Authors — Nick Dawson
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Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz
Brit Edgar Wright’s film career began when, straight out of college, he wrote and directed his ultra-low budget debut feature, A Fistful of Fingers (1994), an affectionate comedic homage to spaghetti westerns. The film played a few festivals, and was enough of a success to get Wright work directing sitcoms and sketch shows, where he worked with many of the best British comic performers around. His friendship with actors Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson resulted in the trio creating Spaced, a television series about the oddball residents of a house in London which achieved cult status. The show, which playfully […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 20, 2007 -
Mike White, Year Of The Dog
MOLLY SHANNON (AND PENCIL) IN MIKE WHITE’S YEAR OF THE DOG. COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE. Chuck and Buck (2000), an incendiary examination of male sexuality, announced the film’s writer and star, Mike White, as an unusually daring and original talent. His next foray as a screenwriter, The Good Girl (2002), was another subversive take on American life, and all the more refreshing in that it was a studio movie which dared to ask difficult questions and featured a raft of indie stalwarts (plus star Jennifer Aniston). Though White’s subsequent films, Orange County, School of Rock and Nacho Libre (all starring Jack […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 13, 2007 -
Jake Kasdan, The TV Set
JUDY GREER, DAVID DUCHOVNY AND WILLIE GARSON IN JAKE KASDAN’S THE TV SET. COURTESY THINKFILM. Writer-director Jake Kasdan comes from a filmmaking family: his father is Hollywood heavyweight Lawrence Kasdan, director of Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983) and Grand Canyon (1991), and his younger brother Jonathan has just written and directed his first film, In the Land of Women. Jake’s own debut came in 1998, when he wrote and directed the quirky private detective movie Zero Effect, which he followed up in 2002 with Orange County. In between, Kasdan directed several episodes of two high-quality but short-lived Judd […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 6, 2007 -
Scott Frank, The Lookout
JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT AND JEFF DANIELS IN SCOTT FRANK’S THE LOOKOUT. COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS. Scott Frank is one of Hollywood’s most respected scriptwriters, and now one of its most promising directors. Frank’s first produced script was high school comedy thriller Plain Clothes (1988), but his breakthrough came in 1991 when his original scripts for both Dead Again and Little Man Tate came to the screen. Since then, he has shown great talent at adapting novels: he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Out of Sight (1998), having already turned another Elmore Leonard novel, Get Shorty (1995), into […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 30, 2007 -
Brian Cook, Color Me Kubrick
JOHN MALKOVICH AS IMPOSTER ALAN CONWAY IN BRIAN COOK’S COLOR ME KUBRICK. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Color Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story is the fascinating story of English conman Alan Conway (flamboyantly portrayed by John Malkovich) who made his career out of impersonating Stanley Kubrick. Conway found out that hardly anyone actually knew what Kubrick looked like, a discovery which led him to take his deception to extravagant, and often ridiculous, extremes. He used his borrowed identity to obtain huge amounts of money and seduce the young and impressionable, and got so immersed in the activities of his affluent alter ego […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 23, 2007
