Well here is the big Where the Wild Things Are Spike Jonze profile, for this Sunday's New York Times magazine. The piece is made up of the idea of the struggle between a brilliant, unusual director and a stultifying studio system. Gosh, it is hard to make a good movie in the studio system! And gosh, directors are difficult little children. This is probably a thing that is always true! And here, not at all appearing in the article, are the names of the producers of the film (except Carls and Sendak, who, you know, were shopping a movie version together for ages), which sort of leaves the article as being a giant heap of nothing, to be rude. But that there is an entire depiction of a back-and-forth between Spike Jonze and the studio, without the producers as participants, is absurd. I'm sure none of the producers would go on the record, because what does it gain them? But to have no view of the roles of extremely powerful people (um, Tom Hanks?) in this process is ridiculous. There are some coded suggestions lurking in the piece however! Let's annotate.

So! The article:

At the conclusion of the four-month shoot in December 2006, Jonze told Warner Brothers he needed more money for additional photography.

Ooh, over budget. And early. Good for him.

The executives replied that they'd first need to see a "director's cut." Usually, Robinov told me, when a studio asks for a director's cut, they expect it to be delivered in three months. Three months passed. Then another three months.

Dude went totally MIA. Like, freakily so.

"We spent a lot of time hunting through the footage trying to find that nuance that Spike wanted," Landay told me.

They seized the film???

Finally, in September 2007, Jonze screened a cut for executives at Warner Brothers. Robinov had concerns. "We felt that the movie was too slow," he told me. There was also "a question of intensity: Is it too intense for kids? Is the audience for the movie that we're making broad enough?" A test screening was convened in Pasadena, and some reactions were later posted on a blog. One viewer wrote, "I don't think it's for young children." Another claimed that some children in the audience began to cry and asked their parents to leave the theater.

They hated it so much they leaked the test screening results.

The back-and-forth between Jonze and the studio over the next few months, Robinov told me, was "a rough process." He and Jonze had a series of "disagreements" about the movie's "tone and pacing and clarity."

They fought like cats and dogs. Presumably the producers spent most of this period sitting on Jonze's head. And massaging the studio.

It was uncertain, he said, "whose cut of the picture and what cut of the picture would ultimately prevail."

Someone took it away from Jonze. Possibly the movie we're going to see is not Jonze's cut.

I asked if there was any truth to the rumor that he'd considered firing Jonze. "There wasn't a conversation about firing him per se," he replied. "We certainly reached a place in talking about the movie where I can imagine it would have been easier for Spike to walk away, and it would have been easier for me to be talking to someone else, but we never got there."

You can 'imagine' that? 'Per se'? I mean...

Jonze wouldn't talk about the rift, but Megan Baltimore, a former roommate from Torrance who remains one of his closest friends, told me: "I think he got in a pretty dark place at the time. I think he got to the point where he was spending more energy in the battle than on making the movie, and I think it was defeating for him."

Oh. Dude was in a "dark place." Yikesies! How dark? We may never know. I hope this movie is really really good, like his other movies, and I also hope it is his movie!