A riveting singer and hit-maker ("Splish Splash," "Beyond the Sea," "Mack the Knife") who worshipped Elvis and the Beatles but found his biggest success as a Sinatra-style crooner, Darin went through all kinds of changes and transportations before his death at age 37. He had a weak ticker all his life and knew it, and went for the Pabst Blue Ribbon gusto all the way.

Like all gifted nutters, Darin was given to obnoxious, egocentric behavior. For some reason I've always remembered his out-front 1967 affair with Diane Hartford, wife of millionaire Huntington Hartford, which ended his seven year-old marriage to actress Sandra Dee.

But he was also a full-on experimenter. He once spoke on the Johnny Carson show in '68 about having had a life-changing religious experience, and thereafter sang a couple of tunes with a newly formed blues-rock band. A sharp departure from his trench-coat crooner rep, but that was Darin for you...a total go-for-broker.

Spacey plays Darin and does his own singing in the film. He's apparently even planning some kind of city-to-city concert tour, in which he'll sing a few Darin tunes, to plug the film. And we've all read how he wanted to do SEA for a long time, and had to struggle to find funding, and how he regards it as a labor of love.

But how does a moviegoer buy a 44 year-old actor playing a guy in his mid 20s to mid 30s? (Born in 1937, Darin's peak years were the late '50s to mid '60s.) And especially the chapter when, at the age of 23 in 1960, Darin romances and marries the 16 (or was it 17?) year-old Dee, played in the film by the 21 year-old Kate Bosworth?

Here's how, according to what I'm hearing. Darin's life is told through a letter he writes to his daughter near the end of his life, when he can feel it coming. The idea, apparently, is that he's revisiting his life from this perspective, and in a manner of speaking relives it physically as a 37 year-old. Or something along these lines.

However successful this device may or may not be, at least it's a stab at getting around the problem.

BEYOND THE SEA reportedly has some big musical numbers (one on the TV set of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand"). The costars are John Goodman, Brenda Blethyn, Greta Scacchi, Bob Hoskins, and Caroline Aaron.

The script is by Paul Attanasio, Lorenzo Carcaterra, Jeffrey Meek and James Toback. It's been in development forever. Director Barry Levinson tried to get funding for Toback's version way eight or nine years ago.

A digital version of SEA will be shown in Toronto. The post-production process, which is happening in Spacey's home town of London these days, won't be delivering a celluloid print until later on. And there won't be any pre-festival screenings in Los Angeles either, so I'm shit out of luck since I'm too broke to afford the 10-day Toronto thing this year. My heart is breaking as I write this.

Spacey has written an article about the film for the September-October issue of AARP magazine.

"What's interesting about Bobby is, you say 'Bobby Darin' to younger people they'll cock their heads, but then you sing four bars of 'Splish Splash' or 'Mack the Knife' and they go, 'Oh! Bobby Darin!'

"Still, it was very difficult to get the movie made because the American movie studios hold this odd belief that people will go to see biographical movies only about people they already know. So I would pitch the film and then hear: 'Yeah, but how many people are gonna know who Bobby Darin is?' That won't be a problem for an older generation, but this is the type of resistance one faces in attempting to do a film also driven by music.

"I would answer these concerns with, 'Whoever heard of Forrest Gump? Just pretend Bobby's fictional!' Ultimately, I couldn't make the movie in the United States. I couldn't raise the money. I [finally] found the funding in the United Kingdom and Germany. We started shooting in Berlin last November.

The piece is partly about how his late mother, a major Darin fan, always urged him to make the biopic, and how her death inspired him to push it through.

"Within a couple of weeks after my mother passed, though, I said, 'All right. I'm going to try to see this through,'"he writes. "And during the entire process of making the movie, I felt my mother looking over us. No matter what we did, she made it work.

"In November and December and January, Berlin is not known for its fantastic weather. But whenever we had to shoot outside, every time, the weather was beautiful. Then we went inside and it poured rain again. We'd go out and it would be beautiful. I swear, I really felt her presence. She was our weather god."

I'm sorry, but this passage makes me nervous. I can't say why; I just don't like the idea. And I hope to hell that Spacey's directing skills have evolved since his last film, ALBINO ALLIGATOR.

Burn

Bryce Dallas Howard is getting great notices off M. Might Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE, but the movie is taking it in the neck. Could this be the end of M. Night Shyamalan as we've known him since THE SIXTH SENSE? Is he going to have to get a new game?

I would have written down my own impressions, but Disney publicity said they couldn't fit me into last Tuesday's all-media screening. I'll pop something into next Wednesday's column, I guess...or maybe I won't. I was going to go to a screening last night, but a guy who went Tuesday told me some people in the audience were booing at the end. And it got panned yesterday by several critics I respect.

My interest first began to ebb when a critic friend wrote me the following a couple of weeks ago:

"Like you, I adored SIGNS," he began, "but this one is terminal. It's a 'Twilight Zone' episode (and a weak one at that) stretched out to feature length. There's no 'there' there, aside from Bryce Dallas Howard's performance.

"Like UNBREAKABLE it does have its moments. But even these are, for the most part, anti-climactic and underwhelming. This is easily Night's weakest film since he broke big. It's the first he's made that leaves you feeling like you got burned.

"I'm being incredibly vague on purpose here, since even hinting at the movie's big twist would render it unwatchable. I can't imagine ever sitting through it again, not because it's so wretched, but because it's all so thin and dull. The characters barely register. The romance doesn't work.

"Brendan Gleeson and Sigourney Weaver have absolutely nothing to do, and you don't feel anything for anyone in this movie (except for the blind girl played by Howard). And William Hurt has become The Most Boring American Actor Working In Movies Today. In every one of his scenes, I had to fight off a sudden urge to nap.

"I suspect this is going to be the last time Night uses the gotcha-ending formula for a while. He's been drawing from that well too many times, and it shows."

VARIETY's Brian Lowry echoed this when he wrote that "the seams on [Shyamalan's] fastball are showing. And even if viewers can't anticipate every twist and turn, many will find themselves impatient to get there only to be let down upon reaching their destination."

Lowry also called it "a watchable film for awhile, [but one] that unravels in a muddled last act [that's] likely to send many opening-weekend filmgoers home head-scratching and grumbling, both ominous in regard to box-office longevity."

Gallo Man

I'm one of the relatively few journos who genuinely likes and admires Vincent Gallo. I've said this a couple of times in print before, but every time I talk with him it feels a bit like, "Yeah, hi...who are you again?"

I thought Gallo's BUFFALO 66 was an above average film about blue-collar weirdness, and a labor of love in several formidable ways. I feel that his latest film, THE BROWN BUNNY (Wellspring, August 27th), is a far better piece about loss and grief than Todd Louiso's LOVE LIZA. And I admire Gallo's willingness to say any impudent thing that comes into his mind.

He's fearless, unblinking...the toughest hard-core malcontent in the film industry.

THE BROWN BUNNY (Wellspring) is opening August 27th. It's an art film in a slightly dreary sense, but it's honest, open, hurting. It never leaves you alone. The emotions of the lead character, Bud Clay, are apparent in every frame. And it has a terrific ending, and I'm not just talking about the blow job.

I tried doing a phoner with Gallo a couple of weeks ago. He was calling from New York on his cell phone. He was walking around downtown somewhere. The reception was okay, but Gallo talks really fast and is always going off-topic and it's difficult to keep up when you're talking and typing and trying to steer him back to the question.

BUNNY "only works if you go into the film with an open mind," he says. "If you go into it waiting to see a blow job, you're not getting the journey. I certainly didn't endure a three and a half year struggle to get it made just to receive fellatio [on camera]."

I'm not going to reveal the big payoff, but the sex scene he's referring to is an honest bit. It's an indicator of where Bud is truly coming from in terms in terms of his longing for his departed girlfriend, Daisy (Chloe Seivgny). When guys think about women they're desperate for, sexual fantasies are never far off. And Bud's case is especially severe.

"That's the whole point," Gallo says. "There's so much he's feeling...guilt, misjudgement ...he has to block it out and the same time touch it with sexual fantasy." Gallo said a lot more than this, but I couldn't type fast enough.

"I put a lot of energy into [my] movies, to make the movie the best that I can. It doesn't matter if the film has an initial resistance. I was only disappointed in the prejudice and the bias..." He was speaking of the reactions that came out of the '03 Cannes showing.

"I don't make a living off movies," Gallo said a few minutes later. "I don't direct films to have a career. I've never been paid a salary that would be deemed a living from my film work. I make money doing a hundred different things. I mean, if I buy a house because I love the architect, and two years later the house sells for a lot more..." He went on a bit about this.

"I've had four film offers since BUFFFALO 66. I haven't had a decent film offer [in a long while]. I have never been approached... mainstream casting directors avoid me like the plague.

"I'm a pro, I don't drink, I don't get high, I'm on the set 40 minutes early, and I'm the only one who knows my lines. I've had some issues with [people in] hair, makeup and wardrobe...I'm exacting, okay. I can be that."

I said I noticed in June that THE BROWN BUNNY was playing in a tiny theatre inside a Left Bank plex in Paris, and that it seemed somehow underwhelming to me. He used this comment to launch into a slight tirade against the French distributor, Mars.

"I don't have good relationship with French business men," he said. "It played well there, and BUFFALO 66 played well there. I was in Paris doing interviews for [BUNNY], and I never met anyone from the distribution company, and I never had a personal handshake from anyone with that company."

I asked him about director Abel Ferrara, for whom Gallo played a criminal type in THE FUNERAL. Gallo's next gig will be in Ferrara's MARY, which is about a director making a film about Jesus. Interesting, I said. Inspired by Mel Gibson and THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST? "The character isn't that far gone," said Gallo.

I told him that my son Jett, who's seen Gallo in a couple of films, had difficulty accepting that Gallo is a conservative. He said he doesn't fit the mold.

"I can say this -- I'm not a provocateur," Gallo said. "I'm not a reactionary but.....I'm a radical person, and I believe that all radical positions come from a conservative base. I can't think of a liberal who's ever had a truly strong position about anything.

"I'm an anti-socialist. I'm an elitist. I'm an elitist when it comes to legislation. I shit on special interests. I shit on anyone who classifies himself as a minority. Tell your son I'm extremely open-minded. I promise you I'm more radical than 99% of the people who call themselves liberals. And I'm more open-minded than those conservative queers...."

He meant the Log Cabin Republicans, but I didn't ask why he was beating up on them in particular. Not that it matters. Gallo will always be Gallo, and that's agreeable.

Angels Fear to Tread

Scott Foundas' piece in last Sunday's NEW YORK TIMES about Thom Andersen's LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, a brilliant 169 minute doc about movie-generated images of this great rancid city over the past few decades, was partly intended to plug the current run at the Film Forum (7.28 to 8.10)....fine. But a piece of it gave me a start.

Not the announcement that Andersen's film has yet to find a distributor (although this is a shame), but that it hasn't even found a commercial booking in its namesake city.

But now it has. For a day, at least. LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF will play September 9 at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian theatre. Film buffs, take notice. There is also a plan to give it a week-long booking at the Steven Spielberg screening facility within the Egyptian, sometime soon after the 9.9 showing. Submarine Entertainment's Josh Braun, the film's rep, is hoping the Film Forum booking will lead to other things.

Andersen's film would be an ideal DVD opportunity for the Criterion Collection, which specializes in high-end art films and has an esoteric fan base that would pounce on LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF like a kitten on a rolling marble.

I saw Andersen's film at the Toronto Film Festival last September. I went in thinking I'd duck out somewhere around the halfway point to make another screening, but it was so pungent and stimulating in a kind of smarty-pants Jean Luc Godard way that I saw the whole thing.

The Film Forum's appreciation says that LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF is "a movie for anyone who loves (or hates) Los Angeles and who wonders what they may have missed by not spending more hours in the dark." I'm a hater, but also on some hard-to-process level a lover....or at least a perverse visual admirer.

I loved the line in Andersen's film that says, "People who hate Los Angeles love POINT BLANK." And yet every time I see this classic John Boorman gangster pic I can feel an odd internal succumbing to the bleachy grotesque splendor of it all.

Likewise, Michael Mann's COLLATERAL, which I saw for a second time two days ago, has made me consider Los Angeles in slightly more positive ways. It's such a rich and pulsing atmosphere trip that some kind of mention in LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF seems warranted. Mann may not actually "love" L.A. any more than I do, but his film is full of affection for the glowing nocturnal funk aspects, and in this respect I have to say that I'm glad.

Harvey Action

There's a well-founded (I'm told) rumor that Miramax topper Harvey Weinstein has arranged for about $1 billlion in financing from an unnamed entitity, to keep Miramax flush and rolling without the bother of Disney's picky-sticky fingers.

He may cut a distrib deal with Disney or he may go with someone else to distrib...but the $1 billion financing deal is "in place," I'm told.

Finding another arrangement outside of Disney ownership is thought to be attractive for Miramax in two ways -- financial flexibility and a greater freedom to pursue this or that movie-subject. And it's presumed some parties are interested in helping Miramax strike out on its own away from Disney, which bought the company in the mid '90s.

But Miramax spokesperson Matthew Hiltzik said "it's premature to say [Weinstein] has all his financing together," "I don't want you to jump the gun," and "I have no idea how this thing is ultimately going to end."

I'm not hearing the $1 billion deal is done and "together." All I'm hearing is that it's "in place."

The previous rumor was that Harvey might go off on his own with his own financing for Miramax, and that Dimension's Bob Weinstein would stay at Disney because Dimension has always been more of a money machine without the mucky-muck.

The billion-dollar credit thing is "a guarded secret," I've been told. "Whether he goes to Disney for a distrib output deal or to somebody else...is not finalized. It's all speculation."

Some are saying that whatever his financing, Harvey can't stay at Miramax unless he mends fences with Disney, since Miramax belongs to Disney and they've shown no interest in selling. And so, the thinking goes, Harvey would have to start his own label or buy an existing one.

Disney owns the name Miramax and they own the library. They don't own Harvey's future. Obviously if they can bury the hatchet with Pixar after all that acrimony they can cut a 10% distrib servicing deal with Miramax and give Harvey the freedom to go off and finance his own slate.

Da Bomb

This is a very small thing, but I'll bet others have noticed this from time to time. You're at a party and talking to someone a bit older, and you'll lean in to hear more clearly, and you're about six or eight inches away, and it hits you. It's bad. It's not good.

You need to step back a bit but you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so you decide to hang in for a couple of minutes, not really listening and waiting for a chance to slip away. And those two minutes always feel like a lot longer.

A very famous older guy came to a film class that I moderated six or seven years ago in Woodland Hills. He was a huge hit and everyone loved him, etc. But an actor friend who spoke to him for a few minutes after it ended called me the next day and said, "His breath stinks."

I used to think about this a lot when I was 14 or 15 and just starting to get going with girls. I used to bring toothpaste and a toothbrush to school. Then I got going in life and I stopped thinking about it. But it's back now and it's serious. I'm in junior high again. I don't know what the answer is. I'm just thinking out loud. All I know is, it's an issue again, and my attitude about parties is starting to be affected.

Affleck in Boston

"Glad to see someone else caught Ben Affleck on 'Hardball.' At first, it seemed the host and the panelists were condescending to him, or least bemused simply because he could drop polysyllables into his conversation. Funnily enough, however, they appeared visibly impressed as the conversation continued. Good for Ben. Good for MSNBC (which has, in 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann,' the best hour-long news show on TV)." -- Joe Leydon

"Are you watching this? Ben Affleck is on CNN now from Boston, debating with the old farts of 'Crossfire,' and he is holding his own incredibly! I mean, he is smart, thinks on his feet, and gets right to it. It makes you wonder if this guy has another career in him." -- Drew Kerr

This Land

"'This Land' is hilarious. But from your comments about Kerry ('stand-up Vietnam record') I wonder if you get that they are lampooning Kerry's Purple Hearts as well as his record as a waffler.

"When you get right down to it, I think they skewered both candidates fairly. I wonder if both Kerry and Bush have seen 'This Land,' and I wonder how they reacted to it.

My favorite part wasn't from either candidate. I laughed out loud at work when I saw Bubba in arms with a babe saying, 'What'd I do?' when Hillary slapped him. Classic!" -- Larry Brown

Wells to Brown: I get the gag, but they're not lampooning Kerry's Purple Heart medals. How can you make fun of someone getting wounded? It happened. He got hurt. And he's let that be known. That's funny?

"In Wedneday's column you asked people to write in and complain if 'This Land' didn't make them laugh out loud. So I'm writing and complaining.

"Maybe my expectations were too high but I was hoping for something a little more clever. 'This Land' wallows in the same tired stereotypes we've been getting for years from Leno, Letterman and their ilk. Bush is dumb. Liberals waffle. Clinton likes the ladies. Yawn...nothing new here." -- Mike Scholtz, Duluth, Minnesota.