books about films?

Started by (kelvin), April 24, 2003, 08:37:24 AM

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modage

no i havent.  i read in the into that this book would be staying away from ground covered by that one, but i forgot my mental note to get that one next.  i'll probably wait a while since i'm broke right now and i've still got my Evil Dead Companion from xmas to read (at your recommendation).
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

SoNowThen

I always got that the 70's were supposed to be the "directors" era, then the (unwritten book) 80's were the "producers" era, and I guess the 90's were the company era. He did touch on the big name producers in Easy Riders, like Evans, but it was completely director heavy (I included BBS in the director slot, because of the Rafelson connection). And of course if he did a book on the 80's (which he won't, because who the fuck wants to remember them?), it'd be on Bruckheimer and Simpson mainly. So under the circumstances, I think it was the right choice for this book.

Had anyone heard of Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky before this? They sound like good guys, people who might get your movie made...

Oh also, did anybody else find his mentions of PTA to be a little dismissive? I think he called Magnolia "overblown but not uninteresting". How grudging is that!! Some one the movies he heaped praise on were suspect, and yet he glides by Magnolia???
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

modage

yeah but he did keep menioning 'the andersons' everytime a good new filmmakers were being brought up.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

SoNowThen

Seemingly out of obligation.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

Quote from: themodernage02

just finished this book.  didnt like it as much as Easy Riders, but it was still very interesting.  i wish it had focused more on how these movies actually got made and more on the directors, and less on harvey fucking weinstein and how they were distributed.  there were hundreds of pages filled with harvey berating people and being an awful human being, and i wish they had spent less time on that and more on qt talking making Pulp Fiction or whatever.  harvey weinstein seems like the worst human being i can imagine.  just reading about what he's done to these filmmakers makes me feel like i've been yelled at.  godardian, have you gotten to the part where he makes todd haynes cry yet?  and sonowthen gotten to the gangs mess with scorsese?

I just finished this book last night. I'll finally have my free time back (Biskind's books are soooo addictive). I already knew most of the Haynes story from the Portland grapevine (I lived/wrote there when it was going on), but it was cool to read some of the Vachon war-stories; her book is excellent, too:



I also already knew most of the weinstein shit, as I'm friends with a local publicist who dealt with Miramax.

Modage, I think the focus of the book is only a symptom of the huge difference between film in the 70s and film in the 90s; if it's disappointing that the book is more about the personalities of the producers/distributors, it's only as disappointing as the fact that that's what film(making) was mostly about in the 90s. I think the book is very critical of that, as well it should be, but it can't alter the facts to make for more of a focus on what we might've been more interested in reading about.

One thing I did notice: They didn't go into any of the Rysher shit that PTA went through. In fact, though i would've loved to have read the inside stuff on the PTA films of the era, I felt really good for him that he wasn't included in a lot of the wrenching rollercoastering of the biz. He was either very lucky, preternaturally wise in his business decisions, or a combination of both...
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

MacGuffin



BOOK STABS HOLLYWOOD; ESZTERHAS TELLS ALL

PARAMOUNT Studio head Sherry Lansing was so afraid of being attacked for nepotism involving her husband, director Billy Friedkin, that she asked screenwriter Joe Eszterhas to lie for her.

That’s the allegation contained in HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL, the 736-page memoir written by Eszterhas that is set to cause a serious TinselTown storm.

Publisher KNOPF has been holding the book close, and only the DRUDGE REPORT can crack the embargo.

Eszterhas claims Lansing asked him as “a favor” to tell the media that he wanted director Billy Friedkin, Lansing’s husband, to direct the movie JADE.

Eszterhas writes: “She was going to be criticized, Sherry said, for letting Billy direct Jade ... and she wanted me to say it was my idea for Billy to direct Jade, not hers. As I thought about it, Sherry said, ‘I’ll owe you a favor, honey.’ I smiled and simply said okay and Sherry said, ‘I love you, honey.’”

Earlier, Eszterhas writes, he told Lansing “Billy hasn’t had a hit in over 20 years, Sherry. There are people in town who think the only reason Billy still works is because he’s married to you.”

Eszterhas writes that Friedkin assured him in a meeting that he “wouldn’t change a comma of my script” and that in return, and as a favor to Lansing, Eszterhas spoke to the LOS ANGELES TIMES and on April 18th, 1994, that newspaper wrote: “Eszterhas, also the film’s executive producer, maintains that Friedkin had long been his first choice to direct JADE.”

During the production of the movie, when Friedkin began changing Eszterhas’s script, the screenwriter wrote Friedkin an angry memo on October 31, 1994 which said:

“It is clear that you lied to me. The lie rankles, of course, not only on a creative level, but on a personal one. Considering the fact that the last time you had a hit movie was in the early 70s, you never would have gotten the chance to direct a script that was viewed as the hottest in town without my support... you needed my public support to avoid any charges of favoritism. You needed it and you got it. We even had a discussion outside Alice’s in Malibu one day about how, thanks to my quotes in the L.A. Times, we had put the issue to rest.”

When Eszterhas saw the film, he was so angry that he called Lansing. He writes in the memoir: “I called Sherry from the limo, screamed at her and told her she’d used me and her husband had used me to get a job... and had then lied to me about changing my script. I told Sherry I wanted my name off the movie and was going to tell the media how she’d asked me to say Billy was my idea to direct the script so it would seem like there was no nepotism involved.”

Eszterhas writes that Lansing said “You can’t do that, honey, please” and that he hung up on her.

According to Eszterhas, Lansing called his agent the next day and offered him a $4 million script for an unspecified new deal. Eszterhas took the deal and didn’t take his name off the movie. Nor did he reveal the agreement he had made with Lansing to shield her from criticism.

The allegations are just the the first licks of HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A name-naming memoir

NEW YORK — Joe Eszterhas can write, and he proves it in the first pages of his memoir "Hollywood Animal" (Knopf) as he drops one scandalous, funny or outrageous grenade after another.

Speaking of "Showgirls" director Paul Verhoeven, he writes, "He said Sharon Stone couldn't act. I think he was lying about Sharon. I think he was still angry that Sharon wouldn't have sex with him while they were shooting 'Basic Instinct.' "

This is only the icing on the cake Eszterhas has baked — hundreds of people, from Sherry Lansing to Michael Ovitz to Bob Evans, will be riveted.

The book deals with a man leaving one longtime wife for another woman; struggling almost to the death with his father; celebrating sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; and rising above his Hungarian immigrant childhood and all the machinations of nasty Hollywood.

This is down and dirty, not the laundered version of the movie biz, celebrity and fame that we are fed (and, yes, that some of us ladle out) most of the time. It resonates with truth. It's not just mean and cynical and lowdown, but has a heart and soul.
"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

SoNowThen

Hahaha, why is it that such mediocre writers like Eszterhas and Goldman feel the need to mouth off like they're God's gift to the written word?

Joe, get over yourself.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

MacGuffin

The Los Angeles Times's response to the Biskind book:

The indie eye
Independent film isn't dead. It's just suffering a bad case of inflated expectations. By Manohla Dargis

"Get me out of here!" The words slammed into my head as I slammed close my book. I had just finished reading Peter Biskind's astonishing claim that Miramax had "killed" the independent film movement of the 1990s "with success." If that was the case, I wondered, what was I doing at Sundance?

Bunkered in a condo, I was slogging through another Sundance Film Festival where, too embarrassed to be seen carting around Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film," I would return from my latest screening to read about the frenetic scene I had just escaped. A deal-oriented, personality-driven chronicle of low-budget American filmmaking set primarily during the 1990s, Biskind's book is, much like his previous exposé "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood," packed with juicy incidents, bigger-than-life characters, copious author interviews and some questionable historical interpretations.

Couched in starkly Hobbesian terms — "life in the indie world can be nasty, brutish, and short," Biskind announces on the first page — the new book makes low-budget filmmaking sound like an especially vicious edition of "Survivor," in which the last man standing, checkbook in meaty hand, is named Harvey Weinstein. If the Miramax co-chairman looms large in Biskind's account, as a kind of rampaging monster leaving scores of damaged movies and egos in his wake — not to mention an entire film movement — my guess is that it's largely because distribution and production is pretty dull stuff. It is, after all, easier to sell a book about moguls behaving badly than to define independent filmmaking in the age of conglomerates; certainly it's easier to sell personalities than to parse how money flows from one pocket to the next.

One problem with Biskind's take is that it works only if you buy the canard that Miramax was an independent company even after 1993, the year it was bought by Disney, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. (Biskind admits Miramax's independence was a fiction but nonetheless lavishes much of his attention on the company.) Given how important the independent stamp became to the movie industry during the 1990s — as a marker of quality, as a promise of difference and distinction — it's no surprise that everyone went along. As the hullabaloo over this week's Academy Award nominations makes clear, the story of the little indie that could remains irresistible — witness "Lost in Translation," which was partly financed by Focus International, which in turn is owned by Universal Pictures.

Indeed, Biskind's glum take on the independent film world only really works if you ignore those independents working without studio patronage — and if you keep your eyes shut. If you keep them open, as I did while watching more than 30 features at Sundance, you discover that independent film is rolling along pretty much the same bumpy way it has for the last decade. This year, along with a smattering of documentaries, the best evidence that reports of independent film's death were premature included John Curran's thorny drama about two married couples in their 30s, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," adapted by Larry Gross from a pair of Andre Dubus stories. And Jonathan Caouette's "Tarnation," an exuberantly personal work smeared with lipstick traces from the likes of David Lynch and avant-garde legend Jack Smith that recounts the filmmaker's life with and without his disturbed mother.

Two facets of the whole

I've written my share of cranky articles about the country's most important film festival, but either by design or default, Sundance continues to be the leading venue for American independents.

It's where I caught the world premiere of Todd Haynes' "Safe," a thrilling, eerily prescient work about toxic America that put Julianne Moore on the road to stardom. And where I saw Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise," a heart-soaring film about an underprivileged young woman struggling to find herself (a favorite Sundance trope), and the last great evidence of just how good an actress Ashley Judd can be. It's also where I have seen tough, aesthetically uncompromising films such as Mary Harron's "American Psycho," Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" (which, to its credit, Miramax picked up after Sundance), Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and Martin Bell's "American Heart."

None of this makes Sundance any more pleasurable. Good movie year or not — and this was a middling year — the festival invariably features an overabundance of mediocre work. Too many films hew to familiar Sundance templates — the family dysfunction confab, the "I'm on hiatus, get me an indie" flick, the premature-coming-of-age drama — that hit all the usual story notes and, for some ungodly reason, feature a lot of sensitive guitar strumming. Movies that, to paraphrase one friend, are Hollywood films without the glamour, art movies without the art. That's brutal, but Sundance's core problem is that there aren't enough good homegrown films produced in a given year to support a festival of this size. Which is why the festival's smartest move has been to dramatically increase its number of foreign-language selections.

But Sundance isn't the sum of American independent film any more than Miramax is. Rather, they're two pieces in the larger puzzle that is the contemporary movie industry. If the industry can be difficult to grasp these days, it's because our movies — once built on the factory floor from the ground up, much like granddad's Chrysler — are now created in a radically decentralized system. So while most of the major studios are part of enormous global conglomerates, filmmaking has become bewilderingly piecemeal, especially when it comes to financing. Killer Films, to take one example, which produced some of the most acclaimed and daring nonstudio films of the 1990s, including "Safe" and "Swoon," is now partly funded by John Wells Productions, which last year signed a reported $70-million production and development deal with Warner Bros.

That may not make Killer Films a studio company, but it may make it something less than fully independent. Still, because all filmmaking involves necessary degrees of dependence — whether on grants, family money, bank loans or production deals — the distinctions between independents and the studios sometimes seem more nominal than meaningful. As Biskind's repeated horror stories about Weinstein drive home, so-called independent producers can be as meddlesome and dumb as studio bean counters.

The indie film label may (still) signify freedom, innovation and even a smidgen of radicalism to many consumers and a large swathe of the media that should know better. But filmmakers tend to tell a different tale. Independent or not, making movies means that a very few become very rich, often at the expense of the less ruthless.

Luring the next generation

To an extent, the indie film frenzy of the last decade was symptomatic of a trend launched in the 1940s, when studios increasingly began to target specific audiences. In the 1950s, Hollywood discovered the youth market; it's been rediscovering it ever since, doing so in the late 1960s and again in the early 1990s. In indie film, the studios discovered a fountain of youth that appealed both to a new generation of consumers and to the media, which are desperate to capture that generation's business. When Disney, an old adept hand at seducing young audiences, bought Miramax it wasn't just buying a company, it was buying a coveted demographic. As media critic Robert W. McChesney notes, "Disney, more than any media giant, is the master at figuring out new synergistic ways to acquire, slice, dice and merchandise content."

By absorbing companies such as Miramax and tapping filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh, who went from independent success with "sex, lies, and videotape" to even better mainstream studio hits such as "Traffic," the movie industry was in some ways just conducting business as usual. The central dialectic of the industry has always been between the status quo and "innovation," between giving audiences more of the same (hence genres and the star system) and something slightly new, vaguely different (from "Gone With the Wind" to "Cold Mountain"). And as long as there has been a motion picture industry, there has been a parallel stream of independent production companies and filmmakers from which the industry has regularly drawn new blood, either directly or by osmosis.

There were independent filmmakers before Miramax and there are still independent filmmakers, though not all are equally independent. But some myths die hard. That's particularly true in the media that gladly exploit the scrappy underdog angle — partly to snare younger consumers — and in the sub-industry that has sprung up around indie film. Nowhere is that sub-industry more visible than at Sundance, where an alphabet soup of corporate logos adorns the festival and fleets of support staff — lawyers who try to sell rights to distributors, publicists who try to bait media types like yours truly — accompany each entrant. At center stage, of course, are the all-important executives such as Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice, who are in attendance to support their company's coming releases, while scouting the next "Thirteen," which Rice snapped up at last year's festival.

Last year at Sundance, five of the most-talked-about films were "Thirteen," "American Splendor," "The Station Agent," "All the Real Girls" and "Capturing the Friedmans," all of which were well received by critics and bought by studio specialty divisions and independent distributors. As of my deadline, these five films have grossed a combined $19,232,948 at the American box office. By contrast, Warner Bros.' putative comedy "Kangaroo Jack," which hit theaters the day after the 2003 Sundance opened, earned $21,895,483 in just its opening weekend. Far more people saw "Kangaroo Jack" than last year's big Sundance movies, although you wouldn't know that from the attention these films racked up in taste-making outlets such as the New York Times, which published a whopping 10 articles on "Capturing the Friedmans."

Despite the delirium that now characterizes the Sundance experience, most independent films — whether we're talking studio indies or real indies — exert a greater symbolic impact on the culture than an economic one. True, "Pulp Fiction" grossed more than $100 million in the United States. But it's likely that the film benefited Disney — which in 1994 became, with Quentin Tarantino's help, the first studio to gross a billion dollars at the U.S. box office — more than it did independent cinema. By contrast, movies such as "The Station Agent" and "All the Real Girls," which provide character-based, nominally offbeat (i.e., nongenre) stories to a limited number of filmgoers, can hope to do only a fraction of that business. Some independent film watchers might see such meager returns as proof that the movement is indeed dead, but I wonder if we're not looking at this through the wrong end of the glass.

Here's a thought: Maybe the American audience for character-based, nominally offbeat (i.e., nongenre) movies is fairly modest. When a movie dies an unceremoniously swift and unprofitable death at the box office, filmmakers often point an accusatory finger at the marketing and publicity. But bigger advertising campaigns, of the sort that Miramax has become famous for at awards time, cannot guarantee that the majority or even a large part of the moviegoing public really wants to watch small-scale, star-free, thoughtful, low-concept films about darkly unhappy dwarfs and grieving mothers, misanthropic jazz reviewers with dubious grooming, inarticulate young lovers who don't take their clothes off, out-of-control teenagers who don't take their clothes off and a freaky middle-class family torn apart by their own pathologies and multiple counts of child molestation charges.

That isn't cynical; it's the populist bottom line. In the end, the great fraud perpetuated during the independent film movement of the 1990s wasn't the work of either Miramax or Sundance alone. It was the work of everyone who tried to transform independent cinema into a brand called indie film, thereby insisting that even the most rarefied movie could — and, worse, should — have the audience appeal, the Academy Award-capacity and the box-office muscle of Hollywood.

Thinking like that doesn't just sell short some of our best filmmakers, including those like Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson and "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, some of whom have enjoyed studio patronage but may never find mainstream success. It sells short the idea that movies are more than commodities and have the capacity to be a beautiful dream, a transporting experience — a place where art takes hold, ready or not.
"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

godardian

Quote from: SoNowThenHahaha, why is it that such mediocre writers like Eszterhas and Goldman feel the need to mouth off like they're God's gift to the written word?

Joe, get over yourself.

This doesn't seem so much like "mouthing off" as it does good old-fashioned Hollywood Babylon gossip. This actually sounds like the kind of trashy book it would be fun to read. Funny to see Joe Eszterhas doing a Kenneth Anger... maybe it's more like a Julia Phillips, actually.

Good article, Macguffin. I can never get enough of seeing Safe acknowledged as the masterwork that it is.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

cron

context, context, context.

godardian

Oohhhhhhh you got the godard book... I'm jealous.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

mine comes in the mail next week


wooohooo!!!
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

Quote from: chuckhimselfo


So I stop by University Bookstore here in Seattle yesterday to pick this up, and I can't find it and can't find it, even though their online inventory says it's in stock.

Problem is, chuckhimselfo's presumably European edition looks way prettier than what we get, and since I was looking for the picture above, I passed by this again and again before finally spotting it:




...to make things more confusing, it was in the "new releases" right alongside the Hitchcock book also mentioned by chuckhimselfo, which has an identical jacket.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

cron

hehe, yeah, i just found that about that  earlier today.   looks very promising. i read an article on Sight and Sound about it,  says that it's the most researched biography ever written on Godard.
context, context, context.

Derek

yeah, I was expecting a little more from Down and Dirty...

It was all about Miramax, split into two stories basically about Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting.

Notice how there wasn't any real stories about sex like the was almost every other page of Easy Riders? Maybe the people written about in the book still have something to lose. Or maybe it was a 70's thing.
It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.