quid Pro Quo (2008)
Written by Carlos Brooks
Directed by Carlos Brooks
Produced by Sanford-Pillsbury Productions/ HDNet Films
Running time: 82 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you. I only know what the police and coroner reports said.” So begins a personal remembrance from Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl), correspondent for “Public Radio New York”. His editor (Jessica Hecht) shares with him a tip from an anonymous caller — known only as Ancient Chinese Girl — who claims a man entered a bayside hospital and tried bribing an intern to chop off his leg. The tipster wants to meet Isaac, who’s been paralyzed and restricted to a wheelchair since the age of eight, the only survivor of a car accident that killed his parents in upstate New York.

After Ancient Chinese Girl dispatches him to a clandestine gathering of “wannabes” — able bodied men and women who share the unusual desire to be disabled — Isaac finally meets his wily tipster, an art conservator named Fiona (Vera Farmiga). Fascinated by why someone would want to be paralyzed who isn’t, Fiona agrees to tell Isaac what she knows about this underworld if, quid pro quo, he helps her understand what it’s like being disabled. Daffy and unpredictable, Fiona’s complicated feelings for the reporter change when a pair of antique spectators shoes suddenly give Isaac the ability to walk.

Who Made It?
Carlos Brooks attended Western Washington University as an English major and was later accepted into USC on a merit scholarship to study film and writing. Brooks would win an Abraham Polonsky Award for screenwriting at USC and marry classmate Helen Childress, who was hot as a bottle rocket after authoring the 1994 Winona Ryder/Ethan Hawke flick Reality Bites. Brooks spent the next decade carving out a career as a screenwriter. Among his scripts was a spec called Empire – which Robert Zemeckis was to produce through his company Imagemovers — that took place amid construction of the Empire State Building.

In 2004, Brooks appeared to finally be getting his shot at the director’s chair through HDNet Films, a division of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment. Mark Cuban is the billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and once spent a day managing a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas after Cuban accused a game referee of being unfit to run a DQ. Sticking his big toe into film financing, Cuban has had an energetic run, producing Good Night and Good Luck, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bubble, among many others. HDNet Films was launched to develop, finance and produce feature films to be shot in High Definition.

How’d They Do It?
The idea that would become Quid Pro Quo began germinating in 2000 with Carlos Brooks, whose focus of study at USC had been Alfred Hitchcock. “I wrote the script just to write. I didn’t write it to direct or anything; I just wanted to write something different. I’ve always wanted to write a detective story, and what this really is is a detective story in disguise. It’s an investigative journalistic piece, and the best detective stories are the ones where the detective ultimately realizes he’s been investigating himself. I would never write an actual detective story — at least I don’t think I would — but that’s what this secretly is.”

Brooks’ original idea involved an agoraphobic and a pair of headphones that gave him access to the outside world, Rear Window style. Googling through disabilities, Brooks stumbled upon the wannabe subculture. “I kind of vectored in on them. I’ve never met anybody who had Body Dysmorphic Disorder — that’s what it’s really called, I guess. I just kind of lurked, and I was fascinated by the tone of their writing. They knew they sounded quote, unquote ‘crazy.’ It’s entirely different talking about something we think is crazy without knowing you’re crazy. They were incredibly self-aware, painfully self-aware and wanted acceptance despite what they were saying.”

Intended as a writing sample, Quid Pro Quo started attracting interest from directors. Brooks decided he could do no worse himself and working with producers Midge Sanford & Sarah Pillsbury, landed a $2 million commitment from HDNet for his directing debut. He faced a long slog after being greenlit in 2004. Pre-production was shut down for 11 months after Brooks reached an impasse with the producers over casting. For the female lead, Brooks was set on an unknown named Vera Farmiga. “To find an actress who can make that role sympathetic and living and breathing was too good to pass up. When you find the right actor, you stick by them.”

Vera Farmiga mused, “I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote and Love Boat. Quirky detective stories and oddball romances. I imagine initially that’s what drew me. I love romance. I am always on the quest for an unusual romance, and this was it. There always has to be something about the character in the script that really turns my head and Fiona — I have a stiff neck from craning at this one. My initial response was she’s that woman in your life that you are absolutely terrified of but at the same time have to be around. She fascinated me. And the fact that it is just an unusual detective love story, and also a taboo subject that you don’t hear anything about.”

Quid Pro Quo began rolling October 2005 for an 18-day shoot in New Jersey. Brooks revealed, “I shot on a Sony 900 camera, and we used the 950 for a few scenes where it was a tight space. My production designer, Roshelle Berliner, and the DP Michael McDonough, and I experimented with shiny metallic surfaces to trick the video lens into thinking it’s film. I don’t know why this works, but it does. It tricks the chip in the video camera into softening those hard video lines and edges. If you walked on the set, you would think it’s the strangest looking place because Isaac’s apartment was full of wallpaper with metallic inlays. But on video, it looks like film. It gives it this Sidney Lumet-circa-The Verdict look, and that’s what I wanted.”

Joining Vera Farmiga was Nick Stahl, the best John Connor (in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and the lead in the HBO series Carnivale. Stahl elaborated on the film’s difficult journey. “We actually ended up re-shooting some stuff, and adding a couple of scenes. I think it was the kind of thing that, it was so clear on the page, the story, and the tone of it was so clear, but, for whatever reason, it’s such a different process once you actually film it and then you actually go to start editing it.” He added, “A lot of people didn’t get it, and that was the reason why we had to go back and retool some stuff. Carlos Brooks worked endlessly for so long. He kept cutting it and working at it.”

Screened January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, critics went along with Quid Pro Quo, for the most part. Justin Chang, Variety: “An exceedingly odd meeting of the minds (and bodies) occurs in Quid Pro Quo, a strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters’ feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.” Jenni Miller, Premiere: “Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.”

Should I Care?
Quid Pro Quo has been unfortunate to draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash, but I didn’t find anything disturbing about the movie. It’s edgy and a bit dark, but immensely fresh, sharp witted, impeccably well cast and I would even describe this as a film David Fincher might have shot if given only $1.6 million. I don’t care for the title and wonder why Mark Cuban is producing so many movies that barely see the light of day. Distributed by his Magnolia Pictures in June 2008, Quid Pro Quo never expanded beyond four theaters in the United States, grossing $11,864. This movie deserved an attentive publicity campaign and a much better commercial fate.

I liked how Quid Pro Quo defies categorization — if I had to, I’d label it an unusual romantic comedy with mystery — and forced me to both pay attention and react to it, as opposed to just watching passively. The dialogue has a lot of crackle and pop, and for a film with such a grotesque sounding premise, is pretty funny. Rachel Black puts in a cute performance as Stahl’s office buddy. But the chief reason to see this is the daffy Vera Farmiga, who once again spins through a movie like a punk ballerina. Carlos Brooks demonstrates a sharp ear, a terrific eye and great taste not only delivering a solid debut, but executing a film with such a high degree of difficulty.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Carlos Brooks, Quid Pro Quo” The Reeler, 20 January 2008

“Local Film School Drop-out Gets into Sundance” By Sam Vicchrilli. The Seatle Times, 25 January 2008

“Nick Stahl” By Terry Keefe. Venice Magazine, March 2008

“Vera Farmiga Offers up Quid Pro Quo” By Jenni Miller. Premiere, June 2008

“Interview: Carlos Brooks on Quid Pro Quo” By Matt Singer. IFC. Com, 13 June 2008

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Signal,” Wyoming in 1963, two ranch hands arrive and are put to work by a rancher (Randy Quaid) whose sheep need to pasture on “Brokeback Mountain.” The camp tender, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) doesn’t say much to his new partner at first, only that he used to come from ranch people. The herder, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the son of a rodeo rider. As time passes, the two men grow more comfortable with each other. Jack confides that his father was actually a well-known bull rider, but he kept his expertise to himself and never came to see Jack ride. Ennis reveals that his parents died and after a year of high school, he struck out on his own. When Jack complains about having to sleep up on the mountain with the sheep, Ennis offers to switch jobs with him.

Drunk and bunking down at the campsite, Ennis takes shelter with Jack in the tent to get out of the freezing cold. During the middle of the night, Jack initiates what escalates into an intense bout of sex between the men. “This is a one shot thing we got goin’ on here,” Ennis tells Jack the next day, adding “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack responds, “Me neither.” As the summer draws on, the experience turns out to be anything but a one shot deal, but when the job is over, Ennis forces himself to part ways with Jack. He marries his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams) and starts a family. Jack drifts back into rodeo, where he catches the eye of Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a hotshot circuit rider whose father owns an equipment company.

Ennis receives a postcard from Jack, who drops by on his way through Riverton. Alma catches her husband greeting his old friend intimately, but keeps this to herself for the time being. Taking off on what become annual fishing trips to Brokeback Mountain, Jack fails to convince Ennis to go in with him on a ranch somewhere where they can live together. Ennis shares a childhood memory of “two old guys ranched up together” and what ended up happening to one of them. Even after Alma divorces him, Ennis keeps his feelings for Jack private. When Jack asks for how long they have to go on like this, Ennis replies, “As long as we can ride it. There ain’t no reins on this one.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Following the publication of her third novel Accordion Crimes in 1991, Annie Proulx found herself drawn to writing about life in small town America, specifically Wyoming, where the author had moved in 1994 after living in Vermont for thirty years. Proulx recalled, “I am interested in landscape, folkways and rural problems. There is an endless conflict of values, lifestyles, the way people make their livings and social networks. I find the lives of country people far more interesting than the lives of city folk who are less connected to landscape and the natural world.” In 1997, Proulx started writing a short story she doubted would ever be printed; it concerned two young ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming whose sexual and emotional relationship spans twenty years. Published in the October issue of The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain would ultimately be named an O. Henry Prize Story and win a National Magazine Award.

A couple of years prior, Larry McMurtry – the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove – was recuperating from heart surgery in the home of a friend named Diana Ossana. McMurtry wrote his 1993 novel Streets of Laredo on Ossana’s kitchen counter, which she keyed into her computer and edited. McMurtry had received offers from Steven Spielberg, John McTiernan and others to write various screenplays and had rejected them all, but when Warner Bros. contacted the author about scripting a movie about gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, Ossana jumped into action. She recalled, “I went out and did a bunch of research on it. I had ten legal-sized pages of interesting facts about Pretty Boy, and sat down with him and said, ‘These are all the reasons that you ought to write this script.’ He was kind of amused by that, and by the time I was done reading him that list, he said, ‘Ok, I’d like to write the screenplay, but will you write it with me?’”

By October 1997, McMurtry & Ossana had written a script for Pretty Boy Floyd as well as two teleplays based on McMurtry’s work: Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. The duo was back in Texas, where a friend gave Ossana a copy of that month’s issue of the New Yorker, which featured Brokeback Mountain. Ossana recalled, “Two-thirds of the way through reading the story, I began to sob, and I sobbed all the way to the end. I was floored.” Ossana took the magazine to McMurtry, who recalled, “I don’t read fiction much anymore, so I was reluctant. But in her tenacious way, she asked that I humor her and read it. After I was finished reading it, the first thing I thought was that I wished I had written it. It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told, and Annie finally wrote it. It is one of the finest short stories I’ve read. The place, the landscape, the men and the way they speak are drawn precisely and convincingly.”

Diana Ossana recalled, “He read it and said it was the best short story ever published in the New Yorker. ‘Well, do you think it would make a screenplay,’ I asked. And he replied, ‘I think it might.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we write Annie a letter?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’” Within a week, Proulx had optioned her short story to the writing tandem. Paying her out of their own pockets, McMurtry & Ossana started writing and three months later, finished a screenplay. Producer Scott Rudin would option the script and ultimately brought Gus Van Sant on board to direct. Despite interest from Joaquin Phoenix to play Jack Twist, McMurtry believed that actors were getting cold feet. “They’d say it was the best thing they’d ever read, and then they’d waver and anguish. Their agents were afraid and steered them away from it.” Unable to lock a cast, Gus Van Sant had to pass on directing Brokeback Mountain.

In 2001, producer James Schamus took out an option on Brokeback Mountain. Schamus presented it to his longtime collaborator, director Ang Lee, who read the short story, felt the screenplay was a great adaptation, but opted to direct The Hulk instead. Schamus had no luck getting a studio to take a chance on the material. He took a job developing films for Universal’s specialty unit Focus Features, where it dawned on him that now, he had the cache to greenlight Brokeback Mountain himself. By this time, Ang had finished The Hulk. The director recalled, “Two years later, I asked James, ‘What happened with Brokeback Mountain? Did it get made yet?’ He said, ‘We haven’t been able to make that movie.’ Lucky for me. I said, ‘You know, it’s stuck with me over the years. I can’t get it out of my mind.’” Ang continued, “James got the rights, and I started thinking about making the movie right away. Before I knew I could physically do it, I jumped on. I just knew, in the bottom of my heart, if I let it go, I would regret it for the rest of my life.”

With Ang Lee behind the camera, a cast for Brokeback Mountain quickly fell into place. Jake Gyllenhaal had met Gus Van Sant about taking on the role of Jack when he was only 16. The actor recalled, “I was immediately drawn to Brokeback Mountain because love stories haven’t been told this way in a long time. Movies I’ve seen in recent years have avoided the struggles and the trials that it takes to actually be in love and keep that going. When I heard that Ang Lee was going to make it, I thought, ‘I have to do this movie.’” Heath Ledger committed to the project without meeting or even speaking to the director. “I trusted that story in Ang’s hands. I loved the script because it was mature and strong, and such a pure and beautiful love story. I hadn’t done a proper love story, and I find there’s not a lot of mystery left in stories between guys and girls. It’s all been done or seen before.”

Diana Ossana elaborated on the writing process. “Adapting Annie’s story was extremely easy and yet extremely difficult. It was easy in the sense that we had the blueprint right there with her writing – of the story itself, of the characters, of the specific way they speak, of the specific place they were from, and the landscape that formed them. The difficult part was to stay true to all that while turning this into a feature-length film. First we scripted the entire short story, and then we imagined and proceeded to flesh out the female characters so they would have depth and a presence on-screen. We also continued to build upon the stories of Ennis and Jack, many times creating an entire scene based upon a single sentence in the story.” On the strength of the screenplay, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris all joined the cast in supporting roles.

Shooting commenced May 2004 in Alberta, Canada on a budget of $12 million, Ang’s least expensive since making Eat Drink Man Woman in Taiwan. Impressed with his work for Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ang hired cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Production designer Judy Becker was also hired. She recalled, “Ang and I, and Rodrigo, talked about how the towns would be a strong contrast to the mountains – colorless and cluttered. We didn’t have the resources to build a huge amount of the sets. The biggest challenge was finding the right locations.” She added, “I looked at imagery of small towns. One thing that struck me, which Ang and I discussed early on, was that although the movie takes place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, the towns still looked like they could be in earlier decades. We went to Wyoming and Texas to do some research and, even now, so much detail and architecture is left over from pre-World War II. Change happened very, very slowly in small towns in the West.”

Following screenings at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, talk in Hollywood was whether paying audiences would have any desire to see a movie about the love between two men. Diana Ossana recalled, “As human beings we tend to put labels on everything as a way to sort of categorize and feel safe about something. ‘That script is about gay cowboys, well, I’m not going to give that thing the time of day. I’m not going to waste my time on it.’ It’s a way to reduce it to something very simple, when it’s something that isn’t simple at all. At one point I remember somebody saying to me, ‘You know, Diana, this movie would get made a heck of a lot faster if it were about a man and a woman.’ That wouldn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t make that movie.”

Opening December 2005 in the U.S., critics greeted Brokeback Mountain with near universal acclaim. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “There’s neither coyness nor self-importance in Brokeback Mountain – just close, compassionate observation, deeply committed performances, a bone-deep feeling for hardscrabble Western lives. Few films have captured so acutely the desolation of frustrated, repressed passion.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “It’s possible to point to some weak spots in Brokeback – its seeming multiple endings, the lack of clarity about certain images, some digressions – but there is no movie this year that has moved my heart more than Brokeback Mountain.”

Not every community in the world was ready to embrace Brokeback Mountain. The Chinese government refused to add it to a list of foreign films deemed suitable to be shown in mainland theaters. Despite the fact that the city’s two major newspapers carried ads, the late owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz franchise – Larry Miller – withdrew Brokeback Mountain from exhibition in the Salt Lake City suburb where he owned an entertainment complex. Many conservative Christian groups in the U.S. – anticipating noisy protests would only help promote the film, as they had in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ – stayed quiet, predicting that rural audiences would likely reject the subject matter anyway. Strongly favorable word of mouth and eight Academy Award nominations instead had the opposite effect. Brokeback Mountain was propelled to box office receipts of $83 million in the U.S. and $95 million overseas.

The month of its release, Annie Proulx was asked whether straight men would watch Brokeback Mountain. The author replied, “They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn’t they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much, he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it, and they’re not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that’s usually young men who haven’t figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.” She added, “It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific, and I think that’s true. It’s an old, old story. We’ve heard this story a million times; we just haven’t heard it quite with this cast.”

Should I Care?
Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana and composer Gustavo Santaolalla all won Oscars, while – in yet another awards show “moment” – the racial melodrama Crash was voted Best Picture, but one of the more lasting impressions made by Brokeback Mountain is that instead of angling for awards or trying to send a message, the film reveals genuine empathy for its characters and their experiences, portraying both realistically without Hollywood glamour or spin. It’s not a film that casts judgments its characters, in spite how the politics of the time may or may not have judged the movie, developing a timeless quality by depicting its setting with honesty, and its emotional range with complexity. In the process, it cuts deep through just about every demographic to leave its mark as a great love story.

With Annie Proulx’s short story running 11 pages, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t cover a whole lot of ground, but the power of what’s on film is hard to ignore. The opening scenes convey the beauty and solitude of the country as memorably as any of Larry McMurtry’s movie adaptations, particularly Hud. Material is rarely matched so perfectly to the sensibility and skills of a particular director as this story is for Ang Lee. The combination of writing and directing obviously attracted one of the finest casts assembled in recent memory. Each time I watch the movie, I come away thinking another actor gave the best performance: Michelle Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anne Hathaway. There’s nothing more to say about Heath Ledger except that his work as Ennis Del Mar passes into legend.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Ang Lee’s Brokeback Explores ‘Last Frontier’” By Anne Thompson. The Hollywood Reporter, 11 November 2005

“Annie Proulx discusses the origins of Brokeback Mountain” By Sandy Cohen. Associated Press, 18 December 2005

“New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians; Reviews, Not Protests” By John Leland. The New York Times, 26 December 2005

“Annie Proulx Interview” By Deepanjana Pal. Time Out Dubai, 23 March 2009

Brokeback Mountain – Production Notes. Focus Features

Brokeback Mountain – 2-Disc Collector’s Edition. Universal Studios Home Video (2006)

What the *&#! Is This About?
At Darlington Hall, a mansion in the English countryside, American millionaire and former Congressman Jack Lewis (Christopher Reeve) acquires the estate at auction and saves it from being demolished. Lewis inherits aging butler James Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) who nobly presides over a staff that is a skeleton of what it was before World War II. Stevens accepts his new employer’s offer to take some time off and see the world. Lewis asks the butler how long it’s been since he’s seen the world. “Well in the past, sir, the world used to always come to this house in a manner of speaking, if I may say so, sir.” Given the keys to a 1937 Daimler, Stevens announces his intention to drive to Clevedon, to meet an old acquaintance that may be interested in returning to Darlington Hall as housekeeper.

Moving back in time 20 years – when the well-intentioned Lord Darlington (James Fox) presided over the bustling estate – Stevens is tasked with hiring a new housekeeper and underbutler when the previous pair elopes. Stevens makes it clear to the newly arrived Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) that he does not approve of housekeepers “going post to post looking for romance.” He remains wary of Miss Kenton’s youth. For the position of underbutler, Stevens hires his own father (Peter Vaughan) who has 54 years experience of loyal servitude. Miss Kenton observes that Mr. Stevens Sr. has been entrusted with more duties than he can physically handle. Stevens dismisses her concerns of abandoned dustpans or polish on the cutlery, until his father suffers a fall in front of their employer and his own son is forced to demote him.

Committed to helping a Nazi-led Germany get back on its feet, Lord Darlington hosts an international conference to promote this agenda. Amid the preparations, Stevens professes that “a great butler must be possessed of dignity in keeping with his position” and refuses to be drawn into voicing any political beliefs he might have in front of the Lord’s guests. These include the young Congressman Lewis, who tries to warn Darlington and his cronies that when it comes to what’s brewing in Europe, “The days when you could just act out of your noble instincts are over.” As for his blossoming feelings for Miss Kenton, Stevens keeps those to himself. 20 years later, he reunites with her and has one last chance to tell her how he feels.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Born in Nagasaki in 1954, Kazuo Ishiguro grew up in England, relocating there with his family when he was six years old. Of his third novel – The Remains of the Day – the author stated, “I intended the story to be one that could take off quite easily to the metaphorical sphere, so that people could actually apply it to their own lives, wherever they lived, whenever they lived. I wanted it to be universal, a human story.” The author added, “If I was writing a how-to book on How To Waste Your Life, you know, the English butler idea encapsulated two good, very decent ways in which you can waste your life. One was emotionally and the other was politically.” Ishiguro’s manuscript came to the attention of esteemed playwright Harold Pinter, who optioned the film rights while the book was still being proofed.

Published in 1989 to wide acclaim and bestowed England’s highest literary award – the Booker McConnell Prize – Pinter was inundated with offers to adapt The Remains of the Day to film. During this time, James Ivory was shooting Mr. and Mrs. Bridge in Kansas City. One of his cast members – Remak Ramsay – was reading The Remains of the Day and gave the director a copy. Ivory recalled, “I read it, started reading, and I liked it enormously. And I felt as I was reading it, ‘This would make a terrific movie.’ So, as soon as I got done reading it, I asked our agent at Creative Artists, Rand Holston, if he could find out who had the rights and how we could option the book.” Ivory was notified that Columbia Pictures was producing a film version with Mike Nichols already attached to direct. Harold Pinter had adapted a screenplay and Jeremy Irons & Meryl Streep had met with Nichols for the lead roles. But at $26 million, Nichols was unable to get Columbia to bankroll his vision and ultimately chose to direct what seemed more like a home run for the studio: Jack Nicholson & Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf.

Then in March 1992, James Ivory and his producing partner Ismail Merchant saw their modestly budgeted – at $8 million – adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End become the best reviewed and one of the most profitable movies of the year. After flying under the radar of Hollywood for more than twenty years, Merchant commented at the time, “There is no indulgence in the way we spend money on a movie. In small and large ways, the studios are overindulgent. Instead of sending an overnight packet with U.P.S. between L.A. and New York, or L.A. and London, they have a person carrying the package. So they spend $1,000 instead of $50. A movie star wants his entourage on a film set. The studio leases a plane for $40,000. We don’t waste money that way. We often use the same people for production design and costumes and locations and hair and makeup. We make deals with everyone. That’s the point.”

Within two months, Columbia handed the production of The Remains of the Day over to the Merchant/Ivory team, with Mike Nichols and John Calley remaining on as producers. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala spent the summer of 1992 revising Harold Pinter’s script. James Ivory recalled, “It was Ruth who said in some interview: Pinter had written his script for a Mike Nichols film, and she now had to write one for a James Ivory film. She nevertheless admired and incorporated some of Pinter’s dialogue scenes, which were sharp and well paced. Contractually, both writers were to be credited, but Pinter, in a sort of everything-or-nothing mood, I guess, asked not to have his name on the film. He had been an executive producer as well, and that role also he didn’t care to acknowledge.”

Having both pursued the project when Mike Nichols was directing, Anthony Hopkins & Emma Thompson eagerly joined the cast. Thompson said of the material, “It sounds pretentious to say it’s Chekhovian, but, really, so much is said by not being said. Stevens and Miss Kenton discuss the most ridiculous things, like jugs and dust, and underneath them this passionate and tragic story is being staged. She falls in love with him, and that is her downfall, because she cannot crack his walnut carapace. It’s about one of the most important things of all: you have to say to people you love them. Otherwise they go away, and suddenly you find you’ve come to the end of your life, and it’s too late.” With a budget of $11.5 million, The Remains of the Day commenced filming October 1992 in London.

James Ivory recalled, “Our production designer on this film was Luciana Arrighi, who’d worked on Howard’s End, which she got the Oscar … She has a very good, sort of sense of these houses and the kinds of things that ought to be in them and shouldn’t be in them and she’s got a lot of imagination. And it was she in fact who found the very, very important location on this film, which was the whole downstairs/backstairs part of Darlington Hall. That means all the kitchens and the servants rooms and the servants bedrooms and the sculleries and the long passages and she found those. She went out on a scout of her own. She went to a tremendous English house called Badminton House, which isn’t open to the public, and she went around in it and found all these untouched rooms, which a lot of them were sort of caving in, no one used them anymore.” Shot completely on location, five separate mansions would stand in for Darlington Hall.

One difference between the Harold Pinter draft and the Ruth Prawer Jhabvala draft was an omitted scene near the end of the film in which Anthony Hopkins’ character encounters a retired butler on the pier in Clevedon and breaks down in tears. James Ivory recalled, “But in the new script that was written by Ruth it was removed because I didn’t like it very much, and she felt it was a very sentimental sort of thing, which undercut everything that was in, or would be in, the film. Anthony Hopkins had already agreed to do the film, but when he saw Ruth’s new script minus that scene, he got very upset. He said, as actors often do about some deleted scene, that the scene defined everything, defined his character, was the movie’s most important scene, and on and on. He told us that he wasn’t sure he wanted to make the film if he didn’t have that scene.” Ivory agreed to shoot the scene and keep it in the film at his discretion. The director added, “But once it was cut out, Anthony Hopkins never seemed to miss it.”

The Remains of the Day arrived in theaters November 1993 and was greeted enthusiastically by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “Looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults. It’s also about time to recognize that Mr. Ivory is one of our finest directors.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “All the meticulousness, intelligence, taste and superior acting that one expects from Merchant Ivory productions have been brought to bear on The Remains of the Day. This curious, cloistered piece, which examines the life of a very proper English butler who sacrifices anything resembling a personal life in total dedication to his master’s needs, is continuously absorbing but lacks the emotional resonance that would have made it completely satisfying.” Marc Savlov, the Austin Chronicle: “Some people will no doubt find the whole Merchant-Ivory ethos a bit highbrow for their taste, and this will prove to be no exception. Gorgeously lensed and delightfully structured, however, this is, in a word, wonderful.”

As big a hit with audiences as Howard’s End – grossing $23.2 million in the U.S. – The Remains of the Day was also nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. The film ended up being passed over in every category. With the death of Ismail Merchant in 2005 and the end of the Merchant/Ivory era, many felt that in addition to being one of their most profitable films, The Remains of the Day had stood the test of time as one of their finest. During its release, James Ivory touched on this by stating, “The great books, the great novels, the great stories, tend to be about flawed characters, or flawed men who show tremendous potential in one way, but really in some other way are weak. That’s the stuff of drama.”

Should I Care?
With 28 features spanning five decades – including The Europeans, A Room With A View and Le Divorce – the Merchant/Ivory caliber of filmmaking has become world renowned for its taste and literacy. It can also be said that their films are not above falling asleep in some pastoral meadow. That sense of narrative idle is nowhere to be found in The Remains of the Day, which among romances set in England’s rural past, is one of the most riveting ever made. Crisp, cool, tinged with humor as well as tragedy, the film works beautifully on a number of levels: as a portrait of a man’s wasted life, a document of England pre-World War II, a social examination of the servant class, an architectural study of a great house, and the architecture of a man and a woman whose environment keeps them from confiding their feelings for each other.

James Ivory directs The Remains of the Day with his senses curiously attuned to the means and ways of a vanishing culture, which the audience naturally experiences as if gazing through some jeweled spyglass. It goes without saying that the film is magnificently cast. Anthony Hopkins has never been better in a movie, sublimely hinting at an interior world frozen beneath the surface of his character. Emma Thompson – who like Hugh Grant, got her start as a standup comedian – not only gives as good as she gets from Hopkins, but brings an irresistible wit and sadness to her role. Seeing Christopher Reeve give one more strong performance before his accident is beyond words. Merchant/Ivory may have given up $50 million in box office receipts by keeping the book’s ending intact, but 15 years down the road, it may be what resonates most deeply about the film. Tony Pierce-Roberts and Richard Robbins rendered the lavish cinematography and mesmerizing musical score, respectively.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Merchant-Ivory and Friends: On the Job Again” By Benedict Nightingale. The New York Times, 24 January 1993

“The Talk of Hollywood; A Studio Tiptoes on Literary Ground” By Bernard Weinraub. The New York Times, 3 November 1993

The Remains of the Day (Special Edition). Columbia/TriStar (2001)

James Ivory In Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies. By Robert Emmet Long. University of California Press (2006)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In New York City of the 1870s, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is among the well heeled who attend a performance of the opera Faust at the Academy of Music. Newland is taken aback by the entrance of the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s left her husband in Europe and become an object of great scandal by returning to her family. Newland is engaged to Ellen’s innocent, pampered cousin May (Winona Ryder). To discourage gossip against the family, he announces his engagement to May at an opera ball that night. When Ellen fails to appear, Newland seems disappointed. He goes out of his way to ingratiate her back into the favor of New York society, with the help of May’s reclusive grandmother Manson Mingott (Miriam Margolyes).

Sensing she might feel lonely, Newland wants to help the free spirited and exotic Ellen. “Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it was all straight up and down, like 5th Avenue, all the cross streets numbered and big honest labels on everything.” “Everything is labeled,” he tells her, “but everybody is not.” Behind closed doors, Newland questions conformity. In public, he upholds family and tradition. “This was a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper,” says our narrator (Joanne Woodward). The Mingotts enlist Newland to dissuade Ellen from seeking a divorce, but he finds himself falling in love with her. He tries to speed up his engagement to May, who correctly guesses he’s in love with someone else. Newland denies this.

For Newland, responsibility to his mother and sister, who rely on him for every security, comes before his own desires. A year and a half later, Ellen returns to New York when Mrs. Mingott suffers a stroke. Newland goes to meet her at the train station. They share a carriage ride, where a simple touch of Ellen’s wrist qualifies as a consummation of their affair. Ellen refuses to take it any further for fear it will hurt May. Meeting each other at the Metropolitan Museum, Ellen changes her mind about the prospect of an affair. Newland finally decides to confess his feelings to his wife, but she interrupts to tell him that Ellen is returning to her husband. Newland realizes that his family and all of New York society have conspired to send her back to Europe to preserve decorum.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Edith Wharton wrote most of The Age of Innocence from September 1919 to March 1920 while living in the Rue de Varenne of Paris. Her sister-in-law Minnie Jones helped research 1870s New York society by combing through back issues of the New York Tribune at Yale University Library. Published in 1920 in serial format, then as a novel, The Age of Innocence became a phenomenal bestseller. Columbia University awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Literature – making Wharton the first woman to receive the honor – and within two years, the author had reaped $50,000 in royalties, including $15,000 from Warner Bros. for the film rights. The studio produced a seven-reel feature in 1924, while RKO mounted a talkie version in 1931 starring Irene Dunne as Countess Ellen Olenska. Neither was a box office success.

60 years after its publication, Jay Cocks – former film critic for Time Magazine – handed a copy of The Age of Innocence to his friend, director Martin Scorsese. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1993, Scorsese recalled, “We had known each other since ‘68 and over the years we saw so many different films and over the years we really tried to write scripts together and do all kinds of projects and really got involved with wanting to do many different genres: westerns, costume pieces – you could call them costume pieces – romantic films, musicals, etcetera. And so around 1980 he gave me the book and said, ‘When you decide to do that romance piece,’ he said, ‘this one is you.’ Meaning this has the qualities that you would like.’”

Scorsese continued, “When I finally did read the book – because when he gave me the book I was finishing Raging Bull and I was going into King of Comedy – and in a sense, Raging Bull is a picture that is spinning. It’s like a vortex of emotion. I was very much into that state of mind. So it took me a while to sit down and read the book. But when I did, I reacted immediately to the passion of the love story between Archer and Ellen and especially the fact that it’s unconsummated … maybe because I read it and it was 1987, January and I had gotten older, but I reacted immediately to that. I must tell you that I’ve read other books – I’ve loved the books of Thomas Hardy and other types of classical literature and 19th century English literature – but this one, I said I can make into a film.”

Adapting a screenplay in 1987, Cocks & Scorsese had a first draft in three weeks. The Age of Innocence was set up at Fox, with Scorsese planning to direct as soon as he completed GoodFellas. But when studio chairman Joe Roth weighed the commercial risk of an Edith Wharton novel against Scorsese’s $32 million budget – as well as the director’s unwillingness to reduce his fee – the project was put into turnaround. Scorsese accepted an offer to direct Cape Fear for Steven Spielberg, but even after that movie became a blockbuster, Universal Pictures considered The Age of Innocence too rich for its taste as well. Mark Canton, chairman of Columbia/TriStar, was eager to forge a relationship with Scorsese, who by that time had been crowned “the greatest living American director” by critics. Columbia agreed to finance the film.

Speaking with the New York Times in 2007, Daniel Day-Lewis recalled The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese. “He is a mighty man, and when he asks you to do something, you want to do it. I was struggling to escape from English drawing rooms, but because of Martin, I accepted the role in The Age of Innocence.” Michelle Pfeiffer had already worked in drawing rooms as well, but Scorsese was more impressed by the versatility she’d shown in Married to the Mob, as well as Scarface, offering her the role of Ellen Olenska. The actress recalled, “What’s most universal and timeless about the novel and the film is what they have to say about the charades people play, the masks people wear for the sake of what’s socially acceptable. That’s still going strong. And when you see someone’s whole life guided by those standards, it touches a chord. You ask yourself: Will I wind up like Newland Archer? Could I make those sacrifices without becoming bitter?”

Many of those involved with the production of The Age of Innocence seemed enamored with the timelessness of Edith Wharton’s story. Jay Cocks remarked at the time, “The themes – which are love, passion, conscience, commitment – they’re pertinent and immediate and compelling at any time, whether it’s 1993 or 2010. We have the same problems of wanting things we can’t have and having things we don’t want, and that’s what this story is about.” As filming was just getting underway, Martin Scorsese addressed his suitability to portray those themes successfully. “I guess you try to make films about what you know. Merchant and Ivory are maybe more attuned to this kind of society. It is second nature to them, whereas Mean Streets, GoodFellas, Raging Bull are more second nature to me. But a love between two people, whether successful or unsuccessful, is common to everybody.”

By the time The Age of Innocence went before the cameras in March 1992, Scorsese’s visual research consultant – Robin Standefer – had spent two and a half years studying New York society of the 1870s. Her work with the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and Edith Wharton scholars was so meticulous that Standefer discovered Wharton had misnamed a Bougeureau painting in her novel. A dozen other consultants were devoted to food, to decorative arts, to etiquette. With its three-story brownstones, the Victorian city of Troy, New York – located on the east bank of the Hudson River across from Albany – stood in for 19th century Manhattan. The opera sequence was filmed over a five-day period inside the Philadelphia Academy of Music, while outside, the streets were covered with soil, as New York had no paved streets in the 1870s.

Accustomed to having a year to cut his films, when The Age of Innocence wrapped in June 1992, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker were initially given only five months to have the film ready for Christmas. Then Scorsese’s 79-year-old father Charles – who had played bit roles in many of his son’s films – fell seriously ill. The studio decided against hurrying the greatest living American director. Producer Barbara De Fina recalled, “All the fine cutting and shaping would have suffered, the down-to-the-frame timing that makes it a Scorsese movie. Marty also likes to cut his scenes to the music, not lay in the score afterward.” Adding $2 million to its production costs, Columbia was confident that they were positioning the film for Academy Awards consideration in ‘93, with industry observers predicting a Best Actress win for Michelle Pfeiffer.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival August 1993, The Age of Innocence opened in the United States and Canada in limited release the following month. The critical praise was faint. Rita Kempley, the Washington Post: “Though lovely to behold, this film isn’t meant to send you home with a song in your heart.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “An extraordinarily sumptuous piece of filmmaking, The Age of Innocence represents an impeccably faithful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic novel, which is both a blessing and a bit of a curse.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: “As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton’s tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it’s a noble failure.”

After test screenings had not gone well, Mark Canton successfully lobbied Scorsese to cut the film from 165 minutes down to 139 minutes. Audiences ignored the film anyway, which grossed $32.2 million in the U.S. The New York Times cited an unnamed prominent theater exhibitor as saying, “It’s a coast picture, a specialized picture that does best on the East Coast and the West Coast but doesn’t hit in the heartland. The women seemed to like it, but it didn’t grab the men at all. A good picture, but not mainstream.” Nominated for five Academy Awards – including Winona Ryder for Best Supporting Actress – only Gabriella Pescucci (Best Costume Design) ended up being honored. Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t even nominated.

Should I Care?
Stanley Kubrick bent the heads of critics and moviegoers into a question mark in the mid 1970s when the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange announced he was adapting an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray titled Barry Lyndon. If the choice of material wasn’t visionary in itself, the costume piece starring Ryan O’Neal was rendered to film with nothing less than the artistry of an 18th century impressionist painting. Martin Scorsese routinely cites Barry Lyndon as his favorite Kubrick film and The Age of Innocence is not only the director’s valentine to it, but surpasses it in style, exquisitely interpreting the language and descriptive flow of a Victorian Era novel, while boasting actors and production techniques that make Kubrick’s 1975 film look on many levels like hobby moviemaking.

Dante Ferretti lavishes the period in pictorial detail, with director of photography Michael Ballhaus bathing those scenes in vibrant color (the floral shop scenes alone are worth the price of a rental). Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, title designers Elaine & Saul Bass and composer Elmer Bernstein make The Age on Innocence a Thanksgiving banquet where each guest unwraps a spectacular dish. Like Thanksgiving, all this food – not to mention the many characters, their social positions and veiled agendas – are prone to give the first time viewer indigestion. On repeated viewings, the passion between Wharton’s exiled lovers and the tenacity of those seeking to keep them apart is much easier to distill and be moved by. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer are as emotionally compelling here as any other roles I can remember.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Scorsese, From the Mean Streets to Charm School” By Alessandra Stanley. The New York Times, 28 June 1992

“The Fine Aging of Innocence” By Steve Daly. Entertainment Weekly, 21 May 1993

“In Age of Innocence, Eternal Questions” By Francine Prose. The New York Times, 12 September 1993

“Recreating The Age of Innocence In Brick and Paint” By Christopher Gray. The New York Times, 24 October 1993

“Innocence & Experience: The Making of The Age of Innocence” (1993)

Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. By Nancy Griffin, Kim Masters. Simon and Schuster (1997)