Shortcut to Happiness (2007) - My Love Movies

UPDATED JULY 10, 2007

From The National Post of Canada

TO KEEP SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

There Seems To Be No End Of Sympathy For The Evil One

by Robert Fulford, National Post

Father Ronald Knox, a Roman Catholic priest in England who wrote detective stories in his spare time, claimed that it's stupid of modern civilization to stop believing in the Devil when the Devil is the only reasonable explanation for modern civilization. Like all celebrities, The Evil One goes in and out of fashion. He's ignored at times, but he can often become an obsession.

In 1692 the locals in Salem, Mass., executed 19 townsfolk just for consorting with him. Later he grew so obscure that merely mentioning his name could mark you as hopelessly passe. At the moment, however, he's on a roll.

Last year a movie, The Devil Wears Prada, put him into the fashion business, precisely where a sensible demon would look for recruits in the 21st century. This month brings a remake of The Devil And Daniel Webster, a famous 1930s short story and 1940s film, with Anthony Hopkins and Jennifer Love Hewitt (she plays the Devil). The poor farmer of Stephen Vincent Benet's original tale turns into an unsuccessful writer who sells his soul in return for prosperity.

And then there's The Castle in the Forest, the recent novel by Norman Mailer. The Devil has always hovered over Mailer's feverish imagination. This time Mailer's narrator is an assistant demon who brags that he turned Adolf Hitler into a world-dominating villain by distorting his childhood.

Like the rest of us, the Devil probably enjoys good reviews and winces at criticism. The 16th century was ruined for him when Martin Luther blamed him for absolutely everything: "The Devil begat darkness; darkness begat ignorance; ignorance begat error; error begat free-will" --and so on and on through every sin the verbose Luther could remember.

The 17th century was better: John Milton not only made the Devil the star of a masterpiece, Paradise Lost, but treated him as a proud executive with the nerve to defy God, the dictatorial chairman of the board. In a 1997 film, The Devil's Advocate, Al Pacino played the Devil, a lawyer named John Milton who was busy corrupting a young litigator.

As a favourite excuse, "the Devil made me do it" lasted a long time. In the 1980s, I asked a distinguished German historian how he explained Hitler. "I can't. Maybe he was the son of the Devil." H.H. Holmes, possibly the first urban serial killer in America, murderer of many women and children during the Columbian White City Exhibition at Chicago in 1893, said it was all the Devil's fault. Before his execution he claimed: "I was born with the Devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing." In 2003, when Erik Larson wrote a book about Holmes and the fair, he called it The Devil in the White City.

In 1563, the Devil apparently flew over the Thames River in London. Those of a scientific bent thought it a meteor shower, but Christians of the day found it more natural to recall what Jesus observed: "I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven." Today a phenomenon of that kind would make us think, at worst, of flying saucers and alien abductions.

From the standpoint of minor demons trying to rebrand the Devil for a new century, emphasizing his relevance, there's good news from the Vatican. The last pope didn't even believe in hell, and in America Billy Graham long ago abandoned his youthful sermons about eternal damnation. But Pope Benedict XVI believes it's wrong for the church to overlook the Devil's influence. When he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said Christianity's problems included the loss of the sacred identity of the priest, a diminished sense of original sin, permissiveness (particularly birth control) and ... neglecting the power of the Devil.

The Pope believes that a literal (not symbolic, not allegorical) Devil wants to bring mortals to sin: "Whatever the less discerning theologians may say, the Devil, as far as Christian belief is concerned, is a puzzling but real, personal and not merely symbolical presence." Father Pedro Barrajon, a professor at the Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum in Rome, not only believes in the Devil but sometimes defeats him through exorcism -- a cure approved by the Pope. Barrajon knows when people are Devil-beset and require exorcism: They show a deep aversion to holy objects such as the cross. "Also an aversion to the word 'God.' When it is spoken, such people get very nervous."

The recent spate of pro-atheism books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, etc. will be regarded by the Devil, should he exist, as excellent disinformation for his side. Reading a couple of them, I reflected that while I believe in something that could be called original sin, I don't believe in the Devil. How can you believe in him if you don't believe in God?

On the other hand, I wouldn't like to see the Devil forgotten. He's essential to understanding literature, for one thing -- consider Dante, Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann and Isaac Bashevis Singer, for starters.

I suspect that Henry Ansgar Kelly of the University of California harbours similar views. He's the author of the recent Satan: A Biography (Cambridge University Press), in which he notes "the unjustifiably bad press" Satan has had over the centuries. Kelly plays the role (as one English critic has noted) of spin doctor for His Infernal Majesty. He explains that in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Devil is not nearly the total villain we consider him today. He didn't acquire a really bad reputation until about 220 years after the birth of Jesus, when Origen of Alexandria began describing the Devil we now know. Satan wasn't even mentioned as hell's proprietor till centuries after Christ.

Mayor Carolyn Risher of Inglis, Fla., (pop. 1,400) isn't having any of that. Five years ago (guided, she said, by God's hand) she became briefly famous by issuing a decree officially banning Satan from her municipality. Prayers were distributed along with her proclamation. Even so, Steve Morris of the local police acknowledged that he hadn't noticed any reduction in crime. Moreover, public copies of the decree were themselves stolen from where they were posted. Mayor Risher had no trouble figuring out who, or what, inspired that crime.

UPDATED JULY 6, 2007

From The Blog of AmericanHeritage.com

STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT

Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST

Stephen Vincent Benét wrote “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in 1937. I was thinking about that short story yesterday, because I once celebrated the Fourth of July by reading it aloud to some undergraduates the summer after I’d graduated from college. In that time and at that place, patriotism was not a fashionable political or moral posture, and my initial impulse was not love of country but injured pride. One of the other people present had for some reason remarked that Benét was a Popular Front hack, and I wanted to rebut the part about hackery. I had no idea whether Benét had sported any affiliation to the Communist party, but I’d loved the story since hearing it read aloud around a fire at summer camp, hearing its author patronized was irritating, and I was surprised to learn that neither the fellow condemning Benét nor anyone else in the room had ever heard of it (or of anything else the man had written). Their ignorance was in fact a mark of their sophistication—I had a more middle-brow background than those people did, and much less exalted taste.

In any event, a friend who admired the poem “John Brown’s Body” and liked some of the fiction had just lent me a book of Benét’s collected short stories, which meant the evidence was readily at hand, and I let rip. My memory of the occasion is that the others conceded that the story provided authentic if modest pleasure—they thought it low, but oddly appealing. Googling it, I discover that the thing is available on-line, and any reader of this blog ignorant of the story may decide the question for her- or himself. I am sufficiently uneasy about its merits to have refrained from re-reading the story, for this event took place well over thirty years ago, and I make no promises; it is very possible that “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is like Tolkien or Edgar Rice Burroughs, wonderful if read (or heard) young enough, unendurable if first encountered thereafter.

Having just Googled not only “The Devil and Daniel Webster” but also Benét and the Popular Front, I was intrigued to get an awful lot of hits on the latter subject, so maybe my college friend was right, at least in part of what he said. If so, it is intriguing to compare the sensibility and successes of the Popular Front to those of the New Left of the early 1970s, or for that matter the Left of today. Making someone like Daniel Webster into a folk hero for school children does not seem like the kind of thing many (if any) people on the Left have attempted since the 1930s, and I am not sure the Left has done too brilliantly from this abstemious choice. And as it happens, I do not think that an initially uncritical enthusiasm for Webster, contracted at a tender age, bars a citizen from critical thought for the remainder of his life. At the height of the anti-war movement of the early 1970s, I remember a Fourth of July on which I asked a pretty militant friend “Neighbor, how stands the Union?,” and got a prompt and enthusiastic “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible!” Both the question and the answer are from Benét’s story. By the time I finished high school I had encountered Samuel Eliot Morison’s witty and deflating remark on Webster (his joke went something like “two eyes like live coals, under a precipice of brow; no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked”), which gave me a sense of Webster pretty directly opposed to the one I’d gotten from Benét’s story a decade or so earlier. But I am grateful to have gotten that earlier sense first.

Hopkins chuckles, and no wonder: The one-time class clown has become one of Hollywood's iconic actors, parlaying his Oscar-winning turn as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) into the status of a latter-day Olivier, the kind of classically brilliant thespian who moves fellow actors to do movies simply in order to work with him.

That was, in fact, the motivation that up-and-coming Ryan Gosling cited to leave his usual indie stamping grounds and go mainstream with the current Fracture, in which he plays a prosecutor trying to nail a canny aviation executive (Hopkins) who kills his cheating wife and then tries to manipulate the legal system so as to get away with murder.

But it's not Fracture that brings Hopkins to a Los Angeles hotel for this interview. Instead it's a journey into his past, a past that has defied steep odds to become his present.

'It's difficult when you wait a long time for a film to be released'

Back in 2001 Hopkins starred in an updated remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), playing a publisher who, after it turns out that one of his writers (Alec Baldwin) has literally sold his soul to the devil (Jennifer Love Hewitt) in exchange for the ability to write brilliantly, has to go to court to defend the writer in order to save his soul.

The film, which was also Baldwin's directorial debut, was successfully completed despite financial problems during the shoot, but thereafter things went to, well, the devil. The producers, already short of money, quarreled among themselves amid allegations of fiscal wrongdoing. While Baldwin was working on postproduction, the FBI seized investors' assets, included the film. Eventually a frustrated Baldwin took his name off the picture as director.

Problems continued. A rough cut of the film was shown at film festivals in 2003 and 2004, but funding wasn't available for final editing, special effects and music clearances. It was not until the Yari Film Group acquired the film that it finally got a new title, Shortcut to Happiness, and an opening date: A limited release is set for May 18 (SINCE THEN THE NEW DATE IS JULY 13, 2007), a full six years after it was shot.

'It's difficult when you wait a long time for a film to be released,' Hopkins concedes, 'but you remain hopeful. It's an excellent cast.'

Excellent casts are customary for Hopkins films, of course, in part because his presence draws top talent. Besides Gosling, Fracture also features Embeth Davidtz, Rosamund Pike and David Strathairn. Fuelled by a Lecteresque performance from Hopkins, the film has been well received by critics and audiences, which may be especially sweet in that it has far outstripped Hannibal Rising, the recent prequel that is the first of four Lecter films since The Silence of the Lambs not to feature Hopkins.

'It's nice to just upset people'

The character was not inspired by Lecter, Hopkins says, but rather by someone he knew in real life.

'There was someone I knew of, and I had been in his presence years ago,' the actor says. 'He was a con man. I don't know if he ever killed anyone. He was just part of this gang and a totally ruthless man. I heard stories that he would go and break people's legs. This man was an ex-bodyguard, and he worked for the studios. In fact, they fired him because he was scary to people.

'The only contact I had with him was in the commissary at the studio,' he recalls. 'He came up to me and said, 'I heard you say something, and what do you mean by that? And where do you live?'

'Someone pulled my jacket and said, 'Let's get out of here. He's really nuts.''

The thought that anyone who comes into contact with Hopkins might wind up, years later, as the template for one of his onscreen characters, may be intimidating. But there's another side to Hopkins: According to Gosling, he's far from the cliche of the moody, introspective actor, and in fact has been known to unexpectedly start barking during a scene.

'I do spontaneously bark like a dog,' Hopkins says cheerfully. 'I just do it to make people laugh. It's really a joke, but I love it because I like to see people's reactions. In the middle of a take, I'll be barking. People will actually say, 'Is there a dog in here?'

'I'll hear 'Quiet on the set' and then the clapboard sounds,' he continues. 'I'll make a clock-ticking sound. There will be people running around going, 'Is there a clock? Someone help! Get this clock out of here!' The next minute I'll meow, and then a grip will say, 'Now we have to deal with this cat.'

'It's nice to just upset people,' the actor says gleefully. 'Seriously, my goal is to keep it light.'

That attitude, he says, is inspired by another Hollywood icon, Robert Mitchum.

'You can either weather a bad shoot, get through it or leave'

'When he was doing 'Ryan's Daughter' (1970), there was a first AD who was keen on keeping it quiet on the set,' Hopkins says. 'He would say 'Quiet!' and then get so upset because he would hear quiet whistling. It was always Robert Mitchum who came around whistling. He would say, 'Isn't this a catchy tune?'

'Believe me, no one was going to tell Robert Mitchum to shut up,' Hopkins says appreciatively. 'It didn't matter if he didn't get along with this director.'

He too has occasionally had trouble with directors, the actor adds.

'You can either weather a bad shoot, get through it or leave,' Hopkins says. 'I did leave one film. The director was so awful, and I wanted to quit. My people kept saying, 'But they could sue you.' I said, 'I don't care, I'm leaving.' The case was dismissed in court.'

And no, Hopkins won't say which movie that was.

'It was a musical,' he says, his eye twinkling, 'and basically I went to the bathroom one day and then out the door. I said one word: 'Taxi!''

Unlike most British-trained actors, the Welsh-born Hopkins prefers to underplay his parts. His style is more Method than Royal Shakespeare company.

'I think the quieter you play any scene, the better,' he says. 'I just read my part and my scenes over and over again. Then I'm ready. I believe in a very mechanical process. I just go over and over something many times.

'When I'm on a film where they start rewriting stuff while we're filming, then that tends to give me trouble.'

'This film is like a dream'

As for the kind of films that attract him, he says, there's only one thing that he has to see: intelligence.

'Sometimes I'm watching a movie that's supposed to be a thriller and I don't know what's going on,' he says. 'The other day I saw a car-chase scene and I sat back thinking, 'Good actors. But who is chasing whom, and why?' I think the audience gets irritable with bad movies. I don't like it when I see a brilliant director being so clever at the expense of the story, or a director who is trying to show us what a great editor he hired to work on his film. Why do that? Just tell the story.

'I also think it's an insult to the public when I hear that movies are only for kids now, and that the kids don't have the attention span,' Hopkins adds. 'Who says they don't?'

One story to which he won't be returning, he says: that of Hannibal Lecter.

'I didn't see this movie based on the young Hannibal,' Hopkins says. 'I had no real interest. As for playing the adult Hannibal again in a new movie, I'm done. I did three films, and that was enough.'

Instead, he'll next be seen in Slipstream, a fantasy/comedy which he also wrote and directed. It's about an ageing screenwriter torn between the real world and his imagination until writing a murder mystery seems to throw him over the edge. S. Epatha Merkerson, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor and John Turturro co-star.

'This film is like a dream,' Hopkins says. 'It's a movie within a movie. It's about a moment of crisis in a man's life. He's actually killed. It's the moment between life and death. He flips through life. It's a 95-minute film, so it's very fast and the plot is inverted like a sea shell. It's almost hallucinogenic.

'The whole thing is like a dream.'

NEW YORK, NY - Calvert DeForest, the white-haired, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry "Bud" Melman on David Letterman's late night television shows, has died after a long illness. The Brooklyn-born DeForest, who was 85, died Monday at a hospital on Long Island, Letterman's "Late Show" announced Wednesday.

He made dozens of appearances on Letterman's shows from 1982 through 2002, handling a variety of twisted duties: dueting with Sonny Bono on "I Got You, Babe," doing a Mary Tyler Moore impression during a visit to Minneapolis, handing out hot towels to arrivals at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself - a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

The gnomish DeForest was working as a file clerk at a drug rehabilitation center when show producers, who had seen him in a New York University student's film, came calling.

He was the first face to greet viewers when Letterman's NBC show debuted on Feb. 1, 1982, offering a parody of the prologue to the Boris Karloff film "Frankenstein."

"It was the greatest thing that had happened in my life," he once said of his first Letterman appearance.

DeForest, given the nom de tube of Melman, became a program regular. The collaboration continued when the talk show host launched "Late Show with David Letterman" on CBS in 1993, though DeForest had to use his real name because of a dispute with NBC over "intellectual property."

This photo of character actor Calvert DeForest was taken in New York in August of 1993. DeForrest, who appeared as Larry "Bud" Melman on NBC's "Late Night with David Letterman" and under his own name when Letterman brought the show to CBS, died Monday, March 19, 2007.

Its epic backstory seems to confirm its point: There were certainly no shortcuts in pic's route to the screen.

Lensing on the film wrapped way back in the spring of 2001, but the movie promptly went into a post-production period from which it never emerged.

Alec Baldwin, who stars and also directed, at one point sued producer Cutting Edge Entertainment for what he alleged were unpaid fees. He also threatened to stop work on the film. The two parties settled, but Baldwin eventually pulled his name off the project.

Meanwhile, the film languished in post without finishing funds, as various banks and insurance companies haggled over rights. It also had trouble finding distribution.

Making matters more complicated: producer David Glasser's Cutting Edge Entertainment was reborn as Splendid Pictures under German film company Splendid Medien. Splendid Medien later ended its relationship with Glasser, who was subsequently hired by Yari.

As this was happening, several versions of "Webster" were cut. Still the film failed to find a distributor.

Yari, however, recently bought the pic from the insurance company that had taken over the rights and provided finishing funds. He is credited as an exec producer.

Yari won't recut the film, but says he will release a different version than the one he believed caused Baldwin to walk away.

While Baldwin has disavowed any connection to the picture -- indeed, Alan Smithee is currently listed as director -- Yari said he would extend an olive branch to the helmer-thesp by showing him the latest cut. "We'd love for him to be involved in supporting this film," Yari said.

Baldwin and Hewitt are hot these days: Baldwin with acclaimed turns in "The Departed" and NBC comedy "30 Rock; and Hewitt stars and produces CBS #1 Friday hit "Ghost Whisperer."

Yari acknowledged the movie could be a tough sell. "It's very hard to judge how it will perform, because who knows how the history is going to affect the current perception. The public is very savvy."

But he also said he felt the performances and a platform release --similar to his successful rollout for "The Illusionist" -- could help jump-start word of mouth. "This film has a pedigree of stars," he said, "and I think many people will be surprised by it."

Pic also stars Anthony Hopkins, Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd, with Jennifer Love Hewitt cast as the devil.

On Tuesday, Starz revealed the movie as part of a larger buy from Yari, which also will see "The Illusionist" air on the paybox.

Yari Film Group
in association with
Miracle Entertainment

Starring
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT
ALEC BALDWIN
ANTHONY HOPKINS
KIM CATTRALL
DAN ACKROYD
JOHN SAVAGE
BARRY MILLER
DARNELL HAMMOND
GUY PEaRCE
Ken Murton
Frank Sivero
Gregg Bello
Al Palagonia
Jason Patric
Paul Thornton
Kevin Olson
Bill Corsair
Jonathon Gentry
John Hines
Alice Johnson
Canedy Knowles

Karlie Mossman
Luis Pedron
Philippe Vonlanthen
Marni Lustig
Julie Lamb
Katherine O'Sullivan
Bobby Cannavale
Jhon Doria
Mike Doyle
Monte Farber
Bill Montgomery
Amy Poehler
Frank Sepe
Mary Ashton
Bill Boylan
Jane DeNoble
Stephanie Elliot
John Hills
Christine Jones
Jason Evans Lee
CALVERT DeFORREST
JANN CARL

Directed by
HARRY KIRKPATRICK

Screen story by
PETER DEXTER

Screenplay by
PETER DEXTER and
NANCY CASSARO
& BILL CONDON

Based on the
short story BY
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
and the play
"SCRATCH" BY
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

Produced by
DAVID GLASSER
ADAM STONE
ALEC BALDWIN
JON CORNICK

ASSOCIATED ProduceRS
Terry Chase Chenowith
Katie Daily
Dessie Markovsky

Music by
CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

Executive Producers
JEFF G. WAXMAN
BRIAN AVERY
HOWARD KAZANJIAM
TONY CATALDO
CRAIG DARIMAN
BOB YARI
SCOTT G. STONE
JASON ZELIAN

Co-Executive Producers
CAROL GILLSON
BRIAN KEATHLEY
MICHAEL S. GRAYSON
MICHAEL Z. GORDON
PATRICK GALLAGHER
JAMES ROBB
RANDALL EMMETT
GEORGE FURLA
CORRINNE MANN

Domestic Distributor
YARI FILM GROUP

Made by
DEVIL PRODUCTIONS LLC
in association with
EL DORADO PICTURES

Family Room Entertainment

splendid pictures

my own worst enemy productions

cutting edge entertainment

icb entertainment finance

tricor entertainment

Properties: Alec Baldwin, Copyright Control, Cutting Edge Entertainment, Dennis Maxim Inc., Devil Productions LLC, El Dorado Pictures, Family Room Entertainment,
Sir Anthony Hopkins, My Own Worst Enemy Productions, RKO Radio Pictures Inc. - A Time Warner Company obo: Turner Entertainment Company and Yari Film Group. All Rights Reserved.

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