EricRoth Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Personally, I'm of the belief that there should always be exactly one sequel to Forrest Gump. Said sequel, Forrest Gump 2: Gump Again, has already been made. This baby lives inside the maniac world of John Waters and Cecil B. Demented, and it stars Kevin Nealon. It's totally ludicrous, and luckily only a brief blip inside another film, rather than a full-length, big-buzzed feature.

It looks like that's all we will get, courtesy of 9/11. While talking with screenwriter Eric Roth about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, /film asked about long-in-gestation sequel Gump & Co. It seems he whipped up a sequel back in 2001, one that would continue with the story just two minutes after the original ended, and handed it in on September 10, 2001. Then came 9/11, and it was decided that the sequel was no longer relevant. "The world had changed. Now time has obviously passed, but maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are."

Hear, hear.* Forrest Gump is an interesting film, one that's been doused with praise and derision, enough to make me pretty sure that any sequel wouldn't work as well as the first. There's just too much expectation in the air -- both positive and negative. Then again, maybe I say that because I'm not a big fan of the first. What say you?

*Edited

The cover for the spiffy new movie edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reads: "the inspiration for the upcoming major motion picture." Anyone who reads the famous 1922 short story, about a man who is mysteriously born a septuagenarian and begins to age backwards, will immediately realize that it can't be any more than that. My copy is about fifty small, large-print pages, and it takes no more than twenty minutes to read. There are only about four characters of any note, and each of their relationships is bitter and hollow; the whole thing is a quick, moody burst of melancholy, a high concept on which Fitzgerald had no interest in lingering.

The anxiously awaited movie is directed by David Fincher – his follow-up to Zodiac -- and written by Eric Roth (the IMDb doesn't list a credit for Fitzgerald), whose resume includes Forrest Gump, The Insider, and Munich. Compared to the source material, the film has virtually a cast of thousands. Benjamin's love interest is renamed Daisy – the story's "Hildegarde" just doesn't have the same ring to it – and is played by Cate Blanchett. "Daisy age 6" is played by Elle Fanning (a.k.a. Little Dakota), though it's hard to imagine what use the film will have for a Daisy age 6: do she and Benjamin now meet while the latter is an "old man" and she a toddler? President Theodore Roosevelt shows up, for some reason. And, at least according to this Ain't It Cool test screening review, the current incarnation of the movie clocks in at three hours.

After the drama of Little Children, Bona Fide Picture producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa are looking for more, and they've found it. Variety reports that the duo will produce another youth-titled project with very adult themes -- an adaptation of Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, which will be made with Warner Independent Pictures.

Eric Roth, the pen behind Forrest Gump, The Insider, and Munich, is in talks to adapt the novel, which follows the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Las Vegas. Think Lovely Bones, but instead of an eerie account of a girl's death and its aftermath, this is a seedy story set in Sin City. According to the Washington Post review up on Amazon, the kid is a spoiled brat who runs away into a raunchy environment where one girl even cuts her nipples open for a floor show. However, while it just sounds raunchy, the review also says that even though it's not polished, the novel "deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter and the sensitivity with which he treats it." Whether that sensitivity makes its way to the big screen -- we'll have to wait and see.

But this isn't the only project in the works for Yerxa and Berger. They're finalizing the money for The Undeniable Charm of Sloppy Unruh, a comic fable starring Patrick Wilson, Zooey Deschanel, Amy Ryan, Seann William Scott, and John Doe, and they are also reteaming with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris for the Tom Perrotta adaptation The Abstinence Teacher.

The Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men who escape from a cancer ward determined to complete everything on their "Bucket List" -- a list of things to do before they "kick the bucket." The film, directed by Rob Reiner, was just named one of the Ten Best of the Year by the National Board of Review. Cinematical spoke with the film's screenwriter, Justin Zackham.

Cinematical: You sit down to write The Bucket List, do you ever dream that you're going to get Rob Reiner to direct, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to star...

JZ: Of course not! I'd have to be an idiot! Not even close. I wrote it with Morgan Freeman's voice in mind, somehow thinking maybe I'd find a way to get it to him. But no, nothing like this.

Cinematical: And how did you get it to these huge names? What were the steps that brought this movie to the screen?

JZ: I went to film school at NYU. I did a TV pilot that I wrote and executive produced in New York with Paul Sorvino years ago. And then I came out here (Los Angeles) and was dicking around for a while. I made Going Greek, which was a very sort of crappy fraternity comedy that I did back in 2000. I wrote, produced, and directed, and that took so much out of me that I spent another couple years dicking around. And then I just sat down one day and wrote my own "Bucket List" just to kind of get my head organized. On that list was like "Get a movie made by a major studio, marry the perfect woman," all that kind of stuff. A lot of the stuff on there wound up in the movie. I had always fantasized about going to the Pyramids, the Great Wall, I've always been sort of obsessed with the whole notion of Everest. All those things were on it, and I just stuck it on a bulletin board.

About a year later, I just came up with this quote one day, a line that's actually in the film -- "You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you." Stuck that up on the bulletin board. And then another year went by before I had the idea "What about making this into a script?" And I thought if it were about me, at the time I was about 34, it wouldn't be that interesting. So I decided to make it about two guys who had lived a full life, and they only have a few months left, and suddenly there's a ticking clock, and the things that do have real importance, at least in their minds. The story really became about the one thing neither of these guys puts on their list but is the thing they most want. And that's a best friend. I have this ridiculous process, and I wrote the actual script really quickly, in about two weeks.

Oftentimes Hollywood's lack of originality leads to overexposed trends. Remember when every action movie seemed to be easily defined as 'Die Hard on a ...'? Remember when disaster movies were all the rage? And then twenty years later when they were all the rage again? Remember when there were like a hundred body-swapping comedies? Well, there appear to be fewer trends these days, or maybe it's just that Hollywood turns trends into full-blown practices, as in the case of sequels, comic book movies and fantasy films based on literary franchises. Nowadays even a promised trend, like the one involving religious Passion of the Christ copycats, isn't necessarily going to happen. But despite there being so few here-today-gone-tomorrow film fads, there's at least seven bad ideas currently in vogue in Tinsel Town, and all of them need to disappear soon, lest they too become permanent.

1. Torture Porn

I'm going to start with an easy, surely obvious one. Torture porn is the latest trend in horror, a genre that changes its predominant style every few years, and it may be the most despised -- at least by us non-horror junkies. I miss the days when a friend, an actual junkie, could drag me to a harmless scary movie that provided a few screams, a few laughs and afterward, at the most, a few silly nightmares. Now, with each new horror movie there's promise of a seriously depressing experience. After watching The Hills Have Eyes, I realized I hadn't been frightened at all. Instead I wanted to cry my heart out. I haven't been to a horror flick since, and my friend is going solo. Sure, I hear that Eli Roth's movies are a lot more enjoyable than watching a young woman raped while watching her father burned alive and her mother raped and then shot in the head, but I just haven't been in the mood to find out.

Apparently the torture porn trend is already on its way out. Hostel II performed poorly at the box office and Captivity may have peaked too soon, reaching maximum tastelessness before even opening in theaters. So what will be next? I'm rather looking forward to when slasher movies are in fashion again, when I can delight in seeing sinful human beings killed off quickly and deservedly by an implausible maniac. Which brings me to the next trend ...

Of all the actors who are regularly mentioned on Cinematical, Johnny Depp certainly seems to be the most popular. So, I am glad to be able to give the readers another update on Depp's passion project, Shantaram, which has just acquired a new director. Indian auteur Mira Nair has signed on to the film, which is based on Gregory David Roberts' mostly autobiographical novel. Shooting is now slated to begin later this year, once Depp is done with Sweeney Todd.

It has been awhile since we last heard about this film -- its formerly attached director, Peter Weir, dropped out last summer. But there were probably few worries that Depp would run out of projects to work on. Aside from Sweeney, he's also slated for The Rum Diary and maybe Rex Mundi. Plus, his production company has a number of adaptations he could star in. Still, Shantaram is the film that Depp paid $2 million for rights to, so he was probably most interested in getting it off and running again.

Dozens of paparazzi were crouched like lions outside the entrances and exits of a Manhattan hotel last Friday, and not because they're big fans of Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth and really wanted to take a snap of him. The more attractive half of 'Brangelina' is in town, on break from filming A Mighty Heart in India, and she made a late agreement to show up at the junket for her latest project, The Good Shepherd. The film, which is best described as 'The WASP Godfather,' originated with Francis Ford Coppola some years ago and tumbled through many levels of development hell before finally landing at the feet of Robert De Niro. It tells the story of the birth of the CIA through a tight-knit group of ambitious boys, including Matt Damon, who first meet at Yale and then continue their secret-handshake games throughout World War II and into the Cold War. Among other things, the film marks the return of Joe Pesci to the screen after an absence of eight years.

Thanks to the barely controlled chaos of the day and the various gossip columnists who muscled into the event after catching wind of you-know-who's RSVP, Cinematical wasn't able to drum up much time with the attendees, but we were still on hand for most of the day to watch De Niro, Roth, Damon and Jolie sweat it out under the hot lights for the sake of their pet project. Here is a sampling of what went on:

Angelina Jolie

Cinematical: Can you give an update on Atlas Shrugged? What sparked your interest in developing it? "I think it's a wonderful book. I'm a fan of her writing. I think it's an amazing project. It's, in many ways, a controversial and complicated project and I think it needs to be done right. There's been a lot of talk as to how that can be and 'what are the important reasons for making it?' There's a lot of really great people involved. It's being written now, and we'll see as the script comes out, how close we are. Then we'll know how close we are to possibly making it. Everybody involved, the producers involved, we all sat down around a table and we all agreed that if we couldn't do it right, if we couldn't do it justice, if along the way any one piece didn't come together like the right director or the right script, then we would all just fold it and not do it. So that's where we're at right now. We're taking it step by step, and we're going to make damn sure that it's done right."