News

Bill Butler, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose career in Hollywood spanned five decades, has passed away. The news comes to us via The Hollywood Reporter, with the American Society of Cinematographers confirming his death. Butler was 101 years old, and mere days away from 102. The celebrated filmmaker leaves behind a body of work that is sure to outlive us all.

Born in 1921, Butler got his start in the early '60s serving as the director of photography on TV movies such as "The People vs. Paul Crump" and "The Bold Men." But it wasn't long before he was making a name for himself, shooting Francis Ford Coppola's first feature "The Rain People" in 1969. Butler was also behind the camera working with Coppola again for one of cinema's all-time classics a handful of years later with 1974's "The Conversation."

It was, however, the following year when Butler would arguably make his biggest...

Emmy-winning cinematographer Bill Butler, who was Oscar nominated for shooting “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and was also the D.P. on Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” died Wednesday, according to the American Society of Cinematographers. He was 101.

Spielberg remembered Butler in a statement, saying, “On ‘Jaws,’ Bill Butler was the bedrock on that rickety, rocking boat called the Orca. He was the only calm in the middle of that storm, and as we went into a battle against nature and technology that wore both of us down, the audience eventually won the war. Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient, and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”

In addition to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Butler served as d.p. on a number of other high-profile films of the 1970s, including Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,...

Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant and Clare Boothe Luce – a grouping that might sound more like the set-up for a joke than the premise of a musical – were, in real life, proponents of lysergic acid diethylamide, what we’d now call early adopters. Though each of them tripped the light phantasmagorical during the 1950s, the writer, the movie star and the ambassador never actually came face to face, much less mind to mind, at least as far as we know, but they somehow should have, a situation the new, very original and often delightful musical Flying Over Sunset seeks to rectify.

With a book and direction by James Lapine (Into The Woods), music by Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) and lyrics by Michael Korie (Grey Gardens), Flying Over Sunset boasts a top-notch creative team and cast and a physical production that’s one of the most ravishing on Broadway. Carmen Cusack (Bright Star) as Luce,...

Riggs' dad is a bastard, but we already knew that, right?

On Lethal Weapon Season 2 Episode 11 life-changing decisions were made, but not all of them had happy outcomes.

And wouldn't you know it? Once again Riggs gets the short end of the stick. It's maddening, I tell you! Maddening!

But it also makes for good storytelling. I was much more invested in Riggs story than the case of the week which was embarrassingly predictable.

As soon as Secret Service Agent Peterson showed up, I knew he was going to be the bad guy. What was most disappointing was his sob story about why he did it.

Couldn't Matt Miller come up with something more creative than the guy lost all his money from a bad real estate deal? 

Why does there always have to be a sob story? Why couldn't the guy just be a bad guy without a reason?...

If you’re a nonunion actor in Texas, looking to add some theater to your résumé, this one is for you. A regional production of the Ray Cooney farce “Funny Money” is casting non-Equity actors for several roles. The production will hold auditions by appointment Jan. 7–8, 2017 in Dallas, Texas, with a subsequent run slated for Feb. 24–March 25, 2017, also in Dallas. Helmed by director Carol Rice, the production will provide some compensation. Check out the full listing for “Funny Money” to see if there’s a role for you! If not, check out more Texas auditions listings in Backstage casting. Dreaming of making it on Broadway? Head to our YouTube channel for expert insight!

 

It's a very busy weekend for cinema lovers in Austin. First up, you've got the Austin Asian American Film Festival at the Marchesa. It's a welcome return for the festival, which was last held in 2009. The fest aims to turn the spotlight on films from Japan, South Korea, Myanmar Thailand, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Vietnam and the United States. It kicked off last night and will run through Sunday. Tonight, you can catch a Taiwanese drama called Ice Poison and Pee Mak, a horror film that is the highest grossing film in the history of Thailand. Saturday's lineup includes a Vietnamese comedy called Funny Money and the festival's centerpiece, Andrew Lay and Andrew Loo's Revenge Of The Green Dragons, a film that features Martin Scorsese as an executive producer. Sunday will include the Indian documentary Tomorrow We Disappear and the Japanese comedy Cicada. The full lineup and ticket information...

Atlantic Theater Company and Atlantic for Kids is tuning up to present the New York premiere of Mr. Chickee's Funny Money, an all-new, rhythm and blues family musical, featuring music and lyrics that groove to an original score by Motown legend Lamont Dozier hits include Stop in the Name of Love, Sugar Pie Honey Bun, How Sweet it Is, more and his son, Paris Dozier, with a book by David Ingber Major League Baseball Fan Cave, directed by Jade King Carroll Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Portland Stage, and musical supervision by Brian Usifer Kinky Boots, Book of Mormon.

Since the advent of the DVD and special features, deleted scenes have become common knowledge to even the most casual moviegoer and television watcher. They are almost as essential a characteristic of the audience experience as the bits that actually make it into the finished production.

Every once in a while, a line will appear in a movie or TV show that doesn’t quite add up. In other words, there’s a reference to something that doesn’t appear at all in the rest of the movie or show you’re watching.

Often that can just be put down to bad writing, or empty-headed characterisation. But occasionally, it comes down to an editorial decision, when someone axed the scene the character was referring to, but then neglected to clean up the waves created elsewhere in the script.

It seems hard to believe that after spending millions of dollars on...

Above: A rack focus in Bullitt.

Trespassers Will Be Eaten

Perhaps a less eye-grabbing, but still “driving” title for this third Mubi soundtrack mix should be Shifting Gears...as such, it’s a free-falling, propulsive survey of scores focusing on the thriller in all of its manifestations: detective procedurals, bank heists, neo-noirs, spy films, psychodramas, giallos, chases, races, and sci-fi mind-games. Featured also are a few composers better known for their more famous musical projects. Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s metallic, rhythmic score for Rumble Fish, gamely taunts the self-conscious black and white street theatre of Francis Ford Coppola's film. So-called fifth Beatle, producer George Martin’s funky Shaft-influenced Live and Let Die score ushers in a more leisurely 70s-era James Bond, as incarnated by Roger Moore. Epic crooner visionary Scott Walker’s fatally romantic melodies for Leos Carax’s inventively faithful Melville adaptation Pola X is remarkably subdued and lush.

Michael Cera’s new movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which opens today, is based on a comic-book series by Bryan Lee O'Malley. So it should come as no surprise that Scott Pilgrim draws many references from the geek canon—music from Zelda, Street Fighter–esque brawls, and abrupt cuts that smack of comic-book paneling. However, Scott Pilgrim is set in Toronto, Canada, and pays homage to the locale. (O'Malley is from a city just outside Toronto.) A former resident of the Great White North breaks down the Canadiana: Pizza Pizza: This pizza chain—the largest in Ontario—gets some screen time. The stores are everywhere, and the pizza is passable, but it’s the orange-and-white tiling of the stores and the pizza boxes that is instantly identifiable to anyone who has ever lived out their adolescence in Canada, including, apparently, Michael Cera's uncle. Second Cup: Several characters in...

As the founder and CEO of McCorkle Casting, Patricia McCorkle has worked on hundreds of projects for stage and screen since 1979. She cast a pool of undiscovered young actors in Stanley Jaffe's film "School Ties"—including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Brendan Fraser, and Chris O'Donnell—and has tagged a long list of actors early in their careers, from Holly Hunter and Samuel L. Jackson to Kelsey Grammer and Calista Flockhart. Her film and TV credits include "Ghost Town," "Funny Money," the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair," "Die Hard: With a Vengeance," "Splash," "All the Right Moves," "Californication," "The L Word," "Strangers With Candy," and "Hack." Her Broadway credits include Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," two revivals of "The Glass Menagerie" (one starring Jessica Lange and one starring Julie Harris), Arthur Miller's "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan," "Blood Brothers," Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men,...

For the second straight Friday, Hollywood studios serve up a new release menu packed with an R-rated comedy, a family-friendly action pic, and a horror entry although the top film will be nothing like last weekend's. The Adam Sandler comedy Funny People leads the way looking to give director Judd Apatow another hit with adult audiences. Pulling in less business will be the kidpic Aliens in the Attic and the fright flick The Collector. But for the fourth consecutive frame, the overall marketplace should lag behind last year's scorching hot July results further eroding the year-to-year gain the industry has...

The Palo Alto Players invite audiences to come witness the confusion and hilarity when one seemingly ordinary man tries to balance two lives and two wives in Ray Cooney's Run For Your Wife. Opening June 13th at the Lucie Stern Theater in Palo Alto, this popular comedy from the author of "Funny Money" and "Move Over, Mrs. Markham" will be sure to add some heat and humor to your summer.

Let's get supernatural baby

Ghosts/Aliens got themselves more people to join in on their strange and supernatural world. The Comedy Central induced pilot brings along board Keir O’Donnell (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) and Jonathan Sadowski (Friday the 13th Remake). Casted alongside the two are also the likes of Rebecca Wisocky (Funny Money) and Kaylee DeFer (The War At Home). The premise centers on Trey Hamburger (Sadowski) and his best friend Mike Stevens (O’Donnell) taking part on a crazy pot-induced adventure trying to uncover the truth about the supernatural mysteries that happen amongst them and exposing it to others. Along with them in their ongoing search joins Trey’s mother (Wisocky) Deb Hamburger and his friend (DeFer).

The story originally spawned off of a novel of the same title written by Trey Hamburger himself, author also of Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book. If the Comedy Central pilot gets picked up,...

Chevy Chase returns to center screen and Bucharest backlots play Hoboken, N.J., in "Funny Money". The laugher about a meek middle manager who finds a life-changing fortune takes a while to hit its stride, but in its best stretches, it offers deliriously spirited farce. The cast, along with the promotional efforts of timeshare operator Consolidated Resorts, could entice older audiences to theaters, but the film, which never quite shakes off a flat, low-budget look, will find its true payday in video.

The animated credits that open "Money" set the tone of retro silliness for this comedy without an agenda. Chase still is game, and a perfect fit, as milquetoast Henry Perkins, a longtime employee of the Feldman Wax Fruit Co. Henry's not bitter that Feldman himself (Robert Loggia) shot down his visionary bruised-banana concept a decade earlier. He's not angry that his wife, Carol Penelope Ann Miller), mocks him in couples therapy for being a creature of habit. A sharper shrink might note a bit of projecting on her part: Repressed and proper, Carol's the sculptor of voluptuous, oversize nudes that she's afraid to submit to galleries. But however uncomplaining Henry may be, after a subway jostle with a Romanian thug makes him the possessor of a briefcase containing $5 million in cash, he doesn't hesitate for a second to plan his and Carol's getaway to distant shores.

Besides Carol's reluctance to break the rules, Henry's imminent birthday celebration complicates their would-be escape. The couple and their best friends, Vic and Gina (the well-cast Christopher McDonald, Alex Meneses), attempt to pass themselves off in fictional configurations to a couple of comical cops nipping at their heels. The ultra-slow-dawning Slater (a very funny Kevin Sussman) arrives on behalf of the NYPD to tell the inebriated Carol that her dead husband and his briefcase have been found in the East River. Armand Assante, who should do more comedy, all but steals the show as the toothpick-chewing Genero, a crooked Hoboken detective who thinks the cash-rich Henry is a male prostitute.

The comedy of errors grows more tangled as dozens of party guests pour into the Perkins townhouse, a palatial pad whose size is more a function of genre requirements than a reflection of real estate reality. There's plenty of fine comic timing and deliciously deadpan delivery on display, but not all the supporting performances are up to par. Among the central roles, Miller's drunk ditz would have been far funnier if she had started off on a quieter note. But helmer Leslie Greif lets her mug it up well before her character starts boozing it up.

Adapting Ray Cooney's London stage hit, Greif ("Keys to Tulsa") and his co-scripter, Harry Basil, keep the action light and swift-moving. But the most inspired notion here -- the idea of covering up the convoluted charade as a murder-mystery party game -- could have been mined for more laughs.

FUNNY MONEY

ThinkFilm

An FWE Picture Co. production in association with Tobebo Film Produktion GmbH & Co. KG

Credits:

Director: Leslie Greif

Screenwriters: Harry Basil, Leslie Greif

Based on the play by: Ray Cooney

Producers: Herb Nanas, Brad Siegel, Leslie Greif

Executive producers: Jeff Franklin, Philip von Alvensleben, Harry Basil, Ray Cooney

Director of photography: Bill Butler

Production designer: Stephen J. Lineweaver

Music: Andrea Morricone

Co-producers: Pat McCorkle, Peter Perotta

Costume designer: Donna Zakowska

Editors: Stephen Adrianson, Terry Kelley, Stephen Lovejoy

Cast:

Henry Perkins: Chevy Chase

Carol Perkins: Penelope Ann Miller

Genero: Armand Assante

Sol Feldman: Robert Loggia

Vic: Christopher McDonald

Gina: Alex Meneses

Detective Slater: Kevin Sussman

Angel: Guy Torry

MM Virginia: Rebecca Wisocky.

Running time -- 95 minutes

No MPAA rating...

Penelope Ann Miller has joined the cast of Blonde Ambition, a loose remake of the 1988 film Working Girl being directed by Scott Marshall and starring Jessica Simpson.

Also cast in the film are Luke Wilson, Andy Dick, Rachael Leigh Cook and Jamie Kennedy.

Miller is playing the conniving boss of Simpson's character, who is making her way through the corporate world.

Nu Image is producing. Sony Pictures is in talks to distribute the film, though whether it is theatrical or straight-to-DVD has yet to be determined.

Miller next stars opposite Chevy Chase and Armand Assante in ThinkFilm's slapstick comedy Funny Money, which is set to be released Jan. 19, and next appears in Columbia Pictures' psychological thriller The Messengers, opposite Dylan McDermott. Her credits include Carlito's Way and Kindergarten Cop.

Miller is repped by APA and Untitled Entertainment.