this week’s big screen re-up of Miami Vice,
but Justin Theroux has another movie coming out this year that in some
circles is even more hotly anticipated — namely, David Lynch’s Inland Empire, the visionary filmmaker’s first big screen work since 2001’s Oscar-nominated Mulholland Drive.

“I
love it!” exclaims Theroux when asked about the film and his experience
on it, which involved breaks of several days while he was
simultaneously on call for Miami Vice duty. “It’s loosely a
mystery [but] I have no idea what kind of movie we’re going to have,”
says Theroux in an exclusive interview from the editing bay of his directorial debut, Dedication.
“As far as what the movie is about, I could rattle off a couple scenes,
but it’s difficult to describe. I play an actor who sort of gets cast
in a large movie, and in that movie I play a Southern gentleman, and
that’s about all I know. And then there are tons of scenes within that,
but I don’t know how he’s going to use those scenes, you know?” Theroux
estimates the director could have literally hundreds of hours of usable
footage.

While Lynch always exerts an exacting stylistic control over his
films that often renders flat narrative description or attempted plot
synopses rather moot, the tightly controlled and digital video-shot Inland Empire production marks a further descent into the type of beautiful, slurry mystery the director indulged after Mulholland Drive
— in which Theroux also starred — morphed from a failed ABC television
pilot into a stand-alone feature film. Eschewing a completed
screenplay, he instead parceled out bits days before filming. “David
never really gave us a script, he just gave us scenes, these little
10-page packets,” recalls Theroux. “And then we’d go home and he’d hand
us another one at the end of the night, or hand us three at a time. But
they sometimes seemed really linked and sometimes didn’t. So the actual
process [of filming] seemed probably very similar to what it’s going to
be like to watch it, which involves sort of having to link it together
as you go.”

Regardless, it’s the experience itself that Theroux most cherishes.
“Working with David is probably the best time you’ll ever have in your
life,” he notes. “Contrary to what anyone might think, when you’re
making a David Lynch movie you don’t feel like you’re making a
David Lynch movie; you feel like you’re making a Farrelly brothers
movie or something. He’s just a really, really fun guy to be around,
and everyone that he works around and hires is just a blast. So you
just go and have a goof and get serious for the work, but the rest is
just gravy. It was really fun.”

From the outside, the life of a Hollywood director is glamorous, but just days before its $23 million opening weekend bow, Monster House
director Gil Kenan is calling from the doctor’s office, where, in
advance of his film’s big premiere later that night, he’s cramming in a
few interviews alongside a mandatory appointment for a full physical
that will allow him to embark upon an international press tour of three
weeks. We chat a bit about the competition his movie will be facing and
other films soon set to release — he’s eager to get the advance scoop
on Woody Allen’s Scoop — but soon Kenan’s name is called, for the moment cutting short our talk.

The next day Kenan calls back, and confirms what this past weekend’s
box office would corroborate: the 29-year-old is in fine shape. The
motion-capture animated Monster House,
which is deservedly getting great notices, tells the fun, engaging
story of a trio of tweeners who investigate and then do battle with an
anthropomorphized abode, and in a summer full of bloated and
disappointing fare it’s a streamlined winner, something kids, teens and
adults can all enjoy.

For Kenan, all the praise only fits in with what he readily admits
is a surprisingly stratospheric rise. “All kidding aside, I was really
certain that when I graduated from UCLA I would be making short films
in my kitchen for the next five years until I got a job doing something
on a movie and got a break,” says Kenan, a Tarzana, California native.
It was his graduate thesis short, a blend of live-action and animation
entitled The Lark, that put him on the path toward helming a Hollywood blockbuster straight out of film school. “Monster House
is the further embodiment of some of those same themes, one of which is
that houses play an emotional role in our lives,” says Kenan. “In The Lark that notion is much more subtly presented.”

“I was really stunned when the movie got noticed at its first
screening by Creative Artists Agency, and they signed me out of that
screening,” Kenan continues. “That was really shocking to me. I thought
that was as good as it was going to get, and then they started sending
the movie around and it ended up in the hands of Robert Zemeckis, who
thought it was cool. And then he passed it on to his friend Steven Spielberg…”

The rest, as they say, is history. Of course, Kenan still had a few
battles to fight in shepherding the film to the big screen, including
casting age-appropriate actors in the lead voice roles (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi, Jon Heder and others pop up in supporting roles). “That was a big deal for me,
actually,” recalls Kenan. “I had to fight hard to convince a lot of
people that we needed kids in this movie for it to have any shot at
emotional honesty, and for it to be at all valid as a coming-of-age
story. A lot of people would say, well, you don’t see the kids (on
screen) and their voices change (over production), but I knew in my
heart that the movie wouldn’t work without the kind of weirdness and
awkwardness and natural energy that the kids bring to their parts.”

Kenan’s happy, too, with the integrity of Monster House’s
PG rating, which he admits makes the movie probably a bit too
hard-edged for very young kids. Pointing out that its tension comes
from “good-natured scares,” Kenan notes, “One of the great things about
having Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg as your producers is that a lot of that nonsense that makes movies kind
of gutless goes away. They helped me make this movie the way it needs
to be, which is really scary for young kids.” If its opening weekend
and positive word-of-mouth are any indication, Monster House should be scaring up hearty audiences throughout the rest of the summer.

Kevin Smith was at one point attached to make the film adaptation of The Green Hornet. Kevin Smith wants to make it clear he no longer has any interest in that gig. To wit:

“It really comes down to the fact that I’m not
talented enough to pull off a movie like that,” says Smith, in a straightforward fashion. “It was between that and Clerks
II, and I drove toward Clerks II in such a big, bad way. I almost really had to
fight Harvey Weinstein to do Clerks II instead of The Green Hornet, because he was
like, ‘It’s time for you to grow and stretch as a filmmaker,’ and I’m like,
doesn’t anybody fucking get it, after 12 years? I am not that talented. This is
what I do, this is why I got into films, to tell stories like this. I love
watching films, I love comic book movies, I’d love to watch the Green Hornet movie, but I do not want to
be the guy at the helm of that movie.”

“Number one, if I make that movie I lose
the right to make fun of other people for making those movies,” Smith continues. “I learned that
lesson harshly on Jersey Girl. I can’t go after shit like Raising Helen anymore. …But number two, and more importantly, that’s
not the type of story that I like to tell. I like to tell stories about people
sitting around talking to one another, and that’s really all I’m good at, and
most people would argue I’m not very good at that to begin with. So the notion
of doing The Green Hornet is not appealing to me. In comic book form — wonderful. I
love to write comic books. You don’t have to worry about actually shooting it.” For more from Kevin Smith about Clerks II, click here. Or, for a review of the film, click here.

Kevin Smith is a talker. You probably knew this, however. His movies are full of dialogue — wonderfully effusive (and frequently profane) explosions of words. I caught up with him recently at a press day in advance of Clerks II, and this is what one question about the movie’s genesis produced.

“I really wanted to tell a story about what it was like to
be in my 30s, and I tried to do that with Jersey
Girl and I think I was kind of successful in what I wanted to do, but at
the same time it’s a movie that’s a bit manipulative, tends to be a bit mawkish
and what not,” says Smith. “So I wanted to do version of movie that was a little bit more in
touch with reality, which is odd because this movie does have a donkey show at
its epicenter. So I thought Clerks was a movie about what it felt like to be in
my 20s and I could use Dante and Randal as a way in, so suddenly it became
Clerks II. I talked about doing the movie back in 1998, and in the tale end of
the Dogma credits, which came out in ’99, it said, “Jay and Silent Bob will return
in Clerks II: Hardly Clerkin’.” And then I thought you know what, maybe I
shouldn’t fuck with the sacred cow. If I do a sequel to the first film, what if it
sucks and people retroactively go back and hate on the first film as well? So
it became Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,
but all the ideas were there, and the groundwork had been laid in my head, and
that Dante and Randal story was always kind of in the background. I figured I’ll
do it in comic book form or what not.”

“And then when I started thinking about
telling the story about what it felt like to be in my 30s I thought, shit,
that’s the story. It’s all coming together, it’s gelling now. Some people
online have been like, well, it’s obviously a reaction to Jersey Girl. Jersey Girl didn’t do well
so he’s going back to the well and retrenching. And they’ve missed the target
but hit the tree — Jersey Girl played a role but it wasn’t that. Because  I was already dialed into Clerks II while
making Jersey Girl, to some degree. Because I was like, “Man, the next movie I don’t want to
work with famous people or celebrities, I just want to work with people who are
unknowns. I don’t want to have to worry about In Touch or US Weekly putting them on the cover every
fucking week.” I mean, it’s weird when you spend two years of your life trying
to put togther a story and then you sit down to talk about it, and nobody wants
to talk about it. [Instead] they say, “Did you see the pink diamond, is it huge?” I’m like
yes, but, what does that have to do with anything man? When the backstory
overshadows the story, it’s just not cool anymore. As a storyteller it’s kind
of insulting — it’s like Jesus Christ, either the movie is as bad as you say and you have
nothing to talk about except these two or you find these two more fascinating
than the movie we put together.”

Director
Uwe Boll is a filmmaker in the grand, throwback tradition of the
snake-oil showmen of the medium’s traveling circus infancy. Derided by
some (okay, many), he’s made a handful of genre flicks (Blackwoods, House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark), most of which are rooted in videogames, and recently also started challenging journalists to boxing matches (no word yet on whether or not I’ll make the cut). His latest film is January’s BloodRayne,
now new to DVD, complete with a feature-length audio commentary track
with Boll and star Kristanna Loken, storyboards, a five-minute CGI
montage, a 53-minute dinner-and-discussion with IGN’s Chris Carle, and
a separate copy of the eponymous videogame itself. I took some time
recently to talk with Boll about both BloodRayne, its
disappointing and strange commercial release, and his myriad of
forthcoming projects. The conversation is excerpted in brief below, 15
questions for 15 rounds.

Alone in the Dark that there were a lot of script problems on that movie and you weren’t really happy with it. So for BloodRayne you went out and secured Guinevere Turner (American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page, television’s The L Word). How did that come about?

UB: We were definitely looking out for better writers, and
for better writing for all the movies coming up, and Guinevere Turner —
even if she has no ideas from videogames — came up with the best pitch.
We were so convinced that I gave her a full briefing — like 10 pages
that I wanted in the script and she was really able to get in: the way
BloodRayne looks and fights, and certain back stories and brimstone and
vampire hunters. So this was basically a very positive development that
we had a writer like her.

BS: What about for Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King, which seems to be your biggest production to date?

UB: It’s three times bigger than all of the other movies I
have done, and it has a $60 million budget. What is really massive is
that we have 1,400 CGI shots, which is more than (the second) The Lord of the Rings,
and it will be a big, epic movie — the first fantasy epic. All of the
other movies (I’ve done) are more horror and action, so it’s a
different thing. The writers on Dungeon Siege, David Freeman
and Doug Taylor, they both wrote the main story and script, even though
there were other writers involved. It took one and a half years, and
the first draft was like 300 pages long, but they really worked
together and developed a great script. It’s heartbreaking, full of
fantasy, interesting twists and characters, which is one of the reasons
that we got so many great actors in the film. But the same is true of BloodRayne.

BS: What was it about BloodRayne that most interested
you? I know you’ve snapped up a lot of videogame properties, that
you’ve searched for film ideas there, in that medium. But was it the
character first and foremost?

UB: First of all, I always wanted to do a vampire movie, and
here was a chance to do a videogame-based vampire movie and to do it as
a prequel, and really in Transylvania. This is one of the reasons we
shot in Romania. All of this fed my excitement. It was completely
different. In Alone in the Dark you had creatures, House of the Dead is more an action fun zombie movie, and BloodRayne
was more of a character-driven, period piece vampire movie, and so
totally different from the movies I’d done before. There’s a lot of
misunderstanding in the public, where people think I am this guy doing
videogame-based movies and they’re all the same. But this is bullshit
because in videogames you have all genres. You can do an adventure
movie, a horror movie, fantasy, sci-fi. So you have the same
flexibilities as any other movie. So I always look out to make sure
that I do different movies and genres.

BS:
What was it about your leading lady, Kristanna Loken, that most
attracted you — the fact that she has action experience but is
beautiful too?

UB: We had a list of three women that we thought would be good for BloodRayne.
It took a while because Kristanna lives partially in South Africa, so
we went first to another actress, but she passed on it, which was good.
And then Kristanna came back and called me on my cell phone in the
middle of the night in Romania, where (I was scouting), and said she
really wanted to do it. And I had loved her in Terminator 3. BloodRayne is tall, strong and a real heroine, an Amazon fighter. And she’s perfect.

Alone in the Dark and Blackwoods were both hammered critically, and ranked pretty low on various critical aggregate sites, and BloodRayne didn’t do much better. Is that something that you pay any attention to, or does it just make you redouble your efforts?

UB: Look, you never go easy over it, and I think there are
reviews that are fair and good, coming up with the positive and
negative things about that release. (pause) And there are also reviews
out there where they go on the message boards and they see what kind of
videogame geeks, how much they hate me or whatever. They’re getting
influenced not by critics, but more (by) people hanging out on the
Internet. Then they write negative reviews about it because they read
so much negative stuff there. And I also think that from time to time
there are reviews that are unreasonable and unfair, and this is
something I cannot do anything about. But my wish for the future is
basically that more people see the movies before they write something
and before they judge the movies. And then they should compare it to
similar movies and write something based on their real impressions.
This would be my wish list for the future.

Of course these are genre movies and not everybody likes that, so you cannot expect with House of the Dead to get a great review in the Washington Post.
But these are $20 million movies, and the people working on my movies
are all A-list crew people, A-list CGI people. My camera guy, Mathias
Neumann, won all kind of awards; he got, last year in New York City,
the (award for) Best DP in commercial advertising worldwide, so these
people are professionals. And the (effects) people on Dungeon Siege right now are the same people that did Mission: Impossible III and Superman.
So if then people write, “Uwe Boll’s movies are trash,” or, “He is like
Ed Wood,” then this is bullshit. You can write that you don’t like the
story, or you think it’s poor direction or poor acting or whatever, all
this kind of stuff, no problem, but to write that the movies are
completely garbage or are made like hobby movies or amateur movies has
nothing to do with those movies. Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead and BloodRayne are technical, state-of-the-art — they are more expensive and better technically than White Noise
and these kind of other movies. This is the reality. They’re looking
better, our score is always played with a symphony or orchestra of 120
people, made by people (who’ve worked) with Hans Zimmer. And (critics)
writing this bullshit means also that this crew is unprofessional, and
this has nothing to do the reality. I don’t care if the people on the
Internet are writing it, but if the New York Times guy is trashing BloodRayne
(as if) I did a movie on 8mm or something, then I have to think it’s
kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy in his head: “Oh, it’s from Uwe
Boll, I have to trash it.”

BS: If it’s the Internet geeks or fan-boys that so vehemently
dislike you, do you foresee a time, then, because you’re so associated
with videogame adaptations, when you’ll step away from that a little
bit?

UB: Absolutely, I’ll be doing two movies this year. I’ll do Postal, based on the videogame. And Seed
is a horror movie I’ve written which has nothing to do with a
videogame. And in the next few years, I will do definitely a minimum of
the same amount of non-videogame movies as videogame movies.

BS: Tell me a little about those films, then. What’s shooting first and what’s your schedule for the rest of the year?

UB: Seed comes first. In July we start it, and it’s
based on the history of the U.S. death penalty. So you know that under
U.S. law that if you survive three executions in the electric chair
they have to let you go.

BS: I did not know that.

UB: Yeah, but it’s the truth. And in the 1960s and ’70s,
there were electric chairs that were in really bad shape, basically
fucked up, and people survived it but were brain-dead. There are rumors
about what really happened to the people, but they claimed that they
are dead because they had no idea what they should do with these bodies
where the heart was still working but the rest of the body is almost
dead. And so then they buried the people alive.

BS: Wow.

UB: Seed is based on this kind of story, and the
fictional part is that a guy comes back and they dig him out after
having been buried. And (laughs) so it’s a really super, super hot
horror movie.

BS: Has that been cast yet?

UB: No, we start in the next few weeks, but we’ll go more for
unknowns. Because it’s based on reality I don’t want it to be too much
like BloodRayne or whatever. It would be bad for the movie. My
plan is to shoot it more like a documentary — all hand-held, and to get
that feeling like you get in Henry: Portrait of a Serial [Killer], for example. So this (is the) kind of feeling I want in Seed. We’ll have actors that we know, but I don’t want a big star.

BS: And what’s the gist of Postal?

UB: Postal is an action-comedy in a way. It’s like Falling Down,
with Michael Douglas, but funny. In the game you can play it without
violence, too. You can go in a bank and wait in a row; you wait for
two-and-a-half hours in the videogame and then basically you cash in
your check. But also you can go in the bank and kill everybody, and
cash in your check super-fast. (laughs) And in the game you can play
George Bush, Jr. or Osama Bin Laden, you can play all kinds of people.
And my plan is to do, like, Wag the Dog meets Pulp Fiction meets Falling Down.
The script, right now, is being re-written by the game guys. Running
With Scissors is a company in Arizona (that) developed the game on
their own as outsiders, and they’re super-involved also in the
development of the movie. And I think it will be a hilarious movie.
We’ll go for a bigger cast, but only as cameos. We have a couple cops,
and a local political guy who wants to join forces with Bin Laden. So
you have all kinds of freaks and people running around. I think it will
be really funny.

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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.

For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

12 & Holding, which opens this week and expands in arthouse venues across the nation in June.

A quirky tale centering around three 12-year-olds who lose a brother and friend at the hands of two older kids in an unfortunate bullying incident gone wrong, the movie examines the fashion in which these pre-teens cope with grief and other altered circumstances, especially as they run into parents who either suppress, discourage or can’t fully cope with the new ways in which they act out. Zoë Weizenbaum, who played the young Pumpkin in Memoirs of a Geisha, gives a memorably remarkable performance as Malee, a young girl who develops an inappropriate crush on one of the patients, Gus Maitland (Jeremy Renner), of her therapist mother.

“I had some apprehension about the movie just because of the things that (Malee) does,” admits Weizenbaum. But the director, Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.), “explained to me that she’s a really lonely and confused girl, going through all these changes, and her mother is really disconnected from her. It’s an emotional rollercoaster going through puberty and being a teenager, and when you don’t have support it makes it a lot worse. She doesn’t have a father figure (and) she looks to Jeremy as someone to talk to, but I guess she approaches it in the wrong way. She’s just really confused and lonely. It’s sad, what she does.”

What Malee does includes an awkward, attempted seduction — a scene difficult for any actress, but especially one only 14 years of age. “The disrobing scene was done really tastefully,” says Weizenbaum, “and working with Jeremy I basically didn’t have any nerves when it came to doing the scene because of how buddy-buddy we were and how professional he was.” Adds Renner: “Zoë is just so smart and giving, and it’s very easy to like and adore her. I didn’t have to be patient, which I thought I might have to be working with someone younger. She’s probably more professional than I am. She’s just a gem to work with, she felt like family.”

While the Malee-Gus arc is the film’s strongest, it isn’t home to the only interesting, naturalistic adolescent performance. Like Weizenbaum, Montreal native Jesse Camacho — who plays Leonard, a pudgy kid who attempts to reform his family’s eating habits when he loses his sense of taste — won his role after sending in scenes of himself on tape. Cuesta “said I was very natural,” relates Camacho. “I had done these sit-ups in one of the scenes, and apparently those really helped me land the role because they weren’t very good.” No worries — nobody will be saying the same thing about Camacho’s screen work, or that of any of his 12 & Holding peers.

Based on Garrison Keillor’s quirky, long-running eponymous
public radio series and set during said fictitious variety group’s last
broadcast, the musical dramedy A Prairie
Home Companion is director Robert Altman’s 25th feature film, but it still
represented a heartening first for John C. Reilly. “I was doing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway,
and thinking, ‘What’s the next movie I ought to do?’ I literally made a list of directors I wanted to work
with,” recalls Reilly. “Altman was the first one, and four days later he called
me to do the movie. So I was thrilled, obviously, because he’s a pretty special
director. Not every filmmaker has the guts to give people the freedom that Bob
does. He kind of just lets you find your own way into the character and if you
ask him questions about something he’ll give you a straight answer, but if
you’re asking him what you should do he’s gonna say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I
hired you. You tell me what you should do!’”

Shaping his own character was a treat for Reilly,
particularly given his frequent on-screen scene partner — Woody Harrelson, who
Reilly met and befriended on the set of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, another project from a true American auteur. “Me
and Woody are Dusty and Lefty, these old trail hands — archetypal characters
that Garrison has created over the years,” says Reilly. “We do some singing… go
at it a lot. It’s similar to our own friendship — we like to give each other a
hard time, let’s put it that way. But there’s also a lot of funny stuff in
there.” Indeed, set over the course of one rainy evening, the show takes place
against the backdrop of the sale of the radio station, making for much
seriocomic tension.

For Reilly, the experience of actually working with Altman
outstripped even his own inflated expectations. “I found myself many times on Prairie Home Companion having no idea
whether I was on-camera or off-camera,” he says, “and there’s a real,
delightful freedom in that because most of the time in movies you’re all too
aware of where the camera is. There’s a lot of joy in a Robert Altman movie.”

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