If you've been following me over the years, you probably know that my 26 #1 movies dating back to when I started this in 1996 have never featured a repeat director. Twenty-six different men and women (and in one instance, a combination of one of each) have been responsible for directing my 26 #1s.
However, that's not to say there are no individual people who have contributed to more than one #1 -- even a director, though he was not the director in his other top finisher(s).
Each year I notice if a new person has joined this illustrious group, usually mentioning it in one of my wrap-up posts. For example, last year I anointed Casey Affleck, who had starred in that year's #1, Our Friend, as well as 2017's #1, A Ghost Story. (Only later, as my repeating viewings of my #1s got going this year, did I realize Affleck is actually in a third #1, Hamlet (2000), very briefly -- making him the second person to be involved with three different #1 movies, and the first to appear on screen in three different ones.)
To this point, though, I've only been keeping track of this casually, in my head. Well, for a list-maker like myself, such informality cannot stand -- especially since it meant I was likely missing some people. And true enough, I was, as we shall see.
So what I did was pull up an Excel spreadsheet and start recording significant contributors to each of my #1 movies, starting with Looking for Richard in 1996 and going all the way through to Our Friend. "Significant," in this case, is defined as the following: 1) the top five to ten actors, or possibly more, depending on the size of the ensemble; 2) any other actors who appear in the cast whose names I recognize; 3) the director; 4) the screenwriter; 5) the names of any producers I recognize; 6) the composer; 7) the cinematographer; 8) the editor. And in one case, the casting director, though I don't expect that to be a regular thing. (Yes, Mary Vernieu has reached the point of ubiquity that once prompted me to write this post about Avy Kaufman.)
"But Vance," you say. "Can you really describe the contributions of Casey Affleck to Hamlet as 'significant'? The guy has no dialogue and appears on the covers of magazines and newspapers more than there is any actual footage of him."
Good question. And the answer is no, Affleck's work on Hamlet is not significant. However, I am not, technically speaking, trying to quantify the value of the contribution here. I am just trying to find a way to limit the people I'm looking at in IMDB to a manageable crowd, so this Excel spreadsheet is not a thousand names long. This group is the ultimate example of getting in on technicalities, and I'll include anyone who I notice is in more than one of these films. But I'm not going to comb the list of art directors and costume designers and key grips and dolly grips to be completist here. I'm already pretty close to completist as it is, going just on the names I've chosen to examine for each film.
Adding the identifiable "significant contributors" to each film didn't produce a list of a thousand names, but it did give me 336, for an average of 12.9 per movie.
Now, there are some #1s that just have no chance of having any repeat contributors. Out of those 26 films, five are foreign/non-English speaking films. Only two of those are from the same country, Run Lola Run and Toni Erdman, though they are 18 years apart and TE is actually a co-production of multiple countries, not just Germany. And true enough, those movies did not have any contributors in common with any other film, just as A Separation, Beyond the Hills and Parasite had no contributors in common with any other film. I dutifully recorded between five and ten contributors for each movie anyway, given the possibility that these people might be involved in future #1s.
It ended up being an interesting exercise indeed, and revealed as many as five multiple-timers I had not previously identified. (I say "as many as" because there was one where I couldn't remember if I had noticed him before or not.) I'll get into some stats afterward, but here are the 17 people who have worked on more than one #1, listed in the order in which their second film was chosen by me as a #1. And as you will see, two of them had a third in the offing.
1. Carter Burwell - Hamlet (2000) (composer), Adaptation (2002) (composer)
2. Lance Acord - Adaptation (2002) (cinematographer), Lost in Translation (2003) (cinematographer)
2. Bill Murray - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Lost in Translation (2003) (actor)
4. Jane Adams - Happiness (1998) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)
4. Charlie Kaufman - Adaptation (2002) (writer/producer), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (writer/producer), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) (director/writer/producer)
4. Kate Winslet - Titanic (1997) (actor), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (actor)
7. Clive Owen - Gosford Park (2001) (actor), Children of Men (2006) (actor)
8. Maryse Alberti - Happiness (1998) (cinematographer), The Wrestler (2008) (cinematographer)
9. Clint Mansell - The Wrestler (2008) (composer), Moon (2009) (composer)
9. Kevin Spacey - Looking For Richard (1996) (actor), Moon (2009) (actor)
11. Paul Dano - There Will Be Blood (2007) (actor), Ruby Sparks (2012) (actor/producer)
12. Emmanuel Lubezki - Children of Men (2006) (cinematographer), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (cinematographer)
13. Kyle MacLachlan - Hamlet (2000) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)
13. Paula Pell - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) (actor), Inside Out (2015) (actor)
15. Casey Affleck - Hamlet (2000) (actor), A Ghost Story (2017) (actor), Our Friend (2021) (actor)
16. Ethan Hawke - Hamlet (2000) (actor), First Reformed (2018) (actor)
17. Christine Vachon - Happiness (1998) (producer), First Reformed (2018) (producer)
Yes there are a few problematic names in that list -- more problematic than Affleck is of course Kevin Spacey, less problematic (to this point) is Bill Murray. But this list is not based on merit as viewed through a 2022 lens. It's just statistics.
Let's start with the people that this process uncovered:
Lance Acord - I wasn't really familiar with this cinematographer -- I've probably seen the name before -- and it turns out he shot two of my #1s.
Maryse Alberti - You could fill in almost the exact same description for Alberti as for Acord, except swap out the pronoun "he" for "she."
Kyle MacLachlan - I couldn't actually remember if I'd previously noticed this one, so I am including him here just to be sure.
Paula Pell - I wouldn't have noticed this one at all, if Pell hadn't appeared in consecutive #1s and I happened to notice her name in the cast of Birdman, just moments before I noticed it in the cast of Inside Out. Her contributions in both films are minuscule, but hey, as I said earlier, every contribution counts.
Christine Vachon - I wouldn't have noticed this either if I were not already familiar with her name. Apologies to other producers whose names I don't know, who may have produced more than one of these films. (Given that IMDB lists up to ten names for each film when you consider producers, associate producers and executive producers, it just felt too tedious to include all of them.)
Other interesting tidbits:
- Only three of these contributors appeared in consecutive #1s: Acord, Mansell and Pell.
- Only two English language #1s don't share a contributor with any other film: Hustle & Flow and 127 Hours.
- The most fruitful of these #1s is Hamlet, which shares five contributors with at least one other film (Affleck, Murray, Burwell, MacLachlan and Hawke).
- Kate and Rooney Mara are the only family members who appear in different films (127 Hours and A Ghost Story), though some do appear in the same film (the Coppolas in Lost in Translation)
- Longest gap between first contribution and most recent to a #1: Affleck (Hamlet to Our Friend). Honorable mention: Vachon (Happiness to First Reformed).
- Every role I identified has someone who appears across multiple #1s except director and editor -- and casting director, in which I only found Mary Vernieu in one film.
Random things I discovered during this project:
- Dominique McElligott, who plays Sam Bell's wife in Moon, is also Queen Maeve in The Boys.
- The Dardenne brothers produced the Romanian film Beyond the Hills, opening up a greater possibility of foreign language crossover at some point in the future.
- Doug Jones, who plays creatures in Guillermo del Toro's movies, was also in Adaptation. He plays the caveman in the section of the film where Kaufman imagines back to the start of time.
Probably another waste of your good reading time brought to you by The Audient -- but I had a good time compiling it.
And I'll be really excited to see if anyone joins the list in January.
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