NYT on Sunday.

There's so much stuff in today's edition of the New York Times, I thought it might be best to siphon it off into an entry of its own. Michael Joseph Gross's piece on an adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost, "still waiting for a definite go-ahead from a studio," reads here and there like something straight out of Monty Python in the days of the Flying Circus: "This could be like The Lord of the Rings or bigger,' [producer Vincent Newman] said. Daniel Craig and Heath Ledger are two of his top choices for Lucifer." ... "[I]f you get past the Milton of it all, and think about the greatest war that's ever been fought, the story itself is pretty compelling,' [Legendary chief executive Thomas Tull] said." Nice bit, in a way, from second draft screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine: "Milton was trying to achieve with Paradise Lost what Scorsese was trying to achieve with Henry Hill in Goodfellas. You can't understand the nature of the fall until you've tasted some of the exhilaration of sin and crime."

There are a couple of pieces in the Theater section that'll be of interest to film folk:

• "There is Vanessa Redgrave, here from London to play the single part. There is David Hare, here from London to direct. There is the producer Scott Rudin, whose idea it was to make this play." And there is Joan Didion, who has adapted her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.

• Ben Brantley reviews Howard Katz, a "circular, 90-minute study in the spiritual quagmire of male menopause," written by Patrick Marber and starring Alfred Molina.

• David Colman on Wake Up Mr Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!: "[Richard] Foreman has, as usual, taken a sledgehammer to the art-as-mirror ideal, with dueling vignettes of live action and film (equally impenetrable), some of them involving actors in kilts, antique dolls piloting a plane, and ... well, it defies easy description. Which is the point." The point of the piece, though, is a new curtain.

• "[T]he best voice-over actors can, with just a line or two of dialogue, make you see characters you can only hear, and juggle a range of accents more diverse than a Benetton catalog," writes Andrew Adam Newman. "Though Talk Radio, which opens March 11 at the Longacre Theater, focuses on the shock-jock Barry Champlain (played by Liev Schreiber and originated Off Broadway by [Eric] Bogosian), the callers 'really are the heart and soul of the play,' said Robert Falls, the revival's director, adding, 'The play is about voices in the night.'"

"In effect the video market is glutted," writes Bryan Reesman after rattling off the numbers. "For big studios that means more jousting over future formats that may restart sales. But for specialty companies that have traded otherwise unavailable horror, action, art-house and exploitation titles, the glut has meant a struggle to survive."

Richard Siklos asks around Hollywood as to the fate of United Artists: "[Tom] Cruise stands at the end of a long line of creative potentates in Hollywood, including Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen and Steven Spielberg, who have tried to follow the original Chaplin-Fairbanks-Pickford blueprint by overseeing their own mini-studios. All of them experienced mixed results as they ran up against the brutal economics of a hit-and-miss industry in which independents often lack the size needed to overcome the financial vagaries of filmmaking." An accompanying slide show.

Laura M Holson: "[S]ince Pixar was acquired, [John] Lasseter has been heralded as a latter-day Walt Disney, a cultural arbiter who can rekindle the spirit of Disney's famous animation at its theme parks, on store shelves and in a theater near you."

"[M]en in their 20s and 30s with enough disposable income to buy lots of video games." This is the demographic studios hope to reach via gaming consoles, reports Dave Itzkof.

Deborah Solomon talks with Ira Glass about the TV version of This American Life, about why it's on Showtime and why he doesn't call it a "documentary."

Graham Fuller preps American audiences for The Wind That Shakes the Barley: "In condemning the British cabinet's sanctioning of ferocious tactics in Ireland in 1920, two years after Sinn Fein won a democratic mandate to form a republican parliament, [Ken] Loach and the screenwriter Paul Laverty adopt a clear ideological position." And, as you've surely heard, "its winning of the Palme d'Or, the top prize at Cannes, last May provoked the conservative British press into an 'apoplectic' reaction, as Mr Laverty described it."

Lori Gottlieb reports on Hollywood's "baby gurus," advisors to parents who busy themselves in the industry - and with fads.

Posted by dwhudson at March 4, 2007 8:43 AM