April 21, 2000

Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005

According to a recent book review by The Chronicle ( A Duke University Newspaper), PTA has purchased the movie rights to David Liss's new book, "A Conspiracy of Paper". This is a mystery novel set in eighteenth century England. Obliviously this information has not been confirmed by PTA & it's not clear whether it was purchased by Ghoulardi for PTA to direct or produce. I will add this to the new Unconfirmed Section of Future Projects & Rumors until I have more information.

PTA was listed by Premiere Magazine in their annual Power Elite (Who's Running Hollywood Now) May issue at #100. This is his first time on the list. Here's their comments:

100. Paul Thomas Anderson
 

Rank Last Year: Not Ranked 


Job Title: Cocksure Auteur
 

Status Report: Icon for a new generation of writer-directors. After porn epic Boogie Nights, said next would be intimate film, a 30-day shoot. Instead turned in 190-page Magnolia script to New Line, and got $40 million green light, final cut, control over marketing, and Cruise at a discount. Production company, Ghoulardi, seeking to provide safe haven for virgin talents.
 

Yes. It's True: Scott Rudin passed on Anderson project because of elaborate demands for creative control.

September 1, 1999

Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005

Roughcut Scoop/Magnolia to be trimmed and pushed up??

Editor's Note: This scoop courtesy of Rough Cut 

THE GOOD: Jeff Wells got some early poop on Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and thus broke the code of silence around the picture. Jeff's concerns about the over-three-hour running time led to an exchange between myself and New Line's Michael DeLuca on Magnolia, with DeLuca kindly laying out the studio's position on how they handle a three-hour movie: "Here's the straight scoop: There's no pressure on Paul to cut. I don't pressure world class filmmakers. I make suggestions, Bob Shaye makes suggestions, but that's it. I flipped over the film, and all I told Paul was that if he could, he should try to keep the running time requirement for four shows a day as opposed to three in his mind while trimming. He agreed and he's been trimming on his own these past four weeks. I let Paul have his own process, and he often screens changes for me.

We totally knew what the film was going to be when we read the script. No surprises. I thought we'd end up with a three and a half hour movie and he's actually going to end up much shorter. We never thought that the commercial chances for Magnolia would be determined by running time. It's either going to connect as the greatest film ever made before the ending of a millennium, or it won't, but a half hour will not make the difference. With this kind of movie, it's the total experience of the film itself that sells the film. All we told Paul was cut the best movie you can."

In Jeff's conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson, a potential Thanksgiving release on as many as 1800 screens was brought up. New Line got killed in platform release for the underrated and underseen Living Out Loud last year, so one more exchange on the release, so I felt compelled to ask if they were going wider to avoid the past. Apparently not. DeLuca on distribution: "We're actually trying to avoid December competition (Ripley, The Green Mile, etc). There's like four three hour movies in December. So I want to either be the first or the last (a January release with a qualifying run, like we did Wag the Dog). We were always going wider than 800, [it was] just a matter of when."

And I guess it still is. There aren't many production chiefs in Hollywood who surf the Web, much less indulge those of us who work out here. Mike DeLuca is a rare bird in that way and in many others. The most remarkable one is that I don't think he's ever misled me, on or off the record. Could being honest be the future of Hollywood? Let's see. In my experience, Fox and New Line are the most willingly informative and most direct of the studios. And they do pretty well. Hmmmm...Like Cosmo suggested in Sneakers, does the power to create destruction (a big Web issue) come from "Too many secrets?" Hmmmm...

Courtesy of Roughcut by David Poland

Premiere Magazine Tidbit

Magnolia is discussed in the September 1999 Fall Movie Preview. 

The Pitch:

During one day in the San Fernando Valley, the lives of several disparate people (including Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and John C. Reilly) intersect, with tragicomic results.

The Big Picture:

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) denies the rumor that the script for his $30 million-plus follow-up runs a staggering 160 pages. "No," he says with a laugh. "It's longer." He refuses to say much else about it, however. "I feel lately as if I know everything about a movie before I see it, " he says, "and I really want the audience to discover this purely." Some of the Nights cast have returned, plus one rather prominent addition: Tom Cruise, in an un-billed role. And (get this) it was Cruise who approached Anderson. "It's like getting the phone call from the President of the United States, " Anderson says. "If he hadn't called, I just would have assumed he wasn't gettable for me." But if the first days of filming seemed like a class reunion, that feeling didn't last. "Julianne was the first one to shoot - she kind of got the baseball bat in the face," Anderson says, figuratively speaking. "It was emotionally arduous," Moore confirms, "Paul pushed me really hard - much harder than someone I didn't know would have." Macy, who plays a former quiz-show whiz kid obsessed with a male bartender, endured pain of a more physical nature. "Paul had an idea for a gag where I leave the keys on my belt chain in the door and walk away, and it's supposed to knock me ass-over-teakettle," Macy says. "He made me do it 35 times . My whole hip was black and blue by the end of the night." Perhaps Anderson was getting even. Earlier, when the director was discussing how one scene should be shot, Macy observed that the proposed angle was unflattering to him. "Oh, here it starts," Anderson roared. "One fucking nomination and suddenly... You're not a leading man; you're a character actor." Macy gibed back: "And you're a cult director who doesn't know when to stop writing."

February 1999

Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005

Paul - Y2K and beyond!

Paul listed was listed as one of the 20 talents we'll still be talking in the Year 2020.

"This auteur's skill with the quill - his control of interlaced story lines, his creation of complex characters, and his attraction to society's underbelly - aligns him more with Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and even Billy Wilder than with the would-be Tarantino crowd.

Interview: AOL/Premiere Magazine Chat Transcript

AOL/Premiere Magazine Chat Transcript With Paul Thomas Anderson
November 17 1997


Boogie Nights is one of the most audacious movies ever to come out of Hollywood. An in-depth look at the Southern California porn industry, circa 1980, Boogie Nights, stars Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore, and it brings the era of sex, drugs and disco to vivid life. With its explicit sex scenes, its random violence and its portrayal of a feverish, out-of-control society, Boogie Nights is sure to be the most talked-about film of the year.

Astonishingly, its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, was a young boy during the period it chronicles. But the 26-year-old filmmaker has a vivid memory of the sights and sounds of the late 70s and early 80s -- the shag haircuts, the lava lamps, the water beds. Boogie Nights is his second feature (his first was Hard Eight, with Gwyneth Paltrow), but already Anderson shows the psychological penetration of a master filmmaker.

Interview: "Boogie Oogie"

Premiere Magazine, UK - Written By Glenn Kenny
October ??, 1997


How the stars and director of Boogie Nights created an audacious epic about the world of '70s porn

"You can't say it's not about porn, " insists writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson of his new movie Boogie Nights, an ambitious tale set in the late-'70s/early - '80s world of hardcore porn. And he's right, but it seems reductive to say the movie is just about porn. Sure, there's sex, and naturally, since it's the '70's, there are drugs, and, again, since its the '70s, there are synthetic fibres and disco and ELO; and there are the timeless topics the movie tackles, such as family, community, losing your mind, getting it up, not getting it up, and a lot more. Boogie Nights is a film about the '70s that could have been made in the '70s, an era of exuberant Hollywood risk taking. It will have funny stuff, gross stuff, tragic stuff. None of which is conveyed by the phrase "about porn."

So why did the 26-year-old Anderson choose this milieu? It's hard to get a fix on that. You can tell a lot about a man by where he drinks; for a few pint with his Boogie Nights lead, Mark Wahlberg, Anderson picks  a place on Third Street in LA called St Nicks. The atmosphere here can be best described as Bukowski-lite: kind of seedy but with little actual menace. Hell, it's just around the corner from the Beverly Center Mall. And in a near-by booth, in a blur of cell phones and ponytails and loud orders to the bar, what appears to be an informal pitch meeting is taking place. This depresses Anderson. "God, I should never have left Studio City, " he says, referring to the place where he grew up, in relative affluence (his father was one of the top voiceover artists in the business).

Interview: French Premiere Magazine

French Premiere Magazine, Written By Aviva Brooks
April ??, 1998


"I'm nothing more than a movie fanatic who started watching movies at 5 and who decided that it was going to be his job." His favorite film is oh! French and oh! It's Truffaut's Shoot the piano player !

"Between the age of 15 and 18 I only watched Truffaut's and Godard's films. Between 18 and 21, when you acquire a taste, I started watching films from Renoir, Clouzot, Max Ophuls,.."

A thin bespectacled man, PTA "didn't find anything else" to do than making movies. Boogie Nights is his second feature film - which has been a big success for an independent movie- after Hard Eight and a short film which was a fake documentary about John Holmes, the porn actor.

Where does Dirk Diggler come from ?