Sydney Morning Herald:
2/29/00
The Beach strands at box office

The Beach strands at box office: After a tremendous amount of hype and anticipation, The Beach has been a box office disappointment. It took just $US8 million last weekend and looks likely to get no more than $US42 million total in America. Leonardo DiCaprio's salary alone was $US20 million. It may fare better in the European market, but as the film reviewer for Newsweek put it: "In terms of a fall from paradise, The Beach is about as harrowing as being told to go home from summer camp."
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LA Times:
2/29/00
'Whole Nine Yards' Tops Box Office

"The Beach," the new movie from teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, dropped out of the top 10 after just three weekends. It was No. 11 with $3.5 million. Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures were to be released today.
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Sun Herald:
2/29/00
The latest muse of the rich and famous

Some notable quotables: ''I've had every video game system there is. It's a trap once you get involved with that stuff. It becomes like this drug in a weird way.'' - Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who admits he's a video game freak. ''Everybody is trying to tell you, there's rough times ahead and things like that, but you don't hear that, you know what I mean? Because you're so wrapped up.'' - Actor Freddie Prinze Jr., on why love is blind.
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BBC News:
2/28/00
Reclusive role for DiCaprio

Beach star Leonardo DiCaprio looks set to team up with film-maker Michael Mann to make a biography about the legendary reclusive billionaire, Howard Hughes. The pair have wanted to work together since they unsuccessfully tried to film a James Dean biography before DiCaprio became a superstar in Titanic. According to producers New Line Pictures, the movie will be based on Hughes' early years as an aviator and Hollywood producer/director.
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Dialy Iowan:
2/28/00
Web playing role in 'Star Wars' decision

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Fans of Star Wars the whole world over are huddled in front of the gloomy flare of computer monitors, scouting the Web for the play-by-play on who will be the next Anakin Skywalker. Perhaps this will be the watershed event by which movie history marks the transition from artists and corporations making movies for an audience to an audience making movies for themselves. The trend has gathered momentum for years with the independent film movement, which culminated last year with The Blair Witch Project. With the advent of the Web and home movies, assorted would-be movie moguls prowl the 'Net for once-secret knowledge of film productions. This kind of fame by proximity has worked against movies. Gathering early buzz on the Web is now so important that if Harry Knowles on his "Ain't It Cool News" Web page smells trouble, a producer is finished before the first test screening. All the Web boys' attention is now centered on what might be the biggest casting call since that for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Apparently at the forefront of the potential Anakins -- and judging from an interview on "Entertainment Tonight," willingly at the forefront -- is Leonardo Di Caprio, or as he is known in the hearts and minds of young girls everywhere, "Leo." This possibility sends a chill down the spine of a great majority of Star Wars fans, who fear the pollution of the film series by such a well-known talent. More to the point, they fear Leonardo will pull a star trip on the sacred films, somehow compromising the artistic integrity of series creator George Lucas. Too late. All the hubbub about Leo has accelerated in the past few weeks, because he has been out promoting his latest film, The Beach. Letting it be known to various media outlets that yes, he is interested in playing Anakin has put the anti-Leo followers of Yoda into high gear. It has also put Lucas in the unusual position of having to gauge his audience. For the duration of the series, much less his career, Lucas has openly detested the idea of film-by-committee. In an interview last spring with "60 Minutes" on the eve of the release of Episode 1, Lucas lamented that audience testing, that fine polling art by which we get the sudsy endings we complain about, nearly ruined his earliest films. Lucas has resorted to such polling on this issue, probably the issue that will make or break this trilogy in terms of posterity. The official Star Wars Web site recently put up a poll asking visitors who they think would be best for the part of Anakin: A Well Known Actor (um, Leo), An Unknown (as with Star Wars tradition), or simply, the Best Person For the Job. Um, Leo. Despite the threat of being ostracized by my Jedi brothers and sisters, I will walk out onto the lone branch and say, "Yes, go with Leo." Lest one forget, Leo is a good actor: just check out "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." He looks like he could reasonably be the father of Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), and he can walk the line between nice and not so nice pretty well -- probably the most necessary trait for the actor who will see Anakin into Darth Vader. Lucas doesn't need us to tell him what he should already know. The slow-but-inevitable turn toward the audience's becoming the movie maker should not interfere with an artist's vision. Those of us on the Internet pretending to be more than we are by scooping the production should put down the bag of chips and pick up a video camera, if it is moviemaking that we want to do.
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Fox News:
2/28/00
Dicaprio Slides

The Bruce Willis mob comedy The Whole Nine Yards ruled the North American box office for the second consecutive weekend, while two new movies struggled and Leonardo DiCaprio's The Beach tumbled out of the top 10 in its third weekend.Dicaprio Slides DiCaprio's The Beach (Fox) slid four places to No. 11 with $3.5 million and a 17-day total of $33.9 million. Paramount's unheralded Snow Day, which opened at the same time, has pulled in $43.3 million. A spokesman for Fox was philosophical about The Beach, noting that it was shaping up as an international hit.
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US Newswire:
2/25/00
NYLCV Endorses Al Gore for President

In addition to the endorsement of the New York League of Conservation Voters, today the Gore campaign announced the support of more than 1000 "Environmental Voters for Gore." The group includes notable personalities Ted Danson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ed Begley, Jr., as well as environmentally conscious citizens in all fifty states who are working to bring Al Gore to victory.
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Complete Bergen article
Bergen.com:
2/25/00
The rap at the box office

One reason Mechanic is so well-liked by those who work for him is that unlike some other studio heads, he doesn't point fingers or fire executives when movies don't work. Fox executives are quick to add that no one is harder on Mechanic than Mechanic himself. "Eighty percent of Bill's pressures are brought on by Bill," one co-worker says. Mechanic concurs unapologetically. "People will call me if something doesn't work and tell me to ease up on myself, and I say, 'Why?' It's very debilitating when movies you're emotionally invested in don't fulfill expectations." In speaking of expectations, Mechanic says he's pleased with the $15.2 million opening this month of Fox's latest release, "The Beach," which the industry and the media have characterized as disappointing. He predicts the picture, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, will ultimately be profitable.
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Complete Jam Showbiz article
Jam Showbiz:
2/25/00
Tuckered-out Tobey just wants to rest

"I felt like it (The Cider House Rules) was more important than me being homesick, it was more important than me needing rest," says Maguire. "I felt like I had to do it because I liked everything about it." So he went straight to New England for another four months of long days. When that wrapped, the young star was truly anxious to get home - until he got a copy of the script for Wonder Boys, based on Michael Chabon's acclaimed novel, and was offered a part. "I was going, 'Oh no, I like this script and I really want to work with Curtis and Michael Douglas and I think I'm going to end up working again.' " After three months of shooting in Pittsburgh, Maguire finally fled home to California to get some much-needed rest. It's an embarrassment of riches for the young star, who had his first movie role in This Boy's Life (where he met and befriended current pal Leonardo DiCaprio)
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Jam Showbiz:
2/25/00
'Buffy' to play college professor

Would you believe Professor Buffy? Sarah Michelle Gellar, the 21-year-old star of the TV series "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," has signed on to play a philosophy lecturer in director James Toback's next film, the semi-autobiographical "Harvard Man." The British movie web site Popcorn reports that Toback has been working on the project for five years, and the film will recount his own experiences at Harvard during the '60s, including his LSD overdose. Gellar will play a professor having an affair with a star basketball player, a role Toback had hoped Leonardo DiCaprio would play before his $20 million payday put him out of reach of "Harvard Man's" budget. Filming is expected to start in the spring, during Gellar's break from shooting "Buffy," Popcorn reports.
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E! Online:Ted Casablanca
2/24/00
Kiss and Dispel

Chatted for a bit with Bruce Willis during the Whole Nine Yards premiere, and he couldn't have been doing a better job of bolstering his colleagues from The Sixth Sense, the entire crew of which seemed to get Oscar nods, save Mr. W. Shades of Leo and Titanic? You bet. Though I think it's safe to say Bruce the Goose is taking this one a tad better than our rebel Leo did. "They deserve everything they get," B.W. proclaimed, in his best benevolent-ese. "They were sensational to work with."
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MSNBC:
2/24/00
STAR POWER

STAR POWER A stream of celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kenneth Branagh and George Clooney gave the more than 3,000 journalists from around the world plenty to write home about and attracted huge crowds of adoring fans. Asian films featured strongly and a leading light of Asian cinema, the Chinese actress Gong Li, chaired a nine-member jury of international cinema industry representatives judging 21 films from 16 countries. Advertisement The festival featured hundreds of films alongside the prize contenders and ranks just below Cannes and alongside Venice in prestige on the European film festival circuit. Gong Li’s former partner, Zhang Yimou, also won a Silver Bear for directing “The Road Home,” a fable about change in China. He praised Berlin, where he was honored for his film “Red Sorghum” 12 years ago. “Berlin is a city I will always hold dear in my memory. It is a real pleasure to get the award from Gong Li as the last time I won she couldn’t come,” Zhang told the awards ceremony. Another Asian movie, the Japanese “Boy’s Choir,” took the Alfred Bauer Prize for best first feature. Denzel Washington won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his portrayal of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in Norman Jewison’s injustice biopic “The Hurricane.” “I have been an actor for around 25 years now and I have never felt so wonderful as I do tonight,” said Washington, who won a prize here previously for the role of civil rights activist Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s film.
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NY Daily News:
2/23/00
'Beach' Gets Beached

20th Century Fox, which faced some big setbacks at the box office last year, is getting sand kicked in its face again. "The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio in his first big role since "Titanic," finished its second weekend ranked seventh with $8 million, bringing its total take to just $28.5 million. "It's pretty negative," said Robert Bucksbaum, editor of Reel Sources, which tracks the movie industry. Bucksbaum said Fox encountered unexpected competition from Miramax's "Scream 3" and sci-fi thriller "Pitch Black," from USA Films, both of which siphoned off DiCaprio's screaming teen fans. As a result, Fox executives have a lot riding on the movie's performance internationally, where Leo packs in audiences. Fox faced its share of setbacks last year with costly flops like "Anna and the King" and the dark drama "Fight Club." And while the studio had a blockbuster summer hit with "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace," most of the profits went to director George Lucas. Still, Hollywood insiders said Fox is poised for a comeback because of a promising slate of star-studded upcoming offerings, including the drama "Cast Away," starring Tom Hanks, and the comedy "Me, Myself & Irene," featuring Jim Carrey from the creators of "There's Something About Mary," Peter and Bobby Farrelly. "We're Expecting Another 'Liar, Liar.'"
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Mirror:
2/23/00
VIRGINIE'S SECRET

I PREFER MY MAN OF 40 TO DICAPRIO SAYS BEACH STAR CHIC Virginie Ledoyen strolls along the shore after turning her back on Hollywood's hottest heart-throb. The French actress, who filmed a passionate love scene with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach, has revealed that he left her cold. While waves lapped at their sun-bronzed bodies and their lips met in a salty kiss, 23-year-old Virginie had only one man on her mind. It definitely wasn't baby-faced Leo, 25. She could barely wait to rush home to her 40-year-old boyfriend, movie technician Louis Saint Calbre. Louis, who shares a flat with her in Paris, is tall and dark with manly Latin looks. And he's the sort of partner Virginie prefers - mature. She rolls her eyes in astonishment at the thought that she might have been sexually attracted by the pale young American. "Leo and I got on very well as friends," she says. "He is very funny and very intelligent, but he did nothing for me on a romantic level. I suppose he is quite good-looking, but Leonardo is really not the kind of guy I go for. "When we did our love scene, I got no physical pleasure from it. "Sure I kissed Leonardo, but it did nothing for me. I was pretty unimpressed, if you must know. "We had to repeat the scene a dozen times and it was hard work, but certainly not a turn-on. "All I can remember is the taste of salt because we were kissing in the sea and the water kept getting into our mouths." Leonardo modestly agrees that he failed to make the ocean roar for his co-star as they filmed in Thailand. "She simply wasn't interested in me," he confirms. "The fact that I was a Hollywood star meant nothing to her, and rightly so. She's a very sophisticated European lady." Virginie has dated Louis for three years. She has also been closely linked to Paris lawyer Thierry Meunier, 40. A friend said yesterday: "She ended her last affair with Meunier before she started the next one with Saint Calbre. "The one thing both men have in common is they are both much older than she is and both dote on her." Virginie herself seems wise beyond her years. Indeed she is already a showbusiness veteran. She appeared in a TV commercial at the age of three and made her first movie when she was nine. At 16 she had saved enough money to leave home and buy her own flat. Her beauty also won her a modelling contract with cosmetics giant L'Oreal. Featuring in 15 French films made her a big name in her own country. Now the phenomenal success of The Beach has opened the door to Hollywood's riches. Yet she is in no rush. "It's true that since Leonardo, the film offers have been rolling in,'' she concedes. "But I intend to choose my films carefully so I don't get typecast as just the pretty French girl in a short skirt. I am a tough person and I want tough intelligent roles." The Beach's British director Danny Boyle predicts a great future for Virginie, not least because of the way she coped with DiCaprio. Danny recalls: "While other actresses might have been overwhelmed at sharing a lead role with the world's number one film star, she always remained cool and detached."
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The Express:
2/22/00
I'm not just a Beach bum insists Leo

ACTOR Leonardo DiCaprio has declared himself a "hard core" backer of Al Gore's campaign to become the next American president. The star said, during an interview conducted mainly from a supermarket trolley, that he was a keen environmentalist concerned about global warming and the risk to endangered species. He believes that Vice President Gore, the Democrat front-runner, is the best fighter for Green issues. DiCaprio, who has a reputation for being a boisterous bar crawler, revealed his serious side to Time magazine. He says he even agonises over ordering a burger from hotel room service. "I shouldn't be eating hamburgers because the methane gas cows release is the Number One contributor to the destruction of the ozone layer," says the star of The Beach. "The number one reason they destroy the rain forest is to make grazing ground for cattle. So it's very ironic that I eat beef, being the environmentalist that I am," Leo explains. Time, which normally devotes itself to weighty political issues, went shopping with Leo in Los Angeles. The magazine discovered during trips down the aisles that DiCaprio's quandary over what to eat reaches crisis point when he agonises over room service menus. "If I ordered the tuna sandwich, I would be promoting the fact that they have large tuna nets that capture innocent little dolphins," he said. DiCaprio's support might have been a bigger boost for Gore if his 12-year-old fans could actually vote. However, Gore now has at least one challenger less for the White House. Donald Trump has pulled out of the race, citing the quite reasonable excuse that he doesn't think he can win. But the real drama is unfolding in South Carolina. Texas governor George Bush, the anointed choice of the Republican Party establishment, is tied in the polls with the charismatic insurgent, Senator John McCain.The battle is so intense that Bush, who once seemed unassailable with a £50million war chest, is said to be down to his last £10million. The cash crisis comes with 46 states still to be fought over after South Carolina, where voters will choose between the two on Saturday.
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Yahoo News:
2/22/00
Europeans take to The Beach

SYDNEY (Variety) - ``The Beach'' may be all but washed up in the United States, but Leonardo DiCaprio is still the prince of tides overseas, judging by the Fox drama's openings and holding power in its initial foreign engagements. The Danny Boyle-directed picture netted $13.3 million last weekend from handsome bows in eight markets -- claiming pole position in each -- and holdovers in six territories. International gross to date is $25.2 million. The presence of Gallic thesps Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen undoubtedly contributed to the film's strapping $4.9 million bounty in France. Next best opener was Germany's solid $2.3 million (a 30% market share), followed by Brazil's $681,000 and Belgium's $673,000. Equally impressive were Switzerland's $545,000, Austria's $234,000 and South Africa's $211,000 (35% of the market). Indicating that word of mouth is a lot stronger abroad than at home, ``The Beach'' dipped by a reasonable 20% in the U.K., collaring $3.2 million for a 10-day total of $9.7 million. If it can sustain this kind of momentum, an eventual tally north of $100 million seems attainable.
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Complete Washington Post article
Washington Post:
2/22/00
Titanic Junkies, Your Ship Has Come In

This is the first time the 13-by-20-foot slice of the hull has been displayed in its exposed state--it was previously exhibited in a tank of water and chemicals during its lengthy restoration. The hull is positioned lovingly above a bed of white sand. A spotlight plays over it as classical music crescendos in the background. The sinking is re-created with last words from passengers--like Capt. Edward Smith's "It's every man for himself"--projected on a backdrop covered with electric stars. Nearby is a thin piece of ice, about the size of a dining room table, with visitors' handprints all over it. This all makes for melodrama worthy of Leonardo DiCaprio and Celine Dion themselves.
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Entertainment Weekly:
2/21/00
Star Search

All about the Anakin Skywalker casting call. EW gives you the latest on the A-list actors lining up to audition for "Star Wars"

Complete Ain't it cool news article
Ain't it cool news:
2/21/00
A report on THE BEACH southeast Asia

A report on THE BEACH from southeast Asia Our man in the Boondocks caught the early asian release of the new Leo flick THE BEACH while beating around in the bush. Soule our enterprizing explorer filed his report with Father Geek from Taipei and here it is for you all to debate... Ain't the NET wonderful... Hey there, Aint-It-Cool. I am backpacking through Asia right now, and "The Beach" appears to be out here a week earlier than in the States, so I caught it tonight. I wrote a review, which I thought you might find interesting and possibly postable. If you use it, please call me Soule. Here you go: I am currently travelling in Asia, (Hong Kong and Macau last week, Taipei this week, Bangkok next week), and I was surprised to notice that the latest Leonardo DiCaprio opus, "The Beach" was out here in theaters before it's out in the States. So, I caught it in a small theater in Taipei, and am able to say with pleasure that I quite liked it. Part of that might have to do with the fact that I am an American gallivanting around Asia myself at the moment, and the movie romanticizes such activities (more or less), but I also think it was a genuinely good film. It is also recognizably a film from the boys who brought us "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave", which means we get nice techno music, interesting stylistic touches (the shots of Leo as a character in a video game in his own head were particularly good), and not necessarily the most comprehensible narrative. I am sure the film's storyline has leaked out by now, but I'll recap quickly without spoilers. Leo plays Richard, a young American backpacker in Thailand who is dissatisfied with the normal touristy activities, simply because they are too accessible to the hoi-polloi. He happens upon a map to a Beach (not just a beach, mind you), on an island where the average tourist can't go, because its location has been kept a secret by those few adventurous souls who have found it in the past. He goes there with a few French friends he picks up, meets the other backpackers living on the island, and adventures ensue. First of all, Leo is very good in this movie. He successfully dispels any baggage being carried from "Titanic", and he doesn't look like a spindly child, as he did in some of his earlier roles. The Richard role is a tricky one - many things happen to this character, and although by the end I wasn't quite sure that he kept my sympathy, that's because of the way the role was written, not Leo's fault. Actually, seeing this flick made me think, again, that he wouldn't be half-bad as Luke Skywalker's dad.
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Mr. Showbiz:
2/21/00
Brad Says Yea, Leo Nay to Oscars

Being asked to present at the Academy Awards is usually considered something of an honor, but that doesn't mean every celeb says yes. Heartthrobs Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio caused something of a stir when each declined to present at this year's Oscars. Now Pitt's rethinking his refusal, says the New York Daily News. "Although the Oscars are still the Everest of awards for our industry, there is now an oversaturation of these events," Pitt said through a spokeswoman. "Every time you turn on the television, someone's getting an award. My wish is that it was still the golden days when there were only the Oscars — we'd all show up, acknowledge and support the year's work, and call it a day. But these days, you go where you're needed." According to his publicist, Pitt changed his mind to support his friends Tom Cruise and Catherine Keener, who are both going for the gold this year. Pitt co-starred with Being John Malkovich's Keener in the all-but-forgotten 1992 indie Johnny Suede. Get profiles here on all the major actors, actresses, and films; take a daily trivia quiz; and much more! So why is Leo, who famously stayed away from the 1997 ceremony after not being nominated for his Titanic role, opting again for an Oscar no-show? His rep, Ken Sunshine denies that the Beach star is "dissing" the Oscars. Sunshine tells the News that Leo can't attend due to "a long-standing prior commitment." Richard Zanuck, who's producing the awards show, said he found it "disturbing" that these golden boys didn't want to be part of Hollywood's biggest night. So who will be among the illustrious presenters come March 26? Add to the list Charlize Theron, who co-starred in the Oscar-nominated Cider House Rules and whose Reindeer Games opens Feb. 25. Also among the stars who'll be hugging targets for tearful winners: Arnold Schwarzenegger, making his fifth Oscar appearance and Samuel L. Jackson, who goes for three. Mike Myers, whose Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is up for a Best Makeup Oscar, and Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat, whose Anna and the King competes for Art Direction and Costume Design honors, will also present. And those lucky dogs winning the technical achievement awards may be more thankful for the chance to plant one on Wild Wild West star Salma Hayek, who's presenting those early Oscars March 4.
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Complete Spokesman Review article
Spokesman Review:
2/21/00
Farnsworth provides stability in 'Straight

...And, unfortunately, one character who does get added emphasis, Sissy Spacek, is one who shouldn't. Spacek plays Alvin's daughter, a woman with some sort of mental disability, and the Oscar-winning actress affects a stammer that comes across as both ridiculous and phony. (Note to Hollywood types trying to play these kinds of roles: Go back and study the superb work that a 16-year-old Leonard DiCaprio did in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape"). Ultimately, the main strength that "The Straight Story" has is Farnsworth, which is always an asset. Because as has been clear in everything from "The Grey Fox" to "The Natural," Farnsworth represents the very essence of on-screen authenticity.
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Complete NY Times article
NY Times:
2/21/00
Power in Hollywood

...Although agents still have extraordinary leverage, the ascendancy of talent managers who can also produce films and television shows has unhinged top talent agencies like the Creative Artists Agency, International Creative Management and William Morris. Some stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Costner and Robin Williams no longer have agents, but rely on managers or lawyers.
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Sun Herald:
2/21/00
Some notable quotables:

''He's just a nice guy. Like any guy of 25. Sweet. Playful. He makes jokes. He's very simple. He doesn't act like a superstar. He's really normal, I swear.'' - Virginie Ledoyen, on her love interest in ''The Beach,'' Leo DiCaprio.
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LA Times:
2/21/00
FRENCH IMPORT

The face of Virginie Ledoyen (Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Beach" co-star) may be new to Americans, but in her native France the 23-year-old is a huge star with an impressive filmography. Unfortunately, most of Ledoyen's French-language works are not available on video in the U.S., but those that are include Benoi^t Jacquot's "A Single Girl" (La Fille Seule) and Claude Chabrol's "La Ceremonie."
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Excite News:
2/21/00
Ledoyen: Kissing Leo Is Hard Work

It's hard work kissing Leonardo DiCaprio. Really. That's what DiCaprio's co-star Virginie Ledoyen says about their underwater smooch in the film "The Beach." "As you can imagine, you can't breathe. So you have to breathe before and then dive down. It's really work. It's hard to make people understand that you're kissing Leo but that it's a job," Ledoyen says in the Feb. 28 issue of People magazine. The 23-year-old French actress says working with DiCaprio during the four-month shoot in Thailand was a "great time." "He was very sweet to my family and friends."
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Excite News:
2/18/00
Berlinale movie festival in Berlin

British director Danny Boyle, left, and actor Leonardi DiCaprio, right, answer questions during a press conference at the Berlinale movie festival in Berlin, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2000. DiCaprio stars the movie "The Beach" which will have its German premiere later this Saturday.

BBC News:
2/18/00
Leo and Posh top Valentine's wish list

Beach star Leonardo DiCaprio and Posh Spice Victoria Adams are the nation's Valentine choice, a survey has revealed. They came out tops in a poll of 1,000 adults commissioned by Telewest Communications. The survey also revealed the people to whom Britons would least like to send a Valentine's message. This honour went to Tory leader William Hague and the Prince of Wales's companion, Camilla Parker Bowles.
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BBC News:
2/18/00
A record-breaking weekend at the UK

A record-breaking weekend at the UK box office has seen Leonardo DiCaprio's much-hyped film The Beach beaten by animated blockbuster Toy Story 2. The second instalment of the cartoon hit took well over half of the record £14.2m taken by UK cinemas over the weekend. Between Friday and Sunday it took twice as much as its predecessor, Toy Story, raking in £7.8m - compared to the £7.5m which Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace took over the same period when it opened in the UK. The Beach took £2.3m - despite a blaze of publicity surrounding DiCaprio's appearance at the European premiere in London last week. Across the Atlantic, US filmgoers celebrated Valentine's weekend in ghoulish fashion - as horror sequel Scream 3 also beat The Beach at the box office. The third instalment of the Scream series, starring Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell and David Arquette, took $16.4m (£10.3m) across North America, to spend its second week at number one. It is set to be the last of the series of films which has built up a worldwide following, and opens in the UK on 28 April. The Beach came in second place, taking $15m ($9.4m). Critically savaged The film - about an American backpacker's doomed search for paradise in Thailand - has had mixed reviews in the UK, but took a battering at the hands of US critics. Leading film writer Roger Ebert described it as "seriously confused" in the Chicago Sun-Times, and Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times calls it "tedious and unsatisfying". Although the film has generally been seen as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio, its rating in the US has also cut off many of the 25-year-old heart-throb's fans - it is rated "R", barring under-17s from seeing it without an adult. In the UK it carries a 15 rating. But its distributor, 20th Century Fox, is not concerned. Head of distribution Tom Sherak said: "We're all so wound up with what's number one and two. "The fact is there's a lot of movies that have done really well that didn't open as number one, such as There's Something About Mary." Gesture to Thais Meanwhile in Thailand, a newspaper reports Fox is trying to defuse the row over alleged damage to the beach where the movie was made, Maya Bay on Phi Phi Le island. The Nation said Fox would donate money from The Beach's Thai premiere next month to the country's national parks. The film's British director, Danny Boyle, told reporters at the Berlin Film Festival: "We went back to the beach three weeks ago and now it's in good condition. "The Thai government returned the $110,000 damage deposit and I hope this is the end of it."
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BBC News:
2/18/00
All Saints set to topple Oasis

All Saints are set to knock rock superstars Oasis from the top of the charts with their new single Pure Shores, according to early sales figures. They sold 48,000 copies of the track - which features on the soundtrack to the new Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach - during its first day in the shops. The single will be the girls' fourth number one. Oasis look likely to drop to number three as they struggle to match last week's sales of 180,000 copies of Go Let it Out - their first single in two years.
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Variety:
2/18/00
A boy’s best friend is his — mother

GOOD MORNING: A boy’s best friend is his — mother — and his grandmother. Ask Leonardo Di Caprio who brought his mom and grandmother to the London, Berlin and Paris preems of "The Beach" and on Tuesday, he birthday-partied his mother, Irmelin, in Paris at a private party at L’Avenue. (Leo’s grandmother, Herlena, who lives in Germany, is 85). At the Berlin bow, DiCaprio was besieged with questions on everything from his feelings on the Academy Awards to — Austria’s Jorg Haider. As for the Oscars, he has no ill feelings. Leo lingered in Paris after his duties with the pic — after all, there are other ladies to see in Paree … Barbra Streisand and Jim Brolin may take in Bali and other idyllic South Pacific islands after her four concerts in Australia and before he starts (April 16) the bigscreen "Outcry." Barbra plays the Sydney football stadium, March 8 and 10, and the Melbourne New Colonial Stadium, March 13 and 15. On their return, and while Brolin’s in front of the bigscreen cameras in an offbeat, heavy role, Barbra continues editing her New Year’s Eve and Jan. 1 MGM Grand stands … With the California primaries coming up, Connie Stevens will host fundraisers for Sen. John McCain. The first, Feb. 25 at the Grand Ballroom of the BevHilton, and then Feb. 28, Connie intro’s Cindy (Mrs. John) McCain at a Vegas rally-fundraiser. Connie first introduced McCain to the showbiz community July 12, 1998, with a party at her home. She had met him in D.C. when she was honored by the USO for her film about women Vietnam vets, "A Healing." McCain, a five-year prisoner of war in Vietnam was among those on hand to praise Connie’s filmed tribute. At that meeting, she says, "I told him to run for president!" She showed in New Hampshire on Veterans Day for McCain’s presidential primary push. P.S. Although Connie says she "laughed," she also says her lawyers have put the Star "on notice" for claiming she and McCain had an "improper relationship."
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Montreal Gazette:
2/18/00
Yes, that's Leonardo DiCaprio

Yes, that's Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of Time magazine. Not Teen Beat, not YM, not Pimple Cream Monthly, but venerable, staid, reliable old Time. Truly, civilization is coming to an end.
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NY Post:
2/18/00
CRYSTAL-CLEAR JOKES

LEONARDO DiCaprio and Brad Pitt won't be at the Oscar ceremony. Neither will the traditionally cringe-inducing dance numbers. Billy Crystal, thankfully, will. And so will Arnold Schwarzenegger, added yesterday to the roll-call of presenters. While this year's Oscar race is a wide-open field, there are certain givens about the March 26 ceremony. One of them is the irreverent gag-fest sure to result from the welcome re-teaming of Crystal -- whose absence from last year's awards led to a Whoopi Goldberg-hosted fiasco -- and the Oscar show's head writer, Bruce Vilanch. "This year's crop of nominations is very interesting," Vilanch told The Post during a break from preparing jokes for his 11th Oscar ceremony. "There are a lot of quirky, independent-type movies -- not your classic studio pictures -- and that makes my job easier." Daily brainstorming sessions between Crystal, Vilanch and a team of 13 writers began in earnest as soon as the nominations were announced Tuesday. While Vilanch, the subject of last year's hilarious documentary "Get Bruce," refused to give away any of his material, he did allude to a handful of likely targets. "We base our jokes around what the Academy has decided the movie year was about," he said. "And we look to see what the trends were -- this year there were a lot of movies about dysfunctional families and a lot of actors nominated for playing real people. I'm just sorry John Malkovich wasn't nominated." Another disappointment was the exclusion of the Andy Kaufman biopic "Man on the Moon" and star Jim Carrey from the nominations -- Vilanch said he'd prepared a lot of Andy Kaufman material, but doesn't know what he'll do with it now. "It's hard to tell," Vilanch said. "I'm sure Andy Kaufman's presence will be felt somewhere in the ceremony. I'd like to see [Kaufman's alter-ego] Tony Clifton show up." While Vilanch and Crystal were busy kidding around, ceremony producers Richard and Lili Zanuck were hunkered down in a production meeting, juggling the order of the awards announcements. Richard Zanuck has admitted he's disappointed DiCaprio, Pitt and some other stars have said they'll be "unavailable." "It's disturbing," Zanuck told Variety, "that those stars who are neither nominated nor presenters don't show up... The Academy is their friend." Meanwhile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is busy lining up presenters for the 72nd awards ceremony. Already locked in are Gwyneth Paltrow, Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Ashley Judd, Chow Yun-Fat, Steven Spielberg, Roberto Benigni and Best Supporting Actor nominees Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law.
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Complete Christian Science Monitor article
Christian Science Monitor:
2/18/00
It's a wonder-ful life for young star

Tobey Maguire's coming film is the third in 18 months. He won the lead role in the Oscar-nominated 'The Cider House Rules' when his friend Leonardo DiCaprio turned it down. As Maguire leans back in his chair, it's evident he has a story to tell. Maguire and actor Leonardo DiCaprio ("Titanic") are the same age, and through the years have auditioned for the same roles. In 1993, when they read with Robert De Niro for the movie "This Boy's Life," there were several roles to be cast. DiCaprio and Maguire promised if one of them was selected for the top spot, the other would help get a role for his friend. "Leo got the starring role in the movie, and put in a good word for me. I got a smaller role...." Maguire and DiCaprio have remained fast friends. It's ironic that when the script for "The Cider House Rules" was sent to DiCaprio, he turned it down. It was then offered to Maguire (who had won favorable notice in "Pleasantville") and it's proved to be a starmaking role.
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Complete SF Gate article
SF Gate:
2/18/00
Leo lunacy overshadows Berlin film coverage

BERLIN -- As the Berlin International Film Festival winds down -- the Golden Bear will be awarded Sunday -- it's too bad the historic 50th edition of the event will not be most remembered for it's high-quality films, swanky new venue or tribute to Jeanne Moreau. Instead, it will forever be remembered as the festival that Leo roared into town. Leonardo DiCaprio dominated press attention and the thousands of screaming young fans in Marlene Dietrich Platz last Saturday, as the heartthrob showed up with director Danny Boyle and rising French actress Virginie Ledoyen to promote "The Beach," which is in competition. The German daily BZ advertised on its front page that it would pay 1,000 Deutsch marks (about $500) to any woman able to plant a kiss on DiCaprio. Thanks to high security, no one could claim the prize, not even when DiCaprio walked up the red carpet and into the Berlinale Palast for the screening. At the news conference earlier in the day, the spacious room in the basement of the theater that has been the site of many intelligent Q&A sessions with some of the world's top filmmakers degenerated into a crowded lunacy. Officials, unable to squeeze one more reporter into a room jammed with hundreds, closed the doors 10 minutes before the session started. That left dozens of journalists to crowd around each of three closed-circuit televisions in the press center -- or, had they preferred, the big-screen TV set up to please the fans in the plaza. The questions were generally ludicrous. One reporter from a London tabloid, citing an article it ran about a waitress who claims to have slept with DiCaprio, asked the boy wonder to rank her on a scale of one to 10. DiCaprio declined. At one point, festival director Moritz de Hadeln pleaded for a question to be asked of someone other than DiCaprio.
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Chicago Tribune
2/17/00
SUNKEN TREASURES TITANIC RELICS RECOVERED FROM OCEAN FLOOR, BUT STORIES BEHIND THEM REMAIN LOST AT SEA

I saw "Titanic" twice, and each time I couldn't help thinking: "Wouldn't it be cool to look at that wreckage up close? To see stuff from the ship? To learn more about the 1912 disaster that claimed more than 1,500 lives?" Until I dive under the Atlantic, I'll settle for "Titanic: The Exhibition." It opens Friday at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. KidNews got a sneak peek at the exhibit, which includes more than 200 items from the ship. It's the largest gathering of Titanic artifacts ever assembled (more than 4,000 items have been recovered since 1987). Seeing these items, buried more than 80 years at sea, was a voyage in itself on the seas of time -- and a journey into the imagination. All sorts of questions about the passengers and the tragic events bobbed to my mind's surface. Here's what I saw and experienced: RECOVERED RELICS: Many of Titanic's passengers were rich. In today's dollars, some first-class passengers paid the equivalent of $50,000 a ticket! Although personal items recovered from the ocean liner hint at their owners' wealth, the stories behind them were lost at sea. Of course, there's no "Heart of the Ocean" necklace like Kate Winslet wore in the movie. But I did see a gold chain with heart-shaped pendant. The precious stones have lost their glow (all those years under the water have turned them a dull gray). But the gold is still shiny, indicating that it's of very high quality, said Bernhard le Beau, a Titanic exhibit conservator. "I'm used to handling things that come out of wrecks," le Beau said as he opened a crate for me and unwrapped the necklace. "But this is so much more personal. Many of these items actually came out of suitcases." Other items I saw included a luggage tag, a beat-up bowler hat (it was found squashed), a gold fox hat pin (its ruby eyes still glowing red) and a clarinet. Did a Titanic musician play it as the ship went down, I asked? Nobody knows, le Beau said. THE INCREDIBLE HULL: Some of Titanic's smaller pieces, such as the ship's thermometer and logometer (used for tracking distance traveled), have turned copper green from sitting underwater so long. A pair of binoculars I saw had suffered the same fate. Did the binoculars come from the bridge -- and could they have saved Titanic from hitting the iceberg? Again, that's a mystery that went down with the ship. But for sheer size and wonder, nothing beats the 13-ton hunk of Titanic's hull. Measuring 13 by 20 feet, it's the largest piece of the Titanic to have been recovered. I watched workers hoist it into the museum by crane, and it's creepy seeing this black slab of history up close. A porthole window, probably from a first-class cabin, is half intact. I wondered how frightened the occupants were when they heard the ship was sinking, and whether they were among the nearly 700 survivors. DREAMBOAT STAIRCASE: There's also a recreation of Titanic's grand staircase, which will be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie. Crafted from the original blueprints, the staircase has a wrought-iron skylight, winding banisters and carved woodwork. It's quite impressive. In fact, about the only thing missing is Jack Dawson, Leo DiCaprio's "Titanic" character. But for Leo's female fans, it won't be hard to picture Jack waiting at the top, looking hunk-like in his borrowed tux. Or to pretend that you're Rose. Sighhhhhh.
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London Telegraph:
2/17/00
And now, the film of the soundtrack

Excerpt from article:
When All Saints are seen cavorting with Leonardo DiCaprio in scenes from The Beach in the video for their latest single, Pure Shores, it is hard to figure out whether the group are promoting the movie or the movie is promoting the group. This is the essence of the symbiotic relationship between the film and music industries, where soundtracks are considered both lucrative merchandising spin-off and vital marketing tool.
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E! Online: Ted Casablanca
2/17/00
not private at all with his privates

The Eyes Have It Leonardo DiYouknowwho in the men's room of the office building that houses his production company. Vine Street in Hollywood. Unlike the late J.F.K. Jr., not private at all with his privates. Always friendly, too. Talks about how he's going to "party this weekend, dude," and so forth. And like the good partyer he is, never looks his best in the ayem (and other times of the day).
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Salon.com:
2/17/00
1,000 marks to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio

A Berlin tabloid has reportedly set off a fan frenzy by offering 1,000 marks (around $500) to "the Berlin girl who manages to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio" while he's in town for the Berlin Film Festival
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Complete MSNBC article
MSMBC:
2/17/00
DiCaprio emerges on ‘The Beach’

It’s rainy and gray in Maui, with winds blowing off the Pacific so hard palm fronds are flying horizontally, like flags on a battleship. The reporters gathered to interview Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since “Titanic” made him a $20 million man gaze out the windows, as restless and bored as sailors who have been at sea too long. With nothing else to do, they gossip about DiCaprio, who is here to promote his new movie, “The Beach.” LEO, THEY WHISPER, has brought his posse. He’s going to bars, raising a ruckus in the hotel, being difficult, getting to interviews late. And the duchess is here with him. The truth? He’s brought a few friends, including actor Tobey Maguire, who has been a pal since they were both teen-age actors and met at an audition. The bar they went to the night before was a sushi bar, and the only ruckus they raised was when they decided to play basketball in hallways of the Ritz-Carlton. As for the duchess - a k a Sarah Ferguson, who has lived down her own party-hearty reputation and emerged intact - she is here to interview him for the “Today” show. DiCaprio is late for his interviews, however, which gives the reporters even more time to chew over the tabloid details of his off-screen life — the widespread stories of club-hopping, bar brawls, parties with Hef at the Playboy Mansion, models-to-go and general bad behavior. Listening to the reporters, you feel as though you’re playing the party game “Telephone,” in which a message is whispered from player to player around a circle until it ends up completely distorted. DiCaprio has been at the receiving end of that game since 1997, when “Titanic” made him the world’s most famous 23-year-old. He’s used to it, but sometimes the extent of the gossip still surprises him. ‘YOU SORT OF COCOON YOURSELF’ “They’re actually talking about me being here with my friends?” DiCaprio asks, amazed, when he finally arrives and slumps into a chair. “That’s an issue?” Advertisement Then he shakes his head and shrugs. “It’s such a cliché, but almost everything that’s printed about me is a lie,” he says with a sigh. “I thankfully have had a great group of friends that I’ve known for a long time, that my relationship has not changed with, for the longest time, and they’ve always kept me grounded, even through the whole ‘Titanic’ afterperiod, which was really crazy. That’s, like, fundamentally one of the most important things in my life, my friends and family. There’s a lot of misconceptions about what fame is, and you sort of cocoon yourself within the people you care about.” Danny Boyle, who directed DiCaprio in “The Beach,” had heard all the Leo stories before he cast him as Richard, the American backpacker who goes to Thailand looking for adventure and finds more than he bargained for when he discovers a secret island paradise, a false utopia jealously guarded by the young travelers who have made it their home. But Boyle, who directed the controversial drug movie “Trainspotting,” knows firsthand how pop culture can distort the truth: He was accused of glamorizing drug use with a movie that, in truth, made heroin addiction look like the seventh circle of hell. So the stories didn’t stop him from wanting to work with DiCaprio, whom he considers the best of the young American actors.
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Boston Globe:
2/17/00
The high art of protecting low artistry

Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie ''The Beach'' has been catnip for headline writers: ''In his new movie, DiCaprio heads straight for the shallows'' (The Boston Globe); or ''DiCaprio Sinks Again, But There's No Iceberg'' (Wall Street Journal). The movie isn't very good, but the producers knew that months before putting it into theaters. That's where review-proofing comes in. Review-proofing is one of the more diverting sideshows in the entertainment world. Faced with a book, movie, or play of questionable merit, publishers and producers work overtime to shield the turkey from professional reviewers. That way they can make a few dollars before the half-baked bird emerges for the full-bore roast. With ''The Beach,'' 20th Century Fox quite properly hyped the sizzle - teen heartthrob DiCaprio, on the covers of Talk, Time, and Rolling Stone magazines - rather than the celluloid steak. Review-proofing comes in different shapes and forms. An awful movie like ''Independence Day,'' promoted with clever trailers, became too big to fail. Likewise the Star Wars prequel, ''The Phantom Menace,'' survived withering reviews, yet I'm sure it would have earned another $100 million if it had been as engrossing as we all hoped. When the recent teen yukker ''Down to You'' was withheld from movie critics, West Coast reviewers were told there was ''something wrong'' with the print, prompting the inevitable joke that the only thing wrong with the print was the movie itself. Book publishers have their tricks, most often plied with doggy, ghostwritten political memoirs held back from reviewers to hype some tawdry ''news.'' Donald Regan's revelation of Nancy Reagan's astrology interest comes to mind. Similarly, Random House cleverly exploited the controversy over Edmund Morris's fictionalized Reagan biography, ''Dutch,'' to sell a bunch of copies. Professional reviewers quickly understood that Morris had simply dropped the ball. He didn't understand Reagan and he bailed out of the narrative. But the theater is the real locus of review-proofing stunts. Here's why: On stage, you get only one shot. Ensconced in 3,000 theaters, clunker movies like ''The Beach'' and ''Down to You'' can generate millions of dollars in just a couple of weekends before washing out. There is no such luxury in theater. You have one show, and one house to fill. And the critics can close you down. In his heyday, Broadway producer David Merrick was the Magus of review-proofing. One of the first major openings Frank Rich covered as New York Times drama critic was Merrick's ghastly 1980 production of ''42nd Street,'' directed by the legendary Gower Champion. ''Merrick was not stupid,'' Rich remembers. ''He knew he had a mediocre show on his hands.'' At considerable cost, Merrick kept canceling press previews, and announced that critics would have to review the show on opening night. Then, after the second curtain call, Merrick strode onto the stage and launched his bombshell: Following a long illness, Gower Champion had died. Early that afternoon, as it happened. Rich's review was unflattering, but ''no one even cared what the reviews were,'' he says. ''The press was cowed and moved by these extraordinary events.'' ''42nd Street'' enjoyed the proverbial smash run. Does review-proofing work? Sure, sometimes. But sometimes it proves to be overkill. In 1961, Merrick had pessimistic premonitions about his musical ''Subways Are for Sleeping,'' which opened in Boston prior to a Broadway run. With a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Jules Styne, ''Subways'' was supposed to sing. It didn't. So Merrick ginned up another flap. With much attendant publicity, he announced that the Globe's young, ''incompetent'' theater critic, Kevin Kelly, would be barred from the show. So there was Merrick on opening night, with the TV cameras rolling, barring Kevin from the Colonial Theatre. Only the Globe's drama editor, Cyrus Durgin, would be admitted to review the play, Merrick thundered. Who won? Well, Kevin had outfoxed Merrick by sneaking into a ''Subways'' preview in Philadelphia. But - surprise! He loved the play! Review-proofed in vain, ''Subways'' sank back into the shadows of theater history.
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Excite News:
2/17/00
Virginie Ledoyen Talks About Co-Star Leo

The Beach's Virginie Ledoyen Talks About Co-Star Leonardo Dicaprio in the March Issue of Glamour Magazine NEW YORK (ENTERTAINMENT WIRE) - Virginie Ledoyen, who appears on the cover of GLAMOUR magazine for March, candidly talks about fashion, subways, olive oil and Leonardo DiCaprio, her heartthrob love interest in the upcoming blockbuster "The Beach." About DiCaprio, she admits, "Well, he's great. I expected him to (act like) this Hollywood superstar, but he's nothing like the spoiled brat the tabloids make him out to be. In reality, he's generous, simple, charming and lots of fun." Although the two stars worked together for four months on a deserted island, Ledoyen claims that their relationship is strictly professional. "There are still a lot of personal things we don't know about each other." The 23-year-old French actress is still a mainstream newcomer but remains very picky about her roles. "I only make films I'm interested in, with directors I connect with," she says. Besides acting, Ledoyen's diverse passions include books, zoos, subways and clothing. "I love fashion!" she tells GLAMOUR, citing Chanel, Christian Dior, Dries Van Noten, Cerruti, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors and Jean Paul Gaultier. "What I don't like are total looks. I'm more into choosing a piece from one designer's line and mixing it with something else that I've found in another." She also enjoys visiting New York City's Central Park Zoo; reading Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Marguerite Duras; and riding the subway. "I love the trains, the bustle and the murky light," she says. Ledoyen recommends a beauty tip, using her grandmother's unique recipe. "When my hair's dry or damaged, I put olive oil on the ends, then wrap my head in a warm towel. I swear, it works!" The March issue of GLAMOUR magazine hits newsstands on February 15.
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London Telegraph:
2/16/00
Toy Story 2 sets box office record

Toy Story 2 sets box office record THE computer-animated film Toy Story 2 has broken the British box-office record, beating Leonardo DiCaprio's latest epic The Beach, and outstripping last year's big success, The Phantom Menace. The film took £7.8 million in its first three days, making a major contribution to another British cinema record - a total £14.2 million paid at box offices over the weekend. The Beach, which was also released nationwide on Friday, took £2.3 million, and the relatively poor showing must come as a disappointment to its makers, Twentieth Century Fox, after the huge media attention when DiCaprio attended the premiere in London last week.
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Complete Mr. Showbiz article
Mr. Showbiz:
2/16/00
Yanks Invade Berlin Again

Yanks Invade Berlin Again; Million Dollar Mel Missing BERLIN — Leomania returns, Mark Wahlberg confides that "Tom Cruise has a small penis," George Clooney confirms he isn't going to be making an ER appearance this season, Bono swears he wasn't sentimental, and Mel Gibson doesn't show up...

...As for Leomania, when Leonardo DiCaprio showed up with The Beach, one Berlin newspaper had a front-page offer to any Leo-besotted girl: Get a kiss from the Titanic star and the paper — Berlin's Grosste Zeitung — would pay up with 1,000 DM. (Slightly more than $500 American by current exchange rates.) Even without the blatant bribe, the festival looked under siege as crowds gathered hours before the Saturday night screening. Press who had gotten free tickets to The Beach were being offered 100 DM by scalpers.
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E! online:
2/16/00
Leonardo freaking DiCaprio.

Leo makes a list, and Time checks it twice; Premiere reveals the naked truth about male stars; more Next Issue: Pictures of Charlize Theron's Ovarian Cysts!... U.S. politicians are struggling for dominance in primary elections, and airplanes are falling from the sky thanks to metal fatigue. So, what does preeminent newsmag Time slap on its cover this week? Leonardo freaking DiCaprio. Holy good God, it's enough to make the ghost of Henry Luce materialize at an editorial meeting and shred the galleys! And the shame doesn't stop with the Teen Beat-style cover--no, no. The highlight of the DiCaprio feature--we're not kidding here--is a reproduction of DiCaprio's grocery bill from a Ralphs supermarket. And the highlight of the highlight is that the bill's not just reproduced--it's explicated: "Many, many waffle mixes interested him, [but] he finally opted for Paradigm...He knew he liked Vernor's [ginger ale] but worried that Canada Dry may have earned its reputation for a reason...He settled on the sweet ginger teriyaki [marinade] and never looked back." When Walter Isaacson and the rest of Time's editors sober up, we can only hope they're suitably embarrassed.
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Variety:
2/16/00
Oscar nomination announcements

GOOD MORNING and now it’s showtime. No sooner had Richard and Lili Zanuck joined the Oscar nomination announcements at 5:30 Tuesday ayem when they proceeded to a production meeting for the Oscar show and started filling in the board, deciding how to juggle the order of the awards. “Until now, it was guesswork,” he allowed. But “tradition” will ring true with the final awards being best picture, director, actor, actress and writing. The Thalberg Award to Warren Beatty may also be part of the last portion of the show. As for the rest of the program, a lot will depend on presenters and entertainment portions yet to be written. Zanuck said they are also devoting as much effort to the pre-show this year and plan to make it an exciting part of the Oscars —something the network’s home-viewing audience has not been privileged to see in the past. He promises, “We’re going to have a great show, a very entertaining one.” While they have been setting many important star names, Dick Z. admitted his disappointment at some of the younger stars’ non-attendance. He said both Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, for example, have said they are “unavailable.” “It’s disturbing,” Zanuck said, “that those stars who are neither nominated nor presenters don’t show up. This show is what we do (in the biz) and we celebrate movies at the Oscars in an entertaining way. The Academy is their friend. I remember going — with my parents — when everybody went to the Oscars because it was our industry’s show.” He says Swifty Lazar’s private party started luring stars away from the Oscar ceremonies by inviting them to watch at private (restaurant) parties — which have grown and grown … This millennium show will have a salute to the great stars of Hollywood’s past, he promises. Oscar-winner Jane Fonda who starred in Zanuck’s second film, “The Chapman Report” (1962), is one who immediately agreed to participate this year. “It’s about time she came back to the show,” Zanuck said. And maybe a restart in the biz? “Well, this is a start,” he smiled. Dustin Hoffman’s appearance early Tuesday to help with the nomination announcements also indicated another friendship for Oscar (and, of course, for Zanuck!). It’s a busy time for movie producer Zanuck, the week after the Oscars his Par feature, “Rules of Engagement,” directed by Billy Friedkin, hits the nation’s big screens.
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Sydney Morning Herald:
2/16/00
All the beautiful people

Berlin: Berlin's breathless film fans have been treated to a parade of Hollywood's hottest acting talent to tide them over between Leonardo DiCaprio's appearance and Tom Cruise's arrival. Even beautiful people of the stature of Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law, at the 50th Berlin Film Festival to promote their film The Talented Mr Ripley, could not generate the kind of hysteria that followed Di Caprio's arrival the day before. Their film, directed by Oscar-winner Anthony Minghella, will compete with DiCaprio's The Beach and Cruise's Magnolia and 18 others for the Golden Bear best film award, to be decided February 20. In the meantime, though, the European festival risks being upstaged on Tuesday by the announcement in California of the films shortlisted for this year's Academy Awards, The Oscars. The backers of The Talented Mr Ripley will be expecting great things from their team. Minghella won nine Oscars for his previous film, The English Patient, Damon won one as co-writer director of Good Will Hunting and Paltrow one for her starring role in Shakespeare in Love.
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Fox News:
2/16/00
Success Is Relative for DiCaprio's Steps

It's not easy being Leonardo DiCaprio's stepbrother. Even tougher when you're making a silver-screen debut in Pups, a shoestring-budget indie opening the same day as DiCaprio's massively hyped The Beach. But as a relative of the reigning "king of the world," Adam Ferrar, 28, has learned to bask in reflected glory. "There's always going to be a little more attention focused on the things I do, because of the association I have with Leo," he says. "I look at it as a positive thing -- hopefully it will help me do this work that I enjoy." The personable, Los Angeles-based actor may be under-selling himself. His performance as an embittered, wheelchair-bound Gulf war vet in "Pups" -- which opened Friday -- has critics taking notice, though the film's entire budget was just a fraction of the $20 million payday DiCaprio scored for his latest role. Ferrar and DiCaprio grew up together in Los Angeles, and Ferrar says they're still close. Ferrar was 4 years old and DiCaprio 1 year old when DiCaprio's father, George, married Ferrar's mother, Peggy, after leaving Irmalin, DiCaprio's German mother. "We work out together -- he has tons of exercise equipment in his house -- and we play video games," Ferrar says. "Mostly we just hang out, being young guys." Ferrar started acting at the age of 5, landing bit parts in films and television shows such as Battlestar Galactica and Eight Is Enough. When holding down a job became too tiresome for the youngster, his acting career went on ice. Upon leaving school, Ferrar completed a 21/2-year stint as a combat engineer in the Army and studied for a degree in East Asian languages at the University of Southern California. But he didn't need much convincing to return to his first love. When British writer-director Ashley Baron Cohen -- known as "Ash"-- told Ferrar he'd written a part for him in his new film, Ferrar leapt at the chance. "I think actors are born, not created, and when you're an actor, you're an actor," he says. "A lot of people play parts in life, and if you're going to do it, you might as well do it in front of a camera and get paid for it." Ferrar is already eyeing his next part -- a supporting role as a street pimp in Ash's next film, The BBC. Years of watching DiCaprio's meteoric rise from the sidelines have taught Ferrar a thing or two. "I like the variety he's had in his roles -- the fact he's able to go from very dark films to commercial films and back," Ferrar says. "I'd like to have that chameleon-like quality, because variety is the spice of life." But he doesn't envy his stepbrother's "constant fight for anonymity and privacy." "Fame is a double-edged sword, I guess," Ferrar muses. "I've hung out with Leo for a long time and have had to run away from packs of screaming girls with him. It's part of his job, I suppose
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Excite News:
2/16/00
DiCaprio visits the French capital

Leonardo DiCaprio hides under a cap and his fist as he walks into the Crillon Hotel on the Concorde Plaza in Paris, France Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000. DiCaprio visits the French capital for the premiere of the latest movie he stars in, " The Beach", directed by Britain's Danny Boyle. Photo by Jacques Brinon.

MSNBC:
2/15/00
Berlin loves Leo

Leonardo DiCaprio is getting dismissed as slightly washed up on these shores, but the teen heart throb nearly caused titanic-size waves at the Berlin Film Festival, where his new movie “The Beach,” is being shown. A moderator at a press conference had to beg photographers to “please calm down” and eventually asked reporters to address their questions to someone other than Di Caprio, The mayhem was compounded when the German newspaper BZ offered 1000 marks (about $500 dollars) to any woman who could get a kiss from the 25-year-old star. . . . Gwyneth Paltrow keeps her Oscar in storage, according to the Scottish Daily Record. “I don’t want that thing in my house,” the newspaper quotes Paltrow as saying. “It scares me.” . . . Contrary to published reports, motherhood has not made Madonna modest. An article in a British paper says that the Material Mom had her “American Pie” video censored because the singer’s “bum” was visible. “This is totally fictitious,” says the singer’s spokeswoman. “I saw the video, and her behind is in full view. Don’t worry. She’s still Madonna.” Whew.
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Bergen.com:
2/15/00
Truth will out

Myth: Virginie Ledoyen carried on a blistering real-life romance with Leonardo DiCaprio, her co-star and onscreen squeeze in "The Beach." Fact: Doesn't he wish. "I worked with him for four months," Ledoyen says in a recent interview at the Canteen, a subterranean Soho watering hole. "I can't say he's my best friend, because I didn't get to know him all that well. But he loves acting so much, and he's so natural, that it was very stimulating working with him. Above all, he's not a superstar type. He's actually quite normal." Myth: Ledoyen, despite about 18 films under her belt, is unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Fact: Driven a bit bonkers by those rumors of her affair with Leo and "The Beach" trailers that show her bouncing along the surf in a bikini, Ledoyen is mobbed by autograph hounds all over Manhattan. "In France, it's different," says Ledoyen, who's best known, by those who know her, for "La Ceremonie," "A Single Girl," and the English-language Merchant-Ivory film "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries." "People recognize me on the street, and they usually won't say anything. Or they'll come up and say, 'I like what you did.' It's not the same craziness over movie stars you see in the States. It's not the same pressure." Myth: The 23-year-old Ledoyen, dressed down for this interview in glasses, tight pants, pullover sweater, and not a dab of makeup, is really a sweet girl-next-door type. Fact: Who do you live next door to? Ledoyen has been modeling and acting since she was 9. This month alone, she graces the covers of Details and Glamour magazines. And she just signed with French cosmetics company L'Oreal to be its next TV and magazine spokesmodel, a job currently being done by Jennifer Lopez and Andie McDowell. "I see L'Oreal as a ticket to more freedom," Ledoyen says. "You never know in the movie business. You can do four movies one year and then nothing. So the work for L'Oreal will make it possible for me to be choosy about what roles I take. "Besides," she adds, taking a puff of her Marlboro, "they're a French company and they make good, inexpensive beauty and skin care products. It's not like I'm endorsing cigarettes or something awful like that." Myth: The aforementioned bikini -- and how well she looks in it -- has been the key to Ledoyen's success. Fact: Ledoyen was nominated for a Cesar -- the French equivalent of the Oscar -- in the most promising young actress category for the 1996 film "La Fille Seule," and won the best actress award at the 1998 Paris Film Festival for "Jeanne et le Garcon Formidable." So there's more there than just a curve or two. "I've never felt exploited," Ledoyen says, a little insulted that such a suggestion would ever be floated. "I really enjoy what I do, and I've truly never had a regret about anything I've done in my career. I've always had a good time while I was doing a movie, and even if it's a lot of hard work, it's been worth it." Myth: Ledoyen, like most French folks, looks down on American culture. Fact: "There are all kinds of American directors I'd love to work with," Ledoyen says, brushing aside another myth -- that most movies and, especially, most movie scripts, are garbage. "Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, James Cameron -- they're all so different. They're all great. I'd love to do movies with any of them. The reason I became an actress is I'm such a big fan of movies." Myth: Ledoyen's flirty, high-impact performance in "The Beach" has sparked a flood of lucrative offers for future top-line projects. Fact: Ledoyen's set to star as Cosette in a TV version of "Les Miserables," with Gerard Depardieu as Jean Valjean and John Malkovich as Inspector Javert, slated for a probable fall release. And she just wrapped a low-budget, as-yet-untitled film for French director Jean-Francois Richet. That's it. "You have to remember," Ledoyen says with a giggle, "'The Beach' is just coming out. Not everybody's seen it yet." Maybe the exposure to American audiences will muffle the myths. The facts about Ledoyen are compelling enough.
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Excite News:
2/15/00
'Beach' never lives up to its promise

Danny Boyle and John Hodge, the director and writer of "Trainspotting," obviously have no problems taking risks in their films, and sometimes it pays off. Unfortunately, their latest venture, "The Beach," tries far too much for genuine insight and intellectualism, eventually turning what could have been an interesting movie into much trite nonsense. "The Beach" exists in a world between genres, attempting to provide intensity, excitement, romance and philosophy but not really providing much of anything. Though the temptation is to reward filmmakers who push the envelope, it's impossible to watch "The Beach" and not long for some amount of restraint, if only to clarify what the film is about. The one thing "The Beach" absolutely focuses on too much is its central character, Richard, and it's not very hard to see why. Leonardo DiCaprio's immense stardom coupled with a previous tendency towards exaggerated performances ("What's Eating Gilbert Grape" or "The Basketball Diaries") puts him at the center of attention too often, allowing him to over-indulge in one extended monologue after another. To be fair, this cannot wholly be blamed on DiCaprio, who tries to give Richard some dimension and isn't afraid to play a not-nice guy. From the moment Richard is introduced, as an American traveler wandering around Thailand looking for adventures, he comes off as selfish, bratty and all-in-all unlikable. The rest of his saga becomes bizarre and cliche as he comes to possess a strange map, leading to an isolated beach some say is paradise. After recruiting a French couple to join him, Richard finds his way through jungles and oceans to the mystical beach, where he discovers an entire community of travelers who have settled there. Throughout it's first 45 minutes the movie plays like a fairly standard romantic adventure, something along the lines of "Romancing the Stone," but less tongue-in-cheek. Once Richard and company begin to settle on the island, however, things begin to go wrong, both in the movie and the plot. Richard, naturally, falls in love with his female French companion (Virginie Ledoyen), a rather menacing group of marijuana growers threaten the peaceful environs and a rogue copy of the map may have fallen into the wrong hands. At this point, "The Beach" takes several unsatisfying turns. Richard's frequent voice-overs become very intrusive in this section of the film, as the filmmakers attempt to move out of the realm of fantasy and into an exploration of the human condition. Soon, the romantic subplot disappears completely, never being resolved and instead eschewed in favor of philosophical musings about the reality of paradise on Earth and distracting, not to mention silly, special effects sequences. Boyle, try as he might, can't really juggle the myriad of subplots and themes. In the end, his movie is buried under his own grand intentions, unable to illuminate or entertain without the right balance or tone. Giving bad reviews to movies such as "The Beach" proves entirely unsatisfying. The film has an interesting premise, some well-written sequences and a director willing to commit to the material without holding back. But the film never lives up to its promise, lacking a real idea of purpose and a clearer sense of identity.
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CourtTv.com
2/15/00
In an apparent attempt to appease environmentalists

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — In an apparent attempt to appease environmentalists angry over its film "The Beach," 20th Century Fox plans to donate revenue generated from the first showing to Thailand's national parks, according to a published report. The donation will go to the Royal Thai Forestry Department, the Nation reported Saturday. The movie, based on Alex Garland's best-selling novel and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, tells the story of a backpacker whose search for a paradise island turns into savagery. It premiered last week and comes to Thai theaters March 10. Activists and local residents brought the movie's maker to court for allegedly damaging a beach in the Phi Phi Leh National Park in southern Thailand by altering the beachfront and removing vegetation. Activists have already campaigned to ban the movie and are asking movie-goers in Thailand not to see it.
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USA Today:
2/15/00
'SCREAM' weathers 'BEACH,' 'snow'

'SCREAM' weathers 'BEACH,' 'snow': Blood proved thicker than water over the weekend as Scream 3 slashed the competition, including teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio's The Beach, to hold the box office crown for the second week in a row, according to early estimates by ACNielsen EDI. Scream 3 scared up $16.4 million, beating The Beach's estimate of $15 million. The new Chevy Chase comedy Snow Day blew in $14.8 million for third, followed by Disney's The Tigger Movie with $9.2 million.
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Complete E! article
E! Online:
2/15/00
Q&A with Leonardo DiCaprio

"Leo! Leo!" The chorus of female hysteria was heard around the globe wherever he was--or wherever he was believed to be--as fans worshiped the King of the World. But the world wondered when the youthful monarch who starred in Titanic would find another movie to follow this awesome success. Leonardo DiCaprio headed to The Beach, plunging into the kind of twisted take on reality that had attracted him to films like The Basketball Diaries and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Leo's much anticipated big-screen outing is dark and offbeat--a challenge for him and the audience. Okay, he does take off his shirt and get back in the water, but in his latest role, DiCaprio attempts to shed the pop-star image that has enveloped him.
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Happy Valentine's Day from Dicaprio69

Complete Time article
Time magazine:
2/14/00

Newsweek:
2/14/00
French Kissing

Add french beauty Virginie Ledoyen to the list of hot actresses who were underwhelmed by working with Leonardo DiCaprio. Like those who've gone before her, his costar in "The Beach" found that locking lips with the tweens' heartthrob wasn't exactly paradise. In 1995, after "The Quick and the Dead," Sharon Stone proclaimed that "kissing him was like kissing your arm." He got another scathing review from "Romeo + Juliet" costar Claire Danes: "Our chemistry ended when the cameras stopped." Then "Titanic's" Kate Winslet revealed: "It was like kissing my brother." So it's not surprising that Ledoyen, whose name literally means "the experienced one," expresses a certain ennui: "In our love scene underwater, all I could think of was not drowning." Glub, glub, glub!
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Newsweek:
2/14/00
Leonardo Misses the Wave

'The Beach' is inviting, but the water's mighty shallow A friend who'd seen a trailer for "The Beach" described it, only half joking, as a cross between "The Blue Lagoon" and "Lord of the Flies." It's easy enough to see why Danny Boyle's movie would evoke such analogies. Here are nubile young Westerners in pursuit of endless pleasure cavorting on a lush Thai tropical island. And here, of course, is paradise lost—the inevitable moment when the dreams of these young utopians turn into nightmares, and violence supersedes peace, sex and pot-laced pipe dreams. "The Beach" is a much less silly film than "The Blue Lagoon," that "tasteful" 1980 exploitation film designed to showcase Brooke Shields's kiddie-porn chic. But I have a hunch that "Lagoon" will be remembered longer than Boyle's gorgeous but curiously weightless fable—in spite of the fact that it is Leonardo DiCaprio's eagerly awaited follow-up film to You Know What. DiCaprio, to his credit, has never courted matinee-idol status. The character he plays here, Richard, a young backpacker in search of extreme experience, is no sane person's dream date, cute as he may be. A callow American kid with no moral bearings and little common sense, Richard arrives in Bangkok, where he encounters a mad, suicidal Brit (Robert Carlyle) who gives him a map showing the location of an island that, legend has it, is as close as it gets to paradise on earth. Richard's travelling companions are a pretty French girl he covets (Virginie Ledoyen) and her boyfriend (Guillaume Canet), whom Richard is happy to betray. This eye-popping isle, they discover, has already been colonized. Half of the island is run by machine-gun-toting dope growers. The other is a secret community of half-clad fellow travelers led by a commanding Englishwoman named Sal (Tilda Swinton). Can these lotus eaters create their own Eden? One guess. Unfortunately, as screenwriter John Hodge (working from Alex Garland's novel) tells it, the crackup of this would-be utopia is a banal, unsurprising event. No tragic resonance here. Richard, acting out his "Apocalypse Now" fantasies, goes temporarily (and unconvincingly) bonkers in the jungle; the other characters are so sketchy it's impossible to care about any of them. Boyle and Hodge ("Trainspotting") rely heavily on Richard's narration to spell out the meaning of what we are watching; it's as if they knew they had failed to dramatize the story correctly. "The Beach" is nothing to write home about, though the landscapes are ravishing. The movie itself is neither fish nor fowl—the first half is not nearly as sexy as it should be, and the decline and fall is about as harrowing as an expulsion from summer camp. "The Blue Lagoon" meets "Lord of the Flies"? We wish.
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Mr. Showbiz:
2/14/00
Scream 3 Drowns Out Leo's Beach at B.O.

It was the same ol' blood-and-guts, thrills-and-yuks story at the nation's theaters this weekend: Scream 3 displayed considerably less lung-power than during its initial three days in release, but still shouted down the competition. Two newcomers provided stiff competition for the slasher sequel, according to studio estimates released earlier today. The Beach — the first film to feature Leonardo DiCaprio in a starring role since 1998's The Man in the Iron Mask — and Snow Day both performed impressively and finished the weekend virtually tied for second place. As did its franchise predecessor, Scream 3 took a nosedive on the heels of a stellar opening — its estimated gross of $16.4 represents a shrinkage of nearly 54 percent from last weekend's $34.7 million haul. A Miramax rep says the drop-off is actually smaller than anticipated; in December 1997, Scream 2's grosses plunged 58 percent in its second weekend. While Scream 3 continued to rely on its galaxy of B-listers — Neve Campbell, Jenny McCarthy, and David and Courteney Cox Arquette among them — The Beach pinned its hopes on a single A-list star. Reluctant idol DiCaprio delivered, despite a torrent of withering critical notices, boosting Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's cult novel to earnings of approximately $15 million. Not surprisingly, the film drew solidly among DiCaprio's core followings: female viewers accounted for approximately 57 percent of The Beach's total audience, and 55 percent of all viewers were reported to be under the age of 25. Additionally, The Beach could boast of the highest per-screen average in the Top 10, an estimated $5,892. The startling success of Snow Day, a co-production of Paramount and Nickelodeon, proves you don't need stars of any grade to make a killing at the box office — Chevy Chase and Chris Elliott will do. The kid-targeted tale of youth running amok in the aftermath of massive blizzard raked in an estimated $14.8 million, to trail The Beach by a mere $200,000. (Either film could wind up as second banana to Scream 3 when final figures are released Monday.) Snow Day's gross is even more impressive in light of the fact that it weathered a fierce challenge from Disney's The Tigger Movie, which debuted on over 200 more screens and was backed by the commercial might of the beloved Winnie the Pooh franchise. The animated adventure came up well short of its most direct competitor, finishing at No. 4 with estimated earnings of just $9.2 million. Rounding out the Top 5 was Denzel Washington's The Hurricane, which continued to perform well despite persistent attacks on its interpretation of the life story of boxer Rubin Carter. The biopic took in about $3.6 million, and has grossed just over $42 million to date. Persistent holiday holdovers The Green Mile ($3.1 million) and Stuart Little ($2.7 million) made a sandwich around Ice Cube's Next Friday ($2.8 million). Bringing up the rear were Dream Works' Galaxy Quest ($2.2 million), and the Ashley Judd-Ewan McGregor thriller Eye of the Beholder ($2.1 million).
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NY Post:
2/14/00
Slackers-in-paradise flick, "The Beach"

LEONARDO DiCAPRIO's slackers-in-paradise flick, "The Beach," will probably recoup his $20 million salary in its first week. After that, who knows? The film gives Leo plenty of opportunity to emote like mad, and to display himself as a less-than-heroic character. Wisely, he also chose a property that displays him physically, for all those out there who care about that sort of thing. Leo is slimmed-down, tan and buffer than he's been, and his naturally soft features and frame here are harder and sexier. He looks better than he ever has -- or probably ever will again! (I don't get the sense that DiCaprio is terribly vain about himself.) The movie? 'Tis a puzzlement. Though it's definitely the sort of thing some people are going to love. Often, the nuttier, the more off-center and convoluted a movie is, the greater the cult attraction. The important thing, really, is that DiCaprio, a truly gifted actor, is back to acting again. He had to make a "comeback" movie after the crushing success of "Titanic." Now he has. This is it. Whether "The Beach" swims to box office gold or sinks like a gutted ocean liner, it's onward and upward to the resumption of a great career interrupted and an inevitable Oscar, someday.
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Excite News:
2/14/00
'Beach' Makers To Donate to Thais

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - In an apparent attempt to appease environmentalists angry over its film "The Beach," 20th Century Fox plans to donate revenue generated from the first showing to Thailand's national parks, according to a published report. The donation will go to the Royal Thai Forestry Department, the Nation reported Saturday. The movie, based on Alex Garland's best-selling novel and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, tells the story of a backpacker whose search for a paradise island turns into savagery. It premiered last week and comes to Thai theaters March 10. Activists and local residents brought the movie's maker to court for allegedly damaging a beach in the Phi Phi Leh National Park in southern Thailand by altering the beachfront and removing vegetation. Activists have already campaigned to ban the movie and are asking movie-goers in Thailand not to see it.
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Excite News:
2/14/00
'Scream 3' Mutes DiCaprio's 'Beach'

"Scream 3" shouted down Leonardo DiCaprio's new film to retain the top spot at the box office, according to industry estimates Sunday. The third movie in the horror franchise took in $16.4 million in its second weekend. DiCaprio's "The Beach," about an American backpacker's ill-fated search for paradise, opened in second place with $15 million, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc., which tracks movie ticket sales. Two kid-flicks also debuted in the top five. "Snow Day," a comedy about children wreaking havoc when a blizzard closes their school, grossed $14.8 million for third place. The movie co-stars Chevy Chase, Jean Smart, Chris Elliott and Pam Grier. "The Tigger Movie," Disney's animated Winnie the Pooh tale, was No. 4 with $9.2 million. Last weekend's No. 2 film, the Oscar contender "The Hurricane," dropped to fifth place with $3.6 million. Ticket sales for "Scream 3" dropped 53 percent from its $34.7 million opening last weekend. The movie has grossed $57 million in 10 days. Panned by many critics, "The Beach" puts DiCaprio in a far darker role than the heroic heartthrob he played in "Titanic," the all-time box-office leader. Distributor 20th Century Fox said it was not disappointed by the film's No. 2 slot. "Disappointing is when nobody comes to a movie. That's disappointment," said Tom Sherak, the studio's head of distribution. The movie's R rating cut off some of DiCaprio's biggest fans, girls under 17 who would have to see the movie with a parent or guardian. Even so, women made up 57 percent of the movie's audience, and more than half of them were under 25. "There were a lot of guys that went to the movie, and there was enough adventure in it for them. But anytime you have a male star that females are really interested in, they're generally dragging the guys to see it," Sherak said. After two months that were heavy on adult-oriented films vying for Oscar consideration, the weekend offered a truly diverse lineup. "It's the first weekend in a long time that spoke to every demographic," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations. "A horror movie with 'Scream 3,' a date movie with DiCaprio, a movie for the family and older kids with 'Snow Day,' and 'Tigger' for families with little kids." Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations. Final figures were to be released Monday: 1. "Scream 3," $16.4 million. 2. "The Beach," $15 million. 3. "Snow Day," $14.8 million. 4. "The Tigger Movie," $9.2 million. 5. "The Hurricane," $3.6 million. 6. "The Green Mile," $3 million. 7. "Next Friday," $2.8 million. 8. "Stuart Little," $2.7 million. 9. "Galaxy Quest," $2.2 million. 10. "Eye of the Beholder," $2.1 million.
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Excite News:
2/14/00
Berlin girls hunt DiCaprio for lucrative

Adulation is nothing new to Leonardo DiCaprio but a Berlin tabloid might make things even worse than usual by offering a cash bonus to the girl who will steal a kiss from the Hollywood sex symbol. "He is here, 1,000 marks ($502) for the Berlin girl who manages to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio," read Saturday's headline in the popular daily BZ. The money will be paid immediately to the lucky fan who can produce a picture proving she has succeeded, BZ added. It said the 25-year-old DiCaprio, greeted by teen frenzy scenes wherever he goes, had arrived in the German capital on Friday to take part in the Berlin Film Festival which opened on Wednesday. DiCaprio was in Berlin as part of an European tour to promote his latest film, "The Beach," in which he plays an American backpacker in search of isolated paradise in Thailand. Reuters/Variety
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Complete Ottawa Citizen article
Ottawa Citizen:
2/13/00
Psychological adventure plays it safe

We Leonardo DiCaprio fans, who cried our eyes out at the end of Titanic, and bought all the fanzines to keep up on the mid-film adventures of His Adorability and fretted when we heard that his new movie was going to be "dark," even though that was balanced by the news that he was going to be in a bathing suit most of the time, well, we finally can stop worrying. Leo, last seen in the frigid North Atlantic, has washed up on the tropical shores of The Beach, a romantic and psychological adventure that is kind of dark but not that dark. It's the story of a man seeking paradise somewhere in Southeast Asia and who has to go too far to find it: sort of Apocalypse Now Lite, or maybe The Deer Hunter Goes Hawaiian. Actually, with Leo at the centre, it's more like Heart of Cuteness. The Beach, based on a 1996 novel by Alex Garland, is the story of Richard (Leonardo), a young American traveller who heads to Thailand in search of adventure, hungry for the unusual, willing to step past the envelope of tourism, especially if there are some cute chicks waiting there. Richard's hunt is spurred by Daffy (Robert Carlyle), a drugged-out madman with a lung full of reefer smoke and a head full of a story about this perfect beach that lies somewhere beyond the beyond, out past the Thais that bind. Daffy is a raving, sweaty, unshaven seer, a Kurtz who came back, although what made him that way will remain forever locked in the secret soul of this film. The Beach is about going past the edges, but it never does so itself; the madness it finds is a borrowed madness. Richard, who is seeking some real, visceral feelings -- we see him later, sitting in paradise, playing Nintendo -- rounds up a couple of people he's just met, French travellers Etienne and Francoise (French actors Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen), as company for the trip to this place of "pure white sand, crystal clean water and enough dope for all day, every day, for life." Hey, Richard. Need a film critic? Long, arduous and picturesque travels bring our trio to the beach, and by this time, they've formed a romantic triangle of sorts, with Richard and Francoise making eyes at each other and Etienne looking more French and less suitable by the day. All three of them are impossibly attractive, and when they get to the place of smooth grey rocks, jade water, and a white beach laden with palm trees, it appears that we're in for a kind of Blue Lagoon on cannabis. The pipes that are calling for director Danny Boyle are hash pipes, although he abandons the skittish, video style of the opening sequences for a straightforward narrative, interrupted only by one video-game sequence that recalls the stylized interregnums he placed in Trainspotting. The community at the beach itself is one of those modern Waldens comprised of travellers who you meet on the young road: the kind of Utopians in search of the perfect beach or the perfect wave or the perfect ham sandwich. They're the flotsam and jetsam at the edges of the tourist trail, although they seem to be living in quarters thrown up by the architects who do Club Med. The life of hedonism is governed by Sal (Tilda Swinton of Orlando), a sensible if somewhat domineering overseer trying to keep paradise a secret. But the real drama here is meant to be Richard's growing unease with both what he has come to and what he has left behind. The community at the beach itself is one of those modern Waldens comprised of travellers who you meet on the young road: the kind of Utopians in search of the perfect beach or the perfect wave or the perfect ham sandwich. They're the flotsam and jetsam at the edges of the tourist trail, although they seem to be living in quarters thrown up by the architects who do Club Med.
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Complete USA Today article
USA Today:
2/13/00
'The Beach' Khao San lures the upscale side of Bangkok's budget tourists

Not just backpackers walk up the road from 'The Beach' Khao San lures the upscale side of Bangkok's budget tourists BANGKOK, Thailand -- ''Khao San Road was backpacker land . . . a decompression chamber for those about to enter or leave Thailand, a halfway house between East and West,'' wrote Alex Garland in his 1997 novel The Beach, a Gen-X favorite about three travelers whose chance meeting in a dingy guest house along Khao San Road leads to their discovery of a deceptively idyllic island. Today's U.S. release of the film version of The Beach, starring Titanic heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, puts a fresh spotlight on one of Asia's most famous streets of dreams. The nondescript jumble of budget hotels, Internet cafes and stalls crammed with, as DiCaprio's character puts it, ''counterfeit watches and genuine scarves'' remains a magnet for the tattooed and tie-dyed contingent. But Khao San Road is sprucing up -- and reflecting the increasing commercialization of independent shoestring travel. When Lonely Planet guidebook publishers Tony and Maureen Wheeler ''discovered'' it in the 1970s, the roughly quarter-mile stretch of Khao San Road near Bangkok's Democracy Monument was characterized by a handful of cheap accommodations -- the same type of fetid, bug-ridden cubicles where DiCaprio encounters an aging hippie whose hand-drawn map brings him to paradise in the sultry waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Determined budget travelers still can get by on Khao San Road and its connecting web of dimly lighted alleys for as little as 500 baht (about $13) a day, says Bangkok resident John Berns, a 37-year-old backpacker-turned-Internet entrepreneur. A battalion of street vendors sells Styrofoam plates piled high with fragrant pad thai for the equivalent of 25 cents, and plenty of dives feature thin-walled, linoleum-floored rooms that go for less than $5 a night (extra for air conditioning and a shower). But, Berns adds, today's Khao San Road is witness to the growing number and variety of businesses that cater to the backpacker contingent portrayed so unflatteringly in The Beach. ''It's gone upscale a couple of notches,'' says Berns, sipping a Singha beer and gesturing across the street to the Khaosan Palace, a hotel that throws in air conditioning and CNN for a nightly rate of $15. Nearby, a new 7-Eleven dispenses microwave pizza to homesick travelers, who are being joined by increasing numbers of youngThais. At more than 50 fiercely competitive Internet cafes along Khao San Road (up from a handful last year), the cost of checking e-mail and surfing for travel ideas starts at 1 baht per minute. Those with itchy feet can choose among an array of travel agencies pitching tickets to Rangoon, Burma, or Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The street remains, particularly at night, a chaotic bazaar of silver salesmen, bootleg tapes and software, fake press passes and student IDs, and insistent drivers hawking rides on tuk tuks -- motorcycle taxis that leave occupants gasping for breath in Bangkok's infamously polluted air. But The Beach's depiction notwithstanding, open drug use is relatively rare here. And despite the ''SEX INSTRUCTOR (First Lesson Free)'' T-shirts for sale, Khao San Road is notable for its lack of commercial sexuality. The many massage parlors feature authentic Thai massage -- a rigorous discipline that tends to evoke more pain than pleasure. A sign above the front desk at the Marco Polo Hostel, meanwhile, reminds guests that ''Thai Male and Thai Female are not allowed to go upstairs.''
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Complete Sunday Times article
Sunday Times South Africa:
2/13/00
Testing the Water

He's the most drooled over film star on the planet but there are more and more signs that Leonardo DiCaprio's in need of a reality check, writes Barry Ronge There's a general consensus that the new film The Beach is a watershed for Leonardo DiCaprio's career. It will test his box-office appeal and reveal the loyalty of his Titanic fans. At age 25, he's one of a handful of Hollywood actors who can command up to $20-million (about R120-million) a movie. He's become the most famous, most drooled over male star in the world. But there is no more treacherous or dangerous place to live than in the eye of the hurricane of Hollywood fame. Already, when you look at Internet sites dedicated to him, you'll find a box saying, "Check out related sites", and they send you off to pages dedicated to Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Ryan Phillippe or Wes Bentley, who have all become post-Titanic rivals for the attention of Leo's core audience. With The Beach provoking responses that can only be described as mixed, perhaps it's time to pause and take stock of the DiCaprio phenomenon. One thing is crystal clear Ð he is an extremely capable actor. Last year I was granted an interview with director Martin Scorsese and, while discussing his new film, The Gangs of New York, he spoke about how lucky he was to have interested DiCaprio in the lead role. "I like his acting process. It's very detailed, very true," said Scorsese. "He has something unique when he's on screen that a lot of other young actors only develop later or never get at all. De Niro had it and so did the young (al) Pacino. That's what he's got right now and he could be the De Niro of the new century." From the man who made Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, who launched the careers of De Niro and Harvey Keitel, that's high praise. But it only confirms what we have seen for ourselves in films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Total Eclipse and The Basketball Diaries. But when you become a media sensation, the junk journalists of the tabloids get on your case and the truth gets terribly mangled. Add to that the Internet web sites where fans pile up trivia and distort facts with adulation. For example, when it was announced that his co-star in The Beach would not be a Hollywood starlet but Virginie Ledoyen, a fairly anonymous French actress, the media and the fans would not be satisfied with the mundane truth of that announcement. Within days there were rumours that he had insisted that she be hired because she was his latest mistress and Ð wait for it Ð was carrying his child. Suddenly Ledoyen had paparazzi stalking her every move and requests to be on every cheesy satellite TV talk show in existence. "It's upsetting. It's enough to make you completely paranoid," Ledoyen said of the experience. "I just try to keep a distance and protect myself by taking no notice of it and laughing at them."
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Complete Salon article
Salon.com:
2/13/00
No phone, no lights, no motorcar -- not a single luxury!

Leonardo DiCaprio and the "Trainspotting" creators can't rescue Alex Garland's trouble-in-paradise bestseller from trite moralizing. Picture, if you dare, an island community peopled by post-adolescents running around in those long shorts that aren't quite pants and necklaces made out of little shells: The dark side of human nature is indeed terrifying. But Danny Boyle's "The Beach," based on British novelist Alex Garland's 1997 Utopia-gone-wrong bestseller, doesn't stop there. On this particular island, with no phones, no lights, no motorcars, citizens catch their own fish for food and laze around or play volleyball the rest of the time. A Gordon Lightfoot-gone-native troubadour makes music for them on his battered acoustic guitar. They wear clothing made of cotton and other natural fibers, yet all of them have forgotten what an iron looks like. They're living as God intended, and we're the ones made to suffer for it. The Message of "The Beach," both the movie and the book it's based on, is that technology and other stuff you have to plug in have disconnected us from our true natures -- but if we ever have the opportunity to let our freak flags fly, we must be prepared for the dark secrets we might unearth. For anyone who ever read "Lord of the Flies," or even just the Cliffs Notes, that's nothing we haven't heard before. But there's always the possibility that a good director might elevate lackluster material. Boyle just doesn't rise to the challenge. His "Beach" lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material's tepidness. Instead, he now and then simply jabs electrodes into the movie to try to bring it to life, borrowing some of the quicksilver editing techniques and music-video hyperkinesis he used so beautifully in his brilliant second picture, "Trainspotting," and in the highly underrated "A Life Less Ordinary." "The Beach" lurches along, informed by a kind of forced lyricism -- and even that seems to be driven mostly by all that white sand and blue water, the movie's most resonant images (the handiwork of Darius Khondji, who also shot "City of Lost Children"). Of course, on some level, "The Beach" is nothing more than a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Although he's appeared in two pictures since "Titanic" -- "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Celebrity" -- this is the first role he's taken since superstardom tapped him with its mighty scepter. Not so long ago, DiCaprio was one of the finest and most exciting actors movie audiences could have hoped for, and on the basis of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "This Boy's Life" alone, it will be a long time before I'm ready to give up on him. But as Richard in "The Beach," he does little more than strut around, pouting and frowning in his Phish wear. His character may not be particularly well written in the first place (the screenplay was adapted by Boyle's longtime collaborator, John Hodge), but all of DiCaprio's natural appeal is submerged here.
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USA Today:
2/13/00
better left deserted

'The Beach' better left deserted Throw in the towel -- sun, sand and Leo can't save this one By Mike Clark Leonardo DiCaprio walks on warm sand but still hits an iceberg in Danny Boyle's The Beach, which turns Alex Garland's praised novel into something less than the potboilers most people read on the beach. When a movie's most memorable shot is a close-up of shark-mangled human limbs, better you opt for a real-life sunbathing paradise where a waiter with Mai Tais is always an arm's-length away. After crawling out of this movie, you'll start by asking for a tray of seven. Just six months ago, 20th Century Fox plunked DiCaprio's onetime ''Juliet'' (Claire Danes) into an increasingly sinister pleasure trip of her own -- only to suffer the brokedown box office of Brokedown Palace. From Week 2 on, the studio should expect the same from this murky, pretentious and torturously inert postcard about a Bangkok traveler who's given a map to a spot that's awfully populated for a place billed as ''secluded.'' Even the teeny-boppers who sneak into this R-rated silliness will a) be bored or b) need therapy upon seeing their boy temporarily going bonkers Heart of Darkness-style in the film's final half-hour. Driving DiCaprio to an eventual war-paint state are two barely co-existing factions -- one made up of scary-looking natives who work a frame-consuming cannabis patch that looks like Cheech & Chong's outdoor rec room. The other is a community of dropouts (think Woodstock Nation, but better groomed) who've been permitted to get stoned and play beach volleyball as long as no other interlopers show up. Thus, American DiCaprio and two accompanying French acquaintances (Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) are about as welcome as a Blimpie's franchise -- with chaos ensuing when the rigid rules get relaxed on their behalf. Whether something is happening or nothing (the film's more natural state), Trainspotting's Boyle can't even fake giving his yarn a personality. Half the time it regards the neo-hippies as Lord of the Flies combatants waiting to happen. Other times, it treats them as benignly wayward members of some zoned-out commune that enjoys broiling shrubs. As the group leader who wears the pants but briefly drops them for DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton (Orlando) is the one performer who comes across as a human being. Doomed by a virtually non-existent role but still given too much English to speak, Ledoyen mostly negates the fabulous international impression she made in France's A Single Girl. As for the more mature-looking DiCaprio, the fact that the script and direction do him more damage than he does himself means he'll likely survive this turkey. Boyle, however, is already coming off the disastrous A Life Less Ordinary. For him, the coming fallout may be something less than a day at the you-know-where.
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Complete MSNBC article
MSNBC:
2/13/00
Beachnik getaway

You can get a tan watching “The Beach,” or, if you’re a Leonardo DiCaprio fan, be bronzed into your seat by his almost Rodinesque close-ups (this time, no Titanic to share the light adorning the sea). It’s no secret that DiCaprio is a big star, and no secret why. HE MATURED past adolescent puppyhood in “Titanic,” but there’s a persistent boyishness. His good looks are textured individually, not generically. DiCaprio bonds the camera to his face, and as an actor he surfs fluent instincts that rarely leave him beached … even in “The Beach.” The movie is closer to travel diorama than drama, but often a pleasant getaway on just that level. DiCaprio plays Richard, a bored hacker who opts for what he hopes will be transforming, Conradian adventure in Thailand (call him Lord Jimmy). Even the gaudy fleshpots of Bangkok soon pall (was it that icky drink of snake’s blood?), and his spirit quivers at mention of a “mythic” island to the south, a paradise found only by the most karmic tourists. He heads there with two lovely French youths, Etienne (Guillaume Canet) and the even lovelier Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen). They like his mall-boy Americanosity and the way he plunges into the big sea channel that separates them from the island, with its hidden cove of green water and white sands (carried away, Darius Khondji lifts his salivating camera up to a bird’s-eye view that makes the island seem cartoonish, like Peter Pan’s isle in the Disney film). SHANGRI-LA BEACHNIKS After crossing a field of drug plants guarded by armed Thais … the dark side of Shangri-La … the intrepid three find their heaven, laid out like a cabana. It’s a hamlet of Sybaritic beachniks, all young (no oldsters), almost all white (two blacks), and even those who are not beautiful have a tone of succulence (imagine if Helmut Newton worked for National Geographic). Tilda Swinton, whose face is like a claw hammer made from sunflowers, is the leader, Sal. Her fuhrer allure is radiant. She has sex with Richard as if exacting a body tax due her dominance, and as he nods drowsily she snaps: “Get some more sleep. I might want to have sex again before breakfast.” Everyone plays, sings, swims, fishes, hoping sharks won’t show up and the Thais will stay stoned, a bunch of opium Opies sucking their trigger fingers on the other side of the island. And they enjoy goodies brought in furtively from the lavishly stocked hell they left behind. Given the obvious options, there is remarkably little visible sex (darn it, no orgies! … but brief nudity). Richard is bedazzled by the bodies, the beach, the glowing plankton, the stars above, the glands within. Francoise, being French, is available, though she zaps him with a line that feels directly heisted from Julie Delpy in “Before Sunrise”: “This is just the kind of pretentious b.s. that Americans say to French girls so they can sleep with them.” BASKING IN YOUTH DiCaprio remains a star even when almost eclipsed by bad dialogue (he out-winked it in ‘Titanic,’ too). He may not be John Wayne, but he sure is Leo. The movie is often good in a preening, ’60s-forever way, as long as it reminds us of “The Blue Lagoon” and “Swiss Family Robinson,” basking in its youth tour of green (marine) pastures. It has the sugary nip of Thai tea. But director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge go for grim foreshadowing with an early clip from “Apocalypse Now,” and we know that the Thai thugs are going to ape through Eden, if not napalm it.
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TV Guide:
2/13/00
Life's a Beach for Leo DiCaprio

Even if you're Leonardo DiCaprio, when the script says you have to eat a caterpillar in your new movie (The Beach), you eat a caterpillar. Direct from the tongue that touched the creepy-crawly comes this revelation: "It was a caterpillar and I had to put one in my mouth about 20 times." That, he says, is one of the few true tales about him that have circulated since his Titanic success. However, he's determined not to let fame chart his future course. "I'm still experimenting," he explains to anyone who wants to pigeonhole him. "I want to diversify myself as an actor and try as many different characters and styles of filmmaking as I can." Speaking of different styles, DiCaprio didn't keep it a secret that James Cameron's style led to tension on the Titanic set. In hindsight, he says, "It takes that type of personality to be able to command a big film. I don't resent him for it. Nobody else could have done that movie the way he did." DiCaprio explains that Beach director Danny Boyle is the polar opposite of Cameron: "He's sweet, sensitive and slow-paced." The actor takes pride in one sequence in The Beach that was his idea — a moment when his character, descending into madness, seems to be in the middle of a video game. "We were looking for some sort of surreal moment within the film that really expressed his isolation. What better way to show it than that he is sort of playing a game in his own head in which he's a commando in the jungle." Next on DiCaprio's agenda is a starring role in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of the North. "There's a rumor going around that Scorsese is a good director," he deadpans. "I wanted to find out for myself."— Jeanne Wolf
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Beautiful Boy Stelingo:
2/11/00
Screw the so called professional review's of "The Beach" Read this review by a true fan. Then go see the movie yourself and enjoy

Dicaprio69

===== Review of the Beach by Stelingo =====

REVIEW OF THE BEACH After more than a year of anticipation and excitement it had finally arrived. Yes The Beach was here. I was lucky enough to attend a special preview of the film in Manchester, one of 5 cities in the UK where such previews were taking place this evening. To follow the development of a film from location shoot right up to the finished product, to mention nothing of the rumours and controversies surrounding the production, has been a fascinating experience. Would the film live up to my expectations or would it all be a disappointing anti-climax? No question about it. This film is pure excellence. From the very start of the film you are immediately thrown into this exotic and strange world. The pace of the film is brisk, the main characters quickly introduced and the their quest succinctly presented. A sense of adventure is created and I felt myself wanting to jump on the next plane and join them. (And not just because Leo was the main protagonist). After several scrapes they reach the island, join the community and seemingly adapt quickly to their new idyllic life. There are some beautiful shots of Thailand and the island seems to live up to everything you could possibly want from a paradise. Then things start to go wrong. The mood of the film changes. There is a tension and an almost constant darkness both psychologically in the atmosphere and physically in the actual shots. There are some gory scenes; there are moments of total madness and instances of the uglier side of human nature. This film really does pose the question of what is paradise and how far do you go to hold onto it? It makes you think about your own interpretation of these ideas rather than offer convenient neatly packaged answers. The film remains true to the spirit of the book, if not to its every detail of plot. The ending is less gory than the book but, in my opinion, much more tense and will blow your mind away. And Leo? What did I think of him? Utterly superb. I make no secret of the fact I am a big Leo fan and this film merely confirms my opinion and heightens my estimation of him as an actor. His character has been supposedly criticised by the studios for being too unsympathetic. But I found Leo’s performance to be a true and honest portrayal of a Westerner who finds himself in a strange country in extraordinary situations. He is not a hero but a normal person who reacts and behaves as many people probably would. If we dislike Richard or certain aspects of his character it is probably because we recognise these same aspects to a greater or lesser extent in ourselves. We see Leo’s character go through several stages, including love and deliriousness bordering on madness. He portrays each stage skilfully and convincingly and is simply perfect for the role. Another performance, which shines, is that of Robert Carlyle as Daffy, who gives an added dimension to the film. I found the French couple pleasant but felt that their roles were not meaty enough to really make an impression. I feel especially that a chance was missed by not developing more the rivalry between Richard (Leo) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet) over Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen). But then again this wasn’t in the original book. Various other characters feature but are not really sufficiently fleshed out. And finally, if you thought Leo looked hot in Titanic, sizzling in R&J, practically raging with fire in the pics and trailers of the Beach, none of this will prepare you for him on the big screen. The whole Manchester fire department couldn’t even begin to dampen the heat he produces. WHEW!! Words just can’t describe it. And I’d swear those pants just seemed to fall lower and lower in every scene. All I can say is that Leo
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Washington Post:
2/11/00
'The Beach': Trouble in Paradise

Think of "The Beach" as "Peter Pan" with machine guns, sex, and Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Tinker Bell. It's about a tribe of lost boys (and girls) in a Never Never Land that looks exactly like the bejeweled islet glimpsed by Wendy and her brothers as the great Peter P. vectored them in from London. No, it's not third star on the right, straight on till morning. It's off the coast of Thailand, but there are even some pirates in the form of AK-47-toting marijuana farmers who make life interesting by murdering kids once in a while. But when the farmers aren't shooting them and the sharks aren't eating them, these children of pleasure live in Pan-like paradise: For them Never Land evidently means never having to say no to any impulse, no matter how ill-advised. Is this a child's idea of paradise or what? The movie, by the hipsters Danny Boyle, Andrew Macdonald and John Hodge, who made the great "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave" and the ungreat "A Life Less Ordinary," is relentlessly beautiful and wholly annoying. And in fact, it's really not as smart as the wise J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." That old pro knew something these boys don't: how to come up with a third act. Even their second is a mess. Our hero is Richard, embodied by the banal beauty of DiCaprio, that big-headed, gangly boy with an adult's voice and a child's body and Huck Finn's tousle of hair. A wandering American in search of the real, a refugee from Starbucks and www.virtualife.com, he has come to rest in a sleazy Bangkok hotel. A crazy Scot (Robert Carlyle in a cameo for the production team that made him famous in "Trainspotting") tells him of paradise: a beach so unspoiled one could live there like a god, enjoying beauty and bong in double-lungfuls over all of one's wakeful days. Then, presumably in mourning for paradise lost, he slashes his veins and bleeds out on dirty linen, amid a cloud of Asiatic flies and his own stench. Richard hardly notices in the excitement that Carlyle's Daffy has left him a map to the place. He invites along his next-door neighbors--two brilliantly beautiful French kids, Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet)--and the trio begin the pilgrimage. After a few adventures in the jungle, water and midair, they arrive. At about that point the movie tanks. Getting there was all the fun, particularly as Boyle, an expert in squalor (check out the toilet scene in "Trainspotting" if you doubt it), does a fabulous job of evoking Asia as a cesspool of drugs, sweat, fun, travel and adventure. The food is cheap, the beer cold, the sexual opportunity endless, the water warm, the happy grass available by the fistful. Book me on the next flight, thank you very much. But the magic island proves weirdly unmagical. It's more structured than Club Med, run by a nasty totalitarian called Sal (played by Tilda Swinton of "Orlando" as a dour CEO), and it's as full of duties as the life left behind. Okay, so it's on the beach. Well, you've seen beaches as beautiful and they're much closer, and so have I. Nowhere in the film is there much sympathy. The settlers on this new frontier are a fairly unimpressive bunch, and none more so than Richard, who quickly steals Francoise from her lover and could be described as either a showoff or a blowhard if the grass didn't make him so lethargic. The others are no better, and any sense of community is purely the invention of the slightly more adult Sal, who, like any cult leader in recent history, demands sexual gratification from the flock. Then, when one of their members is ripped up by a shark, they put him in the jungle to die more quietly. His screams are very annoying. Ultimately, they exile Richard because he's drawn a map of the place that will attract others; Richard goes quietly nuts in the jungle in the movie's most ludicrous waste of time.
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Complete NY Times article
NY Times:
2/11/00
DiCaprio Swims With the Plankton

The Beach" is an attempt by all the major talents involved to try something new. For the first 10 minutes, the movie slices forward like the prelims of the latest adrenaline splurge at the Extreme Games. Peter Mountain/20th Century Fox Leonardo DiCaprio as Richard in "The Beach." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It reaches an early peak when Robert Carlyle -- the flesh-and-blood yang to the yin flash of the director, Danny Boyle -- pops up as Daffy, a buzz-cut head offering words of wisdom to Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio). Playing to the back row, Carlyle is so potent a presence that he's one of the few actors for whom Dolby Digital is wholly unnecessary. Daffy tells Richard about an island paradise not found on any conventional map. And Richard, a young American vacationing in Thailand and looking for something off the beaten path, follows Daffy's map in search of promise. Boyle is as skilled as any filmmaker at polished sleight-of-hand camera business, in lieu of narrative resonance. DiCaprio wants to stand his image on its head and give the members of his young fan club something to think about as they slip on their retainers and doze off, with visions of Leo dancing in their heads. The picture opens with stark black-and-white that blinks into color before you know it: a metaphor for the awakening that Richard will undergo. "Like every tourist, you want it all ... to be safe, just like America," a Thai street salesman sneers at Richard as he drifts from one noisy, overcrowded bazaar to another. Seconds later, Richard is forcing down several jiggers of snake blood to prove he's down for new experiences. Richard lures his next-door neighbors from his hostel (Virginie Ledoyen and Guilluame Canet) into joining him on the trip to the Shangri-La that Daffy told him about. After a boys' book of adventure journey, they find themselves in the hidden land. (That is, after they slip past acres of apparently wild marijuana that is actually fiercely guarded by drug runners.) There, Richard is knee-deep in pleasure seekers who have established a commune in this hidden land -- more sun, willowy babes and lean fellas with six-pack abs than you'll find in a summer resort layout in the fashion magazine Spoon. Maybe "Shallow Grave," a gleeful and malicious piece of genre legerdemain, was an appropriate first feature from "The Beach" production team: Boyle, the writer John Hodge and the producer Andrew MacDonald. They're best served when riffing on genres, dispensing a superficial gleam that's cool to the touch. Their crowning, and crowing, work, a glib adaptation of Irvine Welsh's facile scab "Trainspotting," contradicted the heroin-pallor of the source material; it burned with a red-eyed eight-ball rush. With the exception of perhaps John Woo, no director is better at exploiting interiors than Boyle. In "Shallow Grave," the apartment that was the center of most of the action was as much a character as any actor in the film. And if mottled walls could talk, they would chatter like "Trainspotting." His camera slithered through every nook and cranny to find just the right peculiar point of view. The camera work in "The Beach" is just as industrious. (Oddly enough, the wide open spaces and big, blue skies confound him a bit here and also in "A Life Less Ordinary.") Boyle and his squad are also gifted at shifts in tone, slipping from cheeky to dread in the same shot, like a gentle freshet with a pearly froth that pours into an ominous waterfall. The camera sidles up to a monkey sitting in a tree, then closes in on the tether on its neck -- it's a watch-primate in service of the weed guards, and what was innocent is transformed into danger.
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Christian Science Monitor:
2/11/00
Just another (gloomy) day at the 'Beach'

Leonardo DiCaprio became a superstar in "Titanic," which became a superhit largely because of his uncanny appeal to moviegoers in general and teenage girls in particular. His fans have been wondering what he'd do for an encore, and today the answer arrives in "The Beach," an action drama so dark that "Titanic" fans may choose to swim away from it fast. DiCaprio plays an American drifter who wanders into faraway Thailand, where he hopes to find experiences more daring and different than the usual tourist excursions. His wish comes true when a mysterious stranger tells him about a secluded island paradise that's known only to the fortunate few who have the courage and stamina to get there. He promptly enlists a young French couple as his traveling companions, and a reel or two later they arrive at their destination, sparking a series of daunting adventures. The best things about "The Beach" are its magnificent Thai scenery, Darius Khondji's shimmering camera work, and yes, DiCaprio's vigorous acting. Tilda Swinton shows her usual talent as the matriarch who keeps the paradise running smoothly, and Robert Carlyle makes a suitably creepy impression during his brief appearance as the map-drawing weirdo who gets the story going. The worst things about "The Beach" are its undercurrents of xenophobia and racism, its surprisingly sour attitude - as peevish and pessimistic as "Titanic" was ripe and romantic - and its limitless penchant for borrowing from other movies. It begins like a rehash of "Return to Paradise," evolves into a hippie version of "Lord of the Flies," and knocks off everything from "Jaws" to "The Blair Witch Project" along the way. When all else fails, director Danny Boyle turns the whole picture into a wide-screen video game, which may earn a few laughs but does little for the picture's shaky logic and sketchy character development. DiCaprio's charm may be enough to turn "The Beach" into a box-office winner, especially with all those waving palm trees and splashing waterfalls to set off his sparkling eyes. But its driving force is less his performance than Boyle's dour vision of the world, which he's developed in pictures like "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave" over the past few years. "The Beach" gives us a hero who craves romance and novelty, then spends the next two hours whisking both out of his reach - and doing the same, regrettably, to its audience.
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Complete SF Gate article
SF Gate:
2/11/00
"The Beach': No day in paradise

If you were alone on a desert island, what lanky mega-famous person would you like to be stranded with? If your answer is Gilligan, you're not pretending hard enough to be a 15-year-old girl. Try Leonardo DiCaprio. In his latest flick, "The Beach," he wanders bare-chested on the white sands of a remote island near Bangkok and makes sweet underwater love to the smoldering French actress Virginie Ledoyen. But, girls be warned. This is a film by the men who made "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" (that smack flick that gave Ewan McGregor a case of the bends), so leave your Teen People at home: It ain't that kind of party. "The Beach" is an edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies." A friend said she was so addiction to the Alex Garland novel that "The Beach" is based on that her mouth couldn't produce saliva fast enough for her fingers to turn the pages. Despite a flat finale and some laughable hypothesizing about pursuits of liberty, the movie has its own addictive elements: well-used electronica, Darius Khondji's photography and the nonstop charisma of its star. DiCaprio plays Richard, a rootless American kid looking for, as he waxes introspective in the film's voice-over, "something more visceral -- more real.' (More "visceral" than, say, the hair gel he's carrying in his backpack.) That search brings him to Thailand, where all Hollywood's disillusioned young retreat. Apparently, the French like it, too, but they go for the sex: Francoise and Etienne (Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet in their first English-language movie) are a couple of wild lovers in the hotel room next door. And since no actress is hired to resist DiCaprio, Etienne will get his heart snapped. But not before the three become thrill-seeking travel companions. In the room on the other side is a Scottish ganja nut named "Daffy" played by Robert Carlyle, more insane, here, than the Scottish soccer nut he played in "Trainspotting." Daffy (as in Duck) tells Richard about paradise, shares a joint with him, kills himself, then leaves Richard a hand-drawn map to the Elysian Fields he was quacking about, The Beach, a multiculti utopian hideaway that Richard tells us is a "resort for people who don't like resorts." (But all that pastel linen? Beach volleyball? Where are Frankie and Annette?) The Beach is lorded over by a Zen mother called Sal who's played with foreboding by Tilda Swinton as a cross between one of the Leakeys and Cleopatra. She tells Richard, Francoise and Etienne they can stay provided no one else has seen the map. (This is the kind of place where the inhabitants do each other's dentistry to keep from returning to the mainland.) So we'll just pretend Richard never thanked those two American stoners who let him hang with them when he was locked out of his bungalow by giving them a copy of the map. Director Danny Boyle and writer John Hodge's adaptation has DiCaprio going hard-core -- at least, hard-core for a guy who once stood on the hull railing of a doomed ocean liner and declared himself the prince of Egypt or something. Here, DiCaprio swallows caterpillars, totes an AK-47, slays a shark, gets high and mistakes himself for Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now" or is that Charlie Sheen in "Platoon"? Either way, "The Beach" is an absorbing reminder that DiCaprio is capable of making you forget the wannabes sitting in the green room.
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Metroactive.com:
2/11/00
Leonardo Beached

Postcard views can't save DiCaprio in deserted-island downer By Richard von Busack ALEX GARLAND'S FIRST NOVEL, The Beach, was indeed beach reading--plenty of violence, abject moral simplicity and obvious derivations from Lord of the Flies and several screenplays, particularly The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. The film version has been cleared up and cheered up by screenwriter John Hodge, which is an advantage--it's smoother, pleasanter trash now. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Richard, who receives a map to an uncharted island from a raving mad denizen (Robert Carlyle) of a backpacker hotel in Bangkok. He and two friends head out for the island and find it a paradise, where an apolitical commune lives well like beachcombers. But the moral of Garland's story is that man defiles every paradise he enters--haven't we had enough of that moral?--and soon enough trouble brews. First unwelcome guests arrive, and then native, heavily armed marijuana farmers show up to protest. The postcardy views will probably draw more tourists to Thailand, just what the country needs. DiCaprio, however, is going to disappoint his teenage fans by his performance as a cowardly, recessive and easily manipulated character who goes barking mad in near-record time. (In the book, Richard was, it was implied, disturbed; here his behavior seems like instant lunacy.) The insolent good looks and the Eddie Munster eyebrows may set young girls pining, but DiCaprio seems to me now what he's always been: an artsy, minor lead with all of Jack Nicholson's mannerisms and little of his charisma. Tilda Swinton, who co-stars, is the lounging dictator of the camp. Though she's cool and emotionless, she doesn't have the manipulative qualities of a real leader, and how she got control of the commune is one of the many questions neither the book nor the film answers. And the happy ending here looks preposterous. In one courtship scene, Richard talks about a parallel universe where everything is just like it is here, only slightly different. Maybe in that universe, The Beach is actually a good movie.
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Excite News:
2/11/00
This weekend at the movies: Leo roars

Leonardo DiCaprio, the screen idol at the heart of many a teenage girl's fantasy, faces his first major box office test since 1997's mega-hit "Titanic" when his new film "The Beach" hits theaters around the country Friday. DiCaprio may find the road to blockbuster ticket sales daunting -- much like his trip to paradise in "Beach" -- however, as he faces the second week of horror hit "Scream 3," which competes for much the same audience. Moreover, the early reviews for "Beach" are, well, less than titanic in their praise of the film. The film is the first he has made since "Titanic" although "The Man In the Iron Mask" came out afterward it was made before the tale of the great ship's sinking and DiCaprio's superstardom. Paul Dergarabedian, who heads up box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Inc., said. "'The Beach' is really going to be a test of Leo's box office drawing power." He added that it was lucky for DiCaprio that "Scream 3" and "The Beach" "aren't opening on the same weekend because they would be fragmenting the 18-to-24-year-old audience." DiCaprio also faces lesser threats from the Chevy Chase comedy "Snow Day" and Disney animated film, "The Tigger Movie," which also open around the United States on Friday. By now, most movie fans know that "Titanic," in which DiCaprio made his breakthrough to superstardom playing a wanderlustful painter traveling on the ill-fated cruise liner, became the highest-grossing movie of all time with a worldwide haul of around $2 billion. TEENAGERS SWOON Much of the movie's box office success owed to repeat visits from young women who swooned every time DiCaprio took off his shirt or brushed his lips against co-star Kate Winslet's. Fox, the studio behind "Beach," is counting on much the same drawing power this time around and DiCaprio, ever mindful that his Hollywood star will shine only as long as his box office muscle still flexes, said he chose this part carefully. "I wanted my next film to be something I felt strong about, and 'The Beach' and the character of Richard were the first things I felt some kind of connection with," he said. DiCaprio plays an idealistic, twentysomething American who leaves the United States and heads to Thailand looking for experience that will enrich his life. He finds it fast, in a rundown hotel in Bangkok where he encounters a loopy British chap named Daffy who carries a hand drawn map to what he claims is an island paradise. Daffy's story of a group of 20-year olds living off the land and smoking dope all day at "The Beach" entices Richard and a suave young French couple (Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) to find the island. It's only after the trio swims for miles across open sea and find the other beautiful dope-smoking hipsters that Richard learns important -- and hard -- lessons in life. In terms of the movie's box office draw, Dergarabedian said "The Beach" has the advantage that horror films historically open big, then drop off quickly. "Scream 2," for instance, hauled in $32.9 million over its initial weekend only to see its ticket sales drop by 58 percent the second weekend. "Scream 3" took in $35.2 million last weekend. POOR EARLY REVIEWS But working against DiCaprio and his group of bikini-clad women and bare-chested men, are early reviews by veterans like the NBC "Today Show"'s Gene Shalit who said he never hoped to see a sequel, much less one titled "Son of The Beach." Still, teenagers and young adults -- DiCaprio's primary audience -- rarely listen to critics, so industry watchers are anxiously watching to see how the film fares at box offices.
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Daily Herald (Chicago):
2/10/00
DiCaprio film stirs controversy

MAYA BAY, Thailand - "The Beach," which premiered in London Wednesday starring Leonardo DiCaprio, tells the story of an amoral backpacker whose quest for the perfect tropical beach leads him to a secret commune on a remote Thai island. But Utopia isn't quite what it seems. The image of sunny, sandy perfection achieved in making the 20th Century Fox film has destroyed the once-pristine beach, environmentalists say. Maya Bay, a strip of sand and vegetation backed by dramatic cliffs, is located on Phi Leh island, part of a national park about 350 miles south of Bangkok. Many of its islands have been blighted by developers who bribed corrupt officials. Phi Leh was largely spared, providing a setting worthy of Alex Garland's best-selling novel. But for filmmakers, led by director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald, it wasn't quite perfect enough. After obtaining permits from the Forestry Department and paying a $110,000 damage deposit, the filmmakers brought in bulldozers to widen and flatten the beach and strip away native grasses, scrub and other vegetation. They also removed a lot of garbage that had washed ashore. Activists who had for years unsuccessfully campaigned against the environmental damage to Thailand's parks joined with local residents to protest. They succeeded in getting the number of coconut trees - a non-indigenous species - planted by the filmmakers reduced from about 100 to 60, but they lost court challenges to impose a restraining order on filming. The filmmakers pledged to restore the beach to its original state and set wooden stakes in the sand to prevent erosion. By the time the monsoon season ended in November, it became clear the stakes didn't work nearly as well as native vegetation. More sand than anyone could remember was washed away by the annual storms. "The beach looks awful," said Alastair Short, 40, a tourist from Worcester, England, visiting the island with friends. "We decided to come by and see with our own eyes what had happened. It's just a shame." A lawyer for 20th Century Fox said filmmakers they took every precaution and the erosion was caused by unusually severe storms, not the filmmakers' actions. "We only need to give the beach time to recover on its own," said the lawyer, Dusit Walee. "I'm confident the claim about the erosion is groundless." The damage to Maya Bay may not be finished yet. Ecologists fear the loosened sand could damage fragile coral reefs on the beach front. "Maya Bay is falling apart in front of us," said Surat Saewkok, who has taken tourists sight-seeing here for 15 years.
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Official DiCaprio website:
2/10/00
The official UK premiere of The Beach

BEACH PREMIERE (LONDON)

The Beach Premiere in London will be re-broadcast tomorrow morning February 10th at

View webcast here

The official UK premiere of The Beach will take place on the evening of Wednesday 9 February at London’s Empire Leicester Square, moving on to the star-studded post-premiere party at at a secret location afterwards.
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Complete London Telegraph article
London Telegraph:
2/10/00
A starry night at the Beach

With a premiere and a spectacular party costing £500,000, The Beach, the first super-hyped film of the year, was launched in Britain last night. Life's a beach: Leonardo DiCaprio arrives at the premiere of The Beach Hopes of a brief sighting of Leonardo DiCaprio and his on-screen lover, Virginie Ledoyen, brought thousands of fans to Leicester Square in London, many brandishing Valentine's Day messages. Some had camped overnight to claim a space by the crush barriers and were rewarded with glimpses of Noel Gallagher, George Michael, John Cusack and members of the pop groups Steps and All Saints, who provided the film's soundtrack. But the turnout of about 3,000 fans was several thousand fewer than gathered for the British premiere of DiCaprio's 1998 film, The Man in The Iron Mask. After the premiere, DiCaprio led the celebrities to a five-storey warehouse in Covent Garden which had been expensively refurbished for a party. Each floor was decorated with a different "theme" from the film, which is about backpackers on the hippie trail in Thailand in search of an idyllic beach. One floor became a Bangkok nightclub, complete with underdressed Oriental dancers and attendants. Another was designed like a beach, with bar staff working in several inches of water. The £25 million film began life four years ago as a debut novel by Alex Garland, son of The Daily Telegraph political cartoonist Nicholas Garland. The book became a best-seller and the fortunes of the film, backed by a huge marketing and publicity campaign, rest heavily on the superstar status of 25-year-old DiCaprio - heart-throb to teenage girls and one of Hollywood's highest earners. It is his first major role since Titanic, the first film ever to gross $1 billion. And the actor's salary accounts for half of the entire budget of the film. London's hot reception for the film last night may be read as a typical sign of British forgiveness. Ewan McGregor had been due to play the role of the central character, Richard, but was dropped to make way for DiCaprio, an American, because 20th Century Fox wanted a globally bankable star. The Beach has been made by director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge, the close-knit all-British team that made Trainspotting and Shallow Grave with McGregor. McGregor was furious with his friends. After learning that he had been dropped, he said: "I think it wasn't handled very well. I wasn't told what was going on nearly early enough. I was led to believe I was playing the part for a long time." McGregor did not attend last night's premiere. A spokesman for the film said: "His name is not on the invitation list I have been given. It may be that he's abroad, but I really don't know why he's not coming."
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Complete LA Times article
LA Times:
2/10/00
At the Movies: 'The Beach'

LONDON--"The Beach" is a mediocre movie, to be sure, but it would be a shame if blame were laid exclusively at the sandy feet of its titanic star, Leonardo DiCaprio. Skeptics scoffed when the quintessentially American "Leo" -as DiCaprio, post-"Titanic," is now known around the world -was cast as Richard. The sought-after role is that of an English drifter at the unnerving heart of the 1996 best-seller published when author Alex Garland was a scant 26. But DiCaprio isn't British, which seems to have necessitated a shift in tone from the unsparing nihilism of the novel. Americans, or so the thinking goes, don't do bleak. Then there was the McGregor factor. Whereas Ewan McGregor was key to the earlier films of the creative team behind "The Beach" -"Shallow Grave," "Trainspotting" and "A Life Less Ordinary" -even the Scottish actor's newfound status as a "Stars Wars" icon wasn't enough to displace DiCaprio when it came to casting. So how is Leo? Not bad actually, which is more than can be said for a script from John Hodge that ditches most of the novel's tension. While the book may not quite be the modern-day "Lord of the Flies" that admirers have claimed, Garland nonetheless proved on his debut outing that he can write a page-turner with the best of 'em. It's a clipped, often violent, ultimately very chilling novel about a time-honored topic -paradise postponed -here reinvented anew. A 20 -something drifter in search of utopia, Richard finds himself a near-casualty of an impossible ideal in a community that could not be more dystopian. "I carry a lot of scars," Richard reports twice in the last page of the book. And so he does, even if readers are likely to be most disturbed by the matter-of-fact blankness that is the narrator's principal means of reportage. From its opening moments -"my name is Richard," we are told, "so what else do you need to know?" -the film sounds as if it wants to catch that moral aphasia. The surprise, then, is how quickly the script lapses into cliche. "We were headed for the great unknown," says Richard, as he and two newly acquired French friends, Francoise (Virgine Ledoyen) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet), abandon their Bangkok dive for a mysterious island locale mapped out for Richard by the haunting Daffy (Robert Carlyle, reprising the psycho turn he perfected last year in "The World Is Not Enough"). They encounter sharks, waterfalls and gun-toting Thais before arriving at an island retreat overseen by Sal (Tilda Swinton), the beach's resident despot, whose officiousness co-exists with a strong sexual appetite. Does the beach offer any kind of balm? Not much, although Danny Boyle's direction is at its strongest juxtaposing the supposed idyll with a return visit to mainland Thailand -here seen as urban life at its most disorienting and jagged. For that sequence, all credit goes to cinematographer Darius Khondji, whose images are every bit as jarring -and, when need be, alluring -as they were in "Evita" and "Seven." In the novel, readers felt each incremental step in the breakdown of "society" into its component savage parts, many of them embodied by Bugs, Sal's supposed main squeeze.
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E! Online/Ted Casablanca:
2/10/00
He'd be gettin' it

Man Overboard Other funny bidness at The Beach bash: Since the flick is about all the awful things people inflict on each other when communing on a deserted island, I asked Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath just what he would do to our man Leo in such a situation. "I'm going to ruin this with some stupid words I'm going to say," he said, surprising (and pleasing) me with his honesty. "Stop me after I have a few beers, and I'll be talking shit about everything." I'm stopping you now. The question, Mark. "What would I do to him--Jesus Christ! Well, within a couple of weeks, he'd be gettin' it, wouldn't he? I'm just kiddin'. Don't fuck me on that. What would I be doing? I don't know. What would you be doing with Leo?" Let's not go there. "I'd be hanging out. I'd be hanging out talking Lakers basketball. That's what I'd be doing." Talking basketball with no television? "Talking basketball, just talking basketball. I guess we'd also be trying to find a way to get the hell off the island. My God, it would be lonely on that thing." Let's get to the important stuff: Did he cry when you saw Titantic? "Yep, but it was cool, man. Leo was cool. He's such a good actor." There you have it, folks. Quite frankly, I'm not sure which of the above revelations is more intriguing. I'll let you ponder that conundrum while we let our hidden celebrity camera zoom in on people who always seem to think they're on a deserted island, even when they're right smack in the middle of the City of Fallen Face-Lifts.
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Complete SF Examiner article
San Francisco Examiner:
2/10/00
50th Berlin film fest thinks big

BERLIN -- The organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival promise to make this year's version the biggest in their history -- which basically would make it one of the biggest festivals anywhere. Berlin is one of Europe's original Big Three (with Cannes and Venice), and has been joined in the last decade or so by Sundance and Toronto in North America as the major festivals each year... ..."Million Dollar Hotel" is one of 21 films from 16 countries in competition for the coveted Golden Bear, to be awarded Feb. 20. That alone should signal the shift in tone from Rotterdam's Tiger Awards, handed out Saturday to three foreign independents. These are not to be confused with the Venice festival, which awards the Golden Lion. Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my. Also in competition is Leonardo DiCaprio's newest, "The Beach," directed by Danny Boyle, as well as current U.S. releases "Magnolia" (Paul Thomas Anderson), "Man on the Moon" (Milos Forman), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (Anthony Minghella) and Zhang Yimou's "The Road Home."...
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Nando Beat:
2/10/00
MOVIE REVIEW: Leonardo washes out on 'The Beach'

In one of his first post-"Titanic" appearances, Leonardo DiCaprio hits "The Beach," Danny Boyle's adaptation of Alex Garland's 1997 novel about a Generation Xer who searches for an idyllic life on an island off the coast of Thailand. Critics saw Garland's book as a cry against the emptiness of popular culture, calling it an anthem for a generation that had been bombarded by culture rather than nourished by it. Oddly, the movie version looks like a prime example of pop culture at its most hollow, a beautifully shot but terminally shallow adventure without an ambiguous bone in its body. What came across as fresh in the novel plays like a jury-rigged, adolescent version of movies such as "Apocalypse Now" and "Lord of the Flies." This "Heart of Darkness" wannabe basks in the balm of sandy beaches and young skin. One had reason to hope "The Beach" wouldn't run dry. The movie's behind-the-camera talent revolved around the trio that gave us the truly incendiary "Trainspotting" (director Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge), and it's time someone took a hard look at 20something life. Boyle brings some trademark edginess to the production, notably in a jungle chase that's shown as a video game; the moment apes the culture that shaped the mentality of DiCaprio's Richard, but looks showy and gratuitous. Once Richard reaches his island paradise - a commune created by young travelers eager to retreat from civilization - there's nothing left for the script to do but play out the obvious. Secrets, sexual jealousies and betrayals loom as we learn what happens when callow youths try to found a Utopia. Few would dispute DiCaprio's acting talents, but he presents Richard, who narrates the story, as an unappealing combination of baby-faced guile and undefined alienation. Richard travels to the island with two companions, a young Frenchman (Guillaume Canet) and his beautiful girlfriend (Virginie Ledoyen). When the trio reaches the island, they meet the head of the community, a tough-minded woman played by British actress Tilda Swinton. She's joined by a variety of indistinguishable marijuana-smoking dropouts who spend their days in the pursuit of pleasure, an activity the movie ultimately condemns, winking a cautionary eye at us. This hip beach-party includes revelry, shark attacks, spear fishing, battles with the local pot farmers and a budding affair between Richard and Francoise, Ledoyen's character. It doesn't help that the French actors speak English with guidebook intonations or that a lengthy scene in which Richard is banished from the camp makes it look as if he's playing at madness. The job of traveling around the bend convincingly goes to Robert Carlyle, who came to international attention as the cruel drug dealer in "Trainspotting." Carlyle plays a character named Daffy Duck. Richard meets Daffy in a rundown Bangkok hotel. Daffy rants in an impenetrable Scottish accent, shares a joint and leaves a map for Richard before committing suicide. The map shows Richard how to reach the fabled island. "The Beach," which was shot in Thailand, has sweaty energy, particularly when Boyle allows the camera to reel through the streets of Thailand's cities. And the island settings have a paradisiacal allure, a feeling of hidden pleasures that only can be attained at great personal risk, say jumping from the top of a 120-foot waterfall. In press material for the movie, writer Hodge says that the story can be summarized as "the devil makes work for idle hands. There isn't enough to do here." Yes, and the talented cast and crew of "The Beach" needed more to do, as well. They may have set out to chronicle a perilous journey on a road that leads nowhere. The result proves decidedly less intriguing, a triumph of scenery over character. "The Beach" runs aground on its own miscalculations, the most notable of which involves mistaking the material for something profound. The movie has the look, feel and intonations of an important movie, but not the heft. Imagine "Apocalypse" Now without a war. Rated R. Grade: C (two stars) Robert Denerstein is film critic at the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
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Complete LA Weekly article
LA Weekly:
2/10/00
DiCaprio finds trouble in Paradise

Excite News:
2/10/00
DiCaprio Thrills At 'Beach' Premiere

LONDON (AP) - Thousands of waiting fans shrieked in adoration Wednesday night as Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio stepped from a limousine for the star-studded European premiere of his latest movie, "The Beach." Admirers gathered 10 deep in places chanting "Leo!" "Leo!" and jostling to get a better view from behind the police barriers at the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. Young fans waved banners saying "Leo, kiss me quick" as celebrity guests filed in. DiCaprio, wearing a gray suit and matching tie, looked slightly bemused by his rapturous reception, but smiled for photographers before heading inside. Long after he disappeared from view, the crowd chanted on in hope he might return. "It's weird these crowds," DiCaprio said once inside. "You have to go through the motions. I try my best, I pose for the cameras, but it's almost like it's not me out there. "But I'm a very lucky person," he added. "I don't complain." The 25-year-old actor's co-star, Virgine Ledoyen, arrived in a pair of faded jeans. Robert Carlyle, another co-star, brought his wife, Anastasia, to the premiere. Baby Spice Emma Bunton and All Saints, who provided the movie's theme tune, appeared, as did Mick Hucknall, the star of the band Simply Red. Steps stars Faye Tozer and Claire Richards were among the pop contingent, along with Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes and their partners Yasmin Le Bon and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. The film is based on a best-selling novel by Alex Garland about a group of travelers who head to an idyllic secret beach on a Thai island and find that their piece of paradise isn't what they expected. The film opens across Britain on Friday.
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Rolling Stone Magazine:
2/9/00
Leo on Dry Land

Official Leonardo DiCaprio Website:
2/9/00
BEACH PARTY BINGO

THE BEACH — The Premiere:

HOLLYWOOD, USA — In front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, under sweeping searchlights, swelling crowds of fans and well-wishers numbering in the hundreds, lined the velvet ropes and police barricades, squealing and screaming at all the appropriate moments. This was the premiere of the 20th Century Fox release of THE BEACH, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and, for all intents and purposes, it was a every bit as much fun and glamorous as those from yesteryear, as flashbulbs exploded, turning night, briefly into day. A football field length of red carpet turned sidewalk into catwalk in front of the entrance to the theater as the press, standing three deep along the rope line, screamed, yelled, cajoled, flashed, filmed, taped and recorded the arrivals of celebrity, cast and crew for the upcoming 20th Century Fox release of THE BEACH, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The entire principal cast, including Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ladoyen, Guillaume Canet and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio, were all in attendance, as was director Danny (TRAINSPOTTING) Boyle, much to the delight of the public which stood patiently behind the ropes across the street from the theater. Other celebs in attendance included Juliet Lewis, Lucas Haas, Lori Petty, Rachel Hunter, John Lequizamo, Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, Limp Bizkit’s Fed Durst and Hugh Hefner, with multiple ladies on his arm(s). And, while most everyone got to see Tilda, Virginie and Guillaume, those who left early, thinking that was it and the film was about to begin, missed Leonardo’s arrival. Appearing relaxed and happy, Leonardo emerged from his limousine dressed in a navy blue Armani suit, dark silk shirt and matching tie. His hair cut short for an upcoming role, Leonardo was all smiles and spent a little moment with just about every journalist who shrieked for a little bit of his time. Finally, Leonardo made his way slowly up the carpet and into the theater, signaling an end to the pre-film festivities.
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Official Leonardo DiCaprio Website
2/9/00
Thailand Travel Expert Joe Cummings Weighs in on The Beach

Notes on The Beach By Joe Cummings
"There's no way you can keep it out of Lonely Planet, and once that happens it's countdown to doomsday." So says one of the backpacking characters in The Beach, UK author Alex Garland's controversial novel set in Thailand. Published in 1997, the story traces the fate of a small, loose-knit group of world travelers who decide to establish their own beach paradise on an island in Thailand's Ang Thong National Marine Park. The tale of their failed beach utopia slowly caught fire in the Gen-X book market and in 1999 was transformed into a $40 million motion picture. As a long-time island-hopper in Thailand, I thought the Ang Thong choice was perfect. Richard, the novel's selfish, Vietnam war-obsessed protagonist also felt pretty real to me. What happens to him - passing on a map showing the beach's secret location to a pair of uninvited backpackers, whose island intrusion and subsequent confrontation with Thai dope growers brings the novel to its violent climax - doesn't make for a very original or challenging plot. Yet there was something other than the Lonely Planet name mentions that compelled me to finish off the book in two reading sessions. Aside from the plot's predictability, one could quibble with Garland's depiction of Thais. The inauthentic Thai accents continually dropped the wrong consonants (resulting in an almost Cockney Thai, e.g. le'er for "letter" and Mis'er for "Mister," when something more like let-tah and Misatah would have been more realistic). Garland has Thais saying gues' for "guest," when as we all know the Thai English pronunciation should be something like "get." And would a Thai ever say banan' for "banana"? Never! More picky stuff: no Yank would say "candy floss" but rather "cotton candy," and it's common knowledge among residents of Thailand, even those who haven't tasted it themselves, that dog meat tastes like beef, not chicken. Also, given his supposed long history of Southeast Asia travel, the protagonist Richard seems to be incredibly naive about the use of Asian squat toilets. Finally, why does Richard never wonder (as every reader must) where the money comes from to pay for The Beach's periodic supply runs to Ko Pha-Ngan? Virtually all of the novel's Thai characters seem rather dark and sinister. In interviews I've read, Garland has deflected this criticism by pointing out that such portrayals were not intended to be realistic but were merely the perceptions of his characters. As Garland told Asiaweek magazine: "I think it's fairly obvious this novel isn't about Thailand. It's about backpackers." Fair enough. The novel's strengths include good farang (foreigner) dialogue and well-narrated settings. Intriguing video game references and a realistic travelers' conversation on Hat Rin regarding the use of "Kampuchea" vs. "Cambodia" also stood out. Although the novel's dip into roving backpacker culture and the Khao San Road scene holds up well enough, the novel really hits its stride once the story confines itself to the secret beach and lagoon. Sal, the dominatrix leader of the beach clubbers, reminded me of an editor I once had at Lonely Planet. When Leo DiCaprio and 20th Century Fox turned up in Thailand to begin filming, I was certain that controversy would follow. But I mistakenly thought the debate would center on the unflattering depiction of the Thais. When Bangkok protestors charged that Fox's use of Ao Maya on Ko Phi-Phi Leh was going to turn it into an environmental wasteland, I had a good laugh. The reality is that Ao Maya - like much of the rest of the Phi-Phi archipelago - has been under intense environmental pressure for many years now. After the dynamite and cyanide fishers came greedy resort developers and tour operators who over-ran Phi-Phi years ago and turned a large chunk of neighboring Ko Phi-Phi Don into a trash heap. Ao Maya itself has received perhaps thousands of group snorkeling tours over the last 10 years. Although some concession to the bay's park status has been observed - there are no bungalows or other permanent developments at Ao Maya (most likely because the bird nest-harvesting Mafia won't allow it) - improper anchoring and the dumping of trash had toppled this beach from any "pristine" status it may once have enjoyed years before Fox arrived on the scene. During the crew's first week on Phi-Phi Leh, the film crew removed an estimated three to four tons of rubbish. Bangkok protestors offered no hard evidence to support their claims of devastation. Experts who visited the bay both before and after filming agreed: Ao Maya looked better than ever. Nonetheless we can expect the February opening of the film to rekindle anti-Fox activism, perhaps accompanied by a movement to boycott the film. Personally I can hardly wait to attend the film's Bangkok premiere, if for no other reason than to find out whether the script retains these lines: "You know, Richard, one of these days I'm going to find one of those Lonely Planet writers and I'm going to ask him, what's so fucking lonely about the Khao San Road?" If I'd been able to walk onto the pages of the novel to answer the question, I'd have said the loneliness comes with the feeling that wherever one goes, one tends to feel alienated from fellow travelers. This is the novel's appeal, and this is why it's believable that a self-elected group might try to escape the perceived ugliness of Khao San Road or other backpacker scenes to establish a private beach reserve. Instead, of course, the characters ended up taking Khao San Road with them. Like the saying goes, "What a Spaniard takes to the Indies, he finds in the Indies." Byline Joe Cummings has been covering Thailand for Lonely Planet for 18 years and is the author of Lonely Planet's Thailand and Thailand's Islands & Beaches. He wrote this article from his home in northern Thailand. The Beach premieres in theaters nationwide on Friday, February 11, 2000.
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NY Post:
2/9/00
Leo Rewrote The Book on Sex

Don't get him wrong. Leonardo DiCaprio respects a writer's work. But sometimes a story needs a little help — say, by allowing the leading man's character to have sex with his gorgeous love interest. When DiCaprio's read Alex Garland's best-selling novel, "The Beach," the actor recalls, "it truly bothered me ... that [Richard, DiCaprio's character] never had any kind of sexual contact with Francoise," a Frenchwoman he meets on the way to a sandy paradise in Thailand. "The constant foreplay between the two characters never amounted to anything," DiCaprio tells the British magazine The Face. "And I really wanted something, whether it be complete and utter rejection or some sort of wild sexual encounter .... It just had to happen." To be fair, editors in England and America had also tried to persuade Garland to resolve the sexual tension between Richard and Francoise. Hey, but they didn't star in "Titanic." DiCaprio surely became more convinced of his literary analysis once he got a look at the actress who plays Francoise — Gallic goddess Virginie Ledoyen. DiCaprio also feels no guilt about beating out "Phantom Menace" star Ewan McGregror for the role. McGregor, who starred in three of "Beach" director Danny Boyle's previous films, suggested that film makers had gone for the obvious, commercial choice in casting DiCaprio. Asked if he felt disrespected by McGregor, DiCaprio snaps, "Yeah. You know, yeah, absolutely." DiCaprio sounds like he's getting a little fed up with being seen as a sell-out to the studios. "I'm extremely lucky," he tells the mag. "But ... there's a lot of prices to that. The most upsetting thing is realizing that I'm no longer the underdog. ... I've always felt like the guy who's had to go out there and prove himself ... I was always too artsy to get certain roles." But after "Titanic," he says, "I am, like, the Antichrist."
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E! online:
2/9/00
fashion police Leo DiCaprio looks blue

Blue Brother It may be the middle of winter, but Leonardo DiCaprio is ready to hit The Beach in style. Immaculately groomed and perfectly tailored in a navy suit, shirt and tie from Giorgio Armani, Leo is simply unsinkable at the world premiere of his new film.
View picture with story
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USA Today:
2/9/00
DiCaprio and his two French friends leap

OPENINGS: One by one, Leonardo DiCaprio and his two French friends leap off a cliff into the water far below on their way to paradise in The Beach. But Richard, DiCaprio's character, and his male pal aren't the first. Virginie Ledoyen's adventurous Frenchwoman takes the plunge to show them how. "Because women are braver than men, I think!" she said at a weekend Beach screening in Manhattan. (Actually, stunt doubles did the leaping.) The event wasn't billed as a premiere, and its star wasn't there (he was at the L.A. opening). Monday, he was on his way to London for tonight's premiere there, then he's moving on to the Berlin Film Festival. He leaves behind some unenthusiastic reviews. But Ledoyen, a star in France, seems delighted with her Beach spotlight here and the trumpeting of her on the Glamour cover in the lobby as "Leonardo's new leading lady." She had known him from What's Eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries and says he is "really cool, an amazing actor, enjoying what he's doing." Many enjoyed Ledoyen, in her fringed Jean-Paul Gaultier dress. To her, the message of the movie is "You've got the paradise inside of you, and there's no special place to be, you have to educate yourself . . . and be careful of your desires, make sure it's really what you want." On hand were DiCaprio fans Heather Donahue, Heather Matarazzo of Now and Again and Scream 3, and Kathrine Narducci of The Sopranos. Matarazzo was quick to say she likes Leonardo "for his work, not for his looks. Not that I think he's ugly!" Narducci has been a fan since Diaries. "I fell in love with him." Her cousin James Madio happened to be in that film. She's still excited about Two Family House winning the Sundance Festival audience award. "It's three of us from The Sopranos. Michael Rispoli, who plays my husband, is the lead, and me and Vincent Pastore, who's Big Pussy on The Sopranos." It's a '50s piece, she says, "about a guy struggling to fulfill his dreams," but it's no sock-hop romp. "It's pretty scandalous." She also gets to play James Gandolfini's wife in a Cinemax movie, A Whole New Day, to bow Feb. 23. No love scenes with him, though. "I wanted the love scenes, I fought for the love scenes!" Narducci says somewhat wistfully.
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Excite News:
2/9/00
Berlin's revamped center hosts 50th film

Berlin's revamped center hosts 50th film festival BERLIN (Reuters) - The 50th Berlin film festival opened Tuesday with Hollywood stars and arthouse directors gathering in a city center only recently transformed from a bombed-out wasteland. The 12-day festival, which ranks below Cannes but rivals Venice on the European film festival circuit, features 21 films from 16 countries competing for the Golden Bear award, announced on Feb. 20. Entries include recent Hollywood issues such as "The Talented Mr Ripley," "The Hurricane" and "Man on the Moon," and previews such as "The Million Dollar Hotel" directed by Germany's Wim Wenders. Wenders' movie, a thriller set in Los Angeles starring Mel Gibson and Milla Jovovich, kicks off the festival. One of Wenders' best-known films, the 1987 "Wings of Desire," showing angels flying over a Berlin still divided into east and west by the Wall, serves as a reminder of how the German capital -- particularly Potsdamer Platz -- has changed. Before World War II, Potsdamer Platz was the key crossroads of the city, but it was reduced to a barren, bombed-out wasteland in the shadow of the Berlin Wall erected after the war. Fast forward to 2000 and the area is now the capital's showplace of modern architecture, combining imposing skyscrapers, offices and shopping malls. Its multiplex cinemas are already a magnet for filmgoers. City planners hope the festival's move to Potsdamer Platz will cement its role as the capital's entertainment focal point. A tribute to actor Robert De Niro is expected to draw another contrast with the past, as 17 of his films are screened, including the Vietnam war movie "The Deer Hunter." When the festival first screened the film 21 years ago, participants from the then Eastern Bloc walked out in sympathy with Soviet anger at its portrayal of Vietnamese conduct. De Niro has not confirmed that he will attend the tribute. The festival will also award a "Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement" to French actress Jeanne Moreau at a screening of her 1966 film "Mademoiselle." Other well-known names attending the festival include Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Mel Gibson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Denzel Washington, and directors Oliver Stone and Milos Forman.
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Excite UK:
2/9/00
DICAPRIO FOR BEACH PREMIERE

Thousands of fans are expected to turn out to catch a glimpse of Hollywood heart-throb Leonardo DiCaprio as he attends the European premiere of his new thriller The Beach. The 25-year-old superstar, who set hearts fluttering in Titanic, has jetted in to join guests at the event at The Empire in London's Leicester Square. Also expected at the launch of the blockbuster - made by the British team behind hit movie Trainspotting - is his co-star Virginie Ledoyen. The last time DiCaprio was in London for the premiere of Man In The Iron Mask thousands of fans mobbed the central London cinema. Based on a bestselling novel by Alex Garland, The Beach tells the story of a young backpacker who teams up with a French couple in the travellers haven of Khao San Road in Bangkok. They come across a map showing the location of an idyllic island community and together they head off there. But when they arrive their dream turns to a nightmare of distrust, infighting and death. Protestors were upset that film-makers were given permission to alter a beach on the island of Koh Phi Phi Leh while working on the movie. The #30 million movie was originally expected to feature Ewan McGregor, a frequent collaborator of director Danny Boyle's, in the main role. However DiCaprio was eventually chosen and received a cut of around #12 million for his efforts.
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NY Daily News:
2/8/00
On Winter's Cold Film Front, Thaw

If it feels like you haven't seen any good new movies this year, you're right: Only a handful of new movies cracked the top 10 box-office list in January; including "Next Friday," whose business dropped 44% in its second week of release. But the midwinter doldrums are almost over, and a variety of promising new offerings are coming soon to a screen near you. Here are some of them: No Sinking Ship: Leonardo DiCaprio in 'The Beach.' "The Beach" Leonardo DiCaprio's first starring role since achieving his "Titanic" superstardom also has a don't-go-near-the-water theme. In Bangkok, Leo is given a map to the ultimate seaside hideaway — but, as always, paradise is only as innocent as the people in it. Directed by "Trainspotting's" Danny Boyle and adapted from the Alex Garland novel by "Shallow Grave" scripter John Hodge, it also features lovely French star Virginie Ledoyen. Opens Friday. "Snow Day" Chevy Chase is an unreliable weatherman and Chris Elliott plays a nasty snowplow man in this comedy about what happens when school is canceled due to bad weather and the out-of-school kids are taking their cues from comedy writers. Iggy Pop and Pam Grier are among the cast of this Nickelodeon co-production. Opens Friday. "The Tigger Movie" Winnie-the-Pooh's animated animal kingdom is back with Tigger taking the lead. He heads for the Hundred Acre Wood, longing to see if there are any other Tigger-ish beings in the universe. Opens Friday. "Boiler Room" Giovanni Ribisi stars as a college dropout who takes a job in the "boiler room" of a high-pressure stockbrokerage only to discover his employer is a crook. Written and directed by Ben Younger, it stars Ben Affleck, Vin Diesel, Jamie Kennedy, Scott Caan, Ron Rifkin, Bill Sage, Tom Everett Scott and Nia Long. Opens Feb. 18. "Drowning Mona" Nick Gomez, who made his name with the indie hit "Laws of Gravity," directs this mystery about the murder of a small-town matriarch. With Bette Midler, Danny DeVito, Neve Campbell, Casey Affleck, Peter Dobson, William Fichtner, Marcus Thomas and Jamie Lee Curtis. Opens Feb. 18. "Hanging Up" Diane Keaton directs this Nora and Delia Ephron-penned comedy of three sisters (Keaton, Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow) dealing with the impending death of their philandering father (Walter Matthau). Adam Arkin also stars as Ryan's husband. Opens Feb. 18. "The Whole Nine Yards" Jonathan Lynn directs this comedy starring Bruce Willis as ex-mobster "Jimmy the Tulip," now of the federal witness protection program. When his suburban neighbors learn of his identity, his next-door neighbor, a dentist played by Matthew Perry is goaded into ratting out Jimmy's location by his wife, Patricia Arquette, even as she's trying to contract a hit on her husband. Perry, meanwhile, finds himself falling for Jimmy's wife, which is not surprising as she's played by Natasha Henstridge. Michael Clarke Duncan, Kevin Pollak, Harland Williams and Amanda Peet also star. Opens Feb. 18.
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NY Post:
2/8/00
Actors' antics find a ‘Beach'-head

SUNDAY was a night for love -- and bad behavior. The premiere of Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Beach" at the DGA Cinema on West 57th Street attracted a boatload of celebs including Adrien Brody--who only had eyes for his Aussie deejay date, Sky. The star of "Summer of Sam" and "Thin Red Line" did the red-carpet photo posing, and spent the rest of the night swapping spit in a corner with the tall redhead. Later on, as the film was about to roll, "The Blair Witch Project" star Heather Donahue pitched a fit when someone accidentally sat in her seat. She rejected empty seats off to the side as hosts rushed around trying to find her a suitable spot. Meanwhile, at the style365.com party at the Four Seasons restaurant, Stephen Baldwin was smitten with his own self. "I didn't wear any underwear when I was Barney Rubble, I'm a method actor," Baldwin said, referring to his "Flintstones" gig. An hour later, while chasing a gorgeous brunette around Moomba, the actor and co-owner of Alaia restaurant charmed her with tales from his trip to Greece, including a description of his tight bathing suit. Five minutes later, Baldwin poked her with a fork and said, "It's kind of Freudian, don't you think?"
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NY Post:
2/8/00
Rolling Stone Leonardo DiCaprio on cover

Rolling Stone, the magazine devoted to music, stars Hollywood hit-maker Leonardo DiCaprio on its cover. While not as intriguing as its winning interview with Brad Pitt a couple of months ago, the piece does tackle the rumors surrounding the teen heartthrob, including his post-"Titanic" partying phase. It's candid and thought-provoking. The piece on one of the leading men of "The Sopranos"-- Steven Van Zandt -- is fascinating. For a music magazine, Rolling Stone does a nice job branching out.
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Complete Philadelhpia Daily News article
Philadelphia Daily News:
2/8/00
Kruk, Wild Thing on TV

During NBC-10's 4 p.m. news last Thursday, Nancy O'Dell of the syndicated "Access Hollywood" was doing an entertainment report on Ricky Martin and at its end, she said she'd have more on Ricky on "Access" - and Leonardo DiCaprio as well. Anchor Larry Mendte asked angelically, "You did them both?" She said, "Excuse me?" Mendte replied, "Interviewed them . . .did you interview them both?" O'Dell blushed and said "Oh. . .of . . .yes."
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Complete USA Today article
USA Today:
2/8/00
'Scream 3' slaughters competition, slashes records

Does Scream 3 have a stab at staying No. 1 when teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio's The Beach opens next weekend? ''I think Scream 3 has a good chance,'' CNN's Grove says. ''Sequels historically drop on the second weekend, but even if it drops 40%, Leo still has to beat $21 million. It's hard to imagine The Beach will open at more than that.''
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Hollywood.com:
2/8/00
EXTRA: The Anakin Sweepstakes

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Feb. 7, 2000 -- You would think that after last summer's insane brouhaha that was "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace", the masses would breathe a sigh of relief. But the commotion is brewing for the second prequel (yet to be titled), which won't be released until summer 2002. Although it isn't inspiring 'round-the-block lines just yet, it is scheduled to begin filming at Fox Studios Australia this June, so this brings us to the most talked-about casting decision of the year: Who will play the grown-up Anakin Skywalker? We'll know soon enough. Casting for "Episode II" is going on right this second, according to Jeanne Cole, spokeswoman for Lucasfilm. Casting director Robin Gurland has been seeing "hundreds of actors" for the past month, but no decision has been made yet. A casting memo that circulated around the Internet -- and was confirmed to be true, according to USA Today -- described to talent agents that candidates should look around 19, since the film takes place 10 years after "Episode I." They should be "self-determined, extremely intelligent and forthright" and "should resemble Jake Lloyd [who played "Episode I's" Anakin]." "Episode II," which is still being written by George Lucas, will focus on the love story between Anakin and Queen Amidala, played by Natalie Portman. As the story goes, Anakin and Amidala eventually marry and spawn Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. By "Episode III," Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes the ominously wheezing Darth Vader. Now before die-hards eager to romance Portman onscreen run out and get their headshots, we're sorry to say that only professional actors with an agent are being considered. This narrows the field to actors who remotely look the part, everyone from Christian Bale to Jude Law to those sons from "Home Improvement." Now, distinguishing "Star Wars" fact from fiction is harder than distinguishing any phrase out of Jar Jar Binks' Gungan tongue. But we're gonna try our best and give you the rundown of the most talked-about names connected to the Anakin role -- the famous ones, because they're the most amusing -- and what they've reportedly said about it. (For the record, Lucasfilm says the reports of the casting of these actors are "all rumors.")
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Complete London Evening Standard article
London Evening Standard:
2/8/00
We're crazy for Dave

How do you know if you've made it into fashion's top flight? A front-row seat? A Vogue cover? A surgically enhanced behind? None of the above count unless you've not only eaten at Davé, but your picture hangs on the wall of this tiny Chinese restaurant on a side street in Paris's first arrondissement. Fashion's top flight: Davé at his restaurant Today in Restaurants & Food Hot menu for restaurant awards Farewell stars, hello great food Men get hot in the kitchen It's time to Chow down New Year again - Chinese style Puff Daddy entertained Kate Moss, Stella McCartney and Lenny Kravitz at Davé during his trip to the haute couture shows last year. Model of the moment Gisele celebrated her 19th birthday there two weeks ago. Leonardo DiCaprio drops in for dim sum when he's in town, and Naomi Campbell, Madonna, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and David Bowie are all regulars.
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USA Today:
2/8/00
Leo's stepbrother makes his film debut

Adam Farrar isn't daunted by the inevitable comparisons between him and stepbrother Leonardo DiCaprio. ''I love what I do, but I'm not looking to be a superstar,'' says Farrar, 28, who makes his feature film acting debut in Pups, a drama by British director Ash. Farrar plays a disabled veteran who is taken hostage by two teens during a bank heist. It opens in New York Friday -- the same day as DiCaprio's The Beach. ''Acting's not my main focus. It may be a way to further my strides in what I really want to do, which is becoming a nutritional consultant or holistic health practitioner.'' Farrar's parents, Peggy and Michael Farrar, divorced when he was 4. ''My mom met Leonardo's father, George (DiCaprio), and they got married after George and Leo's mom, Irmelin, split up, so we're both only children, but we have a brother,'' he says with a laugh. Farrar, single like Leo, says his brother's media image as a Hollywood party boy is unfounded. ''He's a young man, and young men tend to find enjoyment out of life, and there's nothing wrong with that,'' he says, ''but he's very concerned about donating to charitable organizations and the environment, and you hardly ever see that in the papers.'' Has DiCaprio given him any acting advice? ''Just watching his career unfold has been a lesson in itself,'' Farrar says. ''What's important is to stay true to yourself, your family and your friends and, above all, stay humble.''
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NY Post:
2/8/00
‘TITANIC’ STAR HITS ‘THE BEACH’

TWO years after Leonardo DiCaprio sailed into teenybopper superstardom on Titanic comes The Beach a dark adult drama full of drug use and violence. Given the movie’s mature themes and R rating can DiCaprio bring back the fans who made his last film the biggest box office smash of all time? While entertainment experts say teens will still flock to The Beach the only major date film opening Valentine’s Day weekend nobody is predicting a Titanic tidal wave. DiCaprio is still a superstar” among 13- to 17-year-old girls, but his hunk rating has slipped, says CosmoGIRL! magazine editor Atoosa Rubenstein. Up-and-comers Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. placed first and second in her magazine’s recent Web poll of hot celebs while 25-year-old DiCaprio was a distant eighth, Rubenstein says. Geri Sahn, entertainment editor of Twist teen magazine, predicts The Beach will be a far cry from Titanic, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, partly due to repeat business from teen Leo-maniacs. I don’t think they’ll leave the movie obsessed with him because from what I’ve been reading, this is a whole different Leo, Sahn says. That’s no surprise The Beach wasn’t designed with teenage girls in mind. This time, DiCaprio doesn’t play the romantic hero role. The film is rated R meaning many kids under 17 will have to sneak in if parents won’t take them. What you have here is a specialized, adult-appeal film, says CNN movie analyst Martin Grove, who notes The Beach recalls the quirky dramas that attracted DiCaprio early on, such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. DiCaprio’s latest tells the often-violent story of an aimless traveler who sets off to find paradise from a hand-drawn map only to find himself in a tropical lagoon full of drifters. Its R rating could appeal to older fans, says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a box-office tracking firm. The films that are going to do well now are the films that have the 18- to 24-year-old appeal, and ‘The Beach’ certainly falls into that category, he says. That crowd doesn’t want to be talked down to, and with ‘Trainspotting’ director Danny Boyle directing, there’s more cachet. There’s also more violence, too a likely draw for young males who crave a little action with their scenery. It’s a good date film, Dergarabedian adds. There are beautiful settings, beautiful people and a shark-attack scene. The biggest problem for DiCaprio could be Neve Campbell and her cohorts in Scream 3, the slasher film that topped the box-office charts last weekend and will again unless The Beach scores fabulous reviews, Grove predicts. You could say that Leo’s at the beach, but there could be some icebergs in the box-office waters, he says. Grove’s gloomy forecast for The Beach, apparently, has not reached the city’s schoolyards, where enthusiasm is high. All but one of a dozen young teens interviewed by The Post said they’re planning to see the movie even if they have to beg parents to take them. I’m definitely going to go, said a 15-year-old girl. Leo’s really cute. I’ll just have my mom take me.
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LA Times:
2/8/00
Training? DiCaprio Acts Best From Heart

To paraphrase the film for which Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for an Academy Award in 1993, "What's Eating John Crowther"? ("An Open Letter to Leonardo DiCaprio," Jan. 31). Crowther's unfortunate attack on the presumed abilities and accomplishments of DiCaprio because the actor does not subscribe to a formalized regimen of training is nonsense. His condescending words are ill-placed and sound suspiciously like those of a man who might be jealous of DiCaprio's current status in the motion picture industry. Formal training is not, perhaps, what DiCaprio needs. How much did Abe Lincoln have, if you think about it? This doesn't mean he does not research a role. It doesn't mean he doesn't dig deep within himself to find a character he is about to play. Indeed, he visited retarded children to prepare for "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," and I have never seen a more credible performance of a mentally challenged person. There was none of the false stuttering most actors employ when portraying such a role. No, all of this simply means he hasn't gone to a class with a lot of other aspiring actors, most of whom don't share his talent, nor will they enjoy his success. MICHAEL RUSSNOW West Hollywood There may be flaws or missteps in DiCaprio's body of work, but never has it lacked "truthful and expressive behavior." Truth and expressive behavior, in fact, are the hallmarks of DiCaprio's work to date. Ditto the "intelligence, taste and honesty" Crowther wants us to believe DiCaprio lacks. Who is this man kidding? That's like taking Sylvester Stallone to task for not being physical enough as Rocky or Rambo, or Gallagher for not using enough props in his act. JEFF GELBERG Long Beach John Crowther tells Leonardo DiCaprio that if he were "willing to commit to the acquisition of a deeply ingrained and consistently reliable craft, he might find himself able to go places with his acting he never imagined possible." Don't listen, Leo. Forget about "sense memory," "inner monologue" and "psychological gesture." You have the only talent an actor needs and you display it in every role you take on: sincerity! Now that you have learned to fake that, this is not the time to learn the "craft" of acting. TERRENCE BEASOR Santa Monica I would like to ask John Crowther what makes him think he can lecture DiCaprio on acting. Would he care to state what movies, plays, shows, etc. he has appeared in so we can critique his work? I think a far better and qualified person to speak on Leonardo's acting is someone like Meryl Streep, who called him an acting genius, or maybe the countless number of directors, such as Martin Scorsese, who would love to work with him. AIMEE MELANSON Palo Alto The internal "skill" that DiCaprio has can't be learned; whatever "it" is, he has it--right there, inside of him. And it has reached out and touched me just by sitting in a theater and watching him. Not since the great James Dean (who, by the way, never took an acting class) has an artist been able to create such power on the screen, and it all just flows from inside of him. SHARRON BONNAR Kanata, Canada So what if he doesn't like going to acting classes? So what if "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Total Eclipse" both sucked? What does that prove? Does it prove that he needs a coach, or does it prove that both films needed better directing? DiCaprio hasn't made enough films to be judged a good or bad actor. He is simply in the right place at the right time. And trust me, that's not a bad place to be. KEVIN LYGHT Los Angeles
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TV guide on-line:
2/8/00
Life's a Beach for Leo DiCaprio

Even if you're Leonardo DiCaprio, when the script says you have to eat a caterpillar in your new movie (The Beach), you eat a caterpillar. Direct from the tongue that touched the creepy-crawly comes this revelation: "It was a caterpillar and I had to put one in my mouth about 20 times." That, he says, is one of the few true tales about him that have circulated since his Titanic success. However, he's determined not to let fame chart his future course. "I'm still experimenting," he explains to anyone who wants to pigeonhole him. "I want to diversify myself as an actor and try as many different characters and styles of filmmaking as I can." Speaking of different styles, DiCaprio didn't keep it a secret that James Cameron's style led to tension on the Titanic set. In hindsight, he says, "It takes that type of personality to be able to command a big film. I don't resent him for it. Nobody else could have done that movie the way he did." DiCaprio explains that Beach director Danny Boyle is the polar opposite of Cameron: "He's sweet, sensitive and slow-paced." The actor takes pride in one sequence in The Beach that was his idea — a moment when his character, descending into madness, seems to be in the middle of a video game. "We were looking for some sort of surreal moment within the film that really expressed his isolation. What better way to show it than that he is sort of playing a game in his own head in which he's a commando in the jungle." Next on DiCaprio's agenda is a starring role in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of the North. "There's a rumor going around that Scorsese is a good director," he deadpans. "I wanted to find out for myself."— Jeanne Wolf
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Chicago Sun-Times:
2/8/00
DiCaprio says he's not lazy, just choosy

Just a couple of years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio was the world's most famous movie star. The actor will test the waters again with "The Beach," which opens Friday. In the February issue of Premiere, DiCaprio, 25, comes across not as the party boy that the tabloids present, but as a young man who takes his craft seriously--though not himself. Mark Salisbury writes, "An image was emerging of DiCaprio as a party boy clubbing with models and idly toying with movie offers. In fact, he was taking his time deciding. " `I had been searching for something to do for more than 15 months,' DiCaprio explains. "I wanted to find something I connected with. It's a complicated decision process, what makes you trust that a film is going to be unique or interesting. Each film had its own reason why I didn't do it. The misconception was that I was slacking off, but I was just trying to find something I really loved.' "
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Complete Chicago Sun-Times article
Chicago Sun-Times:
2/8/00
A king and his sand castles

Once again Leonardo DiCaprio was going down with the ship. But this time, the vessel wasn't a luxury liner filled with thousands of passengers. It was a tiny rowboat. And he wasn't being thrown into the choppy waters of the Atlantic. It was a riptide in Thailand, where he was filming "The Beach" (opening Friday). It's funny what a man thinks about when he's almost drowning for the second time. Did his short, brilliant career flash before his ice-blue eyes? Did he ponder the things he someday hoped to have--an Oscar, a family, a wife? Or was it even worse? Did the strains of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" flood his mind as he plunged into the waters? Now, as he sits serene and tanned on a veranda in Hawaii, he punches the reporter in the arm. "Good one! Low blow!" he says, twisting that famous boyish face into an impish smile. In the last two years, Leo has learned to roll with the punches. As the wind whips his hair back James-Dean-style, and his black T-shirt flutters in the breeze, he says, "I'm nothing if not a survivor."
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NY Daily News:
2/7/00
Opening This Week

The Beach — A group of backpacking youths journey through Southeast Asia in search of the perfect beach but only find disaster. Leonardo DiCaprio stars, with Robert Carlyle, Tilda Swinton, Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet. Based on the Alex Garland novel, directed by Danny Boyle. Friday.
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Mr. Showbiz:
2/7/00
Leo Late for Beach

Leo Late for Beach; Madonna's Today Postponed Oh, the hectic schedules of the stars. Out promoting their latest movies, Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna both were unavoidably detained from crucial engagements. DiCaprio almost missed the Los Angeles premiere of The Beach. The Titanic star was caught in traffic and — unthinkable! — 20th Century Fox execs wanted to start without him. If you think that mystery island in The Beach is savage, we wouldn't want to imagine a Leo-deprived press corps. Fortunately, the 25-year-old star's publicist, the incongruously named Ken Sunshine, threatened to withhold Leo's presence altogether unless the movie was delayed. "If I insulted some Fox execs," the Manhattan-based Sunshine tells the New York Daily News, "welcome to New York style." The press was appeased, the film was screened, and all retired to the post-party where DiCaprio unwound at Hugh Hefner's Playmate-filled table. Meanwhile, another overscheduled superstar found herself bumped from the Today show. On Wednesday, Madonna, out promoting The Next Best Thing, was more than three hours late for her session with Today host Matt Lauer. The host of the NBC talk show got fed up with waiting and canceled the Material Mom's slot. According to the New York Post, a frustrated Lauer said, "To hell with this," and called his executive producer and told him to cancel, saying, "It's her movie that needs promotion, not us." The actress's rep Liz Rosenberg explains to the Post, "Madonna did 65 interviews that day," including a full-hour sit-down with pal Rosie O'Donnell. "Basically we were backed up because it took a while to set the cameras up, and it kept getting later and later," says Rosenberg. "It happens at junkets; it got a little crazy. Unfortunately, the Today show was going to be the finale, because we wanted to give them as much time as possible." Madonna's Today show appearance will be reskedded for the film's premiere on Feb. 29. "Madonna's a big fan of Matt's," says Rosenberg, who added that her client was sorry to have kept him waiting. A Today rep tells the Post that Lauer received a giant bouquet of flowers as a conciliatory gesture. And while Rosenberg had the Post's ear, she took the opportunity to deny those pregnancy rumors. "She's not pregnant, as you'll see on Rosie," says Rosenberg, insisting that Madonna still has "a 13-inch waist." Another rumor to bite the dust: the feud between Madonna and fellow chanteuse-actress Jennifer Lopez. According to the Post, after taping Rosie's show, Madonna popped over to the Saturday Night Live studios next door to say hello to Jennifer Lopez, who's on host duty this week. The two reportedly laughed off the reputed New Year's Eve catfight, wherein Madonna was widely reported to have dissed the Latina diva.
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NY Post:
2/7/00
Out-of-towners

ANYONE who is anyone is coming to PAGE SIX's big Fashion Week party on Wednesday at Guastavino's under the 59th Street bridge. But a few unfortunate celebs won't be in town. Mariah Carey is flying to Antwerp to start her European tour. Leonardo DiCaprio will be in London for the British premiere of "The Beach." Lisa Ling of "The View" is ice-fishing with Gov. Jesse Ventura in his home state of Minnesota. Naomi Campbell is in Australia launching her perfume. Milla Jovovich is in Canada making a movie. London Daily Mail columnist Nigel Dempster is in South Africa. And Space.com's Lou Dobbs is in Singapore. What's your excuse?
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Complete Mother Jones article
Mother Jones:
2/7/00
Earthy Icon or Polluter's Apologist?

Leonardo DiCaprio has been tapped by Earth Day organizers to host Earth Fair 2000 on April 22 in Washington DC. The event is the centerpiece of the 30th anniversary celebration of Earth Day. That's a bit like making Jesse Helms the poster boy for civil rights. DiCaprio has long been an outspoken environmental advocate, but has oddly decided to serve as apologist for a film studio with a rotten ecological record. Consider: In the past three years, DiCaprio has starred in two major film projects -- 1997's blockbuster "Titanic" and the newly released "The Beach" -- which both earned raspberries, not to mention lawsuits, from environmentalists. Both films were produced by 20th Century Fox. And both inflicted significant environmental and even social damage on the places in which they were shot.
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Complete Boston Phoenix article
Boston Phoenix:
2/7/00
Bard & basics

So much for the millennium. It's time to get back to basics, beginning with a return to the Bard, and to the old reliable themes -- revenge, hubris, thwarted love, corruption in high places -- that made him famous. After a year off following the Oscar-gilded success of Shakespeare in Love, the old Elizabethan wordsmith is back in at least four new screen adaptations. Other familiar faces also return to old haunts -- Leonardo DiCaprio hits The Beach, the Farrelly brothers welcome back Jim Carrey, and Tom Cruise hangs out in Mission: Impossible 2. But before you get too comfortable with the status quo, ask yourself what clearer signs of the Apocalypse there could be than a Julia Roberts movie directed by ur-indie Steven Soderbergh? Or -- shades of the Antichrist himself -- the return of Yahoo Serious?... ...From to be or not to be, it's obese or not obese. Rumors say he's blown up to Brandoish proportions, so who knows what Leonardo DiCaprio will look like in a Speedo in Danny Boyle's The Beach (February 11). A Generation X retake of Lord of the Flies, this one has a bunch of neo-hippies seeking paradise on the isolated Thai strand of the title and finding instead the heart of darkness. Based on a glib novel by Alex Garland, it also stars Virginie Ledoyen and Tilda Swinton and features perhaps a return to Trainspotting form by Boyle.
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Complete Nando Times article
Nando Times:
2/7/00
DiCaprio tackles a complex character in 'The Beach'

It seems that Leonardo DiCaprio can't get enough of the ocean. Last time we saw him he was slowly slipping beneath the waves in a little boat movie called "Titanic." In his new film, he's still surrounded by the sea, although he's made it as far as the beach this time. A story about the quest for an earthly paradise and the heavy price it ultimately exacts, "The Beach" (which opens Friday) stars DiCaprio as Richard, a young American backpacker who travels to Thailand in search of new experience and adventure. But he gets more than he bargained for when he runs into an old hippy traveler, Daffy (Robert Carlyle), who tells him about a secret island, completely off the beaten path and unknown to tourists. Persuading a like-minded young French couple, Etienne (Guillaume Canet) and Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen), to join him, Richard soon finds himself risking his life to reach the elusive "perfect beach." Part extreme-adventure travelogue, part meditation on the nature of civilization and man, "The Beach" is a dark tale directed by "Trainspotting's" Danny Boyle. It's perhaps not the obvious choice for its star's first film since the record-breaking "Titanic." So what was the appeal of "The Beach" and this character for DiCaprio? "I thought this was one of the more complex characters I'd ever read, and he's truly a modern character," explains the actor. "He really represents a lot of themes that I think are going on with my generation and the one before me, of being really, truly desensitized to real emotion and real, tangible things. Through TV or video games or whatever, we've lost that contact. "So it has a lot to do with that and the fact that this character goes on this journey," he adds, "and he ends up finding this pirate-like Utopia that seems to be cocooned away from the normal laws of society and its rules. It (appears that this) is the answer to everything that he's ever hoped for. But eventually he realizes that paradise in itself is a false concept, that a place like that can't exist on its own. "You have to make sacrifices and you have to be a selfish, elitist group of people who care only about their own happiness in order to exist. Because what do you do if someone gets hurt? You can't give up your secret or it's no longer paradise." In the film, the character of Richard quickly adapts to the self-created laws of the island community, even when they lead to deception and death. But the actor doesn't see Richard as an unlikable character. "In fact, I think he's quite sympathetic," says DiCaprio. "I think he's a real human being. He's someone who's constantly contradicting himself and constantly looking for the real thing. "He's quite selfish in a lot of ways and always thinks the grass is greener on the other side. And once he achieves his goal he dismisses it and goes on to the next one and thinks there's got to be something better. So he's neither a hero nor a villain." The director reports that the studio folks were upset to find that the romantic hero of "Titanic" is now playing a character who cheats and lies. "I haven't heard that. Maybe they kept that from me," DiCaprio says with a laugh.
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Complete Boston Globe article
Boston Globe:
2/7/00
DiCaprio takes the plunge into his future

In ''The Beach,'' Leonardo DiCaprio drinks snake blood, cusses like Tony Soprano, smokes funny cigarettes, and is generally the kind of guy who would sucker-punch that sissified Jack Dawson for all his Dudley Do-Right chivalry and woo-woo ''King of the World'' nonsense. Toto, I don't think we're on ''Titanic'' anymore. It was, of course, that 1997 blockbuster that catapulted DiCaprio from an Oscar-nominated up-and-comer into Hollywood's hottest young actor. Playing an old-fashioned romantic hero, he was a boyish, golden-haired Rhett Butler for a new generation of teenage girls whose repeated viewings of the film propelled it to a record-shattering $1.86 billion worldwide gross. Faster than you could say ''My Heart Will Go On,'' DiCaprio became a tabloid fave and paparazzi magnet, with his face as the wallpaper of choice in girls' bedrooms from Boston to Bangkok. It was a tremendous boost for DiCaprio, then 23, but it also sharply divided his career into ''before'' and ''after,'' with everything since ''Titanic'' receiving, perhaps unfairly, a harsh and relentless scrutiny. The ''after'' portion of DiCaprio's professional life begins in earnest this Friday, with ''The Beach.'' Although he has appeared in two films since ''Titanic'' - ''The Man in the Iron Mask'' and Woody Allen's ''Celebrity'' were both released in 1998 - ''The Beach'' was the first project he signed on to during those feverish months when it seemed every director and producer in Hollywood was offering DiCaprio the world plus points.
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Yahoo News:
2/4/00
DiCaprio Team All Over Leo at Premiere

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - In a twist on the traditional media coverage of a star at a movie premiere, Leonardo DiCaprio's personal media covered Wednesday's premiere of ``The Beach'' The star's Web site (http://www.leonardodicaprio.com) had streaming coverage of premiere arrivals. And at the after-party (which was closed to media coverage), DiCaprio had his own video cameraman recording the affair for his personal archives. ``I think we're kind of innovators in this department,''' said Chuck Smith, who's director of creative development for DiCaprio's company, Birken Studios. ``I think the idea is we're trying to gain some control over Leonardo's image because of the complete saturation during the 'Titanic' run.
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NY Daily News:
2/4/00
Wave of Anger At 'Beach' Debut

The show almost went on without Leonardo DiCaprio Wednesday night. Studio execs were at wit's end at the L.A. premiere of "The Beach" when the movie's star got caught in traffic. DiCaprio's Manhattan-based publicist, Ken Sunshine, blasted 20th Century Fox suits for threatening to roll the film before his client had posed and spoken to the assembled world press. Sunshine tells us he declared, "If you bleeping start this movie before he gets here, he's going to turn around and not do one interview." Leonardo DiCaprio The salvo brought cheers from the media. "If I insulted some Fox execs," says Sunshine, "welcome to New York style." On arrival, DiCaprio told Fox to start to the flick while he worked the velvet rope. Later, DiCaprio ambled over to the party at nearby Blue lounge, renamed "The Reclining Buddha" and transformed into a Thai-flavored oasis by decorator Jeffrey Best. The "Titanic" star beached himself next to Hugh Hefner's table, which was surrounded by eight Playmates. They had to compete with a woman wearing only gold paint and festooned with blinking lights. She blessed people with rose water. Among the revelers at the Motorola bash were Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mark McGrath and Fred Durst, Lukas Haas, Juliette Lewis, Mike Ovitz, Rachel Hunter, China Chow and DiCaprio's mother and grandparents.
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Complete Washington Post story
Washington Post:
2/4/00
The Man and the Message

By Christmas Day 1970, John McCain had been a POW for three years. He had been sometimes near death, twice suicidal. That day, the camp commander came to see him and for some reason turned garrulous. He told him that Ho Chi Minh maintained a villa on a picturesque island in Ha Long Bay. Sixteen years later, McCain was back in Vietnam, this time as a U.S. senator. He asked about the villa. It was run-down, abandoned. McCain persisted. He wound up spending the night in Ho's old bedroom. "If you live long enough, anything can happen," McCain said. McCain related this story the day before the New Hampshire primary. As usual, he was ebullient, expecting to win but not, as it turned out, to trounce. He was being who he always is--a bubbling brook of jokes, observations, put-downs, anecdotes and flip remarks, such as his joking reference to Leonardo DiCaprio as an "androgynous wimp."
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The Mirror:
2/4/00
DON'T BEACH LEO - THIS IS MY BIG NIGHT

HE'S been there, done it. She's dazzled with the novelty of Tinseltown. Cool Leonardo DiCaprio and thrilled Virginie Ledoyen were a picture of contrasts as they made their separate entrances at the glitzy Hollywood premiere of their movie The Beach. The 23-year-old actress newcomer could barely contain her excitement. Not only did she beat off thousands of other hopefuls to play Leo's screen love in the adaptation of British writer Alex Garland's best-selling novel on backpackers' Thailand. But she's now being dubbed the new Brigitte Bardot in her native France. And she even got paid to kiss the Titanic heart-throb. Laid-back Leo, 24, surprised fans at the film opening by turning up without on-off-on girlfriend Kristen Zang. The couple split in February last year after model Kristen heard reports of Leo's partying lifestyle in Thailand while filming. But they were reunited at the end of last year and have just splashed out pounds 2million to buy Madonna's former Hollywood mansion.
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Fox News:
2/4/00
Boyle Finds a Project in Paradise With the Beach

A conversation with a friend ultimately led director Danny Boyle to Thailand with Leonardo DiCaprio. His screen adaptation of Alex Garland's acclaimed 1996 novel The Beach grew out of a pal's account of the book's risky quest for an exquisite beach hideaway. "I was mesmerized by my friend's description of the island and its secret community," Boyle says in a statement about the Fox film. The director is loyal to many of the team members he worked with on his first three features, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary, including producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge. The departure for Boyle lies in the casting: Whereas Ewan MacGregor starred in those movies, Titanic's Leonardo DiCaprio took on the lead in The Beach. DiCaprio, on a script hunt after the monumental success of 1997's Titanic, was rumored to be close to signing on as the lead in American Psycho, a role that eventually went to Christian Bale; but the actor recently told Entertainment Weekly the story was overblown. "All I did was read the script and express interest in it," he said, "but because that was during the whole hot-air balloon of Titanic media it became something bigger than what it was." Instead, DiCaprio told Fox studios that "The Beach and the character of Richard were the first things I felt some kind of connection with (after Titanic)." Boyle has said DiCaprio's taste, "though he would vehemently deny this, is quite European, so the idea of playing an extremely flawed hero appealed to him." The lead character, an American backpacker who sets off in search of the ultimate paradise in Thailand, finds himself trapped in a secret, violent world he must try to escape. Both Boyle and author Garland have been at pains to point out that the story is not a Lord of the Flies derivative, but more a meditation on the ironies of seeking and finding an idyllic community in nature. The movie also stars Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet as DiCaprio's cotravelers, and Robert Carlyle — another Trainspotting alum — plays a loopy island denizen. Opening Feb. 11, the movie could be a proving ground for a director the New York Times last year lumped in a group of "directors stuck at 'promising.'" Janet Maslin elaborated, "The Beach is sure to attract attention on the strength of its DiCaprio factor. Perhaps the filmmaker's impact will be even more compelling than that."
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Mann Chinese Theatre
2/3/00
Beach premiere pictures

Leonardo DiCaprio, star of the new adventure film "The Beach," pauses for photographers at the film's premiere before entering the Mann Chinese Theater in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2000. The film marks DiCaprio's first starring role in a film since "Titanic"
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More stars as they arrive for the premiere of the Beach.

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Beautiful Boy Stelingo:
2/3/00
REVIEW OF THE BEACH

After more than a year of anticipation and excitement it had finally arrived. Yes The Beach was here. I was lucky enough to attend a special preview of the film in Manchester, one of 5 cities in the UK where such previews were taking place this evening. To follow the development of a film from location shoot right up to the finished product, to mention nothing of the rumours and controversies surrounding the production, has been a fascinating experience. Would the film live up to my expectations or would it all be a disappointing anti-climax? No question about it. This film is pure excellence. From the very start of the film you are immediately thrown into this exotic and strange world. The pace of the film is brisk, the main characters quickly introduced and the their quest succinctly presented. A sense of adventure is created and I felt myself wanting to jump on the next plane and join them. (And not just because Leo was the main protagonist). After several scrapes they reach the island, join the community and seemingly adapt quickly to their new idyllic life. There are some beautiful shots of Thailand and the island seems to live up to everything you could possibly want from a paradise. Then things start to go wrong. The mood of the film changes. There is a tension and an almost constant darkness both psychologically in the atmosphere and physically in the actual shots. There are some gory scenes; there are moments of total madness and instances of the uglier side of human nature. This film really does pose the question of what is paradise and how far do you go to hold onto it? It makes you think about your own interpretation of these ideas rather than offer convenient neatly packaged answers. The film remains true to the spirit of the book, if not to its every detail of plot. The ending is less gory than the book but, in my opinion, much more tense and will blow your mind away. And Leo? What did I think of him? Utterly superb. I make no secret of the fact I am a big Leo fan and this film merely confirms my opinion and heightens my estimation of him as an actor. His character has been supposedly criticised by the studios for being too unsympathetic. But I found Leo’s performance to be a true and honest portrayal of a Westerner who finds himself in a strange country in extraordinary situations. He is not a hero but a normal person who reacts and behaves as many people probably would. If we dislike Richard or certain aspects of his character it is probably because we recognise these same aspects to a greater or lesser extent in ourselves. We see Leo’s character go through several stages, including love and deliriousness bordering on madness. He portrays each stage skilfully and convincingly and is simply perfect for the role. Another performance, which shines, is that of Robert Carlyle as Daffy, who gives an added dimension to the film. I found the French couple pleasant but felt that their roles were not meaty enough to really make an impression. I feel especially that a chance was missed by not developing more the rivalry between Richard (Leo) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet) over Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen). But then again this wasn’t in the original book. Various other characters feature but are not really sufficiently fleshed out. And finally, if you thought Leo looked hot in Titanic, sizzling in R&J, practically raging with fire in the pics and trailers of the Beach, none of this will prepare you for him on the big screen. The whole Manchester fire department couldn’t even begin to dampen the heat he produces. WHEW!! Words just can’t describe it. And I’d swear those pants just seemed to fall lower and lower in every scene. All I can say is that Leo remains very much King of the World.
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MSNBC:
2/3/00
DiCaprio’s Earth Day

Will Leonardo DiCaprio make Earth Day into Veggie Day? The teen heartthrob — who recently was stung by accusations that his upcoming film “Beach” wrecked the ecosystem of a pristine beach in Thailand — is the chairman of this year’s Earth Day celebration. DiCaprio is in discussions with animals rights activists about declaring the day — April 21 — meat free, sources say. The two issues are related, animals rights activists say, because as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wrote to DiCaprio in an effort to get him to join their cause, “the meat industry’s factory farms pollute our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.” One of the people egging on DiCaprio is Woody Harrelson — a devout vegetarian — who has personally written to the heads of various Earth Day celebrations across the country to make them meat free, and has received tentative commitments from several of them — including ones in San Francisco, Cleveland, and Berkeley, Calif. DiCaprio’s spokesman had no comment, but the source says, “We think he’ll go for it. Vegetarianism isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s the hip thing to do.”
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Complete Electronic Telegraph story
Electronic Telegraph
2/3/00
The Beach boy

Danny Boyle made his name as the director of Trainspotting. Now he's left tiny budgets and stylistic subversion behind him to make The Beach, which means embracing Hollywood, a mega-bucks budget and Leonardo DiCaprio. He talks to David Jenkins about Leo's shyness, Ewan McGregor's wrath - and why Americans hate lying 'NO, I was in the womb,' says Andrew McAlpine, as we re-start our mobile phone conversation. 'Now I'm moving towards the male genitals.' He's speaking, just before Christmas, from inside the Millennium Dome's Body, which he designed, and he's talking to me about The Beach, a $45 million-plus film starring Leonardo DiCaprio that he has also designed and which is the new, first big-budget offering from Andrew Macdonald, John Hodge and Danny Boyle, respectively the producer, writer and director who convulsed British cinema with their first two movies, Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1995). 'Now where did we get to?' McAlpine continues. 'Yeah, Leo had told his management there were only two directors he wanted to work with, Baz Luhrmann and Danny Boyle. And having worked with Baz on Romeo and Juliet [1996], Danny was the great hope. And they were really comfortable with each other from day one - Leo's such a professional and he works so f-ing hard, and there's one thing you should know about Danny Boyle: he's a tornado of energy, always thinking about how to harness the next, best shot. He's incredible, and he's extremely polite to his crew, and he's utterly, utterly charming.' Good looking, too. (When Danny Boyle first came to London, another source told me, 'all the girls on the theatrical scene were screaming with excitement.') And ebullient. And fluent. And funny. And well aware that the commissars of hipdom are sharpening their stilettos, eager to declare that by casting a teen heartthrob like DiCaprio and by taking those mega-millions from 20th Century-Fox the triumvirate has sold out. (Shallow Grave, after all, cost only £1 million, and Trainspotting just £1.6 million.) Indeed, as I start to remind him in his Soho offices, Boyle once said that if you go for a big budget. . . 'You're doomed!' he cuts in, chortling, the words lengthened by his Lancastrian vowels. (He was born and brought up in Radcliffe, near Bolton.) 'Absolutely! Those are the sort of things you say, and then you regret saying them later.' He chuckles again and sips some of his Starbucks coffee. His eyes are blue, his hair is spiky and his hands are expressive. 'Because I think it's perverse to occupy the low-budget stool for too long - particularly with the kind of films we want to make, British films that work on as wide a scale as possible, even if they have some unusual ingredients, and obviously in this one we've got Leonardo DiCaprio. But we're very lucky because it's only big budget in our terms; in Hollywood's, it's not really. Without Leo's fee, it's about $30-35 million - which in their terms is a risk, but not a very big risk.
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Excite News:
2/3/00
Live one-hour chat session

REMINDER/FOXNews.com to Host Live Chat Session With Danny Boyle, Director of "The Beach," Starring Leonardo Dicaprio Updated 7:01 AM ET February 3, 2000 Danny Boyle, director of the new movie "The Beach," the first Leonardo Dicaprio movie since "Titanic," will join FOXNews.com for a live one-hour chat session on Thursday, February 3, at 4:30 p.m./EST. WHO: Danny Boyle, director of "The Beach" WHAT: Live one-hour chat session WHERE: FOXNews.com WHEN: Thursday, February 3, at 4:30 p.m./EST. WHY: FOXNews.com will host a live chat session with director Danny Boyle to provide viewers with an opportunity to discuss his new movie "The Beach," starring Leonardo Dicaprio.
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Empire Online:
2/2/00
Beach Review

Boy finds paradise, boy loses it, boy gets alarming awakening, in the Trainspotting team's adaption of Alex Garland's novel Getting away with it all on an unspoilt tropical beach is not the idyll of your lottery winning dreams in this unnerving drama of a hidden Eden where obsessive travellers disassociate from the world. DiCaprio is backpacker Richard, who thinks he's worldly-wise, but is so "the young American abroad" when he seeks adventure and danger in Thailand. A strange encounter with crazed Daffy (Robert Carlyle), who rants of a perfect, secret beach, seems the travel tip for him. And he recruits a French girl he fancies rotten (Ledoyen) and her amiable boyfriend (Guillaume Canet) to join him on a mysterious, funny, scary journey to the spectacularly beautiful (take a bow, cinematographer Darius Khondji) haven. There Sal (Swinton) holds sway over a community of drop-outs who are kind of a cross between the Swiss Family Robinson and an apocalyptic water sport cult. Like Garland's novel, the film will be compared with Lord Of The Flies as the absence of societal constraints and concerns creates a moral vacuum for wild things to rumpus mightily. The Beach is more a microcosm of the modern world, though, with a more experienced gang and their alternative attempts to connect with one another riven by their secrets, desires, jealousies and competitiveness. They import their own serpents into this paradise. Richard is more than a little disturbed, as we learn from a voiceover that borders on intrusive but underlines his alienation. His fixation with 'Nam movies could be spelled out more clearly to explain his solitary stint in the jungle turning into a pathological commando game, Heart Of Darkness for the Sega generation. DiCaprio's perfect as the smartarsed thrill-seeker and the more wry narrator with hindsight, but he works very hard for his reputed $20 million fee when required to turn into a bug-eating nutter. Despite the dodginess of this interlude, however, Boyle's direction holds a true line between allure and horror, and Hodge's script is intriguing and forceful. Its much better than rumoured: entertaining, engrossing, and ripe for discussion - somewhere civilised - afterwards.
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MSNBC:
2/2/00
Leonardo DiCaprio and model Kristen Zang

Leonardo DiCaprio and model Kristen Zang have split, again, this time, friends of the star say, for good
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Complete New York Times story
New York Times:
2/2/00
Fate of McCain Campaign

With his entire candidacy hinging on victory in New Hampshire's primary on Tuesday, Senator John McCain was running his insurgency by cell phone today. As his campaign bus crawled through a snowstorm just after dawn, Mr. McCain talked and talked, dialing up radio show after radio show to promote his candidacy and matching the radio jocks for irreverence. The senator from Arizona told a Boston radio station of his theory of the rise and fall of Western civilization: "Ever since we've seen the invention of the talk show, we've been on a steady decline." On the air with "Morning Attitude" on WSMN in Nashua, he said: "It's amazing, Arnie. They say we've upset the establishment. I've been told they're in a state of panic." On yet another call he proclaimed the actor Leonardo DiCaprio "an androgynous wimp," then laughed, and said, "there goes the 13-year old vote." As he carried on, his four youngest children, just in from Arizona, slept in the back of the bus.
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Philly News:
2/2/00
Poor Leo

It's not easy being a hunky teen heart throb. Leonardo DiCaprio was caught griping recently about the downside to being a mega star. "Every day it's a new rumor. I'm shocked about how easily people will lie about what I do," he said. "I used to take things personally. I would want to give a press conference every five minutes." Don't dare call him a whiner. "But I'm not complaining," said DiCaprio. I have been given wonderful opportunities. And I love to act."
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Complete Excite news story
Excite News:
2/2/00
Games Site iwin.com is a Huge Winner with Online Game Players

iwin.com stands alone among online games sites by offering fantasy-opportunity prizes such as TV walk-on roles, behind-the-scenes tours of Hollywood studios and the like. iwin's current exciting sweepstakes promotion ties in with the highly anticipated release of "The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio: prizes include two trips for two to Thailand to explore the film's exotic locations, and one trip for two to the film's world premiere in Los Angeles.
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Excite News:
2/2/00
Live Webcast of 'THE BEACH' Premiere

POPcast Communications Corp., the leading application service provider in the personal Webcasting market, today announced they have partnered with Twentieth Century Fox to provide the live international Webcast of the studio's Hollywood Premiere for THE BEACH. The Webcast will begin at approximately 7:00pm PST on Wednesday, February 2. Scheduled to be released in theatres on February 11, THE BEACH is based on Alex Garland's best-selling novel and was produced by the successful TRAINSPOTTING team that includes director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen. Broadcast live from Hollywood's historic Mann's Chinese Theatre, fans from around the globe can log onto www.thebeachmovie.com or www.popcast.com/events/thebeach to get their own personal view of the festivities. In addition to the film's cast, celebrities scheduled to attend include Rosanna Arquette, Elizabeth Berkley, Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anjelica Houston, Chris Klein, Matt LeBlanc, Juliette Lewis, Kelly Preston, Bill Pullman and many others. About POPcast Communications Corporation Los Angeles-based privately-held POPcast Communications Corporation (http://www.popcast.com) is the first application service provider (ASP) to offer a complete solution for self-service Webcasting by integrating an easy-to-use front-end publishing service with an automated back-end media management database and an efficient Internet multimedia distribution network. The company develops scalable video-sharing solutions for leading Web destinations, major ISP providers, computer manufacturers and retailers, as well as providing world-class live-event Webcasting
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LA Times:
2/1/00
An Open Letter to Leonardo DiCaprio

Dear Leonardo, As someone with reverence for the art of acting (and yes, in my opinion it is an art), I read with dismay the interview in Calendar ("In Pursuit of Paradise," by Sean Mitchell, Jan. 23) in which, in reference to your lack of formal acting training, you said, "I've found that when I do that sort of stuff, it makes things more formulaic and takes away the natural charisma that a human being has. . . . And sometimes, when things are too technical, they may come across as realistic but they don't always hit you in the gut as much, is my view on it. If that makes any sense." Well no, Leonardo, that doesn't make much sense at all. Where was "the natural charisma that a human being has" in "The Man in the Iron Mask" or "Total Eclipse"? Perhaps with some training you might have been able to access yours, which was sadly missing from those films. Yes, it's unfortunate when things are "too technical," but hasn't anyone ever told you that technical and technique are two different things, and that technique is what we develop precisely so that our acting doesn't become too technical? The only problem is that it takes time and dedication to develop a solid technique, and until you have it, you risk being bad without knowing why or what to do about it. You risk being like a ballet dancer who only "turns out" some of the time, or an opera tenor who only occasionally sings on key. Whoever told you, as you said in the interview, that there are "rules about how to act"? There are basic internal and external skills that every actor should have, there is intelligence and taste and honesty, and there is knowledge that comes from exposure to the experience of those who have preceded us. But rules? No. There is, however, such a thing called craft, which allows us to awaken appropriate impulses and enables us to turn those impulses reliably and consistently into truthful and expressive behavior. A solid grasp of craft is never a hindrance. On the contrary, control of one's instrument is what gives us total freedom of creative expression. Ask Pablo Casals, or Andres Segovia or Arthur Rubinstein. Art doesn't have to be a hit-or-miss affair, nor should it be. Picasso, Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock, three of the 20th century's more accomplished and successful painters, all had a background of strong classical training. They also painted in three widely divergent styles that had nothing to do with rules. Though none painted in a classical style, it's there in the work, giving them a confidence, strength and power every time they picked up a brush. * * * I can understand that you might fear training at this stage in your career. You're afraid that thinking about things that you have taken for granted, and that have seemed to come naturally up to now, might suddenly stifle the charm and impulsiveness that you rely on (and that you've improperly labeled "charisma"). Yes, you're right, it might not be easy for a while, but if you were willing to commit to the acquisition of a deeply ingrained and consistently reliable craft, you might find yourself able to go places with your acting you never imagined possible. The naturally gifted boy you've been up to now (and 25 is a bit old to continue being a boy) might become a sublimely skillful man. There are musicians with great intuition and emotional depth who lack the technical skills to express their feelings as fully and precisely as they might. There are musicians with flawless technical skills whose playing is cold and unfeeling. And then there are those musicians who combine the best of both. That is technique, and it comes through rigorous training, discipline and knowledge. It is exactly the same in acting as in any other art. John Crowther has experience as a screenwriter, director, writer, actor and acting coach. He currently is a talent agent with the Blake Agency.
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Complete Hollywood.com Article
Hollywood.com:
2/1/00
'Pearl Harbor' Price Tag: $135 million

In case you haven't heard, another big budget, big boat flick is about to set sail in Hollywood. Nope, it's not a sequel to "Titanic." But given its eye-popping $135 million upfront budget, it'd better be like one at the box office.... ..."With a film like this -- which basically belongs to the genre of big-budget disaster film -- the model the studio's going by is to sell the concept rather than the star. With an established director and producer, Bay and Bruckheimer are providing the real star power for the film," said Gitesh Pandya, editor of the box-office analysis Web site Box Office Guru (http://www.boxofficeguru.com). "Take for example, "Twister," with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. They were known but were not big names but the film still went on to make a lot of money. Another one is 'Independence Day.' Bill Pullman, Will Smith were not big level stars, but the concept worked and the film skyrocketed. And let's not forget 'Titanic.' When the film opened, everyone thought it would fail. And look what happened." And what happened was that Leonardo DiCaprio became a worldwide phenomenon.
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Detroit News:
2/1/00
Co-star describes her life with Leo

What's it like to work with Leonardo DiCaprio? Leo's love interest in The Beach, Virginie Ledoyen, says Leo managed to ignore the hype around the movie --- the "ridiculous" gossip (Leo hired a slew of food tasters, Leo dallied with a trespasser, etc. "He is quite wise about it," Virginie tells February's Details magazine. "He never talks about it. He probably does with his friends, but you never hear him say, 'Oh, it's horrible.' " Virginie shrugs off, too, the rumors of an off-camera romance with Leo. "The only thing I know was that for four months, the day began at 6 o'clock in the morning. I'm sure he had parties, but all I know is that he's very professional." And no, she says, she's not pregnant by him.
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Complete Irish Times Article
Irish Times:
2/1/00
Full-time teen, part-time author

When Dublin-born Claire Hennessy was 12, she wrote a book in her free time. Let me run that by you again, folks. Dear Diary, the account of five months in the lives of five girlfriends, all 12, and written in diary form, will be published by Poolbeg on February 1st. Eason's has chosen it as its Children's Book of the Month. And that's not all: Poolbeg contracted her for a three-book deal when it signed her up. She has already written the second one and is about to start the third. And, incidentally, she hates English..... ....Claire looks across the room suspiciously when this is quoted. "I do kind of agree with Amy, because a lot of people do break their Pledges, don't they? You're not going to write that I'm an alcoholic or anything like that, are you?" she says wildly: an early distrust of the dastardly ways of the media evident already. At the beginning of each diary extract, there is a "Fact File" on each girl: Favourite actor, singer, film etc. Leonardo DiCaprio and Celine Dion feature a lot. So what about Claire's own personal "Fact File"? Who is her favourite actor? She twists her hands and says she doesn't have one, not really. So it isn't Leonardo DiCaprio then? She looks about as appalled as it is possible for a 13-year-old to look. The way a 13-yearold might look at a relative who turned up for the school play wearing something ghastly and uncool. "No, no, no!" she declares. "Titanic was out when I was writing the book and everyone in Sixth Class was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio, they were all in love with him for about three months. Now if you say you like Leonardo DiCaprio, you're a social outcast. He's so Sixth Class."
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Jam Showbiz:
2/1/00
Leo's no $100-million man

Producer Andrew MacDonald was not surprised to hear the rumours that his new movie The Beach cost a whopping $100 million US. "Once Leonardo DiCaprio signed onto The Beach, everything that was reported about the film was grossly exaggerated," says MacDonald, who also produced director Danny Boyle's earlier films, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary. "Danny and I always envisioned The Beach as a $20-million movie and it hasn't strayed very far," he says. "We brought it in for a little more than $25 million, but then we had to add on Leo's $20-million salary. We didn't make that deal with him. The studio (20th Century Fox) did." MacDonald has nothing but praise for DiCaprio, who he says "is far more committed and behaves considerably better than actors who get paid a lot less. "Leo had very few special requests. The only extra perk he asked for were plane tickets and accommodations for friends he flew into Thailand to visit him during our 13-week shoot." DiCaprio's guests included his parents, longtime friend actor Tobey Maguire and model Kristin Zang, who DiCaprio was dating at the time -- though he insists that relationship is over. The Beach hits theatres on Feb. 11.