The Screengrab

Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano has been found guilty of 77 out of 78 charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft. (He was acquitted of a single count of unauthorized computer access. He still has a racketeering-related charge yet to be decided.) The case attracted much in show business circle because of the high-profile nature of some of Pellicano's clients, and also some of his victims. Among those who hired him included Brad Grey of Paramount Pictures and Michael Ovitz. Pellicano's downfall began with Ovitz hired him to "handle" a reporter named Anita Busch, who contacted the FBI after she "walked out to her Audi outside her home to find a dead fish under a pan, a hole in the windshield, and a note saying 'STOP.'"

Read More...

Over the years, whenever one of the long lulls between seasons of The Sopranos would finally draw to a close, creator David Chase would emerge from the back room of the Bada Bing and entertain a few questions about the upcoming episodes. After jotting down a few of his substance-free replies, one enterprising reporter or another would ask whether or not this was the end of The Sopranos, for real this time. At which point Chase would make it perfectly clear that what he really wanted to do was direct. Direct movies.

This comment was usually accompanied by some remarks about the base nature of the television medium, how impossible it was to do good work in it, and how movies were really where it was at. Remarks which left us fans of the series dumbfounded. Had Chase no inkling that The Sopranos was head and shoulders above 99% of what was released to theaters while it was on the air? Did he truly think there were more than five people on the planet who had more creative freedom than he enjoyed in his years with HBO? Did he never hear the phrase - on his own television show, even - "Be careful what you wish for"?

Well, now Chase is getting what he wished for.

Read More...

Brad Grey is a TV guy.  (You know him, if for no other reason, because he is one of the men behind The Sopranos.)  TV guys are not supposed to know anything about movies. 

And yet, Brad Grey is running one of the oldest and most respected movie studios in America -- Paramount Pictures, an outfit which, according to one of Grey's collegues, is "on our way to making money", quite an accomplishment in today's Hollywood -- and this weekend will see the release of Cloverfield, a huge gamble that Grey greenlighted at significant personal risk (and which is the product of J.J. Abrams, another TV guy).  

In an interesting interview with the New York Times, Grey discusses his trial by fire as the head of Paramount, the management shuffles that accompanied his rise to the top, and his conception of Abrams as the Spielberg to his Lew Wasserman.  It's fascinating not only because of what Grey has to say -- a typical producer's mix of cautiousness and braggadocio, but without the guarded defensiveness that usually comes with habitiual ass-covering -- but because of the insight it has into the business of running a studio at a time when business is shakier than ever and very little gets produced at the top end without a guarantee of making money.  It's in light of situations like this that whether or not Cloverfield succeeds will mean a lot more than the failure of a single movie.

Read More...