Bouchard is a Fork lift driver, is Prone to fits of apathy. Pop culture buff, Pisces and a Hipster-friendly beer fanatic.
In the summer of 1962, MCA Inc.—the giant Hollywood talent agency so dominant in its field that industry insiders called it The Octopus—acquired a majority stake in Decca Records and Universal Pictures, giving it control of a full-fledged movie studio and a major recording company. For the better part of a decade, MCA had already been the country’s largest creator of television programming. The agency was known for controversially “packaging” its star actors with writing and directing clients into ready-made shows for one-stop, near-monopoly sale to the networks. But the Universal acquisition was a bridge too far for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, which filed a civil antitrust suit against MCA and forced it to dissolve its agency business, on the grounds that being both a buyer and seller of talent posed an inherent conflict of interest. For most of the past 60 years, mindful of this precedent, Hollywood’s agents have largely steered clear of trying to produce movies and television that would give them control of the content that their own clients create. Not anymore. In recent years, powerful uber-agents like William Morris Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel have realized what the legendary MCA boss Lew Wasserman himself understood so well when he agreed to get out of the agency business: Producing and owning entertainment is ultimately more lucrative than simply taking up to a 10 percent commission on its creation. That’s why the big agencies have not only reverted to The Octopus’s old practice of bundling their clients into package deals for movies and television—in the process, waiving their standard commissions while pocketing hefty (and often undisclosed) fees for themselves—but they have also created independent production companies that could amount to mini-studios of their own. Now the Writers Guild of America is fighting back. The union represents about 13,000 screenwriters—some 8,500 of whom have agents—and it provides them with health and pension benefits and advocates for writers’ interests with studios and producers. Last week, the guild sued the four biggest talent agencies—WME, Creative Artists Agency, ICM Partners and United Talent Agency—on the grounds that their packaging practices violate California and federal laws by pitting the financial interests of the agencies against those of their clients. The union also instructed its members to fire their agents after failed negotiations on a new industry code of conduct to replace the compact that governs how agents represent writers. The WGA says that 92 percent of its more than 800 members—including Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey and Adam McKay, and House of Cards’ Beau Willimon—who signed a statement in support of ending packaging fees last month have complied. [Read: I like my agents—but I fired them anyway] “This is incredibly painful,” one veteran television writer who signed the union’s letter firing his longtime agent told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “This is chaos. I’ve been with my agent for 23 years and he’s a good friend of mine, and he’s shown nothing but integrity and commitment for 23 years. To sign something terminating that, even though we know it’s a labor move and part of larger dance that hopefully gets some resolution, it’s a very disconcerting thing.” At the moment, the two sides seem locked in a standoff with no end in sight, in a battle that could ultimately upend television and movie production and threaten the livelihoods of thousands of people. This conflict comes at a time when fundamental economic realities are changing for both writers and agents in the digital Hollywood era, pitting their interests against each other new ways. The period of peak TV has meant more content creation—and perhaps a greater need for writers than ever before. But it has also meant shorter production seasons, lower salaries, less predictable work cycles and, in the case of Netflix, no potential back-end reward for the sales of successful shows to other markets (the streaming service retains ownership of all its original content). At the same time, the agency business has changed dramatically, as the big players have expanded and taken on capital from outside investors, lessening individual agents’ ownership stake in their business and requiring an ever-larger revenue stream to be profitable. It’s a perfect storm, one that will test whether prevailing industry practices draw renewed scrutiny by the Justice Department. In recent years, the major agencies have taken hundreds of millions of dollars in private-equity money—the majority owner of CAA, for example, is now TPG Capital, a giant private-equity firm—and their prime mandate is growth. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that WME is planning for an initial public stock offering this year. “They aren’t agencies any more, in their view,” one former top network executive told me. “They’re entertainment conglomerates.” That is precisely the situation that the 1962 federal consent decree with MCA was intended to prevent. Founded in 1924 in Chicago by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist, MCA initially booked bands into the Windy City’s Prohibition-era nightclubs and speakeasies, often in peaceful collaboration with the city’s mobsters. By 1939, it had moved to Beverly Hills and acquired other talent agencies representing stars like Bette Davis and Henry Fonda, with the leadership of Wasserman, a former theater usher from Cleveland who became Stein’s right-hand man. As an agent in post-war Hollywood, Wasserman revolutionized prevailing industry practices by getting the first-ever back-end percentage deal for James Stewart in Winchester ’73. In the 1950s, MCA moved into television production with its Revue Productions arm. [Read: Steven Spielberg vs. Netflix] MCA was able to do so in part because the agency received a friendly waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, then headed by Ronald Reagan, and from the Writers Guild as well. By the end of the decade, the agency held a virtual stranglehold on TV production, to the exasperation of network executives. Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the onetime head of NBC’s entertainment division (and the father of Sigourney), explained to Justice Department investigators what happened when the network wanted to develop a new series starring Phil Silvers, an MCA client. “We had production facilities; top scripts, writers, and directors; our own production facilities in Burbank,” Weaver would recall. “All we wanted was a star. MCA agreed to furnish us Phil Silvers, but only if it took a package commission: 10 percent from every producer, director, writer … everyone who worked on the show. If we protested that we wanted our own writers because the best ones were not MCA clients, MCA would simply say, ‘That’s the deal. That’s the way it’s got to be.’” In the end, giving up the agency business wasn’t really a tough choice for Wasserman and Stein. By 1961, MCA’s gross revenues were about $82 million, according to Wasserman’s biographer Connie Bruck, with the agency’s share only accounting for about 10 percent of that. As head of Universal, Wasserman would go on to create the studio’s lucrative backlot tour, and would pioneer the summer blockbuster with films like Jaws. The modern packaging system that has evolved over the past couple of decades is somewhat different. The agencies—often two or more together—waive standard commissions for their clients, who are lumped together on a particular project, while taking fees and back-end ownership stakes for themselves. The agents contend this works in favor of the clients, by saving them their 10 percent commission, and for some non-star writers and actors, it may well do so. But the union complains that the system is not transparent, and that there is no way to know whether an agent might have negotiated a higher fee for a writer or performer in a non-packaged deal. David Simon, the creator of The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street, recently wrote an impassioned blog post, reprinted on Deadline, about the inherent conflict that packaging presents:
The WGA is seeking an injunction in Los Angeles Superior Court. It would prevent agencies from accepting packaging fees, and seek damages from those fees it argues were obtained illegally. Union officials have said they do not yet know whether the guild would file a second suit seeking to block the agencies’ moves into the production field, but a union lawyer told me the guild is looking at it. The agencies have mostly maintained silence. But attorneys for their trade group, the Association of Talent Agents, are contending that lawyers and managers assuming the negotiating responsibilities currently reserved expressly for agents would violate both New York and California state laws governing the industry. Most experts seem to agree that the agencies are pushing the envelope in a gray area of the law. The MCA consent decree just covered a single company, and one that no longer exists, at that. The major talent agencies also hold considerable political clout, functioning as reliable fundraising ATMs for politicians by perennially hosting high-ticket dinners and parties for candidates from all over the country—especially liberal Democrats who might otherwise look askance at issues like packaging of entertainment. “State law is a little bit muddled as to what they’re allowed to do as agents,” says a senior lawyer at one major studio. “Even if you’re over the line, who has the balls to bring a lawsuit against them?” Well, the Writers Guild for starters. via Blogger The Fight Between Hollywood Writers and Their Agents Isn’t New
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Ken Jennings rose to fame after an unprecedented run on Jeopardy 15 years ago: Over the course of 74 episodes, he won a total of roughly $2.5 million. Recently, a contestant named James Holzhauer has been working toward Jennings’s record at an astonishing pace. After the Friday evening broadcast of the quiz program, Holzhauer had won about $850,000 over just 12 episodes. If he keeps up that rate, he’ll reach $2.5 million in less than half the time it took Jennings to do so. Before Holzhauer went on the show, the most money earned in a single episode of Jeopardy was $77,000. During his 12-episode streak, he’s beaten that total not once, but five times, and set a new record of $131,127. Holzhauer’s success has been attributed not just to his deep trivia knowledge, but also to his aggressive style of play—he homes in on high-value tiles that might contain Daily Doubles, and then often bets enormous sums when he finds them—and his unmatched buzzer-pressing reflexes. [Read: How a week of ‘Jeopardy’ gets filmed in one day] Whatever his method, Holzhauer is far exceeding the show’s average single-day winnings, which a Jeopardy fan website calculated to be $19,980. With his sometimes six-figure daily prizes, how much damage is Holzhauer doing to the show’s finances? “Every game show has a prize budget,” says Bob Boden, a former head of programming at Game Show Network who has worked on dozens of shows there and elsewhere, including Family Feud. “Typically for a long-running show the prize budget is determined by way of averages of what has been won in the past.” Large deviations from such averages can strain these prize budgets. “James’s performance, I’m sure, is causing grief for an accountant somewhere,” says Boden, who’s now an executive at the production company Entertainment Studios. Estimating payouts is easier for some types of shows than others. “You know that the winner of Survivor is going to get a million dollars, and you know what the second- and third-place players will get, so the prize budget on that is locked,” Boden says. Budgets for shows like Jeopardy with variable winnings are harder to project. Some production companies protect against that unpredictability by taking out insurance policies that cover abnormally large jackpots. This is common, Boden says, for shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, in which giving out the top prize is rare but really costly. But he says he’d be surprised if Jeopardy, which has a prize structure less prone to extremes, had such a policy. (Representatives for Jeopardy and Sony Pictures Television, which produces it, did not respond to requests for details about the show’s financial workings.) Jeopardy, though, should fare just fine during Holzhauer’s reign, for two reasons. First, prize budgets are generally not game shows’ biggest expenses. Boden says that the bills for paying production crews and on-air talent tend to be higher. (The salary of Alex Trebek, Jeopardy’s host, has been reported to be $10 million a year.) Second, Holzhauer’s stellar performances are drawing more viewers in. Normally, Boden says, it’s not compelling TV for a single player to run up the score, “but in a situation like this, where records are being set and broken every night, the excitement, I believe, outweighs the lopsided results." That excitement will almost definitely help the show’s bottom line. Increased viewership often translates to more lucrative ad sales (though, Boden notes, this uptick in ad value isn’t immediate and would take some time to kick in). Spikes in popularity are also good for whatever additional revenue streams a show may have, like merchandising or interactive gaming. More symbolically, Boden says, a thrilling contestant like Holzhauer can further burnish the reputation of a long-running game show like Jeopardy, solidifying its place in the canon of American TV. Jennings was extremely valuable to Jeopardy in this regard, but with average winnings of about $34,000 per episode, he was a bargain compared to Holzhauer, who’s averaging roughly $71,000. In fact, if reports of Trebek’s salary are indeed correct, Holzhauer is currently out-earning even the show’s host on a per-episode basis—though, of course, he has a bit less job security. via Blogger Jeopardy Wasn’t Designed for a Contestant Like James Holzhauer Netflix’s ongoing (and laudable) efforts to revive romantic-comedy films have moved so quickly that the company is now plowing through every subgenre available. There was Set It Up, an endlessly rewatchable workplace meet-cute flick; there was To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, a pitch-perfect high-school throwback. Now, with Someone Great, the moviemaking debut of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who created the TV series Sweet/Vicious), Netflix has its first good breakup film. This energetic misadventure, set over the course of one crazy night in New York, charts the end of a major relationship—as well as the hope, and misery, that follows. Robinson is a vibrant writer, and Someone Great is a confident first film. It makes clever use of various locations throughout New York to create a story that feels like a supercharged episode of Broad City, filled with farcical mishaps involving sex, drugs, and friendship. The movie is grounded by a star turn from Gina Rodriguez, who sheds her chipper Jane the Virgin persona to portray a more frayed romantic lead. Someone Great is sometimes painfully trendy, thanks to flashbacks that are photographed with the neon haze of an Instagram filter and a perfectly curated soundtrack of the moment. But this aesthetic is fitting for a movie that’s best experienced while lazing on the couch, preferably on the morning after a wild night out. Rodriguez plays Jenny, a 29-year-old music journalist who gets her big break and lands a job at Rolling Stone that, implausibly, requires her to move to San Francisco (Rolling Stone closed its famed Bay Area offices 12 years ago). That news prompts Nate (Lakeith Stanfield), Jenny’s boyfriend of nine years, to break up with her rather than turn their relationship into a long-distance slog. Distraught, Jenny enlists her best pals, Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise), to distract her by going out and partying around Manhattan. From then on, Someone Great kicks into high speed, and its plot becomes little more than a series of comedy sketches. The film sometimes gratingly leans into caricature, then swerves away with a cute plot twist. Blair is a type-A stick-in-the-mud with a dull boyfriend (Alex Moffat)—but then it’s revealed that she also has a more dramatic affair playing out in secret. Erin is a free-spirited party animal—but she’s unwilling to admit to herself that her newest relationship might actually be worth committing to. Robinson’s script spends a solid amount of time digging into these dynamics rather than having Blair and Erin exist as one-dimensional plot devices. This is a rom-com where the male characters are the underdeveloped ones, a refreshing turnaround from the norm. Nate is given a little more shading through the frequent memories Robinson sprinkles throughout the film, cutting between the beginning of his and Jenny’s relationship (when they were in their early 20s) and now. It’s basically impossible for Stanfield not to be charming, so there’s a good amount of wistfulness in Someone Great’s flashbacks, and the loss of Nate’s chemistry with Jenny feels like something worth mourning. But the film establishes early on that while this breakup is sad, it’s also important to move on from. Someone Great isn’t so much a story about losing one’s boyfriend as it is about growing up and entering the scary territory of your 30s, where time seems more precious and juvenile mistakes are harder to ignore. Once that emotional truth at the core of Robinson’s script becomes apparent, Someone Great becomes a bit of a drag, jumping from one outlandish premise to another as Jenny and her pals try to get the right drugs, score invites to the right parties, and speak in the buzziest sound bites imaginable. Jenny views her breakup with a ridiculous sort of grandeur, monologuing about how special her bond with Nate was, but it’s an understandable attitude for someone bidding goodbye to her 20s as if life will never be the same again. Robinson could stand to further satirize Jenny’s penchant for apocalyptic pronouncements about her love life, but the writer-director is too busy getting easy laughs from set pieces about “Beyoncé weed” and lobbing guest stars like RuPaul and Jaboukie Young-White at the screen. Someone Great is fizzy, frivolous, and probably easily forgotten, but for a weekend-friendly jolt of entertainment, rom-com fans could do far worse. via Blogger Netflix’s Someone Great Is a Forgettably Fun Breakup Comedy On Thursday morning, the report that had been compiled over the past 22 months by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was released, in a “lightly redacted” digital format, to the American public. By Thursday evening, cheeky reviews of the 448-page compendium began popping up on Goodreads. One went like this: “The previous owner used a black highlighter on all the interesting bits and the main character has no redeeming qualities.” Another: “Slightly better than the SparkNotes edition released a few weeks ago.” Another: “The whole ‘we wouldn’t presume to say the president was guilty even if he was, but we will say that he’s definitely not not guilty’ thing is a bit of a cop-out. But it did have its moments.” What did the president [redacted], and when did he [redacted]? The report, as those playfully disappointed assessments suggest, does not fully answer those questions. Instead—in a move that sometimes evoked a report authored by Dons Quixote or DeLillo, rather than Robert Mueller—the thing goes out of its way to acknowledge its own limitations. It does not contain the information that would have come from an interview with President Donald Trump, and interviewees lied to the Office of Special Counsel, the report notes, heaving a nearly audible sigh. These factors in combination informed its conclusion: that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges” in the matter of the 2016 Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. You could call that punting; you could call it restraint; or you could call it what Trump did on Thursday, as he publicly celebrated the report’s nonfindings: “It’s called no collusion, no obstruction.” I spent much of Thursday watching cable news’s reaction to the report’s public release, which means mostly that, if I have somehow wronged you or your family in the past, you can now consider yourself thoroughly avenged. But it also means that I have passed several strange hours watching pundits engaged in that most modern of activities: grappling with revelations that manage to be at once outrageous and … thoroughly predictable. Shocked, but not surprised. It might be the defining emotion of the politics of 2019, and it lurks, among the shaded legalese, in the Mueller report. The person leading the American government lies, with regularity and impunity? It’s outrageous, but widely known. His agents do the same, on his behalf? Scandalous, and also a bit tedious. The White House, populated by several beneficiaries of nepotism and headed by someone whose mentor was a lawyer for the mob, has a dull tint of corruption? Shocking! But no longer surprising. Trump is exceptionally skilled at separating people from their outrage, and one of his most common rhetorical tricks is his use of repetition as incantation. Whether it’s “U-S-A” or “Lock her up” or “No collusion, no obstruction,” his catchphrases have the effect not only of imposing his version of reality on audiences with blunt-force insistence, but also of lulling them into complacency. The refrains here function in the way refrains usually do: They become so familiar that they stop being questionable. The Mueller report has become evidence of that dynamic. A document making similar claims about a different president would be eye-popping; this particular report, however, about this particular president, simply confirmed that Donald Trump is the same person the American public—his supporters and his dissenters alike—has known him to be all along: venal, self-absorbed, unprepared. The report was metabolized accordingly. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed it up on Thursday evening, it “isn’t a bombshell so much as a compendium and confirmation of who the man is and how he conducts himself.” Because of that—and because the special counsel’s investigation into the workings of the Trump campaign had led to indictments and convictions that were revealed in real time, rather than in the report—Mueller’s findings were treated, on Thursday, not only as a work of legal inquiry but also as a work of cultural mythology. (Or, as CNN’s Jake Tapper put it, “This document now goes from being a legal document to a political document.”) Who would determine The Narrative™ that would shape the report’s afterlife as a work of living history? Tucker Carlson, on his Thursday-evening show, engaged in his own attempt at mythmaking. The Fox News host took a gleeful, if deskbound, victory lap over the Mueller report, reveling in it not so much as a win for the president but as a defeat for other members of the media. “The Mueller report is probably the single most humiliating thing that has ever happened to the White House press corps in the history of this country,” Carlson said, with his signature blend of rage and ennui. His soliloquy—which shifted from mockery of the “hysterical children” of the press to a lengthy suggestion that the Mueller report’s very existence had led to the failure of the Trump presidency—was illustrated with a series of caps-locked chyrons: LEFT STRUGGLES TO ACCEPT MUELLER REPORT FINDINGS; LEFT DEMANDS YOU STOP LISTENING TO AG BARR; OUR LEADERS WORSHIPPED MUELLER FOR YEARS. The longtime Fox anchor Brit Hume joined Carlson on the air: “Some of us, such as those of us here at Fox News, don’t have this collusion dog doo all over our shoes, and never did,” Hume said. “So we look at this and we think to ourselves, ‘Well, I guess we sort of sized that up properly.’” Others were more succinct about it. Donald Trump Jr., one of the many White House surrogates who discussed the Mueller report on Thursday, put it like this via Twitter: “TOLD YA!!!” His father, for his part, posted a meme featuring an image of himself, his back turned to the viewer, his person shrouded by fog, the picture overlaid with words printed in Game of Thrones’ distinctive font. “Game Over,” it said, disregarding the fact that, on this particular show, what is dead may never die. “I’m having a good day,” the president said cheerfully, at a public appearance shortly after the report was released. And he was: The day began when Trump’s recently appointed attorney general, William Barr, convened a press conference at the Justice Department—one staged for reporters who had not yet read the report. Here was the attorney general, acting less as an objective arbiter of the law and more as a foot soldier in an army with a singular general. Barr painted a misleadingly rosy picture of the contents of the report itself, doing his own work to shape The Narrative™. It was egregious, so much so that even Fox News took note of the excess partisanship: “The attorney general seemed almost to be acting the counsel for the defense,” the anchor Chris Wallace said. But the president and his surrogates were not merely fighting for The Narrative™. They were also arguing for something more basic: the notion that the Mueller report is so insignificant, in its findings and nonfindings, as to be laughable. Dog doo. TOLD YA!!! The Mueller report is commonly compared to the Starr Report, and to the report that was produced decades before by the Senate Watergate Committee. But the most apt analogue might be the Iran-Contra report, authored by the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. That assessment, like its most recent successor, found that the personal conduct of the president (Ronald Reagan) in the Iran-Contra affair “fell well short of criminality which could be successfully prosecuted.” It also concluded, however, that the president had “created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others.” That document, too, navigated the tension between criminality in particular and wrongdoing in general; it, too, suggested both Americans’ great capacity for outrage and their equally great capacity for cynicism. (Some of the participants in the affair would receive presidential pardons; Reagan’s role in the scandal would be relegated, for the most part, to the haze of history.) And on it goes. The shock mingling with the gah. Trump’s “on both sides” reaction to the horrors of Charlottesville. The arrest of Roger Stone. Jeff Sessions’s firing as attorney general. Last summer, The New York Times published the results of an extensive investigation into the accumulation of wealth that had helped Donald Trump first to become very rich, and then to star in a reality show whose theme song contains the lyrics “Money, money, money, money—MONEY,” and then to leverage the fame that resulted into a successful bid for the presidency of the United States. The Times’ report was an indictment of Watergate-level proportions. And yet it came and went over not much more than a day, barely putting a dent in the fickle American attention span. The problem, once again, wasn’t that the report wasn’t shocking—it was!—but rather that it wasn’t surprising. It confirmed a thing about Trump that was already part of the story about Trump. It’s a particularly perverse kind of twist: The corruption itself conferred a kind of impunity. And it’s a paradox that was replicated on Thursday. The issue wasn’t that the Mueller report was “fake news,” in that other Trumpian refrain. It was instead something both simpler and more menacing: It was old news. via Blogger ‘Shocked but Not Surprised’ Is the Defining Mood of 2019 It’s hardly shocking that Terry Gilliam might see a bit of himself in Don Quixote. The director and Monty Python member has made a career of tilting at windmills, mounting ambitious film projects such as Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen that are often plagued by studio meddling and budget overruns and end up feeling like implausible gambits. But for three decades, the giant that Gilliam could not slay was The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a fourth wall–breaking, loopily postmodern adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece. That the film exists, and is coming to limited theaters this weekend, feels like an achievement all on its own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story behind The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has come to dominate the narrative of the final project. Gilliam’s film is a deliberately shaggy, recursive story about the all-consuming nature of filmmaking: A director (played by Adam Driver) finds that his long-ago efforts to make a Don Quixote movie as a student have left behind destruction and madness in the town where he worked. To anyone who has followed the parabolic arcs of Gilliam’s career, it’s a fascinating text; to the more casual viewer, it may only come off as a meandering mess. In The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Toby Grisoni (Driver) begins as a put-upon, soulless bigshot, directing a fancy commercial in the Spanish countryside and contending with a grumpy financier known simply as “The Boss” (Stellan Skarsgård). Nostalgic for his old work, Grisoni journeys back to the rural village where he made an amateur black-and-white film version of Don Quixote. There, he finds that the old cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) who worked with him 10 years ago has never let go of the performance: He has become Quixote, the ditzy knight errant who roams the country on a horse, looking for giants (a.k.a windmills) to charge at and women to chivalrously rescue. Grisoni is quickly sucked into Quixote’s delusion, and Gilliam begins toying with the line between fiction and reality. He transports the characters into a 17th-century adventure, never quite settling on whether or not it’s all a dream. Given the movie’s drawn-out production history, the metatextual angle of Grisoni (jokingly named after Gilliam’s co-screenwriter, Tony Grisoni) trying to reckon with the damaging effects of his filmmaking is an interesting one for Gilliam to take. No doubt, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has wreaked havoc on his own life. To get a sense of just how cursed this film has been over the decades, one can seek out Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha, a 2002 documentary about the epic unraveling of an earlier iteration of the project that starred Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort. Others connected to the Don Quixote role over the years include Sean Connery, Robert Duvall, Michael Palin, and John Hurt, whose death from cancer in 2017 stalled out the most recent failed attempt at filming. Even after he finished editing the movie, Gilliam was drawn into a legal battle with its former producer, and then had a health scare while preparing to premiere it at Cannes last year. As someone trying to preserve order while accidentally sowing chaos, Quixote is a fitting avatar for the director. But after that terrific premise is established, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote takes an awfully long time to wind to its conclusion, following Quixote and Grisoni through various misadventures that are as confusingly photographed as they are pointless. Pryce, who collaborated with Gilliam on Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, is beautifully suited to the role of Quixote. He’s an ornery presence with just the barest twinkle in his eye, who gives the knight’s old-fashioned air of righteousness just the right balance of dignity and ludicrousness. Driver, who becomes Quixote’s much abused sidekick Sancho Panza, is a source of boundless energy for a movie that feels longer than its 132-minute running time, giving viewers a human figure to identify with lest they drown in Gilliam’s overflowing imagination. The creative journey, and the magical bond between artist and subject, are what ignite Gilliam’s passion here. Unfortunately, the themes of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are more compelling than the set pieces themselves. While the film is an undeniable triumph for Gilliam, that’s less because of the work itself and more because of the fact that it was released at all. via Blogger Terry Gilliam Reckons With the Noble Madness of Filmmaking It is strange, when you pause to think about it, that E. L. James is still out there being glowingly profiled as a transgressive, taboo-busting warrior for women’s desire, given that her fictional worlds position female characters somewhere between the saintly Dorothea Brooke and the wimple-wearing Maria von Trapp. Her women are blushing, impoverished virgins, pristine of heart and fragile of appetite; her men, meanwhile, are swaggering lotharios whose wallets bulge even more conspicuously than their designer underwear. In James’s new book, The Mister, the hero is an English earl who’s also a model-slash-DJ-slash-photographer-slash-composer, and whose first page of interior monologue is a vainglorious ode to “mindless sex” and a “nameless fuck.” His name, if you can stomach it, is Maxim Trevelyan. And the ultimate object of his affections, the woman who will ensure the rake’s progress from libidinous playboy to loyal husband, is ... his doe-eyed undocumented Albanian maid, Alessia Demachi. It’s not just that The Mister is bad. It’s that it’s bad in ways that seem to cause the space-time continuum itself to wobble, slightly, as the words on the page rearrange themselves into kaleidoscopic fragments of repetition and product placement. There’s the simple conceit for the book, in which James has been compelled to write an erotic novel about a woman who’s been sex trafficked. There are its gender dynamics, which assert, with the stuffiness of a 19th-century provost, that men can hump anything they please with gay abandon, while women should save themselves for their billionaire employers. (It’s not until page 401 of The Mister that Alessia musters the courage to look directly at Maxim’s penis, as if it’s a basilisk whose unfiltered gaze head-on will turn her to stone.) Mostly, though, there’s the writing. I have, for my sins, read all three novels in James’s Fifty Shades trilogy, a series that took sadomasochism and remarketed it for Christian housewives shopping at Target, all hot-pink padded nylon restraints and branded nipple clamps. The one positive thing you can say about The Mister is that it steers (mostly) clear of BDSM, and so doesn’t misinform millions of readers about the dynamics of consent. Like Fifty Shades of Grey, though, it has an errant creepiness about it that’s defined by its strange loyalty to the male gaze. Christian Grey, to me, is a man’s idea of a romantic hero—a 27-year-old tech entrepreneur with planes and cars and helicopters instead of a personality, a squillionaire whose idea of sexual gratification incarnate is getting a woman to do exactly what he says. And The Mister is no different, really, in that its male characters have power and its female characters cook and clean. At the beginning of the novel, Maxim is a 28-year-old aristocrat-playboy whose older brother has just died, meaning that he’s obliged, in English terms, to buck up and start fulfilling his role as heir to the Trevethick estate (vast swathes of land and country houses in Cornwall, Northumberland, and Oxfordshire). Maxim is annoyed that this interferes with his nocturnal schedule of playing Korean house music at nightclubs in Hoxton and using his side gig as a model to sleep with “hot, skinny women.” But then his regular maid, his “daily,” is replaced by Alessia, whose introduction jolts Maxim into an uncharacteristic pattern of celibacy and composing concertos on the piano. “I am cleaner, Mister” Alessia whispers to him, “her eyes still downcast, and her eyelashes fanned out above her luminous cheeks.” “Yes,” Maxim thinks. “For a woman dressed in a nylon housecoat, she’s hot.” Their relationship is crystallized by loaded looks over household chores, captured in paragraphs that are both breathy and unintentionally comical. Alessia, Maxim observes, “moves with such easy, sensuous grace; bending over the sofa, lithe, toned arms reaching out and delicate, long-fingered hands cupping the crumbs from the seat cushions and brushing them off.” Moving on, “with a deliberate and even pace, she works her way around the piano, buffing and polishing, her breathing becoming faster and harder with the exertion. It’s agonising. I close my eyes and imagine how I could elicit the same response from her.” Maxim is stupidly horny, but he’s also dully unimaginative: Alessia, he thinks, “irons with the same sensuous grace I noticed the other day [emphasis mine], in long, easy strokes.” James’s signature quality as a writer is specificity. No wine can go unlisted—“tasty Italian Barolo,” “good Chablis,” “Château Haut-Brion.” She gives us internal monologues that have the breadth and the emotional resonance of the White Pages. “I understand why she’s emotional,” Maxim thinks in one moment. “What a day. If I’m astounded by today’s events, she must be overwhelmed. Completely overwhelmed. I think it’s best if I leave her alone to gather her thoughts. Besides, it’s late and I have to make some calls.” No errant thought or observation of Maxim’s is unworthy of inclusion. (“We pull into the Gordano Services on the M5 just after 10:00 pm. I’m hungry in spite of the cheese sandwich Magda made for me back in Brentford.”) This kind of indiscriminate detail explains why The Mister is more than 500 pages long, but what’s baffling is that despite this exhaustive access to the inner workings of Maxim’s mind, he’s as wooden and charmless as a sideboard (and if E. L. James were writing this, she’d tell you that the sideboard came from West Elm or Restoration Hardware, and that it was polished to a smooth, sexy, expensive-looking sheen). Alessia, meanwhile, is a character so contradictory she feels glued together out of pieces, like an alluring Edward Scissorhands. She’s a 23-year-old virgin who was raised to believe that women do what men say; she’s a virtuoso pianist with synesthesia who sees musical compositions in rainbow colors; she grew up learning English from HBO and Netflix but she’s never had an alcoholic drink, and she ran away when her father arranged her marriage to a local gangster. Her mother, to facilitate her escape, put Alessia on a bus to England, but she was kidnapped by traffickers who stole her passport and planned to force her into prostitution. It’s this last point that feels most glaringly ill-advised: James devotes a little time to the trauma Alessia still feels having managed to get away, but this is not the kind of book that wants to delve into the machinations of how women are forced into sexual slavery, or the shadow economy in England that targets undocumented migrants. Alessia’s past is mostly just a narrative device that enables James to plot complications and dramatic face-offs within her story. Alessia’s escape also allows James to present Maxim as Alessia’s savior, a dynamic that rankles uncomfortably within the uneven framework of their relationship. “Fuck the dishes, baby,” he tells her brazenly, before dragging her off to bed. After Alessia has a nightmare, screaming in terror while remembering how the traffickers put a black plastic bag over her head, Maxim thinks, smirkingly, “Of course, I’d like to make her scream in a different way.” After their relationship deepens, and he invites her to live with him, she “draws a deep breath. ‘I will clean for you. And you will pay me,’” she tells him, an act that’s actually suggested as a bold feminist overture rather than Alessia continuing to position herself as subservient and unequal. Even more than it’s offensive, though, The Mister is tedious. It’s laborious. James retains her capacity to write sex scenes that last thousands of words in a row, but not without including turns of phrase that make you, as the reader, want to bleach your own brain. Alessia’s moan, Maxim notes, “is soft and husky as her head falls into the palm of my hand. It’s music to my dick.” Later, “a shocked giggle bubbles up from her happy place.” Food porn takes on a whole new meaning when Maxim watches Alessia prepare dinner: “Her long slender fingers hold the knife as she slices open the baked potatoes, releasing wisps of steam. With her brow fixed in concentration, she spreads butter on them, and she stops to lick some melted butter from her index finger. My groin tightens.” James is clearly—and self-confessedly—a fan of romance novels, and The Mister seems to evoke the formula of historical romances of yore, when men were strong and complicated (and rich) and women were delicate and soothing (and helpless). But the genre itself moved on a long time ago. Nora Roberts is writing books about female firefighters and hostage negotiators. The pervasive whiteness of romance is finally being challenged. Stories like The Mister, which seem to want to wrench female sexuality and status back into the realm of feudalism, have a long distance to go to catch up. via Blogger The Indelible Awfulness of E. L. James’s The Mister |