Pete Hammond’s Notes On The Season: Directors Hit Santa

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.

Heading into the last big weekend before final Oscar voting begins Monday (with all ballots due in by February 21), we have the British Academy Awards (BAFTA) on Sunday, which is the same day as the Grammys, And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards are on Saturday, which is same day as the Art Directors Guild. It is just two weeks to go until Oscar Sunday, and any added or new momentum for contenders is going to happen now or never.

This week I was happy to drive in the rain to the Santa Barbara Film Festival where I hosted the festival’s annual Outstanding Directors Of The Year tribute at the grand old Arlington Theatre on Tuesday night. The four directors who were mutually nominated for both Oscar and DGA top directorial honors — Damien Chazelle, Barry Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan and Denis Villeneuve — were joined by 13th Best Documentary Feature nominated director Ava DuVernay, who actually had to be sprung from the Santa Clarita set of her $100 million dollar film AWrinkle In Time which stars Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon. It’s the big movie job that sadly kept her from attending Monday’s Oscar nominees lunch, but she made it just in time for the SBIFF tribute show, and even took selfies with the group of “gents” as she called them, posting later to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Although SBIFF has had a parade of star tributes all week including Denzel Washington, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, Isabelle Huppert and others, the real stars of this medium as I pointed out in my intro are clearly the directors, so it was great fun to sit and talk to each individually and then all together before they got their awards. DuVernay actually talked about how she used to drive up from Compton where she said there were no theaters and come to movies in Santa Barbara, including the enormous and stunning Arlington where we were onstage. “It was just something I liked to do,”  she said, clearly something the large local crowd loved hearing.

Her Netflix documentary 13th, which chronicles the unbalanced history of incarceration and racial injustice during the past two American centuries, is getting a big Oscar push from the streamer. It faces tough competition from the ESPN documentary miniseries O.J. Made In America, which at 7 1/2 hours is the longest docu ever nominated and has been piling up awards — likely partially due to its sheer length, which helps it dominate the conversation. In a sly For Your Consideration ad perhaps pointed a bit at that lengthy competition, Netflix came up with the line, “Over 200 Years In 100 Minutes” and,  just to further point out its credentials to the mostly liberal Oscar voter, highlights a critical quote saying, “Of all the films in the Oscar race, 13th is the only one to address Trump’s America.”

It’s pretty effective and DuVernay, whose film Selma was a Best Picture nominee two years ago even if she was overlooked as director. She intelligently makes the case for the startling real facts (not “alternative facts”) in her docu. I pointed out in our conversation at SBIFF that at the nominees lunch Steven Spielberg told me he wished he had known what her docu had uncovered about the 13th Amendment when he was shooting Lincoln because he would have included it. “Leave it to Ava to discover this stuff,” he said. She was genuinely touched to hear that.

Also during the SBIFF tribute, I finally got some payoff from my vast collection of movie memorabilia when I had La La Land director (and DGA winner) Damien Chazelle help me unfurl on stage a large silk banner from the 1950s that reads CINEMASCOPE and designed to hang in big theater lobbies like the Arlington. It cost me $1600 on eBay but I am glad I was able to bring it back to the kind of venue that once proudly proclaimed the process Chazelle pays tribute to at the beginning of his 14-time Oscar-nominated musical. That’s when the screen widens to announce it was shot in CinemaScope, the wide-screen process that almost singlehandedly saved the movie business from the threat of television in the 1950s. Thanks to SBIFF executive director Roger Durling for always including me at the fest, which wraps on Saturday with the always great Women’s Panel moderated by Madelyn Hammond and closing-night film Their Finest. 

IS ‘LA LA LAND’ HEADED FOR BROADWAY?

Two nights later I was back on another old movie theater stage with Chazelle, this time at Quentin Tarantino’s refurbished revival house The New Beverly in Los Angeles, where a special screening of the first-ever showing of a 35MM film print of La La Land had just unspooled. The crowd, full of true film aficionados as well as a few Academy voters like David Foster (who later followed Chazelle out into the alley to ask about the music) seemed to eat it all up.

When he bought the theater, Tarantino removed all the digital equipment and has a policy of playing only film prints, largely from his own collection. Getting the world premiere of the 35MM La La was a coup as there are precious few theaters anywhere that can even still play the venerable format. “We shot this on film so I am really glad because it feels like closing the loop to be back where we shot it on,” Chazelle told me when I led off with a lot of geek questions about seeing the movie on film as opposed to the digital version in which 99.9% of theatres now play movies. “I am not opposed to digital — I shot Whiplash digitally,” he said. “But I think most stories are better served by film. In terms of depth and richness and color, which is important for this, it is probably the superior medium. I think digital will eventually catch up, but it has taken longer than people thought it would. It’s very important to me to try and shoot on film while I can, while it is still around, and do my part to keep it around.”

Chazelle is off to London for the BAFTAs,  where La La Land has a leading 11 nominations, so he is sorry to miss the public double feature New Beverly is showing tonight and Saturday of La La Land and Peter Bogdanovich’s critically derided 1975 musical attempt At Long Last Love that starred Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd. I am told Tarantino personally selected the latter to be paired with the former as he is a big fan of the movie that was a bit of a box office disaster. I didn’t ask Chazelle his opinion of that movie but did wonder about rumors that La La Land might eventually be making its way to Broadway.

“I know people have mentioned it. I’m not closed to the idea,” he said. “I will say though that part of the intention of this movie was to try to make something that had to be on the screen, to make a true screen musical in the fullest sense of that term, not an adaptation, not something that was kind of cross-media, but something that was made and written and intended and composed and sung and danced for the screen. So it’s not to say it couldn’t work on the stage, but it would have to be completely re-conceived and I don’t know if I’m even the person for that job.” He said he is not nearly as obsessive or familiar with stage musicals as he is with those made for the movies.

In fact, he says he won’t be returning to the musical genre any time soon and will next be doing First Man, the Neil Armstrong movie he plans to make with Ryan Gosling, and for which he has been getting advice from none other than Apollo 13 director Ron Howard. “I would be a little afraid to actually try a musical again,” Chazelle said. “It doesn’t mean  I won’t return to the genre, but I definitely need to explore a little more and try something completely different.”

FOREIGN INTRIGUE

With the ever-changing status of President Donald Trump’s travel ban affecting seven countries including Iran, the race for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film has taken on new urgency and drama. As my colleage Nancy Tartaglione has written in the new edition of Deadline’s Awardsline magazine, the nominated Iranian film The Salesman has created waves as its Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) made a very public declaration that he would not be attending the Oscars even if it became possible for him to do so. He’s taking a stand and is clearly insulted by Trump’s attempted — and so far failed — three-month travel ban for citizens from those countries. But it is now officially on hold by ruling of the courts, and  Farhadi still apparently has decided not to come even in the face of the Academy’s strong words of support.

Why boycott the Oscars?  Some voters have publicly tweeted they plan to vote for the Farhadi film just as a method of protest, which I think would be a misguided reason because, fair or not, an Oscar win for The Salesman at this point could be looked at as just that: a political statement and not in the spirit for which the category is intended or the accomplished movie it is. A vote for The Salesman, or any other film, should only be because you think it is the best in order to keep the dignity of the Foreign Language Film category. I know Farhadi believes this whole Trump ban was insulting, but clearly Hollywood and much of America feels insulted by it as well, so why stay away and sit in Iran, something President Trump would probably regard as a victory for his side. Maybe Farhadi, whom I ran into at the Golden Globes where he was also nominated, will change his mind and attend now to make a much stronger statement to the world — possibly even on the Dolby Theater stage of he wins. He could even go to the pro-refugee rally his agency UTA is throwing instead of their usual Oscar party.

Others involved in the Foreign Language category are planning on…

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