It should come as no surprise that there are dozens, if not hundreds of movies about writers. After all, who is coming up with the ideas for these movies? Writers! The very people who put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and come up with the ideas that are the building blocks of film.
This weekend The Words, starring Bradley Cooper, Denis Quaid and Zoe Saldana, is the latest movie to explore the process of putting words in the right order.
Woody Allen has featured writers in many of his movies—Meryl Streep plays a writer in Manhattan, in Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson portrays a screenwriter visiting Paris–but Deconstructing Harry features his most vivid portrayal of a tormented author. Woody plays a novelist with writer’s block whose characters come back to haunt him. “I’m a guy who can’t function well in life but can in art,” he says.
Allen also played a writer in The Front, a movie about a talentless hack who “fronted” for blacklisted writers. Allen’s performance, however, is overshadowed by Zero Mostel as an out-of-work comic in this savage indictment of the McCarthy witch-hunt.
David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is probably the most hallucinatory look at the writing process ever put on film. How strange is it? Typewriters turn into bugs, that’s how weird it is.
To get into the character of Hunter S. Thompson for Where the Buffalo Roam, Bill Murray hung out with the Gonzo journalist. In preparation for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Johnny Depp did the same thing, which led to a friendship that lasted until the writer’s death. “He knew I worshiped him,” said Depp, “and I know that he loved me, so he may have been part father figure, part mentor, but I’d say the closest thing is brothers. We were like brothers.”
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle showcased the alcohol-fuelled work of satirist, poet and all round bon vivant Dorothy Parker. Jennifer Jason Leigh, plays the writer from her heyday at the legendary Algonquin Round Table to her time as a Hollywood screenwriter. Of her Tinsel Town work she said, “I write doodads because it’s a doodad kind of town.”
Finally, 2002 was a particularly good year for writers on film. Nicole Kidman won and Oscar playing author Virginia Wolfe in The Hours and Adaptation featured Nicolas Cage, the star of the film, also playing the film’s writer!
We can all imagine the fear that comes along with being chased by a werewolf. Or waking up to find Dracula staring down at you. They are living, breathing (or in Drac’s case, dead and not so breathing, but you get the idea) embodiments of evil. But how about inanimate objects? Have you ever been terrified of a lamp? Or creeped out by a tire?
In this weekend’s The Possession, a Dybbuk Box purchased at a yard sale brings misfortune to everyone who comes in contact with it.
It’s not the first time that the movies have imbued an inert object with evil powers.
There have been loads of haunted houses in the movies. In most of them, however, the house is merely a vessel for a spirit or some unseen entity that makes its presence know by making the walls bleed or randomly slamming doors. Rarer is the house that is actually evil.
Stephen King wrote about a house that eats people in the third installment of his Dark Tower series. On screen Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg visualized the idea in the appropriately titled Monster House.
In this animated movie three teens figure out the house across the street is a man-eating monster.
By the time they got around to the fourth installment of the most famous haunted house series, the Amityville Horror, filmmakers had to figure out a new plotline apart from the tired “new owners move in to the house, get freaked out leave,” storyline. In The Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes, a cursed lamp causes all sorts of trouble when it is shipped from the evil Long Island house to a Californian mansion.
Much weirder is Rubber, the story of a killer tire — yes, you read that right — with psychokinetic powers — think Carrie with treads — who terrorizes the American southwest. It’s an absurdist tract on how and why we watch movies, what entertainment is and the movie business, among other things. But frankly, mostly it’s about a tire rolling around the desert and while there is something kind of hypnotic about watching the tire on its murderous journey — think Natural Born Killers but round and rubbery — that doesn’t mean Rubber is a good movie.
Finally, think bed bugs are bad? How about a hungry bed? The title of this one sums it up: Death Bed: The Bed that Eats.
In Hollywood careers are built on images. While actors often complain about being pigeon-holed, for many being synonymous with a genre has been the cornerstone of their careers. Think Stallone, think action pictures. Drew Barrymore is joined at the hip to romantic comedies and the very sight of Jim Carrey causes laughter.
Then there’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
He’s quickly becoming one of Hollywood’s go-to guys even though he has yet to settle into an easily defined persona.
He’s been acting since age four, but the first time most of us saw him he was playing an ancient alien trapped in an adolescent’s body on the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. He left the show after six years and for a time made the kind of films you would expect a young sitcom star to make: 10 Things I Hate About You, a teen version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and the animated Treasure Planet.
Then things got interesting.
After a short break from the screen to study at Columbia University he vowed to “only make good films.” What followed is an eclectic IMDB listing that includes everything from low-budget movies like Manic, to indie comedy 500 Days of Summer, to his blockbuster work with Christopher Nolan in Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and this weekend’s thriller Premium Rush.
Here’s a look back at some of the films that made the former sitcom star into one of the most in demand actors working today.
Made for just $500,000, Brick is a high school film noir featuring Gordon-Levitt as a teenager who investigates the disappearance of his girlfriend. The twist is, the dialogue — like “the ape blows or I clam” — sounds ripped from Dashiell Hammett’s playbook. The actor will soon be seen in Brick director Rian Johnson’s next film Looper.
In Mysterious Skin he wore blue contact lenses to play a child-abuse victim turned hustler. Roger Ebert wrote, “This is not an easy movie.” And the Guardian called it a “disorienting hallucination of a film.” But both praised his performance.
The Lookout sees him playing a man with a head injury: “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. While in Killshot, he’s a wannabe assassin opposite Mickey Rourke.
It’s these off-the-wall choices, mixed with more mainstream fare, that prompted the Philadelphia Inquirer to describe Gordon-Levitt as a “surprisingly formidable, and formidably surprising, leading man.”
Sparkle actress Tika Sumpter says the movie “adds another diamond” to the legend of Whitney Houston. The film, a remake of a 1976 picture of the same name, stars the late singer in her final role.
The movie, in which she plays the single mother of a musical prodigy, was being heralded as her comeback, but instead is her swansong. She passed away in February, the result of an accidental drowning in the bathtub of her Beverly Hilton hotel room.
Houston’s co-star Jordan Sparks said, “She lights up the screen, and you can just tell she’s so full of joy to be doing this.”
Houston is not the first performer to earn posthumous praise for a film role. In 2008 Heath Ledger won an Academy Award for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, released after his January, 2008 death from accidental prescription drug overdose.
River Phoenix, another actor cut down at the height of his popularity, didn’t live to see his final completed film Silent Tongue, a movie described as “a haunting tale of love, death and shame in the Old West.” Dark Blood, the film Phoenix was just 11 days away from finishing when he overdosed in front of the Viper Room in Los Angeles, was thought lost to time, but has recently been resurrected and will debut in September at the Netherlands Film Festival.
Old Hollywood also saw its share of tragic ends and last performances.
The 1930s superstar Jean Harlow died of renal failure while filming Saratoga. Instead of replacing her, MGM used three doubles (one for close-ups, another for long shots and a third for dubbing the actress’s lines) and rejigged the story. The salvaged movie became MGM’s biggest hit of 1937.
Gary Cooper’s last film, The Naked Edge, released a month after his death wasn’t as well received.
Despite Cooper’s best efforts — his cancer required that he take frequent oxygen breaks — the thriller was a flop.
The Misfits was also a bomb, but is best remembered as the final completed film for two superstars.
Clark Gable didn’t live to see it; he suffered a heart attack two days after wrapping and died soon afterwards. Marilyn Monroe saw it but reportedly hated the movie and her performance.
Chris Farley, John Candy and Phil Hartman passed before their final films, Dirty Work, Wagon’s East and Small Soldiers, hit theatres, but left behind a legacy of laughter.
This weekend a movie called The Watch is opening in theatres. The Ben Stiller comedy was originally called Neighborhood Watch but the February, 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida led to the change.
In a statement, 20th Century Fox said, “As the subject matter of this alien invasion comedy bears no relation whatsoever to the recent tragic events in Florida, the studio altered the title to avoid any accidental or unintended misimpression that it might.”
The sad incident that prompted the name change was unusual, but title tweaking is commonplace in Hollywood.
Sometimes moniker modification happens for practical reasons.
In the early stages of development, American Pie was known as Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made For Under $10 Million That Your Reader Will Love But The Executive Will Hate. That unwieldy name got the attention of Universal Studios who changed it to East Great Falls High and then Comfort Food before settling on American Pie.
The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night was also considered too long a name and changed to Saturday Night Fever, lifted from the Bee Gees song Night Fever.
A Roy Orbison song triggered the title of one of Julia Roberts’s most famous movies.
Pretty Women went into production under the name 3,000, the amount Julia’s working girl was paid for the night, but research showed audiences thought it sounded like the title of a sci-fi flick. Director Garry Marshal settled on the Oribson classic after listening to dozens of hit songs for inspiration.
Occasionally titles are changed to avoid confusion with other projects. Goodfellas was called Wiseguy but changed so as not be mistaken for the Ken Wahl television series. The Real World was the working title for Reality Bites, but was altered when MTV began airing a reality show of the same name.
One of the most famous James Bond titles was improved by a typo.
The story of a villain who creates the next day’s headlines and then causes them to come true was called Tomorrow Never Lies, but when a marketing executive mistakenly typed Tomorrow Never Dies in a memo the mistake was deemed more catchy and commercial.
Finally, would you see a movie called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Marketers didn’t think so and called it Blade Runner instead.
How about The Last First Kiss? That one became the Will Smith movie Hitch.
Sometimes even villains get a second chance. The Dark Knight Rises, the last entry in Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy, digs deep into Caped Crusader lore to reintroduce brawny bad guy Bane.
The abnormally strong antihero first appeared in the comics in 1993 but after a ridiculous appearance in Batman & Robin earned the title as the worst on-screen Batman baddie. As a scrawny convict pumped up by a drug known as Venom he did little except growl and act as the punch line for a bad joke by his creator Dr. Jason Woodrue. “I call this little number Bane,” he says. “Bane of humanity!”
The movie killed the Batman franchise for seven years, and it looked like Bane, played by wrestler Jeep Swenson—Holy haberdashery, Batman who chose his bad lucha libre mask?—would also be relegated to the big Scoundrel Cemetery in the Sky.
Then Nolan cast Tom Hardy, got rid of the ridiculous mask and gave the brute a second chance. So Bane is back and super-evil, but how do other Batman big-screen baddies stack up on the Bat-scale of finest to vilest?
The Bat’s Best:
Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson both played The Joker, Batman’s arch nemesis, but Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning take on the psychotic clown in The Dark Knight is the most menacingly memorable.
Burgess Meredith made The Penguin’s trademark squawking voice popular, but it was Danny DeVito in Batman Returns who really showed what a megalomaniacal monster he really was. “You’re just jealous because I’m a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask.”
Batman has battled plenty of female foes but feline fiend Catwoman is the pick of the litter. Whether it’s Lee Meriwether meowing, “You’re going to see the purr-fect crime, when I get Batman in my claws,” or Michelle Pfeiffer wielding a twelve-foot bullwhip, the creepy kitty is fun enough for nine lifetimes.
The Winged-One’s Worst:
Too many one-liners from Two-Face in Batman Forever left critics unable to turn the other cheek after Tommy Lee Jones’s over-the-top performance.
As played by Uma Thurman in Batman & Robin botanist-turned-eco-terrorist Poison Ivy proved that not even Mother Nature gets it right every time.
If for no other reason than the joke “Ice to see you!” Batman & Robin’s cold-blooded killer Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) makes the worst-of list. The Governator should’ve been sent to the cooler for his line-readings in this one.
“We fought dinosaurs in the ice age,” Sid the Sloth says in this weekend’s Ice Age: Continental Drift. “It didn’t make sense, but it was fun.”
It doesn’t make sense because dinosaurs were already extinct by the time Manny, Sid and Diego entered the ice age, but the popular kids’ movies aren’t trying to teach, they’re simply continuing a long-held Hollywood tradition of bending history to suit their stories.
Here are 10 other bits of Hollywood history that earn a failing grade.
1 When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth drew on Phoenician, Latin and Sanskrit to create a fake caveman language. Here’s a quick Berlitz primer in cavespeak: For “come back” say “neecha,” “akita” is “look” and “neecro” is “bad.”
2 The man-eating Rhedosaurusis in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a dinosaur, but one that no paleontologist would recognize. It’s rumoured the mythical beast’s name was inspired by the initials of the man who created it, special effects wiz Ray Harryhausen.
3 Mel Gibson wore clothes from the future in Braveheart. The movie is set in the late 13th century, but the kilts he wears didn’t come into existence until 300 years later.
4 Instead of dying in the gladiatorial arena, as Gladiator would have you believe, Emperor Commodus was strangled in a bathtub a decade after his would-be movie assassin (played by Russell Crowe) died.
5 The Spartans in 300 run into battle against the Persian army protected only by leather thongs and rock-hard abs, when in fact they wore bronze armour.
6 As a knight returning from the Crusades in 1272, Nic Cage discovers a plague outbreak in Season of the Witch. Trouble is, the Black Death didn’t strike until 76 years later.
7 In 10,000 BC woolly mammoths are used as labour to build the pyramids in Egypt. Wrong! Woolly mammoths weren’t desert creatures and the pyramids weren’t built until 2500 BC.
8 In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the Queen is courted by Ivan the Terrible in 1585, who, in reality, was dead by then, felled by a stroke while playing chess.
9 California joins the Union at the end of Legend of Zorro in a ceremony that includes President Lincoln. Whoops! California became a state in 1850 and Lincoln wasn’t president until 1861.
10 The title of the historical disaster film Krakatoa: East of Java is a geographical head-scratcher. Krakatoa was actually west of Java.
Play it again, Sam. Hollywood has long been a fan of movie reboots. Spider-Man is the latest flick to get a an actor makeover.
The adage, “The only constant is change,” is only partially true in Hollywood. The list of recent movie reboots is as long as Lindsay Lohan’s arrest record, and there’s more on the way — we’ll soon see new versions of Death Wish, Fletch and Highlander — but while the titles stay the same, the faces change.
This weekend, Peter Parker swings back into theatres, but instead of Tobey Maguire behind the familiar red-and-black-webbed mask it’s Social Network star Andrew Garfield.
Not everyone is happy about the change. 1234zoomer commented on the new movie: “IS NOT GOING TO BE THE SAME WITHOUT TOBBY!!!,” (her uppercase and spelling, not mine), but Maguire has been gracious, saying, “I am excited to see the next chapter unfold in this incredible story.”
Whether the new Spidey acknowledges Maguire is yet to be seen, but at least one replacement had the manners to recognize their precursor on screen.
George Lazenby paid a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Sean Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. After a wild battle to rescue Contessa Teresa (played by Diana Rigg) the new James Bond didn’t get the girl. “This never happened to the other fellow,” he says, looking dejectedly into the camera.
Former Bond Connery went on to co-star in The Hunt for Red October with Alec Baldwin playing Jack Ryan, a character later played by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
It’s rumoured that Chris Pine (who took over the part of Captain Kirk in Star Trek from William Shatner) will soon reprise the role.
The Batman franchise has also had a revolving cast. Since 1943 seven actors have played the Caped Crusader, including Lewis G. Wilson, who at 23 remains the youngest actor to play the character, and George Clooney who admits he was “really bad” in Batman & Robin.
It’s not only the Caped Crusader who changes from time to time. Harvey Dent, the handsome district attorney who turns into villain Two Face has been played by Billy Dee Williams, Tommy Lee Jones and Aaron Eckhart and The Dark Knight’s Maggie Gyllenhaal took over the role of Rachel Dawes from Batman Begins star Katie Holmes.
Finally, Jodie Foster’s take on FBI agent Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs was ranked the sixth greatest protagonist in film history on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Heroes and Villains list, but when she declined to reprise the role in Hannibal, Julianne Moore stepped in.
“When I’m lyin’ in bed at night,” Tom Waits sang, “I don’t wanna grow up.”
He’s not the only one. In recent years Cineplexes have been overrun by boy-men: adult males who still act as though they’re 16 years old.
This weekend in the Seth MacFarlane comedy Ted, Mark Wahlberg is John, a man-child who had trouble letting go of his childhood teddy bear who came to life as the result of a childhood wish.
He does everything with Ted — including cower when a storm hits. “Thunder buddies for life, right, Johnny?” says Ted. John replies with an answer we can’t print here.
That’s one of the hallmarks of the man-child movie, they’re raunchy.
Step Brothers is a rude and crude arrested development comedy with enough swearing to make Lenny Bruce blush. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play spoiled, unemployed men thrown together Brady-Bunch style when their patents wed.
They don’t get along at first — they even try to bury one another alive — but soon their shared passion for karaoke brings them together, like two overgrown kids in a playground.
Adam Sandler has made a career playing testosterone-fuelled men who never grew up. In Mr. Deeds, Just Go with It, The Waterboy and Happy Gilmore he plays characters with the emotional age of a Baby Gap customer, but the classic is Billy Madison, where he plays a hotel heir forced to go back to grade school.
As Sandler was throwing temper tantrums on screen Jason Segel was slowly defining his child-man act. I Love You Man, with its Man Cave and Rush soundtrack, was a warm up to his most grown-up portrayal of an adolescent man. In Jeff, Who Lives at Home he plays a 30-something who lives at home and is obsessed with the M. Night Shyamalan film Signs. Overgrown and underdeveloped he turns an outing to the hardware store into a wild day.
Peter Pan with a plan
The common link to many of these man-child movies is one man — producer Judd Apatow.
• If it ain’t broke… Not since Jerry Lewis has one man made so much money presenting the age-old gag of self-infantilizing on screen.
• Big names. He’s worked with Ferrell, Sandler and Segel, and it was his R-rated The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up that gave us Seth Rogen’s brand of prolonged childhood.
• Plans to recruit Paul Reubens? Apatow even recently announced he’s thinking about making a movie with pop culture’s ultimate man-child, Pee Wee Herman.
It should come as no surprise that there are dozens, if not hundreds of movies about writers. After all, who is coming up with the ideas for these movies? Writers! The very people who put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and come up with the ideas that are the building blocks of film.
