William Horberg

HBO Plans Iran Hostage Drama

Hey there! 

Some more "Wonderful" news, as in an exciting new project for Wonderful Films.

Check out this link to the Variety story:

HBO Plans Iran Hostage Drama

Posted using ShareThis

Goodbye to All That

"It is easy to see the beginning of things and harder to see the end."  

- Joan Didion

Filmmaking is the art of finding the visual correlative, the right place to put the camera and the right composition and lighting and camera movement to capture and convey the emotional and narrative content you are trying to communicate as a storyteller.

When I took this photograph the other day at the Melbourne City Studios (unfortunately with my cellphone camera as that was all I had at the time), it hadn't yet occurred to me that it was in many respects an excellent visual correlative for the end of my stay here in Melbourne as an Executive Producer on the movie "don't be Afraid of the Dark" for Miramax Films.

But when I arrived in Melbourne and was driven to the studio that first day, one of the most striking aspects of the skyline and a landmark by which I could always anchor and locate my daily destination was the enormous Ferris Wheel located just behind the soundstages in this area known as The Docklands.

As it turns out, this would-be tourist attraction is a notorious local white elephant. It was built at considerable taxpayer expense but never operated - a wheel that didn't turn owing to the effect of an extreme heat wave that hit Melbourne just as construction was being completed which warped the steel structure beyond repair.

Suddenly when I looked up in the sky on the way back from our lunch break the other day, a quarter section of the wheel was missing. It is in the process of being dismantled. I am not sure if it will be rebuilt or replaced.

So the deconstructing wheel feels like a fitting visual correlative, my symbol of the end of my stay in Melbourne, a time to say farewell to this temporary home and the good people I met and got to work with here. 

I certainly hope to get back some day, to screen the movie when it is complete?, to make another film here?, to bring the whole family and share the many wonderful places we discovered?

But one thing for certain is that this wheel, and this time of my life, will be but a memory. I'm glad I was able to capture some small parts of it here to share with you.

william

Some Wonderful (Films) News

LaBute to adapt 'Burnt Orange Heresy'

Filmmaker re-teaming with Horberg on project

By DAVE MCNARY

Neil LaBute will write and direct an adaptation of "The Burnt Orange Heresy," Charles Willeford's crime novel set in the world of modern art, with William Horberg ("The Kite Runner") producing.

Project re-teams LaBute with Horberg after the duo worked on the remake of "Death at a Funeral."

"We had a great experience making 'Death at a Funeral' together for Screen Gems and were looking for something else to do together," Horberg told Daily Variety. "We discovered that we were both big Willeford fans."

Willeford's novel, set in Palm Beach, centers on a corrupt art critic's attempts to finagle an interview with a legendary but reclusive French painter.

Horberg noted that he was an associate producer on "Miami Blues," another Willeford adaptation, bringing the project to Jonathon Demme and George Armitage at the start of his career. He was an exec producer on "Milk" and is currently exec producing "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" for Miramax.

LaBute's directing credits include "In the Company of Men," "Nurse Betty" and "Lakeview Terrace."

He's repped by ICM.

No "Picnic"

When asked "how do you make a movie?", one waggish filmmaker once retorted "inch by inch". As a statement of the unglamorous and painstaking process of collecting pictures and sound while a crew of hundreds gather somewhere on the planet and actors dress up and make faces, it pretty much fits the bill.

Our slow daily crawl of recording the precious camera set-ups that will eventually become the tiles in the mosaic that director Troy Nixey and editor Jill Bilcock will stitch together into a narrative (that will resemble the screenplay it is based on in the way that a house could be said to resemble the architect's blueprints for same) begins in the pre-dawn darkness at a place here called Mt. Macedon.

Never heard of it?

What if I told you that it was the location for one of the seminal Australian films of the 1970's - Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock"? 

While the house we are shooting at here was not actually chosen because of any totemic value ascribed to its location, it is nice to feel that we are working in the shadow of that ancestor of poetic ambiguity.

There is nothing particularly poetic about the freezing temperatures each morning at our mud-covered base camp, nor is it ambiguous how many semi-trailers and generators and grip trucks and make-up wagons and miles of cable and gels it takes to bring the circus to town - our crack line producer Stephen Jones has every item covered as a line in his detailed budget.

And yet transcending the very prosaic reality of the shooting process to try to create "pieces of magic" is what every filmmaker must contend with, and what Weir and others have done so magnificently on occasion.

Once, here in the shadow of Mt. Macedon. 

Let's hope it rubs off!

william

Mel Bourne

Mel Bourne was the name of the Chicago-born and New York-based art director and production designer who worked on "Annie Hall" and went on to design 'Manhattan" and "Broadway Danny Rose" and "Zelig" and many other classic movies for Woody Allen. We crossed paths once, on the Paramount production of the Adrian Lyne romantic comedy "Indecent Proposal".

Melbourne is also the name of the second city of Australia where I have taken up residence this summer for the production of the Miramax film "don't Be Afraid of the Dark", which is being directed by talented newcomer Troy Nixey, and produced by my friends Mark Johnson and Guillermo del Toro. This poetic horror film is a remake of a cult classic telefilm from the early 1970's, which viewers of a certain age still recall as one of their scariest memories. It stars nine year old Bailee Madison as the daughter of architect Guy Pearce, who has come to live in a crumbling old mansion called Fallen Mill which is being restored by Guy and his new girlfriend, a designer played by Katie Holmes. 

The "dark" which of course they should be Very afraid of is the ash pit in the basement, wherein reside a set of malevolent creatures known as homunculi, which have been fiendishly and deliciously designed by Troy and Guillermo and the special effects team they have assembled.

Some people compare Melbourne to San Francisco as a city on the bay, but to me it has a real Chicago feel to it, a bit architecturally, but more in the vibe of the place, the many cultural activities found here, the competitive attitude towards their bigger neighbor Sydney to the north, and the hard-working spirit of the people.

I look forward to blogging for you from here and sharing some of the sights and sounds of this big city, somehow, sometime, in between my all-consuming Executive Producer duties on this cool new film project.

I may not be as regular a writer as I have been for this past year, but stay tuned: there will be lots of nifty stuff to come out of this experience, I'm sure.

william

Postcards from Haiti

I found these beautiful vintage postcards of views of Haitian life in the 1950's and wanted to share them with you here. It might seem strange to present a somewhat idealized view of a land that is so identified with suffering and hardship in our contemporary minds, if we can even be bothered to think about it at all, even though it lies merely 600 miles from our shores. 

The idea of taking a vacation there must seem strange indeed, if not voodoo-mad, for most Americans today. 

But for exactly that reason, when I saw these, it felt necessary to put some positive imagery onto the net and into the air, to counterbalance the prevailing hegemony of the lens through which we view others, and to remind ourselves of the real people and rich lives and culture and value that exist everywhere, even in the poorest places. 

william

Making Mom Proud

My friend photographer Phil "the still" Bray snapped this shot for me on the set of the Screen Gems production of the remake of "Death At A Funeral", which was written by, starring and produced by Chris Rock, and co-produced by yours truly.

I'm such a big fan of Rock and his razor-smart political and social humor, and there is no more popular character at my house than Marty the Zebra as voiced by Chris in Madagascar and Madagascar 2, so forgive me for showing off a bit for Mom and the folks back home in Chi-town with today's photo post!!

It's "crack-a-lackin'" to be working with him.

(By the way, it is also the birthday of Chris' co-star and one of the funniest men on the planet today. So happy birthday, Martin Lawrence, we are lucky to be working with you, and thanks for all the moments of inspired madness you've brought to millions of people!)

william

Adventureland Man

At long last, "Adventureland" opens today from Miramax Films at a theatre near you.

Writer/director Greg Mottola got the New Yorker magazine treatment recently, and I thought I'd share that illustration with you here today, as a tribute to Greg who is a great guy and talented filmmaker whom I really admire, and as a shameless plug for the movie, which I urge you to go out and see.

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips had this to say about it:

Best Film of the Year So Far?

It doesn't open until April 3, and it's unlikely to be a commercial wow. But Greg Mottola's wonderful coming-of-age romance "Adventureland" gave me more pleasure (along with some serious pangs of post-adolescent nerd recognition) than anything I've seen so far in 2009. Watch for it. Mottola wrote and directed "The Daytrippers" and more recently directed "Superbad." His new film, set in a 1987 Pittsburgh summer suffused in alcohol, marijuana and yearning, stars Jesse Eisenberg of "The Squid and the Whale." Like Michael Cera, he's a Zen master in the art of naturalistic self-effacement; Kristen Stewart is just as good (she was the desert flower in "Into the Wild") as his co-worker at a tumble-down amusement park, where employees pass the time practicing socially maladroit small talk and angsting, often hilariously, about their futures. It's very low-keyed, and despite the supporting presence of Bill Hader, "Adventureland" lacks the sketch-comedy punch of most contemporary American screen comedy. It doesn't need it. Instead, Mottola and his ensemble succeed on honesty, wit, warmth and a leading actor whose timing is like a Swiss watch with a screw loose. 'Nuff said! william

Opens Tomorrow At A Theatre Near You!!

Death Redux

This week marks the commencement of principal photography on the newest Wonderful Film, a remake of Frank Oz's brilliant British farce "Death At A Funeral", being redone for Screen Gems as an American-set "urban" comedy with the amazing cast of Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Danny Glover, James Marsden, Luke Wilson, Zoe Saldana, Regina Hall, Columbus Short, Ron Glass, Loretta Devine, and reprising his role from the original, one of my favorite actors, Peter Dinklage.

It was a surreal deja vu experience to watch the coffin being lifted out of the hearse and carried up to a waiting Chris Rock at the doorway of his Pasadena house on the morning of the first day of shooting on Monday.

Three years ago I had to great pleasure of making the original film with one of my all-time favorite comedy directors, Frank Oz, the mad genius behind "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels", "Bowfinger" and many other of the funniest films ever made.

I thought the first "Death" was a gem, but although it found a receptive audience all of the world and won audience awards at film festivals, it had a modest release in the U.S. and underperformed here, which was really disappointing.

When Chris Rock approached me last year and suggested an African-American remake, it was one of those "duh, why didn't I think of that" moments. We have some big shoes to fill in taking on a new version of a film that is so recent, but while the plot and characters are mostly the same, placing the story here, and changing the tone from one of British restraint to a more wear-it-on-your-sleeve experience, and especially with this cast of off-the-hook funny people reinterpreting the roles, has me optimistic that we can craft something that, although familiar, will feel fresh and different. And we have a new director in Neil Labute, with whom Chris worked in "Nurse Betty" a few years back, who will bring his own voice and sensibility to the mix.

It is fascinating to me to participate in making two versions of the same story in this way. I've never done it before, and it certainly illustrates how interpretation is everything, and every choice you make adds to the tone and color and temperament of the mosaic you are building.

william