Portrait of a film's (in)completion

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/magazine/here-is-what-happens-when-you-cast-lindsay-lohan-in-your-movie.html?pagewanted=all


This article is, hands down, one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in quite a while. Echoing the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Rodrick deftly illustrates the chaos that surrounds a film set. This is not just any film set either; it is the set of The Canyons, the Paul Schrader directed piece about sexual disillusionment and depravity in California--written by Bret Easton Ellis, no less, who himself is quite the authority on such subjects. The article centers around the director and crew's struggles with the film's star--Lindsay Lohan. More than this, though, the article illustrates what happens when several highly opinionated, uncompromising individuals, each with their own artistic vision, collide.

Even before I'd read this article, i'd heard about this film, and was in awe of it. It could either turn out great or awful. Schrader is known for pushing envelopes and exploring the dark side of the human psyche (he did write Taxi Driver, after all) and his choice to cast Lohan could be a stroke of genius. Her story is truly a modern-day tragedy--here is someone who had so much early promise and talent, and suddenly fell from grace in a very public fashion. That's why I think she was the perfect choice to play Linda Lovelace (at point point there were two Lovelace biopics in production--one which took a very Andrea Dworkin victimizing spin of the story, and the other which showed Lovelace as not only victim, but also active player in her own demise. The latter film was the one set to star Lohan, and that's the one that was pulled.

Anyway, I can't wait for this film to come out! Moreover, this Times piece is simply riveting. If there were enough material for a book, I would read it in a heartbeat. This shows, without a hint of glamour, the bedlam and dysfunction behind the screen.

On a final note, if you haven't seen any Paul Schrader films, I can't recommend his work enough. To be honest, I haven't seen a tremendous number of his films, but what I have seen has left quite an impression upon me. 1979's Hardcore is such a film. Starring George C. Scott, Hardcore is Schrader's semi-autobiographical tale of a staunch Calvinist father from the Midwest in search of his runaway daughter in the seedy underbelly of the Valley during the height of the pornography boom. It's a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a man in crisis, whose core values are out of pace in the modern world.