Contact Help Wanted

European Film Awards 2009: Prix Eurimages

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt (top); Kevin Bishop, Siobhan Hewlett, Marianne Faithfull in Irina Palm (middle); Nadja Uhl, Thekla Reuten in Twin Sisters (bottom)

The European Film Academy has announced that the winners of the 2009 Prix Eurimages, an award "acknowledging the decisive role of co-productions in the European film industry," will go to two producers "who have combined their efforts to develop and promote European cinema": Diana Elbaum and Jani Thiltges, heads of, respectively, Entre Chien et Loup in Belgium and Samsa Film in Luxemburg. Additionally, they have joined forces with Patrick Quinet, Sébastien Delloye and Claude Waringo to create Liaison Cinématographique, a production company based in Paris.
Under [...]

Sylvia Miles, John Barry at MIDNIGHT COWBOY Screening

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented the 1969 Best Picture winner Midnight Cowboy as part of the "Monday Nights with Oscar" series on Monday, March 16, at 7:30 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in New York City.
Pictured above (from left to right): composer John Barry, costume designer Ann Roth, cinematographer Adam Holender, Oscar-nominated actress Sylvia Miles, former United Artist executive and moderator David V. Picker and Oscar-winning producer Jerome Hellman.
Photos: Alex Oliveira / ©A.M.P.A.S.
Click on the images to enlarge them.

David V. Picker, Sylvia Miles

Sylvia Miles, Jerome Hellman, David V. Picker, Adam Holender, Ann Roth

 
Oscar 2009: Robert Pattinson, Sophia Loren, Kate Winslet, Reese Witherspoon
Oscar 2009: Jennifer Aniston, Penélope [...]

Irving Thalberg: Q&A with Mark Vieira

"The Wedding of the Painted Doll" number from the musical The Broadway Melody (1929), the first talkie to win a best picture Academy Award; Louis B. Mayer, director Reginald Barker, Irving Thalberg on the set of The Dixie Handicap (1925); Norma Shearer and Chester Morris in the popular pre-Code melodrama The Divorcee (1930).
 
HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M — Q&A with Mark Vieira (Introduction)
 
First of all, why did you decide to write a book on Irving Thalberg?
Ben-Hur, Flesh and the Devil, Tarzan the Ape Man, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, The Good Earth — most filmgoers today have heard of these Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [...]

HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M – Q&A with Mark Vieira

Author and photographer Mark A. Vieira (right), who’s been a friend for a number of years, has recently written no less than two books on Irving G. Thalberg, the young MGM mogul whose high-quality productions earned him both a reputation as Hollywood’s "Boy Wonder" and a special place in Oscar history as the name attached to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Memorial Award given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg even inspired a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, the unfinished The Last Tycoon.
Now, Mark’s two books may cover the same ground in terms of subject matter, but they’re radically different in terms of approach to same:
Hollywood [...]

Laurence Mark, Bill Condon to Produce Oscar Show

Producer Laurence Mark has been chosen to produce and writer/director Bill Condon to executive produce the telecast of the 81st Academy Awards, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis has announced. It will be Mark and Condon’s first involvement in the production of an Oscar show.
Mark and Condon have worked together before. In 2006, Mark produced and Condon wrote and directed Dreamgirls, which received eight Academy Award nominations (none for either Mark or Condon) and won two Oscars, including one for best supporting actress Jennifer Hudson.
Mark is currently in post-production on Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams (who also co-star in Doubt), and written [...]

William Castle and ROSEMARY’S BABY

David Parkinson’s "The Horror Icon Who Spooked Himself: William Castle and Rosemary’s Baby" at Films in Focus:
"After 15 years toiling in such B-movie series as The Whistler and The Crime Doctor, William Castle sold his soul to horror. In 1958 he hit upon the notion of insuring the lives of those brave enough to see his new chiller, Macabre, and recouped around $5 million on a $90,000 outlay. The same year’s House on Haunted Hill confirmed Castle as the "King of the Gimmicks," thanks to Emergo, a pioneering process that involved a 12-foot plastic skeleton whizzing across the auditorium on a wire.
…
"But Castle had tired of novelty by the time audiences were invited to brandish cardboard axes during Strait-Jacket (1964) [...]

Walter Mirisch Book Signing at the Egyptian Theater

At 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 19, producer Walter Mirisch, 86, will sign copies of his new book of memoirs, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The book signing will be followed by a screening of two Oscar-winning Mirisch productions: Billy Wilder’s mordant 1960 comedy The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and (gasp!) an excellent Fred MacMurray, and Norman Jewison’s well-intentioned but weak 1967 cop melodrama-cum-social commentary In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and best actor Oscar winner Rod Steiger.
Mirisch will introduce the double feature.
By the way, among Mirisch’s other productions or co-productions are Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949, he began modestly), Flight to [...]

ROSEMARY’S BABY at Robert Evans Salute

Producer William Castle, Mia Farrow, Robert Evans on the set of Rosemary’s Baby.
 
"An Academy Salute to Robert Evans" will feature a 40th anniversary screening of (a brand new print of) Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and an onstage "conversation" with all-powerful Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone (he of the Tom Cruise spat), film director Brett Ratner, Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash (formerly of Guns N’ Roses), and Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart — all "close friends" with producer and former Paramount head Robert Evans (right). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Evans "Salute" will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 22, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
According to legend, Evans was discovered by Norma Shearer, who thought [...]

Patrick Goldstein on New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye

Patrick Goldstein’s "Hollywood’s endangered entrepreneurs" in the Los Angeles Times:
"It’s hard to imagine New Line Cinema without Bob Shaye, its prickly paterfamilias. The company is being absorbed into Time Warner’s Warner Bros. film division, with Shaye and most of the employees being cast adrift. Long after he’d sold his company in 1993, Shaye continued to treat New Line as his personal mom-and-pop movie store.
"During the company’s Lord of the Rings heyday, Shaye would host a pre-Oscar party at his stylish home off Mulholland Drive. One night I found myself chatting with the New Line founder when one of his aides scurried over, eyes bright with big news. Shaye’s then boss, Time Warner chieftain Richard Parsons, had arrived. ‘Shall I bring [...]

Producers Guild of America Awards 2008

2007 Producers Guild of America’s Golden Laurel Awards
2007 PGA feature-film and long-form TV nominations: January 14, 2008. Television series nominations: November 15, 2007
2007 PGA winners: Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on February 2, 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

The two biggest surprises among the PGA’s 2008 Golden Laurels was the presence of Julian Schnabel’s French-language The Diving Bell and the Butterfly among the feature film nominees and the absence of Charles Ferguson’s widely praised Iraq War documentary No End in Sight in the documentary shortlist. Also missing from the PGA feature-film list are Into the Wild, and Golden Globe winners Sweeney Todd and Atonement. The eventual winner was No Country for Old Men (above).

 
FEATURE FILMS
The Darryl F. Zanuck [...]

Gloria Swanson in THE TRESPASSER: Academy Screening

Mother love and melodrama in The Trespasser: Purnell Pratt, Gloria Swanson, and Robert Ames, who would die two years after this film was made.
 
Academy film scholar Cari Beauchamp will talk about the convoluted personal and professional relationship between actress Gloria Swanson and producer Joseph P. Kennedy (right) in a program featuring highlights from her upcoming book, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, on Thursday, November 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
A rare screening of Edmund Goulding’s The Trespasser, a 1929 melodrama produced by Kennedy (uncredited) and starring Swanson in her first talkie, will follow Beauchamp’s presentation. Admission is free.
According to the Academy’s press release, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents "offers [...]

Inceville: Film Pioneer Thomas Ince’s Studios

Libby Motika in The Palisadian-Post:
"Once there was a city spread out idyllically on the slopes of Santa Ynez Canyon [between Santa Monica and Malibu] with sweeping views of the sea. The streets were lined with houses of many types, from humble cottages to mansions, and the buildings were fashioned after the architecture of many lands.
"But as ephemeral as Atlantis, this city appeared and then disappeared in 12 short years. [Unless I missed something, the article goes on to say that Inceville was destroyed in 1922. That would make 10 short years.]
"This was the creation of American silent film producer/director Thomas Ince, who in 1912 built a city of motion picture sets on several thousand acres of land in and around [...]

June Mathis: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger

© Allan Ellenberger Collection
 
June Mathis. The name means nothing to most of today’s filmgoers and to the vast majority of self-proclaimed film historians. Yet, nearly nine decades ago June Mathis was, next to Mary Pickford, one of the two most powerful women in Hollywood. “She fairly lives and breathes motion pictures,” reported the New York Morning Telegraph in February 1924, “and if ever a woman had her hand on the pulse of the film industry, it is this indefatigable worker, who not only knows what she wants, but knows how to get it.”
Author Allan Ellenberger, who has written on silent film stars Ramon Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, has agreed to answer a few questions about June Mathis, whose life [...]

IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS Producer John Sinno’s Open Letter to AMPAS

Below is an open letter (dated March 2) that producer John Sinno sent to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sinno co-produced James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, which earlier this year was nominated for an Academy Award in the best documentary feature category.
Note: This year’s best documentary feature Oscar winner was Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming.
 
John Sinno
Typecast Films
3131 Western Ave Suite 514
Seattle, Washington, USA
March 2, 2007

An open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
I had the great fortune of attending the 79th Academy Awards following my nomination as producer for a film in the Best Documentary Feature category. At the Awards ceremony, most categories featured an introduction that glorified the [...]

ALIENS Invade Hollywood

Aliens screening in Hollywood, with producer Gale Ann Hurd hosting a discussion panel. Aliens (1986) was directed by James Cameron. Aliens starred Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn. Aliens is a sequel to Alien, a 1979 horror film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Sigourney Weaver and John Hurt.

Monty Berman

Brief Obit: British cinematographer, director, and film and television producer Monty Berman, whose television series The Saint became an international hit, died in London last June 14. His obit was reported in The [London] Independent on Aug. 4.
Born in London in 1912, at the age of 17 Berman became a camera assistant at Twickenham Studios. In 1935, he developed into a full-fledged cinematographer, working with Michael Powell on the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Some Day.
Berman’s career was curtailed by World War II, during which he served with the Eighth Army Film Unit. Once hostilities were over, Berman worked as a camera operator in films such as Hue and Cry (1946), Daughter of Darkness (1947), and The End of the River [...]

Ismail Merchant

Mumbai-born producer and sometime director Ismail Merchant died today in London. He was 68.
Merchant and his partner, American director James Ivory, were responsible for several classy productions made in the last four decades, including Heat and Dust (1981), starring Julie Christie as a woman traveling through India; the drama Quartet (1981), with Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, and Isabelle Adjani; and the solid dramatic comedy Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Additionally, Merchant produced a trio of Academy Award-nominated pictures: A Room with a View (1986) with Helena Bonham-Carter; Howard’s End (1992), which won Emma Thompson a Best Actress Oscar; and The Remains of the Day (1993) starring Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. German-born, English-raised [...]

Recently Posted

• European Film Awards 2009: Rules & Relevance
• European Film Awards 2009: Nominations
• European Film Awards 2009
• Chicago Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2009
• AFI FEST 2009: THE LAST STATION, AFTER.LIFE
• AFI FEST 2009 Awards
• AFI FEST 2009: POLICE, ADJECTIVE; TO DIE LIKE A MAN
• Grace Kelly: TO CATCH A THIEF, THE SWAN
• Grace Kelly on TCM
• AFI FEST 2009: A SINGLE MAN, THE SINGULARITY

Most Popular Tags

2008 Oscar Academy Awards Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Animation Best Films Books Box Office Brokeback Mountain Censorship Classic Movies Daniel Day-Lewis Documentaries DVDs Film Awards Film Festivals Film Reviews Gay Film Festivals Gay Interest Gay Movies Heath Ledger Helen Mirren Interviews London Film Festival London Film Festival 2009 Los Angeles Screenings Martin Scorsese New York Screenings No Country for Old Men Oscar Movies Penélope Cruz Photos Political Movies Politics Sex Shorts Silent Films Slumdog Millionaire Sundance Film Festival Trailers Turner Classic Movies


Related Posts

Alberto LattuadaAnne BancroftA ROOM WITH A VIEW: Great To Be NominatedMalcolm ArnoldChristopher FryHOWARDS END: Great To Be Nominated