Mar 28 2009
Can you imagine the job of hairstylist on that set?
Robert Pattinson, the heartthrob from "Twilight," tells Moviefone.com that he would love to work with Benicio Del Toro, among others. Del Toro, an Oscar winner for "Traffic" whose unruly hair rivals Pattinson's, is now on screen in the biopic "Che." The second part, in fact, is playing at the Harris Theater, Downtown.
When Moviefone.com asked Pattinson if he follows online gossip about himself, he said he read that and thought it was nonsense and made him sound like a loser.
Pressed, he said: "Well, I do sometimes. I used to a lot more before and then ... I only look at the negative stuff. I just want to know whoever's saying negative stuff, and I just want to remember their names. I write it all down in my black book." And then he laughed.
He confirmed he took a fan out for dinner but batted down a rumor, from the set of "New Moon," that he doesn't smell good and isn't showering. "I haven't even been on the set yet!"
Click here for the rest.
Mar 25 2009
It's official. Seth Rogen is everywhere.
The voice of the gelatinous blue B.O.B. in "Monsters vs. Aliens," the star of the April comedy "Observe and Report" and Playboy's cover guy, Rogen will host "Saturday Night Live" on April 4 with alt rockers Phoenix.
This will be the first of two live shows in April. No host or musical guest has been announced for the second by NBC.
Mar 25 2009
Yet another reason to like the late Natasha Richardson and her family. People magazine reports that her family requested that her organs be donated to help save other patients' lives.
Richardson, wife of Liam Neeson, mother to their boys and a member of the British acting dynasty, died March 18 from head injuries suffered during a skiing lesson. She was 45.
On people.com, a family friend calls organ donation "very Natasha," and something positive that came out of her tragic death. Are you designated an organ donor on your driver's license? I am.
Mar 25 2009
Variety reports today that MGM and the Farrelly brothers could end up with two Oscar winners and a famous funnyman for their Three Stooges movie.
Sean Penn will play Larry and Jim Carrey, with an extra 40 pounds on his lean frame, could play Curly and if that weren't weird enough, the studio is looking at Benicio Del Toro for Moe.
First Che, then Moe. That's enough to give any actor whiplash.
Variety says "The Three Stooges" would be a comedy built around the antics of the characters the actors played in the Columbia Pictures shorts. The movie is targeted for a 2010 release and negotiations are still underway for Carrey and Del Toro.
In an alt-world, Seth Rogen, Mark Addy from "Still Standing" and Robert Downey Jr. would play the Stooges. Your thoughts?
A reader writes: "I just saw a blurb on E.T. that Jim Carey is to be cast as Curly in the upcoming Three Stooges movie. Rogen was born to play Curly. Carey is Shemp. Let's get this right."
Mar 25 2009
If you host (or attend) an annual Oscar party, circle March 7, 2010 on the calendar, if yours goes that far.
That's the date, just announced, for the 82nd Academy Awards. The Oscars again will take place at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, with nominations announced on Feb. 2, a Tuesday as usual. Nominations this year shifted to a Thursday to avoid conflicting with the presidential inauguration.
The Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards presentation will be Feb. 20, final polls will close March 2 and the winners revealed March 7.
Let the Oscar buzz begin!
Mar 23 2009
From the Associated Press:
David Letterman says he and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko are newlyweds.
During a taping Monday of CBS' "Late Show," Letterman said he and Lasko married last Thursday at the Teton County Courthouse in Choteau, Mont. The couple has a son, Harry, born in November 2003. Letterman often would call Lasko "the boy's mother" and joke to other unmarried parents (such as Naomi Watts) about his status.
In his remarks, the late-night host joked that when the couple started dating in 1986 he told Lasko they should see how the relationship was going in about 10 years.
Having avoided getting hitched for more than two decades, Letterman said he felt like he was admired by married men who saw him as the "last of the real gunslingers."
Mar 23 2009
Anne Hathaway (shown at the Academy Awards) has definitely left her pop princess roles behind. Next for her is a stage and film adaptation of Gerald Clarke's biography, "Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland."
The Weinstein Co. has optioned the movie and stage rights of the book, which came out in 2000 and should provide rich fodder for a film.
I reviewed the book when it came out and it paints Garland as a high-maintenance woman, given her early and lifelong addiction to drugs; multiple marriages and bed partners; chronic insecurities; repeated suicide attempts; and the over-the-rainbow voice that remains her legacy.
"We are thrilled to have the brilliantly talented Anne Hathaway portray stage and screen legend Judy Garland. I have worked with Anne on projects in the past and have known her for many years. She will be a true class act in this challenging role," Harvey Weinstein said in a press release.
Here's my review, published in the PG on June 11, 2000:
Katharine Hepburn once said Judy Garland was a 24-hour-a-day job - and she was right.
Garland was a high-maintenance woman, given her early and lifelong addiction to diet pills, uppers, downers and anything she could steal from her friends' medicine chests; multiple marriages and bed partners; chronic insecurities; repeated suicide attempts; and the over-the-rainbow voice that remains her legacy.
Garland, born Frances Ethel Gumm June 10, 1922, had a life that no screenwriter could invent because no one would believe it. Everything was writ large.
Her mother, unhappily pregnant for a third time, did everything she could to induce a miscarriage. When her youngest daughter proved to be an entertainer at age 2 1/2, she then did everything she could to make her a star - and did. And yet she didn't love her daughter the way the girl wanted or needed to be loved.
"If Frank's love was like Niagara, unending and unstoppable, Ethel's could be compared to the flow that comes out of a faucet: a meager stream that she could turn on, and turn off," Garland's latest biographer, Gerald Clarke, writes of Judy's parents.
In mid-March, before singer Lorna Luft came to Pittsburgh, she said of her mother's latest biographer, "I respect him and I know he was really on her side," but Clarke never talked to Garland's two daughters and son. "Some of the stories in there are not only inaccurate, but some of them don't need to be in there," Luft said.
I now understand what she meant. Clarke provides an exhaustive, often overwritten picture of Garland and her family - including the names of the teen-age boys who supposedly had sexual encounters with Judy's father. (This falls under the Too Much Information category.) Three generations of women in the family married men who, it turned out, liked men.
If you've ever wondered how a high-wattage star can die almost penniless, Clarke tells you. Garland made and spent and was cheated out of millions. In the mid-1960s, some of her fans even took turns paying her telephone and electric bills.
"To keep up her spirits, Judy kept a scrapbook of comically macabre news stories" about black widow spiders nesting in a beehive hairdo or victims of a train wreck who were laid out on adjacent tracks and run over. A friend recalls that when she would get depressed, she would take out her scrapbook and say, ‘Look at this! You think I've got troubles!' "
Oh, she had troubles. Big troubles.
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer would place his hand on her left breast to show just where her heart was. Early on, she described herself as a "fat little frightening pig with pigtails" and struggled with herself and the studio over her weight.
Her mother arranged an abortion after Garland became pregnant by first husband David Rose. A married Garland fell in love with actor Tyrone Power, whose wife refused to divorce him. And those are just the earlier years, before she married four more times, underwent six electric shock treatments and ingested countless pills.
Clarke bestows mythic status on Garland and every so often goes into hyperdrive. Or something.
Consider this passage about the singer leaving her imprint at Grauman's Chinese Theater. "With Mickey Rooney helping on her right side, her mother on her left, she pressed her feet and hands into a slab of wet cement, so that, like the image of some girl of Pompeii, immortalized by a belch from Vesuvius, her lithic impression would remain long after she herself was gone."
You should hear his take on Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" and the Yellow Brick Road. "She is treading in the footsteps of heroes, of Odysseus fighting the hostility of gods ..."
Where's an editor with a red pen or a finger on the delete key when you need one? "Get Happy" is an often fascinating read, but it's rarely a fast one.
In the requisite Pittsburgh connection, Garland was breaking all records at the Stanley Theater (now Benedum Center) when she heard MGM had acquired the rights to "The Wizard of Oz" and assigned her the role of Dorothy. After an early screening of the movie, several of MGM's "men in dark suits" suggested the deletion of "Over the Rainbow" and the scene surrounding it. Mayer refused.
Before plunging into "Get Happy," I knew Garland led a dramatic, tumultuous, ultimately tragic life, but I didn't know all the details. And Clarke does offer the details, suggesting that Garland was truly happy only when she was onstage.
It's ironic that after she died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates in June 1969 at age 47, 22,000 people paid their respects and another 2,000 were turned away.
And this was a woman who had watched champagne grow flat in untouched glasses at her last wedding, to Mickey Deans, the night manager of a Manhattan disco. Many of her friends had promised to attend but didn't. Not a single famous name walked through the door.
In the end, Garland exhausted friends and fans, just as she had exhausted herself.
Mar 23 2009
"Slumdog Millionaire" has nothing on "Twilight." The vampire romance was selected by 78 percent of participating moviegoers as the top movie of 2008.
The first Fandango Fan Choice Award will be presented to Summit Entertainment, the studio that produced Twilight, at ShoWest, the world's largest theatrical convention, on April 2 in Las Vegas.
From Feb. 9-Feb. 27, more than 69,000 people voted online for their favorite film at www.fandango.com/awardswatch. Moviegoers were asked to pick their favorite film from a list of 2008's top 10 domestic box office hits, which included "The Dark Knight," "Iron Man" and "WALL-E."
"Twilight," which came out on DVD on Saturday at 12:01 a.m., got more fan votes than any other title, earning it the crown.
Mar 23 2009
If someone asks you to pay to be a movie extra, refuse and run as fast as you can.
The studios pay you to work, not the other way around (although there are times when casting directors are seeking unpaid extras). Do not pay anyone to be an extra in "Warrior," the movie that will start shooting in Pittsburgh in April.
You can find the information on this blog about how to apply, and Lissa Brennan, extras casting director hired by Lionsgate, will have a table at the job fair at Mellon Arena March 24 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Remember, they pay you, not the other way around!
Mar 22 2009
It's official: "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" will open here April 17. Still to come are the theaters (or theater, perhaps) where it will play.
"Mysteries," based on the celebrated Michael Chabon novel, filmed here in late 2006 but was liberated from limbo when it found a distributor.
Set in 1983, "Mysteries" stars Jon Foster as Art Bechstein, spending the summer in suspension between college graduation and real life and caught in a romantic triangle with Cleveland Arning (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jane (Sienna Miller), his girlfriend and an aspiring concert violinist.
The movie's filmed Downtown, on the South Side, in Edgeworth, Mount Washington, Rankin and Fox Chapel.
The press notes devote much time to changes made by writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber. Chabon is quoted as saying: "It's not 'Harry Potter' where every word of it gets parsed over by legions of devoted, rabid fans with websites and so on. I think when the audiences see the film it will fulfill all of their memories of what the book was like."
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