Lucky bastard

Michael Ciepley has an article in The New York Times about filmmaking:

Pigeon droppings lie almost an inch thick in most of Building 69. It is a long red-brick storehouse, built during the Civil War and afterward in what used to be the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California. The interior is a filthy warren of tiny rooms, most empty, except for the pigeons, at least since the shipyard was decommissioned in the 1990s.
But a corner on the south side has been cleaned up. There, just enough sunlight breaks through a window to illuminate what looks like a film-prop chalkboard marked with an elaborate schedule. It records the coming and going of freighters that are nowhere in sight.
With some imagination, and a dozen extras, this could pass for the maritime hiring hall where Freddie Quell, a drifter played by Joaquin Phoenix, looked for work back in about 1951, before stumbling through the docks of San Francisco to his much stranger destiny in a movie that is expected to be called The Master.
Clearly, Paul Thomas Anderson was here.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, Anderson, 41, is now finishing what will be his sixth feature film. Fiercely protective of his process, he has declined to speak publicly about the movie. But the details suggest a story inspired by the founding of Scientology, and that has provoked industry whispers. With that church’s complicated Hollywood ties and high-profile adherents like Tom Cruise, a film even loosely based on it will guarantee discussion upon its release, on 12 October, by the Weinstein Company.
Directing a movie, Anderson once told The New York Times, is only half the job. “The other fifty percent,” he said, “is this gene of protectiveness and parenting and evil that safeguards your movie.”
That spirit still prevails. When Anderson’s crew shot for a month on Mare Island last year, using the wing of an old hospital for some scenes, an empty admiral’s mansion for others, the picture was blandly described as an “untitled western”. Anderson avoided publicity and left few traces— other than the fake shipping schedule, perhaps— of what promises to be a notable piece of period filmmaking.
But as Phoenix joined Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and others in evening clothes on an antique motor yacht, the Potomac, which had belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it became obvious that something serious was afoot.
The Master is ambitious though not vast. It cost about thirty million dollars, according to business associates of Anderson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationships. So the movie is larger, perhaps, than There Will Be Blood, his California oil-boom drama. That film received eight Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, in 2008.
The Master is of a piece with the Anderson oeuvre, which remained personal even as it grew. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love described life in the San Fernando Valley, where Anderson was raised in a family that mingled nine siblings from a pair of marriages. (He lives there still with his partner, Maya Rudolph, and their children.)
Hard Eight, a first feature that grew from his work at a Sundance filmmakers lab, included a brief appearance by his father, the television personality Ernie Anderson, who also narrated a predecessor to Boogie Nights, a short called The Dirk Diggler Story. Though set in Reno, Nevada, Hard Eight, like his other movies, was wrapped around some core California myths about the desert and its characters, and portrayed a kind of loose, defective family of drifters that seemed to replace real families that had fallen apart.
There Will Be Blood added scope with its historical story, which is based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! and an archetypal robber baron, who might have been based on the real Edward L. Doheny. But it remained a story about California and Californians, as if Anderson— not unlike the young François Truffaut— were using film to examine both his own life, and, layer by layer, the lives around him.
With The Master, Anderson will tell a dual tale. The first is that of a boozy Navy veteran, played by Phoenix, who shares what Anderson’s associates say are accidental similarities with the filmmaker’s father, who died in 1997. The elder Anderson was a Navy vet who served in the Pacific during World War Two, and, like Quell, was born about ninety years ago.
The second story is that of Lancaster Dodd, who is eerily referred to in a screenplay Anderson initially wrote for Universal Pictures only as The Master or the Master of Ceremonies. Played by Hoffman, he is the red-haired, round-faced, charismatic founder of that most Californian of phenomena, a psychologically sophisticated, and manipulative, cult.
Dodd was inspired by, though not entirely modeled on, Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard (photo).
“Trust me, it's not about Scientology,” Hoffman told the journalist Jeffrey Wells, when asked about The Master at a party last September.
In a strict sense that is certainly true. The first Church of Scientology was incorporated in December of 1953. Anderson’s story takes place in the preceding years, as Dodd spreads a philosophy that resembles Dianetics, which Hubbard developed before his church was formally founded.
As The Master took shape, Anderson, its writer and director, delved into the personalities behind cults and religious and pop psychology movements with roots in California. Those have included Aimee Semple McPherson, who used radio to evangelize in the 1920s; Werner Erhard, whose est movement swept California in the 1970s; and Jim Jones of San Francisco, whose followers drank the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid) in 1978.
But a glance through the many photographs of Hubbard in the early 1950s— perched in western wear on a fence in Palm Springs, demonstrating his Electro-psychometer to a prone, high-heeled woman— reveals a telling likeness to Hoffman, who shares the same soft features, light hair, and innate theatricality.
In a version of the script that circulated as Anderson sought financing, Lancaster Dodd is described as being in his mid-forties; Hubbard was in his early forties during the matching years. Both share a love of boats, and a near-paranoid suspicion of the American Medical Association. Hubbard’s followers hope to become “clear”; the Master’s followers work toward “optimum”. Psychological exploration by and with either involves ruthless interrogation. Both wrote their ultimate secrets in a book that is said to kill its readers or drive them mad. They are obsessed with motorcycles. Their tantrums are monumental. Each has a wife named Mary Sue.
The Church of Scientology has a reputation for being dogged about policing its image. When the screenwriter and director Paul Haggis quit the church in 2009, he told The New Yorker, nine or ten members showed up in his yard to remind him of the damage that might be caused by a prominent member’s resignation. But associates of Anderson say those making the film have not been contacted, officially or otherwise, by representatives of Scientology.
Asked in March about the church’s awareness of The Master, a Scientology spokeswoman,
Karen Pouw, said by email: “Thank you very much for your inquiry. The Church only knows about the film what it has read in the press.” Asked if that meant Scientology had no concerns about the movie, Pouw indicated that the church would wait and see. “We have not seen the film, so can’t say one way or another,” she said.To wonder how Anderson first became fascinated with Hubbard and his thinking might lead nowhere. Having lived in Los Angeles for more than forty years, he has almost certainly had his share of encounters with Scientology.
In 1999 he worked with Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s best-known Scientologist, on Magnolia. Three years later he used artwork from Jeremy Blake in Punch-Drunk Love, that was said in news reports to have figured, though it is unclear how, in a chronology compiled by Blake of alleged harassment by Scientologists before both he and his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, committed suicide in 2007. One close associate of Anderson— who, again, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships— brushed aside speculation that Blake’s death was an impetus to The Master. “It’s been in his head for years and years and years, probably a dozen years,” this friend said.
Whatever may have started it, The Master almost did not arrive.
Universal, which financed a version of the script, suddenly passed when it was delivered in 2010. Recently, a Universal spokeswoman declined to discuss the studio’s reasoning, but one person who was briefed on the matter said the main issue was a budget then pegged at about $35 million, too much for a company that had spent heavily on the vain pursuit of Oscars for Frost/Nixon and other films.
Bryan Lourd, a Creative Artists Agency partner who represents Anderson, brokered a meeting with Bill Pohlad, the Minneapolis film financier who was then backing The Tree of Life for director Terrence Malick. Pohlad, according to an associate who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Pohlad had not authorized public discussion of the project, never intended to finance The Master. But, as a favor to both Anderson and Lourd, he provided interim support while the filmmaker’s crew scouted locations and otherwise prepared to shoot a movie that would ultimately meld Anderson’s troupe of regulars— including Hoffman and the casting director Cassandra Kulukundis— with additions like Phoenix, Adams, and Laura Dern.
Ultimately, the film was backed by Megan Ellison, who, at the age of 25, had just set up a company, Annapurna Pictures, with money from her father, the Oracle chief executive Lawrence J. Ellison. Like Anderson, Ellison appears to focus more on intended results than possible consequences. While backing The Master, she is shouldering similar risk on a film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The Weinstein Company acquired distribution rights to The Master last May, creating an expectation that it will become a contender in Harvey Weinstein’s bid for a third consecutive best picture Oscar, after The King’s Speech and The Artist.
Before that can happen, of course, the film must be finished, and then seen. People on its periphery say the picture evolved, even as Anderson shot it. The Potomac, which figures as Dodd’s yacht, is grander than the converted cattle trawler once described in Anderson’s script, though perhaps closer to Hubbard’s Apollo, on which he cruised in the 1970s.
The mansion in Vallejo feels more imposing than what in the script is called Helen’s House, the suburban home of a follower, played by Dern, who is party to some of the Master’s deeper secrets.
In any case, those secrets will present challenges when the film is screened. Believers will confront a fiction that purports to tell a truth about their world, without specifically portraying them, at least by the filmmakers’ claim. And Anderson’s admirers will be asked to follow him, one layer at a time, into his next California.

Rico says that Proofmark Cinema is searching for financing for its docudrama, Zone of Fire, but doesn't need (or even want) anything like thirty million bucks...