Hollywood International Filmmaker Magazine-2020 Spring

好莱坞国际电影人

[Quarterly Publication]

2020 Spring

[Issue 010] Published by: Hollywood International Film Exchange Address: 6565 East Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90040, USA

Editor-in-Chief: Sandro Monetti

Editors: Jimmy Jiang, Xinggang

Wang, Yiming (Eva) Bian

Art Editor: Yiming (Eva) Bian

Editorial Committee: Kimberley

Kates, Jimmy Jiang, Xinggang Wang, Sandro Monetti, Yiming (Eva) Bian,

Facebook: Hollywood International

Twitter: @HiFilmExpress

Website: Hi-Fex.com

LEGENDS OF CINEMA: ROBERT DE NIRO GODFATHER OF CINEMA

All Robert De Niro ever wanted to do was act. He knew it from his first stage appearance, aged 10, playing the cowardly lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz.

After getting the best training— including from the fabled Actors Studio - he set out to build a career...and what a career it’s been.

His first major role was in 1973 crime film Mean Streets, directed by his friend, mentor and most frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese.

The next year saw his big breakthrough and first Oscar win, playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II.

Many more iconic movies followed such as Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull, the latter seeing his second Oscar win when he gained 60lbs to play boxer Jake La Motta.

Since then it’s been one memorable role after another in films like The Untouchables, Goodfellas, Meet the Parents, Heat, Casino and Silver Linings Playbook.

His most recent film, Scorsese gangster epic The Irishman, allows De Niro to showcase all the skills which have made him an acting great.

Respected, rewarded, imitated and admired but rarely bettered, Robert De Niro is one of the greatest actors who ever lived.

—Sandro Monetti

HOLLYWOOD INTERNATIONAL FILM EXCHANGE, CAPSTONE GROUP

Rogue is a new action movie, based on a true story about a safari in east Afica. Transformers star Megan Fox heads the cast of the film, currently in post-production.

Logline:

The Postcard Killings

Based on the best seller from James Patterson, a New York detective investigates the death of his daughter who was murdered while on her honeymoon in London.

Director:

Genre:

Status:

Danis Tanovic (Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film for No Man's Land)

Thriller

Post-Production

Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Famke Janssen

Jamie Blackley

BAFTA EVENTS

BAFTA EVENTS

G OLDEN F

ILM A WARD

IFSM NTERNATIONAL

ASHION

IFSM UPER ODEL

BIG SCREEN ENTERTAINMENT GROUP

CHANNELING THE FUTURE

As streaming continues to dominate industry expansion, Big Screen Entertainment Group now has its own Roku channel.

Big Stream Entertainment launched early in 2020 and the channel showcases the company’s growing library of films, documentaries, TV episodes, webisodes and more.

Among the content being streamed there is a wide range of entertaining movies like Babysitter Wanted, A Mosquito Man and You Can't Kill Stephen King.

Documentary lovers are well served by profiles of the famous with titles about everyone from John F Kennedy to John Wayne, James Dean to The Beatles. War, sport and history titles are also on the documentary menu.

In addition to utilizing existing content from in-house and affiliates, a slate of original programming is now being developed for Big Stream.

BSEG Chief Executive Kimberley Kates (above) said, “You can’t stand still in this business. We are always looking to the future and that future is now with the huge impact streaming is having on the entertainment industry. This technology platform delivers our content direct to the consumer and makes us a growing player in this global digital game.”

Roku works through a piece of hardware attached to your TV that streams shows and movies over the internet.

A Big Stream Streaming app is also in development as the company uses technology to grow distribution, awareness and market share for its content. Original content is also in development for Big Stream.

BAFTA

Hollywood’s A-list gathered at the BAFTA Los Angeles Tea Party for one of the most star-studded events of the 2020 award season.

The ballroom of LA’s Four Seasons Hotel was packed with nominated stars who mingled with each other, VIP guests and BAFTA members, catching up in between sips of tea and bites of sandwiches.

Among the guests were Elton John and many of the team from the biopic based on his life, Rocketman.

Robert De Niro, Leonardo Di Caprio, Daniel Craig and Quentin Tarantino all added to the star power at the party. The young star of Jo Jo Rabbit, Roman Griffin Davis (below), met and charmed them all.

BAFTA LA holds the event to celebrate excellence in the industry and to draw attention to its community programs which seek to give access for all to entertainment careers.

BAFTA

CHINA CRISIS?

Box office takings for Hollywood movies in China have dropped as enthusiasm for American films there dramatically cools.

Only two U.S. blockbusters made it onto China’s top ten list in 2019—that’s the fewest in the past decade.

Those films, Avengers Endgame and Hobbs & Shaw, found themselves trailing behind Chinese—language titles like sci-fi adventure The Wandering Earth and animated fantasy Ne Zha.

Hits like those prove that local producers are moving in on the big budget epic territory which had previously been the preserve of international moviemakers.

There was an especially big drop in China revenues for American independent and mid-budget films.

But while most other Hollywood studios are suffering in China, Disney continues its domination being responsible for 54 percent of all US studio revenue there last year.

Hopes of the situation improving in 2020 were shattered by the coronavirus which saw cinemas across China closed due to the outbreak.

—Sandro Monetti

GREAT SCOTT!

Acclaimed film director Ridley Scott has made a winning return to advertising.

The Blade Runner, Alien and Gladiator maestro took top honors at the Social Media Superstar Awards in Los Angeles for the viral video he made promoting cognac brand Hennessy.

Scott first honed his trademark visual style in TV commercials and this visually stunning advert was the first one he had directed in 15 years.

“I’d always been thinking I would do it again if something special came along and this was special,” said Scott.

“It’s more than advertising, it’s entertainment. Advertising must switch back to entertainment and stop treating consumers like demographics.”

Hennessy hired him to make their veteran brand appeal to a wider audience and the decision has paid off with over 20 million online views of the ad, called Seven Worlds, and now this prize in the lifestyle section of the SMS Awards.

The awards, founded and run by Brand Ambassador in collaboration with the British American Business Council, reward work which has impacted the digital and social space worldwide.

—Sandro Monetti

Cat-astrophe At The Multiplex

Movie attendance numbers are down again, much to the worry of the cinema industry.

Ticket sales last year in America were at their second lowest level in the past 25 years.

While box office revenues still seem high, those figures are fueled by rising ticket prices rather than attendance.

The number of tickets sold in the US in 2019 crashed to a lowly 1.24 billion as audiences deserted the multiplex in droves.

Multiple misfires like Cats, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Gemini Man, Missing Link, Hellboy, Ugly Dolls, The Kitchen and Charlie’s Angels all contributed to the slump in attendance.

If it were not for several Disney mega hits like Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2 and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the numbers would have been much worse.

But with fewer Disney blockbusters set for release in 2020 and competition from streaming services on the rise, it’s hard to see the ticket crisis turning around anytime soon.

— Sandro Monetti

Taylor Swift in Cats

There are big changes at the top of Disney with Bob Chapek in as the new Chief Executive of the entertainment empire.

He succeeds Bob Iger who is handing over the reins after a glorious 15 year run of success.

Chapek has held various leadership positions with the company since 1993 and for the past five years had been running the hugely profitable theme parks division. He is a loyal company man who has been a Disney fan ever since childhood trips to Walt Disney World with his family.

Disney is not only continuing with someone called Bob in charge, there will be a continuation in policy too.

Chapek said, “I intend to double down on the exact same strategies that Bob Iger established and that have served us so well. The core of everything is our creative estorytelling.”

Success in China – both at the box office and with theme parks – has been part of that strategy and movie insiders there have noticed a certain symmetry too.

Chapek, 60, was born in the Chinese year of the rat and got his big promotion in 2020 – another year of the rat. Disney’s original character before Mickey Mouse was a rabbit and Bob Iger was born in the year of the rabbit.

Whether it’s rabbits, rats or mice running Disney, ‘The House of Mouse’ appears to be in good hands.

—Sandro Monetti

Iger (left) Chapek (right)

THE OSCARS: A PARTY FOR OLD MEN

Something clearly has to be done about the lack of diversity at the Oscars.

Looking around the nominees at this year’s ceremony, it often seemed like only older men had been invited to the party.

Take the best supporting actor category for example. Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt were nominated. Pitt is the youngest of the bunch – and he’s 56. Where’s the youth?

Then consider the best director line-up of Martin Scorsese, Sam Mendes, Bong Joon-Ho, Todd Phillips and Quentin Tarantino – the average age of that bunch is 57.

No surprise that there were no women in the category. Shamefully, only five female directors have ever been nominated for best director in the 92-year history of the event.

Along with women, people of color were also largely excluded from this celebration of movie excellence. That’s despite there being no shortage of excellent contenders who deserved a place at the party.

As American TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel said: “This year’s Oscar nominations had fewer minorities than Donald Trump’s cabinet.”

But the situation is no laughing matter.

To their credit, the Academy have added 2,000 extra Oscar voters over the last couple of years, most of them women and minorities.

But a bigger injection of youth, color and women is still needed if this situation is going to change–as it must.

The majority of Academy members are still older white men and you can see that in the most nominated films all being to the tastes of that demographic. Those were a study of war (1917), a nostalgic look back at the old days of Hollywood (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), the reflections of an elderly gangster (The Irishman) and an homage to classic Scorsese films like Taxi Driver (Joker).

It’s infuriating how little change there has been in the kind of selections made for the showpiece ceremony of the movie business. If the Oscars are to stay relevant they need to change their ways and embrace the invention and insight brought by the new generation of diverse moviemaking talents.

—Sandro Monetti

THE OSCARS: A PARTY FOR OLD MEN

DOES PARASITE DESERVE ITS PLACE IN HISTORY?

Korean film Parasite shocked the world back in February by becoming the first film in a foreign language to win the Oscar for best picture.

But was there another international movie in the 92year history of the Academy Awards which deserved the history making honor more?

Amid all the praise for Parasite, a twisted tale of class divisions between rich and poor, there has also been some backlash from those claiming previous winners of the best foreign film prize were better movies and should have been the first to take the main prize.

Industry insiders acknowledge it was about time that a film not in the English language got honored with the ultimate Oscar but feel the ten classics listed on these pages could been similarly rewarded had the Academy not taken so long to get around to fully embracing international movies.

Legendary directors like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman all failed

where Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho succeeded and that brings into focus just how big an achievement his best picture triumph was.

They could have won best picture too…

Roshomon (1951) Japan

8 ½ (1963) Italy

Day for Night (1973) France

Fanny and Alexander (1983) Sweden

Pelle the Conqueror (1988) Denmark

Cinema Paradiso (1989) Italy

Life is Beautiful (1998) Italy

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) China mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan

A Separation (2011) Iran

Roma (2018) Mexico

PHOTOGRAPHING FAME

For any movie actor, getting your own photo shoot in Vanity Fair magazine is a sure sign that you’ve hit the big time.

The glossy publication’s celebrity pictures have long been iconic and now the very best of them are being showcased.

An exhibition celebrating Vanity Fair’s finest star photos has opened at LA’s Annenberg Space for Photography.

Visitors see not only glamorous portraits of the industry’s major players, powerbrokers and parties from the past four decades but also get to sit for their own VF style photo session – as our own Sandro Monetti did in one of the pictures opposite.

Multimedia instillations tell the story of the magazine, including the fact that Madonna holds the record for being on the most covers, with 11, although Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman are close behind with ten covers each.

The free of charge exhibition, called Vanity Fair: Hollywood Calling, runs in Los Angeles until July 26 2020 and after that time will tour around the world.

ALL TECHNICAL ON THE WESTERN FRONT

ALL TECHNICAL ON THE WESTERN FRONT

War epic 1917 has been widely hailed as a mind-boggling technical achievement, largely thanks to the illusion that it looks like the whole movie was shot in one continuous take.

The truth is it was actually a series of perfectly choreographed long scenes stitched together in editing with help from visual effects wizards and some state-of-the-art camera equipment.

Legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins shot the film digitally on three prototype Alexa miniature large format cameras from film equipment provider ARRI, a company ironically founded in 1917.

His cameras were, variously, on a 50-foot Technocrane driven on the back of a truck, mounted on motorbikes, carried by grips, placed on wire mounts or attached to drones.

Steadicam operator Peter Cavaciuti was also deployed to run down trenches with his camera facing backwards to create the feeling of being right there amid the mud and bullets.

Deakins and director Sam Mendes were often controlling cameras remotely from a van as the action unfolded.

Cuts were placed at moments unnoticeable to the audience –like during an explosion that clouded the screen or in a brief CGI shot.

It all worked seamlessly to tell the story of two soldiers on a race against time to stop an attack during World War I.

The many awards and big box office numbers which greeted 1917 prove it to be a rarely bettered technical triumph.

—Sandro Monetti

FULL THROTTLE FILMMAKING

It’s no wonder Ford v Ferrari won the Oscar for best sound mixing.

Supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester and his expert team made the car racing movie a triumph of audio technology.

Their challenge was how to make the dialogue of the actors be clearly heard over the roar of the car engines – especially in scenes where the cars and drivers are battling it out during the 1966 Le Mans 24 hour race.

The solution was to locate a Ford GT40 of the period – which they did in Ohio – and record the sounds of its engine, interior, transmission and tailpipe.

They did the same with a classic Ferrari race car – tracked down in Atlanta – and added the sounds of that one to their audio library.

When it came to filming, stars like Christian Bale and Matt Damon wore special DPA lavalier microphones hidden from view within their costumes so the sound team could pick up what they were saying over the noise of the loud race scenes.

The mixers ultimately stitched together the actors’ dialogue and the noise of the cars with the atmosphere of the crowd and PA system track announcements to give audiences a totally immersive experience.

The level of each sound element was strictly controlled to make the viewer feel right up close to the action, excitement and drama.

—Sandro Monetti

The new Invisible Man movie relied on old technology to achieve many of its chilling scares.

Director Leigh Whannell placed an actor in a green unitard body suit and removed him from shots in postproduction.

That particular disappearing act has been a standard special effects trick on film sets for years.

But state of the art CGI was also used to give the riveting reboot a modern feel and some jawdropping moments.

“It was a mixture of everything,” said Whannell. “A lot of old school practical stuff, which I love, and obviously CG is such a gift to improve your film.”

The Universal Pictures movie, which stars Elisabeth Moss and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, also gets it scares from clever sound design and cinematography combining to frighten audiences with what they can’t see but only imagine.

—Sandro Monetti

Movie distribution rules which have been in place in America since 1949 are set to be abolished.

The U.S. Justice Department plans to overturn the regulations because streaming and other technological developments have changed the film landscape.

“We cannot pretend that the business of film distribution and exhibition remains the same,” explained the Justice Department’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim.

The old distribution rules enacted in 1949 were aimed at ensuring the largest studios did not control the film business and made illegal “block booking” – the practice of them forcing theatre owners to play the movies they wanted regardless of how they were performing.

Delrahim said, “That was when metropolitan areas generally had a single movie theater with one screen that showed a single movie at a time. Today, not only do our

metropolitan areas have many multiplex cinemas showing films from different distributors, but much of our movie watching is not in theaters at all.”

But not everyone is happy with the rule change. The National Association of Theater Owners argue that abolishing the decrees could see a return to block booking, threatening the survival of smaller theaters.

“If distributors can engage in block booking, exhibitors may be forced to pack their screens with global tentpoles at the expense of targeted programming,” the association said in a statement, warning about the potential dominance of blockbuster films.

“Consumers will face increasingly limited choices at the box office and, without the possibility of a theatrical run, many films will no longer be made, limiting the availability of choices through home entertainment platforms as well.”

Sandro Monetti

An increasing number of directors are introducing a no cellphones policy on set for cast and crew.

Leading lights of the industry introduced the phone ban idea and now it’s catching on fast.

Quentin Tarantino made the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set a mobile free zone and strictly enforced it too by having everyone check in their phones on arrival each day.

Greta Gerwig introduced a similar system on Little Women having got the idea from her partner, Marriage Story director Noam Baumbach.

Banning Smartphones on Set: A Smart Move

Those film makers all require total focus from their teams and see it as an unhelpful distraction if someone is Tweeting on set or updating their Instagram between scenes.

Actors have been especially welcoming of the shunning of cellphones as it helps many of them reach emotional places easier without seeing workers around them tapping away on devices.

While the no mobiles strategy is not an official industry policy, the fact it worked so well on several Oscar nominated movies is encouraging many more sets to go cellphone free.

—Sandro Monetti

With the 25th James Bond movie, No Time to Die, soon to be released, let’s take a look back at the history of the spectacularly successful film franchise.

The Bond films, based on the spy novels of Ian Fleming, have been in production since 1962 earning a combined gross of $7 billion.

That makes the adventures of British secret agent 007 the fourth biggest franchise of all time behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and the Wizarding world of Harry Potter.

The Bond films are a family fair with Albert “Cubby” Broccoli having produced most of them until being succeeded in 1995 by his daughter Barbara Broccoli who remains at the helm.

Six actors have played 007 and they are Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig.

November 2020 release No Time to Die is Daniel Craig’s final appearance in the role but there is no sign of this franchise dying as the winning formula of action, glamor and excitement looks set to continue for many years to come.

LICENCED TO THRILL

1962

1963

1964

1965

1967

1969

George Lazenby

Timothy Dalton

1973

1974

1977

1979

1981

1983

Pierce Brosnan

Daniel Craig