Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They should look closely at the film before they leap to conclusions. White Hunter, Black Heart is based on co-screenwriter Peter Viertel's roman a clef, published some four decades ago, about his experiences in Africa when he was engaged by Huston to polish James Agee's script for The African Queen. Eastwood has dared to attempt a faithful impression of the director, his growling drawl, his loose-limbed stride, the arrogant tilt of his head. The result is a stretch for him as an actor, and fun for the audience...
...fanciful graffiti forms range from stylized signature "tags" to mural- size "pieces" that elaborately blend fanciful script, cartoon characters and messages with the artist's street name. In Los Angeles authorities are contending with organized teams of taggers who use sophisticated climbing gear to spray their signatures on overpasses or dodge high-speed traffic to emblazon murals on freeway center dividers. "They know their names will be up for months because the state department of transportation has to shut down the freeway to paint over the dividers," a harried official complained last week at a Los Angeles antigraffiti conference attended...
...places an insupportable burden on director Nicholson. This script is, of necessity, endlessly expository: dramatic confrontation is either crowded out entirely by speculative talk, or it arrives so encrusted with a multiplicity of mysterious motivations that it is robbed of impact. Try as he will (and try he does), Nicholson cannot give The Two Jakes the forward motion or the style it desperately needs. And in the end, he fails to supply that satisfying sense of closure any mystery must have. One leaves the theater not knowing for certain why anybody did anything in this movie -- and by this time...
Translating a written tale into TV drama has its pitfalls. Excessive fidelity to the text can emphasize a story's origins on the page. Departure for drama's sake can suggest that what's onscreen came solely from a script. Those perils are present in 90-minute video anthologies -- something of an endangered species these days, like westerns -- that HBO and Showtime coincidentally offer for late-summer viewing. (Both debut Aug. 19.) Differently flawed, they nonetheless make for more satisfactory evenings than network reruns...
...writer Robert Towne, and Nicholson. (Polanski, according to Nicholson, was not involved in the process, partly because of cost overruns). When The Two Jakes finally made it to production, Nicholson had assumed the directing responsibilites. In addition, the freshman director took it upon himself to rewrite parts of the script as he went along...