Jun 23, 2006 03:24 PM
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Hollywood, 4:23 PM
Tue Feb 9
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The LAT previews the shocking! tell-all! confessions offered in the pages of The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, the forthcoming, shockingtellall volume that details the painful dissolution of the visionary, climactic-twist-obsessed director's relationship with Disney, the movie studio who no longer "got" him, over a difference of opinion over the quality of his script for The Lady in the Water. The Times describes the end of the affair—which Shyamalan's pals cutely called the "Valentine's Day Massacre"—thusly:
The setting was a fancy Philadelphia restaurant, Lacroix, not far from the farmhouse where Shyamalan, his wife and two daughters live. But from the start, the book says, the dinner seemed doomed. The tables were too close together, and "Night felt that other diners could hear their conversation."Seated next to Shyamalan, [Disney's Nina] Jacobson aired her problems with the script. Criticisms "came spewing out of her without a filter," Bamberger writes.
"You said it was funny; I didn't laugh," the book quotes her as saying. "You're going to let a critic get attacked? They'll kill you for that ... Your part's too big; you'll get killed again ... What's with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working ... Don't get it ... Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working."Her words went over like spoiled fish. "She went on and on and on," the book says. "Night was waiting for her to say she didn't like the font" his assistant had printed the script in.
We imagine that Steven Spielberg doesn't have to suffer such a mob-style restaurant hit, no matter how much a studio executive wants to tell him, "Now hold on a minute...the world is incinerated by an alien invasion, but Tom Cruise's entire family emerges unscathed? Not buying it! And is the closing shower of teddy bears really necessary, Steve? It's a happy ending, we get it," so we can understand why Shyamalan might have felt disrespected. But in a true Shyamalanic twist, he didn't crush his dinner glass in his bare hand and promise to destroy his betrayers by releasing the highest-grossing Paul Giamatti vehicle of all time; he merely slunk off, had a good, self-pitying cry, and later admitted that his script could have been better. The unparalleled master of the gotcha! still hasn't lost his touch.
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