It's been a few months since we heard the sad and shocking news, in March, that Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since then, rumors have run rampant, both about his health, and about possible movie choices. Finally, we've got some legit news on the actor and his struggle with cancer.
He sent a statement over to People, which says: "Thought I'd give you guys a little update. Lisa and I have been back and forth from New Mexico enjoying the arrival of spring and new baby calves. This past weekend, we spent a fun time with friends in Reno for Lisa's birthday, where I took her jewelry shopping at Kenny G & Company and (we) were able to find her something really special and much deserved! In the meantime, I am continuing treatment at Stanford and the great news is I continue to respond well."
He's also looking pretty darned good too. The pic attached to this post is via the BBC, and shows Swayze at a basketball game last week. Best, and continued wishes to you, Mr. Dirty Dancer.Permalink | Email this | Comments
The talk show host – who plans to wed girlfriend Portia de Rossi and has talked nuptials with recent guests John McCain and Jenna (Bush) Hager – was back to bride-talk with Will Smith.
On Monday’s episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, DeGeneres noted that Will and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, have been married for 10 years, unheard of in Hollywood. “It’s like dog years when you’re married here,” she said. “That’s like 50 years, right?
“What I found is divorce just can’t be an option,” the actor explained. “It’s really that simple. And I think that’s the problem with L.A. – there are so many options. So a huge part of the success for [Jada] and I is that we just removed the other options.”
The secret to their success? “We’re like listen, we’re going to be together one way or the other so we might as well try to be happy,” he said.
DeGeneres also suggested that Smith consider politics for his next project – and join Barack Obama as his running mate.
“I do think about [running for office] sometimes,” Smith admitted. “Right up until that Monday after the movie opens and I have a 100-percent approval rating. No politician is ever going to have that!”
It was a who’s who of celebrities – and their babies – at Kingston Rossdale’s second birthday party.
Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale threw their son an animal-themed bash at their Studio City, Calif., house on Sunday – one day before his actual birthday. The fete drew 40 friends, including Nicole Richie, Joel Madden and daughter Harlow, as well as Victoria Beckham and son Cruz, and Christina Aguilera, husband Jordan Bratman and son Max.
The family’s backyard was outfitted with small safari animals and multicolored balloons. There was also a pony for the children to ride. And a big moon bouncer kept everyone – adults and their kids – entertained.
At one point, Rossdale and the birthday boy joined several of the younger guests in the moon bouncer, while a pregnant Stefani bonded with Richie’s daughter, an eyewitness says.
Victoria Beckham seemed to enjoy the party as well, kicking off her heels to play with her son, who sported a monkey costume. “She took her shoes off and walked around the backyard with bare feet,” the eyewitness reports, noting that Cruz especially loved the pony, riding it around the backyard several times.
The following day, Stefani and her husband celebrated their son’s birthday again – with a little quality time on a Malibu beach.
I have been tossing around an idea for an animated feature film. I have a ton of notes, character breakdowns, beat sheets, outlines, etc., etc. Now its just a question of putting it down on the page. My question is fairly simple and straight-forward: Am I wasting my time?
I’ve read that writing specs for animation should be avoided, as the big animation studios typically take pitches, ideas, and submissions internally. Is this the case?
I know you are credited on Corpse Bride and Titan A.E. I’m assuming those were both work-for-hires. But what do you think about specs?
– Jack Mulligan
Go ahead and write it. It’s very unlikely that an animation spec will get sold and produced, but remember, that’s not the only goal of writing a spec. You write specs to get your next job, and if you can write a great animated spec, do it.
Both Titan A.E. and Corpse Bride were rewrites of movies already close to production. In both cases, I didn’t need to write at all differently than live-action. There were small semantic changes — in animation, you number for sequences rather than scenes — but when reading the script, you wouldn’t necessarily know that it was going to be animated rather than live-action. So don’t freak out about some special formatting you see in a printed script or guidebook. Just write it like a normal feature.
Last year, I had a meeting with Disney Animation, in which they talked through all of their upcoming projects. It’s clear they really develop in-house, and aren’t searching the town for new material. And I suspect that’s true for all of the majors.
But the animated spec you write could be a great sample for live action, particularly if it showcases comedy and set-pieces. If you write Shrek, you can write funny, and someone will want to hire you.
People often complain about celebrities and "Hollywood elites" who talk politics from their soapboxes, but maybe they won't rag on this amusing conservation PSA from Harrison Ford -- after all, he makes a considerable personal sacrifice to get his message across. Or at least it looks like he does. I've never seen the unpleasantness of chest-waxing used as a metaphor for the damage caused by rainforest destruction, and I'm not sure it makes very much sense (is that the Earth wincing in pain?), but it's certainly clever. And Ford, sporting a stylin' stud earring, is in full-on Indiana Jones exasperation mode -- no one can do macho annoyance quite like he does. It's not quite 40-Year Old Virgin-level agony, but it must have taken some convincing.Permalink | Email this | Comments
These stories just keep getting better. On the heels of Israeli municipalities apparently banning the display of the word "sex" on Sex and the City billboards (a claim that's been disputed) and Russian communists calling for a boycott of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because the Soviet Union did not, in fact, seek to use alien technology to practice mind control on US citizens during the Cold War, comes the news that Sharon Stone has annoyed the owner of the leading Chinese cinema chain to the point where he's pledged not to show her films.
What did she say? She said that the recent earthquake in China may have been "karma" -- cosmic justice for the way China has treated the Tibetans. That's stupid, but the theater owner -- Ng See-Yuen -- wasn't angry at the manifest silliness of Stone's statement so much as the fact that she's politicized a devastating natural disaster. Which is kind of a good point too -- at least, she's politicized it in a way that's really weird. And it's important to note that, at least on its face, this doesn't seem to be a case of the Chinese government censoring Stone's films, but rather an exhibitor making a choice not to show them. Of course, with the way the Chinese government operates, who really knows.
Sharon Stone seems to have no "big" films in the pipeline, so it's not clear what effect, if any, the boycott will have on revenues.Permalink | Email this | Comments
The high flying men in the new Ralph Lauren ads: Alex Loomans, Terron Wood and Robyn Sinclair. Photo by Arnaldo Anaya Lucca, courtesy of Major Model Management (Terron and Robyn).
By the end of his long, successful career, Sydney Pollack was just slightly more reliable as an actor than as a director. As Dustin Hoffman's agent in "Tootsie" (that's him on the left above) he represented outraged common sense and the shrug that has seen everything. When he popped up as the gruff, soullessly capable name partner in last year's "Michael Clayton," you breathed a sigh of relief for the New York-school movie professionalism he exuded.
Pollack's final movie appearance before his death Sunday of cancer at 73 was in the recent "Made of Honor," as Patrick Dempsey's much-married father -- the only piece of grit in that empty romantic comedy's faux Manhattan playground. In a way, Pollack the actor was the visual correlative of the Sidney Lumet worldview: tough, East Coast-direct, politically progressive, trusting the individual far more than the group.
Those qualities are present in the movies he directed, too, although camouflaged behind a smoothly faceless style. Pollack would be the first to admit he wasn't an auteur -- he served his actors and the story, not any sense of artistic self. Yet because he was a smart filmmaker and a friend to the reigning powers of his day, it's movies like "Tootsie," "The Way We Were," "Out of Africa," and "Three Days of the Condor" that you think of when you think of the good movies of the 70s and 80s.
Not necessarily the great movies, but the good ones: intelligent, committed, well-acted films with a sweep that flattered both their subjects and their audiences. "Three Days" is possibly the best of the conspiracy thrillers that studded the 1970s, the one most rooted in a realistic sense of one individual (Robert Redford as a low-level CIA librarian, standing in for you and me) peering over the abyss into the evil deeds our government can do.
"Out of Africa" -- Pollack's best director Oscar-winner -- and "The Way We Were" shared big historical canvases and female characters who broke the mold, played by actresses (Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand respectively) who did the same. That could also be said for "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," Pollack's 1969 critical breakthrough about a grueling 1930s dance marathon that served as a metaphor for the death of the American dream. Jane Fonda's performance in that film has a ferocity that takes no prisoners and that makes the men in the film look slightly stupid. Pollack liked ballsy women, and, yes, that includes Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie," learning what it is to be a man by dressing as a woman.
By contrast, the men in his movies are usually daunted by events, and it says something that this Jewish director kept coming back to the WASPy Redford as his hero, a reluctantly active figure thrown by those fierce women even as he's desired by them.
The one Pollack movie that sidesteps the algorithm is 1972's "Jeremiah Johnson," in which the director and his star say the hell with women and disappear into the American west to grow a beard. The movie's a fascinating halfway point between Jedidiah Smith and Hollywood hippie daydream, and a crucial document, in its way, of the changes the American movie industry went through as the anarchic 60s gave way to the corporate 80s.
Which is to say that Sydney Pollack wasn't a raging bull or an easy rider like Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola, Spielberg and the other New Hollywood cowboys. He was from the half-generation earlier that studied acting in New York under Sanford Meisner and learned how to make movies by shooting black-and-white TV shows like "The Defenders" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". Pollack's first movie as director was 1965's "The Slender Thread," an eminently responsible social-problem movie about a suicide hotline staffer (Sidney Poitier) trying to talk a desperate woman (Anne Bancroft, gloriously unsubtle as always) out of killing herself.
It's not exactly a great film, but you can see Pollack the future director in every sensible frame: the woman with frighteningly "big" emotions (a figure to be both pitied and worshipped), the wary man trying to save her from herself, the middlebrow balancing act of Kennedy-era racial and gender politics, a gift for unfussy storytelling as filtered, primarily, through performance.
A Pollack movie, in fact, lives through its central performance, which is almost always about a character kicking at the walls of society: Streep in "Out of Africa," Fonda in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," Hoffman in "Tootsie," Redford in "Jeremiah Johnson," Streisand in "The Way We Were." On top of that performance the director explored certain themes, but always within the context of creating a compelling narrative entertainment.
"Here?s what I always try to do, and again it?s something I get my wrists slapped for all the time," Pollack told Jump Cut magazine in 1976. "I want to work within genres -- a western, romance, melodrama or spy film. And then, within that form, which I try to remain as faithful to as I can, I love to fool around with serious ideas. The westerns that I've made have not been straight westerns, by any manner. 'Jeremiah Johnson' was, for me, a very serious film. It was a western, but it was still a serious film and it entertains very serious ideas about copping out, dropping out, how far can you go? Do you have to make it work within the system or do you try to make it work elsewhere? To me, those are serious ideas, but still it?s a movie, basically an entertainment."
It's a measure of Pollack's power within the industry -- and how much he was well and truly liked by everyone -- that even as he lost his stride as a director, he remained in demand as a producer and an actor. His "Out of Africa" follow-up was 1990's "Havana," a foolhardy attempt to bring the romanticism of "Casablanca" into the modern age (Redford may be many things, but he certainly isn't Bogart). The films that followed -- "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts," "The Interpreter" -- are polished and unnecessary, lacking the urgency that animated Pollack's earlier work. The one keeper is small and personal: a documentary about the director's good friend, architect Frank Gehry.
In front of the cameras, though, he seemed to recover something of himself (Pollack had originally studied to be an actor but decided he didn't have the looks for it). He popped up in "The Sopranos" and "Entourage," sunk his teeth into a juicy Woody Allen role in "Husbands and Wives," served as Tom Cruise's sex-club tour guide in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." His metier was fallen Manhattan men, alternately bitter and tickled by the things they'd seen.
As a producer, Pollack more than kept his hand in. Here are some of the movies on which he's credited as either producer or exective producer: "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "Presumed Innocent," "Searching for Bobby Fischer," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Iris," "The Quiet American," "40 Shades of Blue," "Michael Clayton." Again, not necessarily the greatest movies of their day but ambitious and persuasive and intelligent, which makes them vastly superior to 90 percent of the movies around them.
Pollack had been part of a number of production partnerships over the years -- he joked that one of them, MJ Inc., stood for "Melancholy Jew" -- but in 1985 he launched Mirage Enterprises and in 2000 invited writer-director Anthony Minghella in as full partner. Minghella died unexpectedly earlier this year at 54, and now Pollack is gone. There are remaining Mirage films in the pipeline: "Recount," which just played HBO, Stephen Daldry's "The Reader" with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, a remake of "The Lives of Others" still in development. After that, the slate is empty and a particular (and for Hollywood, rare) movie sensibility ceases.
That said, I think I'll miss Pollack the actor most: The hard-nosed, kind-hearted quintessential New Yorker (quintessentially from someplace else -- Lafayette, Indiana, in his case) bringing the hero down a peg just because he's been around the block so many times.
Kirsten Dunst is opening up about her stint at the Cirque Lodge Treatment Center in Utah earlier this year, saying that she sought help for depression, not for drug or alcohol abuse.
“I was struggling, and I had the opportunity to go somewhere and take care of myself,” Dunst, 26, tells E! Online. “I was fortunate to have the resources to do it. My friends and family thought it was a good idea, too.”
In February, Dunst checked into the same posh facility where Lindsay Lohan and Eva Mendes have been treated.
“She does drink and she does have wild nights, but that was never the root of her issues,” a source close to Dunst says. “She couldn’t control her depression.”
When Dunst entered rehab in February, another friend says that the actress had been feeling low for some time. “She’s been crying a lot lately, ” said the friend. “Everybody hits that bottom where you feel [so] scared that that one heavy night of partying can really wake you up. It’s good she’s getting herself help.”
As for why she decided to talk about her struggles now, Dunst tells E!, “Now that I’m feeling stronger, I was prepared to say something … Depression is pretty serious and should not be gossiped about.”
It's been a few months since we heard the sad and shocking news, in March, that Patrick Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since then, rumors have run rampant, both about his health, and about possible movie choices. Finally, we've got some legit news on the actor and his struggle with cancer.
Ellen DeGeneres clearly has marriage on her mind.
It was a who’s who of celebrities – and their babies – at Kingston Rossdale’s second birthday party.
I have been tossing around an idea for an animated feature film. I have a ton of notes, character breakdowns, beat sheets, outlines, etc., etc. Now its just a question of putting it down on the page. My question is fairly simple and straight-forward: Am I wasting my time?
These stories just keep getting better. On the heels of Israeli municipalities apparently 
Kirsten Dunst is opening up about her stint at the Cirque Lodge Treatment Center in Utah earlier this year, saying that she sought help for depression, not for drug or alcohol abuse.
