Posted on 01/18/2008 2:05:30 PM PST by winstonwolf33
The writer-director of “The Golden Compass,” Chris Weitz, is peeved. The movie tanked so badly that the second and third installments are not going to be made (it did fairly well overseas, but unfortunately for New Line Cinema, that didn’t help because it pre-sold those rights). In an article in the December Atlantic, Hanna Rosin wrote about Weitz’s evident frustrations in making the film. (After he first agreed to do it, he dropped out, fearing either the Christian Right or the atheist followers of the book, then changed his mind again, then alarmed fanboys by basically telling them that he was going to water everything down to please his studio masters. ) Rosin’s article was well-reported and even-keeled; it was a detailed look at how Weitz was trying to make a film that was both faithful to the book and a financial success. He’ll be (falsely) remembered as failing to dilute the book’s atheism enough; what was left of the story, supposedly, was still enough to repel the average Christian. (Actually, the movie died because it was confusing and starred an actress audiences don’t like.)
Weitz wrote a hysterical letter to the Atlantic in response. It is so badly written– highschoolish, petulant, clumsily sarcastic–that it makes you wonder: How is this man finding employment as a massively-paid professional writer? This is not something he said off the cuff; it is a letter he prepared for publication in a national magazine.
I had high hopes for Weitz after he made a film I loved, “About a Boy.” After the execrable “American Dreamz” and the lumpy ”Compass,” though, “About a Boy” is starting to look like a fluke, an easily adapted book that was nicely realized with appealing actors.
Here is Weitz’s letter:
Hanna Rosin’s hatchet job on my film of Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass (“How Hollywood Saved God,” December Atlantic), and by extension on me, is so comprehensive in its disdain that one might go so far as to imagine she had seen the movie! She hasn’t, of course, though that fact was not mentioned in her assemblage of carefully cut-and-pasted quotes and surmises pumped up with paraphrase. For example, it is true that I said that clerics and religious people had been presented as boobs and hypocrites in many Hollywood films in the past few decades. But her statement that this was, to me, an “explanation for why [I’m] not selling out” is her own invention. We were talking about entirely different things at that point in our interview, and the notion that I somehow regard myself as doing the religious right a solid is grotesque.
Elsewhere she simply seems not to have finished her background reading. If she had got to the end of my script, she might have noticed that the Genesis story she says I have stricken from the movie is addressed, though in the mouth of the villain Mrs. Coulter. “A long time ago, one of our ancestors made a terrible mistake. They disobeyed the Authority. And that is what brought Dust into the world. And ever since then, we’ve been sick. Sick with evil—sick with Dust.” It shouldn’t take much for somebody with half a brain to understand the import, and Rosin, who writes about theology, ought to be able to catch it. But evidently it didn’t suit her thesis, which is that I “sold out” the book I happen to love. What did I sell? Who sold the rights to the books? Not me. From the article, we discover all sorts of new and interesting information—studios are afraid of controversy! Actors sometimes don’t have an easy time answering press questions!—and some fascinating paradoxes. A page after a lengthy description of religious imagery in the film, we find a picture in which one of the characters “flies over a land denuded of religious imagery.” Eh? I suppose one can blame an overenthusiastic caption writer for that one.
It has been an interesting experience to be accused, in the same month, of forwarding the aims of a stealth-atheist conspiracy and of selling out the secular ideals of a great work of literature. Thank you for expanding my sense of the absurd!
Chris Weitz Los Angeles, Calif
Hanna Rosin replies: Comprehensive disdain? Certainly not. What I conveyed was more a sigh of resignation. The second half of Chris Weitz’s letter captures the spirit of my story more accurately than the first. Yes, we all know Hollywood is afraid of controversy. And here is a particularly choice example of that instinct in action. I never said Weitz sold out the books. It was plain, in both our interview and my story, that he loves them. I merely described the delicate process by which he reconciled the books with the needs of a Hollywood studio. “Kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul,” is what I wrote. The script contains all the rich characters and adventures of the books. But not, as I explained, the deeply subversive anti-God message. Is that a surprise? Probably not. I don’t think anyone expects a Hollywood studio to make a $180 million holiday-season movie that trashes the Old Testament.
At the time I wrote the story, neither Weitz nor the studio would let me see the film. My story was based on the shooting script, as well as several earlier versions. Readers can find my review of the finished movie at www.theatlantic.com/compass.
I remember reading an article saying the movie had currently grossed over 300 million dollars. Seems to me it did pretty well although I didn’t go see it.
It really freaked me out when I was reading up on new age garbage, and found out that communicating with “spirit guides” is foundational to their occultic beliefs. I read that the humans in the movie have little animal “guides” that go with them everywhere. The movie was totally pushing new-age occultic crap on children! Yikes and double yikes!
Good.
It cost more than $200 million to make it, but they were not able to cover the cost of making the 2nd and 3rd movies, that’s why they said NO.
I live in Hollywood and some of my friends are in the industry. One of my acquaintances worked on the set of Lord of the Rings, and Peter Jackson knew the gamble of making 3 movies back to back. If movie 1 flopped, Peter jackson was finished, plain and simple and he knew it based on the story I was told in a conversation.
Chris Weitz knew the odds were against him because you must be a complete idiot if you didn’t know what the story was about: the death of God. And New Line’s past flops from 2007 were one after the other: Shoot em up’ etc and the result is NO $$ for the next projects obviously.
Good News!
I hope that this is true.
“The movie tanked so badly that the second and third installments are not going to be made”
While I pray this is true, I can’t find conformation of it anywhere else, just a few blogs parroting each others comments. New Line is bragging about how well it did overseas. Unless I’m mistaken, they only sold foreign distribution rights for the first film. They may well decide to swallow their domestic losses and distribute the sequels themselves.
Sweet.
You mean I actually am going to have to read the series..?
I just watched this movie. Wow, was it dumb. And the song at the end was one of the 10 most idiotic things I’ve ever heard.
Just saw it on an in-flight movie track. It is a pretty boring, confusing movie that will not appeal to children and is too non=sensical for adults.
What I do expect is an entertaining movie. While Golden Compass had a lot of great special effects, the acting sucked, the plot was formulaic, and the plot elements themselves seemed like they came from a random grab bag of ideas.
In short, I ended up watching the first 45 minutes and then finding something much better to do with my time...
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