TNT buys rights to 'Inglourious Basterds'; Weinstein Co. still strugglingSome good news for the beleaguered Weinstein Co. as it has sold the rights to "Inglourious Basterds" to Time Warner's basic cable network TNT.
Though terms were not disclosed, typically these deals are based on a percentage of the box office with a cap, which means that a movie that makes $250 million at the box office could go for the same that a movie that pulls in $150 million does. The most TNT is likely to have paid for "Inglourious Basterds" is around $15 million. So far, "Inglourious Basterds" has taken in more than $110 million in U.S. box office, making it director Quentin Tarantino's biggest hit.
Showtime already has the pay TV rights to "Inglourious Basterds" and future Weinstein Co. releases. However, that deal was unique in that Weinstein Co. paid Showtime an advance of $35 million as part of the deal. For more on that arrangement and how it came to pass, see our story.Â
Though the TNT money will come in handy, it is not nearly enough to dig the Weinstein Co. out of the hole it is in. Earlier this year, it hired financial firm Miller Buckfire to figure out how the company could restructure its heavy debt load of more than $500 million. Since then, the company has been laying off staffers, has said it will cutback dramatically on the number of movies it makes and acquires and has started getting out of its nonmovie businesses.
Today's Wall Street Journal was the latest to chronicle the challenges facing Bob and Harvey Weinstein after stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. WSJ dug up a nice little gem that the Weinsteins did not pay back a $75-million bridge loan from Ziff Brothers Investments and that Dirk Ziff, resigned from the Weinstein board earlier this year.
The company has two big movies coming out later this year, the musical "Nine" and "The Road," the latter of which had been billed as its best shot at Oscar gold.
-- Joe Flint
Photo: "Inglourious Basterds." Credit: Francois Duhamel / Associated Press/Weinstein Co.
'Lie to Me's' makeover: The truth from Tim Roth and Shawn RyanWhat is that elusive quality that makes a TV show unmissable?
"Lie To Me" (8 p.m. Monday, WFLD-Ch. 32; three and a half stars), a Fox show entering its second season with a new head writer, is trying to find out.
"Lie To Me," which debuted in January and stars Tim Roth as an expert on the nonverbal clues that signal deception, got middling-to-pretty-good reviews and respectable ratings (which declined during the first season's 13 episodes, but that's normal for many new shows).
In Season 1, the methods of spotting involuntary clues to lies, derived from the scholarly work and nonfiction books of Paul Ekman, were intriguing. Roth, a charismatic performer, was good in the lead role. But his character, Cal Lightman, was a somewhat standard-issue rule-breaking genius in the "House" mold, and the characters around him in his successful consulting practice, the Lightman Group, weren't all that well-defined or interesting.
"I think there was a feeling that after about the fourth or fifth episode, 'OK, these people can tell when people are lying. I get it,' " said Shawn Ryan, the Rockford native who took over as executive producer and head writer for "Lie To Me's" second season.
Ryan and a writing duo he's worked with in the past, Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, actually came on board toward the end of the first season. The show had fallen behind on some deadlines, and Ryan thought they would be helping out temporarily.
But then his CBS show, "The Unit," was canceled (his acclaimed FX drama, "The Shield," ended in 2008). And "Lie To Me" creator Samuel Baum asked Ryan to stick around and take over the administrative and production duties that Baum had found he didn't enjoy.
Though he was initially wary of taking over someone else's show, "I kind of view myself as a worker bee, and I wanted to do the work," Ryan said. And though he saw room for improvement, it's not as if "Lie To Me" was in terrible shape.
"It was an enjoyable show that a lot of people really liked, and one thing that was attractive was it didn't have to be built from the ground up," Ryan said in an August interview at his office on the Fox lot in Los Angeles.
Roth had his own struggles in the first season, he said in a recent conference call with reporters. The workload of being the lead in a weekly series was a big adjustment for the actor, who comes from the more deliberately paced film world. And he said the crime-solving aspects of the show were starting to wear him down a bit.
"I was desperate to get some character stuff to play and some drama to play and not just be doing procedural work," Roth said.
When he read Craft and Fain's excellent script for Season 1's "Blinded," which had the deception expert facing off with a serial rapist who's every bit as good at detecting lies as Lightman, the actor said he thought, "You can have the character-driven stuff and you can have a good [stories] to tell. ... That’s been the starting point this season."
In the Season 2 premiere (another Craft and Fain script), Lightman squares off with a character played by Erika Christensen ("Traffic"), who claims to have witnessed a murder she can't possibly have seen. But Lightman thinks she's telling the truth.
To give away more would ruin the season premiere, but suffice it to say that lie-busting is only half the fun, and Lightman's methods are as surprising as they were in "Blinded." One of the real pleasures of the episode is that the secondary "B story," which involves another Lightman Group staffer vetting a Supreme Court nominee, is rewarding as well.
Referring to a B story in the second episode of Season 2, in which Gillian Foster (Kelli Wiliams) and Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) investigate a religious compound, "I think last year, (the show) would have been more likely to deal with that case as a little bit of an Agatha Christie murder mystery," Ryan said. But Foster and Loker's views are challenged by what they find at the compound, and that leads to a debate about religion and belief.
"This year, we're really going to have these cases rebound back at our characters," Ryan said.
We'll also see more of Lightman's personal life: He's got a teenage daughter, Emily (Hayley McFarland), and his ex-wife, Zoe Landau (Jennifer Beals), is around for the first four episodes of the season. Ryan said the show will explore the attraction between Foster and Lightman, and, in a coming episode, he'll have to deal with an old friend (played by Lennie James) who ran scams with Lightman a couple of decades ago in London.
"We'll learn what Lightman was like before he became a respectable scientist," Ryan said.
But we'll also learn what it's like to have a gift that is a burden at times. In a recent conference call with Ekman, Ryan said, the writers asked the scientist about the following hypothetical: You're out to dinner with a friend and his wife, and the friend says how happy their marriage is.
"You sense some reaction from her that she doesn’t agree with that," Ryan recalled. "Is that something you share with your best friend or not? Some of the bigger sort of [themes of the show] are about Lightman's gift, which is incredibly valuable and serves a lot of people, and yet I think it haunts him in many ways."
Lightman still gets to play the scamp, however. The season premiere contains several amusing lines (he observes that, at his book signings, no one ever looks him in the eye).
For all that, however, taking the characters' emotional lives seriously is the key to the writers' approach this season, Ryan said.
"You look at shows like 'House' -- how much of that show is truly about solving a disease (mystery)?" he said. "You don't have much doubt that House is going to figure out what's wrong with a patient that week. What makes that show work is the relationships with the people that he works with."
On the visit to the "Lie to Me" offices, I got to sit in on a meeting in which Craft and Fain, who were writing Season 2's sixth episode, and the rest of the show's writers tried to hammer out the structure of that outing, which is set in Las Vegas.
Baum, who still is on the show's writing staff, asked Ryan, a longtime poker player, what a tournament poker player's "worst nightmare" would be.
Ryan told poker stories that touched on everything from the movie "Rounders" to the World Series of Poker, and the topics at the hourlong meeting ranged from how involved the casino owner would be in the plot to the budget for the episode.
Unobtrusively, Ryan frequently guided the discussion back to the idea of clarity; if something seemed convoluted, he wanted to know why. Though there was a constant search for moments with "adrenaline" to them, coincidences and character story lines were analyzed by all the writers -- some of whom are veterans who've run their own shows -- to find more than just good "lie-busting" moments and dramatic payoffs.
"What is the emotional hook for Lightman and our characters?" Ryan asked at one point.
"Last year, a lot of episodes started with 'What’s the cool science?' and worked the episodes around that," Ryan said later in his office. "This year, I think the approach is, 'What is the great character story we can tell in this episode -- the mystery -- and we will figure out the science at the end.'"
What follows is specific information, from Fox, Ryan and Roth, about upcoming episodes of "Lie to Me." Spoilers ahoy.
Episode 1: "The Core of It"
The Lightman Group investigates a murder case where a woman with multiple personalities (Erika Christensen) may either be a witness or the killer. Meanwhile, the president of the United States hires the firm to interrogate a potential Supreme Court nominee.
Episode 2: "Truth or Consequences"
Zoe enlists the Lightman Group to defend a star college football player accused of statutory rape. Meanwhile, Foster and Loker travel to a religious compound to find out whether it's actually a nefarious cult.
Guest Cast: Jennifer Beals as Zoe Landau, John Pyper-Ferguson as Jamie Cowley, Chadwick Boseman as Cabe McNeil, John Carroll Lynch as Mr. Reed, James Marsters as Pollack, Gretchen Egolf as Catherine, Colton Shires as Zack, Allie Gonino as Susan, Monique Edwards as Mrs. McNeil, Mark Berry as Mr. McNeil, Grant Alan as Wayne, Crystal Young as Kate, Chaz Wood as Horny Guy, Valerie Rose Curiel as Dori, Michole Briana White as Merrick, Alesa B. Gantz as Agent Ferro, Carlos McCullers II as Kid, Dennis Hill as Frat Boy and Paul Sanchez as Guard.
Shawn Ryan with a bit more on "Truth or Consequences": "It’s not even a main story, but we have what I think is a really fun B story [this episode]. They’ve been hired by the IRS to help them investigate this religious compound. Every homeowner there is claiming that their house is a church for tax purposes, which is something that’s really happening in this country, which is technically acceptable if your religious beliefs are 100 percent pure, and you’re not doing this for financial motivation. Accountants can’t determine that, but our crew can. What it leads to, because it’s Foster and Loker who are on that case â€" it leads to a little introspection about religion between these two characters who have very different views. Foster’s trying to, in the wake of her divorce, still go through the adoption process that she and her husband had started when they were a couple, but that she’s having difficulty with. And it leads to a little bit of a, you know, religious and emotional crisis for her."
Episode 3:
Garret Dillahunt guest stars.
Episode 5:
Lennie James and Marc Blucas guest star.
Description of James' character, Lightman's old friend from London: "British, charming, but rough around the edges, he goes way back with Lightman and is currently on the FBI and Scotland Yard watch lists. Growing up in London together, Ray and Lightman were best mates and partners in crime, running scams and getting into all kinds of trouble. Ray once took the fall for Lightman and spent time in in prison as a result. They haven't seen each other in two decades, so Ray's sudden appearance in Lightman's life is cause for both celebration and suspicion. It seems that Ray's had a lot of time to reflect on the past and has come to collect what he believes he's owed."
Marc Blucas is "Jack Rader, a slick deception expert who is a smooth combination of looks, brains and charisma. Lightman was once his mentor, until some unexplained issue caused a bitter rift in their relationship. With Lightman on vacation, Rader is called in to assist on a case... he might just have an eye on Foster, and he might just try to poach some of Lightman's staff."
Tim Roth: "There’s one we just completed shooting on one, which was very good, a lot of fun about a guy who shows up from my past, 22 years ago, he rolls up in my office and a lot of trouble ensues. And that was very, very well written and cast."
After Episode 5, there is a two-week baseball hiatus.
Episode 6 is titled "Fold Equity" and takes place in Las Vegas (the show shot scenes at a casino in Cabazon, Calif., for two days). Lightman takes on eight of the best poker players -- and liars -- in the world, after he is hired to find a missing tournament poker player. Foster and Reynolds (Mekhi Phifer) acoompany Lightman to Vegas, and Foster is afraid Lightman's old habits will get him into trouble. It's a big episode for Phifer.
Magician/performer Ricky Jay and Abby Brammell from "The Unit" guest star.
Tim Roth: In the past, "my character has been banned from every casino in Vegas."
Review: 'The Cleveland Show''The Cleveland Show' is a 'Family Guy' spinoff with warmth.
From 'Blotto' To 'Betty Booped,' A Dictionary Of DrinkThere are almost as many words for inebriation as there are mixed-drink recipes. Author Paul Dickson presents 2,964 intoxicating euphemisms — including "eating dirt" and going "off me pickle" — in his new book, Drunk: The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary.
Slide show: Monterey Jazz Festival