Studio Film

Last month on the FOX Business Network, Follow the Money host Eric Bolling and guest Dan Gainor blasted the Muppets for using “class warfare” to “brainwash our kids” with an “anti-corporate message.” “They hate the oil industry,” said Gainor, referring both to the Muppets and Hollywood as a whole.

A few days ago, while on a UK press tour for The Muppets, Kermit and Miss Piggy responded to the allegations. “If we had a problem with oil companies,” said Kermit, “why would we have spent the entire film driving around in a gas-guzzling Rolls Royce?”

Added Miss Piggy, “It’s almost as laughable as accusing FOX News of being news.”

Via Dangerous Minds.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

The canine nominees for the first ever Golden Collar Awards were announced last week, and Martin Scorsese was outraged to learn that Hugo star Blackie the Doberman had been overlooked. In an Op-Ed for Sunday’s LA Times, the director made his case for the four-legged actor as a write-in candidate for the “Best Dog in a Theatrical Film” category:

I’m proud of Blackie, who laid it on the line and dared to risk the sympathy of her audience. Let’s just say that on the set, she had a fitting nickname: Citizen Canine. The bath scene alone is a masterpiece of underplaying, with Blackie’s wonderfully aquiline face accentuated by the 3-D.

The editors of Dog News Daily, the publication behind the Golden Collar Awards, have agreed to make Blackie a nominee if and only if they receive 500 “NOMINATE HUGO’S BLACKIE” posts on their Facebook page by Monday, February 6. You know what you have to do, people.

Call it truth in advertising. U.K. website The Shiznit has photoshopped several movie posters in an attempt to more accurately reflect the films in question:

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Our favorite male porn star may just crossover into mainstream film. Bret Easton Ellis has been tweeting about a film script he is writing with James Deen in mind:

Ellis describes the project he’s writing as as an “LA noir micro budget Paul Schrader movie,” and it’s clever of him to want James Deen involved. Deen has a large following of young women, and we’re willing to bet they’d come out in droves to see him in a mainstream film.

What do you think, dear readers? Could the next teen heartthrob be a porn star?

When San Luis Obispo International Film Festival director Wendy Eidson originally floated the idea of a first-ever screening of Citizen Kane at the Hearst Castle, she was actually joking. But as she told LA Times reporter Steve Chawkins, after she made the historic suggestion to the keepers of the state park, the reaction was anything but what she expected:

“They didn’t laugh,” Eidson said. “I was sort of floored.”

Steve Hearst, the mogul’s great-grandson, said the [March 9] event will present the film as a work of fiction rather than as a documentary about the life of the patriarch known to family members as W.R.

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Last night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, there was a special screening of a restored version of original Best Picture co-winner Wings. The 1927 action drama is being released next week on DVD for the first time by Paramount Home Entertainment as part of the studio’s extensive 100th anniversary year celebrations.

KABC-TV reporter George Pennacchio, CBS2-KCAL entertainment correspondent Suzanne Marques and other journalists covering the event all mentioned an astonishing hook. Sitting in the audience Tuesday night was Carl Reiner, who remembers watching Wings with his parents in the Bronx when the film was originally released:

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What is it about Stanley Kubrick and low-level British con men?

First there was Alan Conway, a travel agent turned impersonator, who went around in the 1990s pretending to be Kubrick and whose unlikely success was the basis of the 2005 movie Color Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich. Now comes news, via UK’s Bury Free Press, of another eyes-wide-open scammer:

A Finningham man, who posed as a successful Hollywood filmmaker to con two aspiring screenwriters out of 121,000 pounds, has been jailed for three and a half years.

Richard Maskery, 42, claimed he was a protégé of legendary director Stanley Kubrick and was involved in producing Tom Cruise films, including Mission Impossible. He convinced the screenwriters he was negotiating with stars and leading Hollywood directors and extracted nearly 55,000 pounds of their savings to finance the project.

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The film studios have so little interest in all-black films that even Hollywood royalty like George Lucas struggled to find a distributor for his latest work, Red Tails. Lucas didn’t mince any words when explaining to Daily Show host Jon Stewart the source of the problem:

It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made.

Lucas spent 23 years making the film, which is based on the true story of a crew of African American pilots who fought in World War II and helped start the civil rights movement. “I financed it myself. I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios and that they would release it,” he explained to Stewart. “And I showed it to all of them, and they said, ‘Noooo. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’ It’s not green enough.” And by green, Lucas means profitable.

These are the same yahoos who brought us Mars Need Moms, a film that lost over $100 million. A whackadoodle story about motherless space aliens strikes these dunderheads as a better investment than a classic tale about real American heroes. Because they happen to be black.

Get it together, Hollywood.

View the full Lucas/Stewart interview after the jump.

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Lionsgate tried to back out of a multi-million dollar product tie-in deal for Hunger Games nail polish back in November, prompting beauty brand American International Industries (AII) to slap them with a lawsuit. The two companies have since settled their differences, though they remain tight lipped on the details, with AII simply stating that “Any litigation matters between the parties have been resolved,” and Lionsgate saying nothing at all.

Ads for the polish line have already surfaced, featuring Elizabeth Banks as her character Effie Trinket. As a side note for the ladies and drag queens reading this, the crazy butterfly & deer antler eyelashes she’s wearing are made by London brand Paperself.

The polishes will be released March 1 by China Glaze, and The Hunger Games hits theaters March 23.

The Twitter account for Quentin Tarantino‘s next movie threw out a casual query this afternoon, asking for possible Django Unchained taglines. Faster than you can type “Duck, You Sucker!”, the first round of suggestions is in.

The winner at this early stage is venerable Hollywood Reporter journo Gregg Kilday. His proposed tagline is, “Makes Mandingo Look Like Uncle F*cking Tom.”

Second prize for Round One goes to Jim Vejoda of IGN, thanks to “Django: It’s Belgian Gypsy for Bad Muthaf****r.”

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