Woody Allen the new, back in top form, keen-eye-for-the-nuances -of-British-class-warfare Woody Allen recently subjected himself to an interview with Current, a college campus magazine, in which he was asked for some words of advice for any youngsters out there who aspire to follow in his showbiz footsteps:
· This is how Michael Vale, who passed away Christmas Eve, became the Dunkin' "time to make the" Donuts guy.
· Just to give you an indication of what we're working with, here is one of today's more compelling headlines: Mira Sorvino Made Honorary Pa. Deputy.
· Wasn't there a Seinfeld about this once?
· Single? Looking? Have we got a guy for you!
· Dave White helps us sort through the year's best worst movies.
· Sylvester Stallone's Pathetic Projects Make Headlines, Chapter XXXVII: Sly Vs. Sly.
The WOW Report continues its groundbreaking work in the premiere audience diagramming sciences with an analysis of last Wednesday's Fun With Dick and Jane screening. As their above chart demonstrates, the seating arrangement was carefully engineered by producer Brian Grazer to enhance the already amplified phenomenon of a premiere crowd's laugh-response, an idea no doubt hatched in an intense thinktank session between Grazer and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking (a meeting brokered, of course, by the always-innovative mogul's cultural attaché). While the early results were promising, the process is far from perfected, so expect that Grazer's next event will feature a sonically reflective material surrounding the seating area, which will theoretically produce an eardrum-bursting echo chamber of sycophantic guffaws.
In a recent round of publicity interviews for Rob Reiner's latest cinematic reminder that the days of Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride are long over, Rumor Has It, Jennifer Aniston was paired with co-star Shirley MacLaine, who felt the need to protect the younger actress from the prying questions of reporters who had the audacity to broach the subject of her much-rumored-about personal life. But then wacky Auntie Shirley had to take the bodyguard act a smidge too far:
King Kong, the box office's presumptive simian savior, opened yesterday to just $9.8 million (soon-to-be universally known trivia: this was just the 21st best Wednesday bow on record), and if you're anything like us, you completely forgot that the movie's already been released until you read a story about the disappointing take. Confronted with the low first-day number, Universal's head of distribution displayed a breezy confidence in her studio's product:
Last great indie studio holdout (and, full disclosure, one-time Defamer associate editor employer) Lions Gate Entertainment has revealed a bold new logo reimagining, replacing the somewhat baffling (and scary!) "LGF with green smoke and thunder" motif currently preceding their releases. The new logo, pictured above, melds the studio name into one streamlined word. The press release explains that this was no random smushing, but rather a representation of everything the company stands for:
A reader alerted us to banner ads (one of them is pictured above, and another variety is also rotating through) currently running on Yahoo!'s movie site, which seem to take the 40-Year-Old Virgin Hyphen Affair to its logical conclusion—unless, of course, some insane editor really wants to ensure that no nontraditional hyphenation possibility goes unexplored and approves ads utilizing 40-Year-Old-Virgin, 40 Year Old-Virgin, or the six-legged unicorn of possibilities, 40-Year-Old-Vir-Gin variations.
Brokeback Mountain wasn't the only script about minority discrimination floating around Hollywood for seven years: The Ringer, Ricky Blitt's sweeping, heartbreaking tale of a guy who pretends to be mentally retarded so he can compete in the Special Olympics, also landed on many a showbiz desk in its long journey to the screen. According to this E! Online report on a story from yesterday's Variety, Blitt and Ringer's producers, the Farrelly brothers, are now accusing Trey Parker and Matt Stone of having read the script and stealing the plot for a 2004 episode of South Park with virtually the same storyline:
Universal chairperson Stacey Snider sat down with the THR to wash that DreamWorks nastiness right out of her hair, and in between raving about next year's Miami Vice ("It's got everything: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, rap music, boats, trains, cars, babes.") and discussing the upcoming Munich, gives some insight into the budgeting decisions behind two movies that are dominating much of the industry's year-end discussion:
Many things, it seems, went wrong with The Brothers Grimm, one of 2005's more resounding box office bombs. Big-budget movie production is a delicate, interconnected affair, so who's to say that an error in producer Harvey Weinstein's fuckability calculus, which led to casting little-known actress Lena Headley instead of an Oscar-nominated treasure, didn't contribute to its failure? From The Scoop:
Bringing the latest Steve Carell comedy to your local mall is a massive undertaking, requiring the streamlined coordination of studio development, production, marketing and distribution departments. So it isn't unusual when some of the finer details might fall through the cracks say, the use of correct punctuation in a movie's title. The Velvet Blog would get the "copyeditor's twitch" every time it caught a glimpse of a poster or billboard for The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and see no hyphen where a hyphen should be. It wasn't until the oversight trickled down to the eagle-eyed home video department that someone finally caught the error and inserted the wayward linker onto the DVD cover. (Defamer held its nose and went along with the faulty punctuation in all previous posts, as we have a strict "official art is the word of God" policy.)
A second well-respected indie movie producer in his 40s has died suddenly. Robert Newmyer, who has a long list of credits including sex, lies and videotape and Training Day, suffered a heart attack in a Toronto gym while visiting the set of Breach, a film he was producing starring Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe. An LA Times obituary explains how Drew Barrymore was partially responsible for a passionate career of movie making:
For two glorious sentences, we thought that the NY Times just might be using a Brokeback Mountain review to launch the initial installment of a major daily newspaper's first-ever serialized erotic novel:
It's tough to complain about The Carpetbagger, the Times's just-launched Oscar-season blog by David Carr, mostly because it's a pleasure to read David Carr on just about anything, especially when he's given some extra leash to be un-Timesianly light and clever. But we wouldn't feel like ourselves if we didn't at least try to complain, and so we've come up with this:
Not satisfied to fall back on the utterly clichéd, "Are you exactly like your character/nothing like your character" publicity junket question, Reuters boldly inches forward into the somewhat less stale interrogatory frontier, asking The Family Stone star Sarah Jessica Parker if her new character is exactly like/nothing like (get ready for it) her Sex and the City character, Carrie Bradshaw. And the answer will Blow. Your. Mind:
