By The Book: Literary Icons Flock to Hollywood
Los Angeles, arguably best known for its flagship status as a gateway to Hollywood and the film industry at large, has developed uncountable stereotypes for the culture that populates its traffic-clogged arteries. And while there might be too many LAisms to count (for starters: epic taco trucks, grass-scented juice bars, fuzzed-up band members sauntering down Sunset Boulevard, etc. etc.) those reserved for the film industry are particularly iconic misnomers. Among them, my favorite: the questioningly ambitious, utterly disgruntled screenwriter—covered (of course) in stray streaks of pen ink,...
Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines
Ryan Gosling may have recently suggested that he is taking a break from acting, but fans can still find solace in this weekend’s release of The Place Beyond the Pines, a triptych that reunites him with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance.
The cops and robbers caper—costarring Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta—traces the ramifications caused when Gosling’s character, a drifter-cum-motorcycle stunt driver, finds out he has a child with Mendes...
Getting Gleefully Lost in The Shining Documentary Room 237
“In all things mysterious, never explain.” – Stanley Kubrick, quoting H.P. Lovecraft in an interview with John Hofsess of the International Herald Tribune, October 26, 1980.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was released in the summer of 1980 to tepid reviews but, lucky for him, boffo box office. As with all of Kubrick’s movies since 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, the critics were confounded by what they had seen. Kubrick’s movies post 2001 did not conform to Hollywood narrative conventions,...
Week in Review: Eight Talking Points from the World of Film & TV From This Past Week
Surely you’ve got more to talk about than Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon…
Back to school: The Weinstein Company has officially confirmed they will release Salinger, a feature length documentary on the Catcher in the Rye author, on September 6th. The film was directed by Shane Salerno (he also co-wrote a companion biography with journalist David Shields, to be published by Simon & Schuster, who is a co-producer on the film).
Savages writer-producer Salerno,...
Veronica Mars Takes Hollywood By Storm: We Imagine The Next Back-From-The-Dead Kickstarter Projects
The wildly successful campaign for the Veronica Mars movie brought in $4 million in mere days, making Kickstarter a viable interest-vetting platform for Hollywood. As rumors continue to volley about the potential resurrection of long-forgotten or ended-too-soon series, sequels, and one-offs, industry insiders have been prophetically asking: does the digital model of supply-and-demand mark a new era of movie-making as we know it?
How'd it happen? Kristen Bell and director Rob Thomas issued a heartfelt call to their fans to fund bringing the short-lived UPN cult television franchise back to life once more—this time,...
The Art of Adaptation: Talking With Karen Croner, Admission Screenwriter
Best known for her adaptations of Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing, screenwriter Karen Croner is, above all things, a writer’s screenwriter if there is such a thing. Croner’s first stab at comedy hits the screen this weekend in the ever-capable hands of Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in Admission. Focused largely on the nervous breakdown suffered by a Princeton University admissions officer played by Fey,...
From Game of Thrones to 42: An Epic Spring Awaits
At 7:02 a.m. EDT this morning, the sun crossed directly over the Earth’s equator in a moment called the vernal equinox (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is)—when both day and night are, more or less, equal. Spring lasts until the summer solstice, which comes on Friday, June 21st. Although this might sound like a strange intro to a Weather.com report, we’re merely alerting you to this specific stretch of time because, between today and June 21st, there is an overwhelming amount of film and television to look forward to...
From Making Hats to 3D Cats: Self-Taught Animator TJ Nabors Helps Create The Croods
TJ Nabors has taken your typical road to becoming a top animator in Hollywood—she started out designing hats. She was in theater at the University of Texas, and was focusing on textiles and costume, when she took a particular shine to the creation of hats. "There was a distilled and theatrical power to transform the wearer," she says. The power to transform one thing into another would become a theme in Nabors professional life, as she transformed herself into a self-taught animator,...
511 Days of Total Darkness: The Incredible True Story Behind the Documentary No Place on Earth
In 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NYPD officer and caving enthusiast Chris Nicola set out to Western Ukraine to explore Verteba and the Priest’s Grotto Cave, one of the longest cave systems in the world. Inside the caves—dark, damp, and stifling, wholly inhospitable to human life—he found the unthinkable: buttons, shoes, a house key, artifacts of human habitation decidedly recent. Upon returning from the caves, his attempts at discovering the origins of these items led him to only the offhand comment from a local villager that,...
Week in Review: Seven Talking Points From the World of Film From the Past Week
Veronica who? While it’s entirely possibly you’ve never heard of the series Veronica Mars, which aired on the CW from 2004-2007, a Kickstarter campaign launched on Wednesday by the show’s star Kristin Bell, and its director Rob Thomas, raised $2 million in ten hours to resurrect the show in film form. Read more here.
There’s little doubt they’ll struggle to raise their goal of $3.2 million by the April 11 deadline, but the concept of crowd-sourcing as a legit means of movie development has shaken up Hollywood,...
The Smithsonian’s Warner Bros. Theater Celebrates Women’s History Month With Bette Davis Tribute
Right next to the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. is the Artifact Wall. It showcases 20 feet of Hollywood memorabilia from the Warner Bros. Archive and switches up costumes every so often. Called “You Must Remember This,” the display currently features Bette Davis’ famous butterfly cape from Now, Voyager, along with Harry Potter’s Hogwarts uniform and Jack Warner’s personal address book (which includes the likes of Salvador Dali,...
Composer John Debney Answers The Call, and Goes Really Dark
Incorporating ‘found sound’ into his score for director Brad Anderson’s The Call, Oscar nominated composer John Debney wasn’t afraid to get weird. From slapping the tops of pianos to creating a bizarre engine revving sound for the film’s deranged lunatic, he took risks. The result is a truly unsettling soundscape–from the same man who wrote the score for Elf, no less.
The Call,...
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,...
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 Lovelace, in which he plays Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner in the latter,...
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...
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,...
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...
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. ...
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...
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,...
