Also in Friday afternoon's round-up of news briefs, Israel's celebrated doc The Flat is headed to the U.S. as is Sundance doc A Place at the Table. Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black gets a new gig writing a disaster movie for Universal and R.I.P. Lupe Ontiveros.
more »
Dustin Lance Black spoke of his conservative Mormon upbringing when he won the 2009 Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk, and traces of that childhood are all over his most recent directorial effort Virginia, a garbled coming-of-age story and portrait of a mentally ill mother. The titular character, played by a blonde Jennifer Connelly, suffers from traumatic onset schizophrenia — she's a fey, childlike woman who lives alone with her protective teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) and has been carrying on a decades-long affair with the town sheriff Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), a devout Mormon who's married with kids.
more »
At the press conference for J. Edgar, which premiered last night at AFI Fest to mixed, often hilarious reviews, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts joined director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and producer Brian Grazer fielded questions about the very issues that make the biopic seem difficult to make: the ambiguity surrounding both Hoover and his confidants' personal lives. Movieline culled the best five quotes from the panel, one of which involves 81-year-old Eastwood's on-set brawling.
Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant was once in the running to helm The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn before Bill Condon got the gig, but a July dinner outing with Taylor Lautner and Milk writer Dustin Lance Black had the gossip mill wondering if Van Sant was working on a new film with the Twilight star.This weekend the director and the erstwhile wolf boy were photographed taking in Cirque du Soleil's IRIS: A Journey Through the World of Cinema. What could Gus 'n' Tay-Tay have been talking about?
Oh, great. Just when we thought Armie Hammer's kiss with Leonardo DiCaprio in Clint Eastwood's upcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic was going to be explosive, Eastwood himself is confirming that he's leaving the first FBI director's sexual orientation "open to interpretation." I know a certain TV personality who might have damning evidence to the contrary.
FILM NEWS 
