In Contention

Tag: Eric Roth

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by Eric Roth

    Page to Screen at In Contention“Time is the most precious of God’s gifts. It is untouchable, unseeable, unknowable…it is as light as a feather…as heavy as a stone…Time, my darling, what precious little there is, is all we have…”

    I’ve known from Eric Roth for a few years now. I’ve spent some time investigating his process, picking apart his tendencies and have committed such findings, in addition to personal impressions of the man, to print. So one thing I’ve always taken to heart when sitting down to read one of his scripts is that, “bastardized art form” or not, he is insistent on challenging himself with his screenwriting, stretching the potential for thematic resilience and above all, treating the work like an exercise in elegant prose.

    Such is the case with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a 159-page adaptation of a 30-page F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It’s a rare thing to flip through the pages of a script written by someone focused on the words almost more so than the images he or she expects them to become. And as part of an art form that can be insufferable as a result, I have to say that “Benjamin Button” is something of a masterpiece.

    The script begins with an aging Daisy (to be played by Cate Blanchett), recounting, via the reading of a diary by her daughter Caroline (Julia Ormond), the life and times of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). The love of her life, the one that got away, the one that came back and the one that will stay in her heart forever, Benjamin was born, as you certainly know, “under unusual circumstances.”

    Roth decides to do away with the hilarity of Fitzgerald’s take on Benjamin’s birth. We aren’t treated to a full-grown 85-year-old man in a baby crib greeting his father with a hearty hello. Instead, he treats Benjamin’s early years as something of a potential disease that makes a newborn aged beyond his or her years, so to speak. Frail skin, deformities…”His body is failing him before it has begun,” a doctor conveys with flabbergasted wonder.

    Benjamin’s mother does not survive childbirth, while his father instinctively passes him off on a lonely Baltimore doorstep before disappearing from his life…for a time. It is there, not hours old, that Benjamin is taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) at an old-timers’ home, for lack of better vernacular on my part.

    It was actually a stroke of brilliance by Roth to place Benjamin in such a setting for his formative years (and he’ll come back frequently throughout the tale). The writer’s commentary on wisdom and its many vessels is perfectly conveyed in this environment, simultaneously providing a fair share of comedic relief here and there, most of the time via unexpected flatulence (but it works).

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  • New ‘Button’ TV spot

    A new spot for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” popped up on the Olympics last night.  There’s a rather sub-par clip of the commercial up on YouTube.  Hopefully something better will land soon.

    Eric Roth’s screenplay, by the way, is an out and out masterpiece.  I’ll be reviewing it in this space a week from tomorrow.  I was floored.  If David Fincher can come close to expressing those words on the screen, it’ll have to be considered one of the year’s best films.

    Here’s the spot:

    Anne Thompson, meanwhile, is stirring the shit with some comments out of the studio regarding a lengthy cut from Fincher:

    The early word on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: again, David Fincher has handed in a movie to Paramount that is quite long. That hurt his last pic for Paramount, Zodiac. This film is polished to a fine sheen, I understand. The word from one viewer: “shiny.”

    Well, there is always the old agage: “No good film is too long, no bad film is short enough.”  We’ll see, but the script is 160 pages (that could admittedly use some paring down), so it’s not like the studio didn’t know what it was getting in to here.

  • Fitzgerald’s agonizing beauty

    Cover of The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonI sat down last night to spend a half-hour with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”  It’s been ages since I first gave the story a look and I don’t even think I ever read it throughout until yesterday, but the measured simplicity of it all was striking.

    I don’t count myself one of Fitzgerald’s followers.  I don’t find myself attuned with whatever it is that makes legions of readers consider “The Great Gatsby” to be the greatest American novel, for instance.  I typically find myself leaning toward Hemingway’s brand of the mundane instead, but that’s neither here nor there.

    The structure of “Button” is what stuck out to me.  The strange sort of insight into the stages of one’s life and how Fitzgerald flipped those notions on its ear is incredibly effective.  By the last page, I had that knotted feeling in my stomach, the kind you get after you know you just experienced something that is much more than yourself.  The truth apparent in the final moments, the skewed vision of a life at its end, it was almost too much.

    And I imagine Eric Roth’s adaptation is just as in tune with these notions, albeit in an expanded (well…greatly expanded) format.

    Additionally, the trailer for the film seemed to carry across a similar structure that stuck out to me the moment I saw.  I didn’t know how to address it at the time but reading the original work last night hammered it home.

    All things considered, I think “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” might be my most anticipated film of the upcoming Oscar season.  It seems the easy choice, the obvious one.  No one can argue with the apparent artistry on display from what we’ve seen so far and I find myself watering at the mouth the more I consider its potential.

    I also find myself thankful that a guy as savy and complex as Roth is the one to take the story to adapt the tale for the screen.  Of course he would.

    Roth’s screenplay wil be reviewed here at “Page to Screen” on Tuesday, August 25.

  • Uh…‘Good Shepherd’ was always part of something more

    Universal Pictures\' The Good ShepherdI’ve read three stories today indicating that Robert De Niro wants to spin “The Good Shepherd” into a trilogy.  This…is not news.  Not exactly.

    The first mention was an aside in this Variety story, which was simply a “by the way” kind of thing.  Then Cinematical got a hold of it and passed the news along, and now I see The Movie Blog is sourcing Rope of Silicon (should have sourced Variety, but there’s that whole boycott brouhaha), and suddenly a couple of comments have become a “news item” for the day.

    I’d like to, if I may, quote my own words from a New York Times story nearly two years old:

    But Mr. De Niro, who was developing a C.I.A. project of his own at Tribeca Productions, agreed to a deal that kept things moving: He would consider directing or starring in “The Good Shepherd,” if Mr. Roth would write the Tribeca film, which deals with the period from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    At least one other CIA film was always in the cards, though the reception of “The Good Shepherd” (for which I have great respect despite its flaws) may or may not have slowed that train a bit.  Eric Roth told me about the possibility of a trilogy in the above interview, but that didn’t make the edit.

    Anyway, looking back at the Roth piece, I’m reminded of two of his scripts that I desperately hope find traction: “Hatfields and McCoys” (with Brad Pitt chomping at the bit to make it a reality) and “Comanche” (pitting Roth with Michael Mann once again for a western that sounds like it could be out of the park).

    This year, of course, Roth will be pushing the envelope as always with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” one of my most anticipated films of 2008.

  • Now that it’s in English…

    httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=DelAqaM_p1Y

    And in Quicktime here.

  • The soon-to-be extinct ‘Benjamin Button’ trailer…

    …looks positively AMAZING. Catch it while you can. I’m sure it’ll get yanked soon enough.

    The visual effects look so exquisite and seamless.  Director David Fincher has supposedly been pretty tight-lipped about his recipe in that arena for a while, but it looks to be a truly unique blend of CGI and makeup artistry.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjnd0wsISY0

    Wow.

  • Call it 170

    Reading through Jeffrey Wells’s Hollywood Elsewhere this afternoon, I see he’s spitballing about the length of the script for David Fincher’s upcoming “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” written by Eric Roth.

    I made a call and got a different figure: 170 pages — with some considerable narration to boot.

    Wells’s point seems to be, “uh-oh, it’s gonna be long.” But as far as I’m concerned, a good movie can’t be long enough. So, you know, so be it if “Button” clocks in close to three hours long.

    A commenter at Hollywood Elsewhere, meanwhile, had this to say:

    I know somebody who’s seen a rouch (sic) cut (possibly just the assembly) and says it came in at 3 and a half hours.

    They also said it was a REALLY good 3 and a half hours, so there you go.

    Well, indeed. There you go. We’ll know more soon enough, but this is one of my most anticipated efforts of the season.

    Additionally, Roth is taking off from a 64-page short story, so we can bet on a lot of original material that, hopefully, adds to the emotional context of the original work. And the cover of the recently re-released short story, by the way, showcases the words “The inspiration for the upcoming motion picture,” so I wonder if, at the end of the day, the script might be deemed an original work because of what will likely be a profound, if necessary, departure from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words.

  • Almost there

    shepherd.jpgRobert De Niro’s “The Good Shepherd” has been running on HBO this month. I stopped flipping to watch some of it this evening, kind of caught up in the brief year-ago nostalgia, but mostly transfixed with a film that is so close, yet so far.

    I remember when I first saw the film at the Clarity screening room in Beverly Hills in December of 2006, surrounded by a typically judgmental crowd of HFPA members. I had high hopes. It was, after all, the year’s most anticipated would-be Oscar film, much like 2007’s “Charlie Wilson’s War.” There was a hell of a crew assembled for what sounded like it could be a solid, dense, but meaningful effort. The catch was that I had read Eric Roth’s screenplay some months prior, and “dense” didn’t begin to cover it. I knew this was a script that demanded some sort of device to dig a story, not necessarily bogged down, but still somewhat abstruse, out of the literary and onto the screen in an authoritative manner.

    I had also just finished up a profile of Roth for The New York Times and had grown as fond of the man as I had his work throughout the years.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: 2008, a year in advance

    Another year, another set of wins…and another look ahead at what’s in store NEXT year.

    It’s never too late to take a long gander at what we might see dominating the film awards landscape in 365 days, and with that in mind, I’ve been doing my usual mulling over the possibilities for a few weeks to put together the sadly thorough examination of the 2008-09 award season that follows. Let’s get into it. There are some major considerations to take into account. right off the top.

    Like Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, who is set to be the entertainer of the year. With performances in “Body of Lies” (Ridley Scott) and “Revolutionary Road” (Sam Mendes), DiCaprio is working with a duo of awards-proven talent this year. Perhaps that will work against him, much like it did in 2006, and no major Oscar success will come knocking. But we’ll wait until we see the performances. Each of them could be enticing.

    This year’s Best Picture Oscar victor Scott Rudin is back again, by the way, with “Revolutionary Road,” recently inherited by Paramount Vantage and probably one of the true “frontrunners” this far out that we could put our finger on. The only other film in Vantage’s arsenal is Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” which could simply be a commercial success, but might find its way to multiple nods like “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond” in recent years.

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