Word: studioful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Morgan Creek's eight other movies in various stages of production. Robinson, 56, attributes his success to swift decision making and the fact that his own money is on the line. He has invested about $80 million in Morgan Creek and has attracted $200 million from outside investors. "If studio executives lost 25% of their own money on a film," he says, "they'd make better movies." Robinson spent only 20 hours considering whether to buy the Robin Hood script for $1.2 million, and even less time deciding whether to hire Kevin Costner to play the lead for $7.5 million...
Elvis Costello is only 30 seconds into his set before a small audience in a Los Angeles TV studio when -- boing! -- a broken guitar string brings the music to a halt. During rehearsals, Costello has already groused about the lighting and the sound, so the tension in the wings is palpable. But the mercurial rocker calmly accepts a new guitar and starts again, launching into an acoustic rendition of Deep Dark Truthful Mirror. When Costello leaves the stage nine songs and an hour later, the audience is clamoring for more...
...French Frank Capra, if that populist filmmaker had also been his country's most popular playwright. Pagnol introduced French theatergoers to the accent of his own rural south, where Rs roll off the tongue like a river over its bed, and carted his movie camera out of the studio and into the side streets and luscious hills of Provence. The father of the French talkie, he was also the godfather of European neorealism...
...Hamlet, he begins having conversations with his late father. Fortunately, they are witty exchanges by two convincing characters. Then again, in The Best Revenge (Random House; 240 pages; $20) everyone is convincing. Along with Tennessee Williams, novelist Sol Stein was a member of the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio. His portrait of backstage back stabbing is as uncomfortable as it is amusing, but Stein obviously knows what he is writhing about...
...Everyone was complaining that there were too few good roles for women in American movies -- especially roles that permitted their characters to make their own decisions, control their own destiny. In fact, according to Mimi Polk, Thelma & Louise's producer, the movie did not "pitch well" to studio executives: "The script was full of subtlety that was lost in a two-sentence description." Polk feels, as well, that had she and her partner, Ridley Scott, proposed two male stars in the lead, they could have got a budget heftier than the $17.5 million they ultimately spent...