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Mark Dippé and Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, who created groundbreaking vfx work on "Jurassic Park," "T2," and "The Abyss," talk about what's different about the vfx industry today.

The post ILM’s Rebel ‘Jurassic Park’ Artists Reflect On The State of VFX Art Today appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

American animated features are unstoppable all over the globe.

The post ‘Finding Dory’ Three-Peats In U.S.; ‘Secret Life of Pets,’ ‘Ice Age’ Strong Internationally appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Dreamworks Animation CEO recently said his company is "in the toilet," but he seems to be doing fine himself.

The post Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg Spent $353,000 On Dinner Yesterday appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Disney has unveiled a teaser for The BFG. The story for this movie comes from Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book.

Mashable reports that Steven Spielberg served as the director on this project. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Ruby Barnhill as young Sophie and Mark Rylance playing the titular character.

According to The Guardian, other members of the cast include Bill Hader, Rebecca Hall and Jermaine Clement. The theatrical release date has been set for July 01, 2016. (via Rolling Stone)

The filmmaking essay series "Every Frame A Painting" takes a trip into the wondrous, disciplined mind of legendary animation director Chuck Jones.

Universal Pictures has unveiled the final trailer for Jurassic World. The story for this film was inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Chris Pratt as Owen, Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire and swarms of dinosaurs.

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the director behind the Jurassic Park and The Lost World movies, served as the executive producer for this project. According to RollingStone.com, it will hit theaters on June 12th. Follow these links to watch the teaser trailer and the global trailer. (via CinemaBlend.com)

Academy Award-nominated actress Viola Davis (pictured, via) has signed on to play abolitionist Harriet Tubman in a biopic. Tubman, who was born into slavery, became well-known for escaping and leading 300 others to freedom through an Underground Railroad.

The story will be based on Kate Clifford Larson’s biography, Bound For The Promised Land. Deadline.com reports that “HBO Films has teamed with writer Kirk Ellis, producer Doug Ellin and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin TV” for this project.

Here’s more from the article: “Cliff Dorfman, who had optioned the book, was a writer on the HBO comedy Entourage, created and executive produced by Ellin, who has a deal with the pay cable network. All key auspices have strong ties to HBO.”

After months of speculation, Scarlett Johansson has been confirmed as the star of DreamWorks's live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga "Ghost in the Shell."

Ruby Barnhill, a newcomer English actress, will play Sophie in The BFG. This project marks the first time Barnhill will take on a feature part.

Steven Spielberg will take the helm of this Roald Dahl film adaptation as the director. Mark Rylance, a British theatre actor, has been cast in the titular role.

Here’s more from Deadline: “Published in 1982, The BFG is the story of a young London girl and the world’s only benevolent giant who introduces her to the beauty and peril of Giant Country. The two set off on an adventure (with the aid of the Queen of England) to capture the evil, man-eating giants who have been invading the human world. Spielberg is beginning production early in the New Year and Disney releases on July 1, 2016 in the U.S. EOne will bring it to the UK on July 22, 2016.”

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Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg will direct a live-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved novel, The BFG.

Variety reports that DreamWorks had acquired the film rights back in 2010. E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison will pen the script. The finished movie will be released some time in 2016.

According to an announcement posted on the RoaldDahl.com blog, “The BFG tells the tale of a lovable, dream-hunting giant and Sophie, the little girl who first spots him through the window of the orphanage where she lives. It has continued to delight audiences ever since its release, and was one of Roald’s own favourites. In 1989, the story was adapted as an animated TV film.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Kirk Curnutt

The novel that scared a generation out of the ocean and inspired everything from Shark Week to Sharknado recently turned forty. Commemorations of Peter Benchley’s Jaws have been as rare as megalodon sightings, however. Ballantine has released a new paperback edition featuring an amusing list of the author’s potential titles (The Grinning Fish, Pisces Redux), and in February an LA fundraiser for Shark Savers/Wildaid performed excerpts promising “an evening of relentless terror (and really awkward sex).” Otherwise, silence.

The reason is obvious. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 adaptation is so totemic that the novel is considered glorified source material, despite selling twenty-million copies. Rare is the commentator who doesn’t harp on its faults, and rarer still the fan who defends it. Critics dismiss the book as “airport literature,” while genre lovers complain it lacks “virtually every single thing that makes the movie great.” Negative perceptions arguably begin with Spielberg himself. Amid the legendary production problems that plagued the making of the movie—pneumatic sharks that didn’t work, uncooperative ocean conditions that tripled the shooting schedule—the director managed to suggest that his biggest obstacle was Benchley’s original narrative: “If we don’t succeed in making this picture better than the book,” he said, “we’re in real trouble.”

Jaws by Peter Benchley, first edition paperback, 1975.

It’s unfortunate that Benchley gets so little love. In the mid-seventies book-Jaws didn’t simply inspire a movie but was integral to the overall phenomenon. My mother brought home the hardback months before Spielberg even began filming. As the pre-release hype roiled throughout spring 1975, her ten-year old cobbled together $1.95 for his very own paperback, which featured Roger Kastel’s iconic illustration of a massive beast with a mouthful of stalactites and stalagmites speeding toward a naked woman. (The hardback’s cover was toothless, both literally and figuratively; the shark looks like an index finger with a paper cut aiming to tickle its prey). Shortly after seeing Jaws I owned the soundtrack with John Williams’s ominous dun-dun theme; co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log, which detailed the torturous filming; and a Jaws beach towel, which made me the envy of the pool, if only briefly.

Obsessed, I collected newspaper and magazine clippings on sharks. Following the loony lead of Mad, Cracked, and Sick, I drew goofy, pun-laden parodies (Paws) and became a connoisseur of gory rip-offs (Grizzly, Orca). My paperback was essential to feeding my frenzy. I managed only three matinees before the movie left town. That was as many times per hour as I probably pored over Benchley’s bloodier passages. The urge to revisit scenes would today send a young fan to YouTube for clips or to Google for GIFs and memes. For a pre-Internet, pre-computer kid, however, rereading was the original refresh and replay. I knew Jaws so inside out I could cite the page number where the legs of the boy my age “were severed at the hips” and “sank, spinning slowly,” and I could flip straight to the bizarre moment when the shark hunter Quint insults his quarry’s penis.

I also detailed differences between the book and movie in my journal. (I was an only child; I had free time). The first change beguiled the beginning writer in me: “[Benchley] didn’t like any of his characters,” Spielberg declared, “so none of them were very likable. He put them in a situation where you were rooting for the shark to eat the people—in alphabetical order.”

The director flattened Benchley’s characters into eminently relatable archetypes: the everyman-cop with a near-fatal fear of water, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider); Quint, the aged fisherman (Robert Shaw); and the cocky scientist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). Their counterparts on the page admittedly lack both their comic relief (Scheider’s famous deadpan “You’re going to need a bigger boat” upon first seeing the shark) and their riveting monologues (especially Quint’s tale of surviving the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis, brilliantly if soddenly delivered by Shaw). Benchley preferred his people perturbing, not heroic. His insecure, snockered Brody belligerently spoils his wife’s dinner party; Hooper beds Mrs. Brody; and for bait Quint uses a dolphin fetus he brags of carving from its mother’s womb.

Despite its armrest-gripping terror, Spielberg’s movie is cathartic because man ultimately conquers nature. Like most audiences, I fist-pumped and cheered when Brody blew the shark to smithereens by exploding an oxygen tank. The book’s battle is less intense and yet more primal. Benchley’s captain hurls his harpoons as Queequeg or Tashtego would instead of firing them from a gun, while Quint’s and Hooper’s deaths are cruelly ironic. Maybe it’s because my friends and I had great fun sneaking ketchup packets into the pool to reenact it, but Shaw’s blood-belching final close-up never haunted me as much as the novel’s Ahab-inspired image of Quint dragged to a watery grave snared in his own harpoon line. Hooper’s fate is even more macabre. As the ichthyologist is turned into a human toothpick Brody attempts an ill-conceived rescue by strafing the water with rifle fire. He manages to miss the shark completely yet land a bullet in Hooper’s neck. Long before reading Melville, I intuited that this was how a naturalistic universe mocked humanity.

Jaws remains a very seventies-novel. I rather like that quality, much as, by contrast, I like that Spielberg’s movie hasn’t aged a day. (Thanks to Deep Blue Sea and Sharknado, we know how un-scary CGI sharks are compared to life-size pneumatic ones). Benchley’s book feels the way the first half of its decade did: amorphous and off-center, dubious of heroes, titillated by dirty talk.

Perhaps I might feel differently if I hadn’t read it on the cusp of adolescence, but Jaws reminds me of how novels attuned me to adult frailties. It’s going overboard to say it exposed me to the sharkish side of humanity, but I could recognize Brody’s resentments, Quint’s unapologetic violence, and Hooper’s sense of sexual entitlement in men I knew. A year after I outgrew my obsession I was berated for entering a community-theater dressing room and discovering a very Mrs. Brody-like friend of my family’s kissing a man I knew wasn’t her husband.

Benchley’s novel certainly made me afraid of the water, but unlike the movie, it did nothing to convince me I was any safer on dry land.

Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery, Alabama, campus, where Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in 1918. His publications include A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004), the novels Breathing Out the Ghost (2008) and Dixie Noir (2009), and Brian Wilson (2012). He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

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The post “The Mouth that roared”: Peter Benchley’s Jaws at 40 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Tweet The opening titles of The Adventures of Tintin, while not technically part of the screenplay, offer a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek symposium on the action-adventure  genre.  Or, that is to say, on the films of Steven Spielberg.  There’s a boy, he’s got a companion, in this case a dog, and there is danger and bad guys and [...]

By Candy Gourlay First, let us all take a moment to gaze upon Harrison Ford in his prime. I've been watching a lot of Making Of videos recently and was struck by director Steven Spielberg's negativity when discussing MY favourite Indiana Jones film, The Temple of Doom. I loved that film, but googling around I discovered long discourses about how it was too dark and interviews with

Even Steven Spielberg can get a rejection letter. It seems that Daniel Day-Lewis—who plays Lincoln in Spielberg’s presidential Academy Award Dominated movie, originally did not want to play Abraham Lincoln. Spielberg didn’t let the rejection letter go to waste, he stowed it away for safekeeping and the letter showed up at the awards-podium as reading material last week.

Julie Miller reporter for Vanity Fair wrote, “Before presenting Day-Lewis with the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor, Speilberg read aloud the Oscar winner’s thoughtful brush-off.”

Here is Steven’s Rejection Letter:

Dear Steven,

It was a real pleasure just to sit and talk with you. I listened very carefully to what you had to say about this compelling history, and I’ve since read the script and found it in all the detail in which it describe these monumental events and in the compassionate portraits of all the principal characters, both powerful and moving. I can’t account for how at any given moment I feel the need to explore life as opposed to another, but I do know that I can only do this work if I feel almost as if there is no choice; that a subject coincides inexplicably with a very personal need and a very specific moment in time. In this case, as fascinated as I was by Abe, it was the fascination of a grateful spectator who longed to see a story told, rather than that of a participant. That’s how I feel now in spite of myself, and though I can’t be sure that this won’t change, I couldn’t dream of encouraging you to keep it open on a mere possibility. I do hope this makes sense Steven, I’m glad you’re making the film, I wish you the strength for it, and I send both my very best wishes and my sincere gratitude to you for having considered me.

Daniel Day-Lewis

What can we learn from this? Well, Spielberg didn’t give up. After receiving the letter, he recruited Tony Kushner to pen a new screenplay from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals—one that would earn Day-Lewis’s approval. Apparently he did, because Lincoln is positioned to run away with the Oscars in February.

So the next time you get a rejection letter, keep this story in mind and revise your manuscript. Revision does improve our work and sometimes we just need someone to pull our best out of us.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

The first trailer for Steven Spielberg‘s The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn has been released. Above, we’ve embedded the trailer.

What do you think about this first peek at the footage? The adaptation of Herge’s beloved Tintin series hits theaters December 23rd.

Here’s more about the film: “Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures Present a 3D Motion Capture Film ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish. Starring Jamie Bell (“Billy Elliot,” “Defiance”) as Tintin, the intrepid young reporter whose relentless pursuit of a good story thrusts him into a world of high adventure, and Daniel Craig (“Quantum of Solace,” “Defiance”) as the nefarious Red Rackham.” (Via i09)

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French film site Films Actu has what look to be more Empire mag scans of the Steven Spielberg-directed Tintin movie. They show the Thompson/Dupin twins, villain Barnaby and the endless desert. Also, based on these stills, Tintin will spend the entire movie with his face obscured or in shadow.

While there may be some perception that comic book movie fever is cooling off, at least one super-epic-mega film that will change the world is in the works — the Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson Tintin 3D-mocap-CGI epic. Spielberg is directing while Jackson produces The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, which comes out 12/23/11. The cast includes Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones, Mackenzie Crook, Carey Elwes, and Daniel Mays, most of whom did mocap or supplied vocal talents. This far, details of the movie have been closely guarded — Tintin being one of the world’s most popular characters — although not so much in America. From a business standpoint, a successful film could relaunch the Tintin books in the English speaking world, WATCHMEN style. With so much talent involved, expectations are high.

But what will it look like? Empire magazine has the first images from the movie, and every website including this has them up. Click for larger versions.

From where we sit? It’s not quite as disturbing as The Polar Express, but it’s not exactly cuddly, either.

What do you think?

In the first of what we hope are many journalistic coups, The Indubitable Dweeb has managed to land an interview with the erstwhile most-wanted-man-in-America, accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. We asked some tough questions. He gave some surprising answers. No matter what you think of miranda rights and the role of bloggers in the reporting of terrorism, you’ll want to read this fascinating journey into the mind of a man who a few days before was just another immigrant, another face in the crowd.

ID: Let’s start with your name. Faisal Shahzad. That’s not a name most Americans are familiar with, or certainly comfortable with. Is there something else we can call you? A nickname? Anything like that?

FS: Sure, sure. A lot of people, they call me Fievel.

ID: Like the cartoon mouse?

FS: Exactly! An American Tail. It’s a funny story actually. Back in Pakistan, when I was a kid, my sister and I, we use to love to sing together. Duets, you know? There was a talent show at the local mosque and we signed up to do Close My Eyes Forever, which is a song by Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne.

ID: We’re familiar with the song.

FS: Showstopper, right? Anyhoo, the night before the talent show, we see this movie. This cartoon.  And there’s this song. Somewhere Out There. It’s sung by cartoon mice and it’s out of tune and it’s almost like a bad Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad, but damn it, it works. I’m telling you, it absolutely breaks your heart. So we ditched the ripped jeans and teased hair which, come to think of it, weren’t exactly Taliban-friendly, and we sported some rags and mouse ears and sang Somewhere Out There. And we killed. Just blew the beards right off the crowd. The next morning, people started calling me Fievel. “Keep wishing on that same bright star, Fievel!” That sort of thing. A few years later, I went through a Gomer Pyle phase, I tried to convince people to call me Shazam!, but it never took. It was Fievel then. It’s still Fievel now.

ID: You are aware that Fievel is Jewish, aren’t you?

FS (after a long pause): But he is a mouse?

ID: Yes. A Russian Jewish mouse. His last name is Mousekewitz.

FS: No. You’re wrong. I have the blu-ray at home. I watch it once a year. I’m pretty sure he’s Chechen or something.

ID: Fair enough. You’re entitled to your interpretation. In any case, do you find yourself relating to Fievel’s story.

FS: You know, I do. I was an immigrant to America, just like him. I’m not particularly fond of cats, just like him. There are a lot of coincidences between our stories.

ID: Did Fievel ever try to blow up Times Square?

FS: Well, no…but that doesn’t mean he didn’t want to. It’s never stated explicitly, but I’ve always assumed that sometime before he reached America, Fievel travelled to Pakistan for some training in explosives. There’s a scene where he unleashes the