The Hollywood Reporter recently held a roundtable discussion with the six of this year’s Best Director hopefuls: Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Gus Van Sant (Milk), Ed Zwick (Definace), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino). David Fincher and Christopher Nolan apparently weren’t available for the sit down. You can watch some video clips from the roundtable interview after the jump. I wish that THR would put the entire thing online, but the most we can hope for is that more clips will be released.
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Zach Lawrence (14)- Steve Mason (115)
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Over the past couple months, MTV has had a lot of coverage of the announced Hairspray sequel. I thought that since we haven’t reported on the film since the project’s earliest announcement, that now is a good time to bring together all the facts:
1. John Waters has written a crazy treatment for the sequel called Hairspray 2: White Lipstick.
2. Hairspray director/choreographer Adam Shankman and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are also set to return
3. The story will look at Tracy’s entering the late ’60s era of music, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the British invasion. “We’re trying to track, in a comedic way, the historical elements,” Shankman told EW.
4. Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) is hated because she’s now famous but doesn’t lose weight.
5. Link (Zak Efron) gets a mop-top Beatles hairdo and tries to masquerade himself as a member of the British Invasion in an attempt to remain hip. The hair causes three pimples to spawn on his forehead, which he has “an ongoing dialogue” throughout half the movie. He also somehow accidentally experiments with acid. Shankman later said that Link’s drug storyline probably won’t make it into the final film.
6. Edna (John Travolta) gets hooked on diet pills, actually loses weight, but sees her husband (Christopher Walken) lusting after fat women. Shankman told MTV, “she finally breaks down and runs over to a snack table. Just within one number, she gets fat again; gaining 20 pounds at a time. [Her fat] pops out, and by the end of the song she’s completely at her old weight again.”
7. Velma Von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer) will likely not appear in the sequel due to the introduction of a new villain.
8. Someone gets drafted into war, but it isn’t Link.
9. New Line/Warner Bros has yet to official announce any actors/actresses for the sequel, but they have said that they hope to keep most of the original cast.
10. The film is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters in mid-July 2010.
It’s a slow news day, so I’m brining you whatever interesting content we can dig up.
Impressed by Addictive TV’s remix work for the major Hollywood studios, Slumdog Millionaire’s producers and director Danny Boyle asked the team to create an alternative web trailer for “Slumdog Millionaire”, by sampling sounds and images from the film and producing something entirely new made from only those audiovisual samples. Before the beat kicks in, the whole intro is purely AV, the music being made from only the looped images you see.
Gallery 1988 is selling limited edition prints of Scott Campbell’s “Friends with E.T.” art that was created for the Crazy4Cult show. Each giclee print is on 10 x 8 inch textured fine art paper, limited edition of 100, signed and numbered for $50.00 each. To make a purchase call the San Francisco gallery at 415 409-1376. More photos after the jump.
Turner Classic Movies put together a beautiful video montage remembering the actors, actresses, directors, writers, producers, and musicians that we lost in 2008. Eartha Kitt was probably not included because this was edited before her death. The song is “God Only Knows” by Joe Henry.
Video of the Day is a daily feature of /Film showcasing geekarific video creations. Have a video we should be feature on VOTD? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.
/Film reader Christopher M scored this bad ass fight choreography/stunt training video showing some of the work of 87 Eleven (the stunt team that worked on 300, Watchmen, Matrix and Bourne films) on The Wachowski Brothers-produced, James McTeigue-directed Ninja Assassin. Check it out after the jump.
KristinKreukWeb has posted the first english poster for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. I know we’re only four days into 2009, but I’m already nominating this one-sheet for Worst Movie Poster of 2009. When we first received the poster over the weekend, I wasn’t sure it was even real. It looks like a bad fan-made photoshop. But it appears to be legit after all. I have a theory that all bad marketing started off with a good idea. My guess is that the marketing guys at Fox saw one of the early Street Fighter video game covers and came up with the idea of using the sillioette of the two fighters going at it.
Not a bad idea. I have photoshoped the actual poster to reflect this concept. It actually doesn’t look THAT bad.Imagine if the lettering was also in black to give the poster a two-color color scheme.
Then some studio executive probably sent over a note saying that the stars need to sell the movie. I mean, its not like anyone has ever played and of the video games in the long running fighter franchise, right? So then they added Kristin Kreuk’s head inside the silhouette, but the rest of the image now felt off balance. This lead to the decision to fill the silhouette with floating heads. What a great idea.</sarcasm> /Film reader Christopher M for the tip.
Pat Hingle, a veteran actor known for playing judges, police officers, and other authority figures, has died at age 84 after a battle with blood cancer.
Hingle is probably best known to the /Film community as the actor who played Commissioner James Gordon in Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. According to the AP, Hingle was diagnosed with myelodysplasia in November of 2006, and died in his Carolina Beach home late Saturday night.
His television and film career spanned six decades, and included roles in Gunsmoke, Murder She Wrote, Splendor in the Grass, The Gauntlet, Hang ‘Em High, Norma Rae, Sudden Impact, Brewster’s Millions, Maxim Overdrive, The Land Before Time, The Grifters, The Quick and the Dead, Larger Than Life, Muppets From Space, Shaft, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
Hingle was also nominated for Broadway’s 1958 Tony Award as best supporting or featured actor (dramatic) for “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs”.
STUDIO ESTIMATES: MARLEY & ME with $24M 3-day and lovable lab could be the #1 live action pooch ever; BEDTIME STORIES reaches $20M & could hit $130M domestic; BUTTON #3 with $18.4M; VALKYRIE adds another $14M, but can UA make a profit?; DEFIANCE huge with $60K PTA!
In Studio 3-Day Estimates, the top 5 for the first weekend of 2009 remain the same as the order of finish for Christmas weekend. Marley & Me (Fox) remains the canine king of the box office with an estimated $24M for a new 11-day cume of $106.51M.
The appeal of dogs on the big screen is no surprise. As I wrote Friday night (scroll down), this lovable golden lab is may reach $160M domestic, making Marley & Me the #1 live action dog movie of all time. The real message for Hollywood honchos may be to keep their eyes on book sales. Although numbers are hard to come by, this simple, sweet John Grogan memoir about his rambunctious dog was the #1 selling fiction book of 2006, and it has likely sold about 5 million copies. It continues to sell, #1 on the NY Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller list right now.
The blockbuster status of Marley & Me also adds to the rising star of director David Frankel. A decade ago, he won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for Dear Diary, and then he “cut his teeth” in television on shows like Band of Brothers and Entourage. Now he has successfully delivered back-to-back $100M grossing films with Marley quickly following 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada ($124.7M cume), another movie based on a meteoric bestseller. Any producer who owns the rights to a hot-selling novel should have Frankel at the top of their list of potential directors. (As an aside, Frankel’s father was a longtime editor of the New York Times.)
We’re still trying to catch up on some of the photos that were released in last week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly. Above is your first look at the upcoming Harold Ramis (Caddyshack, Groundhog Day) biblical comedy The Year One (I’ve heard it has in fact been retitled from Year One to The Year One). When a couple of lazy hunter-gatherers named Zed and Oh (Jack Black and Michael Cera) are banished from their primitive village, they set off on an epic journey through the ancient world.
The film also features Paul Rudd and David Cross, who play Cain and Abel, Hank Azaria as Abraham, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (aka McLovin) as Isaac, and Oliver Platt as a High Priest. Based on an original idea by Ramis, and a screenplay by The Office scribes Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg (yes, the guys who are writing the new Ghostbusters movie), The Year One is scheduled to hit theaters on June 19th 2009.