Where the Wild Things Aren't

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It seemed like a match made in heaven. The classic Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are and the one-time video wunderkind who brought a sure-handed touch to offbeat Charlie Kaufman material in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Throw in a screenplay by lit-hipster Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and what could go wrong? But Spike Jonze’s $80 million adaptation of Wild Things appears to have gone off the rails.

According to Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times, the movie “was originally slated for release this October but got pushed back to the fall of 2009. Last week it disappeared entirely from the Warner Bros. release schedule, a sign of continuing troubles. The script got good early reviews. But for months the Web has been pulsing with rumors and in-depth accounts that when Jonze had a research screening last December, kids in the audience were crying and fleeing the theater--not exactly the reaction the studio had hoped for.”

Apparently one big problem is that the young boy at the center of the story is “almost entirely unlikable, coming off as more mean-spirited and bratty than mischievous.” Then there’s the matter of the wild things themselves, originally a mix of actors in furry suits and animatronic puppets. No one was happy with these critters, who are now being replaced by (of course) CGI wild things.

This is not the first time an adaptation of Where the Wild Things has run into trouble. Disney attempted a version in the ’80s, with none other than Pixar maven John Lasseter at the helm. Check out Goldstein’s story for a clip of test footage from that never-made cartoon.

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"Stop-Loss"; Kimberly Peirce on the Back-Door Draft

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Kimberly Peirce's first feature, the 1999 Boys Don't Cry, starred Hilary swank as Brandon Teena, the cross-dressing woman who was murdered by a couple of male associates who had met her when she was presenting herself as a man. It was one of the biggest indie success stories of the period and made a star of Swank (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance), who had previously been best known for The Next Karate Kid. Of all the up-and-coming filmmakers who managed to get their bids in just before the millennium turned, Peirce has been perhaps the most conspicuously missing in action since. Now, nine years later, she's back with her new film, Stop-Loss. The title refers to the "loophole" in American soldiers' contracts permitting for "involuntary extensions" of their tours, as "national security" is deemed to require it. Peirce learned about the so-called "back door draft", which the military has been relying on in the face of a drop-off in recruiting numbers during the Iraq war, from her half-brother, who enlisted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Peirce herself had responded to 9/11 by "traveling the country in 2003, interviewing military men and women and recording homecoming parades for a potential documentary about soldiers from sign-up to return." Then she started tinkering with a script for a fictional film called "AWOL." It wasn't until she'd listened to her brother's stories, and watched his cache of videos made by soldiers overseas, that her ideas began to focus around the idea of a patriotic soldier (played in Stop-Loss by Ryan Phillippe) who wanted to serve his country and has done his time but now wants to be allowed to move on and live his life. The army has other ideas.

Peirce hasn't just been kicking back for much of the nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Even before she began grappling with this new subject matter, she'd flirted with making movies based on Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Arthur Golden's novel Memoir of a Geisha, and the notorious inside-Hollywood murder of William Desmond Taylor. She also considered adapting The Ice at the Bottom of the World, a novel by Mark Richard, before instead inviting Richard to collaborate with her on the script of what became Stop-Loss. A self-described "Southern conservative," Richard may have counterbalanced Peirce's politics and helped prevent the script from turning into a screed. But if Stop-Loss is one more Iraq movie, it also has core similarities to Boys Don't Cry. “When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back," says Peirce, "he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men." As in Boys Don't Cry, Peirce has caught hold of a story of small town kids who risk their lives out of a need for a certain kind of camaraderie. The heroes who feel that they've fulfilled their duty and now expect to be dealt with honorably have only their tiny support network to rely on. “There was a sense of deep, deep longing before Stop-Loss," says Peirce. "Boys set the bar very high artistically for me. I wanted to be that much in love with my next character. I wanted to feel it was taking over my whole life. I was lonely when I wasn’t able to work on a movie at that level again."

The Screengrab : a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Where the Wild Things Aren't

"Stop-Loss"; Kimberly Peirce on the Back-Door Draft