Come anticipate Michael Douglas as Liberace in a Steven Soderbergh film, featuring Matt Damon as Lee's lover

But who will play his brother George?

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20303839,00.html

"We've already done some costume and wardrobe tests on Michael, and they're very, very, very good." Soderbergh told a French newspaper at the Deauville Film Festival. "I swear to you, Michael amazed me. He crushed it."

come on, think of the potential!

Well I suppose it's about time we had a new Mommie Dearest.

This is exceptionally odd.

Mommie Douglas.

So we'll get reenactments of things like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dioRwB4RvrQ

espinozafn (1 week ago)

Dr. Dre referenced his name in California Love. So from then on everyone wanted to know what that was. After that Biggie, Pac, Snoop and a boat load of east coast rappers started wearing mink coats with Ice ( BLING BLING) and cristal. Funny, how most people wont realize that it was this flamboyant man was the cause of that.

And therein you see the prescient genius of Liberace.

Okay so my friend Rob linked to this piece saying "Who proofread this headline, anyway? I mean, seriously."

http://www.poplust.com/poplust/liberace.jpeg

I can totally see Michael Douglas doing this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPGBQ77ddU

wow psyched for this

lol just read the liberace bio on wiki---it's weird, he's always occupied some humorous corner of pop-cultural-references-i-get, but i've never actually known anything about liberace other than 'lol gay!' and 'moms love him!'

Yeah was the same for me but then I watched the Biography on A&E about him a couple years ago.

also, Alice Kramden wanted to watch his TV show.

I could've seen him at Radio City around '86 for $25 maybe? Declined.

I hope it splices in old footage of Douglas's early movies a la The Limey, cherry-picking some of his most select gay gestures.

He already has started preparing for his next role, the title part in Soderbergh’s Liberace, starts shooting in May or June and which will require special prosthetic work as well as musical training. “I’ve got a bunch of tapes of performances,” Douglas says. “I’m thinking; I’m a blank slate. Everything shows me he was a lovely man; I just want to reconfirm that.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-douglas-breaks-silence-s-50151

Project goes to HBO, shoots next summer

http://www.movieline.com/2011/10/so-much-for-oscar-soderberghs-liberace-goes-to-hbo.php

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/pictures-michael-douglas-liberace-behind-candelabra-article-1.1125875

lol, awesome

I like to think that's just Douglas and Damon out on the town, has nothing to do with the movie.

:) Someone suggested that Matt looks like Toni Tennille.

Isn't Matt Damon a little old to be playing Scott Thorson?

yes, but who cares?

if they were supposed to be 40 years apart it does kind of diminish the effect

Damon doesn't look 16 anymore, but he can look 26.

also I hate to tell ya: Bonnie & Clyde were plug-ugly

warning: a big one

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4Bx6RjA3O7o/UFFrljjgytI/AAAAAAABwgU/-NBxrOaTUvk/s1600/Liberace.jpg

Is that a caption for the picture?

“Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it. They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/liberaces_homosexuality_makes_hollywood_squirm/

This was after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie.

oh snaps

I'll take him up on that bet.

so I wonder if the Freddie Mercury biopic w/ Borat will ever roll.

holy shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqAC1yiIROw

Dan Aykroyd!

Channing Tatum looks good in that pool shot.

feel like there's no way this wont be a masterpiece now

Timely, what with all the Liberace this, and Liberace that these days.

Can't wait for John Travolta's competing 'race biopic.

John Travolta as Brad Paisley
C.Thomas Howell as LL

i am accepting NYC invitations to watch this

white-haired gal in there is Debbie Reynolds?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1291580/fullcredits

omg this looks incredible

so stupid they couldn't get a proper film deal for this

God, I can't wait for this.

Cofuckingsign

Holy shit

i didnt realize victor garber starred in a liberace biopic in the 80s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberace:_Behind_the_Music

http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=138167

another roundup:

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-cannes-2013-steven-soderberghs-behind-the-candelabra

They used CG to make Damon plausibly teenaged.

As noted on Twitter, they do the same with Tom Cruise in every one of his movies now.

noted by TheVengefulKatieHolmes?

best thing about it is it hold up to multiple viewings, definitely not a one hit wonder

YESSSSSSSSSSSS.

"Pig".

I have only watched it the once. Need to rectify that.

Nicole <3

I just . . .

http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/HNTqJfqUPfBbRirtAPcpeg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTYwMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/video/video.abcnewsplus.com/4c986e7e5453c06b460817af8d18a0cf.cf.png

This quote makes me laugh for unintended reasons

To achieve Dr. Startz's freakishly elevated brow, Lowe had to endure a contraption of tape and elastic hidden under a wig. ''It's what they used to do before there were face-lifts for actresses — you know, Joan Crawford's whole career was this,'' Lowe says. ''Then the makeup is like Earl Scheib auto-body paint sprayed on my face.... Being pulled that long and that hard for a 12-hour day gave me migraines.''

tee hee

I thought this was bitchy, boring and shallow. Reiterated the usual caricatures of Liberace (and Hollywood's version of the 70s) that everyone knows. The relationship stuff was dull. I would love to see a movie about the real guy. What about his brother who he performed with for decades, his mother, his amazing technical skills on the piano, plus his backstory playing in saloons for 12 hours straight etc. Those things were mentioned but filtered through the viewpoint of this boring boytoy who barely knew him. Dud.

I thought this was bitchy, boring and shallow

Yeah, it was a total kiki.

It was based on Scott Thorson's book, ergo it wasn't a straighforward Liberace biopic. Seems like your ire is misdirected.

i liked the dull relationship stuff. def humanized lee from my, wholly previously uninformed, pov

There was very little about this that had any insider perspective. It's possible Thorson could have had some insight into Liberace as a performer or a pianist. Or about his his mother, other than she's a bit batty. But he doesn't. There's one scene where he's all enraptured with Liberace playing the piano and that is supposedly why he was attracted to him. After that it's forgetten he's a pianist until about an hour later and it's like "oh yeah, he plays the piano".

Thorson himself is not a very interesting person and to me Thorson is one of the least interesting things about Liberace's life. This film (which is very tv movie imho) didn't convince me otherwise.

perhaps this film needed Merv Griffin

xpost lol you must move in some crazy circles if being adopted by Liberace and getting plastic surgery to look his younger self does not qualify as 'interesting'...

:)

Dave Kehr's DVD column in the Sunday NYT reviewed Liberace's sole starring movie, Sincerely Yours (1955), which is also rather wtf:

Skillfully directed by the versatile Gordon Douglas (“Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” “Them!”), “Sincerely Yours” approaches the task of capturing its star’s distinctive appeal with genuine thoughtfulness. As adapted, by the future best-selling novelist Irving Wallace, from a 1914 melodrama most famously filmed in 1932 as “The Man Who Played God,” the film casts Liberace as a slightly more grandiose version of himself: a hugely successful classical pianist with a common touch, who passes from florid renditions of Chopin to “Chopsticks,” boogie-woogie and “The Beer Barrel Polka.”

Douglas’s direction gives particular emphasis to what was certainly Liberace’s greatest talent, his gift for establishing a personal relationship with his public. In one scene set in a nightclub, he invites a table of middle-age women (representatives of the homemaker demographic that supported his daytime television show) to reach out and actually touch him. “A little higher, honey,” he roguishly suggests, pointing to his knee. “About here is where I get the message.”

The film goes through the motions of setting up a rivalry between two women for the star’s affections, with the brunette Joann Dru as his sensible, motherly secretary and the blond bombshell Dorothy Malone as the society dame who wants to be his student (it was this role, in the 1932 film, that made a star of Bette Davis). But the issue of Liberace’s conspicuously ambiguous sexuality is quickly and cleverly elided by projecting his character into a supernatural realm, beyond the reach of mere human relationships.

Struck deaf by an exotic movie disease, Liberace’s Anthony Warrin withdraws from the world to hide in his palatial Manhattan penthouse. He fills his empty hours by peering through binoculars at the little people in Central Park, eavesdropping on their problems through his newly developed gifts as a lip reader. When appropriate, he intervenes — an early example of the celebrity as a magical figure, able to confer health, wealth and happiness on everyday mortals.

One plot strand effectively co-opts the concept of “Queen for a Day,” a popular radio show that would become one of Liberace’s rivals for the afternoon homemaker audience when it moved to national television in 1956. When he sees a working-class woman (Lurene Tuttle) being shunned by her daughter, who has married into money, Warrin arranges an elaborate scheme — involving, of course, a complete makeover and a new ball gown — to present the long-suffering woman to the in-laws she has never met in the most flattering light possible.

He’s God with an account at Bergdorf’s.

wow

xxpost. Thorson has a huge bitter chip on his shoulder against Liberace and has milked their brief and shallow relationship for his entire adult life. Maybe that's the real story, rather than "ooooooh Liberace was gay!!". He was not adopted by Liberace. The notion that he got plastic surgery to look like Liberace is his own story, which conveniently gets him off the hook for becoming a junkie and a theif. In fact his other claims about Liberace usually are to excuse his own bad decisions. eg Liberace was an "addict" (to poppers fuxake, while Thorson took everything) or that Liberace was a closet case. Well, duh. Thorson is at least as big a closet case as Liberace. He's still denying it to this day.

A bad romance on both sides, I'm guessing. That Liberace perpetuated reactionary attitudes seems a totally viable proposition.

Liberace probably voted for Reagan, like a lot of queens did.

well yeah, he was kind of an idiot.

but he had excellent taste in tiny piano tchotchkes

And boys 50 years his junior. (As opposed to Michael Douglas, whose taste in women 25 years his junior is nearly as exquisite.)

otm

"Everybody knows everything in this business; everyone knew about this project, [and] if someone wanted to make it, it would've been made." Soderbergh says. "Calls would go out when the movie became available, from the agencies repping the thing...They all came back with 'not interested' or with no call returned."

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/steven-soderbergh-interview-hollywood-gay

Wonder if this was before or after Magic Mike earned $150M+.

If only Soderbergh had consented to letting Cody Horn play Scott Thorson.

haha

http://24.media.tumblr.com/a04284760e8f91aa88c6262daa36a94d/tumblr_mh9p3vdOsD1qd418mo1_500.png

lock thread

not yet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-E-8z6F2Ww

Holy crap! I was looking for that clip! Thanks, Morbs!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn7ImsFM13k

"i'll explain it to the goyim later"

i enjoyed the performances in this but it was v. disappointing otherwise. the structure and narrative choices were so bland that it really did feel made for tv. only the final scene elevated (sure, i'll take the pun) the material from c-grade biopic stuff.

I finished it about an hour ago.

we watched it on saturday. maybe i read too many good reviews when it came out? i felt let down.

I liked it.

Exactly like CAD above--didn't care for this much. It began promisingly, started to plod about halfway. I could never quite accept Michael Douglas as anybody other than Michael Douglas. (I say that as someone who has no problem with Anthony Hopkins' not-very-Nixon-like Nixon.) Parts mirrored Boogie Nights almost exactly (an intersection underscored when I did a little reading on Scott Thorson--didn't realize he had a connection to the Wonderland murders), but Soderbergh's direction seemed far too careful to me for such a wild story and such an interesting moment. Rob Lowe was kind of compellingly creepy, especially the way he'd sometimes look off to the side blankly after speaking like he'd zoned out altogether.

I really wasn't moved one iota by this, if that was actually a legit intention. Damon very impressive (as well as makeup and effects crews) making Thorson look like everything from golden boy to carved-up shit.

Best mainstream American film about the closet?

Until they start casting the Aaron Rodgers biopic.

bwahah

doublecheck!

Morbz otm in general - I wasnt moved by it either but it was compelling in its diagram of a trainwreck way. Definitely loses steam in the final third.

"These are actual Roman columns... Ionic."

Michael D has never looked so much like his dad, and not just in the deathbed scene.

tbf, the Romans copied the Ionic style of column pretty slavishly, so a column could easily be Roman and Ionic at the same time.

that has nothing to do with the line's appeal, but thx for playing

but he had excellent taste in tiny piano tchotchkes

And boys 50 years his junior.

40!

I look like my faaaather
In draaaag
In Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte

Douglas and Jared Leto taking shit over winning Golden Globes for playing people who died of AIDS and not mentioning AIDS, making boorish jokes, etc. I didn't see the show, but the speeches don't read well.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/01/13/jared_leto_and_michael_douglas_golden_globes_speeches_homophobic_or_insensitive.html

Leto's speech was less risible than Douglas's, but Douglas is 1.5 generations further removed from Leto, so that the latter can't seem to broaden his horizons beyond his own sacrifice and achievement and awesome "all me" bubble butt is far more disappointing.

being disappointed by Jared Leto requires dangerously high expectations

like I said last night Douglas's speech was as if Tom Hanks '93 was his role model, Jared Leto's speech was like Jared Leto '94 was his.