Brad Pitt Actually IS Doing A Heck Of A Job

With all due respect to State of Play and the top-drawer talent involved in it, Brad Pitt--just a day before today's announcement that Russell Crowe would be replacing him in Universal's smart thriller--has again shown an acute sense of what the big picture actually is.

As he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in a comprehensive story about his new initiative to help rebuild a patch of the Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward, the killer 2005 storm "illuminated the brutal truth that there's a portion of our society that we're not looking after, that we are marginalizing. And that shouldn't be."

It could sound almost simplistic, until you reflect on everything that happened--or more to the point didn't happen--both before and after the nation's "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" moment at the Mobile Regional Airport (as quoted here in the official White House Press release of September 2, 2005.

For contrast there's this from today's New York Times piece
on the shortage of affordable rentals (given the slow state of home rebuilding) in NOLA. (Also see the associated video.) "FEMA just makes you feel like dirt," said trailer park resident Tiffany Farbe, in the same edition that also covered Pitt's effort--in which the star, matched by producer Steve Bing, invested $5 million of his own.

I discussed this with Pitt, along with his aid efforts in Africa, when I interviewed him in Namibia last fall:

We're starting this design competition with Build A Dream, that came out of the frustration with the numerous dropped balls and the realization that there's sections of our society that we're ignoring. And so it's going to work on rebuilding some neighborhoods--but the ultimate goal, hopefully, will be for it to become a pilot neighborhood, acting as kindling for further rebuilding for New Orleans.

But it's also kind to kind of evolve the ideas of green architecture. I'm very excited and passionate about where that thing's heading--to take something that was a disaster and turn it into something and make that positive for the people. With proper redevelopment, that doesn't have opportunists come in. It's cool. It's really cool.

Pitt talks about these subjects with an intensity that far outmatches what he has to say about his day job. There's commitment, even fervor, and when we spoke he was eager to rejoin his pal David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , shooting in New Orleans.

He is a conscientious worker, and cynical Hollywood types who are searching for reasons he may have dropped out of State of Play should consider that what he's said, through intermediaries, says is exactly what he means--the script, at least for him to play, wasn't right.

When Pitt and I talked about 12 Monkeys--in which his jittery, amped-up performance was generally admired and taken as a sign of growing seriousness as an actor--he was still brooding over what he felt were wrong choices:

It's in the second half. It's always a puzzle to be figured out and you go with the flow, grab some of the tide, but yeah, that...that second half I got wrong.

I ran the gimmick is what I did. I ran the gimmick in the second half and it called for something else, but it was also confined a little bit by what was on the table, what was on the page.

Going forward, it will be hard to say the abandoned film's name without the echo of "pay or play", which of course in Hollywood means the star gets his dough whether the studio goes forward or not. (Thus Denzel Washington was paid twice for American Gangster when the film skipped a long beat before being made.) But what happens when the studio is game and the star is not? Potentially, a lawsuit...but does Universal really want to alienate one of those exceedingly rare commodities, a genuine, bankable star. Unlikely. (Even if they're going to feel a considerable pinch when Crowe's William Morris agency rep, George Freeman, is done getting his client's $20 million payday taken care of along with a no doubt colossal array of perks involving family airlifts to and from Australia. Then there's the potential reaction of Ridley Scott, who gave them the prize of a sizable hit with American Gangster and has Crowe due to report for his Nottingham, now ramping up and building sets at England' Shepperton studios, at a point perilously close to the likely end of shooting on State of Play.)

Pitt, having endured a long haul with Fincher on Benjamin Button and a fairly quick shoot with buddy George Clooney on the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, just may be happy to take advantage of a little break to attend to that famously expansive family. As he said on the African coast not long after wrapping his (again, much admired) turn in Babel:

I'm exhilarated. I'm pumped at the end of the shoot. I've heard of people who don't know where to go and go into depressions and don't know what to do with themselves. Man, I'm free! I feel great. I feel--a sense of accomplishment and that the work is done and that it's time for a little free play.

(Brad Pitt in new Orleans' 9th Ward, before a "symbolic" art installation for his "Make It Right" project; photo by New Olreans Times-Piccayune)