Dee Rees Bringing Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and The Fight for the ERA to the Big Screen in "An Uncivil War"

by Daniel Crooke

While her World War II-set Mississippi saga Mudbound continues to roll out across the fall festival circuit, steadily increasing its buzz along the way, rising director Dee Rees has set her sights on the feminist movement’s fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment for her next film: An Uncivil War. Particularly focusing on the work of iconic activists Flo Kennedy and Gloria Steinem in the early 1970s as they battle for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all citizens regardless of gender, and against archconservative forces led by fundamentalist organizer Phyllis Schlafly, FilmNation will finance the film with production set to begin early next year.

This is an exciting new chapter in Rees’s already distinguished filmography – which, in addition to Mudbound, includes her tender, achingly gorgeous debut Pariah and the Emmy-nominated Bessie – and the story is ripe for the moment. After so evocatively illustrating in her earlier work the ways in which hard-won personal identity can be met with retaliatory cultural reverberations from the close-mindedness within and around your own community, Rees has set herself up for success to dissect the multi-layered muddle of how this feminist moment impacted America. Indeed, in her own words: “I'm particularly interested in digging into the messiness of the women's movement — the many different alliances that were formed and fractured and exploring who got left behind vs who got remembered.” Personally this quote reminds me of the backroom brainstorm meetings between the fractious feminist street bands of Lizzie Borden’s dystopian docu-manifesto Born In Flames, a film which happens to feature Flo Kennedy in a galvanizing supporting performance as an elder stateswoman of the cause. That story, like this one, is a tale of intersectionality.

As An Uncivil War marches into pre-production, who would you cast as Flo Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, and Phyllis Schlafly?

New Podcast: Desperately Seeking Smackdowns

Nathaniel welcomes our first all Los Angeles panel for this discussion of the 1985 film year. Comedian/Writer Louis Virtel (Billy on the Street), Producer/Writer Abdi Nazemian ("The Authentics"), Actress Nora Zehetner and Director/Writer Michelle Morgan (It Happened in L.A.). We just wrote about the Supporting Actress nominated performances of 1985 but now it's time to zoom out on the films and the film year itself when Oprah Winfrey and Madonna began their global takeovers, Anjelica Huston became a third generation Oscar favorite, and Out of Africa eventually won Best Picture.

Smackdown '85 Companion Podcast
(58 minutes)
00:01 Anjelica vs Oprah with a little Amy Madigan on the side
10:00 Our entire group has a Jane Fonda "problem" - shout-outs to Klute and lots of head-scratching over the plot of Agnes of God
20:00 Meg Tilly and Jennifer Tilly and Oscar trivia
22:00 Should they remake The Color Purple?
28:00 Syphilitic Out of Africa, Divisive Prizzi's Honor and their Oscar wins
35:30 Desperately Seeking Susan and Oscar's resistance to both Madonna and comedy

46:30 Twice in a Lifetime's weird messages and cathartic makeovers
49:40 Individual favorites from the year from each of us including (but not limited to): Clue, The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Mask, The Legend of Billie Jean
55:00 Farewells and Credits

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Don't forget to read the smackdown and continue the conversations in the comments! 

Desperately Seeking Smackdown

Doc Corner: Laura Poitras' Risky Business

By Glenn Dunks

There is a knack to watching Laura Poitras’ latest film, Risk, her first as a director since winning the Academy Award for Citizenfour. And it’s not being abreast of the life and controversies of its on-screen subject, Julian Assange. Although that certainly helps to a point, his journey felt to be of little consequence to me in regards to how I ultimately felt about the movie. The film is messy and often perplexing, no better personified by an utterly surreal and bizarre sequence with Lady Gaga that is not kind to either of its participants.

Rather, the key to Risk’s success is to not view the film as about Assange at all, but rather  Poitras herself. Sure, the WikiLeaks co-founder is front and centre in the film, and documenting him was the modus operandi, but as a documentary subject he’s often far less interesting than the people that orbit him. I am not unaware that I am cutting Poitras an awful lot of slack here...

Click to read more ...

Box Office Three-Way and Dependable Dame Dench

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (Sept 29th-October 1st)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. KINGSMAN 2  $16.9 (cum. $66.6)	1.🔺 TIL DEATH DO US PART $1.5 on 562 screens
2. IT $16.9 (cum. $290.7) REVIEW | 5 TAKEAWAYS	2.🔺 VICTORIA AND ABDUL $1 on 77 screens (cum. $1.3)
3. 🔺 AMERICAN MADE $16.7	3.🔺 A QUESTION OF FAITH $1 on 661 screens
4. LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE $11.6 (cum. $35.2)	4. 🔺 STRONGER $922k on 645 screens (cum. $3.1) REVIEW
5. 🔺  FLATLINERS $6.5	5. 🔺 JUDWAA 2 $638k on 192 screens
6. 🔺 BATTLE OF THE SEXES $3.4 (cum. $4)	6. BRAD'S STATUS $400k on 453 screens (cum. $1.7) REVIEW
🔺 = new or significant expansion numbers (in millions unless otherwise noted) from box office mojo

A bit late on the quickie box office chart this week but for a good reason. The race for #1 was so tight between three films that it took til Monday to clear it up with the Kingsman sequel topping and the new Tom Cruise actioner American Made on bottom....

Click to read more ...

Unlinkable

Awards Daily Jazz interviews Ali Fazal of Victoria & Abdul
Variety Rock star Tom Petty was reported dead today but reports may have been premature. Story developing but sounds dire
Coming Soon M Night Shyamalan's sequel to Unbreakable starring Samuel L Jackson and called Glass is now shooting
/Film Charlies Angels, a property which never truly dies but keeps trying to find new relevance, is trying again. They're talking up Lupita Nyong'o and Kristen Stewart for leading roles. Kristen's been doing amazing work lately but she is 100% wrong for Charlie's Angels which needs exuberant pop flair when she's all minimalist / sober as an actor. WTH?

Decider surprise! Gerald's Game, a Stephen King adaptation for Netflix starring Carla Gugino, is good
Coming Soon Daniel Dae Kim's stunt training for the Hellboy reboot
/Film Hocus Pocus moves forward as a TV movie remake - none of the original actors or filmmaking team are involved
David Poland on Blade Runner 2049 with no spoilers "It is Aliens to Alien" ... whoa, that's high praise
Billboard composer Danny Elfman interviewed about Superman's iconic theme (redeployed for Justice League) and his long collaboration with Gus Van Sant
Playbill Judy Garland's final concert, restored/remastered from 1969 will be released for the first time
i09 on why you should be watching the Exorcist TV series, back for Season 2
/Film Amazon still has a lot of work to do to catch up with Netflix and Hulu but they're diving into the sci-fi genre big time

stage of screen
Playbill a new musical version of Roald Dahl's The Witches (previously dramatizes wonderfully with Anjelica Huston as the High Witch in the 1990 film) coming to the National Theater of London
Gothamist more on the Pretty Woman musical coming to Broadway
Playbill the Mean Girls marquee is up on Broadway now. It's not just on Wednesdays when it's pink

funny haha
Electric Literature what 7 classic literary characters' dick pics would look like from Atticus Finch to Jay Gatsby (p.s. this is actually safe for work so go ahead and click if you're at your place of employment)