Alternate Takes 07.11.09: Chris Columbus

Posted by Shawn S. Lealos on 07.11.2009

I Love You Beth Cooper hits theaters this weekend, directed by the man who is responsible for two of the most profitable franchises in movie history -- Harry Potter and Home Alone. Join Alternate Takes as we look at the career of Chris Columbus!



Welcome to Week 60 of Alternate Takes. I am Shawn S. Lealos and you have now entered my world.

The summer keeps on chugging along. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has made more money than anything else released this summer despite many horrible reviews. I thought it was a fun, loud, dumb movie. I liked it. The Hangover continues to make cash, which is completely awesome as it is the best comedy of the summer. It was made public knowledge this week that Lindsey Lohan had the chance to play the stripper Heather Graham played but turned down the role after reading the script because she said the screenplay "had no potential." That is why you have no career you stupid twit. Ice Age 3 came out last week and made a bunch of money, but still ranked behind Transformers for the weekend box office crown. The other big new release was Public Enemies, which failed to entertain me and came in a distant third. What is on tap for this weekend?



The most interesting release, to me, is the horror movie Blood: The Last Vampire. The plot is pretty cool: A vampire named Saya, who is part of covert government agency that hunts and destroys demons in a post-WWII Japan, is inserted in a military school to discover which one of her classmates is a demon is disguise. Fangoria calls it "a supergory collision between schoolgirls and the undead that represents the zenith of extreme Japanese splatter satire." The bad news is it is only a limited release this weekend. If you live in Texas, Chicago, DC, Las Vegas, California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington or Hawaii, you are one of the lucky ones. Also in limited release are Humpday (it's kind of like if Zack and Miri Makes a Porno were instead Zack and Zack Make a Porno) and Soul Power, a documentary about a legendary concert in Zaire in 1974. Soul Power is only showing in California and New York while Humpday is in New York and Seattle. But what will the rest of the world get to see? You get two choices, the first being Bruno, the latest vehicle for Sacha Baron Cohen. The second is the focus of this week's Alternate Takes...

I LOVE YOU BETH COOPER DIRECTED BY CHRIS COLUMBUS Adventures in Babysitting (1987) Heartbreak Hotel (1988) Home Alone (1990) Only the Lonely (1991) Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) Nine Months (1995) Stepmom (1998) Bicentennial Man (1999) HP: Philosopher's Stone (2001) HP: Chamber of Secrets (2002) Rent (2005) I Love You Beth Cooper (2009)

1987 began the career of a man who has built a solid filmography, yet never will be spoken of in the revered tones of his contemporaries. Chris Columbus is the man who kick started the Harry Potter franchise, only to cede way to better directors who have taken the film to levels I don't believe Columbus ever could have reached. It isn't that Columbus is a bad director, but he has never proven to be capable of the depth of Alfonso Cuarón or Mike Newell. But what Columbus is good at is more basic comic films and there is not a better guilty pleasure than his debut film, Adventures in Babysitting .

Elisabeth Shue portrays Chris Parker, a high school senior who agrees to babysit Sara (Maia Brewton) after Chris' boyfriend Mike (Bradley Whitford) cancels their anniversary date. When Chris' friend calls from a Chicago bus station, Chris takes her charge as well as Sara's older brother Brad and his best friend Daryl into the mean streets of Chicago where they have numerous misadventures. The highlight is an appearance of a mechanic named Dawson (Vincent D'Onofrio), who may or may not be Thor, God of Thunder.



The film remains a cult favorite, and is still one of my wife's favorite movies, but Columbus would hit the highlight of his career three years later. He directed a film that would remain the number one film at the box office for an astonishing twelve straight weeks and remain in the Top 10 for over five months. By the time it had run its course, Home Alone became the third highest grossing movie at the time with a box office take of $477.5 million worldwide.

It wasn't Columbus' first success as he also wrote the scripts for Joe Dante's Gremlins and Richard Donner's Goonies. But with the success of Home Alone, Columbus became one of Hollywood's hottest properties. He followed the hit with the John Candy vehicle Only the Lonely and the successful sequel to Home Alone before he struck gold again. This time, he dressed superstar Robin Williams in drag.

Mrs. Doubtfire tells the story of a man whose wife (Sally Field) files for divorce and because of his lack of income, is granted limited visitation rights on Saturday evenings. It is a sweet film that tells the story of a man willing to go to any lengths to remain in his children's lives and should always be viewed as more than Robin William's drag movie. The film was a box office success making $219 million on a $25 million budget. It was also a critical success, ranked 67th in the AFI 100 Years, 100 Laughs: America's Funniest Movies and 39th on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies of All Time.

Columbus would stick with family comedies until he landed the prize gig of directing the first two movies in the Harry Potter series.

"As a filmmaker," Columbus explained in a Charlie Rose interview, "I started to feel - I don't want to say bored with the job - but I was working with these brilliant actors, people like Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, Robin Williams and I was basically sitting in the director's chair watching these performances. I felt I was getting artistically stale. I read Harry Potter and I felt that intense hunger again. I thought ‘I can turn this into an interactive form of filmmaking where I can be an active participant.' By hiring these kids who are not accomplished actors, I can get in there and act with them."

After two movies, Columbus was replaced as director by Spanish maestro Alfonso Cuarón.

"Physically I had put everything, blood, sweat and tears, into the Chamber of Secrets," Columbus said. "I hadn't seen my own kids for supper in the week for about two and a half years. I have four children and I have to give them some time now."

Despite his desire to get some family time in, he directed the adaptation of the stage play Rent the following year. Rent is a complete 180 from the Harry Potter series, a musical that takes on edgy real world problems. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Lower East Side.

The characters include a struggling filmmaker, an HIV-positive ex-junkie rock musician, an HIV-positive heroin junkie, a philosophy professor suffering from AIDS, a drag queen street musician, and a lesbian Harvard-graduated lawyer. This is definitely not the world of Harry Potter.

"Whether they were good films or bad films," Columbus explained. "Home Alone deals with a kid who doesn't have his family, Harry Potter deals with a kid who's always searching for his family. And [Rent] is about a different type of family. So I'm always fascinated by those particular things. But that's a really extreme connection, in a sense. I just felt that I was the right guy to do this movie."

He made an interesting choice in offering the original stage actors first dibs on the movie and it paid off as only two original stars did not take part in the movie. The remaining cast members shared a chemistry Columbus attributes to the death of the play write bringing them closer together.

"There is the pop-style version with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Usher," Columbus said. "I went so far as meeting Justin, who is a terrific guy, by the way. I don't know if you guys have ever met him, but he's really a sweet guy. But then I started to meet the original cast, and I realized the thing I responded to was the connection that they had, partially because of Jonathan Larson's death. You know, Jonathan tragically died the night before the first preview. Well, that connected these people in a very strong way. There's a deep, intense connection when you're doing that play for 16 months. They did it together for 16 months, and they formed this really, really strong group. There's a chemistry there that, as a director, I had never seen before. And I wanted to catch that."

That would be Columbus' last film until this weekend's I Love You Beth Cooper.

**

Hayden Panettiere began her career as a child star on soap operas One Life to Live and Guiding Light. On Guiding Light, the seven year old gained public recognition playing a young girl fighting leukemia. She received a Special Recognition Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in 2000.

That same year, at the age of eleven, Panettiere hit it big. She began the year with a Grammy nomination in the Spoken Word Album for Children category for her work on the Pixar film A Bug's Life. She was in the running to play Jodi Foster's daughter in Panic Room, losing out on the opportunity to Kristen Stewart. However, she quickly responded with the spunky daughter of Will Patton in the football movie Remember the Titans.

"The funny thing is that people see one film like Racing Stripes or Ice Princess and all of a sudden, slip me into this category of "that's what she's always involved in," Panettiere said, "but people don't remember that I did Normal with Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson for HBO, which was very dramatic. They don't remember that I did Lies My Mother Told Me which was the Lifetime film with Joely Richardson and Colm Feore, which was also extremely dramatic. They don't remember that I did Remember the Titans."

Part of the typecasting has to do with the fact that she is currently only associated with portraying the cheerleader. You know: "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World." The fact that Heroes has made her a household name is never a bad thing for a nineteen year old girl. For someone who looked like they would only be successful in television (she played Ally McBeal's daughter and had a recurring guest role on Malcolm in the Middle), she is now hitting it big.

But people should remember she is only nineteen and prone to make mistakes as she finds her place in the dog-eat-dog Hollywood world. She raised some eyebrows this week when she stated she would not mind getting naked in a movie because she should show it off while she still has it. That's nice for the guys in the audience, I suppose, but you won't be seeing that in I Love You Beth Cooper, which is rated PG-13.

"I have a lot of people that I look up to as an actor," Panettiere said. "Like Meryl Streep is obviously one of if not the best actors of all time. I think she's brilliant. I mean, there's a million people. I think in my position the people I wind up looking up to now are people who have their shit together, people who know who they are and are confident in who they are, people that I look at personality-wise and go, "Gosh, I just want to be like you because you're so likeable and you're so smart and you're so together and with it."

**

While Panettiere is in the media spotlight every day, her costar Paul Rust is less known, but equally talented. Rust is a comedian living in Los Angeles who regularly performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. This summer he is going to finally break out with the starring role in I Love You Beth Cooper and the part of Andy Kagan in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

"It was interesting because when I moved out to Los Angeles, you have goals, and my goal was to do sketch comedy or be a comic," Rust said, "and it was never really part of my goal to, like, have a lead in a movie. And so when it came, it was very exciting, but at the same time, I was kinda like, "Well, I didn't plan for this," so it was actually kind of a weird moment. But obviously a very exciting one, and the three months that we were shooting up in Vancouver, it was a strange thing where I actually wasn't scared or intimidated. I think if I had thought about it more, I'd have thought, "If I screw this up, that could mean bad things for me and this movie." I didn't really think about it, I just thought about how exciting it was."



Columbus wouldn't have chosen anyone else over Rust, regardless of box office potential.

"When it came time to cast, people would say 'what about someone like Michael Cera?'," explains Columbus. "There was something about Paul that I just fell in love with. He has an incredible sense of comic timing, and his more touching dramatic scenes with Hayden are quite effective and quite emotional. After testing him and working with him on a few scenes, I thought this guy had everything. You really grow to love him over the film. He's got a very unusual look, he's sort of a bastard child of Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn."

Working with a television star and a comic unknown makes Columbus' latest film a refreshing break from his last few films. Following two giant budget fantasy films with an ambitious project like adapting Rent, Columbus was ready for something smaller. It is interesting to note he considers I Love You Beth Cooper to be a distant relative of his directorial debut, Adventures in Babysitting.

"I thought, ‘I need to reinvigorate the process of filmmaking,' Columbus said. "I wanted to go back to that, and I said to myself, ‘If I were getting out of film school right now and I was starting to direct my first movie, what would I do?' And, I went back and looked at the movies I had written, Gremlins and Goonies, and then I looked at the first movie I directed, which was Adventures in Babysitting. This had been sitting in our office as a book, and Hayden was attached to it, and I thought, ‘Well, this could be a companion piece to Adventures in Babysitting.' This gave me an opportunity to do a movie on a lower budget, fairly quickly, with a brand new cast, and try to recreate that energy for a filmmaker, like myself, who's been given a lot of money to make movies."

Columbus has proven to be a director who gets bored easily. Last time he wanted to work with younger actors, he kick started the phenomenal Harry Potter franchise. It is unclear where Columbus will go with his career since he is now filming a movie starring Pierce Brosnan, Rosario Dawson, Uma Thurman, Sean Bean, Catherine Keener, Joe Pantoliano and Steve Coogan. If Beth Cooper was a chance to work with younger stars, it appears he has gotten it out of his system and is back to bigger, better things.

I don't know if there is another Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire or Harry Potter in his future, but Chris Columbus is always someone to keep an eye on.

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