Movie City Indie Archive for May, 2005
Dodges mothballed: Brit public film finance
In the Observer, Nick Cohen takes notes on some of the soon to be mothballed UK tax dodges: “Gradually, as Brit-flick followed Brit-flick, the Inland Revenue began to notice a disconcerting pattern: tax relief on film production wasn’t financing film production but being creamed off by middle men. The technicalities of the deals were complicated, but the basic ‘sale and leaseback’ scam was simple. A corporation—a Hollywood film studio—or a consortium of wealthy men… would nominally buy a film for, say, £100 million and lease it back to the producer. As corporation tax is at 30 per cent and the higher rate of personal tax is at 40 per cent, the sale would entitle corporations to knock £30m off their tax bills and footballers and City lawyers to knock £40m off their tax bills. The bulk of their ‘investments’, however, wouldn’t be risked in the notoriously unpredictable film market. The producer would [instead] put most of the money in a high-interest bank account and pay it back to the lenders over the 15 years of the lease. Only a small proportion, typically between 10 to 15 per cent, would actually be spent on the film. Even if every penny was lost, the investors wouldn’t have suffered. They would have gained far more in tax breaks than they had lost in the multiplexes and still have the £85m earning interest which would one day be theirs.” [More at the link.]
Good Will Humping: Branagh digs Shakespeare again
Kenneth Branagh finds work again, courtesy of HBO, he tells the Telegraph’s John Hiscock: “Five years have passed since… Branagh last steered William Shakespeare to the screen with an all-star, singing, dancing version of Love’s Labour’s Lost that not only failed to find an audience, but performed so dismally that it torpedoed his plans for two more Bard-based frolics.” Putting a good face on it, Branagh tells Hiscock that “he feels enough time has elapsed for him to return to his first love.” “Sometimes it’s good to go away from Shakespeare for a bit,” says Branagh… “Then you come back and try to inform it with work from other materials and other mediums. I’ve always had less of a career plan than people think. The main thing is I’ve been lucky enough to be approached with good work and I’ve made my choices based on that… I’m just thrilled because it’s been a long time,” he says. It has also been a somewhat chastening lesson that no matter how big one’s reputation, it is money and box-office receipts that ultimately dictate power in the film industry.”
GreenCannes
The best daily summaries of Cannesblogs high and low are at GreenCine.
Schickel’s tough love: Agee's desperate and pathetic work
In his customary berth on page 2 of the Sunday Los Angeles Times Book Review (May 15), Richard Schickel disinters a predecessor at Time magazine as a movie reviewer, James Agee, and has a happy-dance on the remains. Upon the publication of a “desperate and pathetic” draft of a film treatment that Agee had written for Charlie Chaplin, the ever-benevolent Schickel writes with what reads like the yield of years of calculated hatred, “Such greatness as Agee achieved—and reviewing movies is a field that recruits clever souls but never noble ones—derives from the purity of his enthusiasms and distastes and the rather sporty style he devised to convey them. Some of this manner he borrowed from a forgotten but more trustworthy reviewer, Otis Ferguson of the New Republic… As Manny Farber observed in a tormented piece about the man who mentored him, Agee had no film esthetic… He praised movies that agreed with his liberal, humanistic and essentially liberal biases… He was like a music critic who attends operas for their plots… This document is as disheveled as Agee himself was. An alcoholic, an insomniac, with teeth rotting in his head and dress so slovenly and odoriferous he was banned from eating in the… Fox commissary, he evidently wrote this… in the deeper watches of drunken and desperate nights…. Agee was lucky mainly in his early death, which permitted people to mourn the works unwritten.” (The book is “Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay,” by John Wranovics, Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95.) [The link is subscriber-only.]
A giggle on the Croisette with Terry Gilliam
Ever-resilient Terry Gilliam waxes optimistic to Andrew Pulver in the Guardian about his Brothers Grimm: “Gilliam has got some powerful help in his corner: the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob, who took on the project in 2003 when, Gilliam says, original producers MGM pulled out their funding at the last minute. It’s fair to say that Gilliam, who has a reputation as a wildly expensive cinematic visionary, might not be the best creative fit for the tough-minded, dollars-and-cents Weinsteins—you can’t help but visualise two juggernauts crashing head-on… But, if nothing else, Gilliam recognises their ability to get a movie out there. “They’re going to sell the shit out of it, and make it a success. They’re the best at it,” he mutters after the show…”
Mad Hot doubt: teaching Ballroom's teacher
Yomaira Reynoso, one of the dance teachers of PS 115, talks to Lily Oei and Aaron Dobbs at Gothamist about filmmaker Marilyn Agrelo and her crew: “They came in and introduced themselves like six months before, but we didn’t know if our school would be chosen. We didn’t hear from them for a while, and we figured, oh probably not. Then, all of the sudden, there was that phone call. It was exciting, but we never thought—I thought they were going to film a little cable thing. Not that I didn’t have confidence in them, I just didn’t believe – I didn’t think it was going anywhere. I was just thinking, they’re filming the kids. The kids are having a great time and showing off, that’s all I thought of.”
Tear down that wall, Mr. Rosenbaum!
Freelancers for the Chicago Reader have gotten notice that the paper’s about to follow the Austin Chronicle PDF download model with a rejiggered payment schedule; the mass email also suggests that the archives will likely become free soon, rather than paid, making the writing of reviewers like Jonathan Rosenbaum viewable and Google-able. (An interesting development after the LA Times pulled its entertainment content from behind a firewall and on a day that the New York Times announced “Times Select,” where a chunk of its premium content will follow the Independent (UK) model and only be available for a $49.95 annual fee. Toronto’s Globe & Mail has also placed most of its articles behind a subscription-only barrier.)
Roxie boxed: the slow death of a SF rep house
Another Bay Area arthouse is slipping away, Bill Banning‘s Roxie: “The little Mission District movie house [280 seats] has always struggled to stay afloat, but now it’s sinking in debt. The business will probably go under soon, unless Banning can rustle up the money to pay down some of the $140,000 owed the IRS, the landlord and others… The Roxie has survived, while other single-screen theaters vanished, by finding and distributing films that became arthouse hits. Having a loyal audience has helped, too. The fans came through during the Roxie’s back-rent crisis of 2002, contributing cash and packing the house for benefit screenings of The Last Picture Show …If he doesn’t come up with some cash in the next 45 days or so, he expects the IRS to seize the business… “My lawyers suggested bankruptcy at least 10 years ago,” said Banning, who has lived with his wife and son in an apartment a block away on 16th Street since he started at the Roxie. “I’m of the old school that won’t do that. I guess I’m an optimist. I feel as if something will come along. And for all these years, something has always come along.”
The Passion of the F-bomb: Kevin Smith
Local boy Kevin Smith lights up a few for the Asbury Park Press upon the publication of “Silent Bob Speaks: The Collected Writings of Kevin Smith.” “How will screen stud Ben Affleck, a frequent player in Smith’s films, react when he reads about Smith’s “heterosexual crush” on him…?” He’s seen that before… so he’s kind of way-familiar with that quote… He’s kind of charmed by it. He realizes that I wouldn’t have a shot in the world with him, even if he was gay and I was gay.” … What is off-limits for Smith?” “As long as it’s my life, then I’m kind of OK with talking about it. The problem that you run into is that sometimes your life is other people’s life as well, like (Smith’s wife) Jen. But I just don’t know how else to go about it.” …There’s a section of the Web site called “My Boring-Ass Life,’ where I literally do everything that’s happened in my day. That tends to get very detail-oriented.”
Yari of the 'It Girl': Financing Edie
One of producer Bob Yari‘s entities is putting up the cash for a Katie Holmes-starring biopic Rush & Molloy reports. Mayor of Sunset Strip director George Hickenlooper gushes: “Katie is not too different from Edie, who arrived in New York as young, innocent, looking for excitement.” Guy Pearce is Hickenlooper’s Andy Warhol in Factory Girl, but the director knwon for his compulsive affinity for 1970s “Hollywood Renaissance” filmmakers is manufacturing a distraction from her reputed affairs, such as with Bob Dylan. “Edie definitely knew Dylan, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and others… We’ve decided to create a character who is kind of hybrid of all of them.”
Pauline Kael once said…: Re: The Sith
It’s blurbista Peter Travers‘ turn to exhume the Empress of kiss-kiss-bang-bang in a rare pan, of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith: “The late critic Pauline Kael once dismissed Star Wars as ‘an epic without a dream.'”
Mr. Godard, do you blah blah blah?
Godard lets a little more air out of his recent Notre musique, talking to Tim Witt in the June Sight & Sound. He has no eyes for the fat little 8-year-old girl in Ohio: “What’s bad is that students think that because they’ve got a little camera, they can film something. The manufacturers, even the critics, say: ‘It’s great! Everyone can make cinema!’ No, not everyone can… Everyone can think they’re making cinema, or say, ‘I make cinema.’ But if you give someone a pencil it doesn’t mean they’re going to draw like Raphael or Rembrandt.” The scene in the film is prompted by Godard only half-answering the questions of film students. “If I’d said all that, however, it would have been too long for the scene… Three quarters of the questions would have been stupid. Those are the kinds of questions they’re educated to ask. I remember when I was lecturing in the US I’d spot a girl who looked pretty and address myself to her, as I find talking directly to one person rather than to a group helps me speak. Then she’d formulate a long sentence: ‘Mr Godard, do you blah blah blah’ followed by ‘can you elaborate?’ …I’d start to elaborate further only to look up to see she’s picked up her file and is leaving. I don’t know what your students are like, but I have my suspicions.”
WTF?: UK PhDs K.O. What the Bleep?
A few learned minds gather in the Guardian to put the correct word after “What the?” in What the Bleep Do We Know?. Simon Singh has a PhD in particle physics from Cambridge University: I have spent my entire working life either doing science or conveying its meaning and beauty to the public. Consequently, I despise What the Bleep Do We Know!?, because it distorts science to fit its own agenda, it is full of half-truths and misleading analogies, and some of its so-called scientific claims are downright lies. (More juicy loveliness at the link.) Dr Joao Migueijo, identified as reader in theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, found the movie “horrendously tedious even before we get to its substance. Its meat, alas, only makes matters worse. It would be unwise to condemn total lunacy; it has an important role in society, that of keeping us human. But to deliberately misquote science to gain credibility sounds desperate and badly backfires… One can also understand why the political status quo has such a vested interest in suppressing quality education for the masses. America has long been the land of misinformation, ignorance and prejudice. This is abundantly confirmed by a film, which against all appearances, is actually very mainstream…Please just give us unadultered old-style underground lunacy – it’s so much more entertaining.�”
Uncrossing Jordan: Neil leaves the dole
As his novel “Shade” is issued in paperback, writer-director Neil Jordan recollects his last days on unemployment in the Guardian: “The Sergio Leone films were the ones that first allowed me see there was more going on here than pure entertainment. Then I saw Fellini’s La Strada and realised there was something here that didn’t only aspire to poetry, that was poetry. But Irish people didn’t make films. They wrote books that were banned, whereupon they had to leave the country.” Jordan describes at length the circumstances that led to him getting in trouble with the bureaucrats, and considers, “We all need a catalyst and maybe [this man] was mine. I can still remember the feeling of weightlessness, cycling home past the seagulls picking at the mud along the Tolka River.”
Blockbuster bust: no more copycatting Netflix
Blockbuster is getting out of Netflix’s biz: “Shares of online DVD rental company Netflix… jumped more than 9% on speculation that rival Blockbuster … would shut down its fledgling online rental service following Carl Icahn’s election to Blockbuster’s board of directors, an analyst said.”
