Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs: Robert DeNiro is set to take Santa Barbara honors; Maggie Smith takes a swipe at Hollywood for “treating [audiences] like five year-olds”; And a writer to pen the Scarface re-make is found.
Robert DeNiro to Receive Santa Barbara Honors
Oscar-winner Robert DeNiro will receive the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s 7th annual “Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film” prize at a gala December 8th. DeNiro will receive the honor from Douglas in “recognition of his exceptional career spanning over four and a half decades, leading up to this year’s release of Silver Linings Playbook. The annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival takes place January 24 – February 3.
Around the ‘net…
Lee Daniels Eyes Directing Amy Adams as Janis Joplin
Daniels is in talks to direct Get It While You Can, an Amy Adams starrer in which she will play Janis Joplin. Lee recently finished shooting The Butler and currently has The Paperboy in release. Production on the film about the singer who performed rock classics “Piece of My Heart” and “Me and Bobby McGee” will possibly begin in early 2013, THR reports.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire Producing Two Animal Poaching Pics
Warner Bros. is working on two projects dealing with illegal packing and trafficking in endangered animals. Both are being produced by Tobey Maguire’s Material Pictures, DiCaprio’s Appian Way and Tom Hardy’s Executive Options. Hardy is the would be star in Up In the Air set in Africa in which he’d play a former Special Forces soldier who joins a friend in the bush to fight poachers killing off rhinos and elephants. The second is untitled but would follow the supply and demand for endangered animals that…
Also in Monday morning’s round-up of news briefs, The Other Dream Team tops a mostly lackluster specialty box office, while The Perks of Being a Wallflower held strong in expansion. Looper tops the foreign box office. And, a French film wins in San Sebastian.
Gothams to Honor Matt Damon, David O. Russell and Participant’s Jeff Skoll
The three will be honored with career tributes at the 22nd Gotham Independent Film Awards November 26th at Cipriani Wall Street. Damon stars in Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land, which was produced by Skoll’s Participant Media. Russell directed Silver Linings Playbook, Deadline reports.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire Urge Voter Expression
DiCaprio and Maguire lead a cast of stars in a new public service announcement urging young voters to use social media to talk about which issues they think matter most in the upcoming election. Zac Efron, Selena Gomez, Ellen DeGeneres, Jonah Hill and Joseph Gordon Levitt also appear in the Vote 4 Stuff video unveiled Monday, A.P. reports.
Specialty Box Office: The Other Dream Team Scores on Slow Weekend; Perks of Being a Wallflower Strong in Expansion
There were a few weeks there when the specialties shined compared to their studio brethren — overall box office slumped, but newcomers like The Master and Arbitrage impressed. Well, the final weekend of September saw limited-release titles lack the star-power of those earlier releases, and this frame as a result can best be described as ho-hum for the indies. The documentary The Other Dream Team scored the best overall numbers with a solid $11K-plus screen average,” Deadline reports.
Foreign Box Office: Looper Opens No. 1 Overseas with $36 Million
The sci-fi pic opened strong in only a handful of markets, opening number one in China…
It seems like only yesterday comic book fans were all excited about the very first Spider-Man movie — Sam Raimi’s 2002 take on the webslinging superhero, starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. With Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone stepping in to lead Marc Webb’s high school-set The Amazing Spider-Man, a lot of people are wondering if the reboot is any different at all. Time will tell if fans decide Amazing is better or worse, or maybe just the same as Raimi’s Spider-Man — but looking back on interviews from 2002’s Spider-Man junket, it turned out some of the exact same questions were asked of both sets of directors and stars.
If you’re not sure whether The Amazing Spider-Man is a fresh take on the Marvel superhero tale you’ve seen before, see if the filmmakers’ answers to the same questions convince you. (Boy, Kirsten Dunst sounded so young back then!)
Directors Sam Raimi and Marc Webb were both asked: How did you approach the humorous/wisecracking side of Spider-Man?
Sam Raimi: It’s just like if you go to tell a joke that you heard or if you read 40 years of Spider-Man comic books and now it’s your turn to tell the Spider-Man origin story, if you said, “Well, there was this radioactive spider that bit this kid,” if that’s how you chose to tell it, you’d be telling it a very different way than I would tell it. I would have to start with who the kid was, what his problems are and what things meant to him. So, I understood what the transformation meant to him. I think everybody just tells it differently and I didn’t have a good plan for how I was going to tell it.…
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Andrew Garfield has passed along comments and notes from his inaugural Spider-Man stint for a while now, but he’s saved his first truly in-depth press foray for a chat with the one guy on Earth who can literally relate to every word: Ex-Spider-Man franchise star Tobey Maguire.
The conversation is featured in the new issue of VMan, with numerous highlights from cover boy Garfield confiding to Maguire about the absurdity of the casting process…
“I’m friends with a few of the guys who were up for it, and I actually had dinner with Jamie [Bell] the night of my screen test and his screen test. We compared notes and war stories, and we kind of got past the ridiculousness of it all and thought it would be a nice idea to get everyone together and kind of interview each other about how messed up the process is, being against each other, and remember that we’re all in it together, knowing that when you take off that bodysuit someone else is going to be stepping into your sweat immediately after. It’s a weird kind of cattle call. But Marc [Webb] was great. He was very open and encouraging. You have the monitoring area with literally about 30 people judging you, looking at your face and whispering to each other—it’s one of the most disconcerting and kind of humiliating things to go through, if you’re aware of it.”
…to Maguire singing his heir’s praises…
“When it was coming together, I was particularly excited at two moments: one was when Marc Webb got involved. I think he’s an interesting and cool choice. And then I was certainly curious as to who was going to play Peter Parker. When I heard it was you, I was literally
…
Full Story »So Baz Luhrmann beats on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into 3-D. In the first photos from his splashy new The Great Gatsby adaptation, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, and Joel Edgerton vamp it up like humorlessly obsessed guests at a murder mystery dinner party. Anybody else find the casting here a bit too pat and obvious? Leonardo DiCaprio is a… a moneyed and aloofly self-interested man! Tobey Maguire is… a nervous, kowtowing outsider! Carey Mulligan is… the new Mia Farrow again! Well. Check out the images for yourself and see if I’m too cynical.
Can’t you picture a party tray of spiked punch and pizza rolls just out of frame next to Leo and Carey? They’re high school sophomores wearing their best thrift store finds and acting saucy with the rest of drama club. It’s a little hilariously inept, but it also looks sincere. Question is, do we need to see that hammy sincerity in 3-D? I assume not, but maybe Baz is adding kaleidoscopic flair to the whole thing. Great + Gatsby, if you will.
• First Official Images from THE GREAT GATSBY Featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan [Collider]
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Incarcerated ponzi schemer Bradley Ruderman is allegedly trying to save his bankrupted company by obtaining money through any means possible. According to a report first posted by RadarOnline.com, Ruderman is suing Tobey Maguire for winning $311,200 against him in unlicensed poker games take took place from 2006 through 2009 in Los Angeles-area hotels. California gambling is illegal, see, so the money can be considered illegally obtained. The good news: Tobey Maguire, you are a helluva poker player! You should donate some of that gold to the producers of The Good German, anyway. [NYT/ArtsBeat]
Incarcerated ponzi schemer Bradley Ruderman is allegedly trying to save his bankrupted company by obtaining money through any means possible. According to a report first posted by RadarOnline.com, Ruderman is suing Tobey Maguire for winning $311,200 against him in unlicensed poker games take took place from 2006 through 2009 in Los Angeles-area hotels. California gambling is illegal, see, so the money can be considered illegally obtained. The good news: Tobey Maguire, you are a helluva poker player! You should donate some of that gold to the producers of The Good German, anyway. [NYT/ArtsBeat]
Baz Luhrmann confirms that he cast newcomer Elizabeth Debicki in his 3D The Great Gatsby in the role of Jordan Baker, the golfer and love interest of Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway. This helps fill out a cast that includes Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Leonardo DiCaprio as the East Egg-cellent Gatsby. “Newcomer,” by the way, is an understatement: Debicki is a recent Victorian College of the Arts student who has no IMDB page, Wikipedia entry, or even much in the way of Google results. (UPDATE: An interview!) Luhrmann insists she exhibits a “chemical connectivity to Tobey Maguire.” Well, so does Movieline! [Deadline]
Here’s some exciting casting news to end the week with: Tobey Maguire has joined the cast of Ang Lee’s 3D adaptation of the bestselling novel Life of Pi. The former Spiderman will play a writer who interviews the main character (played as an adult by Slumdog Millionaire’s Irfan Khan) about his experience aboard a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Gerard Depardieu and Adil Hussain round out the cast. Maguire previously worked with Lee on The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil. [Variety]
