Shop Talk
I’m really just throwing this up here as a test of Wordpress / Tumblr interoperability (ooooh) and how it handles things besides metric tons of unedited text (oooooooh). But if you’re following me on Twitter (ooooh ooooh), you might know that I’m also a complete dork for Dinner For Five, so that helps justify this test.
A brief intro, for those not familiar with the show: Dinner For Five was an IFC half-hour reality / interview show hosted by Jon Favreau, back during the days when Favreau was known mostly for writing and starring in Swingers, along with his supporting parts in various flicks and in TV shows like Friends and The Sopranos. In fact, Favreau’s directorial career began to take off during the show’s four-season run — Elf, his first huge box office success, was being made during Season 4 — and was probably one of the biggest reasons the show was ended. The series’ nominal finale was a brief online one-on-one chat with Robert Downey Jr., following the making of Iron Man; as you might’ve heard, that turned out OK for Favreau, too.
Each episode featured Favreau and (usually) four guests from various walks of the Hollywood life having dinner & shooting the shit. Sometimes the shows have a guest-centric theme — there were episodes that featured the cast of Elf and (as you’ll see below) Daredevil — but usually there’s a catch-as-catch-can feel to the show’s groupings, such as in the episode featuring Michael Rapaport, Faizon Love, Saffron Burrows, and Sarah Silverman. Despite the oil-and-water nature of some of the combos, though, the dinner talk — part war story swapping and dirt dishing, part inside-baseball making-the-sausage wonkery — was rarely anything less than top-notch.
One week, there’d be Peter Bogdanovich talking about working and living with Orson Welles (& doing a spot-on impression of Welles during his stories), or Rod Steiger’s impassioned story about (not) working across from Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront. The next, you’d have Faizon Love talking shit about black filmmakers (from Spike Lee to Ice Cube) that, in his eyes, sometimes trade on well-worn stereotypes, while Roger Corman holds court across the very same table, talking about everything from the financial logistics behind Carnosaur V to taking acid for the first time to giving guys like Jonathan Demme and John Sayles (never mind Timur Bekmambetov) their first work in Hollywood. (And here’s the first part of that episode, for giggles.)
Now that some of these episodes are over five years old, these shows (or what few are readily available for viewing) also serve as interesting time capsules. The episode that the clip below is taken from (the Daredevil one) is a particularly intriguing one, & not just because it could be said to featurethe secret origin of Bennifer II. You have Ben Affleck just before his initial eviction from the A-list; no doubt the quality of Daredevil helped accelerate that egress. There’s Jennifer Garner, making her initial transition from hot-shit TV action star to feature films (and, um, Elektra). There’s Colin Farrell, the even hotter-shit up-and-comer who (as he mentions during the show) is about to start filming Alexander with Oliver Stone. And there’s Kevin Smith, whose own fortunes, in keeping with what seems to have happened with everyone else starring in this episode, are about to hit a speed-bump.
On the plus side, everyone seems to have emerged from the other side OK, especially Affleck. His transformation from a leading-man laughing stock into a honest-to-goodness actor / writer / director is probably one of the more improbable Hollywood stories. (Of course, so’s indie swinger Jon Favreau becoming a go-to FX blockbuster guy, for that matter.) As someone that was always rooting for the guy, even when he was drowning in J-Lo’s wake and spinning his wheels in stuff like Paycheck or Reindeer Games, it’s nice to see his second act turn out so well. & it’s nice to see Colin Farrell somewhat follow his lead, choosing more interesting roles in smaller-scale films in lieu of cashing a big paycheck (tho I imagine / hope he’s getting ducats for that upcoming Fright Night remake).
Yeah, so much for my brief intro. Here’s the first part of the Daredevil episode. Links to the second & third parts are below. (The Corman episode I link to above is better than this one, so you might want to watch that instead.) (Also, there’s an hour-long version of the Daredevil episode out there somewhere that balances out Kevin Smith’s blah-blah with a lot more Colin Farrell, which makes for much better viewing.) (Tho this one’s still pretty fun.) (OK, now I’m done.)
[Part Two | Part Three]
