January 14, 2003

QUOTE THE RAVEN:  There was an interesting New York Times story on the impending F.T.C. investigation into movie advertising.  However, there are two misleading things about the story that jumped out at me. 

First, for all the complaining about the studios taking critics’ comments out of context, I have yet to hear of a single case where any critic objected to a studio about an ad and had them turn down a request to remove the allegedly offending quote.  Roger Ebert’s rule is, quite simply, that whatever he writes is fair game.  So, when Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ran a “Big Laughs!” quote all summer long from a negative review, he did not object, as is his rule.  Were David Ansen to complain about a quote that he felt was misleading, the studio would pull it out of circulation immediately.  Moreover, Time has quite specifically put themselves in the business of misleading the public by allowing features from their magazine to be quoted in movie ads, as though they were criticism.  And, in the most heinous case to date, allowed Fox to use a quote from an early piece on Attack of the Clones by non-critic Jess Cagle and veteran critic Richard Schickel, raving about the film, even though Schickel had not seen the film at the time the story was written. (Cagle saw the film and Schickel had just read the screenplay.)

Second, Roger Ebert observes that the junket critics have not been used as much by studios since “David Manning.”  But it’s just not true.  Not only are junket quotes still pervasive in the weeks before traditional critics review films, but more and more long-lead publications that are not reviewing movies, but doing feature stories, are being quoted.  “David Manning” has no legacy at all, except in a few comedy clubs.

THE BIG CHART OF STARDOM:  There were some good letters about the list yesterday, but there was one obvious mistake… and his name is David Spade.  He shouldn’t have been on the list.  Sorry.

STEVE CASE’S EXIT:  The industry transition continues.   Will Steve Case’s exit from Time-Warner really make that much of a difference at New Line and Warner Bros?  Not directly.  But it took less than 24 hours for the second domino to fall, as Walter Isaacson dropped out at CNN.  Related?  Not really.  But don’t expect the changes to stop there.  Warner Bros. is already in transition with Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Warren Lieberfarb losing turf battles to Alan Horn.

While the elimination of the AOL bean counters will be a great relief to many Time-Warner employees, it also seems like time for a philosophy shift.  With someone else’s blood in the water, Time-Warner leadership has the chance to aggressively reinvent the face of their studio.  Warner Bros. as a movie supermarket with overstuffed shelves has made everything seem like 99 Cent Store product, even when the studio delivers top-notch film.  I’d love to see the studio go back to a 20-release-a-year pace with 10 in-house films and 10 more from their production partners. 

Lists of candidates are being bandied about all over town, with assumed openings at as many as four different studios.  Mike DeLuca, Brian Grazer, John Goldwyn, Bryan Lourd, Rob Friedman and Lorenzo are just a handful of the potential alleged candidates. 

Meanwhile, Eric Doctorow followed in the footsteps of Lieberfarb and Fox’s Patricia Wyatt, three top home video execs who have left their studios in the last month or so. 

The more things change…

GANGS OF NEW YORK ANALYSIS:  A while back, I wrote about the October 2002, 3-hour cut of Gangs of New York and the differences between it and the release version.  Now that you’ve had a chance to see the film, I thought I would do a detailed analysis of the variations, just so there is a more definitive record of what I would love to see on DVD eventually.

There are spoilers throughout, so beware….

The biggest changes in the final version of Gangs come in the first act.  There is a lot of restructuring. 

The opening sequence in the cave and then in the Five Points hasn’t changed much.  A few trims here and there and a few shots of extra violence have been removed.  But nothing that really changes things. 

Two devices separate the two versions straight off.  First, there is the DiCaprio voice-over which, with the exception of one sequence at the end of the film, doesn’t exist in the 2002 version.  Second, Scorsese uses art cards from the era in the 2002 version that are used only two or three times in the release version.

The biggest structural effort in the release version is that Scorsese and his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, figured out a way to get Cameron Diaz into the movie much earlier.  To do this, they chopped up a couple of scenes: the Tammany Hall meeting, the Five Points walk-through by Bill, and Amsterdam’s meeting with his thieving friends that ends up with him beating them up and moves on to the John C. Reilly get-his-cut sequence.

The structure starts to match more at around the 45-minute mark, as Amsterdam watches Jenny steal from the uptown house.  In this sequence, the release version has an extensive voice-over explaining what Jenny is doing.  In the 2002 version, Jenny robs the house to a waltz, with a now missing line spoken by Scorsese himself.  A maid tells him, “The upstairs maid has arrived.”  And Scorsese responds, “We don’t have an upstairs maid.” 

A repeating change in the film comes up soon after.  One of the distinct changes is removal of any acknowledgement that Jenny is a prostitute.  This exchange has been removed from the film:

Jenny:  You want to do more than look it’ll cost you more than the price of that medal.

Amsterdam: Well, I ain’t interested in that kind of romance.

Jenny: Oh, I see.  A man of god.

Amsterdam:  I don’t want to see you again.

Jenny: Well, I don’t blame you. 

And they split.

In the next Tammany Hall sequence, there is this bit of dialogue that’s gone.  Talking about immigrants, Tweed says:

“We can’t have them die off before the elections.  Bill the city for $500 and you’ll get 10 percent for yourself.” 

Another repeating change is the removal of references to Roman Catholicism as an issue.   In the dance sequence, a mother comes and gets her child out of the choir, the mother proclaiming the rest of the people “heathens.” 

In the Abraham Lincoln theater sequence, Bill screams, “Go live in Africa with your nigger friends!”  Gone.

When Jenny takes care of Amsterdam, after Bill has beaten him, she tells him about the money she’s saved, and that she’d saved the money by “bludgeoning and whoring and the rest.”  In the release version, the whoring is gone. 

In the sequence in which the draft man explains the rules as Boss Tweed watched, Tweed spoke to the crowd in the 2002 version, saying, “Boys! The Union is in distress.  You are bound by honor and love of country to fight in this time of crisis!”  It’s gone now.

Tweed also had this cut:  “If he understood the true value of this kind of publicity, the archbishop himself would be shoulder to shoulder with half the Irish in New York.”

Finally, there is the ending.  The difference is huge, though I’m not 100% sure that I can explain why the change was made and what it is meant to mean. 

Like so much of the film, the re-cut took existing scenes that played out their little stories and chopped them into pieces that are rearranged throughout the sequence.  This switches much around.  But the biggest difference is in the death of Bill.

But first, perhaps the most startling thing in all of Gangs of New York.  When the cannonballs fly from the ships in the harbor, you might expect a whistle of a 30-pound ball or something.  But if you listen closely to what is in the film, as everyone pauses in anticipation, the sound is that of a jet plane, followed by a crash… very much like the sound of the first airplane hitting the World Trade Center.  Is it that actual sound of 9/11?  I’m not sure.  Jeffrey Wells will be trying to ask Thelma Schoonmaker about this later today.   But it sure sounds like it could be a rather profound aural subtext.

Now, about Bill’s death.  In the 2002 version, Amsterdam and Bill rise from the explosion and, having lost their weapons, they wrestle aggressively in the dirt.  Another explosion ends that.  Then, separated by a couple of feet, Bill tells Amsterdam, “I’m glad I get to die a true American.”  But unlike the release version, Bill not only hasn’t been wounded and is not already on his way to death, but he actually has a knife in his hand.  While in the release print, Amsterdam eyes the wound, in the 2002 version, he has his eyes on Bill’s knife.  And when Leo finally stabs Bill to death, Bill doesn’t defend himself, even though he is armed.  Of course, in the release version, he is already dying of this wound and Leo finishes the unarmed Bill off, which feels like something about revenge more than about higher ideals. 

The effort to look at the two versions of the film side-by-side is seriously inhibited by the major structural changes that Scorsese has made in the film.  Many of the scenes remain intact, but often in different places in the two films.  Schoonmaker has also slices as much as five minutes out of the film by shortening lots of cuts by a second her and a second there.

But the fact of the matter is, there isn’t a single change that I prefer.  More to the point, the nature of the earlier draft is that Scorsese lets the scenes play out and then moves the story along.  The Weinstein influence in the cutting room seems to clearly be about pacing.  And I would continue to make the argument that the longer, more languorous version is significantly better.  It’s not just 15 minutes more.  It’s the entire spirit of the effort. 

READER OF THE DAY:  NOT THE ROG writes:  “I agree with your enraged reader. Every year, there is at least one movie that gets critically lauded that I just don't understand - last year it was Gosford Park, this year, it's Far From Heaven. It makes me ill that critics are giving the cheap and easy melodrama of this movie a free pass because it's all wrapped in a neat little conceit that was done better in - yes, get ready - Pleasantville nearly five years ago. Technically speaking, it looks fantastic (although I've never seen a Douglas Sirk film, so I'm sure that my opinion would be swatted away by big dogs such as Roger Ebert, who I'm sure championed it to the Chicago Film Critics prizes it swept away), but it's a tremendously hollow exercise. So is Chicago, but at least that movie is supremely entertaining. Ugh.”

But HOLMES’ SIDEKICK writes: “Those of us who love Far From Heaven don't love it just because it's a faithful Sirk homage, or because it tells us that the '50s weren't as idyllic as some people remember them (sure, that theme's been used before, but how many individually great WWII movies tell us that war is hell?).

I love it because I'm moved by the small, simple story it tells, and because Cathy Whitaker, as played by Julianne Moore, is a sympathetic heroine who never loses hope.  When critics say the film lacks irony (obviously lines like "There are no black people in Hartford" and Cathy's scolding her son for saying "geez" are meant to elicit chuckles), I think they mean that it doesn't condescend to its characters.  The fact that Cathy, Frank and Raymond are all sensitively and multi-dimensionally rendered makes the film more than a stylistic exercise, and the performers work to make sure that they're all more than just archetypes.  That's not to undermine Haynes' stylistic achievement--I'm too young to remember the Sirk movies (I once saw Imitation of Life on cable), but I still found the Technicolor visuals, dissolves and soaring Elmer Bernstein score hugely enjoyable.  In this era, very few films are so forthright about their desire to manipulate your emotions, and if you surrender to this one, it's an extraordinary experience.

I agreed earlier that the movie's themes aren't new, but nonetheless I still think it's fairly daring to, as many critics have noted, portray the woman as being more repressed than the black man and the gay man.  As for the allegation that any other actress could have played Cathy as well as Julianne Moore, I'm at a loss as to where to begin to disagree.  It could be because Moore might be the best onscreen cryer we have (I know plenty of people who cry as soon as she does in almost any film).  But her natural luminosity, the sad but hopeful smile she maintains even in the toughest of moments, and a thousand other gestures make this an incredibly moving performance (the point is moot, obviously, because Todd Haynes wrote the role for her). 

But to search for a reason as to "why the film was made" is pretty futile.  Isn't the desire to tell a moving, tragic love story in a visually innovative way as good a reason to make a movie as any?”

Finally, THE MAN, THE WORM writes:  “:Your reader of the day makes good points (even though I did like "Far From Heaven").  However, their idea of a "flawless recreation of a Sirk film with space aliens and Nazi werewolves" sounds great!!!  I would be first in line.  We need more films like this.  Maybe Tim Burton or David Lynch could direct it.”

E ME:  Do you care about the quotes?