Posts Tagged ‘Gossip/Controversy’
We have the intersection between famous people and crazy people to thank for no small amount of entertainment. Take the lawsuit filed by Dannez Hunter, who claims that in 1999 he submitted a story treatment to Miramax about a character named Ren. Hunter claims that Ren became O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, and that Quentin Tarantino stole elements of his treatment, including the specific manner of murder of Ren’s mother.
But it gets better, because Hunter also applied for a job at Miramax, and was, ahem, “never given a return phone call, as numerous similar situated less qualified Jewish and White people were bestowed job after job after job.” He wants a bag full of money, in part because whites and jews got all the royalties from Kill Bill. Good luck with this one, buddy. [TMZ]
After the break something slightly more substantive but less amusing: Tarantino reportedly may make a Harvey Weinstein documentary.
News that Tarantino might make a documentary on Harvey Weinstein cropped up about a week ago in the New York Times and most everyone seemed to miss it, but now it has surfaced once more. See, Barry Avrich, who wrote and directed a documentary about Lew R. Wasserman (The Last Mogul) is angling to make a film in the same no-holds-barred vein, with Harvey Weinstein as the subject. But Harvey seems to be less than interested in that film, currently called Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project. Avrich says the film will be balanced, not a hatchet job, and that Harvey Weinstein at first advised him not to make it.
Then Weinstein reportedly said that Quentin Tarantino was mulling his own doc about the mogul, which would start with Weinstein’s days as a concert promoter and then get into his years with Miramax. Tarantino’s spokesperson said that he and the Weinsteins are “unofficially kicking around the idea” of the documentary.
This doesn’t seem like the most likely project — at this point it really looks like something that is just being floated to block the doc by Avrich, and Tarantino already has a laundry list of potential projects that includes a ’30s gangster picture, a western, an Inglourious Basterds prequel, a Kill Bill sequel, a slavery picture and likely several others.
Still, it’s an interesting idea. On one hand, a Weinstein doc from Tarantino would seem superficially like one of the more biased projects out there. But going in with the understanding that the bias exists, we also might be able to get some interesting insight on Harvey from Tarantino, who has worked intimately with the producer throughout almost his entire career.
While many countries offer direct public financing for films, in the United States the primary form of public film funding comes through tax credits.
The state of Florida is considering a new tax incentive bill to draw film production to the state, and a provision in the bill would allow denial of tax breaks to films that feature ‘non-traditional family values.’ What does that phrase mean, exactly? No one knows.
As the Palm Beach Post reports, the $75m bill is a priority for the state’s Republican majority in the House, and has already passed through one committee with unanimous approval. The House Finance and Tax Council, is next. If approved, the state’s allowance for a 2% tax break for ‘family-friendly’ films would become a 5% break, and films could be disallowed on the basis of a very vague language.
There’s an easy defense for the ‘family-friendly’ aspect of the bill: the state can offer tax breaks to whatever films it wants, right? Theoretically, yes. But if the legislation is being used to promote a narrow, unrealistic vision of ‘family’, does it cross the line? I think so. Is that really the point of the bill? One supporter, state representative Stephen Precourt (R-Orlando), wants to recreate Mayberry on film. Literally.
“Think of it as like Mayberry,” Rep. Precourt said. “That’s when I grew up — the ’60s. That’s what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?”
Asked whether gay characters would disallow a production, Precourt said, “That would not be the kind of thing I’d say that we want to invest public dollars in.”
Here’s the relevant portion of the bill, with a section bolded by me for emphasis:
A certified production determined by the Commissioner of Film and Entertainment, with the advice of the Florida Film and Entertainment Advisory Council, to be family-friendly…Family-friendly productions are those that have cross-generational appeal; would be considered suitable for viewing by children age 5 or older…and do not exhibit or imply any act of smoking, sex, nudity, nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, or vulgar or profane language. Under the current incentive program, review of the final release version is not required and nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, and implied acts do not exclude a film from receiving this additional credit.
The problem is that ‘non-traditional family values’ is far too vague. Rep. Precourt’s statements suggest that is a euphemism for ‘no gay characters,’ because that prohibition would clearly raise objections. I can’t see how the language can be allowed to stand in a legal document as is, but Florida is already low on the list of gay-tolerant governments. As ThinkProgress says, “Florida has no statewide law prohibiting discrimination; its constitution prohibits gay marriage; and, it is the only state in the union that forbids gays from adopting children.”
Another lawmaker, Rep. Joseph Abruzzo (D-Wellington), wants to change the wording, and has a proposal for something that should be more acceptable: “To avoid a social argument, I think we can truly simplify that by simply saying a G-rated production,” Abruzzo said. “That would be family friendly and good for all ages.”
After going down well at Sitges and Sundance, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice was picked up for distribution by Warner Bros. through their Dark Castle label. They’ve announced a 4th June release, which simply can’t come soon enough. But what’s this? A fly in the ointment?
According to Fangoria, Natali is heading back to the edit room to make some alterations to the film. He says:
You’re going to see a slightly nipped-and-tucked version. I’m actually going into the editing room next week, and if they’re true to their word, it’s just going to be cosmetic… There are also a few things I’m changing after seeing the film with an audience. I believe what will come out of it will be a new and improved cut, but in essence, it’ll be the same film.
What changes will he make? I made my own enquiries and confirmed that the only tweaks will come in “tightening up the ending”. Note: that’s tightening up, not overthrowing and replacing. The only question remains how many minutes are we calling the ending here? The last five? Ten? Twenty?
Some of the best filmmaking stories involve fueds, and while the run-up to the Oscars in the press was largely concerned with the constructed narrative of Cameron vs. Bigelow, it was a smaller but far more real conflict that took center stage for a moment.
In an Oscar telecast that was noticeably light on dramatic moments, one odd near-confrontation really stands out. When the Oscar was presented to the creator of Music by Prudence, winner in the documentary short category, director/producer Roger Ross Williams took the stage, only to be forcibly interrupted by producer Elinor Burkett, who wrestled the mic away from Williams to make her own speech. What was that all about? Turns out the duo aren’t exactly copacetic, and that there is some difference of opinion as to who is more important to the film’s genesis.
Salon has a good rundown of the history of the film, with statements from both Williams and Burkett. When Burkett took the stage last night it looked like a Kanye moment, but what was really going on?
She says,
What happened was the director and I had a bad difference over the direction of the film that resulted in a lawsuit that has settled amicably out of court. But there have been all these events around the Oscars, and I wasn’t invited to any of them. And he’s not speaking to me. So we weren’t even able to discuss ahead of the time who would be the one person allowed to speak if we won. And then, as I’m sure you saw, when we won, he raced up there to accept the award. And his mother took her cane and blocked me.
Williams, meanwhile, explains,
The academy is very clear that only one person can speak. I own the film. She has no claim whatsoever. She has nothing to do with the movie…The truth is that she saw the band perform [in Zimbabwe], and told me about that, and then I opened up a dialogue with the [King George VI School & Centre for Children with Physical Disabilities] school and went on my own – which you would’ve heard about in my speech — and spent $6,000 going to Africa shooting myself. And when people expressed interest in the film, I asked her to come on board. And then I regretted that decision. Then she sued.
What about the thing with the cane? That sounded weird, right? Williams explains, “My mother got up to hug me. And my mother is 87 years old. She was excited.”
You have to wonder how nobody saw this coming. Last week it was announced that Sacha Baron Cohen would be presenting at the Oscars this Sunday. Yesterday, his name disappeared from the presenters list. The reason for the dismissal, according to Vulture, was that Cohen was collaborating with Ben Stiller for an Avatar sketch that might have offended director James Cameron – someone not exactly known for his sense of humor.
The sketch was dropped by Oscar producer Bill Mechanic, who also dealt with the director as head of Twentieth Century Fox when Cameron was working on Titanic. Mechanic likely gathered a sixth sense towards Cameron’s prickly nature during that film’s shoot, and didn’t want to risk him walking out in the middle of the Oscar ceremony.
According to an Oscar insider speaking to Vulture, the sketch would have played out like so:
Baron Cohen planned to appear onstage as a blue-skinned, female Na’vi, with Stiller translating “her” interplanetary speech. As the skit went on, though, it would become clear that Stiller wasn’t translating properly, because Cohen would grow ever more upset. At its climax, an infuriated Baron Cohen would pull open “her” evening gown to reveal that s/he was pregnant, knocked up with Cameron’s love child, and would go on to confront her baby daddy as if s/he were on Jerry Springer.
We’ve seen the sort of responses Cohen can gather from unsuspecting bystanders in Borat, Bruno, and Da Ali G Show, and it’s a shame that we’re not going to see how James Cameron would react to a mockery of his mega-hit film. I can understand why the Oscar producers would be nervous, but I’m not sure how anyone can bring Cohen onto a project and not expect him to offend someone. This reminds me of how attendees at the recent TED conference were offended when Sarah Silverman was brought on to be Sarah Silverman.
This is the second snub from the upcoming Oscars ceremony for Cohen. According to an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cohen was one of names brought up to host the event, but he was shot down for that as well. “They thought it was too big of a wild card,” said Oscar producer Adam Shankman (Bedtime Stories and Hairspray).
There was some news recently that James Cameron might be producing or even potentially directing a film about Hiroshima. He’d optioned a book called The Last Train From Hiroshima, by Charles Pellegrino, a friend of the director.
Now publication of the book is being halted, because publisher Henry Holt and Company “was not able to answer” questions about the veracity of some of Pellegrino’s facts. Some of the people mentioned in the purportedly factual book may not exist. Oops! Probably won’t see a movie from Cameron any time soon.
Yahoo reports that the publisher released a statement that says, “It is with deep regret that Henry Holt and Company announces that we will not print, correct or ship copies of Charles Pellegrino’s `The Last Train from Hiroshima.”
A week ago, Pellegrino admitted that one person he interviewed had made false claims about being on one of the planes that flew with the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Now the existence of two other men mentioned in the book, Father Mattias and John MacQuitty, cannot be verified.
In fact, Pellegrino’s own cred is being examined. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, from which he claims to have earned a PhD, says it has no proof that he earned a degree.
The association between Cameron and Pellegrino goes back a long way. The director wrote the introduction for Pellegrino’s Ghosts of the Titanic, provided a blurb for this book, and hired Pellegrino as an advisor on Avatar. Cameron also wrote the introduction for The Jesus Family Tomb, the embarrassing book co-authored by Pellegrino that purported to document the discovery of a tomb containing the remains of Jesus. I don’t imagine we’ll hear much, if anything from Cameron on this particular development.
(And yes, the image above has the book title as Last Train to Hiroshima — it was changed at some point.)
We’ve been hearing for a while now that a new Mortal Kombat feature film was in the works, be it a new sequel directed by Christopher ‘mink’ Morrison or a reboot written by screenwriter Oren Uziel, author of the Black List 2009 entry Shimmer Lake. But a pesky reoccurring lawsuit might keep the video game franchise from returning to the big screen.
Filed by film producer Larry Kasanoff (Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) and his production company Threshold Entertainment against Warner Bros/Midway Games, the suit alleges intellectual property claims to the Mortal Kombat franchise. The action was filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles, and states that Warner Bros has “failed to work with Threshold in the development and production of the third ‘Mortal Kombat’ film,” and has avoided communication with the company, even though there have been recent reports that a new screenwriter has been hired to develop a MK reboot.
While it is always sad to see a legal mess hold up production of a potential feature, it is far too hard to formulate an opinion on which company is in the right on this one. It is far too complicated of a mess to make judgements, Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the first two films, and think that Paul W.S. Anderson’s original feature is far overrated among video game fans. The game was fun for its day, but I don’t believe there is really enough material for a feature length story deserving of big screen distribution.
source: The Wrap
According to Vulture, test screenings of The Baster have revealed a popular distaste for the title. Okay, in and of itself the title is barely offensive but it would seem these test audiences are finding it a little too on the nose in how it makes the film’s central maguffin, a turkey baster used for artificial insemination, too front and center.
The script by Allan Loeb is really rather good, and certainly isn’t just lowest common denominator stuff. It’s about a switcheroo stunt with a baster full of semen and a women who finds out she may have conceived with the ‘help’ of a different man to the one intended. In the picture, said woman is Jennifer Aniston so I should hardly be surprised that the studio is looking to keep all sharp edges out of the marketing. I guess they can call it anything they want - Friends: The Movie, if they must - if it means the dopes are more likely to line up with the smarts.
The Terminator movie rights went up for auction today, and Sony Pictures and Lionsgate were bidding frantically back and fourth from 3:00pm to 8:00pm tonight. But as the dust cleared, neither movie studio came out the winner. Halcyon accepted a $29.5 million bid from a Santa Barbara-based hedge fund Pacificor, the debtholder which pushed the company into bankruptcy.Of course, this is subject to the approval by the bankruptcy court.
According to Finke’s source, “Sony and Lionsgate dropped out at just under $29.5 million when it became clear that Pacificor was willing to pay almost any amount of money for Terminator.” As part of the deal, Halcyon will keep the revenue streams from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation, and will receive $5 million for every Terminator movie produced in the future.
What this all means for the future of the Terminator franchise is unclear. The last Terminator film earned $372 million worldwide theatrically. And while Arnold might soon be available for big screen offers, I’m not sure they could afford him. I’m not a money guy, but it seems to me that the smartest thing they could do is make the fifth Termiantor film for about half the estimated budget of Salvation, aiming in the $100-$120 million range.
Last week some quotes came out of a Cop Out roundtable interview where Kevin Smith talked about the notion of accepting money donated from fans to finance his movie Red State. Smith said that he would match donations based on the plan that had been considered so far (a point I think a lot of people missed) to bulk up the financing.
I thought the idea was interesting, though possibly so difficult to pull together from a legal perspective that it could never really work. Astoundingly, a lot of the other reactions to this idea were vehemently negative. There was a range of angry response, much of which boiled down to “how dare he ask for money?” based on the idea that Smith would get paid to make the film and would own the final product.
Smith was understandably less than happy with the negative reaction and has addressed the idea and the response to it in a blog post.
The first point to take away here is that Kevin Smith did not propose this idea. He’s not begging; fans proposed and then endorsed the concept. (I arguably didn’t make that clear in my original post, which was a mistake.) One fan mentioned the idea of donations via Twitter, which led to many others offering to donate. At that point Smith said he’d look into it, and according to his post he has spent as much as ten thousand dollars having lawyers check into the legal issues that would ensue.
Here’s a segment of his blog response, which you should check out in its entirety:
This fan-financed-film (aka, “begging”) hasn’t happened yet, nor might it ever happen. While it all sounds perfectly Amish, it’s fraught with crazy pitfalls and tax problems that have required hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in legal fees to investigate even the possibility of the fan-financed idea’s merit.
…If (and I mean IF with a huge fucking i & f) this fan-financed idea were to move forward? I’m not making a dime. If I were, as suggested, to turn to the fan-base to fund the movie, do you honestly think I’d even take a salary? I was just tickled and touched a bunch of people wanted to see it so badly, they were like “Here’s my twenty, if it’ll help.” All without having read a script.
…This isn’t about making money, you negative pricks: it’s about making movies. And what’s sickening about it? Motherfuckers screaming foul WRITE FOR MOVIE WEBSITES. You’d imagine they’d support the making of a movie.
Whew. Good thing we weren’t among the ones screaming foul.
I want to reiterate the point I tried to make the first time: this is a really intriguing idea, and if Smith and his lawyers could make it happen it could represent a small seismic shift in the way the business works. There’s no real reason it couldn’t work, besides the endless series of legal hurdles that get thrown in the path of any typical film getting made. Add a wildly unconventional financing package to the deal, and things could get really weird. But someone is likely to do this eventually, and Smith has a dream (that may be a pipe dream, but still) that this could be a sort of American Indie Movement v.3. That’s a thing I’d like to see come into being.
