Until now, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” has been all boobs, provocative trailers and Hot Topic magazine spreads, but today, something different arrives from the MouthTapedShut “unofficial” page.
For those of you playing catch up to just what all the fuss is about in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” the story is actually kickstarted some four decades before we meet up with Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. Henrik Vanger, the former CEO of Vanger Enterprises — played in the upcoming movie by Christopher Plummer — hires journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to investigate the death of his niece Harriet forty years ago in what appeared to be an accident. However, he keeps receiving once-a-year “gifts” that he believes are taunts from her killer, and Henrik wants to get to the bottom of it. So Mikael teams with master hacker Lisbeth to unravel the mystery. Anyway, though bereft of sound, a pretty clever Super 8 video style tease has popped up, giving us a drive-by of the accident scene all those many years ago. It’s another small taste from the movie, but an intriguing one nonetheless.
Meanwhile, possibly not all is well within the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ camp, or at least not between the creative and business side of things. You’ll recall that Fincher became embroiled in bitter feuding with Paramount during “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” over its exorbitant running time — Fincher wanted a three hour cut. The obstinate Fincher held his ground and Paramount began to get nasty, dropping his “Heavy Metal” project, and letting the rights lapse on the Eliot Ness serial killer project, “Torso.” Well, a similar situation seems to be quietly brewing with Sony.
Fincher currently has a three hour cut of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and Sony wants nothing longer than two hours and twenty minutes. Now, before you sound the alarms, this type of quote unquote fighting is par for the course with final cut directors and studios (or at least it shouldn’t surprise you with Fincher), but one should note the filmmaker’s first collaboration with Sony — “The Social Network” — went unusually smoothly. There’s also been some battling over the Neil Kellerhouse posters you’ve seen on MouthTapedShut — Fincher and Reznor’s unsanctioned ‘Dragon Tattoo’ blog that Sony obviously knows about, but wasn’t always happy about either since they’re not in control of it. Again, this is a situation to keep an eye on rather than make a fuss about, but if it truly gets ugly, we’d expect 1) you’re going to hear about it from others and 2) it’s going to greatly impact Fincher’s decision on whether he stays on board for the other two books in the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy. That is, if Sony even wants him to. Too much headbutting In Hollywood does get acrimonious after a while. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” hits theaters on December 21st.