Month: September 2021

FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story showrunner Sarah Burgess has spent years crafting the first television show to dramatize the affair between President Bill Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — and to tell the story of Linda Tripp, who leaked details of their affair to investigators.

Viewers who followed the ubiquitous story in the late ’90s remember Tripp well. But Burgess is aware that younger viewers may be hearing about her for the first time.

“Monica Lewinsky herself was made so famous by this crisis, that name is still known, even to teenagers. And, of course, Monica’s reemergence in the past few years has made her a positive public icon for young women,” Burgess said. “But… I remember talking to someone who was in their late 20s and didn’t know the name Linda Tripp at all.”

Longtime Murphy collaborator Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story, Ratched) plays Tripp in Impeachment: American Crime Story. But the real-life Linda Tripp passed away in 2020 before she could ever see Paulson’s portrayal of her on cable television. Tripp and Lewinsky became friends while working at the Pentagon. Tripp has faced immense scrutiny for recording her phone calls with Lewinsky, who revealed intimate details about her sexual relationship with the president. But Burgess made a point to be very fair in telling Tripp’s side of the story.

Also Read: Impeachment: American Crime Story Showrunner Wishes She’d Met the Real Linda Tripp Before She Died

“Different generations are going to hear and feel and experience the story very differently,” Burgess said. “For some people, this would be good information — and some people have read every book and podcast and know all the sort of intricacies of it. I was at a dinner last night where my friend… was telling her friend all about a very specific incident that I do depict in the show, and she hadn’t even seen my show yet. So it’s really fascinating to play to all these different audiences and I’m really curious how it’s all going to land on everybody differently.”

Without Linda Tripp, one could argue that Monica Lewinsky might never have become a household name. But Burgess feels differently.

“Linda’s decision to record Monica, and then to deliver those tapes to Ken Starr’s office, ensured that Monica would be caught up in a federal investigation. I don’t personally believe that Linda wanted to have something as horrible happen to Monica as happened to her. That’s my personal belief in sort of writing this character for several years. I don’t think she understood exactly the forces that she was unleashing,” Burgess said. “They were forces of misogyny, and they landed on Linda, too, and the tragedy of this tragic story is that Linda unleashed forces that harmed a young person who I believe she was friends with, and I don’t think she had that intention for harm of that level to occur… we also wouldn’t know who Monica is if not for Bill Clinton, and Ken Starr, and Matt Drudge, and Michael Isikoff.”

New episodes of Impeachment: American Crime Story air Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. on FX.

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Editors, cinematographers and more could soon go on strike; a closeup look into The Eyes of Tammy Faye; James Bond and Venom try to tag-team a box-office heist. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.

Dune, Sweet: The Denis Villeneuve film is off to a promising start, earning nearly $36 million from 24 overseas markets, Variety notes.

Behind The Eyes of Tammy Faye: Caleb Hammond talks to Michael Showalter, director of the televangelism biopic, who explains that he likes the challenge of taking “seemingly unlikable characters” and trying to “find the humanity in them,” beyond their superficial past portrayals. The film stars Jessica Chastain as singer, evangelist and makeup enthusiast Tammy Faye Bakker, and the interview covers a lot of detail about how Showalter made it.

Strike: One of the entertainment industry’s most essential unions will hold a strike authorization vote after contracts broke down with producers. IATSE represents over 150,000 editors, grips, operators, cinematographers, sound technicians, costumers, make-up artists, hair stylists, writers assistants, script coordinators and other industry professionals in North America. In a statement yesterday, IATSE leaders said the AMPTP, which represents unions, said it would not respond to IASTE’s latest proposal. “This failure to continue negotiating can only be interpreted one way. They simply will not address the core issues we have repeatedly advocated for from the beginning,” the IATSE leaders said in the statement.

What’s at Issue: The two sides are under a media blackout, which means few specifics have come out. But rest periods, higher wages and funding for IATSE’s health and pension plan are key issues.

The Response: The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the industry’s collective bargaining representative, says in a statement that it offered “a deal-closing comprehensive proposal that meaningfully addresses the IATSE’s key bargaining issues,” and would cover a “nearly $400 million pension and health plan deficit” while making “substantial improvements in rest periods, increases in wages and benefits, increases in minimum rates for specific job categories and increases in minimum rates for New Media Productions.”

Bond and Venom: Variety quotes Paul Dergarabedian, a box office authority and senior media analyst with Comscore, saying that the one-two punch of Venom: Let There Be Carnage on Oct. 1 and No Time to Die on Oct. 8 could kick off a “busy” fall box office. Venom: Let There Be Carnage and No Time to Die are perfectly positioned to entice the 18-to-30 year-olds who have driven the comeback of the movie theater in the latter part of the summer,” he says. Variety also says the end-of-summer release Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings looks likely to be the first pandemic-era film to cross $200 million domestically.

Comment of the Day: “Michelle Williams?” — MovieMaker publisher Deirdre McCarrick, upon seeing that the four-time Oscar nominee is in Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

Why Yes: In fact we did open today’s Rundown with a reference to Dude, Where’s My Car.

 

 

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The Eyes of Tammy Faye director Michael Showalter believes America’s longstanding fascination with televangelists and charismatic leaders has to do with the nation’s Christian roots mixed with unbridled capitalism.

“It’s a very American thing. America is rooted in these early Christian spiritual principles and values, plus this capitalist, rugged, individual thing,” he says. “And the televangelists are preaching this notion that God wants you to have it all: ‘The American Dream is out there, and you can have it. And God wants you to have it.’

“It’s more than the white-picket fence and the dog — it’s more than that,” he continues. “You can have the boat and the swimming pool. Your wildest dreams can come true. And God wants that for you. It’s this weird American way in which Christianity mixes with capitalist ambition.”

Pioneering televangelists Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye rode this “God wants you to have it all” prosperity gospel  in the ’70s and ’80s with their wildly popular TV program The PTL Club.

Showalter remembers watching The PTL Club as a teenager in the ’80s. To him, the show was a “curiosity,” something he found “a bit ridiculous but also entertaining.”

In 1988, Jim Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield) was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison, but ultimately served about five. (ABC News goes into the reasons why here.) Tammy Faye was not charged.

“The scandal was big news for a really long time. Everyone took pleasure in watching them be brought down. Tammy Faye was a big laughingstock. We all made fun of the way she looked and the way she talked and her high voice and her makeup and her garish outfits,” says Showalter.

When searching for scripts, Showalter says he looks for a main character who “is not obviously heroic or is challenged in some way.”

“I find that a good challenge is to take seemingly unlikable characters and to find the humanity in them and to look at them in a way that looks past the superficial way we might see that person,” he says.

Tammy Faye fit that description perfectly.

While her then-husband Jim Bakker was committing massive fraud behind closed doors, Faye embraced people on her daily program who had been shunned by more conservative Christians, like Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell (played by Vincent D’Onofrio). In one sequence in the film, she speaks via live feed with gay pastor Steve Pieters, who had been diagnosed as HIV positive. Faye’s compassion is striking in the context of the era, when many fundamentalist Christian leaders turned their backs on people with HIV/AIDS.

Hidden behind fake eyelashes, tattooed eyeliner and colorful eyeshadow, Jessica Chastain lends layers to her Faye portrayal. She even sings, just as the real Tammy Faye did.

“We were using Nashville studio musicians, some of whom had actually recorded songs with Tammy Faye and had done music for the Bakkers on PTL,” Showalter says. “Rather than using hip cool current musicians trying to mimic that, we actually use the actual studio musicians who were of that time period.”

Showalter says he tried to maintains a zen-like disposition through the challenges of the film, which included studio recordings, portraying characters based on real people, and recreating decades of 700 Club and PTL Club sets.

“I often equate my experience of directing as getting in the ocean and letting the waves hit you. If you fight the waves, you get beat up more. You have to let the waves just hit you. There’s so many elements in this movie. My approach was to just to let all of it be what it wanted to be and then just go with it.”

Centering the film on Faye’s perspective also helped guide the editing process.

“In post-production, with all of the jumping back and forth between time periods, there was a lot of experimentation into finding the right balance. In the current version, you start in the ’90s, and you end in the ’90s. But in the original draft, you’re constantly returning to the ’90s as a kind of framing device. And now it’s much more of a bookended thing.”

“It was about telling the story of telling Tammy and trying to zero in on that thread,” he continues. “There’s a lot of other balls in the air. There’s Jim, and there’s the other characters, and there’s all sorts of other points of view that are flowing through it. It was about figuring out how to really focus in on Tammy’s point of view.”

Also read: Paul Schrader Says Shooting The Card Counter Digitally Helped Him Retain Final Cut

Up next for Showalter is a television series with Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd. Rudd starred in Showalter’s breakout, Wet Hot American Summer, in 2001.

Showalter calls Ferrell’s role in the series “quite dramatic.” He says actors best known for comedy and drama tend to approach their work the same way.

“There’s an essence there with someone like Will, where he just is funny even when he’s not meaning to be — that just is,” he says. “But they’re all very serious about it. And it’s the same approach: What performance do you want to give and let me help with that? How can I lean in? How can I encourage that further?

“The biggest choices are in casting that person and trying to work with an actor that isn’t going to rest on their laurels, that isn’t going to just do what they know how to do and not try to examine if there’s more they can explore.”

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Michael Showalter, is now in theaters. 

Main image, above: Jessica Chastain is Tammy Faye in The Eyes of Tammy Faye from director Michael Showalter. 

The post Tammy Faye Director Michael Showalter Sees America’s Televangelist Obsession as a Mixture of These Two Things appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

Takeaways from the Emmys, and scenes from a film festival in virtual reality. Also magic. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.

What Happened This Weekend Besides the Emmys? Our friends at StudioFest held a wildly ambitious VR film festival, using Oculus Quest 2 headsets that enabled guests to enjoy the shared illusion that they were watching the films in a lavish theater, then mixing it up in majestically appointed rooms with stunning views of pretend cities. The films weren’t VR — the screenings and hangouts were. It was mind-blowing. Congratulations to the winner, Courtney Hope Thérond, who now gets to make a film with StudioFest. Here are a couple scenes of how it looked once you put on your headset:

 

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StudioFest: You can learn more about everything they do from their series Demystified, presented by MovieMaker.

The Crown Rules The Emmys: Congratulations to the brilliant and completely engrossing The Crown, which won best drama at the 73rd Emmy Awards last night. Josh O’Connor (who plays Prince Charles), Gillian Anderson (Margaret Thatcher) and Tobias Menzies (Prince Philip) also won Emmys for their roles. The Crown is one of the most sweepingly cinematic shows in the history of television, which feels notable after a year in which the in-theater theatrical experience largely disappeared. The Netflix series won seven Emmys in all for this season, which was its fourth.

Ted Lasso, Too: The buoyant Apple TV+ show won for best comedy, Jason Sudeikis won for best actor in a comedy, and his castmates Brett Goldstein and Hannah Waddingham won in their supporting categories. There are a couple of themes emerging here: Streaming services doing very well, and shows set in the UK doing very well. Ted Lasso won four Emmys in all.

Can We Skip All This and Just See the Full List of Emmy Winners? Yep.

The Queen… Also Rules: Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, the Anya Taylor-Joy chess drama from Scott Frank, won for best limited series. Remember that point in the pandemic when you couldn’t buy chess boards?

Wow, Who Didn’t Win? Variety considers the most-snubbed show to be WandaVision, which won nothing despite 23 nominations.

Also: The Hollywood Reporter summed it up with the headline, #EmmysSoWhite: White Actors Sweep the 2021 Emmy Awards. It’s kind of hard to believe this has happened again at another awards ceremony… but I suppose it’s more likely when the big winner of the night is a show about British royalty, who are not known for their diversity.

Anything Else? In March 2020, when SXSW had just been cancelled and the world was starting to feel rather grim, I talked with filmmaker Alexis Manya Spraic about her terrific SXSW doc M for Magic, about L.A.’s intoxicatingly wonderful Magic Castle, where people dress  up to watch magicians charm their way through performances both grand and personal. It seemed like exactly the kind of crowded, up-close performance venue that could be doomed by COVID. And so it was with a huge sense of relief, gratitude and joy that I joined Team MovieMaker last night for a trip to the Magic Castle, and found that it was still going very strong, and that sometimes dire situations do get better. I left with the sense that magic still exists in the world, or at least in an old mansion on a small hilltop in Los Angeles.

Main image: Emma Corrin as Princess Diana in The Crown, roller skating through Buckingham Palace.

 

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St. Vincent gets fake in the rock star documentary takedown The Nowhere Inn; Justin Chon relocates from Los Angeles to Louisiana for the immigration story Blue Bayou; a Beyond Fest screening is thematically perfect. All in today’s Movie News Rundown.

But First: We’re halfway through September — how’s your screenplay coming? Here’s our list of Screenwriting Competitions to Enter in September, presented by Film Freeway.

But Second: There will be no Rundown tomorrow because I’ll be travelin’.

St. Vincent: The new film The Nowhere Inn is a collaboration between musician St. Vincent (Annie Clark) and Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein that makes fun of all those musican-approved “documentaries” that claim to shed light on this inner life of Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber or whomever. The Nowhere Inn is about the “ego purgatory” of celebrities who “surround themselves with people who only tell them yes,” St. Vincent tells Margeaux Sippell.

Blue Bayou: Justin Chon, director of the new film Blue Bayou, talks to Caleb Hammond in this piece about why he left his film-mad hometown of L.A. to shoot in Louisiana. Blue Bayou is the story of a Korean-born adoptee who faces the threat of deportation — even though he has a new young family in America.

Killian and the Comeback Kids and a Comet: Taylor A. Purdee, the writer-director-and-so-much-more of the new musical drama Killian and the Comeback Kids, wrote this fun piece for us about preparing for all kinds of big cinematic challenges — and then facing down real ones like Muzak that won’t stop playing in the background and a key location. Some big cosmic things broke his way, though, as he explains. The film is out tomorrow. Congratulations!

Beyond Brings the Heat: Beyond Fest, one of our 50 Best Genre Festivals in the World, just announced a dynamic lineup that includes the West Coast Premiere of Julia Ducornau’s Palme d’Or Winner Titane. It will have a simultaneous indoor and drive-in screening, which is fun because the film involves a woman’s very unusual relationship with a vehicle. Yes, your car can be your date. Beyond Fest films will also include Blumhouse’s Halloween Kills and The Black Phone, and  Halloween Kills director David Gordon Green and producer Jason Blum will be on hand to discuss the film. There’s also a 50th anniversary screening of A Clockwork Orange and a salute to the great Michael Mann. The festival will be held in Los Angeles from Wednesday, September 29th through Monday, October 11th. Here is a lot of additional detail.

That’s Cool, Where Are You Travelin’? Los Angeles! I’m back and forth between L.A. and Boston a lot, but have actually been away from L.A. for a long time. It will be nice to eat at Plancha Tacos and go to Largo. Also Team MovieMaker is going to go to some magic shows. Fun!

Where Are You Staying? The Nowhere Inn.

Main Image: St. Vincent in The Nowhere Inn.

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