With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.
Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”
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Roger Avary, who won an Oscar for co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and who also collaborated on the script for Beowulf with Neil Gaiman, was booked on charges of vehicular manslaughter and felony drunken driving, after crashing into a telephone pole late last night in Ojai, CA. According to reports, a friend of Avary’s was fatally injured in the crash, while Avary’s wife was thrown from the car but survived. Avary himself was apparently not injured. More info here.
The tabloid sites are clouding this story with speculation pretty rapidly as the morning progresses, but I’m posting it here because I know several people who used to participate in the forums on Avary’s website, which was something of a destination in the early days of film-bloggery, so I figured it would be of interest.
Hopwood DePree, screenwriter and co-founder for the Waterfront Film Festival, wraps up Sundance. Paul, Dave and Kevin debate questions like, who is The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? How do they pick a winner? Are losers chosen so they make better films? What is up with Dreamgirls among other bizarre anomalies of the 2007 Oscars?
Download FilmCouch #5 or subscribe to FilmCouch in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday.
Standard Podcast [25:44m]:
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Interview with Forrest Whitaker, who’s favored for the Best Actor Oscar, and director Kevin Macdonald before the premier of their film, The Last King of Scotland. Screenwriter and Waterfront Film Festival co-founder, Hopwood DePree, gives the lowdown on this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Also, the Spout guys react to The Last King of Scotland in an eerie, late-night gondola ride. Listen to the podcast.
Download FilmCouch #4 or subscribe to it in the iTunes store (search for “filmcouch” or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday.
Standard Podcast [22:16m]:
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Naked pictures of a stripper? Not news. Naked pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter? Eh. Pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter emulating the naked-but-for-whipped-cream scene from the classic James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues? News enough!
