I turned on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night, and quickly shut it off after hearing the phrase “nerd prom” about seven times and getting sideline reports from at least two guys wearing “wacky” bow ties. Hey, you know what would make the Oscars red carpet even worse? Add cable news pundits and smug DC spin doctors, all filmed on the one night of the year when they’re encouraged to be armchair comedians. Ugh, the worst.

Anyway, since they’re really good at countering the right’s argument that Hollywood is just a mouthpiece for the Democrats, Steven Spielberg showed up to present a parody featurette for Obama (in the vein of Lincoln), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Barack Obama. It was…. decently funny, actually. Turns out Obama is a better comedy actor than most comedy actors. Also, it was worthwhile solely for reminding me of Bill the Butcher.

Say what you will about Gangs of New York‘s plot, my God, I want to live in that set. If a wild-eyed scientist screeched up to the curb in a time machine and asked me where I wanted to go, I’d be screaming “TOP HAT GANG FIGHT!” before he even got the words out of his mouth.

Daniel Day-Lewis did his ridiculous method acting thing in Lincoln, and it’s hard to imagine the movie without him, but did you know that he initially rejected the role? At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (which, additional trivia, Armond White is a three-time former chairman of), Spielberg, presenting Day-Lewis’s best actor award, read the Dear Steve letter Day-Lewis sent him. That’s right, a letter. Like, through the mail, with stamps and ink and everything, just like in olden times.

Dear Steven,

It was a real pleasure just to sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me. [THR]

Typical Daniel Day. “There is no choice. ‘Acting?’ Nay, for that you must call an actor. I merely choose to live my life a certain way, and if that manner of living happens to coincide with a story in a script, I consent to being filmed for a movIe. For one cannot ‘act,’ only live. I would never lie to my audience.”

Spielberg later had Tony Kushner re-write the script, Day-Lewis accepted, and the rest is history. Another piece of trivia, Daniel Day-Lewis actually acquired the “Day” in his surname after marrying former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day-O’Connor while preparing for a role as a judge. Maybe.

“CURSE THIS DAMNABLE AUTOCORRECT!”

The best thing about Daniel Day-Lewis is that he’s an incredible actor, and in Lincoln, he made almost everyone else look like they were in a high school drama class by comparison, especially Sally Field. The worst thing about him is that by being so good while so nutty, he validates all the silly method processes actors think they need in order to convincingly pantomime. In the mid nineties, Lewis trained with boxing champ Barry McGuigan twice a day, seven days a week for three years before starring in The Boxer. For The Crucible, he built his character’s house himself using 17th century tools. On Lincoln, you just know he was screaming about being “clothed in immense power” every time a PA screwed up his macchiato, and Sally Field seems to confirm as much in an interview with Backstage (emphasis mine):

When did you actually meet Daniel as Daniel?
Field: I never met him. Never. I met him as Mr. Lincoln. He met me as his Molly, as he called her. And that’s how we knew each other. And we began a relationship. He began it, not me. After I got the role, there were seven months before we began to shoot and he would text me all the time, in character. I would have to then answer back in the language of the time, which was really hard to figure out, but great fun. And we were very much our characters. I would criticize him for the language he just used, as Mary, would and that was really the beginning of building a relationship that you see on screen.

Man, that’s almost as good as Wesley Snipes signing his post-it notes “from Blade.” More importantly, I think there’s a pretty obvious opportunity for a single-serving Tumblr or Twitter here, “Texts from Abe Lincoln.”

TO: Mme Bixby

SO sry 4 ur loss ;-(. No wrd I say cn assge ur brvmnt. A mlln thx 4 ur cstly scrfce on altr o frdm :-D

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“What did the ten fingers say to the South?”

Steven Spielberg is in full Amistad mode in Lincoln, and if nothing else, it’s nice to have his take on history once again unhoofed from a magical pony. It’s been a few years since ’97, so you may have forgotten how much the Speelzman enjoys him some semi-arcane historical political maneuvering as it relates to the legality of slavery. But boy does he! It fascinates him! For Spielberg, this is actually a good thing. On the rare occasion that Spielberg actually gets criticized these days, it’s usually on account of being a gooey hokey schmaltzy cheeseball. Nothing wrong with that, not everyone’s going to make films as subtle as Sofia Coppola, and thank God, but the biggest problem with cheesy hokum is that it can feel impersonal, like a director’s just telling the audience what they want to hear. And that becomes too broad, lacks personality, starts to feel like it was aimed at a composite of a person instead of a person, glossing over those little details and idiosyncrasies that give people, and movies, their individual charm. The best (and most surprising) thing about Lincoln is that it lets Spielberg indulge his more esoteric side, and it makes you remember that, oh right! This Steven Spielberg, he’s an actual person, and not just a series of focus-tested camera tricks, a chimera built of horse magic, child-like wonder and John Williams scores.

Rather than a broad biopic, Lincoln focuses on the final days of the Civil War, when Abe was trying to force the 13th amendment through a constipated House. Now, here’s where it gets complicated. Lincoln had already sort of freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. The problem with that – as Daniel Day-Lincoln explains during a meeting of his advisors – is that the emancipation was a war powers act, resting on the legal assumption that the president has the right to seize property from enemy nations. That assumption was in turn problematic because for one, it de facto legitimized the notion that slaves were property, and for another, it supported the Confederacy’s disputed notion that the Confederacy was a sovereign nation. Not to mention that the emancipation didn’t apply to the border states or territory already reclaimed by the Union, and once the South was part of the Union again, as everyone hoped it would be, the emancipation did nothing to outlaw slavery there. The emancipation was mostly a big F-you to the South that only freed about 50,000 of the country’s four million slaves. Furthermore, many border staters’ and northerners’ only interest in outlawing slavery was as a way to crush the South’s will^† and end the war. If Lincoln didn’t get slavery outlawed before the end of the war, he worried that it’d never be resolved. With the 13th Amendment already through the Senate, Lincoln is the story of Abraham Lincoln horse-trading and cajoling the House to pass an amendment it had already rejected less than a year earlier.

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And then the Best Boy’s cell phone went off and all hell broke loose.

With Lincoln set to open November 16th, it’s just two weeks until Steven Spielberg transports us back to a time when men communicated BY SHOUTING WORDS AT EACH OTHER, ALL OF THE TIME! I’ve been determinedly pounding my fist against desks for weeks in order to prepare. No one inspires human interest pieces like El Speelzbo, and today, The Old Grey Lady dropped its profile of Daniel Day-Lewis. We like to poke fun at DDL as being the most method actor alive, but it’s important to remember that this joke is mostly true.

Mr. Day-Lewis, 55, has already won two best actor Oscars, and his performance here, tender and soulful, convincingly weary and stoop-shouldered, will almost certainly earn him a nomination.

It’s true, the Academy loves stoop shoulders. I just hope DDL doesn’t get his statue snaked by that slump-necked harelip Joaquin Phoenix.

For a while he seemed to give up movies altogether and apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker and a cobbler.

For “The Last of the Mohicans” he taught himself to build a canoe, shoot a flintlock and trap and skin animals. For the opening scene of “My Left Foot,” about Christy Brown, an artist with cerebral palsy, he taught himself to put a record on a turntable with his toes; he also insisted on remaining in a wheelchair between takes and being fed by the crew.

DAY-LEWIS: (*ringing bell*) Boy! Come here! I’ve soiled myself again.

PA: God I hate this job.

He learned to box, naturally, for “The Boxer,” in which he played a prizefighter and former member of the Irish Republican Army and in the process broke his nose and damaged his back. To play the gang leader Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York,” he took butchering lessons, and to play Abraham Lincoln he half-convinced himself that he was Abraham Lincoln.

“Every day, in order to get him out of his trailer into the modern world, we had to walk him through an empty refrigerator box marked ‘TIME MACHINE.’…”
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