Sundance Takes a Hike with Screenings Around USLOS ANGELES (AP) – Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival is going on the road for one night next winter.
The independent-film showcase is sending eight films playing at the festival for screenings in eight cities around the country on Jan. 28.
One film will go to each of the following cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, N.Y., Nashville, Tenn., Madison, Wis., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Brookline, Mass.
The directors of each film will travel along to introduce their work and answer audience questions afterward. The films will be announced after the festival releases its lineup in December.
The screenings will allow audiences around the country a taste of the festival that runs Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.
WWII Theater to Open with Tom Hanks, ‘4-D’ filmNEW ORLEANS (AP) – Tom Hanks is scheduled to be there when the National World War II Museum in New Orleans debuts the war film he produced to immerse audiences with all their senses in key battles.
The film “Beyond All Boundaries” will be shown exclusively at the museum’s new Victory Theater, which includes elements billed as “4-D” such as wind and shaking seats to accent vintage footage from Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Bulge playing on a 120-foot-wide screen.
The theater was built for the film as part of a $300 million expansion of the museum that is expected to continue through 2015.
Two other museum additions – a canteen that will feature musical revues inspired by USO-style productions and a restaurant called The American Sector – are also opening Friday.
Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin to Co-host OscarsBy Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are taking on the Oscars.
The two Hollywood veterans will share hosting duties at the 82nd Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Tuesday.
Telecast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman said Martin and Baldwin are “the perfect pair of hosts for the Oscars.” The producers have said they hope to resurrect Oscar’s ratings and make the show more fun by building on the changes introduced at February’s ceremony, which tinkered with the way awards were presented and featured Broadway-style musical interludes.
A pair of hosts helmed the inaugural Oscar ceremony in 1929: Douglas Fairbanks and William DeMille, then president and vice president of the film academy, co-hosted the show. The last time multiple hosts graced the Oscar stage was in 1987, when Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn and Paul Hogan shared hosting duties.
“In the modern television era, this is the first time there will be two co-hosts on the same stage,” academy spokeswoman Leslie Unger said Tuesday.
Besides the dual-host approach, the 2010 Oscars have already undergone a major makeover. The academy moved its honorary Oscars, often a long-winded affair that bogged down the ceremony, to a separate e vent in November.
And in the biggest change in decades, the academy doubled the number of best-picture nominees from five to 10. Academy overseers hope that might open the top category to a wider range of films, including commercial movies that could attract more TV viewers.
Chinese Movie Studio Eyes NYSE Listing
By Min Lee, Entertainment Writer
HONG KONG (AP) – A third leading Chinese movie studio is aiming for a listing – this time on the New York Stock Exchange – as the country’s entertainment companies turn to the capital markets to raise funds.
Beijing Polybona Film Distribution Co. is aiming to go public in the second half of next year or the first half of 2011, Chief Executive Yu Dong told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday. The company will start drafting its listing application early next year, he said.
Polybona’s rivals are making similar moves. Huayi Brothers Media Corp. debuted on China’s new small companies market in the southern city Shenzhen on Friday, surging 148 percent on its first day of trading. The state-run China Film Group is planning to list in Shanghai, spokesman Weng Li told the AP recently.
Yu said he wants to list Polybona in the U.S., where entertainment stocks are common, to open up the company to American and other foreign investors.
China still restricts foreign access to its domestic stock markets to certain institutional investors. He said Polybona has already received funding from the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners China, with the second company investing 100 million Chinese yuan ($15 million).
Polybona’s businesses encompass movie distribution, production and multiplexes. Among its recent productions are the upcoming Jackie Chan historical epic “Big Soldier,” the historical thriller “Bodyguards and Assassins,” starring Donnie Yen, the police thriller “Overheard” and “Mulan.” Yu said Polybona will have 50 movie screens by the end of the year, b ut hopes to increase that number to 100 by the end of next year and 200 in three to five years.
While still small compared to the U.S., the Chinese box office is growing rapidly. Government statistics show Chinese revenues surged from 920 million yuan in 2003 to 4.3 billion yuan in 2008 ($703 million) – compared to $9.8 billion in the U.S. last year. The number of movie screens grew by 570 to nearly 4,100 – an average of 1.6 new screens every day.
Former Agent Jailed for Theft From Royal ComposerLONDON (AP) – A man has been jailed of 18 months for embezzling more than 500,000 pounds ($800,000) from the official composer to Queen Elizabeth II.
Michael Arnold was the agent and manager of musician Peter Maxwell Davies for more than 30 years.
Prosecutors say he stole from Maxwell Davies for 16 years. The fraud was discovered when the composer was unable to withdraw 40 pounds from a bank machine because of insufficient funds.
Arnold pleaded guilty at Kingston Crown Court to false accounting involving 522,333 pounds ($853,000). Judge Nicholas Jones said Monday that he had taken the 76-year-old defendant’s age and ill-health into account, but that the serious crime deserved a jail sentence.
Maxwell Davies is considered among the world’s most eminent composers.
Dutch Mark 5th anniversary of Filmmaker’s Murder
By Toby Sterling
AMSTERDAM (AP) – The Dutch marked the fifth anniversary Monday of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic, a brutal killing that continues to shape politics in the Netherlands.
Van Gogh, a distant relative of the famous painter, was shot and stabbed on an Amsterdam street Nov. 2, 2004, setting off a spate of mosque burnings in a country once renowned for its tolerance.
His killer Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born man of Moroccan descent, said he did it because Van Gogh insulted Islam in his films. Bouyeri is serving a life sentence for the killing, which was ruled a terrorist act.
The effects of the murder were far-reaching, and Dutch debate about the integration of Muslims – who make up 5 percent of the 16 million population – continues into the present.
The murder aided the rise of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant politician whose party leads in recent polls.
Television stations were running documentaries and films Monday about the killing, and politicians, fans and members of Van Gogh’s family were to gather later at a monument in a park near the spot where he was killed.
A dozen members of Bouyeri’s circle were arrested later for terrorism-related crimes such as throwing explosives at police or plotting attacks on landmarks.
Cohen said his role has been to “just try to hold things together” in a diverse city where tensions between various groups continue to run high. “Every day it’s a new challenge all over again,” he said.
In the aftermath of the killing the government ordered citizenship tests for resident aliens and language tests for would-be immigrants. The latter was one of several measures intended to make it difficult for Muslim men to marry foreign brides.
The government made it a crime to not carry an ID card, and authorized police to stop people not suspected of any wrongdoing on the street and frisk them. Prosecutors and intelligence agencies were also given greater powers.
In some ways the anti-immigrant politician Wilders has tried to assume Van Gogh’s mantle, creating his own provocative film, “Fitna” which linked Islam and violence.
Van Gogh fans say Wilders lacks the filmmaker’s sense of irony.
