MISSING - In the premiere episode, Becca Winstone learns that her son disappears while studying abroad, and it's a race against time when she travels to Europe to track him down. (ABC/LARRY D. HORRICKS) ADRIANO GIANNINI, ASHLEY JUDD
Look for action and intrigue on the new action series Missing (Thursdays, 8:00 p.m. ET/PT, ABC). Or so the three macho men of the show, Cliff Curtis, Nick Eversman and Adriano Giannini tell us in the video below.
The trio rounds out the cast of Missing, which stars Ashley Judd as Rebecca Winstone, an ex-CIA operative searching for her kidnapped son Michael (Eversman). Rebecca is stepping on the toes of the current CIA dude, Agent Dax Miller (Curtis) and she has also enlisted the help of Interpol hottie Giancarlo Rossi (Giannini).
If Adriano Giannini‘s last name sounds familiar, that’s because his father is legendary actor Giancarlo Giannini, who modern audiences probably know best for his role as tragically-doomed Inspector Renaldo Pazzi in Hannibal.
It can’t be a coincidence that the name of the character that Adriano plays is Giacarlo. Funny? You bet, though he laughs and adds that he hasn’t broken the news to his dad yet.
Other children of actors say it’s tough emerging from the shadow of their famous parents, but Giannini swears it’s only been a plus for his career.
Producers have a lot of confidence in this series. Rather than shooting a pilot and hoping it becomes a hit gradually, the network order 10 episodes of Missing right out of the gate and went immediately into production.
Though following a kidnap case could easily become tiresome, the men promise there will be a big payoff and fans will want to keep watching when, and if, Michael is rescued.
No kidding. Three hunky guys and one sexy, hot mama…yep, that sounds like a genuine hit to me.
Academy historian Peter Decherney courtesy ®The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Academy Film Scholar Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet, will present highlights from his upcoming book on Monday, March 19, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Hollywood’s Copyright Wars will be released in April; advance copies will be available at the event. Admission is free.
Decherney will frame the current debate about technology and intellectual property in historical and political terms, discussing such issues as piracy, plagiarism, Hollywood’s love-hate relationship with fair use, and how the industry has responded to its intellectual property issues through self-regulation.
Decherney, who was named an Academy Film Scholar in 2009, is associate professor of cinema studies, English and communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (2005) and many articles on the film industry, including an October 2011 New York Times op-ed piece titled Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood?
Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to stimulate and support the creation of new and significant works of film scholarship about aesthetic, cultural, educational, historical, theoretical or scientific aspects of theatrical motion pictures. Film scholars receive $25,000 to research and produce such works, which can take the form of books, multimedia presentations, curatorial projects, DVDs or Internet sites.
For grant guidelines and information about the Academy Film Scholars program, visit http://www.oscars.org/education-outreach/grants/filmscholars/index.html.
Admission to the Academy Film Scholars presentation is free, but tickets are required. Tickets are available by mail, at the Academy box office, or online at www.oscars.org. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. All seating is unreserved.
The Linwood Dunn Theater is located at 1313 Vine Street in Hollywood. Free parking is available through the entrance on Homewood Avenue. For more information, call (310) 247-3600.
There were no real blockbusters at The Academy Awards this year, but there were a few intriguing films. A good amount of the pics are arriving on DVD this week, so if you didn’t head out to theaters to catch them when they were released, it’s a great time to see what all the fuss was about during award season.
The Descendants, earned George Clooney a Best ActorOscar nomination for his performance as Matt King, a man who is dealing with his wife’s coma after a tragic accident as well as a major decision regarding the family trust, which includes 25,000 acres of land on the island Kauai. Clooney gives an understated performance in an interesting story.
The Adventures of Tintin was robbed of its nomination for Best Animated Film. This animated feature was stunning and had a forward momentum equal to live action rather than animation. Reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) sets off on a search for a sunken ship looking to find a treasure.
My Week with Marilyn was Michelle Williams’ Academy Award-nominated performance as Marilyn Monroe during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. The story is told through the eyes of Colin Clark, an employee of acclaimed actor Sir Laurence Olivier, who gives a firsthand account of the tension between Monroe and Olivier. Williams nailed the essence of the iconic blond bombshell.
Happy Feet Two is the sequel to the successful animated feature Happy Feet, which won the Best Animated FeatureOscar in 2007. Sequels generally aren’t as good as the original and this is no exception, but it is good fun that should entertain children and parents alike.
'Dolly Partin' featured on 'An Evening with Dolly' cover courtesy Webster & Associates LLC
An Evening With… Dolly will be available on April 2 everywhere including a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store® .
This includes a first-ever Cracker Barrel exclusive two-disc DVD and CD set retailing for $11.99.
The DVD and CD transports you in London as Dolly performs some of her most popular songs Coat of Many Colors, 9 to 5, and Jolene, live in front of her sold-out O2 arena concert.
“In 2008, we released Dolly’s “Backwoods Barbie – Collector’s Edition” CD and we are delighted to work with her on a second project,” said Julie Craig, Cracker Barrel Marketing Manager. “Dolly connects with her audiences and our guests in a genuine, down-home way…And this new “An Evening With… Dolly” DVD and CD showcase not only her amazing musical and songwriting skills, but also her ability to entertain audiences with her heartwarming personality.”
“Cracker Barrel and Dolly Parton are a great collaboration,” says Dolly Parton’s manager Danny Nozell. “We are excited to continue our successful venture together, and thrilled to offer this live concert experience with some of Dolly’s biggest hits.”
The cast of ABC's "GCB." (ABC/RICK ROWELL) MIRIAM SHOR, BRAD BEYER, KRISTIN CHENOWETH, LESLIE BIBB, ANNIE POTTS, DAVID JAMES ELLIOTT, JENNIFER ASPEN, MARISOL NICHOLS
GCB has gone through more than one title change while the series was in the works, but that’s not unusual. The show is based on the book Good Christian Bitches by Kim Gatlin – but the likelihood of a major network like ABC using that handle is nil.
So, it changed to Good Christian Belles and eventually GCB, but we all know well what the storylines will be.
GCB centers on Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb), a divorced mom of two who moves back to the Dallas neighborhood where she grew up to get a fresh start. It’s a sort of Desperate Housewives based in the Lone Star state.
The cast is huge with Bibb surrounded by Annie Potts, Kristin Chenowith and a group of other notable women. Do they get bitchy? Sometimes.
“I think maybe we all have moments of being really bitchy, just like I feel like every human being has a moment of being bitchy,” Bibb confesses. “I think what ends up happening on the show is we all sort of test each other and pull out. I think when a woman’s a bitch, it’s based on being scared. You just put up this wall because they’re scared of the mirror that they’re seeing. [On the show] I think everyone has a really beautiful, delicious moment of being bitchy and then a beautiful, great moment of sort of redemption and then they’re a bitch again and we’re nice again. That’s what’s really amazing.”
As for that title change, well, Executive ProducerRobert Harling says it was an inevitable progression.
“The use of the title raised a lot of eyebrows,” Harling recalls. “What we were trying to do was really create an environment that was very respectful. The characters that have been created are incredibly unique and are all motivated by a real sense of goodness. So, the idea of calling it Good Christian Bitches was sort of not something that seemed to settle at first. Then, Good Christian Belles sort of popped up. But when we were shooting the pilot in Dallas they’d come up with this GCB logo [for the trucks]. I always thought that’s really cool, like LOL and ROLF and BTW. GCB just kind of stuck and we all thought it was cool.”
Sara Paxton stars as Susan Wright, who stabbed her husband Jeffrey nearly 200 times, in the Lifetime biopic "Blue Eyed Butcher." Photo courtesy of Lifetime.
It’s hard to sympathize with a woman whose brutally stabbed her husband nearly 200 times, but that’s precisely what Sara Paxton had to do when she took on the role of Susan Wright in Lifetime’s biopic Blue Eyed Butcher (Saturday, March 3rd, 8:00 p.m. ET/PT).
The real Susan Wright was sentenced to 20 years in November of 2010 after being found guilty of murdering her husband Jeffrey, but her defense was that she had been abused for years.
Paxton admits she was nervous about taking on the role, but eventually realized how important it was for her transition from teen to adult roles. In the past the young actress was featured in movies like Aquamarine and Return to Halloweentown.
Blue Eyed Butcher also gave Paxton a better perspective on abusive relationships, but as you’ll see in the video below, the truth about Wright‘s murderous rampage will always have lingering questions for her.
GRIMM -- "Three Coins in a Fuchsbau" Episode 113 -- Pictured: Titus Welliver -- (Photo by: Scott Green/NBC)
Veteran film, TV and stage actorTitus Welliver plays a jewel thief monster involved in an intricate plot on Grimm tonight. There’s good news all around since Welliver‘s character is likely to be recurring and he doesn’t have to go through the 6-hour makeup ordeal that other monsters on the show have to endure.
Because of allergy issues created by effects makeup (learned the hard way years ago on a film), Welliver‘s facial transition scenes are computer generated.
Welliver tells us that his entrance into film from the New York theater, over 20 years ago, came with a lesson. “It’s been an effort,” Welliver tells Entertainment Heartbeat. “I think oftentimes if you do something fairly well people want you to repeat it, so, very early on in my career I was cast in a roll playing Al Capone’s brother…From the New York stage (I) had a nice career playing leading men, and then I got this role playing this polar opposite.”
But then something happens that Welliver doesn’t quite see coming.
“So I gained 65 pounds and that was not easy, and then the film came out and it was well received, and I said okay, great, let’s start to reap the benefits of the success of this film,” Welliver says, voice rising as he gets to the not-so-funny part. “and then my agent would say, but you don’t look like you did a year ago; a year ago you were a tall, well muscled leading man, and now you’re a big, hulking 215 pound guy, and it was wild how we can delude ourselves into sort of forgetting these things, so, I then took almost a year and worked out very hard and got my body back to normal.”
But after getting himself back to his trim New York-era self there remained residual issues. “And even then I remember walking into a casting director’s office who had really only known my work on film and being heavy from the films I did while I had put on that weight; I still continued to work, I basically did the same thing, I played, you know, big thug roles, and she said, wow, you went on a diet, you look so great – I said, I didn’t go on a diet, and by the way, you know, I felt I had to carry around a head shot of me before I made that idiotic choice. I learned a great lesson from it; if I had to do it all over again, I would, I would gain the weight and play it exactly the same way, only I would make sure that I had a dietitian and a trainer who would help me expedite the loss of the weight in a more healthful fashion.”
While remaining a working actor is a good thing, being relegated into typecasting trivia for a versatile actor might be maddening. “I was sort of relegated to playing tough guys all the time, and then I met (Executive Producer/Writers) David Milch and Steven Bochco, and they were casting a role for NYPD Blue and it was the role of a trauma surgeon, and I said to my agent, they’re never going to cast me as a trauma surgeon because everybody here in Hollywood is still thinking I’m the tough New York guy, I said I’ll come back when they need a tough New York cop and he said, no, they know who you are,and they want you to read for this trauma surgeon role, so I went in reluctantly but wore a nice button down shirt and wore my reading glasses, went in and read and when I was done David Milch said, you like this part and I said, yeah, very much, he said, well, you’re going to play this part. I said, thank you, thank you, and as I was walking out David Milch said, don’t forget to really call your mom and dad.”
Aside from talent, pluck and luck appear to melt doors. “So from then on that kind of turned the tide, and I owe that to StevenBochco. It took power players like Bochco and Milch in the television business to have me play a guy who was polysyllabic…”
While Welliver‘s career is far from over it’s still euphoric to hear a real Hollywood ending for a nice guy.
Grimm featuring Titus Welliver is on tonight (Friday) 9/8c on NBC.
Whitney Houston on 'Rolling Stone' cover courtesy Beth Furtwangler/Wenner Media
The charming church girl, the shining diva and the demons that came out in force.
The new issue of Rolling Stone takes a revealing look back at Whitney Houston’s life, including her dark side that people around her still have a hard time comprehending. “A lot of us talked about that, and no one could come up with an answer,” says Gerry Griffith, the A&R man who brought Houston to Clive Davis‘ attention around 1982. “Where is that rebellion coming from? It didn’t come out for a while.”
A genuine crossover star, Houston was a pop rarity who reached audiences young and old, black and white. “Because of her cousin Dionne [Warwick], she understood all those pretty-ass melodies from Burt Bacharach,” says Narada Michael Walden, one of Houston‘s many producers. “But because she was young and from the era of Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, she had soul in her too – those rhythms. She had both sides. Plus, she was so damn gorgeous. You couldn’t say no to her.”
The full article is in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone on newsstands Friday.
"Sugarland" (Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush) performing photo courtesy Kelly Russell/Sandbox Entertainment
Reigning CMA and ACM Vocal Duo of the Year Sugarland (Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush) will launch their sixth consecutive headlining tour entitled In the Hands of the Fans this April.
The tour will rely solely on fan interaction and requests to determine the set list played in each city.
“This year’s tour is based around the concept of putting the show into the hands of the fans,” said Nettles. “They will make the requests that will help form the set list and guide the show. Through texts, handwritten signs, the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, etc) phone calls made during the show and selections directly from the stage, the fans will become the conductors as well as the audience. If it’s on one of our records or if we’ve played it on a stage it is fair game.”
During an interview with Robert Loggia 10-plus years ago, he admitted to me that the great actor, Luther Adler once gave him a sacred piece of acting advice: “Come on Kid, we’re going to turn sh—t into lemonade.”
That’s precisely what I did during the arrivals for the 84th Academy Awards, from the worst position on the red carpet. Way up in the rafters I was able to get a number of good photos with many of the nominees.
George Clooney greeting fans on the red carpet at the 84 Academy Awards. Photo: EntertainmentHeartbeat.com/HollywoodOutbreak.com.
The highlight of the arrivals came when George Clooney worked his way to my area. I had him in my viewfinder…and boom! He was off and running to shake hands and sign autographs with the fans in the bleachers across from me. And by the way, he was the only actor to do that…at least from my perspective in the nosebleed section.
Meryl Streep on the red carpet at the 84th Academy Awards. Photo: EntertainmentHeartbeat.com/HollywoodOutbreak.com.
Still, the gowns were flowing and all the nominated actors and actresses were fashion dos rather than don’ts.
Like Best Actress winner Meryl Streep, who rocked her gold frock at the age of 62 years old. Or Michelle Williams, nominated for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, who lit up the carpet in her strapless bright orange number.
Michelle Williams rockin' orange at the 84th Academy Awards. Photo: EntertainmentHeartbeat.com/HollywoodOutbreak.com.
So much for the Academy just saying, “No,” to Sasha Baron Cohen who dressed as General Aladeen, from his upcoming movie The Dictator, despite the Academy’s objections. Cohen strikes a mean pose and never drops out of character
Notably, no veteran Hollywood stars were on the carpet like there has been in previous years. No Ernest Borgnine (1955 winner for Marty) or Mickey Rooney (1979 winner for The Black Stallion) anywhere to be seen.
Sasha Baron Cohen in full costume at the 84th Academy Awards. Photo: EntertainmentHeartbeat.com/HollywoodOutbreak.com.
The Awards were fairly good and kept a flow going despite no blockbuster titles being nominated this year.
Billy Crystal was a smart choice as the host, but the comedy bits throughout the show played nicely as well.
Best line of the night from Crystal was to George Clooney’s latest honey, Stacy Keibler: “You’re a lucky girl. He’s a very good kisser.”
Remember the year Debbie Allen choreographed an interpretive dance for Saving Private Ryan? Cirque du Soleil jumped right in to fill the void with an amazing – albeit out of place – performance celebrating the movies. They could have trimmed 10-plus minutes off the running time by cutting that number.
Best Documentary, Undefeated produced the first F-bomb of the evening. It was used in an upbeat way – as in “F—king wonderful,” but thanks to a delay no one but the audience and pressroom probably heard it. Oh, but it will be all over the web no doubt. The filmmakers apologized backstage, of course, but added that the comment “Came from the heart.”
And seriously, what was going through Angelina Jolie‘s mind when she flashed that skinny thigh of hers out of the slit in her dress?
Christopher Plummer, who is the oldest Oscar winner at 82 years old, was basking in his Supporting Actor win for Beginners.
“It’ is a le creme on top and it’s lovely to be sort of accepted, because you know that beyond the pleasure of working in front of a live audience, particularly, it’s a general acceptance of your work,” he stresses. “So, it’s thrilling and I don’t pretend to pooh-pooh awards, although there’s so many of them, I can’t keep up. I mean, they’re inventing a new ones everyday.”
Meryl Streep joked about winning the Oscar for a third time – particularly because as she laughingly point out others might have “Streep fatigue.”
“I thought I was so old and jaded,” Streep begins. “They call your name and you just go into a sort of, I don’t know, white light and it was just thrilling.”
Octavia Spencer gave props to The HelpProducerSteven Spielberg for understanding the chord the flick would strike with audiences.
“Steven Spielberg is a luminary,” she acknowledges. “He has, as far as I can remember in every decade of my life, created brilliance.”
Jean Dujardin, Leading ActorOscar winner for The Artist, was contemplating the future. It sounds like he’s headed back to France rather than try to make a go of it here in Hollywood.
“I’m not an American actor, I’m a French actor,” he says. “I continue in France, but it’s possible…” he pauses groping for the English words, then rattles off a phrase in French for his interpreter to explain, “If he can make another silent movie in America, he’d like to.”
Well, the Academy Awards is certainly a great calling card in any language.
Check out the reactions backstage from Meryl Streep, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer and Jean Dujardin after winning their AcademyAwards.
The ArtistWinner (The Weinstein Company) A La Petite Reine/Studio 37/La Classe Américaine/JD Prod/France3 Cinéma/Jouror Productions/uFilm Production, Thomas Langmann, Producer
Performance by an actor in a leading role
Jean DujardinWinner for The Artist (The Weinstein Company)
Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Christopher PlummerWinner for Beginners (Focus Features)
