Category: International

MUMBAI: Dori Media Group is to sell off its 50 per cent interest in the Argentine production facility Dori Media Central Studios to its partner in the venture to Celina Amadeo and Marcelo Octavio Amadeo for $850,000.

Pending approval by Argentina‘s Labour Ministry, the deal is expected to close next month.

In late 2007, Dori became a partner in the company, then known as Central Park Productions. The company says its new show Ciega a Citas (Date Blind) will continue to be filmed at the studio until mid-2010.

Dori Media Group president and CEO Nadav Palti said, “Buying a stake in Dori Media Central Studios was part of a larger strategy, and this strategy hasn‘t changed. Dori Media Group is now examining new opportunities and ways to invest in new ventures in Latin America.

In addition, the group will continue its traditional productions in Argentina, producing high quality titles, with international appeal, and sell them worldwide such as the current successful production of Ciega a Citas.”

MUMBAI: Dori Media Group is to sell off its 50 per cent interest in the Argentine production facility Dori Media Central Studios to its partner in the venture to Celina Amadeo and Marcelo Octavio Amadeo for $850,000.

Pending approval by Argentina‘s Labour Ministry, the deal is expected to close next month.

In late 2007, Dori became a partner in the company, then known as Central Park Productions. The company says its new show Ciega a Citas (Date Blind) will continue to be filmed at the studio until mid-2010.

Dori Media Group president and CEO Nadav Palti said, “Buying a stake in Dori Media Central Studios was part of a larger strategy, and this strategy hasn‘t changed. Dori Media Group is now examining new opportunities and ways to invest in new ventures in Latin America.

In addition, the group will continue its traditional productions in Argentina, producing high quality titles, with international appeal, and sell them worldwide such as the current successful production of Ciega a Citas.”

MUMBAI: About 150 lenders of MGM had given a 31 January deadline on a big interest payment relating to $3.7 billion in studio debt. But MGM avers that the lenders had extended the deadline to 31 March to accommodate a continued solicitation of offers to buy the studio.

“The lenders took this action in support of the company‘s efforts to strengthen its financial position and to facilitate the company‘s ongoing process of exploring strategic alternatives which include continuing to operate as a standalone entity and evaluating a potential sale of the company,” the studio said adding, “MGM appreciates the continued support of its lender group.”

The studio said it had begun a second phase of the solicitation process. The first round brought roughly 10 non-binding offers to buy the studio but all below $2 billion.

It is said that about half the first-round bidders will be invited for the second round of due diligence. “This phase of the process is expected to run for the next several weeks,” MGM said.

Warner Bros., Lionsgate, Liberty Media, AT&T, Summit Entertainment, Reliance Big Entertainment, and Elliott Management, a stakeholder in Relativity Media have put in their bids while Fox is still reviewing financial data while mulling a possible offer.

MGM‘s current ownership group includes Providence Equity, TPG Capital, Sony, Comcast, DLJ Merchant and Quadrangle.

MUMBAI: Matt Damon will receive the 24th American Cinematheque Award on 27 March. The ceremony is to be aired on broadcast TV by ABC as a special dubbed ‘Hollywood Salutes Matt Damon: An American Cineamatheque Tribute‘.

Earlier, the award was aired on cable outlets like TNT and AMC.

The annual fundraiser recognizes an artist — actor, director or writer — who is in the midst of a career “making a significant contribution to the art of the motion picture.”

Damon who got an Oscar in 1998 for writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck and was also nominated as best actor for that film. He‘s appeared in the Ocean‘s and Bourne franchises and is lending his voice to the upcoming, animated Happy Feet sequel.

He is currently shooting for Clint Eastwood‘s Invictus and will be seen in the director‘s next film Hereafter also.

Damon‘s other upcoming films include Green Zone, Margaret, The Adjustment Bureau and True Grit.

MUMBAI: John Travolta has revealed that faith helped him survive the tragic death of his 16-year-old son, Jett. The actor, a noted Scientologist, was in New York with wife Kelly Preston to promote his new film From Paris With Love.

“We work hard every day with our Church on healing,” Travolta said adding, “Kelly, me and Ella have all been working very hard and they‘ve been helping us,” he said, referring himself, Preston and their daughter.

Jett Travolta died year after a seizure at the family‘s vacation home in the Bahamas.

Asked what gave him the strength to return to his movie career, Travolta avered, “Once you get yourself stable, then you‘re able to reach out again, you know, and I think this whole year every day we‘ve been working on stabilizing ourselves and it‘s been successful so far.”

Travolta flew a jetliner earlier this week carrying relief supplies, doctors and ministers from the Church of Scientology to Port-au-Prince, Haiti for the cause of helping survivors of that country‘s devastating earthquake.

MUMBAI: The 16th Slamdance Film Festival presented grand jury awards to Charles-Olivier Michaud‘s narrative film Snow and Ashes and Mark Claywell‘s documentary American Jihadist.

The audience awards went to Alexandre Franchi‘s narrative The Wild Hunt and Adam Barker‘s documentary Mind of the Demon: The Larry Linkogle Story.

The audience award winning films will be screened in several domestic venues throughout the year including the IFC Center in New York.

Robert Person‘s General Orders No. 9 annexed the Kodak Vision Award for best cinematography, Wallace Cotten‘s Nothing But Everything scored the Dos Equis Most Interesting Film Award and Gia Milani‘s script for All the Wrong Reasons lapped up the 1st Script Accessible Screenplay Award.

MUMBAI: A day after the merger of concert industry giants Ticketmaster Entertainment and Live Nation gained regulatory approval, cable mogul John Malone has moved to greatly increase his stake in the newly-formed colossus.

Malone‘s Liberty Media Corp. had put in a tender offer last Tuesday to acquire 34.5 million shares of Live Nation Entertainment for $12 each. If fully subscribed, Liberty‘s stake in the company would more than double to 35 per cent.

The move strengthens the alignment of Malone and Live Nation Entertainment Chairman Barry Diller, who had before two years battled over plans to split Internet conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp into five companies.

Liberty Media portrays the investment as simply an endorsement of a business combination that united Live Nation, the world‘s largest concert promoter, with Ticketmaster, the dominant seller of tickets and a leading artist management company.

The merger closed late Monday after the companies agreed to concessions required by the Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general to protect competition in the market for ticket sales.
 

MUMBAI: Zelda Rubinstein, the 4-foot-3-inch lady artiste best known as Tangina, the psychic who tries to calm a family inhabiting a haunted house in Poltergeist, the 1982 horror film, has expired at the age of 76.

Her agent, Eric Stevens said that Rubinstein died on Wednesday at a Los Angeles hospital adding that she had recently suffered a heart attack.

Rubinstein made her film debut in the 1981 comedy Under the Rainbow and went on to play roles in Sixteen Candles, Southland Tales, Teen Witch and TV show Picket Fences.

She was later seen in both the Poltergeist sequels.

Rubinstein also appeared as the mother figure in a high-profile mid-1980s AIDS public awareness campaign and was an outspoken activist for the rights of little people.

MUMBAI: Nicholas Hoult is to feature in Fury Road, the new Mad Max film by series writer-director George Miller.

Zoe Kravitz, Teresa Palmer and Adelaide Clemens are also in negotiations to join the cast of the film.

The film, set a short while after the story detailed in 1985‘s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which keeps Mad Max, the character originally played by Mel Gibson, relatively young.

Details are being kept quiet, but it is known that Hoult‘s character is named Nux. Kravitz, whose character‘s name is Five Wives, Palmer and Clemens are in a convoy being chased by bad guys.

Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy are to star in the film, the shooting of which is expected to be held in Australia this summer.

Hoult made his feature debut in About a Boy and starred in the British series Skins. His work in A Single Man earned him a BAFTA nomination. The actor will appear in Warners‘ remake of Clash of the Titans.

MUMBAI: DreamWorks has picked up the filming rights of Eat, Sleep, Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby‘s First Year for producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald to adapt into a feature comedy.

This is the first partnership between Dreamworks and Parkes/MacDonald‘s new development fund with Imagenation Abu Dhabi.

Matt Allen and Caleb Wilson, who penned the Vince Vaughn-Reese Witherspoon comedy Four Christmases are on board to write. 

Poop is a guidebook by Beverly Hills-based pediatrician Scott W. Cohen. The first book of a planned series is a common sense guide for parents with newborns. It also follows Cohen‘s experiences raising his own child, which in many ways defied much of what he learned in medical school and ultimately altered how he advises his patients.

One of Cohen‘s patients was the wife of Chris Fenton, a principal at comedy production outfit H2F and a father of three-year-old twins. The doctor pitched a book idea to Fenton, who then put the writer in touch with a lit agent and the deal with Scribner was struck.
Fenton brought up the book during a lunch with Parkes/MacDonald exec Anson Avellar, who squired the idea away to his bosses. Before long, a pre-emptive bid was in the works.

Non-fiction guidebooks on birthing and parenthood are hot in Hollywood. Two weeks ago Lionsgate and Phoenix Pictures teamed to bring pregnancy series What to Expect When You‘re Expecting to the big screen.

Scribner is set to launch the book on 30 March.