The Screengrab : footloose

Morning Deal Report: Sofia Coppola Goes “Somewhere”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Sofia Coppola’s latest directorial effort Somewhere has secured the participation of a jackass. Chris Pontius of the Jackass crew “will play Sammy, best friend of the character played by Stephen Dorff, a decadent, bad-boy actor living at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood who begins to re-examine his life after a surprise visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning),” per The Hollywood Reporter.

That Dreamworks dream may be deferred. Yesterday we told you the studio had the blessing of the King family to proceed with their MLK biopic. Two of King’s children disagree. “Bernice King and Martin Luther King III have been embroiled in a legal battle with brother Dexter King, who is chairman-CEO of the King Estate, over who controls the personal papers of their late mother, Coretta Scott King,” Variety reports. “Bernice King told the Associated Press on Tuesday: ‘This is a deal that Mr. Spielberg and his people ... have entered into believing that they have the blessing of the King Estate. They don't have the blessings of Bernice and Martin King.’”

And we can all breathe a sigh of relief: the new Footloose has found its Bacon. You’ll recall that Zac Efron dropped out of the project, which had us all worried there for a while, but now Chace Crawford has stepped into his dancing shoes. “With a more mature, edgy version of Footloose than the original, Paramount will likely benefit from the fact that Crawford's Gossip Girl following skews a bit older than Efron's High School Musical audience.”

Morning Deal Report: Jon Hamm on the Howl

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:30:00 GMT

Fans of Mad Men’s Don Draper may see some irony in the fact that the actor who portrays the beatnik-scorning ad exec has taken a role in Howl, the upcoming movie centering on Alan Ginsberg’s obscenity trial. “Hamm will star as defense attorney Jake Ehrlich, whose life was the inspiration for the TV series Perry Mason,” Variety reports. The cast also includes James Franco, Mary-Louise Parker and Jeff Daniels.

Another alien invasion is on the way. Aaron Eckhart will star in Battle: Los Angeles for director Jonathan Liebesman (The Killing Room). Scott Silver (8 Mile) will rewrite “Chris Bertolini's original screenplay, about an alien invasion pulverizing its way across L.A.” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Anyone heartbroken over the news that Zac Efron has dropped out of the Footloose remake – all is not lost. Efron is negotiating to star in The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, “about a caretaker at a cemetery who manages to have weekly meetings with a younger brother whose accidental death he feels was his fault.”

Related:
James Franco Will Howl
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The Farting Deal Report

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Now that we know America loves a talking dog, Hollywood is asking the musical question, “How about a farting dog?” Tween sensations the Jonas Brothers, apparently lacking any agents or adult career advisors of any kind, have signed on to star in Walter the Farting Dog. Peter and Bobby Farrelly may direct the story of “a fat dog with severe flatulence. The brothers play musicians whose parents are asked to care for the dog by an aunt just before she passes away…While his brothers play music, Frankie and the gaseous hound get involved in a plot that involves liberating a koi fish and thwarting jewel thieves,” Variety reports.

Milk director Gus Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Blac will reteam for an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I don’t need to tell you it’s the true “account of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey and a group dubbed the Merry Pranksters as they drive across the country in a DayGlo-painted school bus dubbed Furthur, reaching personal and collective revelations through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs.” But I just told you anyway, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s going to happen, and by “it” I mean a remake of Footloose. High School Musical 3 director Kenny Ortega and star Zac Efron are attached to the project, and Variety reports “the studio is working on new songs that will complement some of the memorable original tunes.”

Related:
Recreating Gay Liberation in the Seventies for "Milk"
Trailer Review: High School Musical 3

The Band From “Barcelona”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

It’s rare to see a new interview with someone whose music is featured in a Woody Allen movie, in that most such people have been dead for fifty years. If that’s an exaggeration, it’s a slight one; the 72-year-old Allen isn’t one for Footloose-style compilations of potential Top 40 hits (of course, by citing Footloose I now feel 72 years old myself). He’s more prone to raiding his collection of 78s for the likes of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, and while he often comes up with some great stuff, it’s still very familiar stuff – just one more element of his filmmaking style that has grown stale over the years.

So it’s at least a little encouraging to learn that the Woodman’s latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, features music by a living, breathing band. Billboard recounts the story of “little-known Spanish indie band” Giulia y los Tellarini, whose “music came to Allen's attention last year during filming, when the girlfriend of one of the band members left a CD with some of the group's songs on it at the director's Barcelona hotel, the fashionable Hotel D'Arts.”

"Our music is difficult to classify. It's got loads of influences," says lead singer Giulia Tellarini. "I think one of the main things about us is that we sing in different languages. We try and get inspired by the atmospheres of different countries." The inspiration for “Barcelona,” which can be heard in the Barcelona trailer, was “Guilia’s on-and-off relationship with the city,” a place she found a little too pricy to live. Not a problem for Allen, of course, who pronounces the song “perfect.” But don’t take his word for it; here’s a performance of the song from the Spanish talk show El Club.

Related:
And Now, Scarlett Johansson Making Out with Penelope Cruz
Woody Allen Doesn't Care What You Think

Vanishing Act: John Hughes

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

You learn some funny things when researching a column dedicated to filmmakers who have mysteriously vacated the multiplex. As surprised as I was last week to find out that Michael Cimino was originally slated to direct Footloose, I am doubly stunned this week to discover that there are no less than five Beethoven movies. I’m not talking about the deaf composer idolized by Alex in A Clockwork Orange; I’m talking about the freakin’ St. Bernard of that name. And do you know what that fifth Beethoven movie is titled? That’s right, it’s Beethoven’s 5th! And why am I telling you this?

It’s because the first Beethoven movie was co-written by John Hughes, under the nom de garbage Edmond Dantès. Dantès, you may recall, was the Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also the name Hughes has used on several occasions to disguise his involvement in films such as Maid in Manhattan. Looking over his body of work, you have to wonder if he wishes he’d started using the name earlier.

Hughes had a pretty good thing going for a while there, as almost anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s will tell you. Together, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off pretty much comprise the definitive portrait of teen angst in the Reagan era. But after a brief foray into the grown-up realm with She’s Having a Baby, Hughes regressed like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, churning out increasingly lame kiddie fare, from the Home Alone series to Curly Sue to (shudder) Baby’s Day Out. At some point, perhaps he realized his name was becoming shorthand for “prolific purveyor of puerile pap,” and made an abrupt course correction. Now he’s almost reclusive enough to consider changing his name to Howard.

The most recent project Hughes graced with his own name was the barely-released Reach the Rock, an uncharacteristically downbeat small-town dramedy he scripted in 1998. Around that time he gave one of last known interviews, conducted by High Hat co-founder and Screengrab confidant William Ham. In it, he does sound like a man who’s ready for an extended sabbatical. “The only sequels I was involved in were under duress,” he says. “I didn't even know about Vegas Vacation until I read about it in the trades!... I tried to talk them out of doing Ferris Bueller as a series…That's why I've stayed in Chicago, 'cause I never quite fit into L.A. It's easier to maintain a degree of innocence here, you're not playing the herd so much.”

It’s a little hard to buy the notion of John Hughes as anti-Hollywood renegade, especially since his alter ego Edmond Dantès is back at work. Did you catch the Drillbit Taylor trailer earlier today on the Screengrab? Well, Dantès is credited with the story on this latest export from the Judd Apatow conglomerate. Indeed, the increasingly overexposed and overextended Apatow could do worse that to regard his latest collaborator as a cautionary tale…before he ends up making his own Curly Sue.

Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When contemplating a subject for the “Vanishing Act” column, I often find myself wondering, “Why hasn’t this person worked in so long?” In the case of Michael Cimino, I did not ask this question. My query was more along the lines of, “How many incriminating photos of which top Hollywood executive blowing what particular kind of farm animal did this person have in order to keep working for so long after Heaven’s Gate?”

Indeed, Gate is such a storied, monumental flop in the annals of motion picture history, it’s some sort of credit to Cimino that it took him so long to vanish. This is particularly true when you consider a slate of aborted projects that makes Terry Gilliam look prolific and bankable by comparison. For instance, did you know that at one time, Cimino was actually hired to direct Footloose? Personally, I would like to see documentary footage of the meeting at which this decision was reached. I’d much rather see that than ever again sit through Desperate Hours or Year of the Dragon, two Cimino films that actually were made. (Quoth Footloose producer Craig Zadan: “Cimino wanted to make a darker movie. We wanted to make an entertainment.” And Kenny Loggins rejoiced.)

The man has never lacked for ambition. Other Cimino projects that never got off the drawing board include an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, biopics of Dostoevsky and Janis Joplin, and a multi-generational American Indian saga to be filmed entirely in the Sioux language. At one time or another, legend has it that he was slated to direct The Dogs of War, The King of Comedy, The Dead Zone and Mutiny on the Bounty. (There’s gotta be a sequel to Final Cut in here somewhere, right?)

Cimino’s final completed feature to date is 1996’s The Sunchaser, starring Woody Harrelson as a wealthy doctor who is kidnapped by a terminally ill gangbanger hoping to find a magical lake of healing. Grossing a grand total of $23,107 at the box office, the barely released Sunchaser appears to have done what Heaven’s Gate could not: make Cimino a complete untouchable.

In 2001, Cimino published his first novel, Big Jane. The following year he gave a rare interview to the Independent, dispelling rumors that he’d had a sex change operation and talking up a big-screen comeback with an adaptation of Man’s Fate, “Andre Malraux's dense, heady novel about the squelched 1927 Communist uprising in Shanghai.” It never happened.

The good news is: they love him in France! Last year, Cimino earned his first film credit in over a decade, contributing the three-minute segment “No Translation Needed” to the omnibus film Chacun son cinema. Don’t call it a comeback yet, but at least it’s a start.