A promo trailer for Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles showed up online yesterday and seems entertaining enough and with Zac Efron should be able to draw a few wandering pop culture eyes and for those of you that remember Claire Danes, well, she’s in it too. The film made the festival circuit last year, but has yet to be picked up for distribution, which seems odd considering it has a wildly out-of-place quote from Roger Ebert attached to it:
Possibly the best movie about the theatre I’ve ever seen.
Strangely enough, I can’t find that quote anywhere online, and considering the number of fantastic films about the theatre I have a hard time believing Ebert would rush to such a judgment. Take All About Eve for example, it’s on Ebert’s greatest films list. I would like to ask him to compare the two and see if he still thinks Me and Orson Welles is still “possibly” the best, and if so, why isn’t anyone picking it up for distribution? I would also throw 42nd Street in the mix as a personal close runner-up.
Nevertheless,
you’re here to check out a trailer for a film you may have to wait for some time to see. It’s set in 1937, and centers on a high school student (Efron) who, while strolling the streets of New York, happens upon the yet-to-open Mercury Theatre and is noticed by its mercurial founder, Orson Welles (Christian McKay). The man lands a bit part in “Julius Caesar,” the production that catapulted Welles to the top, and spends the next week learning about life and love.
Obviously, if that quote isn’t accurate it wouldn’t be the first time. Hell, just yesterday I saw a quote on a press release for a direct-to-DVD animated film called Donkey X that said, “…cinema’s finest computer animation to date” – Variety. I wondered what the “…” was replacing and it just so happens the full quote reads, “A lively but clumsy comic retelling of the Cervantes classic, pic reps Spanish cinema’s finest computer animation to date, but its humdrum script leaves it flailing at windmills.” Hmmmm… looks better the other way eh?
