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Columnist Thunder Mod
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Denver Area, between Asgard and Krypton
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Movie About George Reeves
Not sure how I feel about Ben Affleck playing George Reeves but I'll be seeing this one for sure. My wife and I are big fans of "Adventures of Superman" and are up to the into the second season of the DVD collections.
From Sunday NYTimes 8/20/06:
The (Tinsel) Town That Ate Superman
By KRISTOPHER TAPLEY
Published: August 20, 2006
LOS ANGELES
JUNE 16, 1959, the day the actor George Reeves died, hardly ranks with the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John F. Kennedy when it comes to defining moments in American history. But the date has retained curious power for more than a few people who experienced the demised of television’s Superman as a loss of innocence.
Some remember where they were when they heard that Reeves had been found dead in his Beverly Hills home, an apparent suicide. Lore surrounding the event quickly blossomed into a mystery that seems wholly out of keeping with the modest house — still standing at 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive — where Reeves spent his final moments.
The death was declared a suicide by the police. But Reeves’s mother, Helen Bessolo, refused to believe that her son had ended his own life. She went so far as to hold his body in a temporary burial vault for nearly eight months, waiting for further evidence from a private investigator, Jerry Geisler.
Mrs. Bessolo and Mr. Geisler died before they could prove anything. But theories summarized in deeply researched books like “Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady and the Death of Superman” by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger and “Speeding Bullet: The Life and Bizarre Death of George Reeves” by Jan Alan Henderson continue to fuel the debate.
Was Reeves killed, as some have speculated, by his wild-child fiancée Lenore Lemmon? Or did the MGM public relations director and studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix, with his ties to organized crime, have a hand in it? Or was the culprit — if there was one — actually Mr. Mannix’s wife, Toni, with whom Reeves had a lengthy affair? With these suspects long since dead, the case may never be resolved. But it has become the stuff of a movie, “Hollywoodland,” which can at least close the loop by returning to the big screen an actor who had roles in “Gone With the Wind” and “From Here to Eternity” but would largely be remembered as the Man of Steel on television’s “Adventures of Superman.”
Set for release by Focus Features on Sept. 8, “Hollywoodland” stars Ben Affleck as Reeves and Adrien Brody as a detective investigating his death. Jim Beaver, who plays Whitney Ellsworth on the HBO series “Deadwood,” served as technical advisor. Mr. Beaver has spent decades researching Reeves’s life and death and plans to publish a book revealing his findings.
The film’s director, Allen Coulter, best known for his work on television series including “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The X-Files,” was fascinated less with Reeves than with the transition he represented.
“You sort of see the end of one world and the beginning of another,” Mr. Coulter said in a July interview at the Hotel Bel-Air here. “I think it was a period when the world was changing from what I think of as the old world, which is represented by the old world of Hollywood in the movie, versus the new world that’s coming, that world of rock ’n’ roll, fast food, noise, the ubiquity of televisions — the modern world.”
The truth of Reeves’s death is likely to remain a mystery, but his life uncoiled in a way that Mr. Coulter could understand. “George Reeves was a big success in terms of the public, but not in terms of his mind,” he said. “Television was a new medium. It was considered to be the graveyard of failed movie careers. Those people interest me more than people who are the players. After all, most of us are not famous. Most of us are guys like us that just hope we have some successes.”
“Hollywoodland” got its start in 2001, when the producer Glenn Williamson, then head of production at USA Films (which later merged with Good Machine to form Focus) purchased Paul Bernbaum’s script, “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
The title was changed under legal pressure from Warner Brothers, which produced the “Superman” films and was protective of its hero’s signature phrase (though it conspicuously ditched the words “American way” in its latest “Superman Returns”).
The project, meanwhile, took shape around Mr. Bernbaum’s story of a fictionalized detective in pursuit of an elusive truth. “In subtle ways the script guides the audience toward a conclusion, but there is no definitive answer,” Mr. Williamson said. “Based on the presentation of the material, you can walk away thinking anything happened.”
Having moved for a time to Miramax Films, then run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the project was taken up by the filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish, known for the dark atmospherics of their “Twin Falls Idaho” and “Northfork.” But they moved on, and the picture moved back to Focus, where Mr. Coulter and his actors joined the show.
“The Polish brothers had a very specific view,” Mr. Williamson explained. “But the real issue is, this is a very accessible story, and they’re very stylized filmmakers. It was decided that a version of the film with wider appeal would have been better served with another director.”
Mr. Brody said in a telephone interview that he saw a parallel between his screen character, the fictional investigator Louis Simo, and Reeves, both of whom are discontent with their lives.
“He had bigger plans,” Mr. Brody said of Simo. “It’s an adult role, a character dealing with a lot of things a man my age deals with. The story is ultimately about two people who wanted more than they had, more recognition, fame: things that one might assume bring happiness and fulfillment. But there are other keys to happiness than what we have planned.”
When the Polish brothers were still involved, a screen test of Kyle MacLachlan as Reeves made the rounds. But Mr. Coulter ultimately cast Mr. Affleck, despite some concern that his high profile might get in the way.
“When I learned that Ben was interested,” Mr. Coulter said, “I had to think: Is it helpful to have someone that well known or does it become a distraction? Is it hard for the audience to see George, because they are seeing Ben?”
The film refuses to draw conclusions, but pressed about what he believed to be the cause of Reeves’s death, Mr. Coulter pointed squarely toward the actor.
“When you see the photograph taken of George about a month before he died,” he said, “there’s a look in this man’s face that, even if you didn’t know his end, you would say: There is a guy full of sadness and bitterness and irony. It’s not the face of a happy man. So I want people to talk about it and conjecture, but my personal feeling is Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the correct solution. And I think the simplest solution is the man was at a dead end and could not see how to escape.”
As for the new title, Mr. Coulter is inclined to believe that Warner did him a favor by opposing the old one: “I liked it instantly, because the movie is not about Hollywood. It’s not about a place; it’s about a state of mind, and ‘Hollywoodland’ suggests a state of mind. The pursuit of stardom is not restricted to Hollywood. You could call America Hollywoodland. Everybody wants to be a star.”
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