Boxoffice - July 2019

PHOTO: ALISON COHEN ROSA, © WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Raising Hell
WOMEN TAKE OVER IN ANDREA BERLOFF’S
NEW YORK MOB MOVIE THE KITCHEN
BY REBECCA PAHLE
>> In theaters on August 9, New Line Cinema’s The Kitchen flips
the mob movie script. Set in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen, the film centers
on three women who, after their Irish mobster husbands get
arrested, find themselves in need of money to support themselves.
What’s a woman to do … except take over the operation
for herself? Turns out, between the three of them, Kathy (Melissa
McCarthy), Ruby (Tiffany Haddish), and Claire (Elisabeth Moss) are
actually better at running the mob than the good ol’ boys who
look down on them as powerless housewives. Not that things are
easy. This is still a mob movie after all.
LINING IT UP
Andrea Berloff (right) and
cinematographer Maryse
Alberti bring the Hell’s
Kitchen of the 1970s to the
modern age.
The Kitchen represents a departure for actresses
McCarthy and Haddish, best known for their
comic work. Also jumping into something new
was writer/director Andrea Berloff, who’s racked
up screenwriting work both credited and uncredited
over a decade-plus career. “The best training
to be a director of a studio movie is to put in 15
years writing screenplays,” she quips.
Berloff’s best-known movie—and the one that
garnered her an Oscar nomination—is Straight
Outta Compton, the 2015 hit that dramatized the
rise to fame of rap group NWA. It was Compton,
unsurprisingly, that helped Berloff sell her vision
of The Kitchen to Warner Bros. execs. She’d already
written the script, adapting Ollie Masters’s comic
series. When it came time to sell herself as the
movie’s future director, Berloff “went in there and
gave a really impassioned pitch about how this is
going to be a big, fun event movie. A movie that
people are dying to see, just in the way Compton
was. I laid out for them that I see this as a big,
fun, entertaining movie that we can turn into a
real event if done right.”
An undercurrent in Berloff’s pitch was a theme
that runs through The Kitchen itself. As put by
Berloff: “Don’t underestimate people. Don’t
underestimate comedians, because you know
what? They’re some of the most talented women
out there. Don’t underestimate what they can do.
Don’t underestimate me. I’m not just a writer. I
can direct, too. I hope that message permeates.
That feeling of empowerment does not apply just
to actresses or directors. It applies to everybody.
That’s the universal feeling that I want people to
hook into.”
Shot in four of New York’s five boroughs (sorry,
Queens) and Long Island, The Kitchen pairs a retro
style with a visual aesthetic that consciously avoids
the sort of lo-fi grittiness many other directors
would have drifted to, particularly in this genre.
To that end, the clothes—as chosen by costume
designer Sarah Edwards—are authentic to the
period yet steer clear of the more ridiculous end
of the ’70s fashion spectrum. “Sometimes ’70s
clothes look silly to us today. It’s got to be pieces
of that era that still translate into this era. The
women look fantastic in every scene,” says Berloff.
With cinematographer Maryse Alberti (Velvet
Goldmine, The Wrestler), Berloff aimed to present a
vision of ’70s Hell’s Kitchen—the old storefronts,
trash piling up on the sidewalks—that’s colorful,
not washed out in shades of gray and sepia.
34
JULY 2019