In fact, Whedon was one of those writer-directors who was respected within the industry for his writing chops, but who hadn’t quite scored as a commercial director. He labored for a long time on DC’s Wonder Woman without success—in fact his idiosyncratic smarts had never flourished inside the studio system—but he had scored with Marvel on a comic-book run of The Amazing X-Men. Feige had the sense to pull him into Marvel’s vortex to deliver The Avengers. Whedon had nourished an enormous fan base over the years, who always turn up to his panels in droves. “This is the place where they can say, ‘are we not dope, are we not amazing for being this obsessed with something?’ ” Whedon told Spurlock.
While The Avengers had plenty of visual effects and noisy whiz bang action sequences, it wouldn’t have worked if the cult leader of the Firefly fans known as the browncoats hadn’t understood the characters, from Robert Downey Jr.’s snarky Tony Stark to Mark Ruffalo’s surprisingly sympathetic Bruce Banner/Hulk, and how they related to the mission: defeating super-super villain Loki (Brit rising star Tom Hiddleston).
At Comic-Con 2011, months before The Avengers started filming, Ruffalo stumbled out onto the Hall H stage like a deer in headlights with the long chorus line of the cast, having woken up in the morning at his farm in upstate New York knowing that if a limo pulled up to his door, he had landed the part.
Sure enough, with a mighty Disney marketing campaign and rave reviews, The Avengers April launch turned into a box office juggernaut that lured happy comics lovers of every generation, easily rising to the top of the 2012 box office with a global $1.5 billion total.
By Comic-Con 2012, Marvel is ready to celebrate the success of The Avengers by showing a pump-up reel and a promise of another Joss Whedon installment to come in May 2015. Downey Jr. makes a grand entrance through the hall, joined by his Iron Man 3 costars Don Cheadle, Jon Favreau (now in acting mode), Gwyneth Paltrow, Rebecca Hall, Mia Hanson, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, and new writer-director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).
Three other Marvel movies in the works besides Iron Man 3 (May 3, 2013) are Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World (November 8, 2013) shooting at London’s Shepperton Studios with the entire cast returning; Captain America: The Winter Soldier (April 4, 2014) starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Robert Redford and set to start filming in 2013; and Guardians of the Galaxy (August 1, 2014), starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and Benicio del Toro and based on the Marvel comic (which ran from 1969 through 2008). Also, Comic-Con fave Shaun of the Dead writer-director Edgar Wright is looking to apply the latest technology to Ant-Man (July 31, 2015) who “will kick your ass one inch at a time,” he says.
When Man of Steel finally opens in June 2013, it grosses a respectable but not stellar $630 million worldwide. The following month at Comic-Con, Warner announces it will add the character of Batman to the next Superman movie from Goyer and Snyder, and a month later says Ben Affleck will play the new Batman. Reaction ranges from fan cheers to fears that this is a desperation move to compete with Disney’s Marvel.
That’s because, for the rest of the industry, Marvel has set the bar very high.
CHAPTER 6
THE FALL FILM FESTIVALS
ARGO, SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, LIFE OF PI, LINCOLN
Any movie looking to earn multiple Oscar nominations has to meet a high standard. Getting there is a long hard slog. You need more than merit and luck to go all the way. Your handlers must do everything right—and be willing to spend.
First, assuming that a movie is perfectly mounted, it must have the right stuff to break through—with serious marketing and publicity know-how and resources behind it—and to make noise and grab attention from the media during a crowded period when it’s easy to be drowned out by other films’ thunder.
What magic alchemy of screenplay, direction, visual beauty, and performance—yielding some level of emotion in the beating heart of viewers—will sustain moviegoer attention long enough to wind up on the screener stacks of critics, guild members, and, finally, Academy voters? And not at the bottom of the pile but at the top? That’s the decision that distributors have to make.
As it stands, the big six studios avoid taking undue risks on more than a handful of movies for grownups; these pictures must be brilliantly executed, after all, to get the boost from critics and word-of-mouth they need to lure audiences. The fall season offers the chance to take a few films that have turned out really well for a test drive. It’s the fall festivals that will tell the filmmakers, distributors, and studios what they need to know, that will provide them with the serious contenders heading for the late-year Oscar corridor. The festival programs will be packed, with many of the best films already well-reviewed by critics and audiences at the first wave of festivals—beginning with Sundance in January and going through SXSW in March, Tribeca in April, and Cannes in May—which start the buzz on the better movies. If the movies pass muster with audiences and press at these earlier festivals, they’ll land slots on the fall circuit. And if they score at one or more of the fall festivals that act as launchpads for award campaigns, they’re off to the races. If not, their distributors will pull back and reconfigure their release plans.
The critics perform a valuable role, as their reviews start the drumroll that can turn a film into a must-see; year-end ten-best lists and critics’ group awards also contribute to the snowball effect of a repeated winner.
But a critics’ fave does not always an Oscar contender make—many critics and actors hailed Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, but art-house audiences and the Academy at large gave the handsome but intense drama a pass. And while most Oscar contenders need to earn at least some critical respect, movies like Crash, The Green Mile, Chocolat, and The Cider House Rules landed coveted Best Picture slots without being consensus picks by critics’ groups; in 2005, Crash took home the ultimate prize. Winning a SAG Award or a Golden Globe is great, but it’s still not the Gold Man.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, known as the Academy, is six thousand voters strong. While most are based in Los Angeles and other California environs such as Santa Barbara and the Bay Area, followed next by New York and London, they live all over the country and the world. They have all been recommended and voted in by their peers in each branch; the Academy invites about 130 new nominees and winners every year. They’re voted in by seventeen branches of varying sizes: the actors are by far the largest group, with some twelve hundred members; producers and executives number in the four hundreds; writers, publicists, and directors in the three hundreds; while other crafts are quite small.
The execs, publicists, and actors tend to have more mainstream tastes than the more sophisticated writer, director, and craft branches. But there’s also a steak-eater contingent of old-school males in the Academy who vote for such movies as Gladiator, Silence of the Lambs, and Braveheart, and against gay romance Brokeback Mountain, which by most signposts would ordinarily have won Best Picture against Crash. (Ang Lee did take home Best Director for Brokeback.)
Movies of scale and scope have an advantage for the Best Picture award, especially if they are expensive period pictures with massive sets and visual effects. Think The Last Emperor, Master and Commander, Gandhi, The Lord of the Rings, and Inglourious Basterds. But the Academy doesn’t go for avant-garde or messy, no matter how gorgeously mounted a film like Cloud Atlas may be. And expensive blockbusters such as Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and the Harry Potter films tend to wind up sequestered in the Academy’s technical categories. They’re often rewarded for their individual craft accomplishments—and punished for their populism. Festivals lent a mainstream movie like Argo some gravitas, and helped to boost an indie drama like The Sessions into the limelight.
Effective manipulation of a festival takes both legwork and oodles of money, but there’s a risk involved. You stick your chin out when you are weighed as a possible award contender. You could be found wanting. Reviews could go south. And you
don’t want to seem presumptuous. During the summer of 2012, Roadside Attractions was debating whether to take Richard Gere to the Toronto International Film Festival for Sundance hit Arbitrage. Would screening it there tip their hand, signaling Oscar hopes? Would their film get lost in the noisy scrum? Were they better off spending their money on the release? They opted not to go.
FOUR PROMINENT FALL FESTIVALS ARE on the awards watch list—Venice, Telluride, Toronto, and New York. The first three are held practically within days of each other in late August and early September, with the New York Film Festival following in late September and early October. These festivals are the effective gatekeepers for winnowing the list of serious contenders going forward into the height of Oscar season. The 2012 season yielded an unexpected garden of riches. At the end of July, as the programs began to be announced, some thirty movies were lining up for possible awards consideration.
First up at summer’s end is Italy’s Venice International Film Festival (August 29–September 8, 2012), which at age sixty-nine is the oldest in the world. I went to this glamorous old-school European gathering in 2010, and interviewed Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan and Sofia Coppola for Somewhere. Celebrities love this low-key festival because it makes fewer demands on them than others do. They’re treated like royalty at this romantic Italian tourist hub, and while they do have to alight gracefully from water taxis, they don’t have to do a lot of press. The Venice Fest takes place on the island of Lido, where visitors zip around on bicycles and pile into a series of world-class restaurants between screenings. Unlike Cannes, this fest is a relatively quiet, safe place to unveil a world premiere without generating too many stateside reviews, as few American critics attend beyond Time magazine’s Richard Corliss and the trades. Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), George Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck), Joe Wright (Atonement), Stephen Frears (The Queen), and Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, Black Swan) all launched successful Oscar campaigns at Venice.
But while the Weinsteins took Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to Venice in 2012, it failed to win the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. (That went instead to Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta, the eventual South Korean foreign film Oscar entry.) Instead, Anderson took home the Best Director Silver Lion prize, and the movie shared a Best Actor prize for its stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.
THE TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL: ARGO
Because it does not announce its programming in advance, the thirty-nine-year-old Telluride Film Festival (August 31–September 3, 2012) mounts de facto “world premieres” high in the Colorado Rockies and takes place at the same time as Venice, over a four-day stretch covering Labor Day weekend. Some filmmakers with stamina like to jet straight from Venice to prestigious Telluride in advance of the more sprawling Toronto Film Festival, because it allows for an early spotlight and for buzz to build ahead of the noisier big-city ten-day fest. Every year a growing list of players return with or without their latest film, just to enjoy the relaxed summer camp atmosphere, among them directors Ken Burns, Alexander Payne, Werner Herzog, Mark Cousins, Allan Arkush, and George Lucas; producers Ron Yerxa, Albert Berger, and Bill Pohlad; theater director Peter Sellars; and actors Gael García Bernal, Michael O’Keefe, and Laura Linney.
Per usual, several distributors bring award hopefuls to Telluride in 2012, because the intimate festival has earned a reputation over the past decade with its consistent Oscar track record: Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Jason Reitman’s Juno and Up in the Air, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, and Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, to name a few.
Just before every Labor Day weekend, the L.A. contingent assembles at LAX to board the charter plane to Montrose, Colorado, and shuttle jitneys to Telluride. Critics Todd McCarthy and Leonard Maltin, lawyer Linda Lichter, Paramount marketing exec Megan Colligan, ICM agent Ron Bernstein, and San Francisco chef Alice Waters are eager to grab the Telluride Watch as they settle into their seats and plan their schedules.
We soon discover that Telluride has not only booked Ben Affleck’s Argo but several future foreign Oscar contenders, including Sony Pictures Classics’ Cannes entry Amour and Magnolia’s Berlin prize-winner A Royal Affair, starring Mads Mikkelsen. “We show the best films from around the world,” says Telluride codirector Gary Meyer at the opening day press conference, joined by codirectors Tom Luddy and Julie Huntzinger, “and if the films get Oscar nominations and awards, that’s great.”
Argo has already been getting strong advance word in Los Angeles. Affleck scoped out Telluride in 2011, when his wife, actress Jennifer Garner, came to the sleepy Rocky Mountain town with political satire Butter, in which she played a ruthlessly competitive butter carver. The film did not amuse audiences and was soon pulled from the Weinstein Company’s 2011 release schedule. But Garner and Affleck loved the intimate festival, which allows relatively free movement away from the usual paparazzi craziness. With his sights on the big prize with Argo, Affleck understands that the impeccably programmed art-film-lovers festival, attended by top critics and ardent cinephiles from all over the country, is a classy way to establish his commercial Mideast thriller as both serious-minded and entertaining.
Affleck was happy to world-premiere the movie at Telluride, where people come to see movies, as opposed to hunching in hotels talking about them. On Friday afternoon, he tells the crowd at the mountain ski resort’s Chuck Jones Cinema, accessible by swaying gondola: “You’re the first paying people to see the movie. It was a labor of love.”
At the end of this screening the audience roars its approval, the first of many to applaud Affleck’s taut, fact-based drama, his third film behind the camera (after The Town and Gone Baby Gone). It is directed with a screw-tightening efficiency that would make Michael Mann proud.
DNA from the films of Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Sidney Lumet, and Alan Pakula infuse Argo, which was produced by Affleck with George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse, and distributed by Warner Bros., which had championed The Town. Clooney and Heslov developed a script by Chris Terrio about the CIA’s declassified involvement in rescuing six hostages in Iran in 1979. The screenplay is based on selections from ex-CIA agent Antonio J. Mendez’s book The Master of Disguise and a 2007 Wired magazine article by Joshuah Bearman.
Affleck was looking hard for the right project to do after The Town, and had turned down several studio directing projects, including Man of Steel. He got hold of Terrio’s script and persuaded Clooney—who had obviously also recognized potential in the property—to let it go and produce it with him. Terrio’s screenplay was so strong that Affleck, who after all had won an Oscar with pal Matt Damon for writing Good Will Hunting, saw no need to do his customary script overhaul.
Affleck, like fellow actor-directors Clooney and Clint Eastwood, sees the value of staying hands-on with a modest ($44 million) budget. Like them, he views playing the lead as efficient. After years of watching directors work, from Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting) to Terrence Malick (To the Wonder), Affleck is a strong and confident director who knows what he wants. “I maybe have matured,” the onetime star of Gigli and Pearl Harbor says of his pursuit of smart, quality, modest-budgeted movies designed to stand the test of time—like the seventies classics he reveres.
The star delivers a solid, naturalistic performance as CIA agent Tony Mendez, who specializes in pulling people out of tight situations. Nothing could be tougher than Iran, as angry American flag-burning mobs call for the return of the shah, who has sought asylum in the United States. Painfully slowly, as the Iranians literally piece together the identities of the missing embassy personnel, Mendez, his CIA boss (Bryan Cranston), and others in the administration get the go-ahead to create a fake B-movie production based on the sci-fi fantasy script Argo, using it as a cover to extricate the group.
The tone shifts to enjoyable Hollywood insider parody as ace comedic actors John Goodman and Alan Arkin take the lead as, respectively, a makeup artist and Cannes award-winning producer on the downslope; they pr
etend to be actually producing Argo as cover for the escapees. The six hostages are to impersonate a filmmaking team on a location scout in Tehran. The idea is outrageous—and lives are definitely on the line.
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Oscar-nominated for Brokeback Mountain), who shot the Alejandro González Iñárritu films (such as Babel) that Affleck admires for their gritty naturalism, did outstanding work on location in Turkey, Los Angeles, and the Ontario, California, airport. Prieto and a group of cameramen carrying 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter cameras did such a convincing job shooting the opening mob scene that Affleck and Michael Mann’s longtime editor William Goldenberg (who also edited Gone Baby Gone) didn’t need to use any stock footage. Throughout the film, Prieto’s handheld cameras “make everything feel grabbed and accidental,” Goldenberg tells me during an interview, “finding things and pieces, like the film accidentally landed there.”
Affleck admits that he shoots a lot, trying many performance colors—for himself as well as his editor—and figures out the movie in the editing room. Affleck is his own toughest critic, says Goldenberg: “He is brutal.” That shot of Affleck removing his shirt (revealing a six-pack) was originally written as Mendez emerging naked and vulnerable from the shower and wrapping a towel around himself. Affleck self-consciously pulled it back a tad (and later good-naturedly took his shots on Saturday Night Live).
Goldenberg wound up competing with himself in the year’s awards race, as he also edited Zero Dark Thirty. He and Affleck expertly navigated Argo’s tricky tonal balance: the director admits that lines like Arkin’s classic “If I am doing a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit” are hilarious, but Affleck insists that he cut any laughs that undermined the film’s fabric of reality. “I’ll never go for comedy,” he says, “I’ll go for realism.”
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