The P3 Update Magazine Blog

by James Thompson
I really enjoyed HD Expo’s first show in New York. While the number of attendees wasn’t anything to brag about, the panels were great and the exhibitors were thrilled with the venue and the opportunity to have a show that could benefit the city.

“I think this is a show that is going to work for New York,” says Bob Zupka, Product Manager with Schneider Optics. “These workshops are where I get my ideas for the products. You have to talk to the shooters.”

The venue was an old brick railroad building located in Manhattan’s waterfront area on the Hudson, thus the name the “Waterfront.” I believe this show will follow the footsteps of the Los Angeles show and just keep growing. Incidentally, I’m looking forward to the LA show that is coming up on October 29-30 and will be at the Burbank, Marriott.

Check them out at www.hdexpo.net.

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 By Iain Blair

Chatting with Mark Wahlberg whose latest movie is the big actioneer Max Payne. It marks a welcome change of pace for the star after dramatic turns in The Departed (which got him an Oscar nom), The Happening and The Lovely Bones, which he just shot with Peter Jackson.

“I love doing action, so it was great to get back into a big action film,” he told me. He also said he loved shooting in Toronto where principal photography on Max Payne began on March 3, 2008.  Filming on the 50-day shoot took place in a myriad of locations in Toronto ranging from the subway system, to the city’s busy financial district and sprawling waterfront, as well as on the Cinespace and Toronto Film Studio stages.

The film is based on the popular Max Payne videogame series which debuted in 2001, and while the actor agrees that most games don’t translate to the big screen, he’s confident that Max Payne will please both movie fans and gamers. As for the upcoming The Lovely Bones, it was directed by Peter Jackson, partly in New Zealand, which was amazing,” he says.

Wahlberg is also the executive producer of HBO’s Entourage for which he received three Golden Globe® nominations, and most recently garnered seven Emmy® nominations, and he told me that the new season “Will be totally crazy – someone dies, but it’s a big secret.”

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 By Iain Blair

When I first lived in Hollywood,  I was thrilled to find out that the A&M Records studio lot round the corner on La Brea had originally been Charlie Chaplin’s historic film studio. I’ve spent a lot of time there, as I was still in the music biz and was there for some historic shoots on the famous Chaplin stage, including Madonna’s first video and the classic Police videos, Every Breath and Synchronicity. So it felt that I’ve come full circle when I went back there last week. The lot is now the Jim Henson Company base, and they’ve done it up really well – there are even some great old photos of Chaplin breaking ground for the original studio – which had no roof!

Henson is also breaking its own ground with its new Henson Digital Puppetry Studio motion capture technology that the company is using on shows like Sid the Science Kid and movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I got a great demo of what the technology can do, and it’s really impressive. Mocap’s future looks brighter and brighter, especially with high profile films like Jim Cameron’s Avatar on the way in ’09.

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 By Iain Blair

A lot of people in Hollywood have made a lot of noise about “going green” in recent times, but few have put their money where their mouths are in the way Lauren Shuler Donner and Dick Donner have. The couple are one of the most successful and versatile producer/director teams in Hollywood – his credits include the Lethal Weapon franchise, Superman and The Omen while she’s produced such smash hits as Dave and Free Willy, You’ve Got Mail, Any Given Sunday, Radio Flyer and 3 Fugitives.

Shuler Donner is having a particularly prolific year with four highly-anticipated films upcoming: X Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman, which is the next chapter in the successful X Men Fox  film franchise, The Secret Life of Bees for Fox Searchlight, DreamWorks’ Hotel for Dogs which stars Emma Roberts,  and Cirque du Freak, a Universal film written by Paul Weitz who also directs the adaptation of the bestselling young adult’s book series by Darren Shan.

 I was chatting with both of them recently and it turns out that Lauren always reaches out to the studio heads when she begins a movie about recycling materials and making a donation to Go Zero, or a comparable organization, to help nullify the carbon footprint. “It’s been very easy doing it,” she told me. “In the early ‘90s I was part of a group called Echo when we were based at Warners, and we started the whole recycling thing. Then in the past few years, I started going to studio heads about bringing our carbon footprint down to zero when we’re making a movie. And different studios use different funds, but Fox, Dreamworks, Universal and so on agreed to do it. Isn’t that wonderful?”

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 By Iain Blair

I’ve always been into flying and gliding and do both whenever I get the chance. I even began lessons for my pilot’s licence a year ago – not cheap, though!!!  So I was particularly interested in the mysterious disappearance of billionaire and flying enthusiast Steve Fossett. I’ve hiked, backpacked and camped in the Sierras for years, and have heard so many stories of planes disappearing in the wilderness, with the wreckage only being found decades later, that I always felt he’d gone down there rather than in Nevada.

So when a hiker found Fossett’s FAA and glider licenses, among other belongings, near Mammoth Lakes, I wasn’t that surprised. But I was surprised at how fast the Discovery Channel moved to make a documentary about the events that will apparently air in the next month or two. Turns out, a camera team for Animal Planet just happened to be in the same area when the hiker made his discovery. So in this case, the Discovery Channel is definitely living up to its name.

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By Iain Blair

Turns out that Charlie Kaufman wasn’t exaggerating about the sorry state of indies now.  Right after I saw him, I got a call from a friend at Fox telling me that they’re shutting down their Fox Walden marketing venture – just two years after it arrived with a lot of hoopla. Now it’s going to be folded back into the main studio marketing division, and it comes on the heels of Fox’s decision earlier this year to close down its Fox Atomic indie operation. It’s telling that Fox Walden is no more, even though they were never in the business of edgy indie fare that’s always tougher to sell. They specialized in family films, but had few releases, and when the highly touted Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium starring Dustin Hoffman bombed badly, “the writing was on the wall,” said my friend.

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 By Iain Blair

Rumors about his poor health had been swirling around town for months, but it was still a shock to hear about Paul Newman’s death. I met and interviewed him several times, and he was always impressive in person – humble, courtly, and fascinating to talk to. He was also strikingly handsome, even in his late ‘70s, and it’s a measure of the man that he never let his great looks get in the way of playing a loser or a jerk – unlike so many leading men who always insist on playing heroes.

Typical of his interesting choices was Nobody’s Fool, a great and underrated film from ’94 in which he gives a brilliant and honest performance as a beaten down construction worker – it also features a great turn from Bruce Willis. Everyone’s seen Butch Cassidy, Cool Hand Luke and The Sting, but if you want to see Newman at the peak of his powers, rent Nobody’s Fool and watch some of the greatest acting you’ll ever see.

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 By Iain Blair

Got back to L.A. and the first film I saw, Synecdoche, New York, immediately plunged me headfirst into the weird, wacky world of writer Charlie Kaufman, who first grabbed people’s attention a decade ago with his inspired, surreal script for Being John Malkovich, which came to life in the equally inspired hands of director Spike Jonze.

Since then, Kaufman has happily continued dancing to the beat of his own drum with such offbeat films as Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation  and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now comes Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest script which also marks his directorial debut. It tells the funny, moving and very convoluted story of obsessive theatre director Caden Cotard  (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose life collapses when his marriage to his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) disintegrates and she moves to Germany with their only daughter, and deals with everything from death to illness, gross bodily fluids, despair, heartbreak and bad sex  - but always with a twinkle in the eye.

I met Kaufman to discuss his directorial debut and he was quick to defend the film which, naturally, has confused a lot of critics. “I think the movie is funny,” says Kaufman, “but it’s funny in a weird way. Hopefully the movie will work on a lot of levels, and people can read different things from it depending on who they are.” Not so funny for Kaufman is the current state of indie film. When I asked him about it, he didn’t mince words. “It’s a total disaster! It’s a REALLY bad time and they can’t get audiences, so no one wants to finance them, so they do fake indie stuff. And all the companies with the big studio set up to do indies are now folding. By the time we were ready to sell this, eight of the 12 companies that do this type of movie had gone out of business – in one year! It’s scary and very sad.”

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 By Iain Blair

On one of my last nights in London I had dinner with Lene Bausager, the gorgeous Danish producer with Ugly Duckling Films who lives in London. We met at Fanoos, a great Moroccan restaurant, and caught up on all her current projects. The big one coming up is Flashbacks of a Fool starring Daniel Craig. The soul searching drama comes to Los Angeles and New York theaters when Anchor Bay Entertainment releases the visually striking film on October 17 for an exclusive engagement, and it’s already getting big buzz in the UK for Craig’s dramatic departure from his Bond role and a truly “bare all” performance by the actor.

The movie also marks the first foray into producing for Craig and is the feature film debut of famed music video director Ballie Walsh (Massive Attack, INXS). Craig plays Joe Scott, a former Hollywood hunk who has led an over indulgent lifestyle of sex, drugs and celebrity. Still a striking man, even in his drug-addled 40s, the faded star leads a lonely life in a lush, but cold, Malibu mansion. He now stays secluded from the public that once adored him and he pushes away the truths about his current condition. Only when confronted by tragedy is he forced to face up to the realities of the past and take an unflinching look at what he has become. “He’s just so good in it,” Lene told me, “and a real pleasure to work with.” She’s also a big fan of director Walsh whose evocative and stylish mix of vision and music (a glimmering soundtrack with ’70s glam hits by Roxy Music, Scott Walker, and David Bowie) combined with powerful performances by Craig, Eden, and platinum-selling rapper Eve, make Flashbacks of a Fool a film to watch out for in the upcoming crowded fall release schedule.

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By Dyana Carmella
It’s interesting to see how quickly the industry keeps moving to clinch superb technology for better picture quality. In fact, Sony Electronics has announced they will be using 4K digital technology for most of their filmed productions. On October 2nd at Sony Studios in Culver City, Sony Electronics announced Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and Sony Pictures Entertainment have already agreed to hop on the digital bandwagon and will feature motion pictures in digital form mainly to promote the use of digital cinema projection systems.  Sony has a strong commitment to digital cinema and is powered by intense digital technology.

Mike Fidler, Senior Vice President of Digital Cinema Solutions & Services mentioned that 4K projectors will exceed consumer’s expectations and go beyond HD to bring digital cinema to life. Get ready for 4K digital cinema. Fidler said that Sony is “ready, willing and able to deliver” to turn theaters across the country into “Digital Destinations.” I got to see first hand what these 4K projectors could do. And, I got to say that I was quite impressed with the exceptional picture quality and display of vibrant images. Audiences will have a totally new experience as they visit their local theaters.

Sony Pictures has already released the blockbuster hit “Hancock” in 4K, which grossed more than $600 million at the box office. The lineup for the next motion pictures to be distributed in 4K are expected to be 2012, Salt and The Green Hornet.

For more information visit www.sony.com/digitalcinema

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