Coleman Hough, who received solo screenplay credit on the quirky Steven Soderbergh-directed improvisational films Full Frontal and Bubble, has died. She was 62.
Hough died Feb. 24 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, her friend Jennifer Romine told The Hollywood Reporter. She was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s when she was 42.
Full Frontal (2002), set in Hollywood and a film within a film, shot in 18 days using a consumer-grade digital camera and was the first produced screenplay by playwright and poet Hough.
Featuring Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener, David Hyde Pierce, Blair Underwood, David Duchovny and Jeff Garlin as a Harvey Weinstein type, it marked an extreme change of pace for Soderbergh, who was coming off Erin Brockovich (2000), an Oscar win for Traffic (2000) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001).
Hough’s characters are “simultaneously self-absorbed and less introspective than they think they are,” Craig J. Clark...
Hough died Feb. 24 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, her friend Jennifer Romine told The Hollywood Reporter. She was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s when she was 42.
Full Frontal (2002), set in Hollywood and a film within a film, shot in 18 days using a consumer-grade digital camera and was the first produced screenplay by playwright and poet Hough.
Featuring Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener, David Hyde Pierce, Blair Underwood, David Duchovny and Jeff Garlin as a Harvey Weinstein type, it marked an extreme change of pace for Soderbergh, who was coming off Erin Brockovich (2000), an Oscar win for Traffic (2000) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001).
Hough’s characters are “simultaneously self-absorbed and less introspective than they think they are,” Craig J. Clark...
- 3/12/2024
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
"Full Frontal" finds filmmaker Steven Soderbergh in an experimental mood. Think of Jean-Luc Godard, Luigi Pirandello and Soderbergh himself, playing with stylistic elements and actors from previous movies. It's the kind of self-indulgent movie you get to make if your last five pictures were "Ocean's Eleven", "Traffic", "Erin Brockovich", "The Limey" and "Out of Sight". He has earned the right to play around with levels of movie realities and characters searching for their director in an 18-day shoot featuring some of the town's top -- and very adventurous -- actors.
Audiences for "Full Frontal" will not be vast. A few will read great things into the slim material concocted by Soderbergh and writer Coleman Hough. Most admirers, though, will shrug this one off. The film is clearly both a labor of love and the least expensive movie imaginable with such a cast and director. Miramax will not have to see a huge boxoffice, and ancillary business could be brisk.
To begin with, there is a movie within a movie and, unless I missed something, at least one more movie within that movie. A collection of psychologically complicated characters -- or actors playing characters who are also sometimes actors -- move about Los Angeles within a 24-hour period with everyone and everything winding up at the 40th birthday party of David Duchovny's Hollywood producer.
Julia Roberts plays Catherine, a journalist writing a profile of Blair Underwood's Nicholas, who is playing a sidekick to Brad Pitt in a movie directed by David Fincher, only ... Francesca (also Roberts) is actually playing Catherine and Calvin (again Underwood) is actually playing Nicholas in a movie. Follow that?
Don't feel bad if you don't, but we have to move on to explain that David Hyde Pierce's Carl, a screen and magazine writer, is experiencing marital problems with his wife, Catherine Keener's Lee, an unhappy corporate executive whose lovelorn sister Linda (Mary McCormack) is a hotel masseuse. Meanwhile, Carl has written a play with Enrico Colantoni's Arty -- or is it Ed? -- about Hitler that is being rehearsed by a temperamental actor played by Nicky Katt.
According to press notes, all actors are responsible for their own wardrobe, hair and makeup. Everything is shot at practical locations without a production designer or conventional music score.
Each scene within this complex arrangement is reduced to two actors in lengthy dialogue exchanges. Hough's dialogue is often clever and biting, but much of its look-how-shallow-and-neurotic-people-in-L.A.-are undertone as been put to better use in such movies as "The Player", "Time Code" and "Magnolia".
The cinematography -- Soderbergh shoots under his usual nom-de-camera of Peter Andrews -- switches from sleek-looking film to grainy, contrasty digital video. Interviews with the actors speaking of themselves in character occur frequently on the soundtrack, much of which is improvised.
The whole movie is a riff on movie reality and unreality. Nothing is truly new here, though. OK, so movies are not reality, but a movie pointing that out doesn't make it any less so. Sometimes such existential cleverness is a mere disguise for a lack of imagination. In "Full Frontal", it's the director who wears a fig leaf.
FULL FRONTAL
Miramax Films
Credits:
Director/director of photography: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriter: Coleman Hough
Producers: Scott Kramer, Gregory Jacobs
Editor: Sarah Flack
Cast:
Gus: David Duchovny
Hitler: Nicky Katt
Lee: Catherine Keener
Carl: David Hyde Pierce
Francesca/Catherine: Julia Roberts
Calvin/Nicholas: Blair Underwood
Arty/Ed: Enrico Colantonni
Running time -- 106 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Audiences for "Full Frontal" will not be vast. A few will read great things into the slim material concocted by Soderbergh and writer Coleman Hough. Most admirers, though, will shrug this one off. The film is clearly both a labor of love and the least expensive movie imaginable with such a cast and director. Miramax will not have to see a huge boxoffice, and ancillary business could be brisk.
To begin with, there is a movie within a movie and, unless I missed something, at least one more movie within that movie. A collection of psychologically complicated characters -- or actors playing characters who are also sometimes actors -- move about Los Angeles within a 24-hour period with everyone and everything winding up at the 40th birthday party of David Duchovny's Hollywood producer.
Julia Roberts plays Catherine, a journalist writing a profile of Blair Underwood's Nicholas, who is playing a sidekick to Brad Pitt in a movie directed by David Fincher, only ... Francesca (also Roberts) is actually playing Catherine and Calvin (again Underwood) is actually playing Nicholas in a movie. Follow that?
Don't feel bad if you don't, but we have to move on to explain that David Hyde Pierce's Carl, a screen and magazine writer, is experiencing marital problems with his wife, Catherine Keener's Lee, an unhappy corporate executive whose lovelorn sister Linda (Mary McCormack) is a hotel masseuse. Meanwhile, Carl has written a play with Enrico Colantoni's Arty -- or is it Ed? -- about Hitler that is being rehearsed by a temperamental actor played by Nicky Katt.
According to press notes, all actors are responsible for their own wardrobe, hair and makeup. Everything is shot at practical locations without a production designer or conventional music score.
Each scene within this complex arrangement is reduced to two actors in lengthy dialogue exchanges. Hough's dialogue is often clever and biting, but much of its look-how-shallow-and-neurotic-people-in-L.A.-are undertone as been put to better use in such movies as "The Player", "Time Code" and "Magnolia".
The cinematography -- Soderbergh shoots under his usual nom-de-camera of Peter Andrews -- switches from sleek-looking film to grainy, contrasty digital video. Interviews with the actors speaking of themselves in character occur frequently on the soundtrack, much of which is improvised.
The whole movie is a riff on movie reality and unreality. Nothing is truly new here, though. OK, so movies are not reality, but a movie pointing that out doesn't make it any less so. Sometimes such existential cleverness is a mere disguise for a lack of imagination. In "Full Frontal", it's the director who wears a fig leaf.
FULL FRONTAL
Miramax Films
Credits:
Director/director of photography: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriter: Coleman Hough
Producers: Scott Kramer, Gregory Jacobs
Editor: Sarah Flack
Cast:
Gus: David Duchovny
Hitler: Nicky Katt
Lee: Catherine Keener
Carl: David Hyde Pierce
Francesca/Catherine: Julia Roberts
Calvin/Nicholas: Blair Underwood
Arty/Ed: Enrico Colantonni
Running time -- 106 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 7/25/2002
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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