EC Latest Movie Gig...Cole Porter Biopic!

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bobster
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EC Latest Movie Gig...Cole Porter Biopic!

Post by bobster »

....Or "Elvis, when You MOST Expect Him" (these days, anyhow) -- plus D. Krall, too, form this week's Sunday L.A. Times.

MOVIES
It's like night and day
'De-Lovely' bills itself as the antithesis of the Hollywood version of Cole Porter's complicated married life.


By William Wallace, Special to The Times


Party's on.

The scene is a masked ball in 1920s Venice and on stage, under a drizzle of streamers, Elvis Costello is leading a five-piece band through a boisterous version of Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave." The music's swinging, everyone's dancing, and the bosoms — both men's and women's — are pleasurably heaving.

Costello's voice slides through the lyrics like a trombone. He bends his body backward — fingers snapping, shiny shoes tapping — and the band kicks the dancers into an orgy of exuberance, like King Louie and his apes boogieing with Baloo in "The Jungle Book."

Misbehaving. Just the way Cole Porter loved it.

The scene is from the set of director Irwin Winkler's "De-Lovely," a movie about the brilliant American songwriter that wrapped up shooting last week 4 and that the director emphatically declares will not be a biopic. "There's only been one Cole Porter movie, and it was a whitewash," the energetic 72-year-old Winkler says, referring to the thin plot and wholesome tone of the 1946 "Night and Day," starring Cary Grant.

Different times, of course, but that picture sailed over what Winkler and scriptwriter Jay Cocks ("Gangs of New York") see as the essence of the man: the unconventional but emotionally intimate relationship the gay Porter (Kevin Kline) shared with his socialite wife, Linda Lee (Ashley Judd).

"Linda was so important to him throughout their life together — she saw him find his voice," says Robert Kimball, who has been the artistic advisor to the Cole Porter Trust for 37 years and who visited the set in June to see what Winkler was up to. "She honored and respected him and introduced him to a wider cultural world. And when he had relationships with men, Cole looked to her for advice and approval.

"Friends who were there told me that at her funeral, he cried like a baby." It is a love worthy of cinematic exploration, though any movie about Cole Porter is always going to be about the music. Winkler will use about 30 songs to tell the Porters' love story, and they remain, of course, some of the best songs of the heart ever written ("Thirty songs — and I wish we could use more," Winkler says with a twinkle).

But there will be no Louis Armstrong on the "De-Lovely" soundtrack. No Ella. For the digital era, Winkler has asked modern recording artists to step up to the mike (hence Costello's bandleader). Instead of Sarah Vaughan singing "It's De-Lovely," we get British pop star Robbie Williams, and so on: from Diana Krall ("Just One of Those Things") to Natalie Cole ("Every Time We Say Goodbye") and — more of a stretch, this — Alanis Morissette ("Let's Do It [Let's Fall in Love]"). The producers wanted Norah Jones too but couldn't strike a deal. "She's got a wall of Grammys in front of her," one executive laments.

Like the angel toting up the good and bad moments in George Bailey's wonderful life, "De-Lovely" unfolds as a retrospective accounting from the viewpoint of a widowed, lonely and apparently broken man. Porter's lyrics provide the guide for the story. It takes him back to his fawned-upon childhood in Peru, Ind., and follows as he becomes America's songwriting king of musicals and movies. The journey will be stylish, Winkler promises, with plenty of big production numbers. The commercial backwash of "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago" shows no sign of easing, though the idea of "De-Lovely" was pitched to the Porter estate trustees in pre-"Chicago" 2000. (It will be released by MGM/UA next year.)

Yet the film will not be all Art Deco drawing rooms and bellinis at sunset.

Porter's life was marked by several tragedies, from Linda's miscarriage and their later separation to the bitter aftermath of the 1937 horse-riding accident that crushed his legs and left him in pain until his death in 1964 (Porter eventually had one leg amputated).

It is his relationship with Linda upon which Winkler's movie rests.

Crucially, the film travels through Porter's wasted years in Europe in the post-World War I era, when he was content to be the life of any party. Linda rescued her husband from terminal self-indulgence, her intervention unleashing a singular talent on American popular music.

She was not about to watch Cole's talent atrophy on the shelf of hedonism.

"Linda was saying to him, 'Take yourself seriously,' " Kline says in London shortly before filming ended. "Stop being a party boy and get to work."

Kline is himself a singer — "It was the music that attracted me to the role," he says. "I wanted to be a singer before I wanted to be an actor" — and will carry about half the tunes in the movie. But much of the love story's authenticity will depend on Judd's ability to portray a believable muse. It is a terrific challenge: to show the complicated love between a gay man with an appetite for sexual adventure and the woman who saw into his soul and drew out the genius.

"I just genuinely assume it's an alchemy I understand," the 35-year-old Judd says as she watches Costello rip into "Let's Misbehave" one more time. "It's about believing in someone, something I know about from being with my sister [Grammy-winning Wynonna] and my husband [Scottish race car driver Dario Franchitti], who has a rare and extraordinary gift. It's a kind of compassion towards the character of their gift."

Yet Porter was a complicated, mysterious guy, Kline says, "and we don't know what happened behind closed doors. You can read all the biographies you want, as I've done, but in the end you sort of wheedle out a compromise vision of the character."

And clearly there was a part of Porter that was addicted to danger. "By every report, theirs was a deep and abiding affection for one another," Kline says of the marriage. But while Linda condoned his bisexuality, he adds, "she became increasingly worried when his search for sex became more and more indiscreet."

For Winkler, that means getting the sexual calibration right. Too much and "De-Lovely" descends into campiness. Too sanitized and it risks the wrath of those for whom Porter is a gay icon. Kline says the movie will be "fairly explicit in terms of Cole's appetites, though there is nothing sexually graphic on screen. You'll see the kinds of excess to which he indulged," the actor says. "He could get down and dirty."

Facts aren't the only thing

There is artistic risk, too, in Cocks' decision to write a script that ignores the conventional constraints of biography. Fresh from being pounded by critics for the historical looseness of parts of his "Gangs of New York" script, he fired off a preemptive strike against would-be detractors this time, issuing a one-page manifesto for the movie that warns his love story won't be handcuffed by history.

"The broad outlines of his life are here but placed within the framework of imagination, not scholarship," Cocks writes. He calls the script "an impressionistic musical biography" in which "we've used facts like notes in a melody, putting them together in a way that may never have happened but that may give a truer, deeper picture of the man, his work and — most important — his heart."

(One departure the film takes is in the ages of the couple: Lee was older than Porter; Kline, however, is 20 years older than Judd.)

Or, as "De-Lovely" producer Rob Cowan puts it, "Hey, it's a movie." But that kind of talk can make Porter purists jittery. There are different versions of how "De-Lovely" originated: Winkler says the estate approached him about making a film that might stimulate sales of Porter's catalog; the trustees say it was Winkler who approached them with the idea. But the sides are clearly trying to accommodate each other (for one thing, the estate's cooperation in dropping its usual royalty fees on Porter songs will save the filmmakers millions).

"I told them I had to tell the story as I saw fit and they said 'fine,' " Winkler says matter-of-factly. Winkler's credits as a producer range from "The Right Stuff" to "GoodFellas," and as a director he made, among other films, "Life as a House" with Kline in 2001. Porter historian Kimball says Winkler has the benefit of the estate's doubts. "He's the pro," Kimball says. "Everyone wants to see the picture done in what we called, in the old days, good taste. But Irwin and Jay Cocks should have the right to make their own movie. I may not like it. I don't want people to do violence to it or make up the facts. But there is no set way to do it, either." What Kimball doesn't want to see at any cost is a lot of messing around with Porter's lyrics. Respect the harmonies and rhythms as much as you can.

But the words are sacred.

Ah, the lyrics. It is worth remembering that in Porter's day, the music was not a special taste with a section of his own at the back of music stores.

Back then it was American popular music (at least, white American music). With his lyrical lists and rhyming schemes, Porter was a sort of WASPy rapper for the swing era: "Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it." The songs were part of the cultural ether.

How they will sound to the generation of what would be his great-grandchildren is Winkler's gamble. "What kind of word is 'beguine'?" a laughing Sheryl Crow said to music producer Peter Asher after cutting her vocal track for "Begin the Beguine" in a London recording studio. "I sound like Doris Day."

Hardly. Crow's version of the standard is sung in a minor key, with the rock chick delivering a bluesy, aching ode to lost love.

The tension in that love is evident in the Venetian ballroom scene — actually filmed in a genteel manor house outside London that was rouged up to look suitably decadent. At the time, Porter is in exile from his destiny, and Linda has summoned Irving Berlin and his wife to Venice to try to light the fire of ambition.

So Chance is coming, but for the moment Kline's Porter is making sure no piano goes unplayed. He is sitting in the corner of the ballroom picking out the notes to "You Do Something to Me" and casting lascivious glances at the hard bods going past. Kline has a good voice, and from the back of the room, Costello listens and laughs.

"I've heard a few old recordings of Porter singing, and he had a terrible voice," Costello says. "Awful. Like a cat screeching from the bottom of a well." (Kimball, more defensively, calls Porter's voice "reedy.")

"Oh, he was a famously bad pianist too," Kline agrees. "He had a pounding, oom-pah left hand. Oh baby, he did not have a light touch." Kline laughs. "You know his obituary in the New York Times read: 'Singer Cole Porter,' " he continues. "Well, he was never a singer.

"But it's perfect for me. I've got a wonderful built-in excuse for bad playing and singing."
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Post by bobster »

I should add that, even though they're acknowledging Porter's bisexuality/gayness this time around, this doesn't really sound like it's the "antithesis" of anything Hollywood, though it's probably an improvement over the last Porter biopic, which I've never seen.

I have to say I think it's really cheesy to give Porter a younger wife when he had an older one. That changes the dynamic in a number of ways and closes off a lot of interesting possiblities. I'm sure they'd needed a "bankable" young star to get the financing, but, hey, there's a whole bunch of plenty bankable middle-aged or near middle-aged actresses around now, who could at least be made to look slightly older than Kline. (Merryl Streep comes to mind.)
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Post by LessThanZero »

Yeah, but Bobster.....Ashley Judd. Yes.
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Post by bambooneedle »

bobster wrote:
I have to say I think it's really cheesy to give Porter a younger wife when he had an older one. That changes the dynamic in a number of ways and closes off a lot of interesting possiblities.
Agree completely, Judd's got 'cute' down completely, but not much range -- which necessarily affects crucial interplay. I can't remember a great 'mature female' character role since Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking (who's since taken to showing off her legs in that 'Space.. whatever'). I want to be entertained by the complexity of a character. Someone like Frances McDormand (good job in Primal Fear) might have been a good choice. Haven't seen Gangs Of New York yet... because of DiCaprio, who I can't imagine doing anything I'd be interested in seeing.
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Post by taz »

Oh come on Bamboo...check out What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Basketball Diaries or This Boy's Life as three DiCaprio films that he did a great job in...the boy can act, despite Titanic, the Beach, etc... :)

On the other hand, I think Kline's a great choice but agree that Frances McDormand would be so much better than Judd...yes, less 'cute' but I think the talent factor more than makes up for it.. :D
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Post by bambooneedle »

I just don't like watching him act. Not to deny any talent he has, but he doesn't seem too credible to me.
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Post by bobster »

Look how quickly we degenerate into a pro-or-anti-Leo D. argument....

I've got to put myself in the pro-Leo camp. I actually haven't his most lauded performance, "Gilbert Grape," but give him something half way interesting to do and he's worth watching.

If you haven't seen "Catch Me if You Can", that's a pretty good place to start. My other favorite performance of his is actually in the otherwise unremarkable "The Quick and the Dead." Very young-Paul-Newman/James Dean-esque performance and he held his own against Gene Hackman quite well.

Actually thought he was good in "Titanic" -- the movie was pure corn, of course, but that's not all bad. (I'm a rare "Titanic" moderate. I think it was typically silly for it to rack up all those Oscars, but I still think it was a pretty fun movie. And it might have been a really great old-style romantic melodrama if Cameron had let someone like his old collaborator John Sayles take a wack at the script.)

How's that for a digression?
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Post by LessThanZero »

I don't know Bobster....I thought "The Beach" was a great book. I tried to watch the film, b/c my girlfriend really wanted to see it...i mean, Leo, and I COULDN'T FINISH IT. It was so bad. I think I even tried twice, and I just couldn't get past how bad he was.

Maybe if Ashley Judd would've been the main character......
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Post by bobster »

Haven't seen "The Beach" -- but you certainly seem to be in the majority in disliking it, especially in comparison to Alex Garland's books. (Interestingly, Danny Boyle's new film with an original screenplay by Garland, "28 Days Later" is seen by some as a kind of "make-up" film for the "The Beach" debacle.)

Nevertheless, if the movie stank, it wasn't because of DeCaprio. He just acted in it.

If you thought his performance was lousy, fair enough. (I haven't heard much praise tossed Leo's way for that movie, so it's possible, I'm sure.)

However, and this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I think people give way too much credit/blame to actors for the success or failure of a movie. It's understandable, because they're the folks you see, but they're only one part of the equation -- and not neccessarily that large a part of it. You can put the best actor in the world in an Ed Wood movie (and Bela Lugosi was no slouch!), and you still end up with an Ed Wood movie!

And there are times when actors appear lame when it may not even be all their fault -- a miscast actor is always in some sense "bad," no matter how talented they or how hard they work. Also, if they're in a George Lucas movie, they get special dispensation. Lucas has some kind of magic bad acting charm....

No one would ever lay all the blame for a bad movie at the door of the editor, the set designer, the film composer, et al, because people realize they make limited, albeit important and highly creative, contributions to the final product. However, even sophisticated people forget that actors are in the pretty much the same boat as these folks. They make their limited contribution as best they can and hope the movie turns out well.

Whew! This is really getting to be quite a digression :oops:
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Post by Boy With A Problem »

Bobster - I couldn't agree more that the casting in this thing is terrible. Porter was in his 30's in the 20's and Linda was in her 40's - Kline just seems a little too bulky - I rather see an Edward Norton as Porter - more of a physical resemblence. As for Linda - maybe a Jennifer Jason Leigh or Andie MacDowell - hell Ashley Judd probably works against a younger Porter.

I hate when Hollywood does this. It's the little things that drive you up a wall. Recently I watched, "Dillinger" with Warren Oates and in the ending scene Dillinger is gunned down in a damp alley outside the theatre - it must have been cold too, because the FBI agents were all wearing heavy jackets - in reality there was a heat wave going on in Chicago at the time and it was unbearably hot the night Dillinger was shot (which was sort of alluded to in an earlier scene with Ben Johnson eating popsicles (not nearly as effective as Wolfman Jack eating popsicles in American Grafitti)).
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Post by bobster »

For me, the whole issue of historical authenticity is a pretty complicated.

On the one hand, in a dramatised film, it's pretty much impossible to stay 100% with factsm as far as they are known. Even documentarians are frequently tempted to alter reality. (Sometimes it seems as if almost every good documentary ever made has been accused of excessive manipulation.)

For one thing -- unless you're doing Watergate -- no one know what was actually said at a given time and dialogue has to be created, which puts you in the realm of fiction right away.

On the other hand, there is a line of how far you can depart from the known facts or possibilities that you probably shouldn't cross. But that can be hard to define, it's sort of a "you know when you see it." Unless you're completely crazed like Oliver Stone, in which case you actually believe you'r own personal version of history.

But what really bugs me is not so much when details like whether it was hot or cold on a given night are changed, but when the facts would be more interesting than what's in the movie.

For example, I do understand why Ron Howard and co. changed the nature of the delusion in "A Beautiful Mind." They wanted to draw the audience into the delusion by tricking a large percentage of it that didn't the historical guy was/is schizophrenic. If it had been his actual delusion (which had something to do with aliens, I think), it would have been a lot harder for an audience to believe it was that way since they knew it was supposed to be a true story.

On the other hand, including his bisexuality and his divorce would actually have provided more drama not less, and they avoided for fear of alienating their audience, I suppose. With a decision like that, they pretty much relegated themselves to making a non-great film, when they might have made something truly worthwhile.
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Post by ReadyToHearTheWorst »

Speaking of movie accuracy - anyone care to comment on U-571, the Enigma movie?
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Post by bambooneedle »

To suggest that the US captured the enigma machine (when it was the British) is at least a bold refutable thing and not sleazily deceptive or just among a hodge-podge of thoughtless inaccuracies. And also U-571 was a good movie, besides Jon Bon Jovi who got killed off pretty early, maintaining great tension and suspense the way a submarine movie should. Gritty detail and lighting inside the U-Boat too, and it wasn't pukingly self-congratulatory. I'd like to see it again.
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Post by Poppet »

AND it had my cousin-in-law (!), Jack Noseworthy, in a prominent role (the german american who gets to translate everything).

and honestly, no, i've never met him. we may be southern, but we've never been a particularly close family.
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Post by bobster »

I didn't object to this because the movie didn't purport to be anything other than fiction "inspired by" real events. Still, I can understand why UK folks would be upset. It's not like we yanks are exactly humble about our national achievements and for us to seem to be claiming some of theirs....

On the other hand, the movie put me to sleep, literally.
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Post by bambooneedle »

bobster wrote:I didn't object to this because the movie didn't purport to be anything other than fiction "inspired by" real events. Still, I can understand why UK folks would be upset. It's not like we yanks are exactly humble about our national achievements and for us to seem to be claiming some of theirs....

On the other hand, the movie put me to sleep, literally.
Bobster, I would urge somebody to give it another chance (and you probably missed a lot of it). The beginning is admittedly a bit weak.

Drink some coffee next time :) . Btw, how is your script writing going?
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Post by bobster »

BN --

Re: U-571. Saw more than enough to feel like, well, there's still enough more interesting movies I haven't seen that it's just hard to give a big priority. (Still, I have a history of falling asleep in good or great movies which I was forced to see again including "Ran" and "Das Boot"--hmm, another submarine movie....)

Re: my screenwriting. Been in remission for a sevaral months. The general verdict on the last one was, well...let's say I could barely hope to meet the great heights of U-571 (though, I suspect, folks would agree that it's a lot better than "Gigli"...which is unfair because I haven't seen it, but life is also not fair).

Still, I'm taking another swing at the prior script -- a major rewrite -- and other projects, even as we speak...watch the skies!
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Post by johnfoyle »

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040309/latu128_1.html

Cannes Gets De-lovely
Tuesday March 9, 8:56 pm ET
Cannes to Celebrate De-lovely and MGM's 80th Anniversary With Screening and Concert


LOS ANGELES, March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- De-lovely, a musical drama about legendary American composer Cole Porter, will crown the 2004 Cannes Film Festival with a special presentation after the Award Ceremony on Saturday, May 22nd, 2004. The film will screen that evening as an official selection out- of-competition. Directed by Oscar winner Irwin Winkler, De-lovely stars Academy Award winner Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd in addition to some of today's biggest pop and rock music stars, including Alanis Morissette, Robbie Williams, Lara Fabian, Natalie Cole, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, and Diana Krall. The film was produced by Winkler, Rob Cowan, and Charles Winkler from a script by Oscar nominee Jay Cocks, and will be released in select theaters on June 25, 2004.
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Post by BlueChair »

I'm also not a Leonardo DiCaprio fan. At least he's not as much of a media puppy as he used to be.

I heard about this film quite a while ago. At the very least, I'm interested in seeing it for the music.
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Re: EC Latest Movie Gig...Cole Porter Biopic!

Post by johnfoyle »

Elvis' take on Lets Misbehave has popped up on youTube -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... Yohw#at=13


The account at the start of this thread is a interesting account of the making of the film.
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Re: EC Latest Movie Gig...Cole Porter Biopic!

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