Scorsese’s Golden Key

Good morning: In today’s edition of The Industry, we look at:

Scorsese’s killers. Sam Rockwell’s wigs. A Wim Wender’s tirade. And Celtic lore.

Let’s go!

SCORSESE’S GOLDEN KEY

Scorsese’s masterwork Killers of the Flower Moon eclipses the quality of his most recent films.

NO SPOILERS follow:

He could have stopped after The Wolf of Wall Street. He could have stopped after The Irishman. But at age 80, he seems to have the same gusto for filmmaking as he did in his youth.

In fact, after co-writing the Flower Moon script with Eric Roth (Dune, A Star is Born, Munich) for two years, he decided the quality was not satisfactory and did a full rewrite.

In his own words, he’s persisted through:

Marty is not phoning it in.

The genesis of his unwavering persistence began in 1967. He was fresh out of NYU film school with two shorts: The Big Shave, and It’s Not Just You, Murray!

In an attempt to get his first feature financed, he orchestrated a private screening of his work for an esteemed gentleman he’d heard “was so devoted to the art of cinema” that he wrote the occasional check to young filmmakers.

Scorsese paced outside the theater, awaiting the gentleman to levy a verdict on his future. When the financier exited the theater, in a bespoke suit and bowler hat, he barged straight up to Marty:

and with that, he walked off.

After a few stunned seconds, Scorsese began laughing. An uproarious laughter. Resilient and crazed.

And then he moved on.

​Recanting the incident to his alma mater in 2014, he observed:

For More:

Killers Of The Flower Moon opened in theaters this past Friday, October 20th. It debuted at an impressive $23 million, securing the second spot behind Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour. Flower Moon marks Apple’s first theatrical release.

​Leonardo Dicaprio loves to improvise. On set, though, Scorsese implored him to stick to the script. He repeatedly told him that he didn’t need those extra bits of dialogue. In Friday’s edition, we spoke about Fincher’s obsession with details. It seems like all the greats share this predilection.

THE INDUSTRY NEWS

Ridley Scott is 85.

Scott hasn’t slowed down and is poised to retake the throne of medieval cinema with Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, out next month on November 22nd. This film will be Apple’s 2nd theatrical release.

SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP will meet again tomorrow. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos remains hopeful about the upcoming discussions with SAG-AFTRA. At a charity event last night, he shared a memory about the challenging days of his youth when his father, a union electrician, went on strike.

​NBC Universal overtakes Disney in streaming revenue. They’re up by 15%. Disney is down by 27%, hitting a nine-year stock price low as they’ve struggled to meet subscriber targets.

For those keeping score, the global TV and streaming market in 2023:

• $700 billion global annual revenue
  • 47% Online subscriptions
  • 48% advertising
  • 5% public revenue
• $164 billion invested in programming
• 43% US
• 25% Asia/Oceania
• 18% Western Europe

THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT

Before Lily Gladstone co-starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, she contemplated a career change. Three years ago, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was all set to apply to track the effects of murder hornets on crops for the Department of Agriculture.

As she pulled out her credit card to apply, she got an email from Martin Scorsese. We would have chalked it up to a spam message. Luckily, she was more level-headed, and the rest is history.

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​Elle Fanning’s debuts on Broadway. The actress has never stopped forging her own path from stepping outside her sister, Dakota Fanning’s shadow, with roles like the corrupted model in Neon Demon. Her show, Appropriate, revolves around the Lafayette family’s return to Arkansas to settle their late father’s estate, revealing buried secrets and unresolved conflicts. We can’t wait to see her on stage!

Sam Rockwell looks like Owen Wilson in Argylle, the latest film by Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn. No stranger to wearing wild wigs, R0ckwell dons a zany long-haired disguise as an undercover spy who kidnaps a spy novelist. A master of the out-sized spy/comedy-drama film (see him in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), our office is taking a holiday when this comes out February 2nd, 2024. Trailer here.

FESTIVALS

Berenice Bejo (The Artist) has a new film (The Movie Teller) opening Spain’s Valladolid Festival. They’re featuring new films by a panoply of Spanish directors with previous features at Cannes/Venice to bolster their international growth.

“The key to getting classic docs back into theaters.” Lumiére Film Festival said lies in the restoration. To this end, the festival has launched an award to support feature-length doc restoration. In a festival named after the pioneers of documentary filmmaking, it’s heartening to witness such a steadfast dedication to preserving the craft.

The imagery in this trailer is arresting. The debut feature, Love is a Gun by director Lee Hong-chi, premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The first-time feature director is making the festival circuit in Tokyo and Mumbai.

INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT

Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, The American Friend, Wings of Desire), at the Lumiére Film Festival this week, launched a tirade against sequels:

Wenders (78) had two features at Cannes this year (Perfect Days in Competition and Anselm in Special Screenings). No stranger to breaking existing models, his 1991 road trip movie Until the End of the World, starring William Hurt and Sam Neill, is five hours long.

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The term “first-time director” is often a misnomer. Often, directors have spent over a decade making movies before their first feature. Bryn Chainey, a distinguished British-Australian filmmaker, was awarded the director’s prize at the 2010 Berlinale Talent and whose shorts played at Palm Springs and Raindance just leveled up.

His feature-debut horror film, Rabbit Trap, has an incredible cast (Dev Patel) and producing team (Elijah Wood and Lawrence Inglee (Swiss Army Man). It centers around an audio team that hears an unearthly sound that awakens an ancient Celtic creature.

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​Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet) knows a thing or two about casting. He’s worked with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery and even gave Christian Slater his first big role.