Nicholas Thurkettle

I think I understand now why I so rarely feel comfortable taking a day off – it’s so rare that I feel like I’ve genuinely earned it.

Yesterday, I earned one. Today, I am taking one. That is all.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be spending all of a long day in LA, directing another 10-minute play for Sacred Fools‘ produced-whenever-we’ve-got-nothing-the-hell-else-going-on-this-weekend Fast & Loose showcases for 24-Hour Theatre. At this very moment, my script is in the early stages of writing by some caffeine junkie with whom I’ll be randomly matched in the morning. I’d really like one of those writing slots one of these times.

The first time I did this, I got a lively case of the hots for one of the actresses in my cast, pursued her with an uncharacteristic boldness while I was still in the early stages of re-assembling my heart after a breakup, and ended up getting embarrassed, ignored, and punched in the groin. Ah, the Theatrical Life.

I’m taking an early bedtime tonight, and have downloaded the sound-mixer Audacity for my laptop. The last time, with my old laptop that was a glorified word processor/porn storage device, I lost two hours driving back and forth to Orange County to mix and burn the music and sound cues on my home desktop. When you only have eleven hours to stage a play soup-to-nuts, you cannot just go giving away two hours to LA traffic. I remember almost crying from the CDs not playing in regular CD players, calling to push back my tech rehearsal so I could give it one more shot, and barely making it in time to smuggle the final working versions to the sound operator before tech period closed.

I keep doing these little quick-hitter jobs, and they do scratch the itch; but they also serve to remind me how long it’s been since I got involved in something bigger. I can’t remember any point in my life when this close to 100% of my creative energy was going solely into writing. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe it’s going to drive me mad soon. I do know I jumped at this opportunity, and I anticipate enjoying it. I also anticipate you won’t hear much from me Sunday, while I recover.

I have made small-but-tangible progress on one screenplay for four consecutive days – this has produced eight new pages of material and boosted me over the transition from the beginning into the body of the story. I even had one of those mini-breakthroughs I enjoy so much, where an annoying logical question for which I kept trying to produce contorted solutions proved to be the thread that, once tugged, unraveled a bad scene I had been clinging to and revealed the much better scene hiding behind it. That scene is not even going to happen for 20-ish pages, but I’m looking forward to writing it now.

That’s a decent result, but at least on this specific script it’s probably going to slow down for the moment – I’ve reached one of the major sequences of the movie and so I’m going to have to step back from the keyboard and spend a little time with the legal pad plotting and outlining what has to get done in the next 8-10 pages, and how to get it done in a way that feels entertaining and organic.

I also spent a little time in that highly-personal script on which I work sporadically. I read through the accumulated pages the other night and surprised myself, because I forgot I had written “GOD THIS SCENE IS BORING” on top of an exposition-heavy dialogue in a cafe that I really ought to just torch. I also caught myself trying to write a Meet Cute (Screenwriting Lingo Translation: A charming or funny moment contrived to introduce two characters to each other that are destined to bond with one another somehow. Most often used in romantic comedies.) I’m getting rid of it. This script is not the place for Meet Cutes.

Actually, all this screenwriting, and that short story I finished last week, is just me taking time off from the novel. I’m going to have to transition back into that so I can finish the next chapter and trigger that payment I’ve got coming – I’m also meeting with my collaborator/patron next week, so the more work I can show, the better.

So it is confirmed that Edward Norton will not be playing Bruce Banner or The Hulk in 2012’s planned Avengers movie. Judging by the article’s comments, the denizens of the Internet are reacting with their usual decorum and sense of proportion.

If Marvel had announced they were re-casting Thor before his first movie was even released, THAT would be a disaster. Re-casting Iron Man would be fatal. This will be more of a hiccup than re-casting Rhodes/War Machine for the Iron Man sequel, but still survivable.

I don’t see this as a financial move – Norton isn’t up in the stratosphere, salary-wise, and he has demonstrated by his choices that money isn’t the primary motivator in his career. There are at least ten actors that fit his profile in terms of visibility and affordability, and no doubt their agents are keeping their phone lines open right about now. As for Norton’s twice-Oscar-nominated talent – that’s more difficult to replicate, but the question is: is that even relevant? His run in the gamma-irradiated stretchy-pants provided a basically pedestrian level of wow, failing to improve either critically or financially over the Ang Lee/Eric Bana collaboration that preceded it. And since The Avengers is going to feature a giant ensemble of heroes and villains and continuity plugs, whatever non-CGI human portrays Banner is likely to have little screen-time.

Still, Marvel decided to turn this into a public pie fight with their press release, so here’s how I see the scorecard for the moment:

Marvel: That press release was not exactly cricket, nor was it exactly smart. The story looks ugly right now; they made it that way by taking public potshots at Norton, and the way they made it ugly also gave it longevity. In the short-term, all the good light is going to fall on Norton in this story. If it gets longer, and if Marvel feels like playing ugly, they could make some mud stick on him, but that doesn’t clean them up, it just makes everyone ugly.

They should want to squash this, and the only way to do that is to introduce the new Hulk, do it quickly, and make it a chatter-worthy enough choice to turn the conversation so this flap doesn’t shadow the new guy’s efforts. One option would be a casting coup, which is difficult for the screen-time reason mentioned above, but since Joss Whedon is all-but-confirmed to direct, an actor who has logged time in The Whedonverse would provide an instantly appealing alternative storyline. Or they could go for the headline-grabbing counter-intuitive gamble that hits brilliantly. They pulled off one of those with Robert Downey, Jr., but The Avengers is a unique project – it’s tough to think of another mini-studio that even has the creative opportunity to put all their intellectual property eggs in one tentpole basket like this, much less the capital to gamble on it. With a gamble that big, you want to reduce the number of medium-sized gambles you’re making within it as much as possible.

Norton’s reps: Brian Swardstrom is doing exactly what any good agent (and Swardstrom is a VERY good agent) has to do right now – pick up his biggest, meanest bat, stick a couple of nails in it, wrap it in some barbed wire, and start swinging. Norton presents unique challenges as a client (more on that below), and Swardstrom has to be thinking long-term viability. His client is still relatively bankable on the small-to-medium-sized films he favors. But to be publicly, humiliatingly dumped from something this big – especially after you have accepted the characterization that he really wanted to be a part of it – can have a poisonous effect around town, especially in an era when star salaries (and the financing calculus that assigns values to all these names) are under ruthless assault. Swardstrom has to defend his man, and is earning his money today. I can’t fault him his actions in the slightest.

Norton: Norton wins by clamming the hell up right now. This development peels back the curtain on what, until now, has been a problem only in the Los Angeles Basin: the man is a genius, but he is a genius With a Reputation.

I have not met the man, and will say with no caveats that he is tremendously talented. All I have to offer is scuttlebutt and hearsay – most of it bubbling up from newspaper articles over the years, as well as vague things you hear in the Hollywood knitting circles: That he insists on re-writing every script in which he’s going to act. That he becomes impossible to deal with if he is not acknowledged as the smartest person on the set. That he treated Paramount with rude disdain over enforcing their contract with him in order to cast him in The Italian Job – that’s a long and obscene story that you can go find if you want.

I have no direct knowledge of any aspect of His Reputation – could be he’s a misunderstood sweetheart, and I don’t want to say that the above is gospel truth because no one person knows if it is or not, and I don’t like the laziness of trading in assumed knowledge which is actually just a rolling dung ball of gossip.

But what I have noted over the years is this – filmmakers who work with him once, don’t work with him twice. See for yourself. In two dozen movies over a nearly fifteen-year career, only one director, John Curran (for whom he starred in The Painted Veil and the upcoming Stone), has ever cast him in a second movie after directing him. That’s an insane anomaly. Russell Crowe is a volatile, challenging perfectionist known for running roughshod over unprepared directors, but Ridley Scott keeps calling and Crowe shows up every time. Christian Bale got to be a fifteen-minute laughingstock over his Terminator: Salvation set tirade, but Christopher Nolan has not only kept him in the Batman cowl, he cast him in The Prestige, his between-Batman-s movie. Downey used to break into peoples’ houses on drug benders and went to jail; and Hollywood forgave all and had its happiest day when he achieved both health and fame.

Norton is on a par with these guys creatively. Absolutely. So when you are that talented, how much of a pill do you have to be that filmmakers aren’t fighting to have you back?

D.C. Comics: If they want to score the public bitch-slap of the year, they will announce Edward Norton starring in a Martian Manhunter movie next week.

Knight and Day
Director: James Mangold
Writer: Patrick O’Neill
Producers: Todd Garner, Cathy Konrad, Steve Pink, Joe Roth
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, Viola Davis, Paul Dano

Alfred Hitchcock made some classic movies that were essentially expensive foreplay. They were movies that floated over their plots, and used the tools of Hollywood cinema to work the audience into states of laughter, excitement, and arousal, to “play them like an organ” as Hitchcock himself said. We all know what the last shot of North by Northwest meant.

The majority of modern movies have no interest in foreplay. Pornographers show more patience. But Knight and Day’s director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) has frequently demonstrated an affinity for the classical approach – his movies look totally contemporary, but they feel richer and savvier. Here, in a globe-trotting spectacle starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and a McGuffin that’s literally heating up by the minute, he puts some lessons from Hitchcock to use in making a movie that is not as great, but far better than its plot.

Cruise is – his interstellar flights of public behavior notwithstanding – a real movie star, and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards. Neither of these achievements is an accident. As an action hero we have watched him do (forgive the pun) the impossible; his performance in this film is a high-wire act that capitalizes on that history, riffing on his mad self-confidence in the face of ridiculous perils, but also bringing with it a wistful quality that wasn’t there in his Top Gun days. Watch him in a conversation with the pretty misfit June Havens (Cameron Diaz) that goes on longer than most movies would allow, longer and more intimate than a character of his expediency normally deems necessary. He has more urgent things that ought to be on his mind, but (forgive the pun), there’s something about this girl.
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