News

Buyers pounce in Italy, France, Benelux, Eastern Europe, South Korea.

Grandave International president Tamara Nagahiro has announced in TIFF a raft of territory sales on thriller Righteous Thieves following the North American deal with Gravitas Ventures.

Deals have closed with Daro for Eastern Europe, Africa, and France, Eagle Pictures for Italy, Premiere TV for Benelux, and Bucket Studios for South Korea.

Anthony Nardolillo (7th & Union) directed the film from a screenplay by Michael Corcoran about the head of a secret organisation who assembles a crew to steal back artwork plundered during the Second World War from a modern-day billionaire Neo-Nazi oligarch.

Exclusive: Briarcliff Entertainment has acquired North American distribution rights to the gripping historical drama Kent State from writer, director Karen Slade. The film will star Dermot Mulroney, Clancy Brown, Aksel Hennie, Christopher Backus, Christopher Ammanuel, Andrew Ortenberg and Jacqueline Emerson.

Grandave International is handling foreign sales on the film. The pic will begin filming this November in Columbus, Ga with a US theatrical release anticipated for 2023.

Inspired by true events, the movie tells the story of how a family’s buried past coincides with the brutal truth of one of the most significant events in American history, when the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of student protestors, killing four, and injuring 7 on May 4th, 1970, at Kent State University. Told through the perspective of Will McCormack in two time periods in his life, the film asks the question of not just what happened then, but why these kinds of events continue to happen.

Special From

By Barbara Lovenheim

It seems improbable for a new slant on Katharine Hepburn to emerge, but the upcoming exhibit Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and the five excellent essays in the new Skira/Rizzoli companion book "Katharine Hepburn: Rebel Chic" are provocative and eye-opening. Contrary to Hepburn’s public image as an indifferent fashion rebel who wore slacks in public years before pant suits came into vogue, Hepburn cultivated her counter-culture image deliberately and with great precision when she became aware of its publicity value, eventually ordering custom-made slacks and shoes and, on the sly, ordering handmade French lingerie.

“I think you should pretend you don’t care,” she once remarked to Garbo, who captivated Hollywood with her mannish suits, hats, and Ferragamo flat-heeled shoes. “But it’s the most outrageous pretense.

William Morris' policy for its book/literary department was to send out coverage and trust its West Coast colleagues to sell its books to TV and film. Occasionally New York agents such as Peter Lampack and Ron Yatter ignored it and did the selling on their own. Owen Laster, department chief, appeared to follow tradition, but in reality Owen regularly called me for a head's up.   He was significantly responsible for my first miniseries at NBC. It was in fact his call that morning, saying that he would be sending a memo that James A. Michener's "Kent State:...

As part of our on-going attempt to re-publish some great feature articles from yesteryear for the enjoyment of new readers who may not have visited Owf the first time around, here’s a 2009 article by Tom Fallows originally written for the release of Drag Me To Hell.

This Article Contains Images That Some Readers May Find Disturbing

“The sun began to set – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature. ”

- Edvard Munch

Sam Raimi’s new horror movie Drag Me to Hell is perhaps one of the first movies to fully reflect our current economic crisis/catastrophe. With its story of a bank worker (Alison Lohman) who refuses an old Hungarian woman further...

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #5]

4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 8/8

Tobe Hooper, a talented and innovative filmmaker who never quite got his mainstream due, even after making Poltergeist (and be embroiled in controversy with Steven Spielberg about who actually directed it), made this perennial classic on the cheap in the early seventies. Taking the baton from Wes Craven and Last House on The Left, it expresses the miasma of violent dread and disorientation that hung over an America left schizophrenic by the auto-cannibalism of Vietnam, Kent State, Attica, Watergate, etc. Hooper swings at the audience with the kind of gritty haymaker that only very hungry, very creative, and very poor directors just out of the gate can make.