The Screengrab : vanishing act

Vanishing Act: Monte Hellman

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hellman! His is one of the great “What if?” stories in American cinema. As in, “What if someone had given the poor guy some money to make a few movies over the past 40 years or so?” The beginning of Hellman’s career bears a close resemblance to that of many heavy-hitters from his generation, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. That is, he got his filmmaking education on the cheap from Roger Corman, churning out quickies like Beast from Haunted Cave and Flight to Fury. Once Hellman had put in enough hours in the basement, Corman teamed him with fellow stalwart Jack Nicholson for a pair of offbeat westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Hellman’s breakthrough and downfall arrived simultaneously with 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop, declared “The Movie of the Year” by Esquire and then released to general indifference.

Had the movie caught on with the youth culture in the same way Easy Rider did, Hellman’s subsequent filmography might have been a treasure trove, but instead it’s more of a trivia quiz. There’s Shatter, a 1974 Hong Kong action picture Hellman departed after three weeks of shooting; China 9, Liberty 37, a Spaghetti western in which Warren Oates and Sam Peckinpah appear in support of the immortal Fabio Testi; The Greatest and Avalanche Express, both of which Hellman took over after the original directors died; Iguana, a seafaring tale of a disfigured sailor that never received a theatrical release; and Cockfighter, the only one of the bunch that lives up to the promise of the early westerns and Blacktop – and even that one had its original theatrical release sabotaged when Corman recut it to add more action.

By 1989, it was as if Hellman had come full circle to his disreputable early days with Corman, as he helmed the horror sequel Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! His best shot at a comeback arrived in the form of Quentin Tarantino, who approached Hellman to direct his script Reservoir Dogs. Of course, Tarantino eventually decided to direct it himself, leaving Hellman with only an Executive Producer credit. That led to pretty much nothing.

So where is Hellman now? He’s got a teaching gig at CalArts, helping to educate future filmmakers who may someday hire him and then decide to direct themselves, leaving him only with an Executive Producer credit. He was heavily involved with Criterion’s superb 2-disc DVD release of Two-Lane Blacktop, which includes commentary tracks, a documentary field trip to some of the film’s locations as well as an uneasy conversation between Hellman and Blacktop star James Taylor, who has never seen the film. And after seventeen years, he finally returned to the director’s chair for a segment of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes.

Having recently watched Ashes, just out on DVD, I can attest that Hellman’s segment, “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” is worth a look. Although it’s never explicitly stated, the Stanley of the title is clearly Kubrick, and Hellman has fun with what we know of the legend, weaving the 2001 filmmaker’s love of photography and chess into a supernatural explanation for his permanent exile from the United States. “Stanley’s Girlfriend” isn’t much more than a doodle, but it’s easily the standout in a movie that includes a cautionary plastic surgery tale about vampiric breast implants. See for yourself:

Previously on Vanishing Act:
Christopher McQuarrie
Savage Steve Holland

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s rare that the screenwriter for a splashy indie film will get as much or more attention than the director, but that was the case when The Usual Suspects hit it big in 1995. Boyhood friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie first collaborated on 1993’s Public Access, which went nowhere despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Their second effort become a modern crime classic, and there was no ignoring the fact that McQuarrie’s twisty narrative and twisted characters contributed greatly to the success of Suspects. In fact, when the Academy Awards were held the following year, it was McQuarrie who walked away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Singer, however, who used Suspects as a launching pad to a blockbuster career. After the Stephen King misfire Apt Pupil, Singer bounced back with the first two X-Men movies and the semi-successful Superman Returns. McQuarrie went his own way, hoping to realize his dream project: bringing Alexander the Great to the screen. This turned into a long, frustrating odyssey that ended when Oliver Stone made his own much-mocked version with Colin Farrell. McQuarrie’s sole effort as a writer-director, The Way of the Gun, was released in 2000, but it was something of a disappointment, getting lost in the post-Tarantino crime wave. Since then, McQuarrie has worked as a script doctor (doing uncredited rewrites on the first X-Men, among others) and has been involved in a number of aborted projects, including a Bryan Singer remake of Logan’s Run, but he has a grand total of zero screen credits since 2000.

That’s finally about to change. Today McQuarrie’s name popped up in this AP story about yet another controversy surrounding the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It seems Slate has had to retract a claim that the film’s producers altered photographs of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg in order to make them more closely resemble Cruise. This claim turned out to be false, and commenting on the situation was one of Valkyrie’s producers – Christopher McQuarrie. Per the AP: “‘The picture United Artists used of Colonel Stauffenberg can be found all over the Internet,’ said Valkyrie co-writer and producer Chris McQuarrie in a written statement released by a United Artists spokeswoman Tuesday. McQuarrie, who won a screenplay Oscar in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, added that it would have been easier to ‘alter Tom Cruise’ than to doctor ‘every available picture of Claus von Stauffenberg.’”

Valkyrie is the first full-fledged reunion of Singer and McQuarrie since The Usual Suspects. The duo was also set to re-team for the Harvey Milk biopic The Mayor of Castro Street, but that was before Gus Van Sant went forward with Milk. McQuarrie’s next announced project as a writer-director is The Stanford Prison Experiment, based on the actual psychological study gone awry in 1971. Rumored cast members include Ryan Phillippe and Paul Dano, but given the bumps in the road McQuarrie has already hit, it’s best to take such information with a grain of salt.

Related:
Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update
A Brief History of Milk

Vanishing Act: Savage Steve Holland

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

If you’re not of a certain age, you’ve probably never even heard of Savage Steve Holland – or if you have, you may be under the impression that he was a professional wrestler back in the '80s. Well, you got the right decade: for a little while there, Holland was second only to John Hughes as American cinema’s foremost purveyor of comedic teen angst. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I’ve seen one of his movies in its entirely (though I’m sure I’ve channel surfed through them hundreds of times), but some people my age still swear by the guy.

An animator who studied at CalArts (and who, according to wikipedia, designed the Whammy on the game show Press Your Luck), Holland’s legacy rests entirely on two movies he made with John Cusack: Better Off Dead (1985) and One Crazy Summer (1986). In the former, Cusack gets dumped by his girlfriend, makes several suicide attempts, then hooks up with a foreign exchange student. In the latter, he’s a cartoonist who spends an eventful summer on Nantucket with the likes of Bobcat Goldthwait, Demi Moore and Curtis “Booger” Armstrong. Neither movie set the box office on fire, but both were cult hits with long afterlives on video and cable, thanks to 80s-style wackiness like Cusack’s creation of a claymation Van Halen hamburger:

Or Bobcat Goldthwait wreaking havoc in a Godzilla costume:

Alas, the magic could not last. Holland’s third directorial effort, 1989’s How I Got Into College (which he did not write), was a certifiable box office bomb, and that was it for Holland’s movie career. He found a niche on television, however, directing episodes of Encyclopedia Brown, Shasta McNasty, Lizzie McGuire, and my one-time late night guilty pleasure, V.I.P. But as Indiana Jones is here to remind us, all things '80s will return to haunt us, and that includes Savage Steve Holland. He has no less than three comeback vehicles in the works: a straight-to-video sequel to Legally Blonde, a National Lampoon movie called Ratko: The Dictator’s Son, and The Big One 3, described by the director as the sort-of third part of the Better Off Dead/One Crazy Summer trilogy. But that’s not all. Holland is attached to yet another project, one that can only be summed up by its three word title:

Howard Stern’s Porky’s.

Didn’t I say something about all things '80s returning to haunt us?

Vanishing Act: Allison Anders & Alexandre Rockwell

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

It was a four-car pile-up with only two survivors. It was Four Rooms, an omnibus film by the hottest Sundance kids in town, the self-proclaimed “Class of ‘92” consisting of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. The directors of Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Gas, Food, Lodging and In the Soup decided to join forces before Pulp Fiction went through the stratosphere, but the project didn’t materialize until afterwards. The premise was simplicity itself: each segment of the film took place in a different room in the same hotel, with Tim Roth’s befuddled bellhop as the only common link.

Tarantino’s runaway ego was on full display in his room, “The Man from Hollywood,” yet he would emerge from the wreckage virtually unscathed, along with Rodriguez, whose slapstick contribution “The Misbehavers” was generally regarded as the movie’s highlight. Despite revolving around a coven of topless witches played by Alicia Witt, Ione Skye, Valeria Golino and Madonna, Anders’ “The Missing Ingredient” managed to be both silly and dull – a description that equally applies to Rockwell’s “The Wrong Man,” featuring his then-wife Jennifer Beals gagged and tied to a chair.

Despite its critical and commercial failure, it’s probably unfair to blame Four Rooms for derailing the careers of Anders and Rockwell; both continued to work, at least for a while. Anders made a pair of rock and roll movies, Grace of My Heart and Sugar Town, both of which have their defenders but neither of which made much impact. Most of her work over the past decade has been in episodic TV, from Sex and the City to Cold Case. The exception is Things Behind the Sun, a dark drama about rape that played the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and earned some of the best reviews of Anders’ career, but never secured a theatrical release, premiering instead on Showtime. “I absolutely loved the experience with the distribution on this movie,” Anders said in a recent interview with Moviemaker. “It was a very tough decision to make to go to cable instead of going theatrical. I had a theatrical offer from some great people who really loved the movie, but I tell you I had such a much better experience. I loved that millions of people saw my movie! There's no downside, as far as I can tell.”

Rockwell made a quasi-sequel to In the Soup, spinning off two characters for 1998’s Louis and Frank, a movie that has left very little evidence of its existence. It played a few festivals and apparently had a run in France, but that’s about it. The offbeat 13 Moons, starring Steve Buscemi as Bananas the Clown, fared little better in 2002, securing a limited release but not much critical support.

These careers can be revived, however, and another anthology movie may be the answer. We suggest Anders and Rockwell team up to make an old-fashioned drive-in double feature, complete with fake trailers and plenty of gratuitous sex and violence. How could it miss?

Vanishing Act: Whit Stillman

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Whit Stillman was never what you’d call a prolific filmmaker, but this is getting ridiculous. Stillman was something of a late bloomer in the first place; he started work on the Barcelona screenplay in the early 80s while working as a foreign sales agent in Spain, then set it aside when he returned to New York to run an illustration agency. He then spent four years working on the script for Metropolitan, which eventually became his debut feature in 1990, when Stillman was 38 years old. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay and was able to secure studio funding for Barcelona, which reached screens four years later.

Another four years passed before The Last Days of Disco was released in 1998, but Stillman couldn’t keep up the breakneck pace. It has now been a decade with no new Stillman, at least as far as the movies are concerned. Not that he’s been totally idle in the meantime; you may recall his peculiar decision to write a sort of post-modern novelization of The Last Days of Disco, which was published in 2000. (The book was written from the point of view of one the movie’s characters, who has been hired by Castle Rock Entertainment to adapt the film based on his own experiences.)

Two years ago, Stillman wrote an essay for The Guardian called “Confessions of a Serial Drifter,” in which he attempts to explain his protracted vanishing act. His first attempt at following up Last Days involved the Jamaican music he fell in love with while making that movie, but he put that aside when “a producer friend called to apologise for having claimed I was ‘attached’ to a project he was trying to get a studio to buy, which turned out to be Anchee Min's memoir of the Chinese cultural revolution, Red Azalea.” Stillman read Min’s book and decided he actually would like to be attached to the project. “I was a bit worried - I had liked the idea of doing the small, difficult Jamaican production before the enormous, frightening Chinese one, but the option on the Red Azalea book rights was ticking.”

That ticking sound turned out to be a time bomb. “Someone with a special interest in the subject returned to Los Angeles and interested a far more important director in the book, who then started a long behind-the-scenes campaign to get it for himself - or so rumour has it…Our project for Red Azalea came apart in early 2002. I still had the beloved Jamaican project to return to, and was lucky soon to find backers for that script.”

While that may be the case, the project has yet to surface. But Stillman’s name has since been attached to another novel adaptation. In May of 2006, Variety reported that Stillman had signed on to direct Little Green Men, based on the book by Christopher Buckley. All the project lacked was a leading man. “Whenever Mr. Comedy Star wants to do it, that's when we will," said the helmer. “If he wants, we can do it in his backyard, and there's even a part for his girlfriend.” Apparently Mr. Comedy Star has yet to find a hole in his schedule, because we’re still waiting.

Vanishing Act: Jennifer Lynch

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Most of us first became aware of David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer when she authored The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks tie-in book that could have been nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Instead, as Entertainment Weekly noted at the time, The Secret Diary is “gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of Peaks, and is therefore full of unorthodox sex, illegal drugs, casual blasphemy, and a generally negative attitude… Lynch has taken her father's conception of a good girl gone bad and run with it.” (Fewer Peaks fans remember the worthy follow-up, Scott Frost’s hilarious and astute The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes; you can read it in its entirety here.)

So it wasn’t too surprising that Lynch the younger got her own director’s chair, nor was it a shock that the subject matter of her debut was a bit off the beaten path. As originally announced, Boxing Helena would star Kim Basinger as a woman who has both arms and legs amputated by an obsessed stalker. At some point Basinger decided that this perhaps was not the best direction for her career and dropped out of the project. (Lynch and her producers sued Basinger for breach of contract and were awarded over $8 million, although the verdict was later overturned.) The part of Helena was recast with Peaks beauty Sherilyn Fenn, and Julian Sands took on the role of the creepy suitor.

“I see it as a love story," said Lynch in 1992, "not a horror film. The image of Venus de Milo is so powerful. Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It's inviting, exciting, animalistic. I've been there; I've been drawn to it." But few others were drawn to Boxing Helena when it was released in 1993. “This film has all the psychological depth of a wading pool,” wrote Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle. “Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.”

Most reviews were as bad or worse. As Lynch told the New York Times last year, the criticism stung. “I was so completely dumbfounded. Not that any creative medium isn’t important, but how was it possible for people to write that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or that I was a misogynist? It’s a movie, folks. It’s not like you walk into a museum and see a painter you don’t like and say: ‘You know what? That guy doesn’t deserve to be loved anymore. He’s a bad person.’ ”

Lynch endured some personal struggles as well, including recurring back pain from a long-ago traffic accident and struggles with the bottle. Now clean and sober, Lynch has returned to that director’s chair for the first time in 15 years with Surveillance, a serial killer thriller starring Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Julia Ormond (Inland Empire). It’s due later this year; take a look at the trailer, which features more than a trace of her father’s trademark imagery.

Vanishing Act: Daniel Waters

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Diablo Cody, take notice. Once upon a time, in a magical land called the 1980s, there was a hip youth-culture screenwriter of the moment named Daniel Waters. He wrote a zeitgeisty movie called Heathers that Variety described as “super-smart black comedy about high school politics and teenage suicide that showcases a host of promising young talents.” Among those talents were Christian Slater, unveiling the Jack Nicholson impression that would sustain his career at least until the release of Kuffs in 1992, future 90210 bad girl Shannen Doherty, and future shoplifter Winona Ryder, who was sort of the Ellen Page of her time. Heathers was a cult hit, and Waters got the lion’s share of the credit. (Director Michael Lehmann’s recent comeback attempt Flakes was described here as a “soggy mess.”)

Waters used his newfound clout to pen two of the most reviled movies (justly or not) of the early 1990s: the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and notorious bomb Hudson Hawk. He managed to reclaim a modicum of respectability by scripting Batman Returns (although much of his work went unused), then did some work on 1993’s Demolition Man before disappearing for eight years. He resurfaced with his debut as a writer-director, Happy Campers, a sort of cross between Heathers and Meatballs that never received a theatrical release.

Another long hiatus followed, but now the L.A. Times catches up with Waters, who has a new movie due in theaters Friday. Sex and Death 101 reunites him with Winona Ryder for the story of a man (Simon Baker) who receives a mysterious email listing all the women he ever has or ever will have sex with. As it happens, Waters has taken up residence in the former home of another man who was no stranger to prolonged vanishing acts, Orson Welles. "I bought the house because I wanted to get that Citizen Kane mojo," says Waters. "Instead I'm getting the end of [Welles'] career, the hanging out with Henry Jaglom, doing wine commercials and magic tricks part of his life. I mean, I enjoy my life, but come on -- where's my Touch of Evil?"

Like Welles before him, Waters also keeps busy “on never-made projects like an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land for Tom Hanks.” Is Sex and Death 101 his Touch of Evil? Here’s the trailer – judge for yourself:

Vanishing Act: The “Greenlight” Gang

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

For three seasons (two on HBO and a final one on Bravo), Project Greenlight attempted to capture the filmmaking drama found in documentaries like American Movie or Overnight. Since Greenlight was a reality show, a certain amount of the drama was contrived: the subjects were contest winners, and despite the stated intentions of producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, their projects were not necessarily selected on the basis of artistic merit.

For the inaugural season in 2002, apple-cheeked neophyte Pete Jones and his family-friendly script Stolen Summer were selected for production, with budget to be provided by Miramax (which also produced the series). Jones directed his own script (an arrangement that would not be repeated in subsequent seasons), and while the series documenting his efforts proved to be quite entertaining, the resulting film was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Still, even though he came off as somewhat oafish and full of himself on the show, the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity held true. Jones made enough of a name for himself to take some meetings in L.A. and pitch a new comedy about a closeted gay man who decides to come out to his family, only to find they don’t believe him. No deal materialized, and eventually Jones and his brothers financed the movie, Outing Riley, themselves. Jones took on the title role and snagged Nathan Fillion and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin for the supporting cast. The film played some festivals in 2004 and was released on video last year.

Project Greenlight’s second season suffered from sequel-itis. Producer Chris Moore, breakout reality star of the first season, apparently read his reviews and played up his villainous persona to an embarrassing degree. The victims were screenwriter Erica Beeney and co-directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle, the mismatched creative team behind The Battle of Shaker Heights. Rankin and Potelle have talent, as evidenced in their wacky short films like Pennyweight, but seemed ill-suited to bring Beeney’s coming-of-age story to life. Nonetheless, Shaker Heights has enjoyed a long afterlife on cable, probably because it stars current It Boy Shia LeBeouf. Beeney has no writing credits since, but Rankin has written and directed the horror-comedy Infestation (with Potelle producing, acting and supervising the special effects), due later this year from Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions.

After the second season, HBO cut ties with Greenlight, which relocated to Bravo. In a desperate attempt to keep the series going – and keep the money flowing from the Weinstein brothers – Moore, Damon and Affleck announced that the third Greenlight movie would be a commercial genre piece. This turned out to be good news for the winning screenwriters, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, whose horror screenplay Feast led to gigs writing later installments of the Saw series, as well as a remake of Hellraiser. In addition, the DVD release of Feast was successful enough to spawn two sequels, both penned by Dunstan and Melton and directed by John Gulager, Greenlight III’s designated goofus. In this respect, the show’s third season can be regarded as the most successful, but the producers’ hoped-for outcome never materialized, as future installments of the series got the red light. Still, we’ll always have Feast:

Vanishing Act: Troy Duffy

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In our last Vanishing Act, we got you caught up on Mark Borchardt, the aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in American Movie. As a special St. Paddy’s Day treat, we thought we’d do the same for another aspiring filmmaker whose attempts at bringing his first film to the screen were documented in 2003’s somewhat less uplifting Overnight.

The subject of that documentary is Troy Duffy, a foulmouthed, chain-smoking, overall-clad boy from Boston who went to Hollywood and made his dream come true. At least, that’s the direction things seemed to be going when Duffy made a too-good-to-be-true deal with Miramax based on his buzzed-about script The Boondock Saints. The Weinstein brothers agreed to finance the film with Duffy as director, hire his band to do the music for the movie, and even buy the bar where Duffy works (J. Sloane’s) on the premise that they’ll own it together.

If you’ve seen Overnight, you know what happens next. The tagline “There’s more than one way to shoot yourself” neatly sums up Duffy’s association with Miramax, as the brash, confrontational and increasingly obnoxious and deluded would-be filmmaker goes on to decimate his relationship with the Weinsteins and sandbag Boondocks in the process. Eventually he did make the movie with Franchise Films for a much smaller budget than originally planned. Boondocks opened in a handful – make that a thimbleful – of theaters for a week in 2000, earning less than $100,000 at the box office. If this happened to Mark Borchardt we’d find it depressing, but Duffy comes off as such an unlikable blowhard throughout the documentary, there’s not a wet eye in the house. Hubris had taken down another victim, or so it seemed.

For some reason, however, Boondock Saints developed a rabid cult following once it was released on video exclusively to Blockbuster. The story of two Boston Irishmen who take on the Russian mob, the film is virtually indistinguishable from any number of Tarantino or Guy Ritchie knockoffs, save for Willem Dafoe’s deranged performance as an FBI agent. Still, facts are facts: the DVD sold like crazy, and no matter how many bridges Duffy burned in Hollywood, money still talks.

In this case, the talk was about a sequel, to be called All Saints Day. That talk continues to this day, and generally involves veiled references to rights issues and litigation standing in the way of the “Boondock flock” getting their hearts’ desires. Periodically Duffy issues video messages via his website and YouTube, such as the one below, detailing his plans for the sequel as well as another project-in-waiting, a black comedy called The Good King. He doesn’t really sound like a guy who’s been humbled (he claims never to have seen Overnight), but who knows? If you’re feeling charitable today, why not raise a glass of green beer in a toast to him and all the others who have been chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine – even the ones who had it coming.

Vanishing Act: Mark Borchardt

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

One of the great films of the 1990s was American Movie, Chris Smith’s documentary about working class Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his efforts to complete Coven, a short horror movie about an alcoholic writer. Smith’s film was both a hilarious look at the pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking (as in the signature scene of Borchardt shoving an actor’s head through a non-breakaway cabinet door) and a poignant depiction of economically deprived Middle America. A star was born in the person of Borchardt’s gentle burnout sidekick Mike Schank, who stole every scene in which he appeared.

The American Movie DVD featured the completed Coven, which offered the sort of amateurish performances and unintentional laughs you might expect, but also revealed surprising flashes of wit and an eye for bleak compositions and grim, bare-bones settings. Borchardt’s ostensible reason for making the short was to sell 3000 video copies of it, in order to finance his dream feature film project, Northwestern. He sold at least 5000 via the American Movie website, so it wasn’t out of the question that Northwestern would get made sooner than later.

Nine years later, history seems to be repeating itself. On the one hand, things have certainly improved for Borchardt since his days of delivering newspapers and vacuuming crypts. He has an acting career of sorts; you may have seen him as “Skeeter” in The Godfather of Green Bay or “Al the drunk at the bar” in Zombie Island, and he has four roles lined up for 2008, including one in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. He’s still hoping to make Northwestern, but in the meantime he’s working on another horror film about an alcoholic writer, this one called Scare Me. And as you may not be surprised to learn, it has been in production for quite some time now.

An entry from Borchardt’s long-since abandoned American Movie diary notes that shooting began in early 2003. An undated Premiere blurb finds Borchardt in the midst of auditions, and reports that “funding is no longer an insurmountable problem. Local businesses have pitched in everything from props to locations, including the Elks Lodge and a former roller-skating rink.” A 2005 release was targeted, according to this profile, but in the interview clip below dated February 2007 he admits, “I don’t know when we last shot it or did anything.” IMDb optimistically claims Scare Me will be released next month; if that happens, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Vanishing Act: Bill Forsyth

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Some vanishing acts are harder to explain than others. Who could possible have a problem with Bill Forsyth? He’s no budget-busting megalomaniac like Michael Cimino, nor a purveyor of edgy indie curiosities like Harmony Korine. Maybe you could blame him for inspiring the plethora of quirky British comedies that overtook arthouses in the mid-to-late 1990s – The Full Monty, Waking Ned Devine, Saving Grace, etc. – but that would be excessively ungenerous. The first Scottish director to break through to an international audience, Forsyth began his film career in collaboration with the Glasgow Youth Theater, with whom he produced two low-budget comedies: That Sinking Feeling and the breakthrough hit Gregory’s Girl. With his third film, the fish-out-of-water tale Local Hero, he whipped up a delicate blend of appealing regionalism and low-key whimsy that has often been attempted – and rarely duplicated – since.

After 1984’s Comfort and Joy, Forsyth moved to America, though it would be an exaggeration to say he went Hollywood. His U.S.-made movies weren’t particularly successful; although Housekeeping and Breaking In (featuring one of Burt Reynolds’ many comeback performances) both have their admirers, the 1993 Robin Williams vehicle Being Human was an unmitigated disaster. The closest thing to a big-budget picture Forsyth ever attempted, the film suffered from a troubled production and a nearly non-existent theatrical release.

So much for Forsyth’s American career. Six years passed before the director resurfaced with Gregory’s Two Girls, the Scottish-made sequel to his second feature film. (This is what the experts call “coming full circle.”) Never released theatrically in the U.S., it remains Forsyth’s final film to date. Judging from a recent interview with the London Times, he plans to keep it that way. “I have to put my hand on my heart and say I'm ten times happier not making films than making films.” he says. “I did it 'cos they let me. It's not something you decline…I can't stand the cinema. We did go once three or four years ago just to experience it. We went to a mall outside Glasgow and had a pretty horrendous experience.”

Retirement from filmmaking doesn’t always stick, however, and Forsyth’s vanishing act is one we wouldn’t mind seeing come to an end.

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.

Vanishing Act: Harmony Korine

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Attention Diablo Cody: you are not the first oddly monikered young screenwriter whose first script became an indie sensation. Way back in the 20th century, there was a fella name o’ Harmony Korine, no more than a teenager when his screenplay Kids became photographer Larry Clark’s 1995 directorial debut. An instant controversy, the documentary-style look at the sexually-charged, drug-fueled life of a group of New York teens was slapped with an NC-17 rating that prevented its distribution by Miramax (then as now owned by Disney). The Weinstein brothers released Kids on their own to a mixed reception; some critics swooned, others proclaimed it exploitative sleaze.

Still, Korine made enough of a name for himself to secure his own directorial debut two years later with Gummo. A fragmented, impressionistic ode to white trash, the film was if anything even more divisive than Kids. Janet Maslin of the New York Times opened her review with the line “October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year.” But while sophisticated metropolitan tastemakers were busy pointing out how condescending and hateful Korine was toward his “nonprofessional actors, often freakish individuals” (jeez, no condescension there, Janet!), Gummo was well on its way to becoming the cult favorite of the trailer park. And why not? Among other things, it featured the greatest battle of man versus chair ever captured on film:

Korine followed Gummo with his Dogme 95 entry, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), an uneven tale of a schizophrenic that garnered the now-predictable mixed reception ( I offered qualified praise: “Shot on digital video, with blown-out colors and punishing graininess, Julien Donkey-Boy has the look and feel of something unearthed in an archeological dig - a primitive piece of folk art.” Admittedly, I haven’t revisited it since.) That was nearly a decade ago, so where has Korine been?

For a while, there was talk of a disturbing movie in the Jackass vein, wherein Korine would antagonize random people on the street into fighting him and document the resulting damage done to him. In 2002, Clark directed Korine’s script for Ken Park, but that had been written years earlier. There were whispers of heroin addiction and, perhaps even more disturbing, a friendship with doofus magician David Blaine that resulted in the British television special Above the Below. But there were no new Harmony Korine movies...until now.

Mister Lonely, which will have its U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, is exactly what you’d expect: a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who brings him to a commune full of faux celebrities and historical figures. Having shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film breaks no new ground as far as its critical reception: it’s as divisive as ever, sometimes within the same review. The UK Telegraph describes it as “by turns idiotic, over-extended, childish and half-baked.” Then, in the very next sentence: “But when it’s not those things, and sometimes even when it is, the results are brilliantly bold, moving and tenderly, rhapsodically beautiful.” Sounds like a Harmony Korine movie alright.

Vanishing Act: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation. Unknown filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez hit upon an ingenious plan for making the most of their microscopic budget, using the mockumentary format to not only justify their jittery digital images but to amp up the "you are there" horror of three amateur filmmakers encountering evil in the woods. The Blair Witch Project was also a pioneer in the realm of viral marketing, using the web to generate underground buzz over whether or not the film was "real." Its influence can be seen in two movies releasing this week: Teeth explicitly mentions Blair Witch in its TV ads, while Cloverfield appropriates both the shakycam immediacy and the viral approach.

When Blair Witch grossed an astonishing $140 million at the box office, it seemed that Myrick and Sanchez were sitting pretty. They had the good sense to steer clear of the stinkeroo sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, except as nominal executive producers. Their next announced collaboration, Heart of Love, was to be a complete change of pace, a screwball comedy described by Myrick in several interviews as "the most politically incorrect movie imaginable." Several web sites (now long defunct) were launched in hopes of recapturing the viral magic of their first collaboration, but the movie’s production was delayed over and over while the directors squabbled with distributor Artisan over Blair Witch profits and the project died quietly.

Despite their tiff with Artisan and mutual antipathy toward the failed Book of Shadows, Myrick and Sanchez toyed with making a Blair Witch prequel before finally going their separate ways. So what have they been up to lately?

This 2005 profile of Sanchez from the Baltimore City Paper finds him in pre-production on Probed, an “alien sci-fi horror monster movie” that was released straight to DVD as Altered in 2006. In a three-skull review (I think that’s a good thing), Fangoria.com notes that the effects-based set pieces are “a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch,” but that “Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing.”

Myrick directed The Strand, which originally appeared as a series of webisodes about oddball characters on Venice Beach, CA, and Believers, a straight-to-video thriller about a dangerous cult. In this recent interview, Myrick discusses his new project The Objective, as well as the possibility of working with Sanchez again and maybe even reviving that Blair Witch prequel.