Festivity

Fun interview from the SXSW Samsung bloggers’ lounge in Austin by What’s Trending host Shira Lazar. Thanks to her opening compliments and willingness to drink from the same plastic cup, guest Marc Maron wasn’t sure if this was an interview or a date.

Around the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, Maron tells Lazar about his upcoming IFC show Maron, an offshoot of his podcast success debuting in May. “If you haven’t had your fill of me, there’s more me coming in a different format,” the comedian joked. “It’s all I have.”

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A news story doesn’t get much more gilded than this. But ahhh, how to still have fun with it?

Perusing this morning’s rat-tat-tat pick-up of the announcement that Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby will open the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, here are three quick FishbowlLA favorites:

1) Clever: Dave Itzkoff / New York Times “Arts Beat” blog:

Who said there are no second acts in American lives? Oh, right: It was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose seminal novel, “The Great Gatsby,” is getting a lavish reinterpretation from the director Baz Luhrmann that will open the Cannes Film Festival, its organizers announced Tuesday.

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Following his chronicling of 2012 film awards season via The Frontrunners, Fandango chief correspondent Dave Karger is down in Austin with the site’s senior director of PR Harry Medved and editor-in-chief Chuck Walton to officially launch his new Web series, Weekend Ticket. The program will debut on the site March 14 and feature SXSW interviews with Steve Carell, Jim Carrey, Olivia Wilde, Paul Walker, Josh Duhamel and Paul Rudd (or, as Andy Samberg so hilariously referred to Rudd during the Spirit Awards, Paul “Reeud”).

Karger hinted when we spoke with him not long ago that he would be making use of the formidable Nate Silver-like predictive data gathered from the site’s ticket buyers. Sure enough, Weekend Ticket will be sourcing a new weekly indicator also unveiled at SXSW:

“Fanticipation” ranks fan excitement around upcoming and current movies based on Fandango’s proprietary data collected from its online and mobile traffic, the social media engagement of its fans and its advance ticket sales…

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Studio City Patch local editor Mike Szymanski is a personal friend of actress Sally Kirkland. That connection enabled him to get to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank to do a video interview with the 71-year-old Oscar nominated performer after surgery for a weekend mishap at the Studio City Film Festival.

Kirkland is remarkably calm about the whole thing, even though she says the broken ankle and rehabilitation from her CAP Theatre fall will prevent her from walking for three months and has forced her to cancel four projects. “Life happens,” she noted.

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Los Angeles filmmaker James Tooley, who funded Starring Adam West two years ago via Kickstarter, is set for a somewhat unusual locale  to unveil the finished product. His feature documentary will world premiere next month at the second annual Sun Valley Film Festival (March 14-17).

There’s an even cooler chronology framing Tooley’s movie. When he raised those funds, it was all about the effort to get West a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That has since come to pass, in April 2012, so Starring now stands as something of a double celebration. Per a December 17 Kickstarter update, the Idaho festival fits right in with Tooley’s final project duties:

I know it’s taken a long time and I really appreciate everyone’s patience. We’re now working on the final cut and next comes color correction and mix in January and February. Licensing some of the clips has proven to be difficult but we hope to have the film completed early in 2013. I’m really happy with it and I hope you guys all love it as much as I do.

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Apparently, there is going to be a lot of sex on-screen as well as off this year at Sundance. At least that’s the Day One decoupage offered by Movie City News head honcho David Poland.

In setting the salacious scene, Poland pays a certain male A-lister the ultimate backhanded compliment (the bolding is ours):

We’ve already seen Gaby Hoffman running around buck naked – and not highly sexualized – in the title role of Crystal Fairy. But just wait til they get a load of dick. James Franco is the finger in the ass of Sundance this year, with two strong pieces.

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Nice little exclusive from EW senior writer Anthony Breznican heading into the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He got word from the makers of Lovelace that after a lot of casting drama involving Sarah Jessica Parker for the role of Gloria Steinhem, it all wound up on the cutting room floor:

Parker was a last-minute addition to the film, which features Amanda Seyfried in the life story of the woman who starred in the 1972 X-rated movie Deep Throat. The Sex and the City actress was an emergency fill-in for Demi Moore, who dropped out of the movie in the middle of production after she suffered unspecified health problems and was hospitalized…

With the film now just days away from its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have told EW that it turned out they didn’t need the character after all. Parker, who played the role of feminist icon Gloria Steinem, has joined a long list of actors left on the cutting room floor.

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It makes a lot of sense for the feature-length debut of a veteran journalist to be titled Big Words. World premiering Friday night at the 2013 SLAMdance Film Festival, the drama is the work of Neil Drumming, formerly a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly (2002-2007) and currently a freelancer for such publications as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vibe. The movie tells the story of three former hip-hop group pals struggling with their feelings on the night of President Obama’s election in 2008.

Drumming blogged about the making of his film for The Atlantic. Here’s how he described the final day of shooting:

I can’t speak for every director, but without my crew around me, I feel alone in a profoundly disturbing way – like sitting in the middle of a vacuum waiting for someone to clap the slate. Maybe this is something you get over. But then again, maybe it isn’t. There appear to be many addictive things about being a filmmaker, and maybe this is one of them: You get hooked on the voices. You spend your career desperately chasing collaboration, art by committee. Fortunately for me, I still have weeks of post-production to get the film ready for festival submission. So I have plenty of time to get chummy with my editor.

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Along with being the editor of Southland Publishing’s Arroyo Monthly magazine, Irene Lacher continues to contribute provocative weekly celebrity “Sunday Conversations” Q&As as a freelancer to the LA Times. She was once a staffer for the paper. We covered the one she famously did some time ago with actor Thomas Jane and want to also highlight her intriguing January 13 discussion with Anita Hill.

All four premiere screenings in Park City of Anita, the documentary about Hill’s landmark sexual harassment battle, are already sold out. The only downside of Lacher’s interview is that at the time of the discussion, Clarence Thomas‘ former accuser had not yet seen the film. Hill explained how Anita came about:

“I had been approached by two or three filmmakers about doing a documentary, and for two or three years I simply said no, and Freida Mock had come back a couple of times. I wanted to work to make sure that if the story was told that at least I had some positive input. So after talking with Freida, I just felt that she was the right person to tell the story. She persuaded me in this very calm, clear way that I and the story would be in good hands. And that’s all she promised me.”

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SiriusXM program Rotten Tomatoes Radio just keeps on rolling.

Launched June 7 as a weekly Thursday live call-in show, it was expanded to two nights a week (Tuesdays, Thursdays) just three months later with an eye towards also covering each week’s DVD and VOD releases. Now comes word that the one-hour program will be going daily for the first weekend of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. From today’s announcement:

Rotten Tomatoes Radio will air from the Miami Lounge on Main Street in Park City on Thursday, January 17 at 6:00 pm, Friday, January 18 at 7:00 pm, Saturday, January 19 at 4:00 pm and Sunday, January 20 at 4:00 pm (all times ET) on SiriusXM Stars Too channel 104. Senior editor Grae Drake and Rotten Tomatoes’ international editor Luke Goodsell (live from Park City) together with editor-inc-chief Matt Atchity (live from Rotten Tomatoes LA headquarters) will report on all the latest news, buzz and deals and interview notable guests.

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