In 1984, Paul Reubens was looking for a director. The film in development was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and Reubens, who had been working on the perversely juvenile conceptual-art project for about 15 years, was desperate to find someone he could trust to direct it with style. So, as people in Los Angeles do, he asked around at a party. One of the guests had just seen Frankenweenie—Tim Burton’s 1984 live-action short about a dog that is brought back to life. Burton had no previous experience as a feature-film director, but the two men immediately bonded. Only 25 at the time, Burton got the job, and the pair watched as their strange but imaginative film earned more than $40 million at the box office.

Of course, these days, Burton doesn’t need to rely on word of mouth to find work. Throughout the many stages of his 30 years behind the camera, there has remained a consistent underlying emotional current in Burton’s work—a delicate balance of sadness, humor, and horror that matches his eye for gothic beauty and mythical surrealism.

The 51-year-old filmmaker has written, directed, and/or produced more than 20 movies. Between 1988 and 1996, he was responsible for Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Ed Wood (1994), and Mars Attacks!(1996). It was also during this period that he began working with Johnny Depp, who has acted in seven of his films—a transformative relationship for both men.

READ INTERVIEW AT INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

Where the hell has Christopher Lloyd been? The legendary funny man who’s worked steadily on film and television for years, is bringing his eccentric persona to NBC’s “Chuck.” The news recently broke that he’ll have a guest spot on the action comedy this spring before its highly anticipated finale in May.

The news of Lloyd’s casting was first announced via “Chuck’s” executive producer, Josh Schwartz. He spilled the beans on his official Twitter page that the actor would be coming onto the show, appearing in episode 16 of this season. Over at EW, they went even further and revealed that Lloyd would play “a therapist who Chuck turns to when the pressures of the spy biz become too much for him to bear.” The episode should air sometime in April or May.

How crazy do you have to be to seek out Christopher Lloyd for help? Schwartz has stated in the past that one of the actor’s most well known films (Back to the Future) has had a heavy influence on the show. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he played someone as off the wall as Doc Brown? I think Lloyd’s still got it. Do you think he’ll play the character crazy or straight-laced?

Source: Screencave

DEAR JOHN

Director: Lasse Hallström
Stars: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins
Studio: Sony Pictures Releasing

The Plot: A romantic drama about a soldier (Tatum) who falls for a co-ed (Seyfried) while he’s home on leave. Their relationship is tested in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, an event that causes him to re-enlist for service.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

Director: Pierre Morel
Stars: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Studio: Lionsgate

The Plot: In Paris, a young employee in the office of the US Ambassador (Myers) hooks up with an American spy (Travolta) looking to stop a terrorist attack in the city.

FROZEN

Director: Adam Green
Stars: Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell, Kevin Zegers
Studio: Anchor Bay Films

The Plot: Three snowboarders become stranded on a chairlift at a ski resort. Realizing it’ll be a week before the resort opens again, they are forced to make a series of life-or-death decisions.

RED RIDING: 1974

Director: Julian Jarrold
Stars: Andrew Garfield, David Morrissey
Studio: IFC Films

The Plot: The first in a trilogy of films that fictionalize the Yorkshire Ripper murders, a series of crimes that gripped northwest England in the 1970s and ’80s. Followed by Red Riding: 1980 and Red Riding: 1983.

Warning, SPOILERS ahead. If you haven’t seen the season premiere of “Lost” yet, you might not want to continue. “Lost” fans who have now seen the premiere can read ahead for some explanation from Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. (Comments are likely to be full of spoilers also, you’ve been warned again.)

Once upon a time in Germany, a very smart and spiritual man tried to answer a very tricky and troubling question. In a world created by an allegedly benevolent and omnipotent God, why the heck is there suffering and evil? In the world of philosophy, this field of inquiry is called Theodicy, generally defined as an attempt to understand and justify the behavior of God. The genius German dude thought long and hard about this “problem of evil” question and came up with an answer that was unusually heady for the time. He said that despite the existence of evil, this world is actually “the best of all possible worlds,” as if our universe is the least offensive of countless alternatives, or even a pastiche comprised of pieces from the best parts of all. Wild.

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Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, television producers, and TV enthusiasts, launches its website today with a script contest awarding a $5,000 prize to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share TV scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging enthusiasm for their story. Membership to Storyboard TV is free and open to all, and all members will be able to read, critique, and vote on their favorite TV scripts.

The script contest, which begins February 1^st and runs through March 31, 2010, is open to anyone with a TV script for an original one hour series. After a month of peer review, ten semi-finalist scripts will be forwarded to a panel of writers, producers, and directors which will in turn narrow the field to three. The three finalist scriptwriters will receive an industry reading of their television dramas in New York City in June 2010. The winner of the script contest, announced on July 1, 2010, will be chosen from the finalists exclusively by Storyboard TV’s membership community. In addition to awarding $5,000 prize, Storyboard TV will option and develop the winning TV script for possible production.

“I started this script contest and website with the ridiculously lofty goal to ‘save fiction television,’” says Rachel Levy, Storyboard TV’s founder. “We’re seeing more and more long-form fiction replaced by sitcoms and reality programming on the network schedules. I’m hoping that Storyboard TV will be a place where scriptwriters and their audiences can nurture the television drama while we search for new ways to affordably produce and distribute it.”

Storyboard TV believes in the power of the television drama to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better. Storyboard TV’s mission is to move show selection and pre-production away from the networks and directly to the web. Established in 2009, Storyboard TV endeavors to cultivate new writers and TV scripts, to nurture the connection between the scriptwriter and the fan, and to shepherd new television drama into production during the Internet age.

Mike Starr has done his share of mob movies. The veteran character actor and onetime Chicagoan starred in the local “Osso Bucco” and has done supporting turns in “Goodfellas” and dozens of features and TV shows.

When the young filmmakers of Beverly Ridge Pictures approached him in 2007 to co-star in their take on the genre, “Chicago Overcoat,” everything clicked.

“I liked the chance to play a South Side guy who talked like people I knew, to put another regionalism on film,” Starr says. Plus he’d get to work again with old friends Frank Vincent, Armand Assante, and Danny Goldring. And he’d get to play a boss for once.

“Chicago Overcoat” on Tuesday opened the 2010 season of the Midwest Independent Film Festival.

READ ARTICLE IN REL CHICAGO

Learn about movie producing to make your own movies

There are great sci-fi films like Avatar and District 9, which go on to earn the accolades of Oscar voters and audiences around the globe. And then there are brilliant movies like Primer or Dark City, which are all but forgotten in the multiplex, reduced to cult hit status on video and DVD, leaving fans wondering where things went wrong.

We’ve surveyed a great many of these underrated sci-fi movie masterpieces. And now we’re talking to some of the filmmakers behind these unsung gems. A couple weeks ago we interviewed Alex Proyas, the mastermind behind Dark City (and the director of the forthcoming Dracula: Year Zero). Joining Dark City on our list was 1997’s Gattaca, the sci-fi thriller about a world of genetic purity, and the struggles of one naturally-born human (Ethan Hawke) in pursuing his dreams amid a repressive, stratified society. See our full review here.

We spoke to Ethan Hawke about what it was like to star in an underrated masterpiece:

Read more: http://techland.com/2010/02/03/hawke-gattaca/#ixzz0eWtypQRn

Every now and again, Hollywood makes a go at depicting the working class, often around Oscar season and usually to hilarious effect. The story is generally some slow-moving, minor-key piece involving ordinary folks struggling with ordinary problems in ordinary parts of the country. To offset the dreariness of such an errand, the lead character—a waitress, maid, or stripper with kid/husband problems—is usually played by a jaw-droppingly attractive star, who wins positive press for being willing to subvert her beauty in order to portray one of the great unwashed doing whatever it is they do out there in the dull diabetic landmass between Los Angeles and New York City. (Hiring ugly people to play working class is a job best left to the English.)

This stunt casting has been seen most recently in Precious, in which Mariah Carey won great acclaim for donning a bad haircut and office clothes that look like something Klaus Nomi might have designed for Kmart back in the early ’90s; and in the film Trucker, an indie-darling out this month on DVD, starring the adorable Michelle Monaghan as a hard-bitten long-distance trucker. (Ebert: “Her performance clearly deserves an Oscar nomination.”)

This approach does have its practical side. With a fetching actress onboard, it’s easier to attract funding and publicity for the film. This solves a financial problem, but it creates a bigger artistic one. Namely, how do you sell this actress in this role without burying her so deep in the part that it defeats the point of having her in the film to begin with?

READ ARTICLE AT SLATE