Part Bridget Jones’s
Diary, part Swimming With Sharks,
Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling 2003 novel The
Devil Wears Prada — about the hellish life of a top fashion magazine editor’s
assistant — helped birth the seriocomic, New York workplace-set chick lit
subgenre, capitalizing on the appeal of Sex
in the City. Yet its translation to the big screen was anything but smooth,
churning through five screenwriters.

“For a long time I think the studio thought of this as a
‘boss from hell movie,’” says director David Frankel, “and I thought that it
was about two much more complex characters than just the naïf and crazy boss. It’s
about a young girl who has real conflicts about which path to choose in life. It’s
a coming-of-age story for a woman, and it’s about the price of excellence and what
compromises and sacrifices one makes in life to achieve that. (The editor) Miranda represents a lot of powerful women, and what price they pay for their
ambition. But we understand why she’s demanding in the course of the film and
we come to sympathize with her pursuit of excellence. And the movie’s hopefully
surprisingly moving.”

Certainly abetting that dramatic fleshing out is Meryl Streep,
who stars as magazin-ista Miranda Priestly. “I don’t know what research she did,” admits
Frankel. “She was very careful not to let us peek behind the curtain of her
process. We gave her a lot of information about magazine editors throughout the
years… but I honestly don’t know if she read any of that. I just know she had
an angle of attack on the character that I thought was brilliant.”

Equally important to the movie’s success, though, is its
other star, Anne Hathaway, for whom Frankel also has nothing but the highest
praise. “She really carries the film, she’s like a young Audrey Hepburn or
Julia Roberts,” he says. “She’s just remarkably vulnerable, engaging and funny,
and certainly her experience working with Meryl paralleled the story — which is
that of a young, ambitious girl who comes face to face with someone who might
be her idol, and she has to learn how to work with her and impress her, and
whether that path that her [supposed mentor] has chosen is the path that she
wants for herself.”

It was the movie deal that launched a thousand feverish nights of keyboard pecking, probably more.

In the spring of 1997, a beer slinger/bouncer named Troy Duffy hit the aspirant-filmmaker lotto when he sold his screenplay The Boondock Saints for $300,000 to Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who promptly attached Duffy to direct, agreed to let his band do the soundtrack, and, as a goodwill bonus, even offered to buy and throw in co-ownership of the Melrose Avenue bar where Duffy worked. If Schwab’s was the old symbol of Tinseltown discovery, this was a radical new overhaul for the post-Tarantino age of underclass, video store-fed auteurism.

Co-directors Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith capture the rise, but mostly the fall, of Duffy in their up-close and highly personal documentary, Overnight. Call it Project Redlight — an inverted fairy tale and cautionary portrait of self-deception, whose horrific real-life comedy at times reaches Christopher Guest-like proportions of delusional absurdity.

Smith first caught Duffy performing an acoustic set one night at the now-razed J. Sloan’s. “I looked around the room and noticed that everyone had stopped their conversations,” he recalls. “And then, after the set, he was this center of attention; everyone was surrounding him, and he was being very outspoken, very charismatic, and was making people laugh. I said, ‘I’ve gotta meet this guy.'” Smith approached Duffy as a filmmaker, offered to do a music video with him, and was told to swing by Duffy’s apartment and “bring a six-pack of beer,” a standard entrance fee. Two weeks later, Smith was co-managing the band, partnering at Duffy’s suggestion with Montana, an ex-actor who had background as both a personal trainer and a professional wrestling manager.

In the halcyon days of their early friendship and the deal’s infancy, Duffy — a dynamic, Boston-born, thick-necked blowhard who communicates in the traditional alpha-male modes of drunken cajolery, passive-aggressive manipulation and grandiose bombast — was a rallying (if generally soused) ringleader. He even sent an e-mail to Montana’s parents praising their son and detailing the pair’s plans for shaking up the town. Overnight, however, captures the amplification of his bullying and egomania.

Chain-smoking Marlboro Lights in his standard uniform of surly, anti-establishment disaffection (a black T-shirt and overalls), the burly, invective-spewing Duffy rides herd in Overnight like a Mafioso Don on his wide-eyed, wallflower compatriots — a group of seven (including Montana and Smith) known without irony as The Syndicate — all the while hoarding credit and deflecting all blame and responsibility. “Troy was always shirtless and walking around with his hands in his pants,” recalls Montana. “He had an obsession with pornography. He was so overcompensating. He was a very strange individual.”

After Duffy reacted negatively to sundry early casting suggestions for The Boondock Saints — his deal stipulated a $15 million budget with Weinstein having approval over several of the leads, or $10 million with Duffy getting full casting approval — he agreed to take a meeting with Ewan McGregor. “Troy thought he could go out, meet with Ewan and get drunk, have a Scottish-Irish love affair, as he called it, and sign him lickety-split. That’s what he said,” explains Montana. “So he went to New York, and when he came back, things got very quiet. It turned out that they had a bad meeting, got into an argument over the death penalty, and Ewan wasn’t interested. And at that time, Ewan was really one of Miramax’s rising stars.” Additional dissent within the company — most peg then-president of production Meryl Poster as a fan of neither Duffy’s coarseness nor The Boondock Saints script — made for a slowly developing portrait of buyer’s remorse. “Harvey waited six months to put it into turnaround so it would be considered damaged goods and no one would pick it up, which is exactly what happened,” Montana says. “He slowly kept bankrolling a little bit of pre-production money, and then in November [1997] notified Troy’s agents that they weren’t making the picture.”

Framed within the context of the Oscar success of The English Patient and Weinstein’s ongoing Hollywood feting at the time, it’s not hard to view the entire affair as Miramax bleeding Duffy and the project dead before eventually dumping its corpse out of a speeding car. “In the Hollywood food chain, the distributors are at the top… and they can play games like that,” says Montana. “They don’t care how you feel, what you’re going through, whether you have money or you don’t.”

Montana and Smith would come to experience much of the same ugliness of the business, though initially it came in the form of condescension. “The funny thing is that I don’t think the higher-ups — the executives and the producers and the agents — really thought we’d ever end up with anything,” says Smith of their Overnight footage. “I think they thought we were doing this for Troy — we were a part of his posse, part of the entourage, and were living a pipe dream that … we had a product here. They appeased us, and they let us shoot, [but] they’d roll their eyes when we would walk in the room. It was very humiliating for us.”

The irony, of course, was that, as Duffy’s fortunes spiraled downward, Overnight‘s prospects actually seemed rosier. “Some of our closest friends and family asked if we were going to continue shooting, if we [still] had a story. And we knew what we had captured to that point, and we certainly knew what kind of character Troy was,” says Smith. “So [we decided to] follow him going through the hell of getting this film restructured and getting another record deal. That’s part of the story. We embraced the darkness and, toward the end of the film, it sort of being this Greek tragedy.”

The apex of strangeness was reached after a bizarre incident at the Palm Springs Film Festival — the immediate aftermath of which is captured in Overnight — in which a runaway car jumped the curb, barreled toward Duffy and his producer, and then sped away. It was then that Duffy, who Montana says always kept a shotgun and pistol around, took his guns, changed his phone number, moved out of his apartment, and went into semi-seclusion, claiming the Miramax Mafia — a phrase bandied about in publicity circles but meant literally here — was out to get him. Duffy suggested Montana and Smith take the same measures of precaution, even though he blamed their efforts to document the entire Boondock saga for causing his endangerment.

Montana and Smith last had contact with Duffy on June 30, 2000, when, Montana says, Duffy threatened him over the phone and demanded back the release he had signed. The filmmakers refused. “We decided to cut off all communication with Troy, go underground, and edit the film,” says Smith. “We had to lie to peopl
e we ran into out on the streets, tell them we shelved the project. Only our closest friends and family knew what we were doing.”

“We weren’t about to go down with the ship and just give up four years of our lives,” adds Montana. And for that, inveterate film-gossip hounds and others warm to a jaw-dropping look at a Hollywood train wreck, no matter what they may ultimately think of Duffy or his movie, are thankful.

As the co-writer of deeply loved comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink helped locate
the unique humor in both violently clashing cultures and slacker ethos, and he
says you’ll see that same idiosyncratic stamp of personality on Accepted, a high school laffer that
serves as his directorial debut.

The film centers on Bartleby “B” Gaines (Justin Long), an
inveterate dreamer and graduating senior who’s on his way to amassing a perfect
collection of college rejection letters. (“We establish that he’s a very clever
guy,” says Pink, “but someone who applied it in ways that aren’t traditional —
like he didn’t write for the paper, but did his own ’zine.”) To avoid the
embarrassment of confessing to his parents that he didn’t get into school, B
drafts several of his oddball friends from similar, college-less circumstance
and creates his own university. Calling in some friendly favors, he has techie bud Sherman (Jonah Hill) craft a web site, secures some free space courtesy of a local
abandoned mental hospital and also convinces Sherman’s burnout uncle (Lewis
Black) to pose as the dean.

And voila! The South Harmon Institute of Technology
is born. B and his fellow South Harmon classmates soon realize they’ve done
their jobs too well, though, as dozens of other college rejects from out of
town start showing up for classes. Under the scornful eyes of the privileged
students and faculty from a neighboring college, B and his friends forge ahead
with maintaining a functioning but inherently fake university.

Pink says he was lured behind the camera by the film’s
unique potential (it was written by Mark Perez, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage),
and that he wanted to bring a touch of reality to the adolescent experience and
inject Accepted with some character
and energy from classic teen films of yore. Bartleby is somewhat similar to Ferris
Bueller in that he’s an inventive and otherwise directed kid with a healthy
disregard for institutions — someone who wants to see what it’s like to live
outside the carefully prescribed borders of adolescent life.

In Ferris Bueller,
notes Pink, the joke is that he’s teetering on the edge of this “gateway evil,
when he just really wants to take off a day of school. In this movie it’s
similar: if you don’t go to college, you’re a lost soul. Your very happiness is
threatened by virtue of the fact that your success is put squarely in doubt.
Will you be a successful, productive member of American society if you don’t
get a college degree, or one that’s prescribed by a mainstream institution? If
you have a massively entrepreneurial or artistic spirit or something, then yes
of course you will, but that’s not what kids are trained. Kids are tracked to
go to college to get a degree to get a good job so they can be happy. OK,
there’s nothing wrong with that value, but that can’t be the only value.”

Those expecting Advanced Level Buffoonery or an audit of
Comedic Archetypes 101, meanwhile, might be disappointed or at least surprised
by the film. “I didn’t want to do the ‘hair gel goofballs,’ you know? I tried
to find people who didn’t seem to fit anywhere else instead of construct
deliberately a bunch of freaks,” says Pink. “I love movies where, even inside
the genre, you love all the people. The bad genre movies, to me, are the ones
where all the characters are in service of the gross-out joke or the wacky set
pieces that they engage in. I want kids to identify with people in the movie
and also have it be really, really funny.” If Accepted is accepted, Pink might emerge as the new John Hughes. Accepted is slated to open August 11, from Universal.
For a review of the film, meanwhile, click here.

Set in suburban Orange County in a paranoid, dystopian
future where one-fifth of the American population has been hired to spy on everyone
else in the name of national security and the war on drugs, director Richard
Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a hallucinatory
and cautionary tale of drug use based on a novel by Philip K. Dick somewhat
informed, in turn, by his own experiences. Owing to the genre cachet of its
author, there was considerable interest from Hollywood
studios in making the film.

Waking Life — it
came with all sorts of strings that voided the deal. “We never really thought
it about (as live action),” explains producer Tommy Pallotta. “There were
certain design issues. …What does it mean for the characters and mirroring
their psychological universe? It just really didn’t come to us. It was just an
artistic vision we had that we felt matched the material. Very early on when we
tried to get funding for the project we were met with a lot of resistance,
because it’s an R-rated film and they didn’t feel that there was an audience
for it. So they were interested in it, but only wanted us to do it live action.”

In the wake of the success of Sin City, however, prospects look quite
different for trippy live action-animated hybrids, and the more R-rated, the
better. Still, A Scanner Darkly is
far from an easy sell. A paranoid journey into the absurd — with all its
attendant double crosses, head feints and slurry identities — Pallotta
describes it as an independent-minded animated film with adult themes. “To me
it’s science fiction,” he says, “but does it really fit what people associate
with that genre? There are no spaceships. To me the interesting things about sci-fi
are the philosophical and existential questions about what does it mean to be
human, the ontological questions (about) the nature of reality.”

“Sci-fi as a genre has a certain set of expectations in movies,”
Pallotta continues. “I think there’s a cynical notion on the moviemaking side
that people have to see a chase scene. But teenagers are really open-minded, they’re
into seeing different movies from different countries and people are so much
more sophisticated now — they want something new, something they haven’t seen
before. So I have faith that the audience wants that as well.”

That the $8 million A
Scanner Darkly is a labor of love is undeniable. All the actors (including Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, above) accepted
scale — a necessity, really, given that they worked for a month or less while
most of the film’s animators toiled for around a year. The estate of Philip Dick
also cut their fee significantly after discussions with Linklater and his
production staff. How that love is embraced by audiences — darkly or brightly — remains to
be seen. For a review of the film, click here.