Daily Archives: July 23, 2008

David Zucker Readies Michael Moore Takedown

Amusements, Casting About

David Zucker, the director and writer who helped create Airplane! and The Naked Gun
franchise, has called on Hollywood’s tiny but tightly knit Republican
A-list to help him craft a takedown of Michael Moore in the form of a broad yet unusually right-leaning
political satire titled An American Carol, according to Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner. Zucker and his associates have been keeping the film under fairly tight
wraps for months, avoiding any mention of its political perspective by describing the
movie to Hollywood trades in casting updates as only “a spoof of A Christmas Carol and contemporary American
culture.”

The low-budget indie co-stars Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer, with Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, Paris Hilton and frequent Zucker stooge Leslie Nielsen in minor roles. Release is planned sometime by year’s end; the director, a self-described “Sept. 11 Republican,” suggested Friday, Sept. 12, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. For more from the Politico, including plot specifics, click here.

Jonathan Levine Talks Shakespeare, Weed, The Wackness

Interviews

It’s the last interview of the day for filmmaker Jonathan Levine, just in advance of the opening of his new movie The Wackness, and he’s feeling a bit angsty about having carved lines into the side of his head, what with his haircut now being captured for posterity during television interviews. “I didn’t think that part of it out,” he says,” and I look ridiculous. I haven’t seen my girlfriend yet, but I sent her a picture via text message and she was like, ‘You moron.’”

Levine will more than gladly take a bit of good-natured ribbing to help get his film out there, though, especially after all the curious delays on his first movie, the teen horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, that have helped render his chronological follow-up his actual big screen commercial debut. As The Wackness — a sensation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award — makes a slow summer crawl across the United States (it’s currently grossed just under $600,000 in major cities), the 32-year-old Levine indicates he’s just happy to finally have a film see commercial release. “It’s cool in many ways,” he says, “and it’s fine for this to be my introduction to audiences because it’s a very personal film for me.”

Never in his wildest dreams did Levine imagine that his script — about an angst-ridden, high school pot-peddler who starts swapping Ziploc baggies of weed in exchange for therapy from an equally neurotic, screwed-up therapist — would elicit an Oscar-winning star to make comparisons to the Bard’s Henry IV. For the full interview with Levine, from FilmStew, click here.