24th March 2011
Morgan Spurlock: I'm With the Brand
“Brands and content creators have struggled over control and influence for more than a century. As Spurlock writes in the production notes handed out at screenings of his film, “In the 1800s, Jules Verne sold the naming rights to shipping companies in Around the World in 80 Days, and in the early days of film, Thomas Edison put ads for his own products in the movies.” Radio pioneers like Fred Allen (who quipped, back in the early 1950s, that TV “allows people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who haven’t done anything” — hello, Paris Hilton and her fans!) battled and assuaged their sponsors in the same uneasy way that network news shows do now. Richard Sandomir of The New York Times recently reported that some announcers at ESPN were paid by Nike and Reebok to wear their shoes. Writing on the media-industry blog Romenesko, investigative journalist David Cay Johnston was dismayed: “If [Robert] Iger [CEO of Disney, which owns ESPN] does nothing,” he will leave “doubt as to who may be on the take, whose agenda is being advanced by greasing palms, and which critical stories are fueled by under-the-table payments.” Given this kind of hand-wringing, it’s fair to ask, as Spurlock’s movie does: Just what kind of purity are we looking for? How clean does content need to be — or can it be?
8th March 2011
Casino Royale: discovering the lost script
“The fact that Ben Hecht contributed to the script of Casino Royale has been known for decades, and is mentioned in passing in many books. But perhaps because the film Feldman eventually released in 1967 was a near-incoherent spoof, nobody has followed up to find out precisely what his contribution entailed. My interest was piqued when I came across an article in a May 1966 issue of Time, which mentioned that the screenplay of Casino Royale had started many years earlier “as a literal adaptation of the novel”, and that Hecht had had “three bashes at it”. I decided to go looking for it.
To my amazement, I found that Hecht not only contributed to Casino Royale, but produced several complete drafts, and that much of the material survived. It was stored in folders with the rest of his papers in the Newberry Library in Chicago, where it had been sitting since 1979. And, outside of the people involved in trying to make the film, it seemed nobody had read it. Here was a lost chapter, not just in the world of the Bond films, but in cinema history: before the spoof, Ben Hecht adapted Ian Fleming’s first novel as a straight Bond adventure.
(Thanks, Keith)
28th February 2011
Inside Hollywood's Greatest Vanity Project
“It had cost him $32 million and would earn a total of just $754,000 at the box office, and it hurt all the more because it was not just his first major production, but was all about him. One of the most brazen vanity projects in Hollywood history, the movie focuses on one man—based on Mallick—and his entrepreneurial genius, his business acumen, and his uncorruptible core, which allowed him to keep his moral bearing amid a sea of sleaze and filth. He’d cast Luke Wilson in the lead—as himself, essentially—and also enlisted James Caan and Giovanni Ribisi. And the movie was good—Variety called it “compelling [and] skillfully made.”
Still, it was a flop of epic proportions.
Oscar Night in Hollywood
“It isn’t so much that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements are not rewarded as such. They are rewarded as fine achievements in box-office hits. You can’t be an All-American on a losing team. Technically, they are voted, but actually they are not decided by the use of whatever artistic and critical wisdom Hollywood may happen to possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.
(Via The Atlantic)
18th February 2011
The Day the Movies Died
“Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.
15th February 2011
Zaire Paige Not Only Played a Movie Killer, He Became One in Real Life
“Paige isn’t an actor—he has no formal training and had never acted professionally before making the film. But at his audition, he showed such an unlikely dose of talent and confidence that director Antoine Fuqua gave him a significant part. During the 2008 filming, Paige got advice from veteran actors like Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, and Hassan Johnson, who played the tough-nosed Wee-Bey on The Wire. […] But Fuqua knew that the charismatic Paige had a troubled side, one that added authenticity to his role in the movie.
9th February 2011
The Weinstein Way
“Harvey Weinstein lost not only his beloved Miramax studio, and millions of dollars, but also his passion for filmmaking. Bryan Burrough tells how Hollywood’s last true impresario returned in triumph—just in time for Oscar season.
4th February 2011
National Treasure
“Befitting his status as the most gonzo star ever to take home a best-actor Oscar—he makes Jack Nicholson look like a Swiss banker—Cage has never been Mr. Choosy about which films to grace with his quasi-epileptic presence. Considering how drab most of them would be without him, maybe we should count ourselves lucky.
1st February 2011
The Geek-Kings of Smut
“After once being the best thing that ever happened to porn, the Internet is now wreaking havoc: destroying some fortunes, making bigger ones, and serving as a stimulus plan, in more ways than one.
9th January 2011
Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration
“Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them.
