Issue #4

Emma Thompson and John Lithgow Triumph in Late Night          by Bill Sokolic

 

In Late Night, Oscar Winner Emma Thompson plays an aging talk show host whose rigid ways threaten to end her reign as the queen of that realm. Thompson plays the part as you’d expect, with a British chip on her shoulder. Her character, Katherine Newbury, uses tyrannical tactics to make up for her treatment as the only woman in an all-boys club. Even the entire writing staff is male as Katherine refuses to deal with hiring a woman. She’s also aloof, never meeting directly with her writers until the top exec threatens her job.

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  Emma Thompson                                                                                                                  John Lithgow                

(Photos courtesy of Emily Aragones and Amazon Studios)                                                    (Photo courtesy of Creative Commons) 

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“She’s intellectually superior, a bit snobby and she really doesn’t understand why the ratings are slipping,” Thompson, 60, explains. “In some ways she doesn’t care. She’s come to take her audience for granted. But things start to happen that wake her up, and Mindy’s character becomes the catalyst for changes.”

 

Faced with criticism from above, Katherine orders her staff to hire a woman writer, who turns out to be Mindy Kaling’s Molly Patel, someone devoid of any experience as a TV writer.

“When I pictured Katherine, I always saw Emma playing her,” screenwriter Kaling says. “She has been such an enormous influence on me. I think of it almost as a love story between two women of different generations who have the same passions: comedy and television, two venues that have not been very kind to women, and both characters are a bit like me.”

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John Lithgow, 73, in a co-starring role, is admirable as a husband whose medical issues have impacted both his professional life and his personal.

Lithgow plays Walter Laval, a retired manager of A-list comedians, who has been married to Katherine since before she landed the late night show. “It’s a wonderful portrait of a long, successful marriage,” says the actor. “Katherine is a piece of work and certainly a bit of a dictator, but when she’s with Walter, she’s a completely different person. My role in the film is to give her a relationship that reveals a different side of her character. That really drew me to the role.”

Issue #3

Three Geezers Join Forces To Save the Elephant in the (Circus)     by Bill Sokolic

 

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After 26 years, Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito reunited with their Batman Returns director Tim Burton in Disney’s latest spin-off version of their classic film, Dumbo. DeVito plays Max Medici, the owner of a rundown circus, and Keaton as the entrepreneur V.A. Vandervere, who takes an interest in the elephant.

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 All photos courtesy of Creative Commons                                                                                                                                          

 

Unlike Batman Returns, DeVito, 74, plays the good guy, and Keaton, 71, the bad guy, according to a piece in the March 21 edition of Entertainment Weekly, authored by Chancellor Agard. “It was really great,” DeVito says. “When [Burton] called and said he was going to do this, it’s a joyful thing. I know I’m going to be there. Oh man, it’s so good to be with your friends. It’s just cool to be on the set with them. Michael and I worked on Johnny Dangerously years ago together, and we’ve been friends since then. He is one of the sweetest guys on the planet.”

 

In an interview for the Dumbo production, Burton, 60, says he and Keaton pick up “right where we left off with Batman Returns and Beetlejuice. He’s a live wire, improvisational and exciting to work with. I really like that.”

For his part, Keaton relished working with Burton again. “I’m not looking to go to work. Making movies is hard. But I’ve yet to have a bad experience working with Tim,” he says in the interview.

 

DeVito and Rhea Perlman separated a second time two years ago. Perlman, 71, costars with Diane Keaton in Poms. The pair has three children, all in their 30s. The eldest, Lucy DeVito, has a small role in Dumbo. Lucy also has a part in Curmudgeons, a short comedy directed by and starring her father, about a pair of senior citizens who have a relationship that shocks both their families.

 

Dumbo, DeVito says in a March 22 "People Magazine" article written by Alexia Fernandez

and Kara Warner, “captures how people push away from something different. And then

also the idea of figuring out how to conquer the fears and insecurities that we have in life.”

 

In addition to his role as Frank Reynolds in the long running series, It's Always Sunny in

Philadelphia, DeVito has a handful of other films underway or in post-production.

 

Keaton is also a busy performer with several projects in various stages including a director stint.

 

 

 

 

                   

                                                                    All photos courtesy of Creative Commons       

Issue #2

Orson's Last Gamble by Bill Sokolic 

It took 48 years and a ton of backroom wheeling and dealing, but the old sorcerer finally gets his last film up on the little screen.

Origin Story

Call it an old school hologram in which the deceased shine anew. Orson Welles’

latest film, The Other Side of the Wind, premiered in August, 2018 at the 75th

Venice International Film Festival almost 50 years after shooting began. Netflix

released the film November 2, capping a tortuous route to the screen, following

decades of reshoots, financial hurdles, legal battles and the death of the filmmaker

himself in 1985 at age 70.

 

According to Huffington Post's Nov. 2 article by Oliver Whitney, the story began in

1969 when Welles was in Mexico acting in Mike Nichols Catch-22. Peter

Bogdanovich,then working as a critic, arrived to interview Welles for the American

Film Institute. Bogdanovich mentioned that director John Ford was struggling to get

work. Upset by that prospect, Welles set out to do a movie about how difficult it is

for older filmmakers to carry on with their profession.

                                                                                                                                            Photo courtesy of Netflix

“I didn’t sleep last night thinking about what you told me about Ford,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “I’ve got this movie about an aging macho film director and a young filmmaker. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’m gonna do it next.” This would be his grand return to Hollywood after a decade in Europe.

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Lost money, The Shah of Iran, and Porn

Styled as an unorthodox mockumentary, The Other Side of the Wind, follows Jake Hannaford, an acclaimed director, played by John Huston. Hannaford scrambles to finance his next picture. Meanwhile, a younger director, played by Bogdanovich, comes along. The movie hops between Jake’s 70th birthday party — shown in a collage of footage shot by a crew of fake news reporters — and Jake’s movie-within-the-movie, Welles’ satire of ’70s art house cinema. But reality began mirroring Wind, the article said. Just as Jake encountered countless hitches in making his movie, Welles faced a series of complications. He repeatedly lost funding. An unexpected tax bill from the U.S. government and an alleged embezzlement scam on set derailed finances further. A spotty money arrangement with the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran compounded the situation. As the shoot stretched on, Welles couldn’t pay the crew, so his cinematographer, Gary Graver, was forced to work on adult films to pay the bills. Welles even helped Graver by editing a lesbian sex scene in the 1975 porn film 3 A.M.

 

Ownership problems and 100 hours of footage

Production shut down so many times it took the crew six years to complete principal

photography. Throughout the mid-’70s and early ’80s, Welles wrestled over the rights

to the original negative in a complex ownership dispute. He continued to edit his work

print of the movie until 1983. When he died in 1985, messy legal disputes raged on.

The film’s three beneficiaries, including Welles’ daughter Beatrice Welles, failed to

reach an agreement over the copyright, and for the next three decades Bogdanovich,

original Wind producer Frank Marshall, and Polish producer Filip Jan Rymsza fought       Photo courtesy of Pixabay

to get their hands on the negative. Finally, in March 2017, Marshall and Rymsza acquired the original print totaling over 1,000 reels of film and 100 hours of footage, Whitney wrote. That’s when the daunting task of reconstructing a 40-year-old movie without its director began.

 

“It was like dredging up the Titanic,” post supervisor Ruth Hasty explains in the behind-the-scenes featurette Netflix created, A Final Cut for Orson.

 

The final story emerges

Welles had edited roughly 45 minutes of the footage before he died, so editor Bob Murawski, who helped restore the film, had a template for pace and style. “There was enough material Orson cut to give us a pretty good indication of what [he] had in mind for the whole picture,” Bogdanovich told Whitney. They also had his script, script notes and Bogdanovich and Marshall’s memories from being on set.

 

Marshall says the controversy worked to the producers’ advantage, giving them more time to make last-minute tweaks. “Maybe it was meant to be that it took this long,” he said.

 

The Other Side of the Wind is getting a limited theatrical run, but most audiences will experience Welles’ final film in the same place they binge shows like House of Cards. Netflix will be the primary purveyor of Welles’ extended legacy. It will preserve the 48-year-old movie, making it accessible to more people than Welles could have ever imagined, some of whom could care less what “Rosebud” means.

 

“People who don’t know pictures are going to say, ’What else did this guy make? He’s pretty good!’” Bogdanovich told the HuffPost.

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John Huston, Orson Welles, and                                                                           Photos courtesy of Netflix                Peter Bogdanovich enjoy a laugh after

shooting a scene from The Other Side of the Wind

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