All articles by Colin Brown – Page 8
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2001 - An Odyssey
No one will forget 2001 in a hurry. A year that had already been memorialised by Stanley Kubrick has now been burned into our collective psyches because of one day in September. For once the entertainment industry found itself thrust into the limelight by forces beyond its control and making. ...
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Diller Thriller for Vivendi Universal
At end of play yesterday (Sunday), it looked certain that Barry Diller will be named the film and TV overlord at Vivendi Universal as early as this morning - a move that would appear to relegate its current entertainment chief Pierre Lescure to the managerial sidelines within the French-American conglomerate.In ...
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De Niro initiates festival in aid of downtown NYC
Robert De Niro, togetherwith his business partner Jane Rosenthal, formally unveiled plans yesterday fortheir new four-day film festival in downtown Manhattan that they hope can helprevitalize a neighbourhood devastated by the terror attacks on September 11th.The first annual TribecaFilm Festival will run from May 1st-May 5th and showcasesome 40 feature ...
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Moulin Rouge wins National Board of Review
Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (pictured) was named Best Film of 2001 by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, the first winner in what promises to be one of the most wide open awards seasons, across virtually every category, in recent memory.The Board of Review is seenhas having ...
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Screen International Comment
Not even our darkest imaginations could have foretold the horrors of last week, although several came close enough to force our creative industries into a sensitive retreat. A handful of upcoming films and TV shows with terrorist themes were instantly put on the back-burner; adverts laced with ghoulish humour were ...
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Screen Comment:
To hear it now from Francis Ford Coppola, the same Hollywood studio system that released his magnificent acid trip of a movie, Apocalypse Now, would never today dare indulge such an extravagantly ambitious and vainglorious undertaking by a director. Even by one who had previously made a truck-load of money ...
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Lot 47 confirms digital marketing pioneer as chief
Scott Lipsky has been formallyanointed as chairman and chief executive officer of Lot 47 Films, the NewYork-based independent distributor of such films as Tim Roth's The WarZone, Chunhyang from Korea, Venus Beauty Institute and Claire Denis' controversial Trouble Every Day (pictured left).Lipsky, who co-founded Lot47 in 1999 with his brother ...
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Clear Blue, USA, ARP all ascend to Haynes' Heaven
Clear Blue Sky Productions, the US film production outfit founded by billionaire Paul Allen and run by his sister Jodie Patton, agreed on Friday to co-finance Todd Haynes' $12m-$15m Far From Heaven under a novel arrangementthat sees it sharing in all revenues with both USA Films and ARP of France, ...
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Schneider quits as Disney studio chairman
Peter Schneider has stepped down as chairman of Walt Disney Studios less than one week after Atlantis:The Lost Empire suffered the lowestsummer opening box office gross in the US of any Disney cartoon feature since GreatMouse Detective, which came out justa year after he first joined the studio's animation division ...
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Overseas cinema triumphs at Newport festival
Foreign-language features dominated the prize-giving ceremony at the Newport International Film Festival, with the best feature award going to Japanese director Masato Harada's haunting horror-romance, Inugami.Together, by Swedish director Lukas Moodyson, took the runner-up jury award in the feature competition. A special mention went to the French film Girls Can't ...
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DVD price probe stirs up Hollywood hornets' nest
Brusselsregulators are to investigate why European customers tend to pay more for thesame recent Hollywood movies on DVD than their counterparts do in the US andCanada. They are also opening a potential hornets' nest by questioning thepractice of charging full price for DVD re-issues of old catalogue titles.The EuropeanUnion probe, ...
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Pearl Harbor pummels US with $75.1m opening
With an estimated Memorial Day weekend gross of $75.1m, Touchstone Pictures' $140m Pearl Harbor enjoyed the second highestfour-day holiday tally ever at North American theatres. However, even this fell short of the box office blitz that many in the media had been preparing for.Pearl Harbor may have elbowed out Mission: ...
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Bidding may go sky-high for DirecTV with new buyer
A bidding war is set to erupt over DirecTV, the largest satellite TV operator in the US with 9.5m subscribers.DirecTV's current owner, General Motors, says it is willing to entertain offers from bothcurrent suitor News Corp as well as new would-be buyer EchoStar Communications,which is second largest satellite TV provider ...
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France's ARP first to sign up for Chelsea Walls
Ethan Hawke's Chelsea Walls, a star-studded digital video production that receives its world premiere in the Directors' Fortnight section of this year's Cannes Film Festival this year, has been acquired for France by ARP Selection. It is the first territory to be sold on the film outside North America where ...
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Weinstein considers directing Warsaw ghetto epic
Harvey Weinstein,co-chairman of Miramax Films, says he is now considering himself as the director for Mila 18, an ambitious screen adaptation of Leon Uris' novel about the ghetto uprising in WWII Warsaw in which a small group of Jews held off Nazi forces for 42 days using only handmade weapons.Even ...
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Terry Semel named new CEO of Yahoo!
Former Warner Bros titan Terry Semel has surprised the entertainment world by being named the new chief executive and chairman of Yahoo!, the struggling Internet portal that has been frequently bandied as a merger candidate for virtually every Hollywood studio conglomerate in town.He replaces Tim Koogle, who will stay at ...
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Sloss forges global film financing hub for indies
John Sloss,the New York-based entertainment lawyer who brokered so many of the distribution deals at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is now wading fully into the project financing arena through a new standalone packaging operation known as Cinetic Media.Cinetic, which will work in close co-ordination with his Sloss Law Office, ...
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Miramax smells victory with Apocalypse Now Redux
Miramax Films has acquired North American theatrical rightsto Apocalypse Now Redux, the officialname given to Francis Ford Coppola's extended cut of his 1979 classic Vietnamwar opera that will be given its world premiere as a special screening at this year's Cannes Film Festival in May.The film, which includes an additional ...
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Universal creates dedicated studio franchise unit
Every Hollywood studio conglomerate talks in terms of creating multimedia "franchises" around their most popular properties and commodified characters; now one of them, Universal Pictures, has taken the full plunge and created an entire division dedicated to unlocking theglobal franchising potential of its content across every conceivable distribution outlet.Louis A. ...
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Robin Williams plays villain in Nolan's Insomnia
Robin Williamsis to play the villain in Insomnia, Christopher Nolan's big-budget Hollywood studio remake of the Norwegian psychological thriller originally made in 1997. He will staropposite two other Oscar-winners, Al Pacino and Hillary Swank, when shootinggets underway in Vancouver on April 16th.In a major change of direction from his typical ...