Assorted Discussions of Films That Never Happened

[DarkImbecile]

The article notes that he’s editing season two now; I’ve not seen any indication whether or not there’ll be more episodes beyond that.

[Persona]

I always wanted him to actually make Rendezvous with Rama

Agreed.

I just really don't want him down the path of Social Network, Benjamin Button, Gone Girl, Dragon Tattoo, etc. Which is why I was excited about World War Z 2, even though it was, well, World War Z 2. Really hoping Fincher's next project is something sci-fi or horror or adjacent to those genres.

I mean, he's the ideal director for procedurals, but he's kind of doing that with Mindhunter right now and he perfected the form with Zodiac, so I'd rather see something different for his next film.

[flyonthewall2983]

Maybe get back to his roots and do a musical. He was almost going to direct the Motley Crue bio-pic that's on track to be released on Netflix this year.

[domino harvey]

Stumbled upon this in the Spring 1963 issue of Sight and Sound and enjoyed the vintage shitposting

[swo17]

I can actually see a lot of those!

[tenia]

That Jean-Yves Cousteau ref is quite silly though. "Oh, there's a whale in there, put Cousteau !"

[DarkImbecile]

Netflix is financing Alexander Payne’s next project, an untitled road trip movie with Mads Mikkelsen

[domino harvey]

Netflix is financing Alexander Payne’s next project, an untitled road trip movie with Mads Mikkelsen

The film has been canceled just a week before shooting was set to begin due to a rights problem

[FrauBlucher]

That really is too bad

[flyonthewall2983]

Steven Conrad on what happened to Chad Schmidt, the "Being John Malkovich with Brad Pitt" that never got off the ground. I was a big fan of Conrad's Amazon show Patriot, and I can see how Pitt could have been a good leading man for that kind of dry, dark humor.

[Oedipax]

Steven Conrad on what happened to Chad Schmidt, the "Being John Malkovich with Brad Pitt" that never got off the ground. I was a big fan of Conrad's Amazon show Patriot, and I can see how Pitt could have been a good leading man for that kind of dry, dark humor.

I found this bit kind of strange:

We spent time getting the story together and when I felt I was happy with the tale and the way the script was articulating these themes, Brad - if I remember correctly - made a small list of names that he would work with on the project. And it was Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, the Coens, Tarantino. And when I saw that list, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Those filmmakers are auteurs - they curate their material and generally don’t just make projects that land on their desk; they build them from scratch.

If it went down that way, it sounds more to me like Pitt's way of passing without passing - none of those filmmakers would ever even remotely consider directing someone else's script, I don't think. Pitt had to know that, right?

[flyonthewall2983]

Maybe him feeling more comfortable having a name as a director on it, as opposed to Conrad who was just putting out his first movie as director. It is curious he didn't think of Fincher who he's had a long partnership with, and doesn't cultivate his own material either. So it is perhaps more of his long-winded way of saying no, but if they still talk about it who knows.

[Brian C]

The acorns have directed other people’s scripts a couple of times before, although not exactly to what I’d describe as stellar results.

[beamish14]

Incredible oral history of A Glimpse of Tiger, an Elliott Gould production in the midst of his astonishing run of films made between 1969 and 1971 that was shut down after less than a week's worth of filming due to Gould's erratic behavior.

[domino harvey]

Technicolor test footage of Katharine Hepburn as Joan of Arc in aborted biopic from 1934

[beamish14]

Clips from Henry Selick's The Shadow King. More than 40% of it was in the can when
Disney decided they didn't want to support a riskier film not based on an established IP. I truly hoped that Annapurna or another company
would have purchased it, but the sets were dismantled, the production company dissolved, and the film never to be. An incredible shame.
Maybe we'll get some more insights into what happened when Selick makes the promotional rounds for his Netflix-financed film
Wendell and Wild.


More images from it and a rough synopsis.

[colinr0380]

Technicolor test footage of Katharine Hepburn as Joan of Arc in aborted biopic from 1934

Was that from that "box office poison" period? It seems to be from around the same period as Christopher Strong.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Hepburn was coming right off of Little Women when this footage was shot, which was the commercial peak of her early career. The "Box Office Poison" label dates from 1938. But all of her post-Little Women films were either money-losers or only marginally profitable until The Philadelphia Story, so in hindsight the studio probably wasn't too unhappy the project fell through.

[domino harvey]

I do however believe this was right around the time of her first big bomb, Spitfire, that started the slide

[soundchaser]

Conflicting information from the excellent (though sadly out-of-print) The Dawn of Technicolor — the Hepburn test footage was just that: a test, one of seven shot at RKO by Robert Edmund Jones for Pioneer some time before December 1933. (Another included John Barrymore as Hamlet!) I’m not sure where MoMA got their information from, but as far as I can tell this was more a camera test than anything else. I think they’re mixing up two stories (plus the chronology isn’t quite right).

[domino harvey]

Disney shuts down production on Nimona despite the film being "75% complete"

[aox]

According to the employee, Disney told Blue Sky Studios the shutdown was due to the economic fallout of COVID-19.

Poor Disney. That's awful.

[knives]

Poor workers at Disney. That’s potentially hundreds of animators and other workers without an income.

[DarkImbecile]

That's pretty clearly aox's point... they're shuttering an entire studio and using a crisis to dubiously claim poverty

[beamish14]

That's pretty clearly aox's point... they're shuttering an entire studio and using a crisis to dubiously claim poverty

This is typical of Disney. They also cut 140+ jobs when they shut down Robert Zemeckis' Imagemovers in L.A. (his mo-cap animation mini studio) and Henry Selick's Cinderbiter (which was animating the aforementioned The Shadow King in San Francisco). Disney's price tag for Nimona will be so high that no other studio will buy it, and small fragments of it will be likely be relegated to archives and artist portfolios. Maybe Disney will deposit work-in-progress materials to the AMPAS and the public can eventually see what it would've been like a la The Thief and the Cobbler, but this is an enormous waste of talent.