Kelley

Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and watching. These films are edifying (and cathartic) in a way that could almost be considered a public servic and that’s what works best in James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate wake of World War II. It’s a drama that is well-intentioned and elucidating despite some missteps.

For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his “Zodiac” screenplay for David Fincher, adapts “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Dr. Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.

The film is a two-hander shared by Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley. At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad-hoc Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants. Immediately, he’s intrigued at the thought of sampling so many flavors of narcissism.

It becomes clear that the doctor has his own interests in mind with this unique task as well. At one point while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, Kelley verbalizes “Someone could write a book” and off he dashes to the library with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow. That book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis.

One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed capable of such horrors (the film grinds to an appropriate halt in a crucial moment to simply let the characters and the audience take in devastating concentration camp footage). Human beings, not monsters, were the architects of the Final Solution.

But human beings can also fight against this if they choose to, and the rule of law can prevail if people make the choice to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials start because Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn’t let anything so inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing what’s right.

Kelley’s motivations are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these men and their pathologies, particularly the disarming Göring, and in the name of science the doctor dives headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should, eventually ferrying letters back and forth between Göring and his wife and daughter, still in hiding. He finds that Göring is just a man — a megalomaniacal, arrogant and manipulative man, but just a man. That makes the genocide that he helped to plan and execute that much harder to swallow.

Crowe has a planet-sized gravitational force on screen that he lends to the outsize Göring and Shannon possesses the same weight. A climactic scene between these two actors in which Jackson cross-examines Göring is a riveting piece of courtroom drama. Malek’s energy is unsettled, his character always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting but unbalanced together.

Vanderbilt strives to imbue “Nuremberg” with a retro appeal that sometimes feels misplaced. John Slattery, as the colonel in charge of the prison, throws some sauce on his snappy patter that harks back to old movies from the 1940s, but the film has been color-corrected into a dull, desaturated gray. It’s a stylistic choice to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it’s also ugly as sin.

Vanderbilt struggles to find a tone and clutters the film with extra story lines to diminishing results. Howie’s personal history (based on a true story) is deeply affecting and Woodall sells it beautifully. But then there are the underwritten female characters: a saucy journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelley drunk to draw out his secrets for a scoop, and Justice Jackson’s legal clerk (Wrenn Schmidt) who clucks and tsks her way through the trial, serving only as the person to whom Jackson can articulate his thoughts. Their names are scarcely uttered during the film and their barely-there inclusion feels almost offensive.

So while the subject matter makes “Nuremberg” worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon) and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance. If the film is intended to be a canary in a coal mine, that bird has long since expired.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Filming was about to start on David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ series “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” in early January when the wildfires hit the Los Angeles area, devastating Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Crew members lost their homes or were dealing with severe smoke damage. Others on the show took people who were displaced into their houses.

To add to the uncertainty, the series was still waiting to hear whether it would receive a state film and television tax credit.

It was time for a decision, Kelley and his fellow producers thought. Should they play it safe and relocate to a cheaper filming locale, such as New Mexico or Vancouver, to ensure they had the budget to film the pivotal mid-season finale in Las Vegas?

They took a gamble and decided to stay in California. The bet paid off. “Margo” got a tax credit of about $1.2 million per episode, and the show was able to shoot both in the Los Angeles area and travel to Las Vegas for four days of filming.

“The rest of the story is a California story,” said Matthew Tinker, president of David E. Kelley Productions. “It’s really magical to leave L.A., go to Vegas and then come back, and it gives the show a huge production value that otherwise, we wouldn’t have had.”

Matthew Tinker, president of David E. Kelley Productions, stands on the rooftop of producer David E. Kelley’s new production office in Santa Monica.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

As film and TV projects have increasingly moved out of state in search of better tax incentives and cheaper costs — moves that have culled the number of Hollywood jobs — Kelley’s production company is doubling down on California. The former attorney turned writer-producer is one of the biggest names in TV behind such legal dramas as “Ally McBeal” and “The Practice.”

All of his current projects will shoot in L.A., including the third season of HBO series “Big Little Lies,” the legal drama “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a new HBO Max series based on a Michael Connelly book called “Nightshade” that takes place on Santa Catalina Island, and the thriller “Presumed Innocent.”

Post-production work for his shows also is done in L.A. Kelley’s company, known as David E. Kelley Productions, also recently moved into a new headquarters in Santa Monica, where it plans to make a home for the foreseeable future.

“It just feels wrong to me that L.A. is not continuing to be the epicenter for film and television series,” Kelley said via Zoom in August. “This town has been very good to me for many, many years, so I have an inclination not to abandon it, to cling to the community that has been so rewarding for me.”

The sentiment is shared by his second-in-command.

From the concrete rooftop garden atop the Santa Monica building that houses Kelley’s production office, Tinker looked out at the hills, remembering the wall of smoke that lingered for days.

The January wildfires also encouraged the decision to keep Kelley’s production company in L.A., despite some pitches to move out of state. At the time, there had been industry chatter that the state’s incentive program would be bolstered, giving some optimism for the future of production in the state. But after the fires, there was no question. The company saw the need to rebuild and reinvest in L.A. and Hollywood. The eventual boost to the state’s film and TV tax credit program approved this summer solidified their decision.

“The fires challenged our resilience and sense of community, but the people of L.A. rallied,” Tinker said. “There simply wasn’t a thought beyond this moment to plant roots anywhere else.”

The 2,900-square-foot office, which is a new build that replaced an older building in Santa Monica, is sleek and modern, with concrete walls and flooring, dark wood details, two arcade game machines and a shelving unit holding dozens of awards right at the heart of the space. Inside Tinker’s office is an homage to Hollywood history.

A wall showcases trophies at producer David E. Kelley’s new production office in Santa Monica.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

An old sign from Kelley’s previous offices at the Fox lot hangs on the wall, next to the title page for the first episode of “Margo,” addressed to David and signed by actor Elle Fanning. A photo of Ronald Reagan with Matthew Tinker’s late grandfather Grant Tinker, former chief executive of NBC, sits near a bobblehead from Kelley’s “Boston Legal” days and a black-and-white group shot of Matthew’s father, John Tinker, winning a writing Emmy for the drama “St. Elsewhere” in 1986.

When looking back at his own career, Matthew Tinker has done “pretty much every job under the sun,” which was only possible in a city that consistently had multiple productions running.

That concern for the future of industry employment was a major part of Hollywood and state legislators’ push to increase the annual funding for California’s film and TV tax credit program to $750 million and expand eligibility criteria to allow more projects to apply.

Memorabilia in the office of Matthew Tinker, president of David E. Kelley Productions.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Those changes, which were approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom this summer, have now largely gone into effect and are starting to produce results.

In the first round of TV show tax credits since the program was revamped, the California Film Commission saw a nearly 400% increase in applications and awarded tax credits to a total of 22 shows.

“There was a lot of pent-up demand,” said Colleen Bell, executive director of the California Film Commission. “There’s a lot of momentum here, and these improvements to the program have helped to drive that momentum.”

The new activity is much needed. Production activity in L.A. so far this year is down 9% compared with last year, according to the nonprofit FilmLA, which tracks shoot days in Greater L.A. 2024 was the second-worst year on record for production in the area after 2020, when the industry shut down due to the pandemic.

But there is hope on the horizon — of the 22 new TV projects that received a California tax credit this past round, 18 are slated to film largely in Greater L.A., including Kelley’s “Presumed Innocent.”

“The more that people have hope in the future of California as a production destination, I think you will continue to see entrepreneurs and others make their careers here,” said Philip Sokoloski, spokesman for FilmLA.

Because Los Angeles is more costly than other locations, filmmakers must make certain adjustments, such as shooting a TV series in 85 days instead of 100, or reducing daily filming hours.

But that’s very doable with experienced crews in L.A., said Caroline James, co-executive producer of “Presumed Innocent” and “Margo,” which employed about 500 people.

“There’s such an infrastructure in L.A.,” she said. “There’s no learning curve.”

Kelley’s production company, which has six employees including the veteran writer and producer, may not always be able to shoot everything in L.A., but executives intend to keep L.A. first and foremost in their decision-making and hopes that mentality will catch on around town.

“The goal is to always look at California first,” Tinker said.