SKIRMISHER

Now that murmurs about Lady in the Water are growing into such a confused cacophony the nearer we get to its official opening on July 21, the creator of such films as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and The Village is crying wolf.

Yes, I understand it’s very easy to pick Disney as the wolf here; I also don’t have much sympathy for Hollywood execs who, everybody knows, are just bad people. But the way Shyamalan did all the crying in a book called, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale made me squirm in my seat.

Is it just me, or is M. Night Shyamalan doing something really cheap?

Says the LA Times:

But arguably as shocking as the movie itself is the way Shyamalan, in the book, disses his former studio. As galleys circulate around town, that more than anything else has people musing about just how fragile relationships between artists and executives can be.

Disney production President Nina Jacobson gets the worst drubbing.

Jacobson and Shyamalan enjoyed a close, albeit sometimes combative, relationship. Over six years, she shepherded his four Disney films including “Unbreakable,” “Signs” and “The Village.” On what would have been their fifth collaboration, their bond so eroded that the two didn’t speak for more than a year.

At a disastrous dinner in Philadelphia last year, Jacobson delivered a frank critique of the “Lady in the Water” script. When she told him that she and her boss, studio Chairman Dick Cook, didn’t “get” the idea, Shyamalan was heartbroken. Things got only worse when she lambasted his inclusion of a mauling of a film critic in the story line and told Shyamalan his decision to cast himself as a visionary writer out to change the world bordered on self-serving.

But Shyamalan gets his revenge on Jacobson in the book, in which he says he had felt for some time that he “had witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his own wide-open eyes. She didn’t want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made money.”

Along with the alleged plagiarisms Night committed in the name of edge-of-your-seat filmmaking, I’m fast losing admiration for the man. There was a time in my life when the words “M. Night Shyamalan” sounded to me like “broadsword lopping off the head of everything that’s boring.” But these days, I’m not so sure anymore. His last few films never did really hit me in the chest. The Village’s story looked so familiar you were sure you’ve read something like it a gazillion times before, but I endured watching it because I couldn’t get enough of Bryce Dallas Howard (she’s Ron “The Da Vinci Code” Howard’s daughter, by the way). The last Shyamalan film that still kicked it for me was Unbreakable, but I’d have to give Samuel Jackson much of the credit for that.

On second thought, something also tells me this smells like another guerilla marketing gimmick: the tell-all book hits stores on July 20–a day before Lady in the Water opens in theaters. The bastard is probably trying to hit two birds in one stone: dis Disney and make the revenge much sweeter by ensuring that the film that Nina Jacobson called “crappy” doesn’t at least tank.

And Shyamalan might just hit it.

SHYAMALAN BOOKS TELLS OF BREAKUP WITH DISNEY [LA Times]

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