How much do movie stars contribute to box office success? Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse researched the notion of "star power" to better understand how A-list players contribute to Hollywood's bottom line.   We can all understand at some level that stars in the worlds of film, sports, and even business create results. If you want big box offi…

'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you' Ray Bradbury   Dear Tom, It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one. Where am I? It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the wearines…

  Award-winning actor and comedian Red Buttons has died at the age of 87 He was one of the first funny men to show that comedians could also be Oscar-winning actors. He won the Supporting Actor award for Sayonara (1957), in which he co-starred with Marlon Brando as a U.S. airman who embarks on a tragic romance with a Japanese woman. He was also a quick-witted master of his craft as a com…

Have a slightly madver 2008

Power, Corruption and Laughs. This was Danish director/protagonist Mads Brugger’s route through the failed state chaos that reigns in the Central African Republic in his documentary satire The Ambassador, premiering in the UK at Edinburgh International Film Festival this week. Tackling deadly serious subjects that involve diplomatic immunity, old colonial interference and blood diamonds dredges…

As the season finally closes in on us, for those tired of the same old re-runs on TV or wanting to avoid the family warzone of the living room and watch TV on a computer under your bed - or better still are looking for films to share during the post-dinner web video show-off - I've pulled together some of our favorites of the year. In the first bundle I've focussed on anima…

"The Love Bug features a car that comes to life. Is it powered by the love of Jesus Christ? We aren't offered any evidence that this is the case so we must, unfortunately, assume that it is in fact animated purely by the power of the Lord of Darkness. I still feel an urge to pray whenever I see a Volkswagen Beetle." Watching4Jesus.com is a website run by the Divine Church of Holy Interventi…

It has often been said that men age and women mature. However women, like wine, tend to mature in one of two ways. They either ripen into something full-flavoured, with lots of body and a myriad of intriguing flavours or they turn onto an unpleasant, acidic vinegar. It's further said that there are no good parts in Hollywood for the older woman. Well, one person would take issue with that. She's…

In 2006 we wrote here about this new idea of crowd-source financing to fund films, which had funded a few short films – a couple of years before IndieGoGo and Kickstarter took off. We'd followed the growth of a new website 'craze' called YouTube, that was making the industry sit up sweaty, followed their first feature filmmakers Arin and Susan and written about alternative exhibition as Secret Ci…

Red Bull's Flug Tag is back on the 7th June 2008, and they have kindly given E4 an offcial entry birth. The idea is to make your own flying machine, and well basically fly into the seprentine.  Now E4 want their own fans to represent them at the Flugtag. One lucky team consisting of four fans will be E4's offcial team at the big day. They will design, build and pilot the craft …

It was an inspired idea – creating a feature around the ultimate fantasy of a girl from village India dreaming of Bollywood stardom and to fulfill it, running away with The Truck of Dreams, the mobile cinema that rumbles around the dirt roads that pass for off-the-beaten-track in rural India. It was a dream also for London-based director Arun Kumar, a first feature with global themes, financed a…

 The first time. I can never forget that. Shunted to the outskirts of town to watch Robert LePage juggle love and war in his heartstopping multimedia devised play the Seven Streams of the River Ota, which would eventually run at 7 hours by the time I last saw it at the National, years later. Stuart Lee and Richard Herring in pre Jerry Springer the Opera days chumming with Jenny Eclair…

well....its quite a mad story.... it all started when I was planning to make a short film -'eating out' - in August 2003... managed to get my actors, crew, location, camera, lights etc all via favours but still needed £200 or so to feed everyone and get us all through the 2 day shoot.... which was a problem until a friend called me saying she had a new job as cre…

"Is a very powerful love story. There is man. There is woman. Man falls over. Woman falls in love. Man wears funny hat. Oh no! Is woman dying of disease? Yes. Then man fall over some more. She get better. They get married. The end." Roberto Benitio is best know as the Italian comedian and film maker who directed ‘Wasn’t World War Two Fun?’ which swept the board at the Oscars two years ago. He c…

I stumbled across some of my old writing still online on Netribution from over two decades years ago that was so bad I wanted to cancel myself before anyone else had a chance to. I was scrolling down my old year 2001 design for old raw HTML Netribution pages untouched in 20 years, and still looking much like it did then (other than screens are much bigger so there's a lot of left/right padding)…

"This is a short film about my job as a Projectionist. I am quite proud of this film, mostly because I’m so proud of my job – it seems like a fulfilment of my childhood romantic notions of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nonetheless what it most discernibly omits is how truly magnificent all the other staff are who work there too. It is dedicated to the other projectio…

Jon H from Finland at JonHs.net has pulled together a remarkable list of 9-11 related documentaries online. All are free to watch and most are created by unfunded groups and individuals. There's a few extreme conspiracy theories but it's is still an impresive collective example of citzen filmmaking. So much seems to have happened in the five years since Tom ran up the stairs…

  Writer Simon Rose on Getting His Story to the Big Screen I can't be the only writer who, after sitting through umpteen appalling movies, has thought, "Surely I can do better." By 1994, I was itching to write a screenplay, but a subject eluded me.  Then I heard about Graeme Obree. This down-at-heel Scot built a revolutionary bicycle from scrap and washing- machi…

Sheffield Doc/Fest wound up on Sunday night after 5 full-on days. Capturing a flavour of the event overall did mean sacrificing time spent in screenings, but I caught two films up for a Special Jury Award; Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (premiered at London Film Festival in October) and Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol (premiering in the UK at Sheffield). Neither won, although Barnard’s film did get the…

the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…

So I finally hit the big time and moved up a decimal place in my daily Web Monetization payouts. As I mentioned last month I've added Web Monetization here and a few other sites (FundYourFilm.com, Visuali.st – my work site, and screen.is). After a daily trickle of a penny or two, I got an email on the 15th "You received 1.77612 XRP from Interledger Network", which based on today's price of the c…