Romance & Cigarettes

[Kal]

This is one of the things that I dont understand... Hollywood agrees to release bullshit flops like Stardust, Daddy Day Camp and so many every weekend and so many films with potential dont even get a chance, or get bullshit limited releases. I dont understand the fucking logic.

[SiliasRuby]

Don't you get it, those movies have potential and a target audience. They can pull in the kids to go see daddy day care and the adults, win-win. Bleh. They are not weird or unusual like this movie.

By the way, this film is a fantabulous musical in the vein of Moulin Rouge. Really good. I have a Region 2 version on dvd. It's much more fun and has alot more to offer than the movie version of hairspray ever did. It has it's own unique style. That's another thing, personalized movies with heart and actual originality don't get greenlit, because that may be too risky.

Now that John is distrubuting it himself, it makes alot more sense why he took the bucks to be in that astonshing clusterfuck of a movie, Transformers. Distributing a movie yourself and everything like that takes quite a bit of time and energy that could be spent on being in shitty movies.

It's way too early to be writing this so some of this might make no sense whatsoever but, at least I took the chance that it did.

[grand theft sparrow]

Now that John is distrubuting it himself, it makes alot more sense why he took the bucks to be in that astonshing clusterfuck of a movie, Transformers.

If Turturro getting a golden shower from an '08 Camaro can help his labor of love along, then so be it.

[MacGuffin]

The Actors Sing, the Director Suffers, the Film Survives
Source: New York Times

FOR the actor turned filmmaker John Turturro the low point in the twisty tale of "Romance & Cigarettes" was not his mother's heart attack, or the sudden exit of the United Artists executive who had championed this art-house film, or his mother's battle with pancreatic cancer, or the takeover by Sony Pictures that wiped out the movie's supporters, or his mother's death, or Sony's refusal to give the feature a test screening or put it in theaters or drop the asking price so that a smaller company could buy it.

The low point came when he composed an obsequious letter to a director of summer blockbusters, according to Mr. Turturro's 17-year-old son, Amedeo. "I said, 'Dad, are you trying to get a job with the guy who made all those stinkers?" the younger Turturro recalled. "He bowed his head and mumbled, 'Yeah, that guy.' And I said, 'Dad, you've got to be kidding!' "

The high point will probably come Friday, when "Romance & Cigarettes" begins a month-long engagement at Film Forum in New York, Mr. Turturro's hometown. More than two years after its original intended North American release date, this bawdy, ambitious musical has finally wended its way to a single screen.

The tale of "Romance & Cigarettes" is not an uncommon one in Hollywood, where changes in studio management can keep finished films from ever seeing the dark of a multiplex. What's unusual is Mr. Turturro's perseverance. With his film denied a theatrical run, and being unable to set up the movie elsewhere, he prevailed on Sony to let him distribute the film himself.

"At times I've felt like jumping out a window," said Mr. Turturro, who was the writer, director and a producer of the movie. "I don't like heights, so it would have been a second-floor window. I would have just broken my legs."

A paean to the twin pleasures of lust and tobacco, "Romance & Cigarettes" is an ensemble piece that centers on a construction worker (James Gandolfini) caught between his wife (Susan Sarandon) and his mistress (Kate Winslet), a salty seductress with curves of Titanic proportions.

Inspired by the British dramatist Dennis Potter, Mr. Turturro had his working-class stiffs lip-sync or sing along to pop anthems that express sentiments they cannot. Early on, a forlorn Mr. Gandolfini shuffles out of his Queens bungalow and bursts into Engelbert Humperdinck's "Lonely Is a Man Without Love," joined by a troupe of hoofing garbage collectors.

When the actors aren't miming or crooning to the song score, they're either playing it straight or drifting between memory and daydream. In a fantasy sequence that syringes "King Lear" into "Samson and Delilah," a blind Mr. Gandolfini, flanked by his three daughters, yanks the swing set he has been lashed to off its moorings. Later he has an elective circumcision to please the flame-haired Ms. Winslet, whose showstopping entrance is announced by the Buena Vista Social Club's "Cuarto de Tula," replete with gyrating, hose-wielding firefighters.

"Romance" is Mr. Turturro's third stab at directing, after "Mac" and "Illuminata." He started to write the script while clacking a typewriter on the set of Joel and Ethan Coen's "Barton Fink" (1991), in which he played the eponymous screenwriter. More than a decade later he finished a draft and enlisted the Coen brothers as executive producers. "Basically we told John, 'Use our names and see where it gets you,' " said Joel Coen.

His brother, Ethan Coen, said that was the extent of their involvement. "Honest to God we did no work," he said. "But since the movie turned out great, we're prepared to take the lion's share of the credit. We're not complete ignoramuses."

With strong leads and a supporting cast that includes Christopher Walken, Mary-Louise Parker and Elaine Stritch, Mr. Turturro persuaded Bingham Ray, then president of the United Artists specialty-film unit of MGM, to put up $4.5 million for the rights to North America and several other foreign territories. ("He pitched it as 'The Honeymooners' meets 'The Singing Detective,' " Mr. Ray said.)

That commitment enabled Mr. Turturro to raise $4 million in private equity and an equal amount from Mel Gibson's Icon Productions for the remaining overseas rights. He had been ready to roll in 2003, but delayed the shoot for more than a year until Mr. Gandolfini had finished shooting a season of "The Sopranos."

Mr. Turturro faced his first major obstacle in January 2004, when Mr. Ray stepped down in a studio shake-up. "I thought the film might fall apart," Mr. Turturro said, but MGM kept the project on track. While Mr. Turturro edited, his mother, Katherine Turturro, had a heart attack. She was the model for Ms. Sarandon's character and had appeared in a scene with her. "John was devastated," said his wife, the actress Katherine Borowitz.

Based on enthusiastic screenings — according to Mr. Turturro, 70 percent of the rough-cut test audience indicated it would recommend the movie — "Romance" was slated for a summer 2005 release in more than 500 theaters. That spring, however, MGM was bought by a consortium headed by Sony. "Romance" was one of four United Artists films orphaned in the acquisition. Two of them — "Art School Confidential" and "Capote" — found homes at Sony Pictures Classics, the studio's specialized-film unit. A thriller, "The Woods," went straight to DVD.

"Romance" faced the same fate. Though Sony executives never actually tested the film, they concluded the movie had limited commercial appeal. "Sony wouldn't sink any money into prints and advertising," Joel Coen said.

"Essentially Sony decided to write off its investment," Ethan Coen said, adding that "it's demoralizing" to finish a good movie and have a studio summarily dismiss it. Sony executives declined to comment officially for this article beyond a statement that said in part, "We believe the picture will find a greater audience when the title is distributed in cable, pay TV and home entertainment platforms in 2008."

Mr. Turturro was encouraged to pursue potential buyers at the 2005 Venice and Toronto film festivals, but no distributor would meet Sony's $3 million price. "Once a company gives up on a film, a shadow is cast over it," said Mr. Turturro, whose mother died of pancreatic cancer a month after the Toronto showings. The disease had been discovered just after her heart attack. "The taint is hard to shake in a business where fear of failure runs rampant."

During the two years since, his agent proposed several deals, each loaded with back-end incentives for the company. Still, Sony wouldn't budge from $3 million. "How could this film not make $3 million back in theaters?" Mr. Gandolfini asked. "There's at least $3 million of weirdos out there who'd go to see it. I probably know half of them."

Last year "Romance" did open in more than a dozen foreign countries, earning Icon some $2.5 million. Most of the box office was in Italy, where it was carefully promoted and played for seven months.

The New York engagement came about only through the unlikely intervention of Adam Sandler, who will star with Mr. Turturro in the coming Sony comedy "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," about a Mossad agent who goes underground to become a Manhattan hairstylist. During negotiations Mr. Sandler encouraged the studio to support the run.

"It's a kind of vindication," Mr. Turturro said. "I'm thankful my film will have a little hearing."

[bonanzataz]

A thriller, "The Woods," went straight to DVD.

aaaaaaaaaaahh, that clarifies things.
still need to see that one.


so, this movie IS coming out?

[modage]

so, this movie IS coming out?

Friday.

and...
Q&A WITH JOHN TURTURRO!
Friday, September 7, 7:45 show
http://www.filmforum.org/films/romance.html

[MacGuffin]

John Turturro struggles to keep 'Romance' alive
PERSONAL: John Turturro says his films are "about love."
By Tom Roston, Special to The Times

WHILE John Turturro recounts the "Kafkaesque nightmare" he's been through over the last three years -- struggling to get his third film as a director, "Romance and Cigarettes," into theaters -- there's little hint of the desperadoes ("Miller's Crossing"), hotheads ("Do the Right Thing") and weirdos ("Barton Fink") he's played so well as a go-to character actor. Instead, he convincingly inhabits the role of resilient director.

"I hear people complaining, 'Ooh, my movie didn't do this. Or it didn't do that.' And I go, 'Heh, you don't know the worst of it,' " Turturro, 50, says with a foot kicked up on a table in his high-ceilinged loft office near Chinatown in New York City. "And I do. And that's not so bad to know."

Although "Romance and Cigarettes" was supposed to premiere in 2005, the film began crawling into theaters only this September, opening in the Los Angeles area Friday. That the unconventional musical is playing on the big screen is nothing short of "a miracle," says Turturro, and it is one of his own making. When the movie's original theatrical release was put on hold, Turturro doggedly pursued any avenue to get the film into theaters, eventually opting to handle the distribution himself.

"To do what he's done is so incredibly rare. Some people would say it's nuts and foolish, but it tells you so much about John Turturro the human being," says Bingham Ray, who originally green-lighted "Romance and Cigarettes" when he was president of United Artists in 2003.

While Turturro is well-known for his uninhibited work as an actor, particularly in the films of Spike Lee and Ethan and Joel Coen, he has had a quiet career as a director of critically praised but commercially disappointing films. In his 1992 directorial debut, "Mac," Turturro made a sort of sensitive eulogy to his own father, who had died four years before. In the film, Turturro stars as the overbearing brother in an Italian working-class family in Queens, New York, that tries to rebuild itself after the death of its patriarch.

"People still come up to me and thank me for that movie," he says. "And they don't even realize I directed it."

Turturro says he was offered "big money" to be a pay-for-hire director, but he prefers to work on films that are close to his heart. "My films are, at their core, about love," says the actor.

It's a description that certainly applies to 1998's esoteric "Illuminata," about a failed turn-of-the-20th century playwright's attempt to mount a production -- the film made less than $1 million in theaters.

It's also an apt way to characterize "Romance and Cigarettes," which Turturro describes as "a down-and-dirty love story with fantasy elements," in which characters break into song, lip-syncing or singing along to popular tunes from Engelbert Humperdinck, James Brown and Bruce Springsteen.

Tapping his passion for filmmakers as diverse as Federico Fellini, Dennis Potter and Charlie Kaufman, Turturro fashioned a tale about a family torn apart by a father's infidelity that could have taken shape "if Charles Bukowski collaborated with Bruce Springsteen." It was bold material, powerful enough to draw in the Coen brothers as executive producers and a cast including James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Christopher Walken, Mandy Moore, Steve Buscemi, Mary-Louise Parker and Eddie Izzard.

The film was shot over nine weeks on an $11-million budget and was scheduled for release in the summer of 2005. Sarandon says there was incredible spontaneity on Turturro's set. "When you make a film like this, you remember why you're in the business, because it's not about the business," she says. "It's about the collaboration."

But when Sony bought a controlling interest in UA parent MGM, the film's release date was pushed back indefinitely. With "Romance and Cigarettes" stuck in limbo, Turturro committed himself to acting in an eclectic mix of projects, including Robert De Niro's CIA drama "The Good Shepherd" and Michael Bay's shoot-'em-up blockbuster "Transformers." He also appeared off-Broadway and directed his wife, actress Katherine Borowitz (with whom he has two sons), in a play.

All the while, "Romance and Cigarettes" languished -- until Turturro got a little help from a friend. His two-time costar Adam Sandler, who has a long working relationship with Sony, spoke with the company about letting Turturro distribute the film himself. The studio agreed, and "Romance and Cigarettes" was granted a three-week release at the Film Forum in New York City in September.

One positive review by the New York Times and a strong showing at the weekend box office later, and the film had new life. "I probably would have been happy with that," Turturro says. "But then I got all these calls from movie theaters across the country. They all said, 'We want to show your movie.' And I said, 'What are we going to do now?' "

Working out the rights with Sony and the various television and other ancillary players was "a mess," but Turturro was granted another reprieve, so the film will be in theaters into January. "I figured I am making some money this year, " says Turturro, who is costarring with Sandler in Sony's upcoming comedy "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," in which he plays the Palestinian adversary to Sandler's Mossad agent turned hairdresser. "I decided I'd put part of my salary in and continue."

"Romance and Cigarettes" has made more than $400,000 in the U.S. so far; not a huge amount, but Turturro cites the impressive per-screen average. "We've beaten out movies with $20-million advertising budgets," he says. "It's been a nice vindication -- in a small, modest way."

It's particularly meaningful because the emotional foundation to his film is once again very personal. During the making of the movie, his mother, who served as the basis for Sarandon's character, had a heart attack. She passed away while the film was still in limbo in 2005.

"A lot of this film has my mom's indomitable spirit," says Turturro.

The same could be said for Turturro: he now has three films in development to direct.