Dick Zanuck -- He Left Us the Way He Would Leave a Working Lunch at the Palm
July, 17, 2012 12:18 pm | Comments On #Movies, music, Richard Zanuck
I had never been in the offices of legends until Bob Zemeckis brought me to the Zanuck-Brown Company, an elegant and spacious stand-alone building at the back of the Fox lot.
Ushered into the conference room, I wandered around. All the walls and and side tables were covered with one sheets and assorted trophies: "The Sting," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Jaws," "Sugarland Express." The less successful pictures were also scrupulously represented -- "Ssssss," "Neighbors," "The Black Windmill," "The Girl From Petrovka," "Willie Dynamite" and others I can't remember.
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Read MoreKirk Douglas Rewrites Movie History in 'I Am Spartacus!'
June, 15, 2012 10:30 am | Comments On #Hollywood Blacklist, Kirk Douglas, Movies, SpartacusThis is a little story about the blacklist. Not the list that recognizes some of the best scripts of the year -- the other blacklist. The one that pushed some of the best writers in Hollywood out of the business for nearly a decade -- because of their politics or what was alleged about them. We have to do many things to get a script sold these days, but fortunately, signing a loyalty oath is not one of them.
My novel, “Peloponnesia,” is about a producer with dementia who believes he is the main character in a script he has owned for a long time. Cleon, the protagonist from the script, is a prominent Greek general from the Peloponnesian Wars. My fictional producer, Harley Grace, walks around Los...
Read MoreOn the 'Ground Floor' at UTA's 5th Floor
April, 13, 2009 4:17 pm | Comments On #andy samberg, Deal Central, United Talent Agency, UTAIn the entertainment industry for the long haul? You had better be nice to the person who answers the phone.
More specifically, if you are calling someone at United Talent Agency, the person you are speaking with may be the person you are trying to reach very soon.
At UTA, the long road to agent usually culminates after years on an assistant’s desk on any one of four floors at 9560 Wilshire Blvd. -- a fertile training ground for agency (and industry) personnel. Over 65 of UTA’s nearly 100 agents (including partners Andrew Cannava, Dan Erlij, Wayne Fitterman, Lisa Jacobson, David Kramer, Larry Salz and Jay Sures) all made the jump to agent off of assistants’ desks at the agency.
Subtly contrarian, the partners at UTA have bucked the trend by remaining at their great location between Barneys and the Beverly Wilshire for more than a decade and a...
Read More'Change Agents': the New Web-Series Gurus
March, 26, 2009 3:54 pm | Comments On #EQAL, Harper's Globe, Media, the Fine BrothersOnce you came to Hollywood with what you hoped was a great original screenplay under your arm and you could make things happen in the business. Now it helps to already have made that film … complete with dedicated website, blog, Facebook/Myspace pages, key word, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and email strategy, even perhaps a flash game widget.
As the music business collapsed, musicians learned they had to market themselves independently and digitally. Now filmmakers must move further and further into that same groove.
While the Indie film business works through its current economic shake-out/evolution, DIY marketing has become essential for all but the biggest names.
Suppose you decide to create content primarily for internet distribution. Web programs require even greater measures of interactive efforts. Webisodes are the new cable, but instead of...
Read MoreHollywood 4.0: Coming Soon to a Browser Near You
March, 01, 2009 7:12 pm | Comments On #Adam Fiske, instant downloads, Little Shoot, MediaVery soon, all computers will be easily connected to big home LCD TV screens,. And everybody is going to be downloading entertainment content from the internet. Who will they download from? How will they pay for it? Will they pay for it?
Enter Adam Fisk’s creation, Little Shoot. It is unlike most other peer to peer file sharing software because it lives right on your Firefox or Internet Explorer or Safari browser. Little Shoot downloads and stores music, movies, any media files with one click. It is as easy to use as… AOL Mail. This interface simplicity allows it to blow away all the other lines of access to content on your computer. With Limewire, Bit Torrent, Pirate Bay etc.. there are small, but, for many, insurmountable technological hurdles.
The Little Shoot Add-on operates as simply as Flash on the browser. Tech grandmas who barely manage Yahoo...
Read MoreVintage Ovitz
January, 19, 2009 9:51 pm | Comments On #agency, CAA, Century City, Deal Central, slideshowTurning intermittently from screenwriting, teaching screenwriting and photographing permutations of writing, its process, its physical and emotional results, I decided to start a side project -- a series of photographs of the power centers of Hollywood, past, present, future as the digital age changes everything in greater and greater leaps.
For that purpose, I asked my agent to ask a former agent once removed, Michael Ovitz, if I could do a series of large format photographs of the interior of the old CAA building at Wilshire and little Santa Monica – Ovitz’s House of Pei. The new breed CAA had vacated the dump for Century City and the building stood empty... for a long time. My intention in photographing the building: I hoped to capture a few ghosts and auras of my own Hollywood past. And those of everybody else who toiled to make...
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Description
Tom Benedek wrote the screenplays for Cocoon and other films. His first novel, "Peloponnesia," has just been published. He has written and rewritten screenplays for Robert Zemeckis, Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Harold Ramis and many others. Tom teaches screenwriting at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, UMass Amherst and Screenwritingmasterclass.com. His photography has been exhibited widely and can be viewed at tombenedek.com.
