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Marketing for the true story inspired Foxcatcher is getting properly going now, following the movie’s premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival over the weekend and the first clip being released online last week. The latest drama by director Bennett Miller (Moneyball) was scripted by E. Max Frye (Where the Money Is) and actor/writer Dan Futterman (who also co-wrote Miller’s Oscar-winning Truman Capote biographical feature, Capote).

Based on actual events, Frye and Futterman’s Foxcatcher screenplay offers an intimate look at the relationship between Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), his older brother/ex-Olympian, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), and millionaire Jon du Pont (Steve Carell) – a relationship that went terribly wrong in the late 1990s, when du Pont finally ceased to be an eccentric rich guy – and crossed over the line, to ...

Click to continue reading ‘Foxcatcher’ Gets a Teaser Trailer; Early Reviews Are Very Positive

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Sundance TV is combining Mad Men's Don Draper with Rip Van Winkle. The cable network is developing Crack in the Sky, a drama about a Don Draper-type who falls asleep in 1962 and wakes up in 2012, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The drama hails from E. Max Frye (Band of Brothers, Where the Money Is), who will pen the script and exec produce alongside Deborah Spera (Army Wives, Criminal Minds) and Maria Grasso (Ricochet). The Sony Pictures Television drama will be produced by Marshall Persinger (Army Wives, Rectify) via Spera and Grasso's Sony Pictures Television-based One-Two

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If you want to pull off the perfect heist, then working for the company you’re stealing from is probably a good way to start. In Dito Montiel’s new crime thriller Empire State, Liam Hemsworth plays a young New Yorker who fails to get accepted by the NYPD and subsequently decides to go to the other extreme, taking up a job as a security guard with the Empire State armored truck company and using his position and knowledge of the company’s lax security to pull off a $9 million robbery.

Attempting to track down the money is Dwayne Johnson, who plays a suspicious cop trying to find the evidence needed to send Hemsworth’s character to jail. Emma Roberts (It’s Kind of a Funny Story) and Michael Angarano (Sky High) co-star, and the whole thing is based on a massive ...

Click to continue reading ‘Empire State’ Trailer: Dwayne Johnson...

Film has the power to take you inside someone's head. And that's what under-appreciated aces Scott McGehee and David Siegel do with  well-reviewed "What Maisie Knew," which opens Friday. They show what a sweet smart young girl feels (sharp-as-tack Onata Aprile) as she watches her selfish, narcissistic parents, a rock star (Julianne Moore) and an art dealer (Steve Coogan), break up. She soon realizes that they are ill-equipped to pay her much heed, much less look after her daily needs. So like a flower to the light, she turns to her attentive nanny (Joanna Vanderham) and her mom's hunky new boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard). "I love him," she tells her babysitter. So, it turns out, does she. Painter-turned-writer Carroll Cartwright and partner Nancy Doyne first wrote this script 18 years ago when he was a working screenwriter ("Jumanji," "Pearl Harbor," "Where the Money Is") in Venice, California.  It's based on the 1897 Henry James novel,...

• Sean Penn is in talks to star in the action thriller Prone Gunman, based on the novel by the late French author Jean-Patrick Manchette about an international assassin who runs afoul of the organization that hires him after he says he wants out of the business. (Silly assassin; shadowy global organizations are never keen on quiet retirement.) Peter Travis adapted the screenplay; there is no director yet attached. [THR]

• John Hawkes, lately winning Oscar buzz for The Sessions, has signed on for Low Down, a biopic of jazz pianist Joe Albany. He replaces Mark Ruffalo, who had originally been attached to...

More casting notes today.  Check them out in brief below: Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn) is in talks to topline the period drama, Suite Francaise, from British writer/director Saul Dibb (The Duchess). Anthony Michael Hall (The Dark Knight) is the latest addition to Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, which already stars Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and Sienna Miller. Hit the jump for more on the above-mentioned films.  Variety reports that Williams may star in Suite Francaise as Lucille Angellier, a vivacious young woman living in occupied France who falls for a German officer and is forced to choose between love and country.  Trapped in a loveless marriage, Lucille has only her overbearing mother-in-law for company when her husband is called off to war.  Lucille finds escape in playing the piano, but is instantly attracted to the young German officer assigned to stay at their home, who happens to be a former composer.

Director Bennett Miller is becoming something of a serial biographer about a particular moment in the lives of incredible, infamous and unusual people. He won an Oscar nomination for his film about the defining moments in the life of writer Truman Capote during the putting together of his non-fiction work In Cold Blood in 2005′s ‘Capote‘ and most recently has re-told the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s and his successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players in the Brad Pitt starrer ‘Moneyball’.

For this next and third feature film, Bennett will tell the infamous and shocking true story of the murder of Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler David Schultz in 1996 by his long-time friend.

The drama is titled Foxcatcher and our lead will be John du Pont, a seemingly harmless stamp-collecting, bird-watching multimillionaire and...

Countless documentaries have grooved to the sounds of the Grateful Dead, but Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story) has signed on to direct the first feature-length work of fiction centered around frontman Jerry Garcia. According to Variety, Topper Lilien (Where the Money Is) adapted the screenplay from the Robert Greenfield book Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia.

Garcia played an astounding 2,314 shows with the iconic San Francisco rock band from 1965 up until his passing in 1995. The film will reportedly center on Garcia’s early life before joining the Dead. Hit the jump for a synopsis of the source material.

Here’s the synopsis of Greenfield’s Dark Star:

For more than thirty years, Jerry Garcia was the musical and spiritual center of the Grateful Dead, one of the most popular rock bands of all time. In Dark Star, the first biography of Garcia published after his death, Garcia is...

Back in December Hulu, along with Clear Channel, MySpace, Ford and Pepsi all signed on as sponsors and production partners for If I Can Dream, a new online docusoap Web series by reality programming mastermind Simon Fuller (American Idol). TheWrap (along with Tubefilter) covered the deal announcement, but overall, it didn’t generate much in the way of media or Web series industry buzz. But it’s time to take a closer look. Last week’s article by Stuart Elliott of the NY Times (the advertising industry’s most influential reporter), profiled Pepsi’s new Pepsi Refresh Project campaign and mentioned the Web series production deal as the first original content deal for Hulu—calling attention to it one more time, but to a very wide and influential audience of top media and ad agency execs who are still cautiously dipping their toes into the branded entertainment space with their clients.

Paul Newman was one of the titans of 20th century film. He won huge acclaim in a series of Hollywood classics. But acting was only part of his story - he was also a devoted husband and father, a political activist and a philanthropist

Alistair Cooke, a very shrewd film critic, once wrote of 'stage acting as a form of sculpture and film acting as a performance with the face only - the best film actors do best with the eyes only'. He was writing about Edward G Robinson, Henry Fonda, Jean Gabin and Spencer Tracy. But Paul Newman, who has died at his home in Connecticut aged 83, belongs in that illustrious company.

Although a number of his finest pictures were in black and white (The Hustler, for example, perhaps his best film), what comes most immediately to mind when we think of him are those deep blue eyes that variously sparkle,...

Sexy actress Linda Fiorentino "would have had sex" with her veteran co-star in new film Where the Money Is (2000), Paul Newman - if he wasn't married. Fiorentino plays Newman's platonic girlfriend in crime in the heist movie - but Linda, 40, definitely had the hots for the 75-year-old. She says, "Paul was very sexy - really warm and loving. I wish I'd met him a long time ago."...

Philanthropic movie star Paul Newman is looking for a brewery to back a new NEWMAN'S OWN beer - to compliment his range of salad dressings and organic food. The star of the recent Where the Money Is (2000), who insists he'll retire after his next movie, has already secretly muted the idea with brewers but claims they always want to pocket the profits, rather than give it away to charity - where the cash from Newman's Own products goes. He says, "One big brewery wanted to come out with a BUTCH CASSIDY beer but it was complicated because I said, 'If I give my profits to charity you've got to give your's, ' and they weren't comfortable with that. "I'd still like to do it, although my daughter's organic side of the business is currently the thing. She's doing 74 per cent of business - she'll run me out at this rate."...