The Borat Movie

[MacGuffin]

Borat, Exposed! No, Not in That Way.
Source: Cinematical

When you watch Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (dang, and here I thought I was all done with having to type that title), it looks and feels unscripted. In fact, when the film screened at Toronto, director Larry Charles said during an impromptu Q&A that it was all unscripted. Well, shocking but true -- it's not. In fact, Borat's antics (and success) owe much to three other Brit writers (now imported to LA) who spent hours debating crucial decisions like whether the Borat should carry his feces to the dinner table in a clear or opaque bag.

Written By, the magazine of the WGA West, has a great interview up with comedy scribes Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, and Anthony "Ant" Hines, who, along with Sacha Baron Cohen, form the core of the Borat writing team. The writers agreed to let Written By "out" them as having scripted the seemingly unscripted moments in the film, and what they have to say about the process of creating Borat is fascinating -- especially the degree to which they map out every possible reaction to each bit, with different plans depending on how it goes.

There are juicy tidbits in there about what was really supposed to happen when the Black prostitute showed up at the dinner party (she and Borat were supposed to have loud sex in the bathroom and then get thrown out, but the white folks jumped the gun by freaking out over a Black woman coming in their house and kicked them out early) and who saved the rodeo tapes from a mob of pissed-off rednecks by putting them down his underwear.


http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=2274

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

So it's not real and the lawsuits are all part of the joke?

[Pubrick]

Borat, Exposed! No, Not in That Way.
Source: Cinematical

When you watch Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (dang, and here I thought I was all done with having to type that title), it looks and feels unscripted. In fact, when the film screened at Toronto, director Larry Charles said during an impromptu Q&A that it was all unscripted. Well, shocking but true -- it's not. In fact, Borat's antics (and success) owe much to three other Brit writers (now imported to LA) who spent hours debating crucial decisions like whether the Borat should carry his feces to the dinner table in a clear or opaque bag.

Written By, the magazine of the WGA West, has a great interview up with comedy scribes Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, and Anthony "Ant" Hines, who, along with Sacha Baron Cohen, form the core of the Borat writing team. The writers agreed to let Written By "out" them as having scripted the seemingly unscripted moments in the film, and what they have to say about the process of creating Borat is fascinating -- especially the degree to which they map out every possible reaction to each bit, with different plans depending on how it goes.

There are juicy tidbits in there about what was really supposed to happen when the Black prostitute showed up at the dinner party (she and Borat were supposed to have loud sex in the bathroom and then get thrown out, but the white folks jumped the gun by freaking out over a Black woman coming in their house and kicked them out early) and who saved the rodeo tapes from a mob of pissed-off rednecks by putting them down his underwear.


http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=2274

So it's not real and the lawsuits are all part of the joke?

i don't think you understood. of course his character is scripted (that's not even news), the reactions are not.

[MacGuffin]

Police, camera, action
As Sacha Baron Cohen finally becomes himself again, he tells Patrick Goldstein about the thrills, spills - and smells - of being Borat
Source: The Guardian

OK, so I have to admit, it was a little disconcerting to see Sacha Baron Cohen without his Borat moustache. When the lanky comedian showed up for his first newspaper interview as himself since the inception of Borat-mania last autumn, Baron Cohen looked a little smaller than life, especially compared with the outsize character who caused such a sensation in Borat, the hit that managed to be something for all people, whether you laughed at Borat's outlandish behavior - or the people who indulged it.

Sipping hot lemon tea at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, California, Baron Cohen had the air of a man who had shed a layer of skin that had been worn to a frazzle. With a thatch of unruly black hair and a three-day beard, wearing a rumpled corduroy jacket, the 35-year-old comic could pass for a young film professor at UCLA without attracting a second glance. His thick Kazakh accent was gone, replaced by a sober British purr.

Most comics drop the act when the movie finishes. But for months last autumn, wherever he went, Cohen arrived in full Borat drag, taking the Toronto Film Festival by storm, holding a news conference outside the Kazakh embassy in Washington and, while accepting a magazine award, praising Mel Gibson, saying, "It is you, not me, who should receive this GQ award for anti-Jew warrior of the year."

It was brilliant marketing, with news organisations happily turning their reporters into straight men for a series of madcap interviews. In a way, Baron Cohen's still at it. His publicist first called with the idea of Baron Cohen doing an interview - as himself - the day after he scored a Golden Globe nomination (he duly won the award for best actor in a musical or comedy on Monday). Coincidence? I think not.

Still, the burden of being Borat took its toll, especially during months of filming when, to keep up the charade, he was Borat from dawn to dusk.

"It was exhausting," he recalls, slumped in the booth, fighting off a nagging cold. "I had to be that way all day and all night, because even if the tiniest detail had gone awry, it could've made them suspicious. I mean, even if I went to the bathroom, I had to make sure I went to the bathroom as Borat." He allows a tiny sliver of a smile. "There would definitely be potpourri in the toilet, so you'd know Borat had been there."

In an era when entertainers have to apologise for any sort of intemperate remark, Cohen cleverly created a comic character that provided him free passage for all sorts of outrageous behaviour, be it lewd remarks about women, mocking of worshippers at a Pentecostal church or a visit to a gun shop where he asked the proprietor, "What is best gun to defend against Jew?"

Having perfected this sly shtick in television on Da Ali G Show, and its predecessor, The Eleven O'Clock Show, where he posed as a gold-chain-encrusted hip-hop dunce, torturing a variety of government officials with wildly inappropriate questions, Cohen has become a master provocateur. Borat seems uniquely suited to our time, even if the character has deep comedy roots. If you wanted to see a nice Jewish boy assume an ethnic identity as a way to passing himself off as a cartoonish insult artist and womaniser, you could watch Chico Marx in any Marx Brothers comedy.

And though nothing can top the incomparable Ali G Show sketch in which Borat gets a crowd to sing along to Throw the Jew Down the Well in a redneck bar, it owes a debt to the work of Randy Newman, who would gleefully encourage similar singalongs to Short People ("They got little hands, little eyes, they walk around telling great big lies") as if he were endorsing the song's unsettling sentiment. Cohen's breakthrough is that he presents his comedy in a realistic setting - with recognisable people, people who might live next door, as foils. It gives his bits a barbed authenticity that is often as troubling as it is funny.

"Throw the Jew Down the Well was only interesting because the people in the bar started to sing along," he explains. Some of the people Baron Cohen and his director, Larry Charles, filmed say their actions were taken out of context, a charge Cohen vehemently denies. "If you saw all of our footage with the gun shop owner, for example, we had a whole conversation about the right gun to use to shoot a Jew's horns off his head."

None the less, a number of people in the movie have complained or filed suit, claiming they were hoodwinked. Cohen isn't exactly sympathetic. "This wasn't Candid Camera," he says. "There were two large cameras in the room. I don't buy the argument that, 'Oh, I wouldn't have acted so racist or anti-semitic if I'd known this film was being shown in America.' That's no excuse."

Borat was produced by Jay Roach (the director of "Meet the Parents"), who likens Cohen's comedy technique to the work of a gifted magician. "You know it's a contrivance and that you're going to be fooled, but then there's this extra layer of reality that takes you past the amazement factor and to a place where you're not even sure it's a trick any more," he explains. "Sacha's a real student of comedy, so he's incredibly thorough."

Born into a middle-class family in London, Cohen had early dreams of being a basketball player or a breakdancer. He spent a year on a kibbutz as a teenager and was a member of Habonim, a Socialist-Zionist youth movement that, he jokes, "basically meant that we shared our sweets". He was ambivalent about becoming a performer. "I think I was embarrassed to admit to my friends or myself that I wanted to be a comic - it was sort of like admitting you wanted to be a model."

At Cambridge he read history, spending a summer in the US researching a dissertation on the prominent role Jews played in the American civil-rights movement titled The Black-Jewish Allies: A Case of Mistaking Identity. As the title suggests, he was already fascinated by the notion that irony and identity play a big role in cultural differences.

"I was writing this at the time of the Crown Heights riots when the Jewish community was obsessed with black anti-semitism," he explains. "And I argued that this obsession came out of Jews feeling betrayed by their old blood brothers from the civil-rights movement. But while it was perceived in the Jewish community that Jews were disproportionately involved in civil rights, my conclusion was black Americans didn't see Jews as being more involved than any white Americans.

"The Jewish kids were all there in the South, but because they were there as part of church organisations like the [Southern Christian Leadership Council], they weren't seen as Jews but as white liberals. So there was this deep irony that the Jewish establishment took martyrs like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner" - two civil-rights workers from New York who went to Mississippi to register black voters and were killed by the Ku Klux Klan - "and used them as symbols of a Jewish-black alliance when, in fact, they didn't really see themselves as Jews at all." Cohen pauses, drolly adding: "The dissertation is a lot funnier than I depicted it."

Not long after graduating from Cambridge, Cohen found himself drawn to the hip-hop scene in London, where he became a fan of the DJ Tim Westwood. "I'm sure he helped inspire Ali G," he says. "I'd thought he was black, because he sounded like a New York gangsta, but he was actually a tall, skinny, white guy who was the son of a bishop."

Soon Cohen was creating Ali G-style sketches for TV - he first appeared on the Paramout Comedy Channel, with two-minute segments in the guise of Bruno, the gay, Austrian fashion reporter. Borat followed soon after. A stickler for authenticity, during filming for the movie he never washed his grey Borat suit and never wore deodorant: "The smell is an added thing for people to believe that I'm from a country where hygiene wasn't a necessity."

By his count, people called police 37 times during filming, not counting the time Secret Service men showed up when he was outside the White House "figuring we must be al-Qaida, since why else would two guys be driving around the White House in an ice cream truck".

His closest escape came in Louisiana, when a woman whose family had once been plantation owners was insulted by a question he asked her and instructed her husband to call the police.

"We had 30 seconds to make our getaway in an ice cream truck whose top speed was 50mph," he says. I asked Cohen what he said to insult her. He furrows his brow for a moment. "I'm not sure," he finally responds. "But I think I might have been trying to sell her some Kazakhi slaves."

[MacGuffin]

BACK TO BORAT?
Source: CHUD

Did you like Borat? Well, Rupert Murdoch is promising you more, according to the Financial Times. The Supreme Evil Leader of News Corp and owner of 20th Century Fox says that Sacha Baron Cohen will be returning to Fox after doing Bruno for Universal.

This seems odd, as most people have assumed that Borat has become too big a cultural phenomenon to allow him to fool people anymore. That said, never underestimate the basic ignorance of the American people. I am sure Cohen and friends can find pockets of rural America where alternating current is still a myth.

Murdoch, speaking at a press conference in New York, said that Cohen would come back after doing gay Austrian fashion guy movie Bruno, which Fox declined to bid on after the comedian wouldn't even show them the script (yes, these movies have scripted elements). Is this true, or is Murdoch just the world's richest fanboy? After all, he tells the Financial Times that he saw Borat three times. He said he "laughed like hell." And Murdoch would know how hell laughs. He runs it.

[MacGuffin]

Murdoch's 'Borat 2' news raises eyebrows
Source" Hollywood Reporter

In the second time in as many days, Rupert Murdoch seems to be jumping the gun on announcing news within News Corp.'s operations.

The chairman and CEO of the media conglomerate said Thursday at Media Summit New York, an event produced by Digital Hollywood and presented by McGraw-Hill, that Sacha Baron Cohen has signaled that he will do a "Borat" sequel with Fox.

"He will do a sequel," Murdoch said in an onstage interview. "He will first do something else ... then he wants to come back and do a 'Borat 2.' "

That doesn't appear to be quite accurate. While it is true that Baron Cohen is going off to do "something else," specifially the "Bruno" picture that Universal recently locked up for a reported $42 million. According to Twentieth Century Fox -- the producers behind the first "Borat" that has generated more than $128 million in domestic grosses -- the company has had preliminary discussions with the British comedian, but nothing is even close to a real project.

"We're eager to work with Sacha again, and we've had casual discussions about a sequel, which we'd love to do, but at this point it remains too preliminary to discuss," said Chris Petrikin, senior vp, corporate communications at Fox.

On Wednesday, Murdoch told analysts and journalists following New Corp.'s second-quarter earnings call, that an announcement to the timing of the launch of the Fox Business Channel would be in the next week. News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin had to step into the call, suggesting the announcement would be "soon" but declined to be more specific.

What does remain clear is Murdoch's enthusiasm for Baron Cohen's humor.

The Australian media mogul called "Borat," "a pretty clever picture" that "subtly made Americans laugh at themselves." The media mogul also said he saw it three times. He shared with the audience that after a screening in the News Corp. building with friends and colleagues, "we laughed like hell," then went for dinner and laughed more.

Murdoch does remain a bit more skeptical about the prospects for a sequel. Films like that "don't necessarily repeat themselves easily," he said.

We'll have to wait and see if "Borat" repeats itself at all.

[Ravi]

What does remain clear is Murdoch's enthusiasm for Baron Cohen's humor profit-generating abilities.

[picolas]

anyone watching this on dvd is in for a very nice packaging surprise. without having put it in my player it's the winner for best dvd release at next year's xixaxies in my mind.

[Ravi]

I see this getting a double-dip in a few months.

[modage]

the commercials for this are TERRIBLE.  actually the commercials for any movie coming to dvd make everything look awful.  but these are especially offensive because they have a fake Borat announcer.

[Ravi]

One thing is certain on Tuesday, the DVD market will be taken over by Kazakhs as the long-awaited Borat makes its debut. But, it looks like the DVD consumer will be getting more (or less) than they bargained for.

Underneath the standard O-ring packaging, the look and feel of the artwork on the sleeve of the DVD will appear as though it is a pirated product. The entire artwork is in Kazakh and the only english on the entire sleeve is in the billing block on the back of the package.

Pics

[Garam]

We'll have to wait and see if "Borat" repeats itself at all.

Hahah

[grand theft sparrow]

One thing is certain on Tuesday, the DVD market will be taken over by Kazakhs as the long-awaited Borat makes its debut. But, it looks like the DVD consumer will be getting more (or less) than they bargained for.

Underneath the standard O-ring packaging, the look and feel of the artwork on the sleeve of the DVD will appear as though it is a pirated product. The entire artwork is in Kazakh and the only english on the entire sleeve is in the billing block on the back of the package.

Pics

I am SO glad I didn't read this until after I bought my own copy. 

[hedwig]

mine has regular sleeve artwork.

[Kal]

Kazakhs high-five 'Borat' DVD
Hollywood Reporter

LONDON -- Kazakhs are rushing to order Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan on DVD from Amazon.co.uk, the online giant said Friday.

Borat topped the order list from consumers in the former Soviet republic this week, according to Amazon head of media Rakhi Parekh.

"With the controversy the film caused around the world, it seems residents of Kazakhstan are now desperate to see what all the fuss is about -- so much so that they are willing to pay the 505 Kazakhstani Tenge ($4) charge to have the DVD delivered from the U.K.," Parekh said.

Kazakhs also appear to have developed a healthy interest in capitalism and the U.S., according to the Top 10 product orders from Amazon.co.uk. The top-selling book is "Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on How to Be a High Performing Leader." Other titles on investment strategies and offshore tax planning suggest that locals are looking to add to the country's current list of six registered millionaires.