Director Curtis Hanson, Looking Beyond the Oscars

This is the season for Academy Award predictions, with a string of film-critic groups kicking off the race for the gold statue by announcing their picks.

And, it’s the season for Curtis Hanson, who directed the much-nominated “L.A. Confidential” and this season’s contender, “Wonder Boys,” to take all the Oscar prognosticating with a grain of salt and shot of wry.

“I try to ignore it and embrace it and not get caught up in it,” Hanson says of all the film-group pronouncements, industry buzz and flurry of ads touting the merits of particular movies in the months leading up to the March awards ceremony. “I think I have a very healthy perspective on that because I have been a movie lover for so long and I have seen so many filmmakers who I loved--and so many achievements that I’ve loved--never get nominated, let alone win the award. And knowing that puts [winning an Oscar] in a certain perspective: It is what it is, but it isn’t any more than that.”

Hanson’s take on the Academy Awards has been shaped by his 25-plus years in filmmaking as well as by a 1997 Oscar run (“a tremendously fun ride,” he says) with “L.A. Confidential,” his film on 1950s police corruption. It earned nine nominations and two wins, a supporting actress statue for Kim Basinger and adapted screenplay honors for Hanson and Brian Helgeland.

“Having Kim win that Oscar was a real thrill, both because I was so fond of her and because she was held in so much lower esteem when we started working. And also because she was sort of the flag-bearer for the whole cast,” he says. “But in addition to the honor of the whole thing, for better or worse, the Oscar has become this incredible word-of-mouth marketing tool. When a picture gets nominated, it’s like a stamp of approval that encourages people all over the country, all over the world in fact, to check out that movie. . . . I’d be so thrilled to have the actors in ‘Wonder Boys’ get that kind of acknowledgment both because I’m proud of their work and also because it would encourage so many more people to see their work.”

A Second Chance for ‘Wonder Boys’

Drumming up box-office and Oscar interest in “Wonder Boys” is why Hanson landed in Chicago recently for a day of media chats. Paramount Pictures, bummed by the initial box office when the film hit cineplexes last February, refashioned the marketing campaign for the ensemble comedy-drama starring Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr., and gave it a second chance by re-releasing the film in November. It was just named one of the year’s top 10 films by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, and recently received four Golden Globe nominations, including one for best dramatic picture and one for best actor for Michael Douglas.

Having finished a morning of interviews and a Four Seasons lunch, Hanson settled into the rose-red cushions of a chair inspired by an era that considerably predated his birth 55 years ago. His hair is salted with gray. His passion is movies. For years he fed that passion as a writer and photographer for a cinema magazine. Since 1970, he has channeled it into movies, from 1983’s Tom Cruise vehicle “Losin’ It” through “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” (1992) and “The River Wild” (1994). For the last year, he has served as chairman of UCLA’s Film and Television Archive.

As director and producer of “Wonder Boys,” his most recent film, he’s wearing his favorite mantle, that of a storyteller who weaves richly textured tales that tease the senses.

“I knew that [Michael Douglas] thought that I was a good storyteller. And I think one of the fringe benefits or perks, if you will, of making a movie that’s received the way ‘L.A. Confidential’ was is that actors become very interested in working with you. Actors, bless their souls, are not so much concerned about box office. When they look at a picture, they look at the performances,” Hanson says. “Actors really liked ‘L.A. Confidential’ and they liked the way that Russell [Crowe] and Guy Pearce and Kevin [Spacey] and Kim all came off in the movie. . . . With Michael and with any of them, it’s their work. And what I do, I kind of put a frame around it so people can see it. But it’s them that they’re looking at.”

Hanson began “Wonder Boys” with Michael Chabon’s novel about passionate people in a dysfunctional world. At the core is Grady Tripp, played with scruffy enthusiasm by Douglas. Tripp is a 50-something professor with one blockbuster novel to his credit and a second that has been incubating for seven years, despite the good-luck charm of a ratty chenille bathrobe he wears when facing that blank paper scrolled in his typewriter. Nor has the “charm” helped the ex-wonder boy with his life--his wife has split; his girlfriend Sara, played by Frances McDormand, is pregnant. His life, in fact, is percolating at a ready-to-crack anxiety level. That a wonder-boy-in-the-works, Maguire, is part of his loony universe doesn’t help.

“These characters are all struggling to find their way in this world. And often struggling with problems that they themselves created,” Hanson says. Hanson tapped director of photography Dante Spinotti and production designer Jeannine Oppewall, both of whom earned Oscar nods for their work on “L.A. Confidential,” to help him tell the “Wonder Boys” story. They drenched the shot-in-Pittsburgh movie in rainy, icy weather. Bob Dylan songs fill the soundtrack. Visual metaphors echo the story line.

“I fell in love with the idea that Pittsburgh was a wonder boy just like the human character. That it had this rich, industrious past that had burned out with the steel industry and now was left trying to figure out what to do with itself. I had such warm feelings about the characters . . . that I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to shoot this in the Pittsburgh wintertime where you’ve got this cold and gloomy weather with our warm characters?’ I thought it would add a texture to the movie as well. I love it when the location is part of the story.

“An example of how we illustrated that in the movie is during the scene when Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire are driving to the Howard Johnson’s. We found a road, where out one side of the window there are factories. So that’s behind Tobey Maguire, who is the wonder boy about to be, whereas outside Michael Douglas’ window, it’s all dark and gloomy,” he says. “He is in that gloomy state of mind and kind of burned out.”

Says Hanson, “With the best directors, the camera is part of the writing process.” And writing and its power to create images is integral to “Wonder Boys.”

“Pittsburgh has more bridges than any other city in North America,” Hanson says. “But as I was looking at them, it struck me that the bridge is the perfect visual metaphor for what each of our characters is trying to accomplish: How to leave the past behind. How to move on to a better version of themselves. We tried then to work bridges into the movie in subtle ways whenever we could. Like on Michael’s desk, there will be a postcard of a bridge. The Danny Lyon photograph, ‘Crossing the Ohio,’ it’s on the wall in Grady’s office. . . . I love details because it’s all part of the storytelling process. It’s not like you expect the audience to stop and think about why [Bob] Dylan’s song ‘Shooting Star’ is in the movie. And if they do think about it, well, what is the perfect metaphor for a wonder boy but a shooting star? And why do we have these singer-songwriters in the movie at all? Because they all came of age creatively at the same time Grady did, they’re all wonder boys and they all wrote about the same things that interested me about these characters.”

*

With a movie that he and Douglas seem so passionate about, why the initial marketing blunders? Hanson won’t point fingers, but “as unhappy as I was with the original marketing campaign that was done on ‘Wonder Boys,’ I sympathize with the problem, which was they knew from the test screening that people liked the movie, but they were [unsure of] how to get them to come see it.

“Certain movies, like . . . the ‘Grinch’ movie or ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ are very easy to market because you’ve got a very recognizable title, a concept that everybody’s familiar with. And in the case of ‘The Grinch,’ you’ve got an enormous star that’s the Grinch. But when you come up with a movie that doesn’t have those same elements going, it demands a little more creative approach,” he says.

“It’s almost like there are two businesses. There’s the business of the movies that’s sort of like the amusement-park ride, whether it comes out in the summer or Christmas. It’s just sort of big entertainment,” says Hanson, who has yet to pick a next project. “And then there’s this other business of movies that don’t cost as much and they’re not as marketable in such an instantaneous way [and] it’s more of a struggle.

“It’s a very tricky situation because, and I say this as a movie lover, as much as a movie maker, when we look back over time at the pictures that made us fall in love with movies in the first place, most of them were not high-concept marketing dreams.”