Category: International

MUMBAI: Neil Patrick Harris has snagged two feature film roles: a starring gig in the indie farce The Best and the Brightest and a supporting role in CBS Films‘ Beastly.

Co-written and directed by Josh Shelov, Best revolves around a couple from Delaware who move to New York‘s Upper East Side and enter the world of the city‘s private kindergartens.

Harris is playing the husband, who is not worried about his social status. Bonnie Somerville is on board as the class-aware wife. Also cast are Amy Sedaris, John Hodgman, Peter Serafinowicz, Bridget Regan, Kate Mulgrew and Christopher McDonald. Robert and Patricia Weiser are reteaming with Richard Schiffrin — with whom they collaborated on the steroid documentary “Bigger Stronger Faster” — to produce along with Nicholas Simon.

Shelov, who penned Green Street Hooligans and created the ESPN series Mayne Street, wrote the script with Michael Jaeger. Shooting began recently in Philadelphia.

MUMBAI: A new TV maxi-series is trying to buck the trend and bring back appointment viewing for fictional sagas, a la The Thorn Birds or, more recently and modestly, Angels in America or Broken Trail. Most of the big Euro stations have lined up to air The Pillars of the Earth, but so far there are no broadcast takers in the U.S. or the U.K.

A Germany-Canada co-production spearheaded by Munich-based Tandem Communications and Montreal-based Muse Entertainment, the eight-hour saga, based on Ken Follett‘s best-seller, will be directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, who has helmed episodes of Heroes and Saving Grace and was Steven Spielberg‘s first assistant director on Saving Private Ryan and Schindler‘s List.

Pillars starts shooting on June 22 in Hungary and Austria. The premiere is set for the second half of 2010.

Ian McShane, who starred on HBO‘s Deadwood, will play Waleran; Donald Sutherland takes the role as Bartholomew; and Rufus Sewell, who recently headlined Eleventh Hour, plays Tom Builder. Others who have signed on for the shoot include Matthew Macfadyen (Frost/Nixon) as Prior Philip, Sarah Parish (The Holiday) as Regan Hamleigh, Hayley Atwell (Brideshead Revisited) as Aliena, Eddie Redmayne (The Other Boleyn Girl) as Jack and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) as the Archbishop.

“It‘s a new world order,” Scott Free TV president David Zucker said in describing the strategy of putting together financing abroad and then backing into a broadcast deal stateside. “Yes, there is more risk at the top, but there‘s more latitude on the creative side. It‘s not dissimilar to the indie film biz in this respect. Given how difficult the economy became here, we decided to plow ahead and get funding and casting done before trying to do a licensing deal in the States.”

Zucker said there was “a lot of interest” among yank broadcasters, cablers and pay cablers but did not specify how close to a deal the producers were.

The novel has been adapted by John Pielmeier, who will also play the role of Cuthbert in the saga. His credits include The Memory Keeper‘s Daughter and Hitler: The Rise of Evil. The historical novel set in 12th century England involves war, religious strife and power struggles as well as two interwoven love stories.

MUMBAI: Fourteen-year-old chef Greg Grossman has signed a production deal to develop and star in his own reality TV show.

Grossman and New York-based Picture This Television (“Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List”) are teaming to land the professional teen chef a series.

“The moment we met Greg, we knew he was a one-of-a-kind-talent,” said Picture This partner Bryan Scott. “It‘s not every day you encounter a kid who goes to junior high school during the day and cooks with some of the world‘s leading chefs at night.”

Grossman was raised in East Hampton, N.Y., and started catering when he was 11 years old. His work has drawn media headlines and the interest of celebrity chefs.

MUMBAI: Disney is getting serious about Phineas & Ferb, the animated TV show about a couple of brilliantly outlandish school kids. The show, on both the Disney Channel and Disney XD, not only got picked up for a third season, but a Christmas special and a music CD is in the works.

Disney ordered 35 more episodes, which will take the show to 100 total episodes. The third season also features a new recurring cast member: Jack McBrayer, the actor who plays Kenneth the page on “30 Rock.”

Phineas & Ferb, which also stars Ashley Tisdale, is about a couple of stepbrothers who spend their 104-day summer vacation masterminding one grandiose scheme after another. Tisdale plays the boy‘s sister, Candace, whose mission is to tattle on her precocious little brothers.

Co-created by Dan Povenmire and Jeff Swampy Marsh, it‘s the top-rated primetime animated show for children 6-11 and 9-14. Disney Channel entertainment president Gary Marsh hinted during the Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas recently that bigger things were in store for the property.

“I am telling you all now, Phineas & Ferb is going to be our next worldwide sensation,” he said.

MUMBAI: Neil Patrick Harris has snagged two feature film roles: a starring gig in the indie farce The Best and the Brightest and a supporting role in CBS Films‘ Beastly.

Co-written and directed by Josh Shelov, Best revolves around a couple from Delaware who move to New York‘s Upper East Side and enter the world of the city‘s private kindergartens.

Harris is playing the husband, who is not worried about his social status. Bonnie Somerville is on board as the class-aware wife. Also cast are Amy Sedaris, John Hodgman, Peter Serafinowicz, Bridget Regan, Kate Mulgrew and Christopher McDonald. Robert and Patricia Weiser are reteaming with Richard Schiffrin — with whom they collaborated on the steroid documentary Bigger Stronger Faster — to produce along with Nicholas Simon.

Shelov, who penned Green Street Hooligans and created the ESPN series “Mayne Street, wrote the script with Michael Jaeger. Shooting recently began in Philadelphia.

In “Beastly, a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Harris is playing a blind tutor who helps and bonds with a teen (Alex Pettyfer) who is shell-shocked from being turned into a hideous young man. Vanessa Hudgens and Mary-Kate Olsen also star in the adaptation of the Alex Finn novel, being directed by Daniel Barnz. The movie is in a pre-production stage.

Paradigm-repped Harris, who hosted Sunday‘s Tony Awards, has been twice nominated for an Emmy for his work in the TV series “How I Met Your Mother.” Both movies will done on Harris‘ summer hiatus from the show.

MUMBAI: DreamWorks has picked up The Defenders, a family adventure project conceived by Heroes actor Masi Oka to be produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. D.J. Caruso is in negotiations to direct, and Gary Whitta is on board to write the script.

The story centers on a group of mostly teenagers from around the world who are involved in a multiplayer video game, each unaware of who they really are behind the cover of their consoles and avatars. They are forced to come together for a real adventure, becoming inadvertent heroes in the process. DreamWorks will develop a video game simultaneously with the feature.

Oka, who is the executive producer, came up with idea while playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in that world‘s parlance.

“You can be whoever you want to be,” he said. “The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?”

Oka had met Kurtzman and Orci, whose Kurtzman/Orci Prods. is based at DreamWorks, at parties and taken a couple of meetings with them, hoping to score a role in one of their movies.

The pair was looking for “the kinds of movies that Amblin used to do, that combined an innocence with the adventure,” Orci said.

Once Oka, also a fan of those movies — epitomized by “The Goonies” — learned that, he pitched Kurtzman and Orci his idea. The duo went for it, and Oka has honed the concept for the past year, collaborating with them as they worked on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Kurtzman/Orci‘s Mandy Safavi also helped develop Defenders and will oversee for the company.

Oka and Whitta, who also plays online games, bonded over their love of the medium‘s World of Warcraft. Kurtzman and Orci ensnared Caruso, with whom they worked on the 2008 thriller Eagle Eye.

MUMBAI: Star of the 1970s TV series Kung Fu and the Kill Bill movies, David Carradine was found dead in a Bangkok hotel yesterday in what Thai police initially said was a suicide, but now suspect to be a tragic accident.

Police said 72-year-old Carradine was found with lengths of cord wrapped around his neck and other parts of his body, including his penis. The revelations have given rise to speculation the actor died from erotic asphyxiation, a practice that instigates sexual arousal by depriving the brain of oxygen.

The US embassy in the Thai capital confirmed the death. Carradinem was in Thailand to shoot a film called Stretch.

“He was found in his hotel room in Bangkok but the cause of death has not yet been established,” an embassy official said. Carradine‘s manager Chuck Binder described the death as “accidental”.

Police said Carradine‘s body was found around 11:30am local time on 4th June, hanging by his neck in the closet of his hotel room. An initial report suggested he had been in rigor mortis(“dead”) for at least 12 hours. Local police officer Pirom Janthapirom said security cameras showed footage of no-one else going in or out of Carradine‘s hotel room.
The death came just three days before the end of filming for the movie.

Carradine was the son of prominent actor John Carradine and part of an acting family that includes brothers Keith Carradine and Robert Carradine. Born on December 8, 1936, during Hollywood‘s Golden Age of cinema, he first entered showbusiness via musical theatre on New York‘s Broadway.

While best known for his role as the fugitive half-Chinese Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s TV drama Kung Fu, Carradine had a long a varied career in film. He appeared in Martin Scorsese‘s Boxcar Bertha in 1972, and played legendary folk singer

Woody Guthrie in the 1976 film Bound for Glory, that garnered him a Golden Globe nomination.

MUMBAI: It‘s quiet out there, too damn quiet as this year‘s first quarter for film production collapsed in on itself here, according to statistics from the UK Film Council.

Figures from the government-backed organization make for uncomfortable reading for indie producers with just 19 pictures with budgets over ?500,000 ($800,000) going into production in the first three months of 2009, compared to 31 in the same period last year.

The collapse in movies being made comes — according to the Council and indie observers alike — on the back of a continuing fall in co-productions here and a slump in movies backed overseas coming to the UK to shoot.

The research shows that only two co-productions mounted shoots in the first quarter, compared to seven in 2008.

But the factoids from inward investment projects — those titles which include pictures backed by the U.S. studios — will provide a fillip for those producers working with Hollywood.

While half the number of projects landed here in Q1 this year — just four compared to eight during 2008‘s first quarter — the combined U.K. spend of ?185.7 million ($300 million) this year outshone January to March‘s tally in 2008 of ?142.6 million.

The uptick in spend is down to big budget spends from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Ridley Scott‘s Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett starrer Robin Hood

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MUMBAI: Bertelsmann, which controls European TV giant RTL Group, has shown a €94 million ($134 million) net loss in the first quarter of this year. The company‘s debt climbed to €6.7 billion ($9.5 billion).

The company has dismissed as “pure speculation” media reports that it plans to cut some 10,000 jobs this year but confirmed some redundancies are likely as the German media giant adjusts to the global economic crisis.

CEO, Hartmut Ostrowski has said the company will have to chop “hundreds of millions of Euros” from its debit column this year in what he has termed “the largest cost cutting program in (Bertelsmann‘s) history.”

So far Bertelsmann has been careful not to say where the cuts will come. CFO Thomas Rabe has started a top-to-bottom analysis of every department in the transnational conglomerate. Results are expected by late summer. Bertelsmann says job cuts are not its “top priority” but has not yet ruled anything out.

Bertelsmann employs around 100,000 people worldwide.

MUMBAI

: The death of David Carradine has forced a recast of what was to be his next project, the indie drama “Portland,” on the eve of principal photography in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles and along the Pacific coast.

“Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this difficult time,” executive producers Adrian Salpeter and Elizabeth Levine of Vancouver-based Random Bench Prods. said in a statement.

Carradine, who was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room two days ago, was to co-star in the feature about the death of a young wanderer that connects a trio of damaged souls. The ensemble cast includes Erin Daniels, Jonathan Caouette, Steven Martini, Renee Victor and Alex Schemmer.

The project from writer-director Matthew Mishory will go ahead, with Iconoclastic Features and Random Bench co-producing the U.S./U.K./Canada feature.