With the Halloween season finally upon us, that we’ve got a ton of horror and sci-fi titles headed our way via VOD and various digital platforms throughout the month of October. Things kick off with the 1992 horror comedy Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which hits Digital HD for the first time ever on October 2nd. The very next day, Cult of Chucky, Super Dark Times, The Forlorned, and Realive all make their respective debuts, and just a few days later the holiday horror flick Better Watch Out arrives on October 6th.
October 10th is another busy day, with the digital releases of Wish Upon, Dementia 13, The 13th Friday, War for the Planet of the Apes, and Wes Craven’s cult classic Summer of Fear, and for those looking to spend their Friday the 13th at home, you’ve got M.F.A., Brawl in Cell Block 99, and the Psycho-themed documentary 78/52 to look forward to.
October 10th is another busy day, with the digital releases of Wish Upon, Dementia 13, The 13th Friday, War for the Planet of the Apes, and Wes Craven’s cult classic Summer of Fear, and for those looking to spend their Friday the 13th at home, you’ve got M.F.A., Brawl in Cell Block 99, and the Psycho-themed documentary 78/52 to look forward to.
- 10/1/2017
- by Heather Wixson
- DailyDead
Directed by Andrew Wiest, The Forlorned, based on the novel by Angela Townsend, will be released on October 3rd courtesy of Midnight Releasing. Continue reading for more details in today's Horror Highlights. We also have a trailer extravaganza with looks at Truth or Dare, Axeman 2: Overkill, and Irrational Fear, London Horror Festival performance details for The Raven, and a clip from Downrange.
Trailer and Poster Revealed for The Forlorned: Press Release: "Los Angeles, CA-- Midnight Releasing turns on the light for Andrew Wiest's The Forlorned October 3rd. Based on the book by suspense novelist Angela Townsend, The Forlorned is the story of a man lured by a job to a desolate lighthouse who quickly finds himself in over his head and at the mercy of malevolent forces. The Forlorned will be available October 3rd on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Xbox, Vimeo, Steam, Vudu, Google Play and more.
Andrew Wiest...
Trailer and Poster Revealed for The Forlorned: Press Release: "Los Angeles, CA-- Midnight Releasing turns on the light for Andrew Wiest's The Forlorned October 3rd. Based on the book by suspense novelist Angela Townsend, The Forlorned is the story of a man lured by a job to a desolate lighthouse who quickly finds himself in over his head and at the mercy of malevolent forces. The Forlorned will be available October 3rd on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Xbox, Vimeo, Steam, Vudu, Google Play and more.
Andrew Wiest...
- 9/30/2017
- by Tamika Jones
- DailyDead
When Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon first teamed up 32 years ago, the door had just started to crack open for female film writers.
“We came at the right time, it was right when women writers were coming into vogue,” McGibbon said. “It was the time of ‘Thelma and Louise’ and there was two of us — a blonde and a brunette and it all fell into place.”
Parriott and McGibbon’s latest project, “Descendants 2,” premieres Friday night on Disney Channel, as well as ABC, Freeform, Disney Xd and Lifetime. It’s now a key franchise for Disney, and the latest career twist for Parriott and McGibbon, who now boast one of the longest-running writing partnerships in all of Hollywood.
Read MoreAt D23, Disney Showed Off Its Mighty Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar Muscle — Full Report
The duo initially chose film over TV because “we felt in success we could still...
“We came at the right time, it was right when women writers were coming into vogue,” McGibbon said. “It was the time of ‘Thelma and Louise’ and there was two of us — a blonde and a brunette and it all fell into place.”
Parriott and McGibbon’s latest project, “Descendants 2,” premieres Friday night on Disney Channel, as well as ABC, Freeform, Disney Xd and Lifetime. It’s now a key franchise for Disney, and the latest career twist for Parriott and McGibbon, who now boast one of the longest-running writing partnerships in all of Hollywood.
Read MoreAt D23, Disney Showed Off Its Mighty Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar Muscle — Full Report
The duo initially chose film over TV because “we felt in success we could still...
- 7/21/2017
- by Michael Schneider
- Indiewire
Shannen Doherty is thankful for the years that she had with her late father, who would have turned 73 on March 25.
In a touching post shared on Saturday, the 90210 actress honored her dad, John Thomas Doherty, who passed away in November 2010 at the age of 66.
“March 25 this beautiful light entered the world and left a lasting impression upon everyone he encountered….. they say we pick our family,” she captioned an Instagram post, which featured two black-and-white photos of herself and her father.
“I would pick him over and over again. Every time. My hero. My mentor. I’m ridiculously lucky to have had him guiding me,...
In a touching post shared on Saturday, the 90210 actress honored her dad, John Thomas Doherty, who passed away in November 2010 at the age of 66.
“March 25 this beautiful light entered the world and left a lasting impression upon everyone he encountered….. they say we pick our family,” she captioned an Instagram post, which featured two black-and-white photos of herself and her father.
“I would pick him over and over again. Every time. My hero. My mentor. I’m ridiculously lucky to have had him guiding me,...
- 3/27/2017
- by Natalie Stone
- PEOPLE.com
When Mal and the gang return for Descendants 2 in 2017, they’ll be sporting some bold new fashions.
RelatedLiv and Maddie Season 4 Exclusive: Watch Video, Get Scoop on the ‘Cali Style’ Changes
The Disney Channel original movie’s core crew — that’d be Mal (Dove Cameron), daughter of Maleficent; Evie (Sofia Carson), daughter of the Evil Queen; Jay (Booboo Stewart), son of Jafar; Carlos (Cameron Boyce), son of Cruella de Vil; and now Ben (Mitchell Hope), son of Belle and the Beast — got a major hair-and-wardrobe update for the highly anticipated sequel, as seen in the photo above.
When we last saw the Descendants,...
RelatedLiv and Maddie Season 4 Exclusive: Watch Video, Get Scoop on the ‘Cali Style’ Changes
The Disney Channel original movie’s core crew — that’d be Mal (Dove Cameron), daughter of Maleficent; Evie (Sofia Carson), daughter of the Evil Queen; Jay (Booboo Stewart), son of Jafar; Carlos (Cameron Boyce), son of Cruella de Vil; and now Ben (Mitchell Hope), son of Belle and the Beast — got a major hair-and-wardrobe update for the highly anticipated sequel, as seen in the photo above.
When we last saw the Descendants,...
- 9/16/2016
- TVLine.com
Check out photos for Disney's The Lodge TV series, coming to Disney Channel, in September and October. In the Us, the first season of The Lodge premieres Monday, October 17, 2016 at 5:00pm Edt. In UK and Canada The Lodge debuts Friday, September 23, 2016. Check local listings.A music-filled mystery drama series, filmed in Ballynahinch, Northern Ireland, The Lodge stars: Sophie Simnett, Jade Alleyne, Thomas Doherty, Luke Newton, Jayden Revri, Joshua Sinclair-Evans, Bethan Wright, Clara Rugaard, Sarah Nauta, and Tom Hudson.The supporting cast includes Martin Anzor, Emma Campbell-Jones, Marcus Garvey, Dominic Harrison, John Hopkins, Cameron King, Geoff McGivern, Dan Richardson, Laila Rouass and Ellie Taylor.Read More…...
- 8/31/2016
- by TVSeriesFinale.com
- TVSeriesFinale.com
Crackle has snatched up Harry Potter‘s Rupert Grint.
The actor will headline and executive-produce Snatch, a 10-episode series for the streaming network based on the 2000 movie of the same name.
VideosStartUp Trailer: Adam Brody Wages Deadly Tech War in Crackle Thriller
Grint will be joined by cast member Dougray Scott (Hemlock Grove) and recurring player Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl). The show, which will carry the spirit of the Brad Pitt-Jason Statham film while featuring new characters, revolves around a group of twenty-something hustlers who stumble upon a truckload of stolen gold bullion and are thrust into...
The actor will headline and executive-produce Snatch, a 10-episode series for the streaming network based on the 2000 movie of the same name.
VideosStartUp Trailer: Adam Brody Wages Deadly Tech War in Crackle Thriller
Grint will be joined by cast member Dougray Scott (Hemlock Grove) and recurring player Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl). The show, which will carry the spirit of the Brad Pitt-Jason Statham film while featuring new characters, revolves around a group of twenty-something hustlers who stumble upon a truckload of stolen gold bullion and are thrust into...
- 8/22/2016
- TVLine.com
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your newest Disney villain offspring: Harry, the son of Peter Pan's Captain Hook, is joining the cast of Descendants 2 and E! News has learned who will play the new character. Thomas Doherty has joined Dove Cameron, Cameron Boyce, Booboo Stewart, Sofia Carson and fellow new addition China Anne McClain in the Disney Channel Original Movie sequel. The first movie featured the children of some of Disney's most iconic villains: Mal (Cameron), the daughter of Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent; Carlos (Boyce), the son of 101 Dalmatians' Cruella De Vil; Jay (Stewart), the son of Aladdin's Jafar; and Evie (Carson), the daughter of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' Evil Queen....
- 8/18/2016
- E! Online
Rob Leane Aug 5, 2016
We spoke to Cory Michael Smith about Gotham season 3, the rise of the Riddler, and the chances of him donning spandex...
Warning: contains spoilers for Gotham season 2.
Back in June, after a long day of interviews, I sat down with Cory Michael Smith in a swanky London hotel to talk about all things Gotham, both the second season that had recently concluded its run on TV, and the third season which hadn’t yet begun filming. Mr Smith proved to be a very open interviewee, letting us in on a detailed account of how he ended up in the show in the first place. Here’s our our 15-minute chat...
Just to get it out of the way first: can I just ask, have they started trying to put you in hats and canes and spandex yet?
I have not had spandex... I may or may not have tried on different hats.
We spoke to Cory Michael Smith about Gotham season 3, the rise of the Riddler, and the chances of him donning spandex...
Warning: contains spoilers for Gotham season 2.
Back in June, after a long day of interviews, I sat down with Cory Michael Smith in a swanky London hotel to talk about all things Gotham, both the second season that had recently concluded its run on TV, and the third season which hadn’t yet begun filming. Mr Smith proved to be a very open interviewee, letting us in on a detailed account of how he ended up in the show in the first place. Here’s our our 15-minute chat...
Just to get it out of the way first: can I just ask, have they started trying to put you in hats and canes and spandex yet?
I have not had spandex... I may or may not have tried on different hats.
- 7/30/2016
- Den of Geek
Filming is underway in Northern Ireland on new Disney teen musical drama The Lodge, a 10-part series which will air on the Disney Channel in 108 countries later this year.
Featuring an international cast drawn from emerging talent across Europe, each 22 minute episode will see them rock-climb, kayak, mountain bike, sing and dance, with all the action filmed against the backdrop of Ballynahinch, Co Down.
18 year old Sophie Simnett (represented by Waring & McKenna) leads the cast as Skye, who returns with her father to her childhood holiday lodge in Northern Ireland after the death of her mother.
She is joined by fellow Brits 20 year old Bethan Wright (represented by Rka Talent) from Cbbc's web series Dixi, Jade Alleyne (represented by Sylvia Young Agency) who stars as Clem in Cbbc's 4 O'Clock Club, Luke Newton (represented by Rka Talent) who previously starred in BBC Switch's The Cut plays Ben.
20 year old Thomas Doherty...
Featuring an international cast drawn from emerging talent across Europe, each 22 minute episode will see them rock-climb, kayak, mountain bike, sing and dance, with all the action filmed against the backdrop of Ballynahinch, Co Down.
18 year old Sophie Simnett (represented by Waring & McKenna) leads the cast as Skye, who returns with her father to her childhood holiday lodge in Northern Ireland after the death of her mother.
She is joined by fellow Brits 20 year old Bethan Wright (represented by Rka Talent) from Cbbc's web series Dixi, Jade Alleyne (represented by Sylvia Young Agency) who stars as Clem in Cbbc's 4 O'Clock Club, Luke Newton (represented by Rka Talent) who previously starred in BBC Switch's The Cut plays Ben.
20 year old Thomas Doherty...
- 3/23/2016
- by noreply@blogger.com (ScreenTerrier)
- ScreenTerrier
Recently, Fox served up the new,official synopsis/spoilers for their upcoming "Gotham" episode 20 of season 1. The episode is entitled, "Under The Knife," and it turns out that we're going to see very interesting stuff go down as Ogre starts to go after someone close to Gordon. Selina and Bruce continue their investigative partnership, and more! In the new, 20th episode press release: The Hunt For The Ogre Continues. Press release number 2: Gordon and Bullock will continue to investigate the Ogre (guest star Milo Ventimiglia), who will begin to make his move on someone close to Gordon. In the meantime, Bruce and Selina are going to team up to expose a corrupt Wayne Enterprises employee, and Nygma will come to Kristin Kringle's defense. Guest stars feature: Morena Baccarin as Dr. Leslie Thompkins, Milo Ventimiglia as Jason Lennon, Drew Powell as Butch Gilzean, David Zayas as Don Maroni, Chelsea Spack as Kristin Kringle,...
- 4/13/2015
- by Eric
- OnTheFlix
Recently, Fox released the new,official synopsis/spoilers for their upcoming "Gotham" episode 18 of season 1. The episode is entitled, "Everyone Has A Cobblepot," and it turns out that we're going to see very intense and dramatic stuff as young Bruce deal with the aftermath of another attack. It appears that Fish turns on the prisoners, and more! In the new, 18th episode press release: New alliances are going to emerge. Press release number 2: While Gordon seeks information about the recent controversy with Commissioner Loeb, Fish's allegiance with the prisoners will get questioned when she appears to join forces with Dr. Dulmacher (guest star Colm Feore, "The Borgias," "24"). In the meantime, after an attack close to home, Bruce is going to deal with the aftermath. Guest stars feature: Nicholas D'Agosto as Harvey Dent, Peter Scolari as Commissioner Loeb, Chelsea Spack as Kristin Kringle, Michael J. Burg as Charlie Griggs, Perry Yung as Xi Lu,...
- 2/23/2015
- by Eric
- OnTheFlix
See Full Gallery Here
A batch of new images from Gotham‘s strangely-titled upcoming episode, “Everyone Has A Cobblepot,” have appeared online, showing the return of young Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent – played by Masters of Sex alum Nicholas D’Agosto – and the debut of the creepy serial killer known as the Dollmaker.
The Borgias and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 actor Colm Feore was cast as the Dollmaker (or in this case, Dr. Dulmacher) late last month, and based on the episode’s synopsis, he’s the one behind the creepy organ donation ring that Fish Mooney was recently caught up in, which makes sense considering he was attached to child smuggling earlier in the season as well.
Check out the new Gotham episode synopsis below, and be sure to tune in when “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” airs on March 2nd, 2015.
While Gordon seeks information about the recent controversy with Commissioner Loeb,...
A batch of new images from Gotham‘s strangely-titled upcoming episode, “Everyone Has A Cobblepot,” have appeared online, showing the return of young Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent – played by Masters of Sex alum Nicholas D’Agosto – and the debut of the creepy serial killer known as the Dollmaker.
The Borgias and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 actor Colm Feore was cast as the Dollmaker (or in this case, Dr. Dulmacher) late last month, and based on the episode’s synopsis, he’s the one behind the creepy organ donation ring that Fish Mooney was recently caught up in, which makes sense considering he was attached to child smuggling earlier in the season as well.
Check out the new Gotham episode synopsis below, and be sure to tune in when “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” airs on March 2nd, 2015.
While Gordon seeks information about the recent controversy with Commissioner Loeb,...
- 2/18/2015
- by James Garcia
- We Got This Covered
By Thomas Doherty
The Hollywood Reporter
The calendar delivers an invitation to pause and observe — not celebrate — the 100th anniversary of the most important, innovative and despicable film in American history.
On February 8, 1915, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of Nation (then under its original title, The Clansman) premiered at Clunes Auditorium in Los Angeles, with a full symphony orchestra playing live musical accompaniment. It soon became a nationwide sensation: a cinematic milestone that established the narrative feature film as the flagship product of Hollywood cinema. Its depiction of African-Americans also exposed — in the most visceral and vivid way — the raw symptoms of a peculiarly American pathology. For the last century, for better but mostly for worse, its impact has rippled through the currents of American culture.
Read the rest of this entry…...
The Hollywood Reporter
The calendar delivers an invitation to pause and observe — not celebrate — the 100th anniversary of the most important, innovative and despicable film in American history.
On February 8, 1915, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of Nation (then under its original title, The Clansman) premiered at Clunes Auditorium in Los Angeles, with a full symphony orchestra playing live musical accompaniment. It soon became a nationwide sensation: a cinematic milestone that established the narrative feature film as the flagship product of Hollywood cinema. Its depiction of African-Americans also exposed — in the most visceral and vivid way — the raw symptoms of a peculiarly American pathology. For the last century, for better but mostly for worse, its impact has rippled through the currents of American culture.
Read the rest of this entry…...
- 2/8/2015
- by Anjelica Oswald
- Scott Feinberg
A unidentified teenage girl who was found fatally shot in upstate New York in 1979 has finally been revealed to be Tammy Jo Alexander, thanks to recent DNA testing, the Livingston County Sheriff's Office confirms to People. Alexander, who would now be 51, was known as "Jane Doe 1979" until last week. In the summer of 2014, a high school friend of Alexander's decided to contact her half-sister, expressing her concern that she was never found. "Her half-sister had always assumed that their mother had filed a missing person's report," Sheriff Thomas Dougherty tells People. "But she never did. This poor girl went missing...
- 1/27/2015
- by Caitlin Keating, @caitkeating
- PEOPLE.com
A unidentified teenage girl who was found fatally shot in upstate New York in 1979 has finally been revealed to be Tammy Jo Alexander, thanks to recent DNA testing, the Livingston County Sheriff's Office confirms to People. Alexander, who would now be 51, was known as "Jane Doe 1979" until last week. In the summer of 2014, a high school friend of Alexander's decided to contact her half-sister, expressing her concern that she was never found. "Her half-sister had always assumed that their mother had filed a missing person's report," Sheriff Thomas Dougherty tells People. "But she never did. This poor girl went missing...
- 1/27/2015
- by Caitlin Keating, @caitkeating
- PEOPLE.com
By Thomas Doherty
The Hollywood Reporter
On the evening of Dec. 4, 1930, inside the ornate Mozart Hall in Berlin, Universal’s antiwar epic All Quiet on the Western Front was just starting to unspool when spectators noticed a rancid smell in the theater—stink bombs—and spotted dozens of white mice scurrying down the aisles. Women began to scream and, amid the chaos, a cadre of Nazi storm troopers stood up, pointed at the screen and screamed “Judenfilm!” The Nazis—still over two years away from turning Germany into a gangster state—had vandalized and infiltrated the theater to shut down a Hollywood film that depicted the Great War as a muddy death trap. Days of protests and street demonstrations followed: The Nazis vowed that either All Quiet on the Western Front would be withdrawn or the theaters world burn.
It worked. Germany banned the film that its own censors had earlier cleared for domestic release.
The Hollywood Reporter
On the evening of Dec. 4, 1930, inside the ornate Mozart Hall in Berlin, Universal’s antiwar epic All Quiet on the Western Front was just starting to unspool when spectators noticed a rancid smell in the theater—stink bombs—and spotted dozens of white mice scurrying down the aisles. Women began to scream and, amid the chaos, a cadre of Nazi storm troopers stood up, pointed at the screen and screamed “Judenfilm!” The Nazis—still over two years away from turning Germany into a gangster state—had vandalized and infiltrated the theater to shut down a Hollywood film that depicted the Great War as a muddy death trap. Days of protests and street demonstrations followed: The Nazis vowed that either All Quiet on the Western Front would be withdrawn or the theaters world burn.
It worked. Germany banned the film that its own censors had earlier cleared for domestic release.
- 12/22/2014
- by Anjelica Oswald
- Scott Feinberg
This is a reprint of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education , L’affaire Natan, about a little known story given new life, the Dreyfus affair of French cinema. “Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect. Entitled Nazis, French Port and Film Studies: Bernard Natan’s Strange Saga, by Thomas Doherty, chair of the American-studies program at Brandeis University whose most recent book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
- 6/12/2014
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Mark Harris's study of the interwoven war careers of Ford, Wyler, Capra, Stevens and Huston impresses Philip French
The two most remarkable film books of last year were both about the ways – mostly craven and temporising – that the American cinema responded to the rise of Nazism: The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand and Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty. By a useful coincidence, the first important movie history so far this year, and likely to prove one of the most memorable, is Mark Harris's Five Came Back. His complementary work picks up Urband's and Doherty's studies at that crucial point where the bombs fall on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hollywood rolls up its sleeves and swaps the diplomatic velvet glove for a patriotic steel fist. As in his impressive first book, Scenes from a Revolution, a long, detailed study of five 1967 movies that...
The two most remarkable film books of last year were both about the ways – mostly craven and temporising – that the American cinema responded to the rise of Nazism: The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand and Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty. By a useful coincidence, the first important movie history so far this year, and likely to prove one of the most memorable, is Mark Harris's Five Came Back. His complementary work picks up Urband's and Doherty's studies at that crucial point where the bombs fall on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hollywood rolls up its sleeves and swaps the diplomatic velvet glove for a patriotic steel fist. As in his impressive first book, Scenes from a Revolution, a long, detailed study of five 1967 movies that...
- 3/17/2014
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
- 11/24/2013
- by Ali Smith, Robert McCrum, Tim Adams, Kate Kellaway, Rachel Cooke, Sebastian Faulks, Jackie Kay
- The Guardian - Film News
It turns out the golden age of Hollywood wasn't so bright after all. A nefarious side of Hollywood's history has been unveiled in the new book "The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler," which explores the U.S. movie industry's apparent contentious dealings with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.
The book's author, Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ben Urwand, combed through archival documents that reportedly uncover negotiations between the two entities. The Hollywood Reporter notes that "collaboration" is a word that appears repeatedly throughout the correspondence, which details agreements to mitigate any unfavorable depictions of Germany or the Nazi Party in American movies. The studios felt compliance was needed because at the time Germany offered the second largest film market in the world and threatened to exclude American films that clashed with Nazi ideology.
Hollywood studios reportedly ran scripts and even finished movies past German officials for approval, according to Urwand's research. Movies...
The book's author, Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ben Urwand, combed through archival documents that reportedly uncover negotiations between the two entities. The Hollywood Reporter notes that "collaboration" is a word that appears repeatedly throughout the correspondence, which details agreements to mitigate any unfavorable depictions of Germany or the Nazi Party in American movies. The studios felt compliance was needed because at the time Germany offered the second largest film market in the world and threatened to exclude American films that clashed with Nazi ideology.
Hollywood studios reportedly ran scripts and even finished movies past German officials for approval, according to Urwand's research. Movies...
- 8/1/2013
- by Matthew Jacobs
- Huffington Post
Book by a Harvard scholar argues that Us producers in the 1930s 'collaborated' with the Nazis with cuts to films and self-censorship
The author of a controversial book causing a stir in Hollywood for exposing collaboration between the major studios and Nazi Germany in the runup to the second world war has defended his claims to the Observer.
Harvard scholar Ben Urwand, who spent a decade sifting through German and American archives, said: "I want to bring out a hidden episode in Hollywood history and an episode that has not been reported accurately."
Urwand's interpretation of the relationship is disputed by other scholars of the period. He claims that Hollywood studio chiefs, many of them recent eastern European Jewish refugees, enthusiastically worked with Hitler's censors to alter films or even cancel productions entirely in order to protect access to the German film market. "In the 1930s the Hollywood studios not...
The author of a controversial book causing a stir in Hollywood for exposing collaboration between the major studios and Nazi Germany in the runup to the second world war has defended his claims to the Observer.
Harvard scholar Ben Urwand, who spent a decade sifting through German and American archives, said: "I want to bring out a hidden episode in Hollywood history and an episode that has not been reported accurately."
Urwand's interpretation of the relationship is disputed by other scholars of the period. He claims that Hollywood studio chiefs, many of them recent eastern European Jewish refugees, enthusiastically worked with Hitler's censors to alter films or even cancel productions entirely in order to protect access to the German film market. "In the 1930s the Hollywood studios not...
- 6/29/2013
- by Edward Helmore
- The Guardian - Film News
Back in late 1989, Tor Books began a huge promotion for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Contracted as far back as 1984 to write a traditional trilogy, publisher Tom Doherty already knew Jordan –based on previous novels Tor had published with the author- that he had a tendency to go long. So they signed him to a six volume deal instead. It was Doherty who deemed the series the next Lord of the Rings, and pushed the book hard, mostly by sending out Advanced Readers Copies to almost every bookstore on the planet. But the strategy succeeded and on January 15, 1990, Eye of the World was released. It quickly became a best seller, with fans asking when the next book was coming out. And Jordan did keep a great pace, writing as fast as he could, releasing the second book only eight months later. Books three through six were released roughly a year apart after that.
- 1/2/2013
- by spaced-odyssey
- doorQ.com
While science fiction writer Harry Harrison never had the a high profile career like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark or Ray Bradbury, he none the less is still a legend who helped define the decades that made science fiction one the best genre’s for social commentary. Harrison died on August 15 of undisclosed causes at the age of 87.
Most might be unaware that his 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! Became the 1973 thriller Soylent Green, a dystopian film that starred Charleston Heston.
“He believed science fiction was important, that it caused people to think about our world and what it could become,” Tor Books’ publisher Tom Doherty wrote in a blog post.
That novel and film was about population that has exploded since the turn of the 20th Century. And while the novel was set in 1999, the books themes resonate today as they did when the book was released 46 years ago: there are too many people,...
Most might be unaware that his 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! Became the 1973 thriller Soylent Green, a dystopian film that starred Charleston Heston.
“He believed science fiction was important, that it caused people to think about our world and what it could become,” Tor Books’ publisher Tom Doherty wrote in a blog post.
That novel and film was about population that has exploded since the turn of the 20th Century. And while the novel was set in 1999, the books themes resonate today as they did when the book was released 46 years ago: there are too many people,...
- 8/31/2012
- by spaced-odyssey
- doorQ.com
News.
After three years as Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, Olivier Père has stepped down and is now the managing director of Arte France Cinema. His time with the festival were pivotal years in which he transformed its direction and established Locarno as one of the key cinephilic stops on the circuit. I was fortunate enough to enjoy what has now surprisingly become the final festival under his direction. Père offers some parting words over at his official blog (which is well worth perusing for the rest of its contents). Cinema Scope has launched its intimidatingly comprehensive online pre-coverage of Tiff—in which yours truly will be taking part in. Check the introductory post here, and the first content from Jason Anderson and Mark Peranson on Peter Mettler's The End of Time and Miguel Gomes' Tabu, respectively.
Finds.
Above: A brief clip from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers,...
After three years as Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, Olivier Père has stepped down and is now the managing director of Arte France Cinema. His time with the festival were pivotal years in which he transformed its direction and established Locarno as one of the key cinephilic stops on the circuit. I was fortunate enough to enjoy what has now surprisingly become the final festival under his direction. Père offers some parting words over at his official blog (which is well worth perusing for the rest of its contents). Cinema Scope has launched its intimidatingly comprehensive online pre-coverage of Tiff—in which yours truly will be taking part in. Check the introductory post here, and the first content from Jason Anderson and Mark Peranson on Peter Mettler's The End of Time and Miguel Gomes' Tabu, respectively.
Finds.
Above: A brief clip from Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers,...
- 8/29/2012
- MUBI
Shannen Doherty and photographer Kurt Iswarienko made it down the aisle in a black-tie, Malibu, Calif., wedding last October, but the process leading up to their nuptials wasn't always picture-perfect. In a sneak peek of We TV's Shannen Says, the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star, 40, gives her fans an inside look into the seven tumultuous weeks leading up to her big day. Tensions run high for the couple, as Doherty calls Iswarienko profane names in one scene, leading to her say in another clip, "I don't want to fight with you anymore. We're going to a shrink." Related: Shannen Doherty's...
- 3/2/2012
- by Dahvi Shira
- PEOPLE.com
The new Spring 2012 issue of Cineaste is out and selections online include James L Neibaur on Kino's Blu-ray releases of Buster Keaton's work (as well as eleven more DVD/Blu-ray reviews), Andrew Horton's remembrance of Theo Angelopolous, Anchalee Chaiwaraporn and Kong Rithdee on the politics of Thai film and the opening paragraphs of Thomas Doherty's review of Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director:
Generally admiring but never intoxicated, Patrick McGilligan's insightful biography is a chronicle not only of the troubled director but also of the Hollywood studio system at dusk, the vagaries of the multilateral skirmishes between French, British, and American film criticism, and the political follies roiling through twentieth-century America. The author of well-regarded biographies of Fritz Lang and Clint Eastwood and the editor of the invaluable Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters (who all prove to be much more than...
Generally admiring but never intoxicated, Patrick McGilligan's insightful biography is a chronicle not only of the troubled director but also of the Hollywood studio system at dusk, the vagaries of the multilateral skirmishes between French, British, and American film criticism, and the political follies roiling through twentieth-century America. The author of well-regarded biographies of Fritz Lang and Clint Eastwood and the editor of the invaluable Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters (who all prove to be much more than...
- 2/24/2012
- MUBI
Where can you go to get the best science fiction and fantasy in any given year? Anywhere that sells the annual Nebula and Hugo anthologies, naturally! This year, the collected nominated Nebula short stories and novelettes are gathered together in a tome called Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, edited by the esteemed and highly talented author Kevin J. Anderson. Included is the winning novella, the incredible The Women of Nell Gwynne’s by Kage Baker; the three poems nominated for the Rhysling Awards; a story by the Sfwa Author Emeritus, Neal Barrett Jr., “Getting Dark”; and a story introduced by the Sfwa Grand Master, Damon Knight, by Joe Haldeman, the newest Grand Master, “A Tangled Web.”
Winners of the other awards given out are also included, like the Nebula Award for the Best Novel, The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi; the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy winner,...
Winners of the other awards given out are also included, like the Nebula Award for the Best Novel, The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi; the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy winner,...
- 6/28/2011
- by Professor Crazy
- Boomtron
Tuesday, DVD roundup day, is a fine day for taking a look at the new Summer 2011 issue of Cineaste, particularly since, among the online samplings this time around, DVD reviews outnumber all other types of articles combined.
To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements. These two levels, though defined by opposites — stasis/motion, tell/show — are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image (Ein bild, 1983). In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including...
To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements. These two levels, though defined by opposites — stasis/motion, tell/show — are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image (Ein bild, 1983). In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including...
- 6/7/2011
- MUBI
Beverly Hills, CA . The life and career of silent film star Gloria Swanson and camera movement in classic Hollywood cinema will be the topics explored by Cari Beauchamp and Patrick Keating, respectively, who have been named Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The Academy.s Institutional Grants Committee selected the pair for the honor on the basis of their manuscript proposals. Each will receive $25,000 from the Academy to aid in the research and writing of their projects.
Beauchamp, an independent film historian and author of five previous books, will research and write the first comprehensive biography of Gloria Swanson (1899.1983) whose iconic career spanned from silent films to television and included her Oscar®-nominated performance as Norma Desmond in .Sunset Blvd.. The book will explore the actress and producer.s influence on film production and the culture at large, as well as her off-camera life...
The Academy.s Institutional Grants Committee selected the pair for the honor on the basis of their manuscript proposals. Each will receive $25,000 from the Academy to aid in the research and writing of their projects.
Beauchamp, an independent film historian and author of five previous books, will research and write the first comprehensive biography of Gloria Swanson (1899.1983) whose iconic career spanned from silent films to television and included her Oscar®-nominated performance as Norma Desmond in .Sunset Blvd.. The book will explore the actress and producer.s influence on film production and the culture at large, as well as her off-camera life...
- 3/7/2011
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
The pitch here is pretty simple: what if Dr. Seuss had created Star Wars? Thanks to characters like Yoda and Jabba the Hut, and the basic morality of the story, it actually works pretty well. Check out the work of cartoonist Adam Watson after the break. That's obviously the Seuss-style Jabba above, and a couple more can be found below, with more embedded in a post [1] on Adam Watson's site. He said of the work, This is a little project that, as is often the case, started off as a throwaway doodle. With a little encouragement from my friend Tom Dougherty, (link on the right) I turned it into several drawings. What's fun is that the Star Wars universe really blends with the goofy, strangely-named world of Dr. Seuss pretty easily. I have a couple more of these up my sleeve which I hope I can get around to soon.
- 12/6/2010
- by Russ Fischer
- Slash Film
This is so cool! Artist Adam Watson has reimagined Star Wars in the classic style of Dr. Seuss. I think the style and writing is very fun.
Here's a note from the artist:
This is a little project that, as is often the case, started off as a throwaway doodle. With a little encouragement from my friend Tom Dougherty, I turned it into several drawings. What's fun is that the Star Wars universe really blends with the goofy, strangely-named world of Dr. Seuss pretty easily. I have a couple more of these up my sleeve which I hope I can get around to soon.
Check out the art and tell us what you think!
Source: The Mighty Adam (http://themightyadam.blogspot.com/2010/11/dr-seuss-does-star-wars.html)...
Here's a note from the artist:
This is a little project that, as is often the case, started off as a throwaway doodle. With a little encouragement from my friend Tom Dougherty, I turned it into several drawings. What's fun is that the Star Wars universe really blends with the goofy, strangely-named world of Dr. Seuss pretty easily. I have a couple more of these up my sleeve which I hope I can get around to soon.
Check out the art and tell us what you think!
Source: The Mighty Adam (http://themightyadam.blogspot.com/2010/11/dr-seuss-does-star-wars.html)...
- 12/3/2010
- by Venkman
- GeekTyrant
Filed under: Celebrities and Gossip
Want to know what's going on with your favorite TV stars when the cameras aren't rolling? Check out the latest celebrity news from our friends at PopEater.com.
o. 'Boardwalk Empire' star Gretchen Mol is expecting her second child with her husband, 'Paranormal Activity 2' director Kip Williams.
o. California girl Kendra Wilkinson says she moved back to L.A. without husband Hank Baskett so she can promote her projects, exercise outside, lay in the sun, run on the beach and be near her family.
o. Shannen Doherty's father, John Thomas Doherty, passed away Friday at age 66 after a series of health issues.
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments...
Want to know what's going on with your favorite TV stars when the cameras aren't rolling? Check out the latest celebrity news from our friends at PopEater.com.
o. 'Boardwalk Empire' star Gretchen Mol is expecting her second child with her husband, 'Paranormal Activity 2' director Kip Williams.
o. California girl Kendra Wilkinson says she moved back to L.A. without husband Hank Baskett so she can promote her projects, exercise outside, lay in the sun, run on the beach and be near her family.
o. Shannen Doherty's father, John Thomas Doherty, passed away Friday at age 66 after a series of health issues.
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments...
- 11/9/2010
- by Elena Cox
- Aol TV.
Former "Beverly Hills, 90210" star Shannen Doherty told Et earlier this year that she chose to go on "Dancing with the Stars" for her father, but sadly her dad, John Thomas Doherty, died on Friday at age 66. Shannen broke the news to People.com in a statement from her publicist, where the actress refers to her father as the "greatest man in the world . . . I love him with every inch of my being and cannot imagine life without him." The actress, 39, recently became a published author, penning her memoir and self-help tome titled Badass.
[Read full story on The Insider]...
[Read full story on The Insider]...
- 11/9/2010
- by TheInsider
- TheInsider.com
Actress Shannen Doherty is in mourning following the death of her beloved father on Friday.
The former Beverly Hills 90210 star's dad John Thomas Doherty, known as Tom, passed away following a long battle with ill health. He was 66.
In a statement, she says, "I love him with every inch of my being and cannot imagine life without him."
Earlier this year, Doherty revealed she was spurred on to compete in TV talent show Dancing with the Stars after her father suffered a stroke.
She revealed, "He lost his speech, he wasn't mobile. He was really struggling... When I mentioned this to him, he got really excited, and he wanted me to do it. I thought, if my dad can fight through having a stroke and the loss of being able to communicate, I think I can do this for him. So I figured I'm going to get over my fear for him..."...
The former Beverly Hills 90210 star's dad John Thomas Doherty, known as Tom, passed away following a long battle with ill health. He was 66.
In a statement, she says, "I love him with every inch of my being and cannot imagine life without him."
Earlier this year, Doherty revealed she was spurred on to compete in TV talent show Dancing with the Stars after her father suffered a stroke.
She revealed, "He lost his speech, he wasn't mobile. He was really struggling... When I mentioned this to him, he got really excited, and he wanted me to do it. I thought, if my dad can fight through having a stroke and the loss of being able to communicate, I think I can do this for him. So I figured I'm going to get over my fear for him..."...
- 11/9/2010
- WENN
Shannen Doherty is mourning the death of her father, according to The AP. The former Beverly Hills, 90210 star had credited John Thomas Doherty as the inspiration behind her decision to appear on Dancing With The Stars last season, and he watched her from the audience in the first episode. She issued a statement over the weekend saying that her father had passed away on Friday at the age of 66. "[He was] the greatest man in the world," she said. "I love him with every inch of my being and cannot imagine life (more)...
- 11/9/2010
- by By Lara Martin
- Digital Spy
Shannen Doherty has had to say goodbye to her inspiration. The actress's father, John Thomas Doherty, died on Friday at 66. He was in poor health for some time and had suffered a stroke not long before his daughter's appearance on Dancing With the Stars in March. In fact, Doherty dedicated her short time on the show to her father, who was doing well enough to be in the audience when she performed. Calling him the "greatest man in the world," she said in a statement: "I love him with every inch of my being and cannot imagine life without him."...
- 11/9/2010
- E! Online
Brian Stelter of the New York Times takes a devastating look at Larry King, the host of the 9pmET CNN show that is in deep decline; the personality whose contract is up next year with the murky future; the 76-year-old who hosts an "old" program. But what jumped out the most was a quote from Tom Dougherty that only loosely referred to King personally, and more broadly about CNN as a whole. It essentially asks: Who are you, CNN?...
- 5/27/2010
- by Steve Krakauer
- Mediaite - TV
Thomas Doherty in The Chronicle of Higher Education Review is lamenting how “serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed”... which is something I not only sympathize with, I live it. It’s unbelievably disheartening to be looking for work -- as I’ve been -- and find only ads for “voluntary” jobs, or ones that pay in “exposure.” Writing, of any kind, is even less valued today than it has been in the past, when it wasn’t terribly valued either. Of course, Doherty is unlikely to consider me a “serious” writer. I’m not an academic, for one -- I don’t even have an undergraduate degree of any stripe! But he believes that “the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism” on the Internet is “It sucks.” Which is an indication only that he hasn’t read much film criticism on the Net. But wait,...
- 3/1/2010
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
Producers Moritz Borman and Peter Graves have licensed film rights to the novel "The Seven Sins: The Tyrant Ascending" from Las Vegas entrepreneur Fabrizio Boccardi's King Midas World Entertainment.
Jon Land's action thriller, published last month by Tom Doherty Associates' Forge imprint, centers on a Las Vegas casino owner, Michael "The Tyrant" Tiranno, the adopted son of an Italian crime lord who is called upon to defend the gambling mecca from terrorist attacks.
Land has said that the character is loosely inspired by Boccardi's life story and is designed as the first of a series of James Bond-like adventure tales.
Graves said the thriller's protagonist "is not your normal lead; he's a little off-center, a little unusual."
Added Moritz, "It's the kind of book that lends itself to a franchise."
Borman would produce, with Graves serving as exec producer. The two have similar roles on the upcoming "W" and "Terminator: Salvation." Boccardi will serve as a producer on the film. Once they assemble more elements, they plan to approach a studio.
The globe-trotting novel takes its title from a fictional casino/hotel called the Seven Sins. Boccardi said he plans to build a resort of the same name in Vegas. "My company has spent millions of dollars developing the plans," he said. "In another year or two, we intend to pull the trigger."...
Jon Land's action thriller, published last month by Tom Doherty Associates' Forge imprint, centers on a Las Vegas casino owner, Michael "The Tyrant" Tiranno, the adopted son of an Italian crime lord who is called upon to defend the gambling mecca from terrorist attacks.
Land has said that the character is loosely inspired by Boccardi's life story and is designed as the first of a series of James Bond-like adventure tales.
Graves said the thriller's protagonist "is not your normal lead; he's a little off-center, a little unusual."
Added Moritz, "It's the kind of book that lends itself to a franchise."
Borman would produce, with Graves serving as exec producer. The two have similar roles on the upcoming "W" and "Terminator: Salvation." Boccardi will serve as a producer on the film. Once they assemble more elements, they plan to approach a studio.
The globe-trotting novel takes its title from a fictional casino/hotel called the Seven Sins. Boccardi said he plans to build a resort of the same name in Vegas. "My company has spent millions of dollars developing the plans," he said. "In another year or two, we intend to pull the trigger."...
- 7/23/2008
- by By Gregg Kilday
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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