A New Start

FT: A Sex and the City guide to media

A Sex and the City guide to media

By John Gapper

Published: May 15 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 15 2008 03:00

It may not take a lot to make the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's city tabloid, grumpy but the four actresses of Sex and the City , the new film of the television series, certainly provoked it this week.

The Post was dubious about the hat worn to the film's premiere by Sara Jessica Parker, who plays the lead character Carrie Bradshaw in the drama about the lives of four Manhattan women. Even worse than this faux-pas, she wore the hat in London, where the film's world premiere was held.

After London, which the Post dismissed as "the wrong city", the quartet is hitting Berlin tonight before returning to New York for yet another glitzy launch event in two weeks. New Yorkers must make do for now with posters of Carrie and her friends plastered around the city.

Even in its absence, however, Sex and the City is part of the Zeitgeist. Both the drama itself and the way it is being marketed say a lot about the future of film and television. In fact, here is my Sex and the City guide to the entertainment industry.

First, the world is bigger than the US. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are jetting around Europe for the same reason that the Cannes film festival, which opened yesterday, includes the premiere of the planned summer blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That is where the money is.

US films earned $17bn at the international box office last year, compared with $9.6bn at home. As a result, studios are becoming loath to invest in films that do not travel, such as dramas based on baseball. Because SATC is heavily identified with New York, the producer New Line Cinema hedged its bets with European premieres.

Second, paid-for is bigger than free. That sounds strange in the era of the internet, but entertainment for which consumers rather than advertisers pay is growing more powerful. Americans used to spend many more hours with media such as radio and broadcast television than with DVDs and video games but they are switching.

SATC is a prime example because it was a subscription cable television series made by Time Warner's Home Box Office. Indeed, along with The Sopranos , it was part of the Sunday night line-up of original programmes that turned HBO into one of the most powerful forces in entertainment, with annual revenues of about $4bn.

HBO's formula, which has since been mimicked by pay channels such as Showtime and even free cable channels such as AMC, the maker of Mad Men , was to make expensive and intelligent dramas that viewers could not find on broadcast television. SATC was too raunchy, The Sopranos was too dark and violent, Six Feet Under was too morbid etc.

It did not care about decency, or whether there was a broad enough audience to draw advertisers, because it was funded by 29m subscribers. Meanwhile, broadcasters switched to reality shows that were cheap to make - far cheaper than the $2.5m per hour a top-rank drama can cost - and reached big audiences.

That made sense in the moment but it means that HBO and Showtime, which makes Dexter and Weeds , hold more valuable long-term properties. The deal struck by HBO with Apple this week to charge $2.99 for episodes of The Sopranos and Rome on iTunes (and the standard $1.99 for SATC ) shows its pricing power.

Third, the small screen is bigger than the big screen. Box office receipts of $9.6bn in the US last year were easily outstripped by the $23.4bn of DVD rentals and sales. Digital technology allows studios to exploit new forms of distribution, including iTunes and video-on-demand. Some 20 per cent of HBO's revenues come from reselling its dramas.

Furthermore, the power of pay television is not only biting into broadcast networks but is posing a challenge to Hollywood. Subscription channels used to rely almost wholly on re-running Hollywood films and, even now, 70 per cent of HBO's output consists of studio films. The transfer of SATC from the small to the big screen is a symbol of a shift in the power balance.

A decade ago, actors, directors and scriptwriters far preferred to work in film. Complex and sophisticated dramas were found in cinemas while television was a forum for soap operas and bland drama. The rise of HBO and Hollywood's switch to making blockbusters for the 12-24 year-olds who comprise 41 per cent of frequent film-goers is changing that.

The rise of pay television as an artistic force is matched by a decline in the value of run-of-the-mill films in the secondary market. Three Hollywood studios broke away from a deal with Showtime last month to form their own pay television channel after the latter complained that it was paying too much for films and could make its own dramas.

Fourth, adults are bigger than teenagers. Young people have held sway over Hollywood in recent years because they can be relied upon to go to the cinema. But pay television has tapped an adult audience that has been under-served by film studios and can now watch dramas at home on high-definition televisions.

That is breathing life into dramas made for adult niche audiences rather than big teenage and college-student cohorts. Hollywood studios are responding to this. "Studios are being much more deliberate about choosing demographic targets and developing films for them," says Geoff Sands, a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

As adult targets go, you do not get much better than SATC . It started out as a quintessentially American television series and has ended up as a film seen first by Londoners and Berliners. Romance, promiscuity, fashion and all, it is the very model of a modern media enterprise.

john.gapper@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

movies

In The Mood For Love 

 

BY ROGER EBERT / February 16, 2001  

Cast & Credits Chow Mo-Wan: Tony Leung Chiu-Wai Su Li-Zhen: Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk Mrs. Suen: Rebecca Pan Mr. Ho: Lai Chin Ah Ping: Siu Ping-Lam The Amah: Chin Tsi-Ang Usa Films Presents A Film Written And Directed By Wong Kar-Wai Running Time: 97 Minutes. No MPAA Rating (Content Is Mature But Mild). In Chinese With English Subtitles.     Printer-friendly »  E-mail this to a friend »

 

They are in the mood for love, but not in the time and place for it. They look at each other with big damp eyes of yearning and sweetness, and go home to sleep by themselves. Adultery has sullied their lives: his wife and her husband are having an affair. "For us to do the same thing," they agree, "would mean we are no better than they are." The key word there is "agree." The fact is, they do not agree. It is simply that neither one has the courage to disagree, and time is passing. He wants to sleep with her and she wants to sleep with him, but they are both bound by the moral stand that each believes the other has taken.

You may disagree with my analysis. You may think one is more reluctant than the other. There is room for speculation, because whole continents of emotions go unexplored in Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood for Love," a lush story of unrequited love that looks the way its songs sound. Many of them are by Nat King Cole, but the instrumental "Green Eyes," suggesting jealousy, is playing when they figure out why her husband and his wife always seem to be away at the same times.

His name is Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Hers is Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk). In the crowded Hong Kong of 1962, they have rented rooms in apartments next to each other. They are not poor; he's a newspaper reporter, she's an executive assistant, but there is no space in the crowded city and little room for secrets.

Cheung and Leung are two of the biggest stars in Asia. Their pairing here as unrequited lovers is ironic because of their images as the usual winners in such affairs. This is the kind of story that could be remade by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, although in the Hollywood version, there'd be a happy ending. That would kind of miss the point and release the tension, I think; the thrust of Wong's film is that paths cross but intentions rarely do. In his other films, like "Chungking Express," his characters sometimes just barely miss connecting, and here again key things are said in the wrong way at the wrong time. Instead of asking us to identify with this couple, as an American film would, Wong asks us to empathize with them; that is a higher and more complex assignment, with greater rewards.

The movie is physically lush. The deep colors of film noir saturate the scenes: Reds, yellows, browns, deep shadows. One scene opens with only a coil of cigarette smoke, and then reveals its characters. In the hallway outside the two apartments, the camera slides back and forth, emphasizing not their nearness but that there are two apartments, not one.

The most ingenious device in the story is the way Chow and Su play-act imaginary scenes between their cheating spouses. "Do you have a mistress?" she asks, and we think she is asking Chow, but actually she is asking her husband, as played by Chow. There is a slap, not as hard as it would be with a real spouse. They wound themselves with imaginary dialogue in which their cheating partners laugh about them. "I didn't expect it to hurt so much," Su says, after one of their imaginary scenarios.

Wong Kar-wai leaves the cheating couple offscreen. Movies about adultery are almost always about the adulterers, but the critic Elvis Mitchell observes that the heroes here are "the characters who are usually the victims in a James M. Cain story." Their spouses may sin in Singapore, Tokyo or a downtown love hotel, but they will never sin on the screen of this movie, because their adultery is boring and commonplace, while the reticence of Chow and Su elevates their love to a kind of noble perfection.

Their lives are as walled in as their cramped living quarters. They have more money than places to spend it. Still dressed for the office, she dashes out to a crowded alley to buy noodles. Sometimes they meet on the grotty staircase. Often it is raining. Sometimes they simply talk on the sidewalk. Lovers do not notice where they are, do not notice that they repeat themselves. It isn't repetition, anyway--it's reassurance. And when you're holding back and speaking in code, no conversation is boring, because the empty spaces are filled by your desires.

Cable TV's the Sundance Channel will play Wong Kar-  wai's "Chungking Express" on Feb. 22 and 27, and "Fallen Angels" on Feb. 22 and 26.

Chungking Express 

 

BY ROGER EBERT / March 15, 1996  

Cast & Credits First Cop: Takeshi Kaneshiro Woman In Wig: Brigitte Lin Second Cop: Tony Leung Faye: Faye Wang Flight Attendant: Valerie Chow Written And Directed By Wong Kar-Wai . Running Time: 104 Minutes. Rated PG-13 (For Some Violence, Sexuality And Drug Content).     Printer-friendly »  E-mail this to a friend »

 

At UCLA last summer, Quentin Tarantino introduced a screening of "ChungkingExpress'' and confessed that while watching it on video, "I just startedcrying.'' He cried not because the movie was sad, he said, but because "I'mjust so happy to love a movie this much.'' I didn't have to take out my handkerchief a single time during the film, and I didn't love it nearly as much as he did, but I know what he meant: This is the kind of movie you'll relate to if you love film itself, rather than its surface aspects such as story and stars. It's not a movie for casual audiences, and it may not reveal all its secrets the first time through, but it announces Wong Kar-Wai, its Hong Kong-based director, as a filmmaker in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard.

He is concerned more with the materials of a story than with the story itself, and he demonstrates that by telling two stories, somewhat similar, that have no obvious connection. He sets the stories in the Hong Kong world off ast-food restaurants, shopping malls, nightclubs, concrete plazas and pop culture (one of his heroines wears a blond wig and dark glasses, and the other seems addicted to "California Dream?in''' by the Mamas and the Papas). His visuals rhythmically switch between ordinary film, video and pixilated images,often in slow motion, as if the very lives of his characters threaten to disintegrate into the raw materials of media.

If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing,"Chungking Express'' works. If you're trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated. As the film opens, we meet a policeman named He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who wanders the nighttime city, lonely and depressed, pining after a girl who has left him. He gives himself 30 days to find another girl, and uses the expiration dates on cans of pineapple as a way of doing a countdown. A new woman walks into his life: the woman in the wig (Brigitte Chin-Hsia Lin), who is involved in drug deals.

We expect their relationship to develop in conventional crime movie ways, but instead, the film switches stories, introducing a new couple. The first cop hangs out at a fast-food bar, where he notices an attractive waitress (FayeWang), but she has eyes only for another cop who frequents the same restaurant (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung). He scarcely notices her, but she gets the keys to his apartment, and moves in when he isn't there -- cleaning, redecorating, even changing the labels on his canned food.

Both of these stories, about disconnections, loneliness and being alone in the vast city, are photographed in the style of a music video, crossed with a little Godard (signs, slogans, pop music) and some Cassavetes (improvised dialogue and situations). What happens to the character is not really the point; the movie is about their journeys, not their destinations. There is the possibility that they have all been driven to desperation, if not the edge of madness, by the artificial lives they lead, in which all authentic experience seems at one remove.

Tarantino loved this movie so much, indeed, that he signed a deal with Miramax to start his own releasing company, and his first two pick-up deals are "Chungking Express'' and another Wong Kar-Wai film. There's a lot of interesting Hong Kong films right now, but it centers more on commercially oriented figures like John Woo and Jackie Chan. Wong is more of an art director, playing with the medium itself, taking fractured elements of criss-crossing stories and running them through the blender of pop culture.

When Godard was hot, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an audience for this style, but in those days, there were still film societies and repertory theaters to build and nourish such audiences. Many of today's younger filmgoers, fed only by the narrow selections at video stores, are not as curious or knowledgeable and may simply be puzzled by "Chungking Express'' instead of challenged. It needs to be said, in any event, that a film like this is largely a cerebral experience: You enjoy it because of what you know about film, not because of what it knows about life.

In any case, Tarantino may weep again when he sees the box-office figures

FT: Kings of the Hollywood jungle

excerpt:

On their way to the Rome Film Festival, where the movie received its world premiere on Tuesday, before its showing the following day at the London Film Festival, Redford and his co-stars Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep stopped in New York to promote a film they all feel strongly about...

... the story takes place on three tense emotional fronts. Presidential hopeful Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise) is about to give a sensational story about a new war strategy to a probing TV journalist (Streep) as the two carry on a fierce cat-and-mouse game of wit and evasion. At a West Coast University, a once idealistic professor, Dr Malley (Redford), confronts a privileged but blasé student (Andrew Garfield). Meanwhile, in the heat of battle in Afghanistan, two of Malley's former students, Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña) lay bare the arguments of mentors and politicians...

....The screenwriter set out to explore the ways in which different people face demanding times. The movie features two soldiers who have risen out of poverty to serve their country; an ambitious politician pursuing his beliefs with secret military missions; an influential reporter unsure of her role in a world where journalists themselves have become part of political agendas; a wearied professor whose last great hope is to make an impact on his students; and a cocky college kid who has never taken a real stand...

...It's a film about personal responsibility, about people accepting their role in shaping the future, about how we each deal with our choices in life to try to make this a better world."

Streep was impressed by the subject's urgency. "It's a story about making the right choices, but it's also about how easy it is not to make a choice at all," she says. "The film says that it doesn't matter what you think or feel if you don't do something about it, if you don't stand up and jeopardise everything."

==

Kings of the Hollywood jungle

By Emanuel Levy

Published: October 27 2007 03:00 | Last updated: October 27 2007 03:00

What attracted me to Lions for Lambs ," says the film's star and director Robert Redford, "was the way the story uses the war as a catalyst for major issues, such as the role of the media, of education, of politics and youth in America. It's a provocative film that addresses big questions head-on, while compelling the audience into thinking about where we are right now, and how we got here."

On their way to the Rome Film Festival, where the movie received its world premiere on Tuesday, before its showing the following day at the London Film Festival, Redford and his co-stars Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep stopped in New York to promote a film they all feel strongly about.

Covering the events of a single day, the story takes place on three tense emotional fronts. Presidential hopeful Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise) is about to give a sensational story about a new war strategy to a probing TV journalist (Streep) as the two carry on a fierce cat-and-mouse game of wit and evasion. At a West Coast University, a once idealistic professor, Dr Malley (Redford), confronts a privileged but blasé student (Andrew Garfield). Meanwhile, in the heat of battle in Afghanistan, two of Malley's former students, Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña) lay bare the arguments of mentors and politicians.

One of Hollywood's most articulate thinkers, Redford emphasises that, while Lions focuses on current events, its themes dig much deeper and the film is not a war drama. Rather, he sees it as "a human drama that dares to ask the viewers to question".

"In the end," says Redford, "the questions raised by the film go to the audience: 'What would you do? How do you feel about this?' "

Redford has always been drawn to stories about the fabric of American institutions. This interest, which has marked his diverse career as a movie star, producer, director and guru of the independent movement, drew him to this script by the relatively unknown Matthew Michael Carnahan.

The screenwriter set out to explore the ways in which different people face demanding times. The movie features two soldiers who have risen out of poverty to serve their country; an ambitious politician pursuing his beliefs with secret military missions; an influential reporter unsure of her role in a world where journalists themselves have become part of political agendas; a wearied professor whose last great hope is to make an impact on his students; and a cocky college kid who has never taken a real stand.

When Carnahan, who also wrote the current action thriller The Kingdom , set in Saudi Arabia, finished his screenplay, he joked to producer Tracy Falco that perhaps he should send it to Redford. He couldn't believe it when the joke became a reality. "I talked to Bob for the first time last September and a few months later we were in production. It's amazing how much energy and enthusiasm he brought to this project."

Although Redford hadn't directed a film for seven years, the script struck a nerve. "It came out of the blue," Redford recalls, "I was surprised by it because it was political. There's so much commercial insecurity about political films these days that only the safe ones get made. Those that are risky, that force you to think, are harder to come by."

As a director, Redford has explored the turmoil within American families in the 1980 Oscar-winning Ordinary People , the temptations of TV culture in the 1994 Quiz Show , the vital connections between landscape, nature and the American soul in The Milagro Beanfiled War and The Horse Whisperer . He has also influenced American filmmaking by founding the Sundance Institute, Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Channel, which have nurtured a young generation of directors making bold and original stories, those largely untold by mainstream Hollywood.

But Lions for Lambs was not just about taking chances. Redford says he was drawn to the idea of sparking real debate and invigorating young audiences not used to seeing such big issues tackled by movies. "I hoped this film would provoke audiences to contemplate where we are in this country," says Redford. "To me, it's a story about much more than the current issues now. It's about the deeper factors that lie behind the issues and how they are experienced on a personal level by real people. It's a film about personal responsibility, about people accepting their role in shaping the future, about how we each deal with our choices in life to try to make this a better world."

Redford was further compelled by the taut storytelling and artistic challenges. "I'm not interested in political films for history's sake. There had to be a character-driven story," as there was in the 1976 All The President's Men about the Watergate scandal, which Redford produced and starred in with Dustin Hoffman. Redford's films as producer and actor have centred on populist American themes, as evident in The Candidate , a critical look at the political process. But Redford adds: "I would never want to do something that was abject propaganda. Lions shows different points of view and we have to respect all of them. I want the audience to have an open reaction to each story."

The final, irresistible pull for Redford was the fact that Cruise had already expressed interest, not only as an actor playing the slick yet impassioned senator, but also as executive, making the film with his long-time partner Paula Wagner as their first project in the new United Artists. "I don't think the film would have been made without Tom," says Redford. "The idea of Tom playing a senator was different and intriguing. Then I called Meryl Streep and said, 'I'm interested in this, how about you?' and she said, 'If you do it, I'll do it.' That's how it came together so quickly, and for a relatively modest budget."

Streep was impressed by the subject's urgency. "It's a story about making the right choices, but it's also about how easy it is not to make a choice at all," she says. "The film says that it doesn't matter what you think or feel if you don't do something about it, if you don't stand up and jeopardise everything."

For Cruise, the movie represents the kind of bold, unexpected story he and Wagner hope will form the foundation of the reinvented United Artists, the company that originally began in 1919 to give Hollywood artists, such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, creative control over their work.

Cruise says: "It's a very powerful script, and it's a great film to kick off the new UA, especially with Bob Redford, a true maverick who has defined so much of modern cinema with his championing of independent cinema.

"I never thought of this as a war film but as one that will promote dialogue and challenge the audience's ideas - no matter what their point of view."

www.romacinemafest.org

'Lions for Lambs' goes on general release in the UK on November 9

[trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPCbOqiVKfo]

FT: Paris - Portraits of a lost metropolis

At barely half a century old, photography was merely considered a useful technical innovation, strictly subordinate to figurative painting. There was a market for photographic likenesses to aid painters in preparation for their work - landscapes, still lives, street views. By supplying them, Atget stumbled into the profession that would occupy him for the rest of his days.

==

Portraits of a lost metropolis

By Angel Gurria-Quintana

Published: April 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2007 03:00

Ican say that I now possess all of Old Paris." This extraordinary claim, made in 1920 by the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), was not as outlandish as it sounds. Writing in a letter to the director of the Institut des Beaux-Arts, Atget was referring to the completion of a lifetime's project: capturing the city's streets, monuments and views in their endless variety.

When he died seven years later, the photographic pioneer left behind more than 25,000 images and 8,500 glass negatives, divided among government institutions and private collectors. This cache of images remains the largest ever produced to document the French capital.

Avenue des Gobelins (1927)

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of Atget's birth, and the 80th anniversary of his death, the Bibliothèque Nationale has put together the first retrospective of his work to be shown in France (two previous retrospectives were held in the US). The astonishing collection illuminates the career of one of photography's neglected masters, and brings to life a city that no longer exists.

Atget's artistic trajectory tells us much about the evolution of photography. His early ambition was to make a living as a stage actor. An apprenticeship in music was cut short by military duties but, once released from the service, he began to edit and illustrate pamphlets. In 1892, desperate for money, he took out an advertisement in an arts magazine offering "documents for artists".

At barely half a century old, photography was merely considered a useful technical innovation, strictly subordinate to figurative painting. There was a market for photographic likenesses to aid painters in preparation for their work - landscapes, still lives, street views. By supplying them, Atget stumbled into the profession that would occupy him for the rest of his days.

His earliest pictures were neither technically nor pictorially accomplished. But unlike most photographers serving painters' needs, Atget developed a system. He devised his own taxonomy - with subjects divided into categories such as "old trades", "interiors", "shop-fronts", "ornaments" - and set about capturing scenes from Parisian life.

Soon Atget's efforts to "possess" as many aspects of the city as possible acquired a new rationale. He had witnessed, during the 1850s and 1860s, the destruction of almost two-thirds of medieval Paris under Baron Haussmann's planning schemes. As late as the 1890s, when Atget took to walking the streets with his camera, whole blocks of old Paris continued to be demolished. His work became a labour of conservation.

The artist label never suited Atget. He saw himself as a hoarder of images, and found that money could be made from selling his collection to institutions interested in the city's heritage. As his documentary ambition broadened, so did his stash of photographs, which he organised into series: "Landscapes", "Art in Old Paris", "Topography of Paris", "Environs".

The Bibliothèque Nationale's retrospective is ordered chronologically, beginning with the photographer's early efforts to depict street trades. Atget's herb vendors, basket weavers and lamp sellers are romantic figures, posing uneasily during long exposures. They are endearing but unremarkable, a photographic equivalent of the 18th-century "Cries of Paris" prints of life dans la rue.

With time, however, Atget's images gradually empty themselves of the human element. He dwells extensively on architecture in details, ruins and perspectives. His photographs become sharper, as does his eye for composition.

The Paris of his later work is a ghost town. People are occasionally present, but mostly off-stage. When they do appear, they are other-worldly apparitions - blurred, obscured, vaguely spied through a window. (The only exceptions are his pictures of zoniers, street dwellers from the infamous zones between the city's ramparts and the suburbs.)

Certain prints, such as the ones in a sequence taken on the Rue Quincampoix, are almost abstract. The city's haphazard geometry, in bleached whites and rich darks, resembles the backdrop to an expressionist film. Indeed, Atget's photography manages to make all of Paris seem like a movie set. We have all seen those vistas, even if we've been nowhere near the French capital. Some, such as the view of Pont Saint-Michel through mist, are now iconic. They may appear to be clichés, but it was Atget who shot them first.

There is an intense nostalgia about the photographs in this show. It does not originate in the distance separating us from pictures taken a century ago, but in the feeling that this cityscape was vanishing even as Atget set out to capture it. It is difficult to shake the impression that those alleys and street-corners were as short-lived as Atget's street vendors.

Many 20th-century critics derided Atget's work. He was called naïf, antiquarian, even reactionary. In fact Atget was unknowingly laying the groundwork for modern documentary photography. His aesthetic influence is evident in the work of later photographers such as Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. His Parisian ramblings set the scene for other photographic flâneurs such as Brassaï, Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier Bresson.

Surprisingly for someone who thought of himself as a workaday collector of views, Atget was even appropriated by the surrealists. His next-door neighbour, the American avant-garde photographer Man Ray, published a handful of his pictures in André Breton's magazine La Révolution Surréaliste. Rather than its last romantic, Atget was photography's first modern.

Man Ray's assistant, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, became the greatest champion of Atget's work. It is to her that we owe the only known photographic portrait of Atget, taken months before his death, and also on display at the Bibliothèque Nationale. In it he is gaunt and hunched over, almost haunted, as if staring into a lost past that lingered only in his luminous images.

Joueur d’Orgue (Street Musicians), 1899-1900, Toned gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches, Gift of the Ackerman Foundation, 1984.194A

	Rue de la Colonie, 1900

'Atget: Une Rétrospective', Bibliothèque Nationale de France (site Richelieu), www.bnf.fr, tel +33 1 53 79 59 59. Until July 1

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Cheerleader for cinema's underdogs

Death Proof is also full of female characters. There are eight parts for women, and only one for a man (Kurt Russell, as the serial killer.) Tarantino maintains that while his women are strong, he doesn't endow them with male attributes: "The characters of Kim and of Zoe are stuntwomen, but that's not really a male trait; there's a whole history of stuntwomen."

He goes on: "I think it would be cheating, if I really gave them male attributes. I mean they're bad-assed, but that's not necessarily a masculine trait. My women stand up for themselves, but again, I don't consider that a male trait; it's a human trait. I am proud of my female characters, because they're feminine and they talk like real women. It's not like I am J.D. Salinger, sitting in my house trying to remember how people talked in college back then."

When I ask why he doesn't make more pictures, he says: "It's only been three years since I made Kill Bill 2. That's about my rate." I push further and he elaborates: "Okay, I don't mean to be stuttering, here's the deal, there are two reasons. One, I do want to live life in between time. I have to be able to live life so I can give something back to it. But the real, real reason is because I'm a writer and I always have to start with the blank page and that's hard."

Hollywood is an easy place to lose control. "If you take a lot of directors 15 years into their career, they all started off as writer-directors and then they started having a bit more success and little by little they stopped writing - all of a sudden they're collaborating on scripts and all of a sudden they're not even writing at all anymore. You know why they do that? Because it's fucking hard to write." (If memory serves, this is the first Tarantino interview I have conducted over the past 15 years in which it has taken him a whole half-hour to use the f-word.)

So what does Tarantino do for recreation? "I don't have a family and kids," he says, "but every film is an adventure, at the end of which the air starts getting less rarefied, you realise you've put your friends on hold for a year, the opposite sex, and it's appealing just sitting on your couch and watching TV, or trying to go to bed at night."

==

Cheerleader for cinema's underdogs

By Emanuel Levy

Published: April 16 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 16 2007 03:00

Quentin Tarantino is in high spirits. Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the director's loving tribute with Robert Rodriguez to 1970s exploitation films, has just been accepted into competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which this year celebrates its 60th anniversary.

Tarantino is elated to be adding footage to his segment for the screening at Cannes. In the US Grindhouse plays as a double-feature (with a running time of 192 minutes), but most countries will show it in two instalments, with Tarantino's Death Proof and Rodriguez's Planet Terror as two distinct movies.

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But there is another reason for his giddiness. When we meet, Tarantino is preparing to show a double bill of two of his favourite films at his newly launched Grindhouse Festival, an annual celebration of schlock cinema. "One of my favourite sexploitation movies is by the British director Derek Ford, The Girl from Starship Venus, which will be playing with a Spanish picture, The Legend of the Wolf Woman," he says. "Any plans tonight? You can come and see my favourite prints at the New Beverly [an arthouse revival moviehouse in LA]."

The film reel in the projection room is important to Tarantino. He owns a substantial library of 16mm and 35mm prints, including such classics as the Howard Hawks-John Wayne Western Rio Bravo ("Man, I just got my own 35mm print, which I can't believe I own"), as well as the schlocky fare he admires, films he became steeped in as a clerk at Manhattan Beach's video store.

"I'm limited in my programming [at Grindhouse]," Tarantino says, "because I wanted to use only my prints. I didn't want to borrow anything, I wanted it to have my complete personal touch." Every year the festival will be devoted to a different decade: "This year I made it exclusively the 1970s, but next year I could do 1960s stuff, or 1980s, my library is big enough."

Cannes, queen of international festivals, has always occupied a special place in Tarantino's heart. In 1994, Pulp Fiction won the top prize, the Palme d'Or, which Tarantino considers the happiest moment of his life. "I remember reading about Cannes when I was a little boy," he says, "and I always imagined going there. Reservoir Dogs was not in competition, but I got to see my very first movie in the Grand Lumière and it was fantastic."

When Clint Eastwood, who was jury president in 1994, announced Pulp Fiction as the winner, Tarantino "jumped up and screamed like it was a football game. That's my favourite memory of Cannes. It's my favourite of all accolades I've received.The Palme d'Or was more important than the Oscar [for Original Screenplay], more than anything."

In 2004, Tarantino was himself asked to preside over the Cannes jury. The award of the Palme d'Or to Michael Moore's provocative documentary Fahrenheit 9/11caused quite a stir, especially as Tarantino is generally considered an a political filmmaker.

Tarantino, however, claims he is "extremely influenced by what happens in the world" but that that doesn't affect the way he deals with violence or drama as a filmmaker. "Nothing has changed much, but that doesn't mean that my movies aren't connected to life," he adds. "I don't think the reasons you're here is just because I've directed a bunch of sensationalistic violent movies. Part of the reason you're here is because of my characters, and the human hearts that are in those characters. I am very connected to Planet Earth and to the human heart when it comes to characters and dialogue."

Tarantino has applied this interest to genres that are underdogs as far as mainstream critics are concerned. Reservoir Dogs was his response to Hollywood's heist movies; Jackie Brown was made to honour exploitation actress Pam Grier (star of Foxy Brown); Kill Bill: Volume 1 paid tribute to Hong Kong kung fu and Kill Bill: Volume 2 was prompted by Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns.

Death Proof is Tarantino's take on the "slasher" and "road" genres of the 1970s. He considers his films to be personal genre movies, with themes and motifs filtered through his own idiosyncratic sensibility.

By now, he is used to charges of excessive violence, which began with the torture of a policeman in Reservoir Dogs. Indeed, Tarantino has never been apologetic about this aspect of his movies. He says: "I don't think either sex or violence are harmful, except when it comes to children. But that's not my business. That's up to the parents to expose them, or not."

Still, the question remains, what if children get hold of violent content on their own? "That's part of childhood," Tarantino says. "Part of being a kid is looking at what you're not supposed to look at, have the excitement of seeing the forbidden fruit." End of discussion.

Since the male-dominated Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's oeuvre has increasingly centred on women. Jackie Brown was written with Grier in mind, Kill Bill for Uma Thurman, his muse at the time.

Death Proof is also full of female characters. There are eight parts for women, and only one for a man (Kurt Russell, as the serial killer.) Tarantino maintains that while his women are strong, he doesn't endow them with male attributes: "The characters of Kim and of Zoe are stuntwomen, but that's not really a male trait; there's a whole history of stuntwomen."

He goes on: "I think it would be cheating, if I really gave them male attributes. I mean they're bad-assed, but that's not necessarily a masculine trait. My women stand up for themselves, but again, I don't consider that a male trait; it's a human trait. I am proud of my female characters, because they're feminine and they talk like real women. It's not like I am J.D. Salinger, sitting in my house trying to remember how people talked in college back then."

Death Proofis the first movie in which Tarantino served as his own director of photography. He says that while he had a "really good time", he doesn't consider himself a cinematographer. "A director who acts as his own photographer is just taking responsibility for the photography, because what a cinematographer considers good images and what a director considers are not necessarily the same thing."

Unlike his collaborator Rodriguez, Tarantino is not a prolific filmmaker, having made seven pictures in 15 years. Part of the reason for his being "slow" is his interest in acting; he recently starred on Broadway in a revival of Wait Until Dark, alongside Marisa Tomei.

When I ask why he doesn't make more pictures, he says: "It's only been three years since I made Kill Bill 2. That's about my rate." I push further and he elaborates: "Okay, I don't mean to be stuttering, here's the deal, there are two reasons. One, I do want to live life in between time. I have to be able to live life so I can give something back to it. But the real, real reason is because I'm a writer and I always have to start with the blank page and that's hard."

Hollywood is an easy place to lose control. "If you take a lot of directors 15 years into their career, they all started off as writer-directors and then they started having a bit more success and little by little they stopped writing - all of a sudden they're collaborating on scripts and all of a sudden they're not even writing at all anymore. You know why they do that? Because it's fucking hard to write." (If memory serves, this is the first Tarantino interview I have conducted over the past 15 years in which it has taken him a whole half-hour to use the f-word.)

So what does Tarantino do for recreation? "I don't have a family and kids," he says, "but every film is an adventure, at the end of which the air starts getting less rarefied, you realise you've put your friends on hold for a year, the opposite sex, and it's appealing just sitting on your couch and watching TV, or trying to go to bed at night."

At the same time, he relishes the opportunities to travel that his profession affords. "One of the best things cinema has given me is a passport to the world, because I am going to all these countries, and I've got friends in this place, and that place." That is just as well, because Tarantino will be travelling extensively in the next six months to promote Death Proof.

But right now he is anxious to see the film's "new" version at Cannes. "It will be the first time anyone, including me, sees it on the big screen with a live audience," he says. "I can't wait."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: The new prints of Denmark

In many ways, however, manga and Shakespearean tragedy are perfectly suited. The Japanese form makes explicit some of the bard's abiding concerns: passionate love leads to violence, men defend their honour, families are defied and social mores corrupted. Shakespeare's plays are full of sex and violence. The old-fashioned, formal stage productions sometimes forget this.

A cartoon version of Shakespeare is in some ways truer to the original than reading the text alone; the visual element was always supposed to be part of the experience. Ultimately, however, nothing beats seeing these plays performed.

These new graphic novels are definitely entertaining - and the Bard, lest we forget, was unabashedly in the entertainment business. This is not literal Shakespeare, and these books are unlikely to open up new interpretations or nuances of the plays. Not all Shakespeare scholars will approve - but sometimes, methinks, they protest too much.

==

The new prints of Denmark

By Rosie Blau

Published: February 24 2007 02:00 | Last updated: February 24 2007 02:00

In a trendy Tokyo night spot, two teenagers meet, kiss and fall in love. But each is a member of a rival Yakuza mafia family. What's a young rock star to do when he's threatened with death if he visits his new love?

If the plot sounds weak, be careful, for you tread on hallowed ground. This is the work of William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, the most famous love story ever told, has just been transplanted out of Renaissance Italy and into a Japanese comic book.

Manga Shakespeare is a new enterprise by publishing company SelfMadeHero. While the abridged text is lifted straight from Shakespeare's play, the visuals are those of manga, Japanese-style cartoons.

It is only one example of a growing trend for recreating classic works in graphic form. SelfMadeHero releases manga Hamlet next week. Richard III and The Tempest are coming out in the autumn, along with other classics such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Kidnapped, the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, has also been cast into graphic form (a Scots translation, Kidnappit, is the first ever Scots language graphic novel).

Classics have always been reinterpreted for new audiences, new genres and new times. The stories of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet existed in various forms before Shakespeare wrote his dramas, and the works have since been made into operas and ballets. Even as "straight" plays they've been performed in every conceivable time, place and dress. One of the most popular adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, was set in modern-day "Verona beach" and was populated by warring gangs wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying guns. The text was Shakespeare's but the setting certainly wasn't. And even the Shakespeare scholars approved. But how well does classic fiction work in graphic novel form?

Unlike children's comic books, graphic novels and manga use literary techniques to tell a story. Rather than recount every move, they allow action to take place off screen; it might take five squares of a comic strip to show a man walking down the street, while manga and graphic novels usher the man straight into a house, allowing the reader's imagination to get him there.

Graphic adaptations aren't new. The popular Classics Illustrated in the 1940s and 1950s numbered all of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Kidnapped among its titles. More recently, the Graphic Shakespeare series and Comic Book Shakespeare released comic versions of various plays. In both these later series, the text was modernised, simplified and, arguably, ruined, while the visual elements were minimal.

The new manga Shakespeare and Kidnapped are better and more rigorous than any previous example. They uphold two important principles: they retain the original language, albeit abridged, and they are long enough to allow the story to be told (The Classics Illustrated Romeo and Juliet was 44 pages, the manga version is 200). Even graphic Hamlet, which is such a long play that every director cuts it (except Kenneth Branagh), is about a third of the original length.

The form is also truly inventive. The books all shun a regulated grid of comic book squares, and offer varying shapes and sizes of picture for emphasis. When David Balfour sets out for his uncle's house in Kidnapped, his image looms over the other three frames on the page; the ghost of Hamlet's father is allowed to filter across two pages, dominating the spread even though he is drawn in shadowy strokes.

The experience of reading these works is very different to that of regular prose. The text is all in capital letters, but the eye becomes accustomed to that. Kidnapped survives without chapter headings, but Shakespeare suffers from not being divided into acts: the flow is sometimes too fast, without space for action between the words.

In many ways, however, manga and Shakespearean tragedy are perfectly suited. The Japanese form makes explicit some of the bard's abiding concerns: passionate love leads to violence, men defend their honour, families are defied and social mores corrupted. Shakespeare's plays are full of sex and violence. The old-fashioned, formal stage productions sometimes forget this.

The British illustrators have given the Shakespearean characters a manga makeover. Juliet becomes a dark-haired beauty (in most graphic adaptations she is blonde), wide-eyed, long-limbed and big- breasted (at 13). She sports a manga-infused wardrobe of miniskirts, knee-high schoolgirl socks, shorts with stockings, and the occasional kimono for Japanese effect.

The effeminate appearance of many male manga heroes also matches Shakespeare's prose. Romeo "thy tears are womanish" Montague pushes back his long blond hair as he weeps at his banishment to Mantua (or in this case, Kyoto). Hamlet, in his "unmanly grief" and moody angst, lashes out from beneath long lashes and blond spikey hair, though he wears an "inky cloak" in line with the play's insistence on his dark personality.

Like all good adaptations, the manga books add new comic elements and twists to the old plays. Hamlet confers with Horatio via a video screen; when he utters his "to be or not to be" speech a retractable blade comes shooting from his wrist. By contrast, Romeo and Juliet's downfall is modern communication systems: a server failure blocks an e-mail telling Romeo of Juliet's faked death, while Romeo can't call anyone from his caravan exile as his mobile phone has no reception. And nothing can change some of the crowning moments in these classic tales: in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Kidnapped, the characters all speak as and after they die - why would a graphic novelist defy such a plot device?

The new contexts aren't consistent, however. We are told on the first page that Hamlet is set in 2107, when "global climate change has devastated the earth". We see the cyberworld: all the characters have some kind of implanted computer chip and wear fabulous manga costumes, part-Elizabethan, part-Star Trek. But none of the visual cues point to any kind of climate-change distressed world - or is this the "something's rotten in the state of Denmark"?

The niggles in Romeo and Juliet are smaller: she speaks from her balcony into a massive garden that surely couldn't exist in the pricey and densely populated Shibuya district of Tokyo where it is set, while the lovers look up to stars that are barely visible in that neon-obsessed city. And when Juliet goes to see the Catholic Friar Laurence to seek his help, she finds him in Japanese dress in a Buddhist monastery. Other comic elements work better, such as Romeo's race back from Kyoto on his motorbike, and the "Police Line - Do Not Cross" at the play's tragic ending.

But a graphic novel can not convey all the nuances and possible interpretations of a Shakespeare work. One of the joys of these plays is that, alongside the impetuous, passionate lead characters blinded by love or revenge, the wider cast joke, foil and, above all, add depth and humour. Think about Romeo and Juliet: a couple meet once, kiss, and are so overcome with love (lust by any other name?), that they are prepared to defy their family and if necessary kill themselves. The great story of the star-crossed lovers is not built on this bare plot alone. When you read the original text or watch the play you are swept up almost despite the absurdity of it - and it's the other characters who maintain this balance. In the text of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo's friend Mercutio, for example, is there specifically to ridicule the whole idea of love poetry, and love as anything other than sex. In the graphic novel his part is minimal (though he does have great dreadlocks).

Hamlet, too, is a play about more than revenge and power. But no graphic novel would make good reading if it took as elaborate a course as Shakespeare did to ponder the nature of truth, indecision, action and death.

At other times the visuals do set off Shakespeare's suggestive prose. For example, the drawings reinforce the hint of incestuous desire between the ravishing Ophelia and her brother Laertes, while Hamlet crouches inappropriately over his mother's prone body: "Go not to mine uncle's bed... assume a virtue if you have it not."

A degree of irony and emotion are certainly lost in the graphic adaptations. This is not so much the fault of the adapters, however, but a limit of the form. Of necessity, these versions focus on the central characters more than the original text does - a graphic novel simply can't hold as many people as a play, particularly when they so often speak in asides or hide behind tapestries. And the typical black-and-white manga drawings, though beautiful, make it harder to distinguish between personalities than a colour version would. If you haven't read the plays before - and teenagers are part of the target audience for these stories - then these books may be hard to follow.

Kidnapped, by contrast, is a much easier work to recast. It is 1751, and David Balfour has hit a patch of bad luck: his uncle steals his inheritance, kidnaps him and sends him off on a ship bound for America. It's a classic boy's own adventure story, narrated by one person in a linear form. Stevenson's novel itself is quite childlike - the book title alone gives away half the story, while chapter headings such as "I Come to My Journey's End" emphasise the literal nature of this tale.

Some moments are managed brilliantly, such as David's shock when he first reaches his uncle's home. We see him from the back in the shadow of a crumbling house so monumental that it blocks out the sun: "Was this the palace I had been coming to? Was it within these walls that I was to seek new friends and begin great fortunes?"

The visual characterisation is distinctly unsubtle: we see evil at first glance. Captain Hoseason, for example, glares out of the page from beneath a rounded brow that comes down over his deep-set eyes and hooked nose. But the book is swift with this information too; we pre-empt the original by only a few paragraphs.

There are, inevitably, soap-opera style flaws to the graphic element. The kidnapped, shipwrecked and on-the-run David Balfour looks as clean-shaven and kempt at his journey's end as he did at the beginning. But this we can forgive. Although it lacks the rich density of Stevenson's language and storytelling, Kidnapped is precisely the kind of excellent adaptation that should help to keep the story alive. And since the graphic version is aimed partly at a school audience, some readers may later take up the novel itself.

So should we be reading and recommending these graphic adaptations? When it comes to classic works, only some subjects work well in this genre. Robert Louis Stevenson passes the test, at least for this novel. As for Shakespeare, on the surface the manga versions are more obviously "fun" than the texts teenagers might read in school - they are visually appealing, intelligently adapted and demonstrate that Shakespeare is a writer for every age. A cartoon version of Shakespeare is in some ways truer to the original than reading the text alone; the visual element was always supposed to be part of the experience. Ultimately, however, nothing beats seeing these plays performed.

These new graphic novels are definitely entertaining - and the Bard, lest we forget, was unabashedly in the entertainment business. This is not literal Shakespeare, and these books are unlikely to open up new interpretations or nuances of the plays. Not all Shakespeare scholars will approve - but sometimes, methinks, they protest too much.

ROMEO AND JULIET

by William Shakespeare

adapted by Richard Appignanesi

illustrated by Sonia Leong

SelfMadeHero £6.99, 200 pages

FT bookshop price: £5.59

HAMLET

by William Shakespeare

adapted by Richard Appignanesi

illustrated by Emma Vieceli

SelfMadeHero £6.99, 200 pages

FT bookshop price: £5.59

KIDNAPPED

by Robert Louis Stevenson

adapted by Alan Grant

illustrated by Cam Kennedy

Waverley Books £8.99, 64 pages

FT bookshop price: £7.19

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Big-spending brands turn Oscars into week-long party

With 30-second advertising slots that can cost $1m a piece, the Super Bowl is a more lucrative marketing opportunity than the Oscars. But the build-up to the Oscars is coveted by advertisers because they can conduct smaller, more targeted campaigns.

The Oscars, unlike the Super Bowl, represent "a week in time that allows entertainment and brands to converge in a really strong way", says Lori Sale, head of global branded entertainment at International Creative Management, a Hollywood talent agency.

"It is hugely important for every fashion, jewellery and cosmetic brand. But the Oscars has also expanded to cars, weight loss products . . any brand you can think of."

==

Big-spending brands turn Oscars into week-long party

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles

Published: February 24 2007 02:00 | Last updated: February 24 2007 02:00

The ticking clock on the official Oscar website is breathlessly billed as a "countdown to the live telecast", showing the number of hours left before the start of the 79th Academy Awards tomorrow.

The website, much like the awards themselves, serves another purpose though: a host of brands are prominently displayed, reflecting the Oscars' increasing ability to sell products.

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The Oscars used to be confined to a single evening of television, watched patiently by families across America. But during the last 10 years, they have evolved into a week-long marketing juggernaut of promotional parties and events that are highly coveted by advertisers.

Hollywood has been packed this week as companies have sought to capitalise on the pulling power of the awards. General Motors, for example, bought itself priceless airtime on the main television networks when it hosted a pre-Oscar fashion show featuring stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Carmen Electra posing alongside its latest range.

The Oscars have "become a season", says Damon Wolf, president and chief executive of Crew Creative, the advertising agency that creates campaigns for Hollywood films. The week of warm-up events and parties, and the big night itself, is a "must for certain products and [brand] categories.

"It is a great opportunity for companies to seetheir brands reach millions of people around the world".

Unlike the Sunday night ceremony, the private events this week will not be seen by millions of people. Instead, they represent a chance for individual brands to reach a wealthy, niche audience.

At the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, home to many nominated actors during Oscar week, several "luxury lounges" have been opened where invited stars can view and sample the latest upmarket products.

The Oscars are a marketing opportunity for the hotel, too. It is popular with British nominees and is using Oscar week to redirect its marketing activities towards British guests. "It is our most important market outside the US," says Sarah Cairns of Four Seasons.

Giorgio Armani is tonight due to host a star-studded event at the home of Ron Burkle, the southern California-based billionaire. Meanwhile, Ebony magazine's pre-Oscar party on Thursday night attracted leading African American stars such as Forest Whitaker and secured sponsorship from Lincoln Mercury cars, Anheuser-Busch, and the Bahamas.

"What we are trying to do is break out of all the clutter," says Ellison Tommy Thompson, deputy director- general of the Bahamas ministry of tourism. "We are trying to attract the African American audience to the Bahamas while Los Angeles is also a growing market for us." The Ebony Oscar party, he said, was "a great opportunity to associate ourselves with a big brand that is fun and exciting".

With 30-second advertising slots that can cost $1m a piece, the Super Bowl is a more lucrative marketing opportunity than the Oscars. But the build-up to the Oscars is coveted by advertisers because they can conduct smaller, more targeted campaigns.

The Oscars, unlike the Super Bowl, represent "a week in time that allows entertainment and brands to converge in a really strong way", says Lori Sale, head of global branded entertainment at International Creative Management, a Hollywood talent agency.

"It is hugely important for every fashion, jewellery and cosmetic brand. But the Oscars has also expanded to cars, weight loss products . . any brand you can think of."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Monday Interview: Big hitter who bats for stars

As the head of ICM, his management strategy has always been to give young, talented agents more responsibility.

“We tend to put agents in senior roles relatively early on in their careers,” he says. “We would rather let someone grow and develop when their ambition is unbridled than let them settle into a complacent career.”

Monday Interview: Big hitter who bats for stars

By Matthew Garrahan

Published: February 4 2007 17:53 | Last updated: February 4 2007 17:53

Two photographs hang on the wall of Jeffrey Berg’s Beverly Hills office, each one showing the biggest hitters in US corporate life relaxing at Herb Allen’s exclusive annual media gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Among the small group dressed casually for the golf course are Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Sumner Redstone of Viacom is there, as is Dick Parsons of Time Warner. And in the middle of each photograph is Mr Berg, the chairman and chief executive of International Creative Management.

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ICM is a minnow compared with Microsoft and News Corp. But as Mr Berg’s attendance at the elite Sun Valley event suggests, the talent agency he has chaired for 22 years packs a big punch.

Under Mr Berg’s leadership, the company has established itself as one of the leading players in talent representation, jostling for supremacy with the likes of CAA, William Morris and Endeavor.

Some of Hollywood’s brightest stars are on its books, notably Mel Gibson, Denzel Washington, Beyoncé Knowles and Halle Berry. Its activities are not confined to the film industry, though. It has had a hand in the success of many lucrative, long-running television programmes, packaging and syndicating Grey’s Anatomy, Friends, Sex and the City and The Simpsons, among others. ICM also boasts a thriving literary division, representing authors such as Toni Morrison and Carl Hiaasen.

Mr Berg’s career in the entertainment industry be-gan unconventionally. At high school he toyed with joining the marines but had to change his plans after a fall in which he broke both arms. Then, as an undergraduate reading literature at the University at California at Berkeley in the 1960s, he joined the Peace & Freedom party, which campaigned against the war in Vietnam.

He had his first encounter with the industry when he took a summer job for an agency reading scripts and novels to find material that might be suitable for the big screen.

Through this work he had a hand in two of the era’s seminal films, reading A Clockwork Orange and Midnight Cowboy and recommending them to his agency bosses. “I found those pro-jects at a relatively young stage in my life and I thought, ‘I like this. This is interesting’.”

After graduating in 1969 and going to Hawaii for a surfing holiday, word reached him that the agency, a predecessor of ICM, was offering him a full-time job. So he packed his surfboard and returned to the office to take up his post.

Almost 40 years later, after a career in which he has worked on films as diverse as Star Wars, Jaws and Braveheart, the board shorts have gone, replaced by a smart suit, blue shirt and Hermès tie. He appears erudite yet is personable and easy-going – a useful attri-bute in an industry where the ability to maintain strong personal relationships is prized.

Unlike the average Hollywood executive who is happy to charm actors and directors but lacks financial know-how, Mr Berg also has a grasp of the broader economic changes taking place in the industry. Hedge funds, private equity groups and other investors are increasingly looking to put money into the film business.

“All the studios are accessing sources of outside capital,” he says. “At one point our job [as an agency] was to advise artists and negotiate smart and informed deals. We still do this but we also have a role to play in securing finance to make the films in the first place.” This has led to new opportunities for ICM. “We have been one of the agencies that have successfully penetrated the capital markets. It has given us a real competitive edge.”

He has also been able to act on his long-held belief in the need for consolidation among talent agencies, last year acquiring Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann, a leading television agency, in a deal worth close to $100m. The deal was made possible by an equity financing in which Rizvi Traverse, a private equity group, and Merrill Lynch’s asset-based finance group acquired stakes in ICM. “There will be more deals to follow,” Mr Berg says.

The Broder deal strengthened ICM’s position in tele-vision at a critical time. The sharp increase in the num-ber of US cable channels and the fast-expanding international broadcasting market has increased the value of television content. Capable of drawing audiences years after they were first aired because of secondary and even tertiary syndication deals, popular television shows “can have an economic life in perpetuity”, according to Mr Berg.

The shift has led to ICM’s television business becoming more profitable than its core film activities. “From a margin performance, television is the leader,” he says. Following the Broder deal, ICM’s revenues are believed to be about $200m.

In terms of prestige, though, having a strong presence in film remains crucial because of its ability to act as a magnet for talent in related industries. So ICM has maintained and added to an impressive roster of film clients. All of the top 10 grossing films of 2006 featured ICM clients, while the company also represents directors such as Woody Allen, and Stephen Frears who directed The Queen.

As in other agencies, staff retention is crucial at ICM because of the close relationships between agents and their superstar clients. But at the beginning of the year ICM suffered a blow when Robert Newman, one of its most senior agents, left to join Endeavor, a fierce rival. Mr Berg takes a pragmatic view. “We never want to lose good people,” he says, adding that he is proud of the group’s ability to retain key staff. “If you look around our offices in Los Angeles and New York you will find people who have been here 20, 25 years.”

The close relationship between an agency and its clients also means agents can be brought into the spotlight if the clients mis-behave. Mr Berg experienced this six months ago when Mel Gibson, one of ICM’s biggest stars, made anti-Semitic remarks to a Jewish police officer after being arrested for drink driving.

Mr Berg, who is Jewish, was faced with a dilemma. “It was a difficult event for our agency. I supported him publicly but also said his actions were indefensible. I think I know what’s in his heart and who he is.”

When he came out in support of Mr Gibson, “I took criticism for it. But I would do it again,” says Mr Berg. The broader issue, he says, “is that agents often find themselves in situations that have nothing to do with the deal”.

Still, the boy from Berkeley continues to love the entertainment industry. “It’s a smaller industry than something like financial services. But it’s wildly more influential in terms of affecting social thought and cultural opinion,” he says.

Thick skin and a level head

An agent for almost 40 years, Jeffrey Berg has worked on a diverse range of films and entertainment projects, including ‘Star Wars’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Braveheart’. He knows what it takes to succeed in the competitive talent agency industry.

“You need to know how to construct a deal and be able to openly communicate complex issues to staff and clients,” he says.

“You need passion for
the career, intense salesmanship skills and the ability to subordinate your own ego. You need to be able to foster good relations [with clients]. I would also say a pretty tough skin and ability to cope with rejection [is important].”

As the head of ICM, his management strategy has always been to give young, talented agents more responsibility.

“We tend to put agents in senior roles relatively early on in their careers,” he says. “We would rather let someone grow and develop when their ambition is unbridled than let them settle into a complacent career.”

With hedge funds and private equity firms looking to invest in Hollywood, the nature of ICM’s work has changed: the agency is now active in securing film financing. Such complex work requires employees with different skills.

“We compete directly with the major law firms and investment banks for new staff,” says Mr Berg. “People coming out of business schools in America are looking at agency careers in the way that 10, 15 years ago they were looking at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.”

The changing nature of ICM’s business is a new attraction, he adds, but the lure of working in the entertainment industry is also a factor for young people considering an agency career. “It’s dynamic and sexy . . . it’s a magnet to people.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

FT: Altered images

You might think the sacrifice of the heroine made Pan's Labyrinth a tougher movie than Spirit of the Beehive. It is certainly shocking, but the murder of Ofelia, as well as representing the death of any hope for the future, is also a cop-out that allows her to be reunited with her dead parents in the fantasy world. It repeats the tear-jerking pathos of Frankenstein, which Spirit of the Beehive subverts. Much tougher to imagine how a girl such as Ana will ultimately cope with growing up in a complex adult world suffused with lies and repression.

Pan's Labyrinth, unlike Spirit of the Beehive, refuses adulthood and complexity.

t's cosy to know immediately who is a goody and who is a baddy, but that is not the way we truly experience the world.

The world, for Ana and her sister Isabel, is opaque, not easy to read: why are their parents so withdrawn, from each other and from society? To whom is their mother writing letters? Why is their father preoccupied with bees? What does he sit up late at night writing?

Faced with enigma and doubleness, human beings, or certain brave ones, must test out appearances

Ana in Spirit of the Beehive goes through a great test: she has to lose her innocence and realise that what grown-ups say is not always to be trusted, that the grown-up world is full of lies and deceit, as well as love.What worries me about Pan's Labyrinth, and so much contemporary cinema, is that it substitutes technical ingenuity and special effects for the deeper truth that lies in metaphor and in letting things slowly reveal themselves.

Metaphor is in this sense the opposite of fantasy, forging connections that resonate through decades, making the heart and understanding more supple, not more rigid.

==

Altered images

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 20 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 20 2007 02:00

Just over 30 years separate the two films: strong thematic similarities link them. Both look at the aftermath of the Spanish civil war through the eyes of a young girl. Both show fantasy and reality colliding in traumatic fashion. Extraordinary performances from young actresses grace both films. But in other respects Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive of 1973 and Guillermo del Toro's recently released Pan's Labyrinth could hardly be more different. The differences have much to tell us about the evolution of our times and of our imaginations.

Del Toro, by all accounts a scholarly, even geekish director, is surely paying an implicit homage to Erice by making his central character a girl whose imagination sometimes gets the better of her. Both girls, Ana in Spirit of the Beehive and Ofelia in Pan's Labyrinth, befriend a scary-looking imaginary creature. For Ana it is Boris Karloff's beetle-browed monster in James Whale's Frankenstein, which she has just seen as a travelling cinema visits her home village. With Ofelia it is a faun, created by elaborate computer-generated special effects.

Erice has no need of special effects; all he needs is short clips of the black and white film, and a sequence where Ana hallucinates meeting the monster by a pond. But though he conveys a child's imagination with the minimum of means (mainly the expression in Ana Torrent's unfathomably deep, dark eyes), the repercussions are infinitely more powerful. The link that forms in Ana's mind between Frankenstein's monster and the Republican fugitive she finds in a farm building is central to the film's action and her character's development. For all the weird beauty of the labyrinth scenes in Pan's Labyrinth, by contrast, they ultimately have no power to engage with reality.

Perhaps this is what makes Pan's Labyrinth such a pessimistic film. Spirit of the Beehive shows a child, and a whole country, emerging from a profound trauma. After finding evidence of the murder of the fugitive, and thinking that her father is implicated, Ana runs away, falls ill and seems on the point of death. But she survives, and we feel by the end of the film that she has grown up, and will become a different kind of adult from her sad, silenced parents. She symbolises (in the most natural way, for she remains utterly individual) a nation coming to terms with a brutal past.

You might think the sacrifice of the heroine made Pan's Labyrinth a tougher movie than Spirit of the Beehive. It is certainly shocking, but the murder of Ofelia, as well as representing the death of any hope for the future, is also a cop-out that allows her to be reunited with her dead parents in the fantasy world. It repeats the tear-jerking pathos of Frankenstein, which Spirit of the Beehive subverts. Much tougher to imagine how a girl such as Ana will ultimately cope with growing up in a complex adult world suffused with lies and repression.

Pan's Labyrinth, unlike Spirit of the Beehive, refuses adulthood and complexity.

There is a sadistic villain who enjoys beating innocents' faces in with bottles, romantic bands of rebels in the woods (more like Robin Hood and his merry men than any real rebels who might have been left in Spain in 1944) and a heroically self-sacrificing doctor. It's cosy to know immediately who is a goody and who is a baddy, but that is not the way we truly experience the world.

The world, for Ana and her sister Isabel, is opaque, not easy to read: why are their parents so withdrawn, from each other and from society? To whom is their mother writing letters? Why is their father preoccupied with bees? What does he sit up late at night writing?

Faced with enigma and doubleness, human beings, or certain brave ones, must test out appearances. Ana is one of those. She cannot accept that the monster is "bad": she must summon him to find out his secret. Good and evil must sometimes be reversed, as Nietzsche saw. Are little girls good? Not always, not when they torture cats. Are fathers good? Not when they collude in or turn a blind eye to murder. What does a beehive represent? An ordered society, or a constant agitation?

The complexity of Spirit of the Beehive lies not in any over-intellectual schematising, but in its allowing the face of things to appear in all its enigmatic undecidability. Ana in Spirit of the Beehive goes through a great test: she has to lose her innocence and realise that what grown-ups say is not always to be trusted, that the grown-up world is full of lies and deceit, as well as love.

What worries me about Pan's Labyrinth, and so much contemporary cinema, is that it substitutes technical ingenuity and special effects for the deeper truth that lies in metaphor and in letting things slowly reveal themselves. Retreat into fantasy and the simplification of goodies and baddies are the last thing we need, on the screen as much as in the political arena. "We had fed our hearts upon fantasy," as Yeats wrote so prophetically in "Meditations in Time of Civil War", "the heart's grown brutal from the fare". Metaphor is in this sense the opposite of fantasy, forging connections that resonate through decades, making the heart and understanding more supple, not more rigid.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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