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Exclusive: Luxury labels are “naturally evolving” toward producing and making their own indie feature films, says Charles Finch, founder and chief executive of Finch and Partners, the consulting firm that has been the prime mover in enabling “a synergy of content” between the entertainment sector and the crème de la crème of brands.

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For 25 years, Finch tells Deadline, “we have either represented studios in helping to promote their programming or we have brought enormous luxury deals to artists, and...

It’s been 24 and 23 years since the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, respectively, were brutally gunned down, and their deaths have become the grist for so many narrative features and documentaries that some filmmakers are now returning for seconds. British director Nick Broomfield first explored the crimes in his 2002 doc “Biggie and Tupac,” which has long been seen as the standard-bearer when it comes to films on this oft-visited subject. So why, then, is he returning to the same landscape now?

Based on its title, “Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac” looks to recontextualize the case by positing that Death Row Records founder, Marion “Suge” Knight, was the instigator of one murder. But Broomfield’s focus ends up being far too scattered. For a while it’s a biographical doc: At times he seems more interested in how a man like Knight,...

Appointment

Former Disney, DreamWorks and Twentieth Century Fox executive Tim Erickson has been named executive VP of brand Peanuts Worldwide, reporting into Eric Ellenbogen, CEO of WildBrain, the majority owner of Peanuts. Working together with the family of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, WildBrain’s content and management teams and brand co-owners Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), Erickson will be responsible for sustaining a strategy supporting brand marketing and leveraging new content launches to expand the global presence of the Peanuts brand and build momentum towards its 75th anniversary in 2025. Erickson will be based in New York.

Erickson most recently held the position of COO at the media company GoldieBlox, and prior to that as senior VP of global licensing and operations at Twentieth Century Fox, preceded by the position of global head of licensing and operations at DreamWorks. He also spent several years driving consumer products and sales strategies at Disney and Lego.

Periodically, the Federal Bureau of Investigation makes public some of it's archives on politicians and entertainers. Last month the FBI made it's file on late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain available to the public for the first time. The 10-page file contains two letters from two individuals who asked the FBI to investigate the rockstar's 1994 death by suicide, believing foul play may have been involved.

The names of the individuals has been redacted from the FBI documents, but a letter sent to the bureau in September 2003 reads: "Millions of fans around the world would like to see the inconsistencies surrounding his death cleared up once and for all. It is sad to think that an injustice of this nature can be allowed in the United States." This letter was typed-out and cites director Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney documentary from 1998 as an example of similar skepticism.

The other letter is...

Leonard Cohen was a lot of things in his life, but most of all he was a searcher. And like all true searchers, he always needed something to seek — something that he had, and loved, and let slip through his open fingers once it was familiar enough that he knew he could feel it on his skin forever. For Cohen, that something was a someone, and that someone was Marianne Ihlen, a Norwegian single mother who the late musician and writer met on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s.

Along with Ihlen’s young son, Axle, they lived together in a daydream; she thought of them as a makeshift family, but he thought of her as his muse. And muses, like the inspiration they provide, are not made to be kept, so much as lost and found and lost again. The first and most famous song...

The ghostly voice of Leonard Cohen reflects on love in the trailer for Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, a new documentary about the singer-songwriter’s decades-long relationship with muse Marianne Ihlen, who inspired Cohen classics like “So Long, Marianne.” “When trying to learn some things about love,” the late Cohen intones, “when your woman becomes her own content, and you become her content, that’s love.”

The poetic clip opens with a news report of Ihlen’s death in July 2016, followed by narration from part of a Cohen “love letter”: “Dearest Marianne,...

“Love is not a victory march,” Leonard Cohen sang in one of the many verses of his signature song “Hallelujah” — and Nick Broomfield’s haunting documentary “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” which premiered on Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, is a lovely illustration of the twists and turns of a complicated relationship that produced some of the gifted songwriter’s most indelible songs.

The Marianne of the title is Marianne Ihlen, a young Norwegian woman who Cohen met in the early ’60s on the Greek isle of Hydra, where artists of all stripes washed up to enjoy an idyllic life where, says one friend of Marianne’s, “there was so much freedom that people went too far with it.”

Leonard was a poet and novelist, Marianne a young mother with a rocky marriage. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen; she didn’t agree,...

London -- Online digital broadcast network Babelgum has signed a deal with ContentFilm International to make 10 feature-length documentaries by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield available across its online and mobile platforms.

The deal was negotiated by Babelgum director of acquisitions Andreas Lemos and Jonathan Ford, exec vp of digital acquisitions and distribution for ContentFilm.

Titles include "Kurt & Courtney," "Biggie and Tupac," "Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam" and "Aileen -- Life and Death of a Serial Killer."

Babelgum has set up a dedicated Nick Broomfield "superpage" available from July 19 as well as putting up free video streaming of the titles.

TORONTO -- After directing documentaries for the past quarter-century, Nick Broomfield (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Kurt & Courtney, Biggie and Tupac) has taken on his first dramatic narrative with Battle for Haditha.

Portraying the events leading to the Nov. 19, 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi noncombatants at the hands of U.S. Marines, the film retains many of the cinema verite qualities of Broomfield's previous works, lending it a powerful, devastating immediacy.

Part recreation, part speculation, formulated from hundreds of interviews, the docudrama has set out to put a personal face on the war in Iraq, and no matter the vantage point, that human cost on both sides is inexorably tragic.

One of the most affecting of the recent rash of similarly themed films, the British production should have no trouble courting North American distributors following its Toronto International Film Festival premiere.

Shot in Jordan, Battle for Haditha makes an effort to spend as much time with those young American soldiers (several of whom are played here by actual ex-Marines) as it does with the Iraqi families living in constant fear of terrorists, and a middle-aged man and another not much younger than those Marines, who would at first appear to be a father and son, but turn out to be insurgents.

After establishing the parallel day-to-day existence, Broomfield then ratchets up the tension as those insurgents patiently for a Marine convoy to pass over a roadside IED (Improvised Explosive Device).

When the moment arrives, one of the men activates the bomb with his cell phone, literally blowing one Marine apart and badly injuring two others.

Seeking vengeance and hopped up on a diet of caffeine and death metal, the surviving Marines retaliate by conducting a violent house-to-house search for the perpetrators.

By the time the smoke clears, two dozen Iraqis civilians, many of them women and children, are dead.

With its dialogue largely improvised by many who had seen extensive combat in Iraq, Battle for Haditha has a gripping authenticity lacking in other similarly themed dramas.

One of those individuals is Elliot Ruiz, a former U.S. Marine Corporal who had been told by doctors that he may never be able to walk unassisted again after badly damaging his leg during an insurgent attack in Tikrit.

Having since taking up acting, his performance, as the conflicted Cpl. Ramirez, lends the film a particular poignancy.

Back in the real world, the Haditha trials are about to get underway at Camp Pendleton, almost two full years after the incident.

BATTLE FOR HADITHA

Lafayette Film Ltd./Channel 4 UK

Credits:

Director: Nick Broomfield

Writers: Nick Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin, Anna Telford

Producer: Nick Broomfield

Executive producers: Peter Dale, Charles Finch

Director of photography: Mark Wolf

Production designer: David Bryan

Music: Nick Laid-Clowes

Co-producer: Anna Telford

Editors: Ash Jenkins, Stuart Gazzard

Cast:

Cpl. Ramirez: Elliot Ruiz

Ahmad: Falah Flayeh

Hiba: Yasmine Hanani

Capt. Sampson: Andrew McClaren

Sgt. Ross: Eric Mehalacopoulos

Rashied: Duraid A Ghaieb

Jafar: Oliver Bytrus

Safa: Aya Abbas

Running time -- 93 minutes

No MPAA rating...