Festivity

There’s no mention of a gossipy Hollywood Reporter item on Alec Baldwin’s Twitter feed, yet. But because the piece disparages the all-powerful Harvey Weinstein, perhaps there soon will be.

In the headline and first few paragraphs, reporter Merle Ginsberg suggests that at a May 17 IFP party in Cannes, the actor went around calling Weinstein the D-word because of the latter’s refusal to participate in a French Riviera-focused documentary Baldwin is making with James Toback. But further into the piece, it gets murky:

A source close to the actor parses that Baldwin actually said the mogul… “was an a-hole, not a d-bag.” Both Baldwin and Weinstein’s reps declined to comment.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Based on reports coming out of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival sneak peak at Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, it’s going to be a very schizophrenic Christmas at the movies for perennial Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio.

Arriving in theaters December 25 together with Baz Luhrmann’s remake of The Great Gatsby will be a DiCaprio we’ve never seen or heard before. Per Kyle Buchanan’s Vulture dispatch on the seven minutes of footage shown:

The big surprise? How funny this potentially controversial Western has turned out to be. In particular, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be having the time of his life dropping N-bombs and smiling rotted teeth as plantation owner Calvin Candie, whom freed slave Jamie Foxx and bounty hunter Christoph Waltz must defeat in order to save Foxx’s wife Kerry Washington.

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Megan Ellison, 26-year-old daughter of the third-richest man in America, has so far refused all interview requests. Nevertheless, LA Times reporters Ben Fritz and Steven Zeitchik have managed to put together a solid profile of the moneyed indie producer, beginning with these fabulous first two paragraphs:

She’s a 26-year-old former party girl with social anxiety issues, a motorcycle-riding iconoclast who dropped out of USC and attends meetings in Led Zeppelin T-shirts.

Megan Ellison is also the most powerful new producer in Hollywood, running a burgeoning movie company from her $33 million compound in the hills above the Sunset Strip — and giving a critical boost to the kinds of adult dramas the major studios have all but abandoned.

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Despite outrageous ticket prices and no confirmed music acts, the advance passes for Coachella 2013 managed to sell out Thursday in less than five hours.

If you were able to clear your busy schedule nearly a year in advance, you could have bought a three-day general admission pass for the low price of $349 or a VIP pass for $799.

The only advance tickets that remain are part of the Lake Eldorado camping package.

Similar to this year, next year’s festival will take place over two weekends in April (12-14, 19-21).

For those of you who didn’t want to commit to a music festival without knowing any of the acts (what a concept, I know), general tickets go on sale in early 2013.

Previously on FishbowlLA:
The Coachella 2013 Lineup According to Funny or Die

Should a documentary conversation between filmmaker Roman Polanski and one of his closest friends and associates have essentially skirted the topic of the 1977 sexual assault above Mulholland Drive? That’s one of the first questions being addressed by local reporters covering this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir reviewer Jeffrey Wells suggests that “Polanski pitch-forkers will dismiss” the movie. He and colleague Sasha Stone are themselves quick to dismiss in the comments user Abbey_Normal, who innocently asks and then follows up about the topic of whether or not the episode is covered:

Dude, I’m not a pitch-forker, I’m just curious how they addressed it. Did they not even mention it? Wouldn’t most people watching a documentary on Polanski expect them to say SOMETHING about an incident that has haunted him for decades, effectively exiled him from a number of countries, and left him reviled, fairly or not, by massive swaths of people?

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The always funny folks over at Funny or Die “leaked” their version of the Coachella 2013 lineup.

I’m looking forward to hearing Vodka in a Water Bottle and Waiting Until You Get Back to the Hotel to Poop tear it up next year in Indio.

Five-time Oscar nominee Kenneth Branagh has made his way to the San Francisco International Film Festival to accept the Founder’s Directing Award (last night) and participate in a Q&A screening of his 1991 film Dead Again (tonight).

Branagh told San Francisco Chronicle regular contributor Pam Grady that after the success of Henry V, he had hoped to convince Hollywood to let him adapt Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Instead, Paramount pointed him in the direction of Scott Frank’s long-in-development tale of a modern-day Los Angeles private detective juxtaposed with a 1940s-era German composer. Which led to this spring 1990 moment:

At the time, Branagh was playing Edgar in King Lear at the Mark Taper Forum in LA. While waiting for the curtain to go up that night, he read the first page of Dead Again aloud to then-wife Emma Thompson, vowing to put the script aside if it didn’t grab their attention immediately. He kept reading through the night, stopping only to step onstage.

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The LA Times’ Hero Complex Film Festival just announced the schedule for its third annual iteration at the Downtown Regal Cinemas at L.A. LIVE. The festivities kick off May 18 with a screening of Dawn of the Dead. Director Zack Snyder will be there for a zombietastic night with Walking Dead writer/creator Robert Kirkman.

The festival will close May 21 with a night with comic book legend Stan Lee. Other highlights include a screening of A Clockwork Orange followed by a discussion with Malcolm McDowell. There will also be Robocop.

Full schedule after the jump.

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Film Independent just released the preliminary gala schedule for this year’s LA Film Festival. Focus Features’ Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Fox Searchlight’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and AFFRM and Participant’s Middle of Nowhere are the latest films added to roster. Beasts and Middle of Nowhere have already earned acclaim after debuting at Sundance. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World–with Steve Carell, Keira Knightley, Rob Corddry, and Patton Oswalt, among others–will be making its world premiere.

Woody Allen‘s To Rome With Love will kick off the festival on June 14. More films should be announced shortly.

Although it has long been known that Gene Kelly and other Golden Age leading men wore hairpieces on screen, it’s debatable whether this should be a topic of Q&A conversation before the Hollywood world premiere of a 60th anniversary restored edition of Singin’ in the Rain. Especially when the actor’s widow is sitting in the audience, as was the case Saturday night at Grauman’s Chinese for this Turner Classic Movies Film Festival marquee event:

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