Archive for the ‘TWITTER’ Category
@ChloeGMoretz You want cute. Here is my dog Otter. She is a furball. She gets dirty in about 15min.
Posted: May 4, 2010 in PHOTOS, TWITTER
Hollywood Cracks Down On Twitter Leaks…This will NEVER work because Insiders like me can share the scoop…
Posted: October 20, 2009 in NEWS STORY, TWITTER
Folks in Hollywood are going to have to mind more than their P’s and Q’s as studios are starting to crack down on employees using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to curb information leaking out ahead of schedule.
Some studios have already begun the crackdown with Disney including clauses in their contracts citing “interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog” as a means for breaching confidentially. DreamWorks is another studio to jump on the social network clampdown by cautioning their employees not to circumvent (“cirsumvent” – Gob Bluth) the company’s press releases through the use of “a social networking site, blog or other Internet-type site.”
This is not too surprising with Twitter allowing one person the possibility to instantly reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with breaking news, minutes from when it occurred. Some recent news announced on Twitter include Paula Abdul (@PaulaAbdul) announcing her departure from American Idol, Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) revealing Ben Silverman leaving NBC and Greg Grunberg (@greggrunberg) confirming that one of the main cast of Heroes will be killed off.
There was also a flurry of news reports hitting the net after young actor Tim Pocock, who played Cyclops in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, tweeted that he’d be off to work on X-Men: First Class after production on his Australian TV show finishes in February, 2010. Once word had spread everywhere, Pocock posted a retraction, stating it was all a cruel prank.
While news leaks may be one reason to curb celebrity Tweeting, the misinterpretation of information might be another as two weeks ago the creator for the hit FOX drama Bones, Hart Hanson (@HartHanson), tweeted; “First time in ‘Bones’ history we are shut down from production. Damn swine flu!” What started as a joke quickly turned into anything but as news outlets quickly picked up the story, reporting it as fact. This caused Hanson to return to Twitter to clarify that while the show was shut down because of the flu, it was not of the pork variety.
Hollywood seems to be of two minds in regards to the use of social networking sites, even when under the same corporate umbrella with the Disney side looking to crack down with contract clauses while the television side, ABC, encourages their stars to Twitter, even publishing the tweets on the networks website.
Still, if we’ve learned anything about the internet, it’s that if information wants to get out, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Especially if you’re angry that you’re show has been canceled without even a single episode making it to air. Such as Southland star, Michael Cudlitz (@Cudlitz).
Who are some of your favorite celebrity Twitterers? I’d tell you mine, but I’m a little embarrassed because some of them aren’t as manly as MythBusters Adam Savage (@donttrythis) and Grant Imahara (@GrantImahara).
I’ll give you a hint – it rhymes with Bristin Bhenoweth (cough – @KCHENOWETH – cough)
Source: The Hollywood Reporter [via: Cinema Blend]
Megan Fox on Michael Bay: ‘He wants to be like Hitler.’
Posted: September 6, 2009 in ACTORS, TWITTERLet’s be frank. I’m not sure if Megan Fox, the sultry starlet of “Transformers” fame, actually knows all that much about Hitler, other than the fact that he had a mustache, makes a brief appearance for some reason in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and — if you believe various right-wing nut-jobs — seems to have promoted a healthcare plan back in the 1930s that was a lot like the one the Democrats are trying to ram through Congress this year. (OK, I’m not actually sure Fox knows that last part at all.)
But having been on a few movie sets in recent years, Fox sure knows a Type A dictatorial personality type when she sees one, which must be why in this new interview with Wonderland magazine, she decided to compare “Transformers” director Michael Bay to the notoriously madcap leader of the Third Reich. (The interview with Fox was actually designed to promote her upcoming fall release, “Jennifer’s Body,” but why talk about yet another bloody horror-comedy thriller when you can wax eloquent about Michael Bay.)
At any rate, as Fox puts it: “[Michael] wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all. It’s endearing to watch him. He’s so vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set, he’s a tyrant.”
Hmmmm: hopelessly awkward, vulnerable, no social skills and a nightmare to work for. Actually, what boy wonder filmmaker from the past 40 years does that description not apply to?
Photo of Megan Fox by Matt Sayles / AP
Photo of Michael Bay by Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times
Yo girl you want to keep working stop the psycho crap now…
I'd been wondering for a while whatever happened to "The Maiden Heist," an offbeat comedy about a trio of museum guards who steal a batch of their favorite art. Financed by Bob Yari, the maverick producer who won an Oscar for "Crash," the film stars Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, William H. Macy and Marcia Gay Harden, who have a raft of Oscar wins and nominations among them.
The film is finally coming out Oct. 27 — but only at your local video store, not at your local multiplex. NPR's Cory Turner recently did a nice in-depth piece about how the movie crashed and burned even before it made it to market. The story is well worth a read, since it offers a perfect example of how calamitous the current Hollywood business model is for indie films. According to Turner, Yari had planned to distribute the film himself but then ran into financial difficulties (his distribution wing recently declared bankruptcy). Yari tried to drum up interest from various studio distributors but found no takers, largely because he'd already sold the film's DVD and pay-TV rights to Sony.
The real rub, as indie filmmakers have discovered in recent years, is that it costs nearly as much to market a film as it does to make it. "Maiden Heist," for example, was made for $20 million but clearly needed nearly another $20 million to be properly marketed in a theatrical release. Needless to say, there aren't many distributors willing to plunk down that kind of money for a film that — despite its classy lineup of top actors — has relatively limited commercial potential.
It's why I always end up wondering each year what happened to some of the delightful little movies I saw at the Toronto Film Festival that never ended up seeing the light of day. "Maiden Heist" has its own set of special issues, largely owing to the involvement of Yari, who has burned a lot of bridges around town in the last few years by over-promising and under-delivering the goods.
But the lesson here is pretty simple: It's no longer enough to simply round up the financing for a film. In today's brutal, bottom-line environment, you need to have a plausible marketing strategy — and plenty of moolah behind it — before you start dreaming about your big opening weekend.
That is, unless you want to have your big movie opening at Wal-Mart.
Photo of William H. Macy, left, Morgan Freeman and Christopher Walken in "The Maiden Heist" from the Yari Film Group.
The Big Deal: Marvel is Disney’s new family brand
August 31, 2009 | 5:48 pm
Any doubts about Bob Iger’s willingness to belly up to the table and roll the dice were blown away by today’s surprise announcement that Disney spent $4 billion to acquire the comic-book giant Marvel Entertainment. The deal gives Disney access to Marvel’s voluminous library of super heroes, which include Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, Captain America, Thor and the Fantastic Four and about 4,995 other comic-book characters.
But Disney isn’t just buying into the Marvel business. It’s reinventing its future, which has become increasingly cloudy as family entertainment, especially in the movie end of the business, has been inexorably evolving from old-fashioned squeaky-clean Disney fare to the edgier, more unsettling PG-13 universe populated by Marvel’s potent arsenal of comic superheroes.
The Marvel purchase, like the $7.4-billion deal Iger negotiated in 2006 to bring Pixar into the Disney fold, is another sign that Disney’s top brass realizes that the company’s reign as an original creative engine for mass entertainment is over. Once an idea factory full of brilliant animators and imagineers, Disney is now a mass merchandising machine in search of exploitable product, whether it comes from Marvel, Pixar or DreamWorks, which will be releasing its upcoming slate through Disney as well.
The signals of Disney distress have all been visible for some time. The Pixar deal was a frank admission that Disney’s venerable animation factory had run out of gas. Not long after Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter gave an especially revealing interview to Fortune magazine, where he told of Iger experiencing a remarkable epiphany when attending an opening-day parade at the ceremonial launch of Hong Kong Disneyland. As Lasseter recalled: “[Bob] was watching all the classic Disney characters go by, and it hit him that there was not one character that Disney had created in the past ten years. Not one. All the new characters were invented by Pixar.”
Iger clearly had a similar moment of brutal corporate clarity when he made an unusually frank admission to media analysts this year when attempting to explain why Disney had such an abysmal quarter with its theatrical releases when the other studios were enjoying near-record box-office returns. “It’s about choice of films and the execution of the films that have been chosen for production,” Iger confessed. “We’ve had a rough year. So in that case, it’s not the marketplace. It’s our slate.”
While Pixar is now around to bolster the animation side of the business, the live-action end has been in the doldrums. In fact, since the studio’s lucrative “Pirates of the Caribbean” series premiered in 2003, Disney hasn’t been able to launch another broad-appeal international franchise. That would be a huge gaping wound for any studio but especially for Disney, which needs new mass appeal product to feed its real profit centers — its merchandising division, theme parks and TV channel.
What went wrong? And can Disney fix it? Keep reading:
The studio’s biggest failures in the past year showed Disney’s inability to reach the new family audience that has supplanted Disney’s traditional customers. Last Christmas, Disney thought it had a big winner with “Bedtime Stories,” which attempted to broaden the studio’s traditional family brand by marrying a kid-friendly concept to the young male appeal of Adam Sandler. The studio tried a similar strategy recently with “G Force,” another kid-friendly computer-animated/live-action film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer in a bid to connect Bruckheimer’s broader-edged brand to the traditional Disney animated audience.
Despite spending millions in TV advertising reaching out to the older-skewing (Disney-owned) ESPN sports audience, the movie failed to reach an older audience. As with “Bedtime Stories,” Disney found itself unable to age up its films.
Iger goes to the movies, so he must have realized what was happening. The sweet-natured vibe of older Disney films is losing its appeal. In recent years, parents have become comfortable with a new, more intense level of violence and action. And of course, it is Marvel more than any other film producer that has tapped into that new sensibility with its “Spider-Man,” “Iron Man” and “X-Men” franchises.
“The real difference maker with Marvel,” says one rival studio chief, “is that it makes movies where the parents are just as excited to see the film as their kids. That’s the difference between a movie barely making $100 million — like a lot of Disney’s homegrown products — and a movie making $300 or $400 million. It’s a whole different playing field.”
The purchase of Marvel allows Disney to broaden its brand. It can now be the studio that encompasses every niche of family entertainment, from “High School Musical” to “Pirates of the Caribbean” to “Toy Story” to “Spider-Man.” For years, everyone has tried to take all of the risk out of the movie business. For Disney, this latest purchase is a way to take all of the unbranded — meaning risky, obscure or experimental — material out of its wheelhouse. The studio is now a giant collection of familiar, easily accessible brands — Marvel, Pixar, Spielberg and Bruckheimer — all under one large, even more familiar umbrella brand: Disney. It is a media conglomerate that will probably someday look a lot more like Procter & Gamble than a movie studio.
Change doesn’t happen overnight. While Disney won’t get to distribute Marvel’s movies until 2013 (when Marvel’s distribution deal with Paramount comes to an end after Paramount releases an “Iron Man” sequel in 2010, “Thor” and “First Avenger: Captain America” in 2011 and “The Avengers” in 2012), it will enjoy most of the proceeds from those films. And Disney will immediately start tapping into the merchandising revenues from those releases as it figures out how to exploit the titles via its other businesses.
But what the Marvel deal really means is that Disney is radically restructuring its creative aspirations. Once a company that drew inspiration from within, it is now paying top dollar to buy mature businesses — first Pixar and now Marvel — to feed its merchandising assembly lines. It will be years before anyone can say whether Disney overpaid for access to all this outside creative energy. Let’s just say that once it was on the open market, Marvel was clearly worth more to Disney than it was to Fox, Sony, Viacom or any other possible suitors.
There will be plenty of bumps in the road, since Disney will eventually have to make room in its movie-release calendar for an increasingly wide range of product and brands, including Pixar, Bruckheimer, Marvel and DreamWorks. Iger and his studio lieutenant Dick Cook will have to referee all sorts of release-date disputes as well as prickly creative autonomy issues.
But with one bold move, Disney has accepted an uncomfortable reality, that the foundation of the family entertainment business has shifted under its feet. If the studio wants to stay at the front of the pack, it will have to change with the times. In many ways, Marvel is the modern-era version of Disney, the repository of adolescent dreams and fantasies that has helped shape today’s pop culture. It will be Disney’s challenge not just to absorb all of Marvel’s unruly superheroes but to understand why they have as strong of a hold on today’s young audiences as any of Disney’s own creations.
More in: Pop Culture
It killed at the box office this weekend, but will District 9 get a sequel?
It might be too soon to know for sure, but many involved with the project seem to think it likely.
The star of the sci-fi thriller, Sharlto Copley, suggested that because of the filmmaker’s method of “improvisatory dialogue” and shooting film at random, there may in fact be enough footage on the cutting room floor to already spawn a sequel. And if not, they’ll make for killer DVD Extras.
“The behind-the-scenes DVD is gonna be crazy because we shot an enormous amount of footage,” he says. “There were a lot of exciting avenues to want to go down and you really [have to fit it all] into a small block of time.”
Last month, at Comic-Con, Peter Jackson, the film’s producer, was reluctant to suggest that there might be a sequel, but given the immense success of the film so far, we can see it happening.
Did U see District 9 this weekend? Should there be a sequel?
Posted: August 18, 2009 at 9:45 am
Ridley Scott Confirmed to Direct Alien Prequel
Source: VarietyJuly 30, 2009After months of rumor and speculation, Variety confirms that 20th Century Fox plans to keep the “Alien” franchise alive with a prequel film that will be directed by original helmer Ridley Scott. The announcement that Fox has hired a writer comes just two months after the 30th Anniversary of Scott’s original sci-fi horror film which launched a series of movie sequels, a number of comic books, and two movies that pit the Aliens against Fox’s other creature franchise, the Predator. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts has been hired to write the prequel after the studio was impressed by his work on two space thrillers, both for Keanu Reeves, called Passengers and Shadow 19.
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