It is the work that lives on

• Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008.

Talk about someone that left us too soon -- and he was the same age as my parents (both, thankfully, still living). Minghella's work as a screenwriter was equaled only by his finesse as a filmmaker and his talent at drawing nuanced performances from some of the finest actors on the planet. His DVD commentaries are master classes in film, art and life; he is already missed.

Bizarrely enough, just last evening I watched Atonement, Joe Wright's film of the Ian McEwan novel, and was surprised to see Minghella pop up in the film's final sections, in his only onscreen acting role as a television interviewer. Proof positive that it is always the work that lives on.

Minghella was born Jan. 6, 1954 on the Isle of Wight, where his Italian parents ran a successful ice-cream business. He became a lecturer at Hull University, and started carving a reputation as a writer for the stage, radio and TV. He penned episodes of detective drama “Inspector Morse” and high school series “Grange Hill,” and created the Jim Henson miniseries “The Storyteller: Greek Myths.”

“Truly, Madly, Deeply,” his directorial debut from his own script, won him a BAFTA for best original screenplay. He won the best director Oscar for “The English Patient” in 1997, which also earned him an adapted screenplay nomination. He got another Oscar nomination in 2000 for the screenplay of “The Talented Mr Ripley.”

Rearranging the pieces of life

• Rachel Donadio appreciates Alain Robbe-Grillet in The New York Times.

Lame-ass headline aside ("He Was Nouveau When It Was New"... oh, NYT editors, you're so damn clever), it's a good overview of Robbe-Grillet's work as a writer. The later section of the piece examines the influence of Last Year at Marienbad, his '62 collaboration with Alain Resnais, which is well worth tracking down -- that is, if you have a taste for 60s-era arty-farty films. Marienbad (as well as Resnais' earlier film Hiroshima mon amour), is basically the modern template for the pretentious art film, but if you're game, there are few better pieces of willfully demanding art to surrender yourself to.

A dreamlike, fragmented narrative, “Last Year at Marienbad” opened in New York in 1962. The style, “with its use of glamorous, glazed-looking actors framed in mannerist poses within the glittering, implicitly decadent mirrored salons of a luxe European hotel, may no longer dazzle audiences that have seen it cribbed (and spoofed) by countless perfume ads and rock videos,” Mark Harris wrote in The New York Times last month. But its “nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory voice-over and toxically discordant organ music, is as disturbing as ever and retains its power to frustrate anybody who hopes to shake loose some answers after 93 minutes.”

In an interview, P. Adams Sitney, a Princeton film professor, called the film “an extremely abstract version” of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” in which a woman “disappears and maybe dies and yet transmographies into the land of the Nouveau Roman.” In his view, “the combination of Robbe-Grillet’s literary prestige and the innovative nature of ‘Marienbad’ was perfect for that moment in the history of taste.”

Writing is writing, regardless of medium

• The Los Angeles Times reports on the "online factor" of the brewing writer's strike.

I'm a bit amazed that the industry is still scrambling to come up with a business model for online production that will satisfy all concerned parties, but then again, this is Hollywood we're talking about -- a town not noted for its sympathy towards scribes.

The issue of how to compensate talent for work distributed online is central to contentious contract talks with writers -- and could trigger the first major strike in Hollywood in nearly two decades.

"The more it looks like television is migrating to the Internet, the more important it is for us to ensure that writers are covered under a writers guild contract," said Patric Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America, West. "We certainly don't want to get left behind the way we were with cable television, reality TV and animation."

Network executives are loath to further inflame the issue by discussing it publicly. Privately, however, several studio and network executives said they were not trying to circumvent the unions but instead attempting to adapt to a changing landscape in which entertainment plays out on multiple screens.

Many likened their situation to being in a vise grip, squeezed on one side by advertisers and fans demanding more online entertainment while pressured on the other side by guild officials who insist that ground rules be established first.

Always just out of reach

• Lois Maxwell, 1927-2007.

Rest in peace, Miss Moneypenny. [Image from A View to a Kill, 1985 -- her final appearance in the 007 series.]

The poet of cinema

• Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007.

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

The problems of adaptation

• Bookforum examines "fiction into film."

A six-part look at different prose-to-screen adaptations, focusing on The Godfather, Jackie Brown, Godard's Contempt, Minnelli's 1949 take on Madame Bovary, From Here to Eternity, and David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations.

First, it may be necessary to question the received wisdom. One such premise is that it is easier to make a fine film out of a mediocre novel than out of a superior one, because the adapter will feel less reverent toward the source material. (In reality, a screenwriter who has had to adapt a weak novel can tell you that inheriting a lousy plot and thin characters does not make the job any easier.)

...Another received truth is that the way to make a vivid adaptation is to cut loose from the novel as soon as possible. Some screenwriters boast that they read the novel once, then never go back to it, and there are directors (such as John Ford with "The Grapes of Wrath" [1940]) who say they never read the novel at all. There may be some egoprotecting here: Jean-Luc Godard was being a bit disingenuous in dismissing his source for "Contempt," Alberto Moravia’s A Ghost at Noon, as a mediocre novel to read on a train, thereby downplaying the psychological dynamics he had borrowed from the author. But for every instance in which a rough, indifferent attitude (or the pretense of one) toward the source material resulted in a successful film, there are plenty of others in which the screenwriter and/or director took the original very seriously, such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who used the pages of Graciliano Ramos’s novel as the shooting script for his beautiful "Barren Lives" (1963).

One event before another

• David Denby examines the history of fractured storytelling in films in The New Yorker.

“Pulp Fiction” was a highly influential movie, but the majority of narratives, of course, are still constructed in the traditional way. Event A leads to events B and C. Or, alternatively, the movie starts in the middle, with B, which necessarily throws us back to A, which eventually leads past B and onward to C. “The Good Shepherd,” one of the best (and most underpraised) movies of last year, jumps all over the place, but the different time periods—the distant, intermediate, and recent past, as well as the present—are clearly marked elements in a chronological scheme that the viewer eventually assembles in his head as a continuous tale. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume spent years hoping to convince his readers that sequence does not necessarily imply causality, but I would guess that he didn’t get very far with such contemporary narrative artists as Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson (although Laurence Sterne, the proto-modernist prankster of “Tristram Shandy,” may have been listening). Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives.

When hack novelists strike

• Clive Cussler's iron-fisted grip on the film of Sahara is dissected in the Los Angeles Times.

I once saw George Romero relate a great Stephen King anecdote. Romero was talking about how whenever someone went up to King and complained how whichever movie ruined his book, King would point to the bookshelf and go, "No, they didn't. The book's right there." I kept thinking about this the entire time I was reading this article. I find it ironic that Cussler, whose junk-food pulp-adventure novels have long wallowed in blatant racism and sexism, considers the many screenwriters who tried to turn a turd into a diamond as "hacks."

As a best-selling author, Cussler was used to getting his way. "Traditionally, all my editors have suggested changes and I have only followed them 20%," he said in a deposition.

Cussler's approval rights troubled the movie's creative personnel, who were unaccustomed to catering to the whims of a novelist.

Studio officials at Paramount, the distributor of "Sahara," resisted Cussler's active participation in the script, according to Karen Baldwin, who served as executive vice president of creative affairs for Anschutz's film company.

"Paramount has always been cagey in that respect — urging us to keep you out of the loop and lie when necessary," Baldwin wrote Cussler in July 2003. "Essentially, Paramount feels … the author should not have much input when it comes to script."

In all, Anschutz's firm spent about $4 million on writers, many of whom produced scripts that Cussler deemed inferior. In one memo, the author wrote that the money producers have "thrown down the sewer with hack writers is a crime."

It's the typical Hollywood bullshit -- throw money at it, that will always work, right? -- but it's still incredible to read. Aspiring screenwriters, take note...

Ever the iconoclast

• Robert Altman, 1925-2006.

A late bloomer, Altman was a middle-aged TV director when he took over the reins of 1969's Korean war satire "MASH," reportedly after 17 other directors had turned it down. The movie tapped into a groundswell of opposition to the war in Vietnam and became a mammoth hit. It also established the director's genius for loose-limbed narratives and multi-tracked sound recording; a kind of controlled chaos that caught the mood of a culture in flux.

...Born in Kansas City, Altman originally worked as a small-time entrepreneur, tattooing identification numbers on household pets. He blagged his way into the White House where he tattooed President Truman's dog as a publicity stunt. "The dog barked," he remembered. That maverick, cavalier quality never left him. Even in white-bearded old age he was an unapologetic dope smoker and a fierce critic of George Bush's policies. He also continued to make films that beguiled and exasperated in equal measure.

Tales from the Faulknerian crypt

• A long-lost William Faulkner manuscript is an unproduced vampire screenplay.

Makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.

Beginning in 1932, and intermittently over the next 13 years, Faulkner was a contract writer at MGM, Fox and Warner Bros. who mainly wrote screenplays for good friend and drinking buddy Howard Hawks. Their best and most notable collaborations are Faulkner's adaptations of Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and Raymond Chandler's noir classic "The Big Sleep."

In the midst of all this, Faulkner apparently spun out a vampire saga set in an anonymous Eastern European location. Caplin plans to relocate the story to the Deep South and has a high-end computer-graphics firm on the hook to dress it up with modern effects.

So Anne Rice didn't invent the Southern Gothic vampire story after all...

Gladwell's newest

• Malcolm Gladwell details the development of a system to predict box-office hits in The New Yorker.

As is typical with Gladwell, the above summary doesn't do justice to the range of subject areas he can cover in a page without appearing to strain himself. Good stuff, as always.

The most famous dictum about Hollywood belongs to the screenwriter William Goldman. “Nobody knows anything,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade” a couple of decades ago. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.” One of the highest-grossing movies in history, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance. He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil’s hexameters to Horace’s could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames—someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody’s looking hard enough.

Notes from Frankfurt

The Frankfurt Book Fair is going on as we speak. Here's some of the highlights:

• The trend of publishing bloggers may be winding down.

Shocker.

• Most books that get optioned for film never get made.

Ditto.

Thankfully, GalleyCat is there with some real news, most notably a roundup of the big deals:

Woody Allen's MERE ANARCHY, his first collection of comic writing since his celebrated 1970s books GETTING EVEN and WITHOUT FEATHERS, will be out in August 2007, when Random House US and Ebury will publish the book at the same time. Meanwhile, Felicity Bryan has concluded 'substantial' US and French deals for the latest novel by Iain Pears with Julie Grau at Spiegel & Grau/Doubleday and Francois Triffault at Belfond. STONE'S FALL, will be delivered next year.

Meanwhile, over at the NBCC, John Freeman has gotten his hands on Against the Day. Bastard.

Writers are boring to watch

• Columnist Jeffrey Wells talks about the difficulty of making a good movie about writers at Hollywood Elsewhere.

Good points from Mr. Wells, whose website I wrote for briefly, once upon a time:

Writers --- serious writers of books and plays as opposed to, say, journalists -- are not very interesting people to make films about. They're almost as bad as painters. Morose, self-destructive depressives...terrific. Unless the film follows the writer on an intense real-life adventure of some kind, as Fred Zinneman's "Julia" did with an episode in the life of the young Lillian Hellman. Or better yet, if the movie somehow injects its writer character into a surreal realm of his/her own devising, like Joel and Ethan Coen did with John Turturro's gloom-head screenwriter in "Barton Fink", or like David Cronenberg did with a William S. Burroughs-like character in his adaptation of "Naked Lunch."

From another post:

The history of movies about writers is mostly colored in varying shades of tedium.

He's right -- there's nothing terribly cinematic about a guy sitting at a typewriter for hours at a time, wandering around the office, smoking, drinking, writing some more, petting the cat, playing with the stress ball, wandering around some more, writing some more... watching grass grow would be more exciting. Still, there are exceptions; Wonder Boys and Adaptation come to mind.

From the page to the screen

• The Guardian picks the 50 best film adaptations of books.

Another list to nitpick, this time slightly less so. There's a definite British slant to the selections (The Day of the Triffids?), but it's a pretty good collection nonetheless:

1984
Alice in Wonderland
American Psycho
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Brighton Rock
Catch-22
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
A Clockwork Orange
Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
The Day of the Triffids
Devil in a Blue Dress
Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
Doctor Zhivago
Empire of the Sun
The English Patient
Fight Club
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Get Shorty
The Godfather
Goldfinger
Goodfellas
Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Jaws
The Jungle Book
A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
LA Confidential
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
Oliver Twist
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Orlando
The Outsiders
Pride and Prejudice
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Railway Children
Rebecca
The Remains of the Day
Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
Sin City
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Talented Mr Ripley
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To Kill a Mockingbird
Trainspotting
The Vanishing
Watership Down

It seems that, unlike the WGA's recent "101 Best," they're judging the merits of the screenplay adaptations before the film itself, which is a tricky tightrope to walk; some books flat-out resist a filmed adaptation at every turn, where others are practically tailor-made for the screen. Some others I'd nominate:

Dolores Claiborne, scripted by Tony Gilroy and directed by Taylor Hackford, always gets my nomination for the most underappreciated Stephen King adaptation, second only to Rob Reiner and William Goldman's take on Misery. (I've never been a fan of either the film of The Shawshank Redemption or the original novella; it's King at his more preachy and ickily sentimental.) Dolores Claiborne is a book-length monologue by the title character; Gilroy restructed the story somewhat and despite a jarring, tacked-on courtroom finale, it's consistently gripping. Hackford's stylish take on the flashback sequences is amazing.

Waterland, adapted by Peter Prince from the novel by Graham Swift, is particuarly good, once you get past the Americanized plot elements that are rather obviously grafted on. Like Dolores Claiborne above, the story incorporates many flashback sequences that somehow maintain the heft and magic-realism weight of the novel. [It just so happens that the film is playing tonight -- 4/20 -- on the Independent Film Channel at 9:15pm. Unfortunately, the print IFC is using is panned-and-scanned; Stephen Gyllenhaal's filming of it takes every advantage of the Panavision widescreen process and can only be truly appreciated in that format. Image Entertainment will be releasing the film on DVD next month.]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from the novel by Milan Kundera, tends to split people straight down the middle. Most people I know who've read the novel hate the movie, and vice versa. I like them both very much, but they are, by neccessity, very different beasts; the film is fairly linear, whereas the novel is decidedly not so. Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere did the adaptation, and Kaufman directed.

The Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Kobo Abe from his novel, and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Abe is an acquired taste, but if your taste happens to run towards unsettling, threateningly erotic surrealism, then he's your man. This is the kind of adaptation you watch and, if you're familiar with both, you think, "It couldn't have been done any other way." It helps, of course, that Abe did the adaptation himself, but Teshigahara deserves a lot of credit for crisply visualizing Abe's strange, almost otherworldly textures and shadings. [Abe and Teshigahara collaborated twice more, on adaptations of Abe's novels The Face of Another (1966) and The Ruined Map (1968), both of which have yet to be released on video in America.]

Deliverance, scripted by James Dickey from his novel, and directed by John Boorman. This is the movie that's essentially responsible for every redneck-psychopath stereotype in every movie made since; apparently, there are many people in the world who truly believe there are toothless, shotgun-toting rapists behind every tree in the American South. Get past that, and you're left with truly one of the best movies ever made, one in which Dickey's poetic examination of masculinity versus nature is preserved with tremendous clarity and resonance.

There are plenty of other great adaptations that didn't make the cut -- The Last Picture Show, Wonder Boys, In the Bedroom, The Manchurian Candidate, The Pledge and especially A Simple Plan are others that come to mind -- but these are some I think are particularly worth singling out.

Math and art, strange bedfellows

• Writer Gregory K. Pincus has turned mathematics into poetry.

This is pretty cool:

Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry?

THAT'S exactly what happened after Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter and aspiring children's book author in Los Angeles, wrote a post on his GottaBook blog (gottabook.blogspot.com) two weeks ago inviting readers to write "Fibs," six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line.

Within a few days, Mr. Pincus, 41, had received about 30 responses, a large portion of them Fibonacci poems. Most of them were from friends or relatives or people who regularly read his blog, which focuses on children's literature.

There is often an intriguing overlap between mathematical and dramatic theories. My favorite example is the Golden Section; a colleague of mine named Doug Adams once wrote a fascinating article on film music which included an intriguing discourse on the theory:

There exists a theory known as the rule of the Golden Section. Roughly paraphrased, this theory states that just under two-thirds (0.618034... and so on) of the way through anything there is some significant occurrence. The idea is that those things which humans naturally find appealing or stereotypically beautiful are most likely to adhere to these guidelines. Much of nature adheres to this rule. Many flowers have their largest leaves about two-thirds of the way up their total height. Multiply a human's height by .618 and you'll often find the waist. The eyes are approximately two-thirds of the way up the human face, the heart two-thirds of the way up the torso. Human-made art often follows these rules as well. Debussy was a strong believer in the Golden Section and structured his works accordingly. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" has some elements of the GS in its construction. "Alien"'s climatic cat-and-mouse chase begins at roughly around this ratio, as does "Star Wars"' trench battle.

In practically every writing course I've ever taken, mention was made of something similar in terms of the structure of whatever piece of writing you were focused on. For example, the Joseph Campbell model of screenwriting (which has been nearly beaten to death in the years since Star Wars first opened... thanks a lot, George) posits nine steps in the hero's journey:

1. The ordinary world.
2. The call to action.
3. Refusal of the call.
4. Crossing the threshold.
5. Tests, allies and enemies.
6. Ordeal.
7. Reward.
8. The road back.
9. Return and resurrection.

You'll note that two-thirds of the way through this list is "ordeal," which typically takes the form of a plot twist that changes the hero's goal -- the token damsel getting kidnapped by the bad guy, for example, thus giving the hero a new emotional investment in achieving his objective. (This device is also commonly referred to as the "third-act ticking clock," and was satirized hilariously in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.) The rhythm of certain styles of poetry -- cinquains and sonnets, for example -- follow this idea. Basic rules of composition for art and photography emphasize a one-thirds/two-thirds standard for filling the frame. And the musicians amongst you are already aware that typical 32-bar (AABA) song structure usually places the bridge about two-thirds of the way through the song.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this rule, ingrained as it is in typical perceptions of art and aesthetics, can be of great help to you in terms of the construction of your work, be it written, visual or auditory. If anything, it's a good jumping-off point. Not all works of art adhere to this rule, of course, but a lot of fun can be had in the manipulation of the rules... once you learn them, that is.

As an extension of that, I’ve found, more often than not, that exploring the strictures of math and science can in fact reveal new elements in aesthetics. Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation has many such passages that illustrate how one could inform the other. Mathematics, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, is entirely theoretical, and like any other man-made system of thought it’s subject to the same fallibility, and flexibility, as art.

Now I want someone to come up with a way to turn Occam's Razor into, say, a cell phone ad.

Yet another list to nitpick

• The Writers' Guild of America picks the 101 greatest screenplays of all time.

It's a surprisingly disappointing selection, even by the dubious standards of the list-mania that's been prevalent since the AFI started churning them out. Many, many obvious choices, with a whopping two foreign films getting a nod (Renoir's Grand Illusion and Fellini's 8-1/2, #85 and #87, respectively), with no respect whatsoever paid to Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, John Sayles, Francois Truffaut, Pedro Almodovar, Werner Herzog or Richard Linklater, writers all whose work put story and character first.

It's more of a celebration of LA-style studio filmmaking, as opposed to screenwriting. Casablanca, for example, was, at the time of its making, considered a run-of-the-mill studio installment, the script of which was cobbled together by a handful of writers, some credited, some not. Most of the scripts on the list feature more than one writer, and many of those had work done on them by writers who went uncredited (Tootsie being the most notorious example). It is nice, however, to see Groundhog Day get a nod, as well as Memento, Harold & Maude and The Wild Bunch.

Of course, the very nature of moviemaking makes the presentation of a singular point of view difficult, if not altogether impossible. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, especially within the studio system, and the WGA's list reflects that attitude. Still, their choices and omissions are surprising, and not in a good way.

Real-life mysteries, and the book market expands again

• Patricia Cornwell is trying to help solve the mystery of the Hunley.
  

Cornwell is donating $500,000 to researchers who are trying to determine exactly how the famed Hurley submarine was sunk off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina during the Civil War. Interesting to note how this announcement comes two days before the 142nd anniversary of its sinking... a slick bit of public relations, that. But this is still a promising trend. Perhaps Cornwell can next focus her sleuthing skills in an attempt to find, you know, those weapons of mass destruction we've heard so much about.

• Random House is going into the movie business.

A brief story from the New York Times:

A novel set in today's Tel Aviv and a nonfiction work about an Iraqi informant have been acquired by Random House Films and Focus Features as the first two projects for their recently announced filmmaking partnership. The novel is "The Attack," by Yasmina Khadra, a pseudonym used by Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer. It tells of an Arab surgeon living in Tel Aviv who learns a shattering secret about his wife after a suicide bombing. It is to be published in May. The nonfiction work, "Curveball," is being written by Bob Drogin. Derived from his front page article in The Los Angeles Times, it tells of a man who gave deceptive information that was used by the United States government to justify the war in Iraq.

A recent article at Slate by Edward Jay Epstein talked about how the major studios' tunnel vision now has them focused exclusively on remakes and/or sequels, which, the logic seems to go, are a sure bet, from a financial standpoint. Things are in a pretty sorry state indeed when publishing companies have to start their own film divisions to get original material brought back to the multiplexes. The studios, of course, will make whatever they think will turn a profit, regardless of the source material, but this trend is particularly depressing. Hollywood's turned into the Donner Party... eating itself to stay alive. But the publishing companies are looking for more and more ways to keep themselves afloat as well; Signet Classics has started to sell tomes like Anna Karenina and The Hunchback of Notre Dame bundled with DVDs of public-domain film versions of the respective stories. Whatever works, babe, whatever works.

Still believe in that happy ending?

An interesting insight from New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, from Slate's "Movie Club 2005":

But I want to get right to the large topic that hovers between Jonathan's and David's posts—the question of how movies can (or should) engage pressing and controversial political and social concerns, and the related question of how these engagements should be judged. It seems to me that there is a disproportionate belief in the power of movies to influence opinion—"Fahrenheit 9/11" was going to decide the election; "Brokeback Mountain" will roll back the homophobic tide; "The Chronicles of Narnia" will bring news of the Gospels to a new generation of children, etc.—and an accompanying eagerness to dismiss them when they fail, as of course they do, at least in the short, measurable term. This cycle of overvaluation and rejection reflects an unresolved cultural ambivalence, especially among educated people, about movies as an art form and (therefore) as a vehicle for thinking about matters other than art. The scale and power of film is such that it can never apparently be trusted or valued without some component of anxiety, the expression of which often takes the form of condescension. We spend a lot of time complaining about the triviality of movies, and then, when they turn serious, we complain about that. They get the historical facts wrong; they traffic in overwrought conspiracy theories or unconvincing happy endings; they manipulate rather than enlighten; they're not as smart as we are.

Author profile: Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael should have been a standup comic. She wrote film criticism instead; lucky for us. Not so lucky for the films, filmmakers and performers she zeroed in on:

On Return of the Jedi: “Even the scene that should be the emotional peak of the whole mythic trilogy -- the moment when the young protagonist, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) removes the black visor and the helmet that have concealed Darth Vader’s face -- has no thrill. There isn’t a gasp to be heard in the entire theatre. Luke looks into the eyes of his nightmare father, and he might be ordering a veggieburger.”

Kael was born in California in 1919. She was a philosophy major at the University of California, Berkeley, and parlayed that lucrative diploma into a patchwork career as a movie theatre manager. She flirted with radio and filmmaking early on, but it was her written descriptions of the films playing at her theatre that first caught attention. A notorious early stint at McCall’s, during which she famously trashed The Sound of Music, led her to The New Yorker, where she spent 23 years. She retired in 1991 and died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Sep. 3, 2001.

The act of deconstruction is a vicious thrill to every critic, and Kael’s writing style often convinced her readers that there was more bitter vitriol in her than celebratory adulations. She was a physically small woman (under five feet tall), which was a marked contrast to the authoritative boom of her writing. Automatic audience goodwill was a fallacy to her; what mattered most was the intoxicating, intensely vivid personal experiences that, she believed, only the movies had the power to convey. More than anything else, she valued films that were honest and direct in their intentions; she was as quick to celebrate pop filmmaking that went unashamedly for the gold as she was to denounce excessive self-consciousness and pretension.

She was, of course, controversial, not to mention undeniably influential. Peter Biskind’s gossipy Easy Riders, Raging Bulls depicts Kael as a starstruck member of the New York literati elite who was subject to hyperbole when it came to the work of filmmakers she was familiar with on a personal level, like Robert Altman, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese (claims Kael subsequently dismissed as specious), but it’s generally agreed that her insistent support of films like Bonnie & Clyde, MASH, Mean Streets and The Godfather helped play a crucial role in the film movement of the 1960s and 70s. She also was one of the first film critics to cross over to a job in the film business, as an “executive consultant” for Paramount, a job which lasted all of five months and inspired her most incisive, and prescient, piece on the state of the art, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers” (June 23, 1980):

“There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. At first, the heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications -- the opportunity to associate with world-famous celebrities. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the girls, but for them, too, a new social life beckons, and as they become socially involved, people with great names approach them as equals, and it gets them crazy. Famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them about offers they’ve had from other studios and about what ideas that they have for pictures, and the conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they control aren’t in on those wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with their studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed.”

Film criticism can sometimes be a lucrative gateway; Stephen Schiff, Rod Lurie, Stephen Hunter and Elvis Mitchell have followed in her footsteps, but few have Kael’s ferocious gift for it. You get the sense that her best work is done when she’s picking apart something that she can’t help but to love. What is most striking about Kael is her voice: passionate, tough and uncompromising. Alongside critics like Andrew Sarris, she brought artistic legitimacy to the form and captured, in her body of work, the electric excitement of creative revolution, and the crushing sadness of its increasingly-commercialized decline. In her introduction for For Keeps, a 1996 anthology of her work, she wrote:

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Bibliography:
I Lost It at the Movies (1965)
Going Steady (1970)
Deeper Into Movies (1973) (winner of the National Book Award)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1976)
Reeling (1977)
When the Lights Go Down (1980)
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) (collected capsule reviews)
Taking It All In (1984)
State of the Art (1985)
Hooked (1989)
Movie Love (1991)
For Keeps (1996) (collected reviews & essays)

Featured in:
The Citizen Kane Book (1972) (essay “Raising Kane”)

Subject of:
Conversations with Pauline Kael by Will Brantley (1996)
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman
Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael by Francis Davis (2002)
- read excerpts at Salon

Further resources:
Ken Tucker surveys Kael’s career at Salon
Choice Kael quotes from BrainyQuotes
NPR’s collection of audio tributes to Kael from All Things Considered, David Thomson and Elvis Mitchell