Sunday shorts.

There's development hell, and then, there's development hell. DM Thomas has spent two decades in one of its deeper circles, watching screenwriters, directors and actors come and go, attach themselves to and fall away from an elusive film adaptation of his bestselling novel, The White Hotel. At the very least, this journey to nowhere has given him stories to tell, and they tumble one after another, dropping names left and right. One of my favorites involves the incarnation of the screenplay in around 1990:

A day of Biblical rain in New York... a winey dinner... On parting, [Dennis] Potter's face streamed with tears as his crippled, arthritic hands grasped [David] Lynch's lapels. If they didn't screw it up, he said, if they saw it through to the end, this would be the work they would both be remembered by. "This movie will be the Madame Bovary of our time."

They screwed it up. Or actually, Lynch did. And on the story rolls.

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• PG Wodehouse is another British writer who had a hellish relationship with Hollywood, writes Robert McCrum.
• Andrew Anthony flies over to interview Tim Robbins but has to deal with US customs first: "Only in America is it no surprise to find a state official who is aware of a film actor's latest output, and only in America would that actor's political pronouncements inspire that official to issue a warning, almost as a condition of entry."
• Bush, Cheney and Blair figure prominently in David Hare's new play, Stuff Happens. Kate Kellaway talks to the leading playwrights of the day about the explicit political content of contemporary theater.
• Jo Tuckman reports on the hopes a TV doc is raising for a group seeking justice in the case of the death of Kirsty MacColl.
• Andrew Pulver's adaptation of the week: Phillipe Harel's Whatever.
• Phelim O'Neill profiles Dennis Quaid.
• The pitch, in full, that scored first a development grant and then a deal: "2128: Everyone wants a ticket off a chronically overcrowded Earth to the new Lunar Cities. But one man uncovers the devastating secret behind the exodus."
• What might the Brits come up with now that tax benefits may be extended for the film industry? Victoria Cohen speculates.
• Euan Ferguson: Mackenzie Crook been "busy filming with Al Pacino, Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp (again) and Terry Gilliam, and today he's on stage in the Assembly Rooms with Christian Slater in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."
• Xan Brooks passes along news that the London Film Festival will open on October 20 with Mike Leigh's Vera Drake and close on November 4 with I Heart Huckabees.

To read Walead Beshty's "The City Without Qualities: Cinema and the Post-Apocalyptic Ruin," spanning Desolation Row from from The Omega Man through Baudrillard's America, click the title at the top of the table of contents for the 7-8.2004 issue of Site.

In the New York Post, Lou Lumenick looks ahead to several tempting releases of classic films on DVD this fall. Via Movie City News.

Hugh Hart takes on the movies section of the San Francisco Chronicle's fall preview. To-the-point blurbs and lots of trailers.

Richard Schickel kicks off Time's thinner yet more lavishly designed fall arts preview. Don't stop clicking once Schickel wraps; he's only handling the biopics. Joel Stein looks ahead to the season's sequels and Richard Corliss introduces "four films that are trespassing on virgin soil."

Looking back instead, Slate's David Edelstein offers "a roundup of the summer's more exotic indie and foreign films."

In the New York Times, Richard Eder reviews Maureen Howard's novel, The Silver Screen (first chapter), "a searching series of variations on one of Howard's large themes: celebrity in American life, the allure it holds, the falsification it works." Speaking of which, Randy Kennedy reports that the Democrats are all but wearing out their celebrity supporters while, in Slate, Rob Long, a writer, producer and Republican, has a few amusing thoughts on the paucity of stars on his side of the fence.

Back to the NYT:

• The sets and costumes are all 19th century, but the perspective is straight-up 21st: Caryn James looks ahead to Mira Nair's Vanity Fair. Deborah Solomon interviews Nair, and over at Film Monthly, by the way, Paul Fischer interviews Reese Witherspoon. Most interesting of the batch, though: Doug Cummings attended Nair's presentation of Satyajit Ray's Aparajito; among the great anecdotes, news that "she is currently preparing to shoot a screen version of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul as well as an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, a novel she recently read that she claimed 'completely moved me to my bones.'"
• Marcelle Clements: "[N]o writer has provided as many scenarios for suspense films - a genre that arguably provides the purest expression of excruciating paranoia - than the great master of unease, Georges Simenon."
• Richard Rushfield: Maggie Rowe "and her band of comedians, actors, special-effects artists and sound engineers - including [Sarah] Silverman, the comedian David Cross, the actor Richard Belzer, the television host Bill Maher and the former pornography actress Traci Lords - are taking over the Steve Allen Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and converting it, and the two-story office building around it, into a 'Hell House.' Or a parody of one."
• Mark Graff, the mover and shaker behind Playgirl TV, and film director Kelly Holland have been asking women what they want to see in their porn. Susan Dominus reports on what they've come up with so far.
• Susan Campos: LA's poshest home screening rooms.
• Virginia Heffernan talks with Ellen DeGeneres as she prepares for the second season of her daytime talk show.

Drew to Kevin Smith: "Why, Kevin, why?" Also: Those duelling Capotes.

"Next month, indieWIRE will launch a new interview series featuring questions posed by our readers. Our first interview will be with acclaimed indie filmmaker, John Sayles." Also from the Insider: Early news of an earlier Tribeca next year.

Roger Avary's hoping you'll make it to the L'Étrange Festival in Paris (September 1 through 14): "This festival is sure to be a weirdo's delight!"

Online viewing tip. From The Forbidden Zone: "Planet of the Apes 're-imagined' as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Why? Both were written by Rod Serling!" So popular, it's been mirrored. Via The Movie Blog.

Posted by dwhudson at August 29, 2004 6:19 AM