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.

It’s all but gospel now that Stanley Kubrick once conceived a perfect movie called AI, but died before he could make it, at which point Steven Spielberg took over and added an ending that was just him raining a warm piss stream on Kubrick’s dead face. Hey, that’s what people say. Well now, Spielberg tells French TV that he’s taken over another Kubrick project, working with Kubrick’s family on Kubrick’s famously ambitious but never executed screenplay about Napoleon, of which Kubrick once said “I expect to make the best movie ever made.” Interestingly, Spielberg plans to do it as a miniseries. Say what you will about AI, if this is half as good as Band of Brothers, I will watch until my eyes bleed.

Kubrick wrote the script in 1961 but ultimately abandoned the Napoleon biopic in the ’70s because of budget and production challenges. The late filmmaker is famed for his obsessive perfectionism, so his estate should find comfort working in the able hands of Spielberg. [THR]

Kubrick’s Napoleon project was so well-known that it even inspired an 1100-page coffee table book called “The Greatest Movie Never Made.” Impressive, considering a script is only about a hundred pages. ThePlaylist offers their cliff’s notes:

Originally proposed as his next project after “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick pitched the movie as a $5 million production (roughly $100 million in today’s dollars) with extraordinarily ambitious plans that included upwards of 30,000 men as extras for the battle scenes (remember, this was before CGI) as well as utilizing front projection techniques that he had recently used on ‘2001.’

The research was extensive and meticulous, with Kubrick using Felix Markham’s 1966 biography as a launching pad for his in-depth study that eventually grew to include extensive index cards kept on everyone in Napoleon’s life, and cross referenced to an exacting degree.

MGM had initially greenlit the movie, and United Artists were offered the project, but both grew wary after similar epics like “War & Peace” and “Waterloo” struggled financially.

Kubrick once contracted Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange (the novel) to write a novel which would become the basis for his Napoleon movie. Kubrick rejected Burgess’s work, saying “Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.” Burgess published the book anyway, Napoleon’s Symphony.

Meanwhile, I’m told, Spielberg has found a novel way to approach the material, in that he plans to tell the entire story from the perspective of Napoleon’s horse. I’d actually be most interested in the period of Napoleon’s life when he was exiled on Saint Helena way the hell out in the middle of the South Atlantic. But as long as they cover the day he spent at Raging Waters I’ll be happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

This is… the story of a girl… who cried a river and drowned the whole world…

Director’s Guild president Taylor Hackford today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2012, which included Steven Spielberg and Les Misérables director Tom Hooper, but not Paul Thomas Anderson, Rian Johnson, Steven Soderbergh, or Quentin Tarantino. If you wonder why there are so many bad movies, that a voting majority of directors have boring, crappy taste may have something to do with it.

Argo – Ben Affleck

Zero Dark Thirty – Kathryn Bigelow

Les Misérables -Tom Hooper

Life of Pi – Ang Lee

Lincoln – Steven Spielberg [full press release]

This is Spielberg’s 11th DGA nomination, a record. I don’t know what’s worse, the DGA not recognizing The Master, Django Unchained, or Looper (all of which feature in my top five of the year), or that they honored Les Mis with anything but a Smash Mouth parody. Especially since the Les Mis haters were so vocal:

Read the rest of this entry »

I did my best when I reviewed Lincoln, and it was pretty good because I’m a certified genius, but to a certain degree, my analysis of it as entertainment value doesn’t matter nearly as much as how accurate it was as history. Because while certain biopics about historical figures go more for historical fiction than literal history (Braveheart, say), the ones that do purport to be factual have a certain amount of responsibility. It’s scarily easy for popular myths to drown out actual truths in the popular memory, like that time Teddy Roosevelt ate three whole pheasants and still mollywhopped a Cossack. I’m not a Civil War historian, so I leave the historical analysis up to the experts, like Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College Jim Downs, who recently wrote a nice piece on Lincoln for Huffington Post.

Downs’ take on Lincoln is, predictably, nuanced. He refutes other historians charges that Spielberg portrayed blacks as passive, arguing that the subtlety of their objections to the proceedings in the movie actually seems period accurate. He praises Gloria Reuben’s performance as Lincoln’s housekeeper, Elizabeth Keckley, as “a masterful portrayal of subtlety and dissemblance” – a delicate balancing act of dual consciousness, fulfilling white expectations while maintaining an inner self.

Meanwhile, Downs takes Spielberg (or screenwriter Tony Kushner, depending on how you look at it) to task for failing to present Lincoln and others’ true motivations for wanting to abolish slavery, a good deal of which was economic. (This part involves some spoilers):

At that point, I wanted to jump up in the theater in the spirit of Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire and exclaim, “show me the money.” Were there no economic motivations for abolishing slavery? Economic concerns were integral in starting the war — the South wanted to move west to expand cotton production and needed slave labor to ensure its capital growth. The North feared that if slavery expanded to the West, then the Northern economy would crumble as a result of competition and the general desolation that slavery left in its wake. Yet Spielberg’s Lincoln never tips his stovepipe hat to economic considerations for ending slavery nor do any of the members of Congress who speak ardently for passage of the bill. In the film, the Speaker of the House, in an unprecedented move, interrupts the proceedings to announce that he wants to add his vote to the tally, claiming that he was breaking parliamentary procedure and voting for the bill in the name of history. Are we really supposed to believe that the whole of Congress voted to end slavery based solely on how they thought history would remember them, or did their economic self-interests play a part?

Read the rest of this entry »