FilmStew.com: HOLLYWOODSPIN

Memo to Tom Cruise

05/09/2008

If, in the space of a few years, Robert Downey Jr. can segue from the laboratory of Dr. Kozak in 2006’s The Shaggy Dog to that of Tony Stark in Iron Man, there’s hope for any free-falling 40’s male Hollywood star. But whereas Downey Jr. had to put behind him years of alcohol and drug abuse, a veritable common currency among today’s stars, you must erase the stigma of something much trickier – a ridiculed religion.

Granted, you don’t have nearly the same kind of insouciance that Downey Jr. does. Watching him for example this week on Jimmy Kimmel Live, during which he endlessly poked fun at the fact that one big weekend has transformed him into a perceived Tinseltown “genius,” makes it apparent that his current Paramount cabaret act is no Method trick. In your case, the million-dollar smile and still stunning good looks are no longer enough. Following a nicely done presenter appearance at this year’s Academy Awards, you’ve now kicked off your full battle plan for A-list recovery, but there’s still lots of work to be done. So here’s a look at the items you’ve already covered, and the ones I think you still need to check off.

#1: Sit down with Oprah and try to wash away the memory of the couch incident as well as apologize to Brooke Shields, explain Matt Lauer and just briefly touch on that leaked 2004 Scientology video. Check.

#2: Get Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone to publicly state that bygones are now bygones, and that if it came to pass, he would be more than happy to sign the checks for M:I:IV. Check.

#3: Revamp the official TomCruise.com website, gussying it up with the latest bells and whistles and, more importantly, begin using its messaging powers as a direct and regenerative connection with your fans. Check.

#4: Make a hilarious cameo in a movie starring Robert Downey Jr., and – to maximize the bulls eye in this post-post-post-modern world - make it a parody of Sumner Redstone, in a movie that the mogul’s own damn studio financed. Check (Tropic Thunder).

#5: Contact fellow Scientologist Paul Haggis and ask, “What have you got for me?”

#6: Track down Jerry Maguire guru Cameron Crowe and beg him to write another romantic comedy vehicle for you.

#7: Contact fellow Scientologists Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley and start working on them for a late years Elvis movie. The right approach and tone to Graceland could lead to a fourth trip to Oscarland.

#8: Pick up the phone and chat with Mel Gibson about a possible buddy cop movie or some sort of wink-wink action flick. A summer 2010 kick-off actioner with this pairing could do for you what the titanium suit did for Downey Jr..

#9: Figure out how to address the next wave of goofy Internet Scientology gossip, which looks to revolve around your – and perhaps Katie’s – extremely stringent diet. You might just want to have your chef pick out the favorite recipe now and book an appearance on Rachael Ray for right around the time when Tropic Thunder hits theaters this August.

#10: Do whatever you have to do to make your upcoming World War II Valkyrie movie palatable. The buzz is already bad, but now that you’ve got fans’ attention, it’s up to you, Bryan and Paula to re-edit, reshoot and market in a way that avoids at all costs a crash and burn at the 2009 box office. Because that will, in one weekend, pretty much undo all the hard work leading up to that point.

The "Daily Show" Deluge

05/07/2008

Over here, Stephen Colbert has been voted the “Internet Person of the Year” by the Webby Awards. Over there, Rob Corrdry - after a solid bit of supporting work in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay - is getting ready to do the same this weekend in What Happens in Vegas… and later this year in the Justin Long Indian casino comedy Patriotville. Then there is of course Get Smart, Steve Carell’s big June 20th summer gambit.

And let’s not forget Lewis Black, whose acerbic commentaries on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart paved the way for his own Comedy Central series Root of All Evil, a six-episode curio that debuted in March. Or Ed Helms, who jumped to NBC’s version of The Office. Wait, there’s more.

When The Rocker world premieres at the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, among the onscreen talent will be Demetri Martin, whose work last year on The Daily Show has also led to the upcoming Comedy Central program Important Things with Demetri Martin. Meanwhile, former show producer Ben Karlin, as part of a new overall deal with HBO, has optioned for feature film treatment a New Yorker article about a billionaire who paid $500,000 for a bottle of wine that may or may not have been once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

It all adds up to Stewart’s operation being the most reliable minter of male comedic talent this side of Saturday Night Live. A most ironic development, given the fact that Stewart essentially crashed and burned as a feature film actor (whenever the moment calls for it, he is wont to bring up 2002’s Death to Smoochy).

Whereas the pinnacle of a male stand-up comic’s career was once appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, it is now without a doubt scoring a spot on The Daily Show, a winner of five consecutive Emmy Awards for Best Comedy, Music or Variety Series. And by producing The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and that upcoming Martin sketch comedy through his Busboy Productions, Stewart is along the way following in the very lucrative footsteps of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants.

We’re not even halfway through 2008, but when you throw in the Oscars gig, Tom Brokaw saying he’s fine with the kids today getting their news from The Daily Show and the indelible imprint the Stewart-Colbert combo are putting on the most important Presidential election in a generation, it all adds up to a career year for someone who glided into the picture as "Rollerblader" in the 1994 Steve Martin comedy Mixed Nuts. And nowhere is Stewart’s eye for talent more obvious than in the form of Colbert, who is much more than just the “Internet Person of the Year.” He is in fact currently the funniest damn person on the planet.

Made in Japan

05/05/2008

Regardless of what you think about Speed Racer, the film’s most notable element is arguably the fact that this is the first time a Japanese TV series has been imported for the American big screen. And if Warner Bros has anything to do with it, its big May 9th release will also help cement anime on the lot as a new, profitable J.K. Rowling-like source of family entertainments.

Whereas the four U.S. TV networks continue to heavily rely on Americanized versions of UK and European game show and reality hits, spreading now to Latin America with Fox’s Moment of Truth, it’s rather odd that the garish TV sensibilities of the Empire of the Sun have failed so far to click with the garish sensibilities of Hollywood execs. Other than Iron Chef, the only other really notable North American Japanese TV import is the Canadian series Dragon’s Den, which hews closely to the kind of panel-pitch thing Donnie Deutsch regularly presides over on his CNBC program The Big Idea.

There are a few other Tokyo boob tube traces here and there – the cancelled Spike TV series Most Extreme Elimination Challenge and the 2006 ABC-TV offering Master of Champions - but Speed Racer, coming on the heels of much horror and the unofficial Godzilla remake Cloverfield, is aiming to push things in a decidedly non-R rated direction. Warner Bros. is certainly a believer in the Japanese animation concept; the studio is already at work on its second anime-driven effort, 2009’s Gatchaman, about a teenage superhero team that battles Galactor. They’re also looking at a movie based on the 1988 anime movie Akira, a project that has been rumored to have been dangled in the Leonardo DiCaprio direction.

For now, it’s all about Speed Racer, a film that I for one – in the recent company of my eight-year-old son – was absolutely bowled over by. Helping implant the franchise into the minds of my and everyone else’s offspring will be the Nicktoons Network companion piece Speed Racer: The Next Generation, along with of course the reams of prominently displayed toy merchandise.

In terms of remade Japanese family fare, Speed Racer’s closest cousin is the 2006 Disney film Eight Below. Just as the Emile Hirsch flick owes its storyline to the 1967-1968 TV series Mahha GoGoGo, the Paul Walker sled dog movie was a remake of the 1983 Japanese film Nakyoku monogatari. (A very lucrative one at that; it grossed $120 million in theaters before becoming a monster on DVD.)

Of course, if Speed Racer really hits it out of the park, it will have a chance of following in the fumes of the two all-time greatest examples of Japanese-American family-friendly cinematic collaboration: The Magnificient Seven (1960) and George Lucas’ Star Wars, which sourced respectively Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958).

Then again, this could all be cancelled out if The Weinstein Co. proceeds with its plans for a 2009 remake of The Seven Samurai. To quote the title of the most recent post, at press time, on that film’s IMDB page: ‘NNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.’

Tony Stark's Media Empire

04/30/2008

In today’s conglomerate-owned world of print, online, radio and TV outlets, there is no such thing anymore as “conflict of interest.” Instead, it’s all about “confluence of interest.”

On Monday’s edition of The Late Show with David Letterman, the bespectacled host raved with uncharacteristic abandon about Iron Man, the movie that is about to kick off the 2008 summer season. A short time later on the same program, it was on to the business of interviewing the film’s co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, who said she had not yet seen the film because Paramount, perhaps fearful of her video piracy tendencies, had refused to surrender a DVD screener. The next night, Tuesday, it was titular star Robert Downey Jr.’s turn to sit down with Dave.

If Iron Man performs the way it is expected to - both here and overseas - chances are the second and third quarter Viacom stock dividends will benefit handsomely as a result, and, by default, stock option incentivized employees like Letterman. The idea of a Viacom brand name product being hawked all across its media verticals is nothing new, but each year, the machinery seems to get just that much more well-oiled, so much so that it’s easy to forget that William Randolph Hearst has been replaced by the likes of Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch.

In addition to CBS, Viacom avenues being used to drive home the Iron Man media message include cable TV stations MTV, VH1, UPN, BET , Comedy Central and Spike; pay cable channels Showtime, Flix, The Movie Channel and Logo; Internet sites iFilm.com, MTV.com and GameTrailers.com; billboard company Viacom Outdoor; and radio station group Infiniti Broadcasting. About the only thing missing is Redstone himself, walking up and down Melrose Ave. wearing a two-sided ad panel.

Expect the same drill in support of Paramount’s two other big summer releases, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Love Guru. In the case of the latter, for example, MTV.com got an early jump start on things, publishing a flattering interview of star Mike Myers several weeks back. Just ahead of Myers being tapped as the host of this year’s MTV Movie Awards.

Unless you pay particular attention to M&A’s (mergers and acquisitions), it’s easy to forget just how far the Viacom tentacles extend. For example, we all by now pretty much know that ET, Inside Edition and the executive offices of Paramount Pictures are just a few steps from each other on the studio lot. But how many of us realize that Oprah Winfrey is now semi-owned by Viacom, via its acquisition of King World Productions? (All of a sudden, Tom Cruise’s upcoming two-part interview on the show takes on a whole new purposeful meaning. As in, let’s see if you can fix what you broke enough to allow for a M:I:IV.)

There aren’t too many good anagrams that can be gleaned from re-arranging the words Iron Man, but one of them is a text message worthy spelling of harmony. As in, a super hero and his corporate cousins working in perfect “armonni.”

From Malibu with Love

04/29/2008

On comic book paper, Iron Man may play a lot like the Caped Crusader: mega-rich dude who lives in a metropolis secretly doubles as a uniformed superhero. But on celluloid, thanks mainly to the sensibilities of actor Robert Downey Jr., it comes across like an Americanized James Bond flick.

The early Afghanistan scenes tip the May 2nd Paramount release in the direction of From Malibu with Love. But later on, when industrialist billionaire Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) dons the get –up, it’s more along the lines of a Goldfingers or The Man with the Golden Guns re-imagining. And though Stark has a plethora of sporty automobiles, the Iron Man suit is definitely his Aston Martin, the apple of his gadget eye.

Downey Jr. plays Stark with the same blend of insouciance and glibness once owned by seminal Bonds Sean Connery and Roger Moore (though this Yank prefers Scotch on the rocks to a shaken martini). Trading places with Miss Moneypenny is Virginia “Pepper” Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), a similarly faithful secretary whose banter with her boss is also all about the other women in his life.

Befitting the times, Q has gone virtual. He is now J.A.R.V.I.S., an Artificial Intelligence super-computer who resides anywhere and everywhere thatStark needs him. As voiced by actor Paul Bettany, “J” modulates and articulates with a British accent in a way that would do original Bond film co-star Desmond Llewellyn proud.

This is the first Marvel Comics adaptation fully financed by Stan Lee’s company, which saw its modern incarnation take shape in the early 1960’s. As such, it seems only fitting that a large chunk of Iron Man comes across like a modern day flipside version of Dr. No, the 1962 film that kicked off the 007 franchise. Once the cookie cutter, capitalist hero version of Stark gives way to more of a renegade anti-hero – when he essentially says ‘No!’ to the American industrial military complex - he toils deep within the bowels of a ridiculous cliff side Malibu manse that looks very much like the Extreme Makeover version of Dr. No’s lair. (The exterior shots of the home are actually digitally rendered images superimposed on a portion of Point Dume, Malibu park land.)

An equally striking visual cue comes from the shiny bald patina of Obadiah Stane, the conniving villain of Iron Man portrayed by Jeff Bridges. This is the American corporate world’s version of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Bond baddie essayed in a couple of franchise appearances by Telly Savalas and Donald Pleasance. Though his final showdown with Stark is more Transformers than You Only Live Twice, everything up until that point is delightfully in sync with Downey Jr.’s titanium-is-forever spirit.

Memo to Wesley Snipes

04/25/2008

I’m not buying it for one second, this idea that – to quote your prepared statement delivered Thursday in response to being sentenced to three years in a Florida jail for 1999-2004 income tax evasion – that you are “an idealistic, naive, passionate, truth seeking, spiritually motivated artist, and unschooled in the science of law and finance."

You’re actually a guy who grew up in the South Bronx, someone who saw fit to publicly call out Shaft director John Singleton for casting Samuel L. Jackson rather than you in the lead role of the 2000 action remake. You’re also someone who chose to listen with regards to tax matters to an accountant stripped of his license in 1997 (Douglas Rosile) and another guy who has already served time in prison for tax evasion (Eddie Kahn).

The fact is that your former tax adviser Kenneth Starr (head of Starr and Company), per his testimony, once had a 90-minute conversation with you before quitting in the year 2000, during which he tried to convince you that yes, you did have to pay taxes. But neither that, nor narrowly escaping possible death at your Twin Towers-adjacent apartment on September 11th, were able to put you on the straight and narrow. You chose to hang with the likes of Rosalie, Kahn and eventually Robert Bernhoft, your defense attorney and a champion of the FU-IRS rule.

Once again, an opportunity has been lost. Instead of stepping up to the prepared statement podium and telling America something to the effect of, ‘Folks, I tried to cheat on my taxes and I got caught. Because I am a celebrity, I thought that even if the authorities did catch up with me, that I could wriggle out of it. I was wrong; $38 million over five years is more than most of my fans make in a lifetime. It’s wrong not to file a tax return, and as surely as I will not be starring in Blade 4, I accept my sentence as a belated form of taxation, to be paid in full.’

The only way you could have pulled off your ‘I-thought-I-didn’t-have-to-pay-taxes-I-swear’ defense is if you had had Johnnie Cochran as your lawyer. He is the only attorney on the planet who could have yanked this out of the 1040 hat (“If the advice comes from a nitwit, you must acquit”?). But Cochran is-was not a tax attorney, and he is no longer with us. Like many of your recent movies, you aligned yourself with the wrong co-stars.

There are two ways you can start making it up to your fans. Firstly, do not file an appeal. This was an error-free trial proceeding, and Ocala, Florida U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges showed the Ito’s of the world just what a judicial action hero looks like. An appeal will simply eat up some of the tax dollars you under-contributed to.

Secondly, you’ve got three years minus good behavior to start re-thinking your spiritually motivated career. You could write a great book; you could start putting out the word for a different kind of script, one where the drama does not come from wondering how quickly the end result will go straight to DVD. You could even start mapping out a meaningful directing career. But please, for now, ditch the bogus statement, ditch the thought of an appeal and take it like a martial arts man.

Harrison vs. Heath

04/24/2008

Box office, schmox office. The real time capsule question regarding any predictive look at this summer’s tentpole offerings is which performance will ultimately – and most robustly - stand the test of time: Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Night, or Harrison Ford in what is perhaps his final go-round frowning under a Fedora in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Excepting two-time Academy Award nominee Will Smith, summer is not usually a time for male Oscar nominees to be plying their trade. But this year, we’ve got a veritable plethora: there’s Chaplin (Robert Downey Jr.), trading the bowler hat and tattered suit for a stainless one-piece number; that Philly cop who once hid out in the kingdom of the wooden barn (Ford) is back to big budget retro-gliding; a gay cowboy (Ledger) is now a gay villain; and that crazy white supremacist slash diabolical courtroom trial murder suspect (Ed Norton) is picking up where cowboy wrangler Ang Lee left off. (Amazingly, Christian Bale, fast becoming a summer fixture, has yet to get the Oscar nod.)

In the past week or so, word starting leaking out from the first Paramount employee screenings of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Although this kind of thing is always a little suspect, it seems that Ford has knocked it out of the archeological park, reclaiming under the superlative direction of Spielberg the spirit that he channeled for Raiders of the Lost Ark. All signs point to a Fugitive-like slam dunk, and arguably Ford’s first “movie star” performance in a decade (since 1997’s Air Force One).

But all that pales in comparison to the situation that surrounds Heath Ledger’s posthumous swan song. Though nothing can be today quite as big as what James Dean was a part of in the mid-1950’s with Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, simply because we no longer live in a world where the big screen is king, the intertwined elements of Ledger’s final days and the no-holds-barred approach to a role previously essayed by the King of All Male Oscar Nominations (Jack Nicholson) is epic. Warner Bros. is keeping this one under very tight lock and key, but if the trailer and ShoWest reactions are any indication, this one is the future look-back performance to beat.

Certainly, with a comparatively late silly season release date of July 18th, The Dark Night could have the rest of the summer essentially to itself. In a field littered with a third Mummy, another pair of Traveling Pants and an opening weekend companion by the name of Space Chimps (seriously), Heath could be lined up for the kind of repeat-repeat-repeat viewing that could help brand it into the moviegoing consciousness.

Ledger would have turned 29 this month, which is five years older than the age Dean was when he passed. If Ledger had died in circumstances more akin to Dean’s spectacular demise rather than the somewhat sad way that he did, it would certainly have added to his Hollywood halo. But look out if there is, in The Dark Knight, any kind of intentional-accidental dialogue or eyebrow similarity to Dean. That could cement the super-talented Aussie’s place on the 2008 time capsule scale.

To put it all in proper comparative perspective, if Ford had died at the same age as Ledger did, he would never have starred in American Graffiti, Star Wars or Raiders.

The Pursuit of "Hancock"

04/23/2008

Without a doubt, the viral marketing website HancockWasHere.com - in support of the upcoming Will Smith hybrid superhero movie Hancock (July 2nd) - is not only the strangest such entry for 2008, but also, based on the evidence so far, the least successful.

Back in December, the site "re-kicked off" with the premise that while rescuing 37 hostages on Wilshire Boulevard, our mixed up superhero also accidentally took out his own ISP. The site is moderated not by Hancock but rather his anonymous webmaster. Among the seven comments posted in response to this return item was a link to a “lost video,” one that hilariously shows a beached whale suddenly being catapulted back out into the ocean, presumably by our summer film protagonist.

Since then, Hancock has been sighted at: the restaurant Hop Sing’s Dim Sum; a Beverly Hills revival showing of the movie Frankenstein; helping out the UCLA gals of the Zeta Alpha Zeta Sorority; the La Brea Tarpits; Yummy Burgers; City Hall; the 101 Freeway; an MTA bus stop bench on Hollywood Boulevard; and, this month, flying high above downtown and the Hollywood Hills.

The first problem with the site is its tonal inconsistency, as it can’t seem to make up its mind between tongue-in-cheek and deadpan seriousness. Second is the fact that despite the fact that the comments section for each item is artifically populated, it still looks odd to see only a few repeat posters chiming in. Surely, there is an intern or assistant with free time at Sony who could be tasked with padding the totals a little bit, to a number of comments befitting the earth shaking topics of most entries.

The website is the product of the cryptically named CTMG, which in fact stands for Columbia Tri-Star Marketing Group. Despite their best efforts, you never buy for one second the Internet premise that Hancock is “real.” Maybe it’s been done too many times; maybe it’s the fact that star Will Smith has too recently seared himself into our minds in real fashion (via The Pursuit of Happyness). But all in all, HancockWasHere.com is far from super.

It would be much more interesting to read about real topics such as the reaction to this month’s test screenings of the unfinished film in Texas, Arizona and elsewhere (generally positive) or the possibility of a Smith-Charlize Theron interracial kiss and more. The irony is that over on IMDB, several threads about those test screenings have some accusing posters of being studio plants. If CTMG must stick with the current website format, then how about saucier items like a post with video detailing how the Church of Scientology agressively tried to recruit Hancock? That would definitely start a viral fire.

Smith’s movies are impervious to bad promotion. As we head towards the star’s beloved July 4th weekend frame, this thing is going to open huge, regardless of whether CTMG starts posting hourly on HancockWasHere.com or turns the website off for good. But c’mon marketing people; when you’re working in support of the world’s current bonafide number one box office star, you need to bring your A game.

Missed Marketing Opportunities

04/21/2008

Yesterday, at 4:20 p.m on 4/20, pot smokers all over North America gleefully lit up in time zone after time zone, including a whole bunch of folks at the University of Colorado. And yet, the best the marketing wizards at New Line could do was simply to schedule the New York Comic-Con panel for Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay to overlap with yesterday’s date.

That’s it. No special 4:20 p.m. sneak preview screenings across the country; no 5:20 p.m. munchies promotion at participating 7/11’s; just a tepid day-and-date juxtaposition. It’s what you call a missed marketing opportunity, and in today’s crowded marketplace, that’s unforgivable. In point of fact, the Harold and Kumar sequel should have been released this past Friday, April 18th, not this coming Friday, April 25th, so as to take full advantage of the big Sunday opportunity.

The same goes for the unexploited tie-in potential of tomorrow’s Earth Day celebrations. The reaction was split this weekend at Comic-Con with regards to the new Incredible Hulk trailer that was premiered as part of Saturday’s panel. Some loved it, others hated it. Ed Norton was nowhere to be found at the convention, but think of the high-brand Hulk-Earth Day cross-promotion the actor could have been seen engaging in starting Tuesday. Norton going green in advance of really going green might be just what is required to reverse the negative buzz that has been surrounding the film.*

The funny thing is, Hollywood is usually all over this kind of correlation when it comes to scheduling the press junkets for their films. The one for Speed Racer was held this past weekend in Long Beach, CA, in the shadow of the Long Beach Grand Prix; the interviews for What Happens in Vegas were done in Vegas; the Hawaii break-up flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall gathered up reporters on the Big Island. And so on.

So, as much as I enjoy hearing a guy like Robert Downey Jr. - after having done every variety of drug and sexual partner known to man – counsel against overly wild behavior, what I really yearned to see in advance of Iron Man were TV spots starring baseball’s former Iron Man, Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken Jr.’s remarkable consecutive game streak of 2, 632 games began in May, the same month the Paramount flick opens, but alas, the possibility of a Mac-IBM type square off with Tony Stark will have to wait until at least the sequel.

The reason this kind of atypical Iron Man promotion might be worth considering is that the drumbeats that precede each big summer tentpole are all starting to blur together. An early trailer here, a Comic-Con there, an exclusively arranged interview or two in between... It’s become very homogenous. What we need is a marketing superhero of the ilk of David Ogilvy or Steve Jobs, to swoop down and reconfigure the spring-summer wheel.

*Update - 04/22/08: Norton did show up on The Today Show for Earth Day, but he was there mainly to promote a PBS series he narrates called Strang Days on Planet Earth.

The Greatest Actor Who Ever Lived?

04/17/2008

Playwright David Mamet has watched a lot of great actors tackle his staccato words over the years, so when he chooses to go “big picture” and identify the performer he thinks may be the greatest actor who ever lived, it’s a name obviously well worth considering. Mamet’s choice? Henry Fonda.

Though Fonda was nominated for Best Actor at age 35 for the 1940 classic The Grapes of Wrath, it wasn’t until the 1980’s that he finally snagged an Honorary Academy Award and that same Best Actor trophy the following year in 1981 for On Golden Pond. As we all know, because there are only so many Oscars to go around each year, the number of nominations and-or statuettes claimed by a particular performer rarely tends to correspond with the breadth and depth of their talents.

In the words of Mamet, Fonda “is always telling the truth, always simple and never making anything up.” As it so happens, the actor has cropped up again in recent months on DVD, first via the March 4th release of a 50th anniversary edition of 12 Angry Men and then shortly thereafter via the first-ever DVD version of the love triangle drama Daisy Kenyon. Though the latter is decidedly a minor work, Fonda is his usual solid self alongside co-stars Joan Crawford and Dana Andrews.

Another specter of Fonda can be found in the film Leatherheads. Co-stars George Clooney and Renée Zellweger do their best to banter in the spirit of Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, but it only serves to remind us that the era of classic screwball comedies is long gone. Jack Klugman certainly agrees with Mamet’s assessment; he recently told a reporter that the biggest thrill of his career was appearing with Fonda and Humphrey Bogart in a 1955 Producers Showcase live TV episode staging of The Petrified Forest.

Meanwhile, at the just concluded “Real to Reel”, a three-day conference and exhibit (April 10th - 12th) at New Orleans’ National Museum of World War II, Fonda was among the actors whose presence in newsreels and documentaries was discussed, as part of a broader look at how the movies have helped shape people’s perceptions of the conflict. The recent deaths of Charlton Heston and Richard Widmark also resonated with Fonda fans. In the case of the former, it was because Heston - like Fonda, John Wayne and James Stewart - often played characters who were quintessentially American; in the case of the latter, it came from the fact that Fonda and Widmark were friends, and that Widmark late in life (1999) married Fonda’s ex-wife Susan. (If you want to see a great little Widmark-Fonda film, check out 1968’s Madigan.)

If I had to pick one favorite Fonda film (not an easy thing to do), I think it would have to be The Lady Eve. Blessed with a Preston Sturges working at the peak of his powers, Fonda proved that along with making a great Tom Joad or Abraham Lincoln, he could also deftly manage comedy. Unlike the other two films Fonda made with Stanwyck around that same time, this one is as fresh as the day it first hit theaters.