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HBO president on the Deadwood movie: "it’s going to happen"

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R

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
Deadwood Reunion Movie 'Is Going to Happen,' Promises HBO President

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo confirmed to TVLine that he personally gave series creator David Milch the green light to resurrect the acclaimed yet painfully short-lived Western.

“David has our commitment that we are going to do it,” says Lombardo. “He pitched what he thought generally the storyline would be — and knowing David, that could change. But it’s going to happen.”
Click to expand...

And what about the potential scheduling nightmare that awaits trying to corral the show’s busy, in-demand cast? “I’m going to leave that in David’s hands,” Lombardo says with a smile. “He’s confident he will be able to.

“The cast is unbelievably [tight],” he adds. “Some casts and creators form a bond that becomes relevant for the rest of their lives. This was a defining moment for a lot of them.”
Click to expand...
 
J

johnsmith

remember me
zQNC920.gif


Great news, now announce season 4 after it.
 
K

~Kinggi~

Banned
i was wondering why the other thread got locked. I thought i sealed the deal with my '10k go fuck yourself liars' post. u know

shit. there were 2 threads locked. Neogaf deadwood thirst is strong and THIRSTY
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
If Milch fucks the dog on this I will feed the cocksucker to Wu's pigs my own fuckin' self, I swear to God in Heaven on the souls of my unborn cunt children.
 
rbanke

rbanke

Member
Huzzah!

Just rewatched the series a few months ago, my wife hadn't seen it. Man what an excellent show.
 
K

~Kinggi~

Banned
btrboyev said:
Not exactly sure why they would bother putting in theaters. Just film a 5 part finale on HBO.
Click to expand...

Yeah truth be told unless they actually think they got greatness an HBO special would achieve the same effect. But hey whatever the fuckers want i guess
 
D

Dead Man

Member
Meh. That shitty writing in the finale where they
murder an innocent to protect Trixie, who then just hangs around town
, makes me not really give a fuck any more. It was 2 seasons and 11 episodes of brilliance.
 
B

BobLoblaw

Banned
So now I can finally watch the show? This is one I never got around to watching since they canceled it without an appropriate ending based on what I've heard.
 
rbanke

rbanke

Member
Hrm, what's the deal with Jeffery Jones? didn't he get busted on child porn or something like that? I see he's done work recently, I had thought his career was done.

EDIT: it was hiring a 14 year old boy to do sexual photos and he pled no contest and got fined & 5 years probation. Would be strange if he made it back.


BobLoblaw said:
So now I can finally watch the show? This is one I never got around to watching since they canceled it without an appropriate ending based on what I've heard.
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The ending doesn't put a bow on it but wasn't wholly unfulfilling i thought.
 
S

Smokey_Run

Member
rbanke said:
Hrm, what's the deal with Jeffery Jones? didn't he get busted on child porn or something like that? I see he's done work recently, I had thought his career was done.





The ending doesn't put a bow on it but wasn't wholly unfulfilling i thought.
Click to expand...

I'm in the same camp about the ending. I came to the show late and thought the ending worked in a strange way.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
BobLoblaw said:
So now I can finally watch the show? This is one I never got around to watching since they canceled it without an appropriate ending based on what I've heard.
Click to expand...

If you held off on watching it even though everyone else who's watched it can't stop praising it even though it wasn't able to finish in the means intended?

The ending it gets is frustrating, but it's fine enough, I guess. It's certainly not a reason to not watch hours upon hours of some of the finest acting in the medium, made possible by the finest dialog ever written for television.

edit: and yeah, Jeffrey Jones can stay his nasty-ass home. Have him get eaten offscreen by a mountain lion or some shit.
 
B

Blader

Member
Timing wise, Lombardo says Milch has another project he’s currently working on, “But the understanding is that when he is done with that he will turn his attention to [writing the] script for the Deadwood film.”
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So just as soon as his next thing is cancelled, then.
 
DietRob

DietRob

i've been begging for over 5 years.
Yes, yes, yes!!!

Though tbh I'd prefer the series just returning instead of only a movie but I'll take what I can get.
 
M

meltingparappa

Member
I made peace that it would never get a filmed ending, and looked up historical spoilers on the real Al Sweringen and it seemed like a fitting fate for his character..

I wonder if that'll work into the movie.
 
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
RatskyWatsky said:
He also said that Milch has another project in the works at HBO, which is lol.
:(
Click to expand...
Now this I want. I loved Luck, and thought John from Cincinnati was strangely great.
I still haven't seen Deadwood.

btrboyev said:
Not exactly sure why they would bother putting in theaters. Just film a 5 part finale on HBO.
Click to expand...
I don't think anyone's saying anything about theaters. "Movie" is just referring to the format and length more than a distribution model. HBO's recently given/ordered both Hello Ladies and Looking movie specials to wrap up those shows.
 
C

Cipherr

Member
This would be great.

“The cast is unbelievably [tight],” he adds. “Some casts and creators form a bond that becomes relevant for the rest of their lives. This was a defining moment for a lot of them.”
Click to expand...

I loved reading that. I remember seeing a video of the guy who played Ellsworth saying how important the role was to his career. I wish I could find it, but he said after doing Deadwood he would go into auditions where people would recognize him and call out his characters name
3AQmK.gif
He said he really liked that people knew him after he played that part.
 
J

Jonm1010

Banned
Cipherr said:
This would be great.



I loved reading that. I remember seeing a video of the guy who played Ellsworth saying how important the role was to his career. I wish I could find it, but he said after doing Deadwood he would go into auditions where people would recognize him and call out his characters name
3AQmK.gif
He said he really liked that people knew him after he played that part.
Click to expand...

Yeah, he showed up in the comment section of the AV Club re-watch with Sepinwell and let go some pretty interesting stories.

http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/deadwood-rewind-season-3-episode-11-the-catbird-seat
 
B

blainethemono

Member
probably the best news i've ever heard. wish it would be at least a 6 episode thing rather than a movie given the usual narrative pace of the show, but Deadwood is still my favorite piece of film or television ever and i'll take whatever Milch and the cast give me

Cipherr said:
This would be great.



I loved reading that. I remember seeing a video of the guy who played Ellsworth saying how important the role was to his career. I wish I could find it, but he said after doing Deadwood he would go into auditions where people would recognize him and call out his characters name
3AQmK.gif
He said he really liked that people knew him after he played that part.
Click to expand...

Reminds me of this post Jim Beaver wrote about his final scenes in the comments section of this Sepinwall rewind a few years ago - http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-wa...d-season-3-episode-11-the-catbird-seat#368073


(pretty big season 3 spoilers)


This was a tough one.

I hadn't seen it again since it aired. It still ranks among the most emotional experiences of my career, both making it and watching it. Even now, seven years later, I don't find watching it easy.

Deadwood was the greatest thing to ever happen to me as an actor. I'd had some wonderful breaks and some wonderful roles prior to it, but nothing had ever put me into the public consciousness, or the consciousness of the film industry, before Deadwood. The truth is, after thirty years of telling myself I would never quit acting, that there was no "civilian" job I would ever choose over acting, in the fall of 2002 I was feeling about at the end of my string. I had a one-year-old daughter and felt unable to support her or my wife. I was working on and off with regularity, but without the frequency that makes a living. It's one thing to be willing to sleep on friends' sofas in order to make a career happen, it's quite another to ask one's family to do the same. So in the fall of 2002, for the first time in my career, at age 52, I began thinking about what else I might possibly do to make a living. I hadn't done anything else in years, and had nothing to go back to. My last civilian job had been as a motorcycle delivery guy, dropping off scripts and contracts around the studios, something email and faxes had long since practically eliminated. I didn't know where to turn. And then Junie Lowry Johnson and Libby Goldstein called me in for an audition for Deadwood. I saw the material for the audition (it was Ellsworth's "flatter'n hammered shit" monologue from the pilot), and I knew this part was mine. I knew I might not get it, but I knew it was mine, knew no one else understood that character the way I instantly did. And amazingly, in a business where the sure thing never happens, I got it. And that was the last time I ever really worried about what I would do for a living. Deadwood changed everything. It made me a familiar figure in every audition I went to, every meeting I took. No more having the casting director explain who I was and what I'd done to disinterested producers. Now, I walked into rooms and heard people say, "Oh, my god, it's Ellsworth!" It was a career dream come true.

And it was an actor-artist's dream come true. The greatest dialog ever written for television, and I got to play it. The greatest character arc in television history (from drunken reprobate to husband of the richest woman in town and a deeply respected man in his own right), and I got to personify it.

And finally, it was family. I had lost my wife at 46 during season one, and this amazing band of people had rallied 'round me as though I were what I was, a wounded bird the flock was committed to protect. The friendships and deep love I felt for that cast and that crew are unmatched by anything else I've ever experienced, and, brother, I've worked with some great people in my time.

So you can imagine, perhaps, how it felt to have it all taken away.

As I mentioned with the previous of Alan's posts, the afternoon I shot the scene in the Gem in which Ellsworth and Alma meet up after she's been targeted was my last day on that episode. I was wrapped for the day, but I hung around jawing with the crew for an hour or so. Just as I was leaving, a staffer told me David Milch wanted to see me. I found him, and we went off for a walk around the area between the soundstage where the Gem interior was and the back of the buildings that fronted on the thoroughfare. We walked a few steps into that open area, and David said, "I've been batting my head against the wall for a couple of weeks trying to figure out how not to do this, but I can't think of any way. This guy's got to die." And I, thinking perhaps, unlikely as it seems, the great man was asking my advice on how to structure something in the upcoming episode, asked, "What guy?" And then he told me. "Ellsworth."

If a hole had opened up in the earth and I had fallen through to emerge in the Seychelles, I could not have sensed it differently, I suspect. I couldn't really hear much of David's explanation, or anything else, for there was a rush in my ears like the surf when you're under it. I don't beg. I don't plead. I know how the business works, and I know that something like this isn't done lightly or with any chance of reversal. Yet every fiber of my soul wanted to beg him to change his mind, to try harder to find a way, to just do it arbitrarily if nothing else. Every fear I ever had as an actor about never working again flooded over me afresh. This was almost exactly two years after my wife's death, and I envisioned soon being on the street with my four-year-old daughter, with no income and no future. (Actors think like this all the time, but never more so than when a job comes to a premature end.) All these worries and potential pleadings flashed through my brain in seconds, and then I slumped into a nauseated pile of barely verbal dejection. I could tell that David was distraught, that he cared for me and hated desperately doing this to me. David is a strong and courageous man, but he has an almost absolute weakness for trying to make people feel good. He's famed in Hollywood for promising almost everyone he meets a part on his next episode or show, even though it's literally impossible for him to provide all those jobs. He wants, most sincerely, to make people feel good and feel included. It is utterly against his nature to take something away from someone. If I hadn't been pitying myself so much at that moment, I'd have pitied him with all my heart. As it was, I did pity him, as much as I could squeeze in with my own despair. This was a Wednesday afternoon. He told me we would shoot my last scene on Friday morning. We embraced, he promised there would be something for me on his next show, which he said HBO had picked up that very day (and sure enough, there was a great role for me in it), and then he went his way and I went mine.

I remember stumbling back to my trailer and running into Sean Bridgers, Titus Welliver, and Earl Brown and telling them. Sean and Titus were aghast (Earl told me at a more propitious time that he'd known it was coming). We commiserated for a bit, but while I very much like the tender ministrations of my friends when I'm in distress, I abhor milking it, so I got out of there as fast as I could. I was dazed. Numb.

As I drove home, the emotions let loose, and I began sobbing like an idiot in the car. My emotions were none too deeply repressed in those days anyway, but this was something new to deal with that hit me in a way I can only relate to the loss of a love. The refrain kept playing in my head, "They're going on without me. They'll do season 4 without me." It was very much like some milder variation on losing one's entire family all at once. Which, in a way, it was.

As I drove home to Los Angeles from Newhall, where we shot, I had NPR going on the radio. Once I stopped weeping, I began to hear the story they were playing. It was about a caste of people in India with a very special job. Apparently, one is born into a caste and the occupation that delineates that caste, and there were people who were born and forever limited to one caste and one job. In this case, the job was going through the streets of the town and picking up shit from the gutters. No one else would do this job, and no one in this caste could do any other job. They were stuck. Shitpickers forever, regardless of their intelligence, personality, connections. With that story, I got a bit of a shove back into a sense of perspective. Whatever had happened, whatever I had lost, I will never be an Indian shitpicker. And, remarkably, that helped.

That's not to say I didn't sob some more. The worst emotional losses of my life -- my wife, my father, and my grandmother within 11 weeks in 2004 -- were far worse than this, but I had no reserves left to protect me, and it seemed at the time as though I were experiencing all this on the same level as those prior, greater, losses. It was a tough time.

Friday morning came. My scene in the tent with the dog was the only thing scheduled for the first half of the day. Except for the day-player who would shoot me, no other actors were called to the set until after lunch, by which time I'd probably be done and gone. This meant I probably wouldn't even see any of the cast again, unless I someday dragged myself like a has-been ballplayer down to the dugout to say hi to my former colleagues -- an ignominy I preferred not to experience.

But the crew was there. It was eerie. I hadn't worked the previous day, so coming to work to shoot my death scene was my first real contact with the bulk of the crew since the word got out. There was a somber air about the place like nothing I'd ever experienced on a set. The crew was pretty much equally divided. Half of them sort of stayed away from me, kept their distance in a manner quite unusual. The other half either cried or came pretty near as they interacted with me. I remember Manuel Baca, our prop guy, strapping my gunbelt on around me as he'd done many times, this time with tears rolling down his face. It was touching. But I wasn't in a mood for tears on this day. This day, I was angry. I felt unappreciated and as though not enough effort and thought had been given to ways to avoid this plotline, and I was in little mood for the kindnesses that came my way from every direction. I was pouting, and fiercely so.

We were shooting at a place we'd never been before, on the far western edge of the Melody Ranch lot, quite a way from where anything else had ever been shot on Deadwood. They had my tent set up, though all that mining activity you see behind me in the tent sequence is all blue-screen stuff that was added later. There were no camp, miners, mountains or tents nearby. Just me and the dog.

Damn dog. As I've mentioned before, dogs are a pain. The shot's no good if the dog's not right, no matter how brilliant the humans are, and there was a ton of dialog to deliver to this mutt, who had always to be looking in the correct direction. Here I am, getting ready to perform this massive monologue that I don't quite even understand (since I wasn't aware of the stuff in the prior episode about the guys guarding the schoolhouse), getting ready to play my final moments in this great show, and far too much concentration was going to be expended on whether the dog was looking the right way. I never hated that mutt more. Not that he cared. Or made it easy on me.

Gregg Fienberg was directing, and I really like Gregg and felt very close to him in our work. But he too was avoiding anything personal, just getting the work done as though it were as impersonally typical a day as any. I think that was absolutely right, as the last thing we needed was the guy at the top letting emotions go. We'd all have been a wreck then.

So we set up the first shot, and then something amazing happened, something I've never seen the like of before. As I mentioned, except for me and my murderer (whom I didn't know) and the dog, no cast members were called until around 2 in the afternoon, and it was barely 8:30 am when we were ready to run through the scene for the first time. I sat down in the tent and looked up, and there, beyond the crew, standing in an arc around the perimeter of the set was, as far as I could tell, the entire cast of Deadwood. People who weren't called until 2 pm. People who weren't called at all. People who weren't even in the episode. All of them. Standing there, watching me prepare to do my last living scene as Ellsworth. Boy, if you think I didn't almost lose it then.... It remains one of the greatest acts of kindness and support I've ever had in my career. I will never forget those people.

So we shot the scene. The dog did what he wanted and not what we wanted, and it took a long time. I remember David was there, and he gave me a direction for that last look, the one where I turn and see the gunman and my fate. The funny thing is, I don't remember what he said, except that it was something about resignation and defiance and complete acceptance, and that's what I tried to portray. The same things I was portraying in real life. I felt at the time, and when I looked at the episode again, that I did a very good job of playing that moment, yet writing about it here, I realize that I didn't really have to play it. Resignation, defiance, acceptance...that's what I had to offer at the moment.

I've done a lot of stunt falls in my life, but I really cracked my noggin on the first take of my fall out of the tent. But we still had to do it a couple more times. And then it was over. I said goodbye to everyone, cast and crew alike. There were tears all around. And then I went to my trailer, changed clothes, got into my car, and... backed into a post, denting the rear of my car prodigiously. All in all, a lovely day.

Of course, it wasn't my last day, really. I had still to play the dead Ellsworth in the wagon and in Doc's place. Playing dead is hard. It was somewhat easier in the wagon than in Doc's, because the wagon bouncing covered any breaths I might sneak. But the Doc's office was tough... long takes with my breath held. They did make a fake me in case I didn't look dead enough, and I think it's the fake Ellsworth in the close-ups, since my own hairline hadn't receded as far as the one on the dummy. But I'm not certain.

The wagon stuff was hard, as it was hot and bright. I never realized the level of the acting that was going on until I saw the show, because my eyes were closed to the reactions of Molly, Dayton, Paula, and others. I don't remember much about the day other than its physical difficulties. But sometime later, the costume guys presented me with a framed photo of me lying dead in the wagon as they stood around it shading my face with umbrellas.

And that was it for me and Deadwood. Right around that time, I got an offer to do a guest shot on a new show called Supernatural, and David said I could go do it, but not to shave, because in the next episode, he was planning a dream sequence in which Sofia gets to say goodbye to Ellsworth and touch his beard one last time. That scene got cut for time, but it meant that I had a beard when I reported to work on Supernatural, which in turn meant that I've still got one seven years later, as my time on Supernatural has lingered all those years. But in my mind, I think nothing I've ever done will linger longer than the gift I was given of Whitney Ellsworth and Deadwood, and of the people who toiled alongside me.

Jim Beaver
Click to expand...
 
C

Cipherr

Member
Thanks for posting that. Im wondering if thats it and it was a quote rather than a video
KuGsj.gif
. I feel like I saw him say it in motion, but I'm getting old, maybe I read it. Thanks a ton for the link!
 
M

Matticers

Member
I also wish it was a little miniseries instead and I question how much they can tie up in an 90 minutes to 2 hours but whatever. I'll gladly take it.

Some of them will look weird due to the time that has passed but I can easily live with that. I just hope it's not too jarring.
 
J

Jonm1010

Banned
Matticers said:
I also wish it was a little miniseries instead and I question how much they can tie up in an 90 minutes to 2 hours but whatever. I'll gladly take it.

Some of them will look weird due to the time that has passed but I can easily live with that. I just hope it's not too jarring.
Click to expand...

Im secretly hoping this will be like a reversal of the heartbreak the first go round.

Where it went from a final season to a shortened season to movies to nothing. Im hoping once Milch gets going he sees the need to make this a longer affair. So instead of a movie we get a nice little miniseries send off.
 
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