"The Informers"

[CHRIS B]

[vulcannonibird]

The Informers will hit german theaters on October 30th. As this is a german produced movie it could be the world premiere date - most likely in Berlin.

The movie will be distributed by the (german) producer of this movie Senator Film.

http://www.zelluloid.de/filme/index.php3?id=15069 zelluloid.de announcement

http://www.senator.de/ senator.de homepage

[CHRIS B]

I wonder why it's going to open there first. I thought maybe it was because of the Berlin Film Festival, but that's not until February.

Found this about the film:

On an October day, half of Canter’s Deli was open for business. The other half was filled with the cast and crew for the $15 million The Informers, which had just started principal photography. The cast includes Billy Bob Thornton, Winona Ryder, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

“Up until last night, I wasn’t sure we were going to make this movie,” director Jordan says during a lunch break. It’s not that he didn’t believe in Senator, it’s that Jordan has grown accustomed to his films falling apart like a cheap suit. He had been penciled in to direct the sci-fi movie The Tripod, but the project was canceled, as was the Mel Gibson film Under and Alone.

“I was in development hell for a couple of years,” Jordan says. “But in the end, it just comes down to luck.”

When Jordan became involved in The Informers, it had an unwieldy 150-page script - Ellis’ own adaptation of his stories about emotional drift in 1980s Hollywood - and another director (Nick Jarecki) attached.

That wasn’t Jordan’s sole worry. When he was preparing the Heath Ledger movie Ned Kelly, Jordan said he would receive worrisome memos from financier Universal Studios about the box-office grosses of recent Westerns. “There was this whole sort of marketing analysis done on it,” Jordan says, adding that those kind of worries are not what directors should have on their minds during production.

When he met with Senator’s Weber, Jordan was nervous about having the same kind of conversations. Just a few minutes into their initial meeting, though, the director began to relax. “It’s not that I am obsessed with making art films per se, but it was clear he was not interested in making a film clearly driven by economics. And this is definitely a movie with a dark edge to it.”

Within hours, not months, Jordan was handed The Informers job.

Although Jordan and Lee ultimately brought together recognizable casts, it required a bit of gamesmanship. “The message had to get out,” Jordan says, “that Senator was real and that the money was real.”

Now Senator has to show moviegoers that it’s legitimate as well. Mandy Lane, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, isscheduled to be released in late March or early April. Fireflies is set to debut this summer, with The Informers arriving in late summer or early fall.

[CHRIS B]

If anyone is interested, I found from 1994, Bret Easton Ellis on Charlie Rose talking about "The Informers."

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/8ZhCPCCqE-g" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/8ZhCPCCqE-g</a>

[Gary]

he reminds me of hells_unicorn

[CHRIS B]

Exclusive: Undead Removed From Informers
Vampires, Zombies stripped from American Psycho author's new movie.

 UK, March 10, 2008 - The much-anticipated film adaptation of American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis' 1995 novel 'The Informers' – about the undead lurking among the beautiful but empty denizens of 80s LA - will not contain any vampires or zombies.

In some countries, such as France, the book was even released under the title 'Zombies', and makes the omission extremely surprising. When Superman star Brandon Routh was cast it was even announced by the studio that he would play the lead vampire from the book.

However, Jon Foster who plays Graham, the son of a Hollywood movie exec (Billy Bob Thornton) has made the shocking revelation that there are no creatures from the dead in director Gregor Jordon's upcoming adaptation.

"There are no more vampires. They took the vampires out. There are no zombies or monsters either," he announces. "This is more about the narcissistic side of people's characters. God knows why they took the vampire characters out. I can't say if I was pleased or displeased, that is just the way it is."

The Informers has a stellar cast, in addition to Kim Bassinger playing Foster's mother, Mickey Rourke, Amber Heard and Winona Ryder have roles in the story that takes place in Los Angeles in 1983. It is also the last film that will feature Brad Renfro who died after a drug overdose in January.

Author Bret Easton Ellis has co-written the screenplay with Nicolas Jarecki and it seems that Ellis has taken heed of all the criticism that the book received when it first came out that revolved around his decision to put vampires into the tale. This is the fourth adaptation of an Ellis novel following American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction.

http://movies.ign.com/articles/858/858175p1.html

[CHRIS B]

Bret Easton Ellis Adaptation The Informers Loses Entire Vampire Sub-Plot with Brandon Routh?
Posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 11:21 pm by: Hunter Stephenson

Compared to most authors, onetime New York it-boy Bret Easton Ellis’s works have had a pretty good translation record at the cinema. American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero were all pretty faithful, quality adaptations that kept Ellis’s sensational penchant for drugs, kinky sex and sociopathic detachment intact. A tall order these days. Next in line is this fall’s The Informers. Not only did Ellis co-write the screenplay for his 1995 interlocked collection of twisted tales set in the ’80s, but the film easily has the coolest cast of any Ellis flick: Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Pineapple Express‘ Amber Heard and Brad Renfro’s last theatrical role.

Well, now it seems that the key element that made The Informers stand out from its darkly hedonistic pack, a good dose of the supernatural, including a vampire storyline starring Superman Returns‘ Brandon Routh as the book’s main vampire, Jamie, has either been “exorcised” or dumped altogether. Odd. Actor John Graham, who has a rather large role as the son to Thornton’s Hollywood exec, expressed dissonance about the film’s seemingly last minute change to IGN…

“There are no more vampires. They took the vampires out. There are no zombies or monsters either,” he announces. “This is more about the narcissistic side of people’s characters. God knows why they took the vampire characters out. I can’t say if I was pleased or displeased, that is just the way it is.”

Sounds as if Routh is no longer in the film, eh? If so, that’s a pretty big blow for him, as it would have given the All-American actor a dose of indie cred. There’s speculation that Ellis himself made the decision to ditch the fanged murderers from the film version due to criticism the book’s subplot received originally. Ho-hum. Fans will be bummed. Has to be more to it than that though, right? Perhaps director Gregor Jordan (Buffalo Soldiers, Ned Kelly) wasn’t digging the footage? If anyone has a contact or, cough, informant on this film, let us know.

Ellis is really starting to dive into Hollywood, with an adaptation of his bat@#$% semi-autobiographical Lunar Park due in 2009, along with The Frog King, another writer-obsessed flick starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt that he wrote an original screenplay for. Also kicking around is Roger Avary’s third (yes, third) adaptation Glamorama, which would follow The Rules of Attraction and its obscure, never released, mysterious spin-off film Glitterati starring Kip Pardue.

Discuss: Any Informers fans pissed? We haven’t heard much from this flick as of yet, but how many of you anticipate it? Who’s seen Glitterati? What’s the best Ellis movie? 

http://www.slashfilm.com/...-plot-with-brandon-routh/

[CHRIS B]

The project is due for theatrical release in 2009.

Senator's most recent credits include Gregor Jordan's "The Informers," starring Billy Bob Thornton and Kim Basinger; ensembler "Fireflies in the Garden," which features Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson and Julia Roberts; and the horror-thriller "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane," which the company acquired for U.S. and German distribution

http://movies.go.com/vari.../feature?featureid=948066

  I thought it was supposed to come out this fall.

[CHRIS B]

Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2008:

#26 The Informers

Director: Gregor Jordan
Writers: Nicholas Jarecki
Producers: Marco Weber (Igby Goes Down)
Distributor: Senator International

The Gist: Based on the Bret Easton Ellis 1995 novel, this is a collection of connected short stories set in 1983 Los Angeles and featuring movie execs, rock stars, a vampire and other morally challenged characters in tales highlighted by sex, drugs and violence.

Fact: Three of Ellis' novels -- "American Psycho," "Less Than Zero" and "The Rules of Attraction" -- have been made into films.

See It: B-E-Ellis fans are looking forward to this, cinephiles will be noting Brad Renfro's last performance and this red carpet will see an eclectic bunch of actors who've managed to grab attention for their public lives.

Release Date/Status?: Now in post-production, new kid on the block distributor Senator have yet to set a date for this ensemble.

[Gary]

Top 100 anticipated films of 2008? Um couldn't they have narrowed it down maybe a little more?

[CHRIS B]

Top 100 anticipated films of 2008? Um couldn't they have narrowed it down maybe a little more?

I know, really! I can't even name 5 films I want to see in 2008.

[CHRIS B]

Bret Easton Ellis is sooo over being a famous writer whose novels get made into movies
April 20, 2008 in Bookish, Filmy

Bret Easton Ellis, T. Cole Rachel, The Informers, V Magazine

I failed to mention in my previous post, the two book-related interviews in the current issue of V. First, Bret Easton Ellis chats with pal T. Cole Rachel to promote his film-adaptation for The Informers, set to release in October of this year. The cast includes Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Mickey Rourke, Mary-Kate Olsen, Billy Bob Thornton and the late Brad Renfro, which already seems like a strange amalgam no? The inclusion of Renfro (who died earlier this year of an accidental heroin overdose) seems disturbingly apropos for a BEE project though. Rachel put it best when he says that Ellis’ work makes the unsettling statement that “we are $%#@ed.” A collected of losely intertwined short stories, The Informers, was first published in 1994.

In the second interview V editor, Chris Bollen, talks with lit-it-boy (kind of), Keith Gessen of n+1 about his new book — but more on him later. Check out some of what BEE told V after the jump.

On film adaptations of his books (which he didn’t adapt):

As well-made as American Psycho is, I don’t think it really did that. I just think that American Psycho is an un-adaptable book that was turned into a perfectly serviceable movie.

On the current film adaptation of The Informers (which he adapted):

It is, by far, the most expensive film adaptation that’s ever been done for one of my novels and from what I’ve seen it’s the most beautiful looking.

On what the story is about (my fav quote in this piece):

The movie is really about the end of the ‘70’s and the beginning of the ‘80’s. It’s about that moment when we realized that everything the ‘70’s had been about was going to be wiped away—by AIDS, by drugs, by Reagan-era politics. It’s about that moment when this cultural shift took place and everything suddenly felt completely different.

http://homoneurotic.wordp...els-get-made-into-movies/

[CHRIS B]

In that V Magazine, Bret Easton Ellis says "The Informers" is coming out Summer 08!!!! I hope an offical date is announced soon!!

[CHRIS B]

Here's the full V Magazine interview with Bret Easton Ellis:

AMERICAN INFORMER

BRET EASTON ELLIS MAY BE THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL, UPSETTING, DANGEROUS, AND CRITICALLY DISREGARDED WRITER IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. HE MAY ALSO PROVE TO BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT. AS HE WRAPS UP WORK ON THE FILM ADAPTATION OF THE INFORMERS, HE TALKS ABOUT THE MANY LIVES OF HIS BOOKS

At the time of its publication in 1994, Bret Easton ElIis’s The Informers was a polarizing topic in the literary world. As has been the case with all of the 44-year-old writer`s books, the story collection seemed to engender glowing, it somewhat reluctant, admiration or vehement disdain. Most of the time, it was the disdain that won out. The thirteen loosely interwoven stories of desperation, decadence, and general despair in early ‘80s Los Angeles proved too nihilistic - and perhaps too prescient - for many critics. Despite having been deemed "empty writing about empty lives" by Kirkus or, even less kindly, “as cynical, shallow, and stupid as the people it depicts" by The New York Times` Michiko Kakutani, The Informers has, over the years, continued to attract its own cultish fan base. While the book is certainly not as celebrated (or reviled) as Ellis‘s other best-sellers - 1985's Less Than Zero, 1991's American Psycho, and 1998's Glamorama - The Informers is arguably one of his masterpieces. Buried under the spare, almost mercilessly sharp prose lays a very genuine sadness and, even more overlooked, a wicked sense of humor. Ellis is much more than a master stylist. His best work makes a very clear statement about what it means to be human, even if that statement is a generally unsettling one: we are *beep*

It's not surprising then that The Informers is the next book in Ellis's back catalog to be given the Hollywood film treatment. Directed by Gregor Jordan, the film‘s ensemble cast includes Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Mickey Rourke, Mary-Kate Olsen and Billy Bob Thornton. While the author has remained largely disconnected from previous film adaptations, he's served as a screenwriter here to help bring one of his most seemingly un-filmable books to the big screen. Maybe it has taken a decade for the ironies of Ellis‘s work to become clear to us. (T. Cole Rachel)

T. COLE RACHEL: One of the first questions that people must always ask you is what you think about the movies that have been made from your books.
BRET EASTON ELLIS: Yes. It’s weird. When I'm writing, I'm not thinking of the books as movies, I‘m thinking of them as purely literary experiences. When I‘m writing a screenplay it's obviously very different. So, I find the idea of adapting my own work for the screen - or seeing it adapted—very disorienting. There are always problems.

TCR: Such as?
BEE: Well, I remember that the people who wanted to do Less Than Zero were caught in a regime change at the studio where the movie was being done. There were a lot of conflicting ideas by everyone involved about exactly how that book should be made into a film. The end result was a very compromised film that was much different than it had originally been envisioned. That movie was also very affected by the times in which it was made. There was no independent cinema then, which is where a movie like that should have gone rather than become a huge, glossy 20th Century Fox production. Also, there are no scenes from the book that are actually in the movie. It’s totally different. Saying that, however, I see that movie late at night sometimes on cable and I actually have a lot of fondness for it. The cinematography is beautiful. It’s really one of the only movies of its kind that captures however tacky the youth culture of L.A. at that time. It’s the only movie l can think of that shows what L.A. was like at that moment, for better or worse.

TCR: Which of the film adaptations do you think most accurately captures your own sensibility?
BEE: The only one that really does it is The Rules of Attraction. It`s also the most divisive movie - not only among fans of my work but probably among fans of movies in general [laughs]. I watched it again recently and I think it`s kind of a marvelous adaptation.
Regardless of what Roger Avary kept from the book and what he threw out - and he kept a lot - it got the essence of the novel. As well-made as American Psycho is, I don't think it really did that. I just think that American Psycho is an un-adaptable book that was turned into a perfectly serviceable movie.

TCR: I know you‘ve done lots of screenwriting, but was The Informers the first time you took a shot at adapting your own work for the screen?
BEE: Not exactly. I did a version of The Rules of Attraction years ago. I did a draft of American Psycho for David Cronenberg when he was attached to direct it. Neither of those versions was ever used. The Informers is the first time that l did an adaptation of one of my books that was actually shot.

TCR: It seems like the least adaptable of all your work. There is a certain loose connectedness to the book, but ifs still essentially a collection of short stories.
BEE: Yeah. there is a kind of cohesiveness to it...you know, the stories get darker as you move through it, certain characters pop up again in later stories, or certain details about characters are revealed. But still, it doesn't easily lend itself to this kind of treatment. It was written when I was going through a very brief phase of writing short stories - which lasted about five years - and I was just interested in the form. I don`t think I've ever been interested in it since. I haven’t actually written a short story since 1986. What happened was that I had gotten stuck on Glamorama and I owed a book to Knopf. It became apparent that Glamorama was going to take a long time to finish, so my editor suggested that we do a book of stories. I looked at all the stories I'd written and I liked the L.A. stories the most. I arranged them in a way that they seemed to make the most sense - like the way a musician might arrange tracks on an album - and then it just felt like it worked.

TCR: So much of your most memorable work is set in L.A. and now you’re living there again alter nearly two decades in New York. Does the city still hold the same kind of creative sway over you?
BEE: It's funny. I'm not really sure that it ever did. My work tends to be about wherever I am at the moment, it kind of goes where I go. L.A. just happened to be where I was most of the time. I was writing Less Than Zero when I was in college and it was about college students. I spent half of my time in L.A., half in Vermont. A lot of Less Than Zero comes from the two novels I wrote when I was in high school. I wrote about L.A. because that's where I lived and that's what I knew. The same goes for Rules of Attraction. American Psycho was written when I moved to New York. Glamorama was the result of traveling around Europe so much.
Lunar Park was written mostly in Los Angeles, but that book isn’t so much about the suburbs or a particular place as it is about getting older. The book I‘m writing now is set in Los Angeles, out it`s not so much about the city itself.


TCR: You‘ve been very involved with the production of The Informers - from working with the director, Gregor Jordan, to visiting the set and talking to the actors about their roles. Has this experience changed your perspective on what it means to make movies?
BEE: Completely and totally. You know, it was always boring for me to begin with. When I as a kid I knew people whose parents made television shows and movies. I went to a school where most of my friend’s parents worked in the entertainment industry. So it wasn't unusual alter school to go visit a set because someone's dad was Michael Landon and they were shooting Little House on the Prairie. It's kind of horrible to say, but at an early age you become very jaded about stuff like that because you understand how completely boring and tedious it is most of the time. I was on the set of American Psycho a couple of times – boring, did not want to be there – and once it was actually by accident. I walked down the street and literally stumbled across the film crew who was shooting near my apartment. With Informers there were a couple of times when the actors requested dialogue revisions, so I came down to the set to do that. But, you know, for whatever reason, perhaps my age, it doesn`t really excite me. However, there was a moment on Informers when I watched these four young actors shoot a very complicated scene and totally nail it every time. I realized how much better they actually made the scene and it was exciting to see the thing just come to life. That's when you realize that making movies is truly a collaborative experience, while screenwriting isn't. As a screenwriter you're giving them a map - a compass - and the rest is up to everyone else.

TCR: Capturing the look of the early '80s is actually much harder than people probably think. There’s a fine line between looking authentic and beautiful and lust having it look like a bed episode of Dynasty.
BEE: Exactly. This movie really needed to have an almost Antonioni-esque sheen to it in order to work and they really went all out to achieve that. It is, by far, the most expensive film adaptation that’s ever been done for one of my novels and from what I‘ve seen, it’s the most beautiful looking. We talked at length about how the people would dress. This book takes place in 1983, so it was just before things got really tacky. Armani was very big at the time and all the guys I knew would wear a lot of streamlined Italian clothes. The mullet hadn't appeared yet, nor had shoulder pads. Girls hadn`t gone insane with their hair yet in terms of giant perms or whatever. It's just before that all started to happen. We looked at a movie like The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, even though that movie is actually set in the 1930s, for an idea of how these young people should look. We also wanted to capture the kind of laid-back, So-Cal glamour that kids I knew growing up were into. We weren't making Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We didn't want to make a parody of 1983. The movie is really about the end of the '70s and the beginning of the `80s. It's about that moment when we realized that everything the '70s had been about was going to be wiped away - by AIDS, by drugs, by Reagan-era politics. It's about that moment when this cultural shift took place and everything suddenly felt completely different.

The Informers is out in summer 2008 from Senator Entertainment

http://www.vmagazinedigit...com/vmagazine/2008spring/

[CHRIS B]

Found this description of the film and I liked it- so I thought I'd post it here!

THE INFORMERS

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder and Mickey Rourke
Director: Gregor Jordan 
Genre(s): Drama 
From the Producer of the Golden Globe nominated IGBY GOES DOWN, comes a compelling story about a dark undercurrent to the Eighties in Los Angeles beneath the style, the music, and the glamour.

Set in Los Angeles during the early 1980’s, THE INFORMERS focuses on young, wealthy Angelenos, consumed by a decadent lifestyle, who remain detached and isolated from the real world.

The film’s half-dozen narrative threads all have one thing in common – Graham Sloan, a child of privilege struggling to find his own direction. Graham’s best friends are the irresistible Christie and Martin; the three of them frequently share sex, drugs, and musings on life. But Martin is secretly carrying on an affair with Graham’s mother. Dad, meanwhile, is obsessed with the sexy, if aging newscaster Cheryl Laine, who’s seeing a kid named Danny that’s half her age. What a tangled web we weave.

Graham’s friend Tim has gone to Hawaii with his father, but Les can’t understand why his son doesn’t like girls, or why men seem so attracted to his boy. Graham’s neighbor, Jack, is holding a child prisoner; kidnapped not for ransom but darker purposes. Abusive pop star, Bryan Metro, hits rock bottom just as his career is peaking.

THE INFORMERS is a portrait of a generation losing its way - an outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.’s gorgeous surface.