Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It was once so rich that Concorde used to fly from Caracas to Paris. But in the last three years its economy has collapsed. Hunger has gripped the nation for years. Now, it’s killing people and animals that are dying of starvation. The Venezuelan government knows, but won’t admit it!!! Four in five Venezuelans live in poverty. People queue for hours to buy food. Much of the time they go without. People are also dying from a lack of medicines. Inflation is at 82,766% and there are warnings it could exceed one million per cent by the end of this year. Venezuelans are trying to get out. The UN says 2.3 million people have fled the country - 7% of the population.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Theater Owners Fuming Over Studios' VOD Plan...

News of the DirecTV deal, which is likely to include titles like Sony's "Just Go With It," adds new twist to CinemaCon.

LAS VEGAS – Feeling blindsided, theater owners were furious Thursday that four Hollywood studios didn't brief them on plans to launch a new premium VOD service on DirecTV late next month, followed swiftly by Comcast and VUDU. Exhibitors could respond by changing how they book films and play trailers.

OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS
DirecTV to Launch Premium VOD in April
Adding to their ire, word of the service broke just as exhibitors and studios were together in Las Vegas for CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners. Throughout Caesars Palace, home of the show, meetings between distributors and exhibitors ended abruptly as theater owners scrambled to make sense of the news.

Warner Bros., Fox, Sony and Universal are all on board, according to insiders.
The movies will be available 60 days after their release in theaters for $29.99.

Fox Searchlight titles will be offered 60 days from the date that they go wide.
In a strongly worded statement, National Assn. of Theater Owners John Fithian said the VOD service could fundamentally alter the economic relationships between exhibitors and the studios taking part in this "misguided adventure."
Theater owners say the shortening of the theatrical window could damage their businesses. Today, the average window is 120 days, although exhibitors have been amenable to a 90-day window in some cases.
"As NATO's executive board noted in their open letter of June, 16, 2010, the length of a movie's release window is an important considering for theater owners in whether, how widely and under what terms they book a film," Fithian said.
Fithian also said exhibitors could reevaluate how they play trailers for the films that are going to be made available on premium VOD.
While exhibitors knew there were discussions going on between the studios and DirecTV, they didn't know the deal had been finalized. They say the studios had assured them they'd be kept in the loop.
"Theater operators were not consulted or informed of the substance, details or timing of this announcement. It's particularly disappointing to confront this issue today, while we are celebrating our industry partnerships at our annual convention – CinemaCon – in Las Vegas," Fithian continued. "In the end, the entire motion picture community will have a say in how the industry moves forward. These studios have made their decision in what they no doubt perceive to be their best interests. Theater owners will do the same."
Theater owners aren't likely to speak out themselves until early next week, after they've returned home and checked with their boards. They always have the option of refusing to play a film.

Throughout the history of the film business, there have been dramatic showdowns between theater owners and studios over the window issue.
While DirecTV will offer the service to its to customers nationwide, Comcast and VUDU will do so only in select markets, at least initially.

Studios are hoping that premium VOD can help offset the decline of the DVD business, once a major source of revenue.

But some in the industry question whether consumers will want to pay up to $29.99 for a movie.
There's also concern over piracy. Paramount isn't taking part in the premium VOD service because of this issue.

The Hollywood Reporter

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

MPAA Chief Christopher Dodd: Hollywood Is 'Terrible' at Marketing Itself...

The studios' newly installed top lobbyist tells THR "there is a total misunderstanding on Capitol Hill" that the film industry is nothing but "red carpets and tuxedoes."
LAS VEGAS -- Christopher Dodd doesn't mince words. At CinemaCon on Tuesday, the new MPAA chairman and CEO said Hollywood is great at selling movies but awful at marketing itself.

MPAA's Chris Dodd: Piracy Is 'Single Biggest Threat We Face as an Industry'
As a result, Washington tends to think of the film industry as "red carpets and tuxedoes," not as a thriving industry that employs millions and contributes billions to the economy.
Dodd's comments came during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter following his first public speech and news briefing since he began at the MPAA nine days ago. CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners where studios tout their upcoming movies, was a natural venue for Dodd to emerge.
Dodd took the convention by storm, setting up a flurry of meetings with exhibitors and studios and becoming the unofficial star of the Caesars Palace event.
Becoming a lobbyist is a big change for Dodd, who spent three decades as a U.S. senator from Connecticut. The six major studios wanted someone who was a Washington insider, and Dodd more than fits the bill.
In the interview with THR, Dodd said it's too early to make any big policy announcements on such issues as piracy -- the most pressing problem facing the business -- or theatrical windows. But on the issue of Hollywood doing a better job of marketing itself, he was adamant, saying it's a top priority for him.
"There is a total misunderstanding on Capitol Hill," Dodd said. "Studios are terrific at selling their films but terrible, just terrible, at marketing their business."
RELATED: MPAA's Chris Dodd: Piracy Is "Single Biggest Threat We Face as an Industry"
One idea Dodd has involves theater owners. During his speech, he encouraged exhibitors to host Saturday morning community meetings, where they could explain the problems and concerns facing the movie business.
"After three decades in Congress, I have some idea how to attract the attention of a congressman or senator," Dodd said. "When you return to your states, invite your local governor, state legislator, congressman and senator to your theater and fill it with those who work with you along with video store employees and their families. Tell them about the importance of these issues to you and to your communities."
He said that sort of event would have impressed him far more when he was a senator than a visit from an executive.
Dodd, who perfected his oration skills during his years in public office, spoke with the firey flair of a politician during his address to exhibitors.
"Much of what I will say this morning, I know you know, but at a moment like this, it is important that you know what I feel about this industry and the determination I bring to this undertaking," he said. "So let me begin with the obvious: The production and exhibition industries cannot succeed -- cannot survive -- without each other. If you fail, we fail. And it's just as true that if we fail, so will you."
It was Dodd's level of activity at CinemaCon and effort to absorb everything he could about the film business that had people talking. He was already quoting screen counts and statistics about how many people work in the film industry (2.5 million).
On Monday night, Dodd spent time in the green room at the Colosseum during Paramount's presentation, which included titles from DreamWorks Animation and Marvel Studios. He got to meet Paramount vice chair Rob Moore and DWA CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Dodd was again backstage for a few moments on Tuesday during DreamWorks' presentation, meeting DreamWorks co-chairman and CEO Stacey Snider, among others.
At a news briefing with National Association of Theatre Owners chairman and CEO John Fithian, Dodd said it had been an intense 24 hours. "It was kind of like sitting under a waterfall in terms of the information coming in," Dodd said.
Dodd has known Fithian for years, having served in the U.S. House of Representatives with Fithian's father, Floyd Fithian.

Thank you Holylwood Reporter

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Actors Join L.A. Labor Protesters...

Actors joined thousands of other workers marching over the weekend to preserve collective bargaining rights.

March 26 was dubbed "Solidarity Saturday" in Los Angeles, as thousands of area union workers marched the streets of downtown L.A. and rallied in Pershing Square to protest efforts to weaken public-employee unions. Among those marchers were members of the Screen Actors Guild.

MOVE Hollywood, a SAG committee whose mission includes promoting union solidarity, helped organize the members. Originally called Members on the Move, the committee was formed during the SAG commercials strike of 2000 to organize the picketing and rallies and provide other support. Later its mission broadened; MOVE now stands for "members organizing volunteer efforts."
"Besides our volunteer programs, a very big part of what we do is organize labor unions in support of our members and our sisters and brothers in other labor unions," said Ellen Crawford, a SAG member and the chair of MOVE Hollywood.
As bills that many consider to be anti-labor make their way through state legislatures around the country, union members have taken notice and taken to the streets. Though most of the legislation prompting protests in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana targets public-sector unions, many at the L.A. rally believe that the current political atmosphere represents a threat to all union workers, including performers.
"We're workers. Most people don't think of performers as workers," Crawford said. "A lot of people think all SAG members are like George Clooney, but most of us are middle-class workers. I make my living as an actor and I'm middle-class. I realize it's very different from being a miner or a factory worker or even some of our service unions like IATSE, but we share something in that we all need a safe workplace and we all need a living wage."
Crawford thought it significant that the rally occurred on the day after the 100th anniversary of New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 mostly female employees died—some jumping from the building's windows—due to unsafe workplace conditions. "That tragedy spurred on safety standards," said Crawford. "No matter what your profession is, you cannot let an entire century of worker protection be thrown out the window like the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. We cannot allow that to happen."
SAG Hollywood board member Patrick Fabian also attended the rally. He was concerned about efforts by some state governments to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.
"I'm here supporting workers' rights throughout all of America," Fabian said. "I've got three union cards—my Equity card, my SAG card, and my AFTRA card—and when anybody's threatening to take away the collective bargaining rights of the union, I think it's threatening to take away the middle class that makes this country great. I'm here to support all the unions and their right to exist and their right to bargain for their workers."
But it wasn't just solidarity with public employees that brought Fabian downtown on Saturday. He believes that unions provide him with protection as an artist. "I think your highest quality, most talented workers in the industry are union workers," he said. "You need protection in a business that is freelance and artistic. It's the only thing that can actually give you a living wage. We can't all be Tom Cruise; we can't all be the superstars. A middle-class existence is hard enough as an artist, and a union helps ensure that."

Thank you Hollywood Reporter

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Monday, March 28, 2011

U.S. Hispanic population tops 50 million

By Wendell Marsh

The U.S. Hispanic population passed the 50 million mark for the first time and Latinos accounted more than half of U.S. population growth in the last decade, the Census Bureau said on Thursday.

The Census Bureau put the Latino count at 50.5 million or 16.3 percent of the U.S. population. In 2000, Hispanics accounted for 12.5 percent of Americans.

The new numbers were part of a wealth of data released by the bureau, including ethnicity and geographical figures.

Growth in the Hispanic population accounted for more than half of American population growth between 2000 and 2010, the data shows. The Census Bureau said that it had not yet determined if the increases were caused by immigration or births.

The Asian American population grew by almost 43 percent, and now accounts for 4.8 percent of the U.S. population. African American numbers grew slightly to 12.6 percent of the population.

The white population of the United States fell to 72.4 percent in 2010 from 75.1 percent ten years ago.

Over nine million Americans identify themselves as being multiracial.

Census Bureau analysts said that 46.5 percent of all children under the age of 18 are minorities, an indication of how the demographics of the United States are changing.

The overall population of the United States was 308 million people, a figure the agency announced at the end of last year.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Greg McCune)

Thanks Reuters

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Call for Entries: Rose Marine Latino Film Festival

The historic Rose Marine Theater, a landmark for Latino arts and culture, will host an independent Latino film festival May 19-21, 2011.

The festival is accepting shorts in two categories:
The Rose Marine Tejano Short Premiere: Films must be directed and/or written by American-Latino Texas residents. Film length should not exceed more the 20 minutes. Winning short will be presented as the shorts program closer on Friday May 20th, 2011. The director will recieve membership to Lone Star Film Society.

Rose Marine Student Lone Star Award: Films must be directed or written by American-Latino Texas resident students that are registered and attending classes at a Texas University. Film length should not be less than 10 minutes and not exceed more the 20 minutes. Winning short will be presented in a panel for a feedback session with guest filmmakers and industry representatives on Friday May 20th, 2011. Director will receive membership with Lone Star Film Society. One crew member will be invited to intern with Endeavor Cinema Group�s ECG Review to document the festival.

The three day event features screenings of international award winning films, the Rose Marine Tejano Short Film Premiere, panels, networking events and an educational outreach collaborative.

Deadline for Submissions
April 24th, 2011. (Postmarked, Emailed by 11:59pm)

Submit by mail with cover letter and DVD to:
RMLFF Rose Marine Tejano Short Premiere
56 Fort Washington Ave #55
New York, New York 10032

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Unprecedented Number of Latinos Cast During 2011 Pilot Season

ABC & FOX Lead with Nine Latinos Cast Each
By Bel Hernandez

Hollywood, CA -- Last year the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s annual “Network Report Cards” resulted in failing grades for three out of the four top English-language prime time networks. Only CBS received high marks for the hiring of Latinos. If this years pilot season is any indication, the networks seem to be working towards a better grade year. An unprecedented number of Latinos have been cast as leads this season -- twenty-nine (29) at last count, with a few more roles yet to be cast.

It stills remains to be seen how many of these pilots will actually get picked up, but the number of Latinos roles cast may be an indication the networks are finally beginning to realize the importance of including Latinos on primetime, if not for a better “diversity grade”, maybe because the 2010 census numbers don’t lie.

By 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the Latino population in the U.S. will grow to 57.7 million, accounting for 18% of the total population.

The growth of U.S. TV households mirrors this trend as they outpace the growth of the general market. According to the Nielsen Company’s universe estimates for the 2009-10 television season, the number of U.S. Latino TV households grew 2.3% to 12.9 million. In comparison, total TV households grew 0.3% to 114.9 million, African-American TV households grew 0.3% to 14.0 million, and Asian TV households grew 0.8% to 4.7 million.

With that, here is the pilot casting breakdown of Latino series regulars, by network and number of roles cast:

NETWORK: ABC 9 Roles

GOOD CHRISTIAN BITCHES
Format: Hour Drama
Logline: Primetime soap is set in Dallas and asks the question – Is it possible to start over in a town that thinks they already know ...
Cast: Marisol Nichols as Heather
Producers: Robert Harling, Darren Star
Writer:

THE RIVER
Format: Drama
Logline: The search for a famed adventurer/TV personality who, along with his crew, goes missing deep in the Amazon.
Cast: Paulina Gaitan, Eloise Mumford, Joe Anderson
Producers: Oren Peli, Jason Blum
Writer: Michael R. Perry, Oren Peli

DAMAGE CONTROL
Format: Drama
Logline: Revolves around the life and work of a crisis management consultant and her dysfunctional staff.
Cast: Guillermo Diaz; Kerry Washington
Producers: Shonda Rhimes, Betsy Beers

CHARLIES ANGELS
Format: Drama
Logline: The modern-day version of the classic show of three females detectives will be set in Miami.
Cast: Ramon Rodriguez as Bosley, Annie Ilonzeh, Minka Kelly, Rachael Taylor as the Angels
Producers: Miles Millar, Al Gough, Leonard Goldberg, Drew Barrymore, Nancy Juvonen
Writer: Miles Millar & Ivan Goff

PARTNERS
Format: Crime Drama
Logline: Centers on two female police detectives who are fiercely loyal to one another since they’re also secretly sisters.
Cast: Nester Serrano, Francis Fisher, Scottie Thompson
Producers: Ed Bernero
Writer: Marc Fantini

GRACE
Format: Musical Drama
Logline: A a world famous choreographer is the center of a dysfunctional family set in the world of professional dance.
Cast: Anabelle Acosta as Eden; Eric Roberts, Chantz Simpson, Debbie Allen, Will Kemp
Producers: Krista Vernoff, Carrie Ann Inaba
Writer: Krista Vernoff

LOST AND FOUND
Format: Comedy
Logline: A narcissistic New York City bartender and party girl has her life turned upside down when the conservative 18-year-old son she gave up for adoption shows up on her doorstep.
Cast: Diana Maria Riva, Gary Clayton, Josh Casaubo
Producers: Marisa Coughlan
Writer: Walter Barnett
Format: Comedy
Logline: Two unemployed car salesmen who realize that they are living in a woman's world, decide that to find work again, they must dress as women to get jobs as pharmaceutical reps
Cast: Amaury Nolasco, John Caparulo, Rebecca Made
Producers: Andrew Reich, Ted Cohen
Writer: Andrew Reich, Brad Segal

ABC FAMILY

SHOW
Format: Family Drama
Logline: Two teen girls are accidently switched at birth. One grows up in a wealthy family the other lost her hearing as a child and grew up poor.
Cast: Constance Marie plays mom Regina Vasquez; Lea Thompson, Vanessa Marano, Katie Leclerc
Producers: Shawn Wilt, David Hartle
Writer: Lizzy Weiss

NETWORK: FOX 9 Roles

ALCATRAZ
Format: Action/Drama
Logline: Revolves around Alcatraz Island and notorious criminals housed there.
Cast: Jorge Garcia as Dr. Diego Soto; Santiago Cabrera as Jimmy Dickens; Sam Neill Robert Forster
Producers: J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk, Liz Sarnoff)
Writer: Steven Lilien, Bryan Wynbrandt, J.J. Abrams

COUNCIL OF DADS
Format: Half-Hour Comedy
Logline: A group of five men are called together by the widow of their close friend in order to help her raise his two young children.
Cast: Rick Gomez as Eddie, Kyle Bornheimer, Patrick Breen, Ken Howard
Producers: Peter Tolan, Leslie Tolan, Michael Wimer
Writer: Peter Tolan

FAMILY ALBUM
Format: Half-Hour Comedy
Logline: A larger than life dad uses technology to recount his family’s most memorable moments.
Cast: Damaris Diaz as Jenna; Bob Huebel, Mike O’Malley, Rachael Harris
Producers: Joe Port, Joe Wiseman, Marty Adelstein, Becky Clements, Shawn Levy
Writer: Joe Port, Joe Wiseman

ICELAND
Format: Half-Hour Singlecam Comedy
Logline: A single-camera romantic comedy about a group of friends moving forward after the loss of a loved one.
Cast: Krysta Rodriguez as Rose; Kerry Bishe, Zach Gilford , John Boyd
Producers: Andy Bobrow
Writer: Andy Bobrow

OUTNUMBERED
Format: Half- Hour Comedy
Logline: Based on a British family comedy about a set of parents challenged to raise three precocious kids. Ana Ortiz plays the mother.
Cast: Ana Ortiz as Sue; Cheech Marin as Grandpa Frank; Mateus Ward, Gibson Sjobeck , Ava Acres
Producers: Barbara Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Larry Charles, Peter Chernin, Katherine Pope, Jimmy Mulville
Writers: Barbara Wallace, Tom Wolfe

TAGGED
Format: Comedic Drama
Director: Scott Ellis
Logline: An unconventional love story between a son and his emotionally absent father serves as the center for a lively work ensemble in a coroner's office.
Cast: Mel Rodriguez as Rodriguez; Gary Cole, Tommy Dewey, Robin Givens Producers: Moses Port, David Guarascio, Carolyn Bernstein, Howard Owens, Todd Cohen
Writers: David Guarascio, Moses Port

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Format: Animated Comedy
Logline: An animated sitcom based on the movie “Napoleon Dynamite."
Voice Cast: Efren Ramirez as Pedro; Jon Heder, Aaron Ruell, Tina Majorino
Producers: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess, Mike Scully
Writers: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess, Mike Scully

NETWORK: NBC 6 Roles

STEPHEN GAGHAN UNTITLED
Format: Drama
Logline: In the style of Traffic, the drama is set in the world of crime, law enforcement, and politics in modern-day L.A. Jimmy Smits plays Los Angeles Mayor Alfonso Morales a man full of ambition who cares deeply about his city, power and women, perhaps in reverse order.
Cast: Jimmy Smits, Danny Pino, Madchen Amic, Noah Emmerich
Producers: Stephen Gaghan, Peter Chernin, Katherine Pope
Writer: Shannon Burke

PRIME SUSPECT
Format: Crime Drama
Logline: an iconoclastic female detective who has to make her bones in a tough New York precinct that is dominated by men. Adaptation of the British miniseries.
Cast: Kirk Acevedo as Phil Carter; Maria Bello, Aidan Quinn, Peter Gerety
Producers: Alexandra Cunningham, Sarah Aubrey, Peter Berg
Writer: Lynda La Plante & Alexandra Cunningham

17th PRECINCT
Format: Sy Fi Drama
Logline: Cop drama with a science-fiction twist. Esai Morales plays Lt. Liam Butterfield charged with keeping the peace in the enchanted town.
Cast: Esai Morales, Stockard Channing, Jamie Bamber, Kristin Kreuk
Producers: Ron Moore
Writer: Dawn Snyder

REM
Format: Drama
Logline: A detective drama which revolves on one of the detectives who, after suffering a tragic accident, straddles two realities. Valderrama plays Detective Richard Vega in this, in one Det. Vega is his best bud.
Cast: Wilmer Valderrama, Jason Isaacs, Steve Harris
Producers: Kyle Killen
Writer: Jason Isaacs

PLAYBOY
Format: Drama
Logline: Set in the 1960s, the drama takes a look at the lives of Playboy bunnies. Eddie Cibrian will play the lead character of Nick Dalton.
Cast: Eddie Cibrian, Amber Heard, David Krumholtz
Producers: Chad Hodge
Writer: Scott P. Murphy

NETWORK: CBS 5 Roles

ROB SCHNEIDER PROJECT
Format: Half-hour Comedy
Logline: Schneider stars as a confirmed bachelor who has just married into a tight-knit Mexican-American family.
Cast: Rob Schneider as Rob
Nadine Valezquez as Maggie Rob’s fiancee
Tony Plana as Fernando, Maggie’s father
Lupe Ontiveros as Abuelita, Fernando’s mother
Producers: Lew Morton, Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, Pam Fryman, Rob Schneider, John
Schneider, Jamie Widdoes
Writer: Lew Morton, Rob Schneider


HAIL MARY
Format: Crime Drama
Logline: Enrique Murciano plays detective Carlos Moreno in this buddy P.I. show centered on a suburban single mom in Atlanta who teams up with a street-wise hustler to solve crimes.
Cast: Enrique Murciano; Minnie Driver; Stephen Tobolowsky
Producers: Joel Silver, Ilene Chaiken, Brad Silberling, Jeff Wadlow
Writer: Jeff Wadlow

RINGER
Format: One-Hour Drama
Logline: On the run from the mob, a troubled young woman hides out by inhabiting the life of her wealthy twin sister, until she learns that her twin’s life has a bounty on it as well.
Cast: Nestor Carbonell as Victor Machado; Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kristoffer Polaha, Tara Summers.
Producers: Peter Traugott, Richard Shepard, Pam Veasey, Eric Charmelo & Nicole Snyder, Sarah Michelle Gellar
Writers: Eric Charmelo & Nicole Snyder

Thanks Latin Heat

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Call for Submissions: Bridging Cultures through Film - International Topics Grant

Bridging Cultures through Film: International Topics

June 29, 2011 (receipt deadline)

Bridging Cultures films will spark Americans' engagement with the wider world through the exploration of countries and cultures outside of the United States, and/or across nations. Two levels of support are available: Development (up to $75,000) and Production (up to $800,000).

Films might take a wide range of approaches to international and transnational topics:
- an examination of a critical issue in ethics, religion, or history, viewed through an international lens;
- an approach to a topic or subject that transcends the idea of traditional nation statehood and explores it across borders;
- a biography of a foreign leader, writer, artist, or historical figure; or
- an exploration of the history and culture(s) of a specific region, country, or community outside of the United States.

Projects must be analytical and deeply grounded in humanities scholarship. We encourage innovative nonfiction stories and creative formats that will reach broad audiences. Films must range in length from a stand-alone broadcast hour to a feature-length documentary.

Applicants should demonstrate international collaboration by enlisting U.S.-based and non-U.S.-based scholars and/or by working with an international media team.

Who is eligible? Any U.S. nonprofit organization with IRS 501(c)(3) tax exempt status is eligible. Grants are not awarded to individuals. Independent producers who wish to apply are advised to partner with an eligible organization, which can act as fiscal sponsor.

Deadline: June 29, 2011 (receipt deadline)
Notification of awards will be in April 2012.
Visit the Bridging Cultures through Film: International Topics webpage for more information.

For more information, please contact:
Division of Public Programs
202-606-8269
publicpgms@neh.gov

All applicants, particularly first-time applicants, are encouraged to contact NEH program officers who will answer questions about the review process, supply samples of similar applications, and review preliminary drafts.

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HOLLYWOOD SHADOWS: A cure for blocked screenwriters.

By Dana Goodyear

The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.”
Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. Michels told him to keep doing it.
A few weeks later, the writer was startled from his sleep by a voice: it sounded like a woman talking at a dinner party. He went to his computer, which was on a folding table in a corner of the room, and began to write a scene. Six weeks later, he had a hundred-and-sixty-five-page script. Six months after that, the script was shot, and when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award.
Michels, in the words of a former patient, is an “open secret” in Hollywood. Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, he and Phil Stutz, a psychiatrist who is his mentor, have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry. “The Jungians I’ve always been uncomfortable with, because they kind of drift,” Stutz says. “They say that the dreams will tell you what to do, and that’s bullshit.” Instead, he and Michels tell their patients what to do. Their brand of therapy is heavily prescriptive and not always intuitive. “I had one guy who was terrified of public speaking,” Michels says. “He had to learn to make more passionate love to his wife. If he could expose himself to his wife and really let go, I knew he’d be able to speak publicly.” He hands out three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like “THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.” His starting rate is three hundred and sixty dollars an hour.
Michels is fifty-seven and trim, with a clipped beard surrounding his mouth and silver hair that ripples back in waves from a high forehead. He looks uncannily like Barry Landes, the psychiatrist on “24,” who was patterned on him by Howard Gordon, an executive producer on the show and a former patient. Michels’s manner is meditative; to illustrate his points, he draws slow circles in the air. He rarely swears except during sessions, when he says “fuck” constantly—as in “Fuck, yeah,” “Fuck, no,” “Stop being such a fucking baby,” and “Shut the fuck up”—a habit that can shock patients used to coddling and, in some instances, is a sympathetic mirroring of their speech patterns. At times, his language is just a matter of expediency. When P. K. Simonds, a self-effacing writer, got his first job as a show runner, a managerial position, on “Party of Five,” Michels said, “P.K., you need to be a much bigger bastard.” Simonds, too, wrote a Michels character in homage.
Michels’s office, in West Los Angeles, is spare, and generically therapeutic in its décor, with a black leather couch and, on the walls, carved wood African masks, along with his diplomas: one from Harvard, which he attended as an undergraduate; one from Berkeley, where he went to law school (he worked at a white-shoe firm for a couple of years before quitting, at the age of twenty-eight, and going to Europe to play guitar on street corners); and one from the University of Southern California, where he earned a master’s in social work, in 1984.
As he finished his training, Michels, already disenchanted with what he felt was the passivity of traditional therapy, met Stutz, who became his supervisor. In the course of their work, Stutz, a transplant from the Upper West Side who had recently arrived in Los Angeles, introduced him to his unconventional approach, a series of tools and principles, often illustrated by stick-figure drawings on index cards, which he calls “the information.” He showed him how to make the drawings and weave connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena (driving buzzed and problems at work; mistreating assistants and marital discord; going to matinées on weekdays and writer’s block). The two share a facial-hair style, and a habit of closing their eyes when explaining something recherché. Overhearing Michels talking to a patient on the phone, his wife, Judith White, a Jungian psychologist, once pointed out that he did therapy with Stutz’s New York accent.
For the past several years, Michels and Stutz have been collaborating on a manuscript tentatively titled “The Tools.” If “The Secret,” a best-selling self-help book, promises riches through manifestation—think about a pile of gold and one will literally appear—“The Tools” represents a prosperity gospel better suited to a patient base that repeatedly encounters humiliation and failure even as it is conditioned to expect life-altering windfalls.
Patients are told to visualize things going horribly wrong, a strategy of “pre-disappointment.” The tool for this, which Michels and Stutz teach to those who are hoping to win an award or who are about to submit a script for approval, involves imagining yourself falling backward into the sun, saying “I am willing to lose everything” as you are consumed in a giant fireball, after which, transformed into a sunbeam, you profess, “I am infinite.” Needless to say, neither therapist relates much to the wider analytic community, and both suspect that the techniques would be met with consternation. “My method and orientation are radically outside the mainstream of my profession,” Michels told me. “I like being a little bit of a maverick.” On a low bookshelf at the far end of his office sits a Carl Jung action doll.
Paging through his calendar on a recent afternoon, Michels enumerated the week’s appointments. “Writer, director, entertainment attorney, actor, investment banker, agent, writer, writer-director-producer, guy who works peripherally in Hollywood—let’s say catering,” he said, for the sake of discretion. According to a former patient, “His waiting room was like the red carpet.” Michels has treated warring agents from the same office and opposing parties in a creative dispute, who may or may not know he’s counselling the other side. Many report feeling a prickle of eagerness and curiosity when a green button on the office wall lights up, indicating the arrival of the next patient.
Once, in a previous office, Michels caught an agent patient wooing an actress who had the next appointment. “I was, like, ‘Get the fuck out of my office!’ ” he said, but he wasn’t really mad. “That’s the agent just being an agent. They’re relentless. There’s something in me, I think it’s my father’s entrepreneurialism, that admires the chutzpah.” Michels’s father manufactured furniture; his mother, late in life, became a therapist. They brought up Barry and his sister in West Los Angeles, and their best friends were Rod Serling, who created “The Twilight Zone,” and his family. Serling gave Michels his first lesson in writerly discipline. When the families took vacations together, Michels noticed that Serling woke up every morning at five or six to work and did not emerge from his room until eleven.
Paparazzi have sometimes staked out Michels’s building; some years ago, he got nervous about the amount of attention a celebrity patient was attracting, and transferred the patient’s file to a bank safe-deposit box. A few days later, he arrived at work and found the place trashed: someone had thrown a brick through the window, torn apart his file cabinet, and left without stealing anything. Now, for extra security, he assigns high-profile patients aliases like P. G. Wodehouse, John Milton, and John Keats.
The writer-director-producer Adam McKay started seeing Michels about four years ago, around the time he opened a production company with the comedian Will Ferrell. (They make movies and run the Web site Funny or Die.) He soon discovered that he knew a number of other patients. “Many’s the time I’ve gone to see him and seen someone I know in the hallway,” McKay said. “It’s, like, ‘Wait a minute, you go to Barry?’ I’ve seen one of my colleagues here, one of my agents. It’s like a brotherhood.”
McKay’s presenting problem was a fear of the red carpet and talk shows, which aggravated a neurological condition he has called “essential tremor.” “My existential nightmare is ‘Charlie Rose,’ ” he told me. The first time he went on the show, promoting “Step Brothers,” he had a panic attack and started to shake visibly. “People are, like, ‘Oh, my God, are you all right? Do you have Parkinson’s?’ You think no one will notice and then you read the comments online, and people are genuinely worried, or, worse, they’re making fun of you.”
Michels gave him an index card bearing the mantra “YOU ARE MARKED TO BATTLE THE FORCES OF JUDGMENT” and one with a drawing of a stick figure radiating arrows to symbolize the internal seat of authority, which McKay keeps in the visor of his car. Michels taught him a tool called Cosmic Rage, which entailed his shouting “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” in his head to a roomful of faceless critics. (Kelli Williams, a patient of Michels’s who plays a psychiatrist on the television show “Lie to Me,” told me that when she does her version of Cosmic Rage she just pretends she’s running lines.) After McKay finished his next movie, “The Other Guys,” he said, “I decided, I’m going to do every bit of press on this. Fuck it.” He visualized the worst-case scenario and told himself, If I get shaky, I get shaky, who the fuck cares. “I did Jimmy Fallon, the red carpet, all the press junkets where you’re filmed a hundred times, and I did great with it,” he said. “But for some fuckin’ reason ‘Charlie Rose’ got me again.” During the show, which also featured Ferrell, he forced himself to engage in the conversation, even as he started to tremble. He said, “I talked to Judd Apatow about it and he said, ‘That’s because you know President Clinton is watching.’ ” McKay still sees Michels once a week.
“My buzzer looks like I’m a hooker or something, ’cause the button is completely worn out,” Stutz told me, when giving directions to his apartment, which is also where he sees patients. The apartment, in a run-down brown stucco building on a residential street not far from Michels’s office, is a two-bedroom, with a tiny, mustard-yellow kitchen, a small living room that doubles as a waiting area, and a balcony where shyer patients have been known to hide until it’s their turn. Stutz’s patients—C.E.O.s of companies, high-level producers—hate the place, and complain constantly. “One guy said he was going to buy the building and evict me,” he said. “There’s a rumor I have this huge estate in Bel Air or something.” Stutz, who is sixty-four, lives alone, and believes that his monastic example can be therapeutic. “Part of what we’re doing is to get this result-free attitude,” he said.
But simply being a Stutz patient confers status. He charges up to four hundred dollars an hour and hasn’t taken a new patient in years. Mark Levin, a writer-director who has been working in the business for twenty years and seeing Michels on and off for fourteen, understands it this way: “Oh—you got to Hollywood before me, because you see Phil.” (For a number of years, between other projects, Levin and his wife, Jennifer Flackett, have been working on a movie in which six filmmaker patients each make a segment about a character based on Michels.) Stutz’s patients have won so many Oscars—twelve or thirteen, he told me, reluctantly—that he has developed a coping strategy he calls the Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle, which postulates that by Day Four life sucks again and no one knows who you are, so you might as well get over it now. His credo for writers is “KEEP WRITING SHIT, STUPID.”
Stutz is thin, with a haunted look; he wears his pants tightly belted above his hips. When he came to Los Angeles, seeking a milder climate for the chronic-fatigue syndrome that then afflicted him, he hated it. “I was pissed off when I saw that smog,” he says. “I saw everybody in the morning driving to work through the smog and I thought, These fucking people are crazy. Six months later, I never noticed the smog again.” This gave rise to a principle that Stutz calls Ceaseless Immersion—the idea that it’s easier to live with painful conditions if you accept them.
Stutz had no patients, and so he cold-called established therapists to ask for referrals. Every day, he’d force himself to approach the scariest person on his list, an undertaking that he described as eating “a death cookie.” Most rejected him, but he found the process generative. “The risk you take has a feedback effect on the unconscious,” he says. “The unconscious will give you ideas and it wants you to act on them. The more courage you have when you act, the more ideas it will give you.” Over time, Stutz began to build a practice among entertainment-industry people; for a number of years, he held workshops in his apartment that were attended by actors like John Cusack and Hank Azaria.
Hollywood psychotherapy, when Stutz arrived, was divided between the classical Freudians, who had started coming West in the twenties to treat nervous stars and studio heads, and the followers of Jung, whose arcane symbology appealed to the arty spiritualist impulses of the locals. Jung’s school of thought, particularly his belief that universal archetypes—the Mother, the Father, the Hero, the Maiden—play a role in humanity’s collective imagination, found purchase with the industry’s storytelling class. The assumption that a universal archetype will hold universal appeal has been proved at the box office: George Lucas famously credited “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell, a follower of Jung, as an inspiration for the “Star Wars” franchise. The allure of Jung’s ideas persists. To celebrate the recent publication of Jung’s “Red Book,” an illuminated manuscript full of paintings of mandalas and snakes in which Jung recorded his investigation of the archetypes inherent in his own psyche—a document so bizarre that his heirs kept it in a bank vault for twenty-three years, perhaps for fear it would damage his reputation—the Hammer Museum held a series of talks. Helen Hunt and Miranda July were among the featured speakers.
At the center of Michels’s practice is the Jungian figure of the Shadow, the occult aspect of the personality that Jung defined as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.” In “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” Jung describes a dream in which he was out on a windy night, cupping a tiny candle in his hand. “I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me,” he writes. “When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a ‘specter of the Brocken,’ my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying.”
As the liaison to the unconscious, Michels says, the Shadow is the source of all creativity and agility in life, business, and art, which he calls “flow.” “If you can really know your own Shadow, you start to know the Shadows of everyone,” he says. “People who can write that way start to articulate universal themes, which not only makes them more successful on that level”—in other words, commercially—“but it’s a more gratifying endeavor.” In Hollywood, mentioning the Shadow can draw a look of recognition, followed by instant camaraderie. “It’s like we all went to the same school,” one of Michels’s patients—seven of whose good friends also see Michels—told me. “As in, ‘Oh, you went to Princeton? What year?’ ” Talk of Michels’s services spreads through productions, casts, and groups of friends. Howard Gordon says, “Outside the military, I can’t imagine too many collective communities sharing that kind of professional help.”
Michels asks his patients to relate to the Shadow as something real, which can be coaxed from the cobwebbed lair of the unconscious into the physical world. The process, as he describes it, is spooky, a kind of daylight séance in which he plays the role of guide. In “The Tools,” Michels tells the story of “Jennifer,” a model who lobbies to get her child into a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year kindergarten but is too ashamed of her self-described “trailer trash” origins to talk to the other mothers, whom she views as “a superior race of Range-Rover-driving goddesses.” The secret to her crippling sense of inferiority lies with her Shadow, which she must accept and integrate into her public self. “I asked her to close her eyes,” Michels writes. He goes on:

“Go back to the parents’ meeting where you froze up; re-create all those shaky feelings you had.” She nodded. “Now, push the feelings out in front of you and give them a face and body. This figure is the embodiment of everything you feel insecure about.” I paused. “When you’re ready, tell me what you see.”
There was a long silence. Jennifer flinched suddenly, then blinked her eyes open. “Ugh,” she said grimacing. “I saw this 13 or 14 years old girl, overweight, unwashed. Her face was pasty and covered with zits . . . a complete loser.”
Jennifer had just seen her shadow.

If the Shadow has a flesh-and-blood counterpart in the hierarchy of Hollywood, it is the writer: a pasty loser, whose suggestions are constantly being ignored or overruled. “No one looks to the writer to make the decisions,” one of Michels’s writer patients said. “You’re trying to fulfill everyone’s expectations. They think of you almost as an arm to do their thoughts.” “We’re like carnies, always out there trying to sell some idea,” another writer, who sees Michels, and whose husband, also a writer, sees Stutz, told me. It can be a frustrating, demoralizing job; scripts are bastardized to the point of being unrecognizable, if they get made at all. According to Michels, “Writers always feel beaten up. They always feel like an underclass. How do you maintain a sense of self in this environment?” In sessions with writers, Michels listens to pitches and plot lines, an attentive, albeit paid, audience. He reassures them that they are “off-the-charts smart”—a turn of phrase that some are surprised to learn does not exclusively pertain to them. He has occasionally been known to read scripts and, he says, “I give pretty good notes.”
To help a patient avoid freezing during a pitch—a problem that Michels attributes to trying to hide your Shadow from development executives—he’ll tell him to reassure his Shadow with the words “I love you and I care more about you than I do whether this pitch sells.” That is step one. Then he must invite the Shadow into the conference room, so that together they can address a silent scream—“Listen!”—to the assembled suits. “What it does is assert our—me and my Shadow’s—authority and right to have something to say,” Michels says. The third step takes place afterward, when, regardless of the outcome, the patient thanks the Shadow for its time, so that it knows the ego wasn’t just using it to get money. For writers, the analogy is clear: give the Shadow the respect you long for.
Then, there is Dust, a super-technique, good for the red carpet, auditions, and any situation in which you want to impress people. It involves pretending that your audience is covered from head to toe in dust—“a nice, thick, two-inch coat of dust, like you’re going up into an attic and everything is covered, it’s been up there for eight months,” Stutz says.
Molly Newman, an established television writer who started seeing Michels after a pilot she had written did not get green-lit, told me she used Dust when pitching to a roomful of executives. “I have radar for what people are thinking of me—Do-they-like-it-do-they-like-me-am-I-doing-it-wrong-oops-I-lost-’em.” She recounted going to the FX network to try to sell a half-hour character-driven comedy. “You walk in and there’s the head of the network and three development people and your agent and a junior agent,” she said. “They all sit down, there’s thirty seconds to a minute of small talk, and then it’s Now go! And you have to describe your idea and tell the story of what your pilot script is and how the series would progress and who the characters are—and make it sound like the most exciting idea in the world.” All the while, she said, she pictured her Shadow at her side, emanating light, and everyone else in the room blotted out by dust. Michels told me he had also used Dust with a creative executive whose boss was such an irrational screamer that she couldn’t speak to him unless she imagined him caked.
By far the most common problem afflicting the writers in Michels’s practice is procrastination, which he understands in terms of Jung’s Father archetype. “They procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write,” he says. “Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he’s answerable to, but it’s not human. It’s Time itself that’s passing inexorably. That’s why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you’re defying this authority figure.” Procrastination, he says, is a “spurious form of immortality,” the ego’s way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. “You say, ‘I’m surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos,’ ” he says. ‘I’m surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me.’ That submission activates something inside someone. In the simplest terms, it gets people to get their ass in the chair.” For the truly unproductive, he sets the initial period at ten minutes—“an amount of time it would sort of embarrass them not to be able to do.”
One recent afternoon, Michels put on his glasses, pulled out a file, and began to leaf through a pile of yellow legal-pad pages. It was a difficult case—a writer who had been blocked for two years. He was a type Michels sees frequently: someone vacillating between thinking he is God’s gift to mankind and thinking he is garbage. “Mmm, now this is interesting,” he said, looking at his notes. “That voice, the voice that says ‘I’m shitty’ or ‘I’m above this,’ is going to increase in volume the closer you get to actually doing the deed. You have to anticipate it, label it, and reject it every time it comes up.”
The voice belongs to what Stutz refers to as Part X, a deeply primitive dimension of the personality he identified after he began to work with show-business patients; its characteristics are petulance, rage, arrogance, hypersensitivity, a sense of victimization, and, above all, a resistance to process. Michels explains it by invoking the behavior of a two-year-old. “It’s the part that’s pounding on the table because nothing’s good enough,” he says. “They’re saying no to everything, even the color of the sippy cup—unacceptable. Most of us grow beyond the expectation that life will meet our needs in every instance. Some don’t. That’s the head of the studio, the head of the agency, or whatever, pounding his fist on a table and saying, ‘God damn it, somebody is going to pay for it!’ It’s the part of the ego that is so egotistical it believes it’s God, king of the universe. At every moment, the universe is telling him, ‘Sorry, bub, you’re not God,’ and he’s screaming, ‘No, you’re wrong and I’m going to prove it to you!’ ”
Of course, in a certain environment—around indulgent parents, say, or yes-men—Part X can be effective. “It’s not only that there’s more of it in Hollywood—it’s that there’s more reward for it,” Stutz says. After years of practicing in the industry, Stutz subdivided Part X into the Seussian categories Type 1 and Type 2—Type 1 being most people, who must conquer their X in order to succeed, while Type 2 never works on himself and gets away with it. One of his patients, a well-known actor, explained this to a younger actor he met in rehab, saying that they were both Type 1, hence the need for rehab; the younger actor took this in and asked, “How do we become Type 2?”
The novelist Bret Easton Ellis told me that he went to see Michels after he moved to Los Angeles to help with the production of a movie based on one of his books. The situation had grown sour—he was no longer speaking to his best friend, Nicholas Jarecki, with whom he wrote the screenplay, and the director, he felt, had misinterpreted the material. After working with Michels for a few months, he called Jarecki and invited him to a makeup dinner. Jarecki brought along his friend Sharon Stone. Ellis recalls that when the dinner conversation turned to the work that he had been doing with Michels, Stone interjected, “Barry and Phil and all that Shadow shit, all that Part X shit. I love my Part X, I’m not letting go of my Part X. Fuck Barry!”
Back in the office, Michels turned over another sheet of legal paper and, referring to the blocked writer, said, “He was one I taught Reversal of Desire to.” Reversal of Desire, Michels says, helps a patient face something he’s avoiding, and involves another silent scream—“Bring it on!”—addressed to an imaginary cloud of pain. While pushing into the center of the cloud, the patient says, “I love pain,” and then, “Pain sets me free.” For this writer, Michels said, it was the pain of focussing on writing when he was at his computer. “Just the little pain of when you’re writing and you really want to flip over to the Internet, which writers always want to do,” he said. “And that little pain of No, I’m not going to do that, bring on that pain.” In addition, Michels counselled him to embrace the pain of not flirting. “For a lot of guys, seducing and having sex with a woman symbolizes an exemption from process,” he said. “Sex is almost like magic—I’m there, I’ve made it. It’s the ultimate accomplishment, especially for a writer. They spend all their time alone. They usually have little—I mean we all do—feelings of inferiority. That’s going to cure it all in one fell swoop.” Reversal of Desire worked on a number of levels, Michels said. “We used it not only to get him to write and face the pain of not seducing women but also to understand pain better, because one of the criticisms of his writing was that his characters weren’t deep enough. He couldn’t quite connect to their pain, because he was avoiding his own.”
Another population on whom Michels uses Reversal of Desire is agents. “The typical agent is a very likable person with the attention span of a flea,” he says. “Agents tend to be very pain-averse and pleasure-oriented. They’re on the phone, writing an e-mail, texting, and maybe reading a script. It’s a little bit painful just to focus on one thing at a time. You get a boredom and itchiness, a feeling of ‘I don’t want to do it.’ ” But this, Michels knows from talking to talent, is alienating, and often the reason an actor or a writer will seek new representation. Sometimes, with agents, Michels starts by prohibiting them from bringing their BlackBerrys into their children’s rooms when they are putting them to bed.
A writer went to see Michels. “I don’t want to do this thing where you have to write it down,” the writer told him. He blamed the screenwriting software Final Draft for the tedium of crafting a script. “You press this button to get to Character and then the margin changes. It’s all in Courier. It’s all sanitized and the same and that aspect of it is antithetical—”
“That’s your enemy,” Michels said.
“What is my enemy?”
“That attitude,” Michels said. “You understand why? Because it’s a given. It’s like a lawyer who says, ‘I love the law, I love the research and the writing and the documents—it’s just that fuckin’ judge, I mean what the fuck, why’s he there.’ ”
Michels said that in order to love his work again the writer had to break down. “It’s really your ego that resists the form that is the accepted form.”
“No, I hate the fuckin’ form,” the writer said. After a while, he added, “I have such a knee-jerk reaction against authority.” He explained, “The selling of a script and the expectation that comes with it is a manifestation of authority. They’ve given me money, I have to satisfy what they think.”
“Here’s the secret,” Michels said. “You’ll stop rebelling against authority when a part of you—spiritually, we call it your higher self, but I don’t care what you call it—has so much faith in the breakdown-leading-to-breakthrough process (and it’s been through that process so many times) that it doesn’t really care that much about the external authority. In a sense, it has substituted the authority of process for the external authority.”
The writer said that it always seemed to him that if writing was too hard it wasn’t right. “Rocky,” after all, was written in just a few days. Michels tried his theory again. “There’s this cycle of death and rebirth even in the space of a single lifetime, and, if you can endorse the death, say, ‘Bring it on, I have to break down before I break through, I have to die before I’m reborn,’ then the process in a weird way actually gets simpler, because you’re not fighting.”
“Right,” the writer said, uncertainly, and then, more forcefully, “There’s a large degree of fuck ’em. Forget what they’re paying me, what they mentioned in an offhand e-mail.” He said he was going out of town. “Hopefully, in two weeks’ time, I’ll be back here, reporting, ‘I just spat out a first draft,’ ” he said. Michels reminded him to have faith that being stuck would defeat his ego, making room for the Shadow. “The green light is on,” the writer said, cheerfully ignoring him. “It’s time to go.” ♦

Thanks The New Yorker

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TIMELINE: The Hobbit’s Troubled 75-Year Journey From Page to Screen

By Mike Ryan

On Monday, somewhat incredibly, The Hobbit finally started filming. Amid the seemingly weekly reports of turmoil and lawsuits surrounding the two-part Hobbit film over the last few years, it’s easy to forget just how long this movie has been in production — and the minor miracle it is that not only is The Hobbit being filmed, but Peter Jackson is behind the camera. So let’s take a quick look back — a “Dummy’s Guide,” if you will — at the timeline associated with the long, torturous journey that finally got us to where we are today.

The Players

Ralph Bakshi: Director of the 1978 The Lord of the Rings animated movie

Guillermo del Toro: At one time the announced director of The Hobbit

Peter Jackson: Director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit

Miramax: Studio originally set to make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson

MGM: Studio that purchased United Artists, which own the distribution rights to The Hobbit

New Line Cinema: Studio that produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy and is co-producing The Hobbit

Arthur Rankin: Director of the 1977 The Hobbit animated film

Bob Shaye: CEO of New Line Cinema

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books

United Artists: Distribution rights holders for The Hobbit since 1966

Saul Zaentz: Oscar winning producer who purchased most of the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings


The Timeline

1937: J.R.R. Tolkien releases The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.

1954-1955: J.R.R. Tolkien releases the sequels to The Hobbit: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King (also known, together, as The Lord of the Rings).

1966: Tolkien sells the film and merchandising rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists.

1976: Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The English Patient) purchases the full rights to The Lord of the Rings and partial rights to The Hobbit. The terms of this deal are tricky, which would lead to a lot of the future problems. Zaentz’s partial Hobbit rights entitle him to produce a film based on Tolkien’s source material, but not to distribute a Hobbit film. United Artists kept those rights (hold this thought).

1977: Unrelated to Zaentz, an animated Hobbit film is released as an NBC special, produced and directed by Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass (Rankin is best known for his holiday specials that include Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman). This adaptation was not particularly well-received.

1978: Zaentz produces an animated version of The Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi, that tells the first half of the three-book story, amid controversy: What was always intended as a two-part story was never revealed to audiences, leading to dissatisfied movie goers who were not expecting the story to end halfway through. Though the film was a financial success, the second part was never completed.

1980: An unofficial animated sequel, The Return of the King, was released by Arthur Rankin.

1981: MGM purchases United Artists

1995: According to his biography, Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey, Jackson first inquires about directing an adaptation of The Hobbit for Miramax, envisioning a three-part movie: one based on The Hobbit and two based on The Lord of the Rings. During negotiations, Jackson discovers that Zaentz does not have the distribution rights to The Hobbit. United Artists, thinking that The Hobbit would be the book first subject to a possible film adaptation, retained those rights in the 1978 deal with Zaentz.

1996: Again according to his biography, Jackson decides to put The Hobbit on hold and film a remake of King Kong with Universal.

1997: Also from Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey, Universal cancels that particular King Kong remake. Jackson reaches an agreement with Miramax to produce two The Lord of the Rings movies.

1998: Because of cost concerns, Miramax proposes condensing the two Lord of the Rings movies into one film. Jackson declines and approaches New Line Cinema, which suggests a trilogy instead of two films. Jackson is not allowed to use the scripts presented to Miramax, so three new scripts are written.

1999: On Oct. 11, filming begins on The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

2001 - 2003: Three live action movies based on The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King — are released over a three-year period. Combined, the three movies gross almost $3 billion worldwide.

2003: After overwhelming success of the first two films, the first signs of backlash from a cast that feels New Line wasn’t particularly generous with sharing the profits start to arise.

2004: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King wins all 11 of its Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

2004: Saul Zaentz (yep, he’s still involved) files suit against New Line over royalties. Also, Peter Jackson, as his contract with New Line stipulates that he can, requests an external audit of New Line’s finances in conjunction to The Lord of the Rings. This creates a strain between Jackson and New Line CEO Bob Shaye.

2005: Zaentz’s lawsuit is settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Peter Jackson files suit over New Line not providing requested records in a timely matter. According to Entertainment Weekly, the major sticking point was how New Line distributed The Lord of the Rings to other internal Time Warner companies like Warner Bros. and Turner. Jackson felt that there was a possibility of lost revenue if he could prove these were sweetheart deals. Jackson’s King Kong is released.

2006: New Line, as part of an overall settlement, approaches Jackson about filming The Hobbit. Jackson declines. MGM (who, remember, still owns the United Artist distribution rights) announce that they would like to work with Jackson and New Line in making The Hobbit film a reality. New Line publicly announces that Jackson is fired from The Hobbit. Peter Jackson writes an open letter on TheOneRing.net declaring, “the studio is going to have to hire another director.”

2007: Bob Shaye, CEO of New Line, writes to Sci-fi Wire, “I don’t care about Peter Jackson anymore. He wants to have another $100 million or $50 million, whatever he’s suing us for. He doesn’t want to sit down and talk about it. He thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars.” In September, New Line is fined $125,000 for not providing financial documents requested.

2007: In December, somewhat surprisingly, it’s announced that New Line and MGM would co-finance a two-part Hobbit film with Peter Jackson as the executive producer. Jackson explains that it was his own decision not to direct. The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien sues New Line for 7.5 percent of all profits from The Lord of the Rings films and blocks production of The Hobbit.

2008: Warner Bros. absorbs New Line. Guillermo del Toro is hired to direct The Hobbit. In April he is interviewed about his plans as director by TheOneRing.net. In August, preproduction finally begins on The Hobbit.

2009: The suit from the Tolkien estate is settled” for an unspecified amount. Jackson’s The Lovely Bones is released.

2010: Citing MGM’s financial troubles causing delays, del Toro leaves The Hobbit. In June it’s announced that Jackson himself is in negotiations to, once again, be the director of The Hobbit. In October, the announcement is made that Jackson will indeed direct both films and direct them in 3-D. Even with MGM’s financial woes, The Hobbit is green lit for filming to begin in early 2011.

2010: In October, a fire destroys a New Zealand warehouse where many of the miniatures used in the film are stored. Unions protest the production of The Hobbit and Jackson levies the threat of leaving New Zealand. An agreement with the unions and the New Zealand government is quickly reached. Casting for the film — including casting a large portion of the cast from the Lord of the Rings trilogy — begins.

2011: Warner Bros. (New Line’s parent company) reaches a deal with the troubled MGM that gives WB sole worldwide distribution rights of both installments of The Hobbit.

March 21, 2011: On Monday, the first scenes for The Hobbit are shot on location in New Zealand. The first Hobbit film is set to be released in 2012, followed by the second in 2013 — but, at this point, we just never quite know for sure, do we?

Thanks Movie Line!

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DVD pirates running rampant in China

Reel China: With the Chinese government essentially looking the other way, major Hollywood films can be had on the cheap in Beijing and beyond within days of their theatrical release.

By Dan Levin and John Horn, Los Angeles Times

Poking around a pirate DVD shop down the block from the Apple Store in central Beijing one recent afternoon on her lunch break, Zhou Xin eyed the floor-to-ceiling selection of Oscar-nominated films, indie flicks and B-movies such as "Nude Nuns With Big Guns" before grabbing a sleek copy of "Black Swan," complete with a blurb in English and Mandarin, for closer inspection.

"It looks creepy," said the 26-year-old, who works in public relations. She replaced it on the shelf and picked up "The Social Network," which she purchased for eight yuan, or about $1.22.

Asked if she had ever bought a legal foreign DVD, she replied: "Never. And even if I wanted to, there's nowhere to go. Legal DVDs are like democracy — they don't exist in China."

Thanks to globalization, rising incomes and the spread of the Internet, Chinese consumers such as Zhou have an interest in Hollywood movies like never before — "Avatar," for instance, grossed more money in China than any other country besides the United States. But their options for legal viewing of foreign films remain scant.

China allows only about 20 foreign movies into theaters each year, and has strict licensing rules for the sale of home entertainment products. Censors must approve of all films for legal viewing and would certainly frown upon fare such as "Black Swan," with its explicit sex scenes, and "The Social Network," which is about Facebook — a service that the Chinese government blocks.

With no outlets akin to Netflix, Blockbuster or iTunes legitimately selling or renting a broad selection of titles, Chinese movie buffs opt for illegal Internet downloads or pirated DVDs. More and more piracy has migrated to the Web in China, though reliable estimates of its magnitude are hard to find. Still, bootleg DVDs — slickly produced and packaged, some with "extras" even better than those found on legitimate discs — remain a huge business and give an indication of the scale of the problem: According to a report in state-run media, the country's pirate DVD industry raked in $6 billion in 2010. By comparison, China's box-office receipts totaled $1.5 billion last year.

Authorities say they are taking robust action to thwart copyright infringement of items such as films, music and clothing and claim a crackdown has netted 3,000 people since October. But the fundamental problem, Hollywood studios and many Chinese consumers agree, is that China's censorship policies and restrictions on home entertainment products make it nearly impossible for consumers here to buy legal copies of American films. The Motion Picture Assn. of America has estimated that nine out of 10 DVDs sold in China are bootlegged, and piracy rates for downloaded films are almost certainly as high or higher.

"We will not make serious inroads on piracy in China until we can get into that market and offer a legitimate and legal alternative," said Greg Frazier, chief policy officer of the MPAA. The trade group, which represents the six major Hollywood studios, is hopeful that a pending World Trade Organization dispute will force China to liberalize not only the theatrical distribution of movies but also the import and sale of home entertainment products and the licensing process retailers must go through. China is expected to respond sometime this month.

Hollywood studios have started experimenting with licensing deals with Chinese video portals after major ones such as Youku and Tudou lost lawsuits and began removing copyrighted content from their sites. Youku recently licensed the Warner Bros. film "Inception," which users can pay five yuan, about 75 cents, to watch. Tudou is to start streaming TV programs including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" in a deal with Disney Media Distribution. But shadowy new sites continue to pop up, and pirated DVDs are easily bought online.

Chinese consumers are so used to bootlegs that particular pirate "brands" with names like Red Dragon, Monkey King and Pegasus have loyal followings. Some of the more established pirate brands are experimenting with watermarks of their own, in an effort to distinguish their products from those made by smaller bootleg outfits. The high-end pirates don't deal in copies of movies recorded in theaters with shaky hand-held cameras; rather, they make bootleg copies of authentic DVDs, known as D9s, that often offer more features than an authorized DVD of the same movie sold in an American Wal-Mart. Some brands put together exquisitely packaged box sets or collectors' editions.

These sophisticated pirate operations draw on multiple sources. They'll take video features from North American discs and combine those with the most accurate Chinese subtitles from Taiwan and Hong Kong discs. For instance, a pirated DVD version of "The Shawshank Redemption" includes an MP3 file of the entire soundtrack.

The speed of China's DVD pirates can be astonishing: Just four days after the latest Harry Potter film premiered in theaters worldwide in November — including in China — the boy wizard had flown in from bootleg factories in the southern city of Guangzhou to DVD shops across Beijing.

"It's a really quick turnaround," said an employee at one such shop in the city's university district. "And if a movie isn't available we can just call and order it for you. New inventory comes in every few days."

During Hollywood's Oscar season, DVD screeners that studios send out to voters are often copied by pirates. "Black Swan," which debuted in U.S. theaters on Dec. 3, was available on DVD in China by late in the month.

Aside from a brief bit of text at the start of the disc warning viewers not to copy or sell the movie, the film was crystal clear. (Eagle-eyed viewers, though, might have noticed a few typos in the start-up screen added by the bootleggers: The title was rendered as "Black Sean," and viewers had to click on "Mian Menu" to start the disc. But such imperfections bother few shoppers here.)

On the day of the Oscars, another DVD shop was sold out of the best picture winner, "The King's Speech." A young woman sitting on the floor packaging discs did her best to save the sale. "Don't worry," she chirped. "We'll get more in tomorrow."

Member companies of the MPAA have taken various websites, DVD vendors and an unlicensed video-on-demand service to court in China and won cases, but the penalties aren't severe enough to discourage other bootleggers.

"What we can do here is very limited," said Li Chow, vice president for greater China at Sony Pictures International and Columbia Tristar Films. "There are too many factories and little enforcement. You can shut them down today and they reopen tomorrow."

"Why are these DVD shops allowed?" she continued. "That's what we're asking the government. You need better enforcement to stop all this."

Chinese authorities certainly do conduct periodic crackdowns. At the Zhongguancun market in Beijing, where DVDs are sold wholesale by weight or in quantities of 100 for about 30 cents each, stands were empty and guarded by police on a recent visit. Vendors said the enforcement was launched ahead of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in early March.

"Those two conferences are coming soon, so the government is taking these issues extremely seriously," said one vendor who refused to give his name. "But if you really want DVDs come back tomorrow and find me."

Given that the government has demonstrated it can stamp out the online and street sales of material it objects to, such as religious texts or democracy literature, many outsiders believe Beijing has good reason for looking the other way on commercial piracy. The business interests of the country's military, the People's Liberation Army, may be a factor.

"It was pretty clear to us that the PLA was involved in the replicating business. If not involved, at least condoning," said Frazier of the MPAA.

The Hollywood trade group believes China will only get serious about piracy when its homegrown industry demands action.

Major Chinese directors are becoming increasingly vocal about the threat of piracy to China's film industry. This month, Zhang Yimou, who directed "Raise the Red Lantern" and designed the Beijing Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, has called film theft "rampant" and said that "boosting copyright protection is key to the healthy development of film industry," according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Some directors have resigned themselves to the efficiency of pirates. Chen Daming, who directed the Chinese remake of "What Women Want," went to a DVD shop three weeks after the film premiered last month to buy copies of the movie after he ran out of his own discs.

"The quality wasn't bad," he said. "I don't know how they do it."

Still, he said, 20 days before being pirated is a pretty good "window" for a Chinese film — his previous film was pirated even before it was widely released.

Whether the concerns of domestic directors are enough to alter the political calculus of China's leaders on piracy remains to be seen.

"China's leaders are very concerned about keeping the country together," said Frazier of the MPAA. Piracy "may help keep the masses happy."

john.horn@latimes.com

Dan Levin reporting from Beijing and John Horn reporting from Los Angeles

Times staff writer Julie Makinen contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Thanks LA Times!

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