The Screengrab : miramax

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Phil Nugent — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

For whom were these movies made? Even when they managed to acquire a theatrical release, as Stacking did, they never got far out of the major cities before twitching to death in the hot sun. Certainly there was no audience for them among the people whose lives they tried to ennoble. Speaking as someone who grew up in a rural farming community, I can tell you that nobody who spends his days working on a farm wants to blow his mad money on the chance to watch some poor bastard wonder whether he'll be able to get this year's crop in. Basically, they were made only for the people who'd see them at a festival like Sundance: educated liberals who felt virtuous from seeing people in denim and broad-brimmed hats being boring on-screen and critics who enjoyed denouncing the public for not making these fine, well-meaning movies as successful as Lethal Weapon. One reason they're such period pieces now is that they were made before people started thinking in terms of the Red State/Blue State divide, which makes them bittersweet reminders of a time not so long ago when educated big-city liberals thought of the people who grow their steaks as dull but honorable tillers of the soil instead of that pack of dumbasses who re-elected Bush.

IN THE SOUP (1992): It's not exactly unheard of for a movie to be greeted with awards and recognition at Sundance and then die on the vine when it's sent out into the cold, unfriendly world to fend for itself. That was certainly the case with this comedy, starring Steve Buscemi as an aspiring filmmaker and the veteran character actor Seymour Cassel as a Life Force, which was directed and co-written by Alexandre Rockwell, the rtist formerly known as Mr. Jennifer Beals. (Beals is in it, too, as are Jim Jarmusch, Carol Kane, Stanley Tucci, Debi Mazar, Sam Rockwell, and the late '80s indie stalwart Rockets Redglare.) The movie's Grand Jury Prize wouldn't be so embarrassing if it weren't for the competition: among the movies it beat out was Reservoir Dogs, which got a legendary bad reception from a festival crowd put off by its violence and gaudy showmanship. You don't have to be a Tarantino enthusiast to compare the reaction his movie got to the soft, clumsy whimsey of Rockwell's and feel that Sundance, just three years after sex, lies... had taken it to a new level, was already in danger of seeming out of touch. Nothing Rockwell ever did again would garner as much attention; his biggest break came when Tarantino invited him to contribute a segment to the disastrous implosion of a multi-director feature, Four Rooms. The real winner of this round would be Steve Buscemi, who could boast of having starred in the year's big hit at Sundance and also having a breakout role in the real-world hit that smoked the Sundance hit.

THE BROTHERS McMULLEN (1995): Never has anybody gotten more out of a pretty face and a knack for making connections--he was working in the offices of Entertainment Tonight while making his movie and managed to slip a copy of the film to Redford himself when the great man was on ET plugging Quiz Show--when he had nothing, literally nothing else, to back it up than McMullen star and auteur Edward Burns. Burns's movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to be a modest hit in theaters, was a half-assed sitcom that benefited from his lack of an eye and his inability to parlay his $28.000 budget into a halfway-decent-looking or decent-sounding movie; for a while, people taken with Burns's puppy-dog eyes, floppy locks, and the notion that making a movie while working as a production assistant on Entertainment Tonight counted as a struggling-artist story assumed that the rough poverty-row look of the film must confer artistic respectablity on it. Burns cleared up any lingering misunderstanding with his second film, She's the One, where his lame script was given a pricey big-studio mounting and consequently just looked lame. (He also publicly humiliated his McMullen co-stars Mike McGlone and his then-girlfriend Maxine Bahns by casting them alongside real actors such as John Mahoney, Cameron Diaz, Amanda Peet, and Frank Vincent. McGlone's "performance" in She's the One, which consisted of having a petulant, screaming fit in just about every scene he was in, made him in particular look like a prime candidate for the title Supreme Asshat of the Known Universe.) Burns has directed half a dozen movies since then, none of which has garnered any real attention; he also acts, sort of, in better directors' films, most notably in Saving Private Ryan from back in the days when his name had some heat attached to it. Technically, his name still does, in the sense that he now must spend a certain amount of time wondering if he's obligated to correct people who think he's the Ed Burns responsible for The Wire.

THE SPITFIRE GRILL (1996): This movie about misunderstandings and redemption in rural Maine was the only feature film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff, best known for his work in TV, as a writer and producer on such series as Remington Steele and Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The real creative force behind the movie was Roger M. Courts, a direct mail fundraiser and CEO of a Mississippi-based Catholic fund-raising organization called the Sacred Heart League, Inc. Courts was interested in making a movie that could serve as a film equivalent to the "testimonial" literature religious groups passed around, and he spent many years looking for a script that had what he saw as the right mixture of Christian teaching and solid narrative values. He decided that he'd found it in Zlotoff's screenplay about a young ex-con (played by Alison Elliot) whose death at the end of the movie turns her into the fresh-faced Christ figure of Pepperidge Farm. It seems likely that the humanist audience at Sundance missed the religious undertones completely and simply took the movie's heavy-handed moralizing and rustic dullness as a throwback to the good old days of "regional filmmaking", and that the movie won the festival's Audience Award partly on the strength of nostalgia for the days before Miramax deals and Tarantino rip-offs. Ironically, the movie's popular success at the festival led to a high-priced bidding war among distributors. In the end, it was Castle Rock Entertainment that paid top dollar for the privilege of seeing the movie crash and burn in theaters later that year. The material has since found its true level as a play (with a de-sacrificial happy ending) that is popular with regional theater groups.

HAPPY, TEXAS (1999): Sometimes, the family vibe at a big festival, where a lot of steady filmgoers mix and mingle with filmmakers, can inspire a certain amount of self-deception. This godawful comedy, starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as escaped convicts posing as gay beauty pageant directors (while Northam fends off the advances of gay small town sheriff William H. Macy), was received with rhapsodic abandon at Sundance, which can best be interpreted as an explosion of love for Steve Zahn, who had delivered a steady stream of amazing supporting performances in such movies as Reality Bites, That Thing You Do, and Out of Sight, and who had his biggest role to date here. He won the Grand Jury Prize for his performance, which isn't completely off the wall: he's very funny in it. But Miramax's decision to shell out what was variously reported as anywhere from $2.5 million to $10 million dollars for the movie itself proved, shall we say, ill-advised. At the time of the purchase, there were actually outraged bleatings in the trade press from people complaining that Miramax got all the cool movies. But after Happy, Texas collapsed in theaters, the movie would be remembered only as the centerpiece of stories about how Harvey Weinstein couldn't be trusted alone with his checkbook at Sundance.

Trailer Review: Killshot

Paul Clark — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Looking at the IMDb page for Killshot, I can’t help but be a little confused about the parties involved. Sure, I can understand Quentin Tarantino exec-producing an Elmore Leonard adaptation. But somewhat more unexpected is that the director and screenwriter of note on the film have, between then, been responsible for Shakespeare in Love, Wings of the Dove, Proof, and The Four Feathers- in other words, not exactly Hollywood’s reigning kings of taut suspense. But looking at the “trivia” page, it all begins to make sense- Killshot is a former Miramax film, and director John Madden and writer Hossein Amini were Miramax favorites back when the film was shot in 2005. Hell, even the 3 1/2-year delay makes sense considering who ponied up the dough, although the question remains of why anyone would actually sit on a movie for that long. Were they waiting for one of the lead actors to become bankable? Tom Jane’s leading-man career didn’t quite pan out, and Diane Lane isn’t really able to open a movie, so maybe MGM (the new distributor) figures that Mickey Rourke’s Wrestler buzz will boost the box office enough to make it worth releasing. Or perhaps we’ve got a Midnight Meat Train situation here, with MGM contractually bound to give this a theatrical release. Yes, but will it be any good? On the basis of the trailer, it looks pretty uninspired, and is the sort of boilerplate trailer I practically forget while I’m watching. Which probably explains why I devoted so much time to the production history- after all, I had to write about something, didn’t I?

OST: "Pulp Fiction"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:15:00 GMT

We knew this day would come. We knew that eventually, we were going to have to address the man who is arguably almost as famous for his game-changing approach to soundtracks as for the actual movies he directs. Quentin Tarantino, like a lot of smart-ass culture vultures of his generation, is a pop-cult omnivore, as well-versed in music as he is in literature, film, television, and fashion, and it should come as no surprise that in his greatest accomplishement as a director, 1994's Pulp Fiction, he brought his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music to bear on the soundtrack with a geek's precision and an auteur's passion. Tarantino's instincts as a music director proved as profitable to Sony Music as his instincts as a filmmaker did to Miramax: the movie was a huge success, and the soundtrack went platinum almost immediately after its release. Selling over a million and a half units in its first year, it was one of the most popular soundtracks of the decade, and not only launched one career (that of Urge Overkill, the Chicago band who covered "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" on the album) but revived two more (those of Kool & the Gang and Dick Dale, who enjoyed a popular resurgence after two of their best-known songs were featured in the film).

The curious alchemy that took place when Tarantino put the soundtrack together -- and it is no exaggeration to call him the creator of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, as he personally selected every single track, often building entire scenes around a piece of music he felt would be appropriate -- has become characteristic of his films, and has led to his reputation as a director who has an uncanny ability to match up visual and musical elements in his films. And yet, many of his detractors -- and, for that matter, a number of his supporters -- are quick to point out that the story of music in Tarantino's films is one of missed opportunities, and a triumph of metareference over originality. After all, in his soundtracks no less than in his movies themselves, Quentin Tarantino is a pastiche artist. A filmmaker of his caliber is perfectly capable of doing what Jim Jarmusch, another director with a reputation for crafting stellar soundtracks, does: use a few existing pieces of music as ringers, and then commission an original score that conjures its own mood and moment, rather than relying on the emotions generated by preexisting songs to create impact. Just as his films constantly serve as a sort of postmodernist irritant, a nagging little voice saying, hey, do you remember this? Do you get what I'm referencing here?, his film music can be viewed as little more than a catalog of referents, a mixtape to the last half-century of junk culture that's designed not so much the create a thrilling film experience so much as remind you of a thrilling film experience you've already had.

And yet, as reluctant as we are to engage in such dismissive approaches, who cares? When the alchemy works so wonderfully, why pick nits? As long as Tarantino isn't being dismayingly obvious in his lifts -- a crime of which Reservoir Dogs was occasionally guilty -- they come in such rapid bursts (as in Kill Bill) or with such a dazzling degree of clever storytelling techniques (as in Pulp Fiction), the gentlemanly thing is not to notice. Sure, Quentin Tarantino is just a gifted rip-off artist. But he's so gifted, and his rip-offs are so amazingly successful, so exquisitely framed in new viewpoints and new contexts, and delivered in such a supremely confident and technically competent way, that he earns our indulgence the way a lesser filmmaker wouldn't. A Pulp Fiction with an original score might have had more integrity and originality, but it probably wouldn't have been as good. The key to Tarantino's genius, musically and as a filmmaker, isn't that he's showing us something we've never seen before; it's that he's showing it to us in a way we've never thought of, and making it seem new and exciting again. The greatness of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack isn't that he gathers together a bunch of songs we've never heard before, but that he's presenting them in such a way that we now inextricably associate them with the images he chose them to accompany. If this is a rip-off, let us make the most of it.

BEST TRACKS: The most memorable use of an extant song on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack is one of the most memorable in movie history: John Travolta's hitman and Uma Thurman's moll dance wildly and seductively to Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell." It's the purest distillation of Tarantino's genius for matching music to visual, surpassing even the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, and it's so smashingly effective that it's entered our cultural vocabulary in half a dozen ways. But there's plenty of other treats to be had here, including Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man", Al Green's "Let's Stay Together", a devastating use of "Jungle Boogie", and the weird, creepy ode to isolation, "Flowers on the Wall" by the otherwise sunshiney Statler Brothers. I've always found dialogue snippets on a soundtrack to be gimmicky and distracting, but there's plenty of them here for those that disagree. Worth seeking out is the collector's edition to the soundtrack, issued in 2002, which features a brief but generally enjoyable interview with Tarantino, and a handful of dynamite bonus tracks, including "Rumble" by proto-Dalean Link Wray & HIs Ray-Men, and "Out of Limits" by the Marketts, another surf classic.

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Screengrab Q&A: Joachim Trier, Director of Reprise

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film, like skewing timelines or having scenes play where the dialogue track doesn't match the action. How much of that was in the script and how much was done afterwards?
The screenplay is a lot like the film as a finished piece, but along the way you have to create something else and then come back to it. We would write a very intertwined, intercut scene to give the financiers an idea of how it would look. But then I would re-write it, with my co-writer, as a long linear scene that we would then cut up and go back to the initial idea. Dirty formalism, I usually call it. It needs to be alive and chaotic, yet it's also quite particularly planned.

The film plays very loose, but at the same time feels very focused.
I think those are the kind of contrasts we are always looking for when we do movies. I think it's the same for the actors. They go on set and they learn their lines and practice and run them again and again, and then they go on set and kind of lose them.

You're also dealing with the contrast between light and dark; the film balances very serious scenes with very funny ones.
It's kind of like music. In order to [fit in both tones], you need almost musical transitions.

That is how people actually deal with unhappy experiences. If you're going to pick your best friend up out of the mental hospital, you make a joke to deal with it.
Otherwise you won't survive. Compensational dynamics in people are more interesting. When the two boys are closest to each other, they can throw a lot of shit and say bad things to each other, but when they drift apart, they don't have that glue anymore. They end up trying to be polite; they're just not sure what to say anymore.

You cast mostly non-professional actors.
We looked at musicians or friends of friends or stand-up comedians, all sorts of people. In fairness, some of them are trained actors, but the lead parts are all people who have done other things. Like the guy that plays Phillip is a doctor. He worked with young teenage schizophrenics as part of his education as a doctor, so he had great experience, and he knew that madness isn't always excessive and screamy. It can sometimes be very drawn in.

Were there filmmakers or artists in general who inspired you?
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker are people who have meant a lot to me, because they made films that deal with almost the ground substance of cinema — memory, representation, identity — things that I think give themselves as themes to films particularly. Also Woody Allen, with Annie Hall. A lot of that stuff is seen as comedy but it's actually really good drama. But there are millions of references — a lot of music actually. The guy that did the score has a band called The White Birch, and we were listening to that all the time when we were writing. It was great when he said he would do the score for us since he'd never done feature film scores before.

Was he a friend of yours?
Not at the time, but we had some common friends.You know, it's a little ironic since Reprise is kind of about people who fall apart as friends, but I've made a lot of new friends through this process.

[SEMI-SPOILER ALERT] I thought it was refreshing to have an, in a sense, uplifting, almost happy ending.
Not everybody has interpreted it like that.

I kept waiting for something really dark to happen and I thought the way you tied things up was very nice. Did you struggle with that decision?
People interpret the ending differently. Some people see it as quite bleak and others see it as optimistic. I was always, in my mind, cheering for the characters; I just hope that people are open to an open ending.

One of the hallmarks of American indies seems to be that if you have a happy ending, you secretly wanted to make a commercial film.
I remember hearing acquisitions people talking about the films at Sundance: "Was it hopeful? Was it uplifting?" Those were the two words I kept hearing, and it struck me as so odd. . . I mean, what the fuck is hopeful? It makes me hopeful sometimes if a filmmaker can make a film that's truly sad and makes me feel less alone. But this idea of hopefulness I found very funny.

The Lawyering of the "Rings"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

New Line Cinema only recently settled a lawsuit filed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that was supposed to clear things up between the studio and the filmmaker and open the way to production on Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Now the studio has been hit by a suit by heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien and a group of publishers who are looking to tap the studio for millions. Also waiting for their day in court: the Saul Zaentz Company, which once upon a time owned the film rights to Tolkien's work--they sold them to Miramax, which in turn sold them to New Line, and which has already had its own complicated round of legal action with New Line — and "sixteen New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise." As The New York Times reports, "the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic 'franchise' for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour."

Much of the — let's be generous and call it "miscommunication" — between all these warring parties may come down to New Line's status as an "independent studio", albeit one owned by Time Warner, which has its own manner of accounting for international revenue that differs from that of the major, worldwide studios. That's cold comfort for New Line when it considers the full ramifications of the Tolkien family suit, which "has the earmarks of a public relations nightmare." The studio stands accused of shafting the heirs of a beloved author, including a charitable trust whose revenues go to various very good causes, by ignoring a long-standing agreement regarding the money they were to receive from any film adaptations of the Rings books. Bonnie Eskenazi one of the lawyers for the Tolkien forces, has said that her clients waited so many years before filing suit because they were innocent enough to think that the greedy movie hustlers could be dealt with on a reasonable level, without bringing lawyers into it: "They do things politely, in a certain manner," she said, a statement that for all the sense it will make to most lawyers in the greater Los Angeles area might as well have been issued in Esperantu. Certainly it seems a long, long time ago that the Rings movie project smacked anyone of a risky financial venture. It'll be the ultimate sick joke about Hollywood accounting if the comparatively modest follow-up project The Hobbit never gets off the ground because New Line can't get everyone paid to the courts' satisfaction.