Nicholas Thurkettle

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 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 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.

I don’t know what I’m going to do more often in this life; fall in love or let myself hope I actually have a chance of making a movie. A new opportunity for the latter came into sharper focus today – I have a small raiding party together and we’ve breached the first couple doors of the fortress; and boy howdy is it exhilarating as ever.

It’s small…I’m talking minuscule. This is one of those budgets that wouldn’t cover a week’s food on a superhero movie. There is a legitimate question whether or not the script I’ve written can actually be made for the money that is on the table. IF everyone does three jobs and works for circus peanuts, and IF we catch a couple of breaks on our locations, and IF this camera we have access to can actually live up to its cost-saving billing, and IF we can trim the script and schedule this thing hard and deep with no lube, then…maybe, Jimmy, maybe.

I would be producer, writer, assistant director, and at least a few other tasks along the way. I would have to quit the office job; not immediately but once things started ramping up – which, given the weather requirements of the script might not be for several months. But I also found out today that my screenwriting class is definitely on for the spring, which means money. It didn’t take me long to start working the personal budget numbers. IF the class happened in the fall as well, and IF I finished the novel in a timely manner so I could bring in the rest of that money, and IF I could pick up a few one-off production gigs like I was awhile back, and IF I don’t eat at restaurants or drink in bars for the majority of 2010, then…maybe.

But I’m not walking yet. A good piece of advice I once read about the question of when to leave your dayjob is: “You’ll know when it’s no longer possible to keep it.”

More on this as it develops.

There must be a term for the threshold beyond which the behavior of an individual or organization becomes unmockably retarded. When you have found the exaggeration someone might have used to satirize your actions and actually lapped it.

From Variety.com: Sony Takes ‘Risk’ With Board Game

Risk. The board game. The one they made fun of on that episode of Seinfeld. Soon to be a Sony Pictures Development Hell project.

I have had this long post brewing for awhile about Hollywood’s binge on branded properties, and the long-term (lack of) wisdom it shows. I still intend to write it, because I was there at the ground floor of this stuff: My last job in the development world (way back in 2004) was for a company whose business model was built around scooping up old IP (Intellectual Property) rights and reviving them as movie projects. Ask me someday about the story proposal I wrote for a Frogger movie.

I should not even have to make the mathematical point that this year’s most notorious box-office disaster was based on a branded title: Land of the Lost.

Like I said, I shouldn’t even have to make that argument. It should be loudly, clangingly obvious to anyone who hasn’t succumbed to studio brain phage that Risk is not the raw material for a movie. It is a board game where people roll dice to conquer the world, and everybody tries to hold Australia, because you get the two extra guys every turn and you can only attack it from that one place. The article says Will Smith’s company will produce the film. Just picture Will Smith saying “I know I don’t need Northwest Territory, but I’ll get a Risk Card next turn if I win!”

At this point, they are just paying for a title, ANY title, that people recognize and with which they have a positive association. Very shortly they will be proposing “Banana! The Movie!”