Summer Movie Preview: May, 1999

Notting Hill
Starring: Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, Hugh Bonneville, Gina McKee, Tim McInnerny, Emma Chambers, Rhys Ifans
Directed by: Roger Michell
What’s the big deal? Julia Roberts as Julia Roberts…kind of.

True, the character Julia Roberts plays in Notting Hill is a world-famous movie star who’s paid upwards of $15 mil a picture and who endures her fair share of scandal, but she’s not based on Julia Roberts. ”I’m not having fun at the expense of my life, I’m having fun at the expense of her life,” says Roberts, 31, who uses this comedic chance to take on the paparazzi, plastic surgery, bad boyfriends, nude pictures, and the price of fame. The latest romp from the writer and producers of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill pairs Roberts with Wedding alum Hugh Grant, who stretches himself a bit more than his costar, playing a low-key bookstore owner with the outrageous fortune to wake up with a major actress in his bed and his face on every London tabloid. While the story has echoes of Four Weddings (the central characters’ eccentric best friends, including Ifans in a memorable turn as a Welsh wacko of a roommate; Grant in full-on hapless, what-am-I-doing-here mode), the glossier Notting Hill has much better teeth than its predecessor, namely those of Roberts.

While she isn’t playing herself — really! — the parallels between Roberts and her character are ripe for comparison: The actress whose love affairs have made a headline or two plays a woman who tries to win a who’s-the-most-pathetic contest at a dinner party by recounting her bad luck with men; the character also overhears a man in a restaurant talking about her rumored drug abuse, gets mistaken for Demi Moore, and worries that by the time she’s 40, her looks will be gone and everyone will realize she can’t act.

This is sweet irony for Roberts. Whether or not audiences take to the film’s insider jokes about press junkets and the downside of celebrity, advance screenings have generated some interesting buzz, suggesting that Roberts’ send-up of herself might be her best work. There’s also irony in Grant’s performance. Although he plays a fellow unfamiliar with stardom, he’s actually anything but. Besides, of course, his extremely high-profile arrest for lewd conduct in 1995, he’s starred in six films since making 1994’s Four Weddings with producer Duncan Kenworthy and writer-exec producer Richard Curtis. ”I think the filmmakers may have been nervous about having me in the movie,” he says, ”given what’s happened to me in the last five years.” Other things have also changed since then, like the perks. ”I could have put the trailer I had on Four Weddings in the fridge of the trailer I had on this one,” says Grant, who was first tantalized by Hill when Curtis discussed it on the set of Four Weddings. ”Richard would cheer me up on bad days saying ‘I have a funny new movie for you.’ I waited five years for it to cross my desk.”

Even two years ago, the production team wasn’t sure of the scope of Notting Hill when stage director Roger Michell signed on to lead the project. ”I thought it would be a lovely movie,” says Michell, ”but I didn’t think it would be a big movie.” Adds Kenworthy, ”We probably would have made the same movie if we’d cast unknowns. But then, the film would have remained unknown.” Once Grant and Roberts took the leads, obscurity became an impossibility. The film ”is something of a hybrid,” Grant acknowledges. ”It has one foot in little British films and one in international films.”

In true big-movie fashion, Notting Hill did go through numerous rewrites. “Julia’s part was underwritten at first,” says Kenworthy. (There were about 10 drafts of the screenplay, according to Michell.) While it was in good enough shape to show Roberts two years ago, the actress requested one more pass. “She said, ‘I love it, but can’t I be funnier?'” Kenworthy remembers. “She went off to Borneo to make a documentary about orangutans, and I knew the cameraman who was working on it, so I sent her a gift and a note saying ‘Please pack your bags for Notting Hill.'”

Once she arrived, the atmosphere became “a bit surreal,” remembers Grant, particularly during a scene in which the paparazzi discover the pair after they spend the night together. When Grant opened the front door, “there were 100 extras playing paparazzi, being filmed by 100 paparazzi.” That particular scene may have been the most tricky, since Roberts’ character — cracking under the pressure — behaves like everyone’s idea of a spoiled celebrity. Before Roberts had signed on, screenwriter William Goldman warned Grant that “you have to get the girl to be that nasty, but you’ll get a star and she won’t want to do that.” “I mentioned that to Julia when we were shooting,” says Grant, “and she said, ‘Oh, God, that’s the scene I dreaded the most.’ She actually behaved very frighteningly all day.” In fact, Michell believes “the survival of the film was that very issue. You have to believe she’s vulnerable and real, but also the most frightening person in the world. Julia didn’t have to do a lot of research, but that’s not her.”

In the end, though, Roberts claims she’s game for the inevitable comparisons. Her character, she says, “does have a great sense of humor, but there are things I didn’t like about her. If she was my friend, I would say, ‘Man, get a grip.'” (May 28, 1999)

The Phantom Menace
Starring: Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, Pernilla August, Anthony Daniels
Directed by: George Lucas
What’s the big deal? You have to ask?

In a lofty corner known as the attic in Lucas’ main house at the Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, Calif., a small team of artists began designing every object and creature for Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace back in 1995. Four years later, after a far-flung live-action shoot in Tunisia, Italy, and an English studio, plus scads of computer animation work at effects company Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas is just now finishing his digitally doctored epic (drop-dead date: April 30, 1999) a couple of floors away from where his illustrators first envisioned it: in the basement of the very same house. That’s where Lucas has a state-of-the-art editing setup, the better to fine-tune about 1,900 F/X shots. He’s not just placing computer-animated creatures around live-action performers. He’s also taking the faces and bodies of the actors themselves and cut-and-pasting them as easily as you might move words around in a computer document. Don’t like child actor Lloyd’s expression in this take of his role as the young Darth Vader-to-be? No problem — let’s graft the mouth from a different take onto this one. Did Neeson raise his hand at the wrong moment as Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn? Fine — we’ll erase the hand and let the background magically show through. ”Nobody else is doing this yet except in some commercials,” says coeditor Martin Smith. ”In 10 years, most film editors will be.” Meanwhile, in less than one month, Menace‘s leading live-action cast is likely to experience a level of scrutiny and mob adoration worthy of the Beatles. Are the stars fearful of typecasting? ”I never worried about that,” says 17-year-old Portman, who plays Luke and Leia’s future mother, Queen Amidala. ”All of us have [starred] in other films, whereas in the other Star Wars, most of them hadn’t really done any [leading roles]. So I think we’re going to have less of that problem.” But remember, Natalie: From now on, the Force will be with you. Always. (May 19, 1999)