Ok, many of us at the Toronto Film Festival missed this Anne Thompson feature story in Variety (or at least, we never saw anyone writing about it) “Studios Wary of Big Budget Auteurs,” written during that week.
Her thesis is given right off the bat, “the figure that haunts every studio chief’s dreams is a high-profile auteur whose artistic vision outweighs his financial constraints,” and yes, this makes absolute sense, we have no argument with this. Thompson name checks films and auteurs like David Fincher and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Spike Jonze and “Where The Wild Things Are” as being big-budgeted “gambles” that could be problematic in terms of recouping their exorbitant costs (curiously, she doesn’t mention Baz Luhrmann and “Australia,” which seem to fit the bill here).
Again, no complaint there. It’s a legitimate concern and she’s on the money. She dives deep into all three of the productions, but the one for ‘Wild Things’ obviously interests us the most and has some eye-raising statements written it it.
We’ve been accused of rumor mongering when it comes to ‘Wild Things,’ by certain parties. An assertion we find ridiculous since we’ve tried to keep the articles in check and actually made a lot of sarcastic fun about all the people leaping to snap speculation and hysteria (see our graphic) when the rumors started flying around (in fact, Radar magazine interviewed us recently on this very topic, the out-of-control “reportage” — it’s not online yet). So we find some of Thompson’s comments more than a little curious.
Clearly she wasn’t at the “Where The Wild Things Are” test screenings (she woulda said so), but she calls them “disastrous” regardless. This might be a studio perspective she’s paraphrasing, but the same viewer she quotes in the article who was in attendance at said screening, Cinemaniac1979, tells us this assertion is off base. At least in his opinion.
“My experience of the December 2007 screening was that it was anything but disastrous. Everyone I talked to really enjoyed the movie, but we weren’t involved in the focus group. In fact, I was disqualified from selection the moment I mentioned the director by name,” he just wrote to us.
Another thing we’ve never heard before or reported anywhere else for that matter, Thompson says the project was shut down after this allegedly “disastrous” test screening.
“I never heard anything about a studio shut down from my sources,” says Cinemaniac1979 who obviously has had at least some inside information (and again, this was never actually reported anywhere outside of rumors that the film was going to be reshot entirely — which of course turned out to be completely false). This smells like speculation on her part, but we could be wrong. Hopefully this report foxes out more concrete info.
Meanwhile, Thompson talks about the reshoots on the film that happened in June. Despite producers of the film suggesting that reshoots would mostly involve the monsters in the woods – scenes they say they, “misjudged” – the Variety scribe says the reshoots mostly revolved around, “the young lead, Max Record. About 10 minutes were added: two scenes at the start and one at the end.”
The article also says that a new ‘Wild Things’ cut will be screened within a month, but that “visual effects won’t be added until Jonze has locked the final cut,” so any test screenings that happen again will still be missing the CGI and elements that were absent for audiences initially in the, now infamous for better or worse, December screening.
About the reshoots, Warner Bros. Prez Jeff Rubinov said:
“We wanted more emotion for the story on the whole. He’s making a Spike Jonze family movie. I can’t tell you how young it’s going to play or its intensity. It’s magical and beautifully shot. It was a long process to end up in a good place.”
A few months ago, Cinemaniac1979 helped us confirm what actors are doing the voices of what monsters in ‘Wild Things’ and also contributed a little bit to our script review. “Where The Wild Things Are” is back ontrack for a October 2009 release.