Word: thinning
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...commonly said, the J.D. Salinger of movies. Out of the aforementioned trio, you certainly wouldn't have guessed that Malick would be the one directing seemingly every other male movie star in Hollywood in a big-scale World War II combat epic. The picture is The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones novel about the battle of Guadalcanal. The cast includes George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, Gary Oldman, Sean Penn, Bill Pullman and John Travolta. And they are only, with the exception of Penn, members of the supporting cast...
...film's core players are a group of mostly unknowns who portray the grunts and noncoms of the novel's C for Charlie company. If the young actors and Malick do their jobs well, The Thin Red Line could do for this cast what The Godfather did once upon a time for the careers of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan. Altogether the film has more than 60 speaking parts, hundreds of extras and a shooting script of 180-plus pages--which would indicate a running time of more than three hours. And that's not including the scenes...
...well, loony? "He's very mysterious, very private, but it's not like he's crazy. He's a lovely and charming man who just wants to keep things to himself," says Laura Ziskin, president of Fox 2000, the division of 20th Century Fox that is financing The Thin Red Line's $50 million to $60 million budget. "He's fun. He's not reclusive or dark. He just has a strong sense of privacy," says George Stevens Jr., the film's executive producer and a longtime friend and patron of Malick's. The supposed recluse could be glimpsed...
Though his current employment means he is no longer the J.D. Salinger of the movies, Malick can still lay claim to being their Thomas Pynchon. While allowing journalists to visit the set of The Thin Red Line (and acting the gracious host in an informal, off-the-record chat), he continues to refuse formal interviews, something he hasn't done since a 1974 chat with Women's Wear Daily. Indeed, his last recorded comment of any kind was, "Well, I, I, uh, I guess I don't want to talk about it..." when journalist David Handelman cold-called...
...associate, Malick found the whole ancillary process of marketing a movie "sickening"--and who wouldn't? "He said he always planned to take a break," recounts Mike Medavoy, Malick's agent at the time of Badlands and currently the head of Phoenix Pictures, which is producing The Thin Red Line for Fox. "He just didn't plan to take such a long break...