MORIARTY Rumbles About BIG FISH, BIG TROUBLE... and KNUCKLE SANDWICH'!

Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

What is it that keeps an artist vital? Is it the ability to push themselves into new areas of creative exploration? Or is it the ability to refine a theme to perfection, revisiting certain concerns over the course of a career? Which is better: shaking it up or embracing your strengths? These are the questions that were going through my head as I sat down early this weekend at the Labs, perfect warm sunlight pouring in the window in the front room. I have my favorite reading spot, as I’m sure many of you do, and I settled into it, my WinAmp spitting out a 45 hour playlist on "shuffle." Perfect mood set, I started to wade through my advance look at what Steven Spielberg, Spike Jonze, Barry Sonnenfeld and Wes Anderson are up to in the months ahead. Oh... and PT Anderson, too... sort of. Keep reading. You’ll see.

SPIELBERG’S MAKING A MYTH OF THINGS!!

Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen have what can only be described as a damn good batting average. Let’s review. Their first film as a producing team was AMERICAN BEAUTY. Best Picture Oscar. $100 million domestic hit. Yeah... looks pretty good. So how do you follow that up? How do you avoid a sophomore slump?

Well, evidently you option a novel by Daniel Wallace, hire John August to write the screenplay, then show it to Steven Spielberg and get him so hot and bothered that he signs on immediately to direct. The announcement about the project was made recently, and Logan’s already turned into Spielberg’s favorite writer. He’s in Hawaii right now tweaking JURASSIC PARK III. Since getting hold of the script for Spielberg’s currently shooting AI is pretty much impossible, I had to placate myself with this, one of the two projects he’s considering next. In some ways, BIG FISH was the bigger mystery to me. I knew that AI was science fiction, a riff on PINOCCHIO, but I wasn’t even sure what genre BIG FISH was.

And now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure what genre I’d say it is. The inside first page of the script simply reads, "This is a Southern story, full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion." That captures some of the tone of the thing, but not all. Calling the script a "tall tale" begins to hint at the delirious journey that Wallace and August have laid out for the reader, but it’s also a touching study of a father and son unable to communicate. Like KNUCKLE SANDWICH, this film has a prolonged pre-title sequence. It’s actually quite lovely the way it traces the development of a rift between EDWARD BLOOM and his son WILL. Edward loves to tell stories over and over, broad impossible tales of his own youth. We see Will at age 3, age 7, age 13, age 17, age 21, and finally at his wedding at age 28. At each of those moments, Edward is telling the same story, and we see Will go from listening in wide-eyed wonder to listening politely to being bored to being embarrassed and finally passing into outright hostility. He confronts his father after the wedding and calls him a liar. For decades, the two of them don’t speak, and it’s only when Edward is on his deathbed that Will gets called home to take one last shot at learning who his father really is.

Will narrates the film, which is a beautifully constructed attempt by him to sort the facts from the fiction in the stories that Edward has told his whole life. Spielberg’s never had material to shoot like this before, and that’s an exciting prospect. In some ways, I think this is going to appeal to people on the same level as FORREST GUMP, striking a chord as an American myth, original and sweeping. In some ways, I’d compare this to Terry Gilliam’s magnificent THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, too, in the way it brings lies to vivid life around characters. This goes further, though, than we’ve seen from Spielberg before, incorporating giants and mermaids and Siamese twins and more. We weave in and out of these stories and reality, past and present, and there’s a really beautiful natural arc to the way Will forgives his father, the way he comes to understanding that no matter how factually inaccurate the stories are, they reveal the truth about his heart. It’s a simple story dressed up with remarkable imagination, and I think it’s damn near heroic material for Spielberg to tackle. More than anything, it’s an indicator that even as we head into the third decade of his amazing career, Spielberg retains the ability to surprise us and to redefine himself at will. Actual production details are sketchy still, and there’s a chance that Scott Frank’s rewrite of MINORITY REPORT will get the greenlight before this does next spring. As the cast comes together, though, this will be a film worth paying attention to. If Jinks and Cohen aren’t careful, they could just go two for two with this wonderful, strange, surreal gem.

THIS TIME, IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A BOMB!!

I’ve given Barry Sonnenfeld a fair amount of shit on this website in the past, but that’s because I was covering things like WILD WILD WEST and his thankfully-aborted attempt at ALI. There’s no denying that Sonnenfeld has done good work, both as a cinematographer and as a director. I’d say his most consistently entertaining film is GET SHORTY, the Elmore Leonard adaptation that was so much dizzy fun and that somehow managed to use Travolta as a gangster post-PULP FICTION without imitating that film. Sonnenfeld made a great human cartoon out of Leonard’s novel, helped in large part by the wonderful witty work by Scott Frank on the script and the ensemble cast, all of them turning in great, funny work.

And now he goes back to the same well, and it looks like he’s made a hell of a great choice in doing so. Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone have adapted the first novel by Floridian columnist Dave Barry, a story that could be compared to the dizzier work of Leonard or Carl Hiaasen. Barry’s trademark sarcasm is on full display, and the result is a fast and funny read with something like 3,000 major speaking roles. We’re talking about an ensemble cast made up of Andy Richter, Tom Sizemore, Rene Russo, Dennis Farina, DJ Qualls, Patrick Warburton, Jason Lee, Tim Allen, Janeane Garafolo, Heavy D, Johnny "JACKASS" Knoxville, Zooey Deschanel, Omar Epps, Stanley Tucci, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jack Black, Peter Stormare, and Kate Hudson. That’s a lot of damn talent in there, and I can’t wait to start sorting out who plays what in the thing. Everything revolves around a nuclear bomb in a suitcase that makes its way from one set of unwitting hands to the next until things come to a head at Miami International Airport.

The great thing about a script like this is that there’s plenty of storylines, and if there’s something you’re not interested in, chances are the next scene will draw you back in. Some of the script is violent, some of it is absurd, but all of it had me laughing out loud. There’s something about Florida as a setting for films like this that informs them enormously. I spent many, many years in that insane swamp of a state, and it’s got a personality all its own. These writers do full justice to Dave Barry’s writing, and it should provide the perfect platform for Sonnenfeld to restablish himself as a wry comic force with major commercial clout. All producers Tom Jacobson, Barry Josephson, and Jim Wedaa have to do is wrangle this giant fistful of entertainment from the page to the screen intact, and this could be one of next year’s most potent comic packages.

IS ADAM SANDLER DUE FOR A KNUCKLE SANDWICH?!

One of those infamous "mysterious packages" ended up on my desk this morning. Inside was a script and a single sheet of paper with three names on it: ADAM SANDLER, SEAN PENN, and EMILY WATSON. Okay... consider my attention got. The name of the screenwriter jumped off the front page at me: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON. Holy crap. This is the untitled comedy project. This is New Line’s mysterious thing I’ve heard about. And it’s got a title!! KNUCKLE SANDWICH, eh? It’s one of those titles that really needs to be said aloud in that cheesy trailer voice to be appreciated.

"ADAM SANDLER... IN A FILM BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON... KNUCKLE SANDWICH!"

I hadn’t heard anything about premise or the other cast members before, so I dug into the script immediately to try and get some grip on what to expect next year. First thing, first page, it says "This movie is to be shot in CINEMASCOPE." You know, there’s a reason I love PTA and his films so far. It’s that sort of high-functioning geek savant quality to his work that makes me smile right off the bat, just like QT. These are guys who list influences like Melville and Lawrence Tierney on the inside front title page, or who specify scope and every single camera move from the moment they start writing. They breathe cinema. They’re like guys who snuck in the back door, hardcore film geeks who have figured out how to bend the mainstream to meet them. PTA is once again working with Los Angeles as his stage, but this time, it’s 1967, and this is no PTA world we’ve seen before.

The one thing that’s immediately his, that’s familiar from page one to the end, is the sense of heightened romanticism. This guy believes in crazy love, manic love, the kind of love that... well, that people write movies about, actually. This film starts right away with the meeting of one BARRY WURLITZER (Adam Sandler) and one LENA LEONARD (Emily Watson). They’re at the Hot Doggie Style Hot Dog Stand on Wilshire. It’s the middle of the night. They meet, and there’s instant electricity. Within days, they’re in Vegas getting married. They speak in that same delirious drunk on love sort of way that Lula and Sailor did or that ‘Bama and Clarence did, like they’ve got a secret private language. As they lay in that honeymoon suite on their first night as man and wife, making love, Lena looks into Barry’s eyes.

"If we ever part, for whatever reason, I have no idea what, and I don’t want to think too long about it... but my darling, my dear... promise me this: promise me we’ll end it with one last kiss."

Barry promises, and so does Lena, and they hold each other even closer as Lena speaks again.

"If you listen closer, I’ll whisper something in your ear. I’ll tell you my secrets and my desires and I’ll tell you the purest thing in the world. I love you, my darling. I love you."

So it’s a fairy tale come true for the first six months. Barry’s a clean thief, a stickup guy who never gets his hands dirty, who never hurts anyone. One night he’s on his way out on a major job with some other goons, all of them working for some unseen crime boss named BABALOO (Sean Penn), a shadowy figure who only deals with one of them. Just before leaving for this particular job on this particular night, though, Lena asks for Barry’s wedding ring. She says she’s got a surprise for him. He leaves it for her, then slips out without a kiss. He and the other guys on the job meet at The Smiling Peanut, a local bar. The bartender there (RIDGELY, a nice nod to PTA’s longtime friend and BOOGIE NIGHTS star Robert Ridgely) gives Barry a note from Lena in a sealed envelope. What that note says begins Barry and the rest of this outrageous cast of characters on an insane path of destruction, violence, and love. This is a crazed action comedy about a man who just wants what he’s been promised from the woman he loves: one last kiss.

Oh... and before you flame me about giving away too much of the script, relax. KNUCKLE SANDWICH isn’t happening. One quick call to a New Line source put a stake through the heart of what I thought was a damn cool scoop. Turns out the script I have is something older of Anderson’s, an unproduced oddity that wound up on my desk out of the goodness of someone’s heart, a curiousity piece that we probably aren’t going to be seeing onscreen. And, to be honest, there’s a number of things that should have tipped me off. This is a fairly long script, and I’ve heard that his untitled project is actually lean and mean, clocking in under 100 pages. Also, it’s pretty rough. There’s a real delicacy to his work in MAGNOLIA and BOOGIE NIGHTS that isn’t present here. This is a fascinating glimpse into the artist that PTA once was, but for now, that’s all it is. That means his new script is still out there, still a secret, mocking me. I’m dying to read it. Whatever it turns out to be, I guarantee it will push Sandler to new places as an actor. How can it not with Penn and Watson attached?

I’ll be back tomorrow with the second half of this piece. We’ve still got Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze to look at, plus a few extras if there’s time. Speaking of Jonze, did anyone catch the episode of JACKASS that MTV showed on Sunday night? It’s like an entire team of Tom Greens, all working in concert to make the world far more bizarre. Johnny Knoxville wins as "most deranged bastard on TV" for this week thanks to the stunt we shall refer to from this point on merely as... "poo cocktail." I love that Jonze has been an Oscar-nominee, and this is what he chooses to put on TV. God bless his sick, sick mind. I’ve gotta go watch the tape again while I work through these next few scripts for tomorrow. Until then...

"Moriarty" out.