The Place: Downtown New York City<\/strong>
The Setting: A nondescript warehouse\/film studio<\/strong>
The Scene: \u201cEllen and Damian Kiss\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it arrives, the blow-up has been a long time coming. Ever since he showed up on the set of the indie film he\u2019s agreed to be in, egotistical actor Chad Palomino has been a source of irritation and constant disruption, but writer\/director Nick Reve has put up with his self-aggrandizing behavior and suggestions \u2014 many of which are at the expense of the film\u2019s leading lady, Nicole \u2014 because he\u2019s a Hollywood star on the rise and his participation could mean the difference between Nick\u2019s film getting seen and being buried. It\u2019s Chad who throws down the gauntlet first, though, dismissively saying he only took the part because someone said Nick was \u201ctight with Quentin Tarantino.\u201d In short order, insults and fists are thrown, Chad is ejected from the set, and Nick is left to placate Nicole, who feels left out to dry by the whole experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The irony here is that Nick, the main character in Tom DiCillo\u2019s Living in Oblivion<\/em><\/strong> \u2014 which premiered at Sundance 25 years ago \u2014 is played by Steve Buscemi, who actually was<\/em> tight with Tarantino, having just been in Reservoir Dogs<\/em> and Pulp Fiction<\/em>. Meanwhile, Chad was originally going to be played by Brad Pitt, who was the lead in DiCillo\u2019s debut, Johnny Suede<\/em> (1991), and eventually would hook up with Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds<\/em> and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em>. When the increasingly busy Pitt was unable to fit the role into his schedule, though, it went to indie fixture James Le Gros, who based his performance on a temperamental actor he had just worked with. Journalists covering Living in Oblivion<\/em>\u2019s Sundance premiere, though, jumped to the conclusion that the character was DiCillo\u2019s way of getting back at Pitt, who they assumed had been difficult to work with on Johnny Suede<\/em>. That the rumor persists to this day in spite of his protestations to the contrary (in interviews, the Living in Oblivion<\/em> book, and on the commentaries for both films) is a testament to how much people want to believe things long after they\u2019ve been refuted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken on its own terms, Johnny Suede <\/em>is an odd kettle of fish, but it\u2019s the perfect encapsulation of DiCillo\u2019s offbeat sense of humor. The title character, a wannabe rockabilly singer who idolizes Ricky Nelson, grew out of the acting classes he took to better understand the actor\u2019s craft after graduating from NYU. That morphed into a one-man show DiCillo wrote and performed in the mid-\u201980s and a screenplay that got some traction after he took part in the Sundance Directors Lab. (After spending a decade as a cinematographer-for-hire, most notably for fellow NYU alum Jim Jarmusch, DiCillo was eager to get back to doing what he originally went to film school for.) The central role proved so difficult to cast, though, that DiCillo considered playing it himself and having longtime friend Steve Buscemi play Johnny\u2019s best friend Deke. It was only during an eleventh-hour casting session in Los Angeles that Pitt entered the picture, having just wrapped Thelma & Louise<\/em>. That film already had industry types talking about his star potential, but all DiCillo cared about was that he was the only actor who seemed to understand how to play the character, an important consideration since this \u201cexaggerated fable\u201d (as DiCillo calls it on the commentary) could have easily tipped over into the cartoonish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other key casting decision was the addition of Catherine Keener as Johnny\u2019s would-be girlfriend Yvonne, a role she similarly made her own. Production brought with it a whole different set of problems, though, including the theft of Johnny\u2019s wardrobe (all of which came out of DiCillo\u2019s own closet), a shooting location being condemned in the middle of the shoot, and a change in cinematographers necessitated by the first one\u2019s near-sabotage of Pitt\u2019s most challenging emotional scene. DiCillo doesn\u2019t name names on the commentary, but he got the last laugh by co-opting the guy\u2019s look \u2014 black beret, fingerless gloves, leather vest \u2014 for the character of Wolf, the pretentious d.p. played by Dermot Mulroney in Living in Oblivion<\/em>. He also channeled his frustrations into the script for a short film when Johnny Suede<\/em>\u2019s failure at the box office in the summer of 1992 (a disappointment for DiCillo since it had won Best Picture at the Locarno Film Festival the previous year) caused the financing for his proposed second feature, Box of Moonlight<\/em>, to fall through. Good thing he had a back-up that wound up turning things around for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Scene: \u201cEllen Talks to Mom\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The first 25 minutes of Living in Oblivion<\/em> depict the array of technical problems that plague a low-budget film shoot on the day the director is determined to get his script\u2019s big, emotional scene in one shot. The early takes, when lead actress Nicole (Keener, naturally) is most focused, are marred by the boom appearing in shot, focus problems, and street noise spoiling the sound. After they break to switch to radio mikes, the hits keep coming when one of Wolf\u2019s lights explodes, literally shattering the delicate mood. By the time they\u2019re ready to go again, Nicole\u2019s performance is rapidly deteriorating and Cora, the older actress playing her mother, has started forgetting her lines. A miracle happens, though, when Nick gives the crew a break to let the actors run the scene and a simple gesture by Cora opens up a wellspring of emotion in Nicole and they play it as truthfully as Nick could have ever wanted. Pity it\u2019s the one time the camera isn\u2019t rolling because Wolf, having drunk some bad milk, is busy puking his guts out. Such is the heartbreak of low-budget film, where \u2014 as DiCillo says on Johnny Suede<\/em>\u2019s commentary \u2014 \u201cwhen something goes wrong, you are screwed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As delighted as he was by the end result, DiCillo knew Living in Oblivion<\/em> had little chance of being seen by a general audience in its abbreviated form, so with the encouragement of his actors, some of whom had put their own money into the short\u2019s budget, he expanded the concept to feature length by adding two more parts, the second of which involved a preening Hollywood star threatening to capsize the entire production with his enormous ego. Over the course of an increasingly tense shooting day \u2014 made all the more awkward by the fact that co-stars Chad and Nicole slept together the night before \u2014 Chad does everything he can to upstage his scene partner, mostly by changing the blocking on the fly and consistently failing to hit his marks. (One of the funniest line deliveries in the film comes when he asks for his original cue and the script assistant steps forward to say, \u201cThe cue for the original blocking is \u2018professional.\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, Nicole loses patience with Chad and snaps, precipitating the aforementioned brawl that ends with Chad getting thrown off the set and Nick and Nicole playing the scene he wrote for her for real. As in the first segment, which turns out to be a dream had by Nick, this is revealed to be Nicole\u2019s dream, although she wonders how much basis it has in reality. When they subsequently compare notes, Nick ruefully shakes his head. \u201cGreat. I freak out in your dream. I freak out in my dream. No wonder I\u2019m f***ing exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Scene: \u201cThe Dream Sequence\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Exhausted as he may be \u2014 physically, mentally, maybe even creatively \u2014 Nick is determined to roll with the punches, even if that includes shooting a dream sequence in place of the scene he originally planned to do that day. This is complicated by a number of factors ranging from a malfunctioning smoke machine to the unexpected arrival of his mother on set to a dwarf actor named Tito with a giant chip on his shoulder. Played with scene-stealing panache by Peter Dinklage (in his screen debut), Tito lurks ominously in the background of DiCillo\u2019s shots whenever the crew is discussing the workings of the unreliable smoke machine, and his refusal to give Nick the maniacal laugh he\u2019s looking for at the end of each take comes to a head when he angrily questions why his character has to be a dwarf and storms off. (\u201cDo you know anyone who’s had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of all the potential disasters that could break his spirit, this is the moment that inspires Nick to throw in the towel, but a miracle occurs and his crew gets the shot with the help of his mother (Rica Martens, who played Cora in the first part of the film). A hard-won happy ending, to be sure, it inspires Nick to fantasize about winning the Golden Apple for Best Film Ever Made by a Human Being while his sound man is recording 30 seconds of room tone. That found its echo in real life when Living in Oblivion<\/em> was accepted into Sundance, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, a fitting tribute to DiCillo\u2019s tenacity. Even better, he finally got the green light to make Box of Moonlight<\/em> after years of struggling to get it off the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like with Johnny Suede<\/em> and Brad Pitt, Box of Moonlight<\/em> continued the trend of showcasing an up-and-coming actor \u2014 in this case, Sam Rockwell, who plays an iconoclast living \u201coff the grid\u201d who helps tightly wound electrical engineer John Turturro unwind a little when they\u2019re thrown together by chance for a few days. And DiCillo was able to follow it in quick succession with The Real Blonde<\/em> in 1997. That film not only saw him working with stars like Matthew Modine, Daryl Hannah, Denis Leary, Christopher Lloyd, and Kathleen Turner, it also brought back Steve Buscemi for an encore as Nick Reve, who has gone from directing his passion project to a Madonna video in which Modine\u2019s character, a struggling actor, is incongruously cast and summarily fired from by assistant director Dave Chappelle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the two decades since then, DiCillo has directed two more features (2001\u2019s Double Whammy<\/em> with Leary and Elizabeth Hurley and 2006\u2019s Delirious<\/em> with Buscemi and Michael Pitt), a pair of documentaries, and a succession of television episodes. Should be ever decide to make a Living in Oblivion 2<\/em> at some point, though, he\u2019s sure to have enough material stockpiled for it. And who knows? He may even get Brad Pitt to return to the fold. Stranger things have happened. The Time: The mid-\u201990sThe Place: Downtown New York CityThe Setting: A nondescript warehouse\/film studioThe Scene: \u201cEllen and Damian Kiss\u201d When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":13166,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/early_pitt_film_reworked_johnny_suede.jpg\")
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