Movie Piracy

So the 3rd installment of Pirates of the Caribbean raked in more than 400 million bucks worldwide. This is not because it is a good film. It is because it opened on 10,000 screens in 104 countries. There are many places in the world where this means this may have been the only real option to watch over the weekend. Plus, the number is for six days, not for the weekend. For weekend gross, actually Spiderman did better.
So what kind of a victory is this, when you open a film in every available movie theater? The victory of a bully. They spend $300 million dollars on a film. They glut every screen with it and the film isn't even good. I haven't seen it, but I know it sucks. The same goes for Spiderman. These things should not be called films anymore. They are amusement rides.

Two movies

I rented Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, a truly bad movie. Apparently, 3 days of shooting my own masterpiece were not enough to discourage me from criticizing somebody else's work. I didn't have millions of dollars, like Mr. De Palma did, nor stars, nor Vilmos Szigmond. So I feel entitled to crap all over his film.
Somehow you can tell by the first frame of the film that it is a disaster.
Why is it so bad? Where do I start?
I blame most of the disaster in the casting, particularly that of Josh Hartnett, in the role of the hero policeman. I want to know who decided that this kid, who has the emotional depth of a lamp, is an actor. I have never seen anybody suck so much. He can't act, he can't speak, and on top of everything he delivers a mumbling voiceover narration suitable only for the treatment of acute insomnia. Why, if there are so many young, capable, interesting actors in Hollywood, De Palma chose this klotz, is beyond me, but he ruins the film. He is so bad, that it took me like two hours to realize that he was sexually obsessed with the footage of the Black Dahlia's sex movies. A wall could have expressed that more accurately. The other actors just give up trying to be alive next to him, and none of them, except for Hilary Swank and Mia Kirshner, seem to have a clue of what to do. It is interesting to see otherwise reliable actors, like Aaron Eckhart and Scarlett Johansson, totally adrift and acting awfully, no doubt aided by a terribly cliched script.
I don't know the source material, James Ellroy's novel, but I know that the movie is called the Black Dahlia because of a gruesome real-life murder and so what I expect to see is a detective story about the murder, which has never been solved. Instead, we are treated to the boring and irrelevant relationship between two partner cops, the dame in the middle and no Dahlia to speak of for hours. When she finally shows up, played by Mia Kirshner, she is the only thing in the film that doesn't seem to come straight from Mme Tussauds. Then there is Hilary Swank, acting weird as the klotz's perverse love interest. She's supposed to look like the victim, but you can't understand why anybody thinks that Hilary Swank looks like Mia Kirshner. Then there is Fiona Shaw, going berserk in a most disturbing way, as her mother. This has got to be the most acute case of unhinged hamming ever recorded. Puts Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rod Steiger* to shame. Coming from an actress of Shaw's caliber, it's painfully embarrassing.
My guess is that the entire approach of the film is misguided. The interesting thing about this story is the endless rot and corruption beneath the glaring veneer of balmy sunshine and Hollywood glamour. But this looks like an expensive music video, all very reminiscent of glamorous photography but not in touch at all with the messy corruption underneath the tinsel.
A terrible movie. Hack work.
*Two hams I loathe.

I also revisited Rosemary's Baby. And boy, do I wish I had seen it before I shot my film. Polanski is a master of creating tension in very limited spaces (check out Knife in the Water). His doors and windows and gorgeously effective camera moves tell the story better than words. He loves that thing where someone answers the phone in the other room and you just see her back. Very unsettling. He is also a master of sound. There is always a clock ticking, or the muffled sounds coming from that other apartment, or stuff that adds to the menace without screaming for attention. This story of sexual guilt is very similar to the story of sexual panic in his film Repulsion, which I like much better.
I prefer to believe it's all in Mia Farrow's head. That is much more interesting than an actual satanic coven. But this is one of the themes in Polanski's work, God bless him: Hell is the neighbors (check out The Tenant). I love that the most benign elderly people are potential satanists. Delightful. I love the casting of the old Hollywood actors. I'm not crazy about the hamming of Ruth Gordon, but somehow it works for the movie. The acting is stilted and clunky at times, but Mia Farrow, as bad as she is, works really well because of how strange and vulnerable she is. She also created a craze with that haircut, which the movie makes sure to mention about 5 times, credited to Vidal Sassoon.
Rosemary's dream sequence is magnificent. All done without special effects, rather cheesily, but it is psychologically and visually believable. It does feel like a dream. And Polanski knows suggestion is far more powerful than showing you the horror. The movie will creep you out.

Close Relations, The Shoot Part II

As you can imagine, yours truly was so exhausted after three nights of filming that I could barely speak in coherent sentences and thus I let a few images tell you a bit about the shoot.
It seems to have gone well, considering it was my first outing into the wonderful world of do-it-yourself cinema. The only horrid thing that happened which is eating up my entrails as I speak is that we had problems downloading all of the digital information into our hard drives, which complicated things considerably after the shoot. I still need to see if everything we shot is safe and downloadable.
In the new world of HD video everything is a digital file. No more rolls of film, no more celluloid, no more tapes, no more film purring through the camera as you shoot (I really miss that sound). This is very practical and saves a lot of money. But as everything that's to do with technology, it is a ghost in the machine kind of thing. It feels much less tactile and in a sense much more fragile than good old film. As long as the material was saved, I will be relieved. If not, I will be armed and dangerous.
I think I surrounded myself with mostly utterly professional, talented people. Starting with my fantastic actors, Dick Latessa and Annie Meisels, who were real pros and extraordinarily talented. It also helped tremendously that they were extremely nice to everybody and seemed to bond instantly. I can't imagine what may happen when actors don't like each other. It must be hell on earth. But these two got along like a house on fire and made all of our lives quite easy.
My DP (director of photography) Manuel Billeter was very thorough and it looks like he did a great job. Of what I could see from some footage, it looks great. He had an amazing crew of three or four, who worked fast, and fabulously. I was particularly impressed with our gaffer, a super talented chick who solved every problem in a second and had great creative ideas.
My producer Susan Leber, did a great job putting the production together. She was unfortunately stuck, among her other responsibilities, to making sure we were fed because we had no catering person, a thankless, boring job.
My friend Marta was my art director/wardrobe/propmaster and she was fantabulous. Marta is so dedicated and thorough and meticulous, she could do this job and excel at it forever, like she excels at other matters of creativity and style. My friend Laura helped me with script. Continuity is the bane of my existence, people. Never again will I make fun of a movie where a character enters a scene with a hat and leaves without it. And neither should you. That stuff is a tedious bitch, because you have to constantly remember where were things before you moved them around. Was the curtain open or closed? Was she wearing the scarf or not. Did she use her left hand? GEEEEEZ. And don't get me started with the eye line business and the crossing the line business. I know for some people this is easy as pie. Not for me. Poor Laura tried heroically to keep me honest in this continuity business, but I just don't have the head for this minutiae. It's the last thing you want to think about when you have to worry about keeping the performances fresh, the camera moves meaningful.
Bea drew magnificent storyboards (which came in really handy) and helped with the boring job of downloading. Our sound guy was an eccentric character from somewhere in Eastern Europe called Andrej, who made strange pronouncements and warbled Beethoven's Fifth incessantly. The sound seems fine so far. I hope it is because we won't know until we edit the monster.
In any case, everybody was fine except for an asshole assistant director who made it his business to be thoroughly disliked by a few people, including myself. He talked a good talk, which is why we hired him, but he was always late and worse, thoroughly disinclined to be respectful or cooperative. He was one of those geniuses who thinks he knows better than anybody else, an arrogant wiseass with no class, no manners and no discernible talent. He kinda knew what his job was, but he didn't do it well. He was incredibly inconsistent. As I said to Laura, his personality got in his way. I hope he is reading this. If you are, Josh, let me put it this way: The name of your job is ASSISTANT Director. That means that you assist the director. You are at the service of the director and you also make sure the director is aware of the realities and constraints of timing and production issues. Your job is not to question the director's or the DP's decisions, or to harass the director when she is taking five minutes to finalize wardrobe after waiting five fucking hours for the set to be ready because you are not doing your fucking job. Neither is it your responsibility to give unsolicited, snide directing lessons. Your job is not that the director has to ask you where are the actors and to tell you where to go fetch them because you don't know. And if you are supposed to show up at 1:30 for a pre-pro meeting, you don't arrive at three and without one word of apology. Truth is we should have fired your ass that very day, but I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt and I will not forgive myself for this one. I should have talked to Susan immediately, who also complained of your rudeness the next day and we should have sent you packing. But we didn't. Lessons learned. I learned other lessons as well. Some of them technical, interesting, some of them painful. All of them useful. At one point I was thinking that directing was wonderful, except you have to deal with people. But in general, most people who converged for my little vanity project were fantastic.
Marta asked me if I didn't feel a bit of post partum depression after it was done. I did not. I was hugely relieved and happy it was over. I think I will feel the baby blues when I edit it and finish it and send it out into the world.

Close Relations: The Shoot Part I

Art is so hard, director sips Red Bull. Director doesn't sleep for three nights in a row. Not so much because of the awful, if effective, beverage, but because the shooting days are from 3 pm to 3 am.

The director watches the action. One thing that happens on a set, to judge from photos taken, is that the director constantly sits and watches as other people spin themselves silly trying to make things happen.

The fantastic Dick Latessa and Annie Meisels. My fabulous actors.

Countdown to the Shoot

We're less than 24 hours away. In one word:
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!
Having said this, as I told my friend and fabulous production designer Marta, I'm so calm, I'm worried. This atypical (in me) lack of worry troubles me. But it sure feels nice. Either I am in some kind of shock, or I feel that I am prepared. Okay, lack of worry may be overstating it a bit. On the other hand, seems like I'm blessed with a group of very talented people who are working hard to make it all happen, so why indeed should I worry? Really, more than worry, I feel boundless excitement. I feel like I have a pogo stick inside me that's out of control. Squadrons of Mexican jumping beans. However, witnesses claim I seem calm and collected.
Let me tell you, this is one of the wonderful things about not being a spring chicken anymore. Age makes it all feel more grounded. I strongly recommend it.