Guided by the Spirit of Capra

“I’m sick of irony,” director Frank Darabont confessed. “If there’s been any irony in my movies, it’s been of the storytelling variety. But as for cynicism or nihilism, that kind of irony doesn’t appeal to me at all. It takes an open heart to look at a movie like this and say, ‘Yeah, I get it. I’m willing to open my heart to it.”’

Back in late May, Darabont was sitting off to the corner of a re-creation of a dilapidated ‘50s, small-town movie theater, built for his latest feature, “The Majestic.” The film was rounding the corner toward completion after finishing 11 weeks of principal photography.

The director’s remarks seemed to place him outside the cultural mainstream. After all, on the same Hollywood lot--BA Studios’ the Lot--Keenen Ivory Wayans was also finishing final re-shoots on his summer parody, “Scary Movie 2,” which seemed to cut much closer to the cultural bone, what with its winking, overstuffed references to everything from “The Exorcist” to “Survivor.”

Darabont, by contrast, has been resolutely anti-hip. As a filmmaker, he has lived a relatively charmed life. His first two features, 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption” and 1999’s “The Green Mile,” were nominated for Academy Awards. But if Darabont’s foursquare, mainstream style of filmmaking scored with the well-heeled tastes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he still had critics who carped that his tales of personal redemption were too earnest for their own good. Perhaps a bit defensively, Darabont was under no illusions that “The Majestic” would win over his most recalcitrant critics. “Irony does appeal to some critics,” he conceded.

If that’s the case, they may have to steer clear of “The Majestic.” The movie offers up the saga of Peter Appleton, a fictional second-rate Hollywood screenwriter, played by Jim Carrey without any of the distancing makeup tricks he employed in his gonzo-comedy outings like “The Mask” or “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” When, in 1951, Appleton is summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he goes on a drunken bender, driving up the California coast, where his car goes off a bridge, leaving him in a state of amnesia. Discovered by the townspeople of Lawson, a picturesque little burg that has never quite recovered from losing so many of its sons in World War II, he is mistaken for Luke Trimble, a soldier thought missing in the war. Martin Landau’s Harry Trimble, Luke’s father, who runs the local, rundown movie theater, the Majestic, believes his son has finally returned. He welcomes Peter/Luke back into his life, sharing with him his dream of returning the Majestic to its former glory.

If the name Frank Capra is invoked once on the set of “The Majestic,” it’s invoked a dozen times. And Darabont doesn’t shy away from the association. When he first read his old Hollywood High School pal Michael Sloane’s original screenplay, he immediately declared, “This is the Frank Capra film I always wanted to make.” During the break on the set, he elaborated: “I think people will turn out to see a heartfelt story well-told, and that’s where Capra’s spirit lives in this. In the last few years, we’ve found audiences want to see movies that give them something to believe in and not necessarily just empty-calorie films that slide off the brain the moment you walk out of the theater.”

But if Darabont’s earnest words carried a hint of whistling in the dark back in May, six months later, as Warner Bros. prepares to open the Castle Rock production on Dec. 21, Darabont’s sentiments sound almost prescient.

For in the intervening months, the fateful date of Sept. 11 upended much of American life, possibly even including audience responses to popular entertainment. Although it’s unclear whether the terrorist attacks will leave a permanent mark on the entertainment world, the issues “The Majestic” raises, instead of sounding retro, suddenly ring with a renewed urgency.

“It’s always hard to speculate,” says Alan Horn, president of Warner Bros. “The public does need to understand that the decision to make this movie took place a long time ago. But it does seem, even if it’s a matter of coincidence, that its patriotic theme, the values expressed in the movie, are now strangely ... so timely that it almost feels cathartic to me.”

Certainly, Sloane had no intention of mining the emotions of the moment when he sat down, between gigs some years back, to pound out the screenplay. “It’s something I’d wanted to write for years,” he explained. “I was working on an IBM computer and I had started the script so many times that I had run out of versions of the file name. So I just named it ‘Start’ and started cruising through it, pulling together bits and pieces from the 40 versions I’d done some work on. Six weeks just went by in a flash.”

Sloane had always been interested in the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist, which provides the frame of his story. “I was always rather annoyed at the lack of projects that used the blacklist as either story material or a framework,” he said. “There’s ‘The Front’ and ‘Guilty by Suspicion’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘The Way We Were’ and a few others here and there. But for the movie industry, the blacklist was our Vietnam War. It was a trial by fire and a test of moral courage. I shudder to think what I might have done in that era had I been presented with the choices some of those people faced. I’d like to think I would have made the right choice, but right and wrong [are] only viewable in context. What seemed right then has come to be perceived as wrong now, and vice versa. That was always a driving impetus. I knew that somewhere there existed a story that could use that as a framework.”

Finishing up the screenplay--he first called it “The Bijou”--he sent it to Darabont, whom he’d known since they had attended Hollywood High School together in the ‘70s. Darabont, who had established himself as a writer on such genre films as “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987) and “The Fly II” (1989) and several episodes of the 1992-93 TV series “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” had just graduated to feature directing with “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) and was, with frustration, wading through scripts in search of his next project. His response was immediate. “When he’s not making a movie, Frank is not known for his presence during the single-digit hours of the morning,” Sloane recalled. “It was ungodly early on Darabont time when he called me, and he sounded very conspiratorial, asking me if I’d shown this to anyone else. My knees gave out. I sort of dropped to the floor. He went on and on and on about how wonderful the script was. I knew in that moment something very significant had happened and my life had changed.”

“It’s not a pastiche or a parody,” Darabont said of his instant attraction to Sloane’s work. “I immediately responded to its purity and optimism. It’s not really a heavy drama about the blacklist. The film has another agenda aside from that in the same way I’ve always said ‘Shawshank’ is a prison movie, yes, but it’s not really a prison movie. I hope people don’t mistake this for a crunchingly dour drama in the style of ‘Fear on Trial.’ It really takes a much lighter approach to things, but it does deal with a few significant and important subjects: What does it really mean to be an American? What do the founding principles of this country really mean to us? What does the guarantee of freedom really mean, and what is the cost of that way of life, particularly to the people in this small town?”

Darabont committed to the project on the spot, although first he would make “The Green Mile” (1999).

“Frank only focuses on one thing at a time,” observed Martin Shafer, chairman and chief executive of Castle Rock, where Darabont had made his two previous movies. “We loved the script, finding it very human and emotional. It was always just a question of when Frank would find the time to address it, and after the release of ‘The Green Mile,’ it’s what he chose to focus on.”

One of the few elements that underwent a change was the project’s initial title. During pre-production, Sloane recalled, “Frank and I found, much to our horror, that many of the people calling the production office didn’t know what [Bijou] meant and were mispronouncing it. Someone even asked, ‘Is that an odd spelling for ‘bayou’? ‘The Majestic’ was right at the top of the short list of titles that we considered. It was another word that could have subtextual meanings, and we almost instantly took to it.”

From the start, Sloane and Darabont envisioned the leading man as the sort of character Jimmy Stewart might have played. After taking a look at the 1992 TV movie “Doing Time on Maple Drive,” in which Carrey played it straight as an alcoholic estranged from his family, Darabont approached the actor beneath the Grinch’s green fur.

To Darabont’s way of thinking, “Jim is actually an old-fashioned movie star. He’s very much a romantic leading man in this film. I’ve always sensed that in the quieter moments of his work. And, indeed, when I approached him, it was fortuitous timing. He was at a point in his life when he wanted to put away the wacky for a while and do something that is really genuine.”

Putting aside a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” he was reading on another corner of the set, Carrey concurred. “It’s exactly what I needed in this period of my life. When I was doing ‘The Grinch,’ I was going through a very isolated feeling, like a freak period, wondering about celebrity and whether it’s worth it. I felt isolated, and I did feel like that furry green guy. And this is, again, very parallel to what I’m going through now. This story is about a lot of things, but manhood is one of them. That’s not something that’s generally celebrated in our business, but I think it’s a big thing in my life now. I’m going through a lot of growth, and I wanted to tell a story that was not just a drug that takes people away from their lives, but leaves them with something they can use, something that inspires.

“There’s nothing wrong with making people laugh,” he continues, “but here I’m going through a naturalistic period and I wanted to tell stories that are a little bit more natural. I really, honestly believe in miracles, that the universe always gives me exactly what I ask of it. This movie is a dream for me.”

Drawing parallels between his life and Peter’s dilemma as he realizes a new, simpler life, when he takes on the identity of Luke, Carrey added, “He washes up on a beach--and I play this total confusion. But I decided to also play a certain freedom. I’m free of striving. I’m free of the responsibility I’m faced with. I’m free of the notion that I’m not a real man. He is confused about who he is and where he is, but he feels wonderful. A couple of weeks into shooting, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly my own psychological makeup at the moment.’

“For the last few movies, there has been a duality to my characters, and that’s how I’ve been both the happiest guy in the world and the saddest guy in the world at the same time,” Carrey said. “As life goes on, hopefully, it all comes together, and, somehow, you find yourself at the center of the wheel. But for the last year or so, it’s been, ‘OK, I’m pretty solid here.’ There’s been more of a balance between my life and my career. And this movie is about a guy who’s prepared to do anything to save his own skin, who somehow becomes completely innocent again and is taught what it’s like to live life like a hero. That’s a totally original concept.”

Although the project may promise an original variation on older Capra-esque themes, Darabont first led his cast and crew back to the past to re-create the America of 1951. Location filming took place in the Victorian-looking town of Ferndale, Calif., on the Northern California coast.

For the Majestic itself--a veritable character in the movie--production designer Gregory Melton built a three-story facade on the location, and then re-created the interior in Hollywood. “We needed a movie theater that you might have found in a small town in 1951 that was really an old theater from the turn of the century that began life as a Victorian opera house in the 1880s or ‘90s,” Melton explained. “It was once a legitimate theater, and then they started glomming other elements onto it, like Egyptian motifs from the early ‘20s.”

Scavenging, he found Deco chandeliers that had been used in the recently closed Warner Huntington Park Theater and red velvet seats that were ripped out of Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre when it was recently refurbished.

Similarly, costume designer Karyn Wagner found herself “trying to incorporate as much that is actually original to the period as I can. 1951 represented a blooming of American culture, and people were eager to have new clothes because people had been making do during the war effort. So skirts were much fuller and men were wearing a more virile cut.” For actress Laurie Holden--known for playing the mysterious U.N. official Marita Covarrubias on “The X-Files” and making her major movie debut as Carrey’s Carole Lombard-esque love interest--researching her role meant “watching, easily, 40 films from the ‘30s and ‘40s. I went through a very long period of time when I didn’t listen to any modern music or even watch television.”

What may keep “The Majestic,” budgeted at more than $70 million, from playing as more than an exercise in tastefully imagined nostalgia--although, as Horn added, “It is beautiful and lush-looking”--is its eerie echoes of America’s current cultural moment.

For one of the issues the filmmakers confront is their fictional town’s overwhelming grief for all the men it lost in World War II. “In this case, the disastrous fact is that this town lost an entire generation,” Sloane said. “ The townspeople still keep gold stars in the windows to symbolize the boys who were lost, and they keep photographs of their boys in the windows too. That sort of mass psychology of grief fascinated me. How one man ultimately turns that around struck me as a sort of wonderful canvas to work with.”

Given the work’s unintended resonance, Darabont’s critics may be hard-pressed to dismiss it as just more recycled Capra-corn. Speaking in May, Carrey had said, “Frank has a real vision, an intelligence and an innocence that a lot of people don’t have these days. But we can’t get any more cynical without exploding. We kind of have to reach back to things that aren’t about denial. There are scenes in this movie that are so old-fashioned that I get choked up thinking about them now.”

As far as Darabont is concerned, if “The Majestic” is inevitably compared to Capra’s work--the lobby of his Majestic includes a poster of “It’s a Wonderful Life”--he welcomes the comparison. “When I invoke the spirit of Capra, it shouldn’t be confused with a remake of anything that that gentlemen ever did,” he said. “It’s just that the tonality and the heart of this seem to speak in that way. If one thinks of a Capra movie as almost a genre of film like a western, you can make a western and not make it be specific to any one film, but it has the tonality and spirit of a western. This, I think, just draws a bit from Capra’s heart, and he was always an enormous influence on me--as a filmmaker and as a person, growing up and watching his films and having my values informed by his work.”