Josh Harris saw all of this coming. The ubiquity of the Internet, the reality-TV craze, social networking, the surging access to (and increasingly desperate chase for) fame -- all of it. In 1999, Harris was at the bleeding edge of the vanguard chronicled in We Live in Public, filmmaker Ondi Timoner's Sundance-winning documentary charting Harris's time spent as an early Web mogul run aground on the shoals of self-obsession. On one hand, Timoner was lucky: That self-obsession yielded thousands of hours' worth of videotapes for her project. But it came at a cost.
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So get this pitch: A young, handsome Hollywood executive has some spare time on his hands, so he writes a script -- a romcom. And because this is a small town and he wants it to be judged on its own merits, he puts the name "Jennifer Kirby" on the front page. The script makes the rounds, people love it, and everyone wants a general meeting with this Kirby girl. So our hero gets his best friend to do him over in drag, heads out into the unforgiving L.A. sunshine, and not long after that the macho head of a studio falls for the script...and for him.
It's Tootsie for a new generation, right? And right when you have the suit sipping a Diet Coke on the other side of the desk hooked, that's when you reel him in with those five magic words:
Based on a true story.
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Harold Ramis has a busy weekend coming up: First, the veteran actor-writer-director will uncork his latest comedy, the historical Jack Black/Michael Cera farce Year One, in multiplexes nationwide. The following day, June 20, Ramis goes a little more micro at the Nantucket FiIm Festival, which will honor Ramis with its Screenwriter's Tribute and a 25th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters. (He'll also participate in a comedy roundtable with Ben Stiller, Peter Farrelly and John Hamburg the same day.) The comic maven spoke with Movieline recently about looking back in time -- from 25 years to two millenniums -- as well as his most underappreciated films and what he absolutely doesn't want Ghostbusters 3 to be.
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Exhausted the classic canon? Fed up with the current cinema of remakes, reboots and reimaginings? This week The Cold Case exhumes the best surrealist noir you've never heard of.
If a "Hollywood insider satire whodunit slasher" was announced today, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes in expectation of a Friedberg-Seltzer atrocity with a title like Hacky Movie. But if, reading on, you saw the words "shot as a B&W German Expressionist noir on one set in Boston", your contempt might be replaced by something approaching incredulity. Even harder to believe is that such a film already exists and that it's virtually unknown.
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Is there any more beloved American comedy icon than Betty White? You need only have scanned the outpouring on Twitter last Thursday, when the star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls shot to the top of the trending topics following a charming appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. (It bears mentioning that she took the host on in a cutthroat match of Beer Pong -- the Official Sport of Movieline, it just so happens.)
Whether boldly paving the way for cougars decades before their time as Sue Ann Nivens, or torturing roommates with tales of her Viking ancestry as Rose Nylund, there's simply no one who could match White's masterful comic timing or gift for character. With talk already turning to the possibility of Oscar nominations for her scene-stealing, tear-jerking turn in The Proposal, Movieline had the opportunity to talk with White about her incredible career.
She was everything we hoped for and more.
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It's time for another submission to Movieline's growing One-Page Screenplay library, a dog-eared three-ring-binder rapidly filling up with looseleaf flashes of brilliance by some of Hollywood's most celebrated screenwriters.
Today, we have a legend in our midst. Carl Gottlieb is an actor, screenwriter and author who boasts the screenplays for Jaws and The Jerk among his many credits. Perhaps you've heard of them. In the latter film, Carl also played Iron Balls McGinty -- the lifelong nemesis of Steve Martin's poor black sharecropper's son. (A short tribute to Iron Balls' nefarious ways is here.)
For his One-Page Screenplay, Carl has crafted nothing short of a Jaws for a new generation -- a gripping techno-thriller starring two stealthy natural predators. After the jump: Polaris Bears.
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Though he's enjoyed success as an independent film actor and even toplined a television series, Jeremy Renner's commanding performance in Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming thriller The Hurt Locker is poised to catapult him to a whole new level of recognition. As Staff Sergeant William James, Renner takes an already tense onscreen profession -- defusing bombs as part of the U.S. Army's Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) -- and invests it with layers of riveting unpredictability. He talked candidly to Movieline about the explosive role and the perils of making an independent action film with no money.
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You could quantify the ongoing poker boom in any number of ways, from the ratings surge for the World Series of Poker to the billion-dollar industry orbiting the explosion of Texas Hold 'Em to card shark Annie Duke's recent second-place finish on Celebrity Apprentice. But the phenomenon hit hardest for me Thursday night at CineVegas, where the red carpet for the terrific documentary All In: The Poker Movie drew more obsessive fans than any of the more conventionally star-studded events here to date. Sure, it's Vegas, and we were a few yards removed from the Palms's poker room. Still, when you can't even conduct an interview with two-time WSOP champion and all-around gambling celebrity Howard Lederer without swatting away fans, that's an eye-opener.
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If you've cued up a children's DVD over the past few years that wasn't made by Pixar, chances are that Karey Kirkpatrick had something to do with it. His screenwriting resume is a veritable master class in family entertainment: Chicken Run, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlotte's Web are just a few of his efforts, and after making his directorial debut with Over the Hedge (just the year after he wrote the screenplay for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), he's moved on to his first live-action directing gig with the Eddie Murphy comedy Imagine That. Movieline talked to Kirkpatrick about Murphy's mystique, the film's soundtrack (for which the director himself recorded several Beatles covers), and the film he's planning that will mark a big departure from his usual family-friendliness.
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To hear Tony Scott tell it today, the director doesn't regard his The Taking of Pelham 123 as a retelling, remake, or a reinvention of the 1974 original. He perceives it more as a metamorphosis of an old idea, reborn from the kinetic cocoon of modern Manhattan. As in the original, hostages are taken and money is demanded, but the world's gone cynical and wireless in the meantime. "My memory of the original was Walter Matthau with his laconic New York sense of humor, pants at half mast," Scott recalled to Movieline. "He was brilliant. But really the story, it was a very simplistic story -- it was a million dollars for hostages in a subway. And they had a sort of hip location. It was a hip location for a million bucks."
But is his big-budget updating any more hip, or just chaotic? Scott responds [with minor spoilers] after the jump.
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For 11 classic seasons, everybody in America knew John Ratzenberger's name. Well, at the very least they knew Cliff Claven's name, installed as he was at the corner of the Cheers serving area, spouting off made-up facts like some Miller-sipping human Wiktionary. The character actor with the unmistakable New England accent would then go on to an unlikely second career act, as Pixar's most dependable repertory player. Beginning with Toy Story, in which he voiced a pragmatic piggy bank named Hamm, Ratzenberger has gone on to appear in every Pixar release since, most recently as Up's Construction Foreman Tom. With that buoyant film sending audiences to animation heaven, and A Bug's Life's recent issue on Blu-ray, we thought it was time to spend a few minutes chatting with John Lasseter's rabbit's foot.
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As I mentioned yesterday, actor/comedian/raconteur Paul Scheer -- who through the years has delighted us with his humorous observations on Best Week Ever, angered us by bullying Kenneth the Page on 30 Rock, and elicited an array of other emotions via projects too numerous to go into here -- has been busily shooting Piranha 3-D on location at Lake Havasu, AZ.
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After a three-year hiatus from the screen, the notorious photographer and Kids/Bully/Ken Park visionary Larry Clark is planning a comeback. And believe it or not, there are no wasted, doomed teenagers in sight: Instead, Clark is the somewhat unlikely (even to himself) choice to revive Neil Jordan's 1986 underworld thriller Mona Lisa, a London-to-New York transplant featuring Mickey Rourke and Eva Green reviving roles originated by Bob Hoskins (whose performance was nominated for an Oscar) and Cathy Tyson. In the meantime, the filmmaker spent three days assembling Chavo, a 42-second-long film for the touring shorts omnibus 42×42, which also features work by David Lynch, Abel Ferrara, Asia Argento, Charles Burnett and more than three dozen other auteurs.
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As we wind down a day of red carpet exclusives from last night's Young Hollywood Awards, we thought we'd share our heart-to-heart with Jackass star and Hollywood mercenary Steve-O, whose past public antics -- including but not limited to red carpet peeing, red carpet testicle exposure, and red carpet setting-a-member-of-Good Charlotte-on-fire -- are the stuff of legend. Sober 15 months and looking great, we covered everything from his "rock bottom" moment (ever wonder what a Jackass intervention is like?), his new forearm tattoo (a naked man in jail accompanied by the words "Sex Behind Bars" -- possibly a relapse-deterrent), and, after noting that buddy Chris Pontius has been cast in Sofia Coppola's next film, a discussion about his own acting aspirations. He thinks he has a great role in him, and to be honest, so do we. Maybe Darren Aronofsky can hang a loosely autobiographical story on his shoulders -- the tale of a loner who just wants to reconcile with his estranged daughter, and relive his glory days thrilling millions by staple-gunning his own scrotes.
The interview is after the jump.
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Welcome back to Movieline's One-Page Screenplay project: the only place in the universe serving up single-page masterpieces from Hollywood's top screenwriters. You think one-page screenwriting is easy? It's a lot harder than it looks. They say that if you can't capture the audience's interest by the first syllable, you've already lost the game.
Not that that's a problem for this week's superstar contributor. Perusing our growing catalog, I was struck by a lack of two things: 1. Female voices, and 2. Oscar™ winners. Well, I'm thrilled to announce that today's entry remedies both of those issues, and quite spectacularly so. That's right, ladies and gentleman: You know her as Juno's life-giver, the great emancipator of The United States of Tara, the one, the only, Diablo Cody!
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