[atari 2600]

Has anyone heard the gossip about The Fountain?

Apparently, Aronofsky became a highly-courted director after Requiem For a Dream made money after being shot for only $5 million, a deal he got based on the critical success of Pi.

On the heels of his newfound clout, Aronofsky decides upon his next venture. He has a screenplay for a longtime pet project called "The Fountain," developed along with old friend Eric Watson, about three separate stories of men looking for a fountain of youth: a Spanish conquistador (based on Ponce de Leon, I would suppose), a modern-day scientist whose own wife is dying and an astronaut some five hundred years in the future. So, what does indie darling Darren do next? He immediately aims to parlay his buzz into becoming a big-time Hollywood director. The draft of The Fountain is sent to only one person in Hollywood for review and that person is none other than international megastar Brad Pitt. Reportedly, Pitt called Aronofsky and Watson after reading forty pages. He was crying on the phone and agreed to do the movie. Darren and Eric rejoiced knowing that their arty film now had a bankable leading man.
They get the greenlight from Warner Bros. to make a 70-million dollar movie and Cate Blanchett is secured as the female lead. A part is even created for Ellen Burstyn to support, making her now sort of a repertoire player for Aronofsky.

Then things get tricky. Aronofsky and Watson, two relative neophytes with no experience making big-budget Hollywood movies, decide that they know how the business works, and start bilking the studio out of what finally tallies up to eighteen million dollars on items that they never intended to purchase, and instead they allegedly just keep the money. To be fair, a good chunk of the money was lost on the fee paid to secure Blanchett, but more on that in a moment. There is a rumor that the two concocted this scheme because Aronofsky had received some correspondence from the studio where they misspelled his name! The two strangely came up with a codeword term for their scam they referred to as the "Chinese Menu Theory." Watson, by his own admission, has stated that they had a long list of items that are often requested by directors and that they made a point of getting around to asking for all of them. So, after a several months, they get found out and are told that unless they can find a partner that will fork over half of the financing (35 million dollars) that the picture is dead and that they can expect legal action. His star, Pitt, starts to get nervous, but Aronofsky reassures him. Meanwhile, Watson starts telemarketing for dollars to everyone and anyone while sneaking in to use WB phones hoping that the official lines will give him cred. They eventually succeed in convincing Regency, the same company that had did Mr. & Mrs. Smith, to assume the slack, but then Pitt drops out unexpectedly and the multi-million dollar sets of Mayan temples that had been constructed in Australia were all destroyed by the studio. The project was officially dead once again. Pitt and Blanchett subsequently do Babel together, presumably an undertaking that got the proverbial thumb-ups go-ahead from Brangelina.

Aronofsky, suffering from "a nervous breakdown," bails on his wife Rachel and goes to China (is he a smack-head like Leto's character in Requiem?) for weeks and weeks and no one is able to contact him. Eventually, Darren and Rachel finally reconnect in New Orleans where he spends many months "hanging out in his underwear" and rewriting the script for a smaller film that only requires a 35-million dollar budget. Warner Bros. miraculousy agrees once again to make the film. For a time, the studio insisted that Darren somewhow acquire Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe or George Clooney, but luckily, Hugh Jackman becomes interested.
Some feel that Crowe wanted to do the movie but was too tied up with Master & Commander and that he did Darren a favor by hooking up Jackman with director Peter Weir, who he had always hoped to work with, to persaude Hugh to do the role in The Fountain.
In the end, Jackman is hired and Aronofsky's wife Rachel Weisz becomes the female lead.

The reviews of the film are mixed. I suppose it's very possible though that a more interesting movie would be the story of how The Fountain, a motion picture about the quest for eternal life that itself was pronounced dead a few times before coming to celluloid life, came to be made.

[atari 2600]

cheap...