We've come to expect high-concept portrayals of the human condition from the Sundance Film Festival, but next year, virtual humans will get some art-house love, too. I'm talking about G.J. Echternkamp’s feature-film debut, Virtually Heroes, which will get a Park City at Midnight premiere at the festival in January. more »
The Provincetown International Film Festival feted Roger Corman over the weekend with John Waters taking to the stage in a laugh-filled interview before a packed house in the eccentric enclave's town hall. The maverick producer/director/actor offered up highlights from his long career and offered up a litany of tales from his years the low budget B-movie throne. While distributors consistently have spats with the MPAA for getting a "harsh" rating, Roger Corman recalled a time when he went back to the MPAA to ask for a "harsher" rating. "Eight year-olds" don't want to see a G-rated film," John Waters observes…
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Also happening in (mostly) film news Tuesday morning, Roger Corman to lead a festival jury, Alfre Woodard to star along with Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender in a slave epic, projections for worldwide entertainment are up, though less so in North America and former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash gets ready for his star...
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The Film: Night Call Nurses (1972), available on DVD in the new set Roger Corman's Cult Classics: The Nurses Collection via Shout! Factory.
Why it's an Inessential Essential: The respectability gap between director Jonathan Kaplan's recent and early-career work is pretty striking. Today, Kaplan works primarily in TV: He served as a co-executive producer for both E.R. and Without a Trace, and has also directed eight episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, two episodes of Brothers and Sisters and 40 episodes of E.R. But when Kaplan started his filmmaking career, he made sleazy but surprisingly sturdy exploitation pics like Truck Turner (1974), in which Isaac Hayes plays a bounty hunter that is very attached to beer and his cat, and The Slams (1973), a prison flick starring Jim Brown. Now Night Call Nurses, Kaplan's 1972 directorial debut, has just been reissued in a new collection highlighting four nursesploitation pics produced by schlockmeister Roger Corman. Kaplan's film is easily the best one in the set — and also a good indicator of Kaplan's then-nascent talent.
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What's second unit? What's the 180 degree line? These questions and more were often answered by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman in his grindhouse movie heyday, when he famously took newbie future auteurs like James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese under his wing while churning out B-movies left and right. In an exclusive deleted scene from Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, almost a dozen of his former proteges, including Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Penelope Spheeris recall the crash course in filmmaking he gave them at the start of their careers.
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