Small MPU – Page 389
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News
Black Book star Carice van Houten moves on to Dorothy Mills
Dutch actress Carice van Houten is playing the lead role in a new psychological thriller by Agnes Merlet, with a working title of Dorothy Mills. The French-Irish coproduction will be Merlet's first feature since her 1997 award-winning biography Artemisia. The film will shoot in Ireland this summer. Van Houten is ...
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Gabriel rises to commercial challenge
Hong Kong-produced films racked up $61m (HK$475.98m) at the local box office in 2001, according to industry body, the Motion Picture Industry Association (MPIA), an impressive 24% increase on the previous year. The growth comes despite a decrease in the number of films screened. 133 locally produced films were released ...
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Features
Editorial - Screen says The future calls
There's an otherwise rather ordinary individual working at Screen's London offices whose telephone ringtone is a snippet from Captain Beefheart's relatively obscure 1967 debut album Safe As Milk. That's the long tail in action. It's a fair guess the person concerned is one of a statistically small group who serendipitously ...
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Tribeca Film Festival: growing gains
Five years ago, Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff launched the first Tribeca Film Festival to contribute to the revival of Lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The five-day festival attracted 150,000 visitors to the downtown neighbourhood.By 2006, Tribeca had grown into an almost two-week ...
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Tribeca Talent: Kevin Connolly
Film-maker Kevin Connolly, best known for playing the sane friend, Eric, in HBO's hit series Entourage, found time from his acting career to direct Gardener Of Eden, a small indie comedy about a New Jersey ne'er-do-well who is pushed to become a local hero after he accidentally captures a serial ...
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Features
United Kingdom - Warrior Spirit
At a recent ceremony at the Kenyan Embassy in London, producer Simon Channing Williams was awarded the Order of the Grand Warrior. The honour came his way primarily for his efforts in Kenya on behalf of The Constant Gardener Trust, the charity he helped set up after shooting that John ...
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Features
Canada - This time it's personal
In 2005, Risa Morimoto learned her late uncle was a kamikaze, one of the suicide pilots of Imperial Japan during the Second World War. For an outside observer, the more startling aspect of her discovery is that her uncle only died 20 years ago - he survived the war.If there ...
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Features
Industry moves
Ray joins Kimmel armBingham Ray has joined Los Angeles-based financing and production company Sidney Kimmel Entertainment as president of the newly formed Kimmel Distribution. Industry veteran Ray has headed United Artists and October Films.Rice departs Disney for United ArtistsDennis Rice has left The Walt Disney Studios to join United Artists ...
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News
Gold in the vaults
With the growth of digital delivery, film archives are a potential goldmine for US studios and other rights-holders. Denis Seguin looks at the promise of digital, while Screen correspondents (see links, right) explore the distribution opportunities for major public rights-holders...In 1955, RKO Pictures licensed the television rights to its 740-film ...
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Archive value: keeping mobile
Movie distribution on the mobile phone presents different challenges, not all of them an issue of size per se. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's (SPHE) giant electronics parent, Sony Corp, is a pioneer in producing mobile phone memory chips with pre-recorded feature-length motion pictures. Potential releases include Casino Royale as well ...
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Studio archives: to have and to hold
The DVD did more than create a new means of exploiting old product. It created an industry devoted to transferring analogue celluloid motion pictures into the digital domain, of converting image and sound into data.It seems a straightforward concept: point a film projector into the lens of an electronic camera. ...
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German archives: know your rights
The positive experiences of such institutions as France's INA in providing access to their archives via the internet has prompted German film archives in turn to consider the creation of their own virtual mediatheques.The German Film Institute and the Defa Foundation, for example, have teamed up with international public organisations, ...
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News
Austar expands offering with Two Way TV
Australian pay-TV operator Austar is adding a local version of popular interactive UK TV channel Two Way TV to its line-up starting from October.However, the service will initially be one-way as it will not allow users in different locations to compete with each other until there is improvements to Austar's ...
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Features
Set Report - The War Makers
It is a cold, bright morning in a tiny village two hours outside Beijing, and Hong Kong star Andy Lau, dressed in floor-sweeping Qing Dynasty robes, is ordering around a group of extras.A veteran of more than 130 films, Lau knows a thing or two about placing extras on their ...
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News
Promotional feature: Quinta essential
Promotional feature: Back in 2002, Tarak Ben Ammar, the Paris-based media mogul and founder of Quinta Communications, watched in surprise as an increasing number of French post-production houses struggled financially. How could this be in a country rich in production and subsidies, he thought.Ben Ammar, whose assets span an Italian ...
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Features
And the winner is..
Running alongside this column is the industry's most comprehensive and, one likes to think, accurate chart of the top-grossing films during the past weekend in the international marketplace.It should be pointed out that even such an established chart faces problems that are intrinsic in putting together a compilation of the ...
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Features
Mr Bean feasts as 300 holds firm
Universal's hit comedy Mr Bean's Holiday kept the international top spot this weekend, grossing $17m from 45 territories and bringing its total to $125.9m after four weeks. 300 continues to battle in second place and generated $13.5m from 55 territories in its sixth week. A handful of new thrillers dot ...
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Features
Market focus - Two heads good'
Plans for the international distribution of Grindhouse are being re-evaluated in English-speaking territories following the film's performance in its first few weeks in the US.Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's double-bill, composed of a feature from each director - Tarantino's Death Proof segment and Rodriguez's horror flick Planet Terror - opened ...
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News
Speed Dating wins best feature at Malibu
Tony Herbert's Speed Dating was named best feature film at the 2007 Malibu International Film Festival which finished at the weekend.Gideon Raff's The Killing Floor won the prize for best thriller, Reynier Molenaar's Replay was named best action film, while Mick Rossi and Sean Stanek won the best screenplay prize ...
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New Summit studio launches with over $1bn in funding
Rob Friedman, the former vice chairman and COO of Paramount Pictures, and Patrick Wachsberger, the head of Summit Entertainment LP, have unveiled their long-in-the-works production and distribution company which has immediate access to $1bn in funds from a financing deal led by Merrill Lynch and a consortium of investors.The company, ...