On the other hand, every week I receive New York magazine, and it’s loaded with legitimate goodness. Like the above piece about my friend Ted’s new film. Ted directed my film, then wrote a screenplay for a movie that Bill Murray read and loved and wanted to be in. Looks amazing.
The magazine’s caption calls Ted a “first time” director, which is not exactly true, but it is his first huge film. Here’s what else it says:
“You can hardly judge how a finished film will be from a single still frame, but the first-time director Ted Melfi appears to have gotten one scene in St. Vincent de Van Nuys exactly right. Shooting in Brooklyn on a recent Tuesday, he put Bill Murray – joined in other moments, by co-stars Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts – in this beat-to-hell ’83 Chrysler LeBaron, complete with spiderweb windshield cracks. (Murray plays the crabby mentor to the child of Watt’s Russian prostitute.) It’s as if the poignantly aging character from Broken Flowers had gone broke and washed up by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. We’ll see if the rest of the film looks this good in 2014.”
