http://chud.com/articles/articles/13720/1/WHERE-THE-WILD-THINGS-ARE-BEING-COMPLETELY-RESHOT/

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE... BEING COMPLETELY RESHOT?
By Devin Faraci
2-20-8

We're on the verge of losing a movie. Spike Jonze's version of Where the Wild Things Are is a film with an uncertain future as executives behind the scenes at Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures are right now trying to figure out whether or not to essentially reshoot the entire film.

If the entire film gets reshot you will hear that the decision came because of technical issues, specifically the animation of the Wild Things' mouths and facial features. The film uses people in huge Jim Henson Creature Shop suits, and the plan was to shoot the suits and animate the Wild Things' faces later. That has been proving to be more technically difficult than anyone had foreseen, even though test footage had been shot (a leaked clip from the movie that hit the internet this weekend was in fact some of that test footage, according to a statement from Spike Jonze). This is a bad situation, obviously, but one where some footage could be salvaged, meaning that a complete and total reshoot of the film wouldn't be necessary.

Yet I'm hearing that just such a massive reshoot is what is on the table right now. And it's not because of technical issues, unless you want to consider the lead kid actor and the script technical issues. Sources tell me that the suits at Legendary and Warner Bros are not happy with Max Records, the actor playing Max, the mischievous boy who is crowned King of the Wild Things. Worse than that, they don't like the film's tone and want to go back to the script drawing board, possibly losing the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers script when they do it. Apparently the film is too weird and 'too scary,' and the character of Max is being seen as not likable (check out some of the test screening responses that Slashfilm is running).

Where The Wild Things Are screened for a test audience in Pasadena late last year; my friend BC, who watches a horror movie a day, caught the screening and liked what he saw, but I've also been told that the movie is 'subversive,' which is just the sort of thing that drives studio suits up the wall. The film, I keep hearing, is pretty great at this early stage of post-production, but it could very possibly not be a commercial movie. You can imagine the panic at Warner Bros when they realized they'd made a reportedly 75 million dollar kiddie art house film.

Can Warner Bros force Spike back to do the sort of massive reshoots they want? I've been on the phone to Warner Bros and Legendary and have not been able to get official statements about the status of the film, or whether Spike has final cut. A less reliable source has told me that he does in fact have final cut, which means that if he doesn't want to go back and do the reshoots he doesn't have to - but Warner Bros could still fire him and assign the reshoots to someone more compliant. Spike has a crew he likes to work with and they have not yet been told to gear up for additional shooting although they do know that it could be coming.

The scary thing is that this wouldn't be unprecedented for Warner Bros. Just a couple of years ago they scrapped Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel and sent Renny Harlin out to remake the thing using the same sets and some of the same actors. Both versions ended up being terrible, but this studio has shown their willingness to do something just this nutty before.

There has been a glimmer of good news, and it's that Spike issued a statement about the leaked clip. For a little while I contemplated the idea that it had been leaked by Spike as some sort of move against the suits, but what could that move have meant? The fact that Spike is making statements about the clip - and that he's making statements at all about the movie - is a sign that not all is lost.

Everything points to Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are being a unique and fascinating film. It's not a cookie cutter kid movie, and I know that was part of the original appeal to folks at Warner Bros - why the hell else do you bring Jonze on? I didn't make it out to that Pasadena test screening, but now I wish I had so that I could report to you just what sort of a movie Spike has made. The reality, though, is that it doesn't matter since I tend to come down on the side of the great talent in these cases, and there's no question that Spike is a great talent. I don't trust the money people to look at a movie that's different and non-comformist and to understand it. Of course they're afraid of it. You can make movies where you don't take risks, but in this case they've decided to take the risk. They should let it play out and see what happens. 

It's important to keep in mind that as of this weekend nothing was decided or set in stone. Hopefully all the behind the scenes stuff will settle soon, Spike will get to release the movie he wants to release and Warner Bros will strongly support the film with marketing and advertising. Meanwhile I'll keep my ear to the ground and let you know what I hear. 

***

http://media.nymag.com/fashion/08/spring/44247/

Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe in "The Last Sitting"
Photographs by Bert Stern
By Amanda Fortini Published Feb 18, 2008 

In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe that have collectively come to be known as “The Last Sitting.” Taken during several boozy sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air, the photographs are arguably the most famous images ever captured of America’s most famous actress: Monroe, sleepy-eyed and naked, sips from a Champagne glass, enacts a fan dance of sorts with various diaphanous scarves, romps with erotic playfulness on a bed of white linens. Six weeks after she had posed, Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose. 

The photos endure partly as artifacts—as the last visible evidence of the living woman (a legacy reinforced by Stern’s decision to publish the contact sheets Monroe herself had crossed out in red marker). But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk. This was an unhappy time for Monroe. Notorious for her on-set antics, she had been publicly lambasted by Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot, then fired from the production of Something’s Got to Give; she’d endured two recent divorces and, in 1961, a brief stint in a psychiatric ward. 

Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real woman—beautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawed—from the monumental sex symbol. In our armored, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary. 

Forty-six years later, Stern has revisited his classic shots with Lindsay Lohan, another actress whose prodigious fame is not quite commensurate with her professional achievements. Stern, who shot the photos on film rather than digitally, told me he was interested in Lohan because he suspected “she had a lot more depth to her” than one might assume from “those teenage movies.” Indeed, many in the film industry believe that Lohan has yet to pursue projects equal to her gifts. Without putting too fine a point on it, you might say Lohan has, like Monroe, a knack for courting the tabloids and tripping up her career. (Readers will remember that Lohan had her own Billy Wilder moment two summers ago on the set of Georgia Rule.) Stern said the project also grew out of his interest in “controversial women,” or “bad girls,” like “Britney, Paris, and Lindsay.” Monroe was, in a sense, the original tabloid queen. 

Though Lohan’s willingness to reprise the photos might seem a sly nod to her scandalous past, the actress offered a straightforward explanation. “I didn’t have to put much thought into it. I mean, Bert Stern? Doing a Marilyn shoot? When is that ever going to come up? It’s really an honor.” During a break in the daylong shoot, Lohan sat cross-legged on a bed in the four-room suite and spoke to me, in that familiar throaty voice with its staccato rhythms, about her abiding obsession with Monroe. Her interest took root a decade ago with multiple viewings of Niagara during the London filming of The Parent Trap. She has even purchased an apartment where Marilyn once lived. “If you saw my house … I have a lot of Marilyn stuff,” she told me, including a huge painting of Monroe. 

“It’s eerie,” Lohan said of the painting, a Christmas gift, “because it’s this picture of her, and it’s kind of cartoony, and there’s a big bottle of pills next to her, and they’ve fallen over.” Lohan called Monroe’s suicide “tragic,” and then added, elliptically, “You know, it’s also tragic what just recently happened to someone else.” I asked whether she was referring to Heath Ledger. She nodded: “They are both prime examples of what this industry can do to someone.” Why some and not others, I asked, since it has often seemed that the thrice-rehabbed Lohan might meet a similar fate. Lohan replied with a flicker of annoyance: “I don’t know. I’m not them. But I sure as hell wouldn’t let it happen to me.” Still, one wonders whether Lohan’s participation in this project, given all the spooky parallels, isn’t the photographic equivalent of moving into a haunted house. (Which, in fact, she may have already done.) 

Lohan viewed the shoot as a theatrical performance, as a chance to inhabit the role of an idol. “I wanted to portray the book and get it point-on as much as I could, to bring it back to life,” she said. Hence the strict mimesis: scarves, nudity, and all. “Not more than fifteen minutes had passed since she’d arrived, and already she had agreed to take her clothes off!” Stern writes of Monroe in his swaggering introduction to The Complete Last Sitting, the book in which all 2,571 photos have been collected. He might have said the same about Lohan. “I was comfortable with it,” the actress remarked of the nudity (though she did confess to doing “250 crunches” the previous night). All made up, in winged eyeliner and shellacked blonde wig, Lohan, who has returned to her former voluptuousness, at times appeared more Marilyn than the thin, somewhat diminished woman of the original Marilyn photos. “It was very similar, déjà vu you might say, like revisiting an old street,” said Stern. 

The original photos, however, were distinguished by an almost claustrophobic intimacy between photographer and muse. In the first session, Stern persuaded the entourage of stylists to leave him alone with Monroe. The shoot thus took on the symbolic (if not the actual) contours of a liaison. The rise of the celebrity industrial complex has rendered this sort of tense pas de deux all but impossible. At the Lohan shoot, the crowd included Lohan’s manager, her security guard, and her younger sister, Ali; a makeup artist and assistant, a hairstylist and assistant, a stylist, a manicurist, a sentry to watch the borrowed diamonds; Stern, his manager, and two photo assistants. Lohan and Stern worked in an adjoining room, while the rest of us hovered outside like groupies at a backstage entrance. 

“Here is a woman who is giving herself to the public,” Lohan said, about the Monroe photos, when we spoke the next day by phone. “She’s saying, ‘Look, you’ve taken a lot from me, so why don’t I give it to you myself.’ She’s taking control back.” Like any tabloid veteran, Lohan understands the potency of a photograph, and that the best way to respond to a society that views you only as an image might just be on its own terms.

***

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/technology/25game-web.html

February 25, 2008
Electronic Arts Offers $2 Billion for Take-Two 
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and SETH SCHIESEL

Electronic Arts, the video gaming giant, made an unsolicited $2 billion bid on Sunday for rival Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, a deal that would further a wave of consolidation in the rapidly growing industry.

Electronic Arts, which publishes hit games like the Madden N.F.L. and Need for Speed series, offered to pay $26 a share for Take-Two, a 50 percent premium over its share price of $17.36 on Friday. The offer was made publicly after a series of private offers to Take-Two were rejected by its board. 

Electronic Arts approached Take Two with a $26-a-share offer on Feb. 19, up from $25 share it initially offered on Feb. 15.

The timing of the bid appears to be an attempt to acquire Take-Two before it releases what is widely expected to be the top-selling game of 2008, the fourth installment of the crime thriller Grand Theft Auto. The Grand Theft Auto franchise, Take-Two’s crown jewel, has sold more than 60 million copies since Grand Theft Auto III took the game industry by storm in 2001.

Through its Rockstar subsidiary, Take-Two is scheduled to release the game on April 29 for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles. If it lives up to consumers’ expectations, the game is expected to sell 10 million copies or more by the end of the year, which would almost certainly make Take-Two more expensive.

Electronic Art’s dominance has been strongly challenged by Activision. Not only has Activision had a recent string of hits, notably Guitar Hero, it also recently agreed to buy Vivendi’s game division to form a company called Activision Blizzard.

At the same time, E.A. has endured a growing chorus of criticism from some investors who say the company has lost its creative and innovative edge. 

There is little doubt that E.A. remains the juggernaut of the video game industry. But it has come to rely heavily on sequels.

A merger with Take-Two would be a union of two vastly different companies. E.A. has a reputation for steady growth and fiscal discipline, while Take-Two is known as a mercurial one-hit wonder. 

Electronic Arts said it was making its offer public to “bring its proposal to the attention of all Take-Two shareholders.” In a telephone interview on Sunday, Electronic Arts’ chief executive, John Riccitiello, said, “It is an enormous premium,” suggesting that rather than consider the offer hostile, “We think of ourselves as a ‘white knight.’ ”

Take-Two was far less generous. In a statement, Strauss Zelnick, the company’s chairman, said, “Electronic Arts’ proposal provides insufficient value to our shareholders and comes at absolutely the wrong time given the crucial initiatives under way at the company,” referring to the new Grand Theft Auto and other products.

Mr. Riccitiello said, however, he believed that Take-Two’s stock price already reflected an expectation among investors that Grand Theft Auto IV would be a success, and that Take-Two would become less valuable to E.A. after the game’s introduction than it was now.

Mr. Riccitiello said his offer’s timing reflected a desire to integrate Take-Two’s operations with E.A.’s before the all-important holiday shopping season. He said he had formed a relationship in recent years with Sam Houser, one of Rockstar’s founders, but added that he had avoided contacting Mr. Houser while pursuing his negotiations with Mr. Zelnick.

Mr. Zelnick said that Take-Two had offered to initiate discussions with Electronic Arts on April 30, the the day after Grand Theft Auto IV was scheduled for release. “We believe this offer demonstrated our commitment to pursuing all avenues to maximize stockholder value, while we believe that E.A.’s refusal to entertain this path is evidence of their desire to acquire Take-Two at a significant discount,” he said.Mr. Riccitiello refused to speculate about what steps he would take next, but it is possible that Electronic Arts could pursue a proxy contest to oust the board.

Over the next several weeks, Mr. Riccitiello’s main challenge will be to persuade investors to accept the deal and convince employees that Electronic Arts will respect the creative autonomy of Take-Two’s various development teams. Over the last decade, E.A. has acquired many high-profile game studios, including Westwood (the Command & Conquer series), Bullfrog Productions (Populous) and Origin Systems (Ultima), which essentially dissolved after Electronic Arts tried to direct and homogenize their creative output.

Any deal for Take-Two would be largely empty if Take-Two teams like Rockstar and Ken Levine’s group at 2K Boston, which recently released the acclaimed game BioShock, were to depart rather than work for E.A.

Mr. Riccitiello seems aware of the danger and is taking steps to convince the game industry of E.A.’s newfound respect for creative talent. At a well-received speech at an industry conference in Las Vegas earlier this month Mr. Riccitiello promised that in future deals, Electronic Arts would avoid killing the creative golden goose as it has in the past.

Matt Richtel contributed reporting.

***

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/cgi_team_creates_realistic_oscar

CGI Team Creates Realistic Oscar For Michael Bay
February 20, 2008 | Issue 44•08 

 LOS ANGELES—A leading team of CGI experts hand-selected by blockbuster producer and director Michael Bay has pushed the limits of what can be accomplished with special effects and digital imaging by creating a computer- generated best-director Oscar for the 43-year-old filmmaker.

The $125 million project, funded entirely by Bay, has been called one of the most ambitious CGI undertakings to date, dwarfing even Bay's most ambitious efforts in his 2007 robot-action film, Transformers. A crew of nearly 200 technicians working for nine months on a 15,000-square-foot soundstage was required to realize the director's wildly imaginative fantasy world.

"Viewers are going to be blown away by how believable-looking we've been able to make Michael Bay accepting the highest award in film appear," said senior technical director Zsolt Krajcsik, who also worked with Bay on the 2003 film Bad Boys II. "The podium, the backdrop, the sense of creative achievement that hangs about him—it's all so vivid and detailed that you'd swear it was real."

Added Krajcsik, "When you see Michael thanking his talented cast and crew and raising the Oscar above his head, it's going to be hard to believe it never, ever happened."

In order to create the illusion of filmmaking achievement, Bay was first filmed in front of a green screen while being presented a "dummy" award, a green cylinder roughly the size and shape of an Oscar statuette. Technicians next analyzed a real Academy Award borrowed from Ben Affleck, whom Bay directed in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, in order to build a digital model. The team then took the raw motion-capture footage of Bay accepting the dummy award and painstakingly rotoscoped the digitally rendered Oscar into every frame.

The CGI team also took great care to make the scenery match flawlessly with the new digital footage. Not only did technicians create a 3-D computer model of the Kodak Theatre, where the 2008 Academy Awards will be held, but they also engineered a startlingly lifelike audience. The computer-generated crowd was designed using advanced artificial intelligence software, which allowed the digital actors to behave as individuals and respond to each other and their surroundings as if Michael Bay were actually standing before them, being honored by his peers and the Academy. Using this program, thousands of meticulously detailed figures seemed to laugh, applaud, and cry at appropriate moments in Bay's 15-minute-long acceptance speech.

The same technology, which features a sophisticated cloth-simulation application, was used to create Bay's digital tuxedo.

"There is no way this would have been possible five years ago," Krajcsik said, later admitting that CGI technology is still decades away from making an Academy Award win for Rush Hour 3 director Brett Ratner look plausible.

While the production is a testament to recent technological advances in the field of CGI, the human aspect of the project also proved extremely challenging. As part of his intense preparation for the role of an acclaimed director, Bay said he interviewed several Academy Award winners, including Steven Spielberg and Marisa Tomei.

"This was a world that was completely foreign to me," said Bay, who spent months practicing the choreographed motions of holding the statue aloft and kissing it. "I tried to get a sense of what it would actually be like to hold an Oscar for the first time, and not just the emotions involved, but the actual heft and tactile feel of accepting the award."

Meryl Streep, who commanded a $5 million salary for her role as the presenter of the Oscar, said the production was the biggest challenge of her career.

"To put yourself in that mental place, in a world where something like this would be possible, it's just indescribable," Streep said. "Standing in front of that greenscreen and trying to make it look as though I actually believed what I was doing was the most difficult thing I've ever attempted as an actor."

The completed production will debut on ABC during the Academy Awards in a seamlessly integrated advertising block Bay purchased that directly precedes the presentation for best director, and has already garnered considerable buzz for its purportedly mind-boggling visual effects.

"We'll just have to wait and see if it lives up to the hype," Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert said. "However, if the special effects team has succeeded in making Michael Bay getting anything above a People's Choice Award seem even remotely convincing, then this has Oscar written all over it."