Move over, “Somebody get these beggars out of here!” May I propose “I’m gonna be bigger than Lost” as the new Robert Pattinson meme of the moment?
Before I get into today’s conversation with Emmy nominee Richard Jenkins — and an insider’s look at the Toronto International Film Festival lineup; it’s a packed newsletter! — I just had to make sure everyone’s seen this new trailer for Primetime, Lance Oppenheim‘s drama in which Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen.
From the looks of that teaser, which also showcases solid supporting roles for Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo — plus Jeff Zucker as himself — Primetime focuses on the 2006 incident when Hansen and his team arrived at the home of an accused sex offender, who died by suicide while the police were waiting outside.
That event, which led to the end of the To Catch a Predator franchise, is also covered in sobering detail in David Osit’s remarkable documentary from last year, Predators, which I highly recommend as prep work before Primetime opens this September. Primetime, with its attention to the TV ratings of the mid-2000s and Pattinson’s all-in performance, looks like a bit more of a thriller in the vein of Nightcrawler than the documentary version of the story. But if we’re going to have two Chris Hansen movies in back-to-back years, I’m much happier if they take very different approaches.
The Primetime trailer launched the same morning as the first trailer for The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which got warm reviews at Sundance and could bring star John Turturro to his first-ever Oscar nomination. So, naturally, it’s all gotten me thinking about the best actor race and how Pattinson fits into the conversation, particularly with Dune: Part Three — and what looks like yet another flashy performance — still on the horizon.
As I’ve written about, picking a favorite supporting actor from The Odyssey is damn near impossible, and it would be very convenient for Pattinson to focus all his Oscar campaigning around Primetime if the film does well with its Venice Film Festival premiere. But thanks to a new Oscar rule change that allows actors to be nominated for multiple roles in the same category, Pattinson could theoretically be nominated in supporting actor for The Odyssey as well as Dune: Part Three, and then a Primetime lead actor nomination as well. Hell, throw in another lead nom for The Drama — he’s fantastic in that A24 springtime hit — and get four Pattinsons at a single Oscars.
I’m fascinated to see how this Oscar rule change will affect actors, who may still be highly incentivized to focus on just one performance lest they risk canceling themselves out. No, I don’t actually expect Pattinson to get four Oscar nominations — but like his Odyssey co-stars Zendaya and Anne Hathaway, he’s in the midst of a very busy year with a lot of good options to campaign. This excellent trailer may have just bumped Primetime up to the top of the list — but we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see how it fares in Venice before we know just how far it might take him.
TIFF Docs Spotlight
What will be the next documentary, like Predators, to lay the groundwork for a starry fictionalized version of the same story? If you want to venture some guesses, the TIFF Documentary lineup, announced this week, is probably a good place to start.
Always one of the most expansive fall festival lineups, TIFF has announced a bunch of fascinating titles this week in several of its sections. I’m especially interested to see if any of the newly announced Midnight Madness titles will have a future as bright as Obsession, which debuted at TIFF last year and will be returning for an anniversary screening.
For the inside scoop on what to expect from the documentary slate, I got on the phone with Thom Powers, friend of The Ankler and TIFF Docs programmer, to walk me through the lineup, chock-full of world premieres and major names. “We’re really trying to bring our audiences things that they’re going to be seeing for the first time,” Powers, who has been programming the TIFF lineup for 21 years, tells me.
To start with the starriest names, there are documentaries focused on soccer great Megan Rapinoe (Rapinoe), singer and previous documentary star Darlene Love (Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been), critic and activist Edward Said (Edward Said: Between Worlds) and, already controversially, Elon Musk (Musk). Powers calls the Rapinoe film “unlike any other sports documentary that I know of, much more personal.” He also compares the Said film to the 2016 documentary hit I Am Not Your Negro, for the way it uses documentary footage to allow Said, who died in 2003, to be part of telling his story “in his own words.”
Two-thirds of the films in the TIFF Docs lineup, Powers notes, are directed by women, which shouldn’t feel remarkable but definitely is, especially this year. “How is it that so many women are so robust in documentary film?” Powers asks, before proposing one answer: Barbara Kopple, who won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1977 for Harlan County U.S.A. and is back at TIFF this year with Union Town, about labor-organizing efforts in New York City. “It was Barbara’s example from the 1970s that I think opened a door for many other women directors to enter,” Powers tells me. “We’ve seen the results of that for decades, but it’s particularly notable in this year’s lineup.”
Sometimes when you’re trying to fit films into a busy festival schedule, you’ve just got to pick the most intriguing title and give it a shot — and I’m not sure any title at this year’s entire festival can hold a candle to The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, the documentary from co-directors Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi. Powers tells me the title comes from the indigenous Peruvian art form of Kené and the film is about the Peruvian artist Sara Flores, and honestly that’s all I want to know. The joy of film festivals, and particularly documentaries from parts of the world you’ve never been to, is so often all about the discovery.
Young at Heart
Richard Jenkins knows he may not have been entirely right for his role on DTF St. Louis. The 79-year-old Emmy winner for Olive Kitteridge is nowhere close to retirement and is busily balancing work in TV and film with time spent with his grandchildren near his home in Providence, Rhode Island. But when he read the role of Detective Donoghue Homer on HBO’s DTF St. Louis, his response to creator Steve Conrad was: “I’m too old to play this part.”
Luckily for Jenkins, Conrad and the show’s viewers, that wasn’t enough to stop him. “I was too old!” Jenkins tells me with a laugh in a recent phone call. “But I did it anyway because it’s so good.”
Now nominated for his fourth Emmy, Jenkins is a key part of the careful tonal balance of DTF St. Louis, which stars Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Linda Cardellini as neighbors in suburban St. Louis whose sex lives become intertwined in complex, genuinely heartfelt ways. Like many a modern limited series, the show kicks off with a mysterious death, as Harbour’s Floyd Schmernitch is found dead at a neighborhood pool. Jenkins is the detective on the case, teaming up with a younger investigator (fellow Emmy nominee Joy Sunday) to unravel a mystery that’s much more about human behavior than any salacious crime.
“It was the people in the story” that drew Jenkins to the Atlanta set of DTF, he tells me. “If somebody says, ‘Well, how do you pick scripts?’ I don’t know. I have no idea how. It’s like you don’t know what food you like until you put it in your mouth.”
Jenkins talks about work in the practical way you might expect for a longtime working actor who got his big breakthrough in ’80s and ’90s films like The Witches of Eastwick and Flirting with Disaster, when he was already in his 40s. His Oscar nomination in 2009 for The Visitor felt like long-overdue validation for an ultimate “that guy” character actor, and he’s been steadily in demand ever since.
“Of all the things I’ve done, I can remember very few that were a real chore,” Jenkins tells me. “You make friends on every set you’re on. You’re all in it together. It is kind of like a circus — you pitch your tent, you do the show, you work, you take the tent down, you move to some other place. That doesn’t change. Most people are there to make it as good as they can.”
On DTF St. Louis, Jenkins had the confidence in himself, his co-stars and Conrad — all of whom are now Emmy nominees, it’s worth noting — that what they were making together would be good. But, he admits, “I just didn’t know what people would think of it. I knew I loved it, but I didn’t know what people would think of it because it’s not what you expect.”
He learned a long time ago, he tells me, that what people think of what you make is out of your control. “The first thing I ever did was a PBS thing with Geraldine Chaplin,” he tells me. “I turned to her one day and said, ‘I hope this is good.’ She said, ‘Stop. You have no control over that. Did you have a good time?’ I said, ‘I did.’ She said, ‘You’re a winner. That’s it. You’re good.’”
Jenkins admits that sometimes that advice slips out of his head, “because I keep thinking, ‘God, I hope this is good.’ Because we all do. But yeah, it’s nice when you have a good time. There are a lot of jobs you can do that are miserable — making movies and television shows shouldn’t be one of them.”
