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Behind the Scenes
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| Christian Bale | August 2009
Movie Entertainment
Jim Slotek
TEMPER, TEMPER
OK, you REALLY don’t want to make these guys angry – the stars and director of The Fighter, we mean.
The movie, the story of boxer “Irish” Mickey Ward, is set to start filming soon with Mark Wahlberg starring as Ward, and Christian Bale as his half-brother/ trainer Dicky Eklund. Bale, of course, is up for the award for “Best Walking Tantrum Streamed to the Internet” for Terminator: Salvation. Wahlberg – who may or may not have wanted to bust up Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg over his impression of him – has a bona fide criminal record.
And the director? David O. Russell notoriously fought with George Clooney on the set of Three Kings and starred in his own viral YouTube video in which he screamed protractedly at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Seriously. Don’t make them angry.
“Everybody has their process,” said Bryan Singer, who was courting Wahlberg and Bale for his own film, Prisoners, before losing them to Russell. “There are some scary tapes of me that are out there from bad days.”
BULLS VS. BEARS
So despite recession-defying robust box office, are these belt-tightening times in Hollywood? It depends who’s talking.
Tom Hanks, for one, says studio cheapskates are keeping down one of his favourite projects, an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry western novel, Boone’s Law. Everyone’s attached, including director Barry Levinson and Julianne Moore, who would play a ranch woman who travels cross-country, with Hanks riding shotgun.
“Oh God, I hope we do it,” Hanks says of what would be his first western. “But it’s run into the economics of modernday studio politics and filmmaking. There’s a whole slew of films that, if you could make them for $15 million, they’d do them. But if you can’t, you just run into a brick wall.” (Estimated combined salary of Hanks, Moore and Levinson: $35 million.)
On the other hand, one infamous budgetary casualty of recent years has a pulse again. The sci-fi comedy Used Guys, about obsolete clones, was to star Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey but buckled under the weight of their combined $40-million salaries. Now it’s being revived by Stiller, with Reese Witherspoon (whose price tag is only about $5 million less than Carrey’s) as his likely co-star.
It appears some people can still get a loan.
REUSE AND REBOOT
Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to do its bit to recycle, with Ridley Scott almost certainly in the running for some kind of Al Gore award. He’s reportedly set to produce (someone else will direct) a “reboot” of the Alien series, going back to the single-alien-picking-off-victims plot from the original. Think of the savings. He and Anthony Hopkins are also said to be poised to dust off the Hannibal Lecter character and return him to his Silence of the Lambs roots (raise your hands, both of you, who saw the prequel Hannibal Rising).
PUFNSTUFF STUFF
And now that trippy ’70s kid-TV icons Sid and Marty Krofft are back in “the loop” with the Will Ferrell-powered comedy of their Land of the Lost dinosaur series, those of us whose minds were warped by their oeuvre can look ahead to the real prize – a movie of their positively psychedelic series H.R. Pufnstuff. The Montreal-born Kroffts (who deny using drugs for inspiration) tell us it’s been green-lit as a first-time nonanimated feature for director Conrad Vernon (Monsters Vs. Aliens; Shreks 2, 3 and the coming 4).
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