playtone Tagged Articles at Cinematical

City of Ember was the surprise closing-night film at Fantastic Fest, but I found out about the surprise a little early (which is always fun). I was able to see the film earlier in the week so I could interview director Gil Kenan, who showed up in Austin with surprise guest (to me, too!) Bill Murray for the closing-night festivities. Kenan has directed a pair of entertaining and visually stunning family-friendly features, the Oscar-nominated animated film Monster House and now the City of Ember adaptation, which opens in theaters on Friday. Not only that, but Kenan landed both of these projects right after he graduated from UCLA, where his short film The Lark won him a lot of attention. We talked about what he's done to make City of Ember as beautiful a film as it is, and how he found such compelling lead actors. He's currently linked to a new Robert Zemeckis production, Airman, and we took a minute to discuss that too. Check it out after the jump.

Way back in the 1970s, clever Washington Post employees named Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate tipster after the hip porn flick that all the cool kids were going to see - thus "Deep Throat" was born. And now, though it's probably a safe bet that it will not be named after its central character, a movie about Mark Felt (recently reveal to be THE Deep Throat) is in the works. The film will be written by the largely untested (in his day job he writes for the New York Times Magazine, but has recently begun penning films as well) Peter Landesman and directed by Jay Roach, whose able direction of all three Austin Powers movies surely qualifies him to undertake this project.

Shortly after Felt told his story to Vanity Fair, Playtone - Tom Hanks' production house - acquired the life rights to both Felt and his family (wow, that's a creepy phrase) and a memoir written by Felt in 1979; Playtone will be producing the film for Universal. Obviously, then, the movie will focus more on Felt's "motivations and the weight of keeping [his] secret" than it will the facts of Watergate. Which is probably good thinking, since All the President's Men already did the latter pretty much to perfection.