We decided this was a good opportunity to look back at other filmmakers who have their own, shared crossover universes. It was all the excuse we needed, really. “Crossover Universe” is vague, nebulous and our rules change sometimes from filmmaker universe to filmmaker universe, but hell, that’s why it’s our site. 🙂
Todd Solondz
So yes, Solondz’s recent work spawned this feature so we’ll start with him, but we’ll also note, his concept might be slightly different as it plays with identity — all the characters in “Life During Wartime” are played by new actors. It’s almost like the reverse engineered idea in “Palindromes” where he found eight actresses to play the same adolescent girl in the film (including Jennifer Jason Leigh as one of the iterations). So, let’s explain. In ‘Wartime,’ Solondz takes two characters from “Welcome To The Dollhouse,” Dawn Weiner’s father and brother (she died, spoiler!) played by Michael Lerner and Rich Pecci and intertwines them with the family of ‘Happiness’ who are left off in that picture with a pedophile father that has molested their son (played originally by Dylan Barker and Cynthia Stevenson). They essentially become a new family unit when the mother (Alison Janney) and father (Lerner) start dating. It’s all kind of difficult to explain so we made this cheat sheet last year outlining all the recurring characters, the actors who once played them and the actors who play them now. We’re not sure what’s a more inspired choice. Getting Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) to take over Jon Lovitz’s snively and pathetic character or Michael K. Williams from “The Wire” replacing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perverted, incessantly masturbating tragic creep. Either way, it’s an ambitious concept, one that works and one that we admire.
Kevin Smith
There’s a moment in “Dogma,” arguably the crown jewel in Kevin Smith’s often spotty (to be generous) filmography, when Jay bemoans the fact that he and his “hetero-lifemate” Silent Bob went looking for Shermer, Illinois, the fictional setting of most of John Hughes’ movies, due to its high level of hot girls and lack of competing drug dealers, only to find out that it was made up. It was a winky moment, full of that zingy mixture of crudity and pop culture savvy that makes the best Kevin Smith joints so enjoyable, but it was also a comment on the burgeoning “View Askewniverse.” While not a staple of every Kevin Smith film, this universe consists of the geographic locations of Leonardo and Red Bank, and cross-over characters like Jay, Silent Bob, and hapless clerks Dante and Randall. (It’s weird to think of the more thematically ambitious “Dogma” caught up in this sophomoric milieu.) At one point Kevin Smith said that “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” would be the View Askewniverse swan song, featuring almost every major character from all of those movies (including the same actors playing multiple roles), but most of them were back for the more fitting close, “Clerks II.” Also, a shout out should go to the “Clerks” animated series, which steadfastly sticks to the preexisting mythology and also generates just as many chuckles as the live action films — without all the cursing!
Pixar
The Pixar universe seems to be fairly straightforward: they’re all one universe, in modern times, with references too plentiful to mention. The Pizza Planet truck, which ushered Woody and Buzz to the lair of the green aliens in the first “Toy Story” movie popped up in almost every Pixar movie since (even “WALL*E,” where it’s seen rusting away in the distant future, and “Finding Nemo,” which is set mostly underwater – it zips by the dentist’s office when the tank gang is making their escape). Ditto the bouncing, starred ball from the short film “Luxo Jr.,” which is a Pixar universe mainstay. But there’s also a weird meta-textual quality to the Pixar universe: Heimlich from “Bug’s Life” might be seen briefly crawling across a leaf in “Toy Story 2,” but there are also “Bug’s Life” toys clearly on display in Al’s Toy Barn. Trippy. Recently, the cross-Pixar appearances have been omens of things to come: in “Ratatouille,” Remy is menaced by the shadow of the talking dog Dug in “Up”; in that Pete Docter-directed flick the house floats by an apartment that has a Lotso bear (from “Toy Story 3”) on the floor. In this summer’s “Toy Story 3,” we got a preview of a character from next year’s “Cars 2” courtesy of a poster on Andy’s wall — that’s Finn Missile, sports car secret agent! It’ll be interesting to see how 2012’s “Brave,” fits in considering it’s set in Viking times… Maybe there were Pizza Planet restaurants back then too?
Quentin Tarantino
The Tarantino-verse is unique because of its scope (there’s an ad for Red Apple cigarettes, the favorite, totally made-up brand of all of Tarantino’s characters, when The Bride steps off the plane in Tokyo in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1”), its historical scale (Donny Donowitz, “The Bear Jew,” [Eli Roth] from the WWII-set “Inglourious Basterds” is the father of Lee Donowitz [Saul Rubinek] in the Tarantino-scripted “True Romance”), its familiar relationships (John Travolta’s Vince Vega in “Pulp Fiction” is the brother of “Reservoir Dogs” Vic Vega, played by Michael Madsen) and its own knowing inter-textuality (a character from “Death Proof” is dressed up like the Bride on an Austin billboard). Yes, Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) shows up in the Tarantino-scripted “From Dusk Till Dawn,” the Tarantino-directed “Kill Bill,” and both halves of “Grindhouse.” But it’s probably stretching to assume that Samuel L. Jackson’s character from “Pulp Fiction,” once he completed “walking the earth” settled down to be a doomed organ player in “Kill Bill,” which some fans have speculated about online. Yes, the Tarantino-verse is super-geeky and intricate, but, really, it has to end somewhere.
Whit Stillman
You’d be hard pressed to find a filmmaker that succeeds in making an audience care about well-educated, well-to-do white pompous rich kids, but when Whit Stillman’s characters talk, we listen. His focus on New York City undergraduate life began in “Metropolitan,” a dialogue heavy film in which a middle class kid falls into a pack of the aforementioned, led by the brilliantly toned Chris Eigeman (who can make any sentence funny). The protagonists’ love interest, played by Carolyn Farina, who looks like a prissier Molly Ringwald, finds herself at a beach house with a shady guy that would love to have her, and it’s up to him to venture off and save her. Years later, Stillman directs his love-letter to disco with the appropriately titled “Last Days of Disco,” which chronicles the death of the aforementioned genre and its scene. Much funnier and more story-driven than his previous films, it still follows the overeducated youth, this time with various characters struggling to move up in their respective jobs or dealing with entry level work. The world’s still the same, and at a certain point, “Metropolitan” characters (including Farina) stop by for a nightly disco jaunt (though they leave Eigeman’s Nick character behind and quietly accept that Eigeman’s “Disco” character, Des, looks and acts exactly the same). Stillman keeps from being too cute with the cross over, though, and the returners from the first film refrain from hinting about past events or other things that would blatantly connect the two films. Its a small world for Stillman, and we just happen to know these people.
Edgar Wright
Ok, this doesn’t really count so much, but “Shaun of The Dead” is almost a spin off an episode of Wright’s U.K. television series “Spaced” called “Art”, where one of the characters (played by Simon Pegg who wrote the episode), hallucinates that he’s fighting off a zombie invasion. “Shaun Of The Dead” is obviously about a zombie invasion and most of the actors from “Spaced.” It’s not true crossover in the sense we mean, but hell, it’s close.
Robert Rodriguez
One could argue that Danny Trejo’s “Machete” character has appeared in almost all of Rodriguez’s films and certainly a very similar knife-wielding character appears in “Desperado.” More to the point, Trejo’s character in “Spy Kids” is called Machete and then in “Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams” he plays another incarnation of this character called, “Machete Cortez” (yes, he’s in “Spy Kids 3” too). Then there’s the Machete character, a Mexican federale who appears in “Grindhouse” and obviously has his own B-movie coming out in the fall. The lines get fuzzy on all of this, but what does appear to be true crossover — the same character planted in a new milieu — is Rose McGowan’s character Cherry Darling from Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” (or at least she has the same name, perhaps this is pre-stump with a machine gun on it?), also appears in “Machete.” Maybe McGowan’s Pam character from Tarantino’s half of “Grindhouse” will appear again sometime? Oh wait, she’s as dead as a doornail.
David Lynch
Okay, we admit this one is a bit more nebulous and speculative than the others. More a universe of spiritual crossover than explicit character reappearances, David Lynch’s film world seems to be governed by the same set of rules in almost everything he does. Any hardcore Lynch fan will know that things like red curtains indicate some sort of passage to another spiritual realm, electricity will invoke a sort of metaphysical transformation, and that personal identity will often be fragmented into two parts. Lynch’s most recent film “Inland Empire” notably incorporates his online ‘Rabbits’ series, and its ending credits sequence features a cameo of Laura Harring’s “Mulholland Drive” character and a seemingly out-of-place woodsman from his little-seen short play “Industrial Symphony No. 1.” Yeah, Lynch may just have been having some fun, but considering that ‘Inland’ is almost a variation on ‘Mulholland’ and “Lost Highway” (Lynch even confesses this one takes place in the same world as “Twin Peaks”), one has to consider that Lynch may be pointing to something bigger — that his works all occupy the same dreamlike space. With Lynch’s own inclination of creating interpretative works, to unite his films into one surreal, imagined world seems like a perfectly valid reading of his work. Maybe Harring isn’t so crazy when she claims a “Muholland Drive 2” is coming.
More & More & More
Leaping filmmaker universe to universe Michael Keaton’s character from “Jackie Brown” crosses over into Steven Soderbergh’s “Out Of Sight,” but that’s really just Elmore Leonard’s universe with one filmmaker being extra meta. Not quite as overt, Shermer, Illinois is the fictitious suburb of Chicago that is featured in several John Hughes pictures including “Weird Science,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Sixteen Candles,” and “Pretty in Pink.” Now if only those characters would have met each other. That could have spawned 10,000 more films. Even more meta (aside from the Shermer reference in “Dogma,” is Kevin Smith‘s cheeky meta-gag in “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.” Smith loves that kind of shit and included an in-joke of Gus Van Sant appearing in the film counting his riches while directing “Good Will Hunting 2” (the connection is that Smith was instrumental in getting Matt Damon and Ben Affleck hooked up with Miramax who hired Van Sant for the gig; that in-joke might be the funniest part of that movie). Don’t The Coen Brothers mention Hudsucker Industries in another one of their films too? We did our best to include Hal Hartley’s “Fay Grim,” but that’s really just the unlikely proper sequel to “Henry Fool.” Oh, Yaphet Kotto reprised his role from “Midnight Run” in the Larry the Cable Guy movie “Witless Protection.” Who knew?
Did we miss something? We’re sure we did, we pulled this one out of our asses, fast. — Drew Taylor, Chris Bell, Jon Davies.