This is the first trailer for Salt (this one’s in English, though a Russian-dubbed one was making the rounds yesterday). It made the “Black List” (the list of the best unproduced screenplays as voted on by Hollywood types) back in 2007, when it was called Edwin A. Salt, and was set to star Tom Cruise in a film by Michael Mann. Mann later dropped out and Hancock director Peter Berg joined the project. Then Cruise dropped out and they hired Quiet American director Phillip Noyce, and re-wrote Cruise’s part for Angelina Jolie, whose character is now named Evelyn A. Salt, which is a shame because everyone knows only c-nty Women Studies professors are named “Evelyn.”
Finally we get a trailer, featuring Jolie opposite Liev Shrieber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, in what looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill thriller, in which the main character may or may not be a Russian spy. It seems like a perfect fit for Cruise, I wonder why he dropped out. I can think of only one explanation — there must’ve been gay people in there. So come on, fess up, who was it? Was it you, Liev? Chuy? Tom Cruise needs to know so he can avoid you.
(Sorry the picture wasn’t more related, Kermit Bale gets me every time)
Poor Tom Cruise can’t seem to buy good publicity these days, but that tends to happen when you’re a total weirdo. The latest hit is an interview with American Psycho director Mary Harron, and it’s really interesting to hear her talk about her latest projects tell us what we already sort of knew about Tom Cruise. From Blackbook Magazine [via Videogum]:
How did you and Christian Bale develop his character in American Psycho?
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.
I can see that. Especially in that one scene where Christian Bale was all, “I like to dissect girls, as long as there are no gay people there.“ By the way, I’m nominating “as long as there are no gays” for the newest meme. “Hey, Bob, what do you say to happy hour?” “I’m in, as long as no gays are in there! You know me, I love to party, as long there’s no gays around! I’ll give a you call the next time no gays are in the room.” “Right on, man, keep f-ckin that chicken.”
Bronson Pinchot has made a career out of playing effeminate foreigners, and he must be set, financially, because he burns some serious bridges in this new interview with the always great Onion A/V Club. Not that that’s a criticism, it’s awesome the 1% of the time when actors are actually honest.
On Risky Business:
We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.
Same thing with Eddie Murphy—I remember somebody calling and saying, “You’ll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!” [Laughs.]
