Interview

Hair/Makeup

Meet William Corso, Oscar Winning Makeup Artist Behind The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

With a formidable resume that includes five Steven Spielberg movies (from Amistad to Munich), eight Jim Carrey movies (from The Majestic to this Friday’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), and dozens of film and television projects in between (from Jackass: The Movie to Grey Gardens), makeup artist William Corso has become one of the most esteemed—and in-demand—behind-the-scenes guys in Hollywood.

In Wonderstone,...

By  |  March 13, 2013

Interview

Actor

Eleven Very Short Answers From James Franco About his Upcoming Film, Bukowski

James Franco’s appearance at Sundance this year was a stunner. But then again the risk-taking renaissance man is accustomed to surprising his critics. At Sundance’s New Frontiers the actor/director/producer/visiting professor/writer presented his collaborative effort with gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. The graphic sixty-minute documentary Interior. Leather Bar, a hard core riff on the gay leather bar scene, and two other films, Kink and Lovelacein which he plays Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner in the latter,...

By  |  March 12, 2013

Interview

Director

Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Jenks Makes Compassion Cool on MTV’s World of Jenks

Andrew Jenks wasn’t the first free spirit to drop out of college. He also wasn’t the first to do it despite having two successful parents, one of whom currently serves as the Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations. But he was certainly the first to go from the halls of NYU straight into an assisted living facility, where the documentary he shot, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, was quickly acquired by HBO, making him a rising star of the film world at the tender age of 19...

By  |  March 11, 2013
Trailer Talk: We Evaluate What’s out and What’s Coming out

Trying to decide what film to see today? Well, we’ll evaluate your options based solely on the three minutes we’ve been given via their trailers.

We’ve already covered Oz the Great and Powerful with our interview with Gary Jones, costume designer extraordinaire, but here's a look at some other films in the theaters this weekend you can choose from (admittedly the first will be a touch hard to find).

Beyond the Hills

Is it reductive to call a movie Romanian-lesbian-Brokeback Mountain?...

By  |  March 10, 2013
Talking Points: Eleven Intriguing Items From the World of Film From the Past Week

Guess who’s having a better spring than you? Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bob Balaban and Jean Dujardin, who have all just begun shooting George Clooney’s latest directing effort, The Monuments Men. Based on a true story, it follows group of military operatives who go behind enemy lines to retrieve stolen art from the Nazis during World War II. With principal shooting to take place in Berlin, you can imagine the shooting scheduling won’t be so punishing that the group can’t spend weekends off at Clooney’s famous Lake Como castle...

By  |  March 9, 2013

Interview

Costume Designer

Meet Gary Jones, the Man Behind the Fantastical Fashion of Oz The Great and Powerful

The clothes make the man, as they say. And in Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead) and his team of designers found themselves with not just a man to make but a few fashionable witches, a carnival crew, some Munchkins and indeed a whole army of Winkie guards.

With Oscar® winner Robert Stromberg (Avatar,...

By  |  March 8, 2013
We’re Fans of Fandor: New Streaming Platform Supports Creative Communities

Streaming content services like Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, and AmazonInstant have made the impossible plausible: we can now stream movies on our phones, iPads, and portable gaming devices in the most unlikely of places. Whether it’s watching The Wizard of Oz in the backseat of a taxi or Avatar on a leisurely gondola ride through the idyllic Venice canals—so long as you have a working Internet connection, the limitations of where, when, and how you view a movie is definitely a woe of the past...

By  |  March 7, 2013
Hispanic Moviegoers a Big Part of Hollywood’s Future

When population numbers are taken into account, Hispanics make up the heaviest percentage of moviegoers today. They represent 18 percent of the movie-going population but account for a solid 25 percent of all movies seen in theaters, and their attendance numbers are only going up. Hollywood, of course, has taken note.

“The overall trend is that Hispanics remain the best movie-going customers,” said Ray Ydoyaga, an executive at Nielsen, who helped put together the analytics company’s annual 2012 American Moviegoing report. ...

By  |  March 6, 2013

Interview

Actor

Sony Pictures Classics Gives Woody Allen’s Latest To Rome With Love The Blu-ray Treatment

There is a scene in Robert B. Weide’s 2012 American Masters special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, in which Allen, sitting casually atop a bed in an unassuming guestroom that betrays the elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains it, takes out an array of paper scraps encompassing a career’s worth of film plots. Or, for the most prolific force in cinema, releasing a movie a year for the past four decades, maybe just half a career...

By  |  March 5, 2013

Interview

Sound Designer

Hearing Is Believing: MPAA’s TED2013 Master Class With Music Supervisor Randall Poster

Everyone knows ‘seeing is believing,’ but master music supervisor Randall Poster will tell you: what you hear in motion pictures is just as tantamount to the images whirring across the screen. Poster is one of the most sought after music supervisors in Hollywood (a sampling from his impressive oeuvre: Rushmore!, Velvet Goldmine, Boardwalk Empire) —and he brought his prowess to TED2013, where he hosted the dynamic MPAA sponsored-Master Class,...

By  |  March 4, 2013

Interview

Actor

The Last Exorcism Part II’s Ashley Bell Shares Another Dance With the Devil

When we last saw Nell Sweetzer she was in the middle of the woods at the top of an altar giving virgin birth to a demon baby while the reverend who tried to save her soul suffered a fate that would make William Peter Blatty proud. If it made fans cringe, well, that was the point. Nearly three years and $68 million in box-office receipts later (against a budget of $1.8mm), The Last Exorcism has an awkwardly named but hotly anticipated sequel,...

By  |  March 1, 2013

Interview

Production Designer

From Return of the Jedi to Jack the Giant Slayer, the Worlds of Production Designer Gavin Bocquet

Starting out as a draftsman on Return of the Jedi (1983), Gavin Bocquet’s career as a production designer coincided with the development and implementation of CGI technology into all spheres of the movie business. Bocquet was at the forefront of that revolution, working regularly for George Lucas, honing his craft on the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Adventures and the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. His career reflects the developing integration between practical production design and ever evolving CGI technology...

By  |  February 28, 2013

Interview

Composer

The Polymath: Chatting With John Ottman, Composer and Editor of Jack the Giant Slayer

Perhaps one of the most famous film sequences of the past thirty years was edited together in a living room using a splicer. By somebody who is also a composer. A composer who has gone on to score a slew of films (while somewhat begrudgingly continuing to edit, too), making him one of the few people in the film industry who is a professional at both of these demanding positions. John Ottman, the composer and editor on Warner Bros...

By  |  February 27, 2013

Interview

Actor, Producer, Screenwriter

Lovesick: Comedian Natasha Leggero Knocks Our Socks Off in the Ben Stiller Produced Burning Love

Sixteen lovelorn bachelorettes bunk up in an L.A. mansion where they’ll compete for the heart of hunky firefighter Mark Orlando and, naturally, embark on some epic makeout sessions and drunken catfights along the way. If it sounds like the “plot” to just about every reality show out there, that’s because it is. But Burning Love, an instant cult classic that started as a Yahoo web series and began its TV run on E! Monday night,...

By  |  February 27, 2013
A Look at how our Oscars Social App Fared Predicting the Oscars (Spoiler Alert: Very Well!)

Tom O'Neil, of GoldDerby.com, got 91% of his predictions correct, according to this round-up by Slate on the most accurate (and inaccurate) Oscar prognosticators. We're not offended we weren't on their list (sniff), but we did want to settle our own accounts and see just how we fared with our social media and critic tracking app, powered by some very big brains (namely our quant, Edward Cook) over at Brandwatch.

Just a recap on how our app works–our Social Oscars DataViz (data visualization) surveyed social media sites like Twitter,...

By  |  February 26, 2013
Qualcomm and Paramount Release New Star Trek App for Smartphones

Star Trek fans who caught the Super Bowl were likely thrilled by the debut of Paramount’s new innovative smartphone app for the highly-anticipated Star Trek Into Darkness, which opens May 17th, with advance screenings in IMAX for the app's users on May 15th. It’s the official spot for Trekkie fans to gain exclusive access to content, info, and giveaways related to J.J. Abrams’ upcoming action thriller.

Offering a high-tech app alongside any franchise in the sci-fi realm is a no-brainer,...

By  |  February 25, 2013

Interview

Actor, Director

Can We Predict The Oscars? Social Media Reveals Who The Public’s Rooting For

They are known as quants (short for ‘quantitative analyst), and their undisputed supreme leader, at least in the public’s perception, is Nate Silver. You’ve heard of Silver, the man who went from relative obscurity before the 2008 presidential election to a household name thanks to his pinpoint accuracy predicting the last two presidential elections.

Quants are not just employed to help us figure out who the next Commander in Chief is going to be, of course. There are other races that capture the public’s interest and imagination—namely,...

By  |  February 23, 2013

Interview

Screenwriter

Meet Lucy Alibar, Oscar Nominated Screenwriter of Beasts of the Southern Wild

It’s not often you hear an Oscar nominee recount her road to recognition as a rapid one, but that’s just how Lucy Alibar describes it. Turning her one-act play Juicy and Delicious into Beasts of the Southern Wild with co-writer and director Benh Zeitlin, the first-time screenwriter won her film a spot in more than twenty film festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Deauville, and Cannes—the last of which she paid her own way to by selling everything from chocolate peanut butter cookies and homemade gelato to postcards and hugs on Indiegogo.com...

By  |  February 23, 2013

Interview

Actor, Director

Celebrate The Other Oscar Nominees – You Know, The Ones Ryan Seacrest Likely Won’t Interview

Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director–these might be the most anticipated categories of the Oscars, but this year, let's celebrate the other half.  After all, the year's best films wouldn't stand a chance without the genius nominees in less-publicized realms like Production Design, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyle, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects.

Here at The Credits, we love all parts of film, which is why we created this infographic to celebrate the many industry icons who are making big waves (but perhaps not big red carpet debuts) at this year's 85th Academy Awards...

By  |  February 22, 2013

Interview

Producer

An Evening With George Stevens Jr., Celebrating his Honorary Oscar and his Remarkable Career

George Stevens Jr. has lived and breathed films since he was a child. His father, the legendary director George Stevens, instilled in Steven fils a love of story. It was a teenage George Jr. who paced around his father’s bed one night, excitedly telling him the truncated story of a book he had read that his father should turn into a movie. That movie turned out to be the legendary western Shane (1953),...

By  |  February 21, 2013