The Hot Blog Archive for November, 2007

Sweenie & The Plasma Factory

There is a freaky embargo on Sweeney Todd, given that it had a junket, unofficial reviews are all over the place, it was reviewed by Harry Knowles a month ago, and I (and most of my colleagues) already know what dozens of people think of the film

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Lunch With… Marion Cotillard

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The star of La Vie en Rose talks about making the film.

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Lunch With… Todd Haynes & Christine Vachon

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How did I’m Not There come together? Find out from Todd Haynes and his producer (and producer to much of the indie community), the legendary Christine Vachon.
The conversation…

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A New WGA Direction

While hopes for a brighter week in reality next week in the negotiations is being held out and Bryan Lourd kept breaking the press blackout that existed until tonight, WGA started laying out the next round of strategy for the strike.
“The Showrunners Strike,” as the first month has been called, is pretty much over. The 10 or so showrunners who crossed lines are now done with whatever was pending. Television is as dead as it’s going to get until the strike ends.
The sense inside the union is that hopes for a quick end to the strike are now over. The very real threat that this strike will last until SAG negotiations are done is quickly becoming a consensus opinion. Underlying all of this is the question of when the other side wants the strike to end, because right now, there is little being offered.
The next phase is trying to have a direct effect on the movies that are currently in production… especially showrunner JJ Abrams’ feature, Star Trek. (Apparently, Eastwood’s The Changeling, another prime target, is hidden well enough behind studio walls that the effort to disrupt the show has been set aside.)
There are around 100 scripts that are currently considered within range of being produced at the studios in the near future. Projects do continue to fall through because “the scripts are not ready,” but whether actors are actually supporting the strike of being self-preserving, using the strike as cover for dropping out of iffy projects, is unclear.
Meanwhile, The Committee of Hyphenates, the 1400 or so writer-directors who are in both WGA and DGA, are starting a serious push to get DGA to join in real support of the WGA, as SAG has done.
And as far as the press goes, there is growing sentiment amongst the ranks that the media is being effectively played by – get this – being too encouraging, therefore crushing morale when things like this week it’s-gonna-happen talk or the notion that there would be real Teamster support turns out to be a dead end of nothing new. Guild members are being told not to trust any media gossip… even/especially if it makes them happy.
Personally, my favorite new adjustment by WGA is offering a set dollar amount for how little the union demands would cost the industry… just over $50 million a year. If the AMPTP had a sense of humor – a nasty one – they would just offer the union the $150 million over the three year contract as a flat rate addition to the current contract to change nothing. And if WGA had a sense of humor, they would offer to take the offer of an annual flat $250 per episode for free hourlong show streaming by making it for every 100,000 downloads… which is still only a quarter of a cent per view, which is about what the rate is for network reruns.
Every day I see the whole thing as more like another more familiar battleground… red vs blue… Democrat vs Republican. The WGA seems to be endlessly interested in talking about being righteous. And the money men just keep being about money… maybe it’s not moral high ground, but it is absolutely consistent and quantifiable. The problem is, in a war of public opinion, the Republicans won, against all logic, the last two presidential races.
Michael Moore is doing a quick stop in L.A. soon… maybe he can shake things up.

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Pointing North – The Golden Compass Review

How much do I really have to say about The Golden Compass?
I liked it.
I don

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The Theater Ate My Show!

Ever hear someone talk about a theater actor

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Lunch With… The Actors Of The Diving Bell & The Butterfly

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Meet Mathieu Amalric, Marie-Jos

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Lunch With… The Diving Bell & The Butterfly Production Team

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Meet screenwriter Ronald Harwood, director Julian Schnabel, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and producer Jon Kilik, the team behind the scenes of The Diving Bell & The Butterfly as they discuss the evolution of the project, how it was shot, and how things fell together.
Here’s the 30 minute conversation…
(Coming tomorrow… those who are on camera in the film.)

One Strike Down

Not the one most of you were hoping for…
But at the end of Young Frankenstein tonight, Roger Bart announced that the Broadway strike was over.
Ironically, tonight’s performance had the worst stagehand glitches of any professsional show I have ever seen. However, on the east coast, on stage, things should be back to normal by Friday night.

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No Variety For Young Men

Charlie Koones’ exit from Variety is only surprising in that he lost the battle for the soul of Reed Business. It is more than a little ironic that the new guy is being sold as a web pro, when Charlie Koones has been pushing hard for the web-based future of Variety and associated properties.
My one daliance with Variety was over one such venture. The trouble, I found, was insane expectations for what the web could mean to the paper. It wasn’t enough that Variety be the first, aside from the WSJ (and now, increasingly, the NYT) to build a great web success off of a print business. They were envisioning a web success of significantly bigger levels than any Reed brand had ever achieved, online or off.
Charlie was fighting, according to insiders, Peter Bart’s old-schoolism a lot in the last year, building a web presence over Bart’s not-dead body. It is possible that “the new guy” will move Variety forward in an way that suits the product.
Charlie Koones, by the view of everyone I have ever known and respected, a major builder. And Old Media is still, for the most part, crawling. If Reed was not willing to push it, it is very easy to see why Koones wanted to head into them thar hills while the gold rush is still on. And while it’s not what it was, make no mistake… It’s still on.

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An Open Letter To Roger Ebert from Jeff Lipsky

Dear David,
As I sit at my desk, dressed to the eight-and-a-halves in anticipation of this evening

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I've Got Spirit, How About You?

A rather odd list from the Indie Spirit crew this year. No one can really accuse the group of pandering to celebrity with its version of Best Picture

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Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson

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By Request: The No Country For Old Men Thread

This is a SPOILER comment thread for No Country… it has been asked for, discussed, avoided, and fought about…
If you don’t want the ending SPOILED, stay out of the thread. You are warned!!1

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Paul Dano, Off-Broadway

Things We Want is the new show from Jonathan Marc Sherman, author of more than a half dozen off-Broadway shows. Having not seen any of the other work, it is hard to put this work into context, other than to say that you can feel from the play that it is a direct descendent of David Rabe

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon