Movies

Gone Girl fans rejoice

As a rule, the works of great directors like Alfred Hitchcock ought not be touched. But if there is anyone who could potentially pull of a solid Hitchcock remake, it’s the team behind Gone Girl.

David Fincher, Ben Affleck and Gillian Flynn are teaming up to remake the Master of Suspense’s Strangers on a Train for Warner Bros., according to The Hollywood Reporter. The original 1951 film was a Hitchcock adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel that followed a tennis star (played by Farley Granger) who meets a charming psychopath. Affleck would take on Granger’s role with Fincher directing and Flynn penning the script.

Strangers (as the working project has been dubbed) is the third collaboration for Fincher and Flynn. After Flynn adapted her own novel Gone Girl for a Fincher-directed film starring Affleck, the writer and director teamed up again for the upcoming HBO show Utopia. So far it seems to be a match made in heaven: Gone Girl earned a whopping $365.3 million worldwide, Fincher’s highest-grossing film to date.

Still, Hitchcock had a very specific, eerie style and remakes of his films have not fared too well in the past. Remember that 1998 version of Psycho? Vince Vaughn and Gus Van Sant probably wish you didn’t. Flynn and Fincher’s take on Hitchcock will almost certainly prove better than Michael Bay’s upcoming remake of The Birds.

MORE: Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?

[THR]

They will appear in an adaptation of Michael Lewis' bestseller, The Big Short

Hollywood A-list dream team Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling have joined forces for a new financial drama based on a work by bestselling author Michael Lewis.

The three in-demand actors will star in an adaptation of Lewis’ bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Variety reports, which explores the years leading up to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007. Lewis also wrote The Blind Side and Moneyball, both of which were turned into Oscar-winning films and the latter of which also starred Pitt.

Paramount and Pitt’s production company Plan B, which made 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Selma (2014), began adapting the book in 2010, according to Vulture. Adam McKay signed on to adapt and direct the film in 2012, THR reports.

[Variety]

"Based on the book everyone's mom read on the beach"

Defenders of LBJ are less interested in history than in hagiography

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

Mark Updegrove, the federal director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library & Museum in Austin, Texas, is one of the instigators of the current backlash against Selma, the widely-praised film that depicts a crucial series of events in the Civil Rights Movement. Leaving others to engage in the historical debate about the film’s portrayal of LBJ, I would like instead to examine the campaign to discredit the film based on that portrayal. Waged by those intent on protecting and promoting Lyndon Johnson’s image, the efforts are part of a larger trend to use presidential libraries in ways far outside their initial objectives and Congressional intent, and to hire “legacy managers” rather than credentialed archivists and historians to run them.

Updegrove, who also serves, ex-officio, as a trustee of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library Foundation, began the wave of criticism in an article last month in Politico (which is published by Robert Allbritton, another trustee of the LBJ Foundation). Updegrove wrote that the film’s “mischaracterization” of LBJ “matters now” because “racial tension is once again high” and that “it does no good to bastardize one of the most hallowed chapters in the Civil Rights Movement by suggesting that the President himself stood in the way of progress.”

A few days later, former LBJ White House aide Joseph A. Califano, Jr. – also a trustee of the LBJ Foundation – in an angry op-ed in the Washington Post (which is published by Politico co-founder Fred Ryan, chairman of the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation) claimed that the Selma marches actually were Johnson’s idea. While this notion has been labeled false and outrageous by, among others, historian Peniel Joseph, in an illuminating NPR piece, the clamor may harm the film’s reputation, business, and, reportedly, its chances during the upcoming awards season.

From the significant, apparently coordinated endeavors of Updegrove, Califano, and others – and the negative attention they have brought to bear on an otherwise broadly-lauded work – it would seem as if, to them, Johnson was, and is, the point. But, like the movement as a whole, Selma the movie is not, and Selma the historical events were not, about Lyndon Johnson. By trying to make them about LBJ, and by rigorously policing any negative representations of him, those entrusted with managing the legacy of our nation’s 36th president reveal the motivations of the private organizations that build, donate, and utilize presidential libraries for their own purposes.

This manufactured controversy sadly diverts proper attention from the film and its powerful message. It also underscores the main theme of my upcoming book, The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their Legacies. In the book, I explore the extent to which former chief executives, their families, supporters, and foundations go in order to, as in a campaign, present only the most positive – while ignoring all of the negative – elements of a president’s life, career, and administration. Instead of selling a candidate for office, they’re selling an image for posterity. And like a presidential campaign, image is more important than substance; the reality is more complicated – and less heroic – than the image-makers would have us believe. That doesn’t prevent them from rewriting history, and waging a concerted, and, at times, aggressive, campaign to rectify what they consider to be misrepresentations of their president.

Selling that image takes more than cheery messaging; it also requires the elimination of anything that may harm what often is a fragile narrative, based more on admiring rhapsodies than documented, historical facts. And like a campaign communications staff, members of the late president’s team feel they must hit back, hard, at criticism, negative facts, or even personal opinions that even slightly deviate from the message they have carefully crafted.

To Updegrove, the suggestion that the man whose legacy he was hired to rescue was anything less than heroic, and motivated by anything other than saintly, selfless, devotion to a just cause, is unacceptable, and swiftly must be “corrected.”

In a CNN blog post in February, 2014, Updegrove was quoted as saying, “We want people to know what this President did – what he got done and how it continues to affect us.” That’s a perfectly acceptable desire for a presidential family member or an official of a private foundation dedicated to promoting a president’s legacy to express, but not a mid-level federal employee responsible for administering a nonpartisan government archival facility.

On the January 4, 2015 edition of Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer commented on critics’ assertion that the movie was “dead wrong” on its portrayal of LBJ, asking Updegrove – as if he were a disinterested arbiter of the truth, rather than a tender of LBJ’s flame and a leader of that very criticism – “What happened here?” Updegrove answered, “Well, unfortunately, there’s no litmus test for movies that — based on history. There’s no standard that says that you got this wrong, you have got to correct that.”

Apparently, though, Updegrove believes there is such a litmus test, and that he is the one designated to administer it.

An insistence that LBJ was so central to the movement that this film “bastardizes” it conveniently ignores his earlier role in successfully blocking civil rights legislation as Senate Majority Leader – a neat trick replicated in the recently-renovated LBJ Library museum. There, in exhibits depicting his pre-presidential career, Vietnam, foreign affairs, domestic programs, and the Civil Rights Movement, the narrative is clean, simple, and undeviating: Lyndon Baines Johnson Was A Great Man Who Did Nothing Other Than Great Things And Only For Great Reasons.

The LBJ presented in the renovated exhibits – which were overseen by Updegrove – bears little resemblance to the meticulously-detailed and extraordinarily well-documented LBJ of Robert Caro’s multi-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The museum’s adulatory portrayal differs little from those in recent presidential libraries, but it is quite different from the other mature museums in the National Archives system, which have, over time, begun to develop more thorough, balanced, and nuanced views of the men to whom they are dedicated. Instead of echoing that progress, the recent changes to the LBJ exhibits go backwards; that they are less factual and more flattering is unprecedented in the history of presidential libraries – as is Updegrove’s assertive campaigning, as a federal employee, to rehabilitate a president’s image.

Will Updegrove’s public scolding of Selma director Ava DuVernay have a chilling effect? Will future filmmakers think twice before daring to express an opinion about a former president with taxpayer-funded legacy managers to rescue their legacy? Will researchers at the Johnson Library worry the director might charge them with “mischaracterizing” Johnson? That our government now appears to be in the business not only of administering these legacy-burnishing shrines but of “correcting” others’ views of history should be unacceptable to the citizens who fund the operation of our presidential libraries.

While it would be a shame if Updegrove’s and his colleagues’ need to police and sanitize Johnson’s image deprives this transformative film of deserved accolades and awards, it would be a greater misfortune if their attempts to discredit Selma prevented it from being seen by a broad audience. It is my hope that the film and the filmmakers succeed in spite of these negative efforts, and, in the face of this latest example of the last campaign, overcome.

Anthony Clark, a former speechwriter and legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives, was responsible for hearings and investigations of the National Archives and presidential libraries for the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the 111th Congress.

Men directed 93 percent of the 250 top-grossing films

“Feminist” was the buzzword in Hollywood in 2014: Emma Watson brought the United Nations to its feet with her speech on gender equality, Beyonce dazzled millions of VMA viewers with her unambiguous statement, Aziz Ansari broke it down for the unconverted on the Late Show with David Letterman. Media outlets kept close tallies on which celebrities embraced and eschewed the label, and headlines like “The 15 Most Feminist Moments of the [insert major event]” populated the media. Ladies like Jennifer Lawrence, Viola Davis, and Reese Witherspoon kicked ass onscreen, while Shonda Rhimes took over our TVs. No one’s claiming Hollywood has achieved gender parity—but by and large, 2014 certainly looked like a giant step forward for the movement.

As is often the case, though, a look beyond the spotlight and behind the scenes tells a startlingly different story—one in which gender equity in the industry is back where it was 17 years ago. In 2014, women comprised a paltry 17 percent of all the people who worked behind the cameras—directors, producers, editors, writers, executive producers and cinematographers—on the top-grossing 250 movies, the same scant percentage as in 1998. The finding is from an annual report called The Celluloid Ceiling, conducted by Dr. Martha M. Lauzen of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. Other disquieting numbers from her research include the fact that 93 percent of the films had no female directors, 78 percent had no female editors, 79 percent had no female writers, and 96 percent had no female cinematographers.

Of even greater concern is the fact that progress has stagnated. Lauzen says that the oft-echoed, vague idea that things are slowly improving is a fallacy. “There is no evidence to support the notion of ‘creeping incrementalism’ or the idea that things get slightly better each and every year,” she explained to EW. “The percentage of women in key behind-the-scenes roles has been bouncing between 15 percent and 19 percent for 17 years now.”

And it follows that the people behind the cameras determine who they put in front of it—so the under-representation of women offscreen impacts what we see in theaters. “[T]he gender disparity behind-the-scenes is related to onscreen portrayals,” she explains. While there are exceptions, “we tend to create what we know,” she says. A previous study she conducted found that in films directed by women, 42 percent of the characters are female, as opposed to 32 percent of characters in male-directed films. Although female directors like Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) may be few and far between (making up 7% percent of all directors), when they do take the helm, they hire significantly more women to play key roles offscreen, too.

For sizable and sweeping progress, though, the rest of Hollywood needs to get on board. “Women’s under-employment is an industry-wide problem that requires an industry-wide solution,” says Lauzen. “The industry has yet to recognize and act on this reality.”

This article originally appeared on EW.com.

Watch the then-unknown actor try out for his 1993 breakout role

*Shudder*