Paul McCartney was in New York the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, sitting on a plane that was taxiing out for takeoff on a flight to Britain, where the singer planned to celebrate two of his kids’ birthdays. Then the captain announced that there’d been a “terrible accident,” and McCartney looked out the window to see one of the World Trade Center towers on fire.

At first everyone thought it was a tragic aircraft mishap until they heard the second tower had just been hit by another plane.

“Like everybody else, it was, ‘Oh no, wow. This is some act of sabotage.’ And then we heard about the Pentagon,” McCartney recalls in the opening interview of the documentary “The Love We Make.”

“I just started thinking, you know, what can I do? Because there’s going to be a spirit shift in New York, in America,” he says. “This is suddenly a place where people are gonna feel vulnerable for the first time in a long time.”

Born the son of a volunteer Liverpool firefighter during the World War II Blitz, McCartney decided to organize a small concert for the firefighters of New York, but he was persuaded instead to headline a much larger event, the “Concert for New York City,” which VH1 was planning at Madison Square Garden.

This fascinating and sometimes moving film documents the rehearsals, promotional interviews and McCartney’s solo wanderings through the streets of post-9/11 New York in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 20, 2001, all-star concert. This not a concert film, although there are brief clips of musical performances by McCartney and others throughout. This is more of an intimate portrait of a famous man, three years a widower at the time, moving through a wounded city, determined not to allow his fame to cut him off from real life. He politely accepts greetings and engages in conversations with all kinds of fans — from housewives and street musicians to more than a couple of crazies, friendly and willing to sign his name for the genuine autograph seeker but not the eBay hustlers, whom he instinctively recognizes. He’s also alert for cars following his limo a little too closely. “Let’s get some distance, George,” he tells his driver at one point.

Then there are his amusing and sometimes revealing backstage conversations with visitors and fellow performers including Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Harrison Ford, Steve Buscemi, Leonardo DiCaprio and President Bill Clinton.

McCartney commissioned the film himself from filmmaker Albert Maysles, who was in the car with the Beatles the first time they drove into New York City in 1964. Co-directed by Bradley Kaplan, the film reveals a well-meaning human side of McCartney seldom seen in the past, emerging to help in one of the nation’s darkest hours.

— Gene Triplett

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Flanked by a trio of the freshest young actors in contemporary film, Jack Nicholson seems to relish his status as Hollywood’s resident lovable rogue.

Since his heyday as counterculture radical in landmark movies such as “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nicholson has lived a high-profile playboy’s life and settled into a kind of elder rebel-emeritus status on screen, burnished by the patina of his bad-boy past and his three acting Oscars.

Jack Nicholson

If there’s a mischievous twinkle in his eyes when he talks about his latest role as a “cuddly shark” in writer-director James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” it is masked by his ubiquitous, signature shades. But when Nicholson talks about working again with Brooks or hanging out and acting with co-stars Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, there’s a weathered warmth in his voice that belies his hipster cool.

“It’s a privilege to work with Jim. He’s probably one of the best screenwriters in the world, and you just get great material and he can always cast wonderful actors. Just look at us all,” Nicholson said, gesturing grandly to his young co-stars during a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park hosted by Columbia Pictures.

With Brooks on one side and Witherspoon, Wilson and Rudd on the other, Nicholson held court in a sense as he talked about Brooks’ new romantic comedy. In it, he plays a deeply flawed father and sharky business mogul trying to balance his love for his son with his instincts for self-preservation. Nicholson’s bond with Brooks goes way back to his Oscar-winning performances in “Terms of Endearment” and “As Good As It Gets,” sandwiched between a memorable turn in “Broadcast News.” (Nicholson’s other Oscar, his first, came for Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1976.)

In “How Do You Know,” Nicholson is essentially in a supporting role – but one that fits him like a tailored suit. He plays Charles, an oily industrialist whose company is under federal investigation for fraud. Unfortunately, blame for Charles’ shady shenanigans falls on his decent but clueless son, George (Rudd), who recently took the corporate reins. As George’s life is falling apart, he stumbles into a romantic triangle with Witherspoon’s Lisa, an Olympic softball player in crisis at the end of her career, and Wilson’s Matty, a playboy pitcher for the Washington Nationals.

For his part, Nicholson’s charmingly caddish Charles occupies a subplot in which he hopes to help his son out of his legal jam while avoiding a lengthy, and well-deserved, prison sentence for himself.

“There are always different things that make parts difficult,” Nicholson said of his raffish character. “I’ve played a lot of bad or semi-bad people and you always have to be on the character’s side. I didn’t have any problem analyzing this character. It wasn’t really the tough part of it for me. I liked playing the father even though he’s not a great father, but I think you can see that he really does care even though he chooses business over his own son. He really didn’t think that he was doing that much wrong. I was a little worried about that myself since I feel like I am a loveable shark. Those are the kinds of things that you have to finesse.”

Brooks said he wrote the character as a personification of a certain kind of predator afoot in America’s financial jungles.

“Everything that’s been going on (in the economy) has been an attack on our personhoods. That shark that you’re talking about is representative of a certain kind of American businessman. I think he’s typical,” Brooks said.

“I am someone who’s obsessive about specifics and detail and I couldn’t pick a business to put up front,” the director continued. “Then I realized that Jack’s character is representative of the whole breed. And also, I realized that so much has gone wrong, and our trust has been eroded to such an extent by the absence of real role models anyplace in our lives, that the last holdout is people needing each other and holding hands and taking it on together. I sort of felt that when I wrote this.”

Nicholson, 73, said Brooks is the kind of director that makes him excited to keep making movies.

“With Jim you have to remember that he writes comedies like nobody else,” the actor said. “I mean, you’re dealing with life, death, business crime, fatherhood, motherhood, all these very serious topics and everything is funny at the same time. It has truth and it’s funny, but what he attacks to begin with is where it’s really distinct if you reviewed it – cancer, news, all this kind of thing. And I know it’s the goal he sets himself. He sets himself very interesting goals.

“Like, I remember the one that I particularly liked was in ‘As Good As It Gets.’ He says, ‘Number one, I want to write a part for the dog.’ He said, ‘I also want (the dog) to get a specific laugh based on language.’ So I mean he just picks out really hard things to do and then it’s supposed to look easy, kind of like Fred Astaire, but where he starts is always amazing to me.”

After a stellar career that has featured the above-mention films as well as era-defining movies such as “The Shining,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” “A Few Good Men,” “The Departed” and “The Bucket List,” Nicholson said he really doesn’t have anything left to prove. So he picks the roles he does take on very carefully.

“I’m kind of a guy that likes to prove things and all my life when I’ve said, ‘I’m so sick of (working),” and everyone always said, ‘Oh, God, man. You couldn’t not work.’ Well, I’m kind of proving them wrong. I read a lot of scripts and so I feel like I do a lot of movies and stuff, but they’re all the same. I like not working. I know that’s hideous, blasphemous, but I really do. I think I’ve started to infect others, young guys. I had a conversation with Leo (DiCaprio) and he said, ‘I love not working.’ I said, ‘See what I mean?’ I don’t really want to infect him.”

So, what does he do when he’s not working?

“It’s a press conference and I like to give great answers, but I just like getting up sometimes between eleven and one,” he said hesitantly. “It’s not movie hours unless you’re doing night movies. I play golf. I have a couple of kids in college and so I’m on the phone a lot. I see my pals. Various women around. Talk to my congressman. Go to funerals.”

What about rooting for his beloved Los Angeles Lakers?

“That’s more of a job,” Nicholson said with that patented bad-boy grin. “I have to be there (at courtside).”

But what is it that he still loves about making movies?

“Travel. Beautiful women. Excellent compatriots. Drinking pals. It’s very exciting. It’s just an exciting business,” Nicholson said. “We’ve all been doing it a while. I think we all get nervous, we get wild and that should be all I say, I think.”

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of ’Shutter Island’ pays homage to Gothics

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Dennis Lehane has learned how to describe “Shutter Island” to a potential reader or viewer without giving away any of the dark plot twists or clues to the shocking surprise ending of his chilling Gothic thriller.

“I’ve had a lot of practice, so don’t worry about it,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing you would say is, ‘You’ll never see where it’s going.’ The word you hear most about this book is, ‘It’s a trip.’ I mean, it’s taking you on a pretty wild ride.”

Published in 2003, the Boston-born writer’s eighth novel, set in the year 1954, tells the story of two U.S. marshals investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from a federal hospital for the criminally insane on one of the remotest of the Boston Harbor Islands.

The book became a movie in 2010 under the direction of Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the investigators and Ben Kingsley as the institution’s inscrutable head psychiatrist. Now it’s out on DVD, and Lehane was doing a round of interviews in the hope of enticing a few more thriller lovers into taking a “trip” behind the walls of Ashecliffe Hospital, where nothing is remotely what it seems.

Rachel Solando, who murdered her children, is loose somewhere on the island, having inexplicably escaped a locked, guarded cell under constant surveillance. A killer hurricane is rolling down on the island as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) search for the missing inmate, and Daniels is beginning to suspect the existence of radical experimentations and surgeries being performed on the patients.

Or is something wholly other going on?

Lehane is the author of two other novels turned into well respected films: “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively.

Dennis Lehane

Unlike those stories, which took a lot of time to plan out, Lehane said the complete narrative of “Shutter Island” came to him in one night — in his sleep.

“Yeah, one night I had this bizarre, almost waking dream,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. I got up, scribbled everything down on a piece of paper, woke up the next morning, and there it was.”

He wishes every book could come to him so easily.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said. “That would be awesome actually.”

Lehane was on the set during the making of the film, and actor Ruffalo got to know him a bit.

“Yeah, I went out and had drinks with him,” Ruffalo recalled in a separate interview conducted Sunday in Beverly Hills. “I really liked him. He’s a great guy. A great writer, really down to earth. But, you know, using that book for the movie was fantastic for me because that did 90 percent of my work.”

And Ruffalo also praised Scorsese for skillfully translating Lehane’s complex and atmospheric novel to the screen.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, from left, in "Shutter Island."

“Scorsese, he shows you movies to inspire you,” Ruffalo said. “So we were steeped in ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Laura’ and all of these films that were from that noir sort of period, which is Gothic. And so, basically I was trying to really do as best an impersonation as I could of Robert Mitchum. And so I think that translates really well. It’s hard to do that, especially with a book with that many turns and twists in it. It’s really hard. And so hats off to Marty again for that.”

Lehane agreed that his vision had been accurately captured on film by the director, who, surprisingly, was working from a screen adaptation written by Laeta Kalogridis.

(Lehane said he never attempts to turn his books into screenplays because “it’s just like operating on your own child if you’re a doctor. I don’t see how anybody can do it.”)

“I loved it,” the writer said. “I mean (Scorsese) got it. He got what I was playing with and what I was trying for. And he did cinematically what I did in the language of the novel. The language of the novel is heightened in such a way that you should be aware very early that you’re reading a novel, that this is an homage to Gothics, that this is basically a book about being a book in a lot of ways.

“And he made a movie about being a movie. The movie is in your face as a movie right from the beginning. You should realize very quickly you’re not in the real world, you’re in Oz.”

The bleak dead of winter is a time that tries movie lovers’ souls. It’s when over-hyped holiday blockbusters and Oscar-buzzed prestige pictures have settled in for their long winter runs. It’s when studios look to dump obvious turkeys, formulaic programmers and hard-to-market odd-goods on the cabin-fevered masses. It’s the traditional in-between season when studios are preoccupied with awards and seem to give short shrift to new releases.

But from now until the first inklings of spring, there are a indeed a handful of big-studio releases that promise a little heat to relieve the winter doldrums.

Here are a few “event pictures” that should feed our movie jones until April.

“Legion” (Friday). God is angry, and the Apocalypse is nigh in this thriller that sports Paul Bettany as a studly Archangel Michael, who appears at a greasy-spoon diner to say grace over a pregnant waitress whose baby is the only hope for mankind. First-time director Scott Stewart, former head of a cutting-edge FX company, promises awesomely celestial special-effects battles as legions of macho angels descend on Earth.

“The Wolfman” (Feb. 12). Universal Pictures mines its vaults to resurrect one of its most hair-raising monsters in this butched-up, retro retelling of the popular old folk tale. Benicio Del Toro plays a nobleman who returns to his ancestral land when he learns that his brother and many villagers have been fatally mauled by a nightmarish beast. With a classy cast that includes Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt and a reliable director in Joe Johnston (“Hidalgo”), this could be frightfully good.

“Shutter Island” (Feb. 19). Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite in this thriller about a psychotic killer (Emily Mortimer) who disappears from a fortress-like mental institution and the U.S. Marshals (DeCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who come to track her down. Skeptics wonder why this big-name, big-budget project was relegated to the off-season, but fans of Scorsese shudder with anticipation at what the master will do with this tantalizing formula.

“Alice in Wonderland” (March 5). Who better to translate the crazy-weird visions of Lewis Carroll to the big screen than Tim Burton? The eccentric, hyper-artistic Burton imagines a 19-year old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returning to the magical world of her childhood storybook adventure and trying to put an end to the Red Queen’s reign of terror.

“Green Zone” (March 12). Matt Damon reunites with his “Bourne Supremacy” and “Bourne Ultimatum” director Paul Greengrass in this political pot-boiler about a U.S. Army officer who goes rogue in search of weapons of mass destruction in an unstable Middle Eastern region. These two certainly know how to pump up the action and maintain stomach-knotting tension.

These high-profile releases should deliver the goods. And for dedicated movie lovers willing to search the far corners of the multiplex, a few limited-release movies (such as “Frozen,” “The Yellow Handkerchief,” “Greenberg,” “The Runaways” or “I Love You Phillip Morris”) might provide some off-Hollywood winter solace.

– Dennis King