July 29, 1997

Information from an AOL chat July 28, 1997:

Question:	Good evening Mr. Sonnenfeld...
                        My question is about your Wild Wild
                        West project...What is the timeline, and who
                       other than Mr. Smith has signed for the movie?
BarrySonn:	Mr. Clooney is on the verge of signing.
BarrySonn:	I hope we will shoot in April.
BarrySonn:	It will be out summer of l999.

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July 25, 1997

#1)

The current issue of Starlog(Men in Black on the cover) has a short blurb about Robert Conrad being asked to play U.S. Grant in the movie. After reading the script, RC is quoted as letting them know that he has NO interest in being in this movie as it stands now.

#2)

This is a file from AOL:

07/28 "Men in Black" Director Barry Sonnenfeld 9:00pm ET (Globe)

BARRY SONNENFELD is the director of the summer's hottest movie, the record-smashing "Men in Black." He has also directed the hit movies "Get Shorty" and "The Addams Family" (the original and the sequel). Before he was a director, Barry was the acclaimed cinematographer of the Coen Brothers' breakthrough films, "Blood Simple" and "Raising Arizona."

Newsweek recently wrote of him: "He is not an alien, but he is, according to Ethan Coen, "an urban neurotic. He wears his neurosis on his sleeve." Highly strung, he did a lot of vomiting on the set of "Blood Simple," fainted while making "The Addams Family" and has no compunction about crying copiously over good news or bad. On the set of "MIB," he burst into tears when he realized that Baker's giant $1 million puppet of Edgar the Bug would not function properly for the big fight scene and had to plead to replace it with $3 million of computer-generated effects. Sonnenfeld was fond of shrieking throughout filming, "I'll give $400,000 to anyone who does one of two things: kill my mother or get me off this movie."

Sonnenfeld has a habit, dangerous in Hollywood, of saying exactly what he's feeling. As "Get Shorty" producer Michael Shamberg discovered, "Barry tells you anything that's on his mind, which is both mortifying and fearless." He was quoted in print saying that producer Brian Grazer ("Apollo 13") was an idiot savant without the savant part. "It upset Brian at first until I explained it was a compliment--and he bought it."

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