Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

If you think this economy is causing problems for you, shed a tear for Steven Spielberg. As Kim Masters reports, DreamWorks, the film company that Spielberg co-founded in the '90s with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, "sold itself to Paramount in 2006 for about $1.6 billion, but the relationship with Paramount chief Brad Grey quickly soured. When contracts allowed it, DreamWorks partner David Geffen stepped out and stepped down. Spielberg and CEO Stacey Snider also left, planning to raise their own money and distribute their films through Universal. That's the studio that Spielberg has always considered his home. (He kept his offices there even after his company sold itself to Paramount.)" At the time, nobody thought that Spielberg would either be begging for pennies or sweating to close a movie deal anytime soon. But then the bottom fell out of the economy, and DreamWorks started ceding to Paramount its right to participate in the production of some hotly anticipated projects that it had developed, treating them as so many sandbags that needed to be tossed over the side. Of course, Spielberg has never lacked for a full plate, but at the moment he's been focused on Lincoln, the planned biopic starring Liam Neeson and written by Tony Kushner. Part of the idea behind the movie was to have it ready for release this year, as part of the celebration of Abe's 200th birthday, and Spielberg was hoping to begin shooting in a few weeks. But he was also hoping that he'd be able to raise the money. When he and DreamWorks found that tough sledding, they asked Universal, which was expected to ultimately distribute Lincoln, to chip in with financing. When Universal proved cool to that, DreamWorks entered into tentative, secret talks with Disney, talks that became a lot less tentative when it turned out that they weren't all that secret. When Universal, which thought it had an exclusive offer from DreamWorks, found out about the Disney negotiations, the studio pitched a fit and, in what Masters calls "an embarrassment that stunned Hollywood", told the aging golden boy and his company to go screw, "pushing DreamWorks into a hasty distribution deal with Disney—a deal less favorable, in certain respects, than the one that had been contemplated at Universal."

Lincoln is now in limbo, along with a few other DreamWorks projects (including Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones) that the studio doesn't want to relinquish its rights to but can't afford to fund or buy outright. Spielberg is hoping that Paramount will foot the bill on Lincoln--Masters notes that the decision will be made by "Brad Grey—the man the DreamWorks team treated for a long time as a mortal enemy." A couple of things make this more complicated than it might seem from a distance. For one thing, Spielberg's relations with Universal run so far back and so deep that nobody's sure whether their disagreement is just a little tiff--Spielberg still has his office on the Universal lot and "continues to serve as a consultant on the Universal theme parks, for which he collects a princely two percent of the gate from all of the parks outside Southern California." And nobody's sure about the commercial prospects of Lincoln: it's one of Spielberg's "serious" movies, and might well turn out to be less along the lines of Schindler's List in terms of popualar appeal than his previous attempt at dealing with the issue of slavery, the ambitious and much-unloved Amistad. So whoever gets in bed with Spielberg for this may not be beginning a long-term relationship with the world's most successful director; they could just be paying for one of his tax write-off projects before he gets over his mid-life crisis and goes crawling back to his first wife's house. (Meanwhile, Disney is said to be toying with the idea of tying its Lincoln-themed attractions at its own park to the movie by hiring Liam Neeson to supply the voice of the Robo-President, an idea that, if anything came of it, would surely have Universal lawyers parachuting onto the Disney CEO's front lawn.) No doubt this will all end up working out in a way that makes everyone involved feel just wonderful. Until then, writes Masters, "the spectacle of Steven Spielberg reduced from 800-pound gorilla to maybe 400-pound gorilla is enough to send shivers through even the iciest executives in the business."

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Playing" and "Theater of War"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's Playing is an experimental documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling. The movie opens with the text of an ad Coutinho placed in the newspaper that amounted to an open call for any women in Rio de Janeiro over eighteen "with stories to tell." He filmed them talking about their lives and then brought in a succession of actresses, who studied these monologues and then, using their own words, delivered their own versions of the stories. The trick is that in the finished film, Coutinho cut together the best of both material-- the original speakers and the actresses doing their "interpretations" of them-- without clearly identifying for the audience which is which. Sometimes a scene will end with a woman revealing herself to be an actress by commenting on what she's just done; sometimes, as in the case of a woman who talks about how she sees her relationship with her grown daughter reflected in Finding Nemo, we get to see the original speaker's words alongside those of the actress who "plays" them; sometimes we never find out. At its simplest, the movie reveals a lot about "real life" and theater and how they complement and comment on each other. (A number of the women who seem to be describing their own experiences tear up very easily. However, an actress shows the director the tool she would have used if he'd insisted that she cry during her performance and explains that though she was prepared to use it, she preferred not to because it's her observation that when people really feel like crying, that's when they hold back their tears.) It also shows how thin the line between the two can be. Coutinho has taken a device that could have been used to cook up one more dopey illusion vs. reality game and made something substantial with it.

Another documentary in the festival, Theater of War, is also meant to be about theater and its application to the real world, which is here defined as torn-from-the-headlines big issues. Thinking about how the movie defines theater sort of makes my head hurt. The director, John Walter, made How to Draw a Bunny, an ugly-looking but endlessly fascinating video documentary about the prankster pop artist Ray Johnson. Theater, a behind-the-scenes look at a 2006 Public Theater production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, is much slicker-looking and about half as interesting. The material about Brecht's life and the writing and original production of the play is enough to make you think it would be great to see a real documentary about that sometime, preferably one that's less slavish in its worship of the playwright and that manages to get by without the contributions of this film's resident Brecht scholar, Jay Cantor, a man who has the rare distinction of having written bad novels about both Che Guevara and Krazy Kat. But the film's prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the "process" of its star, Meryl Streep.

Streep comes across as a very nice woman, and she gets points for allowing herself to be filmed at rehearsals wearing a T-shirt that says "DIVA" across the front, but the big unanswered question raised by Theater of War is why this production was made. When the Public Theater's artistic director tells the camera that the Iraq war is an all-encompassing issue like the Vietnam war, and that he just knew he had to put on "an adaptation" of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner starring Meryl Streep, it just sounds as if he's saying that, in order to appear to be saying something about an important contemporary subject, he just had to have the biggest New York playwright to whom he had access custom-design a big classic play that could seem to be commenting on the subject, with the Official Big New York Stage Actress in the lead. Nothing that comes after that really dispels this impression, whether it's seeing the composer who's been hired to compose new songs in a sort of Brecht-Weill tailor them to the singing abilities of the stars, or the costume designer explain that she's throwing together styles of dress from many different periods and cultures so as not to appear to be commenting on any specific time or place, or watching the prop guys deliver on the director George C. Wolfe's passionate desire to have a jeep that can be driven onstage. (The Public Theater Mother Courage finally opened to loud hype and mixed reviews, with a "translation" by Kushner that included sitcom snappers and lines directed at the Bush administration.) The biggest shocker in the movie comes very early, when Tony Kushner, talking about his early years in New York in the mid-seventies as a theater student from Lousiana, and how he was able to feed his culture jones seeing things like the celebrated Public Theater production of The Threepenny Opera with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene and the whole of Wagner's Ring cycle "for no money." (There were gasps in the audience.) The subtext of Theater of War is the story of how some gifted people who were able to learn their craft and make their names in the last years when New York was affordable for young artists now collaborate, probably with the best of intentions, in the work of maintaining the illusion that this rich man's playground of a city is still a vital culture center by staging effects-heavy, glitzy shows whose point seems to be that Bertolt Brecht had George W. Bush's number. The punchline is that the Tony Kushner of 1975 might not be able to get into these shows, and to his credit, he might not want to.

The Screengrab : tony kushner

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Tribeca Film Festival Reviews: "Playing" and "Theater of War"