With Fahrenheit 9/11 on course to take over $100 million at the US box-office, cinema owners are looking out for the next hit controversial documentary. A prime contender is Inside Deep Throat, which examines the cultural impact of the 1972 porn movie which starred Linda Lovelace. Michael Dwyer reports.
The directors of the documentary are Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who made the recent Party Monster, and the film features interviews with, among others, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Waters.
"Because of the title and what it successfully celebrated, Deep Throat became the most litigated, most profitable movie ever," says the documentary's producer, Brian Grazer, who's best known for family-oriented fare directed by Ron Howard, his partner in Imagine Entertainment.
Fleadh beats Dems to film
Among the visitors to Galway Film Fleadh last Sunday was US writer-director Maureen Foley, who presented a special preview of her new movie American Wake, ahead of its official world première at the Democrats' convention in Boston on July 28th. The première's hosts will be Alec Baldwin and Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston.
Set in Boston, the film features Foley's co-writer, Billy Smith, as a fireman, with Sam Amidon as a gifted fiddler whose father wants him to return home to Ireland.
Kiwi cranks on fests' cases
A conservative New Zealand group has failed in its bid to prevent this month's film festivals in Auckland and Wellington from screening Catherine Breillat's provocative new French film, Anatomy of Hell/Anatomie de l'Enfer, which was shown at the Galway Film Fleadh last weekend. The New Zealand Film and Literature Review Board turned down the application from the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards to stop the screenings, but said it would review the film's censorship rating, which restricts it to patrons 18 years and older.
The Society is also appealing the R18 rating for another French film showing in both festivals, Bruno Dumont's Twenty-nine Palms, which was shown at the CineFrance festival in Dublin last autumn.
Holy Moses, not another one
Doubtless drooling at the prospect of using CGI to part the Red Sea, Paramount Pictures is planning to produce its third screen treatment of The Ten Commandments, already filmed twice by Cecil B. DeMille, in a 1923 silent version and again in 1956 with Charlton Heston as Moses. Mark Gordon, who produced The Day After Tomorrow, is already on board the new version, and Charles Randolph, who scripted The Life of David Gale, will write the screenplay.
While a new Moses movie could tap into some of the same religious fervour that anointed Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ at the box-office, Gordon and Randolph are understood to be interested in "fashioning a serious, research-based treatment of the subject", according to industry reports. Casting will begin after a director is signed for the epic.
Critic to movie: drop dead
Having opened in the US this month to some of the most scathing reviews ever printed, The Singing Forest is unlikely to turn up at a cinema near you. For example, veteran New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote: "To describe this supernatural soap opera as inept and mawkish doesn't really begin to evoke the awfulness ... Exploitative, amateurish, prurient and pretentious are other adjectives that could also be applied to this film, which is swamped in badly used classical music and burdened by purple hand-wringing dialogue and crude black-and-white flashbacks.
"The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film Strippers opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed - until now."
