Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Website garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from the year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye for…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show, and now the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
Like George Clooney says in Ocean’s Eleven, do the math: four Canon XL1 digital cameras, one dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4, a copy of editing software Final Cut Pro 3, eighteen shooting days, a two-million-buck budget, one Oscar-winning Best Director, and nine high-profile actors (among them Julia Roberts, Brad…
At this very moment, members of the Television Critics Association are gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, California, to preview this fall’s new series, interview those responsible for them and, finally, gorge themselves silly and drink themselves stupid on the networks’ dwindling dime. This event, the so-called “press tour,” takes…
A pal asked last week, “Who you writing about?” Told him, “Art Linson,” which screwed his face into a big ol’ question mark. “He’s a movie producer. He made Heat, Fight Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Untouchables, Car Wash…” Said said friend upon hearing that last one, “Dude…
They stream in and out, all day and all night, one after the other: band members, producers, business associates, friends, family, strangers, hangers-on who stare at the familiar face made infamous long ago. The tour bus, this parked sanctuary where he can roll his joints and drink his bottled Starbucks…
Talk about trading down: Adam Sandler now stands in for Gary Cooper, Winona Ryder for Jean Arthur, screenwriter Tim Herlihy (The Waterboy, Billy Madison) for Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Meet John Doe), and director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) for the immortal Frank Capra. The mind reels at the…
Think of it this way, and perhaps Marshall Mathers’s (or Eminem’s, or Slim Shady’s) 25-mil-plus-sold popularity makes more sense to the old farts who stoop to find him repellent. He’s the bleached-blond Holden Caulfield, a catcher-in-the-dye job loaded down by “all that David Copperfield kind of crap” who spends his…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists (instead we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers, and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that to entertain it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
When this column debuted at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form…
Thirty-four years later, Carson has returned to the school to deliver a series of lectures on the power of fable and film as metaphor, and he asked Coppola, whose film was partially inspired by David Holzman, to join him. Carson–who appears in Coppola’s feature debut, CQ, and who helped Roman…
Last month GQ ran a disquietingly flattering profile of Joe Roth, who, in January 2000, quit his gig as Walt Disney Studios chairman to “revolutionize the industry” (GQ’s words) by forming his own studio. With a billion bucks on loan from men with money and bridges to burn — among…
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent upon twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous to…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
Dan Bryk, a frumpy Canuck who refuses to give his age but looks to be in his twenties, sits on an outdoor patio behind his Yamaha keybs and sings his ass off, which isn’t such an easy task — the dude’s heavy, literally. It’s 9 p.m. on a Thursday in…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
