The Wrap Movies | Entertainment Industry Analysis, Breaking Hollywood News

Mel Gibson's Consistent Theme: Violence Begets Redemption

July, 16, 2010 11:26 am | Comments On #Mel Gibson, Movies

The recent news that Mel Gibson is no longer a client of William Morris Endeavor should come as no surprise. Many news and entertainment programs, including NBC's "Today Show," pegged the delisting to Gibson's recent domestic assault allegations and tabloid leak of surreptitious tapes of racist rants he allegedly made, all arising from his custody dispute with his baby-mama Oksana Grigorieva.

But Gibson was already on borrowed time at the agency. In 2006, following his Malibu arrest and anti-Semitic rant, Ari Emanuel, then at Endeavor, writing in the Huffington Post, called on all Hollywood to shun Gibson. Gibson's great defender was his longtime agent Ed Limato, then at ICM, who famously threw a drink in the face of Page Six's Richard Johnson for comments about Gibson at a Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Subsequently, Limato moved his...

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'Killing Kasztner': Rethinking a Holocaust Lightning Rod

February, 01, 2010 1:02 pm | Comments On #Killing Kasztner, Movies, Reszo Kasztner

"Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis," a new documentary, portrays filmmaker Gaylen Ross' attempt to understand why Reszo (Rudolf) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jewish leader who saved more than 1,600 people in war-time Budapest -- more than Oskar Schindler -- on the so-called Kasztner train, remains so controversial to this day.

In the course of the film, Ross tells several interrelated stories, including that of Kasztner's rescue efforts during the Holocaust, as well as the stories of his life in Israel, his infamous libel trial (Kasztner was accused of collaborating with the Nazis) and his 1957 assassination by Ze'ev Eckstein, a right-wing Israeli nationalist. Finally the various threads are brought together as Kasztner's daughter meets with her father's murderer and Israel's Yad Vashem acknowledges the importance of Kasztner's...

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There's Something About a Great Video Store

August, 07, 2009 1:56 pm | Comments On #Los Angeles, Movies, Video stores, Vidiots

If you believe all the tech pundits, the future of home movie watching will be moving to "the cloud." We're already well on the way to where Netflix DVDs will no longer arrive in the mail and sit, unwatched, on an entryway table.

Soon all films and many reruns of TV shows will be downloaded and sit on your hard drive -- indeed, this option is already available in many cases.

It all sounds great -- if you know just what you want to watch -- and if what you want actually is available. But the truth is, sometimes I still need a movie maniac, a real person who will steer me to some incredibly wonderful foreign classic or who owns that obscure title I've been searching for.

Sometimes, too, I am itching to experience the joy of discovery that comes from browsing real-life shelves at some real-life repository with a highly eccentric collection...

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Grauman

March, 13, 2009 4:21 pm | Comments On #Movies

Ever wonder how the movie industry went from five-cent nickelodeons in New York to the glamour of Hollywood, with red-carpet premieres and the highest of artistic aspirations? Or why a certain pagoda-like Hollywood movie theater in whose courtyard rest footprints of actors is one of the most beloved and frequented tourist sites on the planet?

Look no further than the story of Sid Grauman, whose birth 130 years ago will be celebrated this Saturday, March 14, by the American Cinémathèque with a special tour and talk at his other landmark, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. The event will be led by volunteer Mark Simon, a Grauman aficionado.

Born Sidney Patrick Grauman in honor of his St. Patrick...