Benicio Del Toro stars in "The Wolfman," a remake of the legendary classic. The film, directed by Joe Johnston, is being released by Universal on February 12.

He has been given countless names by scores of cultures over thousands of years. There has long been a global fascination with the mythological creature known as the lycanthrope, a human with the unnatural ability to transform into a wolf-like creature when the moon is full. From the myths of the ancient Greeks to documentation by Gervase of Tilbury in 1212’s “Otia Imperialia,” horror stories about werewolves have dominated world cultures for centuries.

Remaking a Classic

But it has only been in the past seven decades that the creature was committed to film. In 1935, Universal released Werewolf of London, from director Stuart Walker, but it was 1941’s classic The Wolf Man that firmly established the modern cinematic myth of the werewolf. The film created a lasting iconic character in the tragic figure of a wayward nobleman by the name of Lawrence Talbot, played by Lon Chaney, Jr., son of silent film icon Lon Chaney, star of The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Directed by George Waggner from an original screenplay by Curt Siodmak, The Wolf Man was Universal’s latest creature film in an era that spawned imagination and nightmares. The Talbot character went on to reappear in films for the studio including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.

While the original, with its tagline of “His hideous howl a dirge of death!” became an instant classic, at only 70 minutes in run time, it was quite a short monster movie. It solidified the fame of star Lon Chaney, Jr. and included cameos from additional Universal “monsters,” including The Invisible Man’s Claude Rains as Sir John Talbot and Dracula’s Bela Lugosi as the gypsy who discovers the curse that’s been leveled upon Lawrence.

A Longtime Fan 

Actor/producer Benicio Del Toro has long been a fan of this genre and began to consider paying homage to the film with his manager and producer, Rick Yorn. Yorn explains his interest in beginning the project: “Growing up, these monster films really had an effect on my brothers and me. When I first came out to Hollywood, I wanted to remake one of the old movies. A few years ago, when Benicio and I were walking out of his house, I saw the one-sheet for The Wolf Man. It shows a close-up of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the monster. I looked at the poster, then back at Benicio—who had a full beard at the time—and said, ‘How would you feel about remaking The Wolf Man?’”

Del Toro was very interested in paying homage to the genre he’d loved since he was a boy. While he realized that would require him going deep into the makeup and prosthetics it would take to pull off the signature look of the creature, he was game for the challenge. “Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy… when I was a kid, I watched these movies,” Del Toro explains. “My earliest recollection of acting was watching Lon Chaney, Jr. play the Wolf Man. We wanted to honor this classic movie and the Henry Hull movie Werewolf of London. We knew it would be exciting to make it in the classic, handcrafted way.”

Del Toro didn’t want to remake the film frame by frame, but rather update it for modern audiences. He felt the story screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self created “gave the movie some twists and turns and a modern edge, while still honoring the original story.”

Del Toro and Yorn set about getting the project off the ground and, during a dinner with producer Scott Stuber, the men decided it was time this classic was updated. “We have put in a few twists, but we wanted to honor the original,” says Stuber. “The Wolf Man is so iconic because, on some level, he is within us. Every person feels a sense of rage. Each of us feels a sense of that time when we went too far, got too angry, did something we shouldn’t have done. Something primal exists within all of us, and we must control it or we are doomed.”

A Perfect Fit 

It was never a doubt for the producer that Del Toro was perfect for the title character. Of the Oscar winner, Stuber commends: “Benicio’s got such powerful eyes. To feel so much emotion coming from under the transformation is critical to the heart of the movie. We didn’t want to separate the actor from the Wolfman…and end up having the beast here and Benicio there. The performance is always most important in order to feel for the character. The special affects are amazing, and they enhance the performance…they don’t create it.”

The three filmmakers were joined by producer Sean Daniel, who knew something about reinvigorating monster franchises himself; Daniel helped relaunch The Mummy series for Universal Pictures. Of his involvement in the production, Daniel notes: “It was really exciting to be asked to join in on giving new life to another of Universal’s great, classic monster characters that so inspired me when I was a kid.” Together, the producers began the search for a director who could not only translate the drama of the script, but also execute a horror film that would seamlessly blend visual effects, creature effects and CGI.

Story Before Spectacle

When director Joe Johnston was brought on to the project, he took over the reigns from Mark Romanek, who departed during pre-production. An Academy Award-winning art director for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Johnston’s resume as a director includes a strong combination of character-driven films such as October Sky and epic visual effects movies including Jurassic Park III and Hidalgo.

As with all of his projects, the director was far more interested in story before spectacle. In screenwriters Walker and Self’s tale, he found “underneath the action and the blood and the terror, a love story about Lawrence Talbot and his dead brother’s fiancée, Gwen. I wanted that relationship to be the element that held the story together…the key piece that invested the audience in understanding this horrible thing Lawrence is inflicted with.”

The former art director was excited by the visual challenges that would come from turning the script into an action-horror film: “I want to show the audience something they haven’t seen before in our process of turning a man into a werewolf,” notes Johnston. “We’ve all seen these transformations in werewolf movies, and they all rely more or less on the same visual elements. It’s stretching bones and hair growing on the face.

“We’ve done transformations in The Wolfman that you could only do with the help of computer generated animation,” he continues. “We have a great place to start the transformation, which is Benicio Del Toro, and we have a great place to end up, which is Rick Baker’s makeup. But it’s not a straight-line transformation…we go off in multiple directions to get to the end result.”

The historical epic "Ben-Hur," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1959 boasted achievements in a number of departments. It was the most expensive film ever made to date, with a budget of $15 million, one fifth of which was allocated for promotion and advertisement. The film was produced in Rome by Sam Zimablist, who reportedly constructed 3,000 sets and employed over 50,000 people.

The MGM Oscar-winning musical may not be Minnelli's best picture but it certainly is his best-known movie. A morally ambiguous story, staged in a sumptuous style, Gigi is also the biggest commercial hit of Minnelli-Freed's long and productive collaboration.

Mike Todd's "Around the World in 80 Days" was the second adventure movie to win the Best Picture Oscar, in a year full of big and prestige productions, such as "The Ten Commandments," "Giant," and "The King and I," all vying for the top prize. 1956 marks the first year in Oscar's history, in which all five Best Picture nominees were in color.

 United Artists
Hecht and Lancaster's Steven Production

The first adventure movie to win (undeservedly) the Best Picture Oscar was Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1952), which also earned, for no apparent reason, the writing award, then called Motion Picture Story, for Frederic M. Frank, Theodore St. John, and Frank Cavett.

In 1949, Vincente Minnelli began discussions with producer Arthur Freed for a musical based on George Gershwins work. Freed had a vague notion for a musical about an expatriate Yank living in Paris.

The only set element was a smash finale, a full-length ballet set to Gershwins suite, An American in Paris. The Irving Berlin medley, Easter Parade, was a big hit, and the unexpected success of the British import, The Red Shoes, further proved that there was a public for opulent dance-oriented musicals.

Ira Gershwin, George's brother, was persuaded to provide new lyrics and revised some old ones, as needed. Freed wanted Alan Jay Lerner, then Broadway's brightest talent, to shape the narrative.

A Francophile, Minnelli identified completely with his hero, Jerry, an American painter in Paris. Arguably, no Hollywood director was as knowledgeable of French art as Minnelli. His work often sought to evoke the light and color of his admired French painters. American in Paris also had a sentimental value, a personal reminder of Minnellis friendship with the Gershwins.

Minnelli had the requisite taste and knowledge to execute a ballet that would become a kaleidoscopic collage, a brief history of French painting. It would run 17 minutes and cost half a million dollars, a staggering amount, basically the entire budget of a modest film. For the story, Lerner devised two romances. One between Jerry, an artist studying in Paris under GI Bill, and his patron, Milo Roberts, an older expatriate heiress interested in Jerry personally and professionally. The second romance is between Jerry and a young Parisienne, Lise Bourvier, with Jerry is unaware that Lise is the fiance of his friend, music hall star Henri Baurel; Henri had sheltered the orphaned Lise during the War. Minnelli thought that the story was uninspired, but there were other compensations, prime among which were Kelly's dancing, Gershwins music, and the picturesque Parisian setting.

Jerrys caustic pal, pianist-composer Adam Cook, was tailored for Gershwin's crony and Minnelli's buddy, Oscar Levant. Levant played a Dave Diamond type, a perpetual expatriate composer living in Europe on the largesse of foundation fellowships. For the part of the older woman-patron Milo, Minnelli settled on Nina Foch.  Henri Baurel was conceived as a comeback role for Maurice Chevalier after a long absence from the screen. However, the French star was dropped from consideration due to MGM's fear of controversy about his alleged collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation. Instead, Georges Guetray, a vet of French musicals, was chosen.

The main problem was finding the right actress to play Lise. Kelly remembered meeting a 17-year-old ballerina, Leslie Caron, whom he had seen on stage in a ballet. Kelly was then sent to Paris to conduct a test of Caron. When Kelly came back, the decision was positive, despite Carons lack of acting experience. Caron was offered a long-term contract that catapulted her to stardom.

Preston Ames, a former architecture student in Paris, designed the sets. Metro's designers often found working with Minnelli frustrating, because he was full of paradoxes, pressing yet inarticulate. However, from their very first collaboration, Ames and Minnelli got along well. In the future, Ames contributed to every musical Minnelli made at MGM. Adrienne Fazan, whose sensibility was in synch with Minnelli's, was recruited as editor. However, American In Paris marked Minnelli's first clash with a cinematographer. Minnelli's wish for visual nuance didnt suit Alfred Gilkes' expediency. No matter what the emotional texture of a scene, Gilkes tended to flood it with light. Minnelli asked to replace Gilkes with John Alton, who had just shot for him Father of the Bride. A film noir specialist, Alton had not worked with color cinematography, but for Minnelli, it became an asset, as Alton wasn't confined by preconceptions of the possibilities of Technicolor.

Minnelli spent weeks with Freed, Kelly, Ira Gershwin, and Chaplin, looking for those George's songs that would best fit Kelly's choreography and Lerner's script. Some songs carried special resonance. Our Love Is Here to Stay," used as a romantic duet for Kelly and Caron, was Gershwin's very last song, left incomplete by his death. And the mock Viennese, "By Strauss," had been written for Minnelli's last Broadway revue.

Caron was a decent dancer but she could not sing. Instead of performing with a borrowed voice, as was the custom, Minnelli decided to keep her silent during the musical interludes. He handled Caron's scenes so sensitively that, when the movie was released, few critics noticed her lack of singing. American in Paris thus became the era's only major musical to feature an all-male score.

Despite Minnellis disappointment of not going to Paris, shooting the film on the studio lot liberated its creative team, particularly in executing the complex ballet. The real city of Paris would have to wait until 1958, when Minnelli shot Gigi there. In designing a dreamlike Paris with lights and canvas, Minnelli relied on his bold imagination and art books. Like the paintings the movie evokes, Minnelli's soundstages had a distilled magic about them.

American in Paris exemplified the virtues of the studio system, specifically, the cooperative coordination among the talent groups. Once completed by Ames, the designs were executed by George Gibson and Keogh Gleason. Minnelli's regular collaborator, Jack Martin, devised the black and white scheme for the Beaux Arts Ball that precedes the ballet. Conrad Salinger orchestrated the score that had been assembled by Green and Chaplin.

What made the ballet special was Minnellis visual conception, which keyed each sequence to a different color scheme and architectural style. The segment was actually shot by Kelly, while Minnelli was busy with Fathers Little Dividend. Kelly's choreography provided the basic movement, but it was Minnelli who turned it into a masterful whirlwind of color and movement, endowing the numbers with propulsive energy.

In the ballet, Minnelli conjures up the eloquence of silent film, using images for sensuality and emotion. The ballet broke records: For 17 minutes, not a single word was uttered, reflecting Minnellis long-standing belief that words presented unnecessary barriers between the images and the emotions they convey.

After the ballet, the fadeout is brief and anticlimactic. Jerry looks down the street as Lise descends from a taxicab, after bidding adieu to Henri. The lovers race into a stairway of 30 steps to paradise, with Kelly going downward as Caron goes upward. They embrace at mid-landing, before descending quickly together. In a final shot, Minnelli pans upward to a sapphire Paris skyline (as hell also do in a number of his melodramas (Some Came Running).

When American in Paris opened in July, the critics liked Gershwin's music, Kelly's innovative choreography, and Caron's charm. Kelly wasn't disappointed when he failed to earn a nomination. As he later noted: "There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy. Minnelli and Lerner resolve the film's narrative before the ballet. It's remarkable how quickly the film ends after the ballet. The camera follows a trail of cigarette smoke to a smoking face, revealing that Henri has overheard Jerry's farewell to Lise. The final reunion of Jerry and Lise concludes the film after 17 minutes of pure visual imagery and music. Henri opens a taxi door, permitting Lise's flight up the steps toward the racing Jerry. The painter finally grasps the rose.

The ballet's duration of 16 minutes and 37 seconds is the culmination of all the frames, mirrors, and psychological projections that had preceded it. Some believed that the ballet was responsible for winning the Oscar. Moreover, after 1951, the ballet became a standard staple in the genre: No prestigious musical could do without a dance. However, in both concept and audacity, none of the other films ballets equals the dream ballet of American in Paris. Minnelli not only saw dancing within painting, but dancing through paintings. At times, it feels as if the paintings themselves dance. For Minnelli, the ballet was an American renewal of the spirit that produced Gershwins music in the first place. Gershwin, like a whole generation of American soldiers, went to Paris. The difference between them is that, unlike Gershwin, Jerry decided to stay in Paris to paint.

 Cast:

Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly)

Lise Bourvier (Leslie Caron)

Adam Cook (Oscar Levant)

Henri Baurel (George Guetary)

Milo Roberts (Nina Foche)

George Mattieu (Eugene Borden)

Mathilde Mattieu (Martha Bamattre)

Therese (Ann Codee)

Francois (George Davis)

Tommy Badwin (Hayden Rorke)

John McDowd (Paul Maxey)

Ben Macrow (Dick Wessel)

Credits

Produced by Arthur Freed

Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his story

Cinematography: Alfred Gilks

Ballet Cinematography: John Alton

Art Direction: Cedric Gibson, Preston Ames

Set Decoration: Edwin B. Willis; Keogh Gleason

Music: George Gershwin

Musical direction: Johnny Green, Saul Chaplin

Orchestrations: Conrad Salinger

Choreography: Gene Kelly; assistant Carol Haney

Lyrics by Ira Gershwin: "I Got Rhythm," Embraceable You," "S' Wonderful," "Nice Work If We Can Get it," "By Strauss," "Tra-La-La," "Our Love Is Here to Stay," "Concero in F," "Liza," "I Don't Think I'll Fall in Love Today," "Ridin' My Time," "How Long Has This Been Going On?" "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" (lyrics by E. Goetz and B. G. DeSylva).

Editing: Adrienne Fazan

Montage Sequences: Peter Basllbusch

Special Effects: Warren Newcombe, Irving Ries

Costumes: Orry-Kelly.

Beaux Arts Ball Costumes: Walter Plunkett

Ballet Costumes: Irene Sharaff

Technicolor direction: Henri Jaffa, James Gooch

Recording Direction: Douglas Shearer

Hair: Sydney Guilaroff

Makeup: William Tuttle

Gene Kelly's paintings: Gene Grant

Running Time: 113 Minutes

In 1950, two major films dealt in a poignantly satirical way with the world of showbiz: "All About Eve" and "Sunset Boulevard." Never before had Broadway in "All About Eve" and Hollywood in "Sunset Boulevard" suffered such scathing indictments from their own members.

"All the King's Men," a political drama about the corruptive nature of political and personal power and the danger of populist dictatorship in America, won the 1949 Best Picture Oscar.

Produced written and directed by Robert Rossen ("The Hustler," "They Came to Cordura"), the movie features a bravura performance by Broderick Crawford (who also made Born Yesterday), who won the 1949 Best Actor with his stunning portrayal of bull-headed, backwoods lawyer Willie Stark,

John Ireland ("Spartacus," TVs Rawhide) garnered an Oscar nomination for his role as Stark's tortured right-hand man, while Mercedes McCambridge ("Giant," "Suddenly Last Summer") won Supporting Actress as Sadie Burke, Stark's callous, conniving political aide.

A somber but realistic chronicle of raw, brutal power in force, "All the King's Men" was brought to the screen by producer Robert Rossen who also wrote the screenplay and directed the film. The story was inspired by the rise and fall of southern bigwig Huey Pierce Long, the infamous "Kingfish" who was Louisiana's governor and one-time senator.

Long's cunning tactics of building public works during the depression to serve his own needs more than those of his constituents eventually brought about his own assassination in 1935.

A compelling story of a self-made, self-styled politician, it was politics that almost prevented Rossen from making "All the King's Men" in the first place, when he was named by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 for having Communist sympathies. Rossen's denial of this to Columbia chief Harry Cohn enables him to continue work on the film. Nonetheless, his earlier radicalism eventually surfaced and Rossen made only one more film ("The Brave Bulls") in the next five years.

Willie Stark, a self-styled demagogue, begins as a self-made rural Louisiana lawyer and ends up building a fraudulent political empire, which results in his assassination.

As Sadie Burke, Mercedes McCambridge won the Supporting Actress Oscar, playing Stark's tough, unscrupulous secretary-mistress. Described as a "hard-boiled henchman in skirts," she is seething with impotence and suppressed rage as she watches Stark get out of personal control.

"All the King's Men" drew on Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer-winning book about the life of Southern Senator Huey Long, adapted to the screen by Robert Rossen. (There's a very good documentary about Huey Long that played at Sundance and other film festivals).

Nominated as Director and Writer, Rossen didn't win in either category; the winner was Joseph Mankiewicz, as the writer-director of "A Letter to Three Wives."

Context Alert

"All the King's Men" competed against four other films, each critical of some aspect of American life. They included two realistic analyses of men at war, "Battleground" and "Twelve O'Clock High;" an adaptation of Henry James' tale of a greedy courtship, "The Heiress;" and a satiric examination of bourgeois suburban life and marriage, "A Letter to Three Wives."

Oscar Nominations: 7

Picture, produced by Robert Rossen Director: Robert Rossen Screenplay: Robert Rossen Actor: Broderick Crawford Supporting Actress: Mercedes McCambridge Supporting Actor: John Ireland Editing: Robert Parrish, Al Clark

Oscar Awards: 3

Picture Actor Supporting Actress

Mercedes McCambridge's Oscar Speech

A word of consolation to the yet undiscovered and unestablished artists appeared in some Oscar speeches. Mercedes McCambridge, who won the Oscar for her very first film, encouraged other young actors: "Mostly I want to say to every waiting actor, hang on! Look what can happen!" "I meant it with my heart," she later explained, "as a message to all those other actors in the cattle call that day back in New York. I got it that time. Maybe their turn is next. The hanging on is the hard part."

New DVD in time for 2006 Remake

Based on the life and death of Louisianas notorious governor, Huey The Kingfish Long, the DVD release is timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the 2006 version All the Kings Men starring Anthony Hopkins, Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, James Gandolfini and Mark Ruffalo.

DVD Special Features

Sneak Peak and Trailer of the 2006 Theatrical Release of "All The Kings Men," including interviews with Jude Law, James Gandolfini and Anthony Hopkins

Digitally Mastered Audio & Video * Full-screen Presentation * Audio: English (Mono) * Subtitles: English

The surprise Oscar-winner of 1948, Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet," was filmed in a different style than the actor's 1946 Oscar-nominated "Henry V."  In this adaptation, Olivier used the camera as an active participant in the narrative, and shot in black and white, based on his metaphor for the movie Hamlet is like an engraving rather than a painting." Hauntingly photographed, the Castle, with its massive and gloomy corridors, framed the human characters in a cool, detached way, and the Oscars for Art Direction and Costume Design were well deserved.

Despite criticism of the 153-minute screen version, which omitted characters and whole scenes from Shakespeare's play, "Hamlet" is still an exciting film, particularly when compared with Zeffirelli's 1990 version, marred by the miscasting of Mel Gibson, as the melancholy Danish prince, and particularly Glenn Close, as Gertrude.

Nominated for seven Oscars, "Hamlet" won four: Best Picture, Actor for Olivier, Black-and-White Art Direction/Set Decoration for Roger K. Furse and Carmen Dillon, and Black-and-White Costume Design for Furse. The other nominations were for Director Olivier; Supporting Actress Jean Simmons, as Ophelia; and for Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy for William Walton.

The political crusading drama reappeared in the late 1940s, when Hollywood devoted its efforts to exploring racial discrimination, first against Jews, then against blacks and Indians. The 1947 Oscar-winning film was Elia Kazan's "Gentleman's Agreement," based on Laura Z. Hobson's novel and adapted to the screen by Moss Hart, which illustrated the cruelties and injustices of anti-Semitism.

Although "Gentleman's Agreement" seems tame and naïve by today's standards, it was definitely a big step in the maturation of Hollywood. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster have correctly noted that the political crusading dramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s conveyed "an optimism which refused to see any problem as insoluble," but at least these films were directly confronting problems. Amazingly, "Gentleman's Agreement" was the first time the word "Jew" was used explicitly in a mainstream film.

Oscar History: Jane Campion (The Piano) Second Woman Director in Oscar History

Italy

"Z," Costa-Gavras's extraordinarily compelling thriller is one of the fastest, most exciting political melodramas ever made. It's also one of the few foreign-language films to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. 

Mel Gibson plays Craven in "Edge of Darkness," the new film based on a 20 year old BBC miniseries of the same name. The film is being released on January 29 by Warner Bros.

Gibson, returning to the screen after a highly successful period behind the camera, takes on the part of Craven, his first starring role in seven years. "It was an intriguing story," says Gibson. "That's the main thing--if I think it'll be compelling and entertaining to an audience, I'm on board."

New Trailer: http://emanuellevy.com/videos/view.cfm?id=151

"What really grabbed me was how the story sneaks up on you," offers Gibson. The actor met with King and Campbell and felt they were "two clever guys who had a clear and smart vision of the movie, and I knew it would be great working with them." 

On His Character 

"Craven is very pedestrian," observes Gibson, "just a guy who's getting by, day-to-day. He hasn't been the greatest father but he provided. His journey now is a war of attrition; everything that happens wears away at who he is. The stress, the traumatic experience of losing a child like that, has him just a little unhinged and walking around most of the time in a state of near breakdown. He is close--right at the edge--but he can't let it crack too much because he's got a job to do."

Gibson says he found the biggest challenge to playing Craven was "the stillness. Stillness has always been a stranger to me, and he's very still. I tried to really rein myself in--not pull too many faces or make too many movements--because he's a very introverted man."

Shooting on Location

"Filming in Boston was terrific, as were the people," says Gibson. "Anywhere you looked, you got a pervasive sense of living history that gave you a true appreciation of our hard-won freedom. You felt you were in the cultural cradle of a young nation with the aged style and charm of Europe."

The behind-the-scenes teams weren't the only ones recreating that uniquely Boston tone. Gibson, a New York native who spent most of his upbringing in Australia, had to sound like a born-and-bred Bostonian.

"All my cousins were from Queens and Brooklyn. My mom was Brooklyn Irish, so it wasn't that far off; it does go back to a Gaelic root," says the actor, who enjoyed doing the research. "I hung out with detectives like Tommy Duffy. He's great, he sounds like a tough-talkin' dog in a cartoon," he grins. "The accent really has its own character. That diphthong can kind of slip you into a different place, a different level of being."

In 1937, William Dieterle's "The Life of Emile Zola" was nominated for the largest number of awards, 10. The movie won 3: Best Picture (producer Henry Blanke), Screenplay (Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg, and Norman Reilly Raine), and Supporting Actor to Joseph Schildkraut, playing the role of the wrongly accused Jewish Captain, Alfred Dreyfus.

MGM

See original 1935 Trailer here.

Produced and directed by Frank Lloyd, this stirring sea adventure is based on the true story of the famous 1787 mutiny aboard the British ship HMS Bounty. 

A reworking of Errol Flynn's 1933 adventure, "In the Wake of the Bounty," Lloyd's version tells the story of the successful mutiny of part of the crew, which took place in the late eighteenth century in the South Seas.

Fox

"Cavalcade," the Oscar winner of 1932-3, was Fox's most prestigious and most important production to date. Based on Noel Coward's stage spectacular, adapted to the screen by Reginald Berkely, it is a tale of an upper-class British family that spans 30 years, beginning in New Year's Eve of 1899, and continuing through the Boer War, the sinking of the Titanic, World War One, and the Depression.

MGM

Only three of the 81 Oscar-winning films have been Westerns: "Cimarron" in 1930-1, Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" in 1990, and Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," in 1992.

Directed by Wesley Ruggles, "Cimarron" is based on Edna Ferber's best-selling book about the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, from the late 1890s to 1940.

If "Wings," the first Oscar-winning war film, celebrates heroism, action, and male camaraderie, "All Quiet on the Western Front," the third Best Picture (for 1929-1930) has a different, anti-war, message. Based on Eric Maria Remarque's famous novel, adapted to the screen by a team of writers headed by playwright Maxwell Anderson, Dell Andrews, and George Abbott, the story describes the initial excitement and then disillusionment of a group of German soldiers in the First World War, none of whom survives.

The second Oscar-winner, "The Broadway Melody," was MGM's first musical and also the first talking film to be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

The second Oscar-winner, "The Broadway Melody," was MGM's first musical and also the first talking film to be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

The first Oscar-winning film, "Wings," is the only silent feature to receive the coveted award, which was given in 1929 for achievements in 1927-1928.

A psychological thriller with strong political overtones about the troubled relations between France and Algiers, "Hidden" ("Cache") deals with a bourgeois nuclear family threatened by forces from within and from without.  Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil play a married couple whose life is preyed upon by mysterious stalkers.

Recent films by Austrian director Michael Haneke have been shot in France with French stars, such as Code Unknown ("Code Inconnu," with Juliette Binoche) and "The Piano Teacher," with Isabelle Huppert, which won the Special Jury in Cannes in 2001. Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as a married couple whose life is preyed upon and threatened by mysterious stalkers.

Haneke is not only a master of gripping suspense and muffled violence, as demonstrated in "Funny Games," an accomplished but lesser picture than "Hidden," but he's also a sharp observer of human behavior in extreme, crisis situations, as was the case in last year's Cannes out-of-competition entry, the existential end-of-the-world saga, "Hour of the Wolves."

Unlike most American suspense thrillers, the tension in all of Haneke's films derives from --and is integral to -- everyday life. This recurrent motif establishes a direct link between his work and that of the ultimate master of suspense, Hitchcock, whose films are also predicated on the notion of a complacent middle-class existence, shattered by various forces of terror and horror.

One of Europe's most accomplished filmmakers, whose work is shamefully little known in the U.S., Haneke is an arthouse auteur, whose oeuvre is marked by a number of persistent issues: the haunting, inevitable effect of the past on the present, personal and collective guilt, paranoia created by and manifest in both the domestic and political arenas, bourgeois complacency, and individuals reluctance and inability to take responsibility for their own conduct. Haneke's dark, cynical and ambiguous worldview is reflected in each of his films, including his metaphysical, apocalyptic meditation on the end-of-the-world in "Hour of the Wolves."

It's to the credit of Haneke as a screenwriter that, though politics is very much part of the narrative, the characters are individualized enough as to not serve as ideological mouthpieces for First World countries (such as France and the U.S.) versus small, underprivileged Third World ones.

Georges (Auteuill), the host of a TV literary show, is a complacent bourgeois, having been born into wealthy, educated family. Anne (Binoche), his wife, is also a career woman, an editor. Their bright adolescent son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), is going through the growing pains typical of that age very much on his own.

The family's routine life is interrupted by anonymous delivery of threatening videotapes and phone calls. The videos are secretly shot from the street in front of their house, which means that someone with the right equipment is observing them. "Hidden" begins with a long, middle range static shot of the front of the house, a seemingly calm image that Haneke repeats throughout the film and increasingly gets more and more threatening. Some of the tapes are wrapped by wild drawings in red of a strange, childlike figure.

At first, the couple thinks that it is a prank of their son or some of his classmates. But later, when the videos persist arriving, at all times of the day, the duo begins to fear for their lives and for the safety of their son.

Georges claim that he knows the perpetrator's identity, but can't share this privileged info with his wife, which, of course, throws the couple into a crisis mode, with Anne, offended and hurt, perceiving it as a clear case of mistrust and even distrust.

Through flashbacks, a painful, traumatic episode of Georges' childhood is recreated. Since this is a major suspense element, not much can be revealed without spoiling the fun. Suffice is to say that it has to do with the relationship between Georges and his family and a family of Algerians, who worked for his father. This episode ends when Georges becomes responsible for sending the Algerian boy (who's his age) to a boarding school.

Georges later encounters the Algerian boy, now a mature man, and his son, and the encounters ends in him witnessing a tragic and violent suicide. Though at first denying any responsibility, gradually, Georges begins to feel an intense guilt that eventually tears him and his entire family apart.

The suspenser ends ambiguously, without ever revealing the identity of the mysterious stalkers and the fate of Georges and his family. The last shot of the film, like the first one, is a frontal middle range image of the school that Pierrot attends. Yet it's not clear if Pierrot is being observed, about to be kidnapped, or waited to be picked up by his parents. The open-ended finale will frustrate American viewers who're used to seeing thrillers in which every element is explained.

A whole dissertation could be written about the differences between David Cronenberg's A History of Violence and Haneke's "Hidden," which share stronger thematic elements in common. In he both films, the central unit is a seemingly happy nuclear family whose balance is shattered. In both, the husband's identity and past are not entirely known to his wife. Yet, stylistically, the two works could not have been different, reflecting both the idiosyncratic vision of their respective directors as well as the national cinema and tradition within which they work.

The title, "Hidden," has multiple meanings, some literal, other more metaphysical. "Hidden" could refer to the hidden camera that secretly record and invade Georges' domestic life. But the moniker could also describe the past of Georges as a child, hidden both from his wife as well as his own consciousness. The tapes force Georges to begin to come to terms with his past, and the last shot of Georges is just as ambiguous as the film's finale.

Though the problematic relations between France and Algiers (which was a colony until it reached independence through violent war) occurred over 40 years ago, the story bears clear resonance to the problematic interracial relations between French and Algerians living in France at the present. By extension, "Hidden" has implications for the relations between any First World-Third World countries, past or present.

"Hidden" might have been over praised by critics in Cannes due to the shortage of great films. Nonetheless, it is an intelligent film for mature viewers that works effectively as a psychological thriller and political allegory. Sony Pictures Classics, which picked up the film for American distribution, could score big with a film that combines the sensibility of a European art film with that of a commercial genre item.

It's about time that Michael Haneke, whose work is almost obscure stateside, should receive a major retrospective honoring his two-decade career.

End note

Cache has won major awards, including Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, FIPRESCI Award, Cannes Film Festival, Ecumenical Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival; Best Foreign Language Film, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Best Foreign Language Film, San Francisco Film Critics Association,  Closing Night Selection, New York Film Festival, Official Selection, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals.  It was nominated for 7 European Film Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay and the Cesar, France's equivalent of the Oscar.

Albert and Allen Hughes' "The Book of Eli," starring Denzel Washington, will be released by Warner on January 15.

Douglas Sirk's stylized melodrama, "All That Heaven Allows," is set in Stonington, Connecticut, a seemingly perfect town to live in, and an ideal setting to have a family.  The opening overhead shot reveals a beautiful New England town with a nice church, white houses, and tall trees.

Whit Stillman has written, produced and directed several films: "Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco," all ensemble pieces with large number of characters. Notable for their Ivy League intellectualism, all three are about a rarified type, the privileged upper class members who marginalized themselves through self-involvement. Stillman makes cerebral comedies, in which relentlessly verbal characters are expressed in and by ideas, and are engaged in circular talk peppered with self-mockery.

The late, great Greta Garbo offers the best ammunition for those who wish to put the Oscar down as a merit award. Despite numerous distinguished performances, Garbo never won a legit Oscar, but the mediocre Sally Field has won two Oscars out of two nominations!

Would anyone remember Field's Oscar winning turns in a decade or so? I doubt it.  While Field's first Oscar, for Martin Ritt's "Norma Rae" (1999) was justified, the second, for Robert Benton's earnest period melodrama, "Places in the Heart" (1984) didn't even deserve a nomination.

Garbo is the one to laugh most. Fifteen years after her death and over six decades after her retirement, the legend of Garbo, the Divine, continues to thrive. However, when the Oscars are concerned, despite talent and stature, Garbo was a victim of MGM's internal politics and her own nonchalant personality, refusing to play by the industry's rules. Even so, Garbo was Oscar-nominated for four of her indelible performances.

First and Second Nominations: Anna Christie and Romance (1929-1930)

Garbo Talks!

On her first two nominations, for Anna Christie and "Romance," Garbo lost out to Norma Shearer, who won for "The Divorcee," also an MGM movie. As is well know, Shearer, a decent if elegant actress, was married at the time to wunderkind Irving Thalberg, MGM's head of production.

In "Anna Christie," a stagy adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's famous play, Garbo plays a down-on-her luck waterfront shady woman who attempts to find love with a sailor (played by Charles Bickford). Garbo's first sound film provided MGM with a proclamation that became one of the classic ad lines in movie history: "Garbo Talks!"

"Anna Christie" was also nominated for Direction, Clarence Brown, who became Garbo's most frequent director, and Cinematography, for William Daniels, Garbo's favorite lenser, who found a special, glowing way to light her. More than any other collaborator, Daniels, who shot most of her films and was responsible for creating the Garbo legendary look.

In the same year, Garbo was nominated for "Romance," an early, primitive talkie, marred by an inadequate leading man. Garbo was cast as an Italian opera star, forced to choose between her wealthy "patron" (Lewis Stone), and a young clergyman (Gavin Gordon), who falls in love with her. Director Clarence Brown was also nominated, but lost to Lewis Milestone, whose anti-war drama, "All Quiet on the Western Front" received the important awards.

Third Nomination: Camille (1937)

Garbo's greatest screen performance, one that prompted playwright-actor-celeb Noel Coward to declare in public: "This is the greatest performance ever committed onto the screen."

Garbo plays Marguerite Gautier, the Parisian courtesan who's supported by the Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell) but falls in love with Armand Duval (the young and handsome Robert Taylor). However, Armand's father (Lionel Barrymore) persuades Margyerite to break off the relationship and she consents to some tragic results. Cukor's sensitive direction, Daniels' luminous lighting, and passable script by Frances Marion, James Hilton, and Zoe Akins (based on Duma's novel and play) elevate the film.

Thalberg died of heart attack in 1936, before the completion of "Camille." Rather absurdly, his last film, "The Good Earth," received five nominations, whereas this gem, one of MGM's best films, received only one nomination, for Garbo. At her third nomination, Garbo lost out to another lesser actress, Luise Rainer, in "The Good Earth." Rainer was then strongly supported by Louis B. Mayer, though three years later, he would drop her and her career would terminate. Today, Rainer, a two-time Oscar-winner, is all but forgotten.

Fourth Nomination: Ninotchka (1939)

Garbo Laughs!

A wonderful romantic comedy, directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the famous Lubitsch touch, "Ninotchka" was nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture; Original Story, Melchior Lengyel; Screenplay, Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Billy Wilder, and of course, Best Actress to Garbo.

Garbo plays the eponymous heroine, a Soviet official sent to Paris to track three commissars who have gone to the City of Light to sell jewels and have stayed there, having been seduced by the decadent bourgeois lifestyle. Ninotchka meets and falls in love with an exiled Russian count (played by Garbo's most frequent star in the sound era, Melvyn Douglas). "Ninotchka" is Garbo'slast nomination and next-to-last film; she made only one more picture, "Two-Faced Woman," directed by George Cukor, before retiring from the screening in 1941.

There are moments in "Ninotchka" in which Garbo seems to parody her own screen image. Nonetheless, the role was tailor-made for Garbo skills, suggesting repressed desire behind a mask of impassivity, a technique she had used before in her tragedies and melodramas but not comedies. Indeed, extremely insecure at playing comedy, especially the scene in which she gets drunk on champagne, Garbo insisted on closing the set to cast and crew members who didn't have to be there.

Garbo lost out at her fourth nomination to Vivien Leigh in "Gone with the Wind," which swept most of the Oscars, including Best Picture and Writing. Unlike Garbo's previous competitors, Leigh at least gave an exuberant performance.

Honorary Oscar as Compensation

In 1954, the Academy bestowed on Garbo an honorary Oscar for her "unforgettable screen performances." Garbo didn't even bother to collect the statuette, which was then sent to her Manhattan home, on East 52nd Street, left outside her door (It's the same building where Rex Harrison used to live, trust me).   But Garbo never displayed her Oscar statutette in public--or talked about it.

Sony Classics December 25

Cannes Film Fest 2009 (In Competition)--With "A Prophet," the acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard has made a powerful, intensely realistic prison drama that contributes to the crime genre and benefits immensely from the raw freshness of its lead character. 

At midpoint of the festival, "Prophet" ("Un Prophet") dominates the critics poll as the best feature in competition, and there are reasons to believe that few other titles would match its level of emotional power and technical artistry. Thus, expect some major jury awards for directing or writing at the end of the event, perhaps even the Palme d'Or or the Special Jury Prize. The estimable Sony Classics has acquired the picture and will release it in December, after traveling the global festival road with stops at Telluride and Toronto Film Fests in September.

Working slowly but methodically, Audiard has made only a few films, but each one of them--"Read My Lips," "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"—is deeply thought, intimate, well-acted, and visually impressive. In the new picture, which is a point of departure, he works on a larger scale than the usual with a larger ensemble of actors. The film is deservedly long (two and a half hours), taking its time in developing the main characters, their conflicts, and some more existential ideas about crime and life in prison.

Neophyte actor Tahar Rahim plays Malik El Djebena, an illiterate Arab youth, only 19, who lands in prison. Upon arrival, he is unaware of the place's formal rules, informal norms, and various dangers that are part of the everyday life.

The first, more familiar reel depicts the violent encounters and humiliations and the struggle for survival that define prison life, particularly for young and naïve first-time offenders. It's in the second chapter that Audiard begins his deeper exploration of the characters and their dilemmas, physical as well as moral.

Forced under threat of death by the Corsican gang that runs the prison to befriend and kill a fellow Arab, Malik basically becomes an obedient slave-soldier in exchange for safety and protection. With time, however, Malik educates himself in the ways of the world and develops enough strength and personality to challenge the dominant power structure in jail. One of the film's new angles is the focus on the Corsicans (not the usual Sicilians), a group seldom represented in cinema, which hates the "bearded ones," the Muslims, as they struggle to maintain the upper hand.  Using both legit and illegit means, Malik becomes a calculated manipulator, playing different groups off each other, violating his own codes, to the point where he begins to have a gang of his own.

Most of the encounters are imbued with raw intensity and authenticity that ring true, though I have to admit that I have seen them before (in American and other films). In this respect, "Prophet" is a strong feature, with personal touches by Audiard, but not highly original.

Occasionally, Audiard, a humanist at heart, punctures the harsh realism with some stylized and lyrical sequences, such as the ghostly image of the man Malik had killed. 

Intermittently, there's also much needed humor in the verbal exchanges and physical interactions among the prisoners and the guards in what is essentially a grim and depressing portrait of a prison, which could easily serve as a microcosm of the larger society.

By Patrick Z. McGavin

Cannes Film Fest 2008--With his remarkable second feature, “Police, Adjective,” Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu joins the ranks of Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”) and 2007 Palme laureate Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”) of a major talent, blessed by a lively, funny and startling way of breathing new life into familiar or received ideas.

In expanding the Best Picture category to include ten films instead of five, the Oscars have opened the gates widely, really widely.  Inevitably, there will be several unexpected contenders in the top category. 

Back in May, right after watching “The White Ribbon,” one of Michael Haneke’s masterpieces, at the Cannes Film Fest, I kept thinking of another dark and brooding chronicle of the evils and secrets that pervade a small town, the very American “Kings Row.” 

"Brothers," directed by Jim Sheridan, stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, and Natalie Portman. The film is being released by Lionsgate on December 4.

Set against the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, BROTHERS visits several themes that have figured prominently throughout Sheridan’s career, including family relationships, the long shadow cast by war, and the enduring possibility of forgiveness and healing.  For his first work set in suburban America, Sheridan teams with a high-profile, award-winning cast, including Tobey Maguire (the SPIDER-MAN franchise, THE GOOD GERMAN), Jake Gyllenhaal (ZODIAC, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN), and Natalie Portman (THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, CLOSER); the august playwright/actor Sam Shepard (THE RIGHT STUFF); and actress Mare Winningham (GEORGIA).

BROTHERS is based on the 2004 Danish drama BRØDRE (BROTHERS), co-written and directed by Susanne Bier.  The film deeply impressed veteran producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson (David Lynch’s WILD AT HEART, Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER and THE WEIGHT OF WATER), who divides his time between California, his native Iceland, and Denmark.  Sighvatsson saw a connection between the narrative of BRØDRE and a post-Vietnam era of American films, such as COMING HOME and THE DEER HUNTER.  Those films explored “the war at home”: how war makes itself felt off the battlefield, in the domestic lives of soldiers and their families.  With that kind of intimate drama in mind, Sighvatsson set out to produce an American version of BRØDRE.  “To me,” says Sighvatsson, “this story is about family.  It’s not about killing people, but about the effect on the living.”

While Sighvatsson was negotiating with Bier in Denmark, on the other side of the globe in Los Angeles, BRØDRE had also caught the attention of Michael De Luca and his associate Zach Schiff-Abrams at Michael De Luca Productions.  De Luca was intrigued by the film’s study of two temperamentally different brothers living unfamiliar and opposing experiences: one constructive, the other destructive.      

Says De Luca, “I thought the original film was a great exploration of two questions:  what are the things that build a man up in his life, and what are the things that break a man down?  For the younger, ex-convict brother, being part of a family builds him up from the brink of self-destruction.  And then the older brother, who’s been the straight arrow his whole life, what breaks him down is war, captivity, and the violent loss of moral clarity.  The two brothers almost switch places, and it was that dynamic that really attracted me to explore the story in an American context.”

When De Luca went to buy the remake rights, he found out that Sighvatsson had already purchased them.  Because the two producers viewed the material in compatible ways, Sighvatsson and De Luca decided to partner as producers on the American remake of BRØDRE. 

Sighvatsson and De Luca tapped acclaimed screenwriter David Benioff (THE KITE RUNNER, STAY, TROY) to adapt the story to an American milieu.  Benioff incorporated recent American history in crafting the story of Sam and Tommy Cahill, sons of retired Marine officer who served in the Vietnam War.  The basic storyline remained the same, says Benioff.  “It’s two brothers, one who’s always followed the straight path and been the high-achieving do-gooder and never let anyone down, and his younger brother, who is kind of the ne’er do well.”

The producers began approaching directors and cast with early versions of Benioff’s script.  When they learned that Jim Sheridan was available, they were delighted.  Sheridan’s films, from MY LEFT FOOT and IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER to THE BOXER and IN AMERICA, have explored the intricacies familial relationships – the vital core of BROTHERS.  Says Sighvatsson, “Jim is always focused on the emotion. While he has an eye on the story and the actual events, that is less the thrust of the movie than the emotion propelling the characters.  That is his uniqueness as a filmmaker.”

Beginning with MY LEFT FOOT, Sheridan has portrayed characters from working class families, and he felt an affinity for the small-town Americans of BROTHERS.  “The Cahills are blue-collar, which I know.  They’re torn asunder by the war, and the film is about whether they can heal.” Sam’s harrowingly plausible ordeal in captivity adds another dimension to the film’s portrait of the human condition.   Comments Sheridan, “Sam’s experience in Afghanistan is beyond normal understanding, and that changes the story.  It’s beyond tragedy, and I was attracted by the heightened emotions that emerge from that.”

Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown co-wrote "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," Heath Ledger's last film shot before his death. Gilliam also directed the film. With actors Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude law stepping in to take over Ledger's unfinished performance, the film will be released December 25 by Sony Classics.

In November 2006, Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown started on the script, the third of their written collaborations, following “Brazil” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”

Gilliam had decided to write something original again, after a number of projects based on finished scripts or adapted from books. “It was nice to see whether we could still do it ourselves from scratch,” he explains. He set himself to exploring his store of unused materials – various ideas, some from unmade films, which had been lying around in a drawer – and started dragging them all out to see what could be used. He wanted to explore the idea of a troupe of travelling theatre people, based in modern-day London, who entered into a variety of exotic and fantastical worlds.

Gilliam also devised the central character of a man who is a bit lost, out of his time, and out of gear with his audience, who don’t want to listen to the stories that he tells any more, while it was McKeown who came up with the name Parnassus. “It’s his adventure, really, I suppose. It wasn’t absolutely fixed, but that was fairly clear in Terry’s mind. I think the idea of Dr Parnassus as a semi-Eastern medicine man just evolved. I don’t think he started quite like that.”

The next stage involved them sitting down and throwing ideas around, although as Gilliam admits, there was no real plan to it. McKeown felt that choice was very important in their movie – entering this extraordinary world involves a series of choices which rule the lives of the characters. The two writers worked on computers, e-mailing back and forth. “Then we’d have another sit down,” says Gilliam. “We’d go through it and, little by little, something was worked out. There is no form as such, it was just sitting down and hammering away at this big block of marble until something beautiful was carved from it.”

“We talked for a couple of weeks around the subject, very broadly,” says McKeown. “We spent a day talking about the whole range of subjects and then, finally, we started talking about the thing itself, and how it related to current events. It was a mixture of a whole medley of stuff for a couple of weeks and then we started to write a treatment.

“In fact, I insisted that Terry write the treatment because he had a better grip of what it was he wanted than I did at that stage. I didn’t really quite get it at that point, I don’t think. Although it was fun and I could see the story, I thought that Terry had a clearer view. Then I started writing scenes and dialogue and characters and settings and so on, clarifying it a bit. I would send him by e-mail six or seven pages, and he would work on that. He’d change it and embellish it and take what he wanted and add what he wanted, and so on. Meanwhile, I’d send him another lot of pages and he would send that back and show me what he’d done.

“It was a rolling process, going back and forth and, at one point, we’d stop when we got right to the end of the script, and discuss where we were going, and where we were so far.”

According to Gilliam, “It was like a tennis match, throwing things back and forth, and slowly things kept developing. You have ideas, you start plugging them in – and out of it comes a tale. It’s nice working with Charles again – it’s been a long time since ‘Munchausen’.”

“I don’t think what we ended up with was what we started out with, in every respect,” admits McKeown. “Maybe Doctor Parnassus is fairly close to how he started, but the other characters changed a bit as we went along. Certainly, the character of Valentina, Parnassus’s daughter, changed a lot and the other characters shifted too, when they weren’t quite working as well as they might do.

“We break the rules really. You are supposed to focus on a central character. That’s one of the recipes for success, to have a central character with whom the audience can identify. But this is a group piece and although it’s called Doctor Parnassus, and he’s very much the centre of it, and everything goes on around him, nevertheless, you are caught up in everybody else’s story as well.

“The theme of imagination is central – the importance of imagination to how you live and how you think and so on – and that’s very much a Terry theme. For some time, he’s taken other scripts and books and made them his own, in the sense that they are identifiably Terry Gilliam movies. But I think this goes further than what he’s done more recently. He’s had more of an input, this is more his thing. This is more a Terry Gilliam film than there has been for some time. Terry always throws himself into what he does with such tremendous energy and vigour, that it has to be worth his while. It has to be worth knocking himself out for, and I think ‘Brazil’ was like that, and to some extent ‘Munchausen’. It has this visceral quality, and Terry doesn’t hold back when he commits himself. This is something to which he has committed himself 120%, and it has all the possibilities of delivering more of him than the other work he has been doing recently.”

“I’m not sure whose autobiography it is,” confesses Gilliam. “I mean, I thought it was vaguely related to mine, but I’m not sure any more! It’s about the struggle of creative people…artists... They try to inspire others, encourage them to open their eyes, to appreciate the truth of the world, but most are not successful – that’s the reality.

“It’s a tragical/magical idea – a group of extraordinary people in an amazing theatre, travelling round London, but nobody’s paying attention to them. I am convinced that in the modern world people don’t see what is really important any more. Everybody’s trapped in their IPods or their video games or playing the stock market – all interesting and timeconsuming – but there are really extraordinary and important things happening out there and nobody is paying attention.”
 

"The White Ribbon” won the top award, the Palme d’Or, at the 2009 Cannes Fest. Sony Classics will release the film, which is Germany's Oscar entry, in December.

"Creation" is a movie about Charles Darwin, directed by Jon Amiel and starring Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany. The film will be released January 22, 2101 by Newmarket Films.

From the outset, the filmmakers knew they wanted British actor Paul Bettany to play Charles Darwin.  Our most familiar image of Darwin is of a balding old man with a long grey beard, but the film captures him in middle age after the loss of his adored ten-year-old daughter, Annie.  In the years following her untimely death, Darwin was left bereft and struggling with his faith.  This inner turmoil, along with his inability to put pen to paper and write his manuscript on the evolution of species for fear of destroying his marriage, all conspired to make him ill.

An intelligent actor was required to take on this complex role, and as Jon Amiel says, “Arriving at Paul Bettany was really easy.  There was almost nobody else that I could conceive of playing this role.  Paul is perfect, he’s perfect because he’s English, and physically the most like Charles Darwin that you could possibly imagine.  He’s very tall, skinny, has a high receding forehead, light sandy coloring and this made him perfect.  But above all else, to me, what Paul has in addition to all his incredible acting skills and ability to enter characters, is intelligence.  Paul is a very, very intelligent man and brings to the role an effortless, piercing, luminous intelligence that makes him absolutely peerless in this role. “

For Bettany, Darwin was the role of a lifetime, “Darwin’s a bit of a hero of mine.  I think he was an extraordinarily brave human being.  I like the idea of a person who is a social conservative having this revolutionary idea, and once he sees it he cannot stop seeing it, and he feels that everywhere he looks there is proof.  I found that really interesting.”

It was a wonderful gift to the film when Jennifer Connelly, Academy Award ® winning actress and Bettany’s wife in real life, expressed interest in playing Charles Darwin’s wife, Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, a cultivated and religious woman.  Bettany and Connelly had been looking for a project to work on together for some time.

As Amiel recalls, “It was obvious to me and to everybody else that Jennifer Connelly would be wonderful casting as Emma, she has tremendous intelligence and the sense of an inner life.  Emma was a great linguist; she spoke French and Italian fluently, as does Jennifer.  Emma was a concert level pianist who studied under Chopin. Jennifer couldn’t play a lick on the piano, but by golly she worked so hard, she will totally convince you as she convinced me, and I can play the piano, that she’s playing one of Chopin’s most difficult virtuoso pieces.”

Connelly’s research in to the woman Charles Darwin was married to for forty-four years and had ten children with unveiled an intelligent and complex woman.  She describes Emma Darwin thus, “Emma was well-educated, she played piano beautifully, she travelled extensively in her youth and lived in Paris, and she spoke other languages.  She was very intelligent, and from all accounts seems to have been a pretty extraordinary mother.  I read about how the kids would just run about the house everywhere and she really had no issue with that.  She had incredible tolerance for that sort of chaos, and Charles did as well.  And a huge component of her character of course was her religion. She was devoutly religious, which put her at odds with Darwin’s emerging beliefs.”

Casting a real-life husband and wife made the usual rehearsals to encourage a sense of intimacy in an onscreen marriage unnecessary.  Bettany and Connelly naturally have this physicality and absent-minded closeness, as subtly conveyed by their body language.  For Amiel, “Paul and Jennifer brought that sense of knowing each other, that sense of intimacy immediately, it was there.  They really do bring an effortless sense of a married-ness to every scene, and that is an enormous bonus.”

As Connelly says, “Paul was set to play Charles and I thought it was an incredible part and the script was very well-written.  I thought it was really interesting to discover many things about Charles Darwin that I had not known before, such as about his family life and his relationship with his wife.  It’s an extraordinary story and I loved the idea of being in it and watching my husband playing Charles Darwin and being married to his character.”

Richard Linklater's new film, "Me and Orson Welles," starring Zac Efron and Christian McKay, centers on a teenager who is cast by young Orson Welles in his 1937 production of Julius Caesar. The film will be released Freestyle November 25.

Recreating 1937 New York

“This movie doesn’t really exist any longer in New York,” says Richard Linklater. “If you go to where the Mercury Theatre was, you would never know. It’s an office building – there’s not even a plaque. That street looks so different, it didn’t really matter to me where we shot the film. As a filmmaker, wherever I could make this film, I would, (and I did)”.
 
“It’s been wonderful working with production designer Laurence Dorman”, continues Linklater.  “We went over to New York together – he wasn’t that familiar with the city, so we went to a lot of the actual addresses in the movie and I showed him around.”

The Mercury Theatre

“I really fell in love with the place,” admits Linklater. “It was almost too nice, too ornate, but I thought if we brought it down a little bit and didn’t look up at the beautiful domed cathedral-like ceiling, it had similar proportions to the Mercury Theatre in seats and size.  The stage was about the same size and the below stage area and its trap door arrangement with locks and pulleys was far more complex and interesting than you would ever be able to realize if you were building your own stage. So all of that felt great, and to shoot on the Isle of Man for those weeks was just kind of perfect. Some films are just meant to be.  It just feels like it lines up and it’s meant to happen.”

Cinematography

A key element in the recreation of the period was the skill and experience of the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Pope.  “I had a great meeting with Dick,” remembers Linklater, “and I just saw him as a kindred spirit.  He had that wild attitude – he seemed like a kind of mad scientist. And what you want in that position is enthusiasm – and skill, obviously, that goes without saying.  Other than that, it’s a personality match. He seems in the spirit of the film and he said he fell in love with it when he read the passage in the script where one of the actresses, Muriel Brassler, played by Kelly Reilly, is talking about lighting and gels and about getting a little butterfly shadow under her nose.  He just thought that was so amusing.

“I think people maybe know him for his Mike Leigh films, but it’s some of his other films that are, I think, just as impressive. It’s been really fun within this film for both of us. You rarely get the opportunity to recreate theatrical lighting. With most films, even a stylised period piece, you bend a little towards naturalism. But when you are recreating the exact lighting of this highly dramatic, very theatrical stage show, it’s just fun.   It was like shooting an old studio film with high contrast lighting and it’s probably the only time I will ever get to do that. The story goes that the great cinematographer Gregg Toland saw this production of Julius Caesar and when he heard that Welles was going to Hollywood to make ‘Citizen Kane’ he told him he wanted to work with him, because of the lighting he had done for the play.

Adapting the Book for the Screen

“It was just wonderful. The author was actually inserting himself as the young character, seeing Welles through his eyes and at that moment in time.  It’s history, theatrical history – Welles’ career and a young man’s coming of age. So I found it utterly charming and really interesting. If you know Welles, you know he mastered theatre and radio before he went on to his more famous film career. It’s such a fascinating portrait of a moment in time in his life.  I was just about to start another movie, but I could see that Vince and Holly Palmo were really passionate about it – their passion kept fuelling me, which was needed, because it seemed like such an ambitious movie.”

Casting Orson Welles

“So we had a script and were really excited about it,” says Linklater, “but I said, before we start doing budgets and schedules and trying to go further, let’s get an Orson, because we are not going to do this thing at all unless we can get the right guy to play him.  To me, that was the biggest piece of the puzzle that had to fit, before it even had the possibility of moving forward.  We thought of all the usual Americans, but we weren’t really getting anywhere. And I remember theorising, ‘you know who our Orson Welles is? He’s in London right now, probably doing Shakespeare. I bet that’s where he is – or there’ll be some great unknown British actor who kind of looks like him’.

“A few months later, Robert Kaplow sends me an e-mail saying that there’s a guy performing in New York at this 50-seat theatre I had never heard of, performing a play called ‘Rosebud: The Lives Of Orson Welles’ for just a couple of weeks. And so I flew to New York and went straight to the play. I’d just had shoulder surgery and I had this brace on, I could barely move, it was really uncomfortable. My only test was, do I believe this guy is Orson Welles? Christian McKay just had that kind of Wellesian manner and he had clearly studied him closely. So I talked to him after the show and I got back to Austin just thinking about him and felt ‘let’s take this to another level’. So I flew Christian to Austin and we did a sort of old fashioned screen test.

“We did three scenes from the movie: I cast some people, did period wardrobe, we had an old car and we did a scene in the back; Christian came in and we worked together and hung out for a couple of days. After that, I didn’t even need to look at the footage. I just knew the kind of guy he was and thought the film Gods were making a very special offering, as they sometimes do. And I remember telling him we don’t have money, we don’t have anything – it may never happen, but we’d try. We started sending the script out and the good news was many seemed intrigued by it, but one of the stumbling blocks we had was a Welles who was unknown. Can you get a bigger name to play Welles?  Ours was always the same argument: no, this is Welles!"
 

Sandra Bullock stars in "The Blind Side," which is written/directed by John Lee Hancock. The film, which is based on a true story, is released November 20 by Warner.

Sandra Bullock, who stars in the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy, notes, "The beauty of the story is that you think it's one thing and it turns out to be something else, and those are usually the best things in life. I thought the script was going to be about football until I read it and realized that it's really about family."

"The Tuohys opened up their home and their lives, so we felt a great deal of responsibility to do right by their family, and that's a lot to live up to," says Bullock. "You want people to be entertained, but you also want them to leave the theatre with a genuine understanding of who these people are. I know that was important to John, who was determined that we not do anything that didn't ring true. It was one of the things I really liked about working with him; he's a wonderful filmmaker."

Bullock read the screenplay and recalls, "It was a beautifully written script. It had all the right beats in all the right places. And I was amazed how John gave every one of the characters such a nice arc...each character has a distinct journey."

However, Bullock remarks, "John would try to explain her to me, but he'd always fall short. I kept feeling something is missing."

"Once I saw the whole package, I realized why John couldn't explain her," the actress states. "How can you explain that kind of energy? By the end of one day with Leigh Anne, I was exhausted. She manages to do what she wants to do in the manner she wants to do it. She doesn't care what it takes; she just gets it done her way. All I can say is, if there were more Leigh Anne Tuohys, the world would be a better-run, more harmonious and more productive place...as long as it was by her rules," she laughs. "It was terrifying to think of playing her, but it was a challenge I couldn't say no to. She's such an amazing person."

Bullock, who is also from the South, notes, "Many people think a Southern accent is a Southern accent, but there are many different ones. But it wasn't just Leigh Anne's accent. My dialect coach explained it was also the intent behind her words. Once we figured out the intent on top of the dialect, it helped so much. I wasn't trying to copy her exactly because then it becomes a caricature, but there is a way she goes about life that you need to pick up on or you're going to be left behind. So we wanted to capture as much of the essence of Leigh Anne as we could."

Chris Weitz is the director of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. The film is released November 20 by Summit.

Director Chris Weitz’s success at adapting books for the screen, including About a Boy and The Golden Compass, made him an obvious choice for this project, says producer Wyck Godfrey. “Chris has a history of helming fantasy films with complex effects as well as intimate character studies, and he works well with young actors. But it is his appreciation of Stephenie Meyer’s books and characters that made him the perfect director for The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

“It was vital for us to really honor Stephenie’s creation and the fans that love the Twilight series,” Godfrey adds. “What we didn’t want to do was take her books and try to reinvent them. Chris fell in love with the books and he knew how to bring the story to life and keep it rooted in reality. That was essential. Even though these are fantasy creatures, the story feels like our world all the time.”

Although Weitz was initially unfamiliar with the novels, he quickly became a fan. “I read the books,” the director says. “Then I went to see the first film with an audience, and I was so jazzed by the extraordinarily deep emotional reaction I saw. When I watch a film, I look for an overwhelming sense of being immersed in a universe, and this was a chance to do that. It’s a bit different from what I’ve done before, but it also draws on some of my experience.”

Weitz realized his foremost responsibility was to be faithful to the books. “I worked very, very hard at making sure things were just right in that sense,” he says. “The first film was such a phenomenon. The books were such a phenomenon. My first job was to respect the love that the fans of the books have for the book, and the love they transferred to the movie. There was no need to completely remake the world. We go different places this time, but we still retain respect for the fans.”

The director consulted the author regularly, even on minor issues, according to Meyer. “He was interested in the smallest things, like can this person wear shoes?” she says. “He checked on all the details. He wanted to make it like the book, and he was very, very cool about that.”

Having the author available was invaluable to Weitz. “With Lord of the Rings, no one could ask Tolkien what he originally had in mind,” says the director. “I could email Stephenie and ask practical questions like, ‘Do Jasper’s powers actually work on Bella?’ as well as larger metaphysical questions. It allowed me to make sure that at all points that we were keeping consistent with the books.”

Meyer appreciates Weitz’s diligence, saying, “He really listens. He’s very quiet and at the same time it’s very clear what he’s looking for. I felt my material was in good hands with him.”

Dear Readers,

"The Men Who Stare at Goats," which stars George Clooney as is directed by Grant Heslov, is an adaptation of Jon Ronson's novel. The films is being released November 6, 2009 by Overture Films.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" takes its characters from small town Michigan to the Iraqi desert, with several stops along the way.

“This is a little film with big ideas and big locations,” says Paul Lister. “It took a lot of wrangling. This story takes place briefly in 1970s Vietnam. We’re in the 1980s. We’re in 2003. We’re in Iraq. We’re in Fort Bragg. It’s really got scope and that means there was a lot of moviemaking to be done.” 

Location scout S. Todd Christensen covered over 14,000 miles finding the right locations for the film, a personal record. “There was one day of scouting that started in Albuquerque, went 80 miles to the Zia Pueblo, then to Roswell, Mescalero Flats, White Sands and Alamogordo,” Christensen remembers. “By the time we got back to Albuquerque, we had driven 700 miles in just over 16 hours. As I told Grant, it was my biggest day ever.”

Christensen found some stunning backdrops for the film in his travels. “I found a dry lake bed in Willard, New Mexico on Google Earth,” he says. “It’s this vast 10-mile dry lake bed that’s alkaline, so it’s very white and absolutely gorgeous. It’s also very desolate. No plant life; there’s very little of anything but sand, which is what they wanted.”

Shooting New Mexico for the Iraqi desert worked well visually, but the weather was not always cooperative. “It turned very cold towards the end of the shoot,” says Heslov. “In the film, it was supposed to be 100-plus degrees and it was 30. George and Ewan were in T-shirts, but sometimes you just have to shoot, so we worked around it. When it started snowing, we had to stop for a couple of hours and wait for it to melt.”     

That was what McGregor refers to as “an interesting acting exercise.” “You take off all the layers and tell yourself ‘Okay it’s warm, it’s warm, it’s warm. Someone would have to put sweat on us, which just makes you colder, of course. It was bizarre.”

To stand in for Vietnam, the filmmakers shot in Puerto Rico during hurricane season. Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan joined the cast and crew there. “When they started filming, I thought George Clooney and Ewan McGregor must be having unimaginable fun,” says Ronson. “I wanted to be part of it. So Peter and I flew to Puerto Rico. It turned out that they weren’t having unimaginable fun. They were working very hard, for very long hours in really quite arduous circumstances.”

Substituting for Fort Bragg in North Carolina is the New Mexico Military Institute. “They hadn’t done any filming there since Dress Gray in 1986,” says Christensen “They had a lot of rules. There was one scene I call the ‘naked guy scene’ that they had some difficulty with so he ended up wearing a skin-colored Speedo.”

And if the filmmakers had any doubts about the authenticity of their information, it was dispelled during their time at the school. “While we were shooting there, we were approached by a representative of the college,” says Lister. He had looked at our shooting schedule and saw “Jedi Earth Prayer.” And he said, ‘Hang on a minute. I did that.’ He had been a part of the First Earth Battalion. This guy was there when they invited Uri Geller, the famous psychic, to demonstrate how to bend a spoon with the power of the mind!”

And then, of course, there were the goats. The filmmakers needed a herd for some of the movie’s most critical scenes. Heslov heard about a particular variety that seemed ideal. “They’re called “Fainting Goats’ for obvious reasons,” he says. “These goats pass out when they’re startled. Our cinematographer, Robert Elswit, had seen them on television and they seemed perfect. So we got some goats in and we did a test. But when we startled the goats, they didn’t faint. Nothing. They were just regular goats. I know these goats do exist, but we didn’t see them, so we had to use normal everyday goats.”   

Mary Duree, the goat wrangler, says that while goats are highly intelligent, they received no special training for the film. “Goats are easy to make look like they’ve been hypnotized,” she says. “They’re very curious, so they’ll gather up together and just gaze at you. They’re comical animals in a lot of ways.” Goats are notoriously playful and will cause a commotion when they’re bored. The solution is simple, says Duree. “Their biggest entertainment is eating. Food keeps them quiet.”

Despite some of the apprehensions the filmmakers had, the goats proved easy to work with and popular on the set. “They’re very responsive,” says the director. “George was sure the goats were going to be difficult. He talks a mean game, but once he had a baby goat in his arms, it was love at first sight.”

The time is always right for a good comedy, and according to Paul Lister, The Men Who Stare at Goats is much more than just that. “Recent foreign policy decisions have caused us as a country to ask some big questions. Finding our way out of those problems is going to take some out-of-the-box thinking, and this is a story about how to think out of the box.”

Richard Kelly is the writer-director of "The Box," starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. The film will be released November 6 by Warner.

See the Trailer: http://emanuellevy.com/videos/view.cfm?id=76

"At the heart of 'The Box' is a moral dilemma," says writer/director Richard Kelly. "What would you do if offered the opportunity for great wealth but it came at the cost of a human life, someone you don't know?"

Norma and Arthur Lewis are an average couple, with the same concerns and aspirations as anyone. Says Kelly, "The idea is that the people faced with this fate-altering dilemma are just like you or me, our parents or neighbors. There is nothing fatally flawed about the Lewises, nor is there anything special about them. They're good, hard-working, loving people who are raising a child, trying to get by, and living a little bit beyond their means--a situation as relevant today as it was when the story was written."?

Ultimately, Kelly believes, "It's about responsibility. What would you sacrifice for your loved ones and what responsibility are you willing to take for your actions? What does it mean to be responsible for another human being and what are the parameters--where does it begin and where does it end? I like to think that I wouldn't push the button but I don't know. Maybe I already have. Maybe we all have.?

On Technology

The director notes, "What fascinates me is the complexity of the instant-gratification, push-button society we live in today, with our handheld devices, TV remotes, computers, and all the ways in which we effortlessly solve our problems or meet our needs, large and small. We toss off messages without much thought to the consequences or ramifications. It was a little different 30 years ago, when the story is set, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to keep it in the 1970s, when the story was first published. Pushing a button was a more deliberate act back then. For Norma and Arthur, it could be the most deliberate act of their lives."?

On His Cast

"James brought a lot of charm and goodwill to his character and his chemistry with Cameron was fantastic," says Kelly. "He also understood the depth of Arthur's disappointment at not getting into the astronaut training program. He really got how that state of mind would affect the quandary they were faced with at home."?

"Exactly who he is, and what he is doing, is open to debate," Kelly concedes, jokingly adding, "You might think of him as a kind of interstellar insurance adjustor or maybe a tax auditor. He's powerful, but also, clearly, fallible. He has his own limitations."?

CGI Makeup

Combining CGI and practical effects to finalize Steward's raw visage, Kelly describes the process as "subtractive," meaning, "Rather than piling on layers of prosthetic rubber and traditional make-up, we digitally removed that portion of his face. By painting his face green and applying motion-capture tracking dots to it, we created an anchoring mechanism through which we could then imbed the digital make-up, the disfigurement itself, directly onto Frank's face and not interfere with the way he talks or moves."?

Shooting in a Historic Setting

For Kelly, who grew up in Langley's shadow, "Embedding our story in the historic setting of the Viking Mission meant presenting Langley in what some would call its glory days. A lot of it hasn't changed significantly from the way it looked in the 1970s: the same interesting architecture, the gantry, the rocket sled, the wind tunnel where they tested parachutes, the media briefing room. We tried to photograph as much of it as we could in a way that felt organic to the story while also paying tribute to what happened there. We were granted unprecedented access and wanted to make the best of it." ?

One of Kelly's favorite sets was the Ukrop's Supermarket, a well-known Virginia-area chain, which was made and stocked from scratch for the film with vintage cereal boxes and canned goods, as well as pricing and signage. "I grew up going to Ukrop's. It's a local chain that's been around for more than 50 years. It was fun to recreate that as a specific element of my childhood instead of going with something generic," he says.

"As much as it's based on larger concepts, in many ways it's the most personal of my three films," says Kelly. "My parents were the ones who introduced me to these kinds of films, the Hitchcock-style psychological thrillers that are still my favorites. Those are the movies that they loved, and they became the movies that I love."

"A Christmas Carol," directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jim Carrey, is an adaptation of  Charles Dickens' 1843 novel.  The film is released by Disney November 6, 2009.

A highlight of the 2009 Cannes Film Fest, "A Prophet," Jacques Audiard's award-winning drama will be released by Sonny Classics in December after traveling the festival road. (See Review).