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HAMILTON & PREMIERE Celebrate Hollywood’s Designers & Stylists

ARIANNE PHILLIPS As the costume designer for the upcoming film Walk the Line, Arianne Phillips had a daunting task. Not only did she have to dress country legends Johnny Cash and June Carter [played by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon], she had to design costumes for numerous rock and roll idols including Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. Fortunately, Phillips has some experience working with pop icons. In addition to designing costumes for films like The People vs. Larry Flynt and Girl, Interrupted, Phillips works as a stylist for several rock stars including Lenny Kravitz and Madonna. “The last thing I want to do when I’m finished with a film is go work on another one because I kind of want to digest it,” says Phillips. “If I can have these little romances doing music videos or a fashion campaign it allows me to express myself in different ways. It all informs each other. I think that’s what makes me a better designer.”

THE MAN IN BLACK: Johnny Cash wore black to his first audition out of pure practicality. “He and his band members were all poor and the only piece of clothing they all had was a funeral outfit,” says Phillips. Over time black became a symbol for Cash. “This film is about Johnny Cash’s journey to becoming the Man in Black so I gradually added black to his wardrobe to show this transformation.”

MADONNA AND ME:

“When Madonna asks you to work with her she expects you to collaborate. You have to bring something to the table. At first it was very daunting but after working together for eight years we’ve developed shorthand. Aesthetically similar things inspire us. We’re both into photography. We both read a lot. So there’s a shared language. In the work I’ve done with her I’ve been able to express myself in a way that you’re not always able to do.”

BOOK SMART:

For every project she works on Phillips compiles a book of visual research – everything from inspirational photography to fabric swatches. “A costume designer has to find ways to communicate emotion and feeling,” says Phillips. “I’m not confident in my abilities as an artist, so I rely on a lot of different visual materials to communicate an idea along with a drawing I might do.” “Angelina had very specific ideas about her character. She thought her palate should be very monochromatic — like beige on beige on beige, from hair to makeup to costume. I remember being very inspired by that. Often actors bring in an idea you never thought of.”

UP NEXT: Madonna’s upcoming album cover.

Scenes from Walk The Line

Walk The Line: In Theatres November 2005 © 20th Century Fox

Photos by: Suzanne Tenner

GIRL INTERRUPTED:

khaki navy GMT automatic movement 2 time zones water resistant to 200m sapphire crystal

In Theaters September 30

INTO THE BLUE © 2005 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, Inc. and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights reserved.

VOL.19, #2

OCTOBER 2005 CONTENTS

Women in Hollywood 2005

78 Charlize Theron BY FRED SCHRUERS Though she’s the epitome of cool elegance, she’s unafraid to play the Monster. Charlize Theron talks candidly about her difficult past, Oscar success, and upcoming roles in Aeon Flux and North Country.

86 Rachel Weisz BY ANN DONAHUE Her role in The Mummy got her noticed, but with The Constant Gardener and The Fountain, the British beauty is hitting her stride.

BACK IN BLACK: Charlize Theron is all class.

78

Photograph by Gilles Bensimon

90 Laura Linney BY TOM ROSTON This playwright’s daughter on going from “cold” and “just not sexy” to acclaimed roles in You Can Count on Me, Kinsey, and this year’s The Squid and the Whale.

94 Shirley MacLaine BY BRANTLEY BARDIN From 1955’s The Trouble With Harry to the current In Her Shoes, her 50-year career has made her a Hollywood icon. Shirley MacLaine reflects on this life, and the one beyond.

100 Lindsay Lohan BY RACHEL CLARKE The teen queen looks to prove her mettle as an actress with A Prairie Home Companion.

SUIT AND CAMISOLE, GUCCI

104 Sophie de Rakoff BY KELLY BORGESON She made Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods pretty in pink. The hot costume designer on how the clothes make the character.

FEATURES 106 The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History Heart-stopping. Jawdropping. Disgusting. PREMIERE presents the most spill-your-popcorn, grab-your-sweetie, reach-for-the-barf-bag moments committed to film. Can you handle it?

114 Plan B From Outer Space BY TOM RUSSO When his TV series Firefly didn’t take off, Joss Whedon took the concept to the big screen. Could Serenity be the next sci-fi franchise?

118 The PREMIERE Interview Steve Martin BY FRED SCHRUERS He’s gone from being The Jerk to America’s most lovable dad. Steve Martin, at 60, gears up for his next act—adapting his novella Shopgirl. PREMIERE.COM 11

THE COVER: Charlize Theron photographed exclusively for PREMIERE by Gilles Bensimon. Stylist, Lisa Michelle for The Wall Group; hair, Enzo Angileri for Cloutier/Matrix; makeup, Shane Paish for Chanel at celestineagency.com; manicurist, Libbie Simpkins for O.P.I. at celestineagency.com; sweater, Prada; hat, Palace Costume

TAKE ONE 27 Play Misty For Me Smallville’s Tom Welling gets lost in The Fog remake.

28 Action Five Things You Didn’t Know About Comic-Con Bryan Singer’s super plans for Superman; Jack Black on Peter Jackson’s diet plan;

plus more for your inner geekboy. Scene Stealer Separate Lies’ Tom Wilkinson on baring it all, fighting Jackie Chan, and losing the Oscar. Win Free Stuff! Complete our crossword puzzle for a chance at 38 DVDs! Yes, It’s True Liam Neeson

teaches the Japanese sex ed; Steven Seagal takes on the nuclear age; and Marilyn Monroe’s new wine reveals all.

37 First Look The luminous Ziyi Zhang stars in Memoirs of a Geisha; and Darcymania revisited. Plus, the sick mind

behind the ferocious Wolf Creek.

42 Previews Mark Ruffalo woos a ghostly Reese Witherspoon in Just Like Heaven; and Johnny Depp gets engaged to a Corpse Bride.

49 Reviews Everything Is

Illuminated is a moving road trip; Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is neo-noir fun; and The Squid and the Whale is one of the year’s best movies.

DEPARTMENTS

and the underrated Upside of Anger, this month on DVD.

144 Idol Chatter Philip Seymour Hoffman BY BRANTLEY BARDIN

On Capote and acting on the fringe.

125 Home Guide Garbo’s greatest hits; the zany Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy;

20 The Backstory 22 Letters

WALLFLOWER: Actor, writer, and comic extraordinaire Steve Martin never paints himself into a corner.

COLUMNS 54 Catching Up With . . . George Clooney BY SARA BRADY

In his second directorial effort, Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney takes an in-depth look at CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s battles with demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a time when the news really mattered.

58 The Biz The Cuban Movie Crisis BY ANN DONAHUE

14 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

BY LAWRENCE TURMAN

They’re overshadowed by directors and misunderstood by actors and audiences, but just try and make a movie without ’em. The man behind The Graduate describes the producer’s one crucial function: to run the show.

76 If You Ask Me Mommy Dearest BY LIBBY GELMANWAXNER

With so many Hollywood mantoys out there, what’s a girl to do? Libby tutors her daughter on the finer points of celebrity worship.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS BUCK

PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE REGENCY HOTEL, N.Y.C.

Billionaire Mark Cuban and his partner, Todd Wagner, have a plan to revolutionize the way movies are distributed. With one big-name director on board, can they convince a skeptical Hollywood to follow suit?

66 How to Watch a Movie: The Producer We Are Not the Enemy

PETER HERBST Editor-in-Chief DIRK BARNETT Art Director KATHERINE HEINTZELMAN Executive Editor RACHEL CLARKE Deputy Editor TIM SWANSON West Coast Bureau Chief CHRIS CRONIS Managing Editor GLENN KENNY, TOM ROSTON, FRED SCHRUERS Senior Editors ANN DONAHUE News Editor HOWARD KARREN Contributing Editor JASON MATLOFF Research Editor KELLY BORGESON Copy Chief BROOKE HAUSER Associate Editor JESSICA LETKEMANN Research Associate SARA BRADY Copy Associate RYAN DEVLIN, CRISTY LYTAL Editorial Assistants CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

ROBERT ABELE, HARRY ALLEN, BRANTLEY BARDIN, CHEO HODARI COKER LIBBY GELMAN-WAXNER, WILLIAM GOLDMAN, DAVID HOCHMAN, JAMES KAPLAN, JAMIE MALANOWSKI MICHAEL O’RORKE, STEVE POND, TRISH DEITCH ROHRER, TOM RUSSO MARK SALISBURY (London Correspondent), JOHANNA SCHNELLER, JAMIE SORCHER, ANNE THOMPSON DESIGN

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THE BACKSTORY BY PETER HERBST, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

It’s hard to believe Charlize Theron just turned 30 in August. She’s got an almost intimidating maturity to her, but it is balanced by a healthy amount of relaxed playfulness. We were sitting near enough to the kitchen of the Los Angeles hotel where we met that our server felt he had to tell us the chef was flattening some poultry. “That chicken,” she said, when a series of thumps could be heard through the wall, “is dead for sure.” The fact is, she’s anything but squeamish, notably about some of the darker elements in her own history— which she’s transformed into useful lessons—but also about Hollywood and its deceptions. That awareness has let her work this town very well, according to her own artistic precepts. —Fred Schruers, senior editor Let’s go over the egghead credentials of Rachel Weisz: Educated at Cambridge University. Has a background in experimental theater. Engaged to auteur Darren Aronofsky. But when I asked her if the improvisation in The Constant Gardener was difficult, her answer was, “I was as happy as a pig in shit.” Weisz is fearless, funny, and outspoken—and still makes time to call her mom. That’s the kind of woman we need more of in Hollywood. —Ann Donahue, news editor I’ve been interviewing celebrities for ten years and no one has distilled the movie actor

20 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

Hear Them Roar Women in Hollywood 2005

WOMEN WE LOVE: From left, leading ladies Theron, Weisz, Linney, Lohan, MacLaine, and de Rakoff.

conundrum better than Laura Linney: She passionately, and intelligently, articulated the difficulty of being an open person in her work at the same time that she has to be fiercely protective of herself in terms of her personal life. I was almost taken aback by the ferocity of how she spoke, but I felt like I was eating breakfast with a good person who is intense and has a sense of integrity, with an admirable dedication to her craft. —Tom Roston, senior editor Anyone who’s seen The Parent Trap and Mean Girls knows that Lindsay Lohan, unlike many of today’s teen queens, can actually act. Yet if you were to just go on what you read about her in the many gossip items, you’d never know that this young woman has a great depth of character and an irreverent sense of humor,

especially about herself. It was lovely to hear her giggle. It reminded me that she’s still a teenager, in all the best ways. —Rachel Clarke, deputy editor

pleased to know that the “journey” of this project, ultimately, has taught me a lot about persistence, nerve, and self-belief. —Brantley Bardin, contributing writer

I wanted to do Shirley MacLaine because she was one of the handful of “dream interviews” I’d yet to do for PREMIERE. I’ve loved her since I was a little boy. Eating a bowl of ice cream (she ordered one for each of us and finished mine too), she replied to my questions about her morphing persona in her fifty years of films with loooong pauses and answers that were sometimes filled with intimidatingly withering and notafraid-to-tell-you-you’re-an-idiot looks and, at other times, dryly amused and forthcoming. She’s fascinating, confrontational, funny, cantankerous, honest to a fault. In fact, MacLaine would, I’m sure, be

When Sophie de Rakoff, the costume designer who famously dressed Elle Woods and who is, by the way, as lovely as anyone you’ll see onscreen, talks about clothes, she talks about character. Which isn’t surprising, once you know that de Rakoff is a devoted reader and a former writer. Though she deals with famous designers and has dressed A-list actresses (Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez), she seems remarkably down-to-earth about fashion, even expressing dismay at the astronomic prices of clothes these days. Making this writer feel better about shopping at H&M. —Kelly Borgeson, copy chief

HERBST: SVEND LINDBAEK. WOMEN IN HOLLYWOOD, FROM LEFT: GILLES BENSIMON; JAMES WHITE/CORBIS OUTLINE; JOHN MIDGLEY; SHERYL NIELDS/ICON INTERNATIONAL; GERALD FOSTER; JACQUELINE BOHNERT

For our 12th annual Women in Hollywood issue, we decided to let our honorees say their piece without interruption. So I thought it would be nice to have the writers who interviewed them share their impressions of these extraordinarily talented people.

LETTER BOX

WHEN I SAW THAT TWO THIRDS OF THE JULY/AUGUST COVER WAS TAKEN UP BY PEOPLE WHO AREN’T EVEN REALLY ACTORS, LET ALONE GOOD ACTORS, I FELT A TAD LET DOWN. —BECKY YASICK, LEETSDALE, PA Duke It Out I am a longtime subscriber who loves your magazine. So when I saw that two thirds of the July/August cover was taken up by people who aren’t even really actors, let alone good actors, I felt a tad let down. I realize that you have to go with what’s popular, but I would think that the average PREMIERE reader is a tad more sophisticated. You have only ten chances a year to impress me and make me want to do nothing else but open your magazine the moment it’s out of the mailbox. Did the Cindy Crawford cover all those years ago teach you nothing? —Becky Yasick, Leetsdale, PA

Roll ‘Em Murderball goes a long way toward eliminating some of the myths and stereotypes associated with disability and quadriplegia [“Hell on Wheels,” July/August]. “Gimps,” as they call themselves, have all the same dreams and desires as their nondisabled counterparts. They like to play, laugh, compete, and even work the ladies. Murderball is a real winner! I must admit, I’m a little biased, but only because I’m a quadriplegic who has played quad rugby for 15 years. —Phil Pangrazio, Phoenix, AZ

It is highly watchable and covers far more ground than the average documentary or concert film of its era. —Rod Reynolds, Los Angeles

Double’s Take As a subscriber to your magazine for almost ten years, I was thrilled to see your article on standins in your July/August issue [“Seeing Doubles”]. David Strick’s photos were brilliant, and his statement in the editor’s letter about being so close to the top yet so far

couldn’t have been more true. While working on War of the Worlds, Spielberg approached me and asked if I had parked a car on an episode of a popular TV series he had seen the previous night. Even though I had only worked on the show as a background actor in the role of a valet, it was nice to see that someone was aware of my aspirations to be something more than just a stand-in. Even if it was only Steven Spielberg. —James Henderson, Studio City, CA

Bohemian Rhapsody I was really surprised while reading Ewan McGregor’s DVD Filmography in your May issue [Home Guide]. The writer says that Moulin Rouge was a “visually florid but narratively mawkish meta-musical” and that “when it’s over, you may feel as if you’ve been shouted at for over two hours.” I strongly disagree with these comments, because I consider Moulin Rouge one of the best achievements in film ever. Both McGregor and

Nicole Kidman are brilliant, and the movie itself is emotionally powerful and breathtaking. And by the way, this film does not have an “exhausting torrent of production numbers.” It’s a musical! —Peter Ramirez, Guanajuato, Mexico

PREMIERE welcomes letters. Send them to Letters Editor, PREMIERE,

5670 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 500, Los Angeles, CA, 90036; fax us at 323-954-4848; or e-mail us at [email protected]. Include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

MAY I BUTT IN? July/August cover subjects (from left) Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, and Johnny Knoxville get cozy with a pair of Daisy Dukes.

Lasse Is More

22 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

MARK ABRAHAMS

Thank you for discussing Lasse Hallström’s ABBA: The Movie [Action, July/ August], but to say that rewatching it would be “to relive the pain” is overly harsh and elitist. True, the movie was not nominated for any Academy Awards, but for its time, it was both ambitious and innovative.

Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler Corporation.

jeep.com

takeone

INSIDE ACTION 28 FIRST LOOK 37 PREVIEWS 43 REVIEWS 49

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! It’s . . . oh, wait. Never mind. Tom Welling, best known for playing a teenage Superman on TV’s Smallville, is stashing the superpowers for his first leading role in a movie. He’s portraying a guy who is . . .well, afraid of weather. • But don’t rain on Welling’s parade just yet. The atmosphere is pretty damn freaky in October’s The Fog, a remake of John Carpenter’s 1980 horror flick that starred Jamie Lee Curtis and leprosy-tainted zombies. “John was amazed by some of the visual effects we were able to bring to this one,” says Welling, 28. “To make the fog then, they made a miniature version of the town and used smoke machines.” • Next Welling will reprise his role as the oldest brother in the upcoming Cheaper by the Dozen 2. “That was kind of a horror film as well, working with all those kids,” he says. “Maybe I do need to branch out.” —Ann Donahue

Play Misty for Me

TONY DURAN/ICON INTERNATIONAL

Tom Welling weathers some deadly dampness in The Fog.

PREMIERE.COM 27

takeone

action

BEHIND THE SCENES & AHEAD OF THE CURVE

GETTING LIT

FIGHTS! SCANDALS! SEX! AN UNFORGETTABLE SET VISIT TO 1955’S REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.

FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT COMIC-CON Believe it or not, the geeks who attended the annual comics–sci-fi–horror fest in San Diego this summer haven’t blabbed everything on the Internet yet. (Yes, HBO’s Entourage did set an episode at Comic-Con. No, there isn’t really an Aquaman movie. Yet.) Here are some more tidbits to get your fanboy tights in a twist. And yes, they’re Superman tights, thank you. —Tom Russo

BRYAN SINGER SETTLES A SCORE

PETER JACKSON ISN’T A CHUNKY MONKEY For those who’ve wondered about Peter Jackson’s recent, startling weight loss—upwards of 100 pounds, by some estimates—King Kong costar Jack Black had the, um, skinny: “His secret was just eating a little bit all the time. But fat, skinny—that dude’s a genius!”

FANS LOVE THE SMELL OF SLIME IN THE MORNING The fans have spoken! Their early favorite for top horror hit of 2006 is . . . Slither? The movie’s trailer got a big response for its gooey shots of, say, an alien-virus–infected woman bloated to Violet Beauregarde size. Said director James Gunn, “We get a lot of the PG-13 horror films, which I’m a little bit bored with.” Indeed.

WONDER WOMAN ROPES IN ALL TYPES A fan suggested director Joss Whedon cast his upcoming Wonder Woman movie against physical type, and go with Serenity’s Cuban-American hottie Gina Torres. “There’s other people I think would do a wonderful job,” protested Torres’s costar Nathan Fillion, as he launched into a Lynda Carter–style spin.

MICHAEL BAY KEEPS ON TRUCKIN’ What was inside the tractor trailer parked on the convention floor to promote Bay’s movie based on Transformers, currently scheduled for a 2007 release? Nothing. The idea, attendants noted, was that the truck would “transform” into a 60-foot robot for next year’s Con. Yeah, well . . . see you then.

28 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

Ask Glenn No question this month— consider it a housekeeping column. Apropos of last month’s identification of Joe Flynn as a former regular on TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a reader writes: “Dude! To 99 percent of those of us who still remember him, Flynn will always be Capt. Binghamton from McHale’s Navy. Your punishment is to write a short piece demanding McHale’s Navy

that the studio start putting it out on DVD.” Consider it done. Also, the bit about Ozzie and Harriet got put in on my day off. I’ve received several letters chiding me for (a) not being respectful to ABBA: The Movie, and (b) not mentioning its imminent release on domestic DVD. The former is a question of taste (and the person who called me an elitist should know that at age 46, I still rent), and the latter is due to that release being put on indefinite hold by Warners. Sorry, folks!

COMIC-CON: CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT, SANDY HUFFAKER/GETTY IMAGES (2); VINCE BUCCI/GETTY IMAGES. GETTING LIT: COURTESY OF SIMON AND SCHUSTER. ASK GLENN: COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION

Superman Returns director Bryan Singer can commit a sin like—gasp!—saying Jor-El when he means Kal-El, and still win over the crowd. (For the uninitiated, Kal-El is Superman’s name on his home planet of Krypton. Jor-El is his dad.) Even after the gaffe, he drew cheers for announcing that he’ll be incorporating John Williams’s original score and old footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El into the film.

It is James Dean’s most memorable movie, a film that’s become even more mythic because of the tragic ends met by its three leads. Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause (Touchstone, $24.95), by film and theater critic Lawrence Frascella and PREMIERE contributor Al Weisel, revisits Rebel’s production, serving up the lurid on-set tales: Dean’s pot-smoking and casual cruelty toward his costars; 16-year-old Natalie Wood’s affairs both with her 43year-old director, Nicholas Ray, and 18-year-old costar, Dennis Hopper; and the is-he-in-the-closet-ornot status of Sal Mineo, who was in love with Dean. Ample airtime is given to the movie’s iconic actors, but Live Fast, Die Young’s real revelation is Ray, who emerges as the book’s most compelling, tortured, and, arguably, talented figure. —Chris Cronis

?

DOMINO HARVEY

action AN ELEGY FOR DOMINO HARVEY

SCENE STEALER

TomWilkinson finds that love is a cruel mistress in the May-December romance Separate Lies.

THE FULL MONTY (1997) Wilkinson wasn’t thrilled about baring it all during the final scene. “None of us were looking forward to it. We said, ‘You’ve got one go at it, so you’ve got to get it right.’ There was a good deal of alcohol consumed—Robert Carlyle, being a good Scotsman, I think had a bit of a go at the whiskey, and the rest of us were on the champagne.”

RUSH HOUR (1998)

Tom Wilkinson was born at the wrong time. Or at least most directors and casting agents seem to think so. He has appeared in one period piece after another— Shakespeare in Love, The Patriot, Stage Beauty, and the upcoming A Good Woman, among others. But anyone who has seen Batman Begins, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or September’s Separate Lies—in which he plays a husband cuckolded by his younger wife (Emily Watson)—knows Wilkinson, 56, is just as adroit at playing contemporary. Which is a good thing. “I’ve developed a terrible allergy to the glue that they use for hairpieces,” he says. “So I don’t know that I’m going to be doing any more beard roles.” —Jason Matloff

30 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

The death of 35-year-old Domino Harvey, the inspiration for Tony Scott’s October film Domino, in West Hollywood this June bore all the tragic hallmarks of a life lived too close to the edge. While the details are still under investigation, Harvey (daughter of late actor Laurence Harvey) was out on bail for drug offenses and facing prison time if convicted. “Domino definitely reached for the dark side,” says Scott (Man on Fire, Top Gun), who spent 12 years developing the project about a model–turned– bounty hunter. He came to see the English-born Harvey (portrayed by Keira Knightley in the film) as a surrogate daughter. “Apart from drugs, the biggest rush she got was kicking down doors, wondering what was on the other side.” Scott opted not to change his film to reflect her death beyond adding “In Loving Memory” over a closing image of the real Domino. “She sang this song, ‘Heads, You Live, Tails, You Die,’ which was her motto,” he explains. “It opens and closes the movie. She was so proud of the fact she’d done that. She came to the set a lot and must have seen more than half the movie in different forms.” Her reaction? “She loved it.” —Mark Salisbury

IN THE BEDROOM (2001) Wilkinson’s haunting portrayal of a grieving parent earned him an Oscar nomination. “I’d read in the papers those rather flattering things that said, ‘Should win? Tom Wilkinson. Will win? Somebody else.’ And I thought, well, that’s cool. It means I can just sort of enjoy it and not feel terribly disappointed if I don’t win.” [Training Day’s Denzel Washington took home the prize.]

SCENE STEALER: CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT, JEROME DE PERLINGHI/CORBIS OUTLINE; NO CREDIT (2); JOHN CLIFFORD. DOMINO: SPLASH NEWS (2)

A villainous Wilkinson faces off against Jackie Chan. “Everything goes at such top speed with Jackie, which took a little bit of getting used to. There’s one particular bit where I had to hit him with a suitcase, and I was sort of pulling the blow. The suitcase was heavy, so it wasn’t looking good. He kept saying, ‘No, no, you got to really hit me as hard as you can.’ So finally I did.”

DIRECTOR TONY SCOTT MOURNS A FRIEND AND TALKS ABOUT THE FATE OF HIS FILM.

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY

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takeone THE PREMIERE CROSSWORD PUZZLE WIN FREE STUFF!

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What, you think the creative effort of three distinguished Oscar winners is going to intimidate the Gaffe Squad? Check out what was lost in translation in The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, and directed by Sydney Pollack. The movie is available on DVD October 4. —Geoff Berkshire

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Security Breach: When Penn enters the FBI building through double glass doors, he uses a card for access. Moments later, extras enter and exit the doors without any trouble.

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LEADING LADIES FOR OUR WOMEN IN HOLLYWOOD ISSUE, IT’S THE MOTHER OF ALL DVD GIVEAWAYS—38 MOVIES FROM FOX STUDIO CLASSICS.

WANT TO OWN The Three Faces of Eve? An Affair to Remember? Those titles, and 36 others, will be given to three winners selected at random from the correctly completed puzzles faxed to 323-954-4848.* (The list of movies is on premiere.com.) A tip: When a clue is bolded, the answer comes from that actress’s film credits. The answers will appear in our November issue. And, yes, it’s hard. But it’s for 38 free DVDs! —Jay A. Fernandez genre 30. Sordidness, as in Taxi Driver 31. Clarice wanted them silenced 33. Mel and 10 Across topline 34. He played Merrin and Ming 37. Order from a movie set’s DP 39. Pulp Fiction’s Fabienne wants one 40. Loc., as in The Day After Tomorrow 41. Fights, in Bridget Jones–speak 42. Stand-in 46. Marge Gunderson utterance

48. Meryl Streep 49. Napoleon Dynamite’s home st. 51. Jett prop in Light of Day 53. Type of diva massage? 54. Raise, like Maria in The Sound of Music 55. Like Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses 57. Pam Grier 60. Cathy Downs DOWN 1. M*A*S*H nickname 2. H’wood activist grp. (acronym)

3. Jenna Jameson won Best Actress this year at these awards (acronym) 4. Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago 5. Dress up, à la Caine or Lemmon 6. Personal ad abbr., from a Barbet Schroeder film, say 7. How long it takes to lose a guy 8. Hitchcock’s long take 9. Debbie Reynolds 11. Recurring clue in The Name of the Rose

12. Bridges 14. Anne Baxter 18. Large theater chain (acronym) 19. Vanessa Redgrave 22. Coven need in Four Rooms 24. Stockings get them 25. Scandalmongers 26. Bottom line 27. Joan Crawford 29. Julie Andrews 32. Jazz Age starlet accessory 35. Camera mover 36. Veteran, like Palance or Eastwood 38. Gene Tierney

43. Valerie Hobson and Gwyneth Paltrow played her 44. You’ll never hear an agent order this in a café 45. Like Adrian in Rocky 47. Lead female character 50. Higgins’s most famous role 51. Private Benjamin outfit 52. Fat Bastard’s underwear size 56. Bali ___ from South Pacific 58. Like Streep in Ironweed 59. A League of Their ___

*See official rules on page 143. 32 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

Switch Hitter? As Penn walks into his dark apartment alone at night, the light switch on the wall behind him changes position between shots, even though the lights remain off. reader Matthew Socey of Indianapolis e-mails that Kidman’s bangs alternate between combed down and swept back in the first scene she has with Penn at the United Nations: “So I was staring at Nicole Kidman’s hair. So what?” he writes. Now that’s the kind of sacrifice the Gaffe Squad likes to see. PREMIERE

Join the Gaffe Squad! E-mail errors and inconsistencies you spy in the movies to [email protected].

PHIL BRAY/UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

ACROSS 1. Woody’s trio 10. Diane Keaton 13. Bambi, for example 15. Film set watchdog org. (acronym) 16. Milla’s last ex-husband 17. Exit like Julia in Steel Magnolias 19. Mo. for big releases 20. Mia Farrow 21. Shirley, to Warren 23. Reviewing Gene 26. A film’s story 27. West 28. Classic Veronica Lake

Revealing Reflections: During Penn’s tearful monologue about his wife’s death, a light from the camera is visible in the picture on the wall next to him. You can even follow its movement as the camera pushes in.

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action Kiss, Bang Bang (September 16), a comedic thriller starring Robert Downey Jr. as a petty thief– turned–wannabe actor, and Val Kilmer as a gay detective–movie consultant. —Ryan Devlin Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’s antiheroes Harry and Gay Perry are a far cry from your original dynamic duo, Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtaugh. Murtaugh and Riggs were pulp characters, and I didn’t want Harry and Gay Perry to be pulp characters. The idea was to take these shlubs who are extremely unmythic and bring out in them, if not the ability, then at least the desire to be heroes.

KISS ME DEADLY AFTER A HOLLYWOOD HIATUS, LETHAL WEAPON WRITER SHANE BLACK IS BACK WITH HIS MODERN NOIR THRILLER KISS KISS, BANG BANG. Shane Black was only 23 when he penned 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Soon after, his screenplays for action films like The Last Boy Scout were being sold for unprecedented millions. But shortly after selling The Long Kiss Goodnight for a then record $4 million, Black pulled a vanishing act. Now, after several years of “banging my head against the wall,” Black is back, writing and directing Kiss

Downey and Kilmer really drive the film. What made you decide to put them together? I think doing so represents in some ways an event, and fuck anybody who doesn’t. Who better to cast in a movie that is supposed to be a romantic comedy and a thriller, that’s at times violent and even disturbing, than these comic geniuses who are at the same time so intimately acquainted with the dark side? After you sold The Long Kiss Goodnight, you went off the Hollywood radar. Did being the poster boy for the screenwriting gold rush have anything to do with your disappearance? There was a lot of, “He’s just a hack who made it. Everyone knows it’s a lottery. If it’s not him, it’s Joe Eszterhas or it’s so-and-so.” I try not to give a shit what people think, but the fact is that I was being judged solely on the money, and people were less nice to me because of it. So how was your directorial debut? I think I didn’t fuck up. Next time, maybe I’ll fuck up. But this time I definitely feel I held my head above water.

YES,

IT’S TRUE . . . NEWS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW. Liam Neeson teaches sex ed in Japan, where pubic hair and genitalia have long been banned from the big screen.

34 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

However, the censors let it all hang out for Kinsey, which stars Neeson as the famous sexologist who displays slides of male and female reproductive organs during class. Kudos

AMC misses the punch line. The theater chain refused to show The Aristocrats, the unrated documentary featuring 100 comics giving their renditions of a vaudeville joke about a XXX stage act. AMC brass said the obscene-to-themax film would have narrow audience appeal, something that didn’t deter them from booking John Waters’s 2004 NC-17 comedy A Dirty Shame. Can’t they take a dirty joke? Sarah Michelle Gellar knows that clothes make the woman. On 2004’s The Grudge, which was shot in Japan, the Buffy star kept track of what she wore in the movie because it’s a common practice for actors to take care of their own wardrobe in the Japanese film industry. It’s one thing for Gellar to face a deadly curse—but your own wardrobe? Horror of horrors!

Paul Thomas Anderson is ready to play. Robert Altman’s insurance company made the 80-yearold pick a God-forbidanything-happens backup director for A Prairie Home Companion. He chose Magnolia’s Anderson. “On the back of one chair, it said ‘Robert Altman,’ and on the back of P.T.’s chair, it said ‘Pinch Hitter,’ ” says costar Virginia Madsen. Don’t worry, P.T., you’ve got game. Steven Seagal kicks some nuclear warhead butt. Sure, he plays a meathead in the movies, but in real life, the action star has been called the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama. He donated $100,000 to finance the disarming of a Russian nuclear missile. Hope he’s Zen about his cash flow. Oh, and one more thing: Each time the gothy titular puppet in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride blinks her eyes, the stop-motion animators took 28 still photographs to incrementally lower her lids. Here’s hoping that she’s not the type of gal to flutter her eyelashes.

to a country that shares our love for violence and sexual repression. Stay classy, Japan.

Marshall’s Falcon Theatre in Burbank for the July 8 premiere of Groovaloo. The kids’ show stars a troupe of

Will Smith gets his groove on. And then some. For their son Jaden’s seventh birthday, Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, bought over one-fourth of the 130 seats in Garry

MARILYN MONROE COULD GO STRAIGHT TO YOUR HEAD. MARILYN WINES’ NEW 2002 NAPA VALLEY VINTAGE, WITH HER FAMOUS PLAYBOY CENTERFOLD AFFIXED TO THE LABEL, WON’T DISAPPOINT. THE NUDE PINUP THAT GRACES EACH $200 BOTTLE IS PROTECTED BY A REMOVABLE “PEEL AND PEEK” CRIMSON PLASTIC OVERLAY, WHICH VEILS MARILYN’S MOST INTOXICATING ASSETS. TAKE THAT, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA!

SHANE BLACK: BRYCE DUFFY/CORBIS OUTLINE. YES, IT’S TRUE: IN ORDER, KEN REGAN; SCOTT KIRKLAND/FILMMAGIC.COM; COURTESY OF THINKFILM; TAKESHI SEIDA; GREGORY PACE/FILMMAGIC.COM; SCOTT KIRKLAND/FILMMAGIC.COM; COURTESY OF MARILYN WINES

PREMIERE:

hip-hop and freestyle dancers who have performed with singers including Justin Timberlake and Usher. Now that’s a cool dad.

THINK LIKE YOU’VE NEVER THOUGHT. FEEL LIKE YOU’VE NEVER FELT. DRIVE LIKE YOU’VE NEVER DRIVEN. Introducing the all-new Subaru B9 Tribeca. A dynamic, progressive design that will change the way you think about SUVs. It’s equipped with a powerful 250-hp, 6-cylinder Subaru Boxer Engine, Vehicle Dynamics Control and signature Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive standard. Providing stability, agility and control you just don’t expect from an SUV. Feel the cockpit wrap around and connect you with a state-of-the-art available touch screen navigation system that intuitively guides you to places near or far. And while the available 9" widescreen DVD entertainment system can capture the attention of up to 7 passengers, the engaging drivability and real world versatility will capture yours. Simply put, you’ll never think, feel, drive, the same way again. subaru.com TM

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firstlook DISPATCHES FROM THE MOVIEMAKING FRONT

HURRICANE ZHANG: Ziyi storms the stage as a geisha in Rob Marshall’s latest.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA STARRING ZIYI ZHANG, GONG LI, MICHELLE YEOH, AND KEN WATANABE; DIRECTED BY ROB MARSHALL (COLUMBIA)

DAVID JAMES

Steven Spielberg, Spike Jonze, Kimberly Peirce, and Brett Ratner all flirted with adapting Memoirs of a Geisha from Arthur Golden’s novel before Rob Marshall claimed it as his follow-up to 2002’s Chicago.“What’s exciting is that there’s all these layers to the geisha world,”Marshall says of the project’s appeal.“You keep peeling them away, and in the center is a beautiful Fabergé egg.”Ziyi Zhang stars as the titular fisherman’s daughter–turned–geisha who falls in love with a businessman (Ken Watanabe). Along with Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh, who play her rival and mentor, respectively, Zhang underwent six weeks of boot camp dedicated to the mastery of seven skills: English language, dance, makeup, hair, dressing, scene rehearsal, and movement. As for Marshall, he too got to work with layers . . . of red tape. Although the crew constructed a 20th-century Japanese village outside of Los Angeles, where a large part of the movie was shot, it took a whole year to secure the real thing.“Shooting in Japan takes an enormous amount of negotiation,”the director says. “Ask Sofia Coppola about it.” —Cristy Lytal

PREMIERE.COM 37

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first look

GROSS ANATOMY Enough already about the dirtiest joke ever told. Here’s the vilest movie you’ll ever watch. Grab your popcorn—and run! Writer-director GREG MCLEAN enjoys terrorizing audiences, which might explain why the monster in his feature debut Wolf Creek makes Leatherface seem like a sweetheart. The horror film, about three young tourists who fall victim to an Outback madman (Aussie TV vet John Jarratt) with a penchant for Crocodile Dundee puns, was inspired by a number of real murders in Australia. “It’s really

interesting from an experimental point of view,” McLean says. “What if things just got progressively worse, everybody died, and the bad guy went away unpunished?” See the movie and find out. —Sara Brady PREMIERE: Greg, has anyone ever told you that

you’re kind of sick? [laughing] Every day. A friend of mine saw the movie the other night, and she said she was crying outside the theater for, like, an hour. I felt terrible. The last 40 minutes are literally torture for the three main characters, and the audience. Why make the horror so unrelenting? Earlier versions of the screenplay had those [lighter] moments, but if you look at the reality of those situations as they go down, sometimes there’s no hope. And it pretty much goes against most stories we tell, because

ON THE ROAD AND UP THE CREEK: Damselin-distress Kestie Morassi.

we’re obsessed with the idea that if we work hard we can save ourselves. What do you find scary? I was researching [the real murders] and came to the conclusion that the guy wasn’t mad, he was just an incredibly bad person. He knew what he was doing; he just really liked it. The idea that someone’s conscious of doing evil and accepts that is scarier than just a crazy psycho.

DAVID STRICK’S HOLLYWOOD

38 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

TOP FROM LEFT: JEFF VESPA/WIREIMAGE.COM; DAVID LEE

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE SPACE: Director Jon Favreau (left) and visual-effects supervisor Joe Bauer (right) set up a scene in which an astronaut appears at the front door of a house hurtled into the cosmos, for the upcoming sci-fi adventure Zathura. October 13, 2004

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100,000 Costumes. 8,000 Cast Members. 300 Sets. A Record-Setting 11 Oscars.* Four Discs. One Unmatched Epic. ®

MONUMENTAL DVD EXTRAS! • Restored and remastered from original elements. • 5 hours of extras: The Complete 1925 Silent Version. Three revealing documentaries. Newly uncovered screen tests. Enhanced Charlton Heston commentary. • Reproduction of 1959 theatrical booklet.

METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PRESENTS “BEN-HUR” DIRECTED BY WILLIAM WYLER STARRING CHARLTON HESTON JACK HAWKINS HAYA HARAREET STEPHEN BOYD HUGH GRIFFITH MARTHA SCOTT CATHY O’DONNELL SAM JAFFE SCREEN PLAY BY KARL TUNBERG PRODUCED BY SAM ZIMBALIST PANAVISION METROCOLOR 

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Media Campaign Subject to Change. “Academy Awards® ” and “Oscars® ”Are the Registered Trademarks and Service Marks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. *1959 Awards: Best Picture, Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), Color Cinematography, Color Art Direction/Set Decoration, Sound, Dramatic Score, Film Editing, Color Costume Design and Special Effects. © 2005 Turner Entertainment Co. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.



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previews THE MOVIES THAT MATTER THIS MONTH By Kelly Borgeson

The Libertine

16 23 SEPTEMBER

Johnny Depp takes a break from Burton flicks (see Corpse Bride, far right) to star as John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, a 17thcentury poet and reprobate who famously caroused his way to an early grave.

Flightplan

Three years after Panic Room, Jodie Foster is again trapped in a confined space and fighting to protect her child. In this thriller, set 37,000 feet above sea level, Foster’s widow turns frantic when her daughter vanishes mid-flight—and no one onboard remembers seeing her. (No word on the location of their luggage.) With Peter Sarsgaard and Sean Bean. The Bottom Line: We’d watch Foster stuck in a cardboard box. (Touchstone)

With Samantha Morton as his lover, actress Elizabeth Barry, and John Malkovich as his nemesis, King Charles II. The Bottom Line: Depp’s dark turn (and unpretty death by syphilis) may be overlooked in the Miramax purge, with An Unfinished Life and Proof also in theaters. (Miramax)

Just Like Heaven Shortly after lovelorn David (Mark Ruffalo) sublets a San Francisco apartment, he starts seeing someone new—that is, the restless spirit of the apartment’s last resident: a comatose medical resident

(Reese Witherspoon). Directed by Mean Girls’ Mark Waters; Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder pops up as a slacker psychic. The Bottom Line: Not as lively as you’d hope. (DreamWorks)

Lord of War Ever wonder how third-world countries get their Uzis? This action drama, from Gattaca’s Andrew Niccol, follows the exploits of a Brighton Beach hustler (Nicolas Cage) who rises to fame as an international arms dealer; Ethan Hawke plays the Interpol agent on his tail. The Bottom Line: The knockout opener—

JUST LIKE HEAVEN

Best friends, first crushes, giant headphones with antennas. Director Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother) rolls back in time to ’70s Chicago, where X (Bow Wow) and his pals, forced uptown by the closing of their local rink, go wheel-to-wheel against the city’s smoothest skater, Sweetness. With Chi McBride, Nick Cannon, and Mike Epps. The Bottom Line: A coming-of-age comedy with a kickin’ soundtrack. (Fox Searchlight)

Separate Lies The seemingly idyllic marriage of James (Tom Wilkinson) and Anna (Emily Watson) falls apart in the wake of an affair (hers, with Rupert Everett) and a tragic accident; Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) directs. The Bottom Line: A stunning debut by Fellowes. (Fox Searchlight)

Cry_Wolf Never type a lie. Intrigued by a murder at their prep school, eight students (including Julian Morris, Lindy Booth, and Jared Padalecki) spread rumors online about a made-up serial killer called “The Wolf” . . . who suddenly ceases to be fiction. The Bottom Line: Needs to scare up some box office in this horror slump. (Rogue)

The Thing About My Folks A family crisis gives Ben Kleinman (played by Paul Reiser, who also wrote this screenplay) the chance to confront his dad (Peter Falk) about past wrongs. The Bottom Line: A road-trip comedy for the mature set— with, yes, the requisite roadhouse brawl. (Picturehouse)

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride Call it The Nightmare Before Marriage. A ghastly mix-up leaves a skittish Victorian man (voiced by Johnny Depp) betrothed to a cadaver (Helena Bonham Carter) and whisked off to the netherworld, to the horror of his live fiancée (Emily Watson), in this stopmotion–animated comic fantasy. The Bottom Line: Romance, Tim Burton–style. (Warner Bros.)

ALSO OUT: Everything Is Illuminated, page 49 TIM BURTON’S CORPSE BRIDE

LEFT TO RIGHT: PETER IOVINO; RON BATZDORFF; COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Roll Bounce

tracing a bullet’s life— could be a tough act to follow. (Lions Gate)

A History of Violence When he thwarts a robbery, small-town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife (Maria Bello) find themselves in the media spotlight—and in the sights of two mobsters (Ed Harris and William Hurt) looking to settle a score. Is it a case of mistaken identity? Or is Tom not the man he claims to be? David Cronenberg directs this dramatic thriller loosely based on the graphic novel. The Bottom Line: Earned a standing ovation at Cannes. (New Line) ALSO OUT: Dear Wendy, page 53

FLIGHTPLAN

PREMIERE.COM 42

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CAPOTE

SEPTEMBER

Capote Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the titular writer in this drama about the story behind the story—that is, of In Cold Blood, his groundbreaking nonfiction novel.

OCTOBER

Into the Blue Up for one last dip?

IN HER SHOES

This action thriller—a holdover from July— stars Paul Walker and Jessica Alba as free divers who find themselves in deep trouble when they discover someone else’s sunken treasure. Directed by Blue Crush’s John Stockwell. The Bottom Line: Sex, drugs, and hungry sharks. (Columbia)

Oliver Twist Director Roman Polanski is spooning up the gruel in the

In Her Shoes

Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and Rose (Toni Collette) are sisters with little in common besides a lust for stilettos. Well, add one more thing: When Maggie seduces Rose’s boyfriend, the betrayal sends Rose reeling, and Maggie off in search of their heretofore unknown grandmother (Shirley MacLaine). Curtis Hanson (8 Mile) directs. The Bottom Line: Three actresses at the top of their game. (Fox)

Waiting . . . Featuring lousy tips, rude customers, and, we suspect, malicious spitting. Ryan Reynolds and Justin Long play waiters at the fictional Shenanigan’s chain in this behind-the-dishes comedy, directed by Rob McKittrick, who served up plenty of jalapeño poppers before selling this screenplay. The Bottom Line: An Office Space for the chain restaurant biz? (Lions Gate)

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit When a strange beast begins eating neighbors’ gardens, Wallace and his faithful dog, Gromit, are on the case. The stars of Aardman’s Oscar-winning shorts make their feature debut; creator Nick Parkcodirects. The Bottom Line: Yeah, Claymation’s slow, but we’ve been waiting a long time. (DreamWorks) ALSO OUT: Good Night, and Good Luck, page 54

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latest adaptation of Dickens’s 1838 novel, about a young orphan (played here by Barney Clark) who falls in with a gang of pickpockets led by the very nasty Fagin (Ben Kingsley). The Bottom Line: A master director takes on a classic writer. (TriStar)

THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when promotional contests required more skill than stamp-licking, Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore) supported her household—ten children and a drunken husband (Woody Harrelson)—by writing prizewinning jingles. Many, many of them. Based on the memoir by Ryan’s daughter, and directed

by Jane Anderson. The Bottom Line: Moore proves to be a jingle belle. (Go Fish)

The Greatest Game Ever Played Well, arguably. Frailty’s Bill Paxton directs this sports biopic about golfer Francis Ouimet (played by

Holes’ Shia LaBeouf), the 20-year-old amateur who defeated reigning British champion Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane) in the 1913 U.S. Open. The Bottom Line: From the studio behind The Rookie and Miracle. Expect a meeting of the two. (Disney)

ALSO OUT: Serenity, page 114

ONE TO WATCH

Keane

SEPTEMBER 9 When writerdirector Lodge Kerrigan’s daughter was younger, she used to run off down the aisles of their local pharmacy. “When I couldn’t find her right away, my heart would drop in my stomach,” he says. “Of course, eventually I’d find her. But that initial visceral reaction and panic was the impetus to make Keane, to examine what it would be like to go through the loss of a child.” Damian Lewis (TV’s Band of Brothers) gives a riveting performance as William Keane, a grief-stricken, increasingly disturbed man who haunts N.Y.C.’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to find clues about his child’s abduction—and forms an unsettling bond with the daughter of a woman staying at the same New Jersey motel. Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven) filmed in the Port Authority—no small feat, given the movie’s long takes. “Let’s say, three minutes into it, a bus arrives and fifty people pour out, and someone says, ‘Are you shooting a movie?’ We’d go back to zero,” he says. “But shooting there was intense. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” (Magnolia)

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: GUY FERRANDIS; JONATHAN WENK; COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES; SIDNEY BALDWIN; ATTILA DORY

7

Directed by Bennett Miller, the film follows Capote’s investigation into the murder of a Kansas family and the unexpected friendship he forms with a local detective (Chris Cooper), and, later, with the killers. With Catherine Keener as Harper Lee. The Bottom Line: Expect an Oscarcaliber performance by Hoffman. (Sony Pictures Classics)

OLIVER TWIST

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LORD & TAYLOR

MACY’S

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www.honora.com

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reviews

✲✲✲ IT’S SO MONEY

By Glenn Kenny

✲✲ COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER

✲ THE HORROR . . . THE HORROR

THE ILLUMINATI: Wood (center), Hutz, and Boris Leskin (far right) attempt to shine a light on the past.

Everything Is Illuminated ✲✲✲

NEIL DAVIDSON

RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 16 (WARNER INDEPENDENT)

Cineasts often enjoy ruminating on the notions that great books rarely make good movies, while awful books can frequently make terrific ones; it’s less often we get the chance to consider how a movie adaptation may,if not redeem,at least vitiate the bordering-on-insufferable conceits of a book we’re on the fence about.Everything Is Illuminated,written and directed by Liev Schreiber from the debut novel by the twerpily precocious Jonathan Safran Foer, is a case in point. Illuminated the novel is a polyglot contraption, in part nar-

rated by a young Ukrainian“translator” named Alex who,along with his crotchety grandfather, is hired by a young American named Jonathan Safran Foer (our approach to the land of borderline insufferable begins) to guide Foer to the remains of the shtetl of Trachimbrod,from which his grandfather escaped the Nazis during World War II.The story also contains a little“historical”narrative of the shtetl that reads like magic realism colored in with Magic Marker.In any case,several considerations—I imagine not the least of them budgetary—compelled Schreiber to lose that latter component. The natural distance between cinema and literature makes the Foer-as-character (played with eerie wide-eyedness by Elijah Wood) gambit easier to swallow. And the English malapropisms that cascade from Alex’s mouth,in a performance of great comic instinct and unexpected subtlety by soulful-eyed,hollow-cheeked first-time actor Eugene

PREMIERE.COM 49

takeone

reviews AND THIS IS HOLLY WOOD: Val Kilmer’s detective shows Robert Downey Jr. (left) the ropes in Tinseltown.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang ✲✲✲ RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 16 (WARNER BROS.)

If writer-director Shane Black had made this movie about a dozen years ago,people would be calling him a genius.But about a dozen years ago,the then poster-boy for screen-scribesgetting-paid-big-time was a cowriter on Last Action Hero, which gave him something even worse than The Last Boy Scout to live down. Oops. As its title,

50 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

presumably lifted from a Pauline Kael book,suggests,Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a very knowing pastiche/send-up of what we’ll call the neo-noir genre,an amiable slice of post-Tarantino nonsense in which N.Y.C.petty thief Robert Downey Jr.literally stumbles into a movie audition,is lauded for his authenticity,and gets dispatched to La La land,where he encounters initially disagreeable private dick Val Kilmer and tags along with him on a case for research. A knotty set of entanglements and references ensues,including the unexpected reemergence of a childhood crush of Downey’s, played with sexy sunniness and sly subtlety by Michelle Monaghan.The inside-Hollywood jokes for the most part avoid the creepily smug disease I call HBOitis; the Raymond Chandler lifts seem almost earned.The picture’s great, fast-moving fun for the most part,and Kilmer gives his most appealing, relaxed, and

amusing performance since Real Genius.It’s too late for Shane Black to be a genius,but I’ve got to say something I never thought I would—I’m looking forward to his next picture.

The Squid and the Whale ✲✲✲✲ RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 5

Thumbsucker ✲✲✲ RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 16 (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS)

Adapted by writer-director Mike Mills from a quasi-autobiographical novel by Walter Kirn, Thumbsucker follows the adventures of its title character,whose unfortunate habit is following him into an adolescence that already promises to be very awkward without it.Sweet,sad,smart but hopelessly unfocused, Justin Cobb (male waif Lou Pucci) is suddenly transformed into a whiz kid via Ritalin, and soon needs to start experimenting with other substances in order to take the edge off,not to mention get his freak on. The movie has a lot of good bits and terrific per-

(SAMUEL GOLDWYN)

It’s a rare film that can be convincingly tender,bitterly funny, and ruthlessly cutting over the

WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY, JUSTIN? Thumbsucker’s title character aspires to be the next Dan Rather.

FROM TOP: JOHN BRAMLEY; TODD COLE

Hutz,come off less as self-conscious wordplay than a bunch of somewhat higher-rent Balkiisms,which benefits the entertainment value of the whole. I have misgivings about Schreiber’s use of the well-worn“I’ll make you empathize with these Others,but first let’s have laughs at their expense”approach,but eventually I was won over by his humane,moving road trip.

formances,including a too-perfect Keanu Reeves as a mystic orthodontist,the sublime Tilda Swinton as Justin’s sweetly eccentric mom,Vince Vaughn as a put-upon teacher,and Kelli Garner as Justin’s discomfitingly sexy initiator into the world of weed and other diversions.My main complaint is Mills’s often arch visuals.He seems overly fond of what I’ll call the multipleshot establishing shot.As in: Here’s the suburban house the protagonist lives in.(Interesting how the finely manicured lawn connotes sterility,given that grass is,after all,a living substance.) Cut to: the empty living room of the protagonist’s house. (See that ’50s-style lamp there on the left? Can you believe it— our prop guy picked it up at a stoop sale for 15 bucks!) Cut to: the kitchen of the house.Hey! There’s our protagonist! Now we can start the scene! Mills is not the only director who has this tendency,which I believe could stem from a profound misreading of the final seven minutes of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse.In any case, Mills’s dawdlings weaken an otherwise engaging effort.

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takeone course of fewer than 90 minutes. The Squid and the Whale not only manages this,it also contains moments that sock you with all three qualities at the same time. Writer-director Noah Baumbach has crafted this tale out of real love and, I presume, painful ambivalence,revisiting the divorce of his own parents (the literary critic–novelist Jonathan Baumbach and the film critic Georgia Brown) for this story of two literary types (beautifully played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) whose marriage is inflected with and infected by the idealism and intellectual currents of the ’60s; they enact mini-dramas of resentment and recrimination before the unwilling audience of their two sons,a teen and a preteen,both of whom are going

reviews through some nasty struggles of their own.Baumbach tells the story with great fluidity and none of the hip coyness that marked previous efforts such as Kicking & Screaming(no,not the soccer movie) and Mr.Jealousy.It’s a breakthrough work and one of the year’s most powerful pictures.

Dear Wendy --RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 23 (WELLSPRING)

You know that any movie provoking clucks of distaste from the butter-won’t-melt-in-ourmouths hipsters who regularly glut the Sundance Film Festival has got to have something going for it, and this Lars von Trier–scripted guns-do-sokill-people parable, directed by his Dogma coconspirator

MENACE, ANYONE? William Baldwin (right) scares a fracturing family with his hairdo in The Squid and the Whale.

Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), has cheek to spare. Taking place, like von Trier’s Dogville and Manderlay, in yet another imaginary, bleak American town, it’s one of von Trier’s wannabe mathematical proofs, here designed to show how even an avowed pacifist (the excellent Jamie Bell, leading a first-rate cast) can be corrupted and drawn into a world of violence by mere exposure to firearms. The stunning obviousness of the story line seems

© 2005 Image Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

to be something Vinterberg’s entirely aware of, and instead of trying to cover it up, he has some nasty fun with it, directing the scenario with a breeziness that turns dour and clinical at just the point where you need it not to. Might be a perfect date picture on a night when you and yours feel like getting good and pissed off. Agree? Disagree? Just looking for something to rent or buy? Respond to Glenn Kenny’s column or check out our weekly reviews posted at premiere.com.

CATCHING UP WITH...

George Clooney In Good Night, and Good Luck, the actor-director dramatizes the famous Edward R. Murrow news broadcasts that helped topple SenatorJoseph McCarthy. By Sara Brady

THE NIGHT TRAIN: Clooney (foreground) and David Strathairn on the set. “Murrow kept saying that we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” says Clooney.

54 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

PREMIERE:

Why is this still an important story? My father was an anchorman for years and years, and we grew up with the theory that there are very few times that broadcast journalism can make that big of a difference, but those mileposts—Murrow taking on McCarthy and Cronkite taking on Vietnam— actually change things. That was a high point

MELINDA SUE GORDON

GEORGE CLOONEY DOESN’T LIKE TO PLAY IT SAFE. HIS DIRECTORIAL DEBUT, 2002’S Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, was a Charlie Kaufman–penned film about a game-show host who may have been a CIA assassin. And for his follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s chosen a piece of 1950s history—about broadcast journalism, no less—and filmed it in lush black and white. David Strathairn plays CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, who devoted several of his See It Now programs (his sign-off is the movie’s title) to exposing the tactics of Communist-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy. Clooney, who cowrote the film (with actor Grant Heslov) and who plays Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, talks about why he considers this project both personal and political.

©2005 General Mills

WHAT’S ZOE’S POP SECRET?

“SNACK SIZE MOVIE THEATER BUTTER IS PERFECT FOR SNEAKIN’.”

CATCHING UP WITH...

56 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

about Murrow and McCarthy. Both suffered the exact same fate: They were basically censured, put in the back row, and left there to dry on the vine. That great historic fight took them both down, ultimately. The difference is, Murrow stands the test of time. Why did you choose to show McCarthy only in archival footage? The danger of hiring an actor for the part was always that you could never believe the guy, with stringy hair hanging down in his face and screaming, ranting and raving. The truth is to use McCarthy’s own words, as opposed to having an actor play him. How did the actors prepare for their roles as journalists? The kids,Tate Donovan and all those guys,would come in and type out the news of the day on a typewriter. And [Strathairn] would sit there and read it; just every morning, he would come in and read some of the news. We were watching, going, this is today’s news read by Edward R. Murrow. Oh my God. How different it sounds. How do you think the film reflects or comments on the current state of television news? It’s an interesting time because you realize how Murrow and McCarthy could never happen again. One voice couldn’t have that impact.There isn’t the most trusted man in America BETTER ED THAN RED: Strathairn as the iconic CBS newsman. “Actors don’t usually get to do [Murrow’s] anymore. kind of lines,” says Clooney. We had a montage of the history of television at the end of the film, bringing to do any playback music. We hired all these us up-to-date—the great moments, the musicians who worked with my aunt Rosestunning moments, the idiot moments. We mary and looked for someone who could be ended it with this car chase—a couple of this iconic figure that we could go back to, stations covered it—where the guy got out like Joel Grey in Cabaret. This touchstone. of the car, took his clothes off, set himself on The whole crew just melted when Dianne fire, stuck a shotgun in his mouth, and blew Reeves would come in and start singing. The his head off. On one of the channels, you whole place was electric. could hear guys laughing in the background, The film takes place largely in the CBS going, oh my God, there’s your news story. newsrooms and studios; we almost never And the camera moved in on him—they’d go home with the characters. interrupted a children’s program to do it. The idea was to try and weave in stories that The montage was an amazing thing to humanize these people. And we got notes at watch, but it dawned on me that it was times from people saying,“Well, what about manipulative, because adults are going to Murrow’s life and what about his wife and understand what we’re talking about. And if what happened to him at the end?”The truth they don’t, then I can’t spoon-feed them arwas, I don’t care. I’m not doing a biopic. It’s a guments about how the news has become story of five episodes of television, basically, entertainment. and the things that went on in those periods To me, it’s a really important time for this of time. A couple [played by Robert Downey film. Whether or not it’s an important film, I Jr. and Patricia Clarkson] happened to be in don’t know. But it was important to just open the newsroom, so we could go home with the discussion again. them for a minute, but the truth was, it was ■ willing—Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s, and Jeff Skoll’s—and we sold it overseas pretty well, surprisingly. They weren’t as shy about black and white. I wanted this to feel like a D.A. Pennebaker documentary in a way. That was why black and white was a must, all the way through. The overlapping dialogue in the newsroom has a clear Robert Altman influence. Well, Altman’s a big part of this. He was certainly the master of getting actors to understand that it can’t all be relied on in a [sound] mix, that you have to make room for other actors. You have to not be trying to outtalk them all the time. And I used Nashville as a template for the music because I didn’t want

MELINDA SUE GORDON

in my family’s life, something my father always talked about—without Murrow, what the country would have been like. So it was something I’ve always sort of romanticized. And as the world changed, and [it came out] that a couple of people McCarthy nailed were actually spies, there was this rewriting of history—about what a good guy McCarthy was. And it occurred to me that the whole point of what Murrow had done so brilliantly was to take on the subject matter saying, “I don’t know whether these people are guilty or not, but they have the right to face their accuser.” I wasn’t looking to preach to anybody; I just thought there were some really interesting parallels to issues going on today. Why is Murrow such an icon? We don’t have anybody that speaks like Murrow today. I mean, if anybody [gave] just one of those speeches that he gives on the show, [they’d] probably be president. I’ve never seen anybody so eloquent. You always want to be represented by your best, and he seems to have been our best. You have actors playing real CBS employees, some of whom are still alive or have family members living. What research went into making these portraits historically accurate? I had to do it the same way that Murrow did it, which was source everything. We sat down and did interview after interview, with Ruth Friendly and with Casey Murrow and Milo Radulovich; we spent time with all those guys and tried to cross-reference stories from over the years. We were very careful with historical references because we felt like this is not the time to play loose with facts. David Strathairn plays Murrow with incredible gravitas. How difficult was it to cast that part? There was a moment that I thought I should play the role, because it’s such a great part. And then I was like, I’m not the right guy. Because every time you see Murrow, you feel like he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders. And you can’t really act that; you just have to sort of have that. And David has it. He channeled him. How hard is it to get a black-and-white film green-lighted? It was all resistance. Every company we went to said, “We can’t sell a black-and-white film.” And fair enough, I get it; but I wrote it, I’m directing it, and I have the second lead in it,and we couldn’t get seven and a half million dollars to make the film. So we pieced it together with a couple of [companies] who were

THE BIZ BYANN DONAHUE

ICEMAN AND MAVERICK: Texan movie magnates Wagner (left) and Cuban.

The Cuban Movie Crisis

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban and his partner, Todd Wagner, are quietly waging war on how Hollywood distributes movies. Now, director Steven Soderbergh has answered their call of duty. LISTEN UP, HOLLYWOOD. THE MOUTH OF THE SOUTH WANTS TO TELL YOU HOW TO fix your ailing business. “It’s a real simple premise,” says Mark Cuban, impolitic NBA team owner, retired Internet savant, obstreperous billionaire blogger, and aspiring movie mogul. “You just let the people tell you what they want and then go backward from there.” It’s quite possible that Cuban has mixed up“simple”with“insane,”at least in the eyes of the entertainment industry, which enjoys change about as much as the ultracompetitive Cuban likes losing. But the brash Pennsylvanian-turned-Texan and his slightly more genteel busi-

58 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

ness partner, Todd Wagner, have earned reputations as innovative thinkers who can see the forest through the trees when it comes to creating new business opportunities. Or, as the always eloquent Cuban once said: “I love to fuck with people,and I love finding ways to make more money.” Cuban and Wagner intend to do both in Hollywood. The two men, friends since their drinking days at Indiana University, have plans to overhaul what they consider to be a broken business. It’s a thermonuclear hot summer day in Dallas (where their 2929 Entertainment and other businesses are located), the kind of afternoon where your shirt melts to your back and you can scoop smog with a spoon. Dressed in a ratty black T-shirt adorned with Johnny Cash’s soulful face, Cuban, later joined by Wagner, relaxes in the airconditioned confines of the neon-laden martini bar at the Inwood Theatre. Make that their Inwood Theatre, part of the 208screen Landmark chain, one of the many entertainment assets—including film companies and TV channels—that are key to their concept for revolutionizing the way the masses watch movies. To understand their idea, you first have to know what’s happening in Hollywood. The predicament that the town is facing—and where Cuban and Wagner plan to profit—is that films often lose more money than they make in domestic theatrical release. According to economist Edward Jay Epstein’s book The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood,the average cost of prints and advertising for a studio film in 2003 was $39 million. That’s $18.4 million more than the average box office return on a movie. It’s no secret that fans aren’t heading to the multiplex the way they used to. For 19 straight weeks in 2005, theatrical revenues were less than they were for the same week in 2004, creating the much bemoaned box office slump. It wasn’t until the release of Fantastic Four in July that the industry saw year-over-year weekly gains—and even then, the weekend after July 4th was a squeaker, with $148.9 million in total ticket sales coming in compared with $148.3 million in 2004. And the box office slump isn’t over just yet. As of mid-August, the year-to-date revenue from all tickets sold in 2005 is still below that of 2004: $5.6 billion compared with $6 billion, a loss of 6.7 percent. Add to these gloomy numbers the fact that a June 2005 AP-AOL poll found that 73

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT HUMPHREYS

THE BIZ

60 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

THE MARK OF CUBAN: Above, the boss man cheering for his Mavs. Right, from top, 2929’s upcoming One Last Thing . . . with Cynthia Nixon; Enron director Alex Gibney; Cuban working it as “Macho Mark” in 1994’s Talking About Sex.

other well, with Cuban antagonizing and Wagner playing the savvy behind-thescenes diplomat. What Cuban takes 50 words to say, Wagner says in five. And as any basketball fan knows,Cuban has a short fuse. Wagner thinks before he acts. In the moviegoing future envisioned by this odd couple, fans could shell out $10 for a theater ticket when a movie comes out, pay a premium price to watch it on pay-perview, or buy a higher-priced DVD. The choice is theirs.“The customer wants to be in charge,” Wagner says, echoing what sounds like a new media mantra from his career as a dot commie. There’s a certain undeniable logic to their argument. But the film industry notoriously operates on illogical economics. And Hollywood has always been slow to change anything about its business. So, for the most part, the powers that be have eyed Cuban and Wagner’s idea with skepticism and even some disdain. Studios scoff at the idea that the same kind of money can be made on a film that doesn’t have a gradual release from theater to DVD to TV. And exhibitors are fearful of any plan that might put fewer popcornmunching patrons in their theater seats. But Cuban and Wagner found a believer in Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), who signed a six-picture deal with their 2929 Entertainment production company in April. The first film, the low-budget Bubble, playing festivals this fall, will be released “day and date” across theaters, DVD, and TV sometime in the near future. “Once

Steven’s deal got announced, that was when everybody said,‘Okay, what are these guys up to?’”Wagner says.“What no one can deny is that an A-lister said,‘I’ll do this with you.’” Another fact that few can deny is Cuban and Wagner’s ability to step in and overhaul an industry. Before Cuban took over the Mavericks, he and Wagner launched Broadcast.com, a website for streaming audio and video that offered up tidbits such as Clinton’s grand jury testimony and Victoria’s Secret’s fashion shows. (The term “webcasting”? Wagner says he invented it.) Cuban was in his thirties and already retired when they came up with this concept, having sold his computer consulting company for $5 million. Yahoo! bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999.Wagner took his windfall and started a charitable foundation serving inner-city kids and minority-owned businesses. Cuban bought the Mavericks and

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES; JOJO WHILDEN/HDNET FILMS; MAGNOLIA PICTURES; NO CREDIT

percent of respondents preferred to watch movies at home. These numbers reflect a not-so-recent shift in the industry’s profit dynamics. In 2004, DVD sales raked in $15 billion, compared with the $9.4 billion for in-theater sales. Figure in DVD/VHS rentals, and the tally jumps to a whopping $24.1 billion. (Although there is some recent indication that this revenue stream could be maturing and leveling off.) Yet, the traditional Hollywood mentality still puts theatrical at the center of the profit strategy.“The problem is how much studios have to spend to get people into the theater,” Cuban explains. “Looking for ways to get people into the theater is as much a challenge as making great movies.” And as DVDs have grown in importance, studios have responded by creating those kinds of million-dollar marketing campaigns all over again months later, when it comes time for the home video release, leaving them in the hole for many, many millions (without even considering the cost of actually making the movie). To tap into home video money quicker, studios are shrinking the time between a movie’s theatrical release and DVD release from five to three months. It’s just this kind of Band-Aid solution that Cuban likens to “shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.” But Cuban, 47, and Wagner, 45, believe they have designs on a lifeboat. Their idea is to release films concurrently in theaters, on DVD, and on pay cable and satellite TV. This would not only consolidate marketing costs, but it would give the consumers a choice that might entice them to see more movies, more often. “It’s five to ten percent of the population that goes to movie theaters on any regular basis,” Wagner says. “So if there’s ninety percent of the audience that’s not going to the theater, if we can figure out how to get content to them and get them to buy it . . .” His voice trails off, leaving one to ponder the millions they hope to make. “There’s a pent-up demand for people who aren’t going to get to the movie theater that weekend, and they’d like to see a movie while everybody is still talking about it,” he continues. “It’s a dangerous assumption to say, ‘They’ll wait five months and buy the DVD or rent it.’” “They won’t,”Cuban says. “Because they’ve lost the impulse to buy,” Wagner says.“We need to get the content to the people.” Cuban and Wagner complement each

THE BIZ racked up fines for mouthing off at games. “Too young to golf every day,” Wagner began dabbling in the movie business, and Cuban (who earlier had a brief career as a D-list actor, with roles such as “Macho Mark” in 1994’s Talking About Sex) followed. Soon they were buying a theater chain (and becoming outspoken proponents of digital cinema) and film libraries, as well as acquiring and financing small indie films, including 2004’s Godsend, with Robert De Niro, and this year’s The Jacket, with Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. Which leads back to Bubble, an experiment not only in distribution but in filmmaking as well. Soderbergh shot the $3 million digital film in a doll factory in tiny Belpre, Ohio, where he hired locals instead of actors for many parts. The cast wasn’t given a script, just scene directions from Soderbergh each day before shooting. Cuban, unconcerned with Soderbergh’s unorthodox style, describes the murder-mystery as “freaky,” with touches of cult favorite What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which was also set in a small town and used some amateur actors. Although it remains to be seen if more people will want to watch a movie—one that seems to have more in common with Soderbergh’s challenging Full Frontal than any of his more commercial efforts—simply because they can get it on several platforms at once, the deal has already given Cuban and Wagner what they need to push forward with their plan: publicity, and more importantly, credibility. “I’m sure some people will say, ‘Why do this?’ ” Soderbergh told the Los Angeles Times in April (busy editing Bubble, he declined to be interviewed for this article). “And my response is, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ In the next five years, you are going to see some significant paradigm shifts in the entertainment business.” Cuban and Wagner plan to capitalize on that shift, and they don’t need Hollywood’s help to do it. Over the past three years, they’ve built their own entertainment empire where they can independently test their ideas. This includes their 2929 Entertainment (named for the former address of Broadcast.com); they also own Magnolia Pictures, which acquires films that play in their Landmark theaters. When it comes to home entertainment, they run two TV channels, HDNet and HDNet Movies, and have relationships with DVD production companies. And they’ve had some early success.

This spring, they released the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in theaters and on HDNet Movies. So far, it’s made $3.9 million at the box office, recouping its $1 million budget, even though many theater chains declined to show the film because it premiered simultaneously in theaters and on TV. It’s the exhibitors, in fact, who think they will lose the most if Cuban and Wagner’s plan is one day embraced by the industry, a belief that Wagner disputes. “I think people who go to the movies will continue to go to the movies,”Wagner says. “That hasn’t changed for sixty years. [It’s] been a misnomer that somehow this is an attack on the exhibition industry.” “Yes, it is,”Cuban cackles. Ignoring his partner, Wagner then throws out the idea that theater owners could get a share of the cash when a movie is released on DVD. That’s not likely to appease exhibitors. Even with a name like Soderbergh’s attached to Bubble, Regal Cinemas, the country’s largest theater chain, will not carry the movie. Regal spokesperson Dick Westerling says that any film that has a simultaneous release on DVD or TV won’t make it onto their screens “to maintain the integrity of the theatrical release.” Earlier this year, Regal was one of the chains that refused to show Enron. But some see the method to their madness. Sort of. Jon Feltheimer, CEO of Lions Gate Entertainment and a mentor to Cuban and Wagner (Cuban first broke into the industry by buying 5 percent of Lions Gate) believes that their compacted release schedule could work for small-budget movies. “For a certain kind of film, maybe that would be the right approach,”he says.“A film that a grownup audience might not race out to the theater to see . . . If you could create some buzz, that might be worth trying.” For their part, Wagner and Cuban concede that this kind of multiplatform release might not be best for all films. But how can they know until they try? The true test will come this fall when Bubble hits a theater, DVD player, and TV near you. “We’re not kamikaze pilots,” Wagner says. “If this is a disaster,we’re not going to keep doing it.” “Whether you buy it by going to the theater, or buy it at home, or buy it for your PlayStation, your phone, your PDA, or buy it for your high-def television, who cares?” Cuban says, oozing the kind of confidence that a billion in the bank brings. “Just have fun,” he says. “Just chill.” I

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CHICAGO JVC: The Perfect Experience Studio JVC: The Perfect Experience Studio opened its doors to consumers on June 15th on the corner of 40th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City. The 30-day experiential enviroment allowed visitors to enjoy interactive entertainment including video games, movie screenings, karaoke, live music and events powered by select HFM U.S. magazines including Movies in High Def presented by PREMIERE. Attendees at PREMIERE’s Movies in High Def nights were treated to the perfect home movie experience as they watched hot blockbusters on JVC’s 70" HD-ILA rear-projection TV – praised as one of the best HDTV’s available!

Broadway’s razzle-dazzle musical smash has a sensational new star: the one and only Brooke Shields. The star of TV’s “Suddenly Susan,” Ms. Shields joins the cast September 9th through October 30th only. For tickets to the show Liz Smith calls “still the best damn musical in town,” visit Telecharge.com online or call 212-239-6200.

CineVegas 2005 The CineVegas Film Festival opened with a Hustle and closed with Zombies this year as the annual fest presented 9 days of film and 9 nights of festivities at The Palms Casino Resort and Brenden Theatres in Las Vegas. Producer John Singleton and cast members from Hustle and Flow partied poolside at Skin at the Palms after the screening of their film Hustle and Flow opening night. The World Premiere of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead brought the festival to a wonderfully gory close with Zombie disco dancers performing at the closing night party at Curve at the Aladdin/Planet Hollywood. Honored this year were Christopher Walken, Samantha Morton, Nicolas Cage, George A. Romero and Wim Wenders. Christopher Jaymes’ In Memory Of My Father won the Grand Jury Award.

Christopher Walken, Marquee Award Winner, Joe Pesci and Dennis Hopper

The festival celebrated the 100th Birthday of the City of Las Vegas with special Centennial Awards presented to Ann-Margret during the Viva Las Vegas party and Rhonda Fleming at the Fremont Street Experience, backed up by 100 showgirls, past and present, courtesy of the Tropicana Hotel’s Folies Bergere. The partying continued throughout the week at Green Valley Ranch Resort’s Whiskey Beach, Tangerine at Treasure Island, Light at Bellagio, Alize at the Palms, ghostbar and Voodoo Lounge at the Rio. Festival-goers enjoyed VIP treatment from sponsors including T-Mobile, Stella Artois, JetBlue Airways, Red Bull, Cuervo & Ginger, The Hollywood Reporter and PREMIERE Magazine.

Simon Baker and George Romero at the premiere of Land of the Dead

Ann-Margret with her CineVegas Centennial Award

Mia Riverton, Georgia Lee and Jane Chen from Red Doors, Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting

Tony Curtis, Bo Derek and Dennis Hopper

Taraji P. Henson, John Singleton, Paula Jai Parker, Taryn Manning

Nicolas Cage with his CineVegas Half-Life award from Nambe

Gina Gershon at the “100 Showgirls” party, Fremont Street Experience

Samantha Morton playing pool at the Real World Suite at the Palms after her Half-Life award presentation

OCTOBER 2005

HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE: THE PRODUCER BY LAWRENCE TURMAN

WeAre Not the Enemy Maligned, misunderstood, and often mysteriously credited, movie producers rarely get their props. Finally, one speaks out. WITH THE SWEET SMELL OF MY SUCCESS still in the air, I thought I would give myself a break and get out of the trenches. Having just produced 1967’s The Graduate, I decided to executive-produce my next film, which meant trying the entrepreneur route—setting up financing for a film and choosing the creative elements, including a producer who would supervise the shoot.So I was a relaxed, happy camper at a dinner hosted by my friend and fellow producer David Wolper in the summer of 1968, bragging about how I had a picture, Pretty Poison, with a fine script by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (The Parallax View) and a superb cast (Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld), that was about to start shooting. I boasted that I wasn’t even going to visit the set.I had hired a producer to do the job. But before I had even started on my dessert, I was hit by a flurry of phone calls; my producer and the director tracked me down to tell me that their crew was in mutiny and they couldn’t start the film. I was on a plane the next morning to put out the fire—as well as to rub sticks to start new ones.First,I cajoled the assistant director to stay on board,then I axed the production manager and hired a new one.I did a lot of fanny-patting and got everyone on track emotionally, and, soon, the movie was off and running. But it wasn’t long before the neophyte director fell behind schedule. Each night I would have to go over his shot list with him for the next day’s work to ensure he could “make his day.”After we finished filming,I had to spend hours in the editing room and at the sound mix. Merely executive-produce!? I never worked so hard in my life. But nobody cares what goes into a film, only what comes out. Happily, the critics, including Pauline Kael, loved Pretty Poison. The director went on to bigger and better things (for a while). My young producer learned the

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HENDRIX

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HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE: THE PRODUCER

THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE: . . . and at the beginning and the end. Producer (and this article’s author) Lawrence Turman (center, smiling) on the set of The Graduate—for which he had optioned the rights when it was a little-known book—with director Mike Nichols (left) and Dustin Hoffman.

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you can hear a writer’s work, and you can readily assess an actor’s skill. But the producer? Let me tell you: He or she just happens to be the cause, the reason, all the others are working on the movie. What you see at your local theater nearly always began life as an idea in a producer’s head. Sure, writers give birth to ideas and stories—some directors, too—but without our recognition and steadfast push, most films would not see the light of day. It is the producer who starts the ball rolling, and keeps it rolling. Do I sound selfserving and prejudiced? Well, I plead guilty. That takes nothing away from the talented, creative others I’ve had to convince, implore, and seduce to climb aboard my project. But even film crews often don’t fully understand or appreciate that the producer has busted his or her butt for several (or many) bloody, sweaty, and tearful years prior to the start of filming.I’ve been on set and heard them mutter about me,“Look at the slicker just standing around,and he gets the big bucks.”

Oh, sure, I’m hot stuff at the restaurants where I get the best tables, and at parties, where everybody wants to talk about my business, not theirs. But I only get a paycheck when/if I make a movie—and that’s not every year. My friends get a paycheck each and every month. I’m more like an oil wildcatter who sinks a lot of dry holes and once in a while, hopefully, hits a gusher, as I did with The Graduate. Maybe a few stories will help show some of the things a producer actually does: GETTING STARTED: WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? Charles Webb wrote The Graduate, but his novel had only sold several thousand hardcover copies and was lying fallow when I spotted it and took an option for $1,000 of my own money—which was a lot for me in 1963.I then chose Mike Nichols to direct, before he became Mike Nichols. (He had directed one Broadway play, Barefoot in the Park, but had not yet done a film. I had already produced

BOB WILLOUGHBY/MPTV

importance of crisis management. And I learned you can’t always tell from the producer credits who did what on a film. Today, many films credit anywhere from 4 to 14 producers, some of whom are “baggage,” because there are so many categories of producer: executive producers, coproducers, associate producers, line producers, assistant producers. Line producers are physical production specialists—they are the guys on the ground, overseeing every day of the shoot. Executive producers get that credit for anything from arranging the money, being manager of the star or director, or being the studio executive overseeing the film.The associate producer title is a catchall, designating anyone the producer deems worthy. But the real deal is the producer. He or she runs the show. It’s the producer, and only the producer, who is called onstage to accept the Academy Award for Best Picture. Even so, hardly anyone knows what a producer’s job is. You can see a director’s work,

HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE: THE PRODUCER four films, the last being Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.) Together, we developed the script and cast Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, and then, together, became rich and famous. Of course, he a little more than I. (A few years later, a big New York Times story about me was headlined“But They Still Say‘Larry Who?’”!) THE PITCH: HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL Every producer pitches a story to the studio his own way. I’ve seen some practically jump on the executive’s desk and act out every role. I myself use a low-key, straightforward approach: Here’s my project, here’s why I like it, here’s what I think its potential is, I hope you share my enthusiasm. And they usually don’t. I always expect a no and am rarely disappointed. But all it takes is one yes, and then I’m in the game. So we producers live on hope, and it does spring eternal. After all, a project is only dead if the producer quits working on it. I hate to admit it, but I quit on Amadeus after my enthusiasm from seeing the play in London was thoroughly dampened by categorical turndowns from every single studio. But the dedicated, tasteful Saul Zaentz didn’t walk away from that project, even though he had to cobble together the financing. And he produced a great,Oscar-winning film.

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CRISIS MANAGEMENT: IF I HAD A DIME FOR EVERY HEADACHE I was on a soundstage in England producing I Could Go on Singing (1963),starring Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde, longtime pals who then were pissing ice water at each other due to Judy’s mercurial mood swings. So I was

On The Graduate, my brilliant director, Mike Nichols,fell in love with a church as a location for our story’s climax, but the church refused to let us film there. The Graduate was racy, sexually provocative; this was 1967. So I told Mike, “No go. We have to find another church.”His reply?“But,Larry,that’s the only one I want.” Shit! I maneuvered a meeting with the church elders in which I told them our film was dealing with the very issues (purpose, morality, etc.) that the church itself should be dealing with. Chutzpah, yes, but the truth. They relented, and their church is the glorious centerpiece of our climax. MINDING THE BUDGET: THE BUCK’S GOT TO STOP SOMEWHERE Producing is largely about balancing your artistic desires against the financial means you have to achieve them. In the middle of filming The Young Doctors in 1961, starring two-time Oscar winner Fredric March and a young Dick Clark, we began slipping over budget. Our director was from the Hollywood studio system and was used to taking orders,so my then partner and I sat him down and told him,“Remember that nighttime ice skating sequence with two hundred extras? Well, it’s now a daytime scene with twentyfive extras.” The old pro agreed, putting the camera up high and pointing it downward to create a tight shot that made it look like we had zillions of extras on location, and, presto, by the next week we were on schedule and budget again.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE, THERE’S A PRODUCER: From top, David Selznick and Robert Evans lit—and stomped out—their share of fires as two of the most celebrated producers in movie history.

ready for another gripe about Dirk when she came up to me, but instead she started bitching that director Ronald Neame was exhausting her by demanding too many takes. Trying to soothe her and to just get through the shoot, I took Neame aside and encouraged him to ease off. The very next scene, after only one take, Neame yelled, “Cut! That’s it. Perfect. Let’s move on to the next.” I let out a sigh of relief, until Judy rushed up and said, “So that’s the game the son of a bitch is going to play.” Sometimes,the producer can’t win. Each film has its own unique problems.

Hopefully, that gives you a sense of just some of what a producer does on a film, and yet, still, we are thought to be irritating, moneyobsessed, artistically devoid trolls. Serving as I do on the board of the producers branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and having formed a board of 40 producer mentors for the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California, which I’ve chaired for 14 years, I talk a lot to my kind. And they all echo the same Rodney Dangerfield complaint: “We don’t get no respect.”And, frankly, it’s damn unfair. The best producers have the taste and creativity of an artist, the mind-set of an entertainer, the people skills of a politician, the business acumen of a CEO, the insight of a psychotherapist, the ebullience of a cheerleader,the tenacity of a pit bull,the charm of a snake-oil seller, the delegating ability of a five-star general, the malleability of a chameleon, and the dedication of a monk. It’s not happenstance that Zaentz produces

FROM TOP, TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION

DEVELOPING THE SCRIPT: A SLOW ROAD How does a producer develop a script with a writer or director? Very carefully. Nothing is more important than the script.I work on the simple premise that I’m an audience of one for the writer. I always ask who is doing what to whom and, very important, why. As I did with novelist Bill Goldman—yes,the one and only future Oscar winner—when I arranged to meet him long before he ever wrote a screenplay, in the early 1960s. I was a big fan of his novels, and we became fast friends. He offered to write on spec what became the movie Harper. In my infinite wisdom, I turned him down, but in turn offered to have him write the screenplay for The Graduate. He turned me down.Bill then wanted to write an original script about the last of the outlaws, The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. We worked together on it for two years, and although I got him to reverse the title, to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and got Paul Newman interested (okay, in fairness, the

script did that), I didn’t even get to produce the movie.Bill’s agent (whom I had set him up with) got muscled by his biggest client, who wanted to produce the picture. So I was out. Whoever said life,or producing,was fair?

TM

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HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE: THE PRODUCER quality classics that also have commercial appeal, that Jerry Bruckheimer has one blockbuster after another, that Brian Grazer can eclectically go from producing A Beautiful Mind to The Cat in the Hat, or that Scott Rudin could mortgage his house to tie up a story he loves. Or that younger newcomers like Laura Bickford and Michael London produce gems such as Traffic and Sideways. I had the good fortune to be around in the old days, and, I have to admit, they were better.Every studio had dozens of producers under contract, each getting a hefty paycheck,

Neal Moritz, Gale Anne Hurd, Joel Silver, Lauren Shuler Donner, and Doug Wick, don’t have the same power and control that David Selznick, Hal Wallis, and Darryl Zanuck had. As legend has it, two-time Oscar-winning director Joseph Mankiewicz once said, “I been tilling the fields a long time and I know who is the massa,” regarding renowned producer–turned–studio chief Zanuck, who had recut his Cleopatra. And Selznick, when asked why he didn’t direct, since he controlled every other aspect of a production, said,“I’ve got more important things to do.”

FROM TOP: AMBLIN/UNIVERSAL/KOBAL COLLECTION; MPTV

TEAM TITANS: Many producers develop long-term—but not exclusive—relationships with top-notch directors, such as (from top) Kathleen Kennedy with Steven Spielberg; and Jerry Bruckheimer (left) with Michael Bay.

and, to boot, a story department that would send around a memo saying the studio just bought such-and-such Pulitzer-winning book or play, and to please register interest if you’d like to produce it. Ah, where are the snows of yesteryear? Today,a producer has to full-time hustle, beg, borrow, and/or steal to nail the hot script or book that is the cheese to bait the trap to catch the money mouse (read: star,director,studio). The old-time producers were lords of the universe, whereas today they’re high-priced peons. I’m not talking about the top elite, who still have the perks of studio-paid plush offices on, or off, the lot, plus plenty of staff, ample expense accounts, and even discretionary money to unilaterally buy a script or a book. But too many producers are working out of their homes, suffering the daily frustration, the indignity, of not having their phone calls returned in a timely fashion, if at all. And today’s fat cats, like Kathy Kennedy,

That was then, this is now. Hollywood has embraced the French Cahiers du Cinema theory that each film has an author, and that author is always, and only, the director (unless a critic’s darling like writer Charlie Kaufman is involved). The studios think the director is the only one who can have a “vision”for a film. And the ripple effect? When was the last time you saw a producer mentioned in a film review? Robert Dowling, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, got it right when he said,“Producing is the only job where you hire the person [the director] from whom you take orders.” If producing is so tough, why do we do it? I asked a dozen top producers—who I inter-

viewed for my book, So You Want to Be a Producer—if they liked producing. To a person, they replied, “I don’t like it, I love it.” Many years ago, I was asked about the joys and sorrows of the job by a young reporter named Curtis Hanson. (Yep, before he was the Oscar-winning writer-director of L.A. Confidential.) My reply? “Nothing could be more rewarding or stimulating. Each day has new challenges, new struggles, new frustrations, new satisfactions. Each day I figure I’ll walk into the office and get hit with a right to the heart and a left to the kidney,but I love it.” I feel the same way today. Nothing beats sitting in a crowded movie theater showing one of my films, hearing the audience laugh and hold its collective breath, seeing tears flow, and, perhaps, hearing some applause. And that’s just the icing. The cake, for me, is my personal expression: the idea behind each film I do, my conscious or sometimes unconscious signature with which I express my values. I like to think—I do think—that I can affect the world,or at least a few people in it. Sure, seeing my name when the credits roll is nice, but knowing how I help shape a film is more important, like with American History X, which I exec-produced. Because he was so eager to play the part, Edward Norton volunteered to test for the lead role of the tattooed skinhead. Here was a guy who had already received an Oscar nomination for his first film. I was elated, and his test knocked my socks off. But not those of our director, Tony Kaye, whom I had also championed, and who was king in the world of commercials but helming his first film. He wanted to find a nonactor, an authentic street person. All studios are director fornicators; thus,to my dismay but not surprise, New Line agreed. After five weeks testing dozens of hopefuls,Tony screened his top choices for us.None of them had the right stuff, so New Line and my producer partners and I put our foot down, and Edward was in our film, for which he rightly earned his second Oscar nomination. Two weeks into shooting, Tony sidled up to me and whispered, “Edward is the best piece of luck I ever had.” His luck was having smart producers. Lawrence Turman has produced 30 films, and is the author of So You Want to Be a Producer, due out this month from Three Rivers Press.

PREMIERE.COM 75

IF YOU ASK ME BYLIBBYGELMAN-WAXNER

Mommy Dearest

Say goodbye to the Girl Scouts, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Judy Blume. These days, the movies can be the best guide to growing up. MY PERFECT DAUGHTER, JENNIFER, IS NOW WELL INTO HER TEENS, SO OF COURSE I have my concerns. Should I try to overschedule her extracurricular activities so that she won’t have time to hang out at clubs and tease older men? Should I believe her when she says that hanging out at clubs and teasing older men actually looks good on college applications? Should I check her blog every day for mentions of satanism, crystal meth, or the workout regime Jessica Simpson used to get her high, muscular butt? Should I believe her when she says that Harvard values a high, muscular butt more than SAT scores and a personal essay combined? And most important, what sort of male movie stars should I encourage her to fantasize about? As a route to bringing up the subject, we read through Jennifer Aniston’s candid interview in Vanity Fair, the piece where she discussed her breakup with Brad Pitt. Aniston confessed that she’s been feeling very lonely and confused lately, immediately following the full-page photo of her wearing only black panties and clutching her naked breasts. I used this article to show my daughter that love is never easy, even with a dreamboat like Brad, and I suggested that Aniston’s clearly been skimming the upcoming Jenna Jameson guide, How to Heal Like a Porn Star.

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Eliminating Brad, I brought up Johnny Depp in director Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Johnny plays Willy Wonka, the factory’s eccentric owner, and I told Jennifer that Johnny was great because he keeps daring to tackle outrageously non-macho roles. Jennifer agreed that both Johnny and the movie are delicious, but she declared that in real life, Johnny is actually a breathtakingly beautiful woman. “I Googled him,” she went on, “and you can tell. He always has porcelain skin, his hair can do anything, and he’s always wearing lots of jewelry and these great, floppy suits. He’s a French lesbian.”I tried to protest that Johnny was in fact just a transcendently fearless actor, and that he’s fathered a couple of children, but Jennifer wasn’t buying it. “Have you seen his cheekbones?” she cried. “And his shiny Willy Wonka pageboy? He only says he’s a guy to drive Michael Jackson crazy. But he’s too gorgeous. If I ever went out with Johnny Depp, I’d feel like I was something on a leash. I mean, Mom, when you wear your huge, oversize sunglasses, you look like a mosquito, but when Johnny wears his, he looks like Jackie Onassis.” I wanted to slap her, but there was just too much truth in her last observation, so I limited myself to stroking her head tenderly and promising that her baby fat would disappear by the time she retired, to which she replied, “So I guess you’re still working,” and to end the subsequent brawl I had to promise to take her to see the R-rated comedy Wedding Crashers. This movie stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as two wild-and-crazy divorce mediators who like to infiltrate weddings in order to seduce susceptible bridesmaids. I told Jennifer that Owen is the current heartthrob of every single woman in the universe, because while he comes off like a zonked-out surfer dude, you can tell that he uses even more haircare products than Johnny Depp, whose name sounds like a haircare product. Owen is like a lost little boy at the mall, with ice cream around his mouth and condoms in his pocket. Jennifer added that Owen was like the sexy older brother of every skateboarder she’d ever met, saying, “He always looks like he just got kicked out of another college for doing something really cool, and that if he got high and killed someone with a machete, you’d totally forgive him because he’d squint his eyes and be really, really sorry.” I commented that Vince Vaughn is more obviously sleazy, and Jen-

ILLUSTRATION BY JOSHUA GORCHOV

Women in Hollywood 2005

CHARLIZE THERON She left home at 16,squared The star of Monster—who calls acting

off against the devil at 22,and won an Oscar at 28. “a big poker game”—dishes about typecasting, transformation, and her passion for emotional stories. INTERVIEW BY FRED SCHRUERS Photographs by Gilles Bensimon

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STYLIST, LISA MICHELLE FOR THE WALL GROUP; HAIR, ENZO ANGILERI FOR CLOUTIER/MATRIX; MAKEUP, SHANE PAISH FOR CHANEL AT CELESTINEAGENCY.COM; MANICURIST, LIBBIE SIMPKINS FOR O.P.I. AT CELESTINEAGENCY.COM. PREVIOUS PAGE: SWEATER, PRADA; HAT, PALACE COSTUME. OPPOSITE PAGE: SWEATER, PRADA; CAMISOLE AND SKIRT, GUCCI; PEARLS, LANVIN

THERE WAS A RESPECT for nature that I was taught at a very young age.It was just the three of us,and we were real farmers [in Benoni,South Africa].We never bought from butchers or anything,and whatever we would do would last us a year.It was the circle of life,which I’ve always loved about farm life. I think when you say “farmer”or “farm community,”you think of a naive, Daisy Duke kind of character. But you can come from that environment and have a great deal of culture and intelligence. It wasn’t like I sat in on every conversation, but we read newspapers and knew what was going on in the world. I always felt like I had a partnership with my mother, and that I never had to rebel against anything. There was a certain amount of responsibility that was given to me as a gift: “You’re smart, use that; be your own person, go explore, go and live a complete, full life.” And there was a certain amount of discipline that came with the way I was raised. You didn’t break things that were not yours; you didn’t wreck a room. My mom and I watch this Nanny 911 show together, and I said to her,“I’m so calling the authorities on you for how you raised me.”Then I think about it and I’ve just got to say, there was a boundary that always made me feel safe. I really always knew from a very, very early age—that’s wrong and don’t you ever do that again. And God, I was spanked. I was more than spanked—I was whipped. Definitely. [With] whatever was around. I went to school one time with Women in Hollywood 2005 Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse enICON CHARLIZE THERON graved in welts on my thighs from a hanger that my mom grabbed that had all these little Disney cartoons cut out in it. It boiled down to respect—my mom was taking care of everything and running a business at the same time and there were never any nannies or anything like that. She was doing laundry and cooking three meals a day and—I remember it so vividly, I came home from school, and she said,“Change your uniform before you have lunch.”And I was like,“Oh, I’ll just take a quick bite of this tomato soup.”And I drizzled it all over. She was busy ironing, and she had all the hangers stacked up. It was so quick—a couple of swipes on the thighs. I remember going to school and showing off my war wounds to my friends. I think that that’s different than beating a child, which shouldn’t happen, or spanking a child unnecessarily. But let me tell you, at that age I knew I was wrong—because I was for sure not washing my own clothes; my mom was doing that. Then look at the relationship I have with her today. That’s a testament for my whole argument right there. [When Theron was 15, her mother shot and killed her father, who was physically threatening them.] It’s really fascinating to see what people will do when they have to make a split-second decision that could change everything in their lives. You start to realize that you were just really blessed and lucky to have somebody like my mom who made that decision, and it did save our lives. But it happens all the time, and it just depends on where you are in your life. And how much you’re willing to fight to live. When I did the promotion for Monster, everybody was saying,“I can’t imagine. . . . ”And I was thinking,“Really? Really, if you were in those circumstances, you can’t imagine?”It’s so hard for people to see themselves doing something as horrible as [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos did. It’s so easy for us to say,“Oh, God, I can’t imagine.” But if you do imagine it and get yourself to that place, I think anybody is capable of doing anything. And capable of surviving anything.

I think all of your experiences mold you into the person that you are. It would just be naive to think that my life didn’t imprint emotionally how I shuffle the cards in emotional situations in my future. I never wanted something like that to happen in my life. It’s not something that I hang on to; it’s something that obviously is there, that I in my own way of therapy, through my work, have dealt with and stayed healthy about. But it’s not something that controls or haunts my life. I read a really interesting book called I Have Life: Alison’s Journey about a woman in South Africa [who survived a rape and a brutal stabbing attack]. She said,“Now that you’ve been given this gift of life, you’ve got to go and live it. You can’t sit in the past and stay there.”And so for me and my mom, it’s been tough because at the same time we were trying to move on, we always have to still deal with it. I gave my mom the script of Monster to read. She called me back and said,“I absolutely think that this is such a heartbreaking story. So fascinating, such a great tale of human nature.”And that was what we talked about. We’ve really moved on in our lives. When I think about the life that I went about living from the age of sixteen to nineteen or twenty, I don’t know if I could do it again. It was basically like backpacking. [Theron, who was studying ballet, also started modeling as a teenager; her work took her to Europe and New York City.] I had the same suitcase that entire time with the same clothes, and I just went from one country to another, never knowing where I was going to end up. For me, it was all about, I’ve been given this chance to see the world. At that age, you just kind of think, well, it’s going to work out. When my career as a dancer ended, I had to look into why I liked it so much. And it was really bottom-line storytelling; I wanted to tell stories. Acting just seemed like another natural venue for that. [The cheap motel she checked into when she first moved to Los Angeles] was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed. I was like,“Look, I can see the Hollywood sign”—that’s all I cared about. And I think that’s why today I’m such a sheet snob, because for years I had to sleep on horrible, dirty sheets. I knew early on that there’s a thing called typecasting. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to grow as an actor—to get some versatility in there. I know for a fact that on my deathbed That Thing You Do! will be one of my fondest memories. All of it—the kids that [Tom Hanks] chose, all of us together, and with him at the helm being such a friend to us. The whole process of [getting her breakthrough role in Devil’s Advocate] was one of hell—no pun intended. I remember traveling to New York several times, sometimes on my own dime, to screen-test. I read [in L.A.] with Keanu Reeves, like, five times, and then they started screen-testing, like, ten actresses. Then they had to re–screen-test all of us. It was three months, [and I thought],“If I go through all of this and don’t get this film, I’d better be walking away with some immense [new] strength.” So when I got it, I still felt like,“Oh my God, I’d better not screw up because they’ll just fire me and get one of those other girls!” You’re not just on your toes, you’re hanging from a very thin wire and you’d better not let go. But then it was great because it was working with amazing people like Taylor Hackford and Al Pacino and Keanu—people who force you to stay at a certain place. Pacino was in the process of editing Looking for Richard at the time, and he was doing a play. It was like,“Could you do any more? Are you baking cookies too?” Acting is easy when you work with somebody who considers you a partner. Then it’s a joy. Some directors are really good at that partnership, and others are not. Part of why I love this job so much is because it is collaborative—you enter a world and everybody’s involved; it’s not just about you and it’s not just about the director. When I find my-

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self in a situation where that nest is really small and only this selected few are allowed in there, I don’t function very well. Reindeer Games was a great example of choosing a film purely because of the director, John Frankenheimer. I think that he was just an incredible filmmaker; The Manchurian Candidate to me was a perfect film. Anyway, I did that movie because I really wanted to work with him. And sometimes that’s not enough. The Yards was probably one of the hardest films for me emotionally, and James Gray is very much that director who just will not stop until he knows that he’s pushed you to the ultimate—almost right over the edge. Which is what you want, but at the same time, it was emotionally a very difficult film to make. He doesn’t leave anything untouched. You’re basically shoveling out your innards. The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story, one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it, they get criticized. When you do something like Monster or what Nicole Kidman did [in The Hours] or what Halle Berry did [in Monster’s Ball], then all of a sudden people go,

we didn’t go,“Well, maybe it’s a piece of shit.”Maybe sometimes we did—depending on the hour. But we did somehow believe that we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t make the cuts everybody was suggesting to water it down. I don’t think [Monster director Patty Jenkins and I] ever really [congratulated each other on the film’s success]. Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve been like,“Are you serious?”Even when I was holding an Oscar and I looked at her, we were like, “How did this happen?” We knew when we were working on the movie that no matter what, even if it went straight to video, it was something special for us. We just didn’t know how many other people would think that it was special. I watch movies and I love to see how people decided to say a specific line or how much to give in an emotional statement. There’s never a right or wrong answer, and it’s great to go to work and have the freedom to throw those kinds of human possibilities around. And as a storyteller, to actually think, how much do you want to give away right now? Acting really is like a big poker game, isn’t it? When do you show your cards? Because we don’t want to know everything up front, do we? My favorite kind of rehearsal is where you’re obsessively talking

“The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story,one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it,they get criticized:‘Well,that’s just a trick to win an Oscar.’ But that’s what we’re supposed to do— we’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves.” “Well, that’s just a trick to win an Women in Hollywood 2005 Oscar.” But what people forget is that ICON CHARLIZE THERON that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves. I think Johnny Depp said it really well: “If you serve roast beef constantly, you get bored.” I’m a fan of brave actors who can celebrate that—Sean Penn is one of them, and Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet. With Aileen Wuornos, it was actually very simple. She was somebody who was five three but couldn’t show that she was five three and a woman on the street. It’s funny, but about a month before I said yes to the film, I went to the aquarium in Long Beach, and it was incredible to watch blowfish [expand]. And there was a blowfish aspect about Aileen—her entire life she had to kind of make sure that people knew she was there, not to mess with her. Aileen didn’t have the luxury of being emotional—to sit in a back alley to cry about her life. For an entire month, I was playing somebody who held onto those things so deep and so hard. And then all of a sudden, in the last week, I had to show emotion. To break through that wall really took some time. I remember it started to rain and everybody was kind of packing up, and I sat in the alley with my manager and good friend, J.J. Harris, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I had an uncontrollably emotional leak for Aileen. [After wrapping Monster] I had to go and do Head in the Clouds [opposite her boyfriend,Stuart Townsend],which I was really happy about because it disciplined me to actually let go [of Aileen].Whereas if I’d come home,I would have really taken my time,I think,before I said goodbye to that completely.But even though I showed up in Montreal and I was like, “Oh,everything’s great,” I didn’t understand why I was drawing the curtains and I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was depressed.It was good to be around somebody who knew me.So that [I knew] I wasn’t losing my mind—somebody who could say,“You just had a really intense experience,and it’s going to take some time,and that’s okay.” Even when [it seemed that no one wanted to distribute Monster],

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about the story a month or two months prior to shooting the film. Where you’re not necessarily doing scenes, but there’s a constant communication about this world—I’m talking about stuff that’s not even in the story—so that there’s an understanding of where all of this takes place. Because then the subconscious can take over. On Aeon Flux [a sci-fi adventure due in December,in which Theron plays the 25th-century assassin of the title],we had a lot of those kind of rehearsals.Then we shot for nine days and I had the injury—I slipped doing a back handspring and landed on my neck—and we had seven weeks off,which was a really great time for me to do a lot of internal work. [When I hurt myself], I had already trained for five months so it wasn’t the first time I’d felt some severe pain. I lay down for a second and I thought, it’s a spasm and it will go away. And it just got worse. Our medic said,“We should have an X-ray and really make sure.”An hour later I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I kind of thought, that’s probably not good. Even after I knew that it was a herniated disk,I took four days off.I was in the hospital for three days getting all these treatments, and then I just didn’t want to give into it. Six days later I went back to work; I had the brace on and I thought,“We’ll just do all the acting stuff.I’ll wear the brace in between takes.”I really couldn’t move my neck. Then I was on set for two hours and I lost all sensation in the right side of my body and that’s when we did some neurological tests. There was a lot of nerve damage. I talked to my doctor in L.A. and he really put things in perspective for me: (a) you’re lucky, because the disk didn’t slip far enough to touch or compress your spinal cord, but (b) you have to know that if you have any bad bump, that disk just needs to move two millimeters and you could be paralyzed. I went, okay, I have to come home and heal from that. [Shooting Aeon Flux] was such an out-of-body experience. It was the biggest movie in every sense that I’ve ever tried to tackle. And it was completely foreign to me. A friend of mine who educated me on the whole Aeon world [the film is adapted from a 1990s MTV ani-

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THE ESSENTIAL

THERON

AGE: 30 PLACE OF BIRTH: Benoni, South 1 Africa AWARDS/NOMINATIONS: Oscar win for Monster; Golden Globe win for Monster and nomination for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; Emmy nomination for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers DON’T-MISS FILMS: DEVIL’S ADVOCATE (1) As a southern belle married to a lawyer (Keanu Reeves), she’s convincingly devoted—and, at times, convincingly deranged—in her show2 down with a satanic Al Pacino. (1997) THE CIDER HOUSE RULES Theron is luminous as Candy, the pilot’s girlfriend who’s “not really good at being alone.” (1999) MONSTER (2) She dove into this grim serial-killer story at every level—as producer, sounding board to director Patty Jenkins, and actress unflinchingly immersed in her role. (2003) NEW PROJECTS: NORTH COUNTRY 3 (3) Whereas Monster’s Aileen Wuornos gave in to her rage, Josie searches for societal justice and a kind of forgiveness in this true-life tale of sexual harassment in the Minnesota mines. (Oct. 7) AEON FLUX (4) This adaptation of an anime series strives to have both a heart and a head as it follows its assassin heroine through a futuristic landscape. (Dec. 2) 4

traveler at heart; we both just love throwing some backpacks together and really living life in whatever situation we find ourselves in. I’ve been very blessed. I could never get jaded or blasé about that. I know I’ve been extremely lucky. I also feel like I have been given this great gift, which is what pushes me to not just take it for granted. It’s really given me this kind of hunger to go and challenge myself to be even better at it. ■

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mated series], told me that she went onto the website and that the fans are a little bit disappointed that I’m not wearing the original outfit. And I thought, how could a human actually wear that—and shoot in it? I mean, it was a cartoon! Seriously, it would be an NC-17 film— what she had was a couple of strings and a patch of fabric. We had a really great costume designer who understood how far to celebrate the original, but with something that we knew that I could do a lot of the stunts in without strangling myself. And exposing all my bits. Even in the original, Aeon’s a very dark girl, and in every way. Her dominatrix aspect is a quality of someone who’s tired of being looked upon as just a woman who should listen and do as the government says. And she uses everything in her body to fight that. I’m going to be completely honest: If I had a choice between seeing a great dramatic film versus something that has science fiction in it, I’d probably go and see the dramatic film. I grew up watching Kramer vs. Kramer or Sophie’s Choice versus [seeing] Star Wars. It’s like a gap—I always think of it that way, like there was a giant generation gap by the time things came to us in South Africa. I just didn’t grow up with those kind of films, and I think it left a mark on me somehow. The funny thing is, when I am forced to go and see them with a friend or something, I actually quite enjoy them. I was in production for almost a year with Aeon Flux and then went straight into North Country [a drama, directed by Whale Rider’s Niki Caro, based on a true story about a Minnesota miner who in the early ’90s filed a class-action sexual harassment suit against her male coworkers]. What I love about the film is that it’s about a community, its social Women in Hollywood 2005 ICON CHARLIZE THERON structure, and its people. And as Niki said, it happened in their community but it could have happened, and did, anywhere. Everywhere. You kind of find yourself in the middle, going, who do you really stand with? Sure, women should have the right to work here, but at the same time these men have families to feed. That kind of struggle is always interesting. By the time Josie [Theron’s character] got to the mine, the women working there had become numbed to [the harassment]—that was partly why they didn’t side with her. They didn’t even think it was wrong anymore. They just dealt with it. Josie wasn’t a superstrong character; she wasn’t one of these women who walk into a room and own it. That’s why it was so fascinating that she ended up standing up against all of these people. There are stories out there that I really feel should be told. I started a production company [Denver & Delilah Films—named after her two dogs], and it wasn’t like,“Oh, I just want to develop things for myself.” If something came along that was right for me . . . but at the end of the day, it’s just things that I’m interested in. We’re in postproduction right now on Our Song, a documentary about the Cuban hip-hop movement. I think people don’t know that this kind of alternative lifestyle exists in Cuba—it’s the youth movement, the future of Cuba, people trying to change their society. We tried to veer away from being too politically heavy, because these kids rap about these things. You don’t have to underline anything. And we’re in development on the life story of the late Edward Bunker, a crime novelist, a great character actor—he was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs—and a [criminal]. He was, like, seventeen when he went to San Quentin. He was deemed to be a lost cause, and he found himself, and found an art form to express himself. It’s just a great redemption story. We have another project, Ice at the Bottom of the World, that I bought the rights to about six years ago. The author, Mark Richard, wrote the script. It’s about a family reuniting in a very witty and un-

sentimental way—but very hard-hitting; it deals with euthanasia. So hopefully that will be my next thing, and after that, we’ll see. I can’t plan that far ahead. It is really important to stop sometimes and go and live life a little bit, just to have something to draw from. I’m at that place right now where I feel I’ve kind of emptied my resources. There’s a giant world out there, and I sure want to see it all. I live with a man [Townsend] who’s a

She made her big-screen bones in The Mummy. Now, after cultivating

Women in Hollywood: ICON

Rachel Weisz her social consciousness in The Constant Gardener, she’s ready to explore a love that spans space and time. INTERVIEW BY ANN DONAHUE

I HAVE VERY PASSIONATE, emotional, loving parents—which maybe helps with acting, I don’t know. My mom is a psychotherapist. She practiced at home. My dad, we say he’s an inventor. He invented an artificial respirator that’s used in accidents and emergencies. He manufactured the stuff that he invented, so he’s not sitting in a shed at the bottom of the garden or anything.

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THE ESSENTIAL

WEISZ

AGE: 34 PLACE OF BIRTH: London AWARDS/ NOMINATIONS: European Film Academy’s People’s Choice Award nomination for best actress for Enemy at the Gates DON’T-MISS FILMS: THE MUMMY (1) Weisz’s bookish but sexy librarian brought spunk, innocence, and humor to what could have been a screechy damsel-in-distress role if played by a lesser actress. (1999) ENEMY AT THE GATES (2) It’s rare that a woman gets to shoot the gun and 1 kiss the guy in a war movie, but Weisz’s gutsy portrayal of a 2 Russian sniper and love interest to Jude Law showed that she can kill when doing drama. (2001) RUNAWAY JURY As a scheming woman aiming to sway a jury in a firearms case, Weisz holds her 3 own against heavyweights Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and John Cusack. (2003) THE CONSTANT GARDENER (3) As an outspoken aid worker in Africa, Weisz infuses her mysterious heroine with a passionate indignation that fuels this political potboiler. (2005) NEW PROJECTS: THE FOUNTAIN (4) In this temporal sci-fi thriller directed by her fiancé, Darren 4 Aronofsky, Weisz plays a modern-day woman dying from cancer, a 16th-century queen, and a space traveler. Her husband (Hugh Jackman) is trying to find the fountain of youth so he can save her. (due in 2006)

ent British movies. In a sense, the budget of a movie is a tiny bit irrelevant. I’m an actor; I’m just playing the character. The Mummy was suddenly something that had a global audience. I think that’s still the role I’m most widely recognized for. The movie was very fun because I got to do physical comedy. I thought it was a hysterical notion that there was this librarian in an action adventure. There was sort of a selfconscious B-movie humor. In England, we used to have Saturday morning television with Buck Rogers. It really reminded me of that. In big-budget films, there can be a lot of green-screen acting involved, which can be quite draining. There was a lot of green screen in Constantine. When I read the script, I just loved this character, that (Continued on page 143) guilt-ridden psychic twin cop, all shut down

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I have a sister who is two years younger than me. She’s an artist—a photographer—and she has her first exhibition in London right now, which is very exciting. And I have a stepbrother who’s in his early twenties. He’s at Christie’s right now, and he’s one of the expert catalogers in the U.K. of antiquarian books. They’re a very loving, quite eccentric bunch. I go back to London four or five times a year. I called my mom already a couple of times today. She likes to know who I’ve been meeting. She asks,“What are you wearing?” I say,“I’m wearing a pair of jeans and a white shirt.”She likes to get a picture of things on the phone. My dad is going to come meet me at the Venice film festival because The Constant Gardener is in competition there. He’s very nervous. Filming The Constant Gardener in Kenya was really tremendous. The physical beauty of the place is astonishing. We were living out in the bush in tents, and they had to fly in water. And then there were the people, particularly the people in Kibera, the slum that we filmed in. There was poverty on a level I have never seen before. There was no running water, no sanitation, no electricity. It’s very shocking when you first see Women in Hollywood 2005 that,and you’re looking through your ICON RACHEL WEISZ eyes and you’re seeing this poverty.But then you start to see it through their eyes,and it’s a very alive,spirited city that they’re living in.There’s song and dance.There’s little cinemas in the shantytown.There’s restaurants and so many hairdressers.It’s a very vibrant,vibrant life.The people were incredibly hospitable and curious and generous.It was just complicated,because you saw this very profound material poverty,but despite it,there was this incredible spiritual wealth. The whole crew was very moved by the people and their spirit, but being moved doesn’t really help them. The producer, Simon Channing Williams, set this charity up so we can actually do something practical. We’re going to be building a secondary school in Loiyangalani, and we’ve already built a school in the slum, in Kibera. There are plans to bring fresh water and shower facilities. Tessa [her character in The Constant Gardener], she’s a real-life woman of passions, of love and intellect. The way that the script is structured, she’s set up to be a certain kind of woman; you think she’s unfaithful, that she’s having an affair. It really plays with people’s expectations and the stereotypes of women. Some scenes were very plot-based, and we had to stick with the script. But there were scenes—for instance, when I was walking in Kibera—when it was pure improvisation. I was interacting with the people, and they weren’t extras; it wasn’t a film set. It was complete verité. It was reportage. Similarly, in the love scenes with me and Ralph Fiennes, [director] Fernando [Meirelles] really allowed us to play and improvise and just create these very natural moments between a husband and wife. I love, love improvising. I’d do it all the time if I could. I didn’t really get into acting until I was in college [at Cambridge University], and I started a theater company there called Talking Tongues Theatre. We used to devise plays through improvisation. It

was very experimental, kind of avant-garde, physical theater. We had been very inspired by theater we had seen in Eastern Europe, which was very different from British theater. I did a play on the West End, Design for Living, which Noël Coward wrote and was directed by Sean Mathias. That was a big, big hit. I think I was 23—very young to play a big classical role. I played Gilda—she’s a muse to a writer and a painter. A casting director saw this performance and thought that I would be perfect for a smallish role in Stealing Beauty, [director Bernardo] Bertolucci’s film starring Liv Tyler. It was quite a christening into movies. [After Stealing Beauty] I did some small, very low-budget independ-

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PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE NAME

Women in Hollywood: ICON

LAURA LINNEY She’s played a reality-TV actress,a churchgoing single mom,and the extremely openminded wife of a sex researcher.This daughter of theater royalty talks about switching between stage and screen,and why actors should never be pigeonholed. INTERVIEW BY TOM ROSTON Photograph by John Midgley

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IT TOOK ME A LONG TIMEto actually fess up and say “I want to be an actress” when I was young.I was a little shy about it.By the time I was in high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.Well,I knew I wanted to be a part of the theater in some way.I didn’t necessarily know that I was going to be acting.

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THE ESSENTIAL

LINNEY

AGE: 41 PLACE OF BIRTH: New York City 1 AWARDS/NOMINATIONS: Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for You Can Count on Me and Kinsey; Emmy wins for Wild Iris and Frasier (Guest Actress); Tony nominations for The Crucible and Sight Unseen (2004 revival) DON’T-MISS FILMS: THE TRUMAN SHOW (1) As a latter-day June Cleaver in a reality-TV show, she blends perkiness, product placement, and deception in a deft, wink-wink 2 comic performance. (1998) YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2) Linney’s a single mom who aspires to a tidy life but wades into the messy end when her beloved brother comes to visit and she begins an affair with her 3 uptight, married boss. (2000) KINSEY (3) The Academy deemed her performance a supporting one, but she seems every bit an equal partner as the adventurous wife of Liam Neeson’s bisexual sex researcher. (2004) NEW PROJECTS: 4 THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (4) Linney stars as a lawyer defending a priest (Tom Wilkinson) charged with negligent homicide after an exorcism. (Sept. 9) THE SQUID AND THE WHALE She plays a 1980s Brooklynite whose literary star is rising as her marriage (to Jeff Daniels) is crumbling. (Oct. 5)

for the story, for the telling of the story. I will certainly try and help whenever I can, if I’m working with a first-time director; I’ll pipe up and give my two cents. But it’s always story first with me, whether I’m in the theater or doing a film. Whether or not it’s because I’m the daughter of a playwright, I don’t know. I’m rarely anywhere more than a few days [when not doing a film or a play].I’ve been in Australia and New York,I’m going to London and Los Angeles.And when press kicks in,you go on sixteen-city tours.When P.S. and Kinsey came out at the same time,I thought my skin was going to melt off my body,I was traveling so much.Which is not good.But that’s what my life is right now and I’m trying to enjoy it as (Continued on page 143)

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My father [acclaimed playwright Romulus Linney, author of The Sorrows of Frederick and Childe Byron] and I talk about the theater a lot. He’s been doing it his whole life; he’s dedicated every cell of his being to it. And I think probably the most valuable thing he ever said to me was, “Get onstage, say what you’ve got to say, and get off.” It’s about not indulging. I think it’s also about trust. The actor is trusting the play. The director is trusting the actor. The fellow actors are trusting each other. The audience is trusting the people onstage. The people onstage are trusting the audience. Trust that who you are and what you’re doing is more than enough. Don’t be desperate; don’t be aggrandizing; don’t try and gild the lily. Do what you’ve got to do fully and completely, and then it’s done. And you will be in service to something else. When I first got out of Juilliard,I was“cold”and“unattractive.”I think that when people don’t quite know how to define you,they go to some stock answers.What does“cold”mean? Waspy? Not ethnic? Uptight? I mean,come on.I’m an actress; how uptight can I be? It’s absurd. Then I went to being “just not sexy.”And I’ve been really good at “intelligent but wounded”for a long time. Now, I guess, people are realizing that, yes, I actually do have sexuality. As a human being, you have Women in Hollywood 2005 to just take all that with a grain of salt ICON LAURA LINNEY and not give it too much power. But it can be really discouraging. From the outside,looking at me,there was a huge shift after You Can Count on Me.Without a doubt,perception changed.My lifestyle didn’t really change; more than anything else,the contents of my closet changed. You Can Count on Me was very satisfying. Everyone did that movie purely because we liked the material. We had no idea what was going to happen. We were relieved that it got made! And then it won Sundance, and it just kept going. All of a sudden, there we were at the Oscars. That movie was a true independent. As is The Squid and the Whale [due out this month, starring Linney and Jeff Daniels in the story of a 1980s Brooklyn couple going through a divorce]. I was attached to The Squid and the Whale for years; I kept saying to [writer-director] Noah [Baumbach],“It really is going to happen. And when it happens, it will be all that it’s supposed to be, so just hang in there.” People used to ask me, which do you prefer, theater or film? And that used to be a very easy question. It used to be theater, theater, theater, theater. I will never forget the opening night of The Crucible—when Arthur Miller walked onstage to take a bow, I had never heard a noise like that in all my life. It was an indescribable roar. But film and television have become a much greater part of my life than I ever thought they would, and that’s fantastic. I love film. I find it fascinating. The fact that any good film is ever made is a miracle. An absolute miracle. The more I do it, the more I realize that. The only way I’ve come close to describing it is, it’s like tennis and swimming. They’re both sports; they both require similar things; but they’re radically different. The stresses are different, the lifestyle is different, your responsibilities are different. One thing I realized, and thank God I realized this early on, is that it is completely unfair to apply the laws of one to the other. Film and theater use very different parts of yourself. Sight Unseen [an award-winning play

in which Linney gave a breakthrough performance in 1992, then revisited in 2004 in a different role] felt like everything I had learned in the past twelve years had come to land there. You have to respect the history that both theater and film have and learn from each. There are things that I’ve learned working in film, about relaxation and my own mental pacing, that have helped me tremendously in the theater. And all the basic laws of theater acting and the discipline [have helped my film acting]. I think people find comfort in the theater because there’s an understanding that actors have enormous range. And a lot of times, people in film are unaware, or really just don’t believe, that actors can do more than one thing. That’s why actors love the indie world as well—because you’re allowed to do different stuff. Film is the director’s medium. And you do the best you possibly can

Women in Hollywood: ICON

SHIRLEY MACLAINE It would be easy to call her a legend. After all, this is a woman who danced for Fosse, was directed by Hitchcock, ran with the Rat Pack, and has worked in films for half a century. But how many legends do you know who are still working this much? And having this much fun doing it? INTERVIEW BY BRANTLEY BARDIN Photographs by Gerald Forster

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I’VE BEEN MAKING MOVIES for fifty years this year. I’m not at all surprised that I’m still here—it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t just keep working. But that’s not from the point of view of “Oh, I’m so good,” it’s that it’s just meant to be: It’s destiny. If I live into my nineties, I’ll be working till then.

“I wasn’t scared of Hitchcock at all: When I first met him at his suite at the Waldorf,I was mainly interested in how he could move around with such fat legs.So I asked him to do some moves for me. And he did—he put his leg and foot up on the chair and went,‘La!’” I think a better word is “direct,”and that’s an easy thing for me to play—it’s more who I am now. But the interesting question is, what happened in between the “pixie”to what some call the “ball-breaker.” Back in 1954, I was in the Broadway chorus of The Pajama Game. I was understudying the role of Gladys, who had the big “Steam Heat” number, knowing that Carol [Haney] would go on [even] with a broken neck. But one night I showed up late because the subway got stuck, and there, all lined up at the stage door, were [Pajama Game choreographer and future director of MacLaine’s Sweet Charity] Bob Fosse and [producer] Hal Prince and [codirector] Jerry Robbins saying,“You’re on!” The conductor asked,“What key do you sing in?”I said,“I don’t know.” I’d never had a rehearsal, and I was worried about dropping my hat in the number. Which I did, and said,“Shit!” But when we took our bows, the audience stood, and [movie producer] Hal B. Wallis happened to be there. Warren [Beatty, her brother] and I had always gone to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis pictures “Produced by Hal B. Wallis,”and that’s all I remembered about him. He said that I should make a screen test. I had no idea what a screen test was. (By the way, Hal Prince said,“Get more experience; don’t go to Hollywood.”) But I got to the studio, and back then they’d always use the same scripts for screen tests, but I’d never learned “Voice of the Turtle,”so I wasn’t gonna act in the test. So I said,“Let’s get a stool,

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was becoming this star in Hollywood. (Though I’ve never thought of myself as a “star”—I can go with “iconic”and “legendary”a little bit now, because of my longevity.) The Rat Pack happened pretty quick after: Frank [Sinatra] had seen me on a TV show and called the studio and said,“I want that girl [for 1958’s Some Came Running].”And let me say that, during their time, the Rat Pack were so outrageous that the likes of them won’t come along again—with them, all bets were off, and we’re living in such a climate of fear and in such a curtailed society now that those people would probably be sent to jail. But, anyway, Some Came Running’s Ginny is still one of my favorites. Her care for other people, her ability to love, just everything about her moved me. I saw that hooker with the heart of gold thing right away. By the time the ’60s were up, I guess I’d done a lot of those loose women. But here’s the thing: They do all kinds of pictures with men that have nothing to do with sex, but in pictures about women they always feel they have to bring in the sexual component. Why? Because they just don’t understand women. I mean, look at the pictures today: There are very few with women stars, and even with the ones that do exist, sex is a big deal.

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I’m interested in the experience of being other people for a little while—I consider it almost a retreat. Also, I enjoy going into those parts of myself that I haven’t been yet, because I think every part you play is part of yourself. And I enjoy the familial environment on the set—the sense of respect and appreciation that everybody working on a picture has for somebody who’s being asked to get up every morning at 5 a.m. and go be somebody else. Especially after having fought the traffic. I’m also enjoying the experience of aging: There’s something to do with getting older that gives you the right to express any feeling you have. When you’re younger, you’re not really sure of what your feelings are, so therefore you can be, let’s say, pixie-ish, the way I was—I was constantly surprised and full of wonder and that showed in my acting. But when you get older, you not only have the right to express yourself completely, but the duty to do so. In fact, I wanted to play Ouiser in [1989’s] Steel Magnolias because I wanted to feel how free it would be to be like her when I got older. It felt fabulous—God, I loved it!—and I think I’ve been employing that tactic pretty frequently now. When you have a sense of experience and wisdom, you realize that life itself is, basically, a theatrical Women in Hollywood 2005 manipulation of mostly bullshit, and ICON SHIRLEY MACLAINE so you have a certain reaction to that which could be called “cantankerous.”

and somebody get me a scarf,”and began to do some little dance moves with the scarf, and then the director interviewed me on camera. From then on, they began to test people as a personality rather than playing a part—the “personality test”was born. I signed a seven-year contract with Hal B. Wallis and then went back to the chorus in Pajama Game. Then Carol was out once more in the fall, and that time Hitch’s people were there [as in Alfred Hitchcock, who directed MacLaine’s first film, 1955’s The Trouble With Harry]. I wasn’t scared of Hitchcock at all: When I first met him at his suite at the Waldorf, I was mainly interested in how he could move around with such fat legs. So I asked him to do some moves for me. And he did—he put his leg and foot up on the chair and went,“La!”I kept asking him to do that again because it was so cute. Then we did a reading of The Trouble With Harry with Mildred Dunnock and John Forsythe, and I read the part, and that’s when he said I had “the guts of a bank robber.”He never said a thing to me on the movie, though. Well, except “Dog’s feet.” “Dog’s feet”is a pause. That’s how he directed. The idea of being in movies was, like, secondary to me—like a little hobby that went along with being in this place called Hollywood, California. I was mostly concerned with “What is it like living where there are no seasons?” [Her “big break”] didn’t make me feel anything. It happened to me so that’s all I knew. Later, when I began to examine it, I realized that this was my destiny—that it was what I’d signed up for, basically. (I don’t have a question with the concept that you choose your parents before you’re born. That’s why it makes so much sense to me that I chose a mother who wanted to be an actress and a father who wanted to run away and join the circus, but who both chose, instead, marriage and children. That left me and Warren the technique of fulfilling their disappointed dreams.) It was who I was and was supposed to be. But I also was supposed to be traveling, and I felt this need to go out and see the world at the same time that I was adjusting to the fact I

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THE ESSENTIAL

MACLAINE

AGE: 71 PLACE OF BIRTH: Richmond, Virginia AWARDS/ NOMINATIONS: Oscar win for Terms of Endearment (1983); Oscar nominations for The Turning Point (1977), The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1975, as director), Irma La Douce (1963), The Apartment (1960), and Some Came Running (1958). Golden Globe wins for Madame Sousatzka (1988), Terms of Endearment, Irma La Douce, The Apartment, and The Trouble With Harry (1955); 13 other Golden Globe nominations including Postcards From the Edge (1990), Being There (1979), and Ask Any Girl (1959). DON’T-MISS FILMS: SWEET CHARITY (1) Pretty Woman who? MacLaine’s Charity is the prototypical hooker with chutzpah who dreams of a better life for herself. The combination of her charm and first-time director Bob Fosse’s incredible choreography makes you believe that 2 Charity just might make that dream come true. (1969) THE TURNING POINT (2) MacLaine and the late Anne Bancroft’s battle at Lincoln Center is a catfight for the ages. And even if you think you won’t like a ballet–diva–“Why didn’t I get to be a ballerina” drama, 3 we dare you not to cry during the last scene. (1977) TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (3) When Jack Nicholson, as a randy astronaut, bemoans that he was “just inches from a clean getaway,” you understand his pain. Aurora Greenway is a piece of work. But MacLaine’s portrayal of a fiercely devoted (okay, crazy) mother is one of her greatest performances ever. (1983) NEW PROJECTS: IN HER SHOES MacLaine plays the grandmother Toni 4 Collette and Cameron Diaz never knew they had and the one we’d all like to have ourselves. (Oct. 7) RUMOR HAS IT (4) . . . that MacLaine’s character is the real Mrs. Robinson. Costarring Jennifer Aniston. (Dec. 25) 1

[Collette] and Cameron [Diaz]—Cameron’s a delightful actress, and this is the part for her. Okay, we’re done. When I look back at my career, I think,“My God, did I do all this stuff?”I can’t believe I did it all, ’cause I’ve done a lot of work, haven’t I? I still find interesting scripts and have two I want to do next year. But when people ask,“How do you want to be remembered,” it’s funny: I probably want to be remembered for not bothering with being remembered. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll be back again. ■

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If I’m not doing a couple of things at once I get very tired—so on [1977’s] The Turning Point’s set, I wrote one of my books, and on [1979’s] Being There, I wrote most of Out on a Limb. I popularized the New Age movement; I made it okay to take it seriously. And I think it goes hand in hand with being an actor: To be metaphysical, to be interested in the exploration of the spirit, is to be a true artist—in life we’re creating our own reality every moment and that’s what the actor’s job is. We create what we think of the script, we create the temperament, the tempo, and sometimes we create falling in love with the opposite character. And so if I didn’t have a love affair with my costar, I was usually having one with the director. It’s not the love scenes, it’s the downtime in between shots when you fall in love. And it’s involved with so many things—with self-perception, with vanity, with being tired, being controlled, rebelling . . . and if you have a copartner questioning the same things, it’s easy to go there. Now I could never fall in love with Larry [Laurence] Harvey—who was bisexual, so that’s possible—because he was so self-centered. Or Jerry Lewis because he was so self-centered. Brilliant, but self-centered. And I never fell in love with Dean [Martin] or Frank—well, a little more with Dean because he let me see insecurities about his lack of education, and that’s something to love because it’s honest. I did with the others by virtue of the fact that we were on a movie set—but it’s three months, and that’s that: I remember having had an affair with one of the directors, and one day the film and “it”were over. Period. I was crying so hard on my way home that I thought it was raining and I turned on the windshield wipers. [One costar MacLaine didn’t have an Women in Hollywood 2005 affair with was Being There’s Peter ICON SHIRLEY MACLAINE Sellers.] But he thought we were. He could go in and out of reality, and people came to me and said,“We walked in when he was talking with you in this sexual way on the phone.” He was so living his part that he was in love with my character, Eve, and honestly believed he had this affair with me. You see what I mean about brilliant acting being so metaphysical? That’s why it’s so funny to me when people say,“Oh, she’s so wacky.”Couldn’t be further from the truth. Because it says a lot about how un-wacky I actually am that I don’t go into these characters like so many of the brilliant ones—like Nicole and Meryl—do. I don’t consider this a compliment to myself, but I’ve never been involved so much in a character that I didn’t know who I was—I’m a Taurus. I’m too rooted for that! I’ve been involved with so many pictures that had problems. But Terms of Endearment was a disaster and look what happened. [The film won five Oscars, including the Best Actress award for MacLaine]. I mean, one day Jack [Nicholson] got so angry about all of the chaos that he just slammed his fists into a table. And you have not felt genuine and profound anger till you’ve felt Jack Nicholson’s anger—it is to be respected. At one point, I quit. When [director] Jim Brooks found me at the airport, I said,“Take my Oscar and shove it! It’s all too amateur night in Dixie for me.”But Jim’s thing is working with chaos, and he’s a genius. And before Terms, I couldn’t get a job in Hollywood, so he saved my career. He’s one of my best teachers, and I’d work with him again in a shot! I know there’s Oscar buzz about In Her Shoes, but I’m going to leave it alone. (Though when you have psychic talent, you’re very tempted to use it, so that’s hard!) I think it’s very important to not care about the outcome of anything, basically—it’s about caring about the process. And I loved the idea of playing a contained portrayal of a grandmother, one not over-the-top in her presentation of herself. I also loved the idea of working with Curtis [Hanson] and Toni

She knows what you’ve been reading about her.

Women in Hollywood: SPOTLIGHT

Lindsay Lohan And she doesn’t care.What she does care about doing is good work—both onscreen and off— o and meeting the many other actresses she admires. INTERVIEW BY RACHEL CLARKE Photograph by Sheryl Nields

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I JUST FINISHED SHOOTINGA PRAIRIE HOME Companion.Oh my God.It was so exhilarating.I never ever really believed that I’d be able to work with those kinds of people.I mean,I aspired to,but I didn’t think ... Garrison Keillor was actually in the film with me. We had some scenes together,and he’s very intimidating when you meet him.But I was singing his songs, so I wanted to impress him.And then I had Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline watching me on the side.The whole cast was incredible,so to be able to be with all of them on a set is insane.

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LOHAN

AGE: 19 PLACE OF BIRTH: New York City 1 AWARDS/NOMINATIONS: Three MTV Movie Awards, for Mean Girls (Best Female Performance and Best Onscreen Team) and for Freaky Friday (Breakthrough Female Performance) DON’T MISS FILMS: THE PARENT TRAP (1) It was a brave move taking on a much-beloved Disney classic starring a much-beloved Disney ingenue (Hayley Mills). But Lohan’s dual performance—as reunited twins who 2 switch places to get their unwitting parents back together—received rave reviews. (1998) FREAKY FRIDAY (2) We told you she was brave. This time, Lohan remade a 1976 film that had starred a little 3 someone named Jodie Foster. In this updated version, Lohan shines as a girl who wakes up one day as—oh, the horror!—her mother (Jamie Lee Curtis). (2003) MEAN GIRLS (3) A John Hughes movie for a new generation. This hilarious high school comedy created a whole new persona for Lohan: Teen Queen. (2004) NEW PROJECTS: JUST MY LUCK Donald Petrie (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) directs this romantic comedy. (March 17, 2006) A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION Based on the Garrison Keillor radio classic and directed by Robert Altman. (due in spring 2006)

much in his life . . . people should focus more on people like him instead of the celebrities and me going out at night. ’Cuz that’s much more interesting. I respect the way Jodie Foster made her transition from younger Disney actress to older actress. I mean, in Taxi Driver. That was kind of the main thing. If I did that now, it would be a lot more controversial. A lot of the movies I’m looking at are along the lines of that. I’m concerned about what my fans will think always, but if I do one of those movies, it’s not going to appeal to a younger audience to begin with. I’m not going to be promoting it like I would for a younger audience. So I think that’s kind of the main idea in a way: to keep it separate. I can’t put all of my focus on what other people are going to think. I’m over that. Everyone’s already thought everything about me. ■

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There was culture shock, but at the same time, I don’t think it could have been more perfect. Not only for me and the position that I’m in in my life, but I’m kind of obsessed with the idea of doing independent films now, just because it’s closer to my heart. And everyone got really close on the set, and we all hung out and went to dinners, and being in Minnesota and shooting, you’re really able to just focus on your craft. And you know, clear your head; it’s a perfect place to go to for that. But it [the media craziness] still happens there. I said,“Meryl, walk out the front door ’cause then you can take the paparazzi off of my hands. Help me out here!” We had a great relationship. Watching her and watching how she is in her characters . . . she’s just a genius. Meryl told me to basically just Women in Hollywood 2005 SPOTLIGHT LINDSAY LOHAN go with what you feel. I think people look for a lot of opinions on the set when they have a question about a line or that sort of thing. You start asking too many questions instead of just going with it. I’m also a huge Sandra Bullock fan. I met her when I was at the MTV Movie Awards. I kind of ran up to her and berated her on the red carpet. I told her I was a huge fan and I really loved her work. She’s heard about court [Lohan’s parents are in the middle of a muchpublicized divorce] and everything, and she told me if I’m there and I don’t want to go out to lunch because of the press, to just bring a lot of protein bars. I don’t want to get too personal with it, but I think the fact that she’s taken the time . . . I’ve started to look up to her as a mentor and I go to her for questions. She’s told me to brush it off. That sort of thing. And Virginia Madsen’s been doing the same thing. She’s completely taken me under her wing, which is nice. I wrote three songs for my next album, and I sang them in the Hamptons at the house that my mother rented. It was in my bedroom, so it was very vibey and Fiona Apple–esque. It worked perfectly. I’m obsessed with them. I wrote one about my father, and I’m planning on possibly directing my video for the song. I broke down the last time I sang it through. It got sort of emotional. My friends came over, and it was really nice and relaxing. So it was great. The emotions were there, so that’s the main focus. I find Angelina Jolie completely . . . I’m infatuated with her. I ran up to her on the red carpet, too. (If you want to say hi to someone, it’s best to just do that. The more advice I can get from these women who are so successful is a great thing.) I’d like to be involved with some of the things Angelina’s involved with at some point. One of my aspirations is to open my own charity. I want to dedicate it to my grandfather and [benefit] abused and underprivileged children in Africa. My grandfather was very involved with this charity, St. Vincent de Paul. Growing up, I would go with him and see the kids, and

I think it’s important to give back. To give back in a way that you feel like it’s going to make you feel better . . . not just to do it just to say that you do it. I feel like a lot of people kind of take advantage of the fact that if you go overseas and you visit the troops, then you’re not doing it because you want to, but more so for the press. It doesn’t really mean anything. I think the most ridiculous thing that’s been written about me is all of the plastic surgery things when I was seventeen. That’s what’s appalling. It’s horrific when people say that kind of stuff. I ignore it. I ignore it all. I read the New York Post and everything because I read about Hillary Clinton and those sorts of things just to keep my mind open to what else is going on in the world. When I was in Paris, I went to the Tour de France. I said, you know what? Someone like Lance Armstrong, who’s been through so much and endured so

Warner Bros. Pictures congratulates all of PREMIERE’s 2005 Women in Hollywood honorees and proudly applauds the performances of

Charlize Theron in

Shirley MacLaine in

Rachel Weisz in

Sophie de Rakoff What to wear? Hollywood looks to a cutting-edge costume designer to answer that age-old question. INTERVIEW BY KELLY BORGESON Photograph by Jacqueline Bohnert

HAIR, KATY O’BRIEN/BARDEEN; MAKEUP, LORI JEAN SWANSON/CLOUTIERAGENCY.COM; DRESS, DE RAKOFF. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: TRACY BENNETT/MGM/KOBAL COLLECTION; SIDNEY BALDWIN

I GOT INTO THIS BUSINESS purely by accident. Well, my father was an AD and a producer, and I grew up being very comfortable with the film business. When I lived in New York, I was a writer, and then when I moved to Los Angeles [in 1994], I couldn’t get a job at a magazine, so I ended up working for a friend as a stylist—as an assistant— instead of, you know, having to waitress. I’ve always loved clothes. When I lived in New York, all my friends were very fashionable. We all worked in nightclubs. And I’m from London, which is a very fashionable city. So it’s something that came really naturally to me—aesthetics and images. But I think because of the writing as much as anything else . . . the reason I’m in film and not in fashion is because of character. The most important thing people should know about costume designers is you’re involved in creating a bigger picture. It’s about creating a character. It’s not about dressing somebody to go to the Oscars. You have to understand who the characters are immediately, because until you understand who they are, you don’t understand what they look like and how they dress and why they dress a certain way. It’s not just about what pair of shoes somebody wears. You have to understand what’s going on inside of the script and the aim of the movie—what the tone is and what the theme is and what it’s meant to be when it’s finished. You help tell the story through the character’s appearance. Legally Blonde was my first time Women in Hollywood 2005 working with Reese [Witherspoon, with whom de Rakoff has since worked ICON SOPHIE DE RAKOFF on three films]. It was also my first studio movie. I think they just wanted someone young and unestablished to do it, because no one knew it was going to be a big movie. [Elle Woods’s wardrobe] was based on the fact that sorority girls love pink, and they do. We went to a sorority house, and we went to the meetings, and everyone was wearing pink and black. Reese is a really easy person to work with. If she thinks something’s ridiculous, she’s the first person to say it, but she’s very open. I obviously have a really good idea of what fits her and what doesn’t, what colors look good, what she likes and what she doesn’t. The nice thing about it is that you get into a rhythm. It’s not like starting all over again with somebody. That first fitting is always nerve-wracking because you’re like,“What if I’m completely wrong?” [In the Legally Blonde sequel, Elle gets involved in animal rights, and de Rakoff outfitted her in animal-free clothing.] When you start conceptualizing the movie, you just make these decisions, for better or for worse, and whether people get it or notice it, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a tool for you to work with. But, yes, it was a pain in the ass not being able to have leather shoes. But, you know, we’re like,“Okay, we’ll get people to take the shape of a leather shoe and make it in satin.” [In September’s Just Like Heaven, Witherspoon plays a medical resident whose spirit wanders after she falls into a coma.] She basically has one outfit. It can’t be a throwaway outfit. It’s got to look really good. It’s got to be, you know, relatively comfortable to wear. Everybody has to agree on it: the star, the director, the producers. We had one outfit set, and we camera-tested it, and it turned out that it wasn’t what everybody hoped it would be. What you see with the eye and what actually ends up photographing are two very different things, especially when you get into the world of film stocks and lighting. Curtis Hanson [director of October’s In Her Shoes], I think because of Legally Blonde, was not interested in meeting me. You can get type-

cast by your work as a designer as much as you can by being an actor. If you look at my résumé, the first thing that stands out is Legally Blonde, and then there’s a bunch of romantic comedies. I worked really hard for the interview, and put together a lot of visual references. And I saw it. I mean, I saw it immediately. As soon as I read that script, I knew exactly who the lead characters were. I had this burned-in impression in my brain of what they would look like and who they were. We all have friends like Maggie [Cameron Diaz], the very attractive, slightly screwed-up party girl who you’ve known for years and who maybe hasn’t moved on quite as much as you have. And I think a lot of women can identify with the Rose [Toni Collette] character, the smart girl who isn’t as attractive as everyone else around her. They just made perfect sense to me. You think, well, obviously Maggie’s always going to wear jeans, and she’s going to want to show as much skin as possible. (Cameron has a fantastic body, so everything she wears looks great on her.) And Rose has to dress a certain way to fit in her work world, and then obviously things start changing when her life changes. You just go with the circumstance and build from there. The shoes [Rose collects,but does not wear,all sorts of fabulous footwear] are who Rose wants to be—who Rose would love to be physically and probably emotionally, too. There are all kinds of designer shoes in [her closet]. I mean, if you’re going to spend over $500 on a pair of shoes, who would you buy? You’d go look at Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin and Chanel. They’re so expensive for a reason. It’s because they’re beautiful. [As a costume designer] you only have a certain amount of money, so you can’t go and buy a hundred pairs of shoes, because that’s phenomenally expensive. So you work with certain designers who give you things, but within that, you also choose. . . . The thing about Curtis is he’s involved in every single decision. It’s not like you turn up the day of the shoot and go,“Here’s the shoe!”It didn’t matter that the characters were women. He was totally tuned in to everything. He had a very specific color scheme for Philadelphia and a very speREGALLY BLOND: De Rakoff cific color scheme for Florida, and he was clothed Witherspoon for very diligent about this. You really weren’t Legally Blonde and Cameron Diaz for In Her Shoes. allowed to waver from it. And it was not just me. The production designer and the prop people, and the sets and the DP, you know—we all work within these parameters of this palette. My favorite designer, for me personally—whom I never use in movies because not a lot of people like him—is Dries van Noten. I love stuff with really bright, colorful prints and interesting silhouettes. (I would love to do a musical—kaleidoscopic, crazy, colorful, you know, with hundreds of people, preferably period or fantasy. Something that is pure imagination and pure color.) I also really love my shoes. I don’t wear them that often—I live in California, you know, so I’m always in jeans and flip-flops and tank tops—but I have them. I’ve got a shelf full of them. It’s definitely not like Rose’s closet, but, you know. ■

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25 SOMETIMES WE WATCH MOVIES FOR HIGH-MINDED reasons, and sometimes we’re just looking for a mindblowing jolt to the system—whether it be a revealing line of dialogue, a horrific act of violence, or simply a star playing against type. Here, then, are the best shocks cinema has to offer. But before you begin reading, please note that there are many spoilers, and, of course, check with a doctor to make sure your heart can take it.

25_Where’s Poppa? (1970, dir. Carl Reiner) Best Seen: MGM DVD Time Code: Chapter 10, 55:57 Never mind that Where’s Poppa? was the first American film to use the word “cocksucker,” or that it contained a character charmingly named

“Muthafucka.” No, the true shocker in Carl Reiner’s black comedy comes when Ruth Gordon, playing a batty old widow, in a moment of overwhelming affection for her son Gordon (George Segal), rips down his trousers and kisses him on the lower cheeks in front of his love interest, a nubile young nurse (Trish Van Devere) hired to take care of the old wacko. “You expected her to just give a little peck, not for her to nuzzle and rub her cheek against it like she did,” says Segal. “By that time in the process, I was completely numb. It seemed like just another warm moment in the film.”

24_ Jaws (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg) Best Seen: Universal DVD Time Code: Chapter 14, 80:47 We already knew the shark was big— just look at the poster, for crying out loud. Even so, when Spielberg finally showed all 25 feet of his prize fish, it

resentfully, when, without so much as a threatening da-dum, the monster emerges, maw gaping. Stunned, Brody leaps back and just stares at the frothing water. He then heads toward Robert Shaw’s Quint, and numbly proclaims, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Maybe an aircraft carrier.

Joel Osment), who utters, “I see people. They don’t know they’re dead.” Wait, so Bruce is . . . whoa. We see shocked people.

23_ S.O.B.

21_ Audition

(1981, dir. Blake Edwards) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 20, 80:50

(2001, dir. Takashi Miike) Best Seen: Lions Gate DVD Time Code: Chapter 9, 45:38

After this summer’s Jude Law debacle, naughty nannies seem almost de rigueur. But when Julie Andrews, everyone’s favorite G-rated cinematic child care professional

A beautiful young Japanese woman (Eihi Shiina) sits in her apartment while her phone rings. A large, tightly sealed sack rests a few feet away. As the ringing continues, she raises her head, her long hair parting to reveal a slight smile. Suddenly the heretofore dormant sack comes alive and violently throws itself against the wall, while a sound that can best be described as the roar of an extremely perturbed lion accompanies the

(The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins) bares her breasts, it’s scandalous. Andrews (as wholesome actress Sally Miles, a.k.a. “Smiles”) pulls the top of her red dress down and pauses almost triumphantly, knowing that she’s changing her own image—as well as her character’s— forever. “I’m going to show my boobies,” Sally says to Dr. Finegarten (Robert Preston). “Do you think they’re worth showing?” He replies, “In my humble opinion, you’ve got a terrific pair of knockers.” And when we were finally able to catch our breath, we realized he was right.

22 _The Sixth Sense (1999, dir. M. Night Shyamalan) Best Seen: Buena Vista DVD Time Code: Chapter 18, 95:55

was scary enough to keep America out of the water that summer. Roy Scheider’s Sheriff Brody is shoveling chum into the drink, muttering

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wedding ring and sends it rolling across the floor. Crowe examines his left hand, confused as to why he’s not wearing the ring. Cut to a previous scene of Crowe treating his clairvoyant young patient, Cole (Haley

Six minutes before the credits roll, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) returns home to find his lovely wife, Anna (Olivia Williams), asleep in front of a TV playing their wedding video. She murmurs, “Why did you leave me?” She drops his

Which is why it’s such a crushing blow to Wendy (Shelley Duvall) when she finally takes a look at her increasingly unstable husband’s manuscript—page after page of a single sentence, repeated over and over again in various typographical permutations. Dull boy? Try world-class loon.

19 _ Once Upon a Time in the West (1969, dir. Sergio Leone) Best Seen: Paramount DVD Time Code: Chapter 4, 21:30 The young boy is terrified. Unseen gunmen have just picked off his family, and as he stands helpless and alone, shadowy figures in long

action. Self-propelled bags are freaky enough but what makes this even more startling is that up until now, Audition has been a romantic drama.

20_The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 28, 100:57

overcoats emerge from the surrounding brush. The camera zeroes in on the lead overcoat and reveals the face of a man who looks just like Henry Fonda, but who can’t be, because Fonda doesn’t slaughter innocents, right? This is the guy who played Abe Lincoln, for God’s sake. Yet those piercing blue eyes look like Henry’s . . . but they can’t be, because his never looked so cold, reptilian. Now he smiles slightly and raises his gun: He’s going to kill the kid, and he’s relishing it. That’s not really Henry Fonda. Is it?

18_Planet of the Apes (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner) Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD Time Code: Chapter 27, 108:23 It’s the quintessential twist ending, a moment so iconic that you needn’t have seen the movie to be familiar with it. And any Simpsons fan can attest to its parodistic possibilities (Homer [thinking]: “Wait a minute:

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The reason the Torrance family has stranded itself at the isolated but notquite-empty Overlook Hotel is so patriarch Jack (Jack Nicholson) can finish his book and rebuild his career.

OPENING ILLUSTRATION BY NATHAN FOX

25 Statue of Liberty . . . that was our planet!”). So it takes a little empathy to appreciate the mindfuck in store for Apes’s original audiences as Charlton Heston rides up that beach to find a time-ravaged Lady Liberty poking out of the earth, a relic of a nuclear-fried New York. Still, the image today remains spine-tingling, and Heston’s overly dramatic yet apt reaction—“You maniacs!” etc.—sure sells the scene.

17_ Star Wars: Episode V— The Empire Strikes Back

(1980, dir. Irvin Kershner) Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD Time Code: Chapter 46, 110:00

16_Pink Flamingos

(1972, dir. John Waters) Best Seen: New Line DVD Time Code: Chapter 26, 90:47 “Other people set out to make movies; we wanted to commit a crime,” says Waters of his masterpiece of filth. And though

most folks would consider a motherson oral sex scene disgusting, it was the infamous munching of fresh dog feces by trailer park tranny and allpurpose Waters antihero Divine that

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15_Don’t Look Now

which is lying at his feet, his scream shatters the quiet California morning and sends shivers down the spine of any pet-loving viewer.

13_The Usual Suspects (1995, dir. Bryan Singer) Best Seen: MGM DVD Time Code: Chapter 31, 97:35

Possibly the most cerebral shock in cinema history, the revelation that pathetic con man Verbal Kint (Kevin

(1973, dir. Nicolas Roeg) Best Seen: Paramount DVD Time Code: Chapter 15, 104:15 Roeg’s tale of an art restorer and his wife (played by Donald Sutherland and the supremely sexy Julie Christie) who lose their way and their minds in a maze of Venetian canals and churches after the drowning death of their daughter contains some truly frightening moments. None, though, approach Sutherland’s character’s death at the hand of a mysterious red-hooded, knife-wielding dwarf. You see his demise coming, thanks to some heavy-handed foreshadowing; still, nothing can prepare you for that

creepy, craggy face, or the gnomish killer’s baffling head shake just before knife slashes throat.

14_The Godfather

(1972, dir. Francis Ford Coppola) Best Seen: Paramount DVD Time Code: Chapter 4, 32:30 When hotshot Hollywood producer Jack Woltz (John Marley) refuses to give the Don’s Sinatraesque godson a juicy movie role, you know he’s facing some hard-core retribution. Ignoring the cardinal rule that says don’t mess with a man’s animal, the Corleones strike with vicious creativity. Woltz awakens to something warm and wet drenching his sheets. When he discovers that it’s blood from his prized thoroughbred’s severed head,

Spacey) has masterminded the whole convoluted Kobayashi–Keyser Soze–Dean Keaton swindle comes as a slowly unraveling stunner. Verbal has finished his tale, which has taken more twists than Mulholland Drive, and detective Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) disparagingly dismisses him. Verbal collects his belongings and limps out of the police station. And then he transforms—his stride becomes the confident swagger of the sociopath who engineered it all.

11_Saving Private Ryan (1998, dir. Steven Spielberg) Best Seen: DreamWorks DVD Time Code: Chapter 2, 9:43

D-Day, 1944, Normandy. Nazi machine guns mow down American GIs like cardboard cutouts at a shooting range. Yet even in the midst of such carnage, one image stands out: A soldier, seemingly unaware of the chaos surrounding him, searches for something on the ground. It soon becomes horrifically clear what it is he seeks—his own severed arm. “I’m sure it [really] happened,” says cinematographer Janusz Kaminski of the soldier’s gory task (an apparent homage to Kurosawa’s Ran). “But

our aim was not to shock the viewers through violence. It was to accomplish a sense of reality that would allow them to understand what the war must have been like.”

10_Un Chien Andalou

(1929, dir. Luis Buñuel) Best Seen: Translux Films DVD Time Code: Chapter 1, 1:27

12 _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper) Best Seen: Pioneer DVD Time Code: Chapter 8, 39:22

Say what you will about psychological terror and fear of the unseen, but when Gunnar Hansen, as the hulking

Leatherface, hangs hapless Teri McMinn on a meat hook while she screams like someone who has, well, just been skewered by a cannibal in a raggedy mask, it’s one of the most chilling moments in the screwsubtlety-go-for-the-grisly horror genre. We thought it couldn’t get any more gruesome than when Leatherface first appeared and sledge-hammered William Vail’s head with a sickening wet thwack. Oh, we were so wrong.

A brutishly handsome young man— Buñuel himself—sharpens a razor on a strop while a lovely young woman sits patiently in a chair. From the balcony of their room, he spies a cloud sliver slicing across a full moon, and inspiration strikes. Holding open the unresisting woman’s lid, he slashes her eyeball in unsparing closeup. (It’s actually a calf’s eye and socket.) Pretty much contextless and utterly disquieting, this scenario kicks off the galvanic Buñuel–Salvador Dali short, a self-described “passionate appeal to murder,” which continues to inspire épater-le-bourgeois types and freak out film students.

9_The Exorcist

(1973, dir. William Friedkin) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 15, 73:20 Spinning heads, projectile green vomit, and endless obscenities—no

THE GODFATHER: PARAMOUNT/THE KOBAL COLLECTION; THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION

Four movies later, Luke Skywalker’s paternity is old news. But when Darth Vader announced in that end-of-days baritone, “I am your father,” he upended the entire Star Wars canon. How could Luke’s innocence and heroism have come from the evil that is Vader? Crouching in fear and pain, Luke doesn’t believe it. We can only wonder what’s going through his mind (“Dude, how about a blood test,” maybe?), but apparently he accepts the fact and begins to howl “Noooooo!” And just like that, Lucas’s seemingly simple morality tale transforms into something much more complex and gloomy.

revolted many during midnight screenings. “People would send us shit,” Waters says. “They would meet us at theaters with floral arrangements made of turds.” Waters calls Flamingos “worse today than it was then,” and says, “It hasn’t gotten even the slightest bit more politically correct. If anything, it’s gotten more shocking.”

25

one ever said demonic possession was pretty. But when 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) stabs herself in the crotch repeatedly with a bloody crucifix, shrieking in a voice that is half grown man, half rabid dog, “Let Jesus fuck you,” it’s no wonder that audience members were passing out in the aisles. Yet the most disturbing thing about the scene—which is disrespectful at best, blasphemous at worst—is the image of such a young girl performing an act that combines self-torture and child abuse.

8_Carrie

Few fears tear deeper into the fragile fabric of being a man than this: getting anally raped by a hillbilly in the woods. And Deliverance, largely, is to blame. This cautionary tale about four friends who venture into the Georgia backwoods for a canoe trip reaches fever pitch when Ned Beatty is forced, at gunpoint, to “squeal like a pig” by the gnarliest mountain men imaginable. Boorman and writer James Dickey get credit for crushing the cushy, protected world of the white-collar professional. But it’s Beatty whose ass is on the line; it’s his pink, dirt-slathered flesh and wails of anguish that leave a lasting, disturbing impression.

6_Reservoir Dogs

(1992, dir. Quentin Tarantino) Best Seen: Artisan DVD Time Code: Chapter 13, 54:50 After a jewel heist goes terribly

(1976, dir. Brian De Palma) Best Seen: MGM DVD Time Code: Chapter 31, 94:20 Okay, so there’s no doubt that seeing Carrie doused in pig’s blood at the prom by her bitchy classmates, and the telekinetic massacre that follows, is enough to make you wish you never made fun of that mousy girl in math class. They may have all laughed at poor Sissy Spacek, but the real joke

was on prissy Amy Irving, whose character is grabbed from beyond the grave by the disgraced prom queen at the end of the film. Granted, the touch from beyond was only a nightmare, but it’s undoubtedly one that she, and everyone who has ever seen this movie, has had more than once.

(1972, dir. John Boorman) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 13, 42:00

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5_Bonnie and Clyde

(1967, dir. Arthur Penn) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 34, 106:37 Having just avoided yet another runin with the law, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde are enjoying a sunny day, blissfully ignorant of the local police lying in wait to ambush them. We think we know what’s in store, but the savagery of the final shootout is worse than moviegoers of the time could have ever imagined. In a surge

2 _The Public Enemy of unprecedented violence, the cops riddle the freewheeling duo with bullets from head to toe. The spareness of the setup—a flock of birds taking flight, the look exchanged by the lovers—and the awful silence of the aftermath make it all that much more unsettling.

4_Psycho

(1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) Best Seen: Universal DVD Time Code: Chapter 24, 100:25 By killing off his star (Janet Leigh) in the first 50 minutes, Hitchcock made it clear he couldn’t care less about our expectations. Then he made it even more evident that he wasn’t too concerned about our heart rates or mental health, either. While investigating her sister’s disappearance, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) stumbles upon an elderly woman in a fruit cellar sitting in a chair, staring at the wall. The chair slowly turns, revealing a corpse more prune than person. As Miles lets out a piercing screech, the iconic Bernard Herrmann score returns and a swinging lightbulb throws jagged shadows on the ghoulish scene.

3_Alien

(1979, dir. Ridley Scott) Best Seen: Twentieth Century Fox DVD Time Code: Chapter 10, 54:27 Forever linking extraterrestrials and indigestion, Scott proved how truly sickening science fiction can be: The crew of the space hauler Nostromo are having dinner. Kane (John Hurt)—who just survived an attack from a facesucking crustacean—starts choking, then whips into seizures as his comrades lay him out on the table. Suddenly, a small, phallic creature with glinting silver teeth bursts out of

(1931, dir. William Wellman) Best Seen: Warner DVD Time Code: Chapter 23, 81:23 Titular gangster Tom Powers is coming home from the hospital where he’d been treated after a gun battle. So says the call received at the Powers household, and that call sets the household buzzing. While the phonograph blares “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” there is a knock on the door, and suddenly there’s James Cagney’s corpse wrapped in a blanket, his eyes still open in horror, standing rigid in the doorway, as his killers placed him. He falls with an ungodly slam into the foyer, the phonograph still merrily crackling.

1_The Crying Game

(1992, dir. Neil Jordan) Best Seen: Artisan DVD Time Code: Chapter 18, 63:57 What started as a fairly routine political thriller takes a jaw-dropping turn into the unknown when former IRA member Fergus (Stephen Rea) goes home with his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Dil changes into a robe, and then, standing before Fergus, lets it slide off her shoulders. The camera pans down . . . and she has a penis. “An awful lot of redblooded Irishmen were very shocked because they really fancied this girl,” Rea says. The unveiling abruptly jerks the film into a no-man’s land of genre; it’s now an odd hybrid of romance, politics, and sexual declaration, but what most people remember is that infamous shot. “There’s only one penis moment,” Rea says. “Once it’s been done, really, you can’t do it again.”

WRITTEN BY KELLY BORGESON, SARA BRADY, RACHEL CLARKE, CHRIS CRONIS, RYAN DEVLIN, ANN DONAHUE, BROOKE HAUSER, GLENN KENNY, JESSICA LETKEMANN, CRISTY LYTAL, JASON MATLOFF, AND TOM ROSTON

ALIEN: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

7_Deliverance

wrong, would-be thief and grade-A psychopath Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is not happy. And that’s very bad news for the young L.A. police officer he has taken hostage. Left alone at a deserted warehouse, Blonde turns on the radio, which is playing the ’70s Stealers Wheel hit “Stuck in the Middle With You.” While grooving to the music, he cuts the cop’s ear off with a razor and douses his victim with gasoline. “[After the film was released], a lot of people would hesitate to get in an elevator with me,” Madsen says. “Parents would grab their children and go, ‘No! Don’t go near that guy! I’ll explain when you grow up.’ ”

his chest, spewing blood and viscera everywhere. It surveys the room with a squawk and runs off into the depths of the ship. Pepto-Bismol stockholders are still singing this film’s praises.

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A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: From left,

0REMIERE PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005 Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Nathan OCTOBER Alan2005 Tudyk,

Fillion, Morena Baccarin, and Sean Maher.

114 2005 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005 RE OCTOBER 114 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005 BER OCTOBER 2005 RE 2005 114 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005 E OCTOBER 2005114 OCTOBER PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005 114 PREMIERE 2005 114 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

THIS SPREAD: ZOIC STUDIOS/UNIVERSAL. INSET: SIDNEY BALDWIN

MIERE OCTOBER 2005

ACEPLAN PLAN B FROM OUTER B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN PLAN B FROM ER N BSPACE FROMOUTER OUTER SPACE PLAN FROM SPACEPLAN B FROMBOUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B ER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER B FROM OUTER BAN FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE N B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B OM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B OM OUTER SPACE PLAN B OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM TER SPACE BER FROM SPACE FROMOUTER OUTER SPACE PLANSPACEPLAN B FROM B FROM

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WHEN A TV SHOW GETS THE AX AFTER AIRING JUST A FEW TIMES, THE COURSE OF ACTION FOR CAST AND CREW IS GENERALLY PRETTY CLEAR: A COUPLE OF DAYS OF network-cursing, followed by calls to agents and back-to-the-drawing-board brainstorming sessions to try to land another gig for the next pilot season. Unless you’re Joss Whedon.“I don’t deal with loss well,”says the 41-year-old writer-director, who first earned fanboy cred by resurrecting his studio-trampled big-screen vision for Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a hip TV phenomenon. Now, he’s hoping to bookend that feat with his feature directing debut, Universal’s sci-fi western Serenity—an extension of his 2002 series Firefly, which Fox brass gave up on after 11 episodes, but which Whedon couldn’t let die. Recalling his unlikely bid to find the concept a new home, Whedon concedes that at times he did wonder,“At what point does this stop being CPR and become necrophilia? The actors were getting other jobs, they were going to tear down the sets—and I was incapable of accepting that this universe I had created, with these actors that I loved, was just going to be pulled out from under me.” That universe was designed to feel less like the final frontier than the American frontier—a hardscrabble, lived-in alternative to what Whedon viewed as the increasingly antiseptic quality of newer incarnations of Star Trek and other genre entries. Set 500 years in the future, the film (made for under $50 million) focuses on Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the rest of the nine-member crew of Serenity, a run-down Firefly-class cargo ship smuggling and scavenging just under the radar of the oppressive, all-seeing Alliance. Deliberately eschewing aliens and laser weapons, Whedon and company instead dish up a group of western archetypes—the jaded gunslinger, the doc, the preacher, the whore—who are protecting what’s theirs with a cache of old-school pistols and shotguns, and who are bound for Earth-colonized planets with names like Beaumonde. “Humanity hasn’t changed much in that period of time,”says Adam Baldwin, who plays the crew’s dodgy tough guy Jayne Cobb. (With a résumé that in-

PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM UTER SPACEPLAN B FROMOUTER SPACEPLAN B TER SPACE PLAN B FROM ROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE TER SPACE LAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM OUTER PACEBPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B AN FROM OUTER FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER CE PLAN B PACEPLAN BFROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM OM OUTER SPACE OUTERPLAN SPACEPLAN B FROM UTER SPACE PLAN B FROM ROM OUTER SPACE PACEPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM ANOUTER B FROM SPACEPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B ROM OUTER SPACE TER SPACE PLAN B LAN B FROM OUTER SPACEPLAN B FROM OUTER OM PACEOUTER PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B CE OUTER PLANSPACE B FROM OUTER ROM PLAN B FROM OUTER

FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM ER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN M OUTER SPACE PLAN B LOCKED AND LOADED: Top, Summer Glau’s ballet training came in handy for the martial-arts– FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM OUTER SPACEheavy PLAN role B of FROM River; below left, writer-director Joss Whedon (left) confers with David Krumholtz, whoSPACE plays Mr. PLAN Universe; below right, Adam Baldwin (foreground) and crewOUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER Torres and Fillion go gunning for the Alliance. FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTERmates SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B “You really felt robbed of being able to experience revelations that FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM Joss had planned,” ER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER says Ron Glass (Barney Miller), whose holy man Shepherd Book isOUTER one of the story’s more enigmatic characters. “They SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM canceled us OUTER halfway through shooting an episode the week before PACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM Christmas, and it came as a shock, because we had been steadily growPLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN FROM says Gina Torres (the Matrix sequels), who plays Zoe ing anBaudience,” OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROMWarren, OUTERthe SPACE ship’sPLAN Amazonian second-in-command. Laughing, she FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B four days, we all made an effort to secretly flip Fox the adds,“For the last FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE bird PLAN B FROM OUTER in as many scenes as we could. So when my hand is in my holster, PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B maybe four out of five fingers are concealed. You do what you can under FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM circumstances.” ER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLANthe B FROM OUTER Still, AlanOUTER Tudyk (Dodgeball), who plays wisecracking Serenity SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN Bsays FROM pilot Wash,“we all knew Joss was looking to bring Firefly back in some PACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER form. He said,‘Even if it’s just Firefly etchings, I will produce that. But it PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B has toBcontinue.’ FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN FROM ” Whedon looked at taking the show to another netOUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROMwork, OUTER SPACE PLAN it as a series of TV movies, to no avail. possibly retooling FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLANinBlate 2003, Fox released the series on DVD, complete with Meanwhile, FROM OUTER SPACE SPACE PLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN FROM OUTER unairedB episodes and the entire run reordered in its intended sePLAN B FROM OUTER SPACE PLAN B quence—and it was a modest hit, largely boosted by Firefly loyalists, FROM OUTER who call themselves Browncoats after the show’s Alliance-defying

116 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

movement. With this built-in fan base and the DVD’s retail numbers (300,000 units through June 2005), Whedon successfully pitched a couple of friends at Universal on the proposition of a feature. “We looked at the show as a jumping-off point for the film,” says Mary Parent, the studio production exec who shepherded the project.“When Joss said, ‘I’m not finished telling this story,’ and showed us the script, we said,‘Wow, this is something really fresh—and a great way to start a relationship with him as well.’”(Reps for both Universal and Fox downplay the notion that the rights logistics were particularly complicated.) Universal’s investment, none too surprisingly, draws endless praise from Whedon’s cast, which was downright giddy not only to be back at work but to be shooting gin-u-whine (in Serenity parlance) movie moments, and to have the benefit of fully tricked-out effects. “I don’t know if I brushed up with some correspondence classes during the hiatus or what, but my flying has gotten really damned good,” deadpans Tudyk. And look for the escaped Alliance lab rat River, played by ballerina-turned-actress Summer Glau, to practice a bit of Kill Bill–style martial artistry as she’s hunted by a new villain, the Operative (Dirty Pretty Things’Chiwetel Ejiofor). As for Serenity’s captain,“we were allowed in the movie to make him as dark as we wanted to in the series,”says Fillion.“I might just be talking out of my ass, but as it stands, I would not mind being pigeonholed for the rest of my life as Malcolm Reynolds. I don’t look at William Shatner doing Boston Legal and say,‘Oh, he’ll only ever be Captain Kirk to me.’ But he has immortalized a character. I wouldn’t mind Malcolm Reynolds being immortal. Right now, he’s like a dirty secret.” Clearly emboldened by the creative death-defying stunt Whedon has already performed, Fillion and his castmates can’t help spilling that the T-word—trilogy—has been bandied about at Universal. (Even if a sequel gets green-lighted, they may have to wait until after Whedon’s next directing effort, Wonder Woman, which he’s currently writing for Warner Bros.) But, says Baldwin,“either way, this movie represents closure. In no way at this point can you consider that what we did was great but a failure. It was great and completed, whether we get to do two more or not. That’s a very liberating feeling.” Tom Russo wrote about Batman Begins in the June issue of PREMIERE.

SIDNEY BALDWIN

cludes My Bodyguard and Full Metal Jacket’s Animal Mother, Baldwin is one of the few widely recognizable faces among Whedon’s cast, all of whom were in the Firefly series.) “You’re still going to have the greedy, the selfish, all the problems that we always have; we just have spaceships. It gives the story relevance.” “Star Trek would hit the big issues, with the alien coming in saying [grandiosely],‘I am from the World of Racism,’”Whedon adds.“Whereas our issues are like, ‘How are we gonna eat?’ The Millennium Falcon analogy has been made a lot, and the premise sort of is, ‘What if Han Solo never met up with the Rebellion—just did his job and never found a higher purpose?’” The absence of actors made up as extraterrestrials or mutants, particularly after Buffy’s vampirefest, was one of several strikes against Firefly in Fox’s eyes, Whedon claims. (One imagines that the suits must have really blown some circuits over the way Asian culture aficionado Whedon regularly dropped snippets of Chinese into the dialogue to hint at 26th-century homogenization.) “The fact that everybody was shocked that there could be a future show without aliens means that we’re in a rut,” says Whedon, who does include numerous shots of the Reavers, a group of horrific-looking colonists gone savage, in the movie. The series went through a notoriously tortured development process; Whedon’s original two-hour, $8.7 million pilot was shelved, and he was asked instead for an hour-long episode that cut the backstory and upped the action. The muddled signals continued: “When Joss first described the show to me, he pitched the darkest stories you could imagine,” says Tim Minear, who executive-produced Firefly with Whedon. (One startling first-episode bit had Reynolds coolly booting a handcuffed opponent right into Serenity’s massive turbine.) “I knew it would be leavened with humor, because that’s what we always do. But then Fox promoted it with Smash Mouth songs, like,‘Hey, a wacky western romp in space!’People tuned in and said,‘Whaaat? I don’t get it.’” Firefly was canceled in December 2002 (the same month that the pilot finally aired as an “origin special”).“I thought it was a fantastic effort on Joss’s part, but it didn’t garner the audience that was necessary,” says Gail Berman, who oversaw the show as Fox Entertainment president (and is now president of Paramount Pictures).

THE IERE PREM W THE GOOD E I V R E N A INT M R O M HU S ONCE A A W E . H , Y E U R G Y SU Z A R C D N A WILD OW BUT N EVE MARTIN— ST , ACTOR, N A I D E COM RITER— G N I K W L AND HAPPIER TA ND A IS L R I G SHOP FAMILYN I G N I R R A T S . E R A F Y L D N E FRI D SCHRUERS E R F Y B Y B S H P A R G O T K O C U H B P CHRIS 119 RE.COM PREMIE

IT’S BECOME MORE AND MORE EVIDENT JUST HOW IMPORTANT CREATIVE PATIENCE HAS BEEN FOR MARTIN. HIS UPCOMING FILM SHOPGIRL—ADAPTED FROM HIS BEST-SELLING NOVELLA OF THE SAME TITLE—RIGOROUSLY KEEPS TO ITS OWN STATELY BUT FASCINATING BEAT.

Martin will insist the story and the film belong to Claire Danes’s titular Mirabelle. But next to her in many frames is Martin’s Ray Porter, a wealthy businessman with an almost arctic reserve that clearly masks much deeper feelings. Steve Martin, of course, can be described in the same terms. Though we met him as the manic stand-up comic, time has shown that persona to be a canny fabrication. His first blip in cinema was the 1977 short, The Absent-Minded Waiter, and when he starred in The Jerk two years later, he won instant acceptance that has persisted. Early next year, Martin will take a turn as Inspector Clouseau in an update of Peter Sellers’s legendary Pink Panther series. He seems hopeful it will launch him, at 60, into a new and revivifying franchise. Not that Martin necessarily needs the help—his sunshiny family comedies like Parenthood, Father of the Bride and its sequel, followed by At one stage in the film, things that in the book were interior Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, have positioned him as an indismonologues become confessions to a psychiatrist. I hate to use a shrink in a movie. It’s kind of an easy way out. But there pensable éminence blanc atop a kinder, gentler genre Hollywood deshad to be a moment in the film, just for good storytelling, where it’s perately needs in its current slump. We spoke with Martin in a quiet fully explained that he has no intention of carrying [the relationship] Manhattan hotel, during a break from shooting the Cheaper sequel in further. Usually those kind of conversations are done with confidants Toronto, and he lived up to his billing as a polite, even courtly lunch in the movie, but he had no confidants. And it’s certainly legitimate companion—and also as a hard man, despite what’s perhaps his best for a guy like him at his age to have a shrink. But also I think the direcperformance to date, in Shopgirl, to compliment. tor did a brilliant thing: He never cut to the shrink. The critics remarked when the book came out that it was the Claire Danes has said she was playing out a love story in Shopgirl work of a man striving to become thoroughly immersed in female that she felt was quite autobiographical for you. That’s not somepsychology. thing you’re emphasizing? It’s hard to say why I became interested in the psychology of women. I definitely downplay it, because it is largely fiction. There are almost I didn’t do it voluntarily—it just occurred. When I was writing the no incidents in the book that occurred in life. Certainly [I’m] reprebook, writing the women parts was much easier than writing the sented by several different relationships, different passages, times in men parts. Because writing about a woman, I know what’s interestmy life, people I’ve talked to, stories I’ve heard. ing to me to show or reveal or describe. But when I’m writing about a I think men who recognize themselves in your character, Ray man, I don’t know. Because I am one, I didn’t know what was interPorter, may be your most fascinated—not to say guilt-ridden—auesting about us. dience. For instance, Ray wants to have sex, even as Mirabelle’s I have a friend who’s a scientist working with, I think it was having a meltdown about their relationship. hedgehogs—and she is on the way to discovering the differences in He decides against it, but—yeah, it’s interesting. I think men think it’s orientation—how men and women find things and locate thema cure-all. [laughs]

120 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

STYLIST, LIZ ENGELHARDT; MAKEUP AND HAIR, JOSEPH A. CAMPAYNO; LOCATION, REGENCY HOTEL, NYC; SUIT, ANDREW BUCKLER BY BORELLI; SHIRT, TIE, AND SHOES, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS SHORT HILLS

SOME EARS AGO, D E Y S I A R P N I T R Y A N M N E E STEV EDIAN JACK B COM TERVIEW: E G A R U O N I C E N H A T . IN D D I A A H S “HE AIT,” MARTIN TO W EARS, Y E H T OVER

122 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

M I H F ALL O

(1977) The Absent-Minded Waiter (1978) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1979) The Muppet Movie (1979) THE JERK (1981) Pennies From Heaven (1982) Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1983) The Man With Two Brains (1984) The Lonely Guy (1984) All of Me (1985) Movers & Shakers (1986) Three Amigos! (1986) Little Shop of Horrors (1987) ROXANNE (1987) Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1988) Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1989) Parenthood (1990) My Blue Heaven (1991) L.A. Story (1991) Father of the Bride (1991) Grand Canyon (1992) Housesitter (1992) Leap of Faith (1994) A Simple Twist of Fate (1994) Mixed Nuts (1995) Father of the Bride Part II (1996) Sgt. Bilko (1998) The Spanish Prisoner (1998) The Prince of Egypt (voice) (1999) The Out-of-Towners (1999) Bowfinger (2000) Joe Gould’s Secret (2001) Novocaine (2003) BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE (2003) Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) Cheaper by the Dozen (2005) SHOPGIRL (2005) Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2006) The Pink Panther

used in my early stand-up days, which was, I’m going to make them think I don’t care, you know. If you’ve got that going, the audience is very relaxed. They go with you; you don’t look like you’re trying to please them or that it’s their job to like you. Maybe part of that approach is the portrayal of sheerly insincere stage personas? Well, I was a witness to ’50s show business, which was built on insincerity. Lounge singers and Vegas acts and kind of super-polished. So it was the first thing a would-be iconoclast would puncture, go after. By the time you had a few pictures under your belt, you gave in more to the underbelly of all that—your inner Jerry Lewis. At one stage in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Michael Caine is laughing in the take. Do you remember that day? I pulled him down on a bed, I know that. And you’re throwing your leg over him. That kind of stuff’s got to be pretty much an homage to Jerry Lewis. Well, I’m always “homaging”Jerry Lewis, you know—[he] affected so much comedy, and especially me and my friends. I’m not saying it’s one hundred percent; it might be ten percent or twenty percent, but it made you love comedy. You kind of grew up with Jerry Lewis. There are things that are just brilliant in his movies. It didn’t always (Continued on page 142)

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION; JOSEPH LEDERER; SAM EMERSON (2)

selves. Men see big landmarks, women see particular details that they remember. Hence, they’re always in conflict about how to get there in the car. Around 1980, there was a stage where you felt a malaise about your career. Pennies From Heaven seemed to pull you out of that, creatively. That just had to do with being tired, I think. I was doing my stand-up career and doing a movie, and it had all been very, very successful. And you just take a deep breath and go,“So, what? I keep doing the same thing? Or do something different?”It was a creative standstill in a way. So you took on a dark Dennis Potter piece that required heaps of dancing. The challenge seemed to reinvigorate you. I read a book in college called Psychology in Art, and it said Picasso continually shifted, [but] Chagall painted the same thing his whole life. It’s just two different ways of operating. And both successful, just a different mind-set. I guess I have the shifting, shifting or learning something new. I’ve always found I do better as a beginner than I do as an experienced worker. You said to a caller on a radio show who asked when you’d do a standup tour again,“Never.You can mark that on your calendar.” Why such a permanent repudiation of the gift that made your name? One, you have to do it all the time in order to be good at it—I’m not prepared to go on the road. And by the time I quit, I found the audience just . . . I like precision of comedy, and the audience just wouldn’t allow that anymore. Years later, I thought,“Oh, I realize what happened. They thought it was a party.”I was doing something else. I thought I was doing my comedy act that they would appreciate. But it had turned into a party. There was a degree of anger and alienation embodied by that guy in the white suit with the balloon animals, and by the Wild and Crazy Guys as well. I don’t think it’s alienation; I think it was the silliness of arrogance. It’s like when people become so self-important, I always find that really, really funny. You hosted the Oscar telecast when the relatively new Iraq war was boiling over nastily. Oh, it was the worst. That day, there was a story—that they were executing army personnel, you know—whoa. I just resolved, I have to put that in another room. You opened with a gag about how they’d turned down the glitz factor, getting a big laugh because they so clearly hadn’t. But you avoided anything portentous. My philosophy came from a couple occasions in my life. In 1963, I was working at the Birdcage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm. We had a show that night, a comedy show. And Kennedy was shot. Everyone was just stunned. We were debating whether to do a show or not. It was decided by others, yes, we’re going to do the show. And we thought, this is going to be horrible. We went out, it was the biggest laughs that we had had in a long, long time. Almost a contrary response. And I always remembered that. I thought, something has to be acknowledged, and then we’re going to move on. And the other reason I wanted to do that was that they told me ahead of time that the show was going to be broadcast to wherever the troops were. And so I thought, if I’m a soldier sitting there, do I want look at a somber ceremony? No, I want a big show. I have a theory that certain comics—notably you and Bill Murray— find much of their humor in twisting things that are commonplace in an inspired but familiar, smart-aleck way. I feel different from Bill Murray. He’s got a real gift of a special kind. He’s just the coolest. I play a different thing. But he’s just got a great, Idon’t-care attitude. Jack Nicholson has it. Actually, it’s something I

20TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION

“NOW THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE!” - THE NEW YORK POST

MASTERFULLY DIRECTED BY JOHN MCNAUGHTON, HENRY CONTINUES TO SHOCK AND DISTURB TWENTY YEARS AFTER ITS DEBUT.

2-DISC SET ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

BONUS FEATURES INCLUDE: COMMENTARY WITH DIRECTOR JOHN MCNAUGHTON

“PORTRAIT: THE MAKING OF HENRY” DOCUMENTARY DELETED SCENES AND OUTTAKES WITH JOHN MCNAUGHTON “THE SERIAL KILLERS: HENRY LEE LUCAS” DOCUMENTARY ORIGINAL STORYBOARDS, THEATRICAL TRAILERS AND STILL GALLERY

OWN IT ON V SEPTEMBER 27 AVAILABLE NOW! THE MANSON FAMILY “IT EXISTS IN A CATEGORY OF ONE FILM–THIS FILM.” - ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

WITHOUT WARNING A FILM NOIR GEM, CONSIDERED ONE OF THE VERY FIRST “SLASHER” FILMS.

THE SERIAL KILLERS DOCUMENTARY INCLUDES EXCLUSIVE ONE-ON-ONE INTERVIEWS WITH THIRTEEN OF THE MOST INFAMOUS MURDERERS IN AMERICA.

www.darkskyfilms.com

This unrated film contains sexually explicit material, graphic violence and drug use. It should not be viewed by anyone 17 and under.

Available at

HomeGuide ESSENTIAL INFORMATION FOR THE MOVIE MANIAC OCTOBER 2005

✲ ✲ ✲ ✲ NINOTCHKA ✲✲✲ SILK STOCKINGS ✲✲ THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!

SO THIS IS PARIS: Garbo’s apparatchik resists Melvyn Douglas (at first) in Ninotchka.

✲ THE EXPERTS

Reviewed This Month

[] BEN HUR: COLLECTOR’S EDITION, 126 THE BLUES BROTHERS: 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, 135 BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING, 130 FEVER PITCH, 130 THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, 128 THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, 127 MAJOR DUNDEE: THE EXTENDED VERSION, 126 SAHARA, 130 THE UPSIDE OF ANGER, 135 AND MORE . . .

HIGHLIGHTS CLASSIC DVD: A GLITTERING ‘CINDERELLA’ (128)

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION (2); THE KOBAL COLLECTION

HOME GUIDE PLUS

Garbo: The Signature Collection COLLECTION: ✲ ✲ ✲ ✲ THE COLLECTION: In the 1920s, before there were, God help us,“Bennifer” and “Brangelina,” (WARNER, $99.92)

there was a substance called “Gilgarbage,” used to describe the bilge the tabloid press would pump out ad nauseam concerning the offscreen romance of beautiful, enigmatic Swedish-born screen star Greta Garbo and her frequent costar John Gilbert. This ten-disc collection highlights most of the peaks—the startling eroticism of the Gilbert-Garbo coupling in 1927’s Flesh and the Devil; the actress’s triumphant entrance into the sound era with Anna Christie; the florid but strangely effective melodramatics of Queen Christina and Camille; and the startling comic change-up of Ninotchka—and a few of the valleys of a remarkable career, one that ended most memorably when the putatively reclusive Garbo retired at the age of only 36 (after making her most egregious flop, Two-Faced Woman, not included). Even the not-so-great pictures here—along with good extras, including a solid bio-doc—provide a master class in the semiotics of stardom as it existed in a time not so different from our own, as it turns out. —G.K.

Go to premiere.com for an inside view of the extended Major Dundee, plus interviews with Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park and Fever Pitch-ers the Farrelly brothers and Jimmy Fallon.

LEGACY

BARBARA BEL GEDDES (1922-2005)

(131)

HomeGuide

DVD REVIEWS SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (KOCH LORBER, $29.98)

THE TICKER

DVD ODDS, SODS, NEWS, AND MINI-REVIEWS

You want cheap DVD thrills and lots of ’em? On November 1, Fox is releasing ten themed box sets, each comprising three or four titles, and each at the attractive price of $29.98. The ATTACK PACK features Commando, Predator, and Kiss of the Dragon; the COURTROOM PACK has The Boston Strangler, Class Action, Runaway Jury, and The Star Chamber, and so on. A good way to gift or beef up the library. . . . They say nothing ages worse than the putatively avant-garde, but a look at Kino on Video’s great two-disc AVANT-GARDE: EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF THE 1920S AND ’30S ($29.95) reveals that the innovations of artistes such as Duchamp, Man Ray, and Dimitri Kirsanoff still seem fresh. These guys might have lost their battles with Hollywood hegemony (which they engaged in quite consciously), but they succeeded in putting some spectacular imagery and emotion on celluloid. . . . As a delightful accompaniment to the DreamWorks release of the first full-length feature starring the fabulous clay-animated inventor-and-dog team of Wallace and Gromit, the studio is releasing WALLACE & GROMIT IN THREE AMAZING ADVENTURES ($19.98), comprising the three legendary BBC-aired shorts—A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave—that made the team’s name. That ought to provide much delight well after Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit hits theaters—and go to premiere.com for an exclusive interview with W&G’s brilliant and hard-working creator, Nick Park. . . . Fans of the French New Wave should exult in Kino’s releases of the KimStim Collection’s stash of Claude Chabrol films, among them the harrowing BETTY, the fatalistic L’ENFER, and two bracing thrillers starring Jean Poiret as the urbane but sour detective Lavardin, COP AU VIN and INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN ($24.95 each). They should also enjoy Wellspring’s release of Godard’s latest, the provocative, elegiac NOTRE MUSIQUE. (Fans of the older, or rather younger, Godard, are awaiting Criterion’s upcoming release of 1966’s great Masculin Feminin.) Wellspring’s also offering a garland of stuff by the Taviani brothers, including their adaptation of Goethe’s ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. . . . Now we’ve got to get back to Warners’ great discs of two Gene Hackman classics, NIGHT MOVES and SCARECROW ($19.97 each). —G.K. WORKING-CLASS DOG: W&G await feature debut.

hour of other supplements, which include intros to many of the deleted scenes and a roundtable with Jang and his cast. —A.H. MOVIE: ✲ ✲ ✲ 1/2 DISC: ✲ ✲ ✲ 1/2

3-IRON (SONY, $29.95)

THE MOVIE: Thanks to his past as a factory worker, military officer, and painter, director Kim Ki-Duk has a fearless disavowal of conventions rarely seen in filmmakers with the benefits of a film

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“WELL, I’VE GOT THE CELEBRATORY GRAFFITI!” Heston disses Richard Harris in Dundee.

•Ben Hur: Collector’s Edition

(WARNER, $39.92)

•Major Dundee:

The Extended Version

(SONY, $19.94)

MOVIES: ✲ ✲ ✲ DISCS: ✲ ✲ ✲ ✲ THE MOVIES: “Charlton Heston is an axiom,” a besotted Cahiers du Cinema critic wrote in 1960.“By himself alone he constitutes a tragedy, and his presence in any film whatsoever suffices to create beauty.” Loopy stuff, yes—but hardly as small-minded as the snobbery that compels so many to dismiss Heston out of hand. Admittedly, the hypertrophied 1959 Ben Hur, itself somewhat on the loopy side, is not the first picture I’d reach for to make a case for Heston, but it is historically significant and fascinating. The new edition of director Sam Peckinpah’s mutilated-for-release 1965 Major Dundee, on the other hand, is a revelation— extended by 12 minutes, with a new, entirely apposite score, this story of Heston’s title character leading a quixotic quest against massacring Indians is now a coherent, if imperfect, piece, highlighting a Heston performance that’s as multilayered as anything he’s ever done. THE DISCS: The four-disc Hur boasts a good commentary, a beautiful disc of the 1925 silent version of the story, and a supplemental disc featuring almost everything you’d ever want to know about the movie. Dundee’s disc features a fine commentary and the film with Danielle Amfitheatrof’s original score. —G.K.

COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION (2)

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THE MOVIE: Outrageously and often simultaneously smudging the lines between alien-conspiracy eco-horror, sober police procedural, and Grand Guignol psycho-slapstick, South Korean auteur Jang JunHwan’s amazing freakout of a first fea-

ture follows the kidnap and subsequent torture of a chemical corporation CEO, believed to be a malevolent space monster by a sensitive, beekeeping wacko. Perhaps too violent for the mainstream masses, and too maniacally self-conscious for some cinephiles, this ambitious hallucination is one hell of a genre pastiche. THE DISC: An intimate interview with Jang from his “filthy room” overlaps a bit with the

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Classic DVDof the Month

NOT ANY OLD IRON: Lee Hyun-Kyoon in front of future love Lee Seung-Yeon in Kim’s enigmatic film.

school education. He broke the limits of cinematic gruesomeness in films like The Isle and Bad Guy, but most viewers will undoubtedly find 3Iron’s near-complete

As delicately designed as a glass slipper and blissfully colored with a glowing palette, Cinderella (1950), the second of Disney’s three animated fairy-tale princess films, is one of the studio’s most endearingly realized romantic treasures. Enchanting yet dramatic, the picture also introduced one of animation’s most intimidating villains, Cinderella’s wicked stepmother, rendered in harsh realism and offsetting this story’s whimsy with more than a shade of menace. The sequence where Cinderella’s gown is torn from her in shreds by her appalling stepsisters is startling; when the gown miraculously reappears more lovely than before, we witness the magic only Disney could conjure—and to which the studio should aspire once more. Always an attractive film, Cinderella has never been better served on any format. Among the superb extras on this twodisc set are discussions of and archival interviews with Disney’s legendary key animators, the famed “Nine Old Men.” Tribute is also paid to concept artist Mary Blair, whose work greatly guided the look of Cinderella, and is so colorfully stylized as to be achingly beautiful. —J.F.

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good and evil, fantasy and reality. —M.I. MOVIE/DISC: ✲ ✲ ✲

THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS (CRITERION, $29.95)

THE MOVIE: This 1950 feature by Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini (cowritten with Federico Fellini) is an episodic look at St. Francis of Assisi and his simpleminded disciples, cast with reallife monks. Rossellini’s direct approach is recognizable despite the medieval setting; scenes of Francis with a leper and of

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At the Drive-In

THE RACES ARE ON!

element of fate plays a heavy role at the conAnchor Bay’s releases of 1974’s Dirty Mary, clusion of both films; the presence of Fonda Crazy Larry ($19.98) and 1975’s Race With in both suggests just how long a shadow the Devil ($14.98) are a pair of smashing Easy Rider’s pessimism cast—even upon the entertainments from an era when B movies exploitation market, which today would were still appealingly innocent yet more avoid such jarring wrap-ups. . . . In other daring in conception. news of digitized cinema of ill repute, VCI The “plotting” of each is simplicity itself; offers a lavish presentation of Greydon Clark’s in Dirty/Crazy, down-on-his-luck racer Larry endlessly outrageous 1976 Black Shampoo (Peter Fonda) and newly found girlfriend, ($14.99), with John trashy Mary (Susan Daniels as the titular George, showing no (sort of) blowhint of her Brit drying/loving/killing accent), set out on a machine. . . . Ever reckless high-speed since the Michael Bay joyride after robbing a sci-fier The Island was supermarket and makannounced, cultists ing fools of the pursuhave speculated about ing authorities (led by its plot resemblance lawman Vic Morrow), to 1979’s Parts: The who take this all very Clonus Horror, in personally. The DIRTY, CRAZY, COOL: George and Fonda which humungoid ensuing car and copter take a short break from car-chase mayhem. doofus Timothy stunt work is exciting Donnelly escapes from what he discovers is and never loses momentum. Race (directed a cloning farm. And now there’s a lawsuit by the late Jack Starrett, whose CV includes and everything! Well, you can have a mock the helming of Cleopatra Jones and the ineftrial at home thanks to Mondo Macabro’s fable portrayal of Gabby Johnson in Blazing solid disc Clonus ($19.95). Actually, this is Saddles) finds a more stable Fonda on vacaprobably the least of the films in Mondo tion with his business partner (the great Macabro’s catalog, which also includes the Warren Oates) and their wives (Lara Parker likes of the 1967 Pakistani vampire film (!) and Loretta Swit), traveling the Texas wilderThe Living Corpse and the deranged ness in the family van only to witness a nunsploitation pic Satanico Pandemonium. demonic sacrifice one night, resulting in a Check out the company’s website, flight for survival by way of a deadly www.mondomacabrodvd.com. —J.F. & G.K. gauntlet laid by the backwoods cultists. The

ICONS: MONIKA AICHELE. PREVIOUS PAGE: LAURIE SPARHAM. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: WOO JONG-IL; HERSHENSON-ALLEN ARCHIVE; TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION

CINDERELLA: SPECIAL EDITION (DISNEY, $29.99)

lack of dialogue tolerable when compared with, say, fishhooks. In 3-Iron, two outcasts—a young drifter who inhabits strangers’ unoccupied homes and a lonely, abused wife—

prove that a gaze or two feet brushing together can surpass words. Though shocking moments of unexplained violence surface, and the film’s fantastical ending hovers between poetic abstraction and mere cop-out, this multi-layered love story rings true with sweetness despite the silence. THE DISC: Kim’s audio commentary gives detailed accounts of everything from Hollywood’s current affinity for all things Asian to his onscreen obsession with the distinction between

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“AWRIGHT, WE GOT US AN IRAQI CONSTITUTION!” McConaughey and crew celebrate.

Sahara (PARAMOUNT, $29.99)

MOVIE: ✲ ✲ DISC: ✲ ✲ THE MOVIE: Glib, thy name is cowboys on camels. Based on a Clive Cussler novel, Sahara oscillates between a serious treatise about ecological damage in West Africa and a buddy movie decked out with a good ol’boy soundtrack, cartoony villains, and sweat-drenched bandannas. On their way to unearthing priceless Civil War booty, wisecracking, ahem, “scientists” Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn stumble into helping good doctor Penélope Cruz prevent toxic waste from destroying the global ecosystem. Although not unpleasant to watch, this is the sort of film that diminishes everyone involved—from its gaffer to the normally terrific William H. Macy, as a fuming, cigar-chomping admiral. Cruz, in particular, looks stunned that she’s slogging through the desert to capitulate to McConaughey’s soggy come-ons without a BacallBogie fight. The gimmicky plotting and dialogue perpetuate the bias of its protagonists, namely that these scenery-chewing frat boys are more compelling than the land and the people that they alternatively pillage and rescue. Talk about cultural imperialism in cargo pants. THE DISC: The seemingly neverending extras (including two—count ’em—two commentaries and three featurettes) are worthy if only to savor star–executive producer McConaughey giving new meaning to the term “vanity project.” —L.R.

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historical context. Interviews with Isabella Rossellini, film historian Adriano Aprà, and film critic Father Virgilio Fantuzzi provide some personal reminiscences of the director and commentary on his aesthetics and the film’s initial reception. —A.L. MOVIE/DISC: ✲ ✲ ✲ ✲

(CRITERION, $29.95)

MOVIE/DISC: A successful Parisian bookseller saves a tramp from suicide, but gets far more than he bargained for as he attempts to improve the unfortunate’s lot in life. Director Jean Renoir’s comedy of bad manners is a truly essential classic, made fresher than ever in this excellent edition, which boasts a beautiful high-def transfer. And there are plenty of archival supplements, including a charming reminiscence between the director and star, Michel Simon, some 30 years after the

DO YOU BOUDU? Michel Simon wallows before he’s Saved.

film was made. —T.S. MOVIE/DISC: ✲ ✲ ✲ ✲

FEVER PITCH (FOX, $29.98)

THE MOVIE: The brothers Farrelly present their most humanistic and least gross film yet, a sweet-hearted romantic comedy about a woman (Drew Barrymore) fighting the Boston Red Sox

for her boyfriend (Jimmy Fallon)’s attention. Shot during the historic 2004 baseball season, the film enjoys plum access to Fenway Park and the Sox themselves. Barrymore’s appealingly camp-free performance is one of the draws for the baseball-indifferent. THE DISC: Most of the supplemental interviews are recycled, but the fresh commentary by Peter and Bobby Farrelly is diverting. —S.B. MOVIE: ✲ ✲ ✲ DISC: ✲ ✲

MELINDA AND MELINDA (FOX, $27.98)

THE MOVIE: Spending time in a recent Woody Allen film is

like taking tea with a slightly addled great aunt who continually offers, from the depths of an enormous handbag, peppermints that fossilized during the Ford administration: It’s tedious, obligatory, and stale. Allen’s frozen-in-carbonite sensibility pervades Melinda, a story told as both comedy and tragedy (though regardless of the genre, the title character, played by Radha Mitchell, is selfcentered, imperious, and infuriating). The sprawling cast displays a dizzying variety of acting styles, and many of the talented actors flounder with Allen’s exposition-

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FROM TOP: KEITH HAMSHERE; COURTESY OF CRITERION COLLECTION

a wild-eyed tyrant (played by Aldo Fabrizi) confronting beatific Brother Ginepro are particularly memorable. THE DISC: The very satisfying supplemental materials include a brief prologue, only previously available on U.S. film prints, detailing Francis’s

BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING

WWW.IMAGE-ENTERTAINMENT.COM Program Content and Artwork: © 2003 WEG INDIA. All Rights Reserved. © 2005 Image Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.

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ObscureObjects

LOST LAUGHS AND LORE, NOW FOUND

The portly Fatty Arbuckle was one of the great architects of silent film comedy,making undignified pratfalls and indulging in all manner of gross behavior onscreen,to undyingly amusing effect.Unfortunately for Arbuckle,his career was derailed in 1921 by a sex-andmurder scandal.Although acquitted of the crime he was accused of,he could never revive his onscreen career and turned to directing,a field in which he did SILLY AND SUBLIME: wonderful work,before dying of a heart attack in 1933.A fantastic Arbuckle (left) takes it overview of Arbuckle’s career in all its phases is provided by on the chin from Buster the spectacular four-disc set The Forgotten Films of Roscoe “Fatty” Keaton; below, the lovers in Ulmer’s Light. Arbuckle (Mackinac,$49.95),compiling shorts from the teens to the early ’30s,beautifully restored and with great extras as well.A laughing and learning experience....Director Edgar G.Ulmer’s career took him all over Europe and America,and all over the genre map as well, from“race” films to noir to sci-fi.The four Yiddish-language films he made in the U.S.beginning in the late ’30s—Green Fields,The Singing Blacksmith, American Matchmaker,and The Light Ahead—are among his most distinguished works,now all available on DVD from the National Center for Jewish Film (www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm/ catalogue/ulmer.htm).They are all worth seeing,but the masterpiece of the bunch is Light,a moving tale of poverty,love,and superstition in a Russian shtetl that is often wrenchingly moving,and replete with Expressionist touches.A fascinating window into a culture that,for all intents and purposes,is gone now. —G.K.

bare-bones; maestro Allen must be above such vulgarities as DVD extras. —S.B. MOVIE: ✲ 1/2 DISC: ✲

TOMORROW WE MOVE (KINO, $29.95)

THE MOVIE: We hope

you’ll find this French comedy as delightful as we did, but if it doesn’t happen for you in the first 20 or so minutes, it’s probably not going to. The issue is not with the film’s quality, which is excellent, but its accessi-

bility—writer-director Chantal Akerman’s storytelling is just realistic enough to throw you off balance every few moments when absurdism rears its merry head. Though the film is ostensibly about a woman

(charmingly frazzled Sylvie Testud) who’s searching for a new apartment for herself and her widowed mother, it quickly becomes apparent that this is actually a means of tackling some of Life’s Major

Issues—loneliness, the search for identity, coping with the expectations of others, etc. Whether you find this a valid device depends largely on whether the kind of real estate fetishization peculiar to major metropolitan

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Look at Me (SONY, $29.95)

MOVIE: ✲ ✲ ✲ DISC: ✲ ✲ ✲

THE MOVIE: There is a certain kind of film about which some people

THE ME NOBODY KNOWS: Jean-Pierre Bacri won’t Look at Marilou Berry.

132 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

will say,“It’s okay, but nothing really happens.”Of course, this is almost never accurate—in fact, often in movies of this kind so much is happening that there’s hardly time to register it all. French director-actress Agnès Jaoui’s 2004 comedy-drama features several distinct story lines whose points of intersection are a celebrated novelist entering middle age and his talented but neglected grown daughter; it advances its action not by stunning leaps but through intricate moments of domestic discord and heartache. The method is particularly well-realized here, because of both a gifted cast of actors who each seem to have an intuitive sense of his or her function in the larger story, and precise and seamless editing work on the part of François Gédigier, who knows just how long a scene should last and just where to take us next. THE DISC: The subtitles are as unobtrusive as one could hope, and the disc has a solid making-of documentary (consisting almost entirely of production footage) and about 20 minutes of deleted scenes. —C.E.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: JERRY TAVIN/COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION; COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR JEWISH FILM; JEAN-PAUL DUMAS-GRILLET

heavy dialogue. One exception is Will Ferrell, who has a surprising facility with Allen’s nervous rhythms. THE DISC: The disc offers Melinda in widescreen and fullscreen presentations. Otherwise, this is

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TechKnowledge MORE PIXELS! MORE DETAIL! CAN A MAN SEE . . . TOO MUCH???

Very High. And Very Def. ake our hand, home-theater enthusiast with a lot of disposable income (or maybe a home-equity loan, or a knack for finding lost drug-deal money in alleyways), for we are about to enter a new realm of television: the realm of microdisplay technology. In the kind of semantic paradox that long-suffering AV mavens have become resigned to, this tech, despite the prefix “micro,” is applicable mostly in totally giganticscreen televisions. See, but it’s the small stuff inside the big boxes that counts, and digitallight–processing and resolution-doubling all boost the power of the thousands of tiny charged thingies that create, in these cases, frighteningly detailed HDTV and DVD pictures. Read and drool . . . —Glenn Kenny & Jamie Sorcher

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Hewlett-Packard’s 1080p, available in 58- and 65-inch versions later this year for about $4,300 and $5,500, respectively, is equipped with HP’s own Visual Fidelity technologies that double pixel resolution; take into account a room’s ambient lighting and adjust the television’s picture accordingly; and call Domino’s to order one of those three-pizzas–one-topping–five-bucks-each deals. The 1080p wants pineapple on its pie.

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MOVIE STILLS, FROM TOP: PHILIPPE ANTONELLO; FRANK MASI; RAFY

Named in homage to Hustle & Flow actor DJ Qualls, the Sony Qualia 006 ($13,000) is a 70-inch rear-projection set boasting more than 2 million pixels (is this microdisplay business starting to make more sense now?) and capable of 1,920x1,080 resolution— that’s to say, fully up to snuff to the demands of HDTV. Of all the tech descriptions we looked at this month, the Qualia’s has the most math in it, which is impressive. It’s not as if the company’s got a shabby track record in TV production, you know.

Sharp’s LC-45GD4U ($7,499.99) is one of three new sets that represent the largest widescreen HDTV liquid crystal displays in the world, as Dana Carvey doing Mickey Rooney would say. As every company must have its proprietary technology with an unwieldy handle, Sharp offers CV-IC System III video processing to further enhance 1080i and 720p cable HDTV signals to something even more nifty, rich in detail, and likely to effectively distract you from the horrors of life on this planet . . . the better to suck you in to the horror dripping from Jennifer Connolly’s ceiling.

Steve Martin (Continued from page 122)

work as a whole, but neither do mine or anybody else’s, you know. So I can see sources of bits in my own work that . . . There’s an echo in your head of where things come from. The Jerk still gets laughs on repeated viewings—that was your film breakthrough. I didn’t know how it was going to work but everything [up until then] had worked. So I had no reason to think it wouldn’t. I wrote the script with Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias, and some of it was from my act, like the “I was born a poor black child”and that bit—“I don’t need anything, just this.”I knew the kind of story I wanted to tell. It’s like everybody came on for their cameos and seemed to be comically inspired—like, today’s my day. Was it like a movie circus? The movie is a circus anyway. The tents and trucks . . . Everybody got—caught the spirit. Carl Reiner was just great. He contributed a lot to the script, too, uncredited of course, ’cause directors don’t get credit. But it was just nothing but fun. I was in love with Bernadette Peters, and everybody was happy and pleasant; nobody was difficult. Victoria Tennant [Martin’s ex-wife] was the perfect person for L.A. Story. Was she the inspiration? I wouldn’t call her the inspiration. People think that, but I was just interested in a love story set in L.A. And I wanted to use her as an actress. So I kind of had to have an English story. But really the premise of L.A. Story was its surrealism. I think one thing people remember is our hero just popping caps out of the car window— That is a very elaborate thing to shoot, too. You have to shut down a freeway. We did it in Bowfinger but only on a Sunday morning, a little tiny stretch of the highway. It’s been rumored that you find your renewed vigor as a box office draw somehow aggravating. I phrase it like this—my career was nicely closing up, then a terrible thing happened: I had a hit. [laughs] I had to get back in show business. Apparently you didn’t rush right to the starting gate for the first, latter-day Cheaper by the Dozen? My instinct was no, no. Remake that? No. By the way, these aren’t remakes; it’s like a new script, just the same premise, is all. And I turned it down. But the ending did get me. Then I talked to the director, Shawn Levy, and I really, really liked him. And then, I was saying, okay, all right. And I had no idea it was

going to turn out to be so popular. I do appreciate that it’s a wholesome film. Of course, I have no problems with violence, crudity, sex, language, anything—except when it’s done wrong. And I’ve felt a lot of movies were just grotesque, and kind of disgusting, because they’re done wrong. I mean they’re not from the heart, they’re just sort of, I don’t know the right word, it’s like research-driven. A lot of that research seems to be backfiring lately. The studios have made some wrong guesses—as an actor you hope not to get swept up in a mistake. If [the script] doesn’t feel good, you have to feel like it’s going to become good. And then you have to say, well, who’s in it? I’m not looking to make just a studio comedy for no reason right now. I mean, Cheaper by the Dozen 2 had a reason—the first one was a big hit. And I was in it, and the studio wanted to make it again. So in a way you have a business obligation to the people who financed the first movie to do it again. And it was a good script, so . . . You’ve said of Queen Latifah, with whom you also had a hit, that what’s good for the Queen is good for Steve. She’s become one of your key onscreen partners along with Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bonnie Hunt. Those women are delightful. Each has a different personality. Diane is coming from a very instinctive place, to the point that she never does a bad take. It might be different. It’s never bad or untrue. And Goldie, her own personality is so lively and so infectiously fun. She’s very smart, and works from her own personality and her intellect at the same time, working out bits and contributing. Bonnie is a director-writer, and she’s coming from that a lot. She’s also incredibly quick, so she’s got that improv thing going with her director sense. All these women have shorthand. Meaning that we can communicate, we get it, you’ve got timing together. We understand what the other is doing. You don’t have to go, “Oh, yeah, I think I got it.” It’s like Eugene Levy and I have shorthand. You got a really nice payday out of The Pink Panther. Were you simply the right guy at the right time to take on a classic that Peter Sellers had such a good run with? There’s two things you risk. One is a gigantic failure, and the other is a gigantic success. If it’s a gigantic success you become completely identified with that character. So I looked at it and I thought, well, you know what, I like that character. And especially now having made one, I’m hoping it’s a giant hit so we can make another one, ’cause I love dressing up like him

IDOL CHATTER BY BRANTLEY BARDIN

PhilipSeymour Hoffman On becoming Capote, playing gay, and how Hollywood can make you want to get drunk and destroy stuff.

144 PREMIERE OCTOBER 2005

Put me through the wringer—it was just an extraordinary amount of selfcriticism, playing that guy. There were tons of pitfalls, the most I’ve ever played. And that’s coming from a guy who, in Flawless, played a drag queen opposite De Niro, folks. By the way, the gays have been awfully good to you. Are you nuts? You’re supposed to think, “I can’t do that because it’ll hurt my career.” That doesn’t make sense to me—when I played Rusty [Flawless] or Scotty J.

[Boogie Nights] or Truman, they’re all distinctly different people. I’d like to know why anyone would say that, ’cause playing gay hasn’t hurt my career. But you’re a daredevil— from the lonely obscene phone caller in Todd Solondz’s Happiness to the saintly nurse in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, you’re always going to deep, dark places. Is that ever scary? Yeah. No. Well . . . it’s just that when you’re exploring certain characters you have to think about certain things

say it: “I sharted.” I usually just smile, and I think they’re a bit disappointed ’cause I didn’t laugh out loud like they did when they first saw it. That, or shit my pants. [laughs] Okay, listen—as Almost Famous’s Lester Bangs, you warned your protégé not to sell out and be seduced by women, glitz, and booze. You’ve brilliantly negotiated that trap by juggling blockbusters with small indie gems. But, tell us: How hard has Hollywood tried to get you drunk? Sometimes, just being around Hollywood makes you want to get drunk. [laughs] Like, I was just flying to Italy for Mission: Impossible III, completely jet-lagged, and they took me to this angular, sterile, firstclass lounge in Frankfurt to change flights. On the desk was this silver tray with the best liquor you could ever imagine. You think, “Okay, it’s 7 A.M., I’m alone in my little pristine, first-class room— why don’t I get trashed and destroy the place!” [laughs] Then you realize, this is where those stories come from—it’s the movie star guy, alone in Frankfurt, who gets trashed, gets on his flight, and there he is on Page Six the next day. Having missed that opportunity, which of your vices would Page Six most be interested in? Forget it—I know your work! Just say, “I’ve told the public enough today.” Or “deduce your own answer—whatever you come up with, you’ll ■ probably be right.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN SCHOELLER

CORBIS OUTLINE

PREMIERE: You’re considered one of our great actors, and Capote is about to reconfirm that. But, hey, is it weird to be so revered at a mere 38? [laughs] I always wonder who’s doing the revering. Well, with your total transformation into Truman C. circa ’64, it’ll probably be Oscar voters. I will accept whatever comes. [laughs] That said, who knows? As an actor who’s declared, “Acting is difficult,” was being Truman hard?

sometimes—you have to think about shit like, “Why would a guy make prank phone calls to strangers in a sexually aggressive fashion?” [laughs] That’s where it gets dark. And a little kinky: Was filming the masturbation scene in Happiness dicey even for you? That was hard. I remember I was pretty heavy, sitting in my underwear in front of all these people and having this “oh, fuck” moment of “I don’t know if I want all these people to know this much.” I said to Todd, “I’m just scared people will laugh,” and he said, “They will, but they’ll also see the pathos; they’ll understand.” And we did. Though it sounds a little sappy, in your work you’ve given voice to a lot of people who don’t have one. Actually, my mother said the exact same thing to me years ago, and I said that that was something I would own. Because I think it’s important. Maybe that’s why I get the label, “the weird guy,” but . . . Yeah, your characters are forever being pegged as “perverts” or “losers.” It seems most don’t want to admit that humans are, well, freaks. That’s what I think—people are very odd in general, but people in private when they’re alone in their own head? The places people go—you just don’t wanna know! [laughs] Yep. So I bet loads of fans bring up your Along Came Polly poop joke gift to the lexicon: “sharting.” Yeah, they just come up and