ITV

Category: International

  • Spielberg mulls making a TV series

    MUMBAI: Steven Spielberg is said to be in talks with Showtime, an American cable television company and DreamWorks TV about a series which has yet to titled.

    The director also intends to take the production itself on to the stage. Spielberg has been developing the concept for the show for years and is hoping to recruit producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who were behind taking Chicago and Hairspray from the stage to the big screen.

    Spielberg is also said to be interested in signing on Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman who co-wrote the score for Hairspray and the musical adaptation of Spielberg‘s 2002 film Catch Me If You Can.

    It is understood Spielberg wants to create a scripted series, as opposed to a reality television programme or documentary, although the fact that it will be made in tandem with the musical could create problems.

  • China picks ‘Forever Enthralled’ for Oscars

    MUMBAI: China has selected Forever Enthralled, a Peking opera biopic, to represent it in the annual run for the best foreign language Academy Award.

    Director Chen Kaige‘s ‘s biopic of China‘s most famous Peking opera performer stars Beijing-born pop star Leon Lai in the title role as Mei Lanfang and also Zhang Ziyi.


    This will be Chen‘s third-time representing China at the Oscars, having previously been nominated for Farewell My Concubine and The Promise.


    In 2001, Ang Lee‘s Mandarin-language film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon entered the Oscars on behalf of Taiwan.


    Forever faces two other Mandarin-language competing entries this year, the first being Hong Kong‘s film Prince of Tears and the second the Taiwanese official selection No puedo vivir sin ti.




     

  • Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs’ beats ‘Surrogates’ hands down

    MUMBAI: Massive moviegoer turnout helped Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs dominate the box-office for the second weekend in a row with an intake of $24.6 million, a mere $6 million less than what it made on its debut weekend.

    On the other hand Disney‘s science-fiction flick Surrogates starring Bruce Willis earned only $15 million.

    Based on a comic book of the same name, Surrogates was expected by many box-office watchdogs to rule the weekend. Despite a close battle last Friday Meatballs led Surrogates by less than $1 million. But Saturday morning saw a new turn – the weekend matinees roped in the family crowd for the animated picture giving it enough of a boost to lead Surrogates by almost $10 million.

    But Surrogates wasn‘t the only new film to fall victim to the ever-edible Meatballs. In third place, Fame managed only $10 million over the weekend, despite its family appeal.

    Coming in third and fourth place were The Informant! and Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All by Myself respectively. Both films have been in theaters for two weeks or more and continue to do decent business.

  • Tom Ortenberg puts in his papers at Weinsteins

    MUMBAI: Tom Ortenberg has stepped down as president of theatrical film at The Weinstein Company (TWC) after being in office for eight months.

    Ortenberg, formerly head of theatrical at Lionsgate, joined TWC last January and served a notice period, his final day being 30 September.

    The move follows TWC‘s latest wave of lay-offs last week, when the company confirmed that it was releasing 35 employees to bring the staff level to approximately 90.

    Harvey and Bob Weinstein called Ortenberg‘s arrival “a major coup” in late January. However since then something clearly did not work between the executives, despite a promising time for the slimmed-down company.

  • VIFF gets $ 467,250 for promotion

    MUMBAI: The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), on the eve of its 28th anniversary edition has received good news.
    The federal government‘s Marquee Tourism Events program granted VIFF new funding to the tune of $467,250 to promote the festival across Canada and abroad.

    Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore made the announcement with an impassioned argument for viewing VIFF and other areas of Canada‘s cultural community as key parts of the economy.


    Moore cited statistics that 650,000 Canadians are employed in arts and culture enterprises worth $46 billion to the economy – twice the size of the forest or agricultural industries and three times the size of the insurance industry.
    VIFF director Alan Franey said the funding will allow the festival to grow beyond local borders.


    “Marketing our festival outside our region to the full Pacific Northwest and the West Coast is something we‘ve always hoped to be able to do,” Franey said. “Now, fortunately, it is within our means.”

  • Fame remake rides money-spinning wave

    MUMBAI: A remake of the 1980 film Fame released on Friday is riding a lucrative wave of song-and-dance shows on the big and small screen.

    Aimed squarely at young girls, the 2009 version of New York performing arts high school students hoping to live their dreams is as squeaky-clean as director Alan Parker‘s original was gritty.


    Updated with rap tunes and hip-hop choreography, the new version barely grazes issues of poverty, sexual exploitation and drugs that lay beneath the exuberance of Fame almost 30 years ago.


    The remake seeks to tap into the money-spinning teen market blazed by Disney‘s $1 billion-plus High School Musical franchise, the worldwide Idol TV talent show franchise and the feature adaptation of Mamma Mia! that was the fifth-biggest movie of 2008 with global ticket sales of $609 million.

  • Victoria Espinel is US IP enforcement coordinator

    MUMBAI: President Barack Obama has named Victoria Espinel as the new U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator. Espinel, in her position, will target, among other areas, the rampant piracy that has plagued the entertainment industry.

    The position created in 2008 will augment American efforts to prevent the exploitation of pirated or counterfeited movies, music and software, as well as other intellectual properties.


    Espinel is the founder and president of Bridging the Innovation Divide, a not-for-profit focused on the innovation divide. From 2007-09, Espinel was a visiting assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law, focusing on IP and international trade issues. She has further served as an adviser on IP issues to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee.


    In 2005, Espinel also became the first-ever Assistant United States Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, serving as chief U.S. trade negotiator on those subjects.

  • Thomson introduces image detection watermarking solutions

    MUMBAI: Thomson will now be offering both its digital cinema image detection watermarking solutions available in the market, Cinefence and Nexguard, both offered by Civolution, through its Technicolor Business Group.

    Digital watermarking solutions make video content easily and precisely identifiable by embedding specific data such as the rights holder‘s or recipient‘s ID or user number. The watermark, totally invisible to the naked eye may be embedded at various points in the content preparation and distribution process.


    In addition to digital cinema watermarking, Technicolor also offers forensic image watermarking embedding and detection services for video and film prints, and also as audio watermarking across Dolby SR, SRD and DTS formats.

  • Newmarket picks US rights of Jon Amiel’s Creation

    MUMBAI: Indie distributor Newmarket has picked up the US rights of Toronto International Film Festival opener Creation.

    The company has sealed the deal for Jon Amiel‘s pic about the life of Charles Darwin and will release the film in December.


    The film has Paul Bettany who stars as the scientist who, as depicted here, battled with others over questions of religion vs. science as he wrote his classic tome ‘On the Origin of Species‘ and also battled his own demons over the loss of a young daughter. Bettany‘s wife, Jennifer Connelly, stars as his on-screen spouse.


    The film produced by Jeremy Thomas was well-received when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival two weeks ago.


    Newmarket has a strong record as an upstart distributor, releasing such films as Memento and The Passion of the Christ.

  • Camden International Film Fest Opens October 1


    MUMBAI: The Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) will open on 1 October at the Camden Opera House.

    The festival opens at the Opera House with the New England premiere of AJ Schnack‘s latest documentary, Convention a collaborative effort from eight different documentarians covering every aspect of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, from a week beforehand all the way through President Obama‘s acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver, and closes there on Sunday, October 4, with acclaimed documentarian Robert Stone‘s Earth Days, which traces the origins of the environmental movement through the eyes of nine Americans who propelled it from its post-war beginnings in the 1950s to 1970‘s first Earth Day, and to its status as a political force in the U.S. today.


    Sandwiched in between are films on global ecological sustainability, films made in Maine or with a Maine connection, and films that Fowlie describes as exploring the experiences of kids who are trying to understand the situation they‘re in and somehow transcend it, as portrayed in, among other films, Because We Were Born, Racing Dreams, and October Country which according to Fowlie, “is one of the most gorgeous films I‘ve ever seen.”


    The first festival had only 15 films while this year there‘ll be 25 feature films and many shorts.