You’d think being an intern on Black Swan would be an incredible experience, like getting to judge a pussy-eating contest, but more artsy. …Huh. That sounded much less coarse in my head. Anyway, sadly, according a lawsuit filed by two former interns in a federal court in Manhattan Wednesday, it sounds more like a terrifying brush with living hell, where the damned perform sisyphean tasks like “making coffee” and “taking lunch orders,” while the demons dance around, watching Two and Half Men reruns.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, claims that Fox Searchlight Pictures, the producer of “Black Swan,” had the interns do menial work that should have been done by paid employees and did not provide them with the type of educational experience that labor rules require in order to exempt employers from paying interns.

“Fox Searchlight’s unpaid interns are a crucial labor force on its productions, functioning as production assistants and bookkeepers and performing secretarial and janitorial work,” the lawsuit says. “In misclassifying many of its workers as unpaid interns, Fox Searchlight has denied them the benefits that the law affords to employees.” Workplace experts say the number of unpaid internships has grown in recent years, in the movie business and many other industries. Some young people complain that these internships give an unfair edge to the affluent and well connected.

Whoa, being rich and well connected helps you land better jobs? Someone call the Duh police.

One plaintiff, Alex Footman, a 2009 Wesleyan graduate who majored in film studies, said he had worked as a production intern on “Black Swan” in New York from October 2009 to February 2010.
He said his responsibilities included preparing coffee for the production office, ensuring that the coffee pot was full, taking and distributing lunch orders for the production staff, taking out the trash and cleaning the office.
“The only thing I learned on this internship was to be more picky in choosing employment opportunities,” Mr. Footman, 24, said in an interview.

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At Bay to Breakers last weekend, I think I counted a good 30 variations on Black Swan costumes (including a black guy dressed as a regular swan, which I thought was nicely subtle), making it by far the most popular costume of the day.  That got old fast, but even that couldn’t make me jaded enough not to appreciate these Black-Swan-themed jerseys that an indoor soccer team in Dallas made for their league matches.  They call themselves the “Portman-Kunis United,” and yes, their logo is two crossed scissors.  Said team captain Mike Miller in an email to BeautifulGear:

“I’ve got an indoor soccer team in Division 11 (1 being best, 11 being worst… obviously) here in Dallas Texas and I would like to submit our team jerseys which I designed and made. The patches are embroidered and the lettering is authentic jersey vinyl on Adidas Predator blanks. While we only finished 3rd in our division, I like to think we looked good doing it. The team name is Portman Kunis United (aka The Scissors). It’s a tribute to Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in the movie Black Swan, for their….. amazing acting. Notice the handcrafted numbering, custom with a swan on each number.”

Ahh, nothing like subtle, classy vulgarity.  I wonder if the team handshake involves putting your palms together and interlocking fingers perpendicularly.  Now you’re turn to peek, hee hee!  And bonus points for not calling it a “kit.”  When spoken with an American accent, that word roughly translates to “I’m pretentious!.”

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Yesterday we touched on the controversy over how much of Natalie Portman’s dancing in Black Swan was performed by a stunt double, a topic we quickly abandoned in favor of a thorough investigation of just how much of that thong butt in the Your Highness trailer was hers.  But God forbid anyone care about my Pulitzer-caliber reporting, everyone’s still hung up on the ballerina crap. Darren Aronofsky and Mila Kunis have now both weighed in on the matter.  To recap, here’s what the ballerina double, Sarah Lane, who earned $6,000 $25,000 for her work, had to say:

“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Natalie Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”

“I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”

If I could paraphrase, “Meee-yow.”  Here’s Darren Aronofsky’s two cents:

“Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.

And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic.” [EW]

(*yawns, suppesses urge to wank dismissively*)  And here’s Kunis’s:

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There’s a controversy a-brewin’ over Black Swan (on the eve of the DVD release, no less!).  And by controversy, I mean something three or four people care about.  Natalie Portman’s ballerino husband Ben Millipede says Portman did 85% of the dancing in Black Swan, while her body double, Sarah Lane, claims the number was more like 5%.  The filmmakers back the ballerino, but Lane says it was always the studio’s plan to make it seem like Portman learned a bunch of fancy ballarinery to help build Oscar buzz, even though it’s possible to master the moves from the movie after just a year and a half of training.  Since neither party seems willing to resolve this dispute through scissoring, it isn’t of particular concern to me.

Therefore, we turn our attention to more important matters.  Namely, whether Natalie Portman used a butt double for her now-infamous thong scene in Your Highness (more screencaps here, here).  It’s an important question, because as a professional blogger, Natalie Portman’s butt puts food in my mouth.  According to a recent article in the Sunday Life from Belfast, where Your Highness was filmed, the answer to the butt double question seems to be “yes.”  THONGPOSTER, THONGPOSTER! (*body snatchers shriek*)

A SULTRY Ulster model has landed a small role in an epic US fantasy drama — as a prostitute who beats up a dwarf king. Beautiful Caroline Davis plays the medieval hooker in Game of Thrones, the new series from the makers of mafia hit The Sopranos.  Caroline landed her role after producers saw her stepping in as Natalie Portman’s ‘butt-double’ in the Belfast-shot movie Your Highness.

BOOM!  BUTT DOUBLE’D!  I’ve included a couple pictures of Davis below, which were really hard to find considering she doesn’t have an IMDB page, and her name is “Caroline Davis.”  What pictures I did find all look like model portfolio shots, which makes sense as they came from modeling portfolio sites.  And to be honest, she looks rather skinny for a butt double.  Could it be that by “butt double” they meant “stand in?”  (Meaning they used Davis while setting up the lights and camera, but you’d still be seeing Portman’s butt in the finished shots).  I didn’t want to be the one to say it, but these Irish, sometimes they drink.  In any case, if someone from the production wants to illuminate this issue, I would be more than happy to investigate further using a pile of photos, a lightbox, a jeweler’s eye loupe, and perhaps a graduated cylinder filled with bubbling green liquid.  Really, it’s no trouble.  I’ve got time.

IMPORTANT BUTT UPDATE: Word from a trusted source close to the production who would know is: the part where you can see Natalie’s face (the banner pic) is all Portman, they only used the stunt double for the part where she dives into the water (here), because pshaw, son, an Oscar-winning actress ain’t gonna dive into no cold-ass Irish water.   So there you have it.  Aren’t you glad we cleared that up?  I know Natalie Portman’s butt has been keeping you up at night. And now, probably.

"A-Dubz replaced Annette Bening's Kool-Aid with KNOWLEDGE. Let's see if she notices."

Last night was the scene of the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, an esteemed organization of which Armond White, our favorite thesaurificent cantankeramous, happens to chair.  White being an old-school gangsta of the country club Gutentocracy who once told producer Scott Rudin to “go throw a cell-phone at some PA, you thin-skinned pussy”, there were bound to be some fireworks.  Wait, did I say fireworks?  I mean TRUTHBOMBS BURSTING IN AIR/PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT A-DUBZ STILL HERE SKEET SKEET!

Armond White brought up ‘Black Swan’ director Darren Aronofsky to present an honor to his cinematographer. Immediately, Aronofsky seemed to be channeling his own black swan. [*queeeeef* -Ed]

“Keep it up,” Aronofsky said to White, “because you give us all another reason not to read New York Press.” [VillageVoice]

OOOOH SNAAAP.  Meanwhile, Armond White is the ONLY reason anyone reads the New York Press.

It may have been a response to White’s review of Black Swan, which accused Aronofsky of “ethnic denial” and went on to discuss how much better Kanye West’s video for “Runaway” was.

But White is not “the Don Rickles of film criticism,” so his responses came off as “pompous and scolding,” [shocking. -Ed] the attendee says. Another person who was there describes it as “a mess—Armond broke the bank on insulting award winners he didn’t agree with.”

Like when he insulted Michelle Williams by introducing her with praise for her role in 2004′s Land of Plenty, which got mixed reviews. “I made that movie almost 10 years ago,” Williams said from the stage, according to people who were there. “I can’t imagine what you’ve said about me since then if you had to go back that far to say something nice.”

The only person he insulted by praising Michelle Williams’ acting was every other actor.  Look, I’m all for the criticizees getting their digs in on the criticizer (myself included), but you gotta do better than “I can’t believe he only praised a movie of mine that’s so old!”  By the way, your math sucks.

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