According to "Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People" by famed primatologist Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson, the original "Clyde" was trained with a can of mace and a pipe wrapped in newspaper. He was viciously beaten the day before filming started to make him more docile. Near the end of filming the sequel "Any Which Way You Can," the orangutan was caught stealing doughnuts on the set, brought back to the training facility and beaten for 20 minutes with a 3 1/2 -foot ax handle. He died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage.

You'd think that 30 years would improve the lot of chimps. In some cases it has, as filmmakers like Peter Jackson are opting for animatronic apes or actors in ape suits. At least two high-profile trainers have been pressured out of the chimp business in the last few years by lawsuits or protesters. Yet some persist. This summer " Speed Racer" became one of the only films in recent history to earn an "unacceptable" rating from the American Humane Assn., the group that monitors the use of animals in films.

Now there are certainly moviegoers who will argue it was they who were mistreated by the Wachowski brothers' candy-colored box-office bomb, but at least consumers weren't physically manhandled. According to the AHA website, two chimps were used to portray the character of Chim-Chim (who performed such feats as driving a golf cart in the movie), and a trainer hit a chimp during a training session in front of a representative of the AHA. (Warner Bros declined to comment.)

Ironic, then, that virtually the only thing left unpixellated in the Wachowski Bros. bomb was the monkey whom activists actually wanted to go CG. Naturally, the reclusive directors had no comment, preferring instead to pass along a message from their publicist that appeared to be scrawled in feces, bearing only the mysterious phrase, "Ooh ooh ooh AHH AHH AHH!"

• PETA doc ask movies to end chimpanzee abuse [LAT]

• WATCH VIDEO

Warners' popular company line has invoked Speed Racer's comparatively low $100 million budget as flop insurance, but that rationale factored in a decent run internationally as well. Alas, the rest of the world turned its back, too, chipping in less than $13 million of the global $33 million take. And it gets worse: The families at whom Warners was ostensibly aiming Speed Racer not only didn't come out, but with Disney offering The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian this Friday and Iron Man retaining momentum in its third week, they probably will never come out.

The studio will find black ink eventually on home video, but the collateral damage is ugly. Emile Hirsch? Can't open. Wachowskis? Tighten their leashes (and quit giving them a pass, media). The Dark Knight? More like the Great White Hope for Warner Bros., whose buzz-building efforts on its behalf make Speed Racer look like the Dennis Kucinich campaign. Hell, Picturehouse fared better with the Spanish-language Pan's Labyrinth on a fraction of the screens in 2006; maybe thinking small could do all right by Warners after all.

It might be self-serving of us to suggest they publicize their films, and in a way, we empathize with their reclusion; Larry Wachowski has been the subject of sex-change and dominatrix-dating speculation since a feminized version of himself — earrings, plucked eyebrows, manicure — showed up on the Matrix Revolutions red carpet in Cannes five years ago with mistress Ilsa Strix (née Karen Winslow) on his arm. The siblings later sneaked into the New York premiere of V For Vendetta (which they wrote and co-produced), and last week in Los Angeles they went positively presidential with subterfuge at the debut of Speed Racer. "They did not do the red-carpet press line at the Nokia Theatre on Saturday, and were well-camouflaged during the after-party," wrote Borys Kit in The Hollywood Reporter. "Photographers were sworn to secrecy as to their whereabouts, and Warner Bros. assigned handlers the mission of keeping journalists off the scent."

Like it matters; the Wachowskis haven't granted an interview in the decade since The Matrix, deferring to mega-producer and de facto representative Joel Silver and their casts to flog their work publicly. Their crews sign non-disclosure agreements. The duo's contracts entitle them to a luxury rarer than final cut — an opt-out provision shielding them from the promotion of their films. It's Stanley Kubrick/Terrence Malick/Eric Rohmer stuff, but with one crucial exception: Their films aren't that good.

Or at least they haven't been in nearly 10 years; Speed Racer is no different. But what is good about it are the things to which only they can speak — the practice of reinventing the source cartoon, the relationship of vision to execution, the extraordinary scene transitions eschewing cuts for something closer to a scrolling-head montage (like "bullet-time," you just have to see it), or, on the most basic of levels, directing a standout cast (and even a goddamned monkey) against one green-screen backdrop after another. Unlike Iron Man or Warners' even more anticipated summer offering The Dark Knight, the brands work in concert with personalities to acquire traction. Emile Hirsch's abstract praises are not enough.

Warner Bros. faced the similar scenario with Kubrick for nearly three decades, covering the director's final five films from A Clockwork Orange through Eyes Wide Shut. Obviously, his death in March 1999 put a pretty irrevocable kibosh on promoting the latter film, but he did speak out from time to time about the intervening work; his daughter Vivian's behind-the-scenes documentary about The Shining was a broadcast TV event in 1980, and he did a few select interviews in 1987 on behalf of Full Metal Jacket. Moreover, he was always involved with people — actors, writers, other filmmakers — and his 15 years of work prior to his British exile in the late '60s had installed him permanently among the world cinema vanguard.

Not so for the Wachowskis, a couple of ex-carpenters from Chicago whose one-two dynamos Bound and The Matrix boosted expectations from 1996 to 1999. Their work since has lapsed into the type of indulgence that further evokes itself in those clauses guaranteeing their immunity to press, and by extension, their audience. That audience has had nothing to latch onto for too long now; no taut narratives, no singular parallel universes and certainly no visual benchmarks that can and/or should speak for themselves. Their self-containment borders on alienating, their aloofness sharing breath with its conjoined twin, arrogance.

As the most public recluses working today (and at the highest budgets), their godfather Silver can only buy the Wachowskis their privacy for so long — especially as another of their putatively visionary summer efforts meets diminishing returns in a culture craving voices with faces and faces with names. If the Viral Era has taught us anything, it's that every mystery needs a payoff, and you have to earn your mystique if you expect to exploit it.

[Photo Credits: Wireimage, Getty]

At present, Speed Racer appears on track to gross $25 million-$35 million during the coming frame, though a late-breaking surge in must-see sentiment could produce a bigger bow. The film targets family moviegoers, a group notoriously tough to track before openings.

Boxoffice derbies aside, Warners execs suggest there's no need for Speed Racer to open huge.

Most of its splashy effects were done with relatively affordable green-screen technology. So the $100 million production will pencil into profitability roughly when its domestic gross hits a similar nine-digit sum, and even a $25 million bow could put it on track to deliver that.

When even the studio hedges, it know what it has — a hyperactive, overlong, purely confectionery treat that disorients as much as it disarms and won't pull near the word-of-mouth that the incumbent possesses. And we even kinda liked it. Warners faces a troubling marketing paradox as well: The viral approach that has so successfully (if slovenly) embedded The Dark Knight among multiplexers is powerless in the service of the kid-friendlier Speed Racer, which relies on conventional methods to boost awareness among youngsters and the parents who'll haul them to the theater. Do most of these kids even know what Speed Racer is? And are the folks ready for the acid trip live-action version of the cartoon they may have seen once? Or do they already have tickets for another viewing of Iron Man?

• 'Speed Racer' tracking unimpressively [THR]

We've heard mixed sentiments about the film, and we've got sort of high standards for the Speed Racer remake based on inflated memories of how much we loved the show in our youth, but if someone was to make book on whether or not we were going to see this on the biggest screen we could find &mdash we'd take that action. [USA Today]

On Wednesday, I had lovely chats with people at the sound studio in Germany where the Wachowskis have been making the live action version of the Japanese cartoon "Speed Racer." The folks I spoke to got quite a kick out of the whole thing.

I asked one man in building operations, "Have you seen Larry lately? Does he have breasts now, as rumored? Is he wearing a dress, wondering if it's making him look fat?"

Laughter. "He looked like a man to me," was the response.

And what about this Lana business? Said one woman who worked in the "Speed Racer" office: "On the call sheets, it still says Larry. There's no Lana." She laughed too. [...]

Finally, I did speak with Joel Silver, who executive produces the W Brothers' movies.

"It's all untrue," he reconfirmed for me. "They just don't do interviews, so people make things up."

Hopefully, the assertions of Wachowski's Speed Racer collaborators will be sufficient to quash the rumor before it's disseminated any further. But if the public's untoward fascination with the director's genitals persists and the gossip continues to circulate, Wachowski's media-shy penis may ultimately have no choice but to break its suspicious silence on the controversy by sitting down with Diane Sawyer to let the world know its longtime relationship with Larry is still intact.

• No Sex Change for 'Matrix' Director Larry Wachowski [Fox 411]
• Previously: Catching Up With Larry Wachowski. Or Lana Wachowski. We're Not Exactly Sure. [Defamer]

The duo will now just be known as "The Wachowskis", dropping the "brothers" part of their name. It is expected that Larry, now called Lana, will actually speak to the press about this for the first time, but not until after the Speed Racer film is out. The current feeling is that his sex change could hurt the family image the Speed Racer film is going for.

It is also expected that Andy will do all the press for the Speed Racer film, with Larry/Lana staying in the background for the above reason.

Dateline NBC is still rumored to have exclusivity of Larry/Lana's first public interview, but it has to be on his terms, not theirs.

If you find any of this reported update confusing, now would probably be a good time to review last January's illuminating Rolling Stone piece on Wachowski's personal life. But with Speed Racer still so far away, we'll have to wait months to see how the Warner Bros. publicity department rises to the challenge of dealing with a delicate situation; while we hope that they'd have the understanding to support their collaborator in an air-clearing TV appearance like the one rumored above, we realize that the far more likely scenario involves the studios sending their potential PR liability on an all-expenses-paid vacation until the movie's had a profitable run, explaining her (or his, you know, depending) conspicous absence from various promotional obligations with a press release asking the media to respect the privacy of Wachowski's genitals during this difficult time.

UPDATE: Larry Wachowski is still a man, reports Fox's Roger Friedman.

• Larry Wachowski's sex change is complete, first photo emerges! [Rated-M via Cinematical]

[Mach 5]

[not via the Official Site]

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