Southland Tales (2007)
Written by Richard Kelly
Directed by Richard Kelly
Produced by Darko Entertainment/ Cherry Road Films/ Persistent Entertainment/ Inferno Distribution
Running time: 145 minutes

Synopsis
Following the detonation of nuclear bombs in Abilene and El Paso, on July 4, 2005, martial law is declared in the United States. Three years later – as World War III rages across the Middle East, civil liberties at home are imperiled and the country searches for an alternative fuel source – movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) reappears in Venice Beach after disappearing for three days. Santaros – whose fiancée (Mandy Moore) is the daughter of Republican presidential nominee Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) – has shacked up with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star with her own issues-driven talk show and perfume line who has co-authored a screenplay with Santaros called The Power. The script depicts a not too distant future the actor begins to see coming true.

Meanwhile, a neo-Marxist cell in Venice Beach plans to swing California into the column of the Democratic Party. A porn director (Nora Dunn) first tries blackmailing Frost with a videotape of his future son-in-law cavorting with Krysta. When that fails to work, a sadistic, power drinking shrew (Cheri Oteri) plots to embarrass the police by abducting racist LAPD commando Roland Tavener (Seann William Scott) and replacing him with his twin Ronald (Seann William Scott). The neo-Marxists arrange a fake police shooting involving Tavener and two of their members (Amy Poehler, Wood Harris) which Santaros is to unwittingly record on tape while following Tavener on a ride along in preparation for his role in The Power. But instead, a real racist cop (Jon Lovitz) appears and kills the couple. Traumatized, Santaros reverts to the character in his screenplay.

War veteran and movie star Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) sees all this from his perch on a gun turret above Venice Beach. Conspiracy theorists say that the flamboyant scientist Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn) experimented on Abilene in Iraq with Fluid Karma, an alternative fuel generated remotely by the tides. As Westphalen’s Fluid Karma station goes online off the coast and his remote powered Mega Zeppelin takes to the skies on the Fourth of July, anarchy grips Los Angeles. Santaros learns that Fluid Karma created a time rift, which enabled him to travel an hour into the past and confront his dual self, who was mysteriously killed shortly thereafter. He also discovers that Roland Tavener stepped through the rift with him, that the commando’s “twin” is really Tavener’s dual self and that if the pair meets, the world will likely end. Not with a whimper, but with a bang.

Production history
After his debut film Donnie Darko left the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 with dismal word of mouth and no distributor, Richard Kelly was irascible. “We were re-cutting and going through this struggle and pressure and I was really frustrated and angry. And I felt like my career was probably over, or ending, or in the process of ending because our movie didn’t get picked up and it didn’t seem like it was going to. And I wanted to write something about Los Angeles and my frustration with Los Angeles, even though it’s a town that I really love and continue to love.” Three weeks later, Kelly showed a draft of Southland Tales to his producing partner Sean McKittrick. “I gave it to Sean and he immediately called me and said, ‘We have to go get drunk. And we went and got drunk at Hinano, this bar in Venice Beach, and he said, ‘We have to make this. This is like, my favorite thing you’ve ever written.’ And it was basically the shell of the story that exists four years later.”

Kelly had rewritten untold number of drafts of a supernatural thriller by Ryne Douglas Pearson titled Knowing with an eye on it being his follow-up to Donnie Darko, but budget and casting concerns by Fox Searchlight ultimately forced him to abandon it. Southland Tales – which had originally been conceived as a “big comedy with a bunch of crazy L.A. eccentric characters” – had evolved in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. “I was like okay, I have this apocalyptic comedy that ends with rioting and the city on fire and everything with all these crazy characters. I thought okay, if it’s really about the end of the world lets try to take it to the next level and make it about something much more then making fun of L.A., trying to blow up L.A., and I thought about all these ideas about homeland security and alternative fuel and I made it more of a science fiction, near future satire.”

Late in 2004, Seann William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar agreed to join the cast. At Sundance a few months later, Kelly met producers Bo Hyde and Kendall Morgan, whose company Cherry Road agreed to finance development. Prospective buyers didn’t know what to make from Southland Tales. Morgan recalls, “I got this all the time: ‘It’s a huge movie, you’ll never be able to make it for that much money.’” But once Dwayne Johnson – aka The Rock – agreed to star, Universal International stepped up to bankroll the picture in exchange for most of the foreign rights (Wild Bunch kicked in additional financing for distribution rights in France, Spain and Switzerland). In April 2005, it was also revealed that three graphic novels – written by Kelly and inked by Brett Weldele – would supplement the movie as an illustrated prequel. On a budget of roughly $17 million, a breakneck six-week shooting schedule commenced August 2005 in Venice Beach.

The call sheet was eccentric to say the least. Kelly later enthused, “I think it helps to have the familiarity of these faces and the comfort of seeing, ‘Oh, there’s Buffy!’ or ‘There’s Stifler!’ or ‘There’s Justin!’ ‘There’s Cheri Oteri!’ ‘There’s Amy Pohler from Saturday Night Live!’ ‘There’s Jon Lovitz!’ They’re all these really fun people – they’re the funnest people for me to watch! You talk about how you want to populate a movie like you’d want to host a dinner party. They’re all very fun people you’d like to have at a dinner party and that’s what I wanted this movie to be because it’s about the end of the world; it’s about too many big, heavy topics -disturbing things and troubling issues – and I thought, ‘Lets make it as fun to watch as possible.’” Immersed in post-production in the spring of 2006 – with the visual effects still to be completed – the filmmakers were surprised to learn that the Cannes Film Festival had selected Southland Tales to vie for the prestigious Palme d’Or in May.

Fans would later refute the claim that Southland Tales was booed, but by all accounts, the screening was a disaster. Geoff Andrew, Time Out London: “Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster’s alternative to The Da Vinci Code.” Sukhdev Sandhu, the Daily Telegraph: “It might conceivably work as a website or as a cult cable show; as an entertainment, it feels so protracted that, given the choice, most of the Cannes audience would have opted for the end of the world.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com: “If Kelly recuts this, takes out all the nonsense and releases it as an experimental, almost wordless, nonnarrative film (at, say, 90 minutes) it might become a rare and beautiful thing. As it is now, it’s about the biggest, ugliest mess I’ve ever seen.”

Kelly would later question the wisdom of sharing his ambitious work in progress with the hardened, worldwide press corps at Cannes. “Usually when you have a movie, at that point you take it to Sherman Oaks and show it to a bunch of teenagers at [sic] screening. We took it to the Cannes Film Festival and showed it to the toughest audience in the world. Was that a good idea? I don’t know. But it happened, and you just sort of take the best from it.” Sony, THINKFilm, Picturehouse, Newmarket and First Look all put in bids to distribute Southland Tales in the United States, with Sony easily putting the best offer on the table. The studio also agreed to kick in more money for special effects, with the caveat that Kelly clip his running time, which was then 160 minutes.

In an effort to make the impenetrable storyline coherent, Kelly inserted an animated prologue referred to as “the Doomsday Scenario Interface” using imagery from the graphic novels to bring audiences up to speed to the events overtaking the country in the wake of World War III; America reinstating the draft, a Hillary Clinton/Joe Lieberman presidential ticket in 2008 and an oil crisis. Sony paid for Kelly to add 90 new effects shots at a cost of $1 million. In return, he chopped 15 minutes off the Cannes cut, most notably the character of a general played by Janeane Garofalo (the actress can be glimpsed with Justin Timberlake near the end of the movie). Kelly also rerecorded Timberlake’s entire voice-over narration. “I misdirected Justin. It was a little too sarcastic. When we did it again, I had him watch Apocalypse Now, so he ended up doing it very deadpan, very dry.”

When Southland Tales finally opened November 2007 in the United States, almost every print critic flushed it. Josh Rosenblatt, the Austin Chronicle: “It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.” Carina Chocano, the Los Angeles Times: “You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It’s easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that’s occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago-Sun Times: “Yes, I admire Kelly’s free spirit. In theory. He is a cinematic anarchist, but the problem is, he’s throwing bombs at his own work. He apparently has no sympathy at all for an audience unable to understand his plot, and every scene plays like something that was dreamed up with little concern for what went before or would follow after.”

Failing to expand beyond 63 theaters, Southland Tales flatlined at the box office with $275,000 in the U.S. and $99,000 overseas. The same month his movie was playing in empty arthouses, Richard Kelly spoke to Lisa Garibay of El Paso’s Newspaper Tree: “You know, all throughout production on Southland Tales, there were a lot of actors and crew who were like, ‘Ok, we have no idea what is going on with this story, but we trust you.’ And just holding onto that trust, it does get a little frustrating after a while when people are just like, ‘I don’t get it. I don’t understand what you’re doing.’ And I keep saying, ‘Trust me, and at the end when it’s all finished, you will!’ It was the same way with Donnie Darko … So there’s been a lot of that and it’s just a little exhausting after a while when people keep saying, ‘’We don’t get it. We don’t get it.’ But I’m always confident that when it’s finally finished, they’ll come up to me after the screening and they’ll say, ‘I get it now.’”

Opinion
The opening sequence of Southland Tales – a block party interrupted by a mushroom cloud rising into the sky – bleeds supernatural dread into an otherwise mundane suburban setting with all the technical virtuosity Richard Kelly demonstrated in Donnie Darko. The remaining 144 minutes of his follow-up contains some eye popping graphics and occasional flare-ups of ingenuity, but vaporizes the audience right along with Abilene. The film tries too hard to comment on every anxiety – and I mean every anxiety, right down to tasteless TV commercials – threatening the world post-9/11. But as if obscured in a haze of bong smoke, Southland Tales isn’t serious enough to be a thriller, isn’t funny enough to be a comedy and never really checks in with reality, so doesn’t qualify as satire either. Whatever the hell this is could be debated in film schools for generations, likely in a course on how to commit career suicide and take an audience along with you.

Southland Tales is cast and scripted on such scale that its ineptitude is almost too big to comprehend. Kelly cast a number of B-movie faces from the ‘80s – Christopher Lambert, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, the munchkin from Poltergeist – as well as so many Saturday Night Live veterans that Chris Kattan must be pissed he didn’t get a reading. Or, maybe not. Nobody is given a character to play or an opportunity to show they can act; their mere appearance is supposed to be the joke. The writing is angry, divisive, infantile, half baked and haplessly convoluted. Timberlake’s narration riffs on Apocalypse Now, but that movie had a concise story: Willard is headed up the river to kill Kurtz. I cannot begin to unravel who was going where or why in this movie. Richard Kelly is a talent, but not a one of his ten producers had the sac to call “bullshit” on his sloppy script. The audience gets to experience the results in the form of a historic clusterfuck.

© Joe Valdez

The Fountain (2006)
Screenplay by Darren Aronofsky, story by Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Produced by Protozoa Pictures/ Warner Bros. Pictures/ New Regency Pictures
Running time: 96 minutes

Synopsis
“Therefore, the Lord God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and placed a flaming sword to protect the tree of life,” writes a woman in a book. A Spanish conquistador (Hugh Jackman) dispatched on a crusade by his queen (Rachel Weisz) reaches the top of a Mayan temple before being mortally wounded by a priest. Moving into the distant future, what appears to be the same man travels through space in a transcendent bubble, on a mission to deliver a dying tree to a supernova. Moving back in time to what appears to be the present day, neurosurgeon Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman, again) searches in vain to find a cure for the brain tumor afflicting his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz, again). She shares with her husband a book she’s written titled The Fountain, a chronicle of immortal love that spans one thousand years. Before her death, she gives her husband the key to finishing the story.

Production history
Darren Aronofsky was a few weeks away from shooting his second feature film – Requiem for a Dream – in March 1999 when he went to the movies with actor Jared Leto. Aronofsky recalls, “I walked out of The Matrix with Jared and I was thinking, ‘What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?’ The Wachowskis basically took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured. Suddenly, Philip K. Dick’s ideas no longer seemed that fresh. Cyberpunk? Done.” Aronofsky’s friend Ari Handel had earned a Ph.D in neuroscience from NYU in 2000, but instead of making a career in academic research, took the director up on an offer to write something together. Over long walks in Brooklyn, Aronofsky & Handel arrived on a science fiction tale that would stretch across time, a story within a story within a story that Aronofsky likened to “Russian matryoshka dolls.”

Handel recalls, “We would plan out the scenes and the characters then Darren would go off and write. I would read what he wrote and give thoughts then work on something. But he basically did the writing of it. At various times in various ways I would be involved with editing that and conceiving the way certain things would happen. I worked him on the structure and the outline of the characters but he put it all together. This was repeated over and over again because the screenplay was rewritten many times. The film is like a jigsaw puzzle, sometimes frustratingly so. Often rewrites felt like when you see yogis on television squeeze themselves into a box then a foot would be sticking out then they would have to get the whole guy out of the box to get that foot in. That’s how complicated it was.”

The screenplay – which Aronofsky code named The Last Man, but intended on calling The Fountain – was a fusion of Handel’s research into astronomy, brain cancer and the afterlife, and Aronofsky’s fascination with Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s experiences as a 16th century conquistador. Somewhere in there, Aronofsky also wanted to explore the meaning of life. “That’s what The Fountain is for me: those late night conversations you had with your college roommates where you basically sat around and talked about what is consciousness? What is existence? That’s, for me, what the exercise of the film was about, it was to explore these big questions and to explore the big questions I think everyone has to come into it and start thinking about how they answer those questions for themselves.” Brad Pitt had seen Requiem for a Dream and was so cuckoo to work with Aronofsky, the star called within half an hour of the director dropping the script off to say he would play the lead.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura – the executive VP of worldwide motion pictures for Warner Bros. – also felt Aronofsky was a major talent, having signed him to write a Batman origin story with Frank Miller. In June 2001, Warner Bros. announced it was moving The Fountain on the fast track for production, with Cate Blanchett joining Pitt in the top secret sci-fi project. While Aronofsky had shot his debut Pi with $60,000 in donations from family and friends, and Requiem for a Dream on a $5 million budget, the cost of The Fountain was tabbed at $60 million. As a September 2001 start date crept closer, that figure climbed to at least $72 million. Warner Bros. tapped the brakes, putting the production on an extended hiatus. Cate Blanchett spent much of the next year on maternity leave, Pitt turned down other job offers – growing a mountain man beard for his character’s scenes in New Spain – and Aronofsky labored to unravel his ambitious screenplay with an eye on reducing costs.

Production of The Fountain was rescheduled for October 2002 at Warner Roadshow Studios in Queensland, Australia. A crew of 450 technicians was – by Aronofsky’s estimation – 60-70% finished constructing the elaborate sets, including a 120-foot tall Mayan pyramid. 150 performers cast as Mayan warriors were waiting to be flown in from Guatemala. Aronofsky had storyboarded and shot listed the entire film. Then seven weeks before cameras were set to roll, the director received a call from Brad Pitt’s agents at CAA notifying him that their client was dropping out of The Fountain. Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov would later admit that Pitt found the original script brilliant, but flawed, and was not satisfied with Aronofsky’s attempts to streamline the story. Aronofsky recalls, “After working together for two and a half years, Brad lost trust in me and faith in the project. He told me he felt like he was breaking up with a girl.”

Efforts to find someone else to take The Fountain to the prom when Pitt exited were unsuccessful. Warner Bros. – having sunk $18 million into the project – pulled the plug a second time, sending the crew home and auctioning off the sets. Seven months later, in the summer of 2003, Aronofsky was unable to sleep. He found his research materials still staring at him from his bookshelf and recalls thinking, “What is the cheapest version of this film that still captures what it’s about and captures the spectacle of it, but I don’t have to deal with all the nightmares? So I literally started writing and two weeks later, this version of The Fountain came out and it was a very different film, but everyone who read it felt it was better. Because I didn’t have to write it for a price, a studio, or for an actor, I was purely writing what I wanted to write, I was able to finally shape it into what it was meant to be.”

Scaling the film back with an independently minded aesthetic, Aronofsky’s producer Eric Watson estimated that Version 2.0 of The Fountain could be produced for roughly $35 million. Warner Bros. agreed to bankroll it, splitting costs with producer Arnon Milchan and his New Regency Pictures. Watson admitted, “We may have been naïve when we started The Fountain about the way Hollywood works. We learned it, and looking back I don’t know if I would have wanted those lessons, but I have them. We thought the whole process was set up to get movies made but you still have to fight.” Aronofsky met Hugh Jackman, who was performing on Broadway in The Boy From Oz; the actor was not only as enthusiastic about the script and working with Aronofsky as Pitt had been, but suggested the director’s fiancée Rachel Weisz be considered as the female lead. In November 2004 – over two years after being shut down – The Fountain finally began shooting, at Technoparc Studios in Montreal.

Premiering September 2006 at the Venice Film Festival to a mixed reaction, The Fountain made a blitz through several festivals – in Toronto, Austin, Chicago – before opening in the U.S. in November. Critics uniformly trashed the long delayed dream project. Carina Chocano, the Los Angeles Times: “Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot.” A.O. Scott, the New York Times: “The problem, though, is that its techniques run too far beyond its ideas, which are blurry and banal, rather than mysterious and resonant. The Fountain is something to see, but it is also much less, finally, than meets the eye.” Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle: “Aronofsky’s reach far exceeds his grasp with this film, and the muddle he concocts makes one wonder if there was ever a solid foundation for The Fountain. Hope may spring eternal, but this fountain is a dry hole.”

The Fountain grossed $10.1 million in the U.S. and $5.8 million overseas, but if Aronofsky had any regrets, he didn’t air them during a media roundtable in November 2006. “I’ve always made divisive films. Whenever you try to make something new, something different, some people are going to want to hang with it, some people are going to shut down. I had the same kind of response on Requiem and the same response on Pi. So I’m very used to it. I know the amount of labor and love that went into The Fountain and, for me, it represents that work so I’m very proud of it. It’s interesting because it’s not the critics that judge films anymore, it’s the public. Because of the Internet, you get people writing in and creating dialogue and that’s what you want to do: you want to make an impact. When you get a 20-year-old kid writing three pages on a talkback about your film, that’s the victory for me. It means that kid has a great experience with it. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

Opinion
Trying to diagnose what went wrong on The Fountain takes an approach like Mission Control’s in Apollo 13; it’s easier to talk about what’s actually good in the film than it is to check off all the systems that are FUBAR. Clint Mansell’s orchestral score is grandly elegant, even if the movie it was composed for does not live up to the sweep of the music. Much of the framing, compositions and camera movements are ornate, even if the Pay-Less sets give director of photography Matthew Libatique precious little to work with. And Darren Aronofsky’s devotion to bringing “psychedelic” back to sci-fi deserves an extra credit point, even it’s on a project that flunks out of the class. In The Fountain, the universe is as mysterious as a fortune cookie, love is as infinite as a bad soap opera and the future is as awesome as a Hare Krishna floating through space in his pajamas.

The budget definitely does not help Aronofsky get his ideas across any more coherently – the Mayan jungle and space bubble sets are so obscured and cheesy looking that taking the movie seriously becomes an exercise in futility – but it’s the screenplay that ultimately writes a check that the director cannot cash, even with his admirable visual skills. Characters remain flat (the gravitas of Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis, Cliff Curtis and Ethan Suplee go to waste in bit parts.) Dialogue is unintentionally funny (Jackman’s line reading upon discovering the tree of life: “Behold!”). Most stupefying for a film so inspired by 2001, Star Wars or The Matrix – at least in terms of wanting to take sci-fi to new places – The Fountain regresses to vague film school drivel where artistic ambition is everything and imagination means little, even in stories about the mysteries of the universe.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“The Outsider”. By Steve Silberman. Wired, November 2006

The Boondock Saints (1999)
Written by Troy Duffy
Directed by Troy Duffy
Produced by Brood Syndicate/ Chris Brinker Productions/ Fried Films/ The Lloyd Segan Company/ Franchise Pictures
Running time: 110 minutes

Synopsis
After whipping a trio of Russian mobsters in a pub brawl, Irish Catholic twins Connor McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy McManus (Norman Reedus) are paid a visit by their pissed off foes. Mopping up the bodies of the Russians afterward, Boston police are aided by outrageous FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), who theorizes the deaths were personal; one of them had a toilet bowl dropped on him. The McManus boys – fluent in seven languages and plying their intelligence as meat packers – turn themselves in and plead self-defense. But after receiving a vision from God to destroy all that is evil so that good may flourish, they embark on a vigilante murder spree against the Boston underworld. The boondock saints have so much fun that they let their dense buddy Rocco (David Della Rocco) in on the team. To retaliate, the mob turns to Irish super assassin Il Duce (Billy Connolly).

Production history
After spending childhood in Exeter, New Hampshire amid a large, lower middle class Irish American family, Troy Duffy was accepted into the premed program at Colorado State University. Realizing his dream was rock ‘n roll, he dropped out of school and headed for Los Angeles in 1993. By day, Duffy served coffee in Westwood and by night, flipped burgers at a titty bar. After taking on odd jobs in home repair, Duffy found himself tending bar at a watering hole on Melrose called J. Sloan’s. With his brother Taylor and two buddies he’d put together a band they called The Brood, but Duffy’s primary occupation soon became movies. He recalled, “The straw that broke the camel’s back was Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death. All I could think was, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

Titled The Boondock Saints, the script Duffy wrote concerned two Irish brothers who embark on a spiritual crusade to cleanse Boston of “evil men”, putting a flamboyant FBI agent on their trail. Duffy recalls, “The idea for the script was just borne out of poverty and frustration. Me and my brother living in Hollywood in this freaking crackhouse, apartment vandalized and his truck broken into, and just living in shit. Getting frustrated and wondering why no one ever does anything about this, and the police just have no real control over it. We had that fantasy. You know who broke into your apartment, and you see that guy in the halls, and you just want to take a baseball bat to his head, but something stops you. I think we had that question in our heads of, ‘What if something didn’t?’”

A friend named Chris Binder who’d gotten a job as an assistant at New Line Cinema made sure The Boondock Saints was passed up the food chain. The heat around Duffy and his writing sample began to build; producer Robert Fried dropped by Sloan’s to meet him. In February 1997, the William Morris Agency took Duffy on as a client. Within a month, they’d inked a $500,000 deal for Duffy to write two original screenplays for Paramount Pictures. That got the attention of Harvey Weinstein, chairman of Miramax Films. Two weeks after the Paramount deal – while in town for the Academy Awards – Weinstein put in an appearance at Duffy’s workplace. Weinstein stated, “I loved the script that he wrote. Then he told me all the ideas for other films that he had, and I said, ‘A guy who thinks like this won’t be around on a one-shot deal.’ The proof is in the words. I read a lot of scripts that get near Boondock Saints but that don’t close the deal. They’re imitations. They’re mechanical. These characters come from Troy Duffy’s soul.”

In a deal celebrated in newspapers around the globe, Weinstein purchased The Boondock Saints for the following terms: $300,000 for Duffy’s script, $150,000 for Duffy to make his directorial debut. The film would carry a budget of $15 million. Duffy’s band The Brood would produce the music. Duffy would retain casting approval and final cut over the film. Last but not least, Weinstein agreed to buy J. Sloan’s outright and split ownership of the bar with his new discovery. No sooner than Duffy was throwing a backyard barbecue to celebrate, Mark Wahlberg dropped by to discuss starring in the movie. Jake Busey, Jerry O’Connell, Billy Zane, Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum and Emilio Estevez were among the actors who showed up at Sloan’s to hold court with Duffy.

Over at Miramax, it was hoped The Boondock Saints would follow the blueprint established by Pulp Fiction and followed by Cop Land: edgy, character driven crime dramas with roles so rich that name actors would waive their salaries for the chance to participate. Duffy had written the nutty FBI agent with Jim Carrey in mind. When the superstar comic passed, Miramax suggested Bill Murray, Mike Myers or Sylvester Stallone. Duffy countered with Patrick Swayze. When the studio proposed making an offer to Brad Pitt to play one of the title characters, Duffy shot that idea down too, reportedly telling friends he didn’t think much of Pitt’s Irish accent in The Devil’s Own. Duffy rejected Matt Damon for not being gritty enough. In private, he called Keanu Reeves a “punk” and Ethan Hawke “a talentless fool.”

Ewan McGregor was interested enough in The Boondock Saints to take a meeting with Duffy. Tony Montana – a co-manager of The Brood, who was shooting a documentary about the Troy Duffy phenomenon – remembered, “Troy thought he could go out, meet with Ewan and get drunk, have a Scottish-Irish love affair, as he called it, and sign him lickety-split. That’s what he said. So he went to New York, and when he came back, things got very quiet. It turned out that they had a bad meeting, got into an argument over the death penalty, and Ewan wasn’t interested. And at that time, Ewan was really one of Miramax’s rising stars.” Unable to lock a cast, Duffy found it harder to get Weinstein on the phone. In November 1997, the studio notified Duffy’s agents that they would not be producing The Boondock Saints.

Duffy recalls, “I told them I’ll jibe with them on every other domain. If you want to cut my budget, if you want to film half of it in Toronto and half in Boston, I’ll jibe with you everywhere except when it comes to casting. So they said, ‘Well, Troy, we just can’t deal with that.’ ” Duffy was permitted to keep his writing fee, but potential buyers were on the hook to reimburse Miramax $700,000 for development costs, plus the $150,000 they’d promised for Duffy to direct. Producer Robert Fried mused, “Troy was very raw and outspoken, and it hurt him. When actors met with him, he didn’t always sound like a polished filmmaker, and it put some people off. But that’s part of what makes such an original. He’s not fake – he’s the real thing.”

Riding to the rescue was Elie Samaha, a former nightclub owner whose Franchise Pictures had carved out a niche bankrolling the pet projects of major stars – Bruce Willis (The Whole Nine Yards), John Travolta (Battlefield Earth), Kevin Costner (3000 Miles To Graceland) – that no one was else wanted to finance. After attaching Sean Patrick Flanery and Jon Bon Jovi to the title roles, Duffy met with Willem Dafoe in April 1998 at the actor’s experimental theater company in New York. As soon as Dafoe signed on to play the FBI agent and Franchise had a name actor they could use to sell the picture, The Boondock Saints commenced shooting August 1998 in Toronto on a budget of $6 million (Norman Reedus became available and was cast in Bon Jovi’s place.)

The München Fantasy Filmfest in Germany was where The Boondock Saints held its world premiere August 1999. It also played theaters in Denmark before a limited release January 2000 at five theaters in the United States. During its three-week run, The Boondock Saints grossed $30,471. But in what may have been the first viral marketing outbreak in Hollywood history, many who discovered the movie on DVD told a friend, who told another friend, who told more friends. Ultimately, more than 430,000 units were sold. The official website boasts a fan section (whose devout members refer to themselves as The Flock) and a store, which sells merchandise from Boondock Saints shot glasses to rosary beads. The DVD grew popular enough for Duffy to secure financing for Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Day, which commenced shooting October 2008 in Toronto. Peter Fonda, Judd Nelson and Julie Benz join Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus and Billy Connolly in the sequel.

At “The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time: Boondock Saints” on videogum, viewers submitted their opinions. H.F.G.: ”My ex-boyfriend loved this movie and tried to get me to watch it. I got half-way through this movie before I just looked at him and said ‘If you wanted to break-up with me, you should have said so.’” jess: “It is poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written, non-sensical, and stupid. I love violent movies AND stupid movies, for that matter. But Boondock Saints definitely represents one of those weird cultural phenomenon moments for me when everyone is saying, ‘You’re going to DIE this movie is so awesome.’ And then, it’s clearly not awesome. Not at all.” Manvnature: “I hate this movie. I hate the people who made it. I hate the cameras that were used to shoot it. I used to love Willem Dafoe. Then I saw this movie. I try not to judge people too much for their personal artistic taste, but I definitely use this film as a litmus test. If you like it, our paths shant cross again.”

Talking Boondock Saints in an interview with attrition.org, Duffy declared, “Yes, it has become a ‘cult’ film. Do you know what that is? It’s simple. A cult flick is a film that Hollywood missed. They made a mistake, plain and simple. After people’s love of the film is expressed the number one comment I hear is, ‘Why wasn’t this in theaters?’ I had my industry screenings a few weeks after Columbine occurred, when the president was forming judiciary committees against violent film. Studios were pulling back and Boondocks was black listed. If anybody had the nuts, we could have seen exactly what this movie could have done in theaters. But, fuck it. I have received mail from fans all over the world. The raw fact is, Boondocks hit the public and they loved it … I am sure in my heart that what happened here happened the way it was supposed to. I love this film. I am proud of this film.”

Opinion
If you let it slip that you’ve never actually seen The Boondock Saints and somebody gets in our face to demand that you watch it, these are the steps to follow: 1) Change the subject by asking them how they’re doing in school, 2) Remind them not to drink and drive, 3) Thank them for their recommendation, 4) Do not see the movie. The Boondock Saints is a gangsta rap demo recorded on film, a bro revenge fantasy that attempts to mix the symbolism of The Deer Hunter with the bullet worship of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The result is feature length masturbation with an admittedly intriguing hook, but wretched execution all the way down the line, from writing to casting to editing. It’s so unwatchable you’ll want to snap the DVD in half and send Guy Ritchie a note on Facebook, apologizing for anything bad you ever said about his movies.

Troy Duffy should be congratulated for getting The Boondock Saints made and mesmerizing the crowd the movie seems designed for: 15 to 22 year old bros who always wanted to hang a neon beer sign in their room. For the sober moviegoer, there’s nothing to recommend about the film at all. Unable or unwilling to involve us in anything dramatically, Duffy tries to compensate by going wildly over the top and making a cheeseball action farce: Ron Jeremy has a cameo, a cat is shot, Willem Dafoe performs in drag. If Duffy had followed the example of Jon Favreau, channeling his Hollywood frustrations into a script about his barstool buddies wondering whether they should get a life, it might not have been as funny as Swingers, but at least it would have been honest. The Boondock Saints is so high on its own supply that the sequel may be the only picture with any chance of topping it as the worst ever made.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Hollywood’s Suddenly Drunk on a Bartender’s Idea”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 14, 1997

“The Two Faces of Hollywood”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 10, 1998

“Back Behind the Bar”. Patrick Goldstein, the Los Angeles Times. April 13, 1998

“Boondock Saints”. Amy Finch, the Boston Phoenix. November 2, 1998

Overnight (2003), directed by Brian Mark Smith & Tony Montana

Jason Bateman was born January 14, 1969 in Rye, New York. Bateman’s father Kent was a TV writer and director who ran a postproduction facility. Bateman’s mother was a flight attendant. At the age of 10, Bateman was living in Los Angeles, helping his dad wash the car when a neighbor on his way to audition – for the role of a father in an educational film – stopped in front of the house. Bateman recalls, “He asked me if I wanted to go along, and I said yes, and fortunately for me they were reading for the role of the son that day as well. So he told me to sneak in there and make it look like I knew what I was doing, and that I was supposed to be there. And so I did, and I got the part, and thought, ‘Well, this is fun and maybe I’m good at this.’ And so my dad took some pictures of me and sent them into an agency. They liked the pictures, and signed me up.”

Bateman landed in commercials for Honeynut Cheerios, Coca Cola and McDonald’s. In 1981, he began a ubiquitous decade on TV by joining the final season of Little House on the Prairie. Bateman found a bigger audience the following year, as Ricky Schroeder’s smarmy pal Derek Taylor on Silver Spoons. Bateman’s rising popularity got him a lead in another NBC sitcom – It’s Your Move – in 1984. Playing a teenage scam artist to a single mom (Caren Kaye), his character’s hijinks sparked so much protest from parents that the network white washed the sociopathic behavior mid-season. It’s Your Move was cancelled after 18 episodes. Interviewed by The Onion in 2004, Bateman stated, “I get a lot of really nice comments about that show. I guess there were a lot more people watching TV back then, and there were only three networks, and we were all 14 or 15 and doing nothing but watching TV and staring at girls. It was a good time to be on TV.”

While his sister Justine Bateman was being featured on the hit sitcom Family Ties, Jason was onto his fourth series for NBC, beginning a five season run as Valerie Harper’s oldest son on the sitcom Valerie in 1986. For his summer hiatus, Bateman was offered the lead in a movie, Teen Wolf Too. It was justifiably shunned by audiences. Shortly after Valerie/ Valerie’s Family/ The Hogan Family was finally cancelled in 1991, Bateman starred in another little seen flick – Breaking the Rules - playing a cancer patient who heads cross country to compete in Jeopardy! before he dies. “I load up a van with my two best friends, Jonathan Silverman and C. Thomas Howell, and we end up meeting Annie Potts, and I get married to her, and, it’s not bad, but, you know, I was 19 when I did it.” The movie did little to raise the actor’s visibility as a screen actor.

Bateman spent the 1990s in near anonymity on television. In addition to Movies of the Week with titles like Confessions: Two Faces of Evil and Hart to Hart: Secrets of the Hart, the actor was living from pilot season to pilot season. Simon lasted one season on the WB in 1995. George & Leo – starring Bob Newhart & Judd Hirsch – only taped five episodes on CBS in 1997. Some of My Best Friends, in which Bateman starred as a gay writer who takes on a straight roommate, made it to eight episodes on CBS in 2001. Bateman recalls, “There are certain networks that are better for liberal fare, and CBS, at least at the time, was not leading in that race as far as their audience and demographic. If it had been on NBC, on a more liberal night – like a Thursday – it probably would’ve had a better shot. Will & Grace was certainly having a good time there.”

Bateman’s 2003 pilot season audition was for a Fox comedy series titled Arrested Development. Describing his career resurgence to NPR in 2008, Bateman commented, “My mother is British and so she gave me this very sort of dry, sarcastic sense of humor. And that works in some projects better than others, it’s more appropriate … And that was also coupled with getting older, and having a different sense of humor, and becoming a bit more cynical or sarcastic or adult, and the writing supported that, and almost, most importantly, I had Jeffrey Tambor. And this is a guy who taught me a lot about – to quote him – not winking.” Bateman was cast as Michael Bluth – the sane character in a family of reprobates – and though Arrested Development was not a ratings success during its three season run, it grew into one of the more prestigious shows on TV.

By the time Bateman hosted Saturday Night Live in February 2005, film offers were pouring in. He appeared as a color commentator in Dodgeball, a bunny suit wearing wacko in Smokin’ Aces and a sarcastic FBI intelligence agent in The Kingdom. The critical and commercial cinematic sensation of 2007 – Juno – featured Bateman as an adoptive parent opposite Jennifer Garner. In 2008, he starred with Will Smith and Charlize Theron in the summer blockbuster Hancock. Remaining self-depreciating about his career rejuvenation, Bateman told The Collider in 2007: “It has less and less to do with your talent, I think. And I don’t mean to sound cynical. But a big part of being hired is what you add or detract from the project as far as pedigree goes. And that show was very well-received. And so I’m just trying to, you know, take the good roles that are coming my way, and try to perpetuate that level of whatever it is.”

© Joe Valdez