Living Inside ‘The Canyons’

For an unreleased, unseen film with a tiny budget,The Canyons has attracted an enormous amount of publicity. It’s reportedly a sex-filled noir-ish melodrama set in LA, but that’s about all we know, since it hasn’t come out yet—in fact, it hasn’t even been shown at any festivals. Sundance rejected it, and South by Southwest not only rejected it, a “festival insider” told the Hollywood Reporter that the film had “an ugliness and a deadness to it.” Ouch. I haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen it. So why has so much been written about it? 

Well for one thing, The Canyons was directed by the legendary Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, co-wroteRaging Bull, and directed movies like American Gigolo and Affliciton, both of which he also wrote. The film also garnered headlines for being written by iconic American Psycho and Less than Zero author Bret Easton Ellis, known more recently as one of the most cantankerous bastards on Twitter. And Ellis took great pains to make sure the film featured pornographic movie star James Deen in his first “mainstream” (for lack of a better word) role.

VICE: Before working on The Canyons, you two had another project on deck, a shark thriller. I am a sucker for shark movies—even shitty ones—so a Bret Easton Ellis-penned shark flick sounds like a dream.
Braxton Pope: It was called Bait, and it was a revenge movie about a disaffected kid, a sociopath who endures a kind of humiliation on the beach and through a series of events, and in a very cunning way, he ends up on this charter boat with the kids who humiliated him. They’re in the open water and he pulls up the ladder and prevents them from coming back on the boat, and he chums the water. It was a Lionsgate movie and there was a Spanish financier. We were very close to shooting it, then the finances imploded at the last minute. It was an exercise in total frustration and wasted time. That’s what sparked the idea to create something that we could self-finance.

Bret Easton Ellis: Part of the reason we made The Canyons was the frustration of working for a studio like Lionsgate and trying to get the shark movie made and having that fall through. Everyone from Ed Burns to the Polish brothers are rethinking the model these days.

Is that what Paul Schrader meant when he said, in the Times article, “The American market is just tapped out”?
Pope: The types of movie Schrader was known for in the 70s and 80s wouldn’t get financed by the studios. Dramas or character pieces—those movies are nearly extinct at the studio level today. There’s been a transition toward spectacle movies with budgets of $100-million-plus, Michael Bay and superhero movies, heavy CG movies. Lionsgate is looking for big franchise properties that will generate huge revenue, mass-market films. And typically the movies I put together tend to be smaller, with filmmakers like Schrader, or Gaspar Noé.

Read the whole interview

AMPHETAMINE LOGIC: BLONDE ON (VERY FAMOUS) BLONDE - Cat Marnell

It’s the Purple Magazine party during Fashion Week and I’m at a booth with my friends Chrissie Miller and Frankie Inglese.

And then there’s Lindsay Lohan.

“You guys are exactly alike,” our mutual friends have told me over and over again. And so when she’s in town, I—or perhaps that moron, Amphetamine Logic—keeps expecting us to get along.

We sure do look alike: a couple of Bony Joanies in the club, our Balenciagas full of prescription bottles that rattle like maracas. We’ve both got hair so white-blonde it glows in the dark. She’s wearing heavy black eye makeup—photo-shoot makeup—ubiquitous false lashes, darling, and of course so am I.

And, then there’s the permeating toxicity that we wear like heavy clouds of perfume—to keep the boys away and all. (“I never have boyfriends either,” I’d like to imagine our giggly girl talk going, were we ever to become—HA—friends, as my other female friends actually are friends with her. “My dad is totally, like, away abusive pathological narcissist mega-asshole who terrorized my whole family until I left home at 15 just like you did, too.”)

Am I wrong? I don’t think so. And we’ve got those mutual friends, so… Lindsay, you know I sort of know all about it.

We’ve both been black inside for a very long time, you see. Or, to look at it another way, we’ve been sealed off from the light.

When’s the last time you saw joy on Lindsay Lohan’s face in a magazine?

If you know me, when’s the last time you saw joy on mine?

There’s a “pinched amphetamine expression,” as doctors call it, that I’ll explain more to you in another column—but let’s get back to Le Bain.

It was recently reported in the tabloids that Lindsay claimed she doesn’t even drink anymore, and I guess I… vaguely believed this. I mean, at this point in my own life, I take so much amphetamine that I just sip one glass of champagne per hour, and that’s not drinking, really.
But now, as I’m sitting next to her and even trying not to watch her, doubt is creeping in. She is a fucking mess.

You just can’t help but see it.