Thompson On Hollywood
- The Academy Tightens Oscar Campaign and International Submission Rules
Monday - 05/01/2023 - 05:00 PMThe Academy Board of Governors met Friday and voted to approve a long list of rule changes for the 96th Oscars to be held on March 10, 2024.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Little Richard Wasn’t an Easy Doc Subject — but Filmmaker Lisa Cortés Knew He Was Worth the Work
Tuesday - 04/18/2023 - 05:00 PMWhen Little Richard died at age 87 in May 2020 during the depths of the pandemic, New York filmmaker Lisa Cortés found herself listening to his music nonstop, from classics like “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Lucille,” and “Long Tall Sally,” to a wide range of surprising tributes, from Bob Dylan to Dave Grohl.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Karina Longworth’s ‘You Must Remember This’ Podcast Goes Deep Into the Erotic ’90s
Tuesday - 04/11/2023 - 05:30 PMLos Angeles native Karina Longworth has long ridden the swells of writing about Hollywood, whether as a cofounder of film blog Cinematical and contributor to Spout, critic and film editor at LA Weekly, author (books on Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, George Lucas, and Howard Hughes), or creator of the popular nine-year-old “You Must Remember This” podc
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - From Marvel Villains to Gandhi, Sir Ben Kingsley Can Do It All
Wednesday - 03/22/2023 - 05:00 PMSir Ben Kingsley, 79, has one foot planted in Beverly Hills, the other in Oxfordshire, England — nearly 200 miles southeast of his native Lancashire, where he was raised by his British model and actress mom and his father, a Kenyan-born family doctor of Indian descent.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Anonymous Oscar Ballot: After Seeing It Three Times, Director Finally Embraces the ‘Modern’ ‘Everything Everywhere’
Saturday - 03/11/2023 - 11:30 AMWith final Oscar balloting closed on March 7, we’re continuing with our sixth annual series of interviews with Academy voters from different branches for their unfiltered takes on what got picked, overlooked, and overvalued in the 2023 award season.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- What to Expect from Oscar Night: Class, 23 Categories, and No Sofas
Wednesday - 03/08/2023 - 04:01 PMThis one has to be better, right? It will be the first Oscars under Academy CEO Bill Kramer, who took the role in July 2022 after running the Academy Museum.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- How the Film Independent Spirit Awards Winners Could Impact Oscar Voting
Sunday - 03/05/2023 - 12:18 AMThis year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards stayed ahead of the Oscar curve once more, announcing their winners on Saturday, March 4 in the usual chilly, white tent on the Santa Monica beach, with Oscar voting not over until March 7.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Jerry Bruckheimer’s 7-Step Formula for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Is Worth Hollywood’s Attention
Tuesday - 02/21/2023 - 03:30 PMJerry Bruckheimer has seen it all.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Marvel Exec Victoria Alonso’s Other Job? Producing Oscar Nominee ‘Argentina 1985’
Friday - 02/17/2023 - 09:30 AMWhen she was a teenager in Buenos Aires, Victoria Alonso never imagined being an executive producer at Marvel.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - The Strange Journey of Surprise Oscar Nominee ‘A House Made of Splinters’
Wednesday - 02/08/2023 - 09:30 AMDocumentary filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont won a Peabody Award in 2017 for “The Distant Barking of Dogs,” which focused on a young boy living in the Ukraine with his grandmother during wartime.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Chevalier’ Writer Stefani Robinson Has Always Been an Overachiever — So Is the Subject of Her First Feature
Friday - 04/21/2023 - 11:00 AMWriter Stefani Robinson is an admitted overachiever. In 2016, on the strength of a spec script, “Lola and the Afterlife,” about the ghost of dead girl stuck in limbo in Boston, she landed a meeting with Donald Glover on FX series “Atlanta” and was promptly hired for the Season 1 writer’s room.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- New York Tributes Late Telluride Networker and Impresario Tom Luddy
Sunday - 04/16/2023 - 02:15 PMTom Luddy wasn’t famous exactly. But he had a huge impact on film culture via UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive in the ’60s and the Telluride Film Festival in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and up to his death in February at age 79.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Ben Kingsley Starrer ‘Jules’ Wins Audience Award at 26th Sonoma International Film Festival — Exclusive
Sunday - 03/26/2023 - 02:01 PMLaunching with the opening night world premiere of Marc Turtletaub’s “Jules,” a crowdpleaser sales title starring Ben Kingsley, the 26th annual Sonoma International Film Festival (March 22-26) drew its highest audience attendance to date.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - How a Busby Berkeley-Obsessed Indie Filmmaker Landed the Stage and Movie Rights to His Unpublished Memoir
Friday - 03/17/2023 - 05:00 PMBring up Golden Age Hollywood filmmaker Busby Berkeley, and most people conjure his staging of elaborate, kaleidoscopic dance numbers in such films as “Dames” and “Footlight Parade,” Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” at the height of the Depression in “Gold Diggers of 1933,” or his sinuous camera weaving through dancer’s legs in such hits as Oscar-nominated “42nd Street” (1933).
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Anonymous Oscar Ballot: Publicist Still Hasn’t Seen ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’
Wednesday - 03/08/2023 - 02:00 PMWith final Oscar balloting closed on March 7, we’re continuing with our sixth annual series of interviews with Academy voters from different branches for their unfiltered takes on what got picked, overlooked, and overvalued in the 2023 award season.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Oscar Contender Jamie Lee Curtis Has a Superpower: She Can’t Fake It
Monday - 03/06/2023 - 05:30 PMGrowing up as the child of movie stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis learned early on the difference between real life and a photo op.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - After Big Guild Wins, ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Heads for Oscars
Sunday - 02/26/2023 - 10:58 PM“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is on a roll, collecting key wins at the DGA and the predictive PGA and SAG Awards.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - What the BAFTAs Mean for the Oscars: Watch Out for ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
Sunday - 02/19/2023 - 04:44 PMThe British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards (BAFTAs) are often quite predictive of the Oscars, as there’s some overlap between BAFTA voters and the Academy. And unlike last year, the BAFTA winners (along with next Sunday’s SAG Awards) could impact Oscar voting, which commences March 2 and ends March 7 ahead of the ABC awards show on Sunday, March 12.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- The Best Romance Movies of the 21st Century, from ‘High Fidelity’ to ‘Carol’
Tuesday - 02/14/2023 - 08:30 PMWhat would movies be about if not for love? Since well before the days of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca,” romance has driven countless classic stories, setting up some of the highest highs in cinematic history to follow.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Santa Barbara Launches with Oscar Tributes, from Cate Blanchett and Colin Farrell to Angela Bassett
Wednesday - 02/08/2023 - 03:30 PMUnder veteran Executive Director Roger Durling, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (February 8-18, 2023) has thrived by surfing the awards season wave and programming a ton of onstage interviews with Oscar contenders.
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- From ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ to ‘The Room’: Why This Great Lit Agent Is a Performance Artist
Thursday - 04/27/2023 - 04:00 PMGet on the phone with Ron Bernstein (like many agents, he loves to gab) and he’ll happily share his views on who’s up and down at the studios — and inevitably, he’ll talk about his latest deals.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - TCM Classic Film Festival 2023: Hollywood Titans Support Saving Movie Memories
Friday - 04/14/2023 - 06:30 PMOpening night of the 14th TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood brought out not only the lustrous 4D restored Howard Hawks classic western “Rio Bravo” — starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Angie Dickinson, 91, who was on hand — but two directors and board members of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - New Model Indie Diversity Hire Ltd. Launches with Festival Hit ‘Joyland’
Friday - 04/07/2023 - 02:30 PMNative Angeleno April Shih is not only a TV writer for “Dave” and WGA Award winner for “Mrs. America” — she is now on location with Season 5 of “Fargo” — but she’s an avid poker player.
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Takeaways from a Kinder, Gentler Oscars 2023
Monday - 03/13/2023 - 06:46 PMOn the way into the Governors’ Ball, Darren Aronofsky happily accepted congrats for two Oscar wins for “The Whale,” for comeback kid Best Actor Brendan Fraser and his makeup transformation.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Anonymous Oscar Ballot: Costume Designer Celebrates ‘TÁR’ and ‘Women Talking’
Thursday - 03/09/2023 - 08:30 PMWith final Oscar balloting closed on March 7, we’re continuing with our sixth annual series of interviews with Academy voters from different branches for their unfiltered takes on what got picked, overlooked, and overvalued in the 2023 award season.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- ‘Women Talking’ and ‘Slow Horses’ Win Adapted Screenplay USC Scripter Awards
Sunday - 03/05/2023 - 11:41 AMThe University of Southern California Libraries revealed the winners for the 35th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award on Saturday. The awards, which honor the year’s best film and television adaptations (along with the works on which they are based), returned live to USC’s elegant Edward L.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Inside the Panic of Making ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
Tuesday - 02/28/2023 - 05:30 PM“All Quiet on the Western Front” came out of the BAFTAs with seven wins, including Best Film and Best Director, and boasts nine Oscar nominations. With the influential international Academy voting bloc, could this win Best Picture?
More | Talk | Read It Later | Share - Six DGA Nominees Reveal Their Secrets, from Spielberg to Kosinski
Saturday - 02/18/2023 - 06:41 PMAt the annual pre-DGA Awards nominees symposium Saturday morning, “Top Gun: Maverick” nabbed the most enthusiastic applause (after a breathtaking clip of Tom Cruise soaring in an F-14). And as usual for these panels, the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” directing duo the Daniels scored the most laughs.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Inside the Place Where You Can Learn One-on-One About Steven Spielberg’s Vulnerability
Thursday - 02/16/2023 - 02:30 PMEvery year, I get a kick out of interviewing the Oscar-nominated screenwriters at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. This year’s panel was intimidating: In addition to their awards-season laurels, they included a Nobel Prize winner (Kazuo Ishiguro), a Pulitzer Prize winner (Tony Kushner) and a professional triathlete (Lesley Paterson).More | Talk | Read It Later | Share
- Remembering Edward R. Pressman: Independent Producer of Malick, Ferrara, Harron, Stone, and Many More
Saturday - 02/04/2023 - 05:42 PMEd Pressman was cool. And he had taste. He didn’t care what other people thought of a given project. If he thought it was cool, that was enough. He kept his own counsel; he was quiet.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share