Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”
Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once. We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”
But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. …Read more
Um, that Marilyn Monroe sex tape? Probably not real. Defamer has a guest post co-written by Marilyn experts Mark Bellinghaus and Ernest W. Cunningham and journalist Jennifer J. Dickinson, which makes a compelling case that the guy selling the 16mm fellatio footage is “well-known within the tight-knit circle of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia collectors for being a sycophantic, press hungry namedropper (check out his likely self-penned IMDB bio) whose main objective is to promote himself and the Monroe documentary that he is working on.” Sorry, boys––at least it’s still porn, right?
BUTTERKNIFE 8: Smelly Elly
All of our SXSW coverage can be found here. Except for our Andre Williams interview, which lives here.
Butterknife wrapped up with episodes 7 and 8 (see above), and a where-are-they-now on the cast and crew.
Live Twittering the Cinema Eye Honors.
Anthony Minghella died of a brain hemmorhage.
On FilmCouch: Loving Rachel Welch, not loving Love Songs.
The sex tape as stealth marketing.
2 Girls, 1 Clooney
When Batman sequels and presidential politics merge.
Harry Houdini battles the robots.
How long can Owen Wilson hide from reporters before we just automatically assume his films are crap?
Suburban moms get a chance to suck on Mr. Big.
If Madonna and Guy Ritchie break up, Swept Away will hold all the answers.
Please, somebody, give Parker Posey a decent job!
“Oh snap!”
Mamie Van Doren nipple slip. Yes, seriously.
Yay, Muppets!
Nerds are mad at Harvey Weinstein.
Trailers: The Children of Huang Shi, Tropic Thunder, Pathology
Sam Raimi + Jack Ryan = WTF?
Help a filmmaker by sending him your film.
Short films have a new venue: the news.
If there’s anything worse than green beer, it’s a bad Irish accent.
Judd Apatow is very busy.
Tracking the evolution from romantic solipsism to existential dread, from All That Heaven Allows to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
Why the audience shouldn’t be blamed for the faults of distributors and the laziness of critics.
Who’s buying movies from iTunes?
The Jewish Juno.
Chris knows why they call it slapstick.
Without Lily Tomlin, it’s just not a real feminist film.
The marshmallow King Kong.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”
Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.
…Read more
