Freddie Prinze Jr. Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The story behind the making of Delgo is heartwarming and inspiring. Fathom Studios, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been creating commercial computer animation for more than ten years. When they decided to produce their own feature-length narrative film, they did it completely independent of the Hollywood studio system. They labored long and hard with a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff than the animation behemoths. They bravely posted "digital dailes" throughout production, a kind of progressive, online series of "making of" snippets. They recruited a slew of actors with name recognition -- Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan, and the late Anne Bancroft in her last performance -- to voice the characters.

If only the film as a whole was as dramatic and lively as the behind-the-scenes story. Under the direction of Marc F. Adler and Jason Maurer, the 3-D animation is quite lovely to behold, but the characters are one-dimensional and the script, credited to six writers, spends too much time on convoluted plot mechanics. Delgo falls into an uncomfortable place where the technical achievement can be admired without the emotions ever being engaged, provoking nothing more than a tepid response ("meh") when the end credits begin to roll.

Set in a lush fantasy world of flying creatures, colorful reptiles, and the odd monster, beast, and giant insect, Delgo pits two races against one another. The proud, dominant, invading race lords it over the humble, subjugated, native race. Sound familiar?

I'm sure I don't have to explain why Alec Baldwin didn't show up at last week's roundtables for Brooklyn Rules, the 1980s mob drama that opened Friday, in which he plays a ruthless Gambino enforcer, but most of the principal cast as well as the director were on hand to discuss the film. Rules stars Freddie Prinze Jr. as a Brooklyn bum who is trying to look out for his two best friends in the neighborhood while courting Mena Suvari's character, an uptown girl who is worried about getting close to a guy who might have mob connections. The film was shot over two and a half years ago but a bad distribution deal kept it sitting on the shelf until things could be worked out for a limited release. Thanks to an actor showing up forty-five minutes late at another junket nearby, Cinematical's intrepid reporter (me) missed the first few interviewees for Rules -- director Michael Corrente was apparently a hoot -- but I was able to sneak into the roundtable room just in time for Prinze and Suvari. Below is a sampling of the numerous questions asked by all the assembled journalists and the answers, so enjoy.

Freddie Prinze Jr.


The film depends a lot on the chemistry of the three friends -- how did you work on establishing that?

FPJ: Michael was very smart -- the director, Michael -- in the regard that, during the rehearsal process, he'd start a conversation casually. He'd start a conversation casually, and be like ... this is the way Michael talks not me ... "Who's the first broad you nailed?" So I would begin to discuss the first woman that I slept with, and you'd start talking about how horrible you were, and it was like ten seconds long and she was like 'what?' and it was really embarrassing ... and then the other guys would start to chime in, and they'd crack jokes on you. Then you'd find out that it was even less with them, and ha ha ha, and then Michael would say "Now read the scene right now!" and we'd just go right into the scene with that same type of energy and that same type of vibe. That really developed a lot of the dialogue and the pace that was required for the scenes that we were gonna do. As far as chemistry, we just lucked out.

Scott and I were confined to a trailer that, I kid you not, was smaller than this table, and he would just chain-smoke and I had a really bad habit of chewing tobacco, and so the door had to be closed because it was cold and so the smoke's in there and we'd watch that one scene in True Romance with Christopher Walken, and we'd do our Walken impressions. His was much better, but my Roger Rabbit was better. And we would watch movies, and Scott and I, we just got along. I guess some of it was that he has a father in this business, I had a father in this, and the sons coming up a chip on their shoulder and then a few years later, 'I don't have a chip on my shoulder, you can just get f*cked!' and then after that it's more like 'I have a chip but I'm dealing with it ...' We both were sort of at the same age, emotionally, so it was very easy for the two of us to bond. Jerry and Mena had the nicer half of the trailer, where they had their own rooms, and it's just hard not to get along with Jerry. I don't know anyone who doesn't like him.

A B-movie Goodfellas down to its bones, Michael Corrente's new film Brooklyn Rules even begins with a 'this is where I live'-style narration in which a young man takes us through the ins and outs of his Italian-American neighborhood, giving us a guided tour of the world we're about to spend 90-odd minutes in. The difference between Scorcese's classic and this is that we're not in the 60s, but the mid-80s -- we see two people arguing over the time logistics of Back to the Future at one point -- and the main character is not a criminal per say, but is only on speaking terms with the life. Michael Turner (Freddie Prinze Jr.) is a scrapper who, we're led to believe, is putting his nascent wiseguy instincts to the most harmless possible use, cheating on tests in a pre-law program at Columbia University. It's here where he will meet Ellen, (Mena Suvari) an uptown girl who is pretty happy in her whitebread world, and will begin to feel himself pressured to choose one world or the other.

If the movie I've just described is from Mars, there's a whole other movie going on in there that's from Venus. That movie features Alec Baldwin as a cold-eyed Gambino associate -- the film is steeped in actual 80s New York mob lore, specifically the murder of boss Castellano and subsequent rise of Gotti -- and aims to be a serious and bloody mob movie. Baldwin's character, Caesar, is recruiting Michael's friend Carmine (Scott Caan) into the mob and whenever Caesar enters the picture, things take on a much darker tone, and violence is usually right around the corner. Baldwin proceeds exactly as if entire movie is focused on him -- maybe that's what they told him -- and because he's such a good actor, he drags the energy of the story towards his B-plot and inadvertently sucks the air out of the film's A-story, which is all about Michael's relationship with Ellen and his attempt to transact an amiable divorce from his old neighborhood. It's an odd problem for a film to have, but it's one that makes Brooklyn Rules fairly lopsided.

This is Freddie Prinze Jr. news that I am much happier with. If you were around on April Fool's Day, you might have caught this little gem from Erik. It's one of those things that could almost be true, considering the questionable casting of Katie Holmes in the first Batman. Luckily, it's not, and Prinze Jr.'s next project is much less worrisome. He's still trying to get the mojo back that made young girls lust for him in To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday and indie fans smirk in The House of Yes -- without much success thus far. However, with a few movies and a new television show on his plate, he's now turning to his first feature as producer.

Variety has reported that the actor has partnered with Freddie writer Conrad Jackson to produce Manslaughter. The film was penned by Jackson, and the writer is also set to make his directorial debut with the feature. (I can't say that I have high hopes yet. Jackson's only listed work is for Freddie's terrible TV show.) The movie is about five college students who are "looking for fun" in the Philippines. The group gets involved in a manslaughter that they try to cover up, and then find themselves "scrambling for their lives." While Prinze Jr. will not star in the picture, because he's really a bit old for that now, he will be making a cameo in it. There is no word on the rest of the cast, but production is set to start next month in Los Angeles, so we will probably hear more about it soon enough.