ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY AND AWARD NEWS
NOVEMBER 14, 2019
Oscar Season’s Final Mysteries
It’s around this time in awards season when some of us start thinking we know everything. Most of the movies that will be contenders, from summer hits Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and The Farewell to December releases Little Women and Bombshell, have screened already. Many of the season’s dominant narratives—the Renée-ssance! Marty vs. Marvel!—have already taken shape. If you’re receiving stacks of screeners this week, as many critics and awards voters are, you probably already know which ones belong at the top of the heap.
But. But! There are still surprises to be had, from Cats—which confirmed last week it would not screen in time for most early awards, but could very well be a Greatest Showman-size hit in the making—to whatever Clint Eastwood might have in store with Richard Jewell. On this week’s episode of the Little Gold Men podcast, Mike Hogan, Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, and Joanna Robinson discuss the mysteries they’re still looking to solve. Can The Irishman get the best-picture victory for Netflix that Roma didn’t, even when the streamer has so many other movies to promote? Will 1917 become the dad movie to rule them all when it finally starts screening the weekend before Thanksgiving? Can a recent push get Taron Egerton a Golden Globe nomination for Rocketman—even if he has to compete with Adam Sandler, whose Uncut Gems is being improbably promoted as a comedy, once he gets there? And seriously, what to make of Cats??
There’s one thing this season, at least, that’s no mystery: the talent of Tracy Letts, who has a small supporting role in Little Women and a more substantial one in Ford v Ferrari, in which he plays the dyspeptic Ford Motor Company heir Henry Ford II. On this week’s podcast Letts talks to Richard Lawson about what appealed to him, a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright, about the script (“It was a human story. It was about people.”) and how he and his wife, Carrie Coon, manage their schedules as two highly in-demand talents (“It’s like planning the Battle of Midway, but it’s also a great time”). In this exclusive excerpt from the interview below, Letts explains what he looks for in a script—and why, as a playwright, he doesn’t feel the need to edit his old work.
Richard Lawson: When you’re reading a screenplay, can you tell when a playwright has had a hand in it? Does it read differently? Is the language somehow more accessible from an actor point of view?
Tracy Letts: I wouldn’t know that it was written by a playwright necessarily, but I can tell when something’s well written. And Ford v Ferrari was well written. The scenes were good on the page. It was a compelling screenplay on the page. So it’s the only way I know to choose material. If I’m in it then it means I think the screenplay is good. I’m sure there were other metrics one could use to choose material. I wouldn’t know what the hell they are. My wife and I pass scripts back and forth and say, “This is good and worth reading and therefore worth being a part of. And this isn’t.” You go through a lot of that stuff too.
You mentioned seeing Ford v Ferrari at the Toronto premiere and being like, I hope what we shot worked out, and then it did. Whereas you come from a medium—theater—that obviously when something is done at a certain point, you can still tweak if you need to. Has working in film changed your perspective on the ever-tweaking format of theater?
I don’t think so. I guess they’re just, they’re just very different for me. I mean, with a play I made, I am able to continue to make changes until I decide I’m done and put it on the shelf. And because I’m a Chicago playwright, for me, eventually getting the thing done in New York is kind of the last step. I feel like that’s a good marker in time for me to say, Okay, I’m done with that, and let’s publish this. And once it’s published I don’t feel the need to go and mess with it anymore. I mean, some playwrights do. Mr. [Edward] Albee was continuing to make changes on Virginia Woolf until very late, maybe just a few years before we did our production. He had done a set of rewrites. But I don’t feel the need to do that.
I just want it to put on the shelf. I feel like, Well, that’s a marker of who I was when I wrote that. And if I look at it years later and say, Oh, I wish I’d done something different, well, so be it. But yeah, movies are just a very different process. In a movie I’m just a little part of the thing. As a playwright I’m, I’m the final arbiter. That’s the way the hierarchy works in a movie. Even as a writer I’m not the final arbiter. I’m pretty far down on the totem pole, and I was an actor way far down on the totem pole, so I just have less invested in a film. If a film works and people like it, then that’s great. And if it doesn’t, well, I’m on to the next thing as an actor.
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For more, listen to this week’s Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts, and find much more awards-season coverage on VF.com. By the time we meet again next week, the Indie Spirit Award nominations will be out—another awards-season mystery solved.
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