Category: News

Dear Gordon,

I know you weren’t too happy about learning that Tim Burton had cast an 18-year old to play his Alice for the new version of Alice in Wonderland that he’s shooting for Disney and with the idea of Johnny Depp playing the Mad Hatter. Well, Hollywood Reporter said that Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter are joining the cast as the two chess-themed monarchs, the White Queen and the Red Queen, respectively.

In addition, HR’s details reveal that in Burton’s film, the two will play sisters with the former having been banished and asking Alice to slay a creature called a Bandersnatch, presumably in order to get her kingdom back—while anyone who’s ever read Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There knows that such a thing never took place.

I’ll be over here while you finish ranting.

Sincerely,
Trisha Lynn

In announcing that the TV and radio actors’ union (AFTRA) and the movie actors’ union (SAG) would conduct their commercials contract re-negotiations together, Variety reported that AFTRA’s president Roberta Reardon said that it took the help of the federation of unions (AFL-CIO) to get them to this point.

I almost wish that I could have been a fly on the wall for that meeting, because I’m pretty certain the AFL-CIO guys would have said the same thing I’ve been thinking for months: SAG, you’re looking like a tool in this fight, and you’ve lost so much ground. If you want to get anywhere, you’re going to have to either bend a little, or bring a different weapon to the table.

Still, it’s so very hard for me to feel sympathetic towards SAG, especially in light of the current financial bailout, the knowledge that since studios get their operating money from investment firms, there might not be any extra money for new media residuals to go around, and my lack of knowledge about how much the average SAG actor—a working actor who isn’t a big celebrity, but someone who still manages to work on enough sets—is affected by the stalled movie contract.

Yesterday, SAG’s negotiating committee—and wouldn’t I really love to know who’s on it!—passed a resolution that basically pleads with the newly elected board to vote on whether or not it will ask its members to strike in order to get a better contract from the AMPTP. Just in case we all forgot, the contract they don’t like is the same one that the Writer’s Guild of America got after they went on strike. The AMPTP immediately proved they were more media-savvy than SAG by issuing a statement on the front page of its website, part of which reads:

Is this really the time for anyone associated with the entertainment business to be talking about going on strike? Not only is the business suffering from recent economic conditions, but if ever there was a time when Americans wanted the diversions of movies and television, it is now.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, 147,000 below-the-line workers in India’s rich movie industry went on strike yesterday. Those workers—which include the lighting technicians, the chorus girls, and the camera operators—called their action a “non-cooperation movement” à la Gandhi, but the studios aren’t having any of it. Over 40 shoots were affected, and at least one film that is expected to be released at the end of October has its opening date on the line.

And what are they asking for, you wonder?

On-time pay (usually, they get paid 90 days after a shoot is over), a 12-hour maximum workday, and improved safety conditions.

Kinda makes you really want to knee some American actors in the balls, don’t it?

Who knew that when 16-year old Bo Burnham started crafting music videos for his brother who was away at college in 2006, only two years later would he be represented by one of the top agencies in the U.S., with a Comedy Central record deal and publications like Hollywood Reporter stating that he was “in talks” with hit comedy director Judd Apatow to co-write a musical?

This is just further proof that the Hollywood dream is not dead; it’s just moved to the Internet. The best part about this is that Burnham does indeed have some wicked songwriting chops – though I find his habit of using callbacks in almost every chorus to be a crutch. Go study some Sondheim and Cole Porter! Your career will thank me for it!

In addition to Rachel McAdams being signed to star in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (filming starts next month!) as Arthur Conan Doyle’s only interesting female character Irene Adler, Hollywood Reporter is also saying that Jude Law will be RDJ’s Watson and Mark Strong will play Holmes’ nemesis, Blackwood. I don’t know enough about Strong to be excited about him, and I have to admit that I often get Jude Law confused with Ewan McGregor (when he cleans up, that is). Still, good casting choices, methinks.

The more I re-read the Sherlock Holmes short stories, the more I appreciate them. I’m in the middle of reading “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” on Bibliomania, and there are a few of the stories there that are about Holmes’ earliest cases, when he was fresh out of college or even when he was in college (“The Gloria Scott,” “The Musgrave Ritual”) and I have to admit that turning a tale like those into a movie might not be a bad idea.

Still, RDJ will have to go a very long way towards replacing Jeremy Brett as being the ultimate Holmes for me, God rest his soul.

As a former English major, I’m aware that there are only so many basic themes and plots to go around. As a (mostly) unpublished writer, I know that there are only so many ways you can tell the same story. However, as a movie fan, I’ve become pleasantly aware that with the visual medium, there are so many things you can do to make the commonplace absolutely extraordinary. Hell, Charlie Kaufman’s made a career of it—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, anyone?

And with the official announcement of his next project Looper‘s 2009 production start date, writer/director Rian Johnson seems to be adding his name to the list of those in the Newer and Spacier Hollywood. Looper is purportedly the tale of hitmen who get sent their targets from the future. So if Brick was the re-imagining of the noir film and The Brothers Bloom is the re-imagining of the conman film, I’m fully prepared to have my little mind’s conceptions of the suspense-thriller completely blown away.

It’s been a while since I gave you an AMPTP vs. SAG update, hasn’t it? Well, previously on Dude, Where’s My Contract?…

Marcia Wallace and the Unite for Strength underdogs challenged Membership First incumbents David Carradine and his gang for overall control of SAG’s fate. Meanwhile, the AMPTP pulled their black hats lower over their heads and announced they’d reached a tentative agreement with the casting directors’ union (scroll to September 12), which I am sure includes provisions for keeping their couch privileges.

The results of the nationwide election came in last week, and… well, let’s let SAG’s barking dog (which backs Membership First) run it down:

Well, the election results are in. And what have we learned? Members vote for celebrities, even if they have diametrically opposed political views as far as SAG is concerned.

For instance, UFS got five of their celebrities elected to the SAG National Board, as did Membership First, one independent Morgan Fairchild was reelected to the National Board.

So, forget any talk about this being a mandate for UFS or a rejection for Membership First. All in all, it seems to be more about who has the most recognizable kisser.

Average people voting for whomever they know that makes them feel comfortable rather than something different and outside of the norm? Us Americans and anyone who went through John Howard’s Coalition rule in Australia wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?

SAG proper also conducted their own version of the Gallup poll, sending out over mail-in postcards to some of their paid-up members asking if they wanted SAG to continue negotiations or if they wanted to take the “last and final” AMPTP offer from June 30. Of the 103,630 cards they sent out, SAG announced in a press release that 87.27% of the respondents would prefer for SAG to try and get them a better deal. Of course, the AMPTP had something to say about that as well, suggesting that there may have been ballot stuffing when there were reports of some actors receiving more than one ballot.

So where do things stand right now? We’re still nowhere near getting the SAG actors a contract, which means that these silly one-upsmanship games will continue to be played.

Maybe if I wait a few months, there will be more interesting news on this subject…

As mentioned back in July, DreamWorks SKG has finally finalized the deal to break free from the Paramount Pictures group and join up with India’s Reliance ADA. “Sources” say that the deal includes Paramount being able to keep their cut of whatever comes out of the DreamWorks pictures that started development prior to just now, without any of the upcoming or future fiscal responsibility. Films in various forms of pre-production that are affected by this deal incude Lincoln, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The 39 Clues, and Tintin.

The reason why I’m so intrigued by this deal is that ever since I learned that the movie studios these days get a lot of their financing from banks and other investment houses, I’ve been wondering how Hollywood is going to come out of our current financial crisis. The only benchmark we had to judge against was that of the Great Depression, where people flocked to the cinemas and theaters in droves, scarfing up gangster movies like Public Enemy, screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey, and musicals like 42nd St.—all genres which gained prominence in this era. Even then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt had this to say:

When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of [child actress Shirley Temple] and forget his troubles.

But “in a world” where our equivalent to Shirley Temple is pictures of cats clutching invisible objects and the motion picture industry is competing with TV, cable, and the Internet for peoples’ attention spans, that business model has to be thrown completely out the window. The question is, what kind of model will take its place?

I’m not entirely sure what Michael Douglas is up to with his most recent career decision to star in Solitary Man, a picture from Millennium Films. It’s about the former owner of a car dealership whose libido destroyed his career and marriage, which sounds like a similar premise to both Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction—movies he made when he wasn’t 64. I hope that the script has more sensibility than to try and push a May-December romance on a public that is crude and callous enough to make jokes about a presidential nominee and the 18-year age difference between him and his second wife. A dialogue about male sexuality and how testosterone overload can poison the mind? That’s an interesting subject for a movie.

Meanwhile, Ocean’s 11 and Traffic director Steven Soderbergh was indirectly quoted by Variety writer Michael Fleming as saying that Douglas would also be starring in a biography about flamboyantly and famously closeted gay pianist/entertainer Liberace that the director is developing for Warner Bros. Fleming also wrote that the director has been talking to Matt Damon about playing Scott Thorson, Liberace’s younger secret lover who sued him for over $100 million in palimony (and eventually settled for $95,000). However, “sources” have also said that it’s not going to be Soderbergh’s next project, or even the one after that. I just gotta know, whatever happened to good old-fashioned primary sources and direct quotes in movie journalism, huh?

Mind you, I am sure most of [the currently depressing slate of films to come, including Valkyrie and The Road] are distinguished films that will attract critical acclaim, but is it what the public wants (or needs) to see? Wouldn’t they prefer to see Miley Cyrus in a remake of The Wizard of Oz? Or how about Tiny Fey and Amy Poeller in a Hope & Crosby-type road movie—perhaps The Road to Alaska?

—Peter Bart, on what movies the general public should be able to choose from during the current U.S. economic crisis.

I’m not sure what to think about the details that Variety blogger David S. Cohen wrote about on the announced partnership between George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic and Paramount to make Rango, its very first animated film.

It’s going to be animated by hand but! it’s going to involve a modification to the process that ILM used to create the animated special effects in Pirates of the Carribbean 2 and 3 but! it’s going to be rendered photo realistically but! they’re also going to be stylized, according to director Gore Verbinski’s will.

It sounds like a mish-mosh of contradictions, and I’m having trouble visualizing what that’s going to look like.

Since it’s not roto-scoping, I know it’s not going to look like Heavy Metal, and I’m fine with that. It’s purported to be better than the mo-cap used in Beowulf, and since I liked Beowulf, I’m disconcerted by that. I was a little freaked out by the creature animation in Pirates of the Carribbean 2, and since this new technique is derived from that one, I’m swinging back into be concerned.

It’s enough to make one yearn for the days of Stan Winston, Phil Tippett, and puppet animation.

If you need any more proof that the Cold War is over—no really it is!—look no further than the House that a Mouse built, for Walt Disney Pictures is throwing their hard-earned Mickey money at a locally produced Russian film called Kniga Masterov, aka The Book of Masters if you don’t speak Russian or didn’t take a comparative lit course in college. (For the record, I’m a member of both groups.) Masters will be a children’s adventure based on Russian fairy tales and characters written and directed by Vadim Sokolovsky, Disney’s head of acquisitions and production in Russia.

Part of me likes the idea of Disney teaming up with foreign movie houses to release films geared towards children about their own culture and/or ethnic backgrounds. If Disney had come out with a movie that was the dramatic tale of how a bunch of natives rose up against the cruel foreigner who was talked into killing their leader by his rival and struck him in the back with a spear when I was a kid, I think I might have actually been more tempted to learn Tagalog.

As it is, Disney’s backing of this film will do wondrous things for their bottom line because if the movie’s only going to cost $7 million USD to make and there are about 141 million people in Russia, (based on the average cost of a movie ticket in Russia, carry the one…) the only people who would need to see this film would be everyone in Moscow, and the rest of the country can just put their feet up.

Original author and real estate broker Richard Doetsch must either have real chops, the best agent in the world, or a lucky horseshoe lodged up his butt in order to nail a second movie deal for a book that didn’t even have a publisher when the movie deal was struck; his first book The Thieves of Heaven is being developed at Fox 2000 and his next novel is going to be auctioned off to the highest publishing bidder soon. Hell, maybe he’s got all three.

The best part of this story is the note that Doetsch has up on his website regarding The Thirteenth Hour:

While you may have read the Hollywood speak where they try to summarize the story by comparing it to two other films—in this case The Bourne Identity and The Time Traveler’s Wife (I’m flattered)—I promise you, it is so much more than that.

SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT.

Well, I’m sold. How ’bout you?

Wendy and Lucy Star, Distributor Get the NY Times Treatment
If there’s one thing I love about print media, it’s their flair for timing. First up was a September 7 profile on Wendy and Lucy star Michelle Williams (yes, they talked about Ledger’s death) and two days later, there was a profile on Beastie Boy MCA, whose indie film label Oscilloscope picked up the film, which opens in limited release on December 10. I’m still not convinced that online press can secure that kind of star access.

Sid and Marty Krofft Strike Universal Gold Again with Sea Monsters
The deal to make a movie based on the live-action/puppet show “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” came right on the heels of production being completed on Land of the Lost, which stars Will Ferrell and will screen in June 2009. (Source: Variety)

Mamma Mia! Lead to Continue Schmaltzy Movie Streak with Sparks Novel Adaptation
It looks like the upcoming dark comedy Jennifer’s Body-starring, “Big Love” daughter of polygamists-portraying Amanda Seyfried is swinging back to the fluffy, romcom side of things with a lead role in Dear John, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel. Now that’s how you throw a change-up into a movie career. (Source: Variety)

Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, and Lisa Kudrow to Star in Paper Man
The story is described as a coming of age comedy focused on the friendship between a failed author (that’s Jeff Daniels) and a Long Island teen. I am trying my best not to make a reference to Alexander Nabokov’s novel Lolit—DAMNIT! (Source: Variety)

As for the other New Line movie announced this week based on best-selling chick-lit novel How to Be Single by Liz Tuccillo (a co-writer of He’s Just Not That Into You), I can probably only think of one reason to think that it would be better or more different than any of the other movies about single women who are trying to find romance in New York City, and that’s if it honestly addresses the real problems that are facing many of the single women here. (Source: Hollywood Reporter)

If you’re under 25, female, and single, the world is your burrito — or fish taco if you’re a lesbian — because every year, there is an influx of cute college freshmen who aren’t smart enough or connected enough to get into an Ivy League school but whose parents make enough money to get them into a private school whose annual tuition is the equivalent of someone else’s yearly salary. You’ll get drunk at clubs where they don’t necessarily check your I.D., know the doormen at all the surrounding dorms by face when you leave them at 6 am during your Walk of Shame, it’ll be a blast.

Then, once you leave college and are lucky enough to nab an entry-level job in your field and make something of yourself by the time you’re 30, something strange happens. All that free time you had to go clubbing? Gone, because you’re either busting your ass to keep paying for a small, cramped apartment in Manhattan or busting your ass to keep paying for a slightly more roomy apartment in one of the other boroughs that you share with some stranger who you may or may not have met off of Craigslist in a desperate attempt to get some housing before you’re forced to move back to your home state or if you’re a native New Yorker, move back in with your parents.

And after you hit 30, it gets worse.

By that time, you’re somewhat expected to either start thinking of having kids or have one already, and if you’re not in a somewhat stable relationship with another busy Manhattanite you haven’t married yet because you’re both working on your careers, you’re spending so much time on the subway commuting to and from your outer borough apartment to your friends’ favorite Manhattan night spots that you don’t have time to eat healthily or exercise. You’re also likely to have a second job, which you take just to be able to afford your very first therapist. As for finding romance at the office, fuggedaboutit, because you’re old enough to know better than to make out with the mailroom staff or the receptionist, but you can’t help but flirt with them anyway since everyone else who is at the same responsibility-level as you are is also your competition for a decreasing amount of raises and bonuses thanks to the recession.

Now that I think about it, maybe a movie about the reality of being a single woman in New York City is just too depressing to be made.