The Screengrab : wonderland

The Return of Mark Leyner

Phil Nugent — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the forthcoming John Cusack movie War, Inc. comes in the opening credits, which reveal that the movie's screenplay is by Cusack, Jeremy (Bulworth) Pikser, and Mark Leyner. Leyner, now 52, was that rarest of things, a genuine literary star in the 1990s, when such books as Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroentesterologist were both critically acclaimed and commercially trendy. Leyner, whose writing danced on the line between experimental meta-fiction and stand-up comedy, was a popular get for magazine profiles and a welcome guest on the David Letterman and Conan O'Brien talk shows. But after his 1998 novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, he slipped from view. Where's he been all this time? Trying to break into writing for TV and movies, it appears. He developed "a pilot about a kilt-wearing, punk rock surgeon for MTV called Iggy Vile, M.D." and wrote scripts for the acclaimed mental-health-ward network drama Wonderland, which ABC cancelled almost instantly--before, in fact, any of the episodes Leyner worked on had a chance to air. One upshot of that was that he met the show's medical consultant, Billy Goldberg, who would collaborate with Leyner on two books of goofball medical questions-and-answers, Why Do Men Have Nipples? and Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? That must have seemed an amusing goof for someone who'd been touted as an important, form-redefining writer and a doctor who'd gotten one foot into show business via a cause celebre' TV series. The books sold better "than all of Mr. Leyner’s books combined" and were "spun off into a desk calendar."

Leyner's association with John Cusack began, Cusack says, when the actor "called him up, kind of as a fan, and said, ‘Let’s do something together? Can we do something?’” Today, they worked on a doomed treatment of a movie version of Et Tu, Babe before hatching the idea for the Iraq satire War, Inc. As Leyner sees it, he brings something a little different to the table than his worthy collaborators. “What John and Jeremy might see as the foreground of the movie, I kind of saw it as the background. I’m more interested in other aspects of the movie. The sort of critique of heroic iconology. The idea of a person who’s actively in conflict with himself.” He and Cusack are working on another movie idea, but Leyner has also sketched out a new work of fiction. (No fool, he is also working with Dr. Goldberg on another book of funny medical lore.) Regarding how long it's been since he had to dodge book reviews, he says, “Whatever this period of time has been, I’ve needed it. Given the extremity of my personal identification with that work, I think 10 years is probably sort of minimal. … I made a very conscious decision to try to do other things.”

Little Minx's Exquisite Corpse: Internet Playground for Tomorrow's Classic Commercials Directors, Today

Phil Nugent — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Little Minx, a commercial production company founded in 1998, has set up a website designed to give their directors a chance to strut their stuff via a series of very short films made under the umbrella title of "Exquisite Corpse". As in the Surrealists' parlor game of the same name, the concept is a sort of creative pass-the-baton game: the chief rule is that each filmmaker has to pick up with the last line of the script from the preceding film. (Typical titles: "She Turns Back and Faces Forward, At Peace" and "Without Missing A Beat, She Asks, 'Waffles For Breakfast?'") Handsomely produced (by Little Minx company founder Rhea Scott), the five films currently available for viewing are as easy on the eyes as they are soft in content. They range in style from urban-gangbanger-violence with arty flashback structure to New Age-feminist music video, and if the worst that can be said for most of the best of them is that they don't have anything new to say however snazzily they say it, the best that can be said of the worst of them is that they're over before you've had a chance to mind them much. The one that seems to have gotten the most attention, Josh Miller's "Waffles", is built around a plot twist that you can see coming from a mile off, but it does have a great opening line ("I guess what I'm tryin' to say is that if the good lord put hair there, it's probably for a reason."), some well-placed waka-jawaka on the soundtrack, and good acting by a cast headed by Stephen Mendillo, a familiar face from '90s episodes of classic Law and Order, and a fetching young actress named Aviva, who was in Superbad. And Chris Nelson's "She Turns Back..." leavens its standard-issue picture of the horrors of a TV casting call with a striking performance by Cara Failer as a conflicted kid actress trying to hang onto some self-respect. Well-executed but unsurprising, these are ideal for viewing on an iPod--which is only a put-down if the filmmakers had grander ambitions than that.

Other websites are popping up now (such as Wonderland) that aim to use the Internet to bring together talented new filmmakers and give viewers access to their work. "Exquisite Corpse" seems like the vanguard for a more business-minded approach that might be called cutting-edge practical: by giving commercial directors the chance to show how they might do if given the chance to stretch a little--say, behind the camera on a theatrical feature film--it may serve industry people as the latest concept in audition reels, while attracting moviegoers who are curious to see where the next Ridley Scott or Brett Ratner might be coming from. My own favorite of the films posted so far may actually be the first, Laurent Briet's "With the Eyes of Every Man Riveted Upon Her," a pulse-driven little vignette set in a gym that makes canny use of its teenaged lead actress and the Black Strobe song "Shining Bright Star." It would make a great commercial for something, which seems to be the idea.

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce