Raimi favoured to direct 'Spiderman'

Walloping websnappers -- just when it seemed "Fight Club's" David Fincher had the inside track on directing the "Spiderman" movie comes word that Sam Raimi has swung in to take over the project.
 
 Variety says Raimi, best known for the "Evil Dead" movies, emerged as the leading candidate to take on the long-gestating Spidy project within the last two weeks after he "blew away the Sony execs in a meeting to discuss the character and script written by David Koepp."
 
 Just before Christmas, talk in Hollywood had it that "Mrs. Doubtfire" director Chris Columbus and Fincher were on the shortlist for "Spiderman." While Columbus had a better box-office track record, Fincher's dark vision was seen as giving him the edge.
 
 But Raimi may face an obstacle of Dr. Octopus proportions. Variety says Sony needs "Spiderman" by summer 2001. But Raimi is starting work on "The Gift" this month and won't be able to take on "Spiderman" unless "The Gift's" producers let him halt post-production on that film to begin work on "Spiderman," then continue post-production on both films later in the year.
 
 That would be a huge inconvenience for "The Gift," but Variety says Sony has offered up a seven-figure package to compensate for the trouble.
 
 "Spiderman" isn't the only big film bending around "The Gift." Cate Blanchett, who is cast in "The Gift," is being considered as a replacement for Jodie Foster in "Hannibal," but the production schedules would also conflict.
 
 Based on a screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton, "The Gift" casts Blanchett as a psychic recruited to help find a missing Arkansas girl, to be played by Katie Holmes.

-- JAM! Movies

Sam Raimi's the man

Master of macabre switches gears

TORONTO -- In the worlds of science or philosophy, it could be called Sam Raimi's paradigm shift.

The world of Hollywood, however, sometimes has trouble with big words or tricky concepts. There, it might be easier to say, "Sam's got a new movie out, and there aren't any evil spirits or zooming cameras in it."

In the space of one movie, this dimunitive and exceedingly polite filmmaker has gone from being the master of the shock-a-lock horror cartoon to the "heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock," as star Bill Paxton puts it.

The film is A Simple Plan, Scott Smith's screen adaptation of his own novel about a Pandora's box of greed and suspicion that's opened when three men from a rural midwestern town stumble across a fortune in cash.

A Simple Plan is considered a dark-horse contender for a best picture Oscar nomination, and has already made it onto several critics' Top 10 lists for 1998. It opens in Edmonton this Friday.

The film's praise has raised many an eyebrow in Hollywood, not because Raimi is an unknown - the 39-year-old has been making movies since he was in his late teens - but because of what he's known for.

When he was 19, Raimi and close friends Robert Tapert and Bruce Campbell scraped together enough cash to film a campy, gory fright flick called The Evil Dead. At the time of its 1982 release, author Stephen King declared it "the most ferociously original horror movie I have ever seen."

Five years later, with only a forgotten film called Crimewave in the interim, Raimi wrote and directed Evil Dead II, with buddy Campbell returning to play the hapless anti-hero, Ash. Few flicks in the horror genre have as much of a devoted cult following.

Campbell returned for a third Raimi-directed Evil Dead film in 1993. Army of Darkness sent Ash back in time to once again do battle with the supernatural Deadites. A classic horror trilogy was born, and Raimi's reputation as a master of the genre was cemented.

The thing was, he wanted more.

His connection to the weird and supernatural has been Raimi's blessing and curse. He's had a hand in the likes of Darkman, the wild western The Quick and the Dead with Sharon Stone, the Jean-Claude Van Damme sci-fi flick Time Cop, the short-lived but lauded TV series American Gothic and the current syndication super-duo Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess.

Nobody really seemed to think Raimi's signature style was suited for anything more than oddball films with swooping camera movements and unusual shot angles.

As Raimi tells it, he was 13th in line to direct A Simple Plan. It turned out to be his lucky number.

"Scott Rudin (the film's original producer) said he had about 12 directors in front of me," remembers Raimi.

One director after another fell through, and the movie was pushed back. Finally, five years after he'd first expressed his keen interest in the project, the reins fell into Raimi's hands.

Billy Bob Thornton had already been cast as Jacob Mitchell, the older of two brothers who discover $4 million in cash inside a plane wreck deep in the snowy backwoods near their rural midwestern town.

Co-stars Paxton as Hank Mitchell, and Bridget Fonda as his wife, were brought on board and the film finally got off the ground.

"I've finally gotten to the point where I don't have to write my own material, I can now choose some of the best material in Hollywood," says Raimi.

"The only way I could make pictures before was by writing them."

Energies that would normally go into constructing wild shots and camera movements instead went into coaxing subtle and powerful performances from his cast.

Even before A Simple Plan's release, Raimi's curse seemed to have been broken. His next feature as director is the Kevin Costner baseball film For Love of the Game, about an aging pitcher.

"Now, for some reason, I'm being offered scripts of a higher quality," Raimi says. "The ones I'm able to make now are of a higher calibre, more about characters."

Which is not to say Raimi plans to abandon his roots. He and his brother have an Evil Dead IV script in the works. Whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen, but Raimi is enthusiastic about it.

"We find (Ash) back at the S-Mart, where he works as assistant manager," says Raimi.

"He's gained, like, 70 pounds. I'm going to make Bruce gain 70 pounds for the role."

For now, though, Raimi is content to sample the more serious side of filmmaking.

"I just want to take advantage of these great, quality scripts," he says.

"It's like a great course in English literature - you're finally able to read the good stuff. So I'm trying to read the good stuff for a little while."

Quick, Dead And Frosty

HOLLYWOOD -- Sam Raimi, the man-child who makes his own brand of deliciously demented movies, figures he is ready to soften up, thanks to fatherhood.

Raimi is a famed cult director whose work includes The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, Darkman, Army Of Darkness and the current Sharon Stone vehicle, The Quick And The Dead, a homage-farce to spaghetti westerns.

But now he is working on a family film, Frosty The Snowman. If it ever gets made - and there is no guarantee because it is merely "in development" at Warner Bros, says Raimi - it will be a live action flick with Frosty created by computer animation.

It will also be the first film he's made that his son Lorne - just a few months old - will be allowed to see: "That's why I'm going to make a sweet movie next," he explains about the joys of parenthood, a joy he shares with wife Gillian.

But, true to form, Raimi says there will be a twist. "I hope I'm not leaving my Evil Dead fans behind, because I want them to know I'm going to KILL Frosty by the end of the movie. I'll melt him in a slow, painful way."

He is just kidding, of course, but the tangent tells you a lot about how Raimi's brain operates. The man, whom Sharon Stone calls charming because he brings the enthusiasm of a child into a film, is unique.

When he comes into a room full of journalists, he greets each in turn, calling men "sir" and women "ma'am" and thanking everyone for bothering to show up to talk to him. Despite his bank teller garb - grey suit and dull tie - and his age - 35 - he still looks like a teenager.

But he is not like your average eager young Hollywood film director. For instance, he talks about how much he loved Simon Moore's script for The Quick And The Dead, then quips: "I polluted it with my own foul vision."

He talks about how much he wants people to love his movies, then admits that only a minority of audiences share his twisted sense of humor. "It's depressing sometimes to go to my own movies," he says, especially at test screenings. "At the time the movies are out, I go, but I'm so beaten up already it's hard. It's not a good way to work. I've got to face the music."

He talks with admiration of Sharon Stone, who is fond of him too. But he admits she terrified him before they started working on The Quick And The Dead. When Stone's aides first called to tell him she wanted to see him, he thought it was a joke.

"I couldn't believe it, because I had made the type of `B' horror movies that you're familiar with. I didn't know why she wanted me to direct it. But I didn't want to say to her: `Are you sure you have the right guy?' So I just kind of nodded my head and played along."

He went to see Stone in Vancouver, where she was working, at "some fancy-pants hotel with a big breakfast spread. It was like Dorothy going to meet Oz.

"But she was very, very normal, very quiet and very sharp and very tough. She wasn't trying to be a big star and intimidate me. I was so relieved because I was so terrified going to meet her."

Nor does Raimi intimidate anyone else. "I don't consider myself the world's biggest talent," he says with a giggle. "Everything I do is out of desperation."

So, if he gets desperate on Frosty, he might even offer Stone a role: "As the ice queen?" he asks rhetorically. "She already has an ice pick!" a voice cries out. Raimi laughs. It's the kind of demented image he adores.

Select Filmography

• 1999: For Love Of The Game - Director
• 1998: A Simple Plan - Director
• 1995: The Quick And The Dead - Director
• 1994: The Hudsucker Proxy - as Co-Writer
• 1993: Army Of Darkness - Director
• 1990: Darkman - Director
• 1987: Evil Dead 2 - Director
• 1985: Crimewave - Director
• 1982: Evil Dead - Director
• 1978: Clockwork - Director