Word is that director Gore Verbinski of bicoastal/international Propaganda Films, and the British co-directing team known as Hammer + Tongs, last with bicoastal U Ground, are joining 8Media, the Culver City, Calif.-based production venture launched by former Propaganda chairman/cofounder Steve Golin….Director Neil Tardio, Jr. has joined Santa Monica-based commercial production house Fuel, a division of publicly traded global digital design firm Razorfish (NASDAQ: RAZF). Tardio was most recently repped by now defunct Fahrenheit Films….Filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld (i.e. Men In Black, Get Shorty, Wild Wild West) is in between features and will be available for commercials for the next several months via executive producer Allison Nunn, who is working independently…. Director Joe Murray has returned to Shadowrock Productions, Beverly Hills….Director Agust Baldursson has come aboard Hollywood-based Orbit Productions….John Orloff, a noted spot director best known for his tenures at a pair of now defunct houses, Wakeford/Orloff and then The Film Tree, has died at the age of 67….
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More