Last year at this time, journalist Sebastian Junger and war photographer Tim Hetherington were on their way to seeing Restrepo win Best Documentary from the jury at Sundance. Today, the pair are Oscar nominees for their searing and critically acclaimed film about the war in Afghanistan. Which doesn't mean the story is complete, of course: Junger and Hetherington will head back to Afghanistan in April.
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Today, John Powell, who has written the score for movies as diverse as The Bourne Ultimatum and Horton Hears a Who (and, yes, Gigli), received his first Academy Award nomination today for Best Original Score for his work on How to Train Your Dragon. Needless to say, it's been a long, strange road -- one that Movieline revisited with Powell after he received today's good news.
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Ryan Kavanaugh awoke early today with the rest of the industry, anticipating if and/or how the Academy would recognize his film The Fighter. But even as the Best Picture nominees were listed, and the Relativity Media CEO's production was among them, there was something a tad... off about it all.
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With eight nominations, perhaps The Social Network isn't the slam dunk runaway Best Picture favorite everyone thought it was, but that doesn't mean producer Michael De Luca (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) is disappointed with what transpired this morning. In fact, trailing The King's Speech and True Grit in total noms just plays into Team Social Network's wheelhouse.
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First-time screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether had already earned fans among the New York art-kid scene with plays like Heddatron (Hedda Gabler meets - what else? - robots), but it was a television pilot entitled Sluts that got her on the fast track to a Hollywood screenwriting career. Sluts didn't get picked up, but it did bring her to the attention of filmmaker Ivan Reitman, who threw out an idea for her to expand into a script. The resulting F*ckbuddies hit the Black List and turned into last weekend's box office topper No Strings Attached -- not a bad way to make your Hollywood screenwriting debut.
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James Franco has been an Academy Award nominee for a little less than two hours now, but he's already fired his first shot across the bows of The Social Network and other "classically made" but utterly conventional Hollywood offerings -- Oscar front-runners or not. And he let it rip exclusively in conversation with Movieline.
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Actor/writer/director and recent NYU film grad James Franco stopped by Movieline's Sundance HQ at the Levi's Dockers House in Park City for a lengthy chat with Elvis Mitchell on the smaller passion projects that drive his inner artiste, including an update on when his SNL documentary, Saturday Night, will finally hit theaters. Get your James Franco quick fix after the jump!
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More guests! Movieline's Sundance interview series continues with J.K. Simmons and Lou Taylor Pucci, who trekked to Park City -- and then to the Levi's Dockers House on Main Street -- on behalf of their festival premiere The Music Never Stopped. Elvis Mitchell gets full details from the fellas after the jump.
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The opening weekend of the Sundance Film Festival might be winding down, but Movieline is just getting started with a full slate of video interviews from our digs at Levi's Dockers House on Main Street. Among the festival luminaries to pay a visit: Ed Helms stopped by to chat with Elvis Mitchell about his new film Cedar Rapids, high expectations and his first Sundance visit -- as a parking attendant.
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Dozens of filmmakers are screening their work at the Sundance Film Festival, and a lucky few will leave Utah with a distribution deal. Those who don't could take a page from filmmaker Dennis Hensley, who collected together his various short films and is marketing them as The Dennis Hensley Five-Pack, a project he says was inspired by the "insulting" offers made by DVD companies who wanted to include his work in compilations of gay shorts.
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Of all the current Saturday Night Live cast members, Fred Armisen seems like the least likely to spin-off one of his Studio 8H characters for the box office. Not necessarily because he hasn't been given the opportunity -- after Will Forte's disastrous MacGruber though, who could blame movie studios for not trying? -- but because Armisen, who Lorne Michaels described as "an artist, not a careerist," seems genuinely content to be part of Saturday Night Live's ensemble cast. So it is a little surprising to see that after nine seasons with the show, the self-described "short-sighted" actor has gone ahead and created a new sketch comedy series for the IFC called Portlandia, which co-stars Sleater-Kinney founder Carrie Brownstein.
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Last year's Greenberg may have marked Greta Gerwig's entrance into mainstream cinema -- when you come from the world of making nano-budgeted improvised films with your friends, a Noah Baumbach project is a big film - but 2011 will be the year the indie darling truly goes Hollywood. In this week's friends-with-benefits comedy No Strings Attached, Gerwig stands out as Natalie Portman's level-headed BFF; in April, she'll play the object of Russell Brand's affections in Arthur. And next month, she'll vie for her first major acting award at the Spirit Awards, nominated (opposite No Strings Attached co-star Portman) for her work as a winsome Los Angeleno in Greenberg.
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While Joel McHale's wryness sets the tone on NBC's hilarious Community, it's Danny Pudi's contributions as the brainy, jolting Abed that fiercely punctuate the show's ensemble. Abed's been funny, reflective, and childlike in Community's second season, and for the Chicago-born Pudi, those facets have posed an irresistible acting challenge. We spoke with Pudi last week about Abed's complicated headspace, relating to his role, and Community's fairytale tendencies.
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This spring, Friday Night Lights star Zach Gilford attempts to leave behind his beloved character Matt Saracen -- the shy former quarterback of the Dillon Panthers -- for an outdoorsy doctor on Shonda Rhimes' latest ABC medical drama, Off the Map. Will the Northwestern grad be able to endear himself to an entirely new audience and adjust to life away from the bubble that he grew comfortable on during the last five seasons on FNL?
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Certain comic book characters remain popular on the page but seem to defy adaptation to the big screen -- Entertainment Weekly recently asked whether or not we'd ever see a Wonder Woman movie. But for filmmaker and former Black Entertainment Television president Reginald Hudlin, writing first a comic book and then an animated series of Black Panther (out today from Shout! Factory) was a way to visualize a cinematic adventure for a character that Hudlin calls the African equivalent of Captain America.
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