Short of the Day

Is this the first promo for his upcoming Amazon series?

Okay, so if we’re technical, today’s Short of the Day isn’t really a short film, at least not in the traditional sense. What it is is a minute-long clip from writer-director-wizard Nicolas Winding Refn that he posted on his Twitter feed over the weekend with the statement: “Dear Friends, Happy Easter.” What follows is a clip of the animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex from the Museum of Natural History in London gesticulating in a weird, fuzzy, purple-green light as a passage from The Satanic Bible is read in voiceover by the late Anton LaVey, and all this with the words “Too Old to Die Young” constantly onscreen.

Take a minute to process all that.

Now, we know that Too Old to Die Young is the name of Refn’s upcoming, L.A.-set crime series for Amazon starring Miles Teller, but is this meant to be a teaser of sorts for that? The passage by LaVey — which is about the relationship between love, good, predation and humanity, and which is cut short mid-word after a minute — could certainly be a thematic indicator of what we can expect from the series, but the T Rex — like that cougar in The Neon Demon — is out of left field and tough to connect to anything other than the sort of beautiful, wicked absurdity we’ve come to expect from Refn.

There’s also the possibility this is a tie-in to the album of songs that inspired The Neon Demon which Refn recently released; it’s called The Wicked Die Young. That seems less likely, but I suppose it’s still in the mix.

Whatever this is, it’s cool as fuck. Check it out, and keep your eyes open for Too Old to Die Young, which is in pre-production now for a 2018 release.

Dear Friends, Happy Easter🐰 https://t.co/g0HmbH2w56

 — @NicolasWR

Nicolas Winding Refn made a…well, I don’t know what it is but there’s a T Rex involved was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new video essay explores the acclaimed filmmaker’s exquisite usage of atmosphere.

When asked which female director he would most like to see direct a Star Wars film, Gareth Edwards said “I’d be first in line for Andrea Arnold.” Although it’s highely unlikely Arnold would ever trade in her gritty, uncompromising indie career for one directing tentpoles, the pairing makes sense: no one is quite as skilled and effective when it comes to building a unique, lived-in atmosphere as she is.

The English filmmaker broke onto the scene in 2003 with her Oscar-winning short Wasp, before following up with the widely acclaimed lo-fi indies Red Road and Fish Tank, the latter winning the Grand Prix at Cannes. In recent years, she has directed an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, as well as the new A24 cult classic American Honey.

This informative video essay courtesy of Fandor does a great job of giving you the skinny on Arnold’s style and composition, and how it compliments her characters and storytelling. We’re very lucky to be witnessing the blossoming career of such a humane and fearless storyteller in a day and age where art needs empathy more than anything.

The Cinematic Universe of Andrea Arnold was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Plus, a plethora of post-credit scenes and news about vol. 3

There are still a couple of weeks before James Gunn releases Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, but recently the film was screened for the press and despite a review embargo being in place, some took to Twitter to share their immediate reactions. The overall assessment? Check it for yourself:

Angie J. Han of Mashable called it “the MCU at its very best,” while Mike Ryan at Uproxx says the film is “very fun” and “Baby Groot steals the show.” Germain Lussier of Gizmodo and io9 describes the film as “filled with tons of surprises and an unexpected amount of emotion,” and Anna Klassen of Bustle calls it “action-packed” with “even more classic 70s/early 80s music cues.”

Furthermore, when one member of the press revealed there’s not one, not two, not even three but four post-credit scenes, Gunn himself joined the conversation to reveal there are actually five, one presumably being held for the wide release. And in case anyone was wondering, yes, Guardians 3 is greenlit and yes, Gunn will once again be writing and directing, an announcement he made on his Facebook yesterday, saying:

In the end, my love for Rocket, Groot, Gamora, Star-Lord, Yondu, Mantis, Drax, and Nebula — and some of the other forthcoming heroes — goes deeper than you guys can possibly imagine, and I feel they have more adventures to go on and things to learn about themselves and the wonderful and sometimes terrifying universe we all inhabit. And, like in both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, we will work on creating the story that goes beyond what you expect.

So if you weren’t excited for G2 already, you’d better get that way. The film hits theaters nationwide on May 5th.

Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including a look at 5 popular TV shows that could be cancelled, a revisit of Beyonce’s Lemonade visual album, a recap of the lackluster Girls finale, an analysis of The Fate of the Furious’ box office record, and a controverisal video everyone’s talking about.

And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.

First ‘Guardians of the Galaxy v. 2’ Reactions Are in and…Surprise, Everyone Loves It was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Looking back at Jeff Goldblum and Laurence Fishburne wearily fighting the war on drugs 25 years ago.

This Monday marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Deep Cover, itself an endpoint of the preceding quarter-century. It bears a deep weariness, beset by crime, racism, and, increasingly, the American government itself. Every frame of the film is soaked in that weariness, and its script explicitly addresses it, as the entire business of its story turns out to be that of the American government’s profit from the illegal drug trade, with then-president George H.W. Bush and the former president of Panama, the notorious CIA operative Manuel Noriega addressed by name.

That it’s ostensibly a crime thriller, a genre picture, makes Deep Cover all the more effective a messenger. In his last film billed as “Larry” — while we’re talking about culmination — Laurence Fishburne stars as a young police officer who, as a child, watched his addict father die, which trauma imbues him with a moral rectitude and a desire to do good. All else is suppressed until DEA agent Charles Martin Smith comes along touting a bullshit detector, recruiting Fishburne for an undercover operation for which Smith feels Fishburne’s true criminal nature, inherited from his father suits him perfectly. Posing, reluctantly, as a low level dealer, Fishburne ascends rapidly, meeting arriviste drug lawyer Jeff Goldblum (in a performance that was something of a revelation at the time, that essayed what we now call “toxic masculinity” exquisitely), who begins to pull Fishburne into a gravitational vortex of criminal schemes, which lead, as in the opening paragraph, all the way to the proverbial top.

Director Bill Duke and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (who, to digress for a second, has also done quite intriguing work lately in both Gore Verbinski’s A Cure For Wellness and David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon, and prior to Deep Cover in Abel Ferrara’s King of New York) present a visual world that connects the street-level drug trade, the stylish nightclubs of the kingpins’ world, and Goldblum’s American Dream domestic life that he, in his privileged ennui, seeks to escape, by the color red. The reds of the street are the blood spilled there, the sticky paint on the back rooms of seedy bars, itself crusted in old blood. The high life reds are sex, both physical and ethereal, the glamour of the world of illicitly gained money. In suburbia, the reds are muted, dull, quieter, present but overlooked, and significantly, worn by Goldblum’s mostly ignored daughter. His attraction to the dangerous life marks his family, even by omission.

The hazy, minor key neo-noir tone and textures compliment and abet performances that, uniformly, are of a suitably pulpy, melodramatic theatricality. Duke, as an actor of great accomplishment himself, creates a theatrical space giving the cast great latitude to build robust and satisfying performances. Goldblum, again, is fantastic in a flashy role. Veterans Gregory Sierra, Clarence Williams III, and Roger Guenveur Smith all play at in that pitch as well, large and loud and fun. Fishburne has a more varied and complex task on his hands, and frequently is obligated to counterpoint louder scene partners with more muted, pensive work. He is the lead, after all, and so must lead, and so he does, so well.

It’s Charles Martin Smith, though, who is the piece’s villain, and the face of all that is wrong in Deep Cover’s, and our own, America. He is the face of authority, an insubstantial, rumpled, physically ineffectual white man who purports to know a young black man better than he knows himself, and who purports to prove his point by stacking the deck, forcing Fishburne into a life of the very crime he’d sworn to fight. The choice of an actor as wholly associated with wholesome benignity as Charles Martin Smith to play the avatar of American perfidy would seem like a dramatic counterpoint if it wasn’t an exact match to reality. At the end of the day, American life is a middle-aged white man in an unflattering suit explaining to you with round vowels why what you want isn’t what will happen, because that’s just the way it is.

Of course, the reason why movies are better than real life is that you can rewrite the ending of a movie. Real life always ends with the protagonist dying, but movies can end with Larry Fishburne fucking over the entire American system and skating with eight figures in his pocket. Why I submit Deep Cover as a truly great and enduring film is that few films are able to gaze this deep into the abyss without sinking. It dives, confronts the leviathan, and returns to the surface, bloody but whole. It manages the rare feat of being an entertaining and formally beguiling piece of dramatic fiction while being an unblinkingly defiant and cogent political statement, with neither suffering due to the needs of the other.

As an epilogue, we must mention the all-time banger closing credits song by Dr. Dre and Snoop (Doggy) Dogg, the latter’s recording debut. Yes, Deep Cover gave the world Snoop. Out of darkness, light.

We Have Always Been At War With Drugs: ‘Deep Cover’ A Quarter-Century Later was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first couple episodes start off a sillier crime story.

Mistaken identity is not as prominent in the Coen Brothers filmography as you’d expect. Outside of the mix up in The Big Lebowski, this specific kind of comedy of errors can’t be found. But it has seeped into Noah Hawley’s Fargo series, which continues to check off Coens tropes as it pays tribute to their movies, quite comfortably. Yet still maybe not as we’d presume. The new season focuses on a set of lookalike brothers, but they’re not, as Shakespeare would have it, confused for each other. Instead, like in Lebowski, it’s a name that sets this caper in motion.

Following a prologue set in East Germany in 1988 involving its own tragic misidentification, Season 3 jumps to central Minnesota, this time in the year 2010, as Ray Stussy (Ewan McGregor) attempts to settle an old inheritance dispute with his much more successful brother, Emmit (also McGregor), aka “the Parking Lot King.” When that goes poorly, Ray, a parole officer, tries to get one of his clients (Scoot McNairy) to help out in a criminal manner, and of course that goes even worse. Hilarity ensues, blood soaks the snow, and Fargo is discernibly back.

Now that the show is in its third season (series? installment?), it is settling a bit into its own groove, so despite some familiar elements, clear homage, and even direct reference to characters from the movie Fargo, it doesn’t feel as much like a Coen Brothers pastiche as it does just another story in this independent entity. Based on the first two episodes (that’s as much as we’ve had access to ahead of the season premiere), it appears to be immediately following the same pattern where two different Midwestern communities become linked through a bungled crime that results in murder.

The formula does come from the movie— there’s also a new small town police chief (Carrie Coon) investigating the cross-jurisdiction case — but the expansive feel of these ensemble stories, which obviously have more time to play out, is more the spinoff series’ specialty. Once again there’s a mysterious devilish figure (David Thewlis), a curious pair of henchmen (Goran Bogdan and Andy Yu), fraternal sibling rivalries, and a romantic duo where the woman proves much smarter and more dominant than her usually dim-witted or oblivious male partner.

Season 3 of Fargo also has its own unique touches, most notably its interest in the world of contract bridge tournaments. Ray and his client/lover Nikki (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) play the card game, and the first two episode titles, “The Law of Vacant Places” and “The Principle of Restricted Choice,” refer to its principles. There also appears to be a subplot dealing with someone’s secret past as a pulp sci-fi novelist, possibly inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout character (Hawley is a fan of the author and is currently working on a series based on his book “Cat’s Cradle”). There may also be something timely to do with Russia.

So far, this installment seems sillier than the previous two, though that might just be an observation propelled by the catchy Russian folk song, “Kukushka” (or “The Cuckoo”), that kicks off the first episode. Fargo has had a dark comedic tone since the start, but this time it’s more consistently goofy, thanks in part to McGregor’s two distinct roles, each marked by their funny wigs (Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Emmit’s right-hand man, also has a distracting hairdo). We’re not used to him looking so strange, and as Ray in particular, the actor comes across like a Mike Myers character. Well, not that over the top, but Season 3 is at least broader than Season 2.

At this point, though, I don’t see it being as memorable as the first season in terms of its most cuckoo characters — Billy Bob Thornton’s is hard to match let alone top — nor do I think it will be as strong as the second season in terms of its performances. McGregor deserves recognition for playing such dissimilar characters, even if each might not be too praiseworthy on its own. There’s no one as enjoyable as Martin Freeman in Season 1 or as alluring as Bokeem Woodbine in Season 2. Winstead could turn out to be Season 3’s Kirsten Dunst-level talent, but we’ll have to see where the show takes her.

Of course, it’s hard to get a proper feel for this series after just two episodes, even if that’s a fifth of the way in. There’s no connection to the other seasons’ storylines, which makes it feel sort of apart and so a little off. Also, we don’t immediately get much of Coon’s character outside of some teased tension between her and a new boss played by Shea Whigam that seems too reminiscent of his position in Agent Carter (Coon’s arc reportedly picks up steam in the third episode). If there’s anything to know about Fargo, it’s that it never winds up going precisely where you expect. Hopefully I’m just mistaking Season 3’s identity for something lesser than it is.

‘Fargo’ Season 3 is Totally Cuckoo was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DP of Kubrick’s most memorable productions.

For his first job in the industry, John Alcott started as a clapper boy; you know, the guy who holds the clapper and clicks it to mark the start of filming. But from this absolute bottom rung of the camera crew Alcott ascended to the ultimate peak, that of an Oscar winner for Best Cinematography, along the way contributing to some of the most important films of the 20th century.

Alcott got his big break while working on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a lighting cameraman. When the film’s original cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, had to leave the project after two years owing to other commitments, Alcott was promoted — though not credited — and helped Kubrick finish the film, including shooting the entire “Dawn of Man” sequence. Two years later it was Kubrick who gave Alcott his first official job as a cinematographer, and what a job it was: A Clockwork Orange. That film, with its frenetic camerawork, unique and exaggerated use of color and unconventional spaces, and intentionally hallucinatory framing, propelled Alcott to the top of his field and opened the door to a pair of other Kubrick collaborations, Barry Lyndon and The Shining, the former of which earned Alcott his Oscar.

Besides Kubrick, Alcott shot for directors Stuart Cooper (Overlord), Roger Spottiswoode (Terror Train, Under Fire), and Don Coscarelli (The Beastmaster). When he died in 1986 from a sudden heart attack at the age of 55, his final two films, White Water Summer and No Way Out, were both dedicated to him.

Alcott is remembered not only as a cinematographer of great vision, but also as one with a great technical proficiency, as much an artist as he was a practitioner, a dichotomy that can be found in the skills and techniques he brought to his work, all of which are covered in the following video for Sareesh Sudhakaran for wolfcrow, the latest in their Understanding Cinematography series, which I personally consider to be the most accessible and thorough guide to the artform online. If you’re unfamiliar, once you finish this be sure to scroll through their YouTube channel for more great stuff.

Started at the Bottom: The Cinematography of John Alcott was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This Week in Home Video

Plus 9 more new releases to watch at home this week on Blu-ray/DVD.

Welcome to this week in home video! Click the title to buy a Blu-ray/DVD from Amazon and help support FSR in the process!

Pick of the Week

Apocalypse Child

What is it? A young man in the Filipino town of Baler suspects he may have been fathered by a certain American director who filmed a Vietnam war epic in town several years prior.

Why buy it? The identity of finding the truth about his father is a catalyst of sorts here, but it’s far from the focus of Mario Cornejo and co-writer Monster Jimenez’s beautiful, raw, and affecting film. Instead it’s the idea of escaping one’s past through self-deception and distraction that pervades the screen alongside gorgeous visuals and performances. You can’t look away no matter how much you may want to. There’s a story here, a few actually threaded in and out of each other, but the film’s as much of a character study as narrative piece. We watch them struggle, both with the past and in the present, and we can’t help but go along for the journey — sometimes willingly, sometimes by force. Credit for that powerful pull is shared equally by cast and crew as everything about this movie is just so damn beautiful.

[DVD extras: None]

The Best

Donnie Darko [Arrow Video]

What is it? A troubled teenager sees visions, has an imaginary (and very non-human) buddy, and believes the end of the world is coming soon.

Why see it? Richard Kelly’s fascinating blend of teenage angst and genre elements remains a darkly compelling descent into madness and sci-fi infused concerns. A strong cast compliments Kelly’s intense and striking visuals and themes, and the result is a film that feels wholly unique. The director’s cut is also included, but it has little to offer beyond mere curiosity as its additions actually subtract from the film. Arrow Video has done their usual outstanding job with the presentation here with newly remastered editions of both versions getting their own cases alongside a hardcover book featuring new writings on the film. It’s a beautiful package for a beautiful film.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Theatrical/director’s cuts, new 4k restorations, commentaries, new documentary, short film, featurettes, deleted scenes, interviews, infomercials, music video, hardcover book]

Donnie Darko (4-Disc Limited Edition) [Blu-ray + DVD]

Tales from the Hood [Scream Factory]

What is it? Four tales and a wraparound focused on three thugs who visit the wrong mortuary.

Why see it? Great horror anthologies are hard to come by these days, but luckily there are still plenty to be rediscovered thanks to home video labels like Scream Factory. 1995’s Tales from the Hood is a highly entertaining blend of horror and social commentary from director Rusty Cundieff (who co-wrote alongside Darin Scott who also co-wrote an earlier horror anthology From a Whisper to a Scream), and it holds up extremely well in its stories, presentation, and themes. Some of the effects are dated, but there’s an undeniable charm in the way they balance the film’s heavier aspects and ideas.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Making of, commentary, featurette]

Tales from the Hood (Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray]

The Rest

The Founder

What is it? The true story of the man who turned McDonald’s into America’s church.

Why see it? There are some interesting details in the story of Ray Kroc’s takeover of the McDonald’s brand and subsequent building of an empire, but the main reason to watch the film is Michael Keaton. He’s a whirling blend of charm, mania, and prickishness, and he energizes the tale more than anything else. Like seemingly all biopics of “great” men the film of course includes Kroc’s decision to dump his old wife and replace her with a younger model, but anyone who listens to NPR will know that’s coming before it hits. There are some laughs alongside the information and mild dramas too.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Featurettes]

The Handmaid’s Tale [Shout Select]

What is it? Births plummet, and men shape a new world to suit their needs and desires.

Why see it? Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel positing a religiously fueled dystopia is getting the limited series treatment from Hulu soon, but for now the feature film from 1990 offers up plenty of commentary and criticism for a patriarchy that doesn’t feel as far removed from reality as it should. It’s a bleak tale, albeit one with slightly more hope than the likes of 1984, but those seeking expected genre thrills should temper those hopes. More drama than thriller, the film suggests a path that the real America could too easily tread, and it’s unsettling.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: None]

Isolation

What is it? A couple takes a vacation hoping fix their relationship, but they find terror and murder instead.

Why see it? Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) is one half of the innocent couple trying to relax but faced with threatening figures in the form of Stephen Lang and Dominic Purcell. Not everyone’s as bad as they first appear, but things play out roughly as you’d expect all the same. It’s a harmless, forgettable thriller, but attractive locales and an appealing B-grade cast make it watchable.

[DVD extras: None]

A League of Their Own — 25th Anniversary

What is it? While the men are away the women will play (baseball).

Why see it? Penny Marshall’s modern comedy classic is now a quarter century old, but it remains as wonderfully acted, terrifically funny, and pitch perfect as ever. There’s not a bad note to be found here. The only reason I’m including this reissue under “the rest” instead of “the best” is that the film hit Blu-ray just five years ago. This new anniversary edition is something of a double dip cash grab as it adds only a mild featurette to the previously available supplements. Pick this up if you don’t already own it, but if you have the earlier Blu just re-watch that one instead.

[Blu-ray extras: Featurette, commentary, deleted scenes, documentary, music video]

Ocean Waves

What is it? Two best friends find their own relationship change with the arrival of a girl.

Why see it? This decade-old Studio Ghibli film gets an overdue release here in the US from the fine folks at GKids, and fans will be pleased. It’s a beautifully-drawn coming of age tale about friendship’s beginnings and ends and the shifting winds of who and what appeals to us as we grow. It feels at times like a YA version of a Haruki Murakami novel, and that’s not a bad thing.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Short film, featurette]

Sleepless

What is it? A seemingly dirty cop is under pressure to rescue his son, prove his innocence, and take down the bad guys in the course of one night.

Why see it? This remake of the French thriller Sleepless Night follows most of the same beats, but it never finds its own pulse. Action is a mixed bag of gun play and brawls, none of which stand out as memorable, and while it’s great to see Michelle Monaghan onscreen in an action-oriented role her detective is a poorly written excuse for a cop.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Deleted scenes, making of]

Split

What is it? A disturbed man abducts three teenage girls and then has debates with himself as to what to do with them.

Why see it? What frustrates about the film and about its two big issues below is that James McAvoy is absolutely terrific and impressively committed with a performance that entertains and excites in equal measure. He crafts unique personas here through mannerism and expression, and in one of the personalities delivers some genuine laughs and levity amid the supposed terror. Some minor beats offer feigned suspense, but anyone who’s seen more than a few thrillers will know where its going well before it gets there as both big and small story turns feel expected. The bigger issue though, the one that drags the film down from passable entertainment to highly disappointing misfire, is its oddly misguided view on women. Perhaps it’s an issue of an economy of characters, but every female character here is, for lack of a better term, worthless under pressure. They accomplish nothing, and with only a single exception they exist only as unavoidable victims.

[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Deleted scenes, making of, featurettes]

Also Out This Week:

The Assassin [Arrow Academy], Bigger Fatter Liar, Buena Vista Social Club [Criterion], Punching Henry, Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, Woman of the Year [Criterion]

‘Apocalypse Child’ Sees Beauty and Pain Both Above and Below was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The last time Hollywood writers walked out seeking a better deal, there were consequences for several tentpoles and would-be franchises.

Hollywood is facing the threat of another Writers’ Guild Strike, one which would immediately stop all writing and rewriting on guild signatory productions — essentially everything from the major studios. So far, negotiations have been contentious, with the WGA arguing that though the business has seen record profits, the average writer’s income has declined in this boom period. And yet, at the bargaining table, the AMPTP — who represent the producers — came offering not gains, but rollbacks. They basically asked the writers to accept less than their current contracts.

The total cost of what the writers are asking for is not particularly excessive. For instance, the cost to Disney would be $21.2 million a year — barely more than half of Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger’s $43.9 million salary last year. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on this, but if you’re interested in the particulars, this post from TV writer Ken Levine lays it all out pretty well.

So if the writers demands aren’t that excessive, is it wise for the AMPTP to force a strike by playing hardball? A long strike would have the result of impairing production in television and film. In TV, the fall season would be delayed and on the feature side, the major tentpoles set for 2019 might have to begin production without complete scripts. And under Guild rules, no writing or rewriting can be done on those scripts for the duration of a strike. This would include Marvel’s Captain Marvel and the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War, the ninth Fast and the Furious film, the next Spider-Man film, Transformers 6, and at least one or two yet-to-be announced Warner/DC films.

Is a strike something those films could just sail through? Through these aggregated interviews, let’s recount how the 2007–08 strike hurt the films of Summer 2009.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay, director (in 2008, before production and mid-strike): “I can’t do the movie without my writers, but I have been prepping. I’m not in the guild, but I’ve been writing every day. This strike (is) insane, and a director’s responsibility is to the 50 crew members who depend on you for their livelihoods. We’ve got battle plans ready for the possibility of an actors strike. Somehow, you’ve got to keep the ball rolling.” Source.

Roberto Orci, co-writer: “We gave them a treatment before the strike which they prepared off of, then when we came back, we started writing immediately.” Source.

Bay: “When I look back at it, that was crap. The writers’ strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks. I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was. It’s a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I’m saying?” Source.

Orci: “Two weeks before the [2007–08 writers] strike, we handed him a 30-page treatment, then he went off, he turned it into 70 pages. He started prepping the movie, and because of the time constraints he got totally locked in. We were locked in a hotel room for three months because the strike had just ended, and it was five blocks from Michael’s office. So it was me, Ehren and Alex in a hotel room every day so he could drop by at noon, see what we had, take pages, and then go prep the movie because it’s gotta go shoot!” Source.

Ehren Kruger, co-writer: Many of those things, under a normal process, would have been considered a first draft outline. And then suddenly you’re locked into some of those things. And at that point it becomes very difficult — and very expensive — to try to rework macro ideas. Added to which, he was a bit cross about us going on strike in the first place! Source.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Hugh Jackman, actor: “It was the writer’s strike, so we couldn’t have a writer. Literally, the script would say things like, ‘Deadpool comes in, talking a mile a minute, very funny.’ Uh, where’s the dialogue? We’d say: ‘Yeah man, do whatever you can.’” Source.

Ryan Reynolds, actor: “So we were in the middle of production, there were no writers, no anything. Every line I have in the movie I just wrote myself because in the script we had, it said, ‘Wade Wilson shows up, talks really fast.’ I was like, ‘What?! What am I supposed to do with that?’” Source.

G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra

As reported in The Hollywood Reporter, screenwriter Stuart Beattie was hired in September 2007 to write the film — a mere six weeks before the WGA contract was about to expire. Beattie initially balked at the time frame, but producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura assured him “That’s plenty of time. Don’t worry about it.”

Stuart Beattie, co-writer: “[I said,] ‘You’re crazy. I love that. Let’s do it.’ “For the first three weeks, I really didn’t write very much at all. I just was concentrating on structure… That six-week period was all about finding a strong structure so I could layer a good and simple story that will allow room for characters to breathe.” Source.

Stephen Sommers, director: “G.I. Joe gave me a lot [of existing mythology]. I didn’t have to do as much work. But, at the same time, the writer’s strike was coming up. The established mythos really helped me because if we had not had such an extensive predefined back-story, we would have never been able to keep the film on schedule [because of the strike].” Source.

Beattie: “I wasn’t sleeping much. I barely saw my family for three weeks even though I was in the same house with them. I was working Saturdays and Sundays, all hours. I just wrote and wrote. It’s 12 weeks usually for a first draft and then eight weeks for a second draft and all through preproduction, which is three or four months. That’s when you want to fix things, because it’s just on paper at that stage.” Source.

Channing Tatum, actor: “Look, I’ll be honest. I f — king hate that movie. I hate that movie!” Source.

Star Trek

John August, reporting on the strike in his blog: “Neither [director] J.J. [Abrams] nor [producer] Damon [Lindelof] are writers on the movie. But they are writers, and WGA members. During a WGA strike, you’re not allowed to write on movies or television shows, period. So they can’t change a word of the script, nor can anyone else. The script they had at 11:59 p.m. November 5th is the script they have to shoot.

“To a screenwriter, that might seem kind of awesome. For once, the director can’t change things. But when its your own movie, it’s maddening. J.J. was describing a scene he was shooting the day before. Midway through it, he got a great idea for a new line. Which he couldn’t write. Couldn’t shoot. Couldn’t be in his movie.

“Damon described it like having one of your superpowers taken away.” Source.

Roberto Orci, co-writer: “Star Trek shot through the strike and luckily, because we were executive producers, we were able to be on set as producers without violating our commitments to the writers guild. But we couldn’t change anything. All we could do was sort of, make funny eyes and faces at the actors whenever they had a problem with the line and sort of nod when they had something better.” Source.

Alex Kurtzman, cowriter: “The other thing is that on set, a lot of the time the actors are — new energy comes up. Sometimes surprises come up and great new opportunities come up, so to be on set and to be able to improvise changes — in the case of Star Trek, there was very little room for that, very, very little room. I think more than any movie we’ve ever done, there was very little room. And we did so much work on the script right before the strike that I think everyone kind of had weighed in by the time they were actually shooting the movie.” Source.

Quantum of Solace

According to a December 9, 2007 article in The New York Times, the latest draft of Quantum of Solace arrived a mere two hours before the strike began, and about six weeks before the start of shooting. At the time, director Marc Forster was wearing a poker face, announcing to the press he was “very pleased.” He assured the reporter that, “It’s a script I can shoot.”

Years later he would tell a different story.

Marc Forster, director: “It was tricky because we didn’t have a finished script… Ultimately at that time I wanted to pull out. Ron Howard pulled out of Angels & Demons which Sony was about to do and they sort of shut down, and at the time I thought, ‘Okay maybe I should pull out’ because we didn’t have a finished script. But everybody said, ‘No we need to make a movie, the strike will be over shortly so you can start shooting what we have and then we’ll finish everything else.’ I said ‘Yeah but the time crunch’…” Source.

Daniel Craig, actor: you swear that you’ll never get involved with shit like that, and it happens. On “Quantum”, we were fucked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again,’ but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes — and a writer I am not.” Source.

Forster: “So ultimately I said ‘Okay’. The idea was to make a follow-up to Casino Royale and ultimately I felt like, ‘Okay worst case scenario the strike goes on, I’ll just make it sort of like a 70s revenge movie; very action driven, lots of cuts to hide that there’s a lot of action and a little less story (laughs). To disguise it.” Source.

Craig: “Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn’t employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.” Source.

Forster: “While you’re shooting you’re also editing, and you’re trying to figure out if the story works… That was, to be honest, the least of my concerns because we were editing as we were going and the key for me was to make sure the visual effects are looking good, and to make sure the story would work. My nightmare was if the strike keeps going, we don’t have a completed story, plus we have a release date, plus we have five weeks to cut it, plus if all of this doesn’t work the film still comes out and you’re the person responsible for it. So I thought, ‘Okay, am I going to work after this?’ (laughs)” Source.

An Aggregated Oral History of 2009 Films Ruined By the Last WGA Strike was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The more minutiae, the more believable a universe.

If there’s one thing that separates good science fiction films from great science fiction films, it’s detail. Sci-fi in particular — which has to create its world from the ground up quickly and believably — is reliant on detail for verisimilitude, especially the wilder its universe. Think about Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Alien, all of which are loaded with carefully-crafted and innovative designs, practical effects, and details. Such movies aren’t just regular stories set in space, after all, they are alternative histories and future projections, they are composites of what we know and what we can imagine, and the more detailed they are, the easier it is for an audience to set their perspective in them, no matter how odd, alien, or mind-bending.

Take the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, for example, easily one of the greatest sci-fi films of all-time. In creating their world within “the world,” the Wachowski’s peppered nearly every scene with intricate details that when viewed as a big picture help to compose a fully-realized, seamless and functional universe.

In the following video from editor photobarin, all the minutiae of The Matrix are in the spotlight, from neck-ports and ankle restraints to a red pill, a blue pill, and the rainfall of binary sequences. The effect of seeing them assembled outside the context of their story illustrates how integral they are to our ability to suspend disbelief and accept the world presented to us as real and viable enough to support the film’s themes, characters, and plot.

Self-helpers like to tell you not to sweat the small stuff. While that might be true in life, in art it’s a cop-out. Always sweat the small stuff, in fact, the smaller it is the more you should sweat it, because in the details there is divinity, there is the spark that separates the contemporary from the immortal, and that’s the whole point of creating, right? To make something that outlives its maker.

This is how.

World-Building 101: Details in ‘The Matrix’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

A stylistic fever dream of frustration.

Anyone who’s ever had it knows that writer’s block is more than a mere malady, it’s a mental frustration that keeps you hovering between the fantasy you’re trying to create and the reality of not being able to create it. It’s like pushing against a massive wall that yields a little but never gives.

Writer’s block has been captured on film many times in everything from Naked Lunch to Adaptation to The Shining, but I’ve never seen it captured quite like it is in Writer’s Block, a short film from writer-director Brandon Polanco that blends one writer’s frustration with fever dream hallucinations of his block, here manifested as a lovely and mysterious woman.

The short stars Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as the writer and it was made a few years ago while Cranston was shooting Cold Comes the Night, on which Polanco worked as a first team production assistant. So cool he got that film’s lead in his, especially considering this was around the end of Breaking Bad when Cranston couldn’t have been any hotter.

There’s definitely more style than story here, but I think that’s appropriate given that Polanco is seeking to capture the intangible, a cognitive strife that blurs actual perception, and in that regard I believe he’s succeeded. Cranston is, of course, excellent, as is Lela Edgar, who plays the embodiment of his block. While the short might be too obtuse and nonlinear for some, anyone who’s ever been afflicted by writer’s block will find a lot they recognize here, if only by feeling.

Bryan Cranston Brings Writer’s Block to Life was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When everyone has a gun…no one’s in control.

It’s kind of amazing to me that every film that features a gun (let alone a full stockade of guns) is not a horror movie. In 2017 alone, over four thousand human beings have been killed as a result of a firearm. When John Wick unsheathes his Glock 26 and rampages through the club popping one headshot after another, we should be fleeing to the exits rather than shoveling the next load of popcorn into our face. Have we simply built an immunity to ballistic violence? Has the trauma of the nightly news numbed our compassion, or have we reached peak saturation on tragedy. “Tonight on News 7, another horrible event we must ignore to maintain our sanity.”

Ten years after a gunman stormed the Virginia Tech campus killing 32 individuals and wounding 17 others, I found myself flinching during the trailer for Ben Wheatley’s latest film, Free Fire. A locked room mystery ricocheting with a bonanza of bullets, Free Fire appears to be another stylish and antagonistic experience from the mischievously hostile director of Kill List and A Field In England. Wheatley’s films are crafted with a sharp edge of humor that cuts an angry smile across my face, and now that he’s lured an A-List cast of talent into his macabre sensibilities, I am greatly anticipating the pangs of rage they will unleash during this ballroom blitz.

I recognize that I have grown into a crazed, disgusted, horrified, and depressed liberal. As a cine-freak, I spend far too many hours trapped inside my head, contemplating the actions of fictional characters that I’ve fallen madly in love with. I am a child of the 80s, and as such, I am also someone who cannot help but feel the undeniable allure of the gun. I rewatch Schwarzenegger’s Commando on a yearly basis, and when we reach that climactic dressing of armaments, each fetishized ammunition insert sends a shiver of pleasure coursing through my veins. That film’s body count reaches fantastical heights of gory bravado that I dare say has yet to be matched in its joyous absurdity.

My childhood was an era defined by the cartoon cries of “Yo Joe!” Knowing was half the battle, and the other half was rupturing 3 ¾ action figures at the waist to recreate the most savage of world war battlefronts. G.I. Joe was a television program less concerned with telling a narrative then it was selling you their plastic soldiers. You picked your favorites based, of course, on their environmentally specific attire (Flame On, Barbecue!), but also on how closely you could replicate your cinematic warrior icons. No Joe quite matched Blaine’s handheld mini-gun from Predator, but Roadblock’s cannon came close enough.

We’re a nation of proud cowboys. We wrestled this land from its indigenous people, villainized them in our entertainment, and childhood games. We rose from the ruble of the Great Depression in thanks to a World War that established us as the nation with the greatest resources, the greatest might, and the greatest will. We cherish our underdog status even if said status was obliterated years back. Our entire ego as a country rests on our inability to back down.

We’ve long associated ourselves with the supremacy of the gun; our heroes, like my action figures, are defined by their weapons. From Jimmy Stewart’s prized rifle in Winchester ’73 to Dirty Harry’s most powerful handgun in the world, the .44 Magnum. Too often I find myself adopting the role of Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown, marveling and praising the artistry of a machine gun, “When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.” We all want to be The Killer.

Then you’ve got Die Hard. Us action movie maniacs can’t shut up about Die Hard. We have a serious hard-on for John McClane, the everyman hero who can kick a German terrorist’s ass without even wearing a pair of shoes. It’s the action movie I judge all others against. JCVD has the high kicks, Arnie has the muscles, and Sly has the guttural rage, but Bruce Willis has the squibs. Honestly, my initial hipstery bitterness towards John Wick was my gruesome admission that Wick’s digital headshots didn’t have the chunky-matter impact that John McClane delightfully delivered from his Berretta under the table.

I have a primordial hunger for carnage. It’s a taste I’ve spent years cultivating through a steady diet of Roger Corman trash cinema and Fangoria magazine. Since nearly half of our action films are spawned from the righteous violence of revenge, I want to see the bad guys vanquished in an equally ghastly manner. Clarence Boddicker rips police officer Alex Murphy’s body apart in a never-ending barrage of gunfire, and in return I scream with glee when the resurrected Robocop pops his neck, unleashing a fire hose of Karo syrup. But I’m not Tim Allen, and I should not define my morality around the caveman aesthetics of Tool Time.

Keith Maitland’s Tower documents the birth of a terrible American legacy, and is currently streaming on Netflix. On August 1st, 1966, a man climbed the University of Texas clock tower, opened fire, and killed 16 people over the course of 96 minutes. The film is a gut-wrenching, sometimes torturous watch as it slowly progresses through the snail’s pace in which the local police finally brought the terror to a close. The film does also give witness to the miniscule acts of heroism committed by neighbors to help the wounded and the dying. It’s impossible not to put yourself on that campus, find the person you would want to be, and fear the person you might actually be. Tower represents the very worst, and the very best of what humanity is capable of committing.

What should have been a one and done event in our history was simply the beginning of a gross national shame. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, UCC…to name a few. I offer no answers or reasons, but the reality of this genuine violence has seeped into my ability to enjoy a good ol’ fashioned shoot-out. Or at least, I am starting to awkwardly catch myself in disgust just as my Tim Allen-self starts grunting for that John Wick blood lust.

There’s something sportsman-like about an action movie. Headshot — 2 Points! Our team vs. their team, good guy vs. bad guy. The narrative gives us a hero to root for, and the cathartic release of victory is a happiness rarely equaled in our daily lives. But I can never return to that trouble-free childish thirst for violence. I can’t get out of my head.

Yes, I am greatly anticipating Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire. The man makes provocative flicks, rich with artistry, and they usually contain one image impossible to shake (I’m thinking of Kill List’s wicker showdown, A Field In England’s psychedelic freak out, High Rise’s meaty skull flap). However, when Free Fire’s trailer slaps you with the tagline, “When everyone has a gun…no one’s in control” I am sent hurtling back to the campus of Virginia Tech on April 16th, 2007.

The Liberal Guilt of Unbridled Anticipation for Ben Wheatley’s ‘Free Fire’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

Don’t go in the basement.

If you’ve been following this column really for any amount of time, then you know I’m a big fan of little horror movies. Horror, to me, seems particularly adept to the parameters of short films, as a genre it has the most potential to deliver a complete story in a brief amount of time, because all it takes is one good scare or twist to start painting consequences in our imaginations after the screen goes dark. Horror relies on suggestion more than other genres, it depends on its audience making leaps ahead of the plot and predicting the terror to come to get them in the proper emotional space. When it comes to short films, this trait is heightened because there’s the added tension of runtime ticking down, the temporal space is more limited, which makes the nefarious narrative possibilities more various.

For evidence of what I mean, check out today’s selection Whistle from writer-director-editor Simon Berry, which clocks in at just over three minutes. The premise is simple: Abigail’s flatmates are out and she’s taking advantage of the privacy to do some laundry down in the basement. That’s when she hears a playful whistle, and that’s when this taut, tense, and wicked game of cat and mouse begins.

There’s no dialogue, but that doesn’t stop lead April Smith from delivering a chilling performance that starts off casual and quickly derails into a palpable terror. I’ll admit it, I watched the last 30 seconds or so through my fingers, and I’m willing to bet you will too.

Oh, and another thing I really like about Whistle: it’s proof positive that it doesn’t take a big to-do to make a great short film as long as you start with a great story. This film was shot in one night, edited in one night, and came in under its budget of £25, or just shy of 32 bucks US. From the final product, though, you’d never guess it was done so swiftly and inexpensively. Give Whistle a watch and stay out of that basement, kids.

‘Whistle’ Sings a Succinct Song of Terror was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hollywood seems hell-bent on de-aging its stars. We look at what this really says about the blockbuster ecosystem.

Oh, Ridley. Every time director Ridley Scott seems to be making headway with his audiences — where people start believing that maybe 2012’s Prometheus might not actually be the kiss of death for the Alien franchise we all feared — he has to go and say something that turns the dial back to zero. Earlier this week, an excerpt from Empire Magazine’s feature on Alien: Covenant included one particularly disheartening tidbit: Scott was not necessarily ruling out the decision to digitally de-age Sigourney Weaver in future films in the franchise. And while some might consider this simply wild speculation on the part of Scott, his colleague, or the magazine, there’s enough smoke here that we should probably address this head on: digital de-aging isn’t necessarily a bad technique, it’s just a terribly unimaginative one.

All else being equal, I find the process of de-aging — as describing in detail in this 2016 New York Magazine story — absolutely fascinating. A skilled Hollywood technician uses the tools available to him or her, and digitally adjusting the age of your stars requires no less skill than the application of a rubber nose and a whole bunch of latex. My only problem? It’s further proof that blockbuster filmmakers are taught that, while they may be asked to compromise on vision, they’ll never be asked to compromise on visuals. Just last month, IndieWire spoke with actor Keegan-Michael Key about his upcoming slate of films and what he admires about the independent film scene. In the interview, Key voiced his opinion about the largesse of most blockbuster films, offering the following exercise as a potential solution:

So I wish studios would say, across the board for a year — and this is never going to happen — every feature we make, no matter how long or big the script is, everybody gets $20 million. That’s it. That’s all you get. $20 million for your principal photography budget. Right there, that’s still $10 million more than the most expensive indie you’re going to see. But we get bogged down.

This idea isn’t as far-fetched as you might think — entire features have been written about Jason Blum’s rigid adherence to movies that cost under five million dollars — but it does perfectly encapsulate my issue with the digital de-aging process. If you’re trying to make a summer movie on only $20 million dollars, you need to maximize the storytelling function of each effect in your movie. Take Marvel. The superhero factory opened eyes with the digital de-aging of Michael Douglas in Ant-Man and Robert Downey Jr. in Avengers: Civil War, but both special effects sequences were done because they had the money, not because it was absolutely necessary. Marvel could’ve chosen to cast younger actors; they could’ve conveyed the relevant information in a disjointed or first-person flashback; hell, they could have done away with the flashbacks entirely. But Marvel had the resources to de-age its two stars, so voila, now exists a frighteningly authentic recreation of both Douglas and Downey (albeit ones with slightly rubbery lips).

The simple solution is to write around the things that won’t work on camera. I’m no screenwriter, but it took me a whopping five minutes yesterday to come up with an approach to Weaver’s character that would require zero digital effects. We know from the special edition of Aliens that Weaver stood in as the older version of her daughter Amanda; why not have a 70-something Weaver play the older version of Ripley’s daughter? Instead of digitally de-aging your star for one last action-packed battle between heroine and monsters, you could make a far more poignant movie about a woman who is willing to throw away her life’s fortune for closure on what happened to her mother. And what about Peter Cushing’s eerie digital doppelgänger in Rogue One? There’s no obvious reason to bring the venerable British actor into the standalone Star Wars film — unless you think your audiences are really that stupid and need an additional reminder of when this movie takes place — so either get rid of him entirely or find a way to imbue an object with Cushing’s screen presence. Show a door at the end of the hall that soldiers are loath to walk through or mimic his voice and have him only appear via an intercom. It’s cheap, it’s obvious, but it also requires you to come up with a good idea. De-aging is many things, but a good idea? That it isn’t.

Of course, the real big test of digital de-aging has yet to come. A few months ago, reports leaked that Martin Scorsese was tinkering with the digital de-aging process for The Irishman, his epic crime thriller that follows gangster Frank Sheeran at many points in his life. Should Scorsese choose to move forward with this project — should we be treated to old-sounding 20-year-olds in Netflix’s expensive film — there may be a lot of people wondering why Scorsese didn’t just hire a younger group of actors to play the roles. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: if the movie you want to make seems simple but will require ungodly amounts of money, maybe it’s not the money you should be worrying about. Maybe it’s the simple.

The Larger Implications of Hollywood’s De-Aging Fascination was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The plain English version.

If you have frequented the film and television minded corners of the Interwebs in the past month or so, you might have heard about a potential Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike looming on the horizon. However, you might not have clicked on those headlines because they are incredibly dull, or quickly closed the tab after wading through a few lines of industry jargon-ese. I certainly did until I was preparing to write this article, because I am a millennial, and therefore have the attention span of a goldfish and the constitution of a snowflake.

Anyway, here’s a very basic breakdown of the current situation:

So, you’ve got the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which is exactly what it says on the tin, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which is “the entertainment industry’s official collective bargaining representative” — aka the voice of The Studios (no relation to the AMPAS, who are the people who bring you the Oscars). The WGA has a three-year contract with the AMPTP that was drawn up three years ago, meaning that the two parties need to meet up and work something out before the clock strikes midnight on May 1 and everything goes to shit, like a much duller version of Cinderella with a lot more at stake. However, very much unlike Cinderella, the two parties involved in this tale actually have a long relationship history. Not all of it is pleasant.

While some of the key aspects of this new WGA-AMPTP deal (residuals and basic wage increases) are pretty much already set due the phenomenon of “pattern bargaining” and the fact that the Directors Guild of America (DGA) renewed its own contract with the AMPTP last December, the WGA still has a lot of concerns. As you probably know if you’ve watched much TV at all these past three years, a lot has changed. Viewers have a lot more options to choose from, but seasons are shorter, come and go seemingly whenever they please (as opposed to, you know, fall and spring, respectively), and cable is mostly for stragglers who haven’t switched to watching HBO via HBOGo yet. However, this switch to so-called “short-order” series (six to thirteen episodes) has become a major issue, especially for “low and mid-level” writers (higher ranking writers earn special fees “negotiated through their talent reps”). As opposed to the traditional 22-episode model, short-order series writers find themselves having fewer episodes to write, and often over longer time periods; that cinematic look we are coming to expect from our TV shows costs both money and extra production time. Once you figure in contract exclusivity terms, this results in lower salaries for writers. Meanwhile, the WGA’s healthcare and pension plans are also in need of reboots.

The first attempt at negotiation between the two parties began on March 13. From the coverage, it seems to have gone a little something like this:

INT. AMPTP’s Sherman Oaks Office — DAY

WGA: You don’t appreciate all the things I do for you.

AMPTP: What? Of course I do!

WGA: Then prove it. [Lists demands.]

AMPTP: How about… no.

End scene.

Negotiations broke down by March 23, and statements from both sides quickly disintegrated into finger pointing over who left the negotiating table first.

As someone in possession of a sibling, I can’t help but think of the many “did not!”/“did too!” debates I was involved in when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. As it turns out, some things never truly change, even when you involve much larger vocabularies and complex sentence structures.

On March 24, the WGA Negotiating Committee voted unanimously to recommend conducting a strike authorization vote, and sent out an email listing their reasons why.

On March 29, the WGA said it was ready to resume talks “whenever the AMPTP was ready and invites us back.” The AMPTP sent a formal invitation the following day. The WGA formally accepted and sent out save-the-dates for April 10.

Tension continued to rise over the course of the hiatus. On April 2, the WGA released a tidal wave of data in support of its bargaining position, including an unfortunate prognosis for its sickly healthcare plan. Effectively, the guild estimates the plan has about three years left before it succumbs (“basically broke and with less than two months of reserves by the end of 2020”).

The AMPTP released a statement the following day; the WGA followed up by setting a date for the strike authorization vote — April 18–19. (Most sources believe the vote will go through).

Negotiations resumed on April 10 as planned, then recessed for Good Friday (because they’re not heathens or something, idk). Negotiations continued on Monday, but concluded with a one line statement: “The WGA and the AMPTP have agreed to resume negotiations on Tuesday, April 25, 2017.” In other words, To Be Continued… (but yeah, no, it doesn’t look good).

And no matter how any of this works out — or, you know, doesn’t — the AMPTP contract with SAG-AFTRA, which represents actors and other performers and is already on strike against certain video game companies to protest unfair compensation and working conditions of voice actors and motion capture performers, is set to expire on June 30. So they’ve got that to look forward to.

Anyway, on to the part you actually care about: how it affects you (let’s be honest here). We just published an article yesterday about how the strike affected movies, but survey says it was TV that really felt the burn of 2007’s 100-day WGA strike. Maybe you remember the shitty 2007–2008 TV season, or maybe you didn’t notice. Or perhaps you really like reality TV, in which case it was kind of a jackpot for you. I, for one, was all of 10 years old for the last WGA strike, and mostly watched reruns and movies from Blockbusters anyway. However, Vanity Fair assures me that the strike “[brought] the entertainment industry to its knees,” with the most notable fatality being the 65th Golden Globe Awards ceremony. [Which, actually now that I look it up, is a lot sadder than I anticipated. Damn, 2007 was a good year for movies.]

As mentioned earlier, the world is different now. One would assume the stakes are different, too. Depending on who you ask, they will tell you they are either much higher or much lower. One thing that would be consistent with 2007, though, is that scripted TV would definitely be hit the hardest (on the flip side, unscripted reality TV and Canada would likely benefit).

Really, the entire notion of “Peak TV” — the term given to describe the “explosion in scripted originals” that has happened in the past few years — is at stake. In 2016, a record-breaking 455 original scripted series were released (including broadcast, cable, and streaming sources), up 71% from just five years earlier. Research was pointing to the continuation of this upward trajectory, but a WGA strike — particularly one that drags out— could put a stop to that. After all, what happens to a scripted content boom if people aren’t writing scripts? Many imagine the same thing that happens when you take a soufflé out of the oven too soon.

But then again, maybe not.

Some have argued that the surplus of available content might potentially limit the effects of a WGA strike — at least, as far as scripted narrative content goes. The whole notion of first run vs. rerun doesn’t work quite the same when everything is dumped together and you just sort of dive in and pick out what you want. An unusually high number of reruns going in primetime slots just won’t have the same sort of impact it once did, even when compared to a mere decade ago. Also, while there are still some mark-the-date-and-wait shows (I’m talking about you, Game of Thrones), there’s also quite a bit of, “oh hey, I didn’t realize a new season of that came out. Nice!” Besides, most of us have enough responsibilities in Real Life to have accumulated at least something of a “Shows I Will Eventually Get Around to Watching Someday” list — in the absence of new content, “eventually” might actually come true for once. And even for those shows you are awaiting, year or multiple year-long hiatuses have gone from being cruel and unusual punishment to cruel fact of life — regardless of whether the cause is difficulty finding a time when the schedules of multiple high-demand actors coincide or a WGA strike. When you take all these factors into consideration, what you get is a possibility that IndieWire put quite eloquently: “What if they striked and no one noticed?”

That said, one area where a WGA strike would definitely be felt is late night talkshows, and, considering the up-to-the-minute nature of their content, it would be felt pretty immediately. The last time ’round, hosts got quite creative. David Letterman managed to strike an interim deal with the WGA via his independent production company Worldwide Pants, but most others were forced to return to air writer-less in order to prevent layoffs of non-writing staff. One particularly memorable product of this interesting period of late night history is the Stephen Colbert/John Stewart/Conan O’Brien “Who Made Huckabee?” pseudo-feud which lasted January — February 2008, but will live on forever in our hearts.

Hopefully a WGA strike won’t happen, but if it does… how does Stephen Colbert vs. John Oliver vs. Samantha Bee sound?

A Breakdown of the Potential WGA Strike (and How It Could Affect You) was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper filmed scenes for the ‘A Star is Born’ remake at Coachella.

Shake out those flower crowns, jean shorts, and neon accessories: we’re talking about Coachella again. I know, I know you’re probably over hearing about the three days millennial Woodstock. However, something interesting happened last weekend. It’s not Hans Zimmer playing a psychedelic set though that was pretty impressive.

Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) headlined Coachella’s Saturday night program — following Beyoncé’s decision to hold off headlining until next year due to her pregnancy. Gaga performed a surprise new song titled The Cure. Gaga then managed to film a part of Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star is Born. If that title sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve probably heard it three times. The Janet Gaynor-starring 1937 version, the Judy Garland-starring 1954 version, and the Barbra Streisand-starring 1976 version. In 2016, Gaga joined the remake of the film with Cooper directing and producing it via his company, 22 Green. Prior to Gaga’s involvement, Beyoncé was attached to star but had to bow out due to a scheduling conflict with her Formation tour. (I’m sensing a trend).

During Coachella, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga started filming their musical remake of A Star is Born. Specifically, they shot some concert scenes. Festival goers received an alert via The Coachella app notifying them of the filming and instructed Gaga’s Little Monsters — a nickname for her fans — to wear country garb. The filming took place on April 18 to 19th at the Empire Polo Club. Gaga posted an announcement on her various social media accounts. Gaga and Cooper fans could pay $10 to attend the filming if they were over 18. The funds went to Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes LGBT advocacy, youth empowerment, and combats bullying. The event also featured giveaways and activities. Coachella is usually a busy weekend, but somehow Gaga managed to outdo even the most FOMO-stricken hipster.

Following Coachella, Warner Brothers released the first still from the film (featured above). The press release describes the plot as follows:

Cooper plays Jackson Maine, a country music star who is on the brink of decline when he discovers a talented unknown named Ally (Germanotta). As the two begin a passionate love affair, Jack coaxes Ally into the spotlight, catapulting her to stardom. But as Ally’s career quickly eclipses his own, Jack finds it increasingly hard to handle his fading glory. In addition to playing Ally, Germanotta… has composed and will perform original songs in the film.

The 1937 A Star is Born is one of those stories that needs a main character that reads normal. The original William Wellman film starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The film told pretty much the same story with the exception of swapping out country stardom for acting stardom and ditching the music. The Judy Garland and James Mason version in 1954 featured Garland’s female lead as a singer who decides to go Hollywood. Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s 1976 version did something similar. Likewise this new version is also changing things, Gaga and Cooper’s makes its leads country stars and emphasizes Gaga’s original compositions for the film.

Career decisions aside, what’s more interesting is that Gaga filmed at Coachella. While filming at festivals is not unheard of — Ke$ha and other artists have filmed at the festival before — the idea of filming a remake of a classic at a relatively modern yearly event is interesting. In the wake of Coachella every year in addition to the recaps of great sets, there is an endless discussion of fashion. Looking at the fashion choices at the festival there seems to be this total acceptance of vintage fashion. Specifically, a pastiche of 70s, 60s, and 90s rave wear: flower crowns, long hair, bell bottoms, short jean shorts, neon colors, sun visors, and the like. Let’s be honest, if I plucked Vanessa Hudgens out of a Coachella party and plopped her into Woodstock she probably wouldn’t stand out too much. It’s this appropriation of the old that always interests me. Almost as if everyone in their peacock-ing decided to raid their parent’s closets. It’s the perfect collective metaphor for what the remake has the potential to be. Like all remakes, when you update things there are always slight changes. However, Gaga and Cooper’s changes seem to be big and the context that they’ve started with is something so distinctly millennial, that it’s interesting to think about exactly how much updating they are actually doing in this remake.

Every remake of A Star is Born has the same central (and immutable) themes: fame, chasing your dreams, and the emotional turmoil this can cause. Stardom and the act of chasing one’s dream is perennial — its part of what made La La Land so popular. However, the incorporation of country music and the added context of the filming are such that Cooper and Gaga have the potential to make something very revealing about the generation that attends Coachella. While the film’s quality and execution is yet to be evaluated, it will be an interesting exercise in comparison between the new film and its predecessors. I sense some film school paper topics and new think-pieces brewing.

Cooper’s A Star is Born is set to hit theaters in September 2018.

‘A Star is Born’ at Coachella was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘King Kong Skull Island’ will be a diverse, female-led series for the small screen.

Kong is big, both in terms of size as well as success, with this year’s Kong: Skull Island having grossed over half a billion dollars. But now, the giant ape-like monster is set to appear on the small screen. Mars Vista Entertainment and IM Global Television are working together to bring the first live-action TV series on Kong. The series will be based on a combination of Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 King Kong and Devito Artworks’ Skull Island, and will imaginatively be called King Kong Skull Island.

The originality doesn’t end with the show’s title, either, since King Kong Skull Island is the first live-action television programme in the Kong Universe. While there have already been three animated TV series on the same topic, the show creates a purpose for itself in that the Kong live-action TV series hasn’t been done before. With three animation films, and over eight features (including 2020’s Godzilla vs. Kong), it begs the question: Do we really need another story about King Kong?

For MarVista CEO Fernando Szew, we do. According to Szew, the show’s writers Jonathan Penner and Stacy Title have “taken a world that has enraptured audiences in all its many forms over the years and given it a contemporary, female-focused spin.” The show, as Deadline notes, is also supposedly going to offer a multicultural cast, and will explore the origins of Skull Island.

While it’s great that King Kong Skull Island will supposedly have a diverse cast with a woman at the centre, these seem to be the only redeeming factors as to why anyone would want another reiteration of Kong. Rather than creating a new and interesting world for its characters, it feels as if King Kong Skull Island is simply using its “female-led, multicultural ensemble” as an excuse to potentially make more money out of the Kong image after having seen the high profit of this year’s film.

And anyway, after over eight features, three animated TV series, a short film, and eighty-four years since the 1933 King Kong, the first still remains the best.

Do We Really Need a Live-Action ‘King Kong’ TV Series? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most audacious cons in history is aided by the certainty that no one would tell a lie so obvious.

A film about an outrageous hoax, based on a true story as told in a book written by the perpetrator of said hoax. With so many layers of reality between the actual events and their onscreen translation, should we assume everything in 2007’s The Hoax is accurate?

Perhaps the more important question is: does it matter?

My feeling is that a film’s first prerogative is to entertain. In any adaptation (whether from real life or another medium of fiction) concessions will be made to the necessity of visual drama. When real life is the model, I’m less concerned with accuracy so long as the film is never presented as evidence of the real events. (In other words, JFK is great drama. You can say it’s a great movie, but never try to convince me it’s the real truth behind the Kennedy Assassination.) There are limits of course. If you’re doing the story of United Flight 93 I don’t endorse taking so many liberties that Marc Wahlberg single-handedly saves the plan from terrorists.

But to return to The Hoax, there’s something appropriate about the uncertainty of historical fidelity in a film about a writer pulling off the mother of all lies. It’s 1971 and Clifford Irving (played with wonderful desperation and cunning by Richard Gere) has just had his latest book rejected by a publisher. Unfortunately, the commercial failure of his last book — about an art forger — has killed his hopes for another project. Like many writers when faced with a “Pass,” he doesn’t take it well and barges into a company meeting to say he’s got the book of the century, something they’d regret passing on — an autobiography of the reclusive Howard Hughes.

It’s an utterly implausible and grandiose lie and — in a manner less surprising in the Trump presidency of 2017 than it was in 2007 — the brazenness of the lie gives it credibility. Who in their right mind would lie about something so easily impeached? Putting the experience of his last book to use, Irving expertly forges notes from Hughes (and it is true that in real-life, handwriting experts said that the odds of being fake were “less than one in a million.”) Hughes’s reclusiveness and erratic behavior also ends up selling the lie. The man was known to be unstable, so bizarrely, and attempt he’d make to disown involvement with Clifford would lack enough credibility to expose Irving.

The real Clifford Irving complained bitterly about the liberties the movie took with his life. Screenwriter William Wheeler agrees with my notion of truth in film, telling The New York Times, “I almost feel like I would not be servicing the material correctly if I didn’t have some mischief in my attitude. I wanted to stay true to the spirit of the things that happened, and the motives of those doing it, and within that, construct my own tall tale, based on Clifford’s tall tale, which is based on Howard’s tall tale. And [director] Lasse [Hallström] did his own spinning on top of mine. And then, Richard.”

(A fairly complete account of the story from Irving’s side can be found here for those interested.)

But beyond that, the movie ends up being an amazing study in people’s abilities to rationalize a bald-faced lie. Surely the publisher would wonder why would a man like Hughes pick a no-name like Irving to write the book? When confronted with the question, Irving’s publisher Andrea Tate says, “There is a perfect logic to it, as everything Hughes does has. It makes sense that he would choose Cliff and not someone like Mailer because then it would be Mailer’s book.”

That is why The Hoax is such a perfect film for the Trump era. It underlines how desperately people want to bring reason to unreasonable situations. Trump can prove himself boorish and ignorant of facts for months, but all he has to do is deliver one speech for the pundits to latch onto the “proof” that “today he finally became the President.” Con men like Irving (and, uh, Trump) thrive because people don’t like to believe they can be conned and they’re loathe to assume an inhuman level of ill will. That’s why a big lie is fertilized by its own implausibility.

In the same scene, Andrea goes on to say, “There are claims from some corners that Mr. Irving has concocted this book from whole cloth. Well, for those of us who have read it, we know that only a Shakespeare could have accomplished such a feat, and while Mr. Irving is a fine man, he is no Shakespeare.”

The arrogance of a perfect mark is on display — “You’d need to be a genius to fool us, and you’re clearly no genius. Therefore, you’re not capable of deceiving us on this level.” It’s circular logic that reinforces the victim’s own self-image AND further sells the lie.

Even better for Irving is that Hughes is so unstable that the publishers barely question it when “Hughes,” using Irving as an intermediary, gives very specific instructions as to how he expects to be paid. Naturally, these procedures are actually done to make it possible for Irving to secure the funds himself. It’s seemingly the perfect crime, particularly when Irving and his associate get their hands on an unpublished manuscript written by a former Hughes employee. This gives Irving just enough truth to weave into his narrative to act as a smokescreen.

The film brilliantly aligns us with Irving in a way that we feel like co-conspirators. We get a vicarious thrill every time he thinks his way out of a clever corner. It’s a brilliant act of bullshitting and salesmanship and before long we’re on the edge of our seats, waiting to see just how much he can inflate the balloon before it pops. It’s beautiful tension, because even as we applaud the snow job, we’re also watching this particular NASCAR race for the crash.

I’ll never understand why William Wheeler’s screenplay isn’t more often cited as one that must be studied because it’s a perfect case study of painting the protagonist into a corner and then showing him escape by breaking down the wall behind him. About 2/3 into the film it really feels like the jig is up when Frank McCullough, the last reporter to interview Hughes, is brought in to help debunk the book. He speaks to Howard Hughes from a phone at the publishing office and is absolutely certain the man he spoke to is no fraud — and Hughes told him that Irving’s book is a hoax.

All eyes turn to Irving. With his back to us and everyone else in the room, a defeated Irving says, “I have betrayed your trust. The book, the entire story is false.” But as a turn brings Irving’s mouth into frame, we realize what we have heard is not a verbal confession, but an internal monologue for our ears only. What Irving SAYS, mustering all the righteous indignation that he can, is that he has information that will bury Hughes and that he’s gonna tell him to show his face or he’ll bury him.

Balls. Of. Steel. It’s like watching Trump accuse his predecessor of wiretapping him and then maintaining he was right even as his story gets torn apart. It’s masterful. If this movie wasn’t called The Hoax, I’d say an even better title would be The Bullshit Artist because what Irving accomplishes is pure artistry. It’s gripping to watch him build this house of cards and continue to add new levels even as the foundations are taken away like Jenga pieces.

This was one of the best films of 2007 and certainly the best film of that year that few people have seen. Not only does it bear revisiting for the Trumpian relevance today, it’s just simply a damn good movie. Late in the film, things take a sinister turn and Wheeler and director Lasse Hallström add a paranoid thriller layer to the film, to the point where Irving believes his life is in danger and we’re lead to believe the events here led to the Watergate scandal. It’s an incredibly delicate juggling act of tones and in looking up Hallström’s resume, I was surprised he didn’t have any notable thrillers since then. (I was also surprised to learn that in addition to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules and Salmon Fishing in Yemen, Hallström’s resume reached back as far as directing ABBA music videos in the 70s!)

Ten years after its release, The Hoax is more relevant than ever before, and features one of Richard Gere’s finest performances. Even if the film itself is complete fabrication — and I don’t believe it is — it remains an engaging film with a ruthlessly smart and ambitious protagonist.

Ten Years Later, ‘The Hoax’ is Even More Timely in the Trump Era was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The actor has made a career out of musclebound oddballs.

Charlie Hunnam gets a bad rap. The former model has attempted to make a name for himself as a leading man, but his unique brand of meatheadedness is quite different to the competent and suave badasses making up the A-list of action. He’s no Jason Bourne. There’s no way he’d pull off billionaire/playboy/superhero. That’s not what he’s after. His characters all — like the man himself — strain against their muscles as physical limitations to their introspective spirits. They want to be poets and writers and academics, but find themselves damned by their bodies, faces, lifestyles, and fates. In performing these roles, Charlie Hunnam has perfected the long-suffering wannabe-intellectual tough guy. He does this to great effect in the gorgeous slow-burn adventure The Lost City of Z, which expands this weekend, but first, let’s look at how he got here.

Hunnam’s career started as a beefy, rebellious pretty boy on Queer as Folk and never quite left that niche. His transition to film only solidified his place in the media world. Green Street’s terribly cockney hooligan and Children of Men’s rebellious biker allowed critics to find the common thread, focusing on his unnatural line delivery. Hunnam always seemed to be working hard to crank out the dialogue, pulling the proper mental cranks with his imposing physique. The words stuck in his mouth, unaccustomed to their brashness.

His awful Green Street accent, which was included on Telegraph’s list of the “five of the worst ‘Cor Blimey’ offenders,” seemed to scare off business. In fact, he didn’t act for an eighteen month period, during which time he wrote and sold a screenplay about Vlad the Impaler just to keep up on his house payments. But Kurt Sutter, the Sons of Anarchy creator that seems to think of himself as a similarly rough-edged artistic soul, cast Hunnam as Jax Teller and what could’ve been an unsuccessful acting career doubled-down on the things that made it watchable in the first place. Jax, the violent yet conflicted leader of a biker gang (excuse me, motorcycle club), embraces the spirit of Hunnam’s talent. He tosses grenades and stabs rival bikers but he never looks more at home than when he’s on a rooftop, floppy hair swaying in the wind, scribbling into a notebook.

Hunnam’s skill lies in, whatever the circumstance, making us believe that he’s never thought this hard in his life. Each self-reflection or considered realization feels so real because of this carefully crafted facade. His dummies are never the anti-intellectual heavies cast as bodyguards and villains. They’re curious and aware of their own educational lack.

As he moved on to work with Guillermo del Toro, a thoughtful filmmaker if ever there was one, his earthiness allowed his earnest intellectual curiosity and capacity for progressivism to be a hidden pleasure. As Pacific Rim’s Raleigh Becket, he speaks Japanese and fights for Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) to join him as his co-pilot. He also beats the hell out of some monsters, pounds some brews, and threatens assholes. He is both leading man and a guy too cinematically tough to lead. His doctor in Crimson Peak continues the negotiation of thick rube and insight, not quite a hyper-masculine savior and not quite as smart as his title may imply.

The Lost City of Z is the ultimate expression of this balancing act and Hunnam’s fascinating embodiment of it. Hunnam plays British explorer Percy Fawcett, a military man skilled at survival and stifled in the political game of peacetime military service. He’s called to go on a cartography mission into the Amazon (we find that he was always good at mapmaking back at school), finding the danger of the jungle intellectually, physically, and spiritually alluring. He’s drawn back to it, time and time again, not just to prove his theories correct about the natives and their history — which would debunk centuries of European racist anthropological theory — but prove himself worthy of the important destiny he feels he deserves. His return to domesticity in between his jungle adventures (even when these adventures become more and more treacherous) hampers him.

His loving wife and his adorable, ever-growing stable of children only cage him in further, turning Hunnam’s often maligned attributes into considerable strengths. His adeptness at being a stubborn dummy isn’t just apt for the character, it’s thematically additive for the film. His thirst for adventure and knowledge masks an insatiable thirst for personal glory that leads to his ruin. As Percy Fawcett remains drawn to the Amazon and his lost city, so does Charlie Hunnam remain magnetized to his lovable — sometimes wooden but always inquisitive — lunkheads.

Charlie Hunnam’s Dumb-Dumbs Are Anything But Humdrum was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More than a sub-genre; a way of life.

Filmmakers have worked within recognizable genres for nearly as long as they’ve told stories. Initially film appropriated genres from literature and theatre, but as the new medium found its footing in Hollywood’s Classical Era of the 40s and 50s, a distinctly cinematic set of generic conventions were codified. Since that time, genres have come in and out favor, but most new films have still defined themselves either in accordance with or opposition to the Classical Hollywood models. Even innovative filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch have self-consciously manipulated the language of genre, treating it like another tool in the director’s toolkit. But films are living things, and there are as many ways to draw the lines of categorization as there are films. Reevaluating movies of the past according to new and different models is one of the best ways to keep the medium from ossifying. In that spirit, I’ll endeavor to lay out a set of conventions for one such model: the hangout film.

The term “hangout film” was first coined by no less masterful a genre manipulator than Quentin Tarantino, most notably in Larissa MacFarquhar’s vivid New Yorker profile. Not unlike landmasses, unexplored genres are defined by their discoverers. Here’s Tarantino’s take on the hangout movie:

“There are certain movies that you hang out with the characters so much that they actually become your friends. And that’s a really rare quality to have in a film…and those movies are usually quite long, because it actually takes that long of a time to get past a movie character where you actually feel that you know the person and you like them…when it’s over, they’re your friends.”

MacFarquhar summarizes that hangout movies are those “whose plot and camerawork you may admire but whose primary attraction is the characters.” This is not quite the same as the character-driven film, nor the ensemble picture. Taxi Driver is not a hangout movie, nor is Spotlight. Mere length isn’t enough to define a hangout picture either: Schindler’s List decidedly does not qualify. Rather, the hangout film is characterized by a certain lightness of tone, and — perhaps most crucially — a languid, almost meandering pace. The familiarity bred by the hangout film is that of the dorm room, the small high school class, or indeed the film crew; it arises not through action but through downtime, the spaces in between events.

Tarantino first deployed the term in reference to Howard Hawks’s 1959 Western, Rio Bravo, and if any film is the standard bearer for “hangout” style, Rio Bravo is it. Clocking in at 2 hours 21 minutes, the film nominally concerns the efforts of Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) to hold a local outlaw’s brother in jail (forming the inspiration for Assault on Precinct 13, not a hangout movie). But this “plot,” such as it is, doesn’t materialize until nearly an hour into the film, by which time we’ve already gotten to know a lovable cast of characters that includes a wily old cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), a quick-witted woman named Feathers (Angie Dickinson), a handsome young cowboy named Colorado (Ricky Nelson), and a noble drunk known only as Dude (Dean Martin).

The film scholar David Bordwell notes, in a reverent piece called “The Tao of Rio Bravo,” that these nicknames help to situate the film outside the strictures of realism and into the mode of a mythic text. He writes:

“Far from being an accident, the names in the Sacred Text are there to impel the Initiate into deeper mysteries. Is, for instance, Stumpy The Elder called Stumpy because of his lameness — always a sign of grace in sacred texts? Because of his inertness (as stiff as a stump)? Or because a tree, even though harvested, retains its attachment to the earth by remaining rooted? Perhaps He Who Is Called Stumpy is “grounded,” as the current saying has it…She Who Is Called Feathers wears feathered clothes, but also has a teasing lightness of manner. He Who Is Called Dude constitutes a crux. Is he a “dude,” an Easterner who has come west, or is he a dude because he favors fancy outfits?…The central fact is that in this text, the mystery of naming opens on to the Mystery of Being. Everyone is named something, but many are not named by their name.”

Bordwell’s tone is playful of course, but the style of the hangout film often invites such mystic readings. The Big Lebowski, another classic of the hangout genre, is revered by many as a paragon of Zen wisdom. Jeff Bridges even co-authored a book with Zen master Bernie Glassman on the timeless wisdom of film’s central character (likewise known only as Dude). Characters in hangout films are prone to making deceptively sage pronouncements, often disguised as throwaway lines. From Big Lebowski: “the dude abides.” From Rio Bravo: “Just stop talking. Just let it be.”

Some directors have made a career on the hangout film, most notably Richard Linklater. Beginning with Slacker in 1991, Linklater’s films have helped to solidify not only the tonal attributes of the hangout film but also its philosophical underpinnings. One does not so much watch a Linklater film as float down its river, acquainting oneself to its characters and musing alongside them about the nature of love, life, and time. Indeed, the exploitation of the element of time is one of the things that makes the hangout film uniquely cinematic. Films like Before Sunrise and Dazed and Confused are unrushed. They draw us in not through the intricacies of plot but the power of good conversation. Their strength lies not in conflict but in presence. As the character played by Linklater himself says in Waking Life, “there’s only one instant, and it’s right now, and it’s eternity.”

Unlike the traditional, narrative-driven film, the hangout film doesn’t rely on tension to maintain interest. Goal-oriented characters with burning wants and needs are traded for principled ones who are just trying to get by. This difference is not merely a matter of narrative strategy; it’s a different view of life. From the standpoint of the hangout film, goals and conflicts aren’t the substance of life but a distraction from it. The emphasis is shifted from action to reflection, from doing to being. These films take to the extreme the old cliché that “it’s about the journey.” Road pictures, for this reason, often make great hangout movies.

One other quality unites nearly all hangout films: the use of music. Whereas most movies use music to drive the narrative forward and make up for lagging pacing, hangout movies often bring the narrative to a halt to allow the characters and audience to relish a particular track. Dazed and Confused, The Big Lebowski, and Tarantino’s Death Proof and Jackie Brown all feature such interludes, but as ever the prime example is Rio Bravo. At the height of the drama, when another film would feature characters loading their guns or preparing their defenses, the characters in Rio Bravo break into song. It’s one of the most bizarre, and bizarrely satisfying, moments in cinematic history. And as with all the great scenes in hangout films, it’s an in-between moment — one that catches the characters and the audience off guard.

So where does the hangout film fit in the latticework of film genres? As we’ve seen, it can overlap with almost any other genre: the Western (Rio Bravo), the noir (The Big Lebowski), the horror film (Death Proof), the comedy (Dazed and Confused), and the romance (Before Sunrise). In that sense, the hangout film might more aptly be called a style, like neorealism or poetic cinema. But uniquely among sub-genres, the hangout film designation also contains a qualitative judgment: to truly be worthy of the name, a hangout film requires that we come to love the characters, and by extension the film itself. The masters of the hangout film have discovered something integral about what makes us feel at home in one another’s presence, and at peace with the flow of life. We’d do well to learn from them.

A Brief History of the ‘Hangout’ Film was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Darren Aronofsky’s film portrays the horror and violence of becoming a different species.

When I first watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 film Black Swan, I immediately knew that it was the kind of film that required multiple viewings. Naturally, I went back to the theater and watched it again before buying a DVD copy which I have since worn out with repeated viewings. Black Swan is a dense and layered film, with so much to focus on: the theme of doubles and doppelgangers, the prominence of mirrors, the way the plot matches the story of Swan Lake, the meticulously crafted visuals, and the film’s obsession with differing expressions of femininity. However, it wasn’t until I took a class focusing on Animals in Cinema that I realized this film deals with a woman’s literal transformation into a swan. Nina’s (Natalie Portman) transformation into a swan neatly matches up with French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal”, wherein a human violently and painfully becomes an animal, in a shift away from their previously established identity.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they outline the concept of “becoming-animal”, which they created to describe the process of human transformation into another species. Becoming-animal is not necessarily a straightforward concept, but begins to make sense once applied to works of art such as Black Swan. The concept focuses on the process of becoming, rather than on the animal become. Gerald L Bruns writes in New Literary History that Deleuze and Guattari frequently improvised concepts — such as becoming-animal — that avoid closure and resolution. Becoming-animal is a process with no conclusion, and instead of focusing on past or present, before or after, it pulls in both directions at the same time. It is a movement from unity to complexity, and from organization to anarchy. The human subject is swept away, and the subject no longer occupies to realm of stability, but is instead nomadic and restless.

Becoming-animal is not merely resemblance or imitation, but rather, it is a human existing in the space between human and animal. Imitation of an animal’s physical behaviors and characteristics is an entirely different phenomena, one that is much more simplistic than what Deleuze and Guattari refer to. “Imitation” implies playful mimicry, but Deleuze and Guattari refer to a process of literally changing one’s entire identity. Deleuze and Guattari write that this is a process of “expansion, propagation, occupation, and contagion” wherein one’s identity is radically transformed, and one no longer has a fixed identity, but rather one that is constantly changing and being renegotiated.

In Black Swan, Nina renegotiates her entire self and all of her relationships once she enters the process of becoming-swan. Nina enters into this process to leave behind the rigidly defined identity in order to become an anarchic being with no fixed place in society. Nina’s identity has been shaped by her mother (Barbara Hershey) and the way she infantilizes Nina and treats her like a little girl, as well as the fact that she is a ballerina who feels she must physically and spiritually conform to what a “perfect” dancer must be. She speaks softly and is very shy, she almost exclusively wears pink, white, and baby blue, and her room is decorated with butterflies and stuffed animals. She is extremely thin and barely eats anything, and spends all of her time working incredibly hard at ballet rehearsals. When she starts to become a swan, she radically transforms and moves away from the rigidly defined idea of “Nina”.

However, Nina’s transformation is complicated by a number of elements. First of all, Nina seems to be the only one who is aware of the transformation. The scenes where she begins to exhibit the physical characteristics of a swan — feathers, webbed feet, a long neck, red eyes, legs that bend backwards — are framed as hallucinations that disappear shortly afterwards. There are some scenes where she is turning into a white swan, and other scenes where she is turning into a black swan — which makes sense, as she is cast as both Odette and Odile in her ballet company’s production of Swan Lake. However, this makes her transformation even more chaotic, as she is in the process of becoming two very different swans.

The concept is also complicated because the film deals with animal imitations, which, as I previously mentioned, are not the same thing as becoming-animal. These imitations are important to consider in order to differentiate between imitation and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal. While Nina imitates the white and black swans when she dances, she is also literally undergoing a metamorphosis from girl to swan, which apparently only she is aware of. The other dancers in the production also wear feathery white costumes and makeup to make them appear swan-like. The film’s mise-en-scene is filled with artistic representations and replicas of swans: there is a swan skeleton in artistic director Thomas’ (Vincent Cassel) office, his apartment has black and white swan-like designs decorating the walls, and there is a mosaic picture of a swan on the ledge of Nina’s bathtub. Nina and Lily’s (Mila Kunis) costumes and makeup resemble the white and black swans — Nina represents the fragile and innocent white swan, as she is pale and thin, and frequently wears a pink and white jacket with a feathery white scarf, whereas Lily represents the dark and seductive black swan, with her dark eye makeup and clothing and black swan wing tattoo on her back. The production’s villain, Rothbart, wears an elaborate black and green feathered costume and a prosthetic bird’s beak. These examples all represent humans imitating animals either for artistic pleasure or as part of their daily expressed identity, and stand in stark contrast to the painful full-body transformations which Nina undergoes.

Nina’s becoming-swan is much more visceral than these imitations, and at times is so violent that the film begins to feel like a horror movie. The camera constantly focuses on Nina’s body as she runs to and from rehearsals, dances, changes clothing, picks at her skin and scratches the rash on her back, and as she begins to experience the violent transformation from girl into swan. Nina’s body is painfully contorted, and the soundtrack is filled with sounds of cracking and breaking as her body changes shape. Her eyes turn deep red like a black swan’s, and she cringes as she pulls pointy black feathers out of the rash on her back. Her legs snap backwards like a bird’s legs, and she loses her balance, hitting her head on the metal edge of her bed. She winces in pain as she realizes her toes have stuck together, becoming webbed swan’s feet. In the most dramatic visualization of her transformation, she fouettés across the stage as big black feathers cover her arms, until she takes her final bow, her arms completely transformed into swan wings. Later on, during the final performance as Odette — the white swan — small white feathers protrude from her arms, in a much more subdued version of the black swan performance. These are the ways in which her transformation is visually presented.

These representations of becoming-swan are presented as moments of body horror, signifying the incredibly dramatic nature of becoming-animal. In Linda Badley’s book Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic, she writes that horror is one of the most physiological genres, focusing on bodily movements and spectacle. Ronald Allan Lopez Cruz writes in the Journal of Popular Film and Television that body horror is a sub-genre of horror, dealing with transgressions and complications of biology, featuring distortions of the human body. Body horror tropes are used in the visual representations of Nina’s becoming-swan. Cruz writes that body horror often focuses on the assimilation of traits from one species to another, forming “hybrid species” which break down any traditional taxonomical classification. These species are presented as terrifying because they are formless and categorically incomplete, producing a fearful and uncertain response in spectators. Black Swan may not be a traditional horror film, but it certainly uses visual tropes of body horror to produce fear and revulsion in spectators.

In Simone Bignall’s brilliant 2013 article, “Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal”, she notes that Nina’s becoming-animal transformation changes her relationships to those around her. As Nina’s identity radically changes, so does her way of interacting with those around her. She begins to reject her mother’s possessive and controlling ways, and she begins a friendship with the seductive Lily. She has fleeting moments of sexual passion with her ballet instructor, Thomas, including one surprising moment when she bites his lip so hard that he bleeds. These new relations with others represent drastic changes in Nina’s behavioral patterns. Bignall writes that Nina feels free to engage in new behaviors — going out dancing and taking drugs with Lily, locking her bedroom door, staying out late — because the process of becoming-swan has begun to expand her identity.

Bignall notes that becoming-animal occurs when an individual rediscovers its form as a multiplicity, rather than as one fixed identity. Deleuze and Guattari believe identity is composed of multiple elemental parts arranged in complex relations. Bignall writes that Nina’s previous elemental parts include “dancing, music box, shyness, broken toenail, ambition, frigidity, plush toys…”, but that once she begins the process of becoming-animal, she is confronted with the fact that she is more than these things. She is no longer a fixed individual, but a complex one that cannot be rigidly defined. Bignall explains that becoming-animal involves the dissolution of the individual along with the forging of new and complex connections to others, which is exactly what Nina experiences as her identity changes.

Black Swan ends with Nina’s demise, after she stabs herself with a shard of broken glass and dances to death onstage. I will note that it is left ambiguous whether or not she actually dies, but she is essentially mentally and physically destroyed by the time the film fades to white at the very end. Nina is not able to successfully reside in her state of becoming-animal, and her attempt to escape from her rigidly defined feminine identity is tragically fatal. Bignall writes that the process of becoming-animal may be radically disabling and end up completely destroying one’s subjective experience and physical form — which is of course what happens to Nina. She descends into madness, and becomes detached from her body and her sense of self. She hallucinates that her mother’s paintings laugh at her, she imagines that Beth (Winona Ryder) stabs herself in the face and follows Nina home, and she fantasizes about a passionate sexual encounter with Lily which she believes actually happened. As Nina moves further away from her past identity, and becomes a “hybrid species”, the more she loses her grip on reality and her own body.

Bignall notes that Deleuze and Guattari account for the dangers of becoming-animal, especially when the process is so disruptive of one’s existing set of relations that the self is completely abolished, which essentially happens to Nina. Deleuze and Guattari propose that one must be cautious during the process of becoming-animal not to leave behind one’s identity too quickly, before considering the possible consequences. Nina’s fearful and anxious personality does not allow her to stop and think rationally about anything that is happening to her, so she continues radically leaving behind her sense of self, with tragic results. Bignall writes that Nina’s transformation is radical and catastrophic, ending with her personal relationships, subjectivity, and physical body all in shambles and completely unrecognizable.

Natalie Portman gives one of her best performances in Black Swan, recalling the tragic and anxious performances of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, and even Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. What sets Black Swan apart from these other films dealing with female anxiety and loss of identity is that Nina also literally begins to become a swan onscreen. This process moves the film from being a psychological thriller to being a body horror film at times. Nina suffers through a violent and gruesome transformation from girl into swan, and at the same time leaves behind her old sense of self. She experiences pain and terror, but in the process she also experiences sexual ecstasy, and feelings of freedom and perfection, particularly when she dances as Odette and Odile in Swan Lake. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal is very abstract, but one of the greatest things about cinema is how strange concepts begin to make sense when applied to films. It is tragic that Nina is unable to completely free herself from her old identity in the end, but her violent ending is also tinged with triumph as she whispers: “I felt it. Perfect. It was perfect.”

Feathers and Female Transformations: Becoming-Animal in ‘Black Swan’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.