Nicholas Thurkettle

I guess it’s about time I confessed: Yes, I helped develop Piranha 3-D.

I am definitely bound to see it this weekend. Whether I see it in 3D or not is questionable, since it’s so unreliable these days. But I’ll be there, hoping for packed, laughing houses of moral degenerates. That’s what we were aiming for from the start.

Will my name be in the end credits? I have no idea, but odds are way, way against it. Will I make any money if it is successful? Not a dime. But I still feel a measure of pride, and hope the final product is something like what we envisioned back at the start.

So what did I do?
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You are a writer in LA. You are probably poor, so you’re looking for ways to save money. You do not aspire to murder anyone, so you’re looking for ways to reduce your time in the car.

A vital part of building your routine in LA will involve finding sanctuary places – places where you can kill time between meetings and hopefully access your three lifelines – free-or-cheap parking, electricity, and Wi-Fi.

Coffee shops come to mind. Many will validate, and unless they are trendy they won’t kick you out after a half-hour. But all those Chai smoothies add up – in a month you could end up spending the equivalent of two tanks of gas.

Going to the movies is an option – you are a writer, so seeing a movie is ALWAYS an option. But once you factor in travel time, parking, and the show itself, it’s likely to eat up three hours. Sometimes that’s too big a block – your next meeting might be before that, or maybe you’re just trying to wait out rush hour.

Now the Beverly Hills Public Library – that’s a Sanctuary spot to always keep in mind. It’s close to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Westwood, which is a pretty healthy concentration of potential meeting sites. They have a large, rarely-full parking deck that provides two hours of absolutely free parking during the day. Since you are a normal human being who doesn’t carry four dollars in quarters in your pocket, this is a great alternative – I’ve had to duck out of meetings to feed parking meters before. It does not make a good impression. I had to borrow change from a manager before – that made an even worse impression.

Their study room has plenty of outlets, the Wi-Fi is free, and the atmosphere of quiet is enforced by the most ardent shaming glares. You will seriously feel self-conscious if your mouse button is loud.

If you arrive after 5pm, the parking is free – you could keep your car there all night if you need to. If you’ve got a dinner or drinks meeting in the 90210, that takes care of one of your biggest headaches right there. The library may close at 6, but there’s a Coffee Bean seven minutes’ walk down the street – again, free Wi-Fi.

These are the pieces of knowledge that will help you navigate here – knowing that you can park along northbound San Vicente just below Melrose for two hours during the day; knowing that the north-south streets north of Sunset near LaBrea are permit-only at night, but there’s an east-west street that is free. This town can nickel-and-dime you to death before you’ve even had your first $9 cocktail. You’ve got to find ways to save your brain for bigger problems.

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.

Entertainment Weekly just ran a feature asking what is wrong with this summer’s movies. By extension, it merits asking what has been wrong with movies in 2010, from both the critical and commercial standpoint.

If you ask the masters of the greenlight, who must be smarter than I am since they make so much more money – the problem is…sunspots. Or the Internet. Or mean critics. They themselves are blameless, having only made the movies we asked for.

But did we ask for this? I know that the summer is our dessert season, when we get our action and our fantasies and our cartoons. But did we really ask for ALL dessert for four consecutive months? And did we really ever promise that we would eat any moose turd pie a studio put whipped cream on between the months of May and August?
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I finally saw The Sugarland Express, which is a 70’s car chase movie that is mostly distinguished in film geek circles as the first fully-theatrical feature from Steven Spielberg. He was all of 26 when he shot it. The boy genius on the Universal Studios lot had already been working in television for 3-4 years, and one of his TV movies, Duel (also a feature-length car chase), had been released theatrically in Europe to critical acclaim.

Spielberg was really playful with the camera back then – not in the hyper-cut, constantly-moving style you think of today, but with an uncanny knack for finding an impish way to compose a master shot, even out on location. The main characters are a young couple (played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run in Texas with a stolen cop car and a policeman hostage – she broke the husband out of prison because child protective services put their baby with a foster couple, and she wants to steal him back.

There’s a shot where the Captain of the Highway Patrol (Oscar-winning Western movie veteran Ben Johnson) first comes up alongside the fleeing vehicle in his own; and they talk to each other over their radios. And it’s a single, unbroken shot, from Hawn’s perspective in the back seat, as his car pulls up on the left, her husband warns him to keep his distance, he speeds up ahead, then drops back around their other side, then finally falls back in line behind them with the other cars in pursuit. The whole time they’re talking through the radio, and you can see Johnson’s lips moving in the other car. This shot wasn’t pieced together with effects or editing, they’re all ACTING, at full speed on the highway.

There’s another shot, originating from Johnson’s car, where the top half of the screen catches his eyes in his rear view mirror, and the bottom half is filled with the rear window of the hostage vehicle. Hawn’s in the back seat, holding a shotgun in one hand, but playfully finger-drawing on the back window with the other. In a single shot we get to see both her, and him studying her. Not only is it a clever trick of framing, it gets across what’s so important in that moment – that he’s realizing these are just a couple of dumb, scared kids in way over their heads, and he really doesn’t want to have to kill them.

That’s what’s finally so startling to me about The Sugarland Express, because I feel like that spirit makes it utterly foreign to today’s America and today’s audience. I don’t know if it’s 30 years of Reaganomics pitting everyone savagely against each other, or our culture’s full-tilt embrace of the Just World fallacy (in which we are only able to cope with the horrors and injustices we see by finding reasons why the victims must have deserved their fate), but most people not only have no more sympathy for the poor and petty, they actively wish to see their harm. I think a contemporary audience would get restless to the point of outright anger that these tragic fools weren’t tased, beaten with clubs, and riddled with bullets ten minutes into the movie. The hostage, too – who, after all, was stupid enough to get caught.

I probably have a different perspective on this than most people. It represents some of the public fallout over Megan Fox’s – let’s call it, “involuntary departure” – from the upcoming third Transformers movie. As someone who has yet to find in her overmuch talent or star charisma, and has largely seen anything resembling acting to be all-but-irrelevant to the success or failure of a Transformers movie, I do not view this is a tragedy, or an injustice, or even likely to have much effect on the final product. To borrow from Rob Lowe’s mega-agent in Thank You For Smoking, to change from one provocatively-lit young body to another in this giant robot spectacle is “an easy fix. One line of dialogue.”

To sum up – what most people care about in this kerfuffle, I do not. But if you want to hear more…
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Of the type that I cannot tell you about. It’s a Hollywood development, it is one of the most exciting things to happen in my career in awhile, and I must remain mum, because:

1) It involves a name I am not officially permitted to drop in public.
2) It does not pass my test of real in Hollywood, which we remember involves a signature on a piece of paper and a check that clears.

It must sound awfully joyless of me that I am so resistant when these things happen for which a lot of would-be screenwriters would trade three toes. But I’m not denying it, just saving it and letting it accrue interest. If this development behaves the way it potentially can – as a hard-to-resist chunk of movie bait that movie-making elements will be drawn out to sniff at – then trust me; you will see joy. Snoopy dancing with his little black nose in the air-type joy.

Until then, keep the faith, brothers and sisters.

I have a few traditions around this time of year:

-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.

None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.

I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.

But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.

And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.

My reasons why?:

-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker’s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”

-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).

-The Hurt Locker’s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker’s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.

-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.

-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?

Now I think I know how baseball fanatics feel, when they draw swords over steroid-inflated statistics, or exactly which of the umpty-ump scandals besmirching The Great American Pastime™ over the course of a century was the one that made it Lose Its Innocence™. When the field is ever-evolving, greatness becomes a moving target, and comparisons to history a trap. But oh, aren’t the arguments fun?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.

What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.

Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.

So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.

Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?

Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”

I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.
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I often say that working in the film business is like being a sprinter lined up in the stadium for a 400-meter dash; only you don’t wait seconds for the starter to fire his pistol, you wait months, maybe years. But he could pull that trigger at any moment, and Jimmy, you’d better keep limber for it, because only one guy gets to hit the tape at the end.

I’m flexing my own muscles right now. If something happens – and it may happen – it’s going to happen unbelievably fast. Stay tuned.