By Steven Zeitchik

Our apologies for a few delays in posting; we’ve been in a transition larger than the McCain campaign’s these last few days. The big news in the last twenty-four hours is Colin Callender’s departure from HBO Films. (He’ll be starting a company, he says; hey, isn’t Chris Albrecht looking for a new gig?)

On the one hand, of course, Callender wasn’t really a feature-film figure — HBO Films most recent theatrical foray with Picturehouse ended with a fizzle, and many of the movies that the HBO Films wing of that company (as opposed to the New line or acquisition pipelines) were underperformers.

But Callender was unique in many of the projects he agitated for on the television side — prestige minis, movies and longer-form series that television has either abandoned or was never really that serious in the first place. While some of them could tend toward the twee side, others, from “Empire Falls” to “Recount,” were as sparklingly dramatic as anything on the big screen.

As is sometimes the case with pay-cable, it’s hard to know exact cume viewership figures. But in an era when the gap between one-off theatrical features and television plays continues to be wide in everything from budgets to storytelling methods, HBO Films under Callender has worked to bridge them.

The network pledges continued support of the kinds of projects Callender championed, and indeed, one of the biggest projects on any screen is due as early as 2009 when Playtone’s Asia-set World War II epic “The Pacific” hits screens. But the job has already split between two deputies, and it’s hard to imagine the process being the same. Callender’s volubleness in pitching his projects made him not just a known figure but reflected a unique role in which an exec could operate with comparatively little corporate interference. We’ll see what the next pages look like when the Callender is flipped.

By Steven Zeitchik

Slash? From Guns ‘n Roses? He’s black. Well, half-black.

That’s the first morsel one learns in the startlingly engaging new HBO doc “The Black List,” which premiered Tuesday night at a star-dotted Time Warner Center event (pity that poor mortal in the back row, craning behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). But it’s by no means the biggest one.

Some movies take the inherently dramatic and make it pedestrian or predictable — we’d nominate Clint Eastwood’s upcoming “Changeling.” And then there are those films, like “The Black List,” which pull off the trickier obverse: take the potentially prosaic and turn it into a work of thoughtfulness and humor. Through nearly two dozen interviews with a range of famous African-Americans — Vernon Jordan to Chris Rock, Toni Morrison to Keenen Ivory Wayans (and of course Slash) — intimate personal details and provocative social theories are dexterously laid out.

Directed by photographer-filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (whose other art form pays off here in the form of painterly framings of his subjects) and featuring interviews by former NY Times film critic and “List” producer Elvis Mitchell (who we never hear, even off-camera, but who elicits the most from his subjects) and with an assist from Darren Aronofsky (who apparently came up with a nifty editing trick), “The Black List” is much more than a totem of ethnic pride, though it’s that too — it’s an exploration of identity and ambition in contemporary and recent America. It may be the best thing, outside a good Obama speech, that one could watch to deepen and humanize their understanding of race.

Of course that makes it sound like the cinematic equivalent of eating broccoli, and the movie couldn’t be further from that. At its heart, really, it’s just a series of entertaining and informative conversations — about the kinds of things many Americans don’t normally converse about — with some of the world’s most famous African-Americans. It’s not even a film about race per se; that theme is woven subtly through the talks, and some of the featured celebs, like Kareem, almost bypass it entirely.

(It’s notable that among some of most famous African-American names in media and entertainment, there’s no sign of Spike Lee. Asked why he decided not to include him, Mitchell told Risky Biz that “Spike Lee is kind of the go-to guy. And Spike Lee is very good at promoting Spike Lee. We wanted to show people you might not see as often.”)

HBO, which picked up “List” at Sundance this year, is airing it on August 25, and will no doubt rerun it a number of times after that. It’s the sort of instance where a TV-first release is actually a good thing — the net’s 30 million-some audience will get a taste of something that, given the earnest-sounding subject matter, they may not run out to see in theaters. And yet there’s something about watching the  film on a big screen, as its successful fest plays at AFI Dallas and Sundance show, that trumps watching it on the one that sits above your cable box. (And yes, we may be dwelling in tough theatrical times for docs. But if Ben Stein’s creationist propaganda  can earn almost $8 million…)

It remains to be seen what kind of theatrical release “The Black List” will get beyond a qualifying run, especially since HBO is largely out of the theatrical game now. Either way, there’s reason to take heart from this movie, which offers yet more evidence among HBO’s summer of docs of why we should be so encouraged that a division like Sheila Nevins’ both exists and flourishes at the country’s largest pay channel and conglom.

The film carries the subtitle “Volume One,”  and Greenfield-Sanders told us that he and Mitchell are meeting with HBO next week for a discussion on whether there will be a second. He’s hopeful. So are we.

By Steven Zeitchik

There may be uncertainty about its theatrical pipeline
but pay no attention — HBO Films has done it again. Colin Callender’s longstanding production unit is attached to a movie (in this case, an acquisition) that brings the prestige without being precious, and is worthy of movie screens even though it plays just fine on the small screen, air quotes around that adjective.

The tony New York premiere Wednesday of “Bernard & Doris” — Sidney Lumet, Susan Sarandon and Ellen Barkin among the guests — suggests how HBO has again managed to walk the ground between cable special and event programming that few TV-first production labels have been able to pull off. The relatively small-budget movie, about the relationship between a gay butler (Ralph Fiennes) and a kooky old heiress (Sarandon), has the cozy, intimate feel of television. And yet by reveling in every gesture and small shift of power in its primary relationship, it captures an oddball tenderness that makes the movie as good as any love story that plays in theaters. Put it in a year of a “The Remains of the Day” or a “Driving Miss Daisy” and it knocks either out of the Best Picture slot.

It’s a strange kind of blessing — sporting original movies that fit snugly into a Saturday night premiere but have enough star wattage and Oscar virtues for a theatrical play — and watching it you can almost feel why HBO has grown conflicted. Enviable hybrids in a world scarce for them, the movies also heighten the question of whether or not it makes sense for the pay network to undertake the labor-intensive job of going theatrical.

In other words, they heighten the Picturehouse question — whether HBO should continue to have the outlet, or the obligation, for riskier and pricier theatrical runs.

And “B&D” isn’t even the most theatrical-ready play on the slate. Upcoming projects like “John Adams,” “Generaton Kill” and “Recount” could, length issues notwithstanding, make a strong case for a multplex run. So too with “Sugar,” the Maud Nadler project from the producers and creators of “Half Nelson” that was so clearly the cream of the Sundance crop. That movie could have sold to a major theatrical distributor in about eighteen seconds flat had there not been a question of HBO going theatrical itself, at least according to some buyers who said they were unsure about how available the movie really is.

But having these kinds of movies, and this kind of distribution potential, is a certain kind of wealth. And as Sarandon’s Doris could tell you, wealth makes life complicated.

I can’t wait to get back to Rome, which resumes again this Sunday on HBO. The LAT’s Robert Lloyd details some reasons to watch in this excellent review :

"Rome" is smart, dirty fun. As a co-production of HBO and the BBC, with a largely British cast, it has something of the dry wit of "I, Claudius" but is also soaked in the get-naked-and-cuss explicitness of American premium cable. (It is rather more circumspect in regard to violence, which happens mostly offscreen.)

Whereas the traditional modern attitude toward this material is to at least pretend to make it the occasion for some useful contemporary moral, "Rome" — like its HBO slate-mate "Deadwood" — attempts instead to re-create the social order and prejudices of a gone time in a way that resonates with and plays against our own without exactly judging it. Because the old rules are not ours, the markers by which we usually read a narrative — e.g., murderers will be punished — don’t quite work. And because nearly all the adult characters have blood on their hands, it becomes possible to root for any of them, and to sympathize, in some crooked way, with almost the worst of them. While still finding them strange.

We like stories of Rome, I think, because in spite of the intervening centuries we can recognize ourselves there: a technologically superior mercantile and military superpower pressing an enormous thumb upon the Western world, its bustling cities full of bars and restaurants and hot-drink shops and theaters. Positively Dickensian in the way it trains an eye on both the powerful and the poor, "Rome" wants us to see the present in the past — offering cocktail parties, rich girls smoking hemp ("I brought back two sacks from Macedonia sooooo much better than the Italian kind"), a criminals’ den that looks like nothing so much as a 1st century BC Bada Bing.

This combining of the remote and the familiar is at the heart of the series and is reflected also in its mix of styles and attitudes: of the real and the fabulous, the historical and the fanciful, the smart and the sensational, the low and the high, the vulgar and the refined. This is perhaps supposed to mirror the Roman world itself, but it’s also good show business.

UPDATE: And here’s TNYDN review. And THR’s estimable Ray Richmond.

The house did look familiar. HBO’s Entourage used legendary Hollywood mogul Robert Evan’s‘ Beverly Hills bachelor pad, which has been swinging since the 70s, as the home of the over-the-hill producer deliciously played by Martin Landau on the series. Evans is fighting mad at the show for making fun of him, reports the NYDN, and may sue. On the one hand, the Landau character reads like an affectionate amalgam of dotty old producers–Evans is way hipper than this guy. On the other, Evans has always had an instinct for attracting attention. There’s a reason Sumner Redstone, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Berg et al were willing to brave the throngs at Evans last party launch (for his Sirius radio show). They love the guy.

You can count on one thing: Brooklyn filmmaker Spike Lee is NEVER dull. That’s partly because he’s fearless, opinionated and outspoken—to a fault. He’s also an excellent documentary filmmaker. He took a crew to New Orleans to examine the conditions post-Katrina: When the Levees Broke airs August 21-22 on HBO. I’ll be watching. Salon’s Cynthia Joyce weighs in; so does Texas critic Joe Leydon. And New York Magazine can’t get enough of the city’s angriest auteur.
[Photo by Charlie Varley]