‘Tis the season. Studios and distributors are pulling out all the stops to bring attention to their big awards contenders. The drumbeat has been so loud since Thanksgiving that it’s not uncommon to be invited to 4 or 5 sceenings, parties, events, and Q&As in a single night. I get the feeling everyone is pushing a lot harder this year than ever before because of relaxed pre-nomination Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences rules and the feeling that the race is wide open. And with ballots due by Sunday for LA Film Critics, Critics Choice, and Golden Globe awards, AFI Top 10, and others, the crush was heavy this week.
Witness Focus Features’ push for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Gary Oldman and cast including Colin Firth and key crew have been in town doing one screening after another to packed Industry crowds for the likes of SAG, BAFTA, DGA guild awards. A post-premiere party Tuesday night drew swarms of Academy members while Oldman and company held court. A Sunday cocktail party attended by Oldman and director Tomas Alfredson was attended by members of the Los Angeles Film Critics, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and guild members just in time to get exposed to these potential nominees before casting their ballots.
The Tinker Tailor contingent is pretty thrilled about their own reviews and current 86% fresh score at Rotten Tomatoes plus the industry reaction. At a KCET/American … Read More
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Hammond: From ‘Tinker Tailor’ To Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt, Oscar Talk Is Everywhere
Hot Trailer: ‘The Flowers Of War’
Zhang Yamou’s fact-based drama The Flowers Of War is China’s entry into Oscar’s foreign-language race and the nation’s most expensive movie ever at a budget of almost $100 million. Here’s an exclusive trailer for the pic, which centers on a man (Christian Bale) who finds refuge with a group of women in a church during Japan’s raid of Nanking in 1937. Wrekin Hill is releasing it in the U.S. and has set it for a qualifying run December 21 in New York and December 23 in Los Angeles and San Francisco, followed by a later bow nationwide.
Click here to view the embedded video.
TOLDJA! Harrison Ford Set To Play Branch Rickey In Jackie Robinson Film ’42′
Deadline revealed yesterday that Legendary Pictures was courting Harrison Ford to play Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers GM who with Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball in 1947. Legendary has announced that Ford is set, and that they’ve cast Chadwick Boseman to play the Hall of Fame second baseman who had a profound impact on the Civil Rights movement. Brian Helgeland wrote the script and will direct. Here’s the release:
Burbank, CA ‘
12 Studios-Distributors, 29 Films, 9 Moguls: ‘The Contenders’ Deadline Hollywood Event
Deadline Hollywood has always tried to innovate while other showbiz media outlets merely imitate. So I’
Big Media vs Google On Capitol Hill Today
MPAA Arranges Studio-Guild D.C. Lobbying
Here’s more on that joint MPAA/studio moguls/Hollywood guilds lobbying in Washington DC today from news reports. The MPAA moguls led by News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch included Fox Filmed Entertainment’s Jim Gianopulos, Warner Bros’ Barry Meyer, and Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Michael Lynton converged on Capitol Hill to solidify support for two antipiracy bills moving through Congress – the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Hollywood Big Media are lined up against Internet companies such as Google. Its Chairman Eric Schmidt today told lawmakers that Congress would be making a big mistake to pass the Hollywood-backed laws. Opponents including much of Silicon Valley plan to present alternative legislation Thursday, a week before the scheduled markup of the House measure. Backed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Or) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca), it will narrow the definition of a rogue website and curb private lawsuits.
The Hollywood studios are among 350 large corporations who have come out in favor of SOPA and PIPA. Opponents besides Google and other Internet companies include the Consumer Electronics Association which according to Forbes claims SOPA ”allows movie studios, foreign luxury goods manufacturers, patent and copyright trolls, and any holder of any intellectual property right to target lawful U.S. websites and technology companies”. Each side has spent roughly $90 million on lobbying efforts. Allegations are that Big Media have donated millions of dollars to individual senators and representatives supporting the legislation over … Read More
WSJ: Ryan Seacrest May Replace Matt Lauer
NBC Universal is courting Ryan Seacrest as a potential replacement for Matt Lauer on the Today show, the Wall Street Journal reports. The paper says NBC News, Today show, and NBC network executives met with Seacrest on Tuesday about the possibilty of him joining the morning talker. The discussions with Seacrest include multiple possibilities that might enhance his role within the broader corporate context at Comcast and NBC Universal. Seacrest’s existing deal with Comcast/NBCUniversal expires next year. He serves as host and producer of a daily news show on E! network as well as E!’s red-carpet specials. Seacrest’s prolific TV production company is also based at E! A Seacrest spokeswoman would say only that negotiations with NBC Universal were ongoing.
R.I.P. Joseph Farrell
Legendary movie marketing innovator Joseph Farrell died this morning of natural causes. He was 76. Farrell is the former chairman and CEO of The National Research Group which quickly became the leading market research firm in the film industry, serving studios and filmmakers and distributors worldwide. Among the services he introduced, now taken for granted by the film industry, are ‘
Greg Daniels Teams With Mindy Kaling & Alan Yang For Animated Projects At NBC
EXCLUSIVE: The Office and Parks & Recreation executive producer Greg Daniels is teaming with a writer from each of his two NBC series to develop new animated comedy projects for the network. One of the projects will be written/executive by The Office co-executive producer/co-star Mindy Kaling, who will also voice a character, the other – by Parks & Recreation producer Alan Yang. Daniels and his manager/producing partner Howard Klein will executive produce both comedies. The Mindy Kaling project revolves around a girls high-school volleyball team. 
Alan Yang’s toon is about a group of 20something guys sharing a house in Los Angeles’ upscale community of Hancock Park. For King Of The Hill co-creator Greg Daniels, returning to his animated roots was important when he closed a new overall production deal with Universal Television this past summer. “One of our focuses will be to return Greg to primetime animation, for which he had particular success with King of the Hill when he and I worked together at FBC,” NBC Entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt said in announcing the deal. In addition to the two animated projects, Daniels has a live-action comedy in the works at NBC, a U.S. version of the UK series Friday Night Dinner, which is looking for a writer. … Read More
Dan Gilroy Signs On To Pen Stan Lee’s Chinese Superhero Pic
Screenwriter Dan Gilroy has come aboard to pen the Chinese superhero project The Annihilator (working title) for Magic Storm Entertainment. CEO Eric Mika said Gilroy would write the screenplay to introduce the Stan Lee superhero to global audiences including the Chinese market as the first film project of the global film-financing joint venture formed by Stan Lee POW! Entertainment and Ricco Capital-Fidelis Entertainment. The story concerns a young man who becomes a superhero who returns to his homeland to mete out justice. Gilroy’s credits include Real Steel, The Bourne Legacy and Two For The Money. Lee described The Annihilator as “the most incredibly original and unique superhero I’
Norway’s Morten Tyldum To Helm ‘What Happened To Monday?’ As First English-Language Pic
Morten Tyldum, whose Norwegian thriller Headhunters became the most successful title in Norway box office history this year, has signed on to helm Vendome Pictures’ futuristic thriller What Happened To Monday?, which will be the director’s first English-language project. Headhunters, based on Jo Nesbo’s bestselling crime novel, garnered plenty of buzz when it played in Cannes this year, and WME signed Tyldum during the festival; he also is repped by Anonymous Content. (Magnolia Pictures already has North American rights to Headhunters and has set a spring release date in the U.S.) What Happened To Monday?, with a Black List script by Max Botkin, revolves around identical septuplet brothers who struggle to stay hidden in an overpopulated world where a one-child policy dictates that siblings are against the law. Raffaella De Laurentiis via Raffaella Productions developed the project; it will produce alongside Vendome CEO Philippe Rousselet. Vendome committed to finance the project in December.
‘Coronation Street’ Celebrated Via Live Musical ‘Street Of Dreams’
Hey Bet Lynch fans: Get out your beehives and your baubles. While U.S. daytime TV is going through a seismic shift, Britain’
MPAA Arranges Studio-Guild D.C. Lobbying
MPAA’s new Chairman/CEO Chris Dodd held his first official Board meeting in Washington DC today. But here’s what I find most interesting: following the meeting, the members of the Board from the major studios suddenly embraced the leaders from the major entertainment industry unions DGA, IATSE, SAG, AFTRA. Notably missing was the WGA which keeps being ostracized by the other unions not to mention the studios. The MPAA tells me the studios and other unions “scheduled meetings with key members of Congress and the Administration to discuss the critical importance of curbing online content theft and improving international market access”. Hmm.
Fox Business Says Muppets Movie Anti-Biz
How did we miss this? Fox Business news on the network’s “Follow the Money” program last week opined that Disney’s The Muppets movie storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood’s anti-corporate liberal agenda. “They’ve been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry,” Gainor continued. “They hate corporate America. And so you’ll see all these movies attacking it,” complained Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center:
REPORTS: NFL Close To Deal Extending TV Rights Through 2021 For $6 Billion A Year
This NFL season’s ratings haven’t been as strong as last year’s which broke a slew of ratings records. But the NFL continues to be the most potent TV sports franchise by a mile. So the National Football League and the broadcast, cable and satellite networks are close to whopping deals stretching through 2021 that would give the league a 60% increase over current fees. That’s $6 billion a year or more from all its media “partners,” according to the industry trade publication Sports Business Daily and the Wall Street Journal.
The deals are with News Corp’s Fox, Comcast’s NBC, and CBS as well as DirecTV and Disney’s ESPN. Broadcast network share of the yearly fees will amount to about $3.2 billion. ESPN’s share will be about $1.9 billion per season under the league’s separate $15.2 billion deal with the cable network for “Monday Night Football” which also lasts through 2021. (ABC suffered significant drops in ratings when Disney opted to shift Monday Night Football to ESPN.) DirecTV pays roughly $1 billion a year to offer its Sunday Ticket that covers all Sunday afternoon games and some other NFL programming.
NFL coverage is also a huge factor for local TV stations, not only for network-owned stations but for affiliates owned by other companies that have to pay the networks for the rights to carry their programming. In turn cable systems and satellite providers have to fork over what are known as … Read More
Global Showbiz Briefs: UK, Africa, Australia
‘Arthur Christmas’ Slays ‘Em In The UK
Sony Pictures Animation and Aardman’
Sports Fees Vex Cable Execs: UBS Confab
The per-household subscription fees ESPN charges cable systems amounts to “a tax on every American household,” Liberty Media Corp. CEO Greg Maffei said Monday at an investor conference sponsored by UBS AG in New York City. ESPN charges are the highest of any cable channel, according to SNL Kagan, which estimates those per-subscriber fees have jumped 42% since 2006 to $4.69. By comparison average cable channel fees were up 24% for that period to 26 cents a month. The problem isn’t just ESPN, Maffei said later, because regional networks such as Fox Sports also contribute to the overall escalation of fees networks pay to carry events. NFL, for example, 
is negotiating contracts that could raise broadcast networks’ fees by 60% to about $3.2 billion a year, the Wall Street Journal noted. Some executives think it might be better to position expensive sports channels such as ESPN on a separate tier that would allow uninterested subscribers to opt out and lower their bills. Otherwise, rising sports rights fees could lead many consumers to drop services. MTV Networks and Nickelodeon owner Viacom Inc.’s CEO Philippe Dauman also singled out ESPN as a significant factor in higher costs because it is “double the cost of all our networks combined.” Even though they still resist the idea of a la carte packaging, media exec are beginning to see the merits of selling smaller, cheaper programming bundles as … Read More
Ice Cube To Star In And Produce Vigilante Drama Project For FX
EXCLUSIVE: In what would be his first TV starring vehicle, Ice Cube is set to topline and executive produce Eye For An Eye, a drama series project in development at FX. The project hails from Ice Cube’s company Cube Vision and Jeff Kwatinetz’s Prospect Park, which developed the idea together. Eye For An Eye centers on a complex man, played by Ice Cube, who is a veteran paramedic. After too many years of leaving the scenes of violent crimes with a victim struggling to live in the back of his ambulance, he snaps and starts going eye for an eye. When his thirst for revenge proves addictive, his personal life spirals out of control as he tries to reconcile it with his newfound life as a vigilante. Cube and his Cube Vision partner Matt Alvarez are executive producing with Kwatinetz and Prospect Park’s TV partner Josh Barry. A search is underway for a writer to pen the script. In TV, Ice Cube is executive producing the TBS sitcom Are We There Yet? based on his 2005 movie. UTA-repped Ice Cube recurs on the series, which has a 100-episode order. On the film side, he is working with New Line on a new installment in his hit Friday franchise. He next stars in Rampart and 21 … Read More
R.I.P. Marion Dougherty
Marion Dougherty, a former Bergdorf-Goodman window dresser who rose to become one of Hollywood’s most influential casting directors, died December 4 in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 88. Once called “the father of casting as we know it” by Paul Newman, Dougherty was responsible for giving Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Ed Asner, Anne Bancroft, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken and numerous others their first breaks. She also was instrumental in the early careers of James Dean and Robert Duvall.
Dougherty entered the business casting the TV series Kraft Television Theater, Naked City and Route 66 during the late 1940s and into the early 1960s. At that time, the end of the studio system meant actors were free agents to be discovered in regional theaters, off-Broadway and at local playhouses, and the demands of TV meant they had to be found fast. She eventually moved into film casting, where she revolutionized the process by moving away from type-casting and toward character and individuality. Her movie credits include casting Pacino in Panic In Needle Park, Redford in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Voight and Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, as well as The Owl And The Pussycat, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Paper Chase, Lenny, The Day Of The Locust, The World According To Garp, Full Metal Jacket, Tim Burton’s Batman, and the four Lethal Weapon movies. Her most recent movie credit was 2001′s Venus And … Read More
Switzerland’s Copyright Law To Stay In Neutral, Surprising Anti-Piracy Groups
Based on a new report on the impact of unauthorized downloads, Switzerland seems to be saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The study, released by the Federal Department of Justice and Police, has concluded that piracy doesn’
E! Inks Talent Deal With David Burtka
Stage and TV actor David Burtka has signed a talent deal with E! Entertainment that will see the stage and TV actor (and Neil Patrick Harris’ longtime companion) join E! News as a correspondent as well as participate on the network’s Live From The Red Carpet and E! specials. He begins his new role in January. Burtka made his Broadway debut in Edward Albee’s The Goat, and played Tulsa opposite Bernadette Peters in Sam Mendes’ Gypsy. He also has TV credits that include CSI: NY, How I Met Your Mother, Steven Spielberg’s On The Lot and Crossing Jordan.