São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

São Paulo, Brazil
Niemeyer’s bleeding open hand is the somber centerpiece of the Monument to Latin America.

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São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

São Paulo, Brazil’s economic engine—a metropolis of more than 19 million—is South America’s biggest city and among the largest on earth. It is a sprawling concrete jungle in some respects, but its reputation for artistry and design shines through in everything from galleries and museums to cuisine and hotels.

One of the city’s most recognizable landmarks is the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), a glass-and-concrete behemoth perched on four red pillars on the grand Avenida Paulista. In addition to permanent exhibits of 14th- to 20th-century pieces by the likes of Raphael, Matisse, and Dalí, MASP shows work by Brazilian artists. More Brazilian art from the 19th and 20th centuries is set against beautifully simple brick walls in another of São Paulo’s famed art museums, the Pinacoteca do Estado, housed in a building that dates to 1900 and is surrounded by the verdant gardens of Jardim da Luz. Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil’s most famous architect and the force behind the city of Brasília , created a more modern setting for the Monument to Latin America complex, which contains a small art gallery and an iconic concrete sculpture of a giant hand stained with a bloodred map of Latin America.

São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

In October and November of even-numbered years, São Paulo becomes a stage for one of the most important art expositions in the Americas: the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, which takes place in a Niemeyer-designed building set in the massive Parque do Ibirapuera. It is the permanent home of the Museu de Arte Contemporánea (MAC), a contemporary art gallery. Also in Ibirapuera Park is the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), which displays local and international contemporary art, and the white-domed OCA Pavilion, another stunning Niemeyer creation, which hosts rotating exhibits and music and dance performances.

São Paulo’s boutique hotels are sure to impress design-conscious visitors. Located near Ibirapuera Park is Hotel Unique, easily the city’s most architecturally ambitious hotel. Shaped like a gigantic slice of watermelon, the structure houses 95 sleek white-on-white rooms, two trendy bars, and a popular restaurant-with-a-view. In the heart of the upscale Jardins district is the chic Emiliano, with 19 spacious suites distinguished by original artwork and stylish décor, and the Fasano, an outpost of the local family-owned brand that has expanded from fine dining to include sublime, streamlined hotels. Just off busy Avenida Paulista, the 80-room L’Hotel is the most elegant of the city’s boutique options, appealing for its traditional design and its museum-quality antiques.

São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

MASP: Tel 55/11-3251-5644; http://www.masp.art.br. Pinacoteca do Estado: Tel 55/113324-1000; http://www.pinacoteca.org.br. MAC: Tel 55/11-3091-3039; http://www.mac.usp.br. MAM: Tel 55/11-5085-1300; http://www.mam.org.br. Pavilhõ da Bienal de Arte: Tel 55/11-5576-7600; http://bienal.org.br. Hotel Unique: Tel 55/113055-4710; http://www.unique.com.br. Cost: from $450. Emiliano: Tel 55/11-3069-4369; http://www.emiliano.com.br. Cost: from $850. Fasano: Tel 55/11-3896-4000; http://www.fasano.com.br. Cost: from $800. L’Hotel: Tel 55/11-2183-0500; http://www.portobay.com. Cost: from $300.

Groundbreaking Cuisine from Brazil and Beyond
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São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

São Paulo, Brazil
Dining is a serious pastime for paulistas, and they stay well informed about the best places to savor the countless cuisines in this diverse metropolis. To understand firsthand something of the local bounty, start by visiting the Mercado Municipal, which is set in a 1928 neo-Baroque building. More than 300 stalls overflow with fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and other goods. Sample the caju (cashew apple), maracuja (passion fruit), or pitaya (dragon fruit), then stop at the Hocca Bar, where patrons line up for bolinhos de bacalhau (cod-filled croquettes).

Ponte Estaiada

There’s a galaxy of superb restaurants in São Paulo, but many gourmands agree that D.O.M. is the best in Brazil. (D.O.M. is an acronym for Domus Optimus Maximus, a Latin phrase asserting that this is the optimum, maximum dining experience.) Here, groundbreaking celebrity chef Alex Atala blends classic French elements with exotic Amazonian ingredients: Foie gras is paired perfectly with crispy wild rice, and breaded oysters are enhanced with tapioca marinade. Atala is also the mastermind behind Dalva e Dito, across the street, a paean to simple Brazilian fare, such as the classic prato feito of rice, beans, and meat.

At Brasil a Gosto, chef Ana Luiza Trajano does a creative take on traditional comfort food from Brazil’s backwaters, while at Mocotó, cow’s-foot soup and other time-honored specialties from northeastern Brazil are prepared with modern panache under the watchful eye of rising chef Rodrigo Oliveira. Celebrities are frequent guests at Maní, claiming seats in either the garden or dining room to sample the panethnic creations of forward-thinking chef Helena Rizzo.

Figueira Rubaiyat is known as much for the gnarled trunk of a magnificent old fig tree that reaches skyward from its front patio as for its cuisine, the highlights of which are meat from the owner’s ranch, as well as a rich, traditional paella and simply prepared fish-of-the-day. The finest choice for Italian cuisine in the city is the elegant, uberfashionable Fasano, in the hotel of the same name .

Restaurants that serve contemporary cuisine open and close in the blink of an eye in São Paulo. But Carlota has thrived since the 1990s thanks to Chef Carla Pernambuco’s talent for reinvention. Set in an old brick pousada, the restaurant features such globe-spanning dishes as crispy shrimp risotto with ham and sweet pepper chutney.

Mercado Municipal: Tel 55/11-3229-7054; http://www.oportaldomercadao.com.br. D.O.M.: Tel 55/11-3088-0761; http://www.domrestaurante.com.br. Cost: dinner $95. Dalva e Dito: Tel 55/11-3068-4444; http://www.dalvaedito.com.br. Cost: dinner $50. Brasil a Gosto: Tel 55/113086-3565; http://www.brasilagosto.com.br. Cost: dinner $35. Mocotó: Tel 55/11-2951-3056; http://www.mocoto.com.br. Cost: lunch $30. Maní: Tel 55/11-3085-4148; http://www.manimanioca.com.br. Cost: dinner $45. Figueira Rubaiyat: Tel 55/11-3087-1399; http://www.rubaiyat.com.br. Cost: lunch $40. Fasano: Tel 55/11-3062-4000; http://www.fasano.com.br. Cost: dinner $100. Carlota: Tel 55/11-3663-0911; http://www.carlota.com.br. Cost: dinner $35.

At Home with Internationally Acclaimed Vintners

São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest

São Paulo’s Screenplay Contest
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‘Eisenstein in Guanajuato’: Russian filmmaker finds love in the New World

Peter Greenaway’s movie explores the story of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck), left, losing his virginity to guide Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti) while working in Mexico. (Strand Releasing)

The premise of “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” is simple. As director Peter Greenaway (“The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover”) lays it out in the film’s production notes, he had long been intrigued by a mystery surrounding the pioneering Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948): Why is it that Eisenstein’s great early films — “Strike,” “Battleship Potemkin” and “October: Ten Days That Shook the World,” all from the 1920s — are so unlike the great films of his later years: “Alexander Nevsky” (1938); “Ivan the Terrible” (1945); and “The Boyar’s Plot,” also known as “Ivan the Terrible, Part II” (released posthumously in 1958)? All six films, as Greenaway puts it, possess cinematic intelligence, but the latter three express far greater empathy and emotional maturity.

The answer, as expressed in Greenaway’s highly speculative yet theoretically plausible film, is that Eisenstein — while working in Mexico in 1931 shooting a never-completed movie — lost his virginity during a passionate affair with his guide, Palomino Cañedo, a married father of two. Greenaway is not the first to argue that Eisenstein had homosexual tendencies, although he did marry the writer and filmmaker Vera Atasheva in 1934, and they remained together until his death. Several of Eisenstein’s actual erotic doodles appear in “Guanajuato,” and they are what might be euphemistically described as polymorphous, focusing on men, women and, at times, animals.

But plausible does not necessarily mean convincing. The Finnish actor in the title role, Elmer Bäck, makes for a gratingly clownish Sergei. “I am a caricature,” he crows, in an exaggerated Russian accent. In many scenes, including one with the wife of his financial backer, Upton Sinclair, we are treated to lingering shots of Sergei’s naked backside (which are matched only by the film’s frank approach to full-frontal nudity). It seems like something in the Mexican air or water makes Eisenstein go so suddenly free-love hippie.

As “Guanajuato” would have it, it’s more likely Palomino’s smoldering good looks. Or maybe it’s his willingness to listen to Sergei endlessly expound on sex, death and filmmaking as Greenaway’s camera orbits the main characters, in almost literally nausea-inducing repetition. The handsome Luis Alberti, who plays Palomino, would be hard for many to resist. But as for what Palomino sees in the dumpy, logorrheic Russian director with a cloud of hair like Larry Fine of the Three Stooges is inexplicable.

Much has been made of the fact that Greenaway, who also wrote the screenplay, has used some of Eisenstein’s own words as dialogue. But because they come from the director’s writings, they don’t sound like extemporaneous spoken conversation between real human beings, which makes for a listening experience that is not just intellectually challenging but emotionally inauthentic.

 

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As for that film that Sergei is supposedly working on in Guanajuato — some 250 miles of footage was actually shot, but never made available for Eisenstein to edit after he returned to Moscow — we’re shown precious little moviemaking. Sergei mostly jawbones, ad infinitum, and visits such morbidly photogenic tourist sites as Guanajuato’s Museum of Mummies.

Greenaway, on the other hand, employs an off-puttingly ostentatious style of filmmaking that overuses such techniques as split screen and a form of digital manipulation that distorts scenery like a funhouse mirror.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

Unrated. At Angelika Pop-Up at Union Market. Contains crude language, graphic sex and frequent nudity. In English and some Spanish with subtitles. 105 minutes.

Epcot Remembering Body Wars

Epcot Remembering Body Wars

Unproduced Screenplays of Walt Disney

The Star Tours and Body Wars attractions use a simulator (Rediffusion ATLAS-Advanced Technology Leisure Application Simulator) that consists of a cabin supported by six servo actuators (“legs”).

The actuators are powered hydraulically and driven automatically using electrical drive signals received from a free-standing motion-control cabinet. The actuators provide “six degrees of freedom movement” so the cabin can be moved in planes representing heave, surge, and sway, and in axes representing pitch, roll, and yaw, independently or in any combination.

In fact, the success of Star Tours in 1987 inspired the Imagineers to try developing an “inner space” attraction of a miniaturized submarine-like probe journeying through a patient’s body just like in the film Fantastic Voyage (1966) for the Wonders of Life pavilion at Epcot in 1989.

The new attraction was called Body Wars most likely because WDW guests called Star Tours the Star Wars ride, or just Star Wars.

The probe’s captain, Jack Braddock (Tim Matheson from Animal House), set out on a fairly routine medical mission with a crew of civilian observers accompanying him. The submarine and crew were miniaturized by a “particle reducer” to the size of a single cell and beamed inside a human body to rendezvous with Dr. Cynthia Lair (Elisabeth Shue, who starred in Disney’s Adventures in Babysitting), an immunologist who had also been miniaturized to study the body’s response to a splinter lodged beneath the skin.

Unfortunately, the mission becomes a high-speed race against time when Dr. Lair is swept from the splinter site into the rush of the bloodstream.

Through the pounding chambers of the patient’s heart and through the lungs’ gale-force winds, the ship rode the body’s current in an effort to rescue Dr. Lair. Even after she was safely on board, there are still problems when the ship loses power and heads toward the brain in search of emergency power and escape.

The film was directed by Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy who had recently finished directing Touchstone’s Three Men and a Baby (1987). With anatomical images produced by computer graphics and special effects film techniques, it was a remarkably realistic experience. Nimoy said:

Even though Body Wars is the shortest film I’ve ever directed, it presented a new set of challenges. We had to take into account that the film will be shown inside a moving theater—the simulator. So, in order to intensify the sense of motion, we built a set that actually moves, and rocked it during filming to match the pitching and rolling of the simulator.

When the ride was being programmed, an Imagineer watched the film repeatedly while moving a computer joystick to indicate movement and to synchronize the ride and the film.

Since the story of the attraction was that guests were in the bloodstream, the Imagineers programmed in movement to mimic the beat of a pulse. That additional movement may be the one that unsettled countless guests who had survived a similar experience on Star Tours without any ill effects.

Some Disney Imagineers felt that it was just the images of being inside a human body with all the yucky “blood and guts” that generated feelings of unease.

The attraction closed when the Wonders of Life Pavilion closed on January 1, 2007. The simulators were eventually stripped for parts for the Star Tours attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, so it would be difficult for Body Wars to once again be brought back to life and rush through the circulatory and respiratory systems and make guests queasy.

The great killer of stories: coincidence.

The great killer of stories: coincidence.

Back at Tip #61 we met the dreaded deus ex machina, something to be avoided at all costs. But that little monster has a cousin, and it can kill your story, too, albeit a bit more slowly.

Coincidence happens all the time in real life. But it should never happen in your novel or screenplay, especially if it provides convenient and unexpected assistance to a character or to the revelation of story points.

In the recent remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 (spoiler alert here), hero Denzel Washington has escaped the clutches of villain John Travolta during a harrowing chase through the subway tunnels of Manhattan. Good stuff, fun to watch. Travolta decides to escape, clutching a few million dollars of ransom money and a significant bomb in his hands, the latter destined for ignition somewhere crowded in the city. Denzel has no idea where he is within a maze of dark tunnels, and they’ve been separated long enough for the distance between them to be discouraging.

So what happens? Denzel decides to climb up a ladder and emerge onto the street. Somewhere in mid-town at rush hour. And just as he does… guess what? Denzel looks up to see, a mere fifteen feet away, Travolta getting into a taxi.

The critics panned the movie. Not because it sucked, but because there were a handful of eye-rollers just like that used to engineer the supposedly exciting end chase sequence.

Don’t go there. Or it won’t be a coincidence that your story gets rejected.