Taylor-hackford | SpoutBlog

Soloist Yanked from AFI, Hackford Going Solo. Trade Roughage 10/23/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

After moving the film’s release date from 2008 awards season to spring 2009, Paramount has taken The Soloist out of its opening night slot at AFI. The festival is expected to announce a new opening night film today.
Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, starring his wife Helen Mirren as a brothel owner and financed by ThinkFilm sister Capitol Films, is in search of a distributor. The director is shopping it to studios himself in the hopes of repeating the good fortune he found with Ray. “Directors have to be realistic about this process because people are so frightened right now,” he said.
The 1963 cult film Hitler’s Brain is being adapted into a “sci-fi musical comedy” for the stage.
Alec Baldwin will replace Rose McGowan as celebrity co-host of The Essentials, the Saturday night showcase of superclassics on TCM. His episodes will start airing in March.

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

In what is probably the only case on record of an oft-voted Sexiest Woman Alive replacing a defensively heterosexual male megastar in a Hollywood thriller, espionage film Edwin A. Salt is being rewritten to star Angelina Jolie instead of Tom Cruise.
Does anyone else sort of wonder if this whole Tropic Thunder “retard” protest is actually just an “alternative” marketing thing, paid for by Dreamworks to make the film’s satire look “dangerous”? Although I have to admit, canceling the premiere after party would be going a little far for a campaign…
Helen Mirren’s husband will direct a film about Tennessee Williams’ dysfunctional childhood. The Cloverfield guy will produce a movie about an earthquake. The Japanese girl from Babel will star as an undercover hit woman in the next film from Isabel Coixet.

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

A twist in the strike saga: the AMPTP’s lead negotiator Nick Counter has accused the WGA of creating a blacklist by “using fear and intimidation to control its membership.” WGA reps were quick to refute that charge, but the writers maintain they will not break the picket line until the studios respond to their final offer on internet residuals. “This is our last chance to get residuals for work on the Internet. If we don’t do it now, they’ll never give it to us,” said writer/showrunner Jack Kenny. Meanwhile, SAG officer Valerie Harper hammered home the point that this is not a Hollywood issue, but a labor issue: “A lot of this is going on in our country — doing business cheaper and decimating the middle class,” Harper said. “In the future, this strike will be a historic moment for unions.”
Neil LaBute has been hired to write a remake of Truffaut’s La Femme d’a cote (AKA The Woman Next Door) for Taylor Hackford to direct at New Line. Because LaBute, whose last released film was a disastrous remake of The Wicker Man, technically cannot write the script until after the strike, it could be years before this project actually comes together. Also, Hackford has to finish that movie with his wife in the brothel.
Ira Levin, the author of the novels that inspired films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Sliver, died on Monday at age 78.

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Advancing the dangerous notion that an Oscar is the first step to the Nobel Prize, Variety asks An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim and producer Laurie David to confirm that “the film played a part” in Al Gore’s Nobel lauding. Meanwhile, the Guardian reveals that the film’s recent battle for educational clearance in Britain was engineered by “a Scottish quarrying magnate who established a controversial lobbying group to attack environmentalists’ claims about global warming.”
According to Pamela McClintock, Across the Universe has managed “by the far the best showing among specialty releases so far this fall” by drawing repeat visits from teenage girls. Meanwhile, the under-marketed expansion of The Assassination of Jesse James was, as could only be expected, a failure, grossing less than $400,000 on 163 screens.
Taylor Hackford will direct his wife, Helen Mirren, in Love Ranch, about “a couple who opened the first legal brothel in Nevada and the violence that resulted when their relationship was tested by infidelity.”