I N - D E P T H F I L M & T V C O V E R A G E
On the 30th anniversary of the tragic accident on the set of "Twilight Zone: The Movie" that took the lives of actor Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Chen (age 6), I take a look back at the incident and examine
the current state of movie set safety in this cover story in Weekly Variety. 
Find out how last year's Arab Spring uprisings threw a wrench into the shooting of "Prometheus" in my Variety profile of director Ridley Scott's "billion-dollar production team."
Also check out my individual profiles of the film's production designer Arthur Max and editor Pietro Scalia. 
I go behind the scenes
at the offices of Bento Box Entertainment, the rising animation house behind such shows as "Bob's Burgers," "Brickleberry" and "Allen Gregory" (co-created by Jonah Hill). 
The Feb. 11 headline in the Hawaii Reporter called it "Shock and Awe." The day before, former President Clinton had submitted a letter endorsing a plan by Relativity Media and partner Shangri-La Industries (founded by Steve Bing) to build what he called "the most environmentally friendly stages in existence" on Maui and Oahu, if the Hawaii Legislature would support a pair of bills boosting the state's film and TV production tax credits to 35% (from 15%) on Oahu and 40% (from 20%) on the neighboring islands.
Three days later, following hours of testimony before a state Senate committee debating the issue, Relativity chief Ryan Kavanaugh poured on the glitter with a star-studded, invitation-only reception at Mandalay Restaurant in downtown Honolulu reportedly attended by more than 100 state legislators and such celebs as Bradley Cooper, Adrien Brody, Zach Braff and Roseanne Barr. Click here to read the entire article from Variety. 
Can The Dude outdo The Duke? In this "Anatomy of a Contender" feature from The
Hollywood Reporter, filmmakers Joel & Ethan Coen and stars Hailee Steinfeld, Matt
Damon and a very Lebowski-esque Jeff
Bridges talk about the challenge of bringing Charles Portis' True Grit to the big screen, while
working in the shadow of John Wayne, who won an Oscar for his
performance in the 1969 adaptation of the novel. Click here
to read the article.
 Matthias Schoenaerts in the Belgian film "Bullhead"
What happens when foreign language filmmakers try to go Hollywood? Find out in my article in Variety.
Always wanted to see a film about an emasculated Limburg cattle farmer mixed up
with with West Flemish beef traders in the Belgian growth hormone underground? Then you'll be eager to read my profile of Michael R. Roskam, writer/director of the Oscar-nominated film "Bullhead," in Variety's "10 Directors to Watch" issue.  "The Avengers" on location in Ohio.
When Jay Villwock got laid off from his job as a TV news reporter in Des Moines, Iowa, in early 2009, the state had recently enacted one of the most generous film and TV production incentives in the country.Its 25% tax credit for in-state expenditures and a 25% tax credit for investors attracted an influx of projects into Iowa, which had only hosted a handful of movies during the previous few decades, most notably 1989's "Field of Dreams."
Villwock had studied theater in college and done some summer stock. Why not give acting another shot? In short order, he found himself in a scene with Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker in "The Experiment" and playing a zombie in "Collapse." "I could hardly believe it," gushes Villwock, who today is president of the Iowa Motion Picture Assn. "It was this golden opportunity; a once in a lifetime thing." Then, in September 2009, an audit revealed improprieties in Iowa's incentive program. The governor suspended the tax credit, and the flood of productions pouring into the state dried up. Read my entire story in Variety's "Global Locations Update" and find out more ways the film and TV production incentive programs sweeping the nation can both giveth and taketh away, whether the party in question is a multi-national corporation or a struggling actor. In this article for Variety, I call on a group of industry leaders (Weinstein Company COO David Glasser, Morgan Creek co-chairman and COO Rick Nicita and Endgame Entertainment CEO Jim Stern) to give their views on the state of the film business.
Child actors dream of being the next Miley Cyrus or Miranda Cosgrove (iCarly), with millions of fans, a fat TV
contract, record deals and studios clamoring to create big-screen roles
them. But is it really worth all the time and money invested by young thesps and their parents, even if they do score that coveted role on a Disney Channel or Nickelodeon show?
Click here to read the article in The Hollywood Reporter. Also check out the sidebar Is Teaching Kids to Perform Worth the Money? 
Will the blockbuster success of The
Expendables lift its prolific producer, Nu Image/Millennium Films
co-chairman Avi Lerner, out of
B-movie purgatory? Does the alternately combative and cool Israeli
native give a damn? I get the lowdown from the film's
writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone,
director Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) and Lerner
himself. Click here to read the article in The Hollywood
Reporter.
What awards show has honored Sarah Silverman for her song "I'm F***ing
Matt Damon" (from ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live), blasphemed Jesus and
featured a nonagenarian fitness guru leading its audience in
calisthenics? It's the Creative Arts Emmys -- or, as Kathy Griffin likes to call them, the Schmemmys -- the most unpredictable show biz kudofest this side of the Golden Globes.
Click here for the article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
"Unless people worked here or they were attending a performance at the Music Center, they just never bothered to come downtown," says Carol E. Schatz, president and CEO of the Central City Association of Los Angeles, an advocacy group for local businesses.
But Lee Zeidman remembers the pre-Staples landscape vividly. "We used to look down on the site from the 27th floor of the TCW building, just as we were starting to dig the hole and condemn some of the buildings," recalls Zeidman, who serves as senior vp and GM of Staples Center and the adjacent Nokia Theatre and L.A. Live for co-owner and operator AEG. "There were dilapidated buildings in various states of decay, different types of liquor stores on the corners. They were basically drug and prostitute hangouts." A mere decade later, Staples has already built a storied history... Click here to read the entire special report from The Hollywood Reporter, which includes an Q&A with AEG president & CEO Tim Leiweke. You can also jump to my pieces on the Staples Center's face-lift and its charitable foundation. 
Read my interviews with four Oscar-nominated actors -- John Hawkes (Winter's Bone), Lesley Manville (Another Year), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) and Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) -- and one that should've been, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), here in The Hollywood Reporter's special report on the 2011 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
The life of an Emmy statuette begins far from the lights and cameras of Hollywood in a non-descript building in a residential industrial neighborhood in a Northwest Chicago. "Passing by, you wouldn't have a clue," says Noreen Prohaska, account executive for the building's tenant R.S. Owens, manufacturers of the Emmys and numerous other prestigious awards, including the Oscars. "But it's an 82,000-square-foot factory and we employ about 170 workers."
Each Emmy statuette takes about 15 man hours to complete, and all the work is done by hand. Production typically commences in late June. Using a single steel mold... Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Producer Lauren Shuler Donner
was in a tough spot ... She
had three films in various stages of production in the U.S.
(Universal’s “Cirque du Freak,” DreamWorks/Paramount’s “Hotel for Dogs”
and Fox Searchlight’s “The Secret Life of Bees”) and one shooting in
Australia that desperately needed some personal attention (Fox’s “X-Men
Origins: Wolverine”).
She knew she couldn’t be on opposite sides of the earth at once. So she did what was, for her, unusual: She turned to her husband, Richard Donner, the veteran director-producer, whose credits include such blockbusters as 1978’s “Superman” and the “Lethal Weapon” series. “I said, ‘Could you please help me?’” Shuler Donner says. “And he came down, and he helped produce ‘Wolverine’ for me in Sydney, Australia, while I went to New Orleans on ‘Cirque du Freak.’” As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Before long, Internet wags were speculating that Donner was waiting in the wings to replace “Wolverine” director Gavin Hood. Click here to read the full article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Check out The Hollywood Reporter's Sundance Directors Spotlight 2011, in which I talk to the creative forces behind 10 must-see films at the fest. (I have no idea why there's someone sharing the byline with me. I think he pasted the photos into the web template.)
When the celeb-reality spectacle "The Surreal Life" first premiered on
the former WB Network in 2002, it seemed like a savvy melding of the
Dutch franchise "Big Brother" and the British creation "I'm a Celebrity,
Get Me Out of Here." But the show's co-creator, Cris Abrego, insists its inspiration was as American as -- well, Stove Top Stuffing.
"There was a TV commercial that featured Sally Jessy Raphael making Stove Top while George Hamilton played a video game in the next room," recalls Abrego of the ad that ran in the early 2000s. "We saw it and we were like, 'What if they really did live together?'" Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
My recent Q&A with writer-producer/WGA president John
Wells (E.R., The Company Men, etc.) is only available online to Hollywood Reporter subscribers, but you can read the entirety of my more in-depth 2010 feature with Wells exploring the fallout of the contentious 2007-2008 WGA strike here and find out what happened to the guy who dreamed up St. Elmo's Fire while you're at it.
Also check out my 2010 Q&A with director/DGA president Taylor
Hackford from The Hollywood Reporter, in which he discusses the contrasting take-control attitude of his guild, which called a strike only once, in 1987, and it lasted slightly more than three hours
in the east and a mere five minutes in the west.
Some might find it strange to see Jimmy Smits' turn as a Cuban-American district attorney whose skewed vision of justice drives him to murder on Showtime's "Dexter" and Edward James Olmos' performance as the voice of the Doberman El Diablo in Disney's "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" nominated for [Imagen] awards. After all, a cold-blooded killer and an evil dog can hardly be seen as role models ...
Click here to read the entire article about the 2009 Imagen Awards from The Hollywood Reporter. 
On the eve of the show's 100th episode, "Lost" executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse discuss the genesis of the series, along with their efforts to perpetuate the labyrinthian maze of mysteries surrounding the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 without alienating casual viewers. Click here to read the story.
As the bottom falls out of the the recording industry, music video producers learn how to make music videos without the Cristal and the G-5s.
Click here to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
The joys and pitfalls of sharing the screen are examined with actors Jeff Daniels, Rosario Dawson, Ralph
Fiennes, William Hurt, Frank Langella, Emily Mortimer, Tony Shalhoub,
Jimmy Smits and David Strathairn
and writer/directors Paul
Haggis and Stephen Gaghan.
Click here
to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter.
Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter.
 Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter.
When Alpha Repertory Television Services merged with the Entertainment Channel to launch Arts & Entertainment (A&E) in 1984, it was anything but a high- flying corporate juggernaut.
"We were one floor of a building, all within earshot of each other, and we used a small studio on the other side of town," recalls Abbe Raven, who was an assistant to the head of production at the time. "It was very entrepreneurial and it felt very much like we were breaking new ground in the business. On a given day, you could be working on new shows and at the same time doing presentations for affiliates or advertisers." Twenty-five years later, Raven has risen from assistant to CEO, and the company--a joint venture of the Hearst Corp., Disney-ABC Television Group and NBC Universal now known as A&E Television Networks (AETN)--is a global media behemoth with 38 channels in 140 countries around the world, reaching 240 million TV households, and providing a wealth of original programming, from edgy reality shows such as History's "Ice Road Truckers," A&E's "Paranormal State" and "Dog the Bounty Hunter" to the scripted hourlong dramas "The Cleaner" and "The Beast." It also markets a multitude of consumer products, such as books and DVDs. But Raven hasn't allowed that to get between her and the people who watch her shows. Every morning on her train ride to the company's Manhattan offices, she conducts informal market research sessions with her fellow passengers. "I'm not shy," says Raven, who was named CEO in April 2005, after being elevated from executive vp and GM to president the previous year … Click here to read the entire article from The Hollywood Reporter. |
Want a bigger tax credit to keep film & TV production in your state? It might be a case of be careful what you wish for, as I explain in this Variety article.
Did you know that the genesis of "America's Funniest Home
Videos" can be traced back to an infestation of Australian frilled lizards in Tokyo? What are the three things host Tom Bergeron wants to see at studio tapings? (Answer: his breath and his nipples.) Learn the stories
behind these and other fun facts in these articles I wrote for Variety marking the 500th episode of the show. 
I call on the directors of a gaggle of upcoming films (including "The Bourne Legacy," "The Expendables 2," "It's a Disaster" and
"The Apparition") to ask what they learned from their below the line brethren in the lead story for Variety's Below the Line Impact Report. In the same issue, I also profile stunt coordinators and second unit directors from such films as "The Bourne Legacy," "The Avengers" and "Mission Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" and talk to DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Weinstein Co. co-chairman Bob Weinstein and others about their adventures working with famed Hollywood attorney Bert Fields. 
Check out my Variety "Talent Watch" profile of Lorene Scafaria, writer/director of Focus Features' "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and, it is rumored, Ashton Kutcher's post-Demi Moore girlfiend.
 Gerard Butler in "Machine Gun Preacher."
When the studio asked Jason Keller to sign up for kidnapping and dismemberment insurance before traveling to Sudan to research his script for "Machine Gun Preacher," they weren't kidding around.
"You couldn't go anywhere without seeing whole villages that had been razed to the ground and the burned out hulks of tanks and trucks on the side of the road, the remnants of an ambush," says Keller, who went there to get a firsthand look at the Children's Village orphanage run by biker-turned-minister Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler in the film). Click here to read the entire article in Variety. 
Take a look into the future with my article in Variety's Hollywood's New Leaders Issue, in which I call on a group of industry experts to predict what the world of entertainment might be like in ten years.
If you're unable to view the Variety page, click here. 
Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas
was atop a snow-covered Fortress Mountain in Alberta, Canada, shooting
the final scenes for "Inception" in late November 2009, when he got the
call on his cell phone: Steven Spielberg wanted to talk to him as soon
as he got back to Los Angeles. Two weeks later, he was sitting in the
director's office at DreamWorks discussing a bigscreen adaptation of
Daniel W. Wilson's sci-fi novel "Robopocalypse."
"The book was still kind of being written," recalls Dyas, who had previously worked with Spielberg on 2008's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." "And it was very unclear as to whether Steven was going to be directing this or producing it. [But] he had a twinkle in his eye and a very clear vision of what he wanted to do with the material." Click here to read the entire article in Variety. Also check out my other feature and the artist profiles I wrote for their special issue Below-the-Line Impact Report 2011.  The microbudget film "Bellflower."
I take a look at how four different productions -- ranging from megabudget ("Transformers: Dark of the Moon") to microbudget ("Bellflower") -- dealt with the opportunities and challenges posed with the availability of money or lack thereof in this article in Variety.
Talk about going for the kill -- Therese DePrez stands six-foot-two in her stocking feet, yet she still wears high heels. Even more impressive is her list of credits, which includes collaborations with high profile maverick filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee and Stephen Frears and an Art Directors Guild Award for her work on Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan."
In Variety's "Talent Watch" column, I talk to the New York-based production designer about working on location in Nashville with Korean director Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") on the gothic thriller "Stoker" (Fox Searchlight), starring Nicole Kidman. 
Check out my Filmmaker Magazine Q&A with French Canadian writer/director Philippe Falardeau in which he talks about his Oscar-nominated film "Monsieur Lazhar" and explains how a stint as a contestant on a Canuck reality show turned him into a filmmaker.
In Variety's "Talent Watch" column, I profile writer/director Dee Rees' struggle to make her highly-personal first feature "Pariah." Click here to read the article.
In my Variety profile of casting director Tracy "Twinkie" Byrd, I detail her long journey from baby wrangling to "Sparkle."
Producer Sally Ann Salsano has no illusions about why her reality shows
have become such a big hit with cable programmers.
"I can shoot an entire season for what it costs them to shoot one episode," Salsano says. "You don't pay anyone on reality TV anything. Your talent is free, there are no writers. You just have your producers and that's it." Still, in the wake of the economic downturn and the corresponding drop in ad sales, networks now are demanding that so-called "cheap reality" be made even more cheaply. Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Read my article in Variety about how producers of Fall 2011's crop of TV pilots spent big bucks to recreate the Playboy mansion circa 1960 and stage
zombie rave parties and otherwise bent over backwards to stand out in the pack of potential fall shows, including NBC's "The Playboy Club" (pictured left). In June 2011, I profiled nine of the "best and the brightest" (Ken Basin, Joshua Binder, Nancy Bruington, Kenneth Deutsch, Nick Gladden, Suann MacIsaac, Jennifer Massey, Patricia Millett and Jonathan West) in Variety's Hollywood Law: Up Next issue.
Like many of today's top casting directors, Victoria Burrows got her
start when personal computers were nonexistent, FedEx was in its
infancy, faxes and videotape machines were rare, and black-and-white
glossies were everywhere.
"It used to be hard-copy pictures, then sit down and meet an actor," Burrows says with little nostalgia. "You would just read them and do call-backs." Now, working on such motion-capture films as Disney's "A Christmas Carol" and "Mars Needs Moms!" she spends her days in casting sessions with partner Scot Boland, calculating how actors' performances will translate in neoprene wet suits covered with white dots and subsequently rendered by 3-D animation software. Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Devin Faraci remembers the bad old days -- way back at the turn of
the millennium -- when studio publicists treated his film Web site CHUD
like a plot-spoiling scourge or, at best, a home for student
journalists.
"Back then, the online guys, no matter what site they were from, were always getting lumped in with the college papers at press events," Faraci says. "There would be a couple of guys who did it full time and then the girls from the Stony Brook Herald or something. Getting one-on-one face time with the talent was the impossible dream." Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
When it comes to
adapting literary works for the big screen, British playwright David
Hare says, one must be promiscuous to be faithful.
"You can't simply step your way through a book with perfect fidelity. If you do, the whole thing is completely dead," Hare argues. John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) is more blunt. In transferring his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt to the big screen, "I used every stinking trick I could," he admits. Click here for the full story from The Hollywood Reporter, with Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). 
I explore the creative process with Hollywood Film Festival honorees, including actress/director Jodie Foster and screenwriter Robert Towne ("Chinatown," "Shampoo," "The Last Detail") in this article from The Hollywood Reporter.
 Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
I discuss plans for the 2010 edition of the Los Angeles Film Festival with fest director Rebecca Yeldham and Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) in this article from The Hollywood Reporter.
Also check out mysidebar on the Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1924-78), a cinematic giant who is a veritable unknown -- even to hardcore cineastes. 
Whether they're racing to do business in China or to find a hot new director from Thailand, Japan or South Korea, it seems everyone in the entertainment industry has their sights set on Asia. But the Far East's cinematic riches are nothing new to the Louis Vuitton International Film Festival...
Click here to read my article about the 25th anniversary of the fest featuring observations from longtime participant Roger Ebert. 
One secret to successfully completing an indie film is to finish it
before you run out of money, use up your favors, alienate your
friends/crew and lose the creative spark that ignited your passion for
the project. Now at events across the country like the 48 Hour Film
Project (www.48hourfilm.com)
and Cinemasports (www.cinemasports.com),
filmmakers are taking that idea to its not-so-logical conclusion and
compressing the entire production process from conception to completion
down to two days or less, starting the weekend with a video camera and
raw stock and going back to work on Monday with a finished short under
their belts.
Click here to read the entire article from Filmmaker Magazine. 
Much is made of
the need
to preserve old films for art's sake. Funds are raised, grants
given out to ensure that even cinematic historical footnotes
like the 1945 Fox melodrama "Leave Her to Heaven" are given as
much care and attention as, say, the Mona Lisa.
But in the end, the real reason more and more movies are being preserved these days is about economics. After decades of letting films decay, the industry has seen the light, which came -- as many Hollywood epiphanies do -- in the form of flashing dollar signs. Click here to read the full article from The Hollywood Reporter.  Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter.
 Click image to view article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Pasted in a corner of Eddie Smith's scrapbook is a small, yellowed
newspaper clipping from 1969 telling of a helicopter crash on the set of
a war movie in which a pilot and two stuntmen "escaped injury." The
movie was "MASH"; Smith was one of the stuntmen; and as he walks across
the den of his Culver City home on this spring day more than 30 years
later, he still has a limp from that accident. Although he's free to
grouse about the pain now, back then he held his tongue.
"I couldn't mess it up for the rest of the group, man," says Smith, 78. "We fought too hard. We had to show ourselves." Click here to read the entire article from the Los Angeles Times. 
With the profusion of quality shows on the air, it's easy to see why
publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Times and the
U.K.'s Guardian as well as various bloggers are so eager to declare a new golden
age of television. But out of respect to Milton Berle, Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and all of the other pioneers of the medium, it
seems prudent to weigh all the evidence...
Click here to read the entire article from The Hollywood Reporter. |
