ProfGoofy
E=m²... See
- Joined
- May 28, 2003
- Messages
- 144
Disney's Smoking Gun No One Will Ever See
By Roger Friedman
Fox News
I read with interest the story in yesterday's New York Times about Disney considering selling Miramax back to the Weinstein brothers. Without Miramax and Steve Jobs' Pixar, which has expressed a desire to leave Disney, I'm not sure what the Mouse House would have left. Certainly it wouldn't be a future for animated films.
This was hammered home to me over the weekend after I finally got to see a copy of Trudie Styler and John-Paul Davidson's 2002 documentary "The Sweatbox." You will probably never see this film and neither, I suppose, will the Disney board. If they did, you'd think their first move would be to shore up Disney's assets i.e. Miramax and Pixar and look to eliminate some real problems.
"The Sweatbox" is a document of the making of a Disney animated film called "The Emperor's New Groove." The project took a long and circuitous course, starting out as a serious minded cartoon called "The Kingdom of the Sun" directed by "The Lion King"'s Roger Allers and featuring several songs by Sting. Styler, Sting's wife and a movie producer, got permission to document the development of the film. What she and partner Davidson didn't bargain on was the entire project capsizing and being rebuilt not once but twice until it had a new director, cast and point of view.
By then Sting's participation had been significantly whittled down, millions had been flushed down the toilet and no one at Disney particularly the subsequently departed exec Peter Schneider seemed to have an idea of what they were doing or why they were doing it.
It's a shame that no one will ever see "The Sweatbox." Somehow Disney has managed to bury it, I assume, by not allowing its animated artwork integral to the documentary to be released. But cineastes and film students would regard with work with the same reference value as Julia Phillips' "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" or the BBC's "Naked Hollywood" series. Rarely have artists been caught so evocatively in fear of executives, or execs framed as being so in possession of the Emperor's new clothes forget about groove.
It's never discussed, but not just a little of this debacle is owed to the decamping of Jeffrey Katzenberg to start DreamWorks and his consequent pillaging of the Disney animations department beginning in 1995.
The animated Disney offerings after "Groove,"_like "Treasure Planet," were even more confusing, and troubled. If only the Disney shareholders could make the company show them "Sweatbox" as a measure of fiduciary duty, they might gain some insight into why the company seems so at sea now.
Meantime, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" which Disney refused to release has been set for its first Los Angeles screening tonight. New York media insiders will see it on Monday, June 14. Stacked up against such Disney losers as "The Ladykillers," "The Alamo," and "Raising Helen," "Fahrenheit 9/11" if it makes the money predicted will make "The Sweatbox" seem like "Mary Poppins."
By Roger Friedman
Fox News
I read with interest the story in yesterday's New York Times about Disney considering selling Miramax back to the Weinstein brothers. Without Miramax and Steve Jobs' Pixar, which has expressed a desire to leave Disney, I'm not sure what the Mouse House would have left. Certainly it wouldn't be a future for animated films.
This was hammered home to me over the weekend after I finally got to see a copy of Trudie Styler and John-Paul Davidson's 2002 documentary "The Sweatbox." You will probably never see this film and neither, I suppose, will the Disney board. If they did, you'd think their first move would be to shore up Disney's assets i.e. Miramax and Pixar and look to eliminate some real problems.
"The Sweatbox" is a document of the making of a Disney animated film called "The Emperor's New Groove." The project took a long and circuitous course, starting out as a serious minded cartoon called "The Kingdom of the Sun" directed by "The Lion King"'s Roger Allers and featuring several songs by Sting. Styler, Sting's wife and a movie producer, got permission to document the development of the film. What she and partner Davidson didn't bargain on was the entire project capsizing and being rebuilt not once but twice until it had a new director, cast and point of view.
By then Sting's participation had been significantly whittled down, millions had been flushed down the toilet and no one at Disney particularly the subsequently departed exec Peter Schneider seemed to have an idea of what they were doing or why they were doing it.
It's a shame that no one will ever see "The Sweatbox." Somehow Disney has managed to bury it, I assume, by not allowing its animated artwork integral to the documentary to be released. But cineastes and film students would regard with work with the same reference value as Julia Phillips' "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" or the BBC's "Naked Hollywood" series. Rarely have artists been caught so evocatively in fear of executives, or execs framed as being so in possession of the Emperor's new clothes forget about groove.
It's never discussed, but not just a little of this debacle is owed to the decamping of Jeffrey Katzenberg to start DreamWorks and his consequent pillaging of the Disney animations department beginning in 1995.
The animated Disney offerings after "Groove,"_like "Treasure Planet," were even more confusing, and troubled. If only the Disney shareholders could make the company show them "Sweatbox" as a measure of fiduciary duty, they might gain some insight into why the company seems so at sea now.
Meantime, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" which Disney refused to release has been set for its first Los Angeles screening tonight. New York media insiders will see it on Monday, June 14. Stacked up against such Disney losers as "The Ladykillers," "The Alamo," and "Raising Helen," "Fahrenheit 9/11" if it makes the money predicted will make "The Sweatbox" seem like "Mary Poppins."
