While every film had it tough over the last year, The Woman in the Window—adapted from A.J. Finn’s best-selling novel—has had a particularly difficult time making it from page to screen. Plagued by reshoots, fraud scandals, and various setbacks from its very inception, the psychological thriller has had a long and arduous journey to Netflix, where it will finally be ready to be consumed by the masses on Friday, May 14.
Now that the Amy Adams vehicle is finally, finally hitting the streaming platform, let’s take a peak back through the window at all the drama that befell the woman inside of it.
The Woman in the Window is a best-selling novel by the pseudonymous author A.J. Finn. The plot follows an agoraphobic psychologist, Dr. Anna Fox, who befriends a neighbor from across the street, only to see said neighbor apparently be murdered late one night. The novel was published on January 2, 2018, and stayed number one atop the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks. By April 25 of that year, a Woman in the Window film adaptation directed by Joe Wright, written by Tracy Letts, and starring Adams as Dr. Anna Fox was in the works. Scott Rudin and Fox 2000 were set to produce the film.
Yes. Yes, it is.
The Woman in the Window’s original release date was October 4, 2019, with the hopes that it would be a big awards-season play. At this point Adams had been nominated for five Oscars with zero wins (for those counting, she’s now at six and zero), and fans of her work were really hoping that Dr. Anna Fox would be the role that would finally deliver her Oscar gold. Let’s just say, it had buzz.
Principal photography began on August 6, 2018. By this point, Gary Oldman, Brian Tyree Henry, and Julianne Moore had joined the cast. Things were looking good; filming wrapped on October 30, 2018. But the film hit its first snag when it was screened for test audiences, as the reception was…not great. Apparently audiences were so befuddled by it that Rudin brought in screenwriter Tony Gilroy to do rewrites before a major round of reshoots.
“There were some plot points that people found a bit confusing—I would say possibly too opaque maybe,” Wright told IndieWire of the test response to the film. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Letts admitted that adapting Finn’s novel proved more challenging then he had originally anticipated. “I read the book and I thought, Oh, this will make a good movie. I can do this job. And then I got into the weeds of it. I was like, Oh, shit. This is hard. And I was also working with a lot of producers, a director, and they had a lot of notes and it was hard,” Letts said in an interview with The Playlist. In the end he had a more blunt opinion of working on the film: “It kind of sucked.” The release date was still set for October 19, 2020.
Well, that’s kind of a funny story. A.J. Finn is the pen name used by former book editor Daniel Mallory—the subject of a gossipy New Yorker story in which journalist Ian Parker accused Mallory of being a serial liar. Parker alleged that during his ascent in the literary world, Mallory falsely told colleagues that he’d had cancer and a brain tumor; that his mother had died of cancer; and that his brother had died by suicide. (On a much less important note, Mallory also apparently spoke in a fake British accent.) Mallory would later say that his deception was an unfortunate side effect of his bipolar II disorder.
Parker’s article also suggested that Mallory copied key elements of The Woman in the Window’s plot from a 1995 film called—we’re not joking here—Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver as an agoraphobic psychologist. While Mallory winked at the similarities between The Woman in the Window and Rear Window by making Dr. Anna Fox a fan of Hitchcock movies, Parker insinuated that this copying was less innocent than a knowing pastiche. Less than two weeks later, The New York Times published an article noting the similarities between Mallory’s The Woman in the Window and the 2016 Sarah A. Denzil novel Saving April.
Still, his publishers at HarperCollins stood by Mallory and said that they’d release Mallory’s second book in January 2020. As of 2021, Mallory’s second novel hasn’t been released.
Wrong. On March 19, 2019, Disney announced its $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox, setting The Woman in the Window up to be the final film from Fox 2000 before the production company shuttered in the wake of the merger. But after another round of test screenings for the film went poorly, The Woman in the Window’s release date was pushed back, as THR reported in July that Walt Disney Studios wanted to “retool” the Fox film again. This retooling involved re-editing and five days of pickup shots to get the film back on track after Adams finished shooting her other Netflix film, Hillbilly Elegy.
“We’re dealing with a complex novel,” Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler told THR at the time. “We tested the movie really early for that very reason. We wanted to make it better, and we’ve had Disney’s full support in doing that.” The Woman in the Window was given a new release date of, gulp, May 15, 2020.
Exactly. (To be fair to the woman in the window: How was she to know what was in store for us all?) On March 17, 2020, The Woman in the Window was taken off of Disney’s release calendar and delayed indefinitely due to the global pandemic, with the hopes of a theatrical release sometime later in 2020.
Right again! With no end to the pandemic in sight, rumors started swirling last summer that Netflix was circling the film. Those rumors turned out to be true when the streaming giant announced on August 3, 2020, that it was acquiring the Amy Adams vehicle, and the film was slated to be released sometime in early 2021. Seven months later Netflix announced that the titular woman would finally make it to her signature window on May 14, 2021, more than three years after the project was initially announced.
Well, that depends on your perspective. In April of 2021, Woman in the Window producer Scott Rudin was the subject of a THR exposé detailing his alleged decades-long pattern of abusive behavior toward his employees. Rudin has since said he is “stepping back” from the entertainment industry. It’s difficult to imagine how many potatoes were thrown on account of issues stemming from reshoots of The Woman in the Window.
That depends. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson was not a fan. Still, if you’d like to see Amy Adams trapped in an NYC brownstone downing red wine and pills as she hangs out with Julianne Moore before they both appear in the Dear Evan Hansen film slated to drop later this year, then you probably want to tune in. Who doesn’t want to see Amy Adams waving through a window at Julianne Moore?
— A First Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
— 15 Summer Movies Worth Returning to Theaters For
— Why Evan Peters Needed a Hug After His Big Mare of Easttown Scene
— Shadow and Bone Creators Break Down Those Big Book Changes
— The Particular Bravery of Elliot Page’s Oprah Interview
— Inside the Collapse of the Golden Globes
— Watch Justin Theroux Break Down His Career
— For the Love of Real Housewives: An Obsession That Never Quits
— From the Archive: The Sky’s the Limit for Leonardo DiCaprio
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.
"had" - Google News
May 14, 2021 at 09:18PM
https://ift.tt/3tHEfXL
‘The Woman in the Window’ Had a Particularly Rocky Road to Netflix - Vanity Fair
"had" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KUBsq7
https://ift.tt/3c5pd6c
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘The Woman in the Window’ Had a Particularly Rocky Road to Netflix - Vanity Fair"
Post a Comment