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Mindhunter Season 2 has Wrapped
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Tag: Production
25th Anniversary of the AT&T “You Will” Ad Campaign
AT&T (YouTube)
November 28, 2018
25 Years Ago, AT&T Predicted the Future We’re Living Now
Matt Stevenson
November 25, 2018
Wired
How AT&T Predicted the Future In 1993
November 25, 2018
Wired
Watch the original campaign:
How David Fincher’s ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Marked the End of the Big-Budget Adult Drama
Merrick Morton (Sony Pictures)
Adam Chitwood
November 7, 2018
Collider
When David Fincher was fielding accolades for his 2010 masterpiece The Social Network, he was already in the midst of filming his follow-up project. On the surface, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo wasn’t a significant departure for Fincher. At the time, he was already well-versed in the arena of making dark dramas with an edge, be it The Game or Zodiac, and he clearly had plenty of experience telling stories about serial killers. The source material of Dragon Tattoo was massively popular, sure, but with that popularity came the opportunity to take hold of an even bigger budget, telling this dark tale about a pair of outsiders investigating a killer of women against an epic canvas. What Fincher (and the rest of us) couldn’t have known at the time, however, was that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would be one of the last of its kind, the dying breath of the big budget studio adult drama, as Hollywood would pivot to bigger, flashier, and more superhero-er films in the ensuing years. In hindsight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a fossil from a bygone era.
The “American” adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was born in 2009, when producer Scott Rudin secured the rights to the book for Sony Pictures and fellow producers Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal. They set Oscar-winning Schindler’s List screenwriter Steven Zaillian to work on the adaptation, and in March 2010—just as Fincher had completed principal photography on Sony’s The Social Network—the studio began courting the Se7en filmmaker to take the helm.
Fincher had actually been approached about Dragon Tattoo years earlier by Kathleen Kennedy, with whom he’d worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But he rejected the proposition without reading the book, assuming a movie about a bisexual hacker in Stockholm who helps a disgraced journalist uncover a dark secret would never get made. The Swedish film adaptation proved he was wrong, and when Pascal came calling a couple years later, she had an exciting proposition:
“As I finished Social Network, [Sony studio boss] Amy Pascal told me they’d just bought the rights to Dragon Tattoo,” says Fincher. “She said, ‘We believe that a movie franchise doesn’t necessarily have to be for 11-year-olds, that this material is most certainly not for 11-year-olds and that is why we are bringing it to you’.”
Fincherphilia & Beyond
Just a small sample of all the precious filmic resources bestowed by Cinephilia & Beyond:
Alien3: “Take all of the responsibility, because you’re going to get all of the blame”
Downwards Is the Only Way Forwards: Welcome to David Fincher’s The Game
Fight Club: David Fincher’s Stylish Exploration of Modern-Day Man’s Estrangement and Disillusionment
Fincher’s Zodiac As Easily One Of The Best Thrillers Of The Millennium So Far
David Fincher’s Favorite Movies
Cinephilia & Beyond, one of the finest websites dedicated to the art and craft of Film, is struggling financially and needs your support: DONATE
In Conversation with Jennifer Haley, Writer (Mindhunter)
Jennifer Haley (Peter Konerko)
Pop Culture Confidential. Episode 90: Jennifer Haley – Writer, Mindhunter
Christina Jeurling Birro
November 29, 2017
Pop Culture Confidential
Thrilling, dark, gripping and tense are just some of the words used to describe the hit Netflix series Mindhunter. Playwright Jennifer Haley is a writer and co-producer on the series, and joins us this week to share her experience getting into the minds of FBI agents and serial killers.
Mindhunter is a meticulously paced crime drama based on the writings of the pioneering serial killer profiler John E Douglas. Along with his team, they interviewed the likes of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Ed Kemper during the seventies and eighties which resulted in a redefining of criminal profiling forever.
The series has wonderful casting, beautiful cinematography, and some of the creepiest conversations you will hear this year. Lead by David Fincher who is Executive Producer and director of four of the episodes, the writers on Mindhunter have delivered an amazing array of characters.
L.A. Not So Confidential. S1 Ep. 4: Writing Minds – Jennifer Haley Interview
Dr. Scott & Dr. Shiloh
December 3, 2017
L.A. Not So Confidential
Forensic psychologists, Dr. Scott and Dr. Shiloh, interview award-winning playwright Jennifer Haley who was a writer on Season 1 of Netflix‘s 2017 hit Mindhunter. In their first interview episode, they dive into the excitement and obstacles of bringing John Douglas‘ book to life and dish on several story arcs that leave us not-so-patiently waiting for Season 2! What’s with Wendy and that cat? Will there be a musical episode to see Jonathon Groff in action?
L.A. Not So Confidential: S1 Ep. 3: Hunting Minds
Dr. Shiloh and Dr. Scott dissect their new favorite show, Netflix’s Mindhunter, and compare their own first experiences interviewing and working with the criminal population.
Jennifer Haley .com
The Difficult History of David Fincher’s Fight Club
Merrick Morton
David Fincher’s Fight Club is now considered a classic, but it had trouble getting off the ground.
Ryan Lambie
October 15, 2018
Den of Geek! (US)
What the hell is Fight Club anyway? A horror film about a Jekyll-and-Hyde office worker who becomes a terrorist? A drama about late 20th century masculinity in crisis? A warped romance about a man trying to change himself into someone as interesting as the woman he loves? A thriller about a decadent generation goading itself into extremism?
Executives at 20th Century Fox certainly struggled with Fight Club. Unsure how to market a film in which young men beat one another to a pulp and stole bags of fat from the bins of liposuction clinics, the studio placed ads for it during World Wrestling Federation matches. Meanwhile, Fight Club‘s posters, dreamed up by an expensive design firm, featured a pink bar of soap with the title incised into its waxy surface. It certainly looked unlike anything else stuck up outside a movie theater in 1999, even if most people walking past wouldn’t have had a clue as to what it meant – the soap being a wry reference to a key scene in the film.
The bewildering split between TV ads during wrestling matches, which emphasized the film’s bruising bare-knuckle scenes, and the artistic posters with their pink bars of soap, were an indication, perhaps, of Fight Club‘s slippery quality. How do you get people to go and see a film like this, Brad Pitt or no Brad Pitt?
In retrospect, it’s little surprise that some of Fox’s higher-ups didn’t like Fight Club – least of all one Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul whose News Corporation had acquired Fox in 1985. Here, after all, was a film which openly attacked corporations, advertisers and the entire capitalist system.
One of Fight Club‘s producers, Art Linson, recalled the first screening of the film for Fox’s executives; they were, he said, “flopping around like acid-crazed carp wondering how such a thing could even have happened.”
There was one executive who did believe in Fight Club: Fox’s studio head Bill Mechanic. In the mid-90s, Chuck Palahniuk‘s Fight Club novel was doing the rounds at Fox before it had even been published, and was originally envisioned as a low-budget movie to be made through the studio’s Fox 2000 division, which specialized in independent film. Along with production executives Laura Ziskin and Kevin McCormick, Mechanic was an enthusiastic champion of Fight Club‘s spiky humor and unpredictable plot.
“Heavy Metal” R-rated animated anthology might finally be happening as a series on Netflix
Last March, during several promotional interviews for his new film Prodigy (1, 2, 3), veteran actor and voice actor Richard Neil talked about one his recent projects:
I just voiced one of the lead roles in a graphic anthology series directed by Tim Miller, who directed Deadpool. That’s being produced by David Fincher and is supposed to debut on Netflix later this year or early next year.
I cannot even say the name of the series at this time.
In that, I took on a kind of Nick Nolte meets Tom Waits voice. You just have to make sure you can sustain it and not hurt yourself!
According to Longmire TV series actor Adam Bartley, David Fincher might be directing one episode:
This year, since I’ve finished Longmire I’ve done two films and a motion-capture job, a David Fincher – Netflix untitled short.
For details on the history of the Heavy Metal anthology project and his development (hell):
Details and Artwork From Tim Miller’s Unmade ‘Heavy Metal’ Reboot
Christopher Marc
December 10, 2016
Omega Underground
Tim Miller Hints ‘Terminator’ Shoots In 2018; ‘Goon’ and ‘Heavy Metal’ Announcements Soon?
Christopher Marc
July 26, 2017
Omega Underground
