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Lights! Camera! Geritol!
Are audiences ready for a rickety Indiana Jones?
Today’s stars keep themselves in better shape than ever before, and audiences seem to like that. In fact, box office receipts for recent flicks featuring some of our favorite aging action heroes are so encouraging that studio execs are practically rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the new Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and Sylvester Stallone (Rambo) vehicles. Stallone certainly didn’t hurt himself when his more famous screen persona—Rocky Balboa—earned critical acclaim and a respectable $70 million in last year’s titular blockbuster, chasing doubts that the actor-director was simply giving himself a starring role in order to slow a career slide.
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Last Exit to Film Geekdom
Film geeks like to show off; it's in their job description. Whether it's debating the merits of Lars von Trier or discussing which Evil Dead film is the true masterpiece, it's just what they do. Well, thanks to entrepreneur Mike Ford, what they do has just gotten a bit easier to show off. Ford's UK-based company, Last Exit to Nowhere, sells T-shirts based on fictional companies and locations from films. And although the movies represented tend to skew a bit toward cult favorites (designs include the Winchester Tavern from Shaun of the Dead, the Urban Achievers from The Big Lebowski and Jaws' Amity Island), Ford says this was not deliberate.
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Harry Potter’s World Comes to a City Near You
It’s really impossible to hear something like “sorting hat” or “invisibility cloak” and not feel at least a little of the allure of Harry Potter's universe. When the films brought the J.K. Rowling books to life, it was through the costuming, set design and props. In 2009, “Harry Potter: The Exhibition” will bring 10,000 square feet of artifacts from the enchanting films to 10 or more cities around the world over a five-year period.
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Kodak Named Technology Sponsor at Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Film Festival has selected the Eastman Kodak Company as its official Technology Sponsor. Kodak will provide educational segments and product demonstrations during the 12 days of the festival. In addition, for one lucky festival winner, Kodak will donate 20,000 feet of camera negative film.
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Website Lets You Create Your Truman Show
Ed Harris’ character Christof in Peter Weir's Oscar-nominated The Truman Show put the appeal of reality television into words when he said, “It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.” Drawing from this line of thinking (and its title), Your Truman Show gives moviemakers the chance to tell their own very personal, very real stories to an audience hungry to hear them.
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Robert Elswit: Blood, Sweat and Oscar
There Will Be Blood earned both Oscar and American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for Robert Elswit, ASC—and he claimed top honors in both competitions. It is an encore performance for Elswit, who earned plaudits from his peers in both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the ASC in 2005 for George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. MM caught up with Elswit right before the Oscar ceremony to discuss There Will Be Blood, his fifth collaboration with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson in 10 years.
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Juno Storms the Spirit Awards
Juno cleaned up at Film Independent's Spirit Awards last night, taking home awards for Best Feature, Best First Screenplay for Diablo Cody and Best Female Lead for Ellen Page. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Best Male Lead award for Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, with Jenkins herself taking the Best Screenplay Award. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly claimed two of the night's top honors, including Best Director for Julian Schnabel and Best Cinematography for Janusz Kaminski. Irishman John Carney's Once won for Best Foreign Film and Cate Blanchett matched director Todd Haynes' Robert Altman Award with her own for Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There.
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MovieMaker Goes for the Gold
Academy members may have the final say on who will walk away with the gold at this Sunday’s Oscar ceremony. But that doesn’t mean that we here at MM can’t have a little fun getting in on the action, too. Here, five editors and longtime contributing writers weigh in on Oscar’s hits, misses and most egregious snubs!
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Roger Deakins Scores Two Oscar Nominations
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC earned his sixth and seventh Oscar and American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His previous nominations were for The Shawshank Redemption, Kundun, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou? During 2007, he also accepted a Career Achievement Award from the National Board of Review, which also bestowed No Country for Old Men with the organization’s award for Best Film, among other accolades.
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Arthur Max Sets the Scene in American Gangster
It took many years and several college degrees before Arthur Max began his work in film. Fortunately, audiences didn’t know what they were missing. Originally a lighting designer for the stage, Max turned his sights to the screen after experimenting with varied forms of theater production. Commercial work shortly led to his first feature film, Se7en, directed by David Fincher. The gritty city streets and the gruesome crimes of the biblically-inspired killer were the bones of this thriller—a genre Max has since become family with, subsequently working on Panic Room and American Gangster. It is this latest movie which brought the art director his second Academy Award nomination.
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BAFTA Award Winners Announced
This year’s British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award winners are official. In addition to the results that have become commonplace this awards season (Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem winning Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively), there were a few surprises, namely Atonement’s win for Best Picture. The British romance certainly benefited from a little home field advantage, beating out consistent frontrunners No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood to reclaim some of its post-Golden Globes momentum, right in time for the Oscars.
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Janusz Kaminski on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Janusz Kaminski earned his fourth Academy Award nomination for his striking cinematography on Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He also took top honors at the 2007 Camerimage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography for the film, and was nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award. Kaminski is a two-time Oscar winner for two of the more than a dozen films he has worked on with Steven Spielberg: Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. (They will team up once again for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)
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Seamus McGarvey Talks Atonement
Though this year's Oscar ceremony may be Seamus McGarvey's first as a nominee, the cinematographer is certainly no stranger to awards buzz. As one of this year's most nominated films—and the Golden Globe winner for Best Motion Picture—McGarvey's been riding Atonement's wave of success and collecting his own share of accolades along the way. In addition to his Oscar nod, McGarvey's work behind the camera has been singled out by the American Society of Cinematographers, BAFTA, Chicago Film Critics Association, Irish Film and Television Awards and the Online Film Critics Society. Only time will tell if he'll walk away from the Kodak Theatre with a golden statue come Oscar night. But as he prepares for his night in the spotlight, MM got the lowdown on how he's getting ready.
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Stephen Goldblatt's War on Film
In 2003, Goldblatt teamed up with director Mike Nichols to shoot the highly acclaimed HBO miniseries "Angels in America." Two years later, they worked together again on Closer. So when Nichols asked Goldblatt if he was interested in collaborating once again—on Charlie Wilson's War—the answer was a no-brainer. Not only was Goldblatt intrigued by the story (Nichols had recommend he read the book the film is based on several months earlier during lunch) and impressed by the cast (Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams among them), but he had found his previous outings with Nichols truly rewarding experiences. Goldblatt immediately said yes.
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Robert Elswit Wins the ASC Outstanding Achievement Award
Robert Elswit, ASC won the feature film competition for There Will Be Blood at the 22nd annual American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Awards. The story opens in a small California town at the turn of the 20th century where Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a local citizen who prospects for oil and strikes it rich while vying with and manipulating his family, neighbors and industry moguls. It's an emotional story with dark overtones of greed and vengence. There Will Be Blood marks Elswit's sixth collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson.
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Top 10 Movie Cities 2008
MM’s eighth annual countdown of the best places to live, work and make movies
From Austin to Albuquerque and plenty of places in between, MovieMaker's eighth annual countdown of the 10 best places to live, work and make movies in the U.S.
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ASC Nominees Earn Oscar Nods
Roger Deakins, Robert Elswit, Janusz Kaminski and Seamus McGarvey are double nominees
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC (The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford and No County for Old Men), Robert Elswit, ASC (There Will be Blood), Janusz Kaminski (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Seamus McGarvey, BSC (Atonement) are contending for the cinematography Oscar in the 80th annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences competition.
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Kodak Recognized for Tech Excellence with Ninth Oscar
Kodak’s Oscar collection will grow soon as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced it will present the company with its ninth Oscar statuette for the development of emulsion technologies incorporated into the KODAK VISION2 family of color negative films. Kodak chairman and chief executive officer Antonio Perez will accept the award on behalf of Kodak at the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards on February 9 in Los Angeles.
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Vittorio Storaro Paints With His Camera
The Oscar-winning DP channels Caravaggio
A frequent collaborator to moviemaking legends like Francis Ford Coppola and Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio Storaro is taking on one of the world's greatest artists with Caravaggio.
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ASC Shines Spotlight on Student Moviemakers
With a nod to the future of moviemaking, the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) has chosen Andrew M. Davis of Chapman University and Sean Stiegemeier of the American Film Institute (AFI) as recipients of the Laszlo Kovacs Heritage Award for Outstanding Cinematography.
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Takes Top Honors at Camerimage
Janusz Kaminski earned the Golden Frog Award for most artful cinematography on a 2007 feature film for Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the 15th annual Plus Camerimage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography. The independent film was produced in France.
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Kodak Ups the Ante with new Motion Picture Film
KODAK VISION3 hits the market
Increased exposure latitude, more detailed colors and noticeably reduced grain (especially in the brightest highlights and darkest shadows) are just a few of the benefits cinematographers who have tested the first member of a new generation of motion picture films introduced by Kodak are buzzing about.
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Silent Movies Are Still Creating an Echo
With silent films more available than ever, now is the time to remember the era's most influential directors
From Griffith and Eisenstein to Chaplin and Keaton, MM revisits the 15 greatest directors of the silent era.
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All the Right Moves: Stabilizing Your Camera
When you need a moving camera, the right gear will make those money shots count
Not every director likes to move the camera. Some simply can’t afford it. Go back and look at Kevin Smith’s Clerks, for example. Almost every shot in that movie was a locked-down tripod shot—no movement at all. At the other extreme is Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov’s mind-blowing Russian Ark, an entire feature film shot in one continous, moving shot, featuring 2,000 actors in 33 different rooms.
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Master of the Movie Prop
Kevin Hughes makes a career out of putting things in their place
Just about anything an actor touches in a film that isn’t nailed down is a prop. Props serve to enhance a character’s backstory, improve the look of a location or, in the case of fake projectile vomit, simply gross out the audience. The talented artists who furnish the canvas of cinema with their treasures are called property masters. MM spoke with Kevin Hughes, an industry veteran who began his career as an assistant on Apocalypse Now, and more recently has worked on such films as Boogie Nights, Borat and Bobby.
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Celebrating An Icon
Celebrating An Icon On the Occasion of His Centennial Year
A man can die, but his movies will always remain in the present tense. That is why, in the case of John Wayne-whose centennial we celebrate on May 26, nearly 28 years after his demise-you can point to the precise moment when the man became an icon.
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Guillermo Navarro: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
Experiment with commercials. I have shot commercials between features since the beginning of my career. They can be experimental, both technically and in the visual language, which contributes to telling stories. I once shot a commercial in the Yukon Mountains where dusk lasted for hours. That gave us an extraordinary opportunity to dig deeper and explore the photographic variables of the location.
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Guillermo Navarro’s Filmmaking Fairytale
Celebrated cinematographer makes history with Oscar for Pan's Labyrinth
Cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, ASC made history when he earned an Academy Award for Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth in 2007, as it was only the second time that a foreign-language film with English subtitles claimed top honors in the Best Cinematography competition.
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Amy Vincent: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
I was a camera loader, assistant and camera operator on crews with Bob Richardson, Bill Pope, John Lindley and Darius Wolski. All of them are master cinematographers. They were my mentors. I saw up close how they made decisions and dealt with the cast and crew. That was a big part of my education.
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Michael Ballhaus: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
You never stop learning. I'm still learning every day, on every picture.
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A Lesson in Collaboration
The Departed marks the seventh collaboration between acclaimed cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and legendary director Martin Scorsese
As he approaches his fiftieth anniversary in the movie business, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus sat down with MM for a candid discussion of his life's work-from Beware of a Holy Whore to The Departed-giving plenty of insight into the fine art of writing with light.
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Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
Stick to your guns. I got a lot of pressure from the studio heads [shooting the pilot for "Scarface"], who wanted me to "brighten it up." I'd tell them that 'the director doesn't want it bright.' The studio barred me from timing the TV show, but I went into the suite at 5:00 a.m. and did it anyhow. I wasn't invited to shoot another film for that studio for more than 20 years.
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Donald Morgan is Still Making Movie Magic
For veteran DP Donald M. Morgan, the best is yet to come
In a career spanning more than 30 years, cinematographer Donald M. Morgan has worked with Robert Zemeckis, John Carpenter, Roger Young and Joseph Sargent, among others, pulling in six award nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers and nine from the Emmy Awards along the way, all the while maintaining a moxie that pushes the boundaries of his art form.
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Things I’ve Learned As A Moviemaker
It's a good thing to be frightened. In fact, you should be scared every day you go to work. There should be something that is daunting to you that you haven't eliminated all doubts about. There should be something that keeps you awake at night.
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Picture Perfect
Allen Daviau celebrates almost 40 years in the cinematography business
Allen Daviau worked his way up the Hollywood food chain by providing lighting for high school stage plays, working the graveyard shift in photo labs and shooting a live television show for $100 per week. These days he's best known as the cinematographer behind some of cinema's most beautiful photographic moments in such films as E.T., The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun and Bugsy. In the course of his career, Daviau has earned five Academy Award nominations and, in February of 2007, he will receive the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award.
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These Are Free, Right?
I'm a relentless truth teller (by "truth" I do not mean the eternal truths of the universe, I mean my personal and completely self-righteous opinion). I will blurt out my truth at the drop of a hat with complete disregard for the impact it has on others. I try not to upset people, but the sad truth is… I kind of enjoy irking those who dare to disagree with me. Knowing my nasty rebellious tendencies, Tim Rhys, publisher of MM, asked me to write a bi-weekly blog. He'd read a cheeky article I wrote for a friend's blog, www.hotinhollywood.tv, and found it somewhat amusing. My initial answer was a gracious "not in a million years." I was terrified that I'd write something incriminating or embarrassing. I think that's what he was counting on. Finally, I relented.
Posted 05.20.08 | Notes From Movieland | No comments yet...
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