6 posts tagged “gyllenhaal”

Film director, poet, and famous father Stephen Gyllenhaal turns sixty today.

This past year the man has gone through tribulations no man should go through. The dumping by his wife of thirty years, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner, who also publicly shamed him in her divorce papers with several odd disclosures. The loss of his house on Martha's Vineyard. The loss of his house on Mulholland (Conan and Springsteen's drummer, Max Weinberg, now owns it). Gawker.com's ridicule of his Huffington blog, particularly his post entitled "Free Bernie Madoff Now!" The exposure on Page Six of the New York Post that he and Naomi were broke from overspending. The strained relations with his children, Jake and Maggie. His sexual insecurity publicly humiliated in this YouTube video.

But let's not dwell on Stephen's real-life stumbles. Let's recall, instead, the bottle-rape scene in Paris Trout—the dreamlike stabbing of David Strathairn by Debra Winger in A Dangerous Woman—Lena Headey's shrieks in a sun-dappled forest while undergoing an illegal abortion in Waterland—Barbara Hershey's graphic ax murder of her love rival in Killing in a Small Town—and wonder that this film director once had it in him to be the American Claude Chabrol, with a little Sylvia Plath thrown in.

And so I urge you: Cheer him up! Send him your warmest, most encouraging birthday greetings here! And tell him Cantara sent you.

Young River Phoenix was the best thing in Sidney Lumet's essentially phony drama about radicals on the run.

 

A wildly popular television show, especially in Baltimore where it was shot, Homicide: Life on the Streets featured Robin Williams in an episode directed by my beloved Stephen Gyllenhaal, who cast his young son in a guest role. This is the scene where Jake is told that his mother is dead. Be prepared to have your heart torn out.

Air date of this episode: January 6, 1994.

From http://www.critterhaven.com/articles1.htm: "It is hard to believe this is a first script for any writer, but that's the case as Simon teamed up with David Mills, a friend since their days together at the University of Maryland. The newbie screenwriters got some help from Fontana, who wrote the storyline of an Iowa tourist whose wife is killed when the couple and their children wander off their tour of Camden Yards. Robin Williams was brilliant as the tourist, and the direction by Stephen Gyllenhaal (Paris Trout) was as good as anything he's done on the big screen. The episode also made you stop and listen to the music—really listen to the music—under the direction of Chris Tergesen. For fun, the next time you view it, count the Parliament-Funkadelic references. Mills, who wrote a book last year about the group, is a P-Funkaholic. Mills and Simon got an Emmy nomination. They deserved to win. —DZ"