Studio Film

This particular Marilyn Monroe is 26 feet tall and weighs 34,000 pounds. Tonight, beginning at 6 p.m., the statue will be officially unveiled in Palm Springs during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the corner of Tahquitz Canyon Way and Palm Canyon Drive.

About a thousand people are expected to attend tonight’s ceremony, which is roughly the same amount of bystanders who looked on the night Monroe shot the famous subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch outside the Trans-Lux Theatre on Lexington Avenue in New York.

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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.

As New York-based media studies student and feministing.com editor Chloe Angyal (pictured) readily admits, pouring over Hollywood romantic comedies for a doctoral dissertation “sure beats poking at a petri dish.” The 2009 Princeton grad is currently working towards this very unusual PhD through the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she is originally from.

The trends Angyal is focused on include the well-noted move in recent years to expose more of the studio film genre’s male stars. Think Jason Segel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Justin Long, Ashton Kutcher, Ryan Reynolds, Justin Timberlake and several others. But what does this all mean?

They’re all white. They’re all lean and broad-shouldered. They’re all rather muscular. Some of them are toned and sculpted in accordance with superhero standards: Chris Evans was fresh off filming Captain America when he made What’s Your Number? and Reynolds made The Proposal right after he wrapped Wolverine. And, uh, it shows…

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OK, so our headline is nowhere near as clever as the one chosen by San Diego Reader film writer Scott Marks. His item, which tipped us to some news related to AFI’s funniest comedy of all time, sits under the hilarious designation “Some Lick It Hot…”

On one of four new USPS stamps honoring the incomparable Billy Wilder, there are companion images of Marilyn Monroe and the iconic red-turret roof of San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. All to remind that the timeless gender-bender was filmed there. From Marks’ report:

The Hotel del will celebrate the new stamp today at the Vista Walk area in front of the hotel. A variety of photographs will be placed on display featuring Wilder, Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon filming scenes from Some Like it Hot in 1958.

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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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With Roger Ebert’s valiant attempt to revive At the Movies having faded into the sunset, writer-director Kevin Smith is aiming to kick-start the critics-talking-heads format on Hulu beginning June 4 with a fundamentally different approach. In each episode of Spoilers, he will have 50 citizen co-hosts.

The hoi polloi popcorn chompers will be chosen via a website launching today and get to chime in about big summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight Rises and Rock of Ages. Ahead of the first taping at his new SmodCo Studios facility on Universal City Walk, Smith teased some of the other content in an interview with Wired:

“We’re going to do a beat called Movie Goon where like I’ll have on my friend Malcolm Ingram, who hates everything. He’s one of these nihilists. If it’s popular, he can’t stand it. He represents the Internet. So we’ll bring him on and let him have his say and then we’ll beat him up verbally and tell him why he’s wrong — have a good old-fashioned debate.”

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Far more intricate than the script of Battleship, exploding today on screens across America after an earlier international start, is the matter of how the source board game came to be.

When people this weekend Google – “Who invented Battleship?” – they’re likely to get a lot of search returns featuring the name Clifford Von Wickler. But a little further research suggests that like President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate, this starting point may be entirely bogus. Per game aficianado Theodor Lauppert:

According to many sources Battleship was invented around 1900 by one Clifford Von Wickler, who however never patented it. This is highly unlikely, since the name Clifford Von Wickler itself is unlikely, and pen-and-paper games typically played by kids at school rarely have a traceable inventor.

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Interesting tidbit from TheWrap film writer Brent Lang.

Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes from 1983 through 1997, told Lang that prior to the making of Michael Mann‘s 1999 drama The Insider, he arranged for Wallace to meet with the director at the Beverly Regent Wilshire hotel. Why? Because Mann at the time hoped to convince Wallace to play himself in the film (the correspondent was, of course, famously channeled in the end by Christopher Plummer). From Lang’s piece:

The movie depicted Wallace caving to CBS’ corporate leadership after the network refused to air the Jeffrey Wigand interview over concerns about a potential lawsuit from tobacco company Brown & Williamson. Wallace claimed that he never agreed that the story should be killed.

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New York publishing firm Open Road Integrated Media is calling it Kirk Douglas’ “first E-riginal.” Even though the 242-page work will also be available in paperback.

At age 95, the three-time Oscar nominee and prolific author has conquered just about every other media realm. Come June, with forward help from George Clooney, he will have added material written primarily for the Kindle, Nook and so on, under the title I Am Spartacus! Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist. From today’s announcement:

Open Road co-founder and CEO Jane Friedman says, “I have admired Kirk Douglas as an author ever since the publication of his first bestselling book, The Ragman’s Son, in which he touched on the complicated and career-threatening decisions he took in producing Spartacus, which resulted in the breaking of the decade-long Hollywood blacklist. I am thrilled that he finally decided— with the wisdom and clarity of his 95 years—to tell the definitive story of the making of this iconic film amid the shameful political climate of the time.”

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One of our favorite Hollywood Foreign Press Association reporters Ruben Nepales has a cool interview piece with Johnny Depp. He leads with several interesting observations made by the reluctant mega-star about dealing with the white noise of the Internet.

While 13-year-old daughter Lily-Rose thinks it’s weird that she has various Facebook and Web fan sites, dad takes it a step further, deeming the phenomenon “somewhat ugly.” He says both she and 10-year-old brother Jack have access to the Internet, but that when it comes to the wild-west standards of Web journalism, he tries to occasionally give them a friendly heads-up:

“They are able to read truths, lies, fiction and rumors. This whole thing has become this mulch of fodder. I’ve decided to just stay hush-hush about anything and everything. If the rumors spin, let the rumors spin.”

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With Los Angeles just seven years away in real calendar terms from the fake version of the city showcased in Blade Runner, Matt Novak at Smithsonian magazine’s Paleofuture blog decided it was high time to take billboard stock.

The best part of his post is the stuff about how Los Angeles fought non-electronic billboard proliferation in the late 1920s. The city fared about as well as it has this time around in the face of electronic displays and so-called super-graphics adorning the sides of office buildings. Writes Novak:

Today, with digital billboard technology becoming commonplace, local governments all over the country have been fighting advertisers with outright bans. Cities claim that these relatively new forms of outdoor advertising are ugly and distract drivers. Of course, these were the exact claims that the opponents of billboard advertising were making in the early 20th century…

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