Next in line for Soderbergh

Started by ©brad, January 30, 2003, 12:59:19 PM

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MacGuffin

Steven Soderbergh Will Interrupt Retirement To Direct And Produce Cinemax Series 'The Knick' With Clive Owen Starring
BY MIKE FLEMING JR | Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: We need to qualify Steven Soderbergh's self-imposed retirement from the business with an asterisk: feature films only. Just as his final film Behind The Candelabra airs this Sunday on HBO, Soderbergh is in talks to team with Clive Owen on The Knick, a period series set in New York in 1900.

I'm told that he and Owen will set this series at Cinemax, which will give him a 10-episode season commitment. Soderbergh will direct all of the episodes. The setting: downtown New York in 1900, a tumultuous time of massive change and great progress. The series centers around the groundbreaking surgeons, nurses and staff at Knickerbocker Hospital, who are pushing the bounds of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics. Jack Amiel & Michael Begler wrote the pilot on spec, and they will be executive producers on the series. Owen and Soderbergh are also executive producers and so are Anonymous Content's Michael Sugar and Soderbergh's longtime producer Gregory Jacobs.

While this might make some might look cynically on Soderbergh's "retirement," he told me the other day in an interview for the Michael Douglas-Matt Damon Liberace movie that for the moment, he has shut the door on feature films. I can see that he likes the energy present in pay and basic cable TV, and it would be like him to try helping re-brand Cinemax by giving that network an event series, rather than setting it at HBO which has a wealth of great series already. HBO and Cinemax are under one roof, so this is easy to finesse. Soderbergh has experience with series, having directed the episodes and exec produced K Street, the HBO-based series done with George Clooney when they together operated the production company Section Eight. As for Owen, he most recently played Ernest Hemingway in the HBO telepic Hemingway & Gellhorn opposite Nicole Kidman, and he did TV work early in his career, including the Brit series Chancer, which was his breakout series.

And if you still want to snivel about Soderbergh's retirement, remember how nice it was when Michael Jordan put away his baseball bat and went back to basketball? The notion of Soderbergh and Owen teaming to add yet another must-watch feature-centric series in the cable landscape is exciting, if you ask me. I believe that production on this will begin in the fall. The broadcaster was not commenting.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

socketlevel

i wonder if soderbergh ever laughs at himself by this point. still, love this guy so much.
the one last hit that spent you...

©brad

This retirement thing has been blown way out of proportion. He's stated several times he's taking an indefinite break from movies to do other things, TV included.

Gold Trumpet

Yea, he also said he was considering it a sabbatical. All of his frustration has been with theatrical filmmaking and its limitations. Ingmar Bergman made a similar transition and his journey to television defined the second part of his career. I honestly think Soderbergh is doing much the same. I can't ever see him not directing visual work in the way we know. Plus his journey will be more honest since unlike other filmmakers attaching themselves to tv projects, Soderbergh will direct it all.

classical gas

Has it ever occurred to anyone that this guy is a whiny bitch?  I mean, what's his best film?  Fuck him.

Lottery

I thought Ocean's Eleven was awesome.

wilder

Soderbergh Says Abandoned Leni Riefenstahl Biopic Would Focus On Director Battling The Studio System
via The Playist

Perhaps only super attentive Steven Soderbergh fans are aware but at one time, the director was kicking around the idea of making a movie about controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The German director is best known for making the Nazi propaganda piece "Triumph Of The Will" which actual content aside, is regarded by many as a pretty technically accomplished work. Soderbergh had worked with Scott Z. Burns on a script about Riefenstahl, cracked the story and then ultimately realized, perhaps correctly, that no studio would finance such a movie. So instead, he and Burns pitched "Contagion" which got them a thumbs up and off they went. But whatever happened with the Riefensthal movie?

Presumably, it's sitting in a desk somewhere but a couple of years ago, Soderbergh elaborated a bit more on the fascinating approach.  "[Scott] and I were working on it and I thought we had an interesting take on it which was: to see if we could make the audience root for her and treat Hitler and Goebbels as like the studio heads and treat her as the aggrieved artist who is being held back by Phillistines and to really flip the thing upside down," he explained. "The job is not to judge your characters, your job is to present their point of view as they would want it presented so I thought, 'Wow, that would be interesting if you could somehow over 90 minutes convince somebody to root for someone who probably on some level was pretty horrible."

And speaking recently with NPR, Soderbergh shared a bit more about how the story would've been told in the film. "And so the movie at no point leaves her point of view, or delves into any of these moral questions at all. The whole design of the movie is that you are rooting for her to win. And the film ends with her onstage after the premier of 'Triumph of the Will' with people throwing roses at her and she's beaming," he said. "And that's the end of the movie. Now, what we realized after we solved this sort of creative problem was no one would go see this."

"I wanted to just be inside of her point of view," Soderbergh says about why he wanted to do the movie in the first place, particularly one that didn't take a stand one way or the other on the filmmaker. "...And so to me, it - the questions are there for the audience. They don't need to be there for her."

Pubrick

That's dumb. She was Hitler's darling, he always defended her against Goebbels who couldn't stand her.

Also she was sexually active well into her 90s.

There's your movie. No need to twist the truth.
under the paving stones.

wilder

David Gordon Green & Steven Soderbergh Bring 'Red Oaks' To Amazon Studios
via The Playlist

Steven Soderbergh has always been one of director David Gordon Green's models for an ideal career path, and it's a perplexing thought that the two filmmakers previously haven't secured a reason to collaborate. They came close—Green's adaptation of "A Confederacy of Dunces" promised Soderbergh as producer, before the film collapsed under studio politics—but now a prime opportunity has finally arrived, thanks to the heads over at Amazon Studios.

After a second slate of pilots including shows from Jill Soloway ("Afternoon Delight"), Chris Carter, and Paul Weitz, Amazon Studios have started prepping their next batch of projects, and they've locked an apparent gem. Green and Soderbergh have been tapped (via Deadline) to create "Red Oaks", a single-camera comedy written by Greg Jacobs and Joe Gagemi that follows the inner workings of a country club, and the relationships of the employees and their rich clientele.

Soderbergh has decided to exec produce the pilot, and Green will both exec-produce and direct once production begins this June.

©brad

There's too much! Too many shows. Too much content. Too much everything. I don't know where to begin sometimes. On my current list:

The Americans
Justified
True Detective
HOC Season 2
Banshee
Transparent (the Jill Jill Soloway amazon show)
Getting On

The Silicon Valley HBO show looks great. And Veep and Mad Men are coming back. And of course there's like, movies.

I'm going to happy hour.




MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

polkablues

Soderbergh's concept of retirement seems exhausting.
My house, my rules, my coffee

Kal

If anyone is in NY or plans to be in the next month, go see Soderbergh's play THE LIBRARY at the Public Theater. Really great stuff.


wilder

Starz Orders Steven Soderbergh Anthology Series 'The Girlfriend Experience' Based On His Movie
via Deadline

Starz has greenlighted The Girlfriend Experience, a 13-part anthology series inspired by Steven Soderbergh's 2009 Magnolia Pictures film. Soderbergh and Philip Fleishman executive produce the half-hour series, from Transactional Pictures, which explores the relationships of the most exclusive courtesans who provide their clients with far more than just sex. These purveyors – or GFEs (Girlfriend Experience) – share intimacies more common to romantic partners or husbands and wives, becoming quasi-lovers and confidants who are richly paid for their time. "Many of these women are extremely accomplished," said Fleishman. "They range from musicians in major orchestras to PhD candidates in the sciences and often feel empowered by the control and economic freedom their work as GFE's affords them. The question is whether they define a new genus of contemporary relationship, or have relationships always been transactionally based in one form or another?"

Soderbergh and Fleishman executive producer along with independent filmmakers Lodge Kerrigan (!) and Amy Seimetz, who will also write and direct on the series. "We're in an exciting period of auteur-driven television right now," Soderbergh said. "When Philip floated the idea of a Girlfriend Experience-inspired television show, I thought: 'let's make it a different woman in a different city, let's pair two independent writer-directors, one male and one female, and let them do the whole thing." Soderbergh said he'd known Lodge for 20 years and became a fan of Amy's when he saw her first feature, Sun Don't Shine, last summer. The series reunites Soderbergh with Starz CEO Chris Albrecht 11 years after the two worked together on the improv Washington DC comedy K Street.

The original feature, directed by Soderbergh and written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 (watch the trailer below). "We are all such fans of the movie that the idea of exploring this world through many different characters, voices and points of view was especially intriguing," Albrecht said. "Steven and Philip's approach to the format is unique and not something seen on the entertainment landscape today."