December 16, 2011
Golden Globe noms rev up Hollywood’s Oscar race
David Germain, Movie Writer
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) – The Golden Globes are good at predicting likely best-picture nominees for the Academy Awards. Not so much at predicting the eventual big Oscar winner, though.
Globe voters, who released their nominations Thursday, used to have a solid track record as a forecast for the Oscar best-picture prize. But they’ve been swinging and missing recently, with only one top Globe recipient going on to claim the main trophy come Oscar night during the last seven years.
Yet the Globes might have better luck this time. The show has two best-picture categories, one for drama, the other for musicals or comedies. The latter category usually doesn’t offer serious best-picture contenders at the Oscars, which tend toward heavier drama.
Last season, the Facebook tale “The Social Network” emerged as the film to beat at the Oscars after it won for best drama at the Globes. Then the monarchy saga “The King’s Speech” picked up steam with key wins at Hollywood trade union honors and wound up crowned best picture at the Oscars.
The year before, the Globes chose “Avatar” over “The Hurt Locker,” the latter ending up the Oscar champ.
The last time the Globes matched up with the Oscars was three years ago, when “Slumdog Millionaire” triumphed at both ceremonies.
Before its current seven-year streak of mostly misses, the Globes had been on a run of eight-straight years in which either its best drama or best musical-comedy winner took home the best-picture Oscar.
With drinks and dinner, the Globes are a laid-back affair for Hollywood’s elite compared to the Oscars. The show turned a bit touchy last year as host Ricky Gervais repeatedly made sharp wisecracks about stars and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of about 85 entertainment reporters for overseas outlets that presents the Globes.
But Gervais helped give the show a TV ratings boost, and he’s been invited back as host for a third-straight year.
China wants to ban several types of movie contentBEIJING (AP) – China is proposing to ban movie content that it says disturbs social stability and promotes religious fanaticism, the latest attempt by the authoritarian government to tighten control over what people see.
According to a draft law posted on the Cabinet’s website on Thursday, films must not harm national honor and interest, incite ethnic hatred, spread “evil cults” or superstition, or propagate obscenity, gambling, drug abuse, violence or terror. A total of 13 types of content are banned in the draft law, but no terms or phrases were defined.
The proposal appears to be part of an overall tightening of cultural industries that are fueling more independent viewpoints, particularly social media and hugely popular microblogs where citizens often vent anger and frustration.
In recent weeks, users of China’s Twitter-like sites have blamed the government for the poor quality of rural school buses after a series of accidents and criticized local environmental bureaus for not reporting full air quality data.
China announced last month that it was issuing orders to prohibit news media from reporting information taken from the Internet or mobile phones without firsthand verification, with serious infractions possibly leading to criminal charges.
A media regulator said those rules were needed to restore government prestige and media credibility following a spate of reports based on “false information” – often a euphemism for reports the government would rather suppress.
In October, a major Communist Party meeting asserted the need for strengthening social morality and boosting China’s cultural influence abroad – a recognition by the party that it is losing its power to dictate public opinion. A week later, the government said it planned to limit reality TV shows and other light entertainment fare shown on satellite television stations.
Thursday’s draft law also bans content that harms national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, discloses state secrets and endangers national security, or jeopardizes social ethics. It does not specify penalties for noncompliance, and it was unclear when the draft – which is open to public consultation – may become law.
The draft as a whole covers a wide range of aspects, including banning movie theaters from showing advertisements after the film’s scheduled start time, supporting the development of the film industry in rural areas, and banning people from carrying explosives or radioactive items into cinemas.
‘New Hollywood’ producer Bert Schneider dies at 78
LOS ANGELES (AP) – “Five Easy Pieces” producer Bert Schneider, credited for inspiring a “New Hollywood” band of independent filmmakers, has died in Los Angeles at 78.
With producer-director Bob Rafelson, Schneider also created the Monkees pop band.
Daughter Audrey Simon tells the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/ugzokk ) that Schneider died on Monday of natural causes at Olympia Medical Center.
Schneider produced 11 movies from 1969 to 1981, including “Easy Rider,” ”Five Easy Pieces” and “The Last Picture Show.” Those movies about rootlessness and discontent became symbols of a new era that helped filmmakers break out of the studio system.
Schneider also produced the Oscar-winning 1974 anti-Vietnam War documentary “Hearts and Minds.”
Orson Welles’ ‘Citizen Kane’ Oscar to be auctioned
LOS ANGELES (AP) – The Academy Award Orson Welles won for writing the classic film “Citizen Kane” will be sold to the highest bidder.
Auctioneer Nate D. Sanders plans to sell the Oscar statuette on Dec. 20.
Welles also earned nominations for acting in and directing the 1941 film.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declined to comment Tuesday on the planned auction. Since 1950, it has required Oscar winners to promise they will not sell their statuette before offering it back to the academy for $1.
Welles died at age 70 in 1985.
Vets upset with ‘Hawaii Five-O’ crew at cemetery
HONOLULU (AP) – A group of Pearl Harbor survivors say they were disrespected by the crew of the CBS drama “Hawaii Five-O” during a visit to Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
The Denver-based Greatest Generations Foundation took 23 veterans to the Punchbowl cemetery last week to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The veterans found it offensive that the crew members didn’t stop production while the national anthem and taps were played and that they were walking on graves, said Steffan Tubbs, a foundation board member and co-host of KOA-AM’s morning news show in Denver.
Tubbs visited the cemetery with the group, which conducted a small ceremony there.
The crew was filming a scene involving a lead character visiting his father’s grave, “which in reality was surrounded by the real graves of WWII heroes,” Tubbs said Tuesday. “It didn’t seem right.”
Cemetery Director Gene Castagnetti said the filming was approved beforehand. He added walking on graves is unavoidable and not considered disrespectful if done carefully.
It came as a surprise that the veterans would be laying roses during their ceremony, taking them to locations in the cemetery where the crew was filming, Castagnetti told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
While payment is not required for filming at the cemetery, “Hawaii Five-O” donated $1,000, KHON-TV reported. The show has filmed there several times previously.
“We were surprised to hear this report and are looking into the matter,” CBS said in a statement. “Our veterans deserve the highest level of respect and reverence for their service, particularly during a ceremony honoring those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.”
The show’s executive producer Peter Lenkov apologized in a statement Tuesday, saying that the crew is made up of mostly locals, many with military ties, and that the series “carries a demonstrative pro-military message.”
“On behalf of the Hawaii Five-O production unit, we’d like to apologize to any veterans and members of the Greatest Generation Foundation whom we unintentionally offended when our events coincided,” he said. “Contrary to some reports, to show respect, our crew did cease production for the playing of the national anthem, taps and for the remainder of the ceremony.”
Any rudeness can be “attributed to haste to finish our work,” the statement said.
The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific is the resting place for some 34,000 veterans of World War I, World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Located in Punchbowl Crater just north of downtown Honolulu, it is a top tourist destination in Hawaii.
Documentary traces fate of Mussolini’s corpse
Trisha Thomas
ROME (AP) – A new documentary about Benito Mussolini examines the near cult-like fascination that many Italians had with the fascist dictator – and how his body became a focus for the fixation.
“Il Corpo Del Duce,” (“The Duce’s Corpse”), contains some gruesome, never-before-seen images of Mussolini’s decayed corpse hanging upside down in a Milan square on April 29, 1945 after he was shot by anti-fascist partisans.
The film, directed by Fabrizio Laurenti, literally follows the path of Mussolini’s corpse from a gas station on the square to an anonymous grave and eventually a tomb in Predappio, his birthplace in northern Italy, where thousands of supporters pay homage every year.
“The images I have in my documentary are pretty, pretty strong,” Laurenti said in a recent interview. “They’re not for everybody.”
Some of the shots show the dictator’s face grotesquely swollen, unrecognizable after being hung upside down, beaten and stoned.
Others being revealed for the first time show his bullet-ridden body, curled up in a near-fetal position, looking mummified after a decade in a crate in a police warehouse. Police confiscated the corpse after diehard fascists dug up Mussolini’s remains from his anonymous Milan grave soon after he was killed.
The government eventually gave in to rightwing pressure and turned the body over to the family for burial in his hometown.
Some of the footage from Piazza Loreto, where he was hanged, was shot by U.S. Army film crews documenting the American liberation of Italy.
Laurenti, whose background is in horror films, has been criticized by the left in Italy for showing the brutal treatment Mussolini was subjected to by Italy’s partisans. Laurenti says he is merely being historically accurate, likening the death of Mussolini to the recent killing of Moammar Gadhafi by Libyan rebel forces.
Mussolini was captured near Lake Como by partisans as he and his lover, Clara Petacchi, tried to flee Italy to Switzerland. The partisans executed the couple and their loyalists and then brought them to Milan where they were hanged for public viewing.
Using file footage from Italy’s Istituto Luce archive, the film documents how a cult promoting Mussolini as a physically powerful and virile leader sprang up around him during his life.
As Mussolini plays tennis in one clip, a solemn voice declares: “The intense job of il Duce is daily preceded by intense physical exercise, which restores his fresh energy and his physical rigor.”
The documentary – based on a book by Italian author Sergio Luzzato – was first presented at the Turin Film Festival last month and will be aired on Italian television in 2012.
Italy’s left-leaning La Repubblica daily called the film a “horror,” noting it included “shocking” new images of the Mussolini body.
It said the editing “revealed the director’s proven familiarity with dark movies.”
Bosnian Serb war victim wants Jolie’s film bannedBANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) – The head of a group for Serbs held prisoner during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war says Angelina Jolie’s movie “In the Land of Blood and Honey” should be banned in the Serb-run part of the country.
Branislav Djukic of the Bosnian Serb Association of Camp Prisoners told the Associated Press on Tuesday that although he has seen only the trailer, he can already say the movie “is showing lies” and portraying Serbs as the only ones who raped women during the war.
Jolie’s movie will be released in the U.S. on Dec. 23 and is a heavy drama about a Serb soldier who finds his ex-lover, a Muslim Bosnian woman, among sex slaves in a camp.
The movie was praised by a selected audience of 11 non-Serb war victim groups who saw it in Sarajevo earlier this month.
Fla. group in Lowe’s flap has history of protestsMitch Stacy
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) – The conservative group that got Lowe’s to pull its ads from a reality TV show about American Muslims has been fighting for more than two decades against gay rights, strip clubs and most anything else that offends evangelical Christians.
The leader of the Florida Family Association is David Caton, a 55-year-old family values crusader who left an accounting career to found the group in 1987. He said the association has 35,000 members who were urged to email Lowe’s to pressure the home improvement giant into dropping commercials during the TLC cable network show “All-American Muslim.”
Lowes has drawn criticism for its decision from leaders in the Muslim community, celebrities and others suggesting a boycott of the store. Despite the growing backlash, the Mooresville, N.C.-based company said Monday it was planning to stick by its decision after the show became a “lightning rod for people to voice complaints from a variety of perspectives – political, social and otherwise.”
Several politicians called the Florida Family Association a fringe hate group, a title Caton shrugged off, saying the group aims to “defend traditional American biblical values.”
The show was not an accurate portrayal American Muslims, he said, because it doesn’t disclose that “99.9 percent of Muslims agree with the principles of Sharia law,” the restrictive religious code that Caton and others warn leads to the spread of Islamic extremism.
“This has all to do with the way this program was constructed to deliberately present Muslims in America as one flavor,” he told The Associated Press. “It would be similar to the Learning Channel doing a report on ‘snakes are good family pets’ without reporting that there are four in Florida that are venomous. ….For TLC to choose to profile five people as an aberration of the Islamic faith is propaganda.”
TLC used to be called The Learning Channel.
“All-American Muslim,” which premiered last month, chronicles the lives of five families who live in and near Dearborn, Mich., a Detroit suburb with a large Muslim and Arab-American population. TLC spokeswoman Laurie Goldberg said the show, which airs Mondays on TLC and ends its first season Jan. 8, has garnered a little over a million viewers per week.
Caton said he targeted the show because a recent poll on the group’s website found that the spread of Islam in America was their No. 1 concern, more than homosexuality and pornography. About 1,800 votes were cast.
Florida Family Association claims more than 60 advertisers that it emailed have also stopped advertising on the show. So far, Lowe’s is the only major company to confirm they pulled their ads.
Caton’s group has also protested “Gay Days” at Walt Disney World.
Last year to no avail, Caton’s group flooded the University of South Florida with 2,500 emails protesting a course on “queer theory.” Recently the group targeted companies advertising on the teen show Degrassi on a Nickelodeon channel because it “promotes the transgender lifestyle and other inappropriate behavior to children,” according to the Florida Family Association website.
The group’s website appeared to be hacked Monday and posted a message that read: “No further proof is needed of the potential for vicious action then exactly what these folks are trying to do to this web site! The attack has been extremely mean spirited. … Because of our real concern for the terrorism that is a way of life for some folks, we ourselves have become victims. Because we urge other to be vigilant we become the targets. Don’t let it happen folks, take stand before it is too late.”
The group also claims credit for helping get the show “The Playboy Club” canceled by NBC. The network, however, announced the show was being canceled less than 24 hours after the new series drew only 3.5 million people for its third episode.
The Florida Family Association, which is not affiliated with the older and larger American Family Association, reported more than $172,000 in donations last year, with $59,423 going toward salaries.
Record exec dies after Hollywood street rampage
LOS ANGELES (AP) – A music executive died Monday after being shot last week by a rampaging gunman in the heart of Hollywood, a hospital spokeswoman said.
John Atterberry, who had worked with the Spice Girls, Jessica Simpson and others, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center shortly before 5 p.m. Monday, spokeswoman Simi Singer said.
The 40-year-old executive was shot in the face and upper body as he drove his Mercedes-Benz during Friday’s random attack.
Atterberry was the only seriously injured victim of 26-year-old Tyler Brehm, who police say fired nearly 20 bullets in the air and at cars as he screamed that he wanted to die. He was killed by police minutes later.
Brehm’s ex-girlfriend has said she and Brehm had recently broken up. But police said they’re still looking for a motive for the attack.
Brehm walked down the middle of Sunset Boulevard, firing on motorists with no clear target and injuring three of them before two police officers who just happened to be in the area – an off-duty motorcycle officer working movie set security and a detective – shot and killed him, authorities said.
In amateur video taken at the shooting scene, the gunman appeared to have short hair and wore jeans and a white tank top. He paced back and forth near the busy intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street, firing from a .40-caliber handgun, police said.
The officers ordered the suspect to stop and drop his weapon. He was shot when he pointed his weapon at the officers, police said.
Atterberry had been a vice president of Death Row Records, the label that produced albums for many of the most prominent names in West Coast hip hop, including Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur.
Benicio del Toro’s directorial debut shows in CubaHAVANA (AP) – Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro said the labor of love that went into his directorial debut in the movie “Seven Days in Havana” was so gratifying that he plans to keep working behind the camera.
“To see the motivation of all the artists, working 14 hours a day, to see the confidence they had in me, the collaboration between everything, is something very special,” del Toro said Friday evening at a news conference in Havana, where “Seven Days” is screening this week at the city’s annual film festival.
“It’s an experience that motivates me to dream of trying it again,” said del Toro, who won the 2003 Oscar for best supporting actor for his role as a Tijuana drug cop in “Traffic.”
“Seven Days” is a French-Spanish production made up of seven shorts, based on stories by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, that take place on different days of the week and show different visions of Cuban society.
Del Toro directed the first segment: “The Yuma,” Cuban slang for “The American,” which tells the story of a young American who travels to Havana for the film festival.
“The theme of the short is to show how people can retain their dignity. It’s something very human,” del Toro said.
U.S. actor Josh Hutcherson, who plays the title role in “The Yuma,” said del Toro yelled a lot but was a genius director, and he would love to work with him again.
Del Toro said the movie is still in post-production and some details still need to be refined before release.
Convicted molester who cast for Hollywood arrestedLOS ANGELES (AP) – A convicted child molester who worked under an alias in casting children’s movies has been arrested on charges of violating sex-offender registration laws.
The Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/tkxpzY ) that prosecutors charged Jason James Murphy Friday with two felonies, failure to file a name change and a change of address.
An investigation Murphy was sparked by Times stories that revealed he’d been working in casting offices in Hollywood under the name Jason James.
Murphy served five years in prison after a conviction for molesting a boy he met at a summer camp, where he worked as a teen counselor.
His credits include the films “Bad News Bears” and “Super 8.”
Murphy surrendered to authorities and was being held on $500,000 bail.
He faces a maximum of three years in prison.
Academy: Labor fight shouldn’t derail Oscar trophy
CHICAGO (AP) – A labor dispute at a Chicago manufacturing company could mean there are no new Oscar trophies at next year’s Academy Awards. But the academy says it has enough trophies for the show to go on.
Workers and management at R.S. Owens & Company are fighting over a proposed wage freeze and benefit cuts. Chicago television station WMAQ reported that union leaders say they want to avoid a work stoppage.
R.S. Owens makes the 13 1/2-inch golden statuettes handed out at the Oscars. It also produces awards for the Emmys and MTV Music Awards.
A spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences told The Associated Press that the academy has a “closet full of Oscars” ready to go.
The Oscar show is scheduled for Feb. 26.
