http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp Stay informed about latest Essential Entertainment News Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT en-us http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article1 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article1 Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT Coming in under the wire for awards consideration, the two final releases of 2008 are Paramount Vantage's "Defiance," directed by Ed Zwick, and ThinkFilm's Viggo Mortensen starrer "Good." The two films -- both Holocaust dramas -- will open in limited runs on Wednesday. "Defiance," whose release was pushed back from early fall, toplines Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. Film is based on the true story of four brothers in Eastern Europe who escaped with scores of Jews, built a city and fought the Nazis. "Good," directed by Vicente Amorim, tells the story of a German professor who unwittingly becomes a member of the SS. "Defiance" and "Good" will have plenty of competition, considering the bevy of specialty titles already in the market. In terms of tone, there is also direct competition: Tom Cruise starrer "Valkyrie," which opened Christmas Day. Elsewhere at the B.O., studios are hoping for big grosses throughout this week and into the weekend after a robust Christmas weekend led by Fox's Jennifer Aniston-Owen Wilson comedy "Marley and Me." Domestic box office revenues continue to run even with last year's record-breaking take of $9.63 billion. Admissions, however, are down 4%-5%. Distributors and exhibitors say they aren't concerned about the dip, considering the economic crisis, which has produced huge plunges in other sectors, including retail and automobile sales, and a staggering drop in crude oil prices. They say the admissions decline is relatively soft in comparison. Over the past decade, admissions have gone up and down. The biggest drop came in 2005, when theater traffic dipped 7.27%. In 2004, admissions dropped 2.43%, and in 2003, 4.87%. Admissions were up 1.38% in 2006 and 0.35% in 2007, according to the National Assn. of Theater Owners. In 2008 alone, there have been substantial swings. Admissions were up 10% for most of the fall season and the middle part of the summer. That box office revenues are even with last year is due to increased ticket prices. The average ticket price year to date is $7.20, compared with $6.88 in 2007. The average price for 2008 could go down once final-quarter numbers are crunched. NATO says comparisons can be tough when the previous year has seen the sort of blockbuster sequels and three-quels that 2007 enjoyed. http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article2 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article2 Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT Hollywood Reporter By Todd Longwell When it comes to adapting literary works for the big screen, British playwright David Hare says, one must be promiscuous to be faithful. "You can't simply step your way through a book with perfect fidelity. If you do, the whole thing is completely dead," Hare argues. His principle was employed to varying degrees by all of this year's leading contenders for the adapted screenplay Oscar -- including Hare himself, who translated Bernhard Schlink's novel "The Reader" (Weinstein Co.) into script form. Hare says the primary challenge with "The Reader" was the same one presented by most novels: the unspoken interior monologue in which characters freely express their thoughts. "In cinema, there really isn't any equivalent to that, unless you use voice-over," observes Hare, who earned an Oscar nomination for his 2002 adaptation of the Michael Cunningham novel "The Hours." "Personally, I hate voice-over. I hate an actor droning at me, telling me all sorts of things that the screenwriter is too lazy to make obvious by writing scenes." One of the ways screenwriter Justin Haythe gave voice to the internal turmoil of '50s suburbanite Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) in his adaptation of Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road" (DreamWorks/Paramount Vantage) was by taking a scene from the novel in which the character seduces a naive secretary over the course of a drunken lunch and adding an emotional rant, which simultaneously communicates his frustration with the humdrum conformity of his life and the backstory of his relationship with his father. "I don't think Frank would ever let his guard down, except at that moment with this girl," Haythe says. "In the book, you'd get this information by being given access to his internal life." Hare says his principal invention for "The Reader" was a vehicle for the main character, Michael (played alternately by David Kross and Ralph Fiennes), to unburden himself of the secret he'd been carrying for decades about a teenage affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet) later accused of Nazi war crimes. Schlink has him do it by writing a book. But writing is hardly cinematic, "and he can't decide to tell it by making a film," Hare says, so he has Michael reveal his secret in a conversation with his adult daughter. "Like all good adaptation ideas, it's suggested by the novel," Hare says. "Or I should say, I don't think the novelist will feel it's false to the novel." There was a great deal more promiscuity involved in Simon Beaufoy's translation of Vikas Swarup's novel "Q&A" into the script for Fox Searchlight's "Slumdog Millionaire." But in the end it led him to true love. Like the movie, the book is about a slum kid (Dev Patel) who gets arrested on suspicion of fraud after he wins big on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" then uses a series of elaborate tales to explain how he answered each question. But, says Beaufoy, "the book, while wonderful, is effectively a series of short stories. There's a story about an Australian spy; a fading Bollywood star; one all about religion -- but there's no real through narrative, no spine, which you absolutely have to have in a film." Beaufoy traveled to the Indian metropolis of Mumbai in search of answers. Wandering around the slums for weeks, he came to realize that, in spite of the rampant poverty, it was a very romantic, passionate culture. "I thought, 'It's got to be a love story,'" Beaufoy says. "So I invented this character of Latika (played by Freida Pinto) and then had to work backwards and get a whole new set of stories that would work with this quest for a long lost love." The need for invention was even greater with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount), based on a tale by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was originally published in Collier's magazine in 1922. "The short story was a jumping-off point," says "Button" screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for the 1994 adaptation of Winston Groom's novel "Forrest Gump." "Fitzgerald is certainly a better writer than I could ever hope to be, but I'm not sure he invested his whole soul into it. It's very farcical. He was just enjoying the idea." Roth responded by investing his own soul into the script, drawing upon his experiences as a father and grandfather, along with the recent passing of his mother, which inspired the framing device of an 85-year-old woman on her deathbed. The brevity of the source material necessitated numerous other additions and alterations. The adventures of Button (Brad Pitt) in the movie don't exist in the short story and vice versa. Roth also changed all names (except Benjamin's), added characters and pushed the time frame forward roughly 60 years to the mid-late 20th century. In contrast to "Button," the source material for "Defiance" (Paramount Vantage) is long and deadly serious. "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans" by Nechama Tec is a 426-page account of 1,250 Jewish men, women and children who waged an underground battle against the Nazis from a Belarusian forest. While the basic history covered in the book could not be drastically altered, screenwriters Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick (who also directed) were able to winnow down its look at the group and larger conflict in Eastern Europe to concentrate on the three Bielski brothers at the center of the story (played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell). "It's not really a narrative; it's more of a 'university press'-type of book," explains Frohman, who has known Zwick since they were boys growing up in Chicago. "And it's not a Harry Potter book with fans who are going to expect the movie to be a copy. It provided us with information, but it allowed us freedom to be dramatists. It was like you have a huge piece of clay or wood and you sculpt it down. We kept the basic framework of the brothers, but we did combine, invent and compress a number of different historical characters." In one instance, they took a real-life figure, Lazar Malbin, and split him into two characters: Lazar (Jonjo O'Neill) and Malbin (Mark Feuerstein). "They organized themselves like a military unit, and the real Lazar Malbin was their chief of intelligence," Frohman explains. "In our story, Malbin is not necessarily the chief of intelligence, but he becomes a confidant to Tuvia (Craig), and the Lazar character became more comic relief." In "Che" (IFC Films), a sprawling four-hour-plus epic adapted from the diaries of guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), screenwriter Peter Buchman's creation of a single fictional composite character -- Alejandro Ramirez (Yul Vazquez), a Cuban working for the CIA -- lent a gestalt to the film's entire dramatic arc. Says Buchman: "We start tracking (Alejandro) in the Cuban Revolution, and he basically follows Che through New York (where he addresses the U.N.), and then ends up tracking him down in Bolivia (where he meets his demise)." Buchman says the creation of Alejandro "sort of brought the whole movie together for me. It was one of those moments when I was finally able to crack the structure." Peter Morgan dealt with two kinds of history in "Frost/Nixon" (Universal): the real events of the televised showdown between former President Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella) and TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen); and the legacy of his original play, which garnered rave reviews and packed houses in New York and London with the same actors in the lead roles. Morgan was initially dismissive of the latter. "My instinct was to dismantle the whole thing in the script," says Morgan, who earned an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay for 2006's "The Queen." Acting on this impulse, he removed the narration that frames the play from the first draft of the script. But director Ron Howard quickly swooped in and encouraged Morgan to salvage it. "He looked at the first 30 pages and felt that it was missing the soul of what it was," Morgan says. "If you take the narration out in any shape or form, it takes out many of the points that are critical to the enjoyment of 'Frost/Nixon' -- observations about politics and the way television works. It would've been very difficult to introduce those things seamlessly into conversation." The solution devised by Morgan and Howard was to take the narration, which in the play had been divided between one man in the Nixon camp and one in the Frost camp, and spread it among the cast in a series of interview snippets set five years after the televised showdown. While screenwriters typically struggle to "open up" a story designed for the confines of a stage, Morgan says it was not a problem with "Frost/Nixon." "David Frost had three talk shows going on simultaneously -- in Australia, New York and London -- and the interviews themselves took place in California," Morgan points out. "Just by shooting in the locations that it actually happened, immediately you've got a movie with more air miles than a Bond film." It wasn't so easy for writer-director John Patrick Shanley when he set out to adapt his play "Doubt" (Miramax) for the big screen. The story, about a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) suspected of improper contact with a Catholic schoolboy in 1964, provided little room for expansion except to add scenes with the students (including the boy, played by Joseph Foster), none of whom are shown in the play. Shanley's solution was to insert small cinematic touches wherever he could. "I treated the micro events of daily life as major events," explains Shanley, who won an original screenplay Oscar for 1987's "Moonstruck." "A breeze coming in the window, or a phone ringing, or somebody opening the blinds -- all of these things are moments in the film, and the movie is rife with them." "I couldn't do things that simply caused interest but actually had nothing to do with the narrative," Shanley adds. That said, he admits, "I used every stinking trick I could." http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article3 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article3 Fri, 5 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT Hollywood Reporter By Gregg Kilday Fox Searchlight's "Slumdog Millionaire," Danny Boyle's tale of a Mumbai orphan who beats the odds, was named best film of the year by the National Board of Review. The New York-based organization, which is always one of the first out of the gate with year-end film kudos, bestowed its best actor honors on Clint Eastwood, who plays an ex-Marine at war with a changing world in "Gran Torino," and its best actress honors on Anne Hathaway, who appears as a disruptive, recovering addict in "Rachel Getting Married." "Slumdog's" Dev Patel also was recognized for breakthrough performance by an actor. The film's screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, was cited for best adapted screenplay, sharing that award with Eric Roth, who penned "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." The best original screenplay prize went to Nick Schenk for "Gran Torino." "Button," the epic love story about a man whose life runs backwards, earned David Fincher the best director prize. Supporting actor honors went to Josh Brolin, who plays the assassin Dan White in "Milk," and Penelope Cruz, who appears as a tempetuous divorcee in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Sergei Bodrov's "Mongol" was named best foreign-language film, while James Marsh's "Man on Wire" was singled out as best documentary. Pixar/Disney's "WALL-E" walked off with the prize for best animated feature. Miramax's "Doubt" earned the prize for best supporting cast, with its Viola Davis cited for breakthrough performance by an actress. "Frozen River's" Melissa Leo, who just took top acting honors at the Gotham Awards, shared the Spotlight Award with "The Visitor's" Richard Jenkins. The Bvlgaricq Award for NBR Freedom of Expression went to Peter Askin's documentary "Trumbo." The NBR, which is comprised of 122 film buffs, academics, professionals and historians, also cited its top ten films of the year. In alphabetical order, they are "Burn After Reading," "Changeling," "Button," "The Dark Knight," "Defiance," "Frost/Nixon," "Torino," "Milk," "WALL-E" and "The Wrestler." Its five top foreign-language films are "Edge of Heaven," Let the Right One In," Roman de Gare," "A Secret" and "Waltz with Bashir." Its top five docs are "American Teen," "The Betrayal" (Nerakhoon), "Dear Zachary," "Encounters at the End of the World" and "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired." The group also gave its William K. Everson Film History Award to married film critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris. The awards will be presented at the NBR's annual gala on Jan. 14 at Cipriani's 42nd St. in New York. http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article4 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article4 Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT NY Times Never Forget. You're Reminded. THIS holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis. A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar-season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past. David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in “Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader’s new film. In “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie,” wears the uniform of the Third Reich though his character, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, was not a true-believing Nazi but rather a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. And of course there will be plenty of room on screen for the victims and survivors of Hitler’s regime. Adam, the title character in “Adam Resurrected,” is a Berlin nightclub performer, played by Jeff Goldblum, who finds himself, after enduring the camps, confined to an Israeli asylum somewhere between “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “King of Hearts.” And in Edward Zwick’s “Defiance,” Daniel Craig transmutes his James Bond action-heroism into the moral heroism of Tuvia Bielski, the real-life leader of a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Germans in the forests of Belarus. Meanwhile the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust — most prominently represented on American screens in recent years by “The Counterfeiters,” which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February, and earlier aspirants like “Downfall” and “Black Book” — continued this fall with the American releases of “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand,” two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression. The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century. The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many? The moral imperatives imposed by the slaughter of European Jews are Never Again and Never Forget, which mean, logically, that the story of the Holocaust must be repeated again and again. But the sheer scale of the atrocity — the six million extinguished lives and the millions more that were indelibly scarred, damaged and disrupted — suggests that the research, documentation and imaginative reconstruction, the building of memorials and museums, the writing of books and scripts, no matter how scrupulous and exhaustive, will necessarily be partial, inadequate and belated. And this tragic foreknowledge of insufficiency, which might be inhibiting, turns out, on the contrary, to spur the creation of more and more material. Shortly after the war the German critic T. W. Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This observation has frequently been interpreted, aphoristically, as a fiat of silence, a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools, however crude, are what we have to work with. And if Adorno intended a warning against representations of the Holocaust, it has been more quoted than heeded. The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary “Shoah,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Peter Eisenmann’s Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism. To describe these as masterpieces is not especially controversial, but it is also, as Adorno perhaps anticipated, somehow unseemly. If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity. Worse, the aura that still surrounds this topic — the sense that it must be treated with a special measure of tact and awe — can be appropriated by clumsy, sentimental and meretricious films or books, which protect themselves from criticism by a cloak of seriousness and piety. Thus the immodest indecency of a movie like Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning “Life Is Beautiful” was, during its initial period of triumph, deflected onto those with the temerity to criticize it. Those who resisted its manipulative juxtaposition of sweet, childlike innocence with barbarity were accused of lacking the gravity and sensitivity that Mr. Benigni’s travesty required. And a similar defense is invoked, explicitly or implicitly, so routinely that it calls forth cynicism. Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists — I won’t name any names — gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors shave their heads and starve themselves, or preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets. For the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers and lab technicians to filter out bright, saturated colors. To win prizes of course. Ms. Winslet said as much on an episode of “Extras”: “I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar.” She was joking, of course, though her appearance in “The Reader” suggests that the joke is funny because it’s often true. Why else do you suppose all the movies listed at the beginning of this article, including “The Reader,” are coming out in November and December? Not because Hanukkah is coming. Of course the line between kitsch and art is notoriously blurry, and in any case kitsch has its uses. The television miniseries “Holocaust” is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but its broadcast, in 1979, on West German state television was a decisive event in that nation’s reckoning with its culpability. It is estimated that more than half of the adult German population watched the series. Subsequently, according to the historian Tony Judt, “Germans would be among the best-informed Europeans on the subject of the Shoah and at the forefront of all efforts to maintain public awareness of their country’s singular crime.” The French conscience may have been stirred by superior movies — “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Shoah” — but France was much slower to acknowledge the full measure of its complicity. And in this country “Schindler’s List” in 1993 was a similar watershed. Though the Holocaust was not a central event in American history, “Schindler’s List,” even more than “Holocaust,” made it into one by turning it into the basis of a Hollywood epic. Buying a ticket was treated almost a moral duty — “You have to see it. You have to!” nagged Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom parents — and its Oscar-night triumph was staged as a grand collective catharsis. “Schindler’s List” undoubtedly gave rise to a new pedagogical and commemorative impulse. It also, however, helped to domesticate the Holocaust by making it a fixture of American middlebrow popular culture. Which I don’t mean entirely as a criticism, since that culture is better than a lot of the alternatives. But Hollywood trades in optimism, redemption and healing, and its rendering of even the most appalling realities inevitably converts their dire facts into its own shiny currency. Thus “Schindler’s List,” for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed, including documentaries and some foreign films, have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction. When death dominates these films — as it does in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” an apt successor to “Life Is Beautiful” — it is spiritualized and rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment. More often the reality of mass death gives way to yet another affirmation of life, and even faithfully rendered true stories are bent into conformity with familiar patterns, themes and conventions: forbidden love; noble sacrifice; victory against the odds. The Holocaust is more accessible than ever, and more entertaining. At the same time it is receding from living memory, which may by itself explain the recent burst of cinematic and literary interest. The movies I find most interesting, most authentic, either address this painful process directly, measuring the distance between our time and the 1930s and ’40s rather than recreating that era faithfully in every detail, or else cleave to the particulars of a single story. Thus Roman Polanski’s “Pianist” and Lajos Koltai’s “Fateless,” though both tales of survival, register the absurdity and abnormality of survival in the manner of the first-person literary works on which they are based. “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand” are meditations on what it means to remember. It is no coincidence that both take place in France, where the habit and policy of forgetting endured until quite recently. In those films, full of unresolved feelings of grief, tenderness and bewilderment, French Jews born after World War II try to figure out what the annihilation of their parents’ world means to them. In both cases the past is both painfully pressing and, mercifully but maddeningly, out of reach. And in both cases the filmmakers explore not only strong feelings but also complicated ideas. The sensations associated with the Holocaust have become perhaps too easy to evoke, given the power of cinema to dispense fear, pity, sorrow and relief through sound, image and pageantry. This has been the route taken by most English-language films about the Holocaust, and also some of their slick European counterparts, like “Black Book” and “The Counterfeiters.” But “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand” represent another strain in European and Israeli film, one that may reflect a deeper cultural difference. In the United States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out — in art, in politics and in the society as a whole. It seems right that movies about a difficult subject should themselves be difficult. But the fate of difficult movies with subtitles, usually, is to slip in and out of American theaters without leaving much of a trace. The big Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a history that they nonetheless keep at a safe, mediated difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the process. We don’t have to ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer that question for us. For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic — part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting. http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article5 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article5 Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT The Hollywood Reporter NEW YORK -- Intrepid Pictures is on board to produce Scott Wiper's Hitchcockian thriller "The Cold Light of Day." Wiper and John Petro's screenplay follows Will Shaw, a young Wall Street trader whose family is kidnapped on a vacation to Spain. He's left with only hours to find them, uncover a government conspiracy and the connection between their disappearance and his father's secrets. Intrepid Pictures principals Trevor Macy and Marc D. Evans will finance and produce the film, which Essential Entertainment is repping at next week's American Film Market. Intrepid produced one of this year's biggest hits, Rogue Pictures' "The Strangers." "Day" will be made outside of Universal and Rogue, which have a first-look pact with Intrepid. Uni is currently negotiating a sale of Rogue to Relativity. Wiper co-wrote and directed the 2007 Lionsgate actioner "The Condemned." Intrepid sees 'Cold Light of Day' Thriller is from Scott Wiper and John Petro http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article6 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article6 Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT Screen Daily Essential Entertainment co-founder Jim Kohlberg and producer Neil Kaplan have launched sister company Essential Pictures to develop, package, finance and produce films and have unveiled a maiden slate of seven titles. Essential Pictures plans to make two to three films a year in the $10m-40m budget range and is seeking product from scripts to books and pre-production galleys. Jere Hausfater will sell worldwide rights to all Essential Pictures product through Essential Entertainment, which will head into AFM with a bumper slate on the back of recent acquisitions Love And Other Impossible Pursuits starring Natalie Portman and the Intrepid Pictures thriller Cold Light Of Day. Portman also stars in one of the first Essential Pictures films, the thriller Isabella V that Dan Gordon will direct. Essential is producing with Brightlight Pictures and Portman's Handsome Charlie Films. The roster includes Todd Robinson's political thriller The Last Full Measure starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne and Andy Garcia in association with Trilogy Entertainment Group; Randall Wallace's adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's time traveling novel Outlander; and Barry Sonnenfeld's romantic comedy Bronwyn And Clyde written by Tom Vaughan and Kristy Dobkin that Kohlberg and Kaplan will produce with Chris Uettiwiller and Dolly Hall. Rounding out the initial line-up are AM Homes' adaptation of her satirical novel This Book Will Save Your Life in association with Stone Village Pictures; a remake with Gianni Nunnari and Hollywood Gang of Leonardo Pieraccioni's 1996 Italian comedy Il Ciclone based on a screenplay by Darin Mark; and Ali Calamari's celebrity tabloid romantic comedy A Match Made In Magazines. "At the heart of Essential Pictures is our desire and our capability to produce creative and commercial projects which take advantage of the fact that we have the necessary distribution in having Essential Entertainment as a partner to handle each film," Kohlberg, who becomes chair, said. Kaplan, who previously served as partner and president of Trilogy Entertainment Group and is named President and COO, added: "With this smart economic model and the collective experience of the team, we can provide a producer and filmmaker friendly environment that's material driven in which projects have a built-in distribution system." http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article7 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article7 Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT Natalie Portman falls in "Love" Variety Natalie Portman is set to star with Scott Cohen and Charlie Tahan in "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits," a Don Roos-directed adaptation of an Ayelet Waldman novel. Produced by Marc Platt, the film will begin shooting in Manhattan on Nov. 10. Roos wrote the script. Story revolves around a young woman who finds the key to recovering her marriage in her relationship with her precocious stepson. The project becomes the first film funded by Incentive Filmed Entertainment. The financing entity was unveiled by William Morris at the Cannes film fest, with $100 million in production financing and a plan to fund films with budgets under $15 million. Incentive then licenses rights to both foreign and domestic distributors. Portman will be executive producer under her handsomecharlie films banner. The shingle has a first-look deal with Participant Prods., and Portman recently wrote and directed "Eve," a short film that starred Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara and Olivia Thirlby. David Molner, managing director of Screen Capital Intl. and chairman of Incentive Filmed Entertainment, said Portman’s deal salvages a film that was imperiled when Jennifer Lopez abruptly dropped out. "We were left in the lurch by one actress and rescued by another," Molner said. "It goes to show that, particularlywith independent features, nothing is more important than the talent. It’s a blessing that Natalie loved the script and now we’ve got a strong film that we can sell at AFM." Platt, who just produced the Jonathan Demme-directed "Rachel Getting Married," is in production on the Rob Marshall-directed "Nine" for the Weinstein Co. and Relativity. Platt exec produced Roos’ most recent film, "Happy Endings," and as Orion’s production head, supervised Roos’ first film as a writer, the 1992 drama "Love Field." Platt gave the Waldman book to Roos and lobbied him to direct after Roos turned in a strong adaptation. http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article8 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article8 Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT Hollywood Reporter ORLANDO -- Paramount is fiddling with its holiday release plans at the eleventh hour, delaying the wide release of true-life drama "The Soloist," starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, and the Daniel Craig-toplined Nazi-escape film "Defiance" until the first quarter. Par is moving "Soloist," the story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez's relationship with a homeless musician, to a March 13 wide release date. The film, a DreamWorks/Universal production, had been considered a possible awards-season candidate and -- with its trailer already playing in theaters -- had been set to unspool Nov. 21 over the prime pre-Thanksgiving frame. It was not clear if "Soloist" might receive an Academy-qualifying run before Dec. 31. As for "Defiance," a Par Vantage production, Par will postpone its Dec. 12 limited bow to an Oscar-qualifying debut Dec. 31, which will maintain its viability for Academy consideration. It will delay an expansion into wider release until Jan. 16. http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article9 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article9 Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT First look: 'Defiance' shows survival side of WWII USA TODAY Suddenly, there is a surge in World War II-themed films. Titles on the horizon include Valkryie, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Good. But filmmaker Ed Zwick isn't jumping on a bandwagon with Defiance. "We optioned the rights 10 years ago," he says. What drew him was a story that shows Jews not just as victims, but fighting back. The Dec. 12 release is based on the true story of three Jewish brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski, in what is now Belarus. They rose up against the Germans and saved about 1,200 lives. "The survivors were generally reticent about sharing their experiences," says Zwick about why the facts behind the Bielski Brigade haven't been widely known. "They felt the burden of those who did not survive." If the face on the poster that will be in theaters Friday shakes (but not stirs) you, that's because Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, is holding the submachine gun. "He was a very reluctant hero," Zwick says of Craig's Tuvia. "Uneducated, unsophisticated, by no means a person you would assume to be a leader of any kind. Bond is an unambivalent hero. Tuvia is more realistic." http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article10 http://www.essential-ent.com/news/news.asp#article10 Fri, 3 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT Variety Zwick Receives Kodak Award Edward Zwick will receive the Kodak Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the upcoming ShowEast confab in Orlando, Fla. Zwick is next in theaters Dec. 12 with "Defiance," about three brothers who escape Nazi-controlled Poland and join Russian resistance fighters. The Paramount Vantage film stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell. Zwick's directing credits include "Blood Diamond," "The Last Samurai," "The Siege," "Courage Under Fire" and "Legends of the Fall." His feature film producing credits include "Defiance," "Traffic" and "I Am Sam." ShowEast runs Oct 13-16.