CinemaCon Showcase: Paramount Pictures Upcoming Releases
Today at CinemaCon, among panels on the movie theater's embrace of the digital world and the future of theater architecture, Paramount Pictures is putting together an exclusive presentation highlighting their slate of summer films and more. We've put together a little trailer rundown of three upcoming Paramount releases for your perusal.
Pain & Gain
Release date: April 26
Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain is an action-comedy-crime film,...
“Playing the Palace”: A History Of Motion Picture Palaces
Today’s motion picture exhibitors treat the movie going public to the most technologically advanced presentation in the history of the medium. We take a look back to see why this has always been so.
In 1914, Mitchell Mark and his brother Moe, opened what many consider the first movie palace, the one-million dollar Mark Strand Theater in Times Square, New York City. Mitchell Mark hired Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel to manage the theater and bring in the crowds...
So Long, Sold Out Shows: The Best Movie Ticket Apps For Smartphones
With so many blockbusters slated for upcoming releases, 2013 is pretty much guaranteed to be a banner year for movie theaters. Don’t get us wrong – content everywhere is great, but there’s no denying that G.I. Joe: Retaliation, The Great Gatsby, and Iron Man 3 are simply too epic to be viewed upon a tablet screen for the first time. And have you seen the trailer for Pacific Rim?...
Scoring Giants: Mark Isham on Composing the Jackie Robinson Biopic 42
Let’s take a quick glance at some of the giants composer Mark Isham has worked with; Robert Redford, Brian De Palma, Jodi Foster, Robert Altman, and Sydney Lumet. In the music realm, his list includes; Bruce Springsteen, Willie Neslon, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, and Van Morrison. Yet there is one legend Isham has worked for (in a very different sense) that loomed even larger when he joined director Brian Helgeland’s team to take on Warner Bros.’ 42;...
Veep‘s new VIP: Veteran Actress Mimi Kennedy Takes us Behind-the-Scenes of HBO’s Comedy
Mimi Kennedy pops up on the screen in the most unexpected places, but as an actor, writer and political activist that should be no surprise. She recently played the formidable madam in a house of ill repute in ABC's Scandal, Jason Segel’s tough talking mother on the big screen in The Five-Year Engagement and the soigneé mother-in-law-to-be in Woody Allen’s all-star cast of Midnight in Paris. Known early on for her TV role as Dharma’s hippie mother in Dharma &...
Company Man: A Conversation with The Company You Keep Author Neil Gordon
“During the war in Vietnam, you were either for Jane Fonda or you were for John Wayne,” says Neil Gordon. The author and professor doesn’t remember where he first heard this maxim, but it perfectly sums up his feelings about one of the most tumultuous eras in our country’s history. Though he’s firmly on Team Fonda, Gordon’s 2003 novel The Company You Keep — and the big-screen political thriller it inspired — doesn’t take sides, opting instead to show what can happen to a well-intentioned movement when good ideas (end an unjust war) and bad tactics (domestic terrorism) collide...
The Midas Touch: From Mad Men and Breaking Bad to Copper, Christina Wayne’s on a Roll
You will not meet a lot of TV executives who were once writers and directors themselves. This might go some way in explaining how Christina Wayne, now the president of Cineflix Studios, has had such a keen eye when it comes to selecting incredible (and oft-overlooked) scripts and getting them made. Wayne’s credits include not one but two game-changing shows, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, poster children for the current golden age of television we’re all living in...
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle Puts us in a Trance
Chances are you’ve seen the trailer to this weekend’s Trance, and while it may be an incredibly intense three minutes, you’re likely left with several questions. Fear not, many of them might never get answered. But that’s okay, according to the film’s director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle. Trance tracks what is a largely internalized journey taken on by an art auctioneer-turned art thief (James McAvoy) forced to see a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to help him recall where he’s stashed his latest haul...
House of Sound: Composer Jeff Beal Talks David Fincher, Scoring Netflix’s Breakout Hit, and Jazz
When composer Jeff Beal heard that director David Fincher was involved in an intriguing television project with Netflix, he wanted in. That project was House of Cards, an original series starring Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip Frank Underwood, a vengeful political animal with scores to settle. Fincher asked Beal to submit some musical sketches, and what Beal created ended up becoming the basis for the show’s theme, and Beal himself became the show’s composer,...
The Sky’s the Limit: Cinematography’s Technological Revolution
Just as smart phones and tablets are changing the way we experience daily life, other technologies are dramatically shifting the cinematic landscape. Directors today can harness these tools in order to express their artistic vision on the screen as never before. We spoke with two of the most significant players in this field in order to find out what’s possible now, and what we can expect to see in the future.
3D moves beyond ‘next big thing’
In 2009,...
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,...
Are you a Joffrey, a Cersei, or a Jon Snow? Take our Game of Thrones Personality Quiz
Season three of Game of Thrones is finally, mercifully here. Of the many, many reasons to love GOT (dragons, palace intrigue, a Tolkien-esque commitment to mythical cartography with a Cinemax After Dark commitment to carnal relations), we've found that it’s the fantastically divergent (and huge) cast of characters that makes it endlessly enjoyable, week after week. Millions of fans would no doubt agree.These characters! They touch upon every possible point along the spectrum of human decency and depravity,...
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...
The Art of Armory: Chatting With Game of Thrones Costume Designer Michele Clapton
Emmy and BAFTA award winning costume designer Michele Clapton has perhaps one of the most demanding, and most fun, jobs in TV—she clothes the wild, epic world of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Clapton, who works in Belfast, Ireland, heads up a team of weavers, embroiderers and armorers as she creates the costumes, most of them from scratch (they have their own loom in which they weave the fabric) for a show unrivaled in its scope,...
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,...
Triple Threat: Chatting With Film/TV/Video Game Composer Christopher Lennertz of NBC’s Revolution
Christopher Lennertz’s composing career has settled nicely across three mediums, making him one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood. His most recent film successes includes scoring a string star-studded comedies like Identity Thief, Think Like a Man and Horrible Bosses. For scoring TV, his credits include NBC’s new series Revolution, about a family struggling to reunite in a totally powerless American landscape–and we mean that literally,...
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...
