Behind The Scenes TV – The Making of New Movies, TV Shows and DVDs

DVD NEW RELEASES – Tuesday, May 1

ALPHA DOG – WIDESCREEN EDITION

Special Features:

• A Cautionary Tale:·The Making of Alpha Dog

• Witness Timeline · Get detailed information on each witness as the shocking events unfold

SHOWGIRLS – 2 DISC SHOWSTOPPER EDITION (Widescreen)

Special Features:

• 12 Never-Before-Seen Extended Musical Numbers

• Music Video "Listen" by Beyonce Knowles

• Dreamgirls Soundtrack Promo

• Go Behind the Scenes with the Full-Length Documentary Building The Dream

• Original Auditions and Screen Tests

• Previsualization Sequences

• Additional Featurettes Including Dream Logic and Dressing The Dreams

• And More!

FLETCH: THE JANE DOE EDITION (WIDESCREEN)

Special Features: 

• Just Charge it to the Underhills: Making and Remembering Fletch
• Relive the insanity of this comedy masterpiece through hilarious interviews with the cast and crew!
• From John Cocktoastin to Harry S. Truman: The Disguises
• See howChevy Chase's wild imagination and a few prosthetics created the wackiest characters of all time!
• Favorite Fletch Moments
• Relive all the funniest Fletch Moments

THE HITCHER – WIDESCREEN EDITION

Special Features: 

• Over 20 Minutes of Deleted Scenes, Including End Of The Road an alternate ending too terrifying for theaters!

• Road Kill - The Ultimate Car Crash: Behind the Scenes of the Amazing, Hard-Hitting Car Stunts

• Fuel Your Fear: The Making of The Hitcher

• And More!

AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN: SPECIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION

Special Features: 

• Commentary by Director Taylor Hackford

• An Officer And A Gentleman: 25 Years Later

• Return to Port Townsend

• True Stories of Military Romance

• The Music of An Officer And A Gentleman

• Gere and Gossett: Hand-to-Hand Combat

• Photo Gallery

BEHIND THE SCENES TV: 7 minute Spiderman 3 Preview

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LKsdU_nKO8]

SHORT TAKES

• New Line is remaking All of Me, the 1984 movie starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin. Created as a vehicle for Queen Latifah for this new remake, the plot updates the body switcheroo gimmick with Latifah as an outspoken female politician trapped inside the body of a conservative.  
• Flush from the box-office success of Wild Hogs, John Travolta segues into another kind of dog – Old Dogs, a Disney comedy that has just enlisted Robin Williams. They play business partners whose worlds are turned upside down when they come into the possession of a pair of twins. Old Dogs is also a family affair for Travolta as his wife, Kelly Preston and daughter Ella Travolta, are part of the cast. 
• Michael Douglas returns to the thriller genre with Courtroom Indifference. Based on Adam Penenberg's 2003 book of the same name, the story centers on attorney Tab Hunter who fought a landmark liability case against automaker Ford on behalf of a woman paralyzed from an accident due to flaws in her Ford vehicle.  
• The Roger Corman classic Death Race is set for a remake with Transporter star Jason Statham in the driver’s seat. The project has had a storied development history at Paramount. It’s set in a Dystopian future where a violent death race forces drivers to mow down innocent bystanders. And get this, the President is on it. Tom Cruise (who once considered the lead role) and Paula Wagner are producing. 
• Ex-classmates Kevin Spacey and Val Kilmer will star in Columbus Day, a heist thriller about a thief who tries to set things right when the heist goes wrong while trying to repair his relationship with his ex-wife. The film is being produced by Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions and co-stars Wilmer Valderrama and Marg Helgenberger.

THE NAKED DVD: BABEL

The Naked DVD is a new, regular column that spotlights DVDs that have been stripped of any or all special features. Most often this is the first issued DVD of a given movie that usually contain the bare bones supplements such as a trailer and nothing else. Hence the term naked. Our goal here at Behind The Scenes is to coax the studios and production companies to come up with a spectacular version of the mentioned DVD through our own wish list of special features. Hopefully, our honorable mentions could influence the next version of the said DVD to be released with all the bells and whistles that the movie deserves of the filmmakers’ vision. 

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel is a powerful triptych of loosely connected stories spanning the globe from Morocco to Japan to Mexico. Inarritu’s affinity for working in the multiple storyline format has made him an agile storyteller of the form. Dominating the awards season a few months ago, Babel follows Amores Perros and 21 Grams, both engrossing stories on their own, to complete a film trilogy. Bending time and space, the stories in Babel form a collage of contrasting landscapes informed by universal emotions.  

In Babel, the Moroccan story of innocence lost and burnt in a second of carefree child’s play is especially heart tugging. The Japanese chapter is a story of isolation and detachment as a deaf teenager tries to connect with the world around her and her human longing only brings her more heartbreak. The US-Mexican story is centered around immigration as a nanny takes her two American wards to Mexico for a wedding and suffers the consequences. The film is ripe with social commentary about the state of the world and the cultural barriers that prevents any meaningful interaction from taking place. But there is a soft heart and empathy for the world it depicts behind Innaratu’s lens. 

Watching the DVD was less than satisfactory. Needless to say, for such a global project with its biblical implications, there is nary a special feature to cast light on the film. Besides a trailer, we’re only offered the theatrical version of the film. We know that the studio (Paramount Vantage) is stockpiling its special edition for a future date but The Naked DVD is here to present its wish list for this heretofore future Babel DVD: 

• A director’s commentary from Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (although we’ve heard they have stopped collaborating) 
• A behind-the-scenes documentary that shows the shooting of all three stories in different continents. We’re thinking at least 45 minutes. 
• The collaboration between Inarritu, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett – only because their story was a very intimate story set in a constricted setting for most of the film. 
• Scoring the movie with composer Gustavo Santaolalla (who won an Oscar for Babel and previously for Brokeback Mountain) 
• Editing tricks for a narrative this sprawling and disjointed in its structure 
• A focus on the local actors of each storyline and how Inarritu communicated and worked with them 

INTERVIEW: ‘Hot Fuzz’ director Edgar Wright

The team behind the quickly-gaining-cult-status film Shaun of the Dead follows up their success with a new film called Hot Fuzz. Just released in the US, it has already been doing robust business in the UK. The director, Edgar Wright, hails from a music video and British episodic TV background. According to Wright, the idea behind Hot Fuzz was hatched prior to the making of Shaun of the Dead:

Kind of the point of the film is that in the UK, there are no action films, particularly. There are hardly any police films at all. In the UK, people make gangster films because gangsters are considered cool, whereas the cops couldn't be less cool, not just as authority figures, but the fact that they don't have guns. So you can't really make a British police film. So that's what we set out to do, because we were so sick of gangster films. How can we make a British Lethal Weapon? How is it even possible with no guns? So that's what we set out to do and essentially the first half of it answers the question of why there are no British action films and then we try to have our cake and eat it by throwing in running and jumping and explosions and shit.

If Shaun of the Dead was an irreverent spoof of zombie films, then Hot Fuzz is a spoof of police action movies. The film's tone toes the line between edgy, funny and violent. Working with the same creative team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Hot Fuzz follows the adventures of a top metro London cop (Pegg) who is assigned to a small sleepy town where no murders have been recorded in twenty years. Until, of course, now when a series of grisly murders start to happen. Edgar Wright chats in this interview about the influences of Hot Fuzz and why Jason Statham is the new Charles Bronson.

Writer-Director David Goyer fades into the background with ‘The Invisible’

David Goyer is best known as the screenwriter of the Blade series of movies and Batman Begins. His initial foray into directing was ZigZag, an independent movie about an autistic teenager that went nowhere theatrically.  His freshman duties found him helming Blade: Trinity, the third movie in the Blade series. Now he returns to the director chair with a more personal story of teenage angst called The Invisible.  Based on the novel by Mats Wahl that was made into the Swedish film Den Onsynlige, Goyer’s take on an American reimagining is darker in tone, as most of his writing is. A teenager (Justin Chatwin, Tom Cruise’s son in War of the Worlds) is beaten to death and wakes up in limbo between life and death where nobody can see him. As he struggles to find his killer, the answers reveal a dark universe of complicated betrayals and unlikely friendship. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyLbBmt1Yg0]

The Invisible marks a departure for Goyer from the superhero-type material into more dramatic territory, grounds he covered in ZigZag. Like any writer-director that doesn’t want to be pigeonholed in any particular genre, Goyer is branching out between smaller independent films and big budget tentpole studio movies. 

Meanwhile, Goyer continues to tread on the dark superhero material he is widely regarded for in the industry. His next project, The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins is currently shooting for a summer 2008 release. He has also announced plans to produce a new Green Arrow movie called Supermax with a broader interpretation of the character’s mythology. In this interview, David Goyer talks about the various superhero landscape he’s skirted in adapting for the silver screen.

Tony Scott develops movie project of ex-movie agent turned war documentarian

 
 Pat Dollard (center)

A few months ago I read an article in Vanity Fair’s March Hollywood issue by Evan Wright. It chronicled the rise, fall and rebirth of a CAA movie agent named Pat Dollard. Before his meltdown in the high stakes racket that is celebrity mongering, Dollard represented Steve Soderbergh and orchestrated the deals that landed Soderbergh Traffic. Grappling with drug and relationship issues, Dollard finally bottomed out. Sending a note to all his collegagues that just said “Later.”, everyone assumed this was a suicide note. But instead, Dollard hopped on a plane to Iraq and embedded himself with a group of Marines and shot a pro-war documentary called The Young Americans. Now back picking up the pieces of his life, he is hawking the documentary to distributors. Needless to say, this was all fascinating reading.

Now, it’s been recently announced that director Tony Scott has decided to make Dollard’s life into a movie. I can’t blame him. That’s what exactly popped into my head - this was a life tailor made for the movies in its absurd madness. Scott may be the perfect director for this project given his style and predilection for over-the-top theatrics with his cutting and camera. Take Domino for instance, another subject with a Hollywood connection. It was presented in disjointed and fragmented style which is quite the Tony Scott standard (also take a look at Man on Fire). Scott can deliver a projectile vomit of  broken psyche images like no other director. I don’t expect his treatment of Dollard’s life to be any tamer than his previous films.

The biggest question to ponder is who will play Dollard. In that regard, Dollard will have a lot of say in since he brings a wealth of experience negotiating the back corridors of power in Hollywood. Here's our bet: Tobey Maguire, in the hardest and edgiest role you've ever seen him in. However, sparking any kind of talent would depend on the kind of script that Dollard and Wright produce. No word yet if The Young Americans has found distribution.

INTERVIEW: Writer-Director Jonathan Kasdan arrives with ‘In The Land of Women’

Director Jon Kasdan (left) with Adam Brody on the set of “In the Land of Women”.
Photo by Liane Hentscher and courtesy of Warner Bros.

Following on the heels of his father Lawrence Kasdan and brother Jake Kasdan, Jonathan Kasdan arrives with his feature directing debut called In The Land of Women. Shot on a US$10 million budget from Warner Independent, it follows a heartbroken TV writer (Adam Brody, breaking away from the OC) who returns to suburban Detroit to nurse his ailing grandmother and begins to emotionally connect with his neighbors – a mother and daughter played by Meg Ryan and Kristen Stewart. 

In The Land of Women falls squarely in the realm of the disillusioned-young-man-heads-back-home sub-genre. One of the most successful movies in that sub-genre has been Zach Braff’s Garden State and currently on network TV, October Road is fanning the flames of another disillusioned writer who returns to his hometown to discover his roots. What does Kasdan bring to the story that audiences might not have already seen? He describes the genesis of In The Land of Women: 

It’s the kind of movie that I really like. I’m a big Jerry Maguire fan, I’m a big Say Anything fan; those are the kinds of movies I really like. In fact, there are references to those kinds of movies in [In the Land of Women]. And they’re not something people are making a lot of in Hollywood right now.

Like his brother Jake, Jonathan briefly dabbled with writing for the cult TV show that was cancelled called Freaks and Geeks. In this audio, video and print interview, Jonathan Kasdan recounts the travails of bringing his feature to the big screen.

BEHIND THE SCENES TV: A Day in the Life of Jensen Ackles & Jared Padalecki from the TV Series ‘Supernatural’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hrCox6MEw]

DVD NEW RELEASES – Tuesday, April 24

CODE NAME: THE CLEANER

   

Special Features: 

"Moppin' Up with the Cleaning Crew" Featurette 

DÉJÀ VU

Special Features:

• The Surveillance Window - Go back in time and experience behind-the-scenes moments with the filmmakers

• The Ferry Explosion

• Stunts: Ferry

• Filming in
  New Orleans

• Split-Time Car Chase

• And Lots More

• Deleted and Extended Scenes

HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS (SPECIAL EDITION)

Special Features:

• Feature Commentary with Director William Dear

• Deleted Scenes

• Harry... Finding the Missing Link Featurette

• Making of Harry And The
  Hendersons

• Newswrap Featurette

• Theatrical Trailer

LIITLE CHILDREN

Special Features: 

None Listed 

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM (TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION)

Special Features:

• Commentary by Director Shawn Levy

• Commentary by Writers Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon

• Featurettes: Bringing the Museum to Life, Directing 101, Monkey Business, Building the Museum, Historical Threads: The Costumes of Night At The Museum, Making Night At The Museum

• Deleted and Extended Scenes with Optional Commentary by Director Shawn Levy

• Blooper Reel

• Comedy Central's Reel Comedy: Night At The Museum

• The Director's Vision Comes Alive - Storyboard-to-Screen Comparison

• Fox Movie Channel Presents: Making a Scene

• Fox Movie Channel Presents: Life After Film School

• Reunite with Rexy DVD-Rom Game

PARENTHOOD: SPECIAL EDITION

Special Features:

• Art Imitating Life: Academy Award®-winning director Ron Howard takes you behind the scenes as he and the crew reminisce about how their own lives affected the film.

• Family Reunion: Casting director Jane Jenkins shares her personal on-set stories about the incredible ensemble of actors.

• Words And Music: Award-winning songwriter Randy Newman discusses the film's musical themes and reflects on his multi-faceted career.

THE QUEEN

Special Features:

• The Making of The Queen

• Audio Commentary with Director Stephen Frears and Writer Peter Morgan

• Audio Commentary with British Historian and Royal Expert Robert Lacey, Author of Majesty

TSUNAMI: THE AFTERMATH

Special Features:

• The Story Behind the Film Featurette

• Recovering Nature's Fury Featurette