Thursday May 22, 2008

PROJECT UPDATES

• Jonathan Demme is taking over from Martin Scorsese as the director of an authorized Bob Marley documentary. Docu, produced by the Marley family’s Tuff Gong Pictures and Steve Bing’s Shangri-La Entertainment, has a target release date of Feb. 6, 2010, the 65th anniversary of Marley’s birth. Fortissimo Films is handling international sales. Scorsese, who announced in February that the untitled pic would be the follow-up to his Rolling Stones concert pic “Shine a Light,” dropped out for scheduling reasons.

ACQUISITIONS/ FESTIVAL NEWS

• For the first time in years, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard’s Sony Pictures Classics might leave the Cannes Film Festival empty-handed. Sony Classics is known for being bullish on foreign-language fare, and has bought two or three films out of Cannes annually. Last year, Bernard and Barker bought “The Counterfeiters” and “The Band’s Visit.” They’re not the exception. Among American studio specialty arms and indie distribs, this year’s fest has been notably lean on deal-making. Despite plenty of advance buzz, James Gray’s “Two Lovers” and Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” are still up for sale.

• Music Box Films has puckered up for domestic rights to Emmanuel Mouret’s Gallic romantic comedy “Shall We Kiss.” Mouret (“Change of Address”) wrote, directed and co-stars in the cause-and-effect tale of a kiss on multiple couples. Plans are for a late summer release. Virginie Ledoyen, Julie Gayet, Michael Cohen, Frederique Bel and Stefano Accorsi also star. Deal, Mouret’s first with a U.S. distrib, was sealed in Cannes by Music Box partner William Schopf and TF1’s Dimitri Stephanides.

• IFC Films has devoured domestic rights to tyro writer-director Steve McQueen and writer Enda Walsh’s drama “Hunger.” Pic had its world preem in Cannes as Un Certain Regard opener and is a Camera d’Or contender. Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham star. “Hunger” picks up in the aftermath of the 1981 IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands and takes a look at life behind bars in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. IFC has been particularly hungry at this year’s fest, snapping up rights to seven titles so far.

BUSINESS NEWS

• Filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish have formed Prohibition Pictures. To launch the shingle, they’ve lined up financing for two features they’ve co-written, which will shoot back to back starting next week. The siblings start with “Manure,” a comedy about manure salesmen in 1960s heartland America that reteams them with their “Astronaut Farmer” star Billy Bob Thornton. Tea Leoni and Kyle MacLachlan also star in the film, which begins production Tuesday. Days after the film wraps July 14, the brothers will begin production on “Stay Cool,” a comedy that will star Winona Ryder, Sean Astin and Chevy Chase. The pair co-wrote the scripts, and Mark Polish will be a featured thesp in both films. They will partner in Prohibition Pictures with longtime collaborator Jonathan Sheldon, financier-producer Ken Johnson and his partner-producer Ja’net DuBois, who has invested in the company. The Polish brothers will produce the films with Johnson, Sheldon and DuBois, with Nick Byassee serving as associate producer.

STRIKE/ LABOR NEWS

• Hopes for the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists closing a primetime deal with the majors soon have started to vanish, with a June 30 contract expiration looming. The majors held their 11th day of contract negotiations Wednesday with talks slated to resume today amid a news blackout at the headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers. Expectations had been high that AFTRA – with only seven shows to cover — would have wrapped up a deal before this week and put pressure on SAG to make a deal when it comes back to the table next week. Instead, AFTRA took a stance this week mirroring the Screen Actors Guild and declared that actors must still be asked for their consent for clips of their work to be used online. That’s significantly lowered expectations of a deal coming any time soon. Studios and broadcast networks can use clips for promotional purposes but are required to negotiate with the performers when clips are re-used for entertainment. The companies have asserted that there’s plenty of potential coin for actors via developing a market for clips to compete with the massive amounts of pirated footage on the Web.

INDUSTRY MOVES

• Hutch Parker, vice chairman of the 20th Century Fox Film Group, has been named chairman of Fox-based New Regency alongside Bob Harper. Parker will end a 13-year run as a Fox exec when he begins the new job in mid-June. At Fox, he had a hand in such recent successes as “X-Men,” “Night at the Museum,” “Borat,” “I, Robot,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “Alien vs. Predator,” “Dodgeball,” “Fantastic Four” and “Master and Commander.”

TECHNOLOGY/ MULT-PLATFORM CONTENT

• Michael Eisner divulged some details about Vuguru’s next big online series. (This one will launch during the 50-webisode run of Foreign Body, a prequel to the Robin Cook hospital thriller about medical tourism set in India, set to launch May 27.) Back on Topps stars Randy and Jason Sklar, former hosts of ESPN’s Cheap Seats, as two of a group of executives vying to succeed the fictional founder of their company, Marvin Topps. The yarn is constructed to synergize with Topps trading cards, acquired by Eisner last year.

• Newly renamed and reorganized KIT Digital (formerly ROO) will announce the acquisition of digital video content creator Kamera today, adding mobile content to its suite of IPTV solutions for the first time. Kamera offers video content to over 100 clients, including 40+ mobile operators and 70+ broadband media publishers, enabling companies such as Vodafone, MSN, Orange, Telefonica, O2, Hutchinson and China Mobile to deliver IPTV channels and content to their customers over mobile and online networks.

• MTV will produce an array of VOD extras around films nominated for MTV Movie Awards this year for affiliates including Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and Charter. Look for making of featurettes behind-the-scenes clips, music videos, etc. There will also be a reprise of the best movie spoofs online UGC contest as well as the top nominated films from mtvU’s Best Film On Campus.

• RDF Digital is producing original webisodes based on RDF’s faux Japanese game show format Banzai, which will have an exclusive home on MySpaceTV for the first 30 days before being syndicated to popular U.S. platforms YouTube, Hulu, MetaCafe and Dailymotion. The show, which has aired on Fox, USA, Comedy Central and G4 in the U.S., has attracted an array of celebrity guests including Angelina Jolie, Kelsey Grammar and Bill Murray.

• Social entertainment producers Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, creators of LG15 and KateModern, look to branch out into a variety of interactive genres in upcoming EQAL projects for CBS including comedy, drama and non-scripted series, the two said in an interview. (In the meantime, the deal has provided enough funds to allow them to move their workspace from their living rooms to an actual LA office space.) Miles, head writer on both projects, did not rule out more shadowy, conspiracy-themed material he admits to gravitating toward. The point after all is to engage the audience and nothing lights up a chat board or motivates a wiki contributor like a good conspiracy yarn. Also expect more strong female characters. More than 65% of the fans that follow their shows are women.

WEBSITES TO WATCH

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/stonehenge-decoded-3372/Overview#tab-stonehenge-theories

Spinal Tap fans have to check this out. Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) pontificates about his theories on Stonehenge in a series of brilliant viral videos to promote Nat Geo’s Stonehenge Decoded special, premiering Sunday, June 1 at 9 pm. There’s even a puzzle game created by Arkadium that reveals facts about the monument, which continues to fascinate hippies the world over. Nigel himself doesn’t watch the channel – it’s too difficult for him. “They should do puppets shows,” he suggests.

SOURCES:

www.variety.com
www.cynopsis.com