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20th Century Fox / Mark Fellman
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There’s no shortage of fan fiction and musty paperbacks based on science fiction movies, but it’s highly unusual for the creators of such films to actually write the things. James Cameron is reportedly working on a novel based on the back story of his latest film, which has already made more money than any movie ever.
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Is it unfair to bring up Mel Gibson’s troubles? After all, it’s been more than three years since the superstar allegedly blamed those “fucking Jews” for “all the wars in the world.” Gibson loses it in this interview, saying “I’ve done all the necessary mea culpas.”
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www.ucpress.edu
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By Tom Kemper — In this first-ever history of Hollywood agents, Tom Kemper mines agency archives to present an insider’s view of their tooth-and-claw rise to power during the studio era. Through case studies of key figures like Myron Selznick and Charles Feldman, we see that the agent’s character and social relationships functioned within a business structure—a good reputation and powerful connections were an agent’s most precious assets.
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When you’re in a movie about a countercultural figure as big as Allen Ginsberg, it’s going to be hard to avoid the political questions, and “Howl” stars Jon Hamm and James Franco, who plays the Beat-era poet in the film, were ready to hold forth at the Sundance Film Festival about one prominent political topic of our time: California’s Proposition 8.
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AP / Robert F. Bukaty
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Which industries actually thrive in the midst of a crippling recession? There are many ways to approach that question, but over the past year, Americans looking for low-impact escapism on a budget went to the movies, and they did so in numbers that might put some of the hand-wringing about the impact of the Internet and the economy on the film business on hold, at least for the time being.
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logoonline.com
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Despite Hollywood’s reputation for being a liberal hotbed, some stubborn forms of prejudice persist, such as the lingering notion that it’s a potential career-killer for certain high-profile types to come out of the closet. Luckily, those who are willing to try have at least one industry expert ready to give them a hand with the press, the public and their risk-averse bosses.
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Flickr / Tony Shek
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There was a time when Hollywood studios kept their stables of stars on a short leash, keeping close watch over their public personas and even arranging their marriages. Actors at least appear to have more leeway these days, but some studios are requiring that they refrain from broadcasting the minutiae of their daily lives via social media like Facebook and Twitter.
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Wikimedia Commons / Subsven
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If things had worked out a little differently, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy was gunned down in 1968, might have become a Wal-Mart or one of Donald Trump’s gaudy creations. Instead, it is now a center of education, home to two elementary schools and, next year, the new Robert F. Kennedy High School.
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AP / Roberto Pfeil
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After his legal team came up short Tuesday with its request that Swiss officials reconsider his recent arrest and release him on bail, film director Roman Polanski remained behind bars, unable to spend his time awaiting his fate from his resort home in Gstaad.
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By Eugene Robinson — Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the Puritan scolds definitely have a point.
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Those poor, beleaguered health insurance honchos would be totally out to sea without the help of Hollywood’s best and brightest—Jon Hamm, Will Ferrell and Olivia Wilde among them—to launch a dinghy of hope their way in the form of this timely PSA. Down with the public option!
Posted on Sep 22, 2009
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AP / Eugene Hoshiko
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It’s not the first time that objections have been raised over the kinds of values promoted, whether explicitly or implicitly, by media products hailing from the general vicinity of Hollywood, but this time the issue concerns a whole country taking on a major international commercial coalition: China and the World Trade Organization, respectively.
Posted on Sep 22, 2009
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Whatever one thinks of his politics, Elia Kazan was inarguably one of the 20th century’s greatest Broadway and Hollywood directors. A new book reveals the master at work.
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localworlds.org
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By Gbemisola Olujobi — The Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood (a play on Hollywood in the manner of Bollywood), has grown from an accidental discovery into a mega-industry of over 2,000 titles and $200M annually.
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Composite image: Kleininstruments.com, twitter.com
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The time frame for projecting the success or failure of a newly released film has already been compressed to the point of asphyxiation, thanks to the Internet, but with the popularity of social networking services like Twitter, the window of box office opportunity has become even shorter, according to The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman.
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Flickr / igKnition
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Sean Penn has pulled out of two upcoming film roles and may be taking a year off from acting. No word yet on his politicking schedule. The star had been set to appear in “Cartel” and “The Three Stooges.” Yes, those Three Stooges.
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aboutus.org
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After a year of haggling (and not much to show for it), the Screen Actors Guild has agreed to a two-year contract with the major studios. SAG President Alan Rosenberg dismissed the deal as “devastatingly unsatisfactory.” So dramatic.
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Flickr/Derek Purdy
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Fresh off a fundraising stop in Las Vegas, where he made an appearance at Caesars Palace, President Barack Obama swung through Hollywood Wednesday evening to pitch woo to a star-studded crowd for the first time since taking office—but, as The Wrap’s Dominic Patten points out, it was a bit of a tough crowd this time around.
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By David Sirota — Most newspaper postmortems insist that decreased ad revenues brought on by the Internet and the recession caused journalism’s problems, but a look at the vapid celebrity-obsessed pages of the nation’s ever-thinner rags tells a different story.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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By David Sirota — Recently, I’ve been groping for the precise word to characterize the zeitgeist of this (unfortunately) historic moment—a word I finally found during a visit last week to central Mexico.
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timesonline.typepad.com
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A special delegation from Hollywood visited Iran this weekend. Said delegation was there to take part in a “cultural exchange,” according to The Wrap, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t rolling out the red carpet.
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The founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the biggest names in file sharing, face up to two years in a hard-core Swedish prison if they can’t convince a judge that their unfortunately named Web site isn’t legally responsible for 115 million kronor worth of media piracy.
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Flickr / AtomicPope
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By Chris Hedges — I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles a few days ago. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more of Hollywood’s founders and stars than anywhere else on Earth.” We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society, our gods are often celebrities.
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AP Photo / Akira Suemori
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What’s a former secretary of state to do once her time in the White House runs out? In Condoleezza Rice’s case, the next step in the “reinvention and evolution” of her professional life involves signing on at the William Morris Agency, according to Variety.
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AP photo / Evan Agostini
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If Sunday’s concert extravaganza, featuring such boldfaced musical acts as U2 (channeling U2 from 25 years ago), Stevie Wonder and Mary J. Blige, didn’t provide enough glitz for one inaugural bash, several dozen of their celebrity peers are following the spotlight to Washington, D.C., to join in the festivities.
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abc.go.com
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By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting —
The inaugural episode of ABC’s newest reality television series did exactly as producer Arnold Shapiro told viewers it would: unabashedly celebrated the Department of Homeland Security. It also failed in every conceivable way to critically examine the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II.
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AP file photo / Reed Saxon
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By Mike Farrell — The Hollywood-centric “Membership First” faction that has controlled the Screen Actors Guild’s national board for most of the last five years chooses tactics—misinformation, tough talk and over-promising—that undermine the union’s credibility.
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filminfocus.com
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By Sheerly Avni — Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is a movie to be thankful for. Go see it, tonight if you can, and in a crowded theater. Then open up some merlot and watch the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” by Robert Epstein—because these two films belong together.
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AP photo / Phil Bray
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By Larry Gross — Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is the first major Hollywood “gay themed” film since “Brokeback Mountain,” and moreover (unlike “Brokeback”), this one is about openly gay activists, not tortured closet cases. Yet, once again, the lead gay roles couldn’t be filled by openly gay actors. What’s going on here?
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Flickr/dcJohn
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Just after Barack Obama was elected president, The Washington Post published the affecting story of former White House butler Eugene Allen—and Hollywood was definitely paying attention.
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rockthetruth.blogspot.com
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There wasn’t a whole lot of love in the room for cable news channel MSNBC during a luncheon in Beverly Hills on Monday for television executives and actors from both ends of the political spectrum.
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AP Photo / Lionel Cironneau
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Seasoned film star and “Changeling” director Clint Eastwood says American politics aren’t what they used to be; in fact, the grizzled sort-of-libertarian thinks they’re even a little “perverted”—but not like that.
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mtv.com
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Paul Newman, the iconic blue-eyed film star of big-screen classics like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “The Sting” and “Cool Hand Luke,” died on Friday at his Connecticut home after a long battle with cancer. Newman, who also made a name for himself as a philanthropist with his Newman’s Own food product line and Hole in the Wall Gang camps, was 83.
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manolomen.com
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It’s good to know that there are still people, in this time of great strife, who believe in the power of diplomatic negotiation over brute force ... even if the people in this particular case happen to be two Hollywood directors apparently possessed of egos the size of Sarah Palin’s home state.
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Barack Obama’s fundraising extravaganza in Hollywood Tuesday night raised a whopping $9 million for his presidential campaign and the Democratic Party—the single highest figure ever raised by a candidate in one go, as MSNBC anchor Alex Witt points out in this clip.
Posted on Sep 17, 2008
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John McCain took the opportunity Tuesday to criticize Barack Obama for consorting with celebrities at a Democratic fund drive in Hollywood that night, but McCain had apparently forgotten about his own celeb-attended fundraiser in Beverly Hills last month. McCain supporter Wilford Brimley has yet to comment on this grievous oversight.
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Keystone / Eddy Risch
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Barack Obama will get the star treatment from Hollywood denizens (or is it the other way around?) once more before the election, at a two-part fundraising extravaganza on Sept. 16.
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By David Sirota — Millions of Americans will flock to movie theaters in the coming months to escape their troubles, but they’d be better off renting one of these five classic political films.
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Mr. Fish
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The renowned author sits down with Truthdig literary editor Steve Wasserman to tell stories about his books, the many loves of his life—including dinosaurs and Halloween—and his own starring role in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame.
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thecia.com.au
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The recent spate of war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be a hard sell with American audiences—even more so with the U.S. military. Now, the Pentagon is combating a certain lack of nuance, as military officials see it, in flicks like “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah” by offering script consultation services to Hollywood types looking to make movies about the current conflicts in the Middle East.
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time.com
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Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman are now personae non gratae in Rome, according to the Italian capital’s new mayor, Gianni Alemanno, a former fascist who thinks American stars shouldn’t be hyped at Rome’s annual film festival at the expense of Italian actors and directors.
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foxnews.com
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A Florida court sentenced Wesley Snipes to 36 months in prison for tax evasion on Thursday, despite the actor’s plea for mercy and written character testimonials by fellow stars Denzel Washington and Woody Harrelson.
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By Ellen Goodman — I always thought that genealogy was for people whose blood ran blue. It was for folks who traced their ancestry to the Mayflower or the American Revolution, not those who came over in steerage one step ahead of the Cossacks.
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Flickr / djloche / jurvetson / seiu_international
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If you’re looking for an indicator of just how close the Democratic primary race is (delegate math notwithstanding), you need look no further than those all-important Hollywood donations. With nearly $6 million in entertainment industry contributions between them, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are separated by a mere $291.
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By Nick Turse —
Remember the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? Nick Turse, author of the new book “The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives,” has come up with a far more sinister version of that fun genealogical party activity—only this time, all proverbial roads lead back to the U.S. military instead of the “Footloose” star.
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evilbeetgossipfilm.com
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After weeks of striking, the Writers Guild of America has struck a deal with Hollywood honchos, ending the protracted impasse between scribes and studios and allowing the stalled wheels of the entertainment industry to creak back into motion on Wednesday.
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Hollywood bigwig Ari Emanuel knows a thing or two about superdelegates. His brother, Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is one. But, as Ari writes on the Huffington Post, “as much as I love and respect him, I don’t trust him and his fellow superdelegates to decide for me and the American people who should be the Democratic nominee—and, therefore, most likely the next president of the United States.”
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Pop star and producer will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob) put together this independent, star-filled tribute to Barack Obama’s New Hampshire concession speech. Whether it’s inspirational or just cheesy is up to you, but we’ve got nothing bad to say about Herbie Hancock on the piano.
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