Skip to main content

Bret Easton Ellis' The Canyons - and Kickstarter

The Canyons, trailer image.
Acclaimed author Bret Easton Ellis is making an original foray into filmmaking with his partners, director Paul Schrader (who wrote Martin Scorsese's astonishing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and directed the classic, Giorgio Moroder-scored American Gigolo) and producer Braxton Pope, with a project called The Canyons - set in contemporary LA and financed in part through Kickstarter, the radical new crowd-funding social platform.


The trio set out to raise $100,000 to add to the money they were putting into the project themselves - in order to bypass the interminable Hollywood studio development process - and wound up exceeding their goal and raising almost $160,000.


I know Bret a little, from a series of dinners we had a few years back, when I was interested in turning Bret's outstanding, self-referential horror novel, Lunar Park, into a film. 


Several of his books have been adapted as movies - including both the zeitgeist-defining, somewhat notorious American Psycho and his debut novel, Less Than Zero, published when he was 21 and still at Bennington College - but none has fully captured the essence of Bret's writing, immortalized perhaps best by the opening line of Zero:


"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."


(Completely true, by the way!)


There is a more than a nod to the extraordinary Joan Didion in Bret's early work, but he developed his own highly distinctive style over the years, perhaps best exemplified by his work in American Psycho.


It will be fascinating to see how The Canyons unfolds and whether, given its unconventional method of production and Bret's close involvement with it, the movie will reflect his particular take on Los Angeles (a city I love, in part through both his and Didion's writing - as well as through living for years in both Laurel and Topanga Canyon) and the canyons themselves...which are like a rural city within a city, and perhaps best exemplified on film thus far by David Lynch's unique and unforgettably wonderful Mulholland Drive.


Today's Guardian newspaper piece (extracted below) on The Canyons gives a strong sense of what the film may hold in store. As does the trailer, which you can view here:





Can Lindsay Lohan finally bring Bret Easton Ellis's LA vision to life?


The Canyons, billed as 'contemporary LA noir', pairs Lohan with former porn star James Deen and sees the maverick storyteller writing directly for the screen for the first time

Thursday 19 July 2012 08.54 EDT

You might think that any film-maker taking the brave step of putting Lindsay Lohan and porn star-turned-thespian James Deen in a movie together might want to ensure at least one of them was front and centre in the debut trailer. Not so Paul Schrader, director of The Canyons, which is scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, perhaps because the film has only been shooting in LA for a couple of weeks, after the project recently secured funding via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter...

Read the full article at The Guardian's website.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye

Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film plays with references to Old Hollywood and opens and closes with the song, Hooray For Hollywood ), the building has another direct connection to Raymond Chandler. It was apparently the inspiration for Chandler in his book, The High Window (the first Chandler novel I ever read), in which Chandler describes the residence of Philip Marlowe as being on the cliffs above High Tower Drive in a building with a fancy elevator tower. (Thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians Southern...

Thank You Sonora ER, Dr Trujillo and Dr Johnson.

Microphone stand designed by Hudson. Our eight year old son, Hudson, has been having severe abdominal pain over the past week to ten days, and this week we took him to see Dr Jennifer Neufeld-Trujillo , one of our regular pediatricians at the Forest Road Pediatric Clinic in Sonora, and also to ER at Sonora Regional Medical Center. We just want to say a big thank you to everyone - including all the very friendly and helpful staff at ER - for their care of and concern for Hudson, who is gradually starting to feel better. We would also like to make a special mention of Dr Lisa Johnson , who was on call tonight for Forest Road Pediatrics, and who had a long telephone conversation with me, in which she answered many questions with a depth of knowledge and experience that was both highly reassuring and informative, and who left us feeling confident that we are on the right path for the weekend - always a difficult time when your child is not feeling well. Hopefully, Hudson will cont...

Hyperbole And A Half - Why I'll Never Be An Adult

All images copyright 2010-2012 Allie and Hyperbole And A Half. These images are from one of my absolute favorite online comic strips/blogs/sites, Hyperbole And A Half by Allie . This particular post is called: This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult - and these are just a few selected panes from a very funny and telling sequence: To check out the entire strip, go to this particular link for Hyperbole And A Half.   You might also want to check out the Hyperbole And A Half Store , which has many goodies such as this wonderful Bird T-shirt . Other designs can be applied to whole variety of products, such as T-shirts, mugs and iPhone cases (please note that not all designs are available for every product). I love the Bird T-shirt  because it makes me think of our much adored lovebird, Miso, who I'm certain spends a great deal of his life squawking these words in a language we can't comprehend because we're too stupid: Please visit Hyperbole And A ...