Favorite Coen Bros. Movie?

Started by Satcho9, January 09, 2003, 03:50:07 PM

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wilder

Coen Brothers To Adapt, Possibly Direct Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer Crime Novel 'Black Money'
via The Playlist

Perhaps you've been wondering what the Coen Brothers have been doing since "Inside Llewyn Davis"? Rather a lot! They've got a movie in the can coming out in February of 2016, the Hollywood comedy "Hail, Caesar!" starring George Clooney, Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson. They've also been doing a lot of writing, penning Angelina Jolie's "Unbroken" screenplay and Steven Spielberg's upcoming "Bridge of Spies" (they also wrote the "Gambit" remake in 2012). One more writing assignment is coming down the pipeline, and they also could direct the project.

Los Bros Coen are going to write an adaptation of Ross MacDonald's crime novel "Black Money." If that sounds vaguely familiar, that's because a movie was already adapted from the book: the same lead character was played by Paul Newman in the very underrated crime thrillers "Harper" (1966) and "The Drowning Pool" (1975). Both look terrific, since they were shot by Conrad L. Hall and Gordon Willis, respectively. But neither movie is based on MacDonald's "Black Money" —the connection is simply the same gumshoe lead character. The Coen brothers could direct, but a film directed by the pair and produced by Joel Silver would be the first as such in a long time (he produced "The Hudsucker Proxy" way back in the day).

The plot centers on a spurned lover who hires private investigator Lew Archer to expose the suave Frenchman who has run off with his client's girlfriend. Archer follows a trail that leads to a deep conspiracy, as the mysterious paramour is connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a ton of gambling debts.

wilder

George Clooney To Direct Coen Bros Crime Noir Drama 'Suburbicon' At TriStar
via Deadline

George Clooney is in talks to direct Suburbicon, a script by Joel and Ethan Coen that will be produced by Joel Silver. It's a noir drama in the vein of the Coens' breakout film Blood Simple, with this one being a small crime drama set in the 1950s.

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From The Playlist:

Nearly a decade ago, word first surfaced that George Clooney would take the helm of "Suburbicon," a screenplay penned by the Coens that they had originally planned to direct, with the actor slated to star. "They offered me a part in 'Suburbicon' a long time ago, and since then decided they have other projects they want to work on," Clooney said in 2005. "So I called them up and said 'How about me taking a spin at it?' Because it's a really interesting, really funny, very dark comedy."

OpO1832

The new Coen Bros movie looks great makes me think of some of the great moments in the deer park but thats me

wilder

Matt Damon, Julianne Moore And Josh Brolin To Star In George Clooney's Coens Penned 'Suburbicon'
via The Playlist

Deadline reports that Clooney pals Matt Damon ("Ocean's Eleven" trilogy, "The Monuments Men," "Syriana," the Clooney directed "Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind"), Julianne Moore (the Clooney co-produced "Far From Heaven"), and Josh Brolin ("Hail, Caesar!") are lining up roles in the movie. However, even as the pieces are coming together, the plot details remain under wraps, though it's described as  a '50s set crime drama in the vein of "Blood Simple."

The wait will be a while for this one, with production not slated to begin until October 2016, which likely means a festival bow sometime in 2017.

wilder

Coen Brothers Talk 'Barton Fink' Sequel 'Old Fink' And #OscarsSoWhite Controversy
via The Playlist

When it came to this weekend's "Hail, Caesar!," it was a project that was mentioned on and off for years, and then, was finally made. Could the same happen for "Old Fink"? To bring you to speed, it's the proposed sequel to "Barton Fink" that the Coens have been tossing around forever, calling it perhaps at their most optimistic, "more a thought experiment than a movie." However, it's a thought they can't shake.

"We're going to do a 'Barton Fink' sequel at some point," Ethan Coen told Variety, with his brother Joel Coen adding: "That's the one movie that we thought deserved a sequel, called 'Old Fink.' But we don't want to do it until Turturro is quite old. He's getting there."

Asked if they had actually written anything yet, Ethan dryly quipped: "No, but there's a huge groundswell of demand for it." So yeah, maybe don't hold your breath for it.

He's certainly not incorrect that most audiences probably couldn't care one way or another for another "Barton Fink" movie, however, there's been a lot of excitement about John Turturro's proposed "Big Lebowski" spinoff centering on Jesus Quintana, at one time working with a proposed title of "100 Minutes Of Jesus." And back in 2014, the actor was quite gung ho saying, "If I can get the permission I need, I'd like to return to that role," and wanted to direct the movie himself in 2015. That didn't happen. And when asked by the trade about the possibility of that movie ever getting made Ethan was quite clear: "No."

And Joel added that there won't be any followups to "The Big Lebowski" either. "Tara Reid likes to announce that just like Clooney likes to announce 'Hail, Caesar!' In this case, I don't think we'll oblige," he quipped, referring to the actress' announcement of the sequel in 2011.

Meanwhile, the directors have waded into the waters of #OscarsSoWhite in an interview with The Daily Beast, and they try to separate the issue from the actual show. "[That's] assigning way too much importance to the awards," Joel said of the controversy. "By making such a big deal, you're assuming that these things really matter. I don't think they even matter much from an economic point of view. So yes, it's true — and it's also true that it's escalating the whole subject to a level it doesn't actually deserve."

"Diversity's important. The Oscars are not that important," he added.

And the pair said that diversity doesn't just mean shoehorning various ethnicities into a script. "It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity — or it might not," Ethan said.

"It's an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, 'Why aren't there this, that, or the other thing?'" Joel added. "It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how stories are written."

Ravi

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/the-coen-brothers-the-ballad-of-buster-scruggs-1201941064/

Coen Brothers to Write and Direct Their First-Ever TV Series, 'Buster Scruggs' (EXCLUSIVE)
Film Reporter
Justin Kroll
Film Reporter @krolljvar   
January 10, 2017 | 04:26PM PT

Joel and Ethan Coen are the latest auteurs moving into television, with a new event anthology set in the Old West.

Annapurna Television is partnering with the Coen brothers on a limited series Western called "The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs." Sources tell Variety that Annapurna intends to pursue an innovative approach that could combine television and theatrical.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the script from an original idea and will direct the project.

The Coens will produce "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" through their Mike Zoss Productions label. Megan Ellison and Annapurna Television's president of television, Sue Naegle, will serve as executive producers.

"We are very excited to be working with Megan and Sue on this project," the Coen brothers said in a statement to Variety.

It's still unclear how theatrical distribution could play a part in the project, but the intent is to shoot "Buster Scruggs" as a miniseries. According to sources, the scope of the project seemed too challenging to be covered in one feature film.

The idea is similar to Imagine Entertainment's adaptation of the "The Dark Tower" series. Imagine Partners Brian Grazer and Ron Howard had planned to do something over both theatrical and television, but ended up sticking with one feature film, which Sony will release later this year.

Plot details of "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" are unknown, though it will intertwine six different story lines. The brothers are no strangers to the genre, with "True Grit" and "No Country for Old Men" on their resume.

The brothers join a list of elite directors who have crossed over to television to further develop stories that could not make it to the big screen. Among many others, David O'Russell is currently working on a series for Amazon starring Julianne Moore and Robert De Niro, and J.J. Abrams is writing and directing a limited series with Meryl Streep that is currently being shopped.

The Coens most recently wrote and directed "Hail, Caesar!" and also penned the script for George Clooney's next directorial effort, "Suburbicon." They are repped by UTA.

After making a mark in the film industry, Annapurna is now making strides in television and is in pre-production on a limited series adaptation of the novel "Today Will Be Different" by Maria Semple, with Julia Roberts attached to star.

PinkTeeth

New Name, Same Typos.


PinkTeeth

I'll miss em dearly, but The Future is Books!
His poems and shorts stories have been longing to stretch out, and I felt terrible using "Almost An Evening" as a bookmark for "Antkind" at one point.

New Name, Same Typos.

PinkTeeth


I've been wanting to see this for years...


New Name, Same Typos.

wilberfan

Just finished the cinematography section.  Didn't realize Spike was on the Nerd Spectrum...  :yabbse-wink:

wilder

Ethan Coen Goes Solo, Will Direct Road Trip Movie for Focus, Working Title
The Hollywood Reporter

After his brother Joel Coen went out on his own to direct a movie, last year's Oscar-nominated The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen is also planning a solo trip.

Ethan Coen, half of the acclaimed sibling partnership known simply as the Coen brothers, has teamed up with Focus Features and Working Title for the feature project, which is currently untitled.

Coen will direct the film, which is eyeing a shoot this summer, and wrote the script with his wife, Tricia Cooke. The two are also producing with Robert Graf and Working Title principals Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

Focus and Working Title are keeping mum on the project, but sources indicate that the untitled feature is a lesbian road trip project that Coen and Cooke initially wrote in the mid-2000s.

The Russ Meyer-inspired action sex comedy was initially to have been directed by Allison Anders, who made the 1992 indie hit Gas Food Lodging. The story centers on a party girl who takes a trip from Philadelphia to Miami with her buttoned-up friend. Along the way they cruise the bars and encounter, among other obstacles, a severed head in a hatbox, a bitter ex-girlfriend, a mystery briefcase and an evil senator.

"The sensibility is exploitive but innocent," Coen told the Los Angeles Times in January 2007, adding that he was going for the tone of early '70s exploitation romps he saw as a teenager, only with more sincerity. Selma Blair, Holly Hunter, Christina Applegate and Chloe Sevigny were among those attached to star at various early points.

Coen was just producing at that time, but now, 15 years later, it looks like he's got gas in the tank and is ready to take the wheel himself, with the script having evolved since then.

The Coen brothers have been making movies together — writing, directing and producing  — since the 1980s. They shared Oscars for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and the last movie they worked on together was 2018's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

wilder

Ethan Coen on his Jerry Lee Lewis doc and filmmaking return
By Jake Coyle
Associated Press

CANNES, France (AP) — Most in the film industry thought Ethan Coen was done with making movies. Ethan did, too.

But on Sunday, Coen will premiere his first documentary, "Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind," at the Cannes Film Festival, a movie that was unknown until last month's festival lineup announcement. The film, which A24 will distribute later this year, is a blistering portrait of the rock 'n' roll and country legend, made almost entirely with archival footage, with riveting extended performances instead of talking heads.

It's Coen's first film without his brother Joel, with whom he for three decades formed one of the movies' most cohesive and unshakable partnerships. But they have lately gone separate ways; last year, Joel made "The Tragedy of Macbeth," a movie he suggested his brother would never have been interested in. Ethan is now also prepping with his wife, the editor Tricia Cooke (who cut many of the Coens' films as well as "Trouble in Mind"), a lesbian road-trip sex comedy they wrote together 15 years ago.

"Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind" started with their longtime collaborator T-Bone Burnett, who in 2019 recorded a gospel album with the 86-year-old Lewis. The film, as Coen and Cooke noted in an interview ahead of their Cannes premiere, touches on some of the more complicated parts of Lewis's legacy. (He married his 13-year-old cousin in his early 20s, Lewis' then third marriage.) But it mostly brings alive the staggering force of the musical dynamo behind "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," "Great Balls of Fire" and "Me and Bobby McGee."

AP: Many thought you, Ethan, were no longer interested in moviemaking. What changed?

COEN: What changed is I started getting bored. I was with Trish in New York at the beginning of the lockdown. So, you know, it was all a little scary and claustrophobic. And T-Bone Burnett, our friend of many years, approached us — actually, more Trish than me — to ask if we wanted to make this movie basically on archival footage. We could do it at home.

COOKE: It was like a home movie project. We're both huge fans of his music. I had some issues with other parts of Jerry Lee's life. I was like, "I don't know if I want to touch that." But it ended up being a lot of fun. Honestly, T-Bone came to us like two weeks into the pandemic, so it was a life saver.

AP: Ethan, what was it that had sapped your desire to make movies?

COEN: Oh, nothing happened, certainly nothing dramatic. You start out when you're a kid and you want to make a movie. Everything's enthusiasm and gung-ho, let's go make a movie. And the first movie is just loads of fun. And then the second movie is loads of fun, almost as much fun as the first. And after 30 years, not that it's no fun, but it's more of a job than it had been. Joel kind of felt the same way but not to the extent that I did. It's an inevitable by-product of aging. And the last two movies we made, me and Joel together, were really difficult in terms of production. I mean, really difficult. So if you don't have to do it, you go at a certain point: Why am I doing this?

COOKE: Too many Westerns.

COEN: It was just getting a little old and difficult.

AP: When you say "difficult," did it have to do with the ecosystem of the industry?

COEN: Not at all, though that's obviously changed from beyond recognition from where we started at. But, no, it was the production experience and having been doing it for — I don't know how many years, maybe 35 years. It was the experience of making a movie. More of a grind and less fun.

AP: Has something switched back for you then, since you're preparing to make a film together this summer?

COEN: Again, it's all kind of circumstance. We finished this one quite a while ago and we were still sitting around. We had this old script and we thought, "Oh, we should do that. That would be fun." That's the movie we're preparing.

COOKE: I don't want to speak for Ethan, but I know for myself, at some point, I stopped cutting, pretty much, because my priorities changed. And now our kids are grown and we still get along and have fun making things together. Joel and Ethan, we had written a few of these things, and they were always like, "We'll put them in a drawer. The kids will find them one day." Now we're here like, OK, let's do that. Let's open up that drawer and see if someone wants to make this movie.

AP: Do you expect, Ethan, that you and Joel will continue to go your separate ways in moviemaking?

COEN: Oh, I don't know. Going our own separate ways sounds like it suggests it might be final. But none of this stuff happened definitively. None of the decisions are definitive. We might make another movie. I don't know what my next movie is going to be after this. The pandemic happened. I turned into a big baby and got bored and quit, and then the pandemic happened. Then other stuff happens and who knows?

AP: Did you always conceive of "Trouble in Mind" as archival-based, no talking heads?

COEN: The movie has a history preceding our involvement. It was originally conceived as being more on the gospel session T-Bone produced with Jerry Lee in 2019. Along the way, they compiled a lot of archival footage. The archival footage kept piling up. It seemed to make more sense to make it about Jerry Lee than this particular session. We pushed it maybe even further that way.

COOKE: When T-Bone brought it to us initially he described what he wanted as a tone poem. I don't think we did that. (laughs)

COEN: Yeah, that sounds a little fruity.

COOKE: But we did from the beginning not want just a bunch of talking heads, especially if they weren't Jerry Lee's.

COEN: T-Bone was explicit about wanting the movie to start with that performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" of "She Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye." And he wanted it to finish with "Another Place, Another Time." And we went "Oh (expletive), that's great." He said the whole performances. We said, "Oh, great. So you're talking about, like, a good movie."

AP: You each have worked overwhelmingly in fiction film. Had you often pondered making a documentary? Do you watch a lot of docs?

COOKE: I had made a short documentary years ago called "Where the Girls Are" on the Dinah Shore golf tournament. In general, we both love documentaries. Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles and Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple. All of those older documentarians.

COEN: Why are they all old?

COOKE: We're old.

COEN: Did you see the Beatles documentary? That was fantastic. Goddamn.

AP: The more distance we get from the films and music of mid-century America, the more it seems to me that was such a fertile period of creation that will never be repeated. Like: Wherever Jerry Lee Lewis came from is not a place anyone comes from anymore.

COEN: I totally agree. It's like, yeah, it's all gone now.

COOKE: Things aren't discovered the same way. For Jerry Lee, when he was young, going to a blues club was nothing he had access to before and it became this incredible passion. Everything now is so large, so global — not that that's necessarily a bad thing — but it doesn't feel like it has the same passion as it did in the '30s, '40s, '50s.

AP: When you see him performing, his arms going up and down like pistons, he's such a dynamo that you can't help wondering where that energy came from.

COEN: Musicians are freaks. I mean it in the best possible way.

COOKE: He talks about the Pentecostal Church. It's almost like he's overcome with this passion for playing. I just remember being mesmerized when we first started watching the footage.

COEN: Sifting through the archival footage was a once-in-a-lifetime blessing but also a curse. Because he did his share of (expletive) stuff, too.

AP: What's your personal thresholds in the behavior of an artist and the art they make? "Trouble in Mind" pointedly doesn't seek to cast judgment.

COEN: If it's a good movie, that's why it's good. What are we supposed to make of that? Right. That's a permitted question. That's what makes the movie interesting. How do you put that magnetic performer together with that flawed person? It's kind of like — I mean none of the Beatles married their 13-year-old cousin — but it's kind of like the Beatles movie and why it's so thrilling. You go: Wow. These are both huge cultural figures and smaller-than-life human beings. That's what's mind blowing.

Jerry Lee is much the same. I don't think any sane person is going to ask to embargo the music because his character had certain flaws. Who imposes that choice? All glory to T-Bone for presenting us with the opportunity and saying that it's going to be about Jerry Lee, about this musician, and it's not going to be about talking heads telling us what to think about Jerry Lee or about us editorializing, telling the audience what to think about Jerry Lee. All of those things are not recipes for making a good movie and no service to Jerry.

wilder

Joel and Ethan Coen to Reunite for New Film
The Film Stage

While Joel and Ethan Coen worked on two more features together after Inside Llewyn Davis, many (such as Mia Hansen-Løve) thought the story of an artist trying to find his way after the loss of his partner portended the eventual parting of ways for the brothers. Following Hail, Caesar! and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Joel Coen went solo directing The Tragedy of Macbeth while Ethan Coen helmed a Jerry Lee Lewis documentary and the forthcoming Drive-Away Dolls. Thankfully, it looks the brothers will now reunite for a new project.

As revealed in the current issue of Empire Magazine (via /Film), Ethan Coen said that he's already working with Joel Coen on developing a new script. He also noted he very much hasn't "gone solo" as his wife Tricia Cooke not only co-wrote the script for Drive-Away Dolls but also co-directed the film with him, though the Directors Guild of America's strict rules prevented her from being credited. As for when we can expect more updates: while Ethan Coen and Tricia Cook recently revealed plans to make a trilogy of lesbian B-movies, Ethan said his new project with Joel may take precedence.

Unfortunately, Ethan was tight-lipped about what the new film may be, but the Coens have a vast handful of unrealized projects they could mine from, including adaptations of Ross Macdonald's crime mystery novels The Zebra-Striped Hearse and Black Money, Michael Chabon's detective novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, James Dickey's WWII thriller To the White Sea, plus a dark web film about Silk Road, a Barton Fink sequel, and more. Knowing the inventiveness of the duo, we wouldn't be entirely surprised if it was something entirely new.