The Screengrab : david koepp

Fox Pulls the Plug on "Terminator" TV Series

Phil Nugent — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Fox has canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the expensive TV series spun off from the now 24-year-old movie franchise, after two seasons and a mere 31 episodes. The series was "created" by Josh Friedman, a screenwriter and blogger who, strangely enough, is best known for his association with movies that he didn't work on. (Friedman was co-credited, with David Koepp, with the script for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, based on a script he'd written based on the H. G. Wells novel before Spielberg and Koepp got involved, and he got the ball rolling on Snakes on a Plane as an Internet punch line.) The series, which got off to a fast start when it premiered mid-season in January 2008, starred Lena Headley of 300 in the role made famous by Linda Hamilton and Thomas Dekker as John Connor, the role created by Edward Furling in Terminator 2, picked up by Nick Stahl in Terminator 3, and about to become, as of this coming Friday, the now-exclusive property of Christian Bale. The cast also included the dancer-actress Summer Glau, whose picture now belongs in the dictionary next to the term "hot poker-faced killer robot babe." It is an unwieldy term, but clearly it or something with the same meaning belongs in the language.

The series, which ended with a cliffhanger designed to make viewers sit up and yell at their sets, "Oh, like this wasn't already confusing enough!", recently won 53% of the vote in the TV channel E!'s annual Save One Show poll, in which viewers select their favorite among a selection of programs said to be in danger of imminent cancellation. (Ironically, the shows that came in second and third in the rankings, Chuck and Dollhouse, have both since been renewed.) For his part, Friedman has issued a public letter thanking fans for their support, saying, "Every network wants a big fat hit, especially one with a brand name behind it, and Fox was/is no different. They supported the show, they supported my vision of the show, and they gave it plenty of time to find an audience." Of course, for the movie industry, the big question is whether this bodes ill for the relaunch of the brand name as a big-budget movie franchise, when Terminator Salvation opens. If the movie fails to live up to its makers' hopes, they may have something to point to now besides Bale's much-disseminated video rant.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

Trailer Review: Ghost Town

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Since I first saw the original version of The Office, I've been of the opinion that Ricky Gervais is one of the funniest guys on the planet right now. So why does this trailer leave me strangely cold? Is it that Gervais, who excels at playing off-putting, needy sorts, is ill-suited to a high-concept Hollywood comedy? Is it the presence of Tea Leoni, who hasn’t really seemed comfortable in a role since Flirting With Disaster a dozen years ago? Or is it simply the fact the this is the umpteeneth comedy about a man whose life is thrown out of whack when he learns he can see the dead? Whatever it is, I’m guessing much of the blame can be placed at the feet of veteran screenwriter-turned-director David Koepp, who doesn’t appear to have the same handle on Gervais’ brand of comedy as Gervais and frequent collaborator Stephen Merchant did on The Office and Extras. I still plan on seeing this in support of Gervais, but if the movie sucks, at least now I won’t be too disappointed.

Raiders of the Leaked Frank Darabont Screenplay

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in the crush of publicity for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, you might have heard that an early version of Indy 4 was scripted by that master of the Stephen King prison movie, Frank Darabont. Among the people who spoke highly of the Darabont script was…Frank Darabont, who made it clear while doing publicity for The Mist over a year ago that he wouldn’t be sending George Lucas any congratulatory bouquets. “I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn't like the script,” Darabont told MTV. “I told him he was crazy. I said, ‘You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.’ You can say things like that to George, and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know.” When asked if he’d like to share his version of Indy with the world, Darabont replied, “I would love it, but it's not my material to disseminate.”

Apparently, someone disseminated it, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Last week a PDF document purporting to be Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods by Frank Darabont surfaced online. Lawyers torpedoed it before we could get our hands on it, and although it’s probably still easy enough to track down, we’re slow readers anyway. So we thought we’d take a spin around the Indysphere and see if there’s any consensus about this alleged artifact.

The first thing that’s apparent: No LaBeouf. That’s right, the character of “Mutt” is entirely absent from City of the Gods. Again, per MTV: “No Mutt Williams; no Mac; a tougher, more Raiders-esque Marion; and a climax that not only gives Indy something to do (how in the world did David Koepp think to give Indy nothing?) but forces him to make a decision that rivals the end of Crusade (the cup or a father's love?), crystallizing the character and his history into one momentous singularity.” And here we thought One Momentous Singularity was the new James Bond movie.

According to the Feed, “the script is largely the same, storywise, focusing on the discovery of the crystal skull, as well as the lost city in Peru where the Gods were thought to live, only to discover that these "gods" were aliens with a culture advanced thousands of years beyond our own. Also, Marion Ravenwood is in the script…and, to my surprise, the ‘nuking the fridge’ sequence and the giant ants are there, as well. However, also in this script are Dr. Henry Jones, Sr. and Sallah, making awesome cameo appearances that really help cement the whole history of Indiana Jones, and tie the whole saga together.”

Of course, Darabont was not the only big name scribe to take a whack at Indy. Again we turn to MTV, where M. Night Shyamalan was queried about his involvement in shaping the story of the fourth installment. “I was just gathering information at that point from all the deities,” Shyamalan said, referring to Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, [Frank] Marshall, and George Lucas. “I haven’t seen the new one yet. I can’t wait… I understand there are a few things we all talked about that are there.” I’m going to be generous and assume Night came up with the quicksand.

Related:
Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008
Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Hollywood Accountants