→ You can now listen to all Ankler stories in the Substack app. Just hit the “play” arrow at the top right of the screen. ‘One Battle After Another’ Wins NYC; Francis Ford Coppola’s Latest Apocalypse‘Megadoc,’ about Coppola boondoggle ‘Megalopolis,’ is a must-see. Plus: Christopher Rosen reports from the audience of PTA’s epic
Today I’m bringing you a behind-the-scenes glimpse at one of the most notorious auteur-driven projects of recent years, plus some speculation on why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has remained silent amid the Jimmy Kimmel uproar. I’m also so excited to tell you about the newly relaunched Prestige Junkie Pundits page, which will be giving you all the Oscar predictions you need all season long. But first, my colleague Christopher Rosen caught up with what’s easily become every cinephile’s most-anticipated movie of the fall, One Battle After Another, and is here to tell the tale.
It probably felt like one screening after another for Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio and the cast of One Battle After Another. Yesterday, Warner Bros. hosted no fewer than six events across Manhattan for Anderson’s latest film — including stops at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, the DGA New York Theater (where Anderson sat down for a post-screening Q&A with Martin Scorsese) and Regal Union Square, one of only four theaters in the world (and three in the U.S.) equipped to project One Battle After Another in VistaVision as Anderson intended. Sitting in the crowd before the 6 p.m. screening at Union Square alongside several of the people who helped make One Battle After Another — including Anderson’s longtime casting director, Cassandra Kulukundis (potentially a first-time Oscar nominee next year with the addition of the new casting category), and co-stars including Tony Goldwyn, John Hoogenakker and Paul Grimstad — the vibe was appropriately enthusiastic, other than filmmaker Josh Safdie bemoaning the state of the New York Mets and their latest collapse (Josh, I feel you). I overheard one indie writer, director and producer suggest his love for One Battle After Another was preordained. I’d be shocked if he thought otherwise by the time the credits rolled. Anderson uses his biggest canvas ever (a reported budget of more than $130 million) and the star wattage of DiCaprio to tell a timely and timeless story about how the revolution never ends and how it’s up to young people to keep the moral compass of America heading due north; it’s arguably his most propulsive movie since Magnolia. (Considering the film starts with a resistance group raiding an immigrant detention center on the U.S.-Mexican border and also suggests a secret cabal of white supremacists — with a twist too good to spoil — holds strong sway with the country’s political elites, expect One Battle After Another to become a right-wing talking point pretty quickly!) Speaking after the screening alongside DiCaprio and cast members Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall, Anderson said the response to the film — about a former revolutionary (DiCaprio) who tries to find his teenage daughter (Infiniti in a star-making performance) before a racist military leader (Penn) gets his hands on her — has been overwhelming so far. That’s with good reason: One Battle After Another is immediately a top Oscar contender in multiple categories, should break Anderson’s winless streak at the Academy Awards (11 nominations thus far without a victory) and, honestly, could make DiCaprio a two-time winner in a crowded best actor field (he’s absolutely at the top of his game here). “It just feels like we are getting back what we have put into it, which is a tremendous feeling, and that makes it very localized,” Anderson said when asked a circular question about releasing the movie at “this particular moment in time.” “To feel the energy of this theater, to feel the energy when we went to Mexico City, when we went to London, that’s all you can kind of hold in your hand, or get that feeling in your body. I speak for all of us when I say it’s a thrill. It’s an amazing feeling — fucking amazing.” Still, despite its weighty subject and imagery that often feels ripped from recent news broadcasts, One Battle After Another is anything but didactic and depressing. In fact, the movie offers a promise for the future that could really resonate with the industry as it tries to find its fight. “It kind of leaves you walking on air and full of hope, and to make an optimistic movie feels quite good, I suppose,” Anderson said toward the end of the evening. “I suppose I’m feeling optimistic. I mean, I have four kids, I’d better feel optimistic.” — Christopher Rosen
Megalopolis Set: What Really Happened
Francis Ford Coppola just wants to try something different. That’s a feeling he expresses over and over again in Megadoc, the new documentary about the making of Coppola’s long-anticipated, mostly derided 2024 epic, Megalopolis, which opened in theaters a year ago. Giving fellow filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) what looks like free rein on the Megalopolis set in Atlanta, Coppola, 86, allows himself to be filmed arguing with his star Shia LaBeouf, scolding the production designer and visual effects artists who would eventually quit, and sometimes getting frustrated enough that he retreats and directs remotely from the Airstream trailer he calls the Silverfish. One scene in particular sums it up. To film a relatively short sequence of a car driving at night, Coppola employs the “poor man’s process,” a cinematic technique that relies on flashing lights and old-school stage tricks like shaking the car to make a stationary vehicle appear to be moving. But he also wants to test out moving small pieces of the set in the background, giving the illusion of the car actually passing buildings and other vehicles. He’s got dozens of people on set with him trying to make it work, and even he’s not sure how it will turn out. “We don’t know what we’re doing,” he tells Figgis cheerfully. “But when we look at it, what looks good we’ll do more of, and what doesn’t look good we’ll do less of.” Eventually Coppola himself declares “it doesn’t work,” and in the clip of the final film that Figgis includes, it looks more or less like any other scene of a car driving at night. But for Coppola, it seems, the point was just trying it out, no matter how much of the crew’s day was used. “I’m asking them to play at it more,” he says with evident frustration. “And they want to work at it.”  We already went through a whole discourse cycle last fall about the wild gambit of Megalopolis and whether Coppola was wise to spend so much of his money (reportedly $120 million or more!) on a passion project that only he seemed to understand clearly. Even the plot summary, released by Lionsgate, which partnered with Coppola on the film’s North American distribution, is inscrutable, calling the movie a “Roman Epic set in an imagined Modern America” focused on the “conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare.” In summary, I’ll quote my colleague Richard Rushfield: “Megalopolis exists because one of the greatest directors in film history, at the end of a long career, decided to spend his own money on a film he wanted to make. Truly, if you have a problem with that, you need to consider maybe you just don’t like film.”  Megadoc, which Utopia — a distributor co-founded by Coppola’s nephew Robert Schwartzman — put out in limited release this month, is not necessarily a case for Megalopolis’ greatness. Figgis sometimes seems as baffled as anyone else on set about where exactly all this is headed. But as a close-up look at both passion and the pig-headed stubbornness sometimes required by directors, it’s an absolute marvel — and makes for a fine bookend with 1991’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which used extensive footage of Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now that his now-late wife, Eleanor Coppola, shot during production of the 1979 classic. With access to everything from the film’s eye-popping budget ($1.165 million for catering! $9.4 million for transportation!) to Coppola’s constant bickering with LaBeouf, Figgis is constantly capturing the inherent contradiction of a film set, where high-minded artistic ideals and people just trying to do their jobs collide in compelling, often hilarious ways. (The one thing Figgis doesn’t have unfettered access to is the film’s stars, Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel, whose constant elusion of the camera is its own comedic subplot.) As much as Aubrey Plaza steals scenes with her deadpan direct-to-camera interviews — including a bit where she suggests Coppola is sexually “repressed” only to pretend she said otherwise — and Esposito and Dustin Hoffman bring their own fascinating perspective on Coppola’s unconventional process, the true star of the film is production designer Beth Mickle. Despite a murderer’s row of credits — including past work with directors Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, Edward Norton and multiple James Gunn projects, including this year’s Superman — Mickle tells Figgis that it was one of the most thrilling days of her career when Coppola first reached out to bring her into the Megalopolis world. Ever the professional, Mickle maintains her enthusiasm even when speaking to Figgis just a few weeks out from the start of production and with the design of the titular city still undetermined. As she puts it carefully, “With trying to get this great big grand vision of a world nobody’s seen before, it’s equal parts exciting and distressing that we’re still figuring that out at this point.” Mickle and visual effects supervisor Mark Russell eventually exited the project following a tense meeting with Coppola that Figgis captured for the film, and was later reported by the trades. (Figgis films that moment, too, with Coppola literally reading the reporting about his crew’s exodus while sitting on set.) But even after she leaves, Mickle maintains her diplomatic enthusiasm and talks to Figgis about it. “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I wonder if he didn’t communicate it clearly,” Mickle tells Figgis on camera. “Knowing what I do now about how Francis likes to work, I feel like we would have built this film very differently.” The entertainment business only ever works because of people like Mickle, who can remain professional and good at their jobs under the most trying of circumstances, and will never burn a bridge or admit any part of a director’s vision is impossible. But movies as a source of art and inspiration only ever work because of people like Coppola, who may drive the Mickles of the world insane, but sometimes can follow their wild ideas toward some glorious end that nobody else ever could have imagined. Was Megalopolis worth all this struggle? Most people don’t seem to think so, and given that Coppola owns the film entirely and has not made it available for streaming or on physical media, it’s not easy to reclaim it at the moment. (The director mounted a small U.S. tour this summer, with post-screening Q&As, but no further dates have been set. Still, New Yorkers reading this right now can try to catch a regular showing of it tonight at Roxy Cinema.) But Megadoc is evidence that it’s a miracle the film exists at all, the result of many people giving themselves over to a truly singular vision. How many movies these days do you genuinely believe can say that?
 I had Megalopolis on the brain while watching the dismal weekend box office returns for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, which I had been hoping for a long time would be a real leveling up for indie auteur Kogonada. It’s certain that Kogonada, director of After Yang and the exceptional Columbus, didn’t have the same kind of control over his film that Coppola did over Megalopolis, and it's hard to know who to blame for the film’s critical and box office failure. But it’s a big swing, and the kind of thing we say we want movie stars to get on board with more often, particularly stars with the world at their feet like a post-Barbie Margot Robbie. I still haven’t seen the film, so I suppose I’m part of the problem, but my goal is to get to it sometime this week. I guess watching Megadoc really did get me to agree with Coppola that sometimes you’ve gotta try something new, even if it won’t work.
 As of this writing on Monday morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences still hasn’t made any statement about ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, even as Hollywood guilds, hundreds of celebrities (including several Oscar winners like Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Frances McDormand), and major critics groups have put out forceful statements of dissent. I’m not terribly surprised to see the famously cautious Academy moving slowly on this, particularly given their complex relationship with both ABC — whose contract to air the Oscars is up for possible renewal in 2028 — and Kimmel, who has hosted the ceremony four times. This reminds me a bit of the minor fiasco the organization faced just a few weeks after the Oscars earlier this year, when one of No Other Land’s Oscar-winning filmmakers, Hamdan Ballal, was arrested and assaulted by the Israeli military. The critics’ groups once again joined forces to support Ballal, but the Academy settled for a mealy-mouthed statement in support of free expression that only brought more criticism; they eventually issued a second statement apologizing to Ballal for not supporting him more directly. Supporting free expression is a core principle of the Academy, obviously. Still, it’s also impossible for a membership group that includes Bob Iger — who once served as chairman of the capital campaign to secure funding for the Academy museum and was floated as a possible honorary Oscar recipient earlier this year — Dana Walden, and Jimmy Kimmel to speak with one voice about all of this. Academy reps haven’t gotten back to me about whether a statement is coming, but I have to imagine at least some branches are discussing it. If you’re on the inside of any of this, my e-mail is open as always: katey@theankler.com
For the latest Oscar season wisdom from the smartest people we know on the Internet — yes, that includes me, Chris and Richard Rushfield — you truly cannot do better than visiting the newly revamped Prestige Junkie Pundits site. Our team of experts has made their first Oscar predictions already, so with a single glance, you can see how bullish everyone is on One Battle After Another — pretty bullish right now! — and which “surprise” awards contenders might not be such a surprise (keep an eye on Sentimental Value breakout Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas is all I’m saying). The pundits page will be updated consistently (and may even add more bells and whistles as we go), so go ahead and bookmark it and follow the season along with us. And a special, heroic shoutout to Ankler Media’s design director Kelsey Stefanson, who made this site look more gorgeous than I’d ever imagined.
Got a tip or story pitch? Email tips@theankler.com ICYMI from The AnklerThe Wakeup Sony’s Big whiff; Uni’s Him misses target ‘Hour to Hour’: Kimmel Crisis Deepens at Disney as Comedy World Erupts Dana Walden, Rob Mills & their star attempt a second meeting as top comics fume, Elaine Low & Lesley Goldberg report Paramount Playbook: Risky, Murky — and Likely to Work. Here’s Why Still undervalued, writes Entertainment Strategy Guy, PSKY is the Ellison slingshot aimed at Netflix, with WBD as the next big stone SCOOP: Julie Plec, Andre Agassi Team for Amazon YA Tennis Drama Lesley has the details on Rally, in development at Prime Video, with former pro Justin Gimelstob and Stick producer Guymon Casady The Kimmel Capitulation: We’re in F*** City Disney serves up one of its biggest faces. Now let’s find our fight, writes Richard Rushfield Jay Penske Bought a Beloved TV Fest Then ‘Didn’t Invest’. Its Founders Took It Back ATX’s Emily Gipson & Caitlin McFarland break their silence with Lesley on how investors like Noah Hawley jumped in after PMC ownership went sideways Neon to North Road: Mid-Market M&A Frenzy Is About to Ignite Dealmakers tell Ashley Cullins which companies are ripe to be bought or buy: ‘There is such an appetite to scale’ Hollywood: Now the Joe Biden of Industries Aimless, out of step, in denial: Richard on how to lose while pretending we’re winning Introducing ‘Crowd Pleaser’: New From The Ankler & Letterboxd The two companies unveil a multi-faceted partnership that includes joint editorial, events and an ad sales alliance during awards season These 10 Movies Will Be Best Picture Nominees (I Think) With major festivals in the rearview, Katey Rich predicts the Oscar race 🎬 The Rushfield Lunch: First, They Came for Kimmel, with Jonathan V. Last The Bulwark editor paints a bleak picture after Trump’s latest encroachment on Hollywood: ‘Do not surrender in advance’ 🎬 Richard, Katey & Chris: Remembering Robert Redford How the actor, director and Sundance founder changed Hollywood forever 🎧 Emergency Pod: The Kimmel Crisis & What’s Next Disney’s decision to yank its star under pressure from the Trump admin has far-reaching ramifications More from Ankler Media
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