The Screengrab : jonathan lethem

New Line Projects Enter Development Limbo

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Being a Hollywood screenwriter is an unpredictable rollercoaster of a career even when the studio you've finally worked out a deal with hasn't just basically disappeared. But that's the case with those writers who had projects pending with New Line Cinema, the idiosyncratic company whose recent financial woes ended with the decision to fold it into Warner Bros. (the better to "streamline" its slate of films) and the departure of Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, the CEOs who founded New Line forty years ago. A lot of people who thought their next projects had been safely sheparded past Development Hell have found themselves right back in purgatory while the "transition team" scours the wreckage with a mind to defining just what the new New Line is supposed to be all about. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jay Fernandez identifies the types of projects that are probably safe, mainly sequels and remakes tied to New Line's licensed properties such as Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and "low-budget comedies like The Grackle, The $40,000 Man and All You Can Eat." Imperilled: "higher-budget or prestige dramas and thrillers, such as writer-director Edward Norton's adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, Brett Ratner's production of Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra and producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci's Red Cell." (Some lucky winners may be bumped up the chain to become Warner Bros. productions.) On the plus side, some projects that had become snared in New Line's corporate tentacles and weren't looking to get made may revert to their creators, who'll have another shot at placing them with another studio. Right now, there isn't much anyone can do besides wait and see.

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (October 11 - 28)

Peter Smith — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Brooklyn Academy of Music gives the borough's literary poster boy a chance to display his wide-ranging taste in movies with the program Jonathan Lethem Selects (October 15 - November 19). Those looking for hard-to-find rough gems will be especially attracted to the "Hitman Double Feature" on October 22, with Don Siegel's The Hitman (1958) paired with the taut B classic Murder by Contract (1958), well directed by Irving Lerner and starring Vince Edwards as an icy fellow who's putting himself through college by performing mob hits on the side. On November 12, a screening of the gritty seventies Dustin Hoffman vehicle Straight Time will be followed by a discussion between Lethem and the movie's director, Ulu Grosbard.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County of Museum of Art presents Life and So Much More: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami (October 12 - 27), with ten features and three triple bills of shorts by the leading figure in Iranian cinema. A great opportunity for the curious or the benighted to catch up.

BERKELEY: Attention, Leone freaks: Once upon a Time in Widescreen: The Films of Sergio Leone (October 12 - 28) has everything you could want — the Dollars trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and the messed-up but lovable Duck, You Sucker, starring Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit and James Coburn as a wayward IRA soldier — in the format you love, with many of them shown in restored prints.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: We may not have a labor movement in this country anymore, but that's no reason not to kick back and celebrate the 2007 DC Labor Filmfest (October 11 - 17) at the AFI Silver Theater. "Organized and presented by the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute and the American Film Institute," the festival presents "an array of new films and beloved classics about work and workers," including a mini-fest of works by the living soul of socially committed British kitchen-sink drama, Ken Loach. (The selection includes Loach's Los Angeles movie, Bread and Roses and his little-screened documentary on the 1980 British miners' strike, Which Side Are You On?) The program also includes the Japanese comedy Hula Girls, the German documentary Our Daily Bread, and that one American movie in a billion that says something about working for a living in a way that most people seem able to relate to: Mike Judge's Office Space.

— Phil Nugent