The new Broad Museum is getting ready for its close-up. We get a sneak peek at the work it takes to curate and install hundreds of piece of art; The spectacular demise of “Fantastic Four” offers a case study in what can go wrong when a studio rushes a film into production and clashes with its director; John Ridley and actor Richard Cabral on how life imitated art in the ABC series "American Crime."
The Broad Museum: 2,000 pieces of art — from Koons to Warhol — find a new home downtown
A lot is happening inside the Broad Museum’s new $140 million building on Grand Avenue downtown, as the staff gears up for the museum’s debut on September 20th. Among their first orders of business: moving Eli and Edythe Broad’s vast collection into the building.
“You can imagine just moving your office after 30 years, let alone moving a collection of about 2,000 works,” says Director of Collections Management Vicki Gambill. A lot of the art is moving from the Santa Monica building that has housed the Broad Art Foundation since 1988 — the rest has been on loan to other institutions or in storage at fine art warehouses around Los Angeles.
So how does the art make it into the new museum?
“For about the past month, we’ve been moving a fully packed tractor trailer in every day,” says Head Preparator Julia Latane. Latane supervises a team of art handlers that carefully wheels the elaborately-crated artworks out of the trucks and into the museum. Even for an experienced crew, moving these valuable, fragile and sometimes enormous artworks can be nerve-wracking. “Things that make me the most nervous are things that are really tall, long, narrow and very top-heavy,” says Latane.
Tom Rosenquist, one of the art handlers assisting with the move, says the job requires “good hands,” which he defines as “somewhere between strength and gentleness.” Many art handlers are themselves artists or musicians — they rely on teamwork and manual dexterity to prevent any damage to the artworks. But that doesn’t stop them from imagining any number of nightmare scenarios. “Anything can happen,” says Rosenquist. “A tape measure could fall off your belt and go through the front of a painting. That would be very, very bad," he says with a laugh.
Once the crated art passes through the museum's loading dock, it travels up a huge elevator nicknamed “Big John” (after the worker who operated it during construction), headed either for storage or for the 35,000 square-foot gallery on the third floor. That’s where Broad Founding Director Joanne Heyler is overseeing the installation of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, a chronologically arranged selection of highlights of the Broad collection.
She's has been working on this exhibition for more than two years, shifting stamp-sized reproductions of paintings around a dollhouse-scale model of the building’s exhibition spaces. Still, she's not quite finished fine-tuning the roster, even as the opening date approaches. “The inaugural installation will probably land at about 250 works,” she says, noting that the public will be able to glimpse additional pieces through windows that overlook the building’s storage “vault.”
“We’re all developing a relationship with this building and with the galleries, and of course with the collection,” says Heyler, who compares the new structure to a 36,000-ton newborn baby. “We have a whole future ahead of us as a museum.”
Kate Mara's terrible wig and other reasons why 'Fantastic Four' flopped
“Fantastic Four” flopped in fantastic fashion this past weekend, taking in only $25.7 million in the U.S. The number is just about half of the most optimistic projections and well below what Fox, which is notorious for low-balling its box office estimates, was hoping for.
The budget for the film was an estimated $120 million.
The spectacular demise of “Fantastic Four” offers a case study in what can go wrong when a studio rushes a film into production and clashes with its director. Or when a makeup department slaps a random wig on an actress during reshoots, as Vulture.com's Kyle Buchanan gleefully points out.
When Buchanan joined us at The Frame studios, we asked him about Kate Mara's Reshoot Wig, the disappearance of the mid-budget blockbuster, and the issues that arise when a studio other than Marvel tries to produce a Marvel superhero movies.
Interview Highlights:
Kyle, you're one of the few and the proud who have seen "Fantastic Four." We know the reviews are bad, but how bad is the movie?
It's pretty painful. I think it was hovering around 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. These movies aren't always surefire critical successes, although Marvel Studios has managed pretty well — movies like "Guardians of the Galaxy" and even "Ant-Man" have been fairly well-reviewed on the whole. But this movie, oh man, this is a textbook example of how not to make a movie. And the version of the movie that director Josh Trank is said to have made, while you can get little glimpses of it in the old trailers, has had whole scenes and moments that are just gone.
So people are now trying to reconstruct the movie that Josh Trank might have made by looking at old trailers?
Yeah, I think people are very curious as to where this movie went wrong. It's pretty obvious that the studio stepped in at some point and reshot the movie, and you can tell by looking at Kate Mara's scalp.
What is it about her hair that's telling?
She has something that I'd like to call a reshoot wig, where she has cut her hair recently and you can immediately identify the re-shot portions because there's this blonde porn-star wig that they just slap on her. From shot-to-shot, it seems like her special power is making her scalp disappear.
So clearly the wardrobe company didn't do a good job, but it seems like there's a bigger problem here: Fox had to release this movie on a certain timetable or else the rights to it would revert back to Marvel Studios.
They were contractually obligated to make this, and this is the difficult thing — before Marvel Studios had this terrific run that we now know, they sold a couple of their most famous characters to Fox. So Fox has those characters as long as they keep making movies about them, and if they don't, those rights will go back to Marvel Studios. It's hard to say whether Fox was motivated by an actual desire to make this movie, or just a bottom-line, Well, I guess we better do something with it mentality that led them astray.
Before the movie came out, Josh Trank said this to whip up enthusiasm in moviegoers: "I want them to go see a really, really great movie, something that is different from your average superhero film, something they don't really expect." Some people have said that Josh Trank wasn't a good fit for this film because his previous film, "Chronicle," was lower-budget. But while there are directors that have transitioned from low-budget movies to big-budge action flicks, Trank still doesn't seem like the right fit for this movie.
You know, the real problem here is that we've essentially gutted the medium-budget movie from Hollywood. In another world, Josh Trank would have moved on to a $40 or $50 million movie, but nowadays you go from making these micro-budget films to making $200 million monstrosities, and those carry with them all sorts of additional pressures, and that apparently made this a very contentious shoot at times.
Does "Fantastic Four" fall into the "so bad it's good" category? Or is it just bad?
Oh man, there were parts of the movie, especially near the end during the obviously re-shot portions, where I was actually watching through my fingers. And I don't even do that during horror movies. There are talented people that worked on this movie, and I'm pretty sure that they're going to put this behind them as fast as they can.
When TV imitates life: John Ridley on the accidental timeliness of 'American Crime'
The ABC show "American Crime" takes a humanistic look at a murder trial that rips apart families and leads to even more violence. The show was a huge success, and garnered 10 Emmy nominations after its first season.
Created by John Ridley, who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2013 for “Twelve Years a Slave,” the show tackles issues of race, class and pervasive stereotypes.
In the series, actor Richard Cabral plays Hector Tontz, a gang member who is a suspect in the trial. As a former gang member himself, Cabral pulled from his own life experiences to embody his character in the show. Now, he’s nominated for the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor.
When Ridley and Cabral joined us on The Frame, we asked them about the show's fictional plot lines that mirror real life events, how they're working on characters that explicitly subvert stereotypical representations of people of color and where "American Crime" will be headed in its second season.
Interview Highlights:
John, you were sitting in that chair five months ago and you said that you didn't want "American Crime" to seem as if it were ripped from the headlines. But now that we've seen all of season one, it seems like the headlines have been ripped from your show, or that there's a parallel track between what's happening dramatically on your fictional show and what's been happening in the real world. I guess it's impossible not to see this show as timely.
Ridley: I don't think anybody realized that we would be intertwined so closely with so many things that were going on. From the moment that ABC approached me in the wake of Treyvon Martin and said that they wanted to do a show that examined race and perceptions, and then every step of the way, through Ferguson, Baltimore, and even the shootings in South Carolina, we've seen the continued use of force against people of color seemingly without regard to circumstance. But there are even other things that slip into the language, like when you hear people that are running for President who feel comfortable saying that all Mexicans are rapists.
Many times, I would've traded our immediacy for a little distance from things that were happening — in no way am I saying that this show made any kind of a difference, but to be so close to things that were happening and to see difference happen, that fills those of us around the show with a bit of hope. And that's what we want with the show: hope.
Richard, at the end of the season finale there is a scene where your character is applying for a job, but it also feels incredibly personal and maybe somewhat autobiographical. Could you talk a little bit about this scene? And John, could you talk about collaborating with your actor in writing it?
Cabral: We had talked, and by then we had gotten a chance to get to know each other a little bit more, and he said, "This is you. This is what you experienced in your life," and it hit me. Whether it was talking about my daughter or not, it was about asking for a second chance, and up to this point my life, my personal life, it was rough, and there was a time where I really needed that second chance, so it all intertwined in that moment.
Ridley: Back up for a second, because some people may not know, but Richard — and he speaks about this openly, in a way that's incredibly inspirational — came from gang culture, not just personally but his family as well, going back decades, and I didn't know this when I originally met Richard and auditioned him.
Richard had done a little bit of acting, but he came out of Homeboy Industries, which is dedicated to giving men and women an opportunity for a second chance. So honestly, when Richard came in he was just interesting, from his look and his manner to the authenticity and emotional honesty that you look for from any actor.
One of the downsides of a limited series is that, typically, at the end of the series you say goodbye to everybody. This time around, you're keeping a lot of your actors, including Richard — you're reuniting a lot of your cast in different roles. Richard, what will you be doing in the next season?
Cabral: John, where's my character at right now?
Ridley: I will say this, and I'm not trying to be coy, but it's 180 degrees. Richard certainly brought an authenticity in terms of how it related to his personal life, but when you see how much he loves his family, how protective he is of his family, how precious he considers life to be — can we take those levels of authenticity and weave those into a different character that's unexpected?
Very specific, yet totally vague.
Cabral: [laughs] Yeah, and I haven't gotten much information, so that's why I had John help me with that!
Ridley: My actors are so angry at me, because I see them do interviews now and they're like, "John never told us anything!"
Let me ask you this, Richard: what do you want to accomplish as an actor going forward? How important is it to you that you play characters that may not be like people imagine you are when they see you?
Cabral: That's the greatest part of hitting the audience from the blind-side, giving them something they didn't expect, and that's what it's about for me. For the last 15, 20 years, Hollywood has created this mindset for how Latino characters are, that they're one-sided and there are no emotions behind them, and working with John we've made the stories that I want to do — I might be a bad guy some times, but there's a reason he became a bad guy. There are three dimensions to this character, and that's why I love working with people like John, people that give so much.