At a special event held in his honor during the AFI Dallas Film Festival last week, Henry Selick made a cryptic admission. The animation guru, whose Coraline opens in Europe next month, was asked why he chose to give The Nightmare Before Christmas star Jack Skellington a cameo in his second feature, James and the Giant Peach. “I can’t admit this for legal reasons,” Selick said, “but Jack might be in every film I’ve done.” Could that mean the soulful dead guy secretly lies somewhere within the Universal-owned Coraline, even though Nightmare belongs to — gasp — Disney?

If so, it certainly wouldn’t signal the first time hidden meanings wound up in an animated movie. Steadfast in their individualistic tendencies, animators have often embedded sly messages and cameos in their work, some more risque than others. Here are a few of our favorites.

Sex in the Clouds: The Lion King
Well, it is a love story, after all. The infamous moment arrives during a tranquil scene in which Simba and his pals quietly stargaze, and the stars gently drift into a not-so-subtle reference to copulation. Or do they? The alleged spelling of the word “sex” in the clouds gave rise to a national controversy when an anti-abortion organization complained about it after the movie hit video stores in 1995. The safer theory? That some post-production folks meant to spell “S-F-X,” for “special effects,” to acknowledge their behind-the-scenes contributions. But we prefer the naughtier angle.

Topless Women and Mice
Disney took a lot of heat from conservative groups looking to pounce on the innuendo of its films. However, while the “sex” in The Lion King was debatable, and the infamous “Priest boner” in The Little Mermaid turned out be a poorly drawn knee, the nudity in the 1977 mouse caper The Rescuers did not result from overactive imaginations. During a fast-paced sequence in which Miss Bianca and Bernard careen through New York on the back of Orville the albatross, a series of topless women appear in photographs placed in apartment windows as the mice pass by. If these fleeting glimpses had the potential to subliminally impact the sexual maturity of viewers at the time of the movie’s release, the damage was done: Nobody caught onto the graphic stills until The Rescuers came out on video, at which point Disney recalled it and reissued a new version minus the explicit imagery. But that won’t keep it off YouTube!

Classic Animators Make Animated Comeback
Brad Bird tipped his hat to his inspiration by putting veteran Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in the climax of The Incredibles. The two men watch the action from afar and appreciate its “old school” spirit. The duo also appeared in Bird’s The Iron Giant, and in both cases they supplied the actual voiceovers for the characters. But the second cameo arrived just in time, since Thomas passed away a few months after the movie’s release.

Not-So-Subtle Inspirations
In the vibrant opening sequence from Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville, Django Reinhardt plays guitar with his toes, Fred Astaire gets devoured by his dancing shoes, and Josephine Baker faces a horde of rabid monkey men turned on by her banana-clad act. Chomet was not subtle about his influences. The movie thrives as a collage of pastiche, but viewers unfamiliar with all the major aesthetic references will still understand them, since Chomet establishes the precedents in the very first scene.

Jack Warner Fields a Daffy Pitch
Every Looney Tunes fan has at least one a favorite short. I have several, but at the top of my list lies The Scarlet Pumpernickel, which opens with Daffy Duck pitching an Errol Flynn-like vehicle to a bemused studio executive. “Honest, J.L.,” cries Daffy, “You just gotta give me a dramatic part!” J.L. was Jack L. Warner, whose ego famously clashed with Flynn’s. Warner’s (off-camera) cameo has an insider’s irony to it: “The studio never knew what the hell was going on,” Scarlet Pumpernickel director Chuck Jones said in a late 1980s interview. “Jack Warner didn’t even know what we were doing or where our studio was.”

I remember the first time The Matrix made sense to me. It was a sunny afternoon at a Seattle multiplex in 1999; I was about thirty minutes into watching the discombobulated world of existential musings and wacky technological discontent when suddenly the whole thing clicked: The red/blue pill polarity that divided truth and illusion, how the advent of thinking machines threatens our individuality, the epic battle between those willing to break down and understand the world in all its true colors and others willing to blindly accept it. A few months later, The Sixth Sense would leave me scratching my head for several days before I made peace with the final act twist, but The Matrix offered instant satisfaction. I left the theater energized, ready to challenge my own notions of reality and match Neo’s heroic ambitions as the One. Then I went home and played a video game in quiet solitude.

And so we arrive at the central paradox of The Matrix paradigm: Technology can set us free, but it also threatens to bind us from the real world. Today marks the tenth anniversary of The Matrix’s triumphant theatrical release (a special edition Blu-ray DVD hits shelves on the same day). A decade after directors Larry and Andy Wachowski established their fictional timeline for humanity’s enslavement at the hands of artificial intelligence, several of the movie’s predictions about our relationship to new media have started to come true.

At the time of its release, the dot com bubble was on the brink of bursting, the inventors of Facebook and Twitter were in high school, and some people thought the world faced imminent destruction from the Y2K virus. With The Matrix, the Wachowskis suggested that technology would indeed precipitate our downfall — although not quite so soon. Still, many of its imaginary conceits proved strikingly prescient. Take the following detailing of its accuracy as an exciting testament to modern progress, a harbinger of the apocalypse, or some unseemly combination of both.

Digital natives will lead the revolution.
When we first meet Neo, he’s holed up in a crappy bachelor pad, buried in books and practically married to his computer screen. But his social ineptitude is key to the character’s masked potential, hinting at his sense that the world he lives in doesn’t quite click. Neo finds solace in those enigmatic interwebs, where he finds solutions to the issues troubling his life. It’s there that he meets Trinity and Morpheus, whose efforts to show Neo the real question he must ask (What is the Matrix?) set him on a path to lead the revolution (or Revolutions, as it were). Neo figures out where his real work belongs in a manner akin to the way online social networking and peer-to-peer services arose from the work of bored young teens adjusted to the possibilities of the Internet. From Sean Fanning to Mark Zuckerberg, youthful innovators raised in a web-centric world have continually invented strategies for changing it. These “digital natives,” as scholar Mark Presnky calls them, answer to a higher calling than the drab business world — the sort of place where Neo keeps his day job, and where they would easily waste their skills. In short, they are an army of Ones, not zeroes.

Transmedia narratives capture the public imagination, but only on its own terms.
From its very first frame, The Matrix is steeped in extraordinary context. References to philosophy and religion abound, not necessarily overcomplicating the work but certainly providing plenty of tidbits for anyone willing to fiddle with the puzzle pieces. The Wachowskis eventually developed the Matrix franchise by turning this approach into a gigantic transmedia world. The details were scattered far and wide, from comic books to the Animatrix shorts and two games. By the time the third movie arrived, there was so much Matrix that existed beyond The Matrix itself that the plot barely made any sense to anyone except those viewers heavily steeped in the nuances of the big picture. “The Matrix was a flawed experiment, an interesting failure,” writes Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. “But its flaws did not detract from the significance of what it tried to accomplish.”

While its creators may have taken the gimmick a little too far, they still had the right idea. Look no further than the dense treasure-hunting for details that preoccupies Lost fans. Tiny story elements surround these stories and exist within them. Neo keeps the work of existential philosopher Jean Baudrillard on his bookshelf and later joins the crew of a ship named after Biblical ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Those are easy clues to the main themes of The Matrix, but the Wachowskis eventually alienated a large number of viewers by expanding the mythology to places where not everyone cared to pay attention. Like the girl in the red dress who famously distracts Neo from protecting himself, transmedia elements should be optional, allowing audiences to intensify the experience only if they choose that degree of immersion. In other words, alternative reality games of the sort forged by The Matrix work best on demand, not on requirement.

Avatars offer incredibly appealing vessels of escapism.
When Neo first learns that his former life in 1999 was pretty much a sham, he initially becomes crestfallen. “I can’t go back, can I?” he asks Morpheus after a brief freak-out session when the truth comes out. “No,” Morpheus replies. “But if you could, would you really want to?”

Well, maybe. As it is later revealed, some people would prefer digital fantasy to the cold facts of real life. Corrupt crewman Cypher double-crosses his shipmates by leaking information to the dreaded Agent Smith in exchange for the promise of a luxurious return to life in the Matrix. Cypher prefers comfortably living in ignorance and assumes everyone else does, too. “I know what you’re thinking,” he tells Neo. “Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”

Four years before Linden Labs launched Second Life, The Matrix predicted its appeal. On the one hand, projecting one’s fantasies onto the mold of an avatar allows for a greater potential to realize ambitions heretofore locked within the confines of the mind — “the mental projection of your digital self,” as Morpheus puts it. But it also threatens to sever our ties to the world surrounding us so that we may begin to resent it. Digital empowerment engenders a dangerously inflated ego. Cypher’s request that the Agents return him to the Matrix as a movie star seems like a retroactive spoof of narcissistic Internet celebrities.

Viral media are products of human nature.
Internet memes weren’t nearly the sensations they would become six years down the road with the advent of YouTube, but The Matrix was hip to the idea of viral media long before the term became widespread. While Morpheus sits in captivity, waiting for Neo and Trinity to save the day, Agent Smith unloads a perceptive monologue about the nature of human behavior, highlighting the innate psychological forces behind viral videos and their ilk. He begins by claiming that people aren’t actually mammals. “Mammals develop equilibrium with the planet,” says Smith. “The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.” Then he drives the point home: “There is another organism that follows that pattern…a virus. Human beings are a disease. We are the cure.”

Or, rather, the outlet. Smith’s point, while negative in tone, essentially argues that viral phenomena naturally arise from social tendencies. He was dead right.

Technology cannot defeat us as long as we defy its boundaries.
Although humanity remains fairly clueless about the machines governing their existence, The Matrix concludes by suggesting the ultimate superiority of our race: When Neo realizes his place as the One, he sees the Matrix as code. The last time a computer screen is shown, it frames the words “System Failure.” The Wachowskis understood the central fallacy of artificial intelligence, at least for now — despite the boom in social networking, alternative reality experiences and the general prevalence of online activity, we have yet to lose our grasp of one simple function: the off switch.

It’s no coincidence that SXSW’s Film and Interactive conferences take place simultaneously, before the hefty barrage of musicians rock and roll into town for the second half of the festival. With Internet-based tools no longer merely an option for all filmmakers to get a handle on but a requirement, the usual discourse on industry issues like distribution and marketing belong squarely within the progressive region of the interactive conference. Even certain Film conference panels not directly advertised as taking the film/interactive crossover approach still had to address a number of questions about the evolution of the industry in the face of new media paradigms. Here’s a snapshot look at some of the more potent themes that emerged at the Austin Convention Center last week. At least, these are the ones that stood out on my notepad; feel free to share yours in the comments section below.

All parts of the industry are not changing in unison. My ears perked up when Withoutabox’s Christian Gaines told me that every time a movie submitted to festivals through the company’s submission engine gets recognized by a festival, the movie automatically gets an IMDb page (IMDb bought Withoutabox last year). It gets better: Filmmakers can tweak the IMDb profile for their films by adding all kind of relevant details, including video content. In certain cases, an entire movie can be uploaded to its profile. The next day, I unloaded a series of questions on Andrei Gregor, IMDb’s product manager for distribution: What if filmmakers decide to take a cue from IFC’s Festival Direct strategy and premiere their movies online on the same days as their festival premieres? Even if most sensible filmmakers wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t giving the filmmakers this option tick off a lot of festivals? Have IMDb or Withoutabox heard from sales agents, distributors or other members of the industry worried about losing their roles in this process now that Withoutabox is introducing the possibility of bypassing such services? Gregor basically just shrugged: That was somebody else’s problem. The potential conflict shouldn’t take away from the merits of Withoutabox/IMDb’s progress, but it does serve as a reminder that many people are trying different things all at once, leading to any number of potential conflicts that filmmakers should keep in mind. Contradictions are more likely to happen now than ever before. Speaking of which…

The Internet made things cheap, so now they’re expensive, but really they should be cheap. “You have four or five paradoxical things going on at once,” said perennial film festival drifter Jeff Dowd — aka “The Dude” — during a Q&A following former Picturehouse head Bob Berney’s public conversation with producer/producer’s rep John Pierson. Dowd was addressing Berney, now a free man looking to launch a new distribution company in the near future. Quoth The Dude: “The economy is worse than it has been in awhile. You’ve got people changing their viewing habits: They’ve invested in their home computers. You’ve got the Internet stronger than ever, with Obama and everyone else. You’ve got…all kinds of shit. How does a visionary like you take those factors, particularly the viral things, and use them to change, keep ahead of the times and all that?” Got that? Well, The Dude tends to ramble. He basically meant that great things of monumental importance now take place online at little to no cost — but with everybody finding a voice on the web, how does a single work of art stand out in the crowd? At least, that’s what I got from the question.

Pierson turned to Berney. “You’ve been challenged to not give a bad answer,” he said.

So Berney talked about his experience with Memento in 2000, when he managed to release and market the film with Internet buzz for a mere two million dollars. It eventually grossed $25 million and landed a Best Screenplay nomination for Christopher Nolan. Berney, then running Newmarket Films, heard from a lot of his colleagues. “Fox Searchlight called us and said, ‘How did you get it out for two million?’” he recalled. “The answer at the time was, ‘We had no money.’”

“That’s the answer to why,” Pierson said. “Not the answer to how.”

Berney elaborated. “Well, we were able to do it with Internet campaigning, using less television, and having the hook intrinsically in the film — you had to see it five times to get the whole thing. I think we have to rethink and step back a little bit. That’s why a lot of these companies are in the ground.” In other words, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on a web-based marketing strategy, even if you have that money at your disposal. “The thing I’ve seen is people just adding on [costs], and it makes the release more expensive,” Berney said. “I think we have to adjust the whole way we market films in terms of money, and bring it back to a way that enables us.” Of course, the cheapness sets up a different problem:

Because things are cheap, it’s pretty damn hard for most filmmakers to make significant profits from digital distribution. Note to panel organizers: If you want a frank discussion about the viability of releasing movies online, put Morgan Spurlock on a panel. At the TED Conference in Long Beach last month, Spurlock told NewTeeVee that he made a paltry $1200 from streaming Super Size Me on SnagFilms for six months. During SXSW, where Spurlock appeared on a panel with SnagFilms’s Rick Allen, Cinetic Rights Management’s Matt Dentler, and several others, he repeated the problem. “This isn’t where we’re going to be making money now,” he said. “The reasons the numbers aren’t released is because the numbers are pathetic. It’s getting to a point where it’s down the road from being profitable, but we’re just not at that point yet.” Then again, there are case studies to disprove Spurlock’s blanket decree, many of which can be found in Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age, a new collection of interviews by Scott Kirsner (the moderator of the SXSW panel where Spurlock appeared). Anyway, monetary issues shouldn’t become the chief concern of filmmakers, because…

Artists should focus on their art. There are a number of new and exciting ways for audiences to discover movies, and many people will urge filmmakers to locate those audiences before they even complete production. But veteran indie distributor Richard Abramowitz of Abramorama says this can create an unnecessary distraction if it eclipses the main goal of making a movie. “It’s always a delicate situation to talk to filmmakers about finding their audience beforehand,” Abramowitz said on a panel about self-distribution. “Presumably, you’re making art. To think about the end user in that particular way is kind of a corruption of the process. It’s the producer’s responsibility to work off the director and understand who the audience may be.” But once you figure that out…

Choose your venue wisely. It’s always intriguing to watch the ubiquitous Cold War between various indie distributors, each of whom champions a different approach to making movies succeed in the current climate, where experiments often trump precedents. Nobody knows anything, so everyone knows everything. This creates many exciting new possibilities, but filmmakers need to take certain cautions. That was the gist of Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker’s energizing monologue during a general distribution panel at SXSW. Joined by reps from various other distributors including IFC and Magnolia, which both employ video-on-demand strategies, Barker may have felt like he was relegated to the stature of resident Luddite — especially when moderator David Garber introduced him as “the most conventional” distributor of the panel. So Barker took the emphasis off SPC and made a broad, lengthy observation that really put things in context:

For independent filmmakers, it’s no different from what it’s been for the last fifty years. One is getting your film financed, two is getting your film distributed. It’s really the variables of toughness that changed with the times. I’m only saying that because I don’t think, from the filmmaker’s perspective, it is a worse time than ever before. I think, in some ways, it’s a better time, especially if you are involved with lower budget films. A lot has to do with the money, which no one seems to be talking about here. If you have a lower budget film, you see the number of opportunities for your film to be distributed. There has been no more exciting time for distribution today. Twenty-five years ago, fifteen years ago, there were literally only two models for which you released a film. One was to release it platform — it’s an independent film, an art film. Another was to release it for television in a very mainstream sort of way, which is the customary studio way. Now with the new technologies, you have many opportunities to get your film seen. There is a perfect opportunity for your film, but where the danger is — is if you choose the wrong model for your film.

Speaking those last six words, Barker leaned especially close to the microphone, giving his voice a sudden and rather ominous reverb effect. People in the room seemed to perk up. Barker continued:

Or if a distributor chooses the wrong model for your film, because there are many more than ever. The idea of [SPC] being traditional — we do have traditional [theatrical] windows because that is the way we get the most revenue possible. However, we certainly are involved with all of these new technologies — albeit in a different way than all of the companies you have up here. The fact of the matter is, every company has its own character, and its own character has to do with the agenda of that company. You can see that with IFC,  you can see that with Magnolia, you can see that with — how do you say it again?

Barker turned to Oscilloscope’s David Fenkel, who pronounced his company’s name. After the laughter subsided, Barker concluded his thought.

“These are new trends that are certainly models that work, but the worst thing you can do is to assume that one model fits all,” he said. “It does not. More than ever before, the idiosyncratic nature of your film is what has to be addressed. You have more opportunities, but you also have more opportunities to make a mistake.”

Here’s what I would like to learn from a movie about film critics: What makes them pertinent to the needs of society? Has the self-empowering progress of the blogosphere endangered the future of the profession? Most importantly, what kind of a fascinating loon do you have to be to watch movies all the time?

You will find answers to none of these provocative questions in Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, a light, impact-free survey of talking heads that adds absolutely nothing new to the general perception of the practice. Those viewers whose interest in watching critics talk about themselves parallels the curiosity behind, say, wanting to see an Asian elephant at the zoo won’t find themselves disappointed. (I can see it now: “Oh, so that’s what an A.O. Scott looks like…”) Everyone else may find the content lacking a much-needed edge.

Peary, a longtime film critic making his directorial debut here, apparently spent years gathering the dozens of interviews threaded throughout the movie. But a plurality of voices does not yield a valid thesis. By trying to bring the history of film criticism into focus, he has grand ambitions. I admire them, but not the resulting product. Here are a few other things I would like to learn: Do junketeers and unpaid web critics deserve equal consideration alongside the (dwindling) collection of salaried ones? Are there cultural, sociological, age or gender issues that play a role in the degree of influence a film critic can have? What qualifies someone as a “professional” critic? Peary doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or couldn’t get his subjects to address these potent, debate-worthy topics.

Although he makes a valuable attempt to combine insights from older critics with the developing voices of the blogger crowd, Peary’s movie joins a handful of other recent documentaries about the job that completely ignore the notion of critical legitimacy. Jamie Kennedy and Michael Addis’s Heckler (for about fifteen minutes, a brilliantly assembled encapsulation of stand-up comedian anger issues) tries to entertain its audience by almost exclusively taunting the lowest common denominator — basically, a handful of narcissistic young critics willing to let Kennedy trash them on camera in exchange for free publicity. There’s no differentiation between these people and the spate of talented folks writing about more important issues than whether or not Son of the Mask deserves a moment’s notice.

While I have only seen the first nine minutes of Sujewa Ekanayake’s Indie Film Blogger Road Trip, it appears to suffer from the opposite problem. Assembling a series of highly perceptive movie bloggers, Ekanayake fails to explore whether their competence has become threatened by an overabundance of amateur critics. I care about the insights of my colleagues Anthony Kaufman and Stu VanAirsdale, but the implicit assumption that these guys possess greater validity than an excitable fanboy whose blog attracts sizable traffic requires fleshing out.

For the Love of Movies at least possesses superior intelligence to the other two entries in this makeshift nonfiction trend, but it never radically engages with the material at hand. Peary’s own film writing proves he’s got the chops, and since he’s been at it for a number of years, you would think he could formulate the varying stages of evolution that the critical practice has undergone. But his even-handed, chapter-based approach doesn’t allow for these important topics to gain any traction. The curse of the average film critic movie lives on.

It seems to me that all three documentaries suffer from a central fallacy: That film critics themselves make interesting subjects. Sure, I get the value of Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, but I don’t necessarily care to know what a cute couple they turned into (I mean, good for them, but it hardly benefits the movie). Sarris’s famous dispute with Pauline Kael about the questionable strengths of the auteur theory would make for a nice segment if we could see some footage of the two of them having it out. Otherwise, you’re probably better off reading the original essays where the battle lines were drawn.

I first saw a rough cut of For the Love of Movies last year at the Moving Image Institute for Film Criticism and Feature Writing, where Peary asked us to keep our reactions under wrap. In the room, however, a number of dissatisfied responses immediately arose during the post-screening discussion. Peary admitted that he avoided trying to represent the act of criticism itself, given the prosaic outcome of simply showing a critic typing away in front of a computer screen. Fair enough — I appreciate that he opted out of making a distended Warholian experiment nobody wants to watch. Nevertheless, the focus on the craft feels disingenuous. The majority of For the Love of Movies features critics talking about their inexplicably profound connection to the silver screen, and how they wound up expressing their affection for it through the written word. If there truly is potential for a great movie about critics, I believe it lies not with the premise of writing movie reviews but with the subtleties of active participation in a diverse and ever-expanding community of fiercely devoted movie buffs.

Here, Peary lacks focus. He arbitrarily drifts from the “elite” critics to the not-so-elite with little regard for the distinctions between the two. And, let’s face it, there are distinctions. I’m sure many critics, particularly those whose entire careers revolve around maintaining a web presence, want to move beyond the facile critic-blogger binary to a place where those differences are treated as irrelevant, but for now the tension between the two ends of the spectrum ought to get more screen time. Peary’s camera shows us the lavish annual awards banquet hosted by the New York Film Critics Circle, where humble guys like Tony Scott and Dave Kehr awkwardly handle the spotlight, but the director devotes no time to the notable absence of certain non-print critics, whose absence lead to the existence of New York Film Critics Online.

Even as he remains within this limited crowd, Peary actively ignores the inherent drama taking place within it. We see no exclusive peaks at the heated behind-the-scenes arguments between NYFCC members about the movies that deserve proper notice. If such incidents leak out to the blogs every year, it couldn’t be so hard to address the clandestine squabbling in Peary’s movie. These incessant debates, which range from hilariously trivial to passionate and occasionally mind-blowing, at least show what distinctive personalities exist in the heart of film critic central. I’m not suggesting Peary should condescend to this bunch, but it’s absolutely worthwhile to analyze the ubiquitous eccentricities of the scene.

A lot of critics embrace their obsessions, but this driving force often alienates them from addressing anyone but their peers. When Cinematical/Fearnet/eFilmcritic writer Scott Weinberg claims that “If movies could kill you, I would have been dead years ago,” I feared for his health. (To Weinberg’s credit, he seems to get along pretty well, so I’m mostly using his histrionic statement to illustrate a point.) If critics spend all their waking moments with the lights out staring at a static screen, it raises the question of how much the real world that gives rise to those moving pictures actually informs their understanding of them. I’m not saying this isolationist effect universally afflicts all critics — merely that it strikes me as an essential part of the Conversation. Angela Chrislieb and Stephen Kijak’s 2002 documentary Cinemania profiles cinefiles whose movie-watching tendencies turn them into unique social pariahs. Presumably, most critics steer clear of this fate in order to deliver sane, coherent film analysis, but you wouldn’t know it from Peary’s documentary.

The posters for Watchmen herald “the visionary director of 300,” but many of the visions in Zack Snyder’s latest directorial feat owe just as much to the efforts of production designer Alex McDowell. A veteran of projects as far reaching as Fight Club and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, McDowell applies a deeply calculated, undeniably intellectual methodology to his projects, making him the perfect world-builder for a dense project like Watchmen. “Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore built this very realistic but stylized version of realism in the graphic novel,” McDowell says. “We looked to do the same.” In this gallery, he elaborates on his meticulous design work.

The War Room

In one of the more interesting visual embellishments on the source material, Snyder and McDowell designed a presidential war room reminiscent of the one in Dr. Strangelove. “It was actually very good that the film took so long to be made,” reasons McDowell. “There was a recontextualizing of the story with regard to everything that occurred in the past twenty years — culturally, historically, but mostly pop-culturally, so that you know now the context of Dr. Strangelove’s war in respect to contemporary history of what was going on.”

More images…

Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?

Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.

“They think the audience is going to grow up and get too old [for the movies] by the time two or three comes out,” Schwartz tells me. “But I honestly don’t believe it’s that crucial to have it out ever year, like Saw. I wish they would take more time, but I’m not making decisions for them.”

Nevertheless, Schwartz knows a thing or two about the fledgling company’s current state. Having worked at New Line throughout the successful run of The Lord of the Rings series, he recognizes the difficulty of handling a massive franchise while simultaneously trying to maintain the studio’s specific brand identity with different releases. “You can’t chase a franchise, that’s for sure,” he says. “It’s one thing to exploit it and to finish its run, but [Summit] is not in that high stakes, big budget business. They’re more competitive with Lionsgate than they are with major studios.”

Which, of course, explains the recent rumors that Lionsgate sought to buy out its nascent competitor. Whether or not such a deal was ever seriously considered, Lionsgate’s uneven track record in recent years — first it was a torture porn factory, now it’s ground zero of Tyler Perryville — may indicate to Summit that it shouldn’t make too much of a good thing. “If you are going to make all young girl movies, Twilight being a big one, you become the young, tween studio,” Schwartz says. “But you can’t be in that business seriously as a steady diet. When you’re not in the tentpole business, the key thing is to diversify.”

On that front, at least, the company appears to have its bases covered. In addition to New Moon, Summit’s 2009 slate contains an odd blend of star-driven material and smaller, low budget projects. A recent series of previews shown at New York Comic Con showcased the variety: First, an exasperated Nicolas Cage made desperate attempts to thwart natural catastrophes predicted by a series of ominous numbers in director Alex Proyas’s March release Knowing; then, Jeremy Renner engaged in a detailed attempt to defuse a car bomb in Kathryn Bigelow’s quietly gripping The Hurt Locker; finally, an animated adolescent went swooping through the clouds in a CGI adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. It almost felt like the projectionist grabbed a few reels at random on the way out the door.

During its nearly invincible run with the LOTR movies, New Line had its fair share of diverse content, from dramas aimed at older demographics like the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Notebook, to auteur-driven works such as David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Both did strong business on a quantitatively separate scale from LOTR. New Line also had a few comedic successes — most notably, Wedding Crashers in 2005. Summit has yet to succeed on that front, having released the dud Sex Drive last year. For now, however, that’s a failure the studio can handle. “There was always one movie that took care of the year,” Schwartz recalls of his New Line days. “Then, you sort of bubbled through the rest of the year, and had some ups and downs and singles and doubles and strikeouts.”

Schwartz thinks The Hurt Locker, which Summit purchased at the Toronto Film Festival and plans to release at the end of the summer, was a good buy for the company (assuming it ever releases the movie). Referring to the difficulties he endured with the release of the dramatically overwrought Rendition in 2007, he urges the studio to avoid the “Iraq war” label. “It doesn’t seem like it’s got any kind of political attitude about it, so that’s how you sell it,” he advises. “I don’t think the Iraq thing means that much anymore, honestly. To me, it seems like a movie you could play right against that 17-24-year-old male forum.”

How much mature, intellectual movies like The Hurt Locker can fill the voids between Twilight movies remains to be seen. A Summit representative declined to comment for this story, perhaps because they’re still not quite sure what to say. Speaking to The New York Times during the wave of optimism on the eve of Twilight’s theatrical premiere, Summit co-chairman and CEO Robert G. Friedman said the company would probably use the franchise’s success to create a brand, which he chose to define as “commercial.” His colleague, Summit president Patrick Wachsberger, added that Twilight’s success “makes it much easier for agencies to let their big stars come do a movie with us.”

So far, the big stars and commercial movies haven’t become Summit’s exclusive route — but it’s early yet. “What a franchise gives you is terrific credibility in Hollywood,” Schwartz says, adding that the relatively low budget approach to the first Twilight movie, and the subsequent monetary advantages Summit has achieved as a result, should motivate other mini-studios to follow suit. “Everybody thinks they can do it now,” he says. “For the independent film business in general, that is a fantastic accomplishment, and I think it has a very big echo effect.”

While the Twilight gears keep turning, Schwartz warns Summit not to assume guaranteed successes with its current pipeline. “The biggest problem that any of these companies face is a tendency to become complacent, particularly as an independent,” he says. “You have to be very careful about that.” Either way, the Moon will rise, but we all know how vampires fare in the sunlight.

Lee Daniels‘ Push has proven to be one of the most divisive high profile movies at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Splitting audiences is nothing to new Daniels, whose Shadowboxer remains generally maligned, but Push at least plays well to a good number of people. A heavily stylized account of troubled, overweight Harlem teen Precious (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), who has been impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend, the movie barrels forward with a frenetic pace.

While some people think Push is too obvious or jarring — I don’t — one performer unarguably reaches her full emotional potential: Mo’Nique, boldly playing against type as Mary, Precious’s crazed single mom. The true villain of the movie, she’s also its tragic centerpiece. The usually, delightfully raunchy comedian turns in a forceful, haunting performance that prompted one audience member, after the premiere on Friday, to ask her what she plans to wear when she wins an Oscar. “Nothing,” she replied. A few days later, over coffee on Main Street, we asked Mo’Nique to elaborate on her dynamic accomplishment.

It looked like the cast was having a really emotional moment together during the Q&A.

I think when we all saw it in its entirety, it was, “Look at what we did.” It’s very honest and I think to get that honest, it brings up emotions, because you start asking yourself questions. You don’t realize until you’re in it, until you see the credits. It’s like, Wow! It takes your breath away.

In your stand-up, you’re usually energized, upbeat and optimistic. Here, you play this incredibly damaged woman. What accounts for the change of pace?

Mr. Daniels. When he called me up, he said — and I’m going to quote him — “Mo’Nique, this could fuck up your career.” I said, “Sign me up.” Oftentimes, I think that people want to put us in a box. You can only do this, or you can only do that. But when you are an entertainer, it’s like, baby, whatever you bring, let’s entertain it. Let’s do it.

So you were waiting for an offer to fuck up your career.

I wasn’t necessarily waiting for someone to ask, but it’s Lee Daniels. When I did Shadowboxer with him, it was such a different role. He’s kept his word to me. The first time I met him, he said, “I have something for you. It’s going to be totally different; something that people can’t imagine seeing you do.” He kept his word.

Was it difficult to do something so different from your stand-up work?

It’s different, because I’m normally laughing and having a great time. It’s a joyful situation. So, yes, it’s different, but it was appreciated because Mary is so honest. That’s what I really dug about it. I remember when we first got the script and my husband looked at that. He said, “This is what people get Oscars for.” We laughed. Now here we are.

You deliver a fairly intense monologue at the end of the movie that really ties it together. Do you see Mary as a sympathetic character?

Yes, I think that all of us know Mary. I had to put her shoes on. If I were that person, I would want forgiveness. You do feel sorry for her because you begin to understand she’s mentally ill. She ain’t just being a bitch. She’s sick, and the society that we’re in, they threw her away. Nobody asked any questions, nobody got involved. That illness doesn’t just start. People know for years. We wanted to bring that world and put it right in your face. To say, they exist; they’re your neighbor. It might be your mother; it might be your sister. It might be you. What we were trying to do is not make it an action-and-cut Hollywood movie. I think Mr. Daniels did a great job.

What guidance did he provide?

He said, “I need you to be a monster,” and that was it: “Be a monster. I need people to hate that character.” Then he asked me before we started filming, “Do you think that everybody gets redemption?” I said, “No, especially if you don’t ask for forgiveness and mean it.” The moment he said action, the monster she was.

You brought to the table what you understood about the character.

Well, I was molested. The person who molested me was a monster. So I had to go to that person, because I know what it was like for me. [Daniels] said action, and be that monster.

There has been talk that the movie is a tough sell. How do you see it working in the marketplace?

It’s honest. You can’t be afraid, and you have to go and work at being fearless. If you go into it saying, well, if I don’t believe it, then you won’t believe it. As long as I believe it, you will believe it. This is a universal film. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I wrote in my review.

It’s all over the world - molestation and abuse, mental and verbal. It’s all over. It’s not just black. It’s not just white. It’s every color, every walk. It’s everywhere. I haven’t met any Martians, but I promise if we have some, it is going on with them, too.

If the movie comes out sometime soon, would you go on the road for it?

Yes, because I believe that everyone needs to see it. Do you know how many people suffer from molestation and mental abuse? They never tell their story, and they stay imprisoned for the rest of their life.

There are still only a certain number of mainstream movies released each year with predominantly black casts.

It is totally up to us to change that. When you say, “It’s a black movie,” what makes it a black movie? Because we are all black people? When have you ever said, “It’s a white movie”? It’s just a movie. The moment we stop making that separation, it becomes a movie and the people just happen to be black, but it is so universal.

Are you looking to do more dramatic work?

I’m looking to keep playing. Whatever that playtime is, that’s what it is. I am excited; I own the rights to Hattie McDaniel. I’m excited about that. I think that’s a story that has to be told, because of all of the doors she opened and kicked down so that I could walk through.

Will you play McDaniel?

Yes. I will be honored, because of the greatness of who that woman was, all that she did, and all the fights she had to have to make it so. One black in the city of a few, how could you not honor her?

How did you feel about George Clooney mentioning McDaniel in his Oscar acceptance speech for Syriana as proof of Hollywood’s progressiveness?

When George Clooney says it, it’s validated. Why is that? He was quite honest, and I appreciate him as a human being for putting out that honesty. But when he says it, why is it that it become validated? I appreciate the fact that he recognized brilliance. I appreciate that, but we’ve been saying it for years. We’ve been saying it out loud for years. The moment he says it, it is validated. The media does that. The industry does that.

Will you ever stop doing stand-up comedy?

I will never stop stand-up. That is my baby; that is my love. You are your own director and writer. You are everything, right in the moment. There is no, “Cut, let’s do a retake.” It is right [clap] there.

Even if you win an Oscar?

I will probably go and do stand-up that night.