The final shootout from Bonnie and Clyde gets me every time.
“In 1971 I wrote and shot a scene for Annie Hall involving the Knicks and Earl The Pearl. I was extolling the concept of the physical over the cerebral, so I wrote a fantasy basketball game in which all the great thinkers of history – Kant and Nietzsche and Kirkegaard – played against the Knicks. I cast actors who looked like those philosophers to play those roles and they played against the real Knicks. We used the players on the team at that time including Earl, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, and we shot it inside Madison Square Garden after the last game of the season. Of course the Knicks were smooth and beat the philosophers easily; all their cerebration was impotent against the Knicks. But I cut the scene from the picture, not because it didn’t come out but because I had to keep the picture moving and it was too much of a digression. It didn’t break my heart not to use it in the film. I always feel that anything I cut out of a film is always a mercy killing.”
— Woody Allen, The Observer Sport Monthly
via waxandmilk andbreadcity
She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual intent, but without ascertainable meaning; “pop,” “comicstrip,” “trash” (“trashy”), “pulp” (“pulpy”), all used judgmentally (usually approvingly) but otherwise apparently interchangeable with “mythic”; “urban poetic,” meaning marginally more violent than “pulpy”; “soft” (pejorative); “tension,” meaning, apparently, any desirable state; “rhythm,” used often as a verb, but meaning harmony or speed; “visceral”; and “level.” These words may be used in any variant, or in alternation, or strung together in sequence—”visceral poetry of pulp,” e.g., or “mythic comic-strip level”—until they become a kind of incantation.
“The Perils of Pauline.” — Renata Adler, The New York Review of Books
Great Profile on Alessandro in the Wall Street Journal
A Lyrical Part a Musical Father Plays Best
In His New Film, ‘Janie Jones,’ Actor Alessandro Nivola Takes On a Role That Hits Close to Home: Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad
by Steve Dollar
Some roles make crazy demands on a performer. In the new movie “Janie Jones,” Brooklyn actor Alessandro Nivola plays Ethan Brand, a rock musician in the throes of a midlife crisis. He suddenly finds himself in charge of a 13-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin) he never knew. Although the combustible character gets punched and bruised up in several scenes, the job wasn’t a terrible stretch.
Mr. Nivola, who is 39 years old, has had a guitar within reach most of his life, and is raising two kids with his wife, the British actress Emily Mortimer.
Stage diving is much easier than some acting gigs he’s scored.
Video: Oscar Nominee Abigail Belts Out Her Singing Prowess at “Janie Jones” Premiere
In David M. Rosenthal’s musical drama “Janie Jones,” a rocker’s best chance at redemption comes at the hands of his 15-year-old daughter, who displays a precocious musical talent.
“CELEBRITIES TRAPPED IN PLUMMETING ELEVATOR AT MOVIE PREMIERE”
And this happened…
Superstition would dictate that it’s not the best idea to step into a packed elevator and joke, “This is overloaded. We might die tonight,” particularly four days before Halloween. Of course, no one ever believes said elevator will then plummet four stories and get stuck. Until … it does. Which is exactly what happened to a merry band of revelers, including Josh Charles and Alessandro Nivola, exiting last night’s premiere party of Tribeca Films Janie Jones, which was hosted by American Express on the sixteenth-floor rooftop terrace of the Gramercy Park Hotel.
My Friend Michael Dunaway just wrote this excellent article about the process of making Janie Jones…
“One of the best-known aphorisms about writing, “Write what you know,” has led to plenty of terrible screenplays by self-absorbed Hollywood hopefuls. But David Rosenthal turned personal experience into a compelling story. In his new film Janie Jones, the insecure lead singer of a moderately successful rock band (Alessandro Nivola) is none too pleased to learn that that a one-night stand from 13 years ago produced a daughter (Abigail Breslin) he never knew he had. Worse yet, when the girl’s desperate mother (Elisabeth Shue) leaves her alone at the band’s gig, he’s forced to take her with him on tour. The idea of a father meeting his adolescent daughter for the first time came from Rosenthal’s own experience.
“I have a 23-year daughter,” he explains, “and I met her when she was 11 and I was 30. Her mother and I had a brief relationship; I was a freshman at college, and she was older than me. And she didn’t really want me to be involved, and I wasn’t mature enough to want to be involved, so we kept it a secret. She told people in her life that she had been artificially inseminated. She just wanted it to be her own thing.”
But his daughter never left his mind: “It gnawed away at me for years and years,” he remembers. “And I finally reached out to her and said that I didn’t want to insinuate myself into her life in any way (she had gotten married and had other kids), but asked if she could send me some pictures. And to make a long story short, I ended up writing her a letter, and she began telling some people in the family the story, and I went to meet my daughter for the first time. So I went to Arizona, and the mother picked me up at the airport dropped me off at this middle school with all these open arcade hallways. And the bell rang and all these kids started walking into the hall, and I started freaking out because I was actually about to meet my daughter for the first time.
“And I finally spotted her, through this crowd of other kids, and she looked at me and just ran straight into my arms. And it was just beautiful; it wasn’t fraught with any kind of anger or resentment or awkwardness. And it’s hard to put into words what’s like looking for the first time into the eyes of this adolescent who obviously shares this genetic imprint with you. There was just this deep soul connection there. And I was just a young filmmaker then, but I started to think about it back then, about how meaningful it was. The idea of this adolescent girl meeting her young father for the first time, at a time when they’re both very vulnerable, was just really interesting to me. In all families, there’s some brokenness or other; all families can relate to that on some level. So I think I started writing it in my head, on some level, on that day.”
Since both the father and daughter are songwriters in the film, it was crucial to find just the right music to provide a window into the characters. It was important to Rosenthal to find different songwriters for each character to give them distinct voices. First he found someone to write for the little girl. “Gemma Hayes was really the perfect choice,” he says. “She immediately got inside the character’s head, and the songs had this great simplicity to them. So then I was hunting around for the right singer/songwriter to write the songs for the father and the band, and I was also really hoping they could also do the score. My music supervisor suggested Clem Snide, and she sent me a lot of stuff. I already knew a few songs, but they’re kind of this great indie rock band that a lot people still haven’t heard everything they’ve done. And the more I listened to it, the more I thought it was perfect. And then he had also scored some movies. He does a lot of this baritone ukulele stuff that he works into his scores that doesn’t seem too cute; it has a real soul to it. We started talking and he really identified with the character in the script. So both of them wrote these songs, 14 original songs.”
But with everything seemingly falling into place, potential calamity struck. The film industry hasn’t escaped the recession; both the budget Rosenthal had been counting on and his time to shoot got cut in half, just before the shoot was to begin. and his team found a way to overcome the obstacles. “They’re asking, ‘Can you do it in 19 days?’” he recalls. “‘Can you not use film? Can you? Can you?’ And making a film is all about compromise, so you have to kind of roll with it. So we filmed in Iowa to take advantage of the tax credit there, and somehow we pulled it off.”
To bring the story to a heartwarming (and very meta) full circle, Rosenthal’s daughter actually worked on Janie Jones with him. “She was my assistant on the film,” he says. “It was during her summer break, so she came out. And she actually ended up befriending Abigail, and they were hanging out and Abigail could see our relationship. There was kind of this nice family thing about it that everybody fed off of.”
Abbie looking beautiful on the Jimmy Fallon show last night!
