ToddField Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm getting ready to interview Todd Field -- one of those deals where the professional in you has to fight the movie-nerd: I'm gonna meet someone who worked with frickin' Kubrick! -- so I'm a little nervy about that. I also dealt with recompression last night -- after a week on Hawaii's Big Island, walking down Market to the Metreon (or, rather, Metreon) to go see Flags of Our Fathers, and the change from tree-lined lava paths to conventioneer-lined city boulevards is a little nervy as well: Where did all these people come from? And, to quote The Old 97's, how soon can they leave? So today I'm sort of mulling over the Eastwood in preparation to write it, and that's a little nervy too -- it's one of those deals where, like The Passion of the Christ or World Trade Center, judging the film is not connected to judging the events it covers, and yet it feels like there's that correlation. And speaking of Jesus, how did I miss the story about Keisha Castle-Hughes, star of The Nativty, getting pregnant? I mean, you can make your own joke here -- Talk about method acting! Or Wow, that's some immaculate promotion! -- but then you realize you're talking about, like, a human being. And that realization makes you nervy. And that you need to cut down on coffee and irony in equal measure.

What's getting you nervy?

J.

Todd Field's adaptation of the novel Little Children by Tom Perrotta posed a lot of problems as he tried to cram the entire novel into a feature film ... so he rewrote it, literally. He hated the ending, and made some major changes, collaborating with Perrotta, who also shares a screenwriting credit on the film. They both worked together to make significant changes in order to adapt the book for into a film.

This isn't the first adaptation for either. Field wrote and directed Oscar-nominated In The Bedroom , which was based on an Andre Dubus short story. However, Dubus died two years before the film came out, which made it impossible for Field to colloborate with him. Perrotta's novel Election was adapted into a movie written by director Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Perrotta didn't work on that script, however, since it was the first one of his novels to be optioned, and the movie development went into high gear and was in theaters only a few months after the book came out.

If you're someone who grew up in the 1970s and early '80s, then you definitely know who Jackie Earle Haley is. If only for his performance as Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears trilogy (and his great turn as Moocher in Peter Yates' Breaking Away), Jack Haley made for a memorable little character actor. After co-starring with a then-unknown actor named Tom Cruise in 1983's Losin' It (which was directed by none other than Curtis Hanson), Haley kind of fell off the Hollywood radar -- in a big way. Aside from a few quick moments in Murder, She Wrote and MacGyver episodes, Jackie Earle Haley could be seen in titles like Dollman, Nemesis and Maniac Cop 3. And unfortunately he didn't work often enough to gain much of a Campbell-type cult following.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I sat down to watch All the King's Men and noticed that -- hey, isn't that Jackie Earle Haley playing Sean Penn's ultra-tough bodyguard dude?!? How cool to see him back in a movie again! Granted, he didn't have many lines, but it was still great to see an old pal after so many years. And then I headed off to see a dark comedy / suburban drama called Little Children ... and there was Jackie again, this time with a much meatier role: He plays a convicted sex offender who moves into a cushy suburban neighborhood that most definitely doesn't want him around. And the guy gives a great performance in a really difficult role.

So who knows what's next for Mr. Haley? This New York Times article does a fine job of summing up the guy's comeback, and I think that both of the directors involved (Steven Zaillian and Todd Field) deserve a hearty round of praise for pulling Jackie Earle out of obscurity and giving him another shot in the spotlight. Based on the two performances I just witnessed, I suspect Haley will be popping up a lot more frequently in the near future.