Screenwriter finally gets top billing on 'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra'Stuart Beattie knows better than most the rude realities of screenwriting credits. He created the Jack Sparrow character in his early draft of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," but received no "written by" attribution. On Russell Crowe's "3:10 to Yuma," Beattie spent 18 months crafting an updated version of the 1957 Western and again got snubbed. But for "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," Beattie boasts top billing as primary author of the action-movie screenplay.
Hired to crank out a script in six weeks to beat the 2007 writers strike deadline, Beattie bulldozed through a basic story structure celebrating the iconic action figure's "can-do spirit," he recalls. "The producers started giving me ideas - Pakistan, Afghanistan, al Qaeda, jihad - and I said: 'That's not G.I. Joe. He's a fantasy. You don't want to be calling out news headlines.' "
Post-strike, Beattie took up daily residence on the "G.I. Joe" set, where he pounded out scene rewrites minutes before cameras began rolling. "It was crazy," he says. " I remember being at home once at 7:30 in the morning when I got a call from the set: 'We need a line! We need a line!' They were just standing around the set waiting to shoot and needed dialogue. It literally went that fast."
Beattie's most notable contribution to the movie's succession of action sequences centers on the collapse of the Eiffel Tower. "That idea came from the G.I. Joe universe, which talks about these warheads that eat metal," he says. "I asked myself, 'What's the most iconic structure in the world that's made of metal?' and you instantly think of the Eiffel Tower. Everyone loved the idea of seeing the Eiffel Tower toppled. It survived all these wars, it survived Hitler, but it didn't survive 'G.I. Joe.' "
San Diego's Comic-Con, which drew a crowd of 125,000 before wrapping last Sunday, has become a key launch pad for big comic-book-based blockbusters. But this summer, Comic-Con also brought attention to a small documentary about a 12-year-old filmmaker named Emily Hagins.
12-year-old's ad grabs filmmaker's attention
"Zombie Girl: The Movie" follows Hagins as she recruits parents and friends to shoot a monster movie. When documentary maker Aaron Marshall spotted Hagins' ad seeking to cast other 12-year-olds, he says, "we were immediately hooked." Marshall, with co-directors Justin Johnson and Erik Mauck, summarizes the dynamic chronicled in his film: "Emily had the camera, and her mom had the driver's license."
PFA summer series delves into the eccentric
Pacific Film Archive curator Steve Seid dipped his toe into the action-horror realm when he programmed the Born to Be Bad film series a few years ago. Now he's refining the concept with a summerlong series called Eccentric Cinema. What, exactly, qualifies as eccentric?
"At some level, we're trying to distinguish this idea of a subgenre that's different from trash cinema,"Seid says. "There's a big interest now in digging up the underbelly of cinema, but the problem for me is that trash cinema might be campy or highly entertaining because it's so awkward or inept, but it's not necessarily good."
Screenings include "Ganja & Hess" (Thursday), a promising vampire flick by playwright-filmmaker Bill Gunn, who died young; the 1974 sci-fi movie "Zardoz" (Aug. 13), made by John Boorman after his considerably more influential "Deliverance"; "Dirty Little Billy" (Aug. 20), featuring Michael J. Pollard ("Bonnie and Clyde") as Billie the Kid; and the rarely seen "Martin" (Aug. 27), from "Night of the Living Dead" auteur George Romero.
"With Eccentric Cinema, we're interested in exploring this whole overlooked world of films that received equal scorn as 'trash cinema' when they were released, but are actually well made and ambitious," Seid says. "This series takes a look at works that I feel are extraordinarily virtuosic." {sbox}
Hugh Hart is a Chronicle correspondent.
This article appeared on page Q - 25 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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