I can’t hear the damn thing for lack of the right software, but about 7 minutes into this KCRW/”Which Way LA?” sound file is an 18-minute conversation about the where the Anthony Pellicano investigation is now (4.4.06) and where it’s going. Ross Johnson, hardcore legal reporter and master of an excellent site called L.A. Indie, tells me “it’s the most sober analysis of Pellicano” — does he mean the man or the scandal? — “you’ll ever hear.” Warren Olney is the host; Johnson and Loyola Marymount law professor Laurie Levenson are the guests. Stay with L.A. Indie: later this week Johnson is going to reveal public documents that may leave certain prosecutors squirming over their past relationships with Pellicano.
Now wait a minute…wait a
Now wait a minute…wait a minute: in stories reporting the decision of attorneys Howard Weitzman and Dale Kinsella to leave Greenburg, Glusker, Fields, Claman, Machtinger & Kinsella to form their own entertainment law firm, Variety‘s Janet Shprintz and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Jesse Hiestand both softballed it when it came to explaining why. They both reported assertions (from Weitzman and Greenberg Glusker managing partner Norman Levine, respectively) that the departure has nothing to do the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping mess that Bert Fields, the head of Greenberg, Clusker, is in right now. You can bet it does have something to do with the Pellicano thing, and most likely to do with fines, lawsuits and other monetary woundings that may be suffered by Greenberg, Glusker due to the ongoing mucky-muck. Here’s Nikki Finke‘s take on the evacuation, which she likens to rats leaving a sinking ship.
Two expensive period films have
Two expensive period films have had a scheduling face-off, and the less heavily-budgeted of the two has retreated with its tail between its legs. The July ’06 shoot of Ridley Scott ‘s American Gangster, a ’70s-era crime film that will costar Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, has delayed a planned September start of a 1930s period drama to be directed by Baz Luhrman and costar Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
Following his detour into soul-stirring
Following his detour into soul-stirring otherness in Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic Southland Tales, Seann William Scott is back to playing bozos in formula crap films. His next, Gary, the Tennis Coach, is about a high school janitor coaching a group of misfits to the Nebraska state championship…zzzzz. Pic will roll this summer under director Danny Leiner (Dude, Where’s My Car).
"If you want to keep
“If you want to keep your argument so narrow as to say the United #93
passengers didn’t enter the cockpit and/or manually force the plane into the ground, and therefore weren’t quite the heroes so many of us believe they are…fine. But whatever strategy the hijackers had in mind, it was not to kill squirrels in a Pennsylvania field . Whether they made it to the cockpit or not, United #93 crashed as a direct result of the passengers revolting against the hijackers. It seems quite clear that everyone on that plane had decided and accepted they were already dead, and that they weren’t going to be taking anyone else with them. I think that field in Pennsylvania is every bit as sacred as the Civil War battlefields that dot the east coast. And frankly, I think the people who say it’s ‘too soon’ are cowards; you don’t have to see the film, but my God…what makes these people think they can speak for the rest of us?” — Michael Andry , San Antonio, Texas.
This is Vivien Leigh as
This is Vivien Leigh as Blanche (Blanche!…Blanche!) Dubois in Streetcar, giving her “don’t hang back with the brutes” speech. Substitute the behavior of Stanley Kowalski, whom she refers to in the early portion, with today’s ape-cage downmarket movies, and…well, something to mull over, I think. I liked this Tennessee Williams play quite a lot when I first saw it in my late teens, but I love it now… especially the second half, starting with that scene with the visiting newspaper boy.
Wouldn't you say the brand-new
Wouldn’t you say the brand-new redesign of the New York Times online site is a wee bit similar to the design of El Pais, the influential Spanish-language newspaper? I’m not saying the Times design guys actually ripped off El Pais, but they might as well have.
I finally got my copy
I finally got my copy of the forthcoming two-disc A Streetcar Named Desire (Warner Home Video, 5.2), and here are two recordings from the 1947 Marlon Brando screen test, when he was 23. It’s mainly footage of Brando and a somewhat older actress acting a scene from an early version of a script called Rebel Without a Cause, in which Brando’s character wasn’t named “Jim Stark” (the teenaged kid played by James Dean in the 1955 film) but “Harold.” In excerpt #1, Harold, obviously angry and distressed, is talking to the girl about getting away (maybe to South America, he says), and excerpt #2 is recorded from footage of an off-the-cuff chat between Brando and an off-screen casting woman (possibly named Ruth Ford). The test was apparently shot before Brando began performing in the ’47 play of “A Streetcar Named Desire”– when the woman asks for his previous stage credits he only mentions plays he did prior to “Streetcar.”
That disputed headline for Sharon
That disputed headline for Sharon Waxman‘s 4.4 N.Y. Times story about the currently-playing trailer for United 93 upsetting people (which has prompted West 43rd Street notions about Universal withdrawing the trailer…notions that are entirely confined to West 43rd Street, apparently) reads “Universal Will Not Pull ‘United 93’ Trailer, Despite Criticism.” But the headline for the same story in today’s (4.4) print edition doesn’t imply quite the same assumption…it feels a tad less negative. Here it is…
"The best mise en scene
“The best mise en scene is the one you don’t notice. You have to make the public forget that there’s a screen. You have to lead them into the screen, until they forget the image only has two dimensions. If you try to be artistic or affected you miss everything.” — director-writer Billy Wilder
Okay, so DHL (the courier
Okay, so DHL (the courier company with the yellow trucks and yellow jackets) isn’t really involved in “a logistic and shipping partnership” with Paramount Pictures and Mission: Impossible: 3 . The real deal, according to Mark Ebner’s Hollywood Interrupted, is that they “paid millions to Paramount for the opportunity of having Tom Cruise appear on screen driving a stupid yellow DHL truck around Italy” in the film. I for one am shocked, shocked, that this sort of thing goes on in the film industry. In Billy Wilder‘s One Two Three, Horst Buccholz screams in exasperation, “Is everybody in the world corrupt?” in response to which a chubby Soviet trade ambassador replies, “I don’t know everybody.”
