wachowski brothers
If You Don’t Read This Post, We’ll Kill This Chimpanzee
4:30AM Defamer Hollywood | While it pains us to stoop to the animal-threatening tactics of National Lampoon, it seems that Hollywood is far more cavalier with the fates of its four-legged thespians. According to the LAT, one of filmdom’s most enjoyable genres — that of the monkey movie — is being assailed by PETA activists, who are demanding that actor chimps be replaced by CG versions. They allege that the trained monkeys are being abused to solicit a performance — and based on this anecdote about “Clyde,” the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose, they may have a point: More »
Amateur Publicist Joel Silver Has Wachowskis’ Backs For the Last Time
4:50AM Defamer Hollywood | In a loooooong video interview with David Poland over at Movie City News, producer Joel Silver chats about the prismatic, pyrotechnic up and downs of his career — the latter of which the bomb Speed Racer likely entered in the time since the modulated mogul sat for this conversation. And while he eventually acknowledges still dreading opening weekends and the Saturday morning silence that follows his weaker openings, he wastes little time defending the Wachowskis’ career-suffocating reclusion and his role as de facto mouthpiece: “It ends up being harder for me because I end up being the voice for them. I wish sometimes they’d speak for themselves because they’re much smarter than I am, and they’re much more articulate than I am. … I just listen to them relate to everybody and I say, ‘Here’s what they think.’ That’s how it happens.” No, Joel — we think you mean that’s how it happened. Time for a change, big guy. [The Hot Blog] More »
The Worst is Yet to Come in ‘Speed Racer’ Crash-and-Burn
1:50AM Defamer Hollywood | How’s this for irony? The same week Warner Bros. reestablished its mainstream priorities by dramatically cutting off Picturehouse and Warner Independent at the knees, the studio opened the summer with one of its biggest bombs in years: Speed Racer, the imperially promoted, poorly received $100 million Wachowskis film that opened this weekend to $20.2 million — if that. A Defamer operative inside Time Warner sent word Sunday that the studio’s estimate could be overstating its actual gross by as much as $2.5 million, placing it in third place overall behind the relatively well-received What Happens in Vegas, which Fox is calling at $20 million but is likelier to cap out between $18 and $18.5 million. We’ll know the actual numbers later today, but as explained after the jump, it couldn’t get much more sobering for Warner Bros.
The Wachowskis Still in Hiding as ‘Speed Racer’ Circles the Drain
3:30AM Defamer Hollywood | For all its confectionery imagery, Christina Ricci scene-stealing and the few other things Speed Racer gets right, it still faces a box-office false start that could make Leatherheads look like a hit in comparison. We sketched a few of the hurdles here yesterday (number one being its own studio’s resignation to its underachievement), but at this point there’s only one that counts: Larry and Andy Wachowski need to climb out of their hole. More »
