Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998).
Today’s story is a little shorter than the rest in this series, but it’s worth remembering because it involves another instance where one Sundance success directly resulted in the making of a later Sundance success (a la Slacker leading to Clerks). The earlier film in this case was Welcome to the Dollhouse, which Darren Aronofsky saw at the 1996 festival. In Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures, Aronfsky comments on the experience: “I thought it was such a unique, weird film, that it really gave me the courage to go back to New York and just try to throw something together.” That November he was in production on Pi.
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The first guest speaker on the first morning of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, New York Times critic A.O. Scott made a comment about the problematic nature of Iraq films that seemed to me to serve as a wider metaphor for the current crisis facing those of us struggling for security and longevity as film writers. To paraphrase, Scott suggested that dramatizations of the Iraq conflict have so far been generally disappointing because not only do we not yet know the outcome of the war, but it’s hard to hypothesize what either a positive or negative end would actually look like. This is essentially how I’ve come to feel about my chosen profession of late: unable to imagine what either a best or worst case scenario would actually look like, the idea of establishing long-term career goals seems unfathomable.
The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there’s a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I’m too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance.
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Karina will be AWOL for most of Wednesday and at least part of Thursday. While I’m gone, you need to go to Hollywood Elsewhere, because Jeff Wells has obtained the script for the movie adaptation of Peter Biskind’s 90s indie film expose, Down and Dirty Pictures. I mean, I think he has––technically, he posted scans of pages on April 1, but he groveled for a copy of the script several days before, so it’s likely legit. Anyway––the pages he’s scanned are…something to behold. They appear to be the first four pages of the screenplay, and they set the film up as a decony film-within-a-film, wherein Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky argue over the portrayal of their own foibles. Read, and talk amongst yourselves. Wells says they’re hiring “name actors” for a Toronto shoot beginning in the fall. Um…casting ideas, anyone?
