Hail, Caesar! is a 2016 comedy mystery film written, produced, edited, and directed by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. An American-British co-production, the film stars Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Channing Tatum, with Michael Gambon as the narrator. It is a fictional story that follows the real-life studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Brolin), working in the Hollywood film industry in the 1950s, trying to discover what happened to a star actor during the filming of a biblical epic.AllMovie
First talked about by the Coens in 2004, Hail, Caesar! was originally to take place in the 1920s and follow actors performing a play about ancient Rome. The Coens shelved the idea until late 2013. Principal photography for the film began in November 2014 in Los Angeles, California. The film premiered at the Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles on February 1, 2016, and was theatrically released by Universal Pictures on February 5.
Hail, Caesar! grossed $63 million worldwide on a $22 million budget and received positive reviews from critics. The film was chosen by National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2016, and received Production Design nominations at the 89th Academy Awards"La La Land" wins for Production Design - Oscaers on YouTube and 70th British Academy Film Awards.2017 Film Production Design|BAFTA Awards
Plot In 1951 Hollywood, Eddie Mannix is head of production at Capitol Pictures. His duties as the studio "fixer" find him covering up for its scandalous stars and fending off twin gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker. All the while, he is weighing a generous job offer from the Lockheed Corporation. When unmarried synchronized swimmer-turned-actress DeeAnna Moran becomes pregnant, Mannix arranges for DeeAnna to place her baby in foster care then discreetly adopt it, preserving her career.
Baird Whitlock, the talented but dim-witted star of the studio's newest major production Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, is drugged and abducted. He awakens at a meeting of "The Future," a group of blacklisted Communist screenwriters, and is easily won over to their cause. The Future send a ransom note demanding $100,000 for Baird's return, which Mannix procures from the studio. He convinces Thora to withhold a story in exchange for information on singing Western film star Hobie Doyle.
Hobie has been hopelessly miscast in a sophisticated comedy of manners and, despite the efforts of director Laurence Laurentz, cannot overcome his thick Western American accent. When Laurentz requests Hobie's removal, Mannix convinces him to continue his coaching. Hobie admits to Mannix his unease about the role, but Mannix reassures him and confides in him about Baird's kidnapping.
That evening, Hobie attends the premiere of his latest Western with starlet Carlotta Valdez, as arranged by Mannix. The pair are accosted by the Thacker sisters, but Hobie spots the briefcase of ransom money, carried by musical star Burt Gurney. Mannix and DeeAnna meet with surety agent Joseph Silverman, a trusted scapegoat for the studio, who agrees to foster DeeAnna's child. His dependability proves immensely attractive to DeeAnna. Hobie follows Burt to The Future's beach house but finds only Baird inside. The Future have taken Burt to rendezvous with a Soviet submarine and defect to the USSR but lose the briefcase in the ocean. Hobie returns Baird to the studio as police arrive to arrest the group.
Baird spouts his newfound Communist beliefs to Mannix, who slaps Baird and orders him to "go out and be a star" and finish Hail, Caesar! The next morning, Mannix learns that DeeAnna has married Silverman. Mannix declines Lockheed's offer, remaining at Capitol Pictures. Thora tells him that her column will reveal Baird won his role in an earlier picture by having sex with Laurentz, but Mannix threatens to ruin her reputation by publicly naming her source as Burt, a Communist and recent Soviet defector. Thora backs down from running the story and Mannix moves on, confident in his role in life.
Cast
Production Development The Coens first pitched the story to George Clooney in 1999 during the shooting of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ethan Coen described it as a "thought experiment" rather than a viable project. The film was originally going to follow "a troupe of actors in the 1920s putting on a play about ancient Rome", with the focus on a matinée idol. Clooney was to play the main character, who is "a hammy actor with a pencil mustache". In February 2008, the Coens said the film had no script and was only an idea. They pitched it to Clooney as an opportunity to play a "numbskull" following his roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and Burn After Reading (2008).
The project was mentioned in a December 2013 interview about Inside Llewyn Davis. Joel Coen said they were working on Hail, Caesar!, and that it would likely be their next project. In May 2014, the Coens reconfirmed the film's development, with the plot now focused on a "fixer" working in the 1950s Hollywood film industry.
Historical context Set in 1951, Hail, Caesar! takes place at a transitional time for the film industry. The studio system was breaking down, and a Supreme Court ruling had forced studios to divest their movie theaters. Television, then still in its early years, threatened to pull away audiences. The Cold War and the Red Scare were both under way. Hollywood responded with escapist fare: westerns, highly choreographed dance and aquatic spectacles, and Roman epics with massive casts.
In The Washington Post, Kristen Page-Kirby wrote that nostalgia for Hollywood's golden age is heavily filtered by time. "It's easy to look back at any part of the past and say, 'Yeah, that's how it should be today'. Hail, Caesar! uses the uniformly terrible fake movies within it to show that while we all remember 1946 for stuff like The Yearling and Notorious, it also gave us Tarzan and the Leopard Woman." The Coens cited their own examples of subpar films and performances from the era that they saw as television reruns while growing up: That Touch of Mink (1962), and Laurence Olivier co-starring with Charlton Heston in Khartoum (1966). "We loved that stuff. We just didn't realize we were watching crap", Joel Coen said.
Casting In December 2013, the Coens confirmed that Clooney remained involved with the project. In June 2014, Josh Brolin, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, and Tilda Swinton joined the cast, Universal Pictures was announced to be distributing the film, and Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan signed on to produce the film for Working Title Films. In July, Jonah Hill and Scarlett Johansson entered talks to join the production. The next month, Johansson and Hill were confirmed to have joined the cast, and Alden Ehrenreich entered negotiations to star. In a September 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, Frances McDormand said she had a role in the film. In October, Patrick Fischler, David Krumholtz, and Fisher Stevens joined the cast as Communist screenwriters, and Clancy Brown joined as an actor in the film within a film, also titled Hail, Caesar! The following month, Christopher Lambert was cast as Arne Slessum, a European filmmaker who has an affair with Johannson's character. In a November 2014 interview at the Ottawa Pop Expo, Robert Picardo said he had a role in the film and that he was set to begin filming in December. Also in November, Emily Beecham was said to have a role in the film. Norman Lloyd was considered for the part of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, but claimed that, owing to safety concerns regarding his centenarian age, the role ultimately went to the younger British comedian John Bluthal.
Costume design Costume designer Mary Zophres began work 12 weeks ahead of shooting, researching period wardrobe from the late 1940s on the assumption that most people routinely wear clothes purchased over the past few years. She designed for a working film studio of the early 1950s, plus six genre films, each of which featured a major actor working on the set for about a week. Photos from the MGM library and the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences showed that film crews dressed more formally than today—no shorts or sneakers. Zophres produced about 15 boards of preliminary sketches, including "sculptural Technicolor gowns" for the ballroom drama inspired by the work of Charles James. Her double-breasted suit for Brolin was intended to blend with his skin tone, his moustache was styled after Walt Disney's, his hair was permed, and his character alone wore a fedora. Zophres modeled Tatum's look on Troy Donahue and Tyrone Power. The costumes in Ben Hur in particular served as references for the gladiator sequences, although Zophres employed the contemporary technique of using painted hard plastic foam instead of metal. The film ultimately required more than 2,500 costumes, including 170 Roman extras, 120 Israelites and about 45 slaves. About 500 of the costumes were custom-made. Toward the end of the shoot, the scope of the project overtook the budget, and Zophres completed some of the sewing herself.
Filming and locations In October 2014, Roger Deakins posted on his website that he would be the film's cinematographer and was shooting test footage. Principal photography on the film began in Los Angeles, California, on November 10, 2014. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Coen brothers' decision to film in Los Angeles increased filming activity in the city, which had previously been down by "a double-digit percentage... in the fourth quarter [of 2014]". In December, Clooney was photographed in full Roman regalia while filming scenes in Downtown Los Angeles.
Tatum dyed his hair blond for his role as a tap-dancing sailor, one of five in the "No Dames!" sequence set in the Swingin' Dinghy bar. Tatum had danced hip-hop and street, not tap, but worked without a double after much training. Other dancers came from Broadway, including Clifton Samuels, who said the scene's greatest challenge was not Christopher Gattelli's choreography per se, but maintaining the style of the period "in which the dancers must stay on the balls of their feet." A split-screen scene from the That's Entertainment! trilogy influenced the Coens' decision to widen the shot to reveal film crew members pushing the set into place.
Hail, Caesar! was the first movie that Deakins shot on film since True Grit in 2010. The Coens themselves had said that their previous movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, would probably be their last use of the medium. But with Hail, Caesar!s classic Hollywood theme making film an obvious choice, Deakins agreed to give it one more try. "I don't mind", he recalled saying, "I'll shoot it on a cell phone if you like." Ultimately, film proved a limited palette due to the narrowing choices of stocks and processing options in the wake of digital cinematography. Deakins did not recall encountering those kinds of problems on earlier projects. "But it makes me nervous now. I don't want to do that again, frankly. I don't think the infrastructure's there."