EXORCIST-Prequel

[crippled_avenger]

Exorcist: The Beginning: After talk the other week they were unhappy with it, its now been mentioned by The New York Post that Morgan Creek Productions has in fact fired Director Paul Schrader from the 'Exorcist' prequel after "giving them footage without any of the bloody violence the backers had wanted" was cited as reason for the dismissal. This is an unusual move as the $40-50 million budget film has already completed photography and as Schrader had made clear in an on-set interview me and nearly a dozen other journalists did with him in February, he was making more of a psychological drama than an all-out gorefest. Co-writer Caleb Carr says "The problem with Paul's cut of the movie is it does not deliver the psychological fear we were looking for...It does have some good dramatic elements which can be rearranged with some good shooting into a very good movie". No announcement as to who will replace Schrader has yet been made, but whoever it is will be expected to handle some reshoots and fix up the film more towards the investor's liking. Thanks to 'Mike', 'Vickman', 'Julez', 'Mick', 'CharlieG', 'Josh' & 'KarlChilders'.

[crippled_avenger]

THE HOLY BOOK OF INTERVIEWS:
Paul Schrader (Director): One of the most acclaimed writer/directors in Hollywood over the last few decades, Schraeder has become well known for doing studio films which take chances and is well known for his collaborations with Director Martin Scorsese on numerous projects. His writing credits include "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", "The Mosquito Coast", "The Last Temptation of Christ", "City Hall" and "Bringing Out the Dead". He has directed fifteen features including "American Gigolo", "Blue Collar", "Cat People", "Affliction" and the recent Bob Crane biopic "Auto Focus". Now he's taken charge of the Exorcist franchise and spoke very candidly with us during out visit:



Question: "How's the production progressing so far? Why did you save the first scene of the film till last?"

Answer: "We'll finish by the end of the week. It's a long shoot, you know. We began in Morocco, so it didn't seem a feasible place to build it and once we came here, we went into stuff we were doing in Morocco so we could release all those actors. I think this will be the longest film I've shot. This week goes over the previous longest shoot I've had - Mishima which was sixty-two days and this will be around sixty-seven I think but it feels real good. Vittorio was sick today, but he's doing an extraordinary job. I have maybe eighty percent of the film cut together in some form or another. There's no hope of topping Friedkin's Exorcist - I mean, that's a film classicm it's like you're going to top Casablanca. You're not going to top it, get that thought out of your head. So, you're trying to make a film that's worthy of it and that can stand on its own two feet apart from it. So, you really do have to stay away from all the things that people identify with the Friedkin film - the kind of tricks he was using. You have to stay away from turning heads and projectile vomit. You have to stay away from the girl on the bed and the throwing of the holy water. You have to find something new that has the exorcism theme in it, but is not like that film. Being a prequel you can start all over and create your own formula. In essence, I'm making four films here. One is 'Father Merrin and the Secret of the Lost Church', another is the John Ford/British outpost movie with the Turkana as the Indians, the third is the conventional one that you would think of as an exorcism movie with a possessed young man and the fourth and probably most interesting for me is the journey of Father Merrin's soul, which is one of those introspective movies that are sort of my forte."

Question: "Can you talk about what's happening in this scene?"

Answer: "Well, this is where Merrin loses his soul in a way. He gets caught in a Sophie's Choice situation in Holland in World War II where he's forced to choose which person is to live or die and after refusing to do so, he finally does and of course that pretty well knocks him out of the church. We pick him up three years later in Kenya - or British East Africa more accurately, where he's an archaeologist. This dig he's on is not the one in the Blatty novel, which I'd imagine takes place some time in the sixties in Iraq. This is an earlier dig."

[Ghoul]

ne iznenadjuje me ovakav rasplet, jedino mi nije jasno zasto su toliko cekali= jos pre pola godine je schrader SVUDA govorio da pravi *dramu*, da ga gore i ostali spektakl-efekti ne zanimaju, da ne pravi *tu* vrstu filma...
drugim recima, zasto su zvali *njega*, i zasto da radi *taj* scenario, kad bi im mick garris u startu dao ilm kakav zele, bez maltretiranja oko *drame*, *umetnicharenja*, i ostalih gluposti koje producente ne zanimaju.

dobro, ne iskljucujem sasvim mogucnost da film kakav jeste ne funkcionise najbolje, mozda je schrader prolupao, ali ipak je bruka tako ga sutnuti s filma...

imao sam umereno velika ocekivanja od njegove verzije filma. koliko ce toga da ostane u konacnoj [ko zna cijoj] verziji... tko zna?

[DylanDog]

Ono sto je zanimljivo je da Schrader-u ovo nije prvi put da ga mocnici ponize. Naime, on je svojevremeno napisao prvi draft za Spielbergove Bliske susrete trece vrste, ali je Spielberg odbacio taj scenario i cak rekao da je to "najgori scenario koji je jedan profesionalni scenarista ikada predao velikom holivudskom studiju". Ha, ha, ha...izgleda da je Schraderov senzibilitet nije narocito na ceni u vladajucim krugovima u fabrici snova. By the way, Autofokus je odlican film, tako da se sigurno ne radi o nekakvom gubljenju talenta pod stare dane (sifra William Goldman).

[crippled_avenger]

Schraderovi skandali sa pisanjem i snimanjima su gradivo koje ostavljamo pokoljenjima, da im se dive.

Ja sam, moram priznati, imao velika ocekivanja od Schraderovog EXORCISTa. Ne zato sto mislim da on moze da se ponese sa materijalom kao Billy Friedkin, vec zato sto poznaje religiju, a narocito poznaje patnju, te u tom smislu apsolutno odgovara materijalu. Buduci da ni raniji EXORCISTi nisu bas bili FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, ucinilo bi se da bi njegov hermetizam (covekove tablice na kolima glase OZU) pomogao filmu. No, sada, ko zna sta cemo gledati...

[Ghoul]

Cr.Aven. = CHU LI TI OVO?!

BOG LICNO UZEO U SVOJE RUKE EXORCISTA?

I've just got this directly fromMorganCreek, but Renny Harlin is taking over the Exorcist helm from fired director Paul Schrader. The reshoots will indeed start at the end of November, with a budget of 8 million dollars. Warner Bros andMorganCreekhope to release the movie in April/may of the next year.  

DODATNA DOBRA STVAR U OVOJ VESTI JE DA CU JOS BITI OVDE, PA DA GA ODGLEDAM PRE TEBE!

[crippled_avenger]

Ah, da, sinoc na AICN videh vest. Genijalno, zar ne? ghoul, zar ne vidis, neko voli nas, neko cuva nas, neko cuje nase molitve,...

Inace ako hoces jos malo droolorame vidi sledece vesti:

Joe Carnahan will direct VOID, a gritty crime drama that has just been set at Universal by producer Kevin Misher. Script will be penned by Guillermo Arriaga (21 GRAMS). The contemporary drama centers on a female Chicago homicide cop who arrives at a prison to provide transfer for a dangerous criminal she helped put behind bars. Events get in the way of a clean transfer.

Zatim:

Marcus Nispel (THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) is in talks to direct THE EXPENDABLES for Warner Bros. Pictures. It's inspired by a real-life program at California's Chino prison in which convicts are taught diving skills that can provide them with lucrative salvage and ship-repair careers following their parole.  (ovo je trebalo da rezira DJ Caruso)

Zatim:

Jonas Akerlund (SPUN) will direct the thriller BIRDMAN, based on the novel by Mo Hayder.

[crippled_avenger]

Fenomenalna vest za sve fanove Renny Harlina i Skip Woodsa!


With Paul Schraeder off, and massive reshoots under the direction of Renny Harlin soon to get underway - people are beginning to wonder what will happen with this project. 'Warner Sister' has left the water tower to fill us in on the project's current status:

"Shooting starts December 8th at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. Vittorio Storaro is shooting, Mark Goldblatt is editing, and Skip Woods ("Swordfish") is doing substantial amounts of re-writing to deliver a dilm going deep into the mythology behind the first and original "Exorcist".

The locals are describing it as a character study with very scary under currents. It doesn't rely on gore per se, but it will introduce several never before seen set pieces. The scale of the shoot has grown significantly, and looks now like it'll be at least six weeks with just a very small amount of the original movie ending up being used. Big sets have been erected at Cine Citta in preparation, and casting for new roles is on going in several countries apparently".

Sounds like a bigger undertaking than we may have been let on to believe.

Thanks again to 'Warner Sister'.

Steta sto nisu zajedno radili SWORDFISH

[taurus-jor]

Evo novog nastavka

"Exorcist" Prequel Times Two
Wed Apr 14, 1:45 PM ET  Add Movies - E! Online to My Yahoo!
By Josh Grossberg

Call it the version you didn't expect to see.

In what may be a first for Hollywood, producers of Exorcist: The Beginning are looking to release two completely different versions of the horror prequel on DVD, according to Daily Variety: the original version, which was scrapped by the studio, and the completely reshot version that is due to be released this summer.

Say what? Is someone possessed?

Not quite. The film's backstory may prove as compelling as the final product, and producers could capitalize by documenting the seemingly cursed production on home video.

Morgan Creek, the company supervising the production, was unhappy with the footage turned in by original director Paul Schrader, claiming the film was devoid of the pea soup vomit and graphic bloodletting that made the original Exorcist so horrifying. Instead, Schrader reportedly offered up a creepy psychological thriller sans the gore.

Schrader and Morgan Creek eventually parted ways, citing "creative differences."

Looking for a more commercial scarefest, the producers hired writer Alexi Hawley to alter the script and director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea) to reshoot the film. The budget was upped by $50 million, pushing the total production to nearly $100 million.

Harlin's version of Exorcist: The Beginning is now scheduled to hit theaters Aug. 20. But given the extraordinarily high cost of making the picture and potentially thorny screen-credit issues, Morgan Creek execs have reportedly decided to salvage Schrader's version and release it alongside Harlin's retooled take on DVD.

"This is going to sound unbelievable," Morgan Creek honcho James Robinson told Variety regarding the idea. "But we made a movie--twice. If you see the two movies, you wouldn't believe it's the same [cinematographer]."

No word whether Morgan Creek will have its distributor, Warner Bros., release both films in one package or separately. In any case, Exorcist: The Beginning won't likely be released until the holiday shopping period or in early 2005. Calls to Morgan Creek were not returned.

Despite the directorial shuffle, the prequel's plot pretty much remains the same, focusing on Satan-battling priest Father Merrin as he journeys to post-World War II Africa and confronts Pazuzu, the demon that later inhabited Linda Blair (news)'s Regan in the first movie. (Screen legend Max von Sydow played the aging Merrin, who was killed by the devil in the 1973 original.)

Harlin, who honed his horror chops on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, shot a completely new version of Exorcist: The Beginning, not retaining any of Schrader's footage. Harlin kept Stellan Skarsgrd as Merrin but recast several other key roles. He tapped Master and Commander's James D'Arcy for the role of Father Francis, originally played by Gabriel Mann, and replaced young actor Billy Crawford (news) with Remy Sweeny.

Aside from the revolving-door directors and cast, Exorcist: The Beginning has been troubled from the beginning. The film was initially supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer (news), but he died shortly before shooting began. As a result, Liam Neeson (news), who was originally supposed to play Merrin, had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, at which point producers brought in Schrader and Skarsgrd.

As for Schrader, whose credits include Cat People and Light Sleeper, he's just happy his version will be resurrected.

"I'm very proud of my film, and I think it deserves to be seen," he told Variety. "If I get the DVD, I can say 'God bless you Renny; may your film do well.' "

[Black Mamba]

valjda Exorcist IV: The Beginning ....videla pre neki dan ...surprise, surprise

[taurus-jor]

Pogledala film? Koju verziju?

[Black Mamba]

ma jok, videla reklamu ...inace sam sve predhodne gledala, naravno ...

[taurus-jor]

O Mambo crna.
Ti si naša ambasadorka. Čim se dotični double bill (nije Kill Bill ) pojavi u bioskopima, a ti pohrli i napiši nam izveštaj.

Nadam se da bar jedno krilo tog The Exorcist IV: The Beginning nije kvalitetno poput Highlander II: The Quickening.  

[Ghoul]

Čim se dotični double bill (nije Kill Bill ) pojavi u bioskopima, a ti pohrli i napiši nam izveštaj.

koliko sam ja shvatio te vesti, ne ide double killbill u bioskope.
u bioskope ide samo popcorn-man, harlin.

schradeur-auteur premijeru ima naDVD-u, decembra.

[taurus-jor]

Ma, shvatio sam i ja da neće.
Ali, stvarno bi bila fora. Sem toga, Shrader se, kako sam čuo, interesuje i za bioskopsko prikazivanje. Sve je moguće.

[Black Mamba]

O Mambo crna.
Ti si naša ambasadorka. Čim se dotični double bill (nije Kill Bill ) pojavi u bioskopima, a ti pohrli i napiši nam izveštaj.

o taurusu jore, sta god da se pojavi, sa zadovoljstvom

[crippled_avenger]

Captain Howdy reports that it was revealed recently the MPAA will slap the new Exorcist prequel "Exorcist: The Beginning" with an NC-17 rating, 'due to the film being to graphic and violent'.

The site was contacted by a rep of the production company who said "Morgan Creek and Warner Bros. are trying to appeal the decision, but being as we're only 34 days from release, the filmmakers might cut the scenes deemed inappropriate in order to secure an 'R' rating".

There is still no official word as to whether these potentially graphic violent scenes will be cut. "If that's the case, fans can look forward to seeing these deleted scenes on DVD." said Greg.

[Tex Murphy]

Why am I not surprised?
"Žao nam je, odlučili smo da ipak ne možemo da vam dozvolimo da gledate ekstremno nasilje za svega 7-8 dolara, koliko košta karta za bioskop. Ali zato skrkajte 50 dolara na DVD i uživajte!"
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ!!!!
Svečano se zaklinjem da nikad neću kupiti nijedan DVD, osim ako nije pirat.

[crippled_avenger]

CITAJTE STA CAR KAZE:

23, 2004
Twists and turns reshooting 'Exorcist' prequel By Martin A. Grove RESHOOTING REPORT: Shooting movies is routine business for directors, but reshooting them is a rarity Renny Harlin can talk about after having done just that on Morgan Creek's "Exorcist: The Beginning."
Opening Aug. 20 via Warner Bros., the "Exorcist" franchise prequel is produced by James G. Robinson and executive produced by Guy McElwaine and David C. Robinson. Its screenplay is by Alexi Hawley. Starring are Stellan Skarsgard, James D'Arcy and Izabella Scorupco.

Talking recently with Harlin about the making of "Exorcist" he explained, "Last September Morgan Creek was weighing their options about what to do with the film they had (directed by Paul Schrader). Obviously, they were not happy with it. I think their original thinking was that maybe with a week or two of reshoots and additional scenes they could sort of spice up the movie and add the kind of elements that they were looking for. So they spoke to several directors and writers about ideas and what to do.
"My approach was that I felt there's no way I would go and start shooting scenes (to be put) into somebody else's movie and adding things and trying to make a movie into something that it was obviously not intended to be. I said that my approach, if you wanted me involved, would be to write a new script and shoot a new movie because if you want a certain kind of movie I don't think you can bend one movie into another shape. You have to approach it starting with the script from a different kind of perspective. I kind of thought that maybe that was the last time I'd hear from them. But a week later they called me from Morgan Creek and said, 'We agree with you, so let's go to work."
That was in October of 2003. "What happened then was that we spoke to several writers and chose Skip Woods to come and write the first draft," Harlin said. "Skip Woods did a very good job and wrote the first draft, which then became the basis of our prep, which had to start immediately because they wanted to start shooting before Christmas. At the beginning of October we didn't have one page of script and we had a whole movie to prep. We started building sets and after Skip had done his job we brought in Alexi Hawley, who then wrote the final shooting script -- but basically sticking to the perimeters we had laid out in terms of what sets we wanted to have and so on."
The movie also needed to be recast. "Certain actors stayed," he explained. "A few of them (remained) like the lead, Stellan Skarsgard, who plays young Father Merrin, which Max Von Sydow played originally. Stellan stayed, but around him we cast new actors. We cast Izabella Scorupco for the female lead and James D'Arcy for the second male lead. And then (recast) some smaller parts and kept a couple of the original actors in smaller parts. We started shooting a few weeks before Christmas (of '03) and then for six weeks after Christmas. So it was really breakneck speed because the basic party line was that Morgan Creek and Warner Bros. wanted to get the movie out by the end of this summer and there was absolutely no time to waste."
The reshoot was done, Harlin noted, "in eight and a half weeks in 42 days. We shot at Cinecitta in Rome. Everybody was working pretty much around the clock and seven days a week. It was a very exciting and very good work environment because after we agreed on the sort of perimeters of the movie with the executives at Morgan Creek and with Jim Robinson (Morgan Creek president and producer of the film) he pretty much let us go and said, 'Okay, we know what we want. We know the characters and the sets and the events of the story. Now give it your best shot and go for it.' So we were able to move very fast, make decisions very fast.
"Also, we didn't have a huge budget to spend. I'm sure they don't want to talk about numbers, but we had much less money given to us than what they spent on the first version they shot. We didn't have much money so we knew the more we compressed the prep and the more we compressed the shooting (the better). We had a fairly small crew and we chose all the people very carefully. And, therefore, we were able to communicate very effectively. And very soon (after that) I moved on to Rome where I would be able to communicate directly with the production designer and with Vittorio Storaro, who was the DP, and everybody else. So we kind of (did this) in a very compact short time (with) hard work.
"We were playing catch-up all the time. While we were shooting we were building sets at the same time and, literally, paint was drying on the sets when we moved into shooting them. So it was that kind of an operation. But I must say that it made the atmosphere very exciting and made everybody kind of pull together and feel like, 'We have a challenge here and we're going to make it happen.' That way we did it on schedule as planned and on budget and got everything done just the way we wanted it. So everybody was very satisfied."
Asked how he works as a director, Harlin told me, "Actually, I storyboard everything I shoot. I had three storyboard artists working from pretty much the first day of working on the script. We were sitting around a table with the writer and we would say, 'Okay, here's the story we want to tell.' Obviously, we analyzed the 1973 "Exorcist" story (directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty) carefully. We said, "We are doing a prequel so there are certain limitations we have because we don't want to go to elaborate special effects and things that if the movie was made as an original today maybe today's filmmaker would use those tools, but we want to be faithful to the original film. If you look at the movie that (we) made, this actually could have been made before 1973 and this organically could have been a movie that took place before the original film.
"So we said, 'What made the original film special?' Obviously, it was and still is rated as one of scariest films ever made. Why was that? What was it about the psychological terror that made it so scary? What was it about the scenes? Whether you talk about the vomiting pea soup or the spinning head -- all these very, very shocking scenes -- what was it that made them so shocking? And how do we offer the audience something that is in the same family of psychology and the same genre that is faithful to the original and, hopefully, answers the questions that were set up in the original film that were never answered. The original film opens with a sequence in Iraq, actually, at an old archaeological dig with Max Von Sydow. (The film) introduces all kinds of things (including) a small black idol that is some kind of symbol of the demon. These things are never explained in the original film. They are just there and you are left to wonder for the rest of the film how they really connected to things. We felt if we could answer some of those questions as if our film was the first film. We set up (to explain) many of these things in this film and then, in a funny way, you would see the original '73 film as a continuation of our film. That's how we approached it."
It's an approach that brings to mind what George Lucas wound up doing himself with his new "Star Wars" episodes that tell the series' story prior to the first three movies that put the franchise on the boxoffice map.
"I actually started storyboarding from the very first meetings that we had with the writer," Harlin said. "I don't think I'm giving away too much when I tell that our movie opens in 500 A.D. So we go way back in time and our opening sequence kind of sets up one of the things that we are then going to explore in the movie. So we had a sequence that was not written and we just kind of brainstormed regarding the sequence. And I started storyboarding it immediately before one word was written on paper. That's what happened with a lot of the sequences of the movie. I had already storyboarded the scenes before the writer had written them. And then I would give my storyboards to the writer and say, 'Okay, here's my idea visually of the scene and how it develops and why it's going to be suspenseful and scary. Now you write the words and you write the dialogue and so on.'
"By the time we started shooting, I had storyboarded at least half the film. Then during the film I continued so that halfway through shooting the whole film was storyboarded and this, of course, helped the set designers and so on to see, 'Okay, we don't need the whole set. We only need the doorway or we only need the one wall with the window.' This way we were able to create the illusion of having much more sets than we really did. Also, what we did was we built sets that could play actually three completely different locations. This was due to the fact that we were drawing and writing and planning and doing everything simultaneously from the first day on."
With post-production -- Harlin was about to start scoring when we spoke -- he explained, "We came back from Rome the beginning of March and we finished editing about the end of May. So I did editing in March, April and May and had about 12 weeks to complete all the editing. The Directors Guild's normal contract is that the director has 10 weeks after the editor finishes the assembly. So I would say the average case would be that a month after you finish shooting the editor has the assembly put together. Then the director has 10 weeks after that to do his cut. Then that cut is commented on by producers and the studio and you go through the test screening process and you probably work at least another month on the cut to fine tune it. But in our case I delivered my cut probably six weeks after we finished shooting and then we fine tuned it for another, maybe, three weeks. And that was it. It was definitely done faster, but on the other hand we are not having test screenings at all. We are going completely without screenings."
Harlin hastened to point out that he's "not opposed to test screenings at all. I think they can be a very useful tool. But because of our schedule and the tightness of the post- production (period), Morgan Creek and Warner Bros. decided that we're not going to test the movie at all. Also, I would say, it's a very, very hard movie to test. If you imagine the original 1973 film, there are scenes of a teenage girl in very sexual situations with a crucifix and cursing at a priest and her mother and vomiting green pea soup and with a spinning head and so forth. You can imagine that if you show that to a test audience it is very hard to judge what they mean if they say, 'I hated this scene' or 'I liked this scene' or 'This scene was horrible' or 'This scene was too much.' So it's very, very hard actually to analyze what people really mean and what their response is when they come to something like this. So in that sense, test screenings can also be misleading."
Focusing on visual effects, Harlin outlined the approach he took to holding down what can be staggering costs. "A money saving philosophy that I've had already on a few of my movies (is) what we do in terms of visual effects work," he said. "In a movie like this (I didn't) want to have special effects that look like we are creating supernatural things that are not organic to the original film, but still in creating (effects) that hopefully will appear as absolutely real we do have several hundred visual effects starting with the fact that our story takes place in 1949 in Africa and we shot the whole thing in Rome on the back lot. We are creating a lot of matte paintings and things like that and compositing a lot of shots together. So we create the illusion that beyond (there is) sort of a grand landscape.
"What we (did) instead of going to one of the digital effects houses (is that we created) almost everything in-house. I hired a visual effects supervisor and under him we have close to 20 digital artists. Basically, they are working in our post- production facility right next to the editing room. We have rows of computers and our artists work there. This way we can bring down the cost of shots tremendously because if you go to a visual effects house you pay a pretty high price for every single shot that you hire them to do. In this case, in the same way that you hire an editor and so on you have people on a weekly salary and they can turn over several shots a week. This way we keep the costs down and we are able to keep really close quality control and creative control. We were able to do it fast and keep it under control. Don't get a feeling that I am arrogant to work with people who do things in different ways. All glory to them when they have the big budgets from the studios to spend. But I just always seek ways how to try to minimize the cost of doing (effects and) getting the same results."
With Harlin having managed to deliver exactly what Morgan Creek needed done on a shoestring budget and with slim production and post-production schedules that many other high profile action directors would never have been willing to deal with, it's no wonder he's now preparing to make another picture for the company. The new project, "The Northmen," is a big historical epic about two Viking brothers who are both in love with a captive English princess. The Morgan Creek production will be distributed domestically by Universal and internationally by Morgan Creek. Its screenplay is being written now by Sean O'Keefe and Will Staples, the writers of "King Tut," Roland Emmerich's now in development epic about the young pharaoh Tutankhamen reclaiming his kingdom after his father's death.
"We are working on the script now and they will probably deliver the final script in about two weeks (which would be a short time ago by now) and we're going to take probably five months to prep this movie, which means scouting locations around the world," Harlin said. "I think we have strong possibilities of doing the movie in New Zealand or in Scotland or in Norway. So we are going to scout locations and, of course, look at the financial side of it very carefully. Then we have lots to do in terms of the locations and costumes and ships and, of course, the casting process. That's definitely a movie where we're going to take our time and do it in a different way. Still, the plan is not to spend huge amounts of money.
"I'm determined to make the movie for way under $100 million because with all respect to all the big movies I do believe it's entirely possible to make movies for smaller budgets than $100 million. I think if you can plan the movie very carefully and you can plan what you build and what you create digitally and if you choose a location that economically makes sense, it's all doable. I personally would rather try to deliver as much as possible for less money and not have the pressure of a budget that is so huge that you know if you don't break every record in the world you're gonna be hard pressed trying to make a profit."
Asked if his new project resulted from his good relationship with Morgan Creek regarding "Exorcist," Harlin replied, "Yes, this is something that (came about) after I showed Morgan Creek my cut of the film. We were having dinner a couple of days later with Jim Robinson and he said, 'Well, Renny, I am going to give my crown jewel to you.' It's something that he has been developing for 15 years and it's his dearest of dearest projects. He said, 'Would you have any interest in a Viking movie?' And I said, 'I can't believe you say that because since (I was a) kid that's been my dream because I'm from Scandinavia and (I read) all my childhood books about Vikings. It's so much part of the culture that I've always felt the natural thing for Hollywood would be to make this great big Viking epic. I said, absolutely (let's do it). And then we started talking about the script and what direction we wanted to take it.
"I was really happy to see that he was very much of the same mind that this is not a movie about big brutes with horns in their helmets, but actually will show the Viking culture, which was very complex. Vikings had one of the first democracies in the world. They had a completely democratic society where all the decisions were made by voting and women were completely equal with men in terms of voting and decision making and so on. Their customs and their religions and their jewelry making skills and, obviously, their navigating skills were extraordinary. So we want to show all that and not go with the image of these brutes who drink lots of ale and have horns in their helmets."
Shooting is to begin this spring, he said, "so now that we've started to prep we'll hopefully be prepped by February or March and will start shooting. This is for Universal so (when it's released) is their decision. I would think that it would be screened in 2005 and (will be), hopefully, one of those very first movies of the summer."

[Ghoul]

stvarno je car, priznajem; ovo kazem narocito nakon MINDHUNTERSA [nedavno odgledanog], koji mi je veoma prijao [3+];

jedva cekam obe verzije exorcista, i iskren da budem – od harlinove vise ocekujem.

[crippled_avenger]

hteo sam nesto da kazem o tome kako se ghoul zadnji smeje, ali sam onda shvatio da mnogi nece pomisliti da je to zato sto slabo kapira vec zato sto se najsladje smeje, a to onda ima gay konotaciju, i onda ghoul misli da nesto hocu s njim...

ipak, drago mi je sto cemo ghoul i ja zajedno klanjati pred kolekcijom Harlinovih VHSova...

[Ghoul]

vehaes šmehaes!
dividi iz d nejm of d gejm!

treba provereiti da li je reni i za koje filmove snimao director's commentary - to bi trebalo posedovatič
ovaj intervju me je podsetio koliko je on lucidan i bistar momak;

kad sam gledo alien 9-ology dvd set, njegovi komentari povodom zlosrećnog 3. dela su bili najlucidniji (šteta što njemu nisu dali da tad napravi šta je hteo!)

[crippled_avenger]

inace, NORTHMEN je cuveni projekat Morgan Creeka. koliko me secanje sluzi to je prvo trebalo da radi Konchalovsky za Morgan Creek u Warnerovoj fazi. potom je Milius bio angazovan na tom filmu i o njemu govori u intervjuu koji mozete naci u ANTIPIRATU. sada je NOTHMEN deo deala koji je Universal potpisao sa Morgan Creekom...

[crippled_avenger]

Hell Hath No Fury
Exorcist: The Beginning, a story of Hollywood possession
by Scott Foundas  







Paul Schrader seems relaxed for a man who's just been doing battle with dark, demonic forces — and I'm not talking about Pazuzu, the sinister spirit that an elderly priest once pursued from the deserts of Iraq to a young girl's bedroom on a foggy street in Georgetown. It's October of last year, and Schrader and I have met for drinks in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont to talk about his latest film, Exorcist: The Beginning — which, as you may already know, will not be coming soon to a theater near you. A couple of months earlier, rumors had begun to circulate that Schrader had been fired from the project — a prequel to the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist — after screening his edit for the executives at Morgan Creek, the independent production company that currently owns all rights to the Exorcist franchise. The former New Hollywood enfant terrible, it was said, had failed to deliver a movie that was as scary or gory as its producers had hoped, and a new director would be brought in to do re-shoots. Then, in a press release dated September 15, 2003, it was made official: "Morgan Creek Productions and director Paul Schrader have jointly announced that Schrader will no longer continue as director of Exorcist: The Beginning due to" — drumroll, please — "creative differences."

As has since been reported, Schrader's firing was merely the latest in a series of wayward turns that had plagued The Beginning since the beginning — a web of movie making, unmaking and remaking so infernally tangled as to give new meaning to the phrase "development hell." Indeed, plans for a new Exorcist film dated back to the summer of 1997, when Variety reported that Morgan Creek was commissioning a script from Terminator 2 co-writer William Wisher that would recount Father Merrin's first confrontation with the devil, in British colonial Africa — events briefly alluded to in both the William Friedkin film and the best-selling William Peter Blatty novel on which it had been based. That script was subsequently overhauled by novelist Caleb Carr (The Alienist) and attached to television director Tom McLoughlin. But the project only really began to pick up steam in the fall of 2000, when The Exorcist, in a tricked-out reissue promoted as "The Version You've Never Seen," bucked all the conventional wisdom concerning special editions to take in $40 million at the domestic box office. Suddenly, The Beginning was back on track, with John Frankenheimer replacing McLoughlin and Liam Neeson set to star as Father Merrin (the role originally played by Max von Sydow).


Paul Schrader: Cast out
(Photo by Max S. Gerber)  
There the bedevilment might have ended, had the 72-year-old Frankenheimer — in the summer of 2002, during pre-production — not undergone back surgery and bowed out of directing the film. (He died shortly thereafter.) A replacement was sought, and Schrader, rather unexpectedly, landed the gig — no matter that he hadn't sat at the helm of a major-studio feature since his much-maligned Cat People remake 20 years earlier. Shooting commenced in late 2002, on locations in Morocco and sound stages in Rome, with a budget of $40 million, the largest of Schrader's career.

"It came out of the blue," Schrader tells me. "It was very prestigious. A chance to play with the big toys — two cameras, cranes, the lighting, the manpower. So I jumped at it." When I ask him why he doesn't seem more riled up about getting fired: "There's no profit in it. People are going to fuck you. Things are going to not work out. You're going to get lucky some days. Most days, you're not going to be lucky. Why dwell on this? Scorsese could tell you virtually every critic who ever gave him a bad review. I couldn't."


Renny Harlin: Unholy alliance?  


Sometime prior to our meeting, I had seen Schrader's version of Exorcist: The Beginning. The television screen was small, and the film was far from finished — all the music and visual effects were temporary, the image itself a high-resolution output from a computer editing system. But even under such circumstances, there was no escaping the lyrical sense of terror evoked in the opening scenes of Schrader's film. In a predominantly Catholic Dutch village in the waning days of World War II, the murder of a German SS officer leads his lieutenant to round up the villagers for interrogation. As snow flurries fill the sky, the lieutenant demands that the local priest identify the guilty party — surely, inasmuch as he is their confessor, he must know which of these people has blood on his hands. The priest, of course, is Father Merrin (played by Stellan Skarsgård, who replaced Neeson during pre-production), and when he insists that none of his parishioners is culpable, the lieutenant sets about a diabolical course of action. He will kill 10 villagers as a warning to the real killer, wherever he may be. What's more, Merrin must select the 10 who will die. Should he refuse, the lieutenant vows to kill everyone. "God is not here today, priest," he bellows as Merrin collapses into prayer.

From there, the film plunges into postwar colonial Africa. Merrin, now working as an archaeologist, is overseeing the excavation of what appears to be a Byzantine church situated high in the hills surrounding the town. It seems to have been buried, intentionally, just after it was constructed, as if to contain some spiritual force rather than exalt it. And as Merrin digs, a mysterious presence seems to set itself upon the entire region. A tribal elder's wife gives birth to a maggot-infested fetus; two British soldiers are found murdered at the dig site, their corpses contorted to resemble those of John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul; and an escalating standoff between the British and the natives bears discomforting similarities to one Merrin himself witnessed not so long ago . . .

Rather than worshipfully recalling the claustrophobic, kitchen-sink realism of the 1973 film, Schrader and Carr seemed actively engaged in subverting, as best they could, its iconography. Shot by no less a visual poet than Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, One From the Heart and virtually everything by Bertolucci), the film is visually wide-open, with a dramatic sense of landscape and a marvelous attention to the subtlest tricks of light. Moreover, this Beginning views demonic possession less as a singular occurrence — the terrors visited upon an innocent young victim — than as a contagion born in the hearts of men, able to cross oceans of time and space, infecting entire communities in its wake. It is, by Schrader and Carr's own admission, an internalized piece of psychological (as opposed to visceral) horror. It's also, not incidentally, an epistemological study of faith, set against a world that gives even the righteous many reasons to question their beliefs. In short, just the sort of brooding, introspective piece you might expect from Schrader (who was raised as a strict Calvinist and who has explored similar themes in films from Hardcore to Affliction) and Carr (who, though best known for his novels, has also written extensively about military history, global terrorism and other Zeitgeist matters), but which Morgan Creek would later claim was exactly what it hadn't asked for.



Knock knock: Pazuzu calling



Back at the Marmont, to hear Schrader tell the story — or as much of the story as he is able to tell, given the "non-disparagement" agreement he and Morgan Creek chairman and CEO James G. Robinson have mutually agreed to — he had little inkling that anything was amiss until midway through the Morocco part of his shoot. "When Jim came to Morocco, he started saying to me, 'It isn't scary enough,' which became a mantra," says Schrader. "We had to get out of Morocco by Christmas, and we only had two weeks left in Morocco before Christmas. So I told him there was nothing we could really do with the Morocco stuff anyway, but let's add some more stuff when we get to Rome. About eight to 10 elements were subsequently added to make it scarier — all within the context of the script we had, and without going into any real hardcore horror stuff, because it had always been established that we didn't want spinning heads and pea soup. And if you don't want that, then it's natural to assume that you don't want that kind of in-your-face horror."

But then, Schrader adds, "By the time I was shooting in Rome, my relationship with Jim had deteriorated quite a bit." There were fights over editors and composers, and over whether Schrader would do postproduction work on the film in New York (where he lives) or L.A. Then, Schrader says, in March 2003, he screened his cut for Robinson and other Morgan Creek executives (including company president Guy McElwaine), following which there was talk of re-editing, of cutting down the film's 130-minute running time. After another round of edits supervised by Schrader, a separate cut of the film was prepared by Robinson himself. By which point, the writing on the wall was plainly visible.

At the time of our meeting, Schrader was still uncertain about the long-term future of his film, though he had gotten wind of who would be warming his recently vacated director's chair: Renny Harlin, the Finnish action specialist previously responsible for the smart-shark thriller Deep Blue Sea and two of Hollywood's better sequels, Die Hard 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, but whose résumé also includes Cutthroat Island and Mindhunters, an abysmal updating of the old Agatha Christie And Then There Were None idea that has so far been bumped by Miramax from at least five different release dates.

"I had actually wanted to stay on and do the re-shoots myself," Schrader told me. "They were contractually obligated to use me, and so they drew up a bill of particulars, of things I had done wrong, a lot of it just normal stuff — fights, angry disputes. It was going to go to arbitration, where the DGA would have represented me. But the people from the DGA said, 'Look, you could lose this. If you lose this, you will lose your salary, and you will open yourself up for a civil suit for damages. It'll be a nuisance suit, but it will keep you in lawyers for the better part of a year. It will cost you a lot of money, and what you will win is the right to do re-shoots that will be dictated to you, and during which there'll probably be a second director on the set. So what are you fighting for?'"

Two months later, Harlin was in Rome, on Schrader's old sound stages, shooting a film called Exorcist: The Beginning, made from a new script and featuring almost entirely new creative teams in front of and behind the camera. (Skarsgård and Storaro were the lone holdovers.) Virtually none of Schrader's scenes were expected to be retained.



"There's nothing like making a practice movie," chuckles James Robinson. It's now May 2004, midway through the Cannes Film Festival, and I've literally run down the Croisette from an early-morning press screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 to meet with Robinson in his temporary office at the posh Hotel Martinez. Posters for his first three movies to be distributed by Universal — where Morgan Creek has just moved its deal after more than a decade at Warner Bros. — line the room, while Robinson's very presence at Cannes is itself something of a statement: Despite reports to the contrary, Morgan Creek is alive and still kicking. Famous for making his fortune before he ever set foot in Hollywood, as a Baltimore entrepreneur whose holdings included a highly profitable Subaru distributorship, Robinson co-founded Morgan Creek in 1988 with then-partner Joe Roth. They went on to enjoy early hits like Young Guns and Major League, mixed in with such prestige titles as David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and Paul Mazursky's Oscar-nominated Enemies: A Love Story. In 1991, the company hit its first bona fide home run with the release of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But the past few years have been leaner for Robinson, who hasn't had a smash since 1995's Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and whose recent efforts include the likes of Chill Factor, Juwanna Mann and I'll Be There, pictures that either went straight to video or might just as well have. Any way you slice it, Robinson, who prides himself on his hands-on involvement in all of Morgan Creek's productions — he claims to personally cast the lead roles in all his pictures, in addition to choosing the key creative teams — has a lot riding on Exorcist: The Beginning.



Izabella Scorupco: Freaked out



"I was not happy with the Paul Schrader version," says Robinson, who looks a bit like Merv Griffin and whose words flow forth in the just-plain-folks patois of a small-town politician running for office. "Now why do I say 'Paul Schrader version' when I'm such a hands-on guy?" he continues. "Bottom line here is that we give the director a lot of latitude during the actual making of the movie, and then I step back in during postproduction. I'm there during production, but if a director has got himself a certain agenda, he can put that thing into effect. So, I saw the director's cut. Then I went in the editing room with Paul, but no matter what we did, it had been shot in such a way that you really couldn't change it. I use the word cerebral — the movie was more cerebral than it was fun or scary or all the other things. But let's not kid ourselves. This is the entertainment business. Realizing we could not get the movie we thought we were going to get, the one Frankenheimer would have given us in a heartbeat, I said, 'We can just throw the thing at video and walk away, or we can make another movie.'"

No question: Robinson is persuasive. Like any true salesman, he's eternally diplomatic and knows how to work the room. "Jim's a nice guy," Caleb Carr tells me by phone several weeks later, "but if you want to go to your grave being one of the most untrustworthy, unreliable people on Earth, he's got a good shot at it." Though, like nearly everyone involved with Schrader's film, he has since moved on to other projects, it's clear that Carr, who previously suffered an infamously protracted courtship with Scott Rudin over a movie version of The Alienist, still feels bruised by his Exorcist experience. "You know, I had a very interesting upbringing on the Lower East Side of New York City, and I often marvel at the fact that anything can still shock me," he says. "I have seen most of the horrible shit that people can do to each other at very close range. Yet I am still stunned by Hollywood people's capacity to be dishonest. It's just amazing."

Pounding the Hollywood pavement between book gigs, Carr had originally come to Morgan Creek to work on a couple of other assignments when, in the fall of 1998, he stumbled onto his own archaeological find: Wisher's script, lying around in a dusty storeroom. "It did have enormous problems, but it also had one of the greatest opening scenes of a horror movie that I've ever read," Carr says in reference to the Dutch-village sequence he would embellish in his rewrite. "The idea of doing a prequel to The Exorcist was not something I had ever considered, but in the course of reading this thing, I started to think, 'This is a really cool idea. How does an average priest become an exorcist?'" Though Carr claims it was only through his own persistent nagging that he was even allowed to take a crack at the project, upon finishing his script he found a trio of allies in Morgan

Creek's president at the time, Jonathan Zimbert, and development executives Joe Martino and Hilary Galanoy. Unfortunately, all three were soon to leave the company, in what Carr describes as the first signs that "This was destined to be one of those projects where misfortune just rained down all over the place."

And for Carr, who had gotten along famously with Frankenheimer, Schrader's hiring was something of a thunderbolt. (Admittedly not the first person who would spring to mind for the project, Schrader had, according to Carr, landed the gig mainly because of the expectation that his name would generate healthy foreign sales for the film. For his part, Robinson says he "didn't know Paul Schrader from Adam" when he was proposed by McElwaine, a friend of Schrader's agent.) "The only time Schrader and I had any contact was a phone call that we had after he was officially hired," Carr says — a story consistent with Schrader's own account. "We talked on the phone for probably two hours, out of which I probably talked 15 minutes. And never once — it's a meaningless detail that nevertheless has some meaning — did Schrader manage to get the words out of his mouth that he liked the script. When I hung up the phone, I realized, 'That's it. This is now officially over.' I called Jim Robinson and said, 'You need to know that if you hire this guy, this will be his movie. If the day comes when Paul calls me and says, I don't understand something or I'm lost on this, I will answer the phone. But I do not anticipate that happening.' And Jim's constant refrain is that he runs the company, he's in charge of the show, and, basically, it's his movie. Which is utter nonsense. He says that on every shoot, and every time he's got some peculiar excuse for why he actually couldn't control the director at all."

If Carr sounds tough on Robinson, you should hear him talk about Schrader. Though he has softened his line considerably since the widely circulated e-mail message in which he accused Schrader of being drunk on the set and suggested, among other things, that the movie might be saved by re-shoots only "if that little cocksucker stays in his fucking hole," Carr makes little secret of his disdain for Schrader's version. "What it reminds me of," he says, "is if you did a blocking rehearsal of the script and somebody filmed it. Nobody's really focusing. All the actors have that unmistakable look where they're standing around silently screaming, 'Someone direct me, please!' I've done a lot of directing in the theater, and I know that look on actors' faces. But I don't really blame them. It wasn't an easy script to do." He is, however, more than happy to blame Schrader. As he told the Web site Horrorexpress.com in September of last year, "All this crap about Morgan Creek wanting a conventional horror movie is just that, crap made up by Schrader to cover his ass, or rather to cover his lackluster cut." It was a moment, Carr freely admits, at which he himself was being actively courted by Morgan Creek to return to the project, though that never happened. "I'm sure that Jim Robinson, right up to the moment he got on the plane with Renny Harlin to go to Rome and re-shoot the whole movie, was on his cell phone saying to me, 'Now, I want to make sure you're still involved,'" Carr says. "It was one of the most amazing bullshit jobs ever."

Nowadays, back in upstate New York, where he teaches military history at Bard College and has no immediate plans to return to L.A., Carr has a marginally more generous take on Robinson's intentions for Exorcist: The Beginning. "You know, the script that I read that they were going to use for the re-shoot — along the lines of a shitty imitation of The Mummy — it wasn't the worst script I've read of that type," he says. "It wasn't good, but it wasn't necessarily awful."

Reading that script later, I too find it an entertaining, if altogether more conventional, affair. Credited to first-time screenwriter Alexi Hawley (with Carr and Wisher sharing "story by" credit), it has been predictably gussied up with buzzing flies, upside-down crucifixes, sinister tarot cards and, in what may be perceived as a nod to fans of The Passion of the Christ, blood-soaked messages scrawled in Aramaic. The possibly possessed village boy from Carr's script has been eliminated in favor of an entirely different possibly possessed village boy. A mad professor has been added to the mix. But what's more remarkable about Hawley's script are all the ways in which it doesn't differ from Carr's. Africa and the archaeological dig are still there, as is the British army, the flashback to the Dutch village (though now positioned much later in the story) and Merrin's ultimate standoff with the demon — even if, true to a prediction Schrader made at our first meeting, that confrontation is now more physical than theological. "If they were going to spend all that money to do a rock 'em, sock 'em Exorcist, I figured they would have gone toward a Texas Chainsaw–style movie," Schrader (who has also read the Hawley script) tells me when I drop by his Manhattan office in July on a rain-soaked afternoon. "But they didn't. They just tried making a more rapid version of what they had and, as such, probably a more commercial version. But whether it's more commercial in the context of where they were when they made that decision is another matter. If no money had been spent at all, then I suspect that script is more commercial than the one I directed. But having already spent $35 million on my version, is it still more commercial?"

Time will tell. A print of Harlin's film was not made available for preview in connection with this article, though, speaking by phone from the film's sound-mixing stage, Harlin assured me that "Like the original, this is a very adult horror film. It very seriously examines the issue of faith and God's presence in people's lives as deciding factors in whether or not justice takes place in the world."



Even on a bright summer's day, the house at 3600 Prospect Street exudes a cool, quiet menace, as does the adjacent flight of stairs, with its dramatic plummet down to M Street below. And here, on this particular day, stands William Peter Blatty, the man who was once one of the top comedy writers in Hollywood, before a certain novel and film immortalized this house and these stairs and, indeed, Blatty himself. In 1949, less than a mile away, Blatty was an undergraduate at Georgetown University. It was there that he followed, in the pages of the Washington Post, the account of a boy from Silver Spring, Maryland, who had supposedly been freed from the devil's grip following a series of exorcisms conducted over a period of several months. The story stuck with Blatty, though it would be more than 20 years before he fictionalized it as The Exorcist. That, of course, was the real "beginning" — if one that has been subjected, for more than three decades, to countless revisions.

Published in 1971, Blatty's novel was a phenomenon from the start, spending 55 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Released two years later on the day after Christmas, William Friedkin's film version, produced and scripted by Blatty, was itself no slouch. According to The New York Times, at Manhattan's Cinema 1 theater, "People stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film," while inside there were reports of nausea, fainting spells and heart attacks — a scene that would be repeated for months to come in cities all around the country. Despite pans from some major critics (including Pauline Kael), the R-rated film went on to gross $193 million (not including the 2000 reissue) and received 10 Oscar nominations, winning for its sound and for Blatty's script. Though Rosemary's Baby had created a stir five years earlier, The Exorcist tapped deeper and more potently into the cultural nerve center than any horror story that had come before it or, quite possibly, has since. Not surprisingly, plans for a follow-up began almost immediately, even though both Blatty and Friedkin excused themselves from the negotiations.

"When they first came to me," Blatty tells me as we duck out of the heat and into the neighborhood bar known as the Tombs, "I said, 'What are you talking about? There's no sequel here. That's the end of the story.' Then, they came back and said, 'We have a story of our own, but we don't have sequel rights.' So I just named an utterly outlandish figure for those days. And they said, 'Okay.'" The result would not arrive in theaters until 1977 — by which time several Exorcist knockoffs had already appeared, including the Italian Beyond the Door, an act of cinematic plagiarism so blatant that Warner Bros. sued its producers. But Warner had nobody to blame but itself for John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, a cosmic disaster on which no expense had been spared, save for the brainpower of the people responsible for making it. It too attempts to tell an origin story of sorts, about the young Father Merrin's African adventures, but ends up being much more memorable for its gobs of New Agey telepathy, its disco-fabulous Ennio Morricone score and its recurrent image of James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust.

However, the true precedent for Exorcist: The Beginning may be the strange case of Blatty's own Legion, his 1983 mystery novel that tells a story unrelated to the events of The Exorcist but involving two of the first novel's peripheral characters: the movie-obsessed detective William Kinderman and the priest Father Joseph Dyer. In 1990, Blatty was approached to adapt and direct a screen version of Legion, though by the time the movie hit theaters, it would be called The Exorcist III and would feature changes — mandated by its producer — that saw the story rewritten to be more of a direct sequel. Those changes included the return of Father Damien Karras (the young priest-psychiatrist who falls to his death at the end of The Exorcist) and the addition of an exorcism scene at the end. The producer in question? None other than James G. Robinson. "Jim Robinson, armed with a copy of my screenplay and his secretary, had requested a meeting with me," Blatty explains. "He began by turning to his secretary and saying, 'You tell him.' She then held up a copy of the screenplay, which I'm supposed to start shooting the next morning, and said, 'I read this, and I really think it's wonderful. But what does it have to do with The Exorcist?' So, I tried to explain to them that The Exorcist was not Rocky — we're not going to go after a new, one-armed demon every episode. But Robinson wouldn't give it up. He just let me go my way until the very end, let me do my cut. Then I showed up on the Fox lot one day, and my parking space was gone and the editing-room door was locked." In fact, Blatty has no shortage of other Robinson stories — unlike Schrader, he ultimately decided to tough 30 things out with Morgan Creek for the duration of postproduction — many of which doubtless informed the more lunatic episodes of Blatty's 1996 satirical novel Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing. As for The Exorcist III, it rolled into cinemas on August 17, 1990, in a cut Blatty acknowledges was far from what he had intended, just one week after the release of another much-beleaguered sequel, the Chinatown follow-up The Two Jakes. Both films were gone before anyone had much of a chance to notice they were there.

So, there are now four official Exorcist movies and countless imitators, among which only 1976's The Omen — itself the progenitor of three unmemorable sequels — made any real impact on audiences or the box office. (Nor is there any end in sight: Robinson, who cites his concern for the longevity of the Exorcist brand as his primary motivation for making the Harlin version, promises that a TV series is next in the pipeline.) Yet, not one of these derivations, with the exception of the best parts of Carr's script and Schrader's movie, has managed to strike the same dark, primal chord as the original. As Carr sees it, "It's an easy mystery to figure out. The Exorcist was such a story of the moment. It exposed things we were scared of that we didn't even know we were scared of at the time. It showed that the traditional path — Catholicism, God and the devil, all of this stuff — could still raise its head and shatter your life. To me, that was really the genius of it, the eruption of the old world into this cool new world of the '70s that everybody thought was basically untouchable."

That's also, Carr adds, the hardest thing about the original to duplicate. "What I kept trying to tell people was, 'If you're going to do it again, you have to do the same thing — you have to tap into what the horror is today, now that we've seen every possible kind of physical horror, not only in horror movies, but on the news.' We haven't yet found a way to cope with the fact that, at their base, a lot of people are not good people. And that's a scary, scary thought — that even that little bit of evil that's in every person can be drawn out and used . . ." And for a moment, it's impossible to be sure whether Carr is talking about Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, James G. Robinson or, perchance, the devil himself.

Blatty, who hasn't seen either version of The Beginning, is skeptical about the ability of any new Exorcist story to recapture the alchemy of the original. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing," he says. In his office on the Paramount Pictures lot, William Friedkin adds, "I don't know if it's possible to come close to what we did. But I can tell you that Blatty and I didn't set out primarily to terrify people. We set out to make a film about the mystery of faith." It's on that count, as Friedkin sees it, that the many pretenders to the Exorcist throne have come up woefully short.

"What I think they've done," he tells me, "is just taken the title and gone out and tried to scare the shit out of people, because that's their perception of what the original movie was. But its impact was far deeper than the fact that people were scared. They really believed it for the most part, or they at least thought it was possible. And they were frightened by it in the same way as by some kind of authentic miracle or disaster of some kind. They realized overwhelmingly that there was evil in the world — that evil could manifest itself and take lives the way a plague or an earthquake might." And while Friedkin's exposure to The Beginning has, like Blatty's, been limited to the movie's trailer — which he resents for "drizzling" shots from his film over Harlin's "like a salad dressing" — he has a few ideas about the purported reasons for Schrader's dismissal. "It's representative, in my opinion, of profound stupidity," he says. "What would they say about Luther or A Man for All Seasons — that they're too religious and profoundly internal, and don't have enough action, and don't have enough scares?"

Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning opens in theaters nationwide next Friday. Meanwhile, Schrader's cut, which had seemed as though it might go the way of von Stroheim's Greed and Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons to become The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen . . . and Never Will, has been announced by Morgan Creek as a future DVD release. "There ought to be something we can get out of this first movie," Robinson told me back in May. "So I thought, maybe if we spend the money to finish up the effects and get the sound right on the Schrader version, then on DVD we'll have a two-pack. Perhaps we can also do an HBO or Showtime sale. But definitely not a theatrical release." A more pragmatic Schrader is quick to point out that no actual deal has yet been put in writing. In the meantime, he's focusing his energies on The Walker, a thematic sequel of sorts to American Gigolo that he's been trying to get made for years. In the immediate future, he's doing a pilot for the FX network. And he has recently landed his "second job for the rest of my life," in the form of a book assignment from Faber & Faber that Schrader describes as the film-studies equivalent of The Western Canon. "Basically, it means re-reading and re-viewing the history of the cinema — the history of film aesthetics, the history of all the masters, all of it. It will be a defense of film as high art versus populist entertainment, as a sort of reaction against all this people's-choice mentality about movies. I'll be lucky to finish it before I die." So the war between heaven and hell — or maybe just art and commerce — continues.

NOTE: After completing the interviews for this article, I received a message from William Peter Blatty saying that Schrader had sent him a copy of his version of Exorcist: The Beginning and that, in spite of his initial reservations, he found it to be "wonderfully acted and directed," "elegant" and "a class act." In fact, he liked it so much he watched it twice.

[Milosh]

Na sajtu: http://www.joblo.com/index.php pojavila se (negativna) kritika filma. Sad, iako ja za informisanje preferiram ovaj sajt, naspram AICNa koji je poceo da mi bas ide na zivce, kritike koje pise JoBlo su u najmanju ruku sumnjive. Licno, iscekujem kritiku sa sajta: http://www.joblo.com/arrow/index.htm jer iako i Arrow zna da lupeta povremeno, na osnovu njegovih kritika moze se steci prilicno dobar uvid u sam film.

Kako god, Exorcist - The Begining wallpaper i dalje na mom desktopu...  

[Ghoul]

lele, al su ga ocrnili na rottentomatoes: od 13 kritika, 12 kaze 'smrdi'!

[crippled_avenger]

Pazi, ovo sto pise JoBlo aludira da je film DO JAJA. Hijene rastrzu decu, shower scene, gore, ludilo, visceralne situacije...

[WARLOCK]

uh! sad mi je lakse!

[Ghoul]

krip, barem ti, kao nekakav nabedjeni vernik, trebalo bi da si iznad tako infantilnih nazora poput 'dajte mi sise i krv, i to je dovoljno za isterivanje MOG djavola!'

exorcist 4 je, inace, dobio nehumano crne kritike- ali je samo u petak zaradio ~7 miliona $$$, sto znaci da bi za vikend mogao da namakne 17-22, sto je bar duplo od ocekivanih 11 mil.

ko zna zasto je to dobro- narocito u svetlu cinjenice da je mnogohvaljeni OPEN WATER zaradio duplo manje [3,8 mil. u petak]

[crippled_avenger]

Ghoul, dva najbitnija mesta za moje odrastanje su crkva i bioskop. Tebi je verovatno samo crkva jer u tvom rodnom selu nema bioskopa...

Renny nije moj duhovnik. Tako da sa njim ne nameravam da polemiem u veri. Mene kod njega zanima `djavo u telu` i `blagodeti prljavog` koje nam prikazuje...

BTW, Harry ga je na neki cudan nacin postedeo na AICN. Tamosnja ekipa mrzi Rennyja, dakle, film je sigurno pristojan...

[taurus-jor]

Yes, the "Exorcist" imprint will draw enough young males for a solid opening week. Once word gets out that this movie makes "Alien vs. Predator" look like a classic, boxoffice could drop 50% or more.

E, ovo stvarno zvuci uvredljivo.
AVP je bio "rotten", sa 24%

[Ghoul]

zanimljivo je poređenje ukupne zarade dosadašnjih exorcista.
poučno je, recimo, da je i totalno bezvezni II deo, na puku inerciju i slavu prethodnika, zaradio više od beskrajno boljeg (i cerebralnijeg) III dela.

The Exorcist     $193,000,000
The Exorcist Director's Cut   (Re-release)$39,671,011
Exorcist II: The Heretic    $30,749,142
The Exorcist III    $26,098,824

producent E4 se nada da za ovaj vikend namlati 40 mil. $$$  
ha ha.
bice srecan ako izbroji polovinu toga...


krip, ti si klasičan primer izreke 'što je kriplu milo, to mu i snilo', ako si u aicn rivjuu uspeo da vidiš 'poštedu' harlina.

'Ya know, I heard some people claim this was the 2nd Best EXORCIST film, but frankly... when I came home last night, I decided to rewatch William Peter Blatty's EXORCIST III... and ya know what? Blatty's film kicks the living shit out of Renny's popcorn balls.
I get the sense this "coulda beena contenda," but it only succeeds in being a slightly enjoyable mediocre film amongst a lot of distracting unnecessary over bloated bullshit. Oh well... '

jel ti ove reči daju nadu?

a pazi tek ovog:

''The Schrader version always sounded more appealing, on paper anyway," said Nick Nunziata, Webmaster of Cinematic Happenings Under Development, or CHUD.com, for short. "He's a real filmmaker."  

[ da se razumemo:   ]

[crippled_avenger]

pazi, harryjeva kritika je i u tvojim navodima, i u ostatku koji nisi citirao prilicno ambivalentna...

evo malo harryjevog prenemaganja:

Anyway – Why was Warner Brothers hiding EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING. While it isn't great, it's vastly superior to Paul W.S. Anderson's curiously entertaining floater, but it still isn't a great film... or even necessarily a good one. However, there is something fascinating with EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING... Watching the film, I couldn't help, but think that there was a great film in there somewhere.

I guess the reason it is so noticeable is that the cinematography from Vittorio Storaro is breathtaking at times

OK... so what do I like... When the movie is still, when we aren't leaving scenes too quickly... when there's something being observed and noted as being wrong. The production design for the physical sets, the church... the concept of the Jackal attack – but not the animation of it... and I like the way the possession plays with one's expectations.

btw, blattyjeva `trojka` je odlican film...

dakle, harryju pretezno ne valjaju efekti. i efekti su mu glavni fokus kritike. stavise neke scene, i to dosta bitne, smatra potentnim da nije losih efekata. ali, van pitanja efekata on ne iznosi mnogo fundamentalnih primedbi. uostalom, zasto toliko insitirati na efektima? sta fali ako se i vidi da je sve to SAMO film? pa nije valjda harry mislio da u filmu glume pravi demoni i da je sniman pre 50 godina u Egiptu?

glavna tendencija kritika je da napadaju konvencionalnost filma, krvoprolice, neukus i nasilje. ja mogu da zivim s tim, jer ni jedan film ne poredim sa friedkinovim prvencem...

[Milosh]

Pa, ovako, Harry je idiot i kritike sa AICNa vec neko vreme ni ne citam. Nedavno sam ponovo pokusao i odmah sam zazalio. Nista se tu bitno ne moze saznati, cak ni na nivou puke informacije. I to ubacivanje Paula Andersona mi lici na jeftini pokusaj vadjenja zbog umerene kritike AVPa, kao, nije Renny gori od Paula. Ma, sranje, besmisleno... Elem, mene jos niko nije do sada ubedio kako je novi Exorsist nesto epohalno i vredno paznje, ali ni da je negledljiva glupost. Ni ja ne poredim nastavke sa Friedkinovim orihinalom, ali cisto da ih prokomentarisem malo... Exorcist II je bio pokusaj da se uradi nova prica, proda novi koncept, a pri tom se potpuno zanemarila ta visceralna komponenta horora tj. jedina "iritacija" cula je ovde pruzena kroz uspavljujucu i potpuno besmislenu pricu. Steta, Exorcist II je imao potencijala i odlicnu ekipu ispred/iza kamere. Na kraju je ipak ispao djubre. Exorcist III je sa druge strane jedan od inteligentnijih nastavaka nekog filma uopste, i odlicna je ideja da se film gradi na saspensu, vise kao paranormalni krimic, u cemu Blatty itekako uspeva. Uzasno efektan film, sa relativno jednostavnom premisom.

Onda je dosao red na prequel... Samo da kazem kako su prequeli poceli da me nerviraju jos od prokletog Star Warsa (nek ide do djavola taj infantilni Lukas!), a sad su mi vec izasli na nos. No, i pored toga, radovao sam se kada je na scenu stupio Schrader. Mnogi su ga nepravedno otpisali, iako je, po meni, bas u 90im snimio jedan od svojih najboljih filmova (Light Sleeper) tj. napisao jedan od boljih scenarija (Bringing Out the Dead). Takodje, to je bila mogucnost da se osmisli novi koncept, koji se, nazalost, ucinio prilicno rizicnim glavesinama Warnera, pa su se odlucili za nesto sasvim drugacije. Na neki nacin, to je i dobro. Dobro, u smislu, da su odlucili ne da zamene samo Schradera vec i koncept sam, da su doveli nekog drugog da dovrsi Schraderov film to bi bila propast, ali oni su doveli reditelja koji ce za njih da snimi potpuno novi film, ne hororicnu dramu sa ozbiljno tretiranim pitanjem vere/religije, vec zabavni gore eksploatacijski horor, i to je sasvim ok, a za tako nesto, pogotovo posle vidjenog Mindhuntersa nema boljeg reditelja od Renny Harlina. Ja se samo nadam, iskreno nadam, da su se i Schreder i Harlin pokazali dobro u onome u cemu su najbolji, i da cemo imati dva nastavka Exorcista koji sigurno nece biti ni blizu originalu, mozda ne cak ni nivou odlicnog treceg dela, ali ipak vredni paznje. Uskoro cemo se i (raz)uveriti...

[Ghoul]

pazi, miki- jedna stvar su vrednosni sudovi; na tom planu, hairy know-less je idiot, i nj. sudovi su mi bezvredni, tj. njegove kritike ili ne citam, ili preletim pogledom ako me film bas zanima [sto je slucaj sa exo. 4];

druga stvar su zamerke koje ima na cisto tehnickom nivou [ocajni viz. efekti], sto je nesto sto neko sa njegovim geekovskim gledalackim iskustvom moze da zapazi i prepozna; tome sam sklon da poverujem, tim pre sto se i u drugim kritikama pominju losi cgi efekti; i to me brine, jer znam koliko je produkcija harlinovog filma zbrzana - bukvalno su ga ugurali u bioskop, ne pitajuci da li je gotov, i u kom stanju.

krip je jezivo naivan kad izjavljuje da tako nesto nije bitno;
hej, krip, pa nisam ni ocekivao da sa ovog [ili bilo kog slicnog filma] izadjes lupajuci se u glavu s pitanjem: 'gde li nadjose ovako dobru kameru u egiptu 1949?!!!'
ali jebote, da bi bilo koji narativni film delovao -a horor posebno- moras da imas tu privremenu suspenziju neverice; ako te budjavi efekti u svakom trenutku podsecaju da gledas jebeni film, gde je onda strava [fiktivna, naravno; znamo da gledamo film, fikciju, o djavolu i bogu, dvema velikim fikcijama]?
cemu onda efekti u bilo kom filmu? mozes da nacrtas king konga na komadu kartona, i tim kartonom da mases pred glumicom, a da tvoja mashta [if any] zamisli sve to kako treba [posto, je li, znas da gledas FILM, nesto sto nije stvarno   ].

ja se i dalje nadam [naj]boljem, ali poslednje vesti JESU zabrinjavajuce...

zna li iko da li je film vec kupljen, i kad ce kod nas?

[eric cartman]

Po ovom novom  EXORCIST-u slobodno mogu napraviti  video-igricu. To sve govori o filmu. Ne bih vise...uostalom, vidjecete

[Black Mamba]

dakle, definitvno bih mogla da se zabrinem za buducnost horor filmova.. ili ja to samo gledam pogresne filmove... or wha da fuck is goin` on.. gde su oni alieni, predatori... gde je onaj exorcist od pre x godina



elem, sve sto mi je bilo ultra u filmu je otprilike nekih 10ak minuta... koliko i traje... hmm.... spoilers dakle, a nechete spoilere

demon rulez ... dakle, Sarah aka Izabella Scorupco ce vam se svideti.. ja sam bar otkinula na ovu njenu ulogu... mnogo jako, ono, posebno ovih 10ak minuta... steta sto to nekako nisu razvukli

ipak, onako kompletno, film me prilicno razocarao.... neke scene su nepotrebno ljigave.. efekti su slabi.... blah blahh.... sve u svemu.. mislim da je krajnje vreme da prestanu da se izmotavaju i prave nastavke, tj da skrnave onako dobre horor filmove

[crippled_avenger]

Harlin ume da bude aljkav sa efektima a Morgan Creek je svakako hteo sto pre da plasira film.

Peti EXORCIST bi po Ghoulovom scenariju trebalo da radi njegov omiljeni reditelj Kim Yu Yu Ping Pong, na nekim filmovima potpisan i kao Subaru Go Go, da se desava u Niskoj Banji i govori o egleskoj porodici Hitchcock koja je pocetkom proslog veka dosla za ocevim poslom i zivela u Banji dok je on instalirao cevi za blato. Malog sina,  debelog Alfreda su Banjani zvali `Aca Bure`, sve do dana kada je uzeo raspece i nabio ga u...

[crippled_avenger]

Exorcist: The Beginning: Horror. Starring Stellan Skarsgard, James D'Arcy and Izabella Scorupco. Directed by Renny Harlin. (R, 114 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not since half the cast of "Poltergeist" started dying mysterious deaths has a movie set seemed so obviously possessed by Lucifer himself.
"Exorcist: The Beginning" lost director John Frankenheimer -- he left the project in 2002 and died shortly thereafter -- and the equally reputable Paul Schrader, who was reportedly fired. Then, in a development more horrifying than anything in the script, Warner Bros. hired "Cutthroat Island" director Renny Harlin, whose leg was broken in 14 places when he was hit by a car during production. And finally, the studio delayed the screening until Thursday night, a tactic generally used to keep critics from warning moviegoers about a bomb (see: "Alien vs. Predator" ... or better yet, don't).

But while the fourth "Exorcist" movie may have unmitigated disaster written all over it, the finished product is somehow sort-of-kind-of not all that bad.

The horror movie is a prequel to William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist," which was directed by William Friedkin in 1973. The lone connection is the Father Merrin character, played by Max von Sydow in the original and by fellow Swede Stellan Skarsgard here. In "The Exorcist," Merrin mentions a demon he confronted in Africa, and "The Beginning" tells that tale -- explaining in the process how Merrin regained his religious faith and went pro in his career, jettisoning demons from puke-spewing pubescent girls.

At this point, instead of dwelling on what's missing from the film, it might be useful to list what's still there. It's clear that at some point, someone intended to make a movie worthy of the original, and scattered elements of that dream remain intact. "Exorcist: The Beginning" works with a blasphemous yet surprisingly decent script ("God is not here today, priest." "Sometimes I think the best view of God is from hell.") and an able cast led by the brooding Skarsgard. As Merrin explores the mystery surrounding a strange church in Kenya that appears to have been buried shortly after it was built, he's accompanied by Bond-girl-turned-decent-actress Izabella Scorupco as dedicated aid worker Dr. Sarah Novack.

And while Harlin's budget was clearly limited (Schrader reportedly completed a film, and Warner asked Harlin for a reshoot), at least someone sprang for a good production designer and lead makeup artist. It may have been a mistake to take on another chapter in an inventively terrifying classic such as "The Exorcist," but what the prequel lacks in spinning heads it makes up for with horrible facial contusions, festering tombs and premature organ donations.

There are plenty of distinct Renny Harlin moments throughout the film, and many are quite distracting. The version made by Schrader -- who wrote "Taxi Driver" and directed "Affliction" -- probably didn't include a pack of poorly rendered computerized hyenas ripping apart a boy, a gratuitous special effect that is rivaled only by the maggot-infested stillborn baby Harlin treats moviegoers to in the second act. Much like its source material, "Exorcist: The Beginning" is filled with shocking images, and it's also a great impetus to start a diet.

But before the Harlin-bashing gets out of hand, it should be noted that he is playing to a modern horror film crowd that expects something scary to pop out of nowhere every few minutes. It must have been hard, but he provides all of those mainstream thrills while treating the source material with subtlety, nodding to the original film instead of repeating the same formula wholesale.

But after a well-paced first two acts, "Exorcist: The Beginning" eventually collapses under its enormous weight. The inevitable exorcism isn't enough -- we also get a full-scale tribal war and a Nazi-saturated flashback subplot that tries to mine "Sophie's Choice" emotions but ends up confusing the plot.

By the time the three or four false endings are finished and the credits roll, moviegoers will be left wondering whether Schrader's version will be released on DVD.

Somewhere in this mediocre horror film, there's a worthy sequel. Right now, fans of "The Exorcist" will have to settle for this "Beginning."

-- Advisory: This film contains violence, gore, adult language and sexual situations. E-mail Peter Hartlaub at phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.

[Ghoul]

krip, priznaj- KOLIKO si rivjua koji su FLEJMOVALI E4 procitao dok nisi nasao ovaj jedan, koji je 'pohvalan' utoliko sto ga naziva mediokritetskim?

EXORCIST 5; PEE-SOUP IN DA HOOD, prema sinopsisu Crippled Dimselhajlhitmajstera:
glavni junak je nigra reper u ghettou koji pokusava da izgubi nevinost; posto nikako ne moze da sebi privoli objekat svojih masturbatorskih fantazija [igra je Lisa Boner], okrece se vuduu; malo da li on zna [little does he know] da nabivsi fetish-lutkicu svoje voljene u prkno postaje host of da Devil [igra ga Busta Rhymes with gangsta]; Djavo ga muci erotskim kosmarima punim obilate golotinje, ali nigra ipak zahvaljujuci njemu izdaje profanity-ridden album MY HEART IS BLACK sa koga platinasti tiraz postize singl YO MOMMA SUCKS MY DING-DONG IN HELL koji, usput, zaradi novouvedeni rejting 'Poppal Advisory: Blasphemous Lyrics'; nigra zahvaljujuci Djavolu postaje bogat i slavan, sto mu automatski privuce davno-zeljenu pichku; u surprise twist endingu, usred krvoliptece sex-scene, ona mu otkriva svoju demonsku prirodu, a nigra zavapi: "Shit, bolje da sam ostao nevin!" dok ga horde djavola kroz rupu u podu odvlace u crveno obasjan podrum.

Film rezira Renny 'Say How High' Harlin, nakon sto su Scorcese, de Palma i Woody Allen [sukcesivno] najureni sa snimanja.

[taurus-jor]

     


i jedan, samo za Lurda:

[crippled_avenger]

Hey Harry here, just came back from the EXORCIST: PEE SOUP IN THA HOOD movie, and boy, that film rocks major ass! It`s not just me, it`s Father Geek and Quint begging me to call Morgan Creek and obtain the DVD to see it at home on Droolorama.

Now, let`s get one tghing straight. This kid who pitched this shit to Morgan Creek is one crazy gangabangin` homie. I`ve heard all kinds of shit about him from Marty Scorsese and Billy Friedkin, and it kinda made me hate the fat fuck. But when De Palma claimed that kid is too edgy for public screened films, I said HELL YEAH, HYPE MACHINE HIT THE BACKBURNER.

Now, before calling this one EXORCIST`N`DA HOOD or 666 MILES, lemme tell you one thing. This boy not just exorcises. He fuckin` converts people into hiphop fans. I mean, imagine Renny THE HACK Harlin coming out like a saint out of this one. His shit is so slick in this picture!!! This guy never dodges Cripple`s mindless acts of senseless violence commited upon US, the audience.

The piching of this flick went kinda `black teen rapper with a boner on his cheerleader girl next door, sells his soul for success and the Devil comes for a bloody payday. Now take this backbone of the story in the OLD BOY, VOLCANO HIGH, CLOCKERS, NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, NEAR DARK, DIE HARD, LUTHER THE GEEK and BLADE territory and you`re just barely grasping what the hell goes on in this one...

When it comes to rating, it ain`t just NC-17 like MPAA said, it`s NC-666 in my book, it`s NC-LONG TIME DEAD!!! I`v e never seen something so perverse and violent. Abnd the most importatnt thing, it`s rarely gross. IT`S JUST PLAIN PERVERSE AND VIOLENT... This kid Cripple specializes in movies your momma won`t let you see. I`m kinda glad my mom is dead...

Go buy ten tickets. Use one to enter, while the rest may come handy when you start creaming...

[Ghoul]

Not since the original THE EXORCIST have we seen such a wave of mass hysteria & heart attacks.
Among the first casualties was the famous film critic Roger Ebert, who passed out on a special preview screening. His last words were recorded as:
"This kind of m...movies m...makes me m...m...maaaad! Oh, my god, my old w...wound... !"

The blaxploitation EXORCIST created a wave of controversies, inspiring praise from some unexpected quarters:

Laszlo Yanosh Pishta La Vey [son of A. Shandor La Vey]: "My Scarlet Woman got so horny around the middle of the movie- I think it was at the scene with a goat, a turnip, and two nuns- that I had to miss the second half. But boy, what a ride she gave me, that infernal bitch! Later I had to go see it on my own. I must say my only complaint is that they made Satan a nigra. Now, that's pushing it a little too far! We all know that it is Yahweh –may his haemorrhoids eternally blister!- who's actually a nigra-lover! Other than that, I found the movie as Satanic as they cum!"

Mel Gibson: "I am humbled into submission in front of this vision of pure carnal spirituality. Never was flesh so transcendent as it was in PEE-SOUP IN DA HOOD! Never Sin so alluring! Never Temptation so explicit! Never was splatter so spiritual!... I was green with envy at his subtle use of unfaked cumshots. Damn, I wish I thought of that first, NC-17 or no Nancy 17!"

Pope John 'Fancy' Paul Gautier XVIII : "Hic nunc id stabat mater. Hic deinde metuant ver non facit. Suae quisque vidi vici. Hic... Hic..."


George Bush: "I may be from Texas, and I may not be famous as an art lover –or any kind of lover at all, for that matter- but I know the face of Eeeevil when I see one. And Evil has a black face! There is a lesson to be learnt here, folks!"

Iako je srpska premijera kasnila za američkom punih 9 meseci, film je i u Srbiji naišao na žestoke reakcije javnih ličnosti, i čak doveo do podela u našoj Crkvi:

Patrijarh Pavle: ''Ovo je vrsta đubreta sa Zapada na koje smo mi u Crkvi oduvek upozoravali. Duh Svetog Save u meni gnuša se svakog sekunda ovog grozomornog filma. To što je nastao po scenariju nekog napaćenog, zastranjenog Srbina navodi mi suze u oči. Neka je Gospod milostiv prema tebi, sinko, ako je ovo tvoja vizija hrišćanske duhovnosti!''

Vladika Pahomije: ''Mislite vi šta hoćete, ali ja tvrdim da scena sa dva dečaka, teglom meda i krastavcem govori više o Veri, Iskušenju, Grešnoj Ploti i Iskupljenju od celog Novog Zaveta.''

Potražili smo i malog Dimitrija, autora scenarija, za komentar, ali ga na kućnoj adresi nismo mogli pronaći. Kako saznajemo, porodica ga se odrekla već u 16. minutu filma –otprilike, na sceni sa grbavcem, dve tinejdžerke i konjem- i njegova sadašnja adresa ostaje nepoznata. Uplakana majka je, držeći u rukama veliku uramljenu sliku svog sina (uvećan kadar iz filma TITO I JA) samo projecala: ''Monstrum koji je napisao ono zlodelo nije naš sin! On će za nas uvek biti mali Zoki.''

[Milosh]

Hajde, lepo rent a room, pa na miru i do mile volje is/u-terujte jedan drugome "djavole"... Ili vam je mozda turn on samo kada neko sve to posmatra?  


...kako god, evo i kritike sa arrow in the head, ocena je 2 od 4, a covek je inace fan Renija Harlina: http://www.joblo.com/arrow/exorcist-beginning.htm

[Ghoul]

ma oladi, miki; opusti se;

krip i ja smo geekovi; we like to watch... & be watched...

[Milosh]

Inace, procitao sam kritiku. Cini mi se da je Arrow dobro potrefio sustinu, i svakako je neuporedivo suvislije od onoga na AICNu. Videcemo i sami kada/ako film dodje u ove nase bioskope... Imam na kompu neke spiskove koje kada se koji film planira za distribuciju, i na jednom Exorcista uopste ni nema (ali zato ima Mindhunters!), a na drugom se nalazi, ali bez precizno utvrdjenog datuma. Imam utisak da ce se ovo ipak pogledati na divxu...

[Spider Jerusalem]

Jebote, kakvo hajpovanje...  Ovoliko se nisam naložio još od onda kad su mi rekli da je Ru Pol žensko. Toliko sam se naložio, infact, da sam odma' na telefon -- jebeš što je long distance, platiću od honorara za kolumne u Emitoru -- pozv'o braću Vorner i sredio da se obe verzije srede za distribuciju kao one-time-only šou na Beokonu 2005. Tako da, ono, to je sređeno. (To je gotovo: so pluća.) Nakon što sam prošetao do Pajine kuće da malo celomudreno i hrišćanski smireno probistrim sa njim oko celog projekta, shvatio sam da je krajnje vreme da obavim još par long-distance telefonskih poziva (pa nek' ide život). Zvao sam Šrekija, zvao sam Renija, obojica će da dođu, pokušavam da ih nagovorim da posle Tripple-Cripple-Bill projekcije odrade jedno rvanje rimsko-protestantskim stilom.

'Teo je da dođe i Mel kad je čuo od svojih špijunčića šta smeram, ali glatko sam ga odbio kad se, pun entuzijazma, nudio da odradi uvodni govor večeri na aramejskom. Nadam se da mi fanovi filma Signs neće zameriti, a ni oni drugi, fanovi najboljeg flika sa Melom Gibsonom ikad, Payback. Pričaj srpski da te ceo svet razume, zealot pendejo.

Sad razmišljam o nekim propratnim sitnicama. Javni egzorcizam Isidore "Calmer than you are" Bjelice, kurs za egzorciste početnike -- predškolski časovi za decu koje će držati Vladika Pahomije, prestižnija ulaznice u mesto održavanja projekcije koje se plaćaju Isključivo Pravoslavnom Dušom, jeftinije ulaznice za pola litre krvi (kupovina na Žilet servisu)... organizovaću jedan brejnstorming sastanak sa Džeronimom i gospođicom Hadžipešić pa ćemo već smisliti.


Dakle, pomenuo sam da će se raditi o tripple-bill projekciji. Koji će biti tradicionalni "film iznenađenja" na Beoconu ove godine, pitate se? Well, none other than the new Serbian peeing-soup horror flick, Ukleti 12:10! Pogledao sam grubi kat i mogu vam reći da mi je, u suštini, cela ova vratolomka od ideje sa dovoženjem đavoisterivača na labilnu pamet pala samo zato kako bih, onako fanovski, pokazao da, u poređenju sa Ukletim 12:10, nijedna od inostranih vizija kako to ZAISTA izgleda ne može da prismrdi ovoj našoj. Mislim, Šred & Ren've got nossing on us! Nossing, Lebowski, nossing! Mi bre isterujemo đavle i iz dildoa, majkojepci anglosaksonski! Do Svetog dana ove čudesne manifestacije moje usne biće zapečaćene kao Kijanuu onomad u Matriksu, ali reći ću samo par stvari. Radi se o uveliko najboljem horor filmu ikada snimljenom. Kad pogledam samo koji džinksovi su pali na leđa produkcije američkih "Početaka", zapitam se šta se te sissy-pussies žale, jebote. Mislim, ovde je režiser koji je prvobitno trebalo da režira film umro onog trenutka kad je rekao sudbonosno "da" producentima. (Njegovo ime ostaće tajna, takve su želje porodice gadno preminulog.) Na dane kad je trebalo da snimamo osunčane eksterijerne kadrove, namrčilo se nebo od Zemuna k'o da će govna da padaju. Na dane kada su nam bili potrebni kišoviti eksterijeri, zvezda žeže ko da joj je poslednji put. Morali smo veštačku kišu da izazovemo nad poljanama Vojvodine kako bi smo postigli neprejebivo tight produkcijske uslove kojima smo bili prokleti since day one (mislim, shooting schedule zahtevao je šezdeset zasebnih junita na različitim lokacijama, pritom ne računam onu ekspediciju koju smo poslali na Kosovo a od koje već nedeljama ništa nismo čuli... trenutno je u planu odašiljanje rescue-team-not-assasins ekspedicije koja za cilj ima da pronađe ovu prvu, zagubljenu ekspediciju... lider ekspedicije biće brat predvodnika prethodne, zalutale ekspedicije). Bili smo opskrbljeni samo jednim filterom za kameru, a da ne govorimo da nismo ni imali kameru, nego smo većinu materijala morali da snimimo u zenicu oka našeg kamermana (ova reč je tako retro!), filter da prekujemo u kontaktno sočivo (kako bismo dobili onu pravu toniskotovsku nijansu), a katove smo radili tako što bi pomoćnik kamermana maljem po glavi snimača zviznuo po lobanji - nismo govorili "Rez!", govorili smo "Krc!" - ili ga zasekao sigurnim potezom skalpela po genitalijama - ovde je uzvik "Rez!" dobio i jedno dublje značenje.

Naravno, moram da kažem i nešto o našem star-dajrektoru, režiseru ekstraordineru, Johnsonu Brohnsonu.

Naime, JB je najsrećniji čovek na svetu. Let me rephrase that. JB je jedini - ujedno i prvi - režiser koga smo angažovali za naš mali poduhvat koji nije susreo svog tvorca tokom prvog dana snimanja. Da pomenemo, on je šestošezdesetišesti režiser koga smo unajmili tokom putešestvija priprema za ovo ostvarenje. On je jedini preživeo. Alal mu ćufte. Svi ostali su poginuli. (Dakle, bilans je JB: 1, humans: nossing.) Na razne, kolorfulne načine. Par njih se srokalo helikopterom kad su išli da traže aerial-shots lokacije po gradu Dragan Kresoja style (sve smo to snimili, tako da će extra sadržaji DVD izdanja biti i te kako sadržajni i fićjureskni: gruesome nesuđeni movie director death #1, gruesome nesuđeni movie director death #2, pa tako do srećnog broja, a sve u odeljku "Lepo im je pisalo u horoskopu za taj dan..." ima za svakog po nešto, a za nekog sve); neke su pojele hijene koje smo unajmili kao propove (jer, za razliku od Holivuda, naše hijene su, kao i njihov smeh, 100% prave u izvornom smislu te reči, gotovo više nego ljudski); neke smo jednostavno ofirali mačetom kad bi nam se učinili kao preveliki postmodernisti i taj footage ćemo iskoristiti za scene našeg sledećeg projekta: "Dan Zaljubljenih" (podnaslov: "Ništa što Majkl Majers ne može iseći u sobi za montažu"; based on a rather gory book by Ratko Radunović, scenario: Ted Tally). But look at me, I'm rambling again...



E, da. Od ljudi koje ćemo za premijeru na Beokon zvati od ovih gorepomenutih big shots najaviću još i onog pedera Robinsona, onu ženturaču onog tipa što je režirao Supermena (cura nema veze sa ovim filmovima, ali dovodimo je kako bi je raščerečili što producira Konstantina), dok ćemo prema gostu, Kejlebu Karu, tom očajnom piscu, biti relativno blagi, jer mi ono "cocksucker" upućeno na Šrederovu adresu zvuči kao da je iz milošte, nekakav pillow-talk, šta li, kao kad meni Ghoul kaže da imam "fensi gaće" ili da sam "city boy". On that note, ako Dragoulche bude dobar mali satanista, možda mu sredim i prikazivanje u Niškoj banji. Ako tamo nema bioskopa, nema veze, pozvaćemo Renija da kao charity work spravi i nazida jedan solo-plex Samo Za Ghoulove Oči, ili stejdžujemo prikazivanje u lokalnoj crkvici -- a kako crkve imaju do jaja reverberaciju, ne moramo da se brinemo za zvuk: imaćemo multi-4thdimensional-stereo-surrounding koji će raditi po principu Braunovog kretanja, ma smislićemo nešto kako se nedavno-deportovani ne bi osećao kao da ga je Dobri Bog uskratio za više nego što je zaslužio...


Ma, sve ide ko pesma.

Elem, kažem vam, Beokon 2005 is the place to be. Da epitafujem rečima Johnsona "Die Another Day" Brohnsona:

"It's a Deal, it's sharper than Hatori Hanzo's Steel, it's the SALE OF THE FUCKIN' CENTURY, MAAAN."


Am I wrong?

[crippled_avenger]

Mozemo Ghoul i ja da se hrvemo grcko-niskim stilom...

Inace, EXORCIST je indie prodaja van Amerike. Kakve smo srece, gledacemo ga kao BASIC, posle dve godine, sa ustaskim titlovima...

[taurus-jor]

E, Cripple, bash je zanimljivo shto se nashi distributeri prave da su srpski i hrvatski isti jezik. Bash fin izgovor da ne plate prevodioce, koje ionako plachaju bedno.

[Spider Jerusalem]

To ti je za nauk da takvo smeće izbegavaš da gledaš u bioskopima, Crip.

Am I wrong?

Ne vidim šta je problem sa Exorcistom. Mislim, izbaciće ga na DVD-u jednom, to iovako ne ide u bioskope, pa ćemo kupovati plastikom. Mislim, nisi mi jasan, kao da ne pričamo o istom filmu...