• Miley Ray Cyrus enters the coliseum. We are one incremental step closer to the end.
• Jon Stewart, witty stuff, good job. Classy move giving the Once singer/songwriter Marketa Irglova a chance to say her piece after being rudely ushered offstage by the music cue cut-off.
• Diablo Cody wins “Best Original Screenplay.” Where does her fairy tale career go from here?
• No memoriam dedication to actors Brad Renfro and Roy Scheider. I don’t care about the dates covered. Bad taste!
• Bardem takes the Supporting Actor award for playing “some expressionless guy who goes around blowing shit up.” More>
• Plainview drinks the Academy’s milkshake. Now we can all officially stop referencing “that” scene.
• Introduced by Marty, the Coen Brothers take home a couple of little golden men in their usual aloof demeanor.

Overall analysis: yawn.

Related: What’s really going down at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Michael Clayton writer/director gets beyond the mechanics of screenwriting and to heart of the matter – imagination [via GreenCine - added podcast.] The podcast itself is a nice little film school compacted into a half an hour program hosted by the always enjoyable Elvis Mitchell. What I like about it is its a real inside take on the process of filmmaking from a doer. Not to take anything away from anyone. I’m a doer. You might be a doer. What I mean is he’s a pro writer turned director who isn’t talking out of his ass like some guru who has never been in the trenches. The real trenches. Twenty years of grinding it out only to emerge now with a project that is getting much attention. When I saw it in the theater all I kept thinking was how much I wanted to read the screenplay [you can download a PDF here.]

I attended a Script to Screen event that the IFP hosted around 2000-01(?) and Gilroy spoke with Raymond De Felitta about screenwriting. It was early on in his career and he was coming off Proof of Life. I remember thinking “that is what a pro screenwriter sounds like.” The guy walked the walk. As you will gather from listening to the podcast you’ll get the idea that he’s worked on his share of questionable films but it’s also where he learned his craft and how to swim the political waters of Hollywood. You can see the culmination of all that in Michael Clayton. You can also see the early films of Alan J. Pakula in it too which is a plus in my book. It is a shame the film got buried amongst the muck early in the year because as far as what Hollywood is celebrating right now as Academy Award fare, this is as good as I’ve seen in a long time.

Note: This is my entry for The Ambitious Failure Blog-a-thon. To further enhance the experience of this post play the .mp3 of “The End” from The Doors while reading.

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin’ all the way — Captain Willard

In Francis Ford Coppola exploratory journey into self backdropped against the Vietnam War he almost lost his most valuable asset – himself. Its turbulent history is recognized in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse which can be considered a companion piece and should be required viewing before anyone considers picking up a camera. In the documentary, Eleanor Coppola, wife of the director and credited co-director, points the camera on her husband as he expresses his frustration with questions he has created in the screenplay but feels he cannot answer. You feel the dread. Private conversations are recorded without his knowledge over the course of 238 days of production. This is where we start to see the wheels spinning and the man cracking:

“My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject”

In his mind he was doing just that but it didn’t just end there, it was real, for him, his family and his cast and crew. The self-financed film went over budget and that was just the beginning. Two weeks into production in the Philippines, the original actor playing Captain Willard, Harvey Keitel, was replaced by Martin Sheen. The production forged ahead. Sheen continued, doing a scene that required him to lose himself in his character. He did. He lost all control of his faculties in a self-medicated meltdown on his 36th birthday. The results: a scene that will live in infamy and a heart attack that almost cost Sheen his life and Coppola the picture.

The film was originally intended to be shot over six weeks but ended up taking 16 months. Typhoons destroyed sets, causing delays of several months. This list of catastrophes is endless. The film dying a slow death wasn’t just paranoia or insecurity in the mind of director or the cast and crew — it was exacerbated by the Hollywood press from back home. The media was caught up in the great American malady of predicting failure before it actual happens, if not actually rooting for it. The film did get shot, all 200 hours of it. Upon completion of production Coppola had his hands full. It took 2 years for editor Walter Murch to bring the troubled film to a final cut.

Ambition¹ has never been a problem for Coppola. He went to the Philippines coming off the success of the first two Godfather films — classics by anyone’s measure. He was accepted and adored by the industry probably even cocky but I bet he never anticipated his own personal journey into madness up river. The film divided audiences. Upon the film’s initial screenings it was considered obnoxious and self-indulgent² by some. The hot topic of Vietnam was still a fresh and bloody wound in America and the film seemed to be rubbing salt in it with its perceived grotesque theatrics and arrogant self-importance³.

A three hour work-in-progress cut of Apocalypse Now was screened for an international festival audience in Cannes in 1979. It won the Palme d’Or that year for best film, the most prestigious prize a film could be awarded. It also went on to win Best Sound and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards in 1980. Maybe now you’re probably asking yourself, “and how is this a failure?”

Before you accuse me of a cutting to black moment, hear me out. I took a contrarian approach when picking Apocalypse Now to hopefully make a point for further reflection. When is it considered a failure and by whom? Maybe it’s just semantics but there have been many films over the course of time that have suffered similar problems but didn’t succeed. Art is perception. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted to theater goers walking out and scratching their collective heads. It was lambasted in the reviews. Weeks later it started to gain underground popularity and to this day is considered a masterful triumph yet to be matched. There’s no denying there are films that just flat out fail in every way; financially, critically and artistically. The other side of the overlooked masterpiece is a film like Waterworld but those aren’t necessarily the films I’m thinking of. Again it’s back to perception. Whose to say what works or doesn’t? Did The Fountain fail? Not in my book. But to some it did. Who validates failure and when is it valid? To quote the infinite wisdom of a screenwriter far greater in talent than most, “Nobody knows anything.”

So is Apocalypse Now considered an ambitious failure? In its overall history — absolutely not. I was obsessed with this film when I was all of maybe 13 years old. Its spectacle ignited my interest in cinema and to this day I still get lost in its allegory. Lets just say it made an impression. Part Odyssey, part Joseph Conrad-inspired nightmare of obsession gone awry, throw in a little Werner Herzog and you have classic storytelling at its core, audaciously revealing the mess that took place what might as well have been a million miles away in some foreign land (hmmm) — a film I consider a must see before you die. So…ambitious? As all hell. A failure? Not by a long shot but there was a time when it was considered to be, by its creators and by its naysayers and critics. We all came around.

1. The director, according to archival materials in the recent “Complete Dossier” edition, also stated that his plan was to create a single theater, in the geographical center of the United States (likely Kansas) that would show Apocalypse Now, and only Apocalypse Now. It would be specially tailored to the film, with 3D 70mm projectors, 5.1 surround sound, and the Sensurround system, which would vibrate the seats at the appropriate intervals. In his eyes, it would be “an event”, and he likened it to travelling to Mount Rushmore. — from Wikipedia
2. Gerald Perry interviews Francis Ford Coppola at a press conference for Redux
3. In Hearts of Darkness we see Coppola at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival press conference with his view of the film claiming, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”

Update: Finally!

Warning! The following post will be stating the obvious like so many before me.

I don’t want to say it’s about time but we all know it is. This time around The Departed is up for five awards tonight including Best Film and Director. Now we know the odds are always in Clint’s favor and we know The Queen is getting tons of adoration but…look who is presenting the Oscar for Best Achievement in Directing.

Best Quote About Scorsese Winning An Oscar Ever goes to Christopher Campbell [Cinematical]:

“Personally, though, I think if Scorsese is a definite lock for the award, then Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Barry Levinson and Roman Polanski should be the ones presenting it.”

I mean, how many directors could you make a film like this about?