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Diablo Cody teams with Steven Spielberg: Garbage seeks its own level

June 5th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Juno meets Jew, yes…Yes…YES!!!

A stripper turned screenwriter cause celebre is teaming with a manchild mogul who never saw a girl naked until he was forty for a new pay cable sitcom about a dysfunctional family.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Showtime has picked up 12 episodes of United States of Tara, a comedy series to be overwritten by Diablo Cody (Juno) and produced by Steve Spielberg.

The show stars Toni Collette as a wife and mother with a dissociative identity disorder family and John Corbett, who plays her husband. It’s expected to enter production in Los Angeles in the summer.

On the basis of one film and a stack of teleplays, Showtime president of entertainment Robert Greenblatt fawned over “Diablo Coby’s vision.” Single-camera comedy does not a visionary make. Her characters, who don’t shut their mouths for two seconds, are too busy blabbing to worry about seeing.

“It’s a very provocative idea,” said Greenblatt, “and there’s a combination of humor and real drama. It’s a unique show that seems to be right up our alley.”

Cody will continue to serve as a writer; she also will exec produce with Spielberg, Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank of DreamWorks TV and Alexa Junge. Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) directed the pilot.

Greenblatt expexts the show to debut early next year. He had originally hoped he might be able to launch it earlier, but the writers strike and Collette’s pregnancy delayed the shooting of the pilot.

The series kickoff focuses on a pregnant, unwed and underage concentration camp victim (who owns nothing more than a little red latex dress) saved from the gas chambers by a band of renegade space aliens that magically appear in the final reel to extinguish Hitler’s inferno.

Loads more spielberg hating here.

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Orson Welles’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND completed by Peter Bogdanovich for Showtime

April 17th, 2008 by Scott Marks

oswwelles.jpg

Here we go again.

According to Lawrence French’s interview with Peter Bogdanovich published on Wellesnet.com, Showtime is once again set to bankroll the completion of Orson Welles’ highly anticipated The Other Side of the Wind.

There were rumblings over the years that Showtime commissioned Welles acolyte Peter Bogdanovich to finally put an amen on the project. Bogdanovich, who also stars in the film, was asked by Welles “to finish the picture if anything should ever happen to him. ” In August 2002, the premium channel announced that a deal had been reached to finish and release the film.

At that time Welles’ daughter Beatrice, who controls her father’s estate but has no claim to the film, threatened the deal with a lawsuit saying she owned the film. Shortly thereafter Showtime backed down.

Rumors persisted that the film was never completed, but according to Bogdanovich, “I don’t think we need to shoot anything, but we still have to see all the footage, so we’re not entirely sure. But Orson said he didn’t think there was anything left that needed to be shot.”

There was also talk that Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover at the time of his death, was also acting as a roadblock. Bogdanovich countered those claims by saying, “No, it wasn’t Oja. I don’t want to go into details, but there were some rights we still needed, but hadn’t gotten. But Showtime is still going to go forward with the project. We just have to work out of few more of the rights issues. Since then, I’ve actually seen a lot of the footage I hadn’t seen before, because we got into Oja’s vault in Los Angeles which has all the positive footage. I’d only seen about 40 minutes of the film and now I’ve seen quite a lot of new footage. These are scenes we had shot but Orson never showed them to me. I still haven’t seen everything, because there is so much stuff to look at. It’s the dailies and so on and it looks great.”

A friend noted, “the footage that I’ve seen seemed ragtag, as if it was slapped together.” The only scenes made public were included in Welles’ 1975 AFI Tribute and the documentary The One Man Band. While cimematographer Gary Graver is hardly a worthy substitute for Gregg Toland or Russell Metty, the footage looked remarkably fresh as though the cinema’s supreme experimental filmmaker was still finding new methods of storytelling.

As much as I would love for the San Diego premiere of The Other Side of the Wind to be held in my living room, let’s hope that the film has a theatrical run before hitting cable TV.

The entire transcript of Peter Bogdanovich’s interview can be found here.


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