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Twilight Breaks Record for Female Director. Trade Roughage 11/24/08

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago
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  • Of all the news related to Twilight’s unsurprising $70.6 million opening, the most important has to be that Catherine Hardwicke (pictured) now holds the record for highest-grossing debut for a female director. The previous record holder was Mimi Leder, whose Deep Impact bowed with $41.2 million a decade ago. And the most important non-Twilight box office news has to be that Slumdog Millionaire continued to have a per-screen average in the $30,000s, even with a minor increase to 32 screens, and reached a very impressive very-limited-release gross of $1.6 million.
  • Last Friday, Twilight costar Anna Kendrick was announced as the female lead opposite George Clooney in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. But the 23-year-old will not be Clooney’s love interest. That honor has instead gone to 35-year-old Vera Farmiga.
  • French filmmaker Pascal Laugier is coming to Hollywood to direct a couple American horror pics, including a Hellraiser remake for Dimension and a short story adaptation titled Details for Paramount Vantage. Both films will likely pale in quality to his French productions, but every foreign auteur has to try tinseltown at least once, right?
  • Film print fans rejoice! Digital projection is being blamed for and may suffer from the faulty screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at LA’s DGA Theatre last Thursday. Apparently similar problems have affected recent screenings of Che and Quantum of Solace, too.

The Return of the Musical. Trade Roughage 10/28/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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  • In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. Paramount is bumping their Zac Efron-starring, Kenny Ortega-directed remake of Footloose up the calendar; Nick and Norah director Peter Sollett has been asked to punch up the script before a spring shoot. Meanwhile, Fox is setting up their own big-screen musical around a passel of Disney Channel stars: this time, it’s the Jonas Brothers, and the project is the first film in a hoped-for franchise based on the “Walter the Farting Dog” books. Yes, there are apparently childrens books about farting dogs. Maybe it’s not The Great Depression 2 — maybe it’s Idiocracy 0.5.
  • Perhaps surprisingly, Dan Glickman says that although “there’s no fundamental difference between Obama or McCain on intellectual property issues,” an Obama administration might be slightly more favorable for the MPAA’s fight against piracy, as Obama be expected to connect to “newer, younger White House staffers and appointees about the value and importance of IP.” But the studios’ lobbying board would clash sharply with a Democrat administration over net neutrality, which Obama strongly supports, and Glickman … doesn’t.
  • DETAILS Magazine has invited their readers to submit film pitches. In partnership with Larry Meistrich of Shooting Gallery and Film Movement, the mag will seek a winning idea targeted at “intelligent, modern, metropolitan men,” they’ll then actually produce.