The P3 Update Magazine Blog

 by Iain Blair

Now the holidays are over, Oscar talk – and buzz – is heating up again. As usual, the end of the year was swamped by quality releases - “No Country for Old Men” from the Oscar-winning Coen Brothers, “Gone Baby Gone,” Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, “Atonement” and “The Diving Bell and theButterfly,” the acclaimed film by director and artist Julian Schnabel (“Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls”) are all getting attention. Chatting with my neighbor, producer Mike Marcus, the former president and COO of MGM (’93-’97) whose comedy “You Kill Me,” staring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hitman and Tea Leoni as his love interest, was one of the best-reviewed indies of the year, about the crowded field. And while “You Kill Me” never gained the expected traction at the box office, it’s now also building some buzz. “I thinkTea – as Best Supporting Actress, and the writers have the best shot,” he says.“It’s the film I’m most proud of since I made “Get Shorty” at MGM.” But Marcus agrees that it’s tougher and tough to get noticed around Oscar time. “It’s crazy – there are just so many releases coming out, it’s hard to pick a date,” he says. “Every distributor I talk to says there’s no great weekend anymore, because they’re all so crowded. And it’s getting worse.”

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by Iain Blair

Not everyone’s affected by the strike. Was talking to Kevin Ward, a well-known DP whose extensive credits include the movie “Dust to Glory”and over 500 commercials. “I’m one of the few who isn’t being hurt by it,because what I do is so off-the-map,” he told me. He’s not kidding. In January he heads off to Utah to do a 2-week shoot for Polaris Snowmobiles. “We’ll be staying at some ski resort in the middle of nowhere and work totally out of backpacks,” he says. “I’d get calls from these shows like “24” and I’d go in and run B camera or maybe 2nd Unit, but that’s all dried up ‘cos of the strike, so thank God I have all these other jobs lined up.”

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by Iain Blair

The writers strike is taking a toll, especially on the writers. Talked with top TV writer David Assael  (“Northern Exposure,” “StarTrek”  “Picket Fences”) who also has two films in development at Utopia Pictures, “Evan’s Crime” and “Glazed-Over.”  He jokes, “It was always hard explaining to me son exactly what I did, as there was a lot of lying around the house and staring out the window, but now it’s far worse.” Like Assael, other writers are anxious to get back to work, but all feel the strike is justified….

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by Iain Blair

If you really want to get a sense of how the film business is rapidly changing, talk to crew members. Was chatting with Mark Shane Davis, a top key grip (“Pulp Fiction,” “Blue Velvet”) who’s currently shooting the big true-life football story “Comeback” for the Weinstein Co. in Shreveport. “The business has totally shifted in the last few years,” he says. “It used to be Canada taking all the work from Hollywood, now it’s Louisiana and New Mexico, ‘cos of their tax breaks. We’ll have 10 big films shooting down here in Louisiana by Feb - it’s a boom town. I’ve even moved my grip rental company, Team Shark, here now.”

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by Iain Blair

Went to a BAFTA screening of much-talked about new Fox Searchlight movie “Juno” written by first-time screenwriter (andex-stripper) Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman (“Thank you for Smoking”) who were both there. Chatted with Jason afterwards who said while the story is set in the mid-west, “we shot it all in just 30 days up in Vancouver, because of the great tax breaks.” Like many filmmakers Jason would like to shoot in the U.S., “but with a small budget you just don’t have much of a choice.”

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by Iain Blair

Got to hang out with Francis Ford Coppola, a true legend of modern cinema, at The Four Seasons. He was in LA to talk about his new movie,“Youth Without Youth.” A friend cut neg on it and told me she was paid in wine! So I asked him, “Is it true that you financed the film with your wine?” He said, “Yes, I financed it with my own money, which is only because I have a big wine company. At leastI gave them something of value. Dollars aren’t very valuable anymore!” He said he was very happy self-financing it and having the control. “Also you save alot of money. There are many things you do when you produce a film that you only do because the banks say you’re required to; you have to give them the script, you have to insure the production against the fact that you may die and never finish it and on and on. So I’ve found that not only can I work much faster when I wasn’t waiting for an answer, but you save money on a production when you’re able to just put up the dough yourself.”

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by James Thompson

I recently attended PlasterCITY Digital Post’s Open House in Los Angeles where they were demonstrating the RED camera and postproduction workflows with RED data laboratory services. While standing in the DI theater line for the demo, Ted Schilowitz from RED Digital Cinema approached me to discuss the event.

I told him that at a recent seminar at the AFM a filmmaker from New Zealand indicated he was interested in purchasing the RED camera. Ted said that he’d have to stand in line. Afterwards, I wondered if he said that because he knows I’m industry press and he wanted me to continue the buzz. What I didn’t tell him was that at the AFM event ASC DP Spiro Dibie advised the filmmaker to go with a camera with a proven track record like the Panavision Genesis. “Don’t be the guinea pig,” he advised. However, I believe Dibie might have had more faith in the RED camera if he were to attend this event, which produced some fantastic footage, validated by the ooh’s and aah’s and positive feedback from the audience.

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by Iain Blair 

Lots of buzz about the new Will Smith apocalyptic drama “I Am Legend” from Warners, but the REAL drama playing outbehind the scenes may be more compelling. Insiders at the studio tell me that the film has been plagued by problems in post. “The production attitude was‘fix it in post’ when they had problems, but it’s turned into a nightmare,” one exec told me. Turns out artifacts have also been showing up in the VFX, which all had to be removed, and now there’s big problems with the audio in some prints,“It’s cursed” he says. “We had people even working over Thanksgiving trying to fix stuff.” But then “Titanic” was also said to be cursed, and look what happened….

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 Iain Blair

Chatting with an old friend, veteran production sound mixer Lee Orloff, about how the current strike is affecting the rank-and-file. Orloff has worked on many high profile shoots, including “Terminator 2” (for which he won an Oscar), “The Abyss” (we hung out on the S. Carolina set together), “Heat” and all three of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, and Lee sums it up for many when he says, “The real strike that’s really hitting us in movies is the fact that SAG’s contract is up in June and so the producers are really feeling the heat now. When we get done with the next show and wrap, they’ll know they may not have the actors available to go back in and do any ADR. That’s the REAL scary one. The studios won’t even greenlight a project that won’t wrap before that deadline.”

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by Iain Blair

The strike has put a lot of people out of work but not everyone. Just got a call from a friend who’s so busy on the set of“G-Force,” the new Jerry Bruckheimer film ” about a team of genetically enhanced guinea pigs working as spies for the U.S. government,that she’s even working weekends. “Babe”may have paved the way for smart talking porkers, but it’s “G-Force’s” critters who look likely to bring home the bacon in this live action/CGI family adventure. Combining adventure with comedy and cutting edge effects, thisproject also takes a page from the Pirates’ “How To Build A Hit” playbook, and puts another former visual effects supervisor, Hoyt Yeatman (“Crimson Tide,”“The Princess Diaries”), in charge of directing. Finding new behind-the-camera talent (Yeatman also worked on “Con-Air” and “The Rock”) has always been part of the Bruckheimer equation.

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