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Saschka Unseld and Lily Baldwin explore the phases and facets of love in Through You, a dance-infused Vr piece that premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Unseld is an animator who directed the Pixar short The Blue Umbrella and is a cofounder of Oculus Story Studio, a Vr media company. Baldwin arrived at filmmaking by way of dance, where she’d worked with everyone from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet to David Byrne. As a creative challenge, the two decided to edit Through You themselves. Below, Unseld and Baldwin discuss the roughly 150-200 hours they spent editing a 14-minute Vr experience. Filmmaker: How and […]...

After many years of a varied theater, dance and film career, Roxanne Messina Captor will be directing her script “Pearl” starring Juliette Binoche along with Leehom Wang (“Blackhat”) and Jing Tian (“Great Wall”). Based upon the life of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck, who was in China during the upheaval of the 1920s. The story follows the “Ten Years Civil War” which took place between the Communists and Nationalists after the Nanking Incident of 1927. Her family escaped Nanking with the help of her family’s nanny and moved to Shanghai. She left China in 1934 and never returned.

Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her novel “The Good Earth,” about the struggle of Chinese farmers, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” She also wrote “Peony” a deeply moving romance about the last Jew in K’aifeng in the province of Hunan.

The 1937 movie “The Good Earth” starred Paul Muni and Luise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for best actress.

During the Beijing Film Festival 2012, writer/ producer/ director Roxanne Messina Captor tied in China Film Group to co-finance and co-produce her project. About 85% of the film will be shot in China.

Binoche, who won an Oscar for “The English Patient,” recently starred in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and will be seen next in Mike Medavoy’s mining rescue drama “The 33″ opposite Antonio Banderas. She’s repped by CAA and Untitled Entertainment. Roxanne and the project are also repped by CAA.

Roxanne has also been invited by the Pearl Buck foundation to present her research paper on Buck in the Pearl Buck Symposium to be held in Zhenjiang early September. This is Pearl’s hometown and museum.

“Pearl” is scheduled to start production in 2016 in Zhejiang Province, Shanghai and Prague. Vilmos Zsigmond has been attached as the cinematographer.

"I found so many parallels in Pearl's life. At twelve I followed my two professional passions, writing and dancing. Both stayed with me as my career expanded to directing. Pearl and I believe anything can manifest with passion and determination."

A Juilliard Theater School graduate, Roxanne Messina Captor was with Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet, Harkness Ballet, New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet and performed as a guest artist with Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. She has performed On and Off Broadway under the direction of Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Uta Hagen, Robert Lewis (Yale Repertory Theatre).

As a theatre director and choreographer working in Regional and Off-Broadway theatre. Francis Ford Coppola chose Captor to assist Gene Kelly with the choreography of "One From the Heart." She danced in the films “Cotton Club”, "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," "Xanadu" and "Pennies From Heaven. Other film producing and directing include: Emmy-nominated "Home Sweet Homeless”, "A Clean Kill” starring Daniel Benzali, “Her Married Lover” prime time premiere Lifetime Television. "Dead On Sight,” starring Jennifer Beals, and Oscar nominated William H. Macy ("Fargo").

In 2001 she was the Executive Director of the San Francisco International Film Festival and one of the few Americans to moderate a panel at the Havana International Film Festival. She received international recognition and was awarded the prestigious Chevalier du Ordre des Arts and Lettres, Republic of France in 2005. One of the original programming executives who formed Turner Network Television.

Just a couple of weeks after the sad death of Richard "Jaws" Kiel, the James Bond pantheon has lost another of its iconic villains. Geoffrey Holder, who played Baron Samedi to unsettling effect in 1973's Live And Let Die, has passed away from complications stemming from pneumonia. He was 84.There was much more to Holder than voodoo henchmen. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he began his career as a dancer aged just 7, and by the time he was 22 was teaching at the Katherine Dunham School of Dance in New York. Four years later he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work as a painter, whilst still finding time to work as a principal dancer with New York's Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He made his Broadway debut in 1954 in the musical House Of Flowers (co-written by Truman Capote), and co-starred in an all-black Waiting For Godot in 1957.His first...

One of these days I will add Eddie Murphy's Boomerang to my Best Movies section. Realistically I could just recategorize my 2012 article on the film's 20th Anniversary and make it a Best Movies entry and be satisfied. However, if I were to do that I'd have to add a little more than just a passing mention of Geoffrey Holder's performance as Nasty Nelson, because he is truly one of the film's high points. Today, sadly, we learn Holder died Sunday at the age of 84 due to complications of pneumonia. On top of playing Nasty Nelson, Holder is perhaps better known to others as the "Un-Cola" guy for 7Up commercials back in the '80s, as Punjab in 1982's Annie, as Baron Samedi in 1973's James Bond film Live and Let Die or in ways I never got to know him, as a Tony Award-winning stage performer and dancer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.

Geoffrey Holder, the only theater man who at 6 feet, 6 inches could look Tommy Tune right in the eye and say “Abosolutely maaaaah-velous,” died Sunday in New York City. He was 84. Charles M. Mirotznik, a spokesman for the family, told the New York Times the cause was complications of pneumonia.

As well known for the honey-smooth bass-baritone that resonated through countless voice-overs as for the white linen suit and Panama hat that set off his gleaming Caribbean features — saucer eyes, broad-as-the-George-Washington-Bridge smile and shaved head — Holder became an advertising icon in the 1970s and ’80s as the pitchman for 7Up, declaring it “the Un-Cola — you know, Sev’mup – wet, wild, all that…” :

But Holder, born in Trinidad, was much more than a seductive accoutrement to Madison Avenue. He left an enduring stamp on virtually every field in the performing arts, as musician, choreographer, actor, director and designer, winning two Tony...

Geoffrey Holder, a larger-than-life presence in the worlds of movies, stage, TV, art, publishing, music, dance - even advertising - died of pneumonia Sunday, The New York Times reports. He was 84 and a resident at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund in Englewood, New Jersey. Holder's imposing 6'6" frame could barely contain his many talents, and a 1975 People profile that ran at the time he won two Tonys for his directing and costuming Broadway's groundbreaking The Wiz described him as having "a voice as deep as Othello and as smooth as Caribbean rum." TV watchers will remember...

Geoffrey Holder, a larger-than-life presence in the world of movies, stage, TV, art, publishing music, dance - even advertising - died of pneumonia Sunday, The New York Times reports. He was 84 and a resident at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund in Englewood, New Jersey. Holder's imposing 6'6" frame could barely contain his many talents, and a 1975 People profile, at the time he won two Tonys for his directing and costuming Broadway's groundbreaking The Wiz, described him as having "a voice as deep as Othello and as smooth as Caribbean rum." TV watchers will remember him as...