The movie business is full of as many comeback stories as there are "Rocky" sequels, and Fox Searchlight is heading into the holiday season with two of the year's more compelling tales of redemption: the country music drama “Crazy Heart” and the fortunes of the studio itself.
Fox Searchlight has experienced more 2009 highs and lows than a bungee jumper. After sweeping February's Academy Awards with "Slumdog Millionaire" and releasing the year's early triumphs "Notorious" and "(500) Days of Summer," the art-house division of 20th Century Fox suffered through a bleak fall and winter. Despite great reviews, "Whip It" skated off the rails, "Gentlemen Broncos" (domestic gross: $113,000) was bucked from theaters in minutes and "Amelia" fared about as well as pilot Earhart's final flight.
The future looks much brighter with "Crazy Heart," which is opening Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles. But the excitement surrounding the Jeff Bridges music movie isn't limited to its critical and commercial potential. It's also that the film has even made it to theaters.
First-time filmmaker Scott Cooper's rise-from-the-ashes narrative is straightforward enough: A fading booze-addicted crooner (imagine an amalgam of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson) tries to find creative purpose and personal connections in his increasingly disorderly life.
For all of the recognizable, root-for-the-underdog beats in Cooper's adaptation of Thomas Cobb's novel, Hollywood initially reacted as if the movie couldn't be more uncommercial. When the filmmaker and his agents at International Creative Management made the Hollywood rounds several years ago looking for money to make the movie, it didn't matter to prospective partners that Bridges was set to star alongside Robert Duvall. Cooper's collaboration with musician T Bone Burnett ("Cold Mountain," "Walk the Line," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") as the film's composer and producer was equally unimpressive.
"It's dark, it's character-based and it's challenging," the 39-year-old Cooper, who's also a character actor ("Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me"), says of the typical rejection excuses he received. It doesn't help, either, that studio executives consider country music unappealing, the playlist on someone else's iPod.
