Check Book: Hooked on Movie News

Thanks, Cinemacon!

Surprise! Blank Check has started a newsletter! Your favorite connoisseurs of context are gonna go on even more tangents, commit to even more bits, and share opinions on even more pieces of entertainment industry news because - hey, why not. Thanks for joining us!

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

I’m going to keep this section short because we’ve got a particularly meaty dossier this week, but—Cinemacon happened this past week! You know, that convention in Vegas that sees all the movie studios attempting to psych up theater owners about all the super awesome new movies (and potential popcorn buckets) coming up later this year.

Here’s the TLDR as it relates to Blank Check:

• While not in attendance himself, James Cameron premiered the first footage from Avatar: Fire and Ash, and announced that fan favorite whale guy Payakan will be returning. Thank GOD. The economy is in the toilet, but at least we’ve got Payakan back.

  

• James L. Brooks received the organization’s “Cinema Verite” award and gave attendees their first look at Ella McKay, coming out this September. The premise seems to be What if young, anxious woman had big stressful job??

• We’ve got a new Mission: Impossible trailer! Tom hangs off planes. He jumps into a very cold looking ocean. Mr. Milchick is in there talking to Tom Cruise like he’s Mark S.:

• Not at technically at Cinemacon, but some very…shocking…news dropped on April Fool’s Day, and we all thought it was a joke. David Fincher is directing the sequel to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood for Netflix. All of us at BCHQ are having trouble wrapping our heads around this announcement. What does a Fincher/Tarantino collab look like? Why isn’t QT directing this himself? Is it going to look like digital grade ass? Will it even receive theatrical distribution? Who can say. But we will, of course, be covering it.

• Neil Blomkamp is directing a new Starship Troopers for Sony. No thanks.

• Also at Sony’s presentation: A new trailer for 28 Years Later! And friend of the show Nia DaCosta debuted some stills from her franchise installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Both the new trailer and Nia’s stills are still exclusive to CinemaCon, so I can’t tell ya what those look like.

• And one bit NOT related to Blank Check filmmakers, but relevant to Griffin Newman’s interests - we love the Naked Gun trailer. Good job, Akiva. We will be seated.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• On July 15th, 1985, Steven Spielberg published an essay in TIME magazine that would serve as his most thorough telling of his own childhood until at least the release of Susan Lacy’s 2017 documentary Spielberg, if not all the way until the release of 2022’s semi-autobiographical narrative film The Fabelmans; the title of said essay was “The Autobiography of Peter Pan,” and it concluded like this: “I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up. If my kids take me seriously as a father, they're going to have a tough time growing up too.”¹ A year prior to the essay’s publishing, Spielberg was publicly attached to a faithful adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s iconic children’s story, which was set to film in London in 1985 with a planned release in early 1986.² But circumstances changed the next year: Spielberg took on the starkly adult story of The Color Purple instead, and during production, he and Amy Irving welcomed their first child—the video game designer Max Spielberg—into the world. In his new fatherhood, Spielberg quickly lost interest in Pan: “[S]uddenly I couldn’t be Peter Pan any more. I had to be his father. That’s literally the reason I didn’t do the movie back then. And I had everything ready and Elliot Scott hired to do the sets in London. In a way, my son took my childhood away from me.”³ In the following years, Spielberg was adamant that his trip to Neverland was permanently canceled. In 1988, he told The New York Times that he would “never direct 'Peter Pan’” and that he had had it “up to here with 'I don't want to grow up.’”⁴ While promoting his 1987 film Empire of the Sun, Spielberg even said that part of his attraction to the project was that it was “the opposite of 'Peter Pan.’”⁵ So, why, then, did Spielberg end up making Hook just a couple of years later? Well, that same kid that had initially spoiled his appetite for the project ended up rejuvenating Spielberg’s interest, especially as the primary hook in Jim Hart’s new script—that Peter Pan had grown up and lost his boyish playfulness—mirrored Spielberg’s own evolving image of himself: “When [Max] was born, I suddenly became the spitting image of my father and mother. All the parental clichés, all the things I said I would never say to my kids if ever I had them, I began saying to my own kids.”⁶ Stuff like, “Hello, Seth Rogen, my best friend who will never wrong me,” probably.

• In a December 1991 People magazine article, Spielberg revealed that Hook star Dustin Hoffman had a disgusting “health” routine he followed each morning while getting ready in the make-up trailer, one which the director and the film’s other star (may have jokingly) picked up: “[Hoffman] would down an entire bowl of hot onions and garlic. To counter directing him nose-to-nose, I would have six mouthfuls of the stuff. So Robin would have six mouthfuls too. Together we’d walk onto the set and gross out the entire crew. They’d part like the Red Sea when we came in. That was the best special effect we had, I think.”⁷ But the smell of an entire bowl of hot onions and garlic was not the only odious thing to exit from Hoffman’s mouth around this time, as the following quote showcases how he decided to promote his children’s film in the pages of The New York Times: “Hook is about killing off a part of yourself when you grow up. God knows, I'm not a feminist, but I do think women understand the idea more than men. As a rule, women can sit on the ground with the kids and just get lost for hours; and for men it's work. The child is still alive in the female more than the man."⁸ If only Dustin Hoffman knew how many times I—a 33-year-old father of a young child—had watched the trailer for Donkey Kong Bananza in the last week.

• Let’s move on to the film’s other star: Robin Williams. Though Hook was the comedian’s first and only corporeal appearance in a Spielberg film, the two remained friendly in the years following the movie’s release.⁹ While filming his landmark 1993 film Schindler’s List, for instance, Spielberg turned to Williams for an escape from the bleakness of his story, per the director: “Twice in the production I called Robin Williams just to say, Robin, I haven't laughed in seven weeks. Help me here. And Robin would do 20 minutes on the telephone.”¹⁰ And The New Yorker’s lengthy 1994 profile of Spielberg features the following incredible transcription of a phone call in which the director rings up Williams to tell him about the Peter Molyneux-produced 1993 video game Syndicate: “They put a lot more graphic design into some of the bullets. And I haven’t got far enough into it yet, but I hear there’s air cover. And there’s also supply drops and there’s also air strikes. We only played two countries, and I got my ass whipped in the second country. So I’ve got another seventy-five countries to go. So you want to do a mission today? O.K. Let’s do it. Let’s do one mission.”¹¹ Steven Spielberg’s publicist, if you are reading this, please reach out to me so I can send Spielberg my Steam ID.

• Hook marked just the second film appearance for a young Gwyneth Paltrow, who had made her film debut just a month prior to Hook’s release in Jeffrey Hornaday’s Shout. The fledgling actress/future founder of Goop did not audition for her role in Hook; she was the director’s goddaughter, after all. Instead, she had previous Blank Check miniseries subject Jonathan Demme to thank for putting her on Spielberg’s radar for the role of Young Wendy. Near the start of Hook’s principal photography, Spielberg took time away from the shoot to attend a screening of The Silence of the Lambs with his soon-to-be-wife Kate Capshaw, Gwyneth’s father Bruce Paltrow, and an 18-year-old Gwyneth. On the drive home from the movie theater, Gwyneth was so visibly shaken up by the film that Spielberg had an unexpected realization: “I was looking at her in the rearview mirror, and she was talking about the film and she had this really frightened look on her face, and it suddenly clicked, and I said, ‘Hey, you could be the young Wendy! You could be the young Maggie Smith!’ So I turned around and said, ‘Do you want to make a movie?’ She got a SAG card because of it.”¹²

• Though Hook featured perhaps the highest number of (already) famous faces of any Spielberg production completed to that point, Spielberg’s earlier, more faithful shelved adaptation of Peter Pan almost featured a face more famous than pretty much any other: Michael Jackson. But when the project morphed into Hook, the King of Pop told Spielberg that he had little interest in the new story: “Michael had always wanted to play Peter Pan, but I called Michael and I said, ‘This is about a lawyer that is brought back to save his kids and discovers that he was once, when he was younger, Peter Pan.’ So Michael understood at that point it wasn’t the same Peter Pan he wanted to make.”¹³ In my research—which stops around 1993, just like our current miniseries—I did not find many other professional interactions between Jackson and Spielberg, aside from the small detail that Jackson—along with Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie—was in attendance at the private stand-up show Whoopi Goldberg used to audition for The Color Purple.¹⁴ And yet, a 2003 Vanity Fair article claimed that Jackson had allegedly hired a Malian witch doctor to curse 25 people, among them our pal Steven Spielberg, in a ceremony in Switzerland in the summer of 2000. The intended goal of the ceremony, which reportedly included the sacrifice of 42 cows, was the imminent death of Jackson’s biggest enemies.¹⁵ When reached for comment, Spielberg released a statement from a spokesman reading, “This is bizarre, but what else is new?”¹⁶

• I’ve already gone so long—sorry!—but I feel like this needs mentioning again (or for the first time, if you haven’t listened to this week’s episode): Hook was meant to be a musical! Somewhere between five to eight songs were prepared by the all-star duo of John Williams and Leslie Bricusse, but after the first week of shooting, Spielberg revealed that he “chickened out [and] … took all the songs out,” claiming that it “was the biggest paradigm shift [he’d] ever had while directing a movie.”¹⁷ Those songs were finally released via La-La Land Records in a massive 3-disc Hook set in 2023, which is available for purchase—and preview!—here. Included among the set is “Childhood,” a song that was written for Maggie Smith’s Granny Wendy. But instead of having Smith sing the song herself, the great Julie Andrews (!) was brought in to sing the song in the voice of a much older woman. In an interview with NPR conducted shortly before his death in 2021, Bricusse divulged that he still smarted from the song’s removal, saying, “We thought we'd got the Oscar with a song called 'Childhood.’ I remember Steven, when he heard it, saying: 'That's a home run.' It was a beautiful song — beautiful song. Beautiful melody. Vintage Williams.”¹⁸ Other excisions included “Stick with Me,” a villain anthem for Hoffman’s titular character, and “Low Below,” a massive dance number that featured choreography from “Smooth Criminal” and Dancer in the Dark choreographer Vincent Paterson. Spielberg actually filmed the later number—in which the pirates burst into song and dance as Peter returns into Neverland—during the first week of shooting, but when he and Williams watched the returns, Spielberg made the decision to cut the scene and abandon almost all of the other numbers. (The lullaby “When You’re Alone” did survive, and it picked up one of the film’s five Oscar nominations in 1992.) The rerelease of the film’s soundtrack was overseen by the record producer Mike Matessino, who told NPR that, though they had been removed, the original presence of the film’s musical numbers can still be felt in Williams’s final score for Hook: “Even without the songs being sung, the score has a 'lyrical' quality. You don't really get themes in a film score that have what we call bridges in a song, sort of a center section. And that's a clue right there that a lot of these themes began life with the intention of having lyrics set to them.”¹⁹

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I am continuing to watch John Ford movies. I watched Fort Apache in which Henry Fonda plays an A+ mean bitch who sucks at his job (his job is Army). Whole movie is just about him making bad decisions and everyone around him having to deal with it without disobeying. Remind you of anything!??!”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend small projects around the house. I replaced lights in the garage and changed out some light switches and I feel good about it.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “Important Haribo update. Checkbook readers will remember my Parisian love affair with Haribo Croco Pik gummies a few months back. And they will also remember my disappointment that Haribo’s stateside offerings don’t live up to the heavenly harmony of Croco Pik’s sour, crunchy exterior and soft marshmallow backing. Well, friends. Haribo’s new Berry Cloud gummies are as close as I’ve gotten to recapturing that EU-only Haribo magic. While not sour like the Haribo Piks, these treats offer three layers of delicious gummy sweetness, a cloud-like consistency, and enough of a textured exterior to feel substantial. 10/10, highly recommend for my candy fans.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “On Sunday I wrapped up Day 4 of this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival. Halfway through this year’s fest, I’ve already seen 12 features and 11 shorts. The best among them has been Rosaura at 10 O’Clock, Argentinian director Mario Soffici’s 1958 adaptation of Marco Denevi’s 1955 novel of the same name. Set in a claustrophobic boarding house where everybody—but especially the landlady—snoops on everyone else, Soffici’s comic-gothic thriller doesn’t have the reputation—in this country, at least—of a film like Citizen Kane or Rashomon, but its slyly bonkers take on subjective modernist storytelling easily merits it mention alongside those two landmarks. More broadly, I’ve just had a great run of revivals: The Spook Who Sat By The Door, The Glass Wall, a certain notoriously unreleased Rolling Stones tour documentary whose title I should not type in this widely distributed newsletter… Of the new releases, I was most impressed with Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came, a network narrative take on the 1989 Romanian revolution that concludes with a half hour of absolutely masterful—if a little unsubtle—filmmaking: so funny, so tragic, so good! But my two favorite ~theatrical~ experiences of the festival so far have been Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome and Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship: the former wrings a great premise—::David Sims voice:: what if there was a threesome (where everyone got pregnant)—for all of its comedic and emotional worth, while the latter gives every person who has ever made me laugh on the Internet a chance to make me laugh in a movie theater, now, too. Both have been blessed reminders of how nice it is to spend 90 to 120 minutes busting up with a crowd of fellow moviegoers. Oh, and one last thing: if you are in Madison and you somehow haven’t bought tickets for tonight’s screening of friend-of-the-show Alex Ross Perry’s new Griffin Newman-starring film Pavements, buy them now!!! I’ve seen the movie, it’s great, and I cannot wait to watch it again tonight, this time on the big screen. Ok, bye bye, talk to you all about the rest of the fest next week <3”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I was out of town this weekend, and as I was leaving the house, I realized I hadn’t packed anything to read. So I grabbed the first book I saw, which was a copy of S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” that my son was assigned for school. I have no relationship to that book or its adaptations. I always thought it was like Revenge of the Nerds but with Greasers instead of nerds. But it’s a lot more subtle and insightful than that (no offense to the Nerds), and a genuinely fun, propulsive read. Extremely crazy considering she was like 17 when she wrote it.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

Lin-Manuel Miranda joins us to talk about Hook and a little bit about Bruno:

And on Patreon, we’re up to Star Trek: Nemesis in our Picard series.

COMING SOON:

1. TIME, July 15th, 1985.

2. New York Times, June 14th, 1984.

3. Cinema Papers, March/April 1992, in Steven Spielberg Interviews, ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm.

4. New York Times, December 8, 1991/New York Times, January 10, 1988.

5. New York Times, January 10, 1988.

6. Cinema Papers, March/April 1992.

7. People, December 23, 1991.

8. New York Times, December 8, 1991.

9. Williams’s only other appearance in a Spielberg film was as the voice of Dr. Know in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

10. Newsweek, December 19, 1993.

11. New Yorker, March 13, 1994.

12. Entertainment Weekly, December 2, 2011.

13. Entertainment Weekly, December 2, 2011.

14. Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 457.

15. Vanity Fair, April 1, 2003.

16. Entertainment Weekly, March 4, 2003.

17. The Guardian, December 8, 2021.

18. NPR, December 20, 2023.

19. NPR, December 20, 2023.