Hulk Smash Puny Internet Rumors

Though I never lived through them, I think I miss the studio days when the buzz around a movie or a celebrity’s image was carefully controlled. At the very least, I’d like to go back to a time before the Internet when behind-the-camera movie gossip wasn’t dressed up as breaking news.

These days, director’s tirades turn up on YouTube and reports of on and off the set squabbles litter fan sites run by people who don’t seem to understand how the creative process works, let alone what happens in group dynamics.

Imagine if someone took notes about the day-to-day workings of your family and posted every disagreement on the Internet for everyone to read. You’d probably be horrified and your family would look like a bunch of dysfunctional freaks. Maybe they are, but even normal, healthy families have their ups and downs. The difference is that, on balance, everyone is happy in the end and the in-between drama isn’t splattered all over the Internet.

Unfortunately, movie productions don’t have that luxury.

The gossip often starts when talent is asked about, or otherwise expresses interest in, a certain project real or imagined. Let’s say it’s Adam McKay acknowledging that yes, he, and Will Ferrell are interested in doing another Anchorman. News that they aren’t interested in returning to one of their most popular movie projects would be more surprising, but nevertheless, McKay’s interest and intentions are stripped of all the conditions he may have added (if we can assemble the cast and if we can get a script and if Venus and Saturn properly align…) and suddenly it’s a scoop: Anchorman 2 is practically coming soon to a theater near you.

An Anchorman sequel may well be thrust upon the world in the next couple of years. I’ll be shocked if it isn’t, but at this point it’s just talk. Look at it this way, if every project a director or star toyed with came into being, I’d be sitting here watching a 5-disc Blu-ray Special Edition of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon right now instead of tapping out this post which has already traveled further afield than I originally planned.

Next, once a project miraculously gets off the ground and production actually begins, the casting rumors start to roll in as this or that celebrity is attached to (or unattached from) this or that film. Some of it is wishful thinking, some of it is misinformation and some of it is fact, but things change right up to the time cameras start rolling. Even then, nothing is final. If they were, I’d be watching Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut starring Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh right now instead of writing this post, which is now even further afield than it was in the last paragraph. Don’t worry though, I’ll bet most of this doesn’t even make it past the first draft.

Once filming blissfully and mercifully begins, the noise continues unabated. Now the set photos and accident reports and production problems begin to circulate. I’ll wager there are few productions that are flawless from beginning to end. In any endeavor there are always unexpected difficulties and in one that is creative like a movie production, there are sure to be differences in opinion that flare into arguments. This I believe is what they refer to as ‘human nature’ and you can magnify it by 1000 when you’re talking about inflated Hollywood egos. Nevertheless, people behaving like people is somehow news.

Oh look, I’m actually, finally, coming to what originally inspired this ramble: The Incredible Hulk. It seems the big green man was already a sensitive subject among fanboys and girls, thanks to the stiff and involuntary rogering they’d recently suffered at the hands of the evil Ang Lee who’d had the nerve to try turning a beloved comic book into an enduring adult work of art (that he didn’t quite succeed is the subject of another post). When a new film was announced, fanboy knives remained unsheathed. Nothing good could possibly come from a sequel, could it?

Alas, the worst nerd fears seemed to be coming to fruition when it was revealed at last summer’s Comic Con that star Edward Norton had rewritten Zach Penn’s original Hulk script. The underlying assumption was that another uppity artiste was screwing the Hulk all over again. The film wasn’t even in the can yet and the project was hopelessly doomed.

This story would continue to circulate and expand as post-production continued. Last March Nikki Finke spun it into a ‘feud’ between Norton and Marvel over final cut of the film. Norton wanted more of the stuff he’d written, Marvel (wishing to distance the new Hulk as much as possible from the Lee failure) wanted less. Marvel won. This isn’t an especially noteworthy issue, but it provided fuel for the fire.

Most recently, there was a dispute when Norton asked to receive writer’s credit for the work he’d done on the script. He didn’t get it. Dubbing the film the “Incredible Sulk” in an errant stab at cleverness, alleged journalist Roger Friedman claimed that a pouty Norton refused to promote the film. However, the FOX News wag’s report was quickly proven inaccurate by the pesky facts of Norton actually, you know, promoting the film. The actor who has a reputation for being difficult even went so far as to record a funny, self-mocking video parody for Jimmy Kimmel.

In the interest of remaining “fair and balanced,” I’m not going to call Roger Friedman a liar, but he’s certainly a guy who seems to know a thing or two about the opposite of the truth.

Of course, in every one of these Hulk reports, the people involved (including Norton himself) did their best to set the record straight and to assure people that nothing was wrong. That’s their job and I admit it’s difficult to gauge facts from studio spin, but then a funny thing happened: the movie came out. It turns out it’s not only nothing close to the disaster everyone seemed to be hoping for, it also looks like it could make quite a lot of money. More importantly, none of the film’s flaws (and it is flawed) have anything to do with on set squabbles, creative differences or personality clashes. In the end, the Internet buzz had turned into an Old Media roar, but it was all just so much crying over milk that would never be spilt.

What is with these people who seem to take no real pleasure in movies, but who get their rocks off obsessing over the details and dramas of the productions? They’re the type who make reality TV so popular. In small doses, this is fine, but en masse, it’s a cancer.

Movies are magic and to carefully parse the construction of the illusion is to ruin the fun of the trick. It’s like looking behind the green curtain and seeing nothing but a helpless old man, or Christmas when you know what you’re getting before you open your presents - it’s a drag and I don’t want any part of it.

Everything I need to know about a movie is up there on the screen in the dark where it belongs. The rest is but the impotent mewling of people with too much time on their hands.

Filed under: Analysis, Opinion

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