My inner quirk now resides somewhere between Amy Adams and Emily Blunt from Sunshine Cleaning (2009).

After a seven month layoff, I’ve gone back to work. While this means I will no longer have to eat Apple Jacks for supper or wait on Sacramento to shake some loose change out of the sofa for my unemployment check, a daytime gig means I have been unable to produce any new content for This Distracted Globe. Please bear with me while I readjust to wearing socks and having a clue and I’ll be back real soon.

There was probably no better year to be a kid going to the movies than 1984.

It seems like I might have spent most of the year at two theaters in northwest Houston: the AMC North Oaks 6 and a six screen General Cinemas theater at the gargantuan Willowbrook Mall. Willowbrook featured countless retail stores. Toys By Roy and a shop that sold role playing game gear are two that stand out because I was their ideal customer at the time.

I preferred North Oaks. In addition to the movie theater, there was B. Dalton Booksellers and Aladdin’s Castle arcade. North Oaks lacked an essential element in the development of the mall as a social scene — the food court — but this suited my purposes well. I could safely enter the world of the movie with minimal risk of running into Shu-Shu Taylor and worrying what I would have to say to her.

Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Top Secret!, Night of the Comet, Dune, Beverly Hills Cop and Starman are among the pictures I remember spending time in a darkened theater with. Some (Red Dawn, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Johnny Dangerously) I felt were masterpieces at the time. Others (Conan the Destroyer, Cannonball Run II, Runaway) I felt were crap then and 25 years has done little to change my mind.

Dialing the way-back machine to the year of 1984 with me over the next several days are the following bloggers. This post will be updated as their links continue to come in, so check back. If you enjoy the content you’re discovering at these sites, bookmark, blogroll or brag about them to anyone you know who loves reading about movies.

Jeremy Richey at Moon In The Gutter brings us all a dream of Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare On Elm Street, with some spooky screen shots.

Neil Fulwood at The Agitation of the Mind opens up the ledger on Sergio Leone’s melancholy swan song Once Upon A Time in America.

Ivan Lerner at The United Provinces of Ivanlandia (too bad for anyone else thinking of naming their blog that!) is all over the stupidest smart movie of 1984: Red Dawn.

Mike Phillips at goatdogblog answers the question of how you make a documentary without the cooperation of the subject with Maximillian Schell’s Marlene.

“Wings” at Caffeinated Joe beholds Crispin Glover dancing and other Crystal Lake horrors in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

Jeff McMahon at When the Dead Walk the Earth chimes in with what he loves about Bill “Ghostbustin” Murray in Ghostbusters.

Patricia Evans at Pretty Pink Patty’s Pictures takes us back through the dark woods with Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves. Apropos to Patricia’s location, Neil Jordan’s adult faerie tale opened in the U.K. in 1984.

Kelsy Chesnut at cheerful cynicism embarks on a review as epic and ridiculous as the film itself, taking her first trip to the David Lynch adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Fantastic post, Kelsy!

Jim Wilson at Let’s Not Talk About Movies recounts the legend of Roy Hobbs, a siren’s bullet and a baseball bat called Wonderboy in The Natural.

Chuck Bowen at Bowen’s-Cinematic revisits Ron Howard’s “wonderful, frisky fantasy” Splash. I couldn’t have said it any better, Chuck!

Edward Copeland at Edward Copeland on Film polishes off his Blue Blaze Irregular badge and blasts back to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension.

Daniel Getahun at Getafilm marvels over The Gods Must Be Crazy. A film connoisseur, Dan knows that this South African comedy played all over the globe before reaching U.S. art houses in 1984, but his take makes me glad he picked it.

Amanda Rehagen at My Life in Movies ventures back to Fantasia for Wolfgang Petersen’s adaptation of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. Awesome selection, Amanda! Can’t wait to find out if that creature was a dragon or a flying dog.

In the first of two exclusives he nabbed for this blogathon, Jim Magovern at The Moviezzz Blog chats with actress Catherine Mary Stewart about The Last Starfighter and Night of the Comet. Coming real soon, Stewart’s Comet co-star Kelli Maroney. Jim, you win the Carl Bernstein Award for tenacity!

Jim Magovern at The Moviezzz Blog grabs a word or two with actress Kelli Maroney about Night of the Comet.

Megan Cahalan at All I Need Is Everything uses the movies of 1984 to recall an experience growing up. On Monday, it was doing “The Neutron Dance” from Beverly Hills Cop. Tuesday brings memories of Michael Douglas & Kathleen Turner doing the business in Romancing the Stone. I really enjoyed your take on this blogathon, Megan.

J.D. Lafrance at Radiator Heaven dreams about Michael Pare and Diane Lane in Walter Hill’s maligned rock ‘n roll fable Streets of Fire.

Christian Divine at Technicolor Dreams turns in an old homework assignment, but his defense of Alex Cox’s Repo Man rates way better than an incomplete grade.

Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films descends into Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Thanks, Marilyn! This post was worth the wait and is a key film to close to the blogathon on.

The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003

Drag Me To Hell (2009)
Written by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi
Directed by Sam Raimi
Produced by Ghost House Pictures
Running time: 99 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In Pasadena, California, 1969, a migrant couple frantically seeks the help of medium Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) to dispel the demons that began harassing their son after he stole from a gypsy. 30 years later, Los Angeles loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) strives to overcome a few personal demons of her own. With her professor boyfriend (Justin Long) offering emotional support, Christine covets a management position at the bank where she works. Hoping to demonstrate to her boss (David Paymer) that she can make tough decisions, Christine denies a decaying gypsy named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her home loan.

After a violent encounter with Mrs. Ganush — in which the crone snatches a button from her coat and breathes a curse on it — Christine visits a storefront psychic named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) who sees an evil spirit haunting her. Following an attack by an unseen force at home and a freak sickness at the office, Christine revisits Rham and learns that her tormentor is the Lamia, a demon that will plague the owner of a cursed object for three days before dragging their soul into hell. He suggests Christine appease the Lamia with an animal sacrifice, but when that fails, she comes up with $10,000 for Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to vanquish the Lamia.

Who Made It?
Sam Raimi grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. While his older brother Ivan Raimi would go on to become a practicing doctor of osteopathic medicine, Sam dropped out Michigan State University after three semesters to raise money and shoot a feature version of a 32-minute horror movie demo Raimi had patched together with his roommate Bruce Campbell starring and brother Ted’s roommate Rob Tapert producing. Titled The Evil Dead (1981), the hyperkinetic no budget flick grew into a cult classic. Raimi helped inspire the careers of Joel & Ethan Coen, who co-wrote Crimewave (1985) with Raimi. The tongue-in-cheek Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (1987), the superhero adventure Darkman (1990) and the special effects romp Army of Darkness (1992) followed.

Sam and his brother Ivan had written a short story about a gypsy hex they referred to simply as The Curse. As Sam Raimi’s directing career made a build toward prestige with A Simple Plan (1998), The Gift (2000), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), Raimi hoped to produce The Curse through his production shingle Ghost House Pictures, with another director taking the reins. Unable to interest anyone, Raimi opted to direct the film, making a return to his low budget spooky roots with Nathan Kahane and Joe Drake of Mandate Pictures financing a comparatively low budget of around $30 million. Sneaking into theaters Memorial Day 2009 under the title Drag Me To Hell, the B-movie became one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Ivan Raimi pinned the genesis of Drag Me To Hell to an exercise he and his brother Sam gave themselves. “We started writing this so far back. We were working on Darkman, I believe, at the time. We’d reached some sort of impasse, and we had the weekend off, we decided to do something else. We challenged ourselves to write a short story in the time we had. It was something that might be meant for a half-hour TV show. That was the beginning of Drag Me to Hell. We wanted to write a gypsy curse story. A story of what somebody would do if they inadvertently got cursed and the lengths they would go to to remove the curse. I think I was dating a bank teller at the time and that’s how the woman became a bank teller.”

He continued, “It got shuffled to the bottom of the trunk, and we always wanted to work on it. Every now and then we’d dust it off and start working on it. Eventually, Sam had this company, Ghost House Pictures and said, ‘Yeah, we should work on it for Ghost House.’ So it became more earnest. It kept going in slightly different directions. It was always a little story. Every time we had a B-story, we’d work hard to integrate it into the A-story, but it never wanted to be that. It always wanted to be the very simple, nonstop story of a curse and the clock’s ticking and what to do to remove it. It went through a lot of permutations but eventually got back to what it was originally intended to be. It’s almost completely an A-story. There’s not much subplot or subtext.”

Sam Raimi recalled the origins of Drag Me To Hell by stating, “My brother, Ivan, and I had written this short story in 1989. Then just a few years ago, in 2002, we adapted it into a screenplay. I have a horror movie company called Ghost House Pictures, so I thought, why not make it into a full-fledged screenplay for the new company? We wrote it in mind with me to produce and for another director to come in and shoot it. Unfortunately that meant cutting the script so it could be made on a smaller budget. And as I started cutting, I realized that’s not why I was in it. I wasn’t there just to make a movie. I wanted to make this movie.”

He continued, “We did the most minor amount of research and discovered there are different demons that exist in many different cultures under the name of ‘Lamia’. In one culture, it’s this baby-eating God. In another, it’s a snake. In another, it’s a very sexy, but evil woman. And we thought, how interesting that they all have the same name, yet they’re all different. Maybe they’re just telling different stories about the same thing? Maybe we can tell our own story about that demon and call it The Lamia? What we really have at the core here is a timeless story concept that was used in this film, along with many others: the idea of a character that commits a sin of greed and has to pay the terrible price for it. It’s a morality tale that many churches have told, throughout the ages. So it’s a tried and true, old horror story in the book, basically.”

Ivan Raimi — who practices osteopathic medicine at Saint Joseph Mercy Livingston Hospital in Howell, Michigan — elaborated on his and his brother’s creative process. “When we write, we’ll have a project that’s assigned to us, or Sam and I will come up with some very basic concept that we try to turn into a couple pages, then together we’ll work it into a five-page story, then we’ll maybe make it into a ten-page story. Then we roughly outline it as well as our limited brains can, then give it a three act structure. But we’re not super structure guys.” He added, “Occasionally, he’ll write a little bit on his own, or I’ll write a little bit on my own, but when we write together, it’s sort of an extension of playing. It’s like being a kid when you’re making up stories. That’s the advantage of working with your brother.”

Sam Raimi commented on the partnership. “I’ve worked on many scripts with Ivan. He’s a doctor by day and a writer by night. We’ve actually spent a lot of time together, writing sometimes on the Spider-Man films, Darkman, Army of Darkness, and we have a great time being together. So it’s really both great family time and great work time for us. Unless he tries to rewrite me. The quality of that family time goes down a little bit, proportional to the amount he wants to rewrite me.” In December 2007, it was announced that Sam Raimi was returning to the horror genre by directing Drag Me To Hell for his Ghost House Pictures banner. The company had produced American remakes of The Grudge (2004) and The Grudge 2 (2006) and the vampire flick 30 Days of Night (2007).

Through Ghost House’s partnership with Mandate Pictures, roughly $30 million in financing was scared up. To play the cursed heroine, Ellen Page — who in December 2007 was being celebrated by critics and adored by moviegoers for her performance in Juno — was cast. Mandate had already booked the ingénue to play a supporting role in the mystery Peacock and the lead in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It. Despite efforts to get Drag Me To Hell rolling in mid-March to accommodate her schedule, a two-week delay in production forced Page to drop out. Alison Lohman — who’d experienced an Ellen Page year in 2002-03 with pivotal roles in White Oleander, Matchstick Men and Big Fish — was cast instead.

Drag Me To Hell commenced filming May 2008 in Tarzana, California, the site of an empty bank building that was transformed into “Wilshire Pacific Bank” by Steve Saklad, art designer of Spider-Man 2. Director of photography Peter Deming had shot Evil Dead 2 for Raimi before serving as David Lynch’s DP on Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Supervising the special makeup effects were Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX Group, who also met Raimi on Evil Dead 2; the company has since become the premiere makeup effects team in Hollywood. Nicotero commented, “Visual effects are fun, but there’s just something about a bunch of guys pulling cables and moving a puppet around. Sam is still enamored with that.”

Deming concurred. ““Sam loves B-movie stuff. He really embraces the wind out of nowhere and the camera shaking and the inventive, interactive lighting. He eats that up.” Raimi maintained he didn’t have other movies in mind specifically during the making of Drag Me To Hell. “I was just trying to make this story as dramatic and fun as I could. Our goal was never to follow any trends or even to try to give the audience what we thought they would want. We always tried to please ourselves — myself and my brother Ivan Raimi — when we were writing the script and in doing so, hoped that we would please the audience.” Additional scenes were filmed at Cal State Northridge and Union Station, while most of the interiors were shot on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles.

With Universal Pictures acquiring domestic and international distribution rights, Drag Me To Hell was screened March 2009 at the South By South Film Festival in Austin and at the Cannes Film Festival just before opening in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Israel in May. While more than a few horror buffs expressed reservations about the film’s PG-13 rating, Raimi explained, “I definitely, when I was writing the picture with my brother Ivan, didn’t want to rely on what I had relied on in the previous horror films, the Evil Dead films which was outrageous amounts of violence, blood and gore. I wanted to go in a slightly different direction with this one so I said, ‘Let’s try not to have any of that if we can, blood and violence and gore.’”

Critics jumped out of the theater praising the film. Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times: “At a time when horror is defined by limp Japanese retreads or punishing exercises in pure sadism, Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “This hellaciously effective B-movie comes with a handy moral tucked inside its scares, laughs and Raimi’s specialty, the scare/laugh hybrid.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Raimi pairs his love of Three Stooges-style physical comedy with moments of pure gross-out schtick and ends up with one of the purest and flat-out satisfying horror films in decades.”

Considered a marketing challenge — with a PG-13 rating that may have alienated horror fans and subject matter that definitely turned away families — Drag Me To Hell still grossed $42.1 million in the United States and $40.7 million overseas. Echoing the response of many who discovered the film, Sam Raimi enthused, “It was the most fun I’ve had in 20 years directing pictures. It was great to make a horror film where we had money to hire the best technicians in their fields. I had the luxury of not freezing to death when I was making the movie or filming it myself like in the first Evil Dead film, which was shot in 16mm and we didn’t have money for heat. I remember washing fake blood off my hands with hot coffee because we didn’t have running water there.”

Should I Care?
When watching a film directed by Sam Raimi, I almost expect to see characters depart in a puff of dust accompanied by rocket sound effects, like Looney Tunes. Whether your point of entry are the spastic Evil Dead trilogy, the Sharon Stone quickdraw epic The Quick and the Dead (1995) or the artificially flavored Spider-Man series, Raimi approaches movies less as art and more like a carnival funhouse, which over time, like the Looney Tunes, sort of makes them art. Drag Me To Hell is the latest coaster from a ride operator who’s had 30 years and over a billion dollars of expertise shelling out intense amusement. Never for a moment scary, this movie does have a moral, a mind and an old school style that gives the horror genre a desperately needed shot in the arm.

Framing a story against the economic recession, mining folklore for inspiration and delivering one of the best shock endings in recent memory, Drag Me To Hell has replaced A Simple Plan as my favorite Sam Raimi movie to date. Plenty goofy on the surface, there are strong ideas under the current here (Patton Oswalt theorized the movie was an allegory for anorexia!) I liked the suggestion that the westerners were seemingly oblivious of the supernatural world that the Mexican, Eastern European and South Asian characters had a hunting blind into. Whether there’s any subtext here or not, the movie is fun as hell, abetted by Christopher Young’s terrific musical score and an Oscar caliber sound mix that makes squishing gums, creaking gates or gust of wind outright characters in the film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Raimi Hell Bent on Thriller” By Michael Fleming. Variety, 19 December 2007

“Sam Raimi Interview for Drag Me to Hell” By Matt Elfman. ScreenCrave, 27 May 2009

“Sam Raimi has horror in his clutches” By Gina McIntyre. The Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2009

Drag Me To Hell – Production Notes

“Sam Raimi Interview, Drag Me To Hell” MoviesOnline

“The Script Doctor” By Denis Faye. Writers Guild of America

Coraline (2009)
Screenplay by Henry Selick, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Directed by Henry Selick
Produced by Pandemonium/ Laika Entertainment
Running time: 100 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) relocates from Pontiac, Michigan to the overcast Ashland, Oregon. While her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) write a gardening catalog, Coraline sets out to explore the Pink Palace Apartments, a 150-year old mansion that’s been rented out to three tenants. These include retired vaudevillians Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) and a Russian acrobat named Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane). Coraline also meets the landlord’s grandson, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (Robert Bailey Jr.) whose great aunt disappeared in the house years ago. Wybie gives Coraline a doll that looks eerily like her.

Wakened at night by Mr. Bobinsky’s performing mice, Coraline follows them through a door to an alternate reality, where her “Other Mother” (Teri Hatcher again) offers Coraline everything she could possibly want: delicious food, nice clothes, a lavish room, wondrous gardens. She discovers a mangy black cat (Keith David) from home has the power of speech in this reality. Coraline’s Other Mother invites her to stay in this perfect world forever, if she’ll permit buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Trapped in a mirror when she refuses, Coraline meets the souls of other lost children and learns that her Other Mother is actually a creature who abducts and once she grows bored with them, devours children.

Who Made It?
Neil Gaiman — celebrated author of the DC Comics epic The Sandman and the novel Stardust – had his daughter to thank for planting the seeds of Coraline, written over a decade and published to great acclaim as a novella in 2002. Gaiman was a fan of Henry Selick, the stop-motion maestro behind The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and sent Selick a manuscript as early as 2000. Optioning the film rights for Selick was Bill Mechanic, former chairman of Fox and founder of the production company Pandemonium. Contractually prohibited from producing animated films by Disney — the studio where Mechanic had a deal — Coraline was initially developed as a live action feature, to no avail.

In May 2004, Selick accepted a job as supervising director with Vinton Studios, a Portland based animation company which found Coraline a little too dark for its tastes. But months later, Nike co-founder Phil Knight would move from an investor in Vinton Studios to buying the company outright and rebranding it as Laika Entertainment. Looking to make a move into feature films, Knight rolled the dice on Selick and Coraline with a production budget of between $60 and $70 million. The first stop-motion animated film shot in 3D, Coraline spent 18 months being meticulously filmed on 52 sets at Laika’s studio in Portland before opening to wide acclaim in February 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Neil Gaiman traced the origins of Coraline back to the unusual demand of a key demographic: his daughter. “It began in about 1989, 1990, somewhere around there. My daughter, Holly, would come home from kindergarten — she’d be about four or five years old — and she would climb on my lap because I would be sitting in my office writing and she would dictate stories and they were terrifying. They’d be about little girls coming home and finding out the evil witches were now impersonating their mothers. Normally the girls would then get locked in cellars and they would have to escape and try and find their real mother with the witches coming after them.”

Gaiman continued, “I thought I’ll go and find her some stories like this to read to her and nobody seemed to be writing any. I couldn’t find any so I thought, ‘I’ll write her one. I’ll write a story that Holly would like.’ And that was where it began. That really was the genesis. I sat down and I started writing Coraline, which was a name that I think I took from a typo. I’d been writing a letter to a friend called Caroline and I transposed.” Gaiman found additional inspiration from Victorian Era author Lucy Clifford, whose 1882 short story The New Mother concerned two misbehaving children whose mother is replaced by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.

Gaiman revealed, “I finished the first draft nine years ago in 2000 and I gave it to my agent and said: ‘Please give this to Henry Selick,’ because I had seen The Nightmare Before Christmas and even though it was called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas I was smart enough to understand that the main man was Henry Selick. I then saw James and the Giant Peach and thought Henry had something really interesting. Especially as a stop-motion director he was just beyond compare. He’s the best there is. I loved the fact that he seemed to understand that sometimes you can show sometimes bravery shines best in dark places.”

Published in 2002, Coraline was awarded that year’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Selick took the property to producer Bill Mechanic, who’d founded Pandemonium after being forced out as chairman of 20th Century Fox, where Mechanic had championed Fight Club, X-Men and Ice Age. Working on an adaptation, Selick resisted developing the material as a live action film, feeling there had been too many talking critter movies and that bringing Gaiman’s dark faerie tale to life through animation might make it less disturbing for younger audiences. But Mechanic’s deal with Disney prohibited him from making animated features.

Selick recalled, “And Bill liked it, but for about two years we had to pretend it was a live action film. I even met with Michelle Pfeiffer, to be possibly in the role of the Mothers, but she didn’t really want to have any buttons on her eyes. And I said, ‘But that’s, kinda the point of the … ‘ Anyway, that was the early days. We kinda hit a dead end. We weren’t going to get to make the film. A scary film for children — it wasn’t going to happen.” Selick moved on to animate sea creatures for the Wes Anderson comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and in May 2004, accepted an offer from Vinton Studios, the Portland based animation unit behind the California Raisins ad campaign and the Fox series The PJs.

Founded by stop-animation pioneer Will Vinton — who’d coined the term Claymation and supervised the stop-motion effects in Return To Oz (1985) — the studio was looking to land financing for animated features that might compete with Pixar. “They were growing, transforming. They had an idea for a short film, Moongirl, and they asked if I’d direct it, and flesh it out. And I said that I was only going to move up there from California if I could bring Coraline with me. And they said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I moved up there, did this short for them, Moongirl, and then said, ‘Well, it’s time to do Coraline.’ And at that time, the guy in charge said, ‘Well, actually, it’s much too dark’, and what changed was, Travis Knight.”

Travis Knight is son of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. After a short-lived career as “Chilly Tee”, a Portland rapper in the early 1990s, Travis Knight found his niche as a stop-motion animator at Vinton Studios. After The PJs was canceled and advertising jobs dried up, his father invested in the studio. In September 2003, Phil Knight bought the company, naming Nike executive Dave Wahl CEO and hiring Selick as supervising animation director. Renaming the operation Laika Entertainment, Knight shifted the studio’s primary focus from commercials to feature films. One year later, it was announced that Laika would bankroll Coraline, with Henry Selick adapting a script and directing. Focus Features — the specialty film division of Universal Pictures — acquired worldwide distribution rights.

In adapting Gaiman’s novella, Selick revealed, “I added a character, this neighbor kid Wybie. I set it in the U.S., because I wasn’t as comfortable with British dialogue. And then, over the years that it took to get this thing off the ground, other elements of the story took on a life of their own. I guess the main thing is there’s a delicacy, a subtlety, that Neil can really exploit with his beautiful writing that can’t all get on the screen. You can go and describe the Other Mother and say that her teeth were just a tiny bit longer, her nails a tiny bit more red, but I had to go bigger and broader at times. I also had to dial back the darkness. I didn’t want to go to the darkest tones of the novel quite so soon. I wanted to go lighter and then descend into it.”

One concept that was floated was to open Coraline with computer-generated animation and transition into stop-motion when the story shifted into the parallel universe. Selick recalled, “It was a nice theory, we actually did a test, but putting the two side by side, it just didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have much to say, you know, crucial time we’re on the razor’s edge: which way do we go, CG or stop-motion? Travis Knight, who’s one of the lead animators, weighed in with his important vote and said, well, if he’s going to animate on one feature, he wanted to do stop-motion, so I owe him a huge debt. We went the right way. Travis had a lot to do with that.” Coraline commenced what became an 18-month shoot May 2006 at the Laika studio in Portland.

According to Selick, 90 percent of the film was done practical, without using CG imagery. “Coraline is about seven inches tall as a puppet. There’s an invisible line in her face that we’ve painted out, between her upper face and lower face. The animation of her face is done through replacement animation, just like Jack Skellington, Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, the old Pillsbury Doughboy. Martin Meunier — very talented artist/ fabrication person I’ve worked with — came up with a new system using rapid proto machines to build on handmade sculpts of her face and give her an ever greater range of expressiveness. Georgina Hayns — or George as we call her — head of puppet fabrication builds these puppets. The armature underneath metal skeleton was by Merri Cheney, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years.”

Critics generally loved the film. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Like the best fantasy writers Mr. Gaiman does not draw too firm a boundary between the actual and the magical, allowing the two realms to shadow and influence each other. Mr. Selick, for his part, is so wantonly inventive and so psychologically astute that even Coraline’s dull domestic reality is tinted with enchantment.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Coraline may not be for all tastes and it’s certainly not for all kids, given its macabre premise. But writer-director Henry Selick’s animated feature advances the stop-motion animation genre through that most heartening of attributes: quality. It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.”

Opening February 2009 in the United States, Coraline earned $75.2 million domestically and added $46.3 million in theaters overseas. It also won the enthusiastic support of Neil Gaiman. “It’s what I hoped Henry would make, which is Henry’s film. It’s very much a film of my book and it hits all the beats of the book and it expands a little bit because it’s not a very big book. But he instilled it with Henry’s wonderful imagination and he doesn’t stop anything.” Gaiman added, “It’s so strange because I think adults have a lot more problems with this kind of story than children do. It’s true for the book. It’s always adults that say to me that they finish reading the book at three o’clock in the morning and go around the house turning on all the lights. I never get that from the kids.”

Should I Care?
Selick is an animation connoisseur and seems to understand that the state of the art only moves as far as animators are willing to challenge their audience. Earlier in his career, Selick was a storyboard artist for Disney and worked on Return To Oz, a dark, exquisitely made fable that critics disparaged for being too scary for kids(!) This as if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty — to name a few — were a trip to McDonald’s. With Neil Gaiman’s novella as a road map, Henry Selick has crafted his finest work yet. Less amusing than The Nightmare Before Christmas, the absence of musical numbers allows Selick and his team to descend into the imagination and angst of a child more vividly than any American animated film I can recall with the exception of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland.

Gaiman’s source material — liberally reworked by Selick — is a handsomely crafted narrative; there’s not a single dopey character or glib reference to be found here. The script doesn’t call for any cheap scares, but like Return To Oz, is a perilous and potent trip to the dark side. I don’t have any funny glasses and can’t comment about the film’s 3D attributes, but there’s no question that the handcrafted, slightly wonky effect of stop-motion animation — whether used in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or Corpse Bride (2005) — is a shot into the nerve center of the brain. Bruno Coulais composed a delightfully spooky score, while alt rock kings They Might Be Giants — who composed four demos, only one of which Selick ended up being able to use — contribute a cool song.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Neil Gaiman Exclusive Interview — Coraline” By Matt Goldberg. Collider.com, 26 January 2009

“Coraline director Henry Selick on how not to mess up Neil Gaiman” By Ian Spelling. SciFi Wire, 26 January 2009

“Laika hangs dreams on Coraline” By Amy Reifenrath. Oregon Live, 4 February 2009

“Director Henry Selick on Coraline” By Debra Kaufman. Studio Daily, 6 February 2009

“Nike father-son duo lace up Coraline” By Peter Debruge. Variety, 6 February 2009

“Exclusive: Henry Selick on Coraline” By Michael Leader. Den of Geek, 7 May 2009

“Neil Gaiman Interview, Coraline” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

Coraline. DVD audio commentary featuring Henry Selick & Bruno Coulais. Universal Home Entertainment (2009)

Trick ‘r Treat (2009)
Written by Michael Dougherty
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Produced by Legendary Pictures/ Bad Hat Harry Productions
Running time: 82 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In “Warren Valley, Ohio” on Halloween Night, a Yuppie couple (Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett) are paid a visit by a demonic trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head. In the first of four tongue-in-cheek horror tales to follow, a junior high school principal (Dylan Baker) poisons an obnoxious candy seeker and attempts to dispose of the body before his young son finds out. Three sexually aggressive party seekers (Lauren Lee Smith, Moneca Delain, Rochelle Aytes) get separated from their more precocious friend Laurie (Anna Paquin). Costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, she soon draws the attention of a psycho killer dressed in black.

Four adolescent trick ‘r treaters (Britt McKillip, Isabelle Deluce, Alberto Ghisi, Jean-Luc Bilodeau) let an outcast named Rhonda (Samm Todd) join their expedition to the local quarry. The trick ‘r treaters intend to make an offering of eight pumpkins to the eight children who as legend has it were driven off the quarry by a homicidal bus driver; their ceremony does not go as planned. Finally, the reclusive Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) wants to be left alone on Halloween, but receives a visit from the burlap headed trick ‘r treater, who’s been wandering in and out of all the stories. The imp seems to have retribution on its mind for All Hallow’s Eve.

Who Made It?
Michael Dougherty was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended New York University, graduating in 1996 from Tisch School of the Arts. Dougherty spent three years toiling on Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, while an animated short he’d written and directed titled Season’s Greetings made it to television. Director Bryan Singer read a spec script Dougherty had written titled Trick ‘r Treat — expanding the character and themes from Dougherty’s short — and introduced him to aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter Dan Harris. After moving to L.A. independent of each other, the duo won jobs writing X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006) for Singer.

Championed by late makeup effects maestro Stan Winston — originally slated to produce the film — Trick ‘r Treat was developed by Legendary Pictures, the Burbank based production company behind Superman Returns, Lady In the Water and 300, co-financing and co-producing in partnership with Warner Bros. Bryan Singer of Bad Hat Harry Productions came on board as a producer in the fall of 2006 and was present on the set of Doughtery’s live action directing debut in Vancouver. Despite overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, Warner Bros. backed away from giving Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release, finally rolling it out on DVD in October 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Seasons Greetings (1996) was a 4-minute, hand drawn and hand colored short film, which writer-director Michael Dougherty spent nine months drawing with pencils and paper at NYU. Each frame was colored with magic markers instead of paint with fellow film students helping him color many of the cels. The short — about a trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head being menaced by a stalker — was broadcast on MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Sci-Fi Channel and played a few film festivals. As Dougherty brainstormed ideas for short films or short stories he noticed they all ended up being about Halloween.

Dougherty recalled, “So I started thinking, well how neat would it be to put them all together into one movie and I guess it was kind of my way of cheating and saying here’s, look, here’s my feature film screenplay, it’s an anthology movie. But then they also started interweaving and it became one movie, just with a lot of characters whose lives start intersecting. I realized I could take this character and make him the next door neighbor of that character and make these trick-or-treaters show up at the door of this guy and so it all ended up coming together. And Sam became a character that wandered though all of their stories.”

He continued, “The first story is really just about a father and a son and introducing the son to the holiday and its traditions. The next one, it’s a group of kids who are between ages 12 and 15 and it’s when you break away from your parents and you’re walking around the town by yourself trick-or-treating. And then the next one, you’re in your twenties and the holiday becomes about nothing but partying and having sex and trying to find the hottest costume possible. The fourth one is the twilight years, when you’re old and alone and celebrating the holiday by yourself, which hopefully none of us end up like, but it’s kind of these weird four seasons of Halloween in a sense.”

Dougherty’s spec script — Trick ‘r Treat – became his calling card to meeting the director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men, Bryan Singer, in 2000. After working with his writing partner Dan Harris on drafts of X2 and Superman Returns, executive producers Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and William Fay of Legendary Pictures were prepared to give Dougherty a shot making the transition from screenwriter to director of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty revealed, “I think the transition was made easier by the fact that Bryan Singer always had me and my writing partner Dan Harris on set throughout X2 and throughout Superman Returns and it’s interesting to realize how much I picked up just from osmosis.”

Dougherty added, “In terms of preparing, interacting with the crew, knowing how to set up a shot, getting your coverage, etc. I think I’m blessed in that I’ve had Bryan to show me the ropes as well as my writing partner Dan who directed a feature film a few years ago called Imaginary Heroes. They’ve both been available to give me pointers and tips and help me out. As well as Alex Garcia; he’s been on the set of Bryan’s movies and produced his TV projects. It’s been good, but I definitely know that those two movies, Superman Returns and X2 were basically boot camp. I’d be twenty times more terrified doing this if I hadn’t been on set for 131 days on each of those two movies.”

With Bryan Singer and Alex Garcia of Bad Hat Harry Productions as producers, Trick ‘r Treat commenced filming November 2006 in Vancouver. Singer was reportedly on set throughout the film’s nine-week shoot. Also working with Dougherty was NYU alum Breehn Burns, who’d come on board as a concept artist and would also design the film’s comic book panel title sequence. Of Burns, Dougherty added, “He referred me to a storyboard guy named Simeon Wilkins, who’s a young guy who has an amazing resume. He worked on The Ring, Monster House, he just finished Beowulf for Bob Zemeckis, and we click really well too.”

Scheduled for release October 2007, Halloween came and went without Warner Bros. giving audiences Trick ‘r Treat. Legendary Pictures screened it December 2007 at the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, Texas, an invitation-only film festival hosted by the architect of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. Avid dispatches from film geeks who’d seen the movie would trickle through the popular website for the next two years. “Massawyrm”: “Horror fans are going to have a ton of fun with this and I fully expect this to take its rightful place as the holiday classic that gets pulled out every year, much the same way Halloween was for many of us in our youth. It is a film very much about the holiday and its spirit, and it captures that wonderfully.”

Warner Bros. began to license Trick ‘r Treat T-shirts, graphic novels and action figures, but the studio was at a loss over how to market the movie. Dougherty mused, “I remember having a conversation with, you know, an executive who shall remain nameless about this, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a horror movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He goes, ‘Well, we’ll target the Saw and the Hostel demographic.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not them.’ ‘Well but they’re the horror audience.’ ‘No, they’re not this horror audience.’ Horror itself isn’t just a genre. There’s so many subgenres to it, just like there’s so many types of comedy. You have your Wayans Brothers comedies and you have your Judd Apatow comedies. Very different audiences. And so, sometimes it can be difficult to try to explain horror as a genre to people.”

Despite successful screenings at Screamfest L.A. in October 2008, Comic Con in July 2009 and recently at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, Warner Bros. shuttled Trick ‘r Treat onto Video On Demand and DVD in October 2009. Reviewers were effusive with praise. Bill Gibron, Pop Matters: “Almost too clever for its own good, Trick ‘r Treat is a really good film. In fact, it’s so unusual in its practical F/X approach and retro direct to video charms that a second viewing is definitely needed before confirming its almost masterpiece status.” Alex Billington, First Showing.Net: “There hasn’t been a horror movie this original and this inventive since Wes Craven brought us Scream in 1996. I guess it only took twelve years to finally find the next great horror franchise.”

Commenting on his film’s winding road to release, Dougherty suggested it was caught between two business models, one dying out, the other taking its baby steps. “We’re reaching a day and age where the generation of kids growing up expect to have the option of going to the theater or watching a movie at home. I think that window is going to close completely, soon. But I think, in the meantime, I think it’s smart for distributors to look at that limited-release fan demand method of distribution.” He added, “Why not try to open it in two cities and let the fans post on Facebook or send out tweets about getting it in their hometown? I really wish we could have tried that model with Trick ‘r Treat, but by the time the decision had been made it was too late.”

Should I Care?
Here’s a movie stoked by such an outpouring of love from its target demographic that I’m left to ponder whether I even saw the same film the fanboys did. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t really for people who read reviews, it’s for the people who love those movies that aren’t screened for critics. It’s also blatantly the work of a first time screenwriter and director. At 82 minutes with credits, Doughtery gets in a hurry introducing too many characters without giving us a reason to care about a single one. Some of his ideas are sketchy and poorly executed. Burlap head — referred to as “Sam” in the credits for reasons that are never explained — never makes the leap from doodle to compelling screen creep.

There’s a segment here — the film’s best — about 13-year-olds trick ‘r treating that recalls those Saturday afternoon, kids on a mission movies I grew up with like The Goonies or The Monster Squad. That’s nice, and so is Breehn Burns’ gorgeous title sequence with comic book panels illustrated with scenes from the movie flipping by. Douglas Pipes supplements this with a fantastic musical score that easily surpasses anything Danny Elfman has composed in 16 years. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t a bad movie. I can name 10 recent horror movies that were a lot worse. But if this is destined to become a Halloween standard, I’ll be watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Superman Returns Writers Ride a Wave of Success” By Torquin Hedd. Moving Pictures Magazine, July 2006

“Quartet are in for Treat” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 9 November 2006

“Trick ‘r Treat: Writer/Director Michael Dougherty, On Set in Vancouver, BC Canada” BloodyDisgusting.com, 11 January 2007

“Director on what the long-delayed release has meant for Trick ‘r Treat” By Patrick Lee. Sci-Fi Wire, 28 July 2009

“Q&A: Trick ‘r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty” Heat Vision Blog. The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2009

Trick ‘r Treat. DVD audio commentary with Michael Dougherty. Warner Home Video (2009)

Adventureland (2009)
Written by Greg Mottola
Directed by Greg Mottola
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the summer of 1987, Oberlin College grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is notified by his parents (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin) that money he was depending on to help pay for a European backpacking trip will no longer be available. Unable to help their son pay rent when he enrolls at Columbia in the fall, James returns to Pittsburgh for the summer looking for work. A comparative literature and Renaissance studies major, the only job he finds he’s really qualified for is at the scruffy amusement park Adventureland, where his childish neighbor Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) works.

James is passed over for a position in Rides when the couple that runs the park (Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig) concludes that he’s more of a Games man. His co-workers include the mopey Joel (Martin Starr) and a streetwise girl named Em (Kristen Stewart) who saves James from getting knifed by a customer. Em reveals a similar taste in music (The Replacements, Big Star) and that she’s headed for NYU in the fall. But James’ affection for Em is tempered when he discovers she’s been sleeping with Adventureland’s 30-year-old married maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds).

Who Made It?
Greg Mottola grew up in Dix Hills, a town on Long Island, New York. After receiving a BFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mottola earned an MFA in film at Columbia. His debut feature film The Daytrippers (starring Hope Davis, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber) won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Mottola envisioned an auteur’s career for himself like that of Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen, writing and directing his own material. But when Columbia Pictures put Mottola’s planned sophomore film – The Life of the Party, a road trip ensemble to feature John Cusack — into turnaround in 1999, Mottola fell into a funk that resulted in little if any writing.

Desperate to get back behind the camera in 2001, Mottola accepted an offer from producer Judd Apatow to direct episodes of Fox’s coed dorm comedy Undeclared. Surrounded by a cast and crew much younger than himself, Mottola started thinking about writing a film about first love. Working with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey of This Is That Productions, Mottola was ready to send his script Adventureland out to investors when Apatow offered Mottola the job of directing a feature: Superbad. The teen comedy’s runaway critical and commercial success in 2007 led to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Miramax Films agreeing to split financing for Adventureland.

How’d They Do It?
Greg Mottola had moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on Undeclared when the idea for what became Adventureland began to percolate. Mottola recalled, “I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there. I thought, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.”

He added, “I was a very naïve young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.” During a conversation with a member of the Undeclared writing staff — Jenny Connor — about the worst jobs anyone had ever had, Mottola mentioned his stint working at a Long Island amusement park called Adventureland in the summer of ’84.

“So I had a friend working at this amusement park I applied and soon found myself wearing a ‘Games’ shirt and being a carnival barker for the summer. And it was just demeaning, you know, I was pretentious, I was an art student at the time, I thought it was beneath me … You know, and I wanted to find people who could sit and talk about the abstract expressionists and Rothko you know, and it was these animals vomiting around me and eating cotton candy. But, you know, it quickly turned into one of those kind of super fun summers.” While directing episodes of Fox’s Arrested Development and HBO’s The Comeback, Mottola continued to work on his script.

Once Mottola had a draft of Adventureland he was happy with, he sent it to producer Ted Hope. A partner in the indie film production company Good Machine, Hope had produced Ride With the Devil for Ang Lee, Storytelling for Todd Solondz and Human Nature for Michel Gondry before agreeing to sell Good Machine to Universal and founding This Is That Productions with Anne Carey. Hope recalled, “Years back when I was struggling to get Nicole Holofcener’s Walking & Talking financed, Nicole said in a fit of despair that I should be working with someone who will actually make a lot of movies, like the guy who had just won best film at Columbia Film School, Greg Mottola.”

Hope added, “He already had a producer relationship so we just got to know each other, but life wasn’t as Nicole had predicted for him. By the time five or so years had passed since Daytrippers, his agents, who were also our agents, submitted the script to us as a ready-to-go project. We loved it but had some thoughts on how to enhance it and make it more resonant in the marketplace. Greg agreed but it took us over two years to get it right, and then he got what initially looked like a direct-to-DVD feature, but that turned out to be Superbad and the rest is history.” Confident of his take on Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s teen comedy, Mottola put his moody take on first love on the backburner.

With the massive success of Superbad, Mottola found plenty of investors willing to bankroll Adventureland, if he could only change it a bit. “You know, it was hard to get the film set up, even after Superbad. People who wanted to make it made a condition that I had to rewrite it as a contemporary film, and I refused. That may have been very stubborn of me. But I didn’t know what the equivalent to this film would be for a 21-year-old just coming into college. I could research it, but it wouldn’t be as fun to me as a film that came from personal experiences. There was just something about a movie that’s looking back — it has a slightly more melancholy strain. And a part of it was because life did seem simpler before the Internet and before cell phones.”

Sidney Kimmel — a garment magnate who built Jones Apparel Group into a publicly traded company worth $5 billion — had quietly assembled a film production and finance company in Beverly Hills in 2005. With indie film vets Jim Tauber and William Horberg on his team, Kimmel rolled the dice on a number of offbeat comedies (Death at a Funeral, Lars and the Real Girl) and socially conscious dramas (United 93, Talk To Me) that were anything but safe commercial bets. SKE financed Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York and decided to go into business with Greg Mottola, splitting $10 million or so in financing with Miramax Films. In August 2007 it was announced that Adventureland would be Mottola’s next picture.

Ted Hope recalled, “We were ready to go out with the script for financing and casting a few weeks before Superbad came out. Interest in Greg was high, but time to put together a summer movie was short. Luckily Greg had thought hard about whom he wanted in the film prior and they were all accessible. Jesse & Kristen were pretty much whom he always wanted. Kristen had yet to get Twilight so she was still considered a virtual unknown. Greg knew Bill Hader from Superbad and wanted him and Kristen Wiig from the get-go too. Ryan Reynolds may have been the first person Greg had met for the role; he just happened to be in NYC right when we started.”

Hope continued, “And Martin Starr just slayed it in an early audition and changed our conception of the character. Similarly Margarita Levieva came to the audition in full character and makeup. Both of them became the archetype so there was no one else we could cast. Perhaps most fortunate, was that our financing partners agreed with our vision for the roles and that allowed Greg to lock his cast quickly by his taste and not some Chinese Menu of what may work in different markets or with specific demographics.” To get the summer romance rolling before winter set in, Mottola ended up with two weeks of prep time. The director admitted some mistakes were made as a result.

“Well, like, a prop guy thought they didn’t have those pop tags on soda cans in 1987. And I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure they did.’ And it’s hard to find ‘80s cars. People will preserve and treasure their ‘70s muscle cars, but not treasure their K-cars. It was weird; we couldn’t find cars that ran. But I grew up in a really modest suburban community in Long Island and a lot of my neighbors didn’t have a lot of money, and their houses were still filled with furniture from the ‘70s and the ‘60s, even. It’s not as though everyone switched to an ‘80s aesthetic because that’s what was on TV. This is a modest world where the film takes place, and it’s okay if there’s a mish-mash of ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The search for an amusement park that hadn’t changed much in 20 years came down to Playland in Rye, NY and Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. Mottola recalled, “The tax rebates in Pennsylvania were better than New York state, plus it seemed like we could get a better deal with Kennywood, so the choice was arrived at pretty quickly. Plus, I have a fondness for poor maligned Pittsburgh. We didn‘t have the budget to build or create very much, although my production designer Stephen Beatrice did a very nice job of creating the specific booths that I needed and scuzzying up the park a bit so it wasn‘t quite as quaint as Kennywood is in reality.” Shooting in the 111-year old park during the week — before Kennywood went into Phantom Fright Nights mode on the weekends — Adventureland commenced filming September 2007.

An Adventureland employee in 1984, Mottola bumped the film’s timeline up to 1987 to take advantage of songs he wanted to use to tell his life story. Collaborating with music supervisor Tracy McKnight — who had worked at an amusement park in Seaside Heights, NJ in her youth — Mottola exchanged iPod playlists and mix tapes. Accustomed to licensing 15 to 20 songs for a movie, McKnight arrived on 40 tunes, including “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” by Husker Du and “I’m In Love With a Girl” by Big Star. Mottola joked that the fee paid to Van Halen to use “Panama” in Superbad “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.” To compose a score, Mottola turned to another favorite band, the Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, Adventureland opened nationwide April 2009. Critics fell in love with the movie. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “A confident return to the kind of teen comedy that’s funny without being raunchy, youthful without being juvenile, and reflective without hitting you over the head.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.”

Never expanding beyond 1,876 U.S. screens, Adventureland sold $16 million in tickets domestically and added $1 million overseas. Acknowledging the challenges of marketing a period movie to kids who might feel it wasn’t about them and to adults who might feel it was just about kids, Greg Mottola sounded pleased with the results. “There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me. I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.”

Should I Care?
Quickly hailed as one of the year’s best films by critics and too easily dismissed by casual viewers as lacking in laughs (Kristen Wiig fans expecting more than a token cameo will probably be disappointed), Adventureland is a little of both, a small but perfect gem that gets better the more I think about it. Without painting a rose colored portrait of the late ‘80s, Greg Mottola’s writing genuinely pines for the days when people somehow met without the Internet and expressed themselves without cell phones. It’s a gentler coming-of-age drama than something from Noah Baumbach and recalls Wes Anderson’s early work in its understated wit.

One sign we’re in the hands of a talented filmmaker is the casting. Jesse Eisenberg does what Michael Cera couldn’t have done, playing a boy growing into a man. Kristen Stewart has an alluring scruffiness that I can’t recall seeing another young actress emulate as convincingly. It takes time before we know how to feel about either character. The soundtrack — a sublime blend of kitsch played at the park and the ‘70s or ‘80s music its couple shares via mix tapes — refrains from explaining the scenes, supplying mood instead. What’s most rewarding about Adventureland is how Mottola smarts the movie up — instead of dumbing it down — by rejecting raunch and taking a slow turn toward brutal honesty.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Film Producer Guided More by His Heart Than by His Calculator” By David Halbfinger. The New York Times, 12 December 2007

“When Hollywood Comes Calling” By Daniel McGuire. IAAPA, February 2008

“Greg Mottola Interview, Adventureland, Sundance 2009” By Kevin Kelly. SpoutBlog, 22 January 2009

“Sundance 2009 — Adventureland — Greg Mottola” The Hollywood Podcast starring Tim Coyne. 19 February 2009

“Directing to an ’80s Playlist” By Larry Rother. The New York Times, 20 March 2009

“Five Questions for Ted Hope (Adventureland)” By Matt Dentler. indieWIRE, 31 March 2009

“After The Daytrippers …” By Peter Keough. The Boston Phoenix, 31 March 2009

“Director Greg Mottola on Keeping Adventureland Eighties Appropriate” By Lane Brown. New York Magazine, 3 April 2009

“Some Kind of Love” By Nick Dawson. Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2009

“What you looking at? You never seen a guy who slept with a fish before?” — Freddie (John Candy) in Splash (1984)

This Distracted Globe will host its first ever carnival — The Class of ’84 Blogathon — on Monday, October 26, 2009. On this date, anyone with a website is invited to post their thoughts on a movie or movies released in 1984. October 26 marks the 25th anniversary of The Terminator, which will be my addition to the festivities.

In addition to those contributors previously announced, the following bloggers are also set to go nostalgic:

Wings over at Caffeinated Joe will return to Crystal Lake with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

Between hot dogs and beer, the busy Tommy Salami at Pluck You, Too! is weighing his options carefully.

Kate Hanley at Life with a Cocktail is set to go Footloose.

Also making her contribution a game time decision will be Megan Cahalan at All I Need Is Everything.

If you haven’t already done so, RSVP This Distracted Globe in either the comments section below or via email at journeymanjones [at] gmail [dot] com. As soon as your post goes live on October 26, remember to email me your URL so I can publish it. Failure to do so may result in a bucket of seawater being thrown on yous.

Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

Surveillance (2008)
Written by Jennifer Lynch & Kent Harper
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Produced by Lago Film/ Arclight Films/ Blue Rider Pictures
Running time: 97 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Following a gruesome murder, FBI Special Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) arrive at a rural police station to interview three witnesses. A drug whore (Pell James) recounts driving out to the middle of nowhere with her boyfriend (Mac Miller) to score; the couple stops to assist a family station wagon stranded by a flat tire. The family’s only surviving member — an observant 8-year-old (Ryan Simpkins) — recounts noticing a strange van earlier in the day, but her mother (Cheri Oteri) and stepfather (Hugh Dillon) ignored her when The Violent Femmes tune “Day After Day” came on the radio.

Officer Bennett (Kent Harper) is a wreck following the murder of his partner out on the road. Under questioning, Bennett admits that his partner (French Stewart) and he liked to pass their time shooting out the tires of passing motorists and victimizing the drivers. Each surviving witness recounts the arrival of two masked killers along the roadside differently. Also participating in the investigation is Captain Billings (Michael Ironside), a receptionist (Caroline Aaron) with intimate access to coroner’s reports, an eager to please rookie cop (Charlie Newmark) and another local policeman (Gill Gayle) hostile towards the FBI.

Who Made It?
Jennifer Lynch is the daughter of painter Peggy Reavey and filmmaker David Lynch. Growing up in Michigan, she would serve as a PA on the set of Blue Velvet and adapt The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the bestselling book tie-in to her father’s heralded TV mini-series Twin Peaks. Lynch made her screenwriting and directorial debut at the age of 23 with the critically reviled Boxing Helena (1993). The gothic drama about a surgeon (Julian Sands) who kidnaps the object of his desire (Sherilyn Fenn) and amputates her arms and injured legs incurred a frenzy of bad press when producers took the picture’s original star — Kim Basinger — to court for backing out of the film at the behest of her agents.

Taking time to recuperate from several spinal surgeries, kick drug and alcohol addiction and raise a daughter by herself, Lynch paired with a friend — Kent Harper — to rework a script he’d written about witches into a Rashomon-like take on the serial killer genre. After numerous rejections, David Lynch agreed to lend his name to his daughter’s project as an executive producer. Germany’s Lago Film agreed to finance Jennifer Lynch’s second feature film at a budget of $10 million. American audiences got a look at Surveillance in May 2009 on video-on-demand, followed by a limited theatrical release the following month.

How’d They Do It?
Jennifer Lynch recalled the genesis of the Boxing Helena fiasco. “I was reading poetry at a fucking nightclub before I was old enough to drink. This person came up to me and said ‘I have this screenplay I’d like you to write about a woman who is cut up and put into a box.’ I said ‘I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘What would you like to do?’ I said ‘I’ve always had a fascination with the Venus de Milo, who has no legs and no arms. I have a story I’d like to tell based on that.’ But I didn’t think in a million fucking years — I mean I was reading goddamn poetry, which is the most schmaltzy fucking thing you can do in L.A. — and I never fucking thought it would go anywhere.”

18 years old when given the idea, 19 when she wrote the script, Lynch’s directing experience was limited to watching her dad work. To her amazement, Madonna expressed interest in starring in Boxing Helena. The pop icon would graciously back out to do Evita for Alan Parker and Andrew Lloyd Webber instead, but Kim Basinger came on board to replace her. Four weeks before shooting was to begin, Basinger’s reps at CAA coaxed her into dropping out as well. Main Line Pictures would retaliate with a breach of contract suit carried out in a televised trial. The jury awarded the producers $8.1 million in damages, but the ruling was later overturned.

Lynch recalled the tumult with Kim Basinger by stating, “If the creative folks had been left to themselves, it would have been settled over a dinner. But because suits got involved, they decided they were going to wipe the slate clean. You don’t bring an army sergeant into a sandbox with kids. She was ordered not to speak to me. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her. The whole thing was stupid. It became a nightmare for all of us. None of us look back on it well.” Scathing reviews, three surgeries to repair critical spinal injuries (suffered in an auto accident at age 19), getting clean from drugs and alcohol and raising a daughter as a single parent all kept Lynch from jumping behind a camera again.

Surveillance began when a friend of Lynch’s — actor/ producer/ screenwriter Kent Harper — approached her with a script he’d written. “It was called Three Witches, Tres Brujas, and it was a really great story, but I didn’t want to do something about witches and I wasn’t quite sure what had happened and this conversation was born about things that happen in the middle of nowhere and what terrifies you. We just started throwing things out on the table and he did have two very corrupt cops in the story. I said, ‘That interests me, and the clarity with which children see interests me, and I haven’t seen a serial killer film the way I want to see a serial killer film and I want to confuse people about what good and bad look like.”

Jennifer Lynch sent a rough draft of Surveillance to actor Bill Pullman. He turned it down, but Lynch remained a big enough fan to recommend her father cast the actor in Lost Highway (1997). Lynch would finally share her script with her dad, prompting an urgent late night phone call. Lynch was aghast at the way his daughter wrapped up the story and challenged her to write a more optimistic ending. Even after Jennifer heeded the fatherly advice, no one expressed much interest in bankrolling the movie. She recalled, “This was very hard to get off the ground. My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, ‘You’re the sickest bitch I know!’”

She added, “But he called ages later and said, ‘What’s happening with your movie?’ and I said ‘Zilch.’ I told him I don’t know if it’s the material, if it’s the 15 years raising a kid, if it’s Boxing Helena, but nobody’s interested. And he said, ‘What if I put my name on it?’ I’m like, ‘C’mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.’ Because, believe me, it’s a big issue for me. But that day I typed: ‘Executive producer: David Lynch’, and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write ‘Steven Spielberg’ on their script. Who’s checking?” Kent Harper traveled to Germany and in November 2005, it was announced that he’d hooked producer Marco Mehlitz and Lago Film to provide $10 million in financing.

Nine months later, actor Billy Burke (Twilight) agreed to take the lead role and Surveillance was slated to begin shooting in October 2006. But Burke became the latest actor to get cold feet with Lynch and dropped out. Lynch phoned Bill Pullman and begged him to give her script another read. Lynch recalled, “He said, ‘Why did I say no?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. You never told me. Can I send it to you?’ He said, ‘Do it right now.’ And two hours later he called me and said, ‘I’m in.’ And Julia actually found me. She read the script and called and I said, ‘The Julia Ormond? You’re so classy and beautiful and awesome.’ And then I thought, that’s a genius idea. That’s the perfect FBI agent.”

Surveillance commenced a 22-day shooting schedule April 2007 in Saskatchewan, Canada near the town of Regina. “They call it the town that rhymes with fun. It’s just outside Big Beaver too so it’s just crude joke after crude joke.” Lynch had envisioned shooting the film in Santa Fe, but the New Mexico Film Office did not embrace the script. Lynch added, “There we were in Regina where they give amazing tax breaks because it’s Canada, incredible crews, incredible production facilities, and their prairies look like middle America and really afforded me the opportunity to aim the camera in any direction and just see that vast nothingness and feel how everything is seen and yet there’s nowhere to go. It’s like there’s all this space but you can’t go anywhere.”

Critics were not favorable to what they saw. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.” Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch’s films, little is explained, yet because he’s so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.” Scott Mendelson, Film Threat: “In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.”

After playing in Europe summer 2008, Americans got a look at Surveillance on HDNet Ultra VOD in May 2009 and in a limited theatrical release in June. Playing only three theaters, it took in $27,349 at the U.S. box office and grossed $974,522 overseas. Jennifer Lynch appeared content to have finished a film after her 15-year hiatus. “The good news is: everybody can make a film. The bad news is: everybody can make a film. And everyone should. It’s just really tricky so it makes those available spots and moments of financing really hard to get and you really earn it. Making a film is hard enough. Starting it’s hard, doing it’s hard, finishing it’s hard, and so I champion everyone who gets it done whether they’re doing it themselves or through a studio or independent financing.”

Should I Care?
Loaded with enough gore to win Best Director for Jennifer Lynch at the 2008 New York City Horror Film Festival — and to get her the job directing Nagin: The Snake Woman, a straight-up horror flick — Surveillance is more coherent than I remember Natural Born Killers being, so as Joe Bob Briggs might opine, if you liked that, you’re gonna love this. Lynch keeps the blood flowing, but her film is dry as a bone everywhere that counts. If you expect suspense, interesting characters, atmosphere or passable dialogue, don’t waste your time on this. Lynch is a fine person, I’m sure, but after two films in 15 years, she’s yet to demonstrate why she should be making movies.

Like The Boondock Saints — which was also ridiculous past the point of being watchable — Lynch is either unable or unwilling to involve the audience in anything emotionally and in an effort to compensate, goes for farce. Instead of Dennis Hopper or Robert Blake, Lynch’s boogeyman is played by … French Stewart, TV’s French Stewart, the guy most likely to be confused for Fred Schneider of The B-52s and least likely to terrorize anyone. Like the ultraviolence, Stewart’s mere appearance seems to be the joke. I didn’t laugh. What’s least amusing about Surveillance is seeing Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond — two actors still rolling strikes and not working near enough in film — wading through garbage like this.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Jennifer Lynch: Life with David and the Turkey of the Decade” By James Mottram. The Independent, 22 February 2009

“Even Hitler Deserved To Be Loved” By John Patterson. The Guardian, 27 February 2009

“Director Jennifer Lynch Interview Surveillance” By Sheila Roberts. The Collider, 22 June 2009

“Jennifer Lynch” By Alex Simon. The Hollywood Interview, 25 June 2009

“LiC Interview: Jennifer Lynch — Surveillance” By Craig Kennedy. Living in Cinema, 25 June 2009