Life

Star Wars Painting for the Movie - The Force Will Be With You Always

2011-09-15T17:42:00.000-07:00

Star Wars
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Star Wars smashed open the possibilities of what film could actually do, says Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was the perfect film to inspire a sense of wonder.

It may seem odd for the director of a film trilogy many compare with Star Wars to go on the record with his love for George Lucas' intergalactic saga. But it's also a testament to the seemingly never-ending appeal of Star Wars. Darth Vader Lives, proclaimed a popular button made in 1977 - and it seems he will continue to live on in the hearts and minds of Star Wars fans around the globe for many years to come.

Many films are successful. Many are popular and have become worldwide hits. Few, however, have entered the public consciousness like the Star Wars films. Jedi and the dark side are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. For better or worse, politicians and celebrities alike use phrases like Death Star, The Force, Evil Empire and lightspeed and the public instantly understands what they mean. Without doubt, Star Wars remains firmly entrenched in every aspect of our lives:

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Amsterdam The City of Joy and Freedom in Europe

2011-09-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

Amsterdam is a refreshing contrast to the other of grandeur and prestige teeming metropolises. In the Dutch city of canals in the bourgeois style homes dominate, which were replete with colorful ornaments and decorations. The metropolis on the Amstel river has so many close to dense stands of monuments that it possesses the largest historical inner city in Europe. The gabled houses and warehouses along the 160 scenic canals, houseboats bobbing on those romantic. An almost idyllic backdrop, the carefree life in Amsterdam and can appear careless.

During the Dark Ages and the great recession in human progress the lead passed to Constantinople in the east, but this was soon overshadowed by Venice, Florence, and Genoa, even farther northwest than Rome. These in turn gave place to Vienna, Paris, and other minor cities, still another five degrees to the north. Even here the northwestward march of progress did not stop, for London, Amsterdam, and Berlin represent regions which came to the forefront still later. Last of all, in our own day, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and the Scotch cities represent extremely northerly or northwesterly regions whose extraordinarily high standards are universally recognized. Thus in four thousand years the center of human progress - that is, the greatest center - has migrated more or less steadily for 2,500 miles from Egypt and Babylonia to the region around the North Sea--from latitude 30° to 50° or more, and through 40° of longitude. At each stage in this migration there have been zones of culture. In the center new inventions, institutions, and ideas have arisen; political and military power has reached the highest levels; industry has been most active; and art and science have flourished most steadily. Farther out in each case there has been an irregular zone of moderate progress, and outside that a relatively backward zone. The size and form of the zones have varied according to the shape and location of seas, rivers, mountains, plains, and deserts, according to the character and migrations of races, and according to the nature of new inventions, habits, and institutions.

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Vintage Oldsmobile Posters - Red 1957 Olds Starfire 98 Holiday Convertible Coupe

2011-09-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

1957 Olds Starfire 98 Holiday Convertible Coupe
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The main development in American automobile styling of the 1950s was the influence of jet fighter-plane styling and the emergence, by the middle of the decade, of tail fins as expressions of the power, speed, and image of the future that so many consumers clearly felt played an important role in suburban lifestyles. The 1948 Cadillac, designed by Harley EarI, was the first model to move beyond the curved aerodynamic streamlined look - a heritage from the prewar period and adopt a suggestion of tail-fins.

By the early 1950s, brightly polished chrome on bumpers, door handles, headlight surrounds and body trim had become the main means through which automobiles expressed more than their mere utility functions. Their bulbous pressed steel bodies provided a canvas upon which all sorts of imaginative delights could be portrayed. While it was a highly capital-intensive exereise to modify the shell itself, it was relatively cheap to vary the amount of chrome detailing in order to provide a range of differently priced models. The fact that General Motors soId automobiles under a range of different brand names - Cadillac, Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet and OIdsmobile, each aimed at a different sector of the market - meant that it could simultaneously standardize the production of major components and provide different models through varied body decoration.

Michael Jackson Thriller Posters

2009-07-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009; a was an American singer, entertainer and businessman. A cultural icon, he is also sometimes referred to as The King of Pop.

Michael Jackson began his career in 1964 as a member of The Jackson 5. Throughout his career, Michael Jackson set records for concert attendance and recordings sales. He is one of the most influential and best-selling artists in the history of pop music, selling over 750 million records.

Michael Jackson's Thriller album is the best-selling album of all time all over the world, others are among the best selling: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991), and HIStory (1995).

Michael Jackson Thriller Poster
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Michael Jackson's Thriller Album Cover Poster

Michael Jackson Album Covers Poster
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Covers of Michael Jackson's Albums Poster: 50 Years of King of Pop

Rolling Stones Tongue Poster Red & Black

2009-04-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Rolling Stones Tongue Poster
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Classic College Posters - Rolling Stones Tongue and Lip Logo Music Poster. 'The Rolling Stones are the biggest rock'n'roll band in the world so to secure a performance from them is amazing. The Stones, who first formed in 1961, August 31, and played their first ever gig outside England in 1963 at the Royal Lido Ballroom in Prestatyn. And although the four remaining members - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood - are now all around 60, they say they are still enjoying performing live.

Science Fiction Caricature Poster

2009-04-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

Sci-Fi Cafe Poster
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Black And White Funny Science Fiction Aliens Caricature Poster - UFO Spaceship Science Fiction Humor Posters - Science Fiction Movies and TV Series Humor Poster - Star Trek, Star Wars - UFO Aliens

Retro 50's American Advertisements Poster Collage

2009-04-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

Retro Collage American Advertisements Poster
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Retro Fun Posters: Funny Vintage American Advertisements

Retro Jimi Hendrix Poster Buddha Hippie 60's

2009-04-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

Jimi Hendrix Giant Poster
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The brilliance of Jimi Hendrix's guitar would have set him apart even within the black music. Jimi Hendrix, who came to Britain in 1966 at the behest of Animal Chas Chandler and formed a trio, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, fusing blues, rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and the pyschedelic lyrics, drugs, and instrumental effects with which many British groups, among them Pink Floyd and the Beatles, had been experimenting. Hendrix also jammed with Cream and was an important influence on Clapton. Jimi Hendrix Experience Axis: Bold as Love Poster - Jimi Hendrix Buddha Poster - Giant Jimi Hendrix Posters - 60's Retro Hippie Giant Poster

Simon Pegg / Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:18:00.001-07:00

Simon Pegg/Star Trek/Paramount Generic/by Jeff Dawson

Is there any phrase more quoted from TV science fiction than “Beam me up, Scotty”? — that ritual emergency issued to the Chief Engineer of the Starship Enterprise whenever Kirk and the boys got into a spot of bother. Simon Pegg laughs. “It’s one of those phrases that’s never actually been said[ital] in Star Trek,” he informs. “It’s one of those weird apocryphal things that’s entered into common parlance.” Still, for someone who grew up watching the original Star Trek series in the early 70s, what an honour it is, he declares, to be filling the size nines of the late James Doohan in the brand new cinematic outing. It was Doohan, of course, who played the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer, one Montgomery Scott.

Sadly Doohan died before the new film went into production, so Pegg never got to meet him. Though Doohan’s actor son Chris, who appears in the movie, was on-hand for information. “Chris was my kind of foil in the transporter room,” says Pegg. “We were able to talk about his father and I got a sense of who James was and what he was like as a man.” Doohan, a former journeyman actor, a combat veteran of World War Two, can barely have suspected that his audition for a part in a no-frills television series would go on to make him a pop culture immortal — so much so that after the venerable Canadian thesp passed away in 2005, aged 85, he had his ashes blasted into space. There were technical hitches that meant it took longer than anticipated. “But he’s up there now,” Pegg smiles.

Needless to say, Paramount’s spanking, big-budget Star Trek film — a real blockbuster extravaganza if ever there was one — is much anticipated as one of the[ital] event films of 2009. Helmed by JJ Abrams, perhaps best known, among numerous film and television credits, as the creator of Lost, the movie is a wham-bam thrill-ride, an affectionate, sometimes playfully irreverent prequel to the original 1966 show — one, people tend to forget, that was cancelled after just three seasons, only achieving a new lease of life when it went into international syndication a few years later. But the rest is entertainment history. Thus was spawned a 1979 film — Star Trek: The Motion Picture — which begat a whole series of movies, which continually evolved as the TV show was reinvented first as Star Trek: The Next Generation and, later, as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.

Eschewing the current, and rather tedious, vogue for exploring the “dark side” of how an action franchise came to be, it’s a refreshingly joyous affair. “Absolutely. Without being 'lite’ light,” assures Pegg. “It’s not fluffy. I think the good thing about it is it completely captures the spirit of the original but with the added bonus of being able to render it in really impressive visuals, which is what they never had in the old days.” Perversely, it was the limitations of the special effects which made the original show so enduring. “It’s quite cerebral,” adds Pegg. “It was actually a fairly challenging show at a time when a lot of the other science fiction was crazy throwaway: Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants.”

This time round, we see how a young Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura came to graduate from Starfleet Academy and sign up for their fabled five-year mission to seek out new worlds, new civilisations. Though we don’t encounter Scott until a little further down the line, as a lone engineer, tinkering in his lab on a remote planet, having been exiled there after an earlier mishap with his trials in teleportation. “Scotty is very sure about his theory to beam something onboard a moving object,” explains Pegg. “So sure that he experiments on the admiral’s prize dog and it disappears.”

But where would the genre of science fiction be without a little time travel? After a visit by Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Scott is prompted to reboot his testing, which will yield a key development in thwarting an impending attack by the Romulans. To this end Scott is aided (if you can follow) by a futuristic, older Mr Spock, who has zipped back in time to give Scott a little tuition. It has been a poorly kept secret, unlike everything else surrounding the production, that it is the great Leonard Nimoy who returns in his iconic role “He’s a remarkable man and it was amazing to work with him because I’ve known him as an actor and that character since I was very small,” says Pegg. “And to suddenly be in a situation where he’s being Spock and I’m reacting to that is quite bizarre.”

These are interesting times for Pegg. Not so long ago, the actor-comedian from Gloucester in England’s rural West Country, had seemed just another budding comic in his TV series Spaced. Then, via two quirky, cult films — Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz — he established himself as one of Britain’s hottest acting properties, whose everyman appeal was showcased, most recently, in How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, where he played the lone British journalist at a pretentious New York, Vanity Fair-style magazine. Hollywood had been taking note. A small and unlikely part in Mission Impossible III, brought Pegg within the scope of its director, JJ Abrams. And thus follows Star Trek.

Though Pegg has another small comedy in the works — “A road movie about two geeks and an alien”— he will next be seen in the Steven Spielberg-produced, computerised, The Adventures Of Tintin, in which he and regular actor/writer sidekick Nick Frost play bumbling detective duo, The Thompson Twins. “When Steven Spielberg asks you to go and meet him, you just go[ital],” says Pegg. “People are often surprised that I’m still in awe of it all. Why? Because ET, Jaws and Close Encounters were films that had a marked effect on me as a child. Nick and I had a conversation with him about Close Encounters and we left and just jumped around in the corridor for two minutes because we’d just spoken to a hero of ours.” Dare one mention that, in his new social circles, Pegg is the godfather to Apple, daughter of London neighbours Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as big pals with David Schwimmer with whom he worked on The Big Nothing and Run Fatboy, Run.

Actually, the amiable Pegg, 39, seems pretty down to earth, if famously private about his domestic affairs, one of the reasons, he says, he’s such a keen internet blogger. “It’s just a great way to put the record straight every time.” Though we do know that his Scottish wife, Maureen, has been very influential when it comes to Star Trek, being the model for the Caledonian accent Pegg has had to carry through the picture, specifically “Maryhill in Glasgow,” he quips.

Pegg was perhaps a natural for Star Trek all along. A known sci-fi fan (he has also appeared in Doctor Who), while studying at Bristol University he had penned a thesis on “The Marxist Overview of Seventies Cinema and Hegemonic Discourses,” he recounts. “Which was enormous fun to do. People go, ‘It’s silly to analyse things like that,’ but it really isn’t.” His chief example of the American Way writ large on the silver screen was Star Wars. Though one can argue Star Trek as a case in point, too – an American ship, named “Enterprise”, set on exacting regime-change upon galactic evildoers…

“Well it was supposed to be like Wagon Train in space, that was the pitch for it, frontiersmanship,” says Pegg, “but the other thing Star Trek did, which was completely radical, was it united a multi-ethnic cast. At a time, not that long after World War Two, and at a very tense time in the Cold War, there was a Russian navigator and a Japanese pilot, and you had a black communications officer, and the first ever interracial kiss (between Kirk and Uhura, a landmark TV moment). It’s easy to forget how utopian the vision of Star Trek was, which is why it is so beloved by people who maybe don’t fit in, because maybe there’s a universe where they would.”

Some of those people can be a little — ahem[ital] — zealous. We’re talking about those diehard fans, the Trekkies. “And Trekkers[ital], who are a different category,” says Pegg. “There are factions within that fanbase.” They have not been unanimous in their approval of the new film. “I think to fold your arms against it like a few of the more militantly purist ones have is kind of self-defeating,” Pegg muses. “You get stuff on the internet where people are dead against it because somehow it’s sacrilegious. Although I get that it’s precious to them. When I got cast as Scotty there were a few dissenting voices about my comedy background. I completely understand that.”

What with their conventions, their penchant for dressing up and their ability to order half a shandy in Klingon, it brings us into that world lampooned so marvellously in that arch Star Trek send-up, Galaxy Quest. “I watched it in my trailer on set,” Pegg sniggers. But, he stresses, generally the goodwill has been enormous. And we shouldn’t stereotype the fans either. “It’s easy to be cynical about people that are enthusiastic about stuff… ‘yeah they live with their mums’… All it is is being unashamedly and unabashedly in awe of something and enjoying it. That’s just the way it is. And I just love that.”

“I think what the filmmakers have really nailed is there is stuff in there that acknowledges and speaks very privately to the faithful and yet you can watch it, if you’ve never even heard of Star Trek, and it will be an absolutely rip-roaring, very engaging adventure about human beings in space, together with their alien counterparts,” he urges. “This is a way for Star Trek to start again and for us to see the further adventures of characters that were made so classic.”

JJ Abrams Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

JJ ABRAMS - Profile
“Star Trek”

JJ Abrams, the man who created the television series ALIAS and co-created FELICITY, LOST, and FRINGE admits that he wasn’t a devoted fan of the original STAR TREK. How ironic, then, that when Paramount Pictures asked him to produce their latest big-screen incarnation of the world-famous franchise, he readily agreed to tackle the project. “I was interested in working on a version of STAR TREK that grabbed me the way it did friends of mine,” he says.

After a year of working on the screenplay with his writers and producing partners, he was hesitant to send out the finished product to other directors. “When I read the script, I knew I would be jealous of anyone else who got to direct,” he laughs. “Here was this funny and emotional story that was a huge spectacle. There was massive action, it was fast-paced and had a huge heart. These were all elements of my favorite films, so how could I say no?”

In Abrams’ version, the story boldly goes where no previous creators dared to go: chronicling the early days of James T. Kirk. The story reveals how Kirk and the crew members of the USS Enterprise graduate from the Star Fleet Academy and set aboard their ship on adventures into deep space. It was in this basic premise that Abrams found the soul of the story that he was looking for.

“We have the character, Kirk, that has a lot of potential, but was aimless,” Abrams explains. “We know he ends up as Captain, but he’s so misguided; he has not found his way. Then we have the character Spock, who is half-human and half-Vulcan, but is fighting with the notion that he’s unable to fit in. The two characters come together and have this contentious relationship. They go on a crazy adventure together and put their lives in each other’s hands, and ultimately are victorious because of that combined power.” Abrams attests: “That is what struck a chord with me.”

The son of prolific TV-movie producer Gerald Abrams, the New York- born, Los Angeles-raised Jeffrey Jacob seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Graduating from Sarah Lawrence College to pursue screenwriting, it wasn’t long before some of his early scripts caught the attention of Harrison Ford (REGARDING HENRY) and Mel Gibson (FOREVER YOUNG). Though Abrams found success on the big screen penning screenplays for ARMAGEDDON and JOYRIDE, it was the small screen that ultimately catapulted him to Hollywood royalty. A succession of three shows, FELICITY, ALIAS and LOST, where he executive produced and directed, became pop-culture mainstays.

The double-agent spy drama ALIAS proved to be the vehicle to bring him back to the big screen. Hollywood heavyweight Tom Cruise, after viewing episodes of the show, called on Abrams to direct MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. How prophetic a journey for Abrams to evolve from a once eight year-old boy blowing up his miniature toys for homemade super 8mm movies to helming a movie for one of the world’s most well-known actors.

It was his childhood fascination with filmmaking and attention to meticulous detail that would come back to reap dividends for the STAR TREK assignment. “This film was literally taking everything I have done before and putting it into a quarter of the movie,” he says. “It was a huge challenge because each sequence was so different; I had to use every trick I knew and learn new ones. The scale of this movie is so ridiculous that it plays with your mind.” Not only did he have to create new planets, but decide on their atmosphere, language, attire and culture. “Every detail had to be considered,” he says.

With casting, Abrams faced a daunting task: Putting actors in place that reflected the personality of the original series regulars, without impersonating or mimicking them. Although some well-known faces expressed interest in the project, Abrams decided early on that casting unknowns would prove to be more beneficial. Looking no further than one of his favorite films, STAR WARS, he felt justified.

“You didn’t know who any of those people were when you first saw STAR WARS,” he explains. “So you believed that guy was Luke Skywalker. You didn’t recognize him from six other films, so you bought into who this guy was.” Following that formula, Abrams is laying his bets with Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), John Cho (Sulu) and Anton Yelchin (Chekov), among others, to inhabit the Enterprise.

A less confident director might feel handcuffed when accepting the challenge of such an iconic franchise, and Abrams acknowledges that his characters come predisposed to certain personality traits. But, his excitement stems from seeing how these characters--with those traits--react to a story that has never been told before. “The characters are all young adults; they are a disparate group of misfits and neophyte cadets, but as soon as they go on this adventure that they could never have anticipated, they form a relationship. They become a family.

Though STAR TREK has always been proactive in dealing with social and political themes, Abrams is under no illusions that his film will cure the world of any collective ills. “I wanted to make a film that would be the great ride at the amusement park; you know, the one ride that you have go on. It couldn’t be too shallow or short, and it had to deliver. As soon as you get off, you want to get back in line again. The only way for me to make that was to create a film that was as intimate and emotional as possible, then balance it with great action. At least, that was my ambition.”

ILM - a combination of artist, magician and scientist

2009-04-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

ILM GENERIC

On May, 8, the most famous Starship of all time returns to the big screen. But Director J.J. Abrams will make sure that this movie goes where no Star Trek has gone before. The film, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, shows the first adventure of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the Enterprise crew. With a quantum twist.
Abrams went for a fresh and realistic look for his movie, while he tried to honor the last 43 years of the long running franchise and it‘s worldwide fan base as much as possible.

For this he went to Industrial Light & Magic, the company that started the modern era of visual effects. ILM has a long history with the Star Trek films and provided with the „Genesis Effect“ the first completely computer-generated sequence in a movie for „The Wrath of Khan“ in 1982.

I talked with ILM‘s Roger Guyett and Michael DiComo about their work with J.J. Abrams on Star Trek.

Roger Guyett joined ILM 1994 and worked on movies like Casper, Dragonheart and Pirates of the Caribbean. He won a BAFTA 1998 for „Saving Private Ryan“ and earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations his work on „Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban“
Roger worked as Visual effects supervisor and Second Unit Director on Star Trek J.J. rendered the title sequence for Lost himself, how was working with him as Second Unit Director?

RG: This is the second movie after Mission: Impossible III we did together, and we have a really good relationship. Bad Robot was looking for a Second Unit Director, and Vic Armstrong, who did the Job on MI3, was not available, so J.J. ended up asking me to do it. Most of the big action and stunt sequences tend to be very visual effects oriented, so it makes sense to have a Second Unit Director who is the Visual Effects Supervisor as well. We worked very close together and met almost every day.

Have you been a Trekkie?

RG: I love TOS, for me the Original series is the most relevant part of the Trek world… as a kid I never missed one episode while it was on TV. Part of my homework for Star Trek was that I watched all 10 movies that came before and re-watched some of TOS, to create the right feeling for the prequel we were doing. How did you upgrade the classic Star Trek effects, like the warp rainbow?

RG: J.J. wanted the movie to be based in reality as much as possible. The Enterprise should be a believable starship, the warp effect should look real and exciting. That means you have to upgrade all of these classics. You have to look at the design of the Communicators and Phasers and the transporter effect. All those things that are fixed in the Trekkies minds, like what Matt Jefferies original design of the warp nacelles looked like. Our version of warp travel is extremely exciting. Throughout the movie we paid respect to all of the classic elements the fans will be watching for, including a lot of the sounds known from The Original Series. We paid our homage to classic elements while upgrading them at the same time. The transporter chime or when the Communicator beep. They are all in there, not as exact copies from 1966 but updates true to the original. Everything the hardcore fans have affection for is there. Like our version of the uniform, they are very familiar but a more contemporary version of what was done in the original. We kept the colors, the Starfleet Delta and the shapes and styles are very familiar to the fans. It is the right balance between just copying something that would seem dated and making it more contemporary. The new bridge of the Enterprise is bright and glossy, some fans compared it to an Apple store…

RG: Yeah, I heard that too.. When you deal with such a hardcore fan base as the Trekkies, some people love what you do while others are disappointed. But you need to make strong decisions if you want to make a great movie. And our goal was to make the best and exciting movie possible. Spock Prime showing Scotty the formula for transwarp beaming is a nice nod to „The Voyage Home“, where „Professor“ Scott introduced transparent aluminum to the world…

RG: That is the great thing if you have somebody like Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman writing the script. Bob is a huge Trekkie himself, he is very aware and respectful of all the things the fans love and embrace. There is a lot of tipping the hat to the fans in the movie, while it is very contemporary film. It is a great adventure story, a high energy, and fun movie. The main viewer on the bridge looks like a real window with heads-up displays in it…

RG: Watching TOS as a kid, the screen always reminded me that the bridge was a set. It was hard to imagine the Enterprise warping through space if you just have a view screen that is playing back footage. But we were very keen on putting the crew really into space. These people are explorers, and if you want to make this experience realistic you don‘t want a view screen but a real window on the bridge. You can see the dish of the primary hull with the NCC 1701 on it, like the hood of a car spread out in front of you. You are connected all the time to the geography of space, where the crew of the Enterprise is going, and what they are about to do. While that created more work for us, it is an important aspect of the bridge itself, making the impression of being out there much more believable. The window can behave as a screen with Nero‘s face displayed on it, or can be a mixture of window and heads-up display. One of the advantages of that for telling a story is that you can have many things happening at the same time. You might be talking to somebody on the screen, but at the same time you can see where you are, adding more layers of context to what the characters are doing. In the sequence were Chekov is addressing the crew about the distress call, we see lots of different areas of the ship, and it appears really huge…

That is one of the main things J.J. did so well on the movie. Schedule wise and physically filming it was a difficult task, but it was certainly worth it. J.J. really wanted to show the size of the Enterprise, as a massive ship, by travelling around in her. So by doing a ship-wide broadcast and following Chekov´s image on the view screens you get the impression what all those different people of the crew are doing. You get a glimpse of Engineering or go down to the torpedo bay, and it really gives the movie a great kind of scope. For 43 years it was part of Trek canon that the Enterprise was assembled in earth orbit. Where you surprised that the ship was build on the ground in Iowa?

Yes, that was a potentially contentious area. We probably negotiated one aspect of that by not showing how the ship got into space… I talked to Bob Orci about that, he was aware of the contradiction, but the way it services the plot makes it worth having the ship built on the ground. What was the toughest job for ILM doing Star Trek?

We spent a surprising amount of time on the transporter effect. J.J. was very interested in the way the effect worked and wanted to make sure that it had real dimension.

We spent an enormous amount of time on making the Starships look the coolest and most interesting of all Trek history. Then there is a tremendous amount of destruction in the movie, which is a lot of fun to do. We spent a lot of time developing the virtual pyrotechnics for the space battles, making sure that the explosions when a ship is hit are appropriate to real space. It is a huge visual effects movie, there are more than 1.000 effects shots in Star Trek.

I am very proud of what we did and the movie is fantastic. There is nothing like doing a space movie, and Star trek has a history of pushing the envelope of visual effects. It is a great honor of being part of that tradition. Michael DiComo joined Industrial Light & Magic in 1996 as a technical director on 101 Dalmatians. On Star Trek he worked as Digital Production Supervisor. How do you destroy a starship?
MDC: First off all we need R&D to come up with a procedural way, luckily we don‘t have to break up the models by hand anymore. So a toolset is built and tested to blow up starships in a convincing way. Did you provide a lot of pre-viz materials for J.J.?

MDC: J.J. was already shooting the movie while we began to send him pre-visualized shots. It was a very tight and collaborative creative process. So while shooting live action J.J. received the pre-vis, got back to us and we had the chance to redo the sequence to deliver exactly what he wanted. We had ILM people on location so that J.J. could check the sequence on a Laptop, he saw the explosions as QuickTime movies while he was directing the scene.

After things got more settled down we would send whole sequences for reviewing to Maryann Brandon, the editor in Los Angeles. So the editorial team was able to react to our work in the right context. The space sequences look astoundingly real, how did you achieve that?

MDC: From the very outset Roger Guyett and J.J. were going for a much more realistic space environment. We started with very high contrast photography, because a lot of viewers know from real footage with NASA‘s Space Shuttle that the Earth bounces a whole bunch of light. Stanley Kubrick went for that look in 2001, but usually space movies go for a flat, low contrast look. We assumed that your primary light source in outer space is the next sun, and that there is very little bounce light. The dark side of the Enterprise is not illuminated by any fill light, you see only the windows and the ships tracer light. So we tried to play with that and forced that realistic contrast space look on the ship‘s hull. Things slide into darkness, so you can‘t tell on the dark side of Nero’s ship, the Narada, where it disappears. It‘s just so big, it looms out of the frame, and so dark that you can‘t see the surface, which makes it much more interesting and menacing.

For the details on the Starfleet ships, we asked the modelers and the painters in ILM‘s model shop who had built the Enterprise by hand for the earlier Trek movies. The Starship‘s outer hull is made from a lot of different panels, and they told us how to get that structure right. Some of the panels are matte, some dirty, some are scruffed and some clean. So we built the complete hull in CG, including virtual layers of paint. CG starts very clean, and then we worked in all the dirt and the grime. Our main task is to mess things up, to give the ships the look they get from patrolling at the final frontier. How did you build the Enterprise?

MDC: Bruce Holcomb, our lead digital modeler and our lead painter Ron Woodall brought in their amazing experience while building the Enterprise. Of course there is a big difference between a few concept drawings by Ryan Church and then building the ship in 3D space and orbit around it. When you see the light shining at the model you start to make some design decisions on top of that. But J.J. Abrams gave us so much creative freedom that we were able to built a beautiful Enterprise for him. When we pointed out that the relationship between the primary hull‘s saucer and the warp nacelles look a little weird, J.J. allowed us to change that, he is pushing something through the creative process till it is perfected. It was an amazing experience. The warp nacelles are equipped with Bussard collectors to collect hydrogen particles from space, after more than 40 years they don‘t glow red anymore…

MDC: While J.J. wanted to be stay true to the past on the Bussard collectors, he did not stick to every square inch of Star Trek that came before. If we showed him something that made sense and made the Enterprise look better he went for it. We actually started with the red warm look on the Bussard collectors, but then we moved to the cooler, bluish look because it worked better with the overall design. J.J. was aware that he would have to take some heat from the hardcore Trek fans, but he was not afraid to do something cool and fresh that could exist inside the established canon of Star Trek at the same time. Was Star Trek shot on film stock?

MDC: Yes, it was shot on film using anamorphic lenses. The negatives get scanned and we work on digital files. Anamorphic lenses like Panavision come with certain artifacts and signature distortions. There are certain ways that flares happen in anamorphic lenses, so when we blow up these giant mega spaceships with huge explosions we need to mimic the trademark anamorphic lens flare, a long horizontal blue line. Let‘s say you have a shot on the bridge of the Enterprise with all those bright lights. When the highlight moves toward the edge of the lens it does this unpredictable magical and beautiful thing. It flares up and creates all sorts of aberrations and reflections within the lens. Our compositing team developed a lens flare toolkit for all starships. We also created those flares by filming a flashlight on a dark stage to combine these real anamorphic shots with the ones we mimic in our software. But the look adds greatly to the scope of Star Trek. What special effects applications did you use?

MDC: At ILM we work with third party software and our in-house solution called Zeno. It serves as a hub and animation environment for most of ILM‘s production pipeline. Within the modular Zeno structure the artists only use the tool needed for the task at hand, and modelers and animators are collaborating on the same file in real-time. Changes on the file are updated automatically through the pipeline. A lot of modeling and animation is done in Autodesk Maya, and the final rendering happens in Pixar‘s RenderMan and mental Ray.

For the space battles we created a whole new set of 3D simulated explosions. Just 10 percent of the shots were supplemented with real live material from our archives. To show the realism of space, without oxygen, our explosions burn off superfast and are sucked back into the ships. We are physically true to what happens in space.

Sometimes you have this exact part of a Starship you want to break off and reveal the decks inside. ILM has a procedure called „Fracture“ for that, which gives us procedural control. This allows an artist to select five missiles for example, and determine which panels of the starship will be damaged without creating this by hand. When the Enterprise warps into this huge debris field of destroyed starships there are these beautiful pieces that come right at the camera. The artist has total control about the pieces of hull that are missing, and the bodies drifting in space.

He can take the piece of saucer and cut it open by hand, having all the creative decisions at his fingertips. How much hardware was needed to create the movie?
MDC: In ILM‘s basement in San Francisco‘s Presidio is a huge, freezing cold room filled with more than 10.000 processors. Star Trek was created at ILM‘s renderfarm on 400 Terabytes disk space. One frame of film, and there are 24 frames per second, takes between six and eight hours to render, depending on specific lightning in the scene. Have you been a trekkie before working on the film?

MDC: No. Of course working at ILM means you are a combination of artist, magician and scientist, so we have a lot of trekkies on our crew. They figured out all the hints in Orci and Kurtzman's script at once and pointed to different episodes and stories, and we others had to do our homework about all the alien races and ship models in Star Trek. Are you excited to see the movie?

I couldn‘t be more excited to see Star Trek, more than any other movie I worked on in a long, long time. It really has a freshness to it that makes it different from all the other space movies we worked on, and totally cool characters in a very real environment. I am very proud on the work we‘ve done on it. It‘s just beautiful looking work in a really good movie, which is a combination that doesn‘t always happen in special effects films.

Zachary Quinto Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:11:00.001-07:00

ZACHARY QUINTO – Profile
‘Star Trek”

Green Tree, Pennsylvania is a suburb of Pittsburgh with a population just north of 4700. Like many small towns, their neighborhood paper likes to cover ‘local boy does good’ so when Zachary Quinto got cast in the television series HEROES, they were the first to do a feature on him. When the actor was queried if there were any roles that interested him, he humbly stated that he was glad to have just gotten this job but he understood that there was to be a new STAR TREK film and it would be kind of cool to play Spock.

Like a shot heard round the world, every subsequent interview the actor gave, the question arouse about his supposed dream role. Luckily for him, when casting did commence for the feature film, the powers that be were aware of his desire and brought him in to read for the part.

STAR TREK, directed by JJ Abrams, is the latest incarnation birthed out of the landmark 1966 television series; however unlike the ten other films or five television adaptations, this version takes audiences back to the beginning. We witness the formation of the now infamous team of Captain Kirk, Sulu, Uhura, Chekhov and Spock; how these young Star Fleet cadets morphed into their leadership roles aboard the USS Enterprise.

Abrams believed that casting the iconic Spock would prove his hardest challenge, but when Zachary came into the audition, he was struck by how much the young actor looked the part. “I knew his acting but when he walked into the room, I was struck how much he looked like Leonard Nimoy, whom I already knew was going to be in the film. We needed someone who could be the younger version of Spock and his talent, his look and his eagerness for the role just made his selection a no brainer.”

For any actor, steeping into a role so identifiable with another actor could be a daunting task and Quinto was well aware of the spotlight that would be cast upon him. Luckily he had someone in his corner who made the transition comfortably easy. Attending the 2007 edition of the Comic Con Convention in San Diego, Quinto found himself riding in a crowded elevator with Nimoy. Silently standing next to each other, no words were spoken on the ride up, but when the doors opened, Nimoy turned and simply stated, “You have no idea what you are in for.”

Subsequent encounters between the two lead to a friendship that afforded Quinto some in depth insights not only into the background and psychology of Spock, but the aura that surrounds the legend of the character that stereotyped Nimoy. “Leonard has spent forty years with this character and you can see the ways in which it has really shaped his life. But I know him to be a man with no regrets,” attests Quinto. As to his own concerns, “I am just looking at this opportunity as an incredible launching point and I am eager for a diverse, extensive experience as an actor.”

The experience began when a few physical changes were necessary to transform him into the half human, half Vulcan who espoused the philosophy to ‘live long and prosper.’ It meant a new set of ears, shaved eyebrows and a bowl haircut. “It was a momentous occasion when I put the ears on for the first time,” he recalls, a process that took the make-up team two hours to apply each day. That appendage is the quintessential image that most people have of the character and although they made a noticeable physical difference, Quinto admits that after a while he didn’t even notice they were there. “Acting is truthful behavior in imaginary circumstances so all of the costumes and props were just about commitment. And as for the ears, my body sort of got used to it.”

Getting used to things has been something Quinto had to learn to deal with from an early age, as his father died when he was only seven. Channeling the grief into his new love for theater, by age eleven he was appearing in productions by the regional music theater company, Pittsburgh Light City Opera. In high school, he received his first artistic honor, the Gene Kelly Award for his role in PIRATES OF PENZANCE. Deciding that theater would be his career, he attended the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, graduating in 1999. Moving to Los Angeles the next year, after waiting on his fair share of tables, he quickly was cast in such TV shows as CSI, SIX FEET UNDER and 24 before landing HEROES, a recurring role as the show’s complicated villain Gabriel “Sylar” Gray.

What has pleased the 31 year-old actor is that this take on the STAR TREK saga continues the optimistic tone that creator Gene Roddenberry first implemented in the original series. “They dealt with problems and themes back then that people had trepidation to talk about, like racial, social and political issues. It was so ahead of its time. What I love about our film is that it’s about friendship and family. That is our heart and while we might have action and drama and comedy, it is ultimately a very moving and touching film.”

John Cho Q&A Star Trek Interview

2009-04-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

JOHN CHO Q&A

TELL US ABOUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE ORIGINAL ‘STAR TREK’.

CHO: I was not a big fan as a kid. And that probably was due to my age. I was six when I immigrated to the States in 1978. And it was the height of ‘Star Wars’ mania. I know I probably shouldn’t compare the two but by then, ‘Star Trek’ was sort of dated. It had funny velour costumes. ‘Star Trek’ was much more literary than ‘Star Wars’ and so it took me a while to get into it. But by the time I got into high school, I was watching ‘The Next Generation’.

SO WHAT WAS IT ABOUT ‘STAR TREK’ THAT REALLY INTRIGUED YOU AS AN ACTOR??
CHO: Well, for me it was mainly the opportunity to be connected to something that I felt was so positive, as I said, from my youth. And to reprise a role that meant personally a lot to me and I think meant a lot to Asian Americans. There are a couple of things that are a downer, being an Asian-American actor. One of them is not being able to, say, play the son of an actor, that’s a big actor that I really admire and as a result, being shut out of a lot of families in scripts. Once they cast a particular role as white, you can’t play their brother or their son. Secondly, there are certain mythologies that you can’t do. One is the Western. And for me, ‘Star Trek’ was my Western. It is, in its themes, it’s such a classic Western, exploring new worlds and stuff. For me, it was a chance to play cowboys and Indians in space. That was another draw for me.

THE THING ABOUT ‘STAR TREK’, ESPECIALLY AT THE TIME, IT WAS A CROSS SECTION, A MICROCOSM OF THE WORLD. THERE WERE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHARACTERS, ASIANS, RUSSIANS – IT WAS SOMETHING WE DIDN’T REALLY SEE ON TV.

CHO: That’s right. And I did clock that as a child. And it was very meaningful to me. I made twin observations. One was, wow, they don’t think much of people that look like me here, as I surfed channels. And then it was clocking George Takei. He was the helmsman of a spaceship, just being cool and not doing any of the things that other people were doing. He was not throwing karate chops or having an accent or buckteeth. So it was very meaningful for me to see George on television. And that’s a great deal of why I was so interested in being in this remaining. I was keen on engaging in that legacy.

HOW DID YOU GUYS WORK TOGETHER? HOW DID YOU GUYS, SINCE YOU’D NEVER ALL WORKED TOGETHER, WHAT DID JJ TRY AND DO TO GET THAT SEEMLESS?

CHOI think JJ just let us be funny. He encouraged that, which I think is useful. I find that sometimes on dramas, there’s more goofing around between takes then there is on comedies. And I’ve found that to be true in my case sometimes. There’s a science to hitting all those beats in comedy. Rather like math. You know, you you’re like [snaps his fingers], do this, this, and it will set up this. And in between takes, I find myself always in a discussion with the director. “How do we improve that scene?” “Can we milk one more joke out of it?” It becomes, like, this obsession with perfection between the scenes – for me, that’s how I find myself on a comedy set. And, you know, on this set we were just… We were dealing with, you know, the end of the world in the scene and so we needed to find a release valve.

HOW MUCH OF THE ENTERPRISE WAS PRACTICAL, WAS ACTUALLY THERE ON SET?

CHO: More than you’d think. I haven’t seen the finished product, so I don’t know what they’ve added. Obviously there has to be a green screen that we’re looking at. But a lot of those controls, although they didn’t make anything go or thrust or work, they turned. So it was easy to make believe. There were so many knobs and stuff. And then there were hallways that led out directly out of the bridge. So it was easy. They made it very easy for us.

John Cho Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:07:00.001-07:00

JOHN CHO
“Star Trek”

John Cho is the first to laugh when describing how he began his career. “I wore the right size clothes.”

While attending college at Berkeley, Cho was part of a local writing group when one of his colleagues asked him how tall he was and how much he weighed. When he replied to the rather usual query, he was informed that some guy had dropped out of a play and he appeared to be the same size fit for the costumes. Would he do it? “I said yes and that is how I got started as an actor,” he smiles. “I had two lines but had a great time.”

That wasn’t quite the same standard applied when JJ Abrams was casting the latest big screen incarnation of STAR TREK. For the part of Hikaru Sulu, Cho was called into audition and then had to ‘sweat it out’ for months waiting for the decision. As fate would have it, the call came when the actor was on his honeymoon in Italy. “That was a very nice treat,” he adds.

Based on characters that were first introduced in Gene Roddenberry’s landmark 1966 television series, this version of STAR TREK is going boldly where none of the other ten films or five television versions have. In Abrams interpretation, audiences will be taken to the beginning and introduced to Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Lt. Uhura, Chekhov and Sulu; from their days at the Star Fleet Academy to their galactic adventures aboard the USS Enterprise.

For Cho, who has previously appeared in such comedies as AMERICAN PIE and HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO THE WHITE CASTLE, the chance to be in the film allowed him not only the opportunity to honor the groundbreaking role that George Takei introduced as one of the very first pro active Asian Americans ever appearing on screen; but also to satisfy his lifelong fantasy to appear in a western.

Now in case you are wondering how the science fiction fantasy would qualify as a western, Cho explains. “As an Asian American, there are two roadblocks that I face. One is I don’t look like most of the actors who are working so I can’t play their sons or brothers. The second is there are certain mythologies that I cannot do. One of them is the western but for me, STAR TREK is my western. With its themes, it follows the classic storyline of the genre so this is my chance to play cowboys and Indians.”

Because television was not the most racially sensitive back in its infancy, Cho recalls viewing as a child stereotypes that he could never fully identify with. What he found so appealing in the character of Sulu was the image of a man who looked like he did that was not throwing karate chops, laden with a thick accent or showcasing bad teeth. “This was why I was so interested in being in this re-imagination,” he proudly states. “I was keen on engaging this legacy.’

Having previously met Takei through some theater work, Cho was able to reconnect after he was cast and sat down with them man who created the character. “George was so gracious with his time. We went all over the place in our conversations but probably the greatest thing I came away with was watching his attitude towards life. He is so generous as a person. But we both knew that my job was not to recreate him. I didn’t want to mess with the mythology and upset people but in order to function, I had to let go.”

One of the things Takei couldn’t share with his young cohort is the technical training that was required for the part; mainly due to the fact that Abrams enabled Sulu to be a much more proactive character in the film. Several months prior to filming, Cho, along with his co-stars Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, were put through a rigorous boot camp learning such skills as sword fighting, boxing and martial arts. “I was the jack of all trades,” he admits. “I had to learn all different types of physical expression and doing stuff that I thought I could never do. I really found this to be the most important part of my preparation.”

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Cho immigrated with his family to the United States when he was six. Initially based in Houston, Texas, the family moved from Seattle to San Francisco before finally steeled in Los Angeles in 1978. After graduating with a BA in English, Cho proceeded to teach English at Pacific High School in West Hollywood while still pursing an acting career. Various theater roles led him to films, where he first gained attention with a small role in the 1999 comedy AMERICAN PIE, popularizing the slang term “MILF.” The young actor continued with small roles in AMERICAN BEAUTY, EVOLUTION, DOWN TO EARTH and BETER LUCK TOMORROW, a drama that focused on a group of Asian Americans living in Southern California who engage in violent, criminal behavior before eventually being cast in as one of the co leads in HAROLD AND KUMAR. In 2006, People Magazine selected him as one of the sexiest men alive.

One is sure that once again, Cho wore the right clothes.

Chris Pine QA Interview Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

CHRIS PINE
“Star Trek”

Chris, could you just talk about your own relationship with ‘Star Trek’ because you were born way after the TV show?

PINE: Way after the TV show. Growing up there were re-runs on television and I’d watch those occasionally. And my grandmother was a big William Shatner fan so we’d watch ‘T.J. Hooker’ and old ‘Star Trek’ episodes. So it was on my radar but I wasn’t a fan.

Have you met Shatner?

PINE: I have not. I wrote him a letter early on in the process and just introduced myself. I just wanted to let him know that I was going to do my best to bring to life this part of Kirk’s journey and do justice to the wonderful job that he had done for 40 years. And he wrote me back very promptly and said, “Thank you so much.” “I wish you all the best of luck and let’s grab some lunch some time soon” which we have not but he’s a busy guy. Actually my father, who’s also an actor, did a Priceline commercial with him about two or three weeks after I found out I had the part; so ironic, strange. And he’d also been on ‘Star Trek’ too, my father.

For someone who has never seen ‘Star Trek’, how would you describe James T Kirk?

PINE: James Kirk is angry, arrogant, brash young punk who is masking an incredible amount of insecurity and fear. He came from a broken home and is searching for something to do with his life. It is clear what he wants but he also isn’t sure if he wants to contend with the great shadow his father has cast over him. The interesting part of the journey is his learning how to harness all of the emotions born from this conflict, from this misguided young man into the focused confident commander that he later becomes. He is no superhero but rather an everyday kinda guy faced with a tremendous challenge. And even though he gets beat down he always picks himself up again.

How did it feel to be in this huge big adventure?

PINE: I’m very excited and I have all the confidence in the world that it’s going to appeal to fans and non-fans alike. It’s overwhelming and its totally daunting but the great thing about J.J. making it is I don’t think any of us ever felt the pressure on set to live up to any kind of expectations. Even though it is like 150 million dollars and it’s this mega, mega, mega tent pole film, he was always concentrated first and foremost on the relationships between the characters and making sure that those were meaningful because he realized that without meaningful relationships, all the effects in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans.

But as actors sometimes its interesting not only what they say yes to but what they say no to versus how fate works out. I think we actually talked about this before, that you were about to do this George Clooney movie too and it was which one are you going to do and the offers were coming in and for whatever reason you chose to do ‘Star Trek’ and the George Clooney movie fell apart.

PINE: Yeah, right. It was like the best times and the worst of times. That one week I happened to have the opportunity to work with George Clooney or do ‘Star Trek’. I mean in a matter of a day my world had completely changed and it was a difficult choice with which I was faced. I mean here I love Joe Carnahan who was going to do ‘White Jazz’ and the prospect of working with George Clooney was awesome.

So why ‘Star Trek’? Why was that?

PINE: Because in that week I really tried to do my due diligence and figure out what was more meaningful to me. On the surface my inclination is naturally to go to Carnahan and do the character part because I get to play this incredibly strange person. I mean this guy’s a psychopathic latently homosexual homicidal maniac.

This is the James Elroy movie?

PINE: Just like awesome. It was just a great role. And then the James Kirk thing came to me, which on the surface is like the classic leading man and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that. But really upon looking at it further, I felt like for me that was actually the more challenging role. It was actually safer to hide behind the make-up and do all that fun ‘character’ stuff. The challenges posed by playing James Kirk, by the prospect of doing a big budget movie, by all the pressure, by the fact that I’d be facing all this scrutiny, I mean not really pleasurable things to think about but it also made it exciting. It’s like high stakes poker or something. It’s like you can either win really big or you can lose really big but that ride is really fun. It’s the drug you know. It’s really fun.

Was it difficult to get the role in ‘Star Trek’ the audition process?

PINE: I auditioned once in the spring of ‘07 and had the worst audition you could ever ask for, and didn’t think anything about it, and just thought another audition that went down the drain. It was fine. I was then asked to come audition for it after the summer and had no interest in going back in again but my agents said you should probably meet J.J. which was the smart move clearly because J.J.’s reputation in the business is held in pretty high standing. So I went and met J.J. For anyone that knows, the audition process sucks. You go in and it’s like they either like you or they don’t. Period. Your forehead’s too big or you’re not this or that or whatever it is. You could tell immediately in the room that J.J. was a great guy. And he is passionate, and positive, and fun, and likes to make movies. He’s really just a great guy. And I auditioned with a couple of scenes and then he threw the sides down, and pushed the chair away, and we started improvising. When J.J. gets really excited he’s like a big eight-year-old kid. It’s so fun to be around people that love what they do, it’s just intoxicating.

Why do you think you did so badly in the first audition?

PINE: Who knows? I was doing a play at the time. My energy was focused elsewhere. It’s difficult. It’s not brain science but when you’re asked to talk about photons and torpedoes, just to get a sense of reality of doing that is hard sometimes if you’re not focused and ready to do it. It’s like I auditioned for ‘Avatar’ and for ‘10,000 B.C.’ and it’s when you’re like in a hot room in Burbank and you’re asked to crouch on a seat and pretend you have a loincloth and a spear, sometimes you can either buy yourself doing it or not. I just didn’t at all.

The whole essence of sci-fi is dealing with things that really aren’t there. How easy is it for you as an actor to access all of that?

PINE: Well it’s one thing when it’s a hot stuffy room in Burbank and it’s a different thing entirely when you’re on a ten million dollar stage with the best looking set of all time and great actors. I mean then its just cake. Its action and then, boom, you’re in it.

But the stuff where you’re supposed to be beamed from one place to another and you’re supposed to do all this other stuff?

PINE: It’s very interesting how the imagination works. It’s like once you just let go, you do just that-you let go. But that’s not to say that after a really long day and you’re doing some intense scene, and I’d be looking at Zach and here he is with his bowl hair cut and pointy ears and yeah, sometimes it’d be a little ridiculous. But for the most part, I know it’s so trite, but it’s like being a big kid in a really big expensive playground and your imagination just says yeah, let’s do it.

Do you think the show really lasted because of the milieu it was set in? Outer space is still the last great mystery.

PINE: What made it interesting and so brilliant about the original series is that because it was in outer space, they could take liberties with class, race and investigate questions that couldn’t have been tackled had it been set in, let’s say, Manhattan at the time. During civil and social unrest and an unpopular war, this show created this utopian soceity where everyone works together In this future state. The enemy weren’t the Russians or the Viet Cong. It was the Romulans and the Klingons. The setting of outer space allowed them to investigate issues that they couldn’t have done. Now with more unrest, economic downturn and wars, this film is another vision of the future that shows hope. It is a wonderful escape and a wonderful vision of humanity.

Have you ever stopped to really comprehend the phenomenon that has become ‘Star Trek’? Outside of James Bond, I cannot think of any film characters that have lasted as long.

PINE: I didn’t grasp the epic scale of the fan base and sense of protectiveness that the fans have until I started watching the series. I still don’t quite understand it. When we went to WonderCon, I saw people dressed as characters of the show and I think for these people, the show presents, clearly, this opportunity of escape. There is this strong, strong sense of community.

What are they saying about you?

PINE: It runs the gamut. They are very protective of the people who created the show and, look, I would be wary of this 28-year-old kid coming aboard. I want to do this job well and add to what is already there. I am taking nothing away from William Shatner. I am merely telling one specific part of this character’s journey.

Unlike superhero characters, these people have no super human abilities. They do get to rely on high technology to help them but they still have to face each other in usually very humanistic terms.

PINE: That is a great point. What is appealing to people is that you are not watching Batman or Superman, with their perfectly sculpted hero suits and cool gadgets. This is about the camaraderie amongst brothers who face life and death circumstances. Through all the turmoil and obstacles, you succeed triumphant only by working together. Just because it is set in the future, it is no different than, say, Band of Brothers.

When you first put on the uniform and you look in the mirror, do you remember what you thought?

PINE: I hope I don’t look like a jackass. No. The first thing I asked J.J., even before I got the part, I was like please don’t make me put on a stupid costume. But it wasn’t really putting on the outfit for the first time as much as being on set with everyone that was so cool. I remember the scene when I sat down in the captain’s chair. I’m not a diehard fan, so it doesn’t hold the same kind of… It’s not as sacrosanct for me as it is for someone else. But you can’t help but smile. It was a pretty big moment.

How did it feel to be looking at Zoe Saldana?

PINE: Not bad at all. Zoe, poor girl. It was like a fraternity on set between all the guys and then J.J. and all his producing partners. It was Animal House without the togas and keg stands. But Zoe is a strong woman so she knows how to handle herself around men and she’s a perfect combination of beauty and brains and great talent and we had a grand old time together.

There is a lot more sexual chemistry between Uhura and Kirk than other episodes of this saga have ever told.

PINE: There is an undercurrent. I don’t think it was any specific choice of JJ to shake up the canon of “Star Trek” folklore. I just think it makes a more interesting story when you add that dynamic. If you are stuck in space and there is a beautiful woman on deck, that certainly doesn’t mean your libido is going to die. We will see how it progresses if the films continue but there is a romantic component to this one, yes.

Zach said that because of his physical appearance, he didn’t feel comfortable in social situations and so he found himself socially beginning to withdraw and I was wondering if you noticed that in him and his character that over the course of time?

PINE: You know I didn’t but that’s really interesting. I had probably the easiest job in the book. I mean Kirk isn’t exactly reserved. Compared to Zach who’s got to take the spectrum of emotion and then just by nature of who he is as a character he has to suck it all in, in order to convey emotion. I don’t envy that position at all. And even J.J. was saying how when he’d cut together scenes, Zach would be doing stuff that he never saw while he was watching him do it on set. He would convey something just by a look or a blink of an eye. That’s a credit to how good Zach is. I mean that is a deceptively difficult part I think to do because people just think you have to look logical, calm, and collected and it’s not that at all. I think to make the character interesting you actually have to take all the breadth of emotion and just distill it.

But he had that advantage per say of the look of Spock then audiences immediately knew him. Were there characteristics of Kirk you could use, because you have this wealth of TV shows and the first six or seven films? Were there little mannerisms that you thought as an homage to add that or something?

PINE: Yeah, there was a conversation with J.J. about what bread crumbs to leave along the way and I think we came up with a couple things. And also when I got it I began watching the episodes and I think just by process of osmosis, just watching it, there were things that I just enjoyed about it. His performance in the original series is really interesting to watch because he’s operating on many different levels. The original series, there is a camp factor to it that’s very fun. It’s that same sense of humor that he brings to ‘Star Trek’ that you see him many years later, and clearly at more of an extreme level, bringing to “Boston Legal.’ I think that people sometimes may not appreciate the cpmplexity he brought to the original series because with their modern sensibilities can’t get over the cheesy effects. He was a Shakespearian actor so he’s bringing all of that projection, and carriage and presence to bear on the part. There’s a way he moves on the deck of the Enterprise, which is almost balletic and there are certain ways he sits in the captain’s chair that are so clearly, and have become so identifiably, Captain Krik. But in terms of making a list of Kirkian attributes, no, I didn’t do that. What I had to do was given to me in the script. The script gave me everything that I needed to play the part.

How physical was the role for you?

PINE: When I read the script, I would just kind of skim over the action stuff and get to the character stuff, and what I failed to realize is there’s like four pages that take about four seconds to skim through take about a month, month and a half to shoot the actual thing. I had no mental preparation for that. I had all the physical preparation where they gave us a trainer, and the best stunt guys in the business. I just wasn’t prepared for the fact that instead of twelve hours a day thinking about the love scene or the talky dialogue scene, it’s like a day of running pretending you’re being fired upon or being chased by something. I had no concept of that and I haven’t sweat that hard in a long time. But it was fun because it’s a different kind of Zen. When you’re using your body that way, like from that scene you saw in the bar, there are these big stunt guys who want to do a good job so they have their mean faces on. So when a big 200 pound Asian cat’s coming at you like with his arm drawn like this, it can be pretty scary. AMking sure you’re hitting your beats and taking good care of the choreography centers you in an incredible way. I did, however, end up breaking a stunt guy’s nose. These stunt guys are so tough. I accidentally broke his nose and it wasn’t like I really got him, it was just like a knuckle. And he goes off to the side with all the other stunt guys in this, like, fraternal huddle. They go off to the side and they get a cold spoon and they set it and he’s like “I’m back”, “I’m back”, and then there he is, he’s doing the scene again, no crying, no nothing. I can imagine it’s like what western stunt guys would’ve been.

Did you know at the time that you’d broken his nose?

PINE: Oh, I felt so bad. It was awful. I’ve never gotten into a fight in my life. I just felt awful but he was good sport and he was a good guy. Interestingly enough we got to talking because I took him outside and was like “Dude I was not trying to impress anybody in there, I just don’t know what I’m doing you know.” He comes from a long line of stunt guys too. I think he’s a third generation stunt guy so we were talking because I’m a third generation actor. It’s an industry town. We don’t make steel or coal we make movies. And that sense of history is very cool.

How specific do these fight scenes have to be?

PINE: That opening fight scene that is in the film took over two months to rehearse and two days to shoot. I was so bummed that after watching the film, it is only on screen for a minute, if that. You have to learn to turn your body on B line then throw a punch on C line. It is all very specific. I have way more respect now for the Tom Cruise’s and Jet Li’s who do action films. It is using a whole different muscle. I only had four of five big action sequences to do but I was exhausted. I cannot imagine what those other actors do it all action films. I really had to get in better shape and really work on the lungs so I could breathe through all the scenes. There were some moments when I was in the corner just trying to catch my breath (laugh).

How were you with the wirework and wind machines? The fight scene on the drill was impressive.

PINE: Well, I’m not going to tell you the magic of that because I know that J.J. wants to protect as much of the sleight of hand as possible. But even after watching it I’m blown away what the folks at ILM can do. It’s extraordinary what they can do. Between camera tricks and post production the magic you can create is ridiculous and I really hope they don’t in the behind the scenes show how they did everything. I think J.J. really wants to, as much as he can, protect the magic of film making is lost when they start bulking up the bonus packages on the dvd’s. It’s too bad, it really is.

What really is appealing about Kirk is his sense of humor. How much did that evolve in the filmmaking process and how much did you improvise on set allowing that to occur?

PINE: JJ wanted to invite fans in and it was important for him to strike the right tone. I think for those non fans, the skeptical critic, to be able to laugh with these characters also forces the guard down and I think makes it easier to go along with the ride.

How much did your vocabulary have to increase?

PINE: I had mouthfuls of military jargon. I just had to clamp down and and put on my best serious and urgent face.

As a third generation actor, were you ever not going to be an actor or was it just inevitable?

PINE: You know I wanted to be a baseball player. I wanted to be Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun’. When I was a kid I wanted to be a garbage truck driver. Yeah, I think I was so close to it that it never entered my mind that I would actually do it. I remember visiting my dad on the set of ‘Quantum Leap’ because he had a guest star part and seeing Scott Bakula eating craft service and there went the magic of ‘Quantum Leap’. Going to the ‘Murder She Wrote’ set and there was no romance to it. It was work. So he’d come home, we’d all sit around the table and have dinner, and we’d talk about what happened on set just like a family of doctors would talk about a surgery or something. Then when I got to college I kind of got more into acting, and I just oddly enough found my way there on my own and realized that it was something that I was better at than anything else that I was trying to do with my life so I might as well give it a go. It’s odd how it happened I think.

What about your grandmother? What movies of hers have you seen?

PINE: Her IMDB list is like 120 films. She was a beauty pageant winner in Waco, Texas and she moved out to L.A. in the 30’s and got under contract at Universal. In fact the first that I did was at Universal I think on the same stage that she worked on in her career. She did the ‘Dick Tracy’ movies and serials and ‘Abbott and Costello’ movies, she played Michael Douglas’s mom once and the last thing that she did ‘Adam at 6:00 a.m.’ in 1964. She did television. She was all over the place. She worked with Lon Chaney Jr.

As a kid were you curious about her stories or not?

PINE: Unfortunately as I was kind of becoming an aware young adult, she’d had a stroke. She was out actually at the motion picture home that has recently, unfortunately, suffered a great deal financially and has resulted in the loss of their medical wing, a place where my grandma spent much of her time. But all I can say is what was wonderful about going out to the motion picture home, which is a retirement community for people that are in the business, is that you’re going out there and here’s my grandmother who was a B movies actress in the 30’s and 40’s and the gal in the next room was a costumer at Warner Brothers during the hay day of Warner Brothers. And then there was a script supervisor from MGM. I mean it’s a very cool thing. It was just a very cool thing. I don’t know what to say about it but she was a wonderful lady and I miss her a lot.

Chris Pine Profile Star Trek

2009-04-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

CHRIS PINE - Profile
“Star Trek”

Chris Pine, who won the coveted casting slot to play James T. Kirk in the new feature STAR TREK, is not the first one in his family to stroll the halls of the USS Enterprise. That honor was bestowed upon his father, Robert Pine, who guest starred in STAR TREK: VOYAGER, one of the many TV incarnations of the beloved science fiction series. But dad never got to sit in the Captain’s chair.

“It was daunting,” laughs the young Pine about having to fill the shoes of William Shatner, who first inhabited the role of Kirk for the 1966 TV series and has since been so identified with the part. “Mr. Shatner had a way he moved around the deck of the Enterprise, which was almost balletic; specific poses he struck in the Captain’s chair which are so identifiably Kirk. He was bold and confident and funny and I was really impressed by the complexity that he brought to the character.”

In JJ Abrams version of STAR TREK, we are taken back to the beginning, meeting our protagonist space travelers for the first time; from Spock to Sulu, from Uhura to Kirk, and how they all happened to be placed on the same Star Fleet ship for what has been a lifetime of galactic adventures.

In casting his feature, Abrams was adamant that he needed to find actors, much in the same way George Lucas did with STAR WARS, that were fresh faces so audiences would not be burdened with previous on screen baggage. Assembling his eclectic artistic team and about to start wardrobe fittings, everyone was in place except for the lead.

“Kirk goes through so many extreme situations in the movie that I needed an actor who was versatile and could shoulder the responsibility of this movie,” explained the director. “We were making a big movie with no big movie star. I looked at a lot of young actors but no one had the right feel. Then Chris came in and he was so funny and smart, confidant yet vulnerable and tough. Chris just asked all the right questions and was hungry to do it. I was so lucky to have an actor that wasn’t self-conscious and knew this job wasn’t just about acting.

Humbled by the praise, the 28 year-old Los Angeles native recalls his audition process with a bit more modesty. “I thought it was just about the worst audition I could’ve given” he adds. “I came in during the spring of ’07. I was doing a play at the time and my energy was focused elsewhere. I was asked to talk about photons and torpedoes and—well, anyway, I just felt the audition went down the drain.” A few months later, his agents called to ask him to go back again, an offer he initially turned down; only to be convinced that he should at least meet with Abrams.

For anyone familiar with the audition process, it can be a cold reality of indifference. But Pine immediately saw a difference as Abrams allowed his actor to improvise and find the nuance of the character. “JJ was so passionate and positive. He is like a big eight year-old kid and the audition was actually fun. It was a smart move on my part to go back.”

For those of you who might not have had the pleasure to have ever seen the character of Kirk, Pine describes him as an angry, brash young punk who is masking an incredible amount of insecurity and fear. “He came from a broken home and is searching for something to do with his life. It is clear what he wants but I think he has to contend with the tremendous shadow his father casts over him. This film is his journey to learn to harness that rage and impulsiveness of a misguided young man into the focused confident commander that he later becomes.”

Ironically, the dilemma of following parental footsteps rang very close to home. Born in Los Angeles in August of 1980, Pine was the son of two working actors and the grandson of 1940’s film siren Anne Gwynne. Though he grew up visiting sets his whole childhood, acting was not his career focus; instead dreaming of a career first as a garbage truck driver (“I grew out of that one”) and then as a professional baseball player. But attending the University of California at Berkeley, heredity kicked in and he soon found his way into the family business, first by acting in plays, a guest stint on “E.R.” and then his feature debut as Anne Hathaway’s love interest in PRINCESS DIARIES 2: ROYAL ENGAGEMENT.

“I oddly just found my way into acting and soon realized that I was better at it than anything else,” he notes. “I didn’t know what else I was going to do with my life so I figured I would just give it a go. I suppose it’s odd that I hadn’t found it earlier.”

For STAR TREK though, Pine found out that acting wasn’t going to be his only skill set. When he first read the script, the young thespian admittedly skimmed over the action stuff to concentrate on the character development. What he failed to realize was that four pages that took him four seconds to flip through while reading were going to take him over one month to physically prepare for. Attending boot camp, Pine was given classes in kickboxing, krav maga (an Israeli based fighting technique) and general conditioning.

“We had the best of the best,” he recalls about the training, “but I wasn’t mentally prepared. Instead of twelve hours a day thinking about a love scene or some intense dialogue driven moment, I would spend a whole day running pretending to be fired upon or chased by something. I had no concept of that and let me tell you, I have not sweat that much since high school.”

While more than happy to describe his preparation for the role, Pine is unwavering in attempts to get him to reveal any of the camera tricks or effects shots that allow him to be perceived in the depths of outer space. “I go to the movies and see stuff where I don’t know how they did what they did. It’s like a great magic trick and like any great trick I don’t want to know how they did it. I think that way the experience is more fun.” Mourning how the magic of filmmaking is slowly dying as everyone can peek behind the curtain, it was Abrams who implored his cast to protect that magic a request Pine is more than happy to oblige. But then as just to offer a delectable tease, he leans in an adds, “we weren’t actually in space. At least all the time.”

While many of the film actors were able to make a physical connection with their original counterparts, Pine has yet to stand face to face with Shatner, although they did correspond. “I wrote him a letter early on in the process and just introduced myself, “ explains Pine. “I wanted him to know that I was not trying to usurp his status as the original Kirk and that I was just doing my best to portray a certain part of the story and character.” Shatner responded back in kind wishing the actor the best of luck and an offer to grab a lunch sometime soon. While that meal has yet to occur, it is safe to say it will provide one great conversation piece.

Zoe Saldana Profile Star Trek

2009-04-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

ZOE SALDANA – Profile
“Star Trek”

Spending part of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, Zoe Saldana recalls watching the show VIAJE A LAS ESTRELLAS with her mother and great-grandmother. Devoted fans of the series, her relatives were not only emotionally involved with the characters, but immersed in all the stories. Little did they realize that the 10 year-old girl sitting next to them on the couch would one day get her chance to actually portray the most important woman on the show in a big screen adaptation of the series.

If the name VIJAE A LAS ESTRELLAS doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps the English version strikes a more familiar tone, STAR TREK. “My mom was a huge Trekkie,” Saldana now admits. “Needless to say, she was very happy when I got this part.” And not just any part. Saldana is portraying Lt. Nyota Uhura, the lead communications officer of the ship who is an expert in linguistics. As the USS Enterprise travels to different galaxies, she is the mediator between the commanders of two different ships from two different planets. If she gets the communication wrong, she can actually start a war.

STAR TREK, directed by JJ Abrams, is the latest incarnation birthed out of the landmark 1966 television series; however unlike the ten other films or five television adaptations, this version takes audiences back to the beginning. We witness the formation of the now infamous team of Captain Kirk, Sulu, Chekhov, Spock and Uhura; how these young Star Fleet cadets morphed into their leadership roles aboard the USS Enterprise.

When the show first premiered, it was revolutionary in that it not only promoted international peace and harmony but also featured prominent minority representation from Asian and African American actors. Nichelle Nichols, who originally portrayed Uhura, became a stalwart symbol for not only her race and gender but her fashion sense as well.

“She was a very sexy, elegant and strong at times,” explains Saldana. “What I wanted to do was recreate her and picture her in school. Because she was very strong and she was able to command herself in that presence, I knew that I could have fun with her and make her powerful.” One thing the actress did not want to do was mimic the prior performance and thus decided to limit her viewing of the previous STAR TREK incarnations. “I took my time getting to know Uhura. We had advisors on set and I spoke to Nichelle and JJ and they allowed me great flexibility in creating this woman as long as there were the basic guidelines I followed.”

While actresses complain about the lack of proactive roles Hollywood seems to afford them, the genre of science fiction has traditionally been good for women. “Look at DUNE, or ALIEN or THE TERMINATOR,” boasts Saldana. “All of these films were ahead of their time offering women substantial roles that demanded more of their physical attention. They were not just the girlfriends. They were the saviors. They were missionaries. They were going to deliver the child that saved the world. Here with STAR TREK, it was one of the first times that a woman had a significant position of power in a cabin. Here was this military show that allowed a woman to have power and it meant so much.”

Much more so than in any of the prior films, there will also be a greater sexual energy between Uhura and Kirk, a fact that brings a smile to Saldana’s face. “I will just say that they have a lot of curiosity about each other. Kirk definitely sparks a lot of intrigue, not only around Uhura but the school in general because he is so different. He takes everything so lightly. Everybody wants to know what his deal is and Uhura is not immune to that. She is intrigued at the same time.”

One can only presume that after STAR TREK opens there will be a great deal of intrigue surrounding the actress as well. Born in New York, the trained dancer moved with her family from Queens to the Caribbean when she was ten. Attending a prominent arts school there for a few years, she returned to her hometown as a teenager and immediately set out on a career in the creative arts. She joined the FACES Theater Company, a group that performed improvisational and educational skits for teens followed by a role in the chorus of JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT. After appearing in an episode of LAW AND ORDER, a rite of passage every actor in New York goes through she adds, Saldana made her feature film debut in CENTER STAGE, chronicling the struggles of a group of students at the American Ballet Company, where she got to show off her notable dance skills.

After a brief appearance as the pirate wench Anamaria in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, Saldana was given a nice romantic turn in Steven Spielberg’s THE TERMINAL, where she played a security officer who is romanced by Diego Luna. Foreshadowing what was to come, the Oscar winning director gave her a few “trekkie” documentaries for her to view to understand the fanaticism that followed the show. “That was my introduction to STAR TREK and I became a fan of the fans.”

Also starring in James Cameron’s highly anticipated AVATAR, Saldana appears poised for greater things but don’t expect the notoriety to impress her. “That is not something that I wake up in the morning thinking about. I just want to continue working with amazing directors. These last two films I have done have spoiled me and I hope to become this rotten child in Hollywood where I only get to work with amazing people that I can learn from.”

One presumes mother and great grandmother will still be devoted fans.

JJ Abrams Star Trek Interview

2009-04-18T19:49:00.000-07:00

JJ ABRAMS
“Star Trek”

Let’s presume there are people on this planet who have never heard of STAR TREK before. What makes it an interesting premise for a story?

ABRAMS: What I loved about the script was the idea of a character that had all this potential, but was aimless. We know Kirk ends up being the Captain, but he started out so misguided. That is what struck a chord in me. We meet someone who has not found his way. Then there is this other character, Spock, who is half-human and half-Vulcan, and he is always fighting with this notion that he is not able to fit in. I had never really thought about that. These two characters were fascinating, and then the idea is that they come together and have this contentious relationship. At the end of the story, they have gone through this crazy adventure together, and put their lives in each other’s hands and ultimately are victorious because of their combined power. I loved that idea. Having worked on this incarnation, I have come to love all of the characters. What I hope this film does is what all my favorite films do -- combine emotion and character with unbelievable visuals and great action.

How much does the location of space lend to the story?

ABRAMS: It is intrinsically connected. You can’t find where one begins and one ends. The themes of the film, the emotional connections, in theory, could be transferred to another time and place and find analogous situations and relationships. You wouldn’t have teleportation if you were doing a western, but you would find another way to get the characters there. You wouldn’t have the issues that space lends, such as time, speed and warp travel, but you would find other things that would lend themselves to the story you are telling. What makes these stories work is that we are dealing with characters that we care about.

Here we have a TV series that went through various TV incarnations and then different film series. What is it about this particular story that lends itself to so many incarnations and retellings?

ABRAMS: I suppose one of the answers could be there is an inherent sense of adventure with the show; you are pitting characters against unexpected conflict. It is what makes a show like ER successful -- you never know what they are facing each week. There is a natural broad stroke that works in that regard. My feeling is that, cynically, there is a studio that owned the property and wanted to exploit it and so they kept coming up with different things that would ride the coattails. Some of the series like NEXT GENERATION were infinitely more popular in their first run than the original series. It is about the luck of having found good storytellers who were passionate about what they were doing. It worked side-by-side with what the studio desired. This version of STAR TREK comes from the same place of the studio wanting to exploit, but I am hoping audiences will feel that this film was not done for a business decision. It was done because the story was valid and relevant with characters that were emotionally appealing.

When you first came aboard to help put together the story, how many incarnations were there? How long did it take to come up with this premise?

ABRAMS: It took us a year or so to come up with the story. Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci did an amazing job and wrote a great script. A lot of it was just me, Bryan Burk, Damon Lindelof and Alex and Bob getting together and just developing the story and ways of telling it in the most exciting ways. There were huge challenges, but I think we got past them. It was that script that made me want to do the film.

Who came first with your casting for this film?

ABRAMS: I thought Spock would be the hardest role to cast, but it was the first. Zachary came in, and I couldn’t believe how much he looked the part and how good he was. We cast him very quickly. We then cast everyone else, but we didn’t have the Captain. It was getting to the point where we had to start measuring people for wardrobe. Then Chris Pine came in, and he was so funny and smart. He was confident, yet vulnerable and tough. Kirk faces so many extreme situations in this movie, and we needed an actor who was versatile. He was that -- really smart and asked great questions and was hungry to do it. More than anything, whoever was going to take this role was going to have to shoulder this movie. We were making a big movie with no movie star. The only feature film directing experience I had was MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III. Every day that I was on set, I knew why I was on that set. It was Tom Cruise’s set, his movie and his thing. It was a wonderful relief because I had that support. When I got to STAR TREK, I didn’t have ‘that’ guy. But from the first day that Chris started working, he had this confidence and determination and focus that made me feel it would be okay. He was so hungry to do it. He wasn’t self-conscious, so I was lucky to have an actor to do a job that wasn’t just about acting. He was number one on the call sheet, and he shouldered that responsibility. In retrospect, I appreciate that even more. If you have someone new and not comfortable in that situation, it is unsettling and even the crew feels it. We finished on schedule in large part because Chris did a great job.

So as the leader of the ship he created this leadership role on the set.

ABRAMS: It was a strange thing. When I did ALIAS, Jennifer Garner had to do so much work. She was in basically every scene of that show. She was so sweet and hardworking and determined to do a good job, she even used to bake desserts for the crew. The crew loved her -- they wanted to make it better for her, and you felt this thing happen where everyone on and off screen just tried harder. If you have a bitter, angry, unhappy star that is the number one on the call sheet, it will make for a crappy experience. Chris has never done this and he came in like it was his 12th movie. There was no attitude and he had great humor. On screen, he brought it and did an amazing job. It was a big thing to have someone who has never done that before shoulder that responsibility. You can see it in his eyes. He did it all effortlessly, yet I know he put in a lot of effort. Look, I feel the whole cast is amazing. Some people leave the theater and speak highly of Spock and others of Kirk.

Is it true that Matt Damon was at one point mentioned to play Kirk?

ABRAMS: I actually approached Matt and we had some discussions, but everything happens for a reason. On the one hand, it would have been great to work with Matt -- but at the end of the day, it was such a better move to cast the movie with unknowns. Not because it is fun to discover the stars of tomorrow, but even more so, just like with the first STAR WARS, you didn’t know who those people were when you saw the movie. You believed that guy was Luke Skywalker. You didn’t recognize him from six other movies. You bought into who this guy was. It is a slippery slope when you cast any actor that is somewhat known. What is the cut off point? If you cast half famous faces and half unknown, it can throw an audience -- but this way, we weren’t beholden to any fame meter.

What was it about Zachary that let you believe right away he was right for Spock?

ABRAMS: I knew his acting, but when he walked in the room, I was so struck by his likeness to Leonard -- who I knew was going to be in the film. We needed someone that we felt could be the younger version of Spock. It was his physicality and eagerness to play this role. It didn’t come from a massive case of fandom, but the struggle of a character. The combination of his look, skill and his desire to play the role for all the right reasons made it a no-brainer.

You mentioned that Nimoy will be in the film, but Shatner has been vocal about not being in the film. Did you try and find a place for him?

ABRAMS: We did meet with him at the beginning and pitch him the story. He was not in the film, though we discussed a number of ideas for how his character could be in the film. I knew that if we did that, it would make it a different story. I wasn’t saying it couldn’t happen, or that if we did another one we couldn’t find a way to make it happen. But for this film, it wasn’t the story we were telling. He made it clear that he didn’t want to do a cameo and so the alternative was to really change the story. Every time we tried to figure out a way to put him in the film because we thought fans would love that, every version felt like some stupid attempt to just put him in the film.

You mentioned before that you were not a real fan of the TV show so why did you want to come aboard and direct?

ABRAMS: I was initially asked to produce, and then I became intrigued by it all. I thought it would be interesting to do a version of STAR TREK that would grab me the way it did friends of mine. I called the writers, and added my two producing partners from LOST, and we came up with this story that I thought was great. One of the writers, Bob Orci, is a huge fan of STAR TREK. Bryan Burk, on the other hand, had never seen an episode or any of the films, so we had this great balance. By working on it together, we found a story that worked for all of us. When I read the script, I knew I would be jealous of anyone who directed it because it was a funny and very emotional story that was a huge spectacle. There was massive action and a fast pace. This is why I wanted to make movies. I didn’t want to make another sequel to a series of films that had been a TV show. I had just done MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, and the last thing I thought I would do was direct another one of these. I said to my wife that I was offered STAR TREK, and she advised me not to do it. I gave her the script and she told me I had to do it because the script was so good.

Normally in Hollywood films, there is a clear-cut villain, like the Germans or Russians or the Japanese. In the world of sci-fi, we don’t have those clear-cut historical enemies. Instead they battle the Romulans. How much does this reflect our world in crisis? Audiences like to identify with the enemy so who are these people?

ABRAMS: One of the things that science fiction does brilliantly, when it is done right, is allegory. My favorite show is TWLIGHT ZONE. Rod Serling got in trouble year after year with networks and sponsors because he was writing about issues that really mattered to him, like politics and race relations. Finally, he decided to do the TWLIGHT ZONE and write about the same issues, but make it aliens instead of Russians. He would take the issues that clearly mattered, and swap out some of the specifics – this way he was allowed to tell the same story without getting into trouble. People still discuss it now because it resonates today. He told stories that mattered. It wasn’t really about aliens. Even STAR TREK was created when there was high tension with the Soviet Union, and there was a U.S. versus Them moment in time. But there was optimism in the show that, in our future, we would all work together. As Gene Rodenberry said, there was this prime objective where we would all go out and explore and discover new worlds -- but not to conquer them. Even though, as in this film, STAR TREK had conflict and bad guys and some scary stuff, it is ultimately an optimistic story and that is why it continues to come out in different versions. Yes, it can relate to current fears, but all stories have conflict. You can always find your analogous fear in science fiction stories or otherwise, but having said that, there is an inherent sense of optimism in the film. Now more than ever, it is something that I am hungry for. That sense of hope is connected to that vision of the future and what the future might be. It is a fantasy, but STAR TREK gives you that. For the past ten years or so, many science fiction films have been darker and more grim -- while they are entertaining, they are much more pessimistic.

The TV show was also groundbreaking in casting African American, Asian and other minority actors and it made a huge impact. In this day and age of an African American President, you cannot make the same impact. So how do you deal with racial and social issues today?

ABRAMS: While it is true that there is nothing shocking today about having an African American woman in a position of power, or an Asian character onboard, it doesn’t have the same meaning now as it did back in the 1960’s. It was a nice by-product of the times, but I agree that today it is actually more relevant because this is increasingly the way the world looks. It is less about being groundbreaking, and more about being reaffirming. With LOST, casting a Korean couple that didn’t speak English was something I was afraid audiences would have problems with. But we never got one comment when we had an episode where 75% of the episode was subtitled. I think people are hungry for diversity. It is not about getting more of a Latin or African American audience. It is more a reflection of the time we live in. Even our extras have diversity. I felt it was something important to show. While it won’t have the same initial impact, like when STAR TREK had the first interracial kiss on television in the 1960’s, it does have a reaffirming positive message to send. It is consistent with the optimism that STAR TREK represents.

Looking at your prior work, there isn’t a lot of special effects history there. Actors sometimes have to go to boot camp to learn skills, so what did you have to do to immerse yourself in the language of special effects?

ABRAMS: That is a cool question. I have always been a crazy fan of this stuff. I remember being 8 years-old and going to the Universal Tour and watching the cool effects of how they did the AIRPORT films, where they would hang the plane upside down so the strings would be upside down so when they played it back, you wouldn’t see the strings. I’ve been fascinated by make-up effects and visual effects and miniatures all my life. So the films I did when I was a kid always had exploding models. I would put firecrackers in them and blow them up. Now, with visual effects, I am a huge fan of the tools that are being used. These computer programs that even allow consumers at home to have access to the same tools that professionals use. I love this technology, and so with my limited knowledge, when I talk to my visual effects supervisors, I can talk to them about what I would do. I have a perverse passion for it, but I also think it helps me with the filmmaking process.

What was the biggest visual challenge for you?

ABRAMS: This film was literally taking everything I have done before and putting it into a quarter of this film. This was such a huge challenge. The sequences were so different and so I had to use every trick I knew and then learn others. The biggest challenge for me was just the scale. In a typical movie, the establishing shot is a building or maybe even a city. Here it was a planet. It was like going to Las Vegas. You walk from one hotel to the next, and thirty minutes later; you still are not there yet. It is so vast. The scale is so ridiculous that it plays with your mind in relation to size. When you create a planet, you don’t just worry about what it will look from a distance, but what will its atmosphere be like? What is the culture like here? What do they wear? How do they speak? Every detail has to be accounted for. If my character crosses a normal street, I know street, plants, and buildings. Nothing can be assumed in this film. The biggest challenge was in the parameters of the world of STAR TREK, and everything that has come before -- how do we make these worlds, and make them believable? I didn’t want to shoot them all green screen and have it look like it was on a stage. I needed to find different locations so I could get outside and move the cameras. There was a lot of stuff. There was this big overall design approach.

I want to ask you about your visual influences. Where did you go to for research and inspiration?

ABRAMS: We have all seen 2001, STAR WARS and all those sequels, BATTELSTAR GALLACTICA and even all of the hundreds of hours of STAR TREK, that it would be very hard to show an image of a ship flying by that we have never seen before. What I came to realize is that it is not about the ship flying by, but who populates the ship. The only reason you care about the Enterprise is that you love the characters that inhabit it. We did reference all of those prior films so we didn’t step on anyone’s toes. We felt that there were certain things that we had to do, but I tend to go with my gut feeling of the way something should look, rather than borrowing a look or style.

Were you handcuffed at all in dealing with the characters because the fans already know exactly the characteristics of each of the lead protagonists?

ABRAMS: It is not so much that knowing the personality would be a hindrance. In doing STAR TREK, we are exploring these characters that do come pre-loaded with these character traits. The fun is seeing how these characters with those traits react to a story that has never been told before. We see these characters not only deal and respond to each other, but get to know each other. By the end of this film, they are this family that has put their lives in each other’s hands. At the beginning of the film, it is this disparate group of misfits and neophyte cadets. They are young adults just forming their lives. Because of this adventure that they never could have anticipated, they form this relationship. That aspect of the story wasn’t explored in the previous STAR TREK stories. We were just supposed to connect with them. I never felt cocky enough to be Kirk; logical enough to be Spock or even Scotty, Bones or Sulu. I wasn’t feeling me in the world. But by deconstructing them, those were amazing ways into a story.

Did you leave any breadcrumbs for the audience? What I mean is that since we know the characteristics of our leads from their later years, did you have moments where we see where these characteristics came from; such as why they say a certain thing or why they do a certain thing?

ABRAMS: Yes, but you have to be careful not to be too cute. I am not saying we didn’t have nods to what came before, we have plenty of those, but I have seen films where a character does something and there is this big flurry about it and it means nothing in context. Had I known that comic book, for example, it would have had huge resonance. For those who do, it does. But you have to be careful you don’t presume too much about what the audience knows, otherwise it has an air of self-importance. We were careful not to go too far. It was important that we use the existing zeitgeist fundamentals that people know about STAR TREK. There is great power in meeting someone like Kirk, knowing he will eventually become Captain, and seeing how he begins. It is using the baggage we inherited. It wasn’t about breadcrumbs or self-reference, it was just about appropriate moments for this story.

Is it true Gene Roddenberry’s widow has a cameo in the film?

ABRAMS: She was always the voice of the Star Fleet computer, and we recorded her voice for the film before she passed away.

How difficult was it balancing directing this film and still overseeing TV shows such as LOST and FRINGE?

ABRAMS: It was really hard this year. We did CLOVERFIELD, STAR TREK and the TV show FRINGE at the same time. The answer is to work with people that are great. I wrote FRINGE with the Alex and Bob, two guys that I worked with before and CLOVERFIELD with Matt Reeves, with whom I created FELICITY so I tend to work with the same people over and over again. Bryan Burk produces everything I do so I have shorthand with all these people. We wrote the script and were in pre-production on FRINGE before we were shooting TREK. Then we were shooting TREK while Bryan oversaw FRINGE. I was giving notes on that. I couldn’t direct two things at once, but I could produce because I have a great team that can focus on the other project. I am not really doing LOST. Damon and Carlton run the show and I stand in awe of what they do.

What do you want audiences to take away from this film?

ABRAMS: Honestly, as someone who was not a huge fan, I hope they get the same thing I did. It is a great story with great characters that is emotional, funny, scary, fast paced and action filled. I wasn’t trying to make a movie that would cure the world of social ills, but I did want to make a film that would be like the great ride at the amusement park. When you go to an amusement park, there is always one ride that you have to ride and I wanted this film to be that. I didn’t want it to be too shallow or short or not have it deliver. I wanted a film to surprise you in what it delivered. Even beyond your STAR TREK expectation, I wanted you to get back in line again. The only way you get that movie is to make it as intimate and emotional as possible, in addition to the great action. When you balance big action with real emotion that, to me, is my favorite movie. That was my ambition.

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2009-04-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

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2009-04-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

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2009-04-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

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2009-04-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

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Best time to visit Kyoto

2009-04-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

The best time to do Kyoto is, of course, in spring and autumn--more crowded in spring than in autumn, though many find the foliage of autumn more alluring than the blossom of spring. The landscape clad in snow is no less irresistible than the cooling excursions on Arashiyama or on the Uji. But there are extra attractions in the form of festivals, over which the whole of Kyoto seems to go crazy and which people will gather from all parts of Japan to view. Happy are the tourists who happen to be in Kyoto in time to see one or all of its three celebrated festivals.

Jidai Matsuri ("various epochs celebration"), held on October 22nd, belongs to the Heian Jingū, already mentioned, of which all the Kyoto citizens are parishioners. Its chief attraction is the remarkable pageant showing the styles of costume accoutrement of various periods from Heian to Tokugawa. It illustrates in a realistic way how Shōguns or political rulers representing different periods made their triumphal entry into Kyoto to pay their homage to the Imperial Court.

Aoi Matsuri (May 15) is the festival observed by the two ancient upper and lower Kamo shrines. It was to these that the Emperors went in olden times to worship and pray, especially when the land was threatened with calamity, and the festival symbolizes this, showing how the Emperor in old days went out in an ox-drawn sacred palanquin.

The third famous festival is that of the Gion Shrine, celebrated in July with the famous shrine of Gion as the center of festivities. Its chief feature is the parading of a number of shrine-cars or floats boarded by chigo -- sacred pages specially appointed by the shrine. Because of the propitious situation of the shrine -- Gion being a center of the pleasure district--it draws out large numbers of worshippers during the ten days or more while the festival lasts. The Gion shrine is always thronged, corresponding perhaps to the Kwannon of Asakusa, Tokyo.
But by far the most popular Shinto deity in or about Kyoto is the celebrated Inari of Fushimi, which commands the devotion of well-nigh the whole nation. If you are of a devotional turn of mind, in the sense in which the worship of Shinto deities is understood, you cannot fail, while in Kyoto, to take half an hour's motor ride to visit this most famous Inari shrine in Japan.

Dedicated to several deities of the mythological age, the Inari is looked upon as one who can give good crops to farmers and good business to merchants. Hence the incessant coming and going in the shrine compound, as if it were in a perpetual state of festivity. The innumerable red torii on the hill behind the main shrine, contributed by its devotees, are so many proofs of the great benevolence of the deity.

Kyoto as a center of the old arts and culture

2009-04-05T14:14:00.001-07:00

Kyoto as a center of the old arts and culture and of various accomplishments and elegant tastes, comes largely, if not entirely, under the head of Buddhist Kyoto. Until Buddhism came into Japan there had not been much to boast of in the so-called fine arts.

"All that can be classed under the name of art in Japan was either introduced or developed by Buddhism; and the same may be said regarding nearly all Japanese literature possessing real quality, -- excepting some Shinto rituals, and some fragments of archaic poetry. It was a civilizing power in the highest sense of the word, for it introduced drama, the highest forms of poetical composition and fiction; history, philosophy, architecture, painting, sculpture, engraving, printing, landscape gardening--in short, every art and industry that held to make life beautiful. All the refinements of Japanese life were of Buddhist introduction, and at least a majority of its diversions and pleasures. Perhaps the briefest way of stating the range of such indebtedness, is simply to say that Buddhism brought the whole of Chinese civilization into Japan, and thereafter patiently modified and reshaped it to Japanese requirements. The older civilization was not merely superimposed upon the social structure, but fitted carefully into it, combined with it so perfectly that the marks of the welding, the lines of the juncture, almost totally disappeared."

This is slightly overstating the case, especially in view of the many revelations now being made, thanks to the increasing study of the ancient classics, concerning the native geniuses of the pre-Buddhist times. For all that, it is substantially true to say that Japanese civilization is largely Buddhist, just as the European civilization is Christian. Therefore, to understand and appreciate the arts and culture of old Japan one can hardly do better than to view old Buddhist temples and study the works of art they embody or keep in store. To facilitate such study there are several useful institutions, of which the best is the Kyoto Municipal Museum, which was donated by the Imperial Household. Its exhibits, divided into the three classes of history, fine arts and art industry, afford us a comprehensive view of the vast range of artistic productions of the past centuries from the Heian to the Tokugawa period. The Museum will also point to the various storehouses of treasures, scattered all over Kyoto, where more unwieldy objects of art may be seen in their appropriate settings.

As for the present-day industry of Kyoto, of which the world speaks in such high terms, it is needless to say that a good standard is zealously maintained in all its branches. It is the pride, nay, the life of Kyoto, and naturally both the local enthusiasts and craftsmen themselves make it almost a matter of religious devotion to live up to the best traditions and fame of the city.

The Nishijin silk industry stands pre-eminent among Kyoto's beauty products. The limpid waters of the Kamo are believed to be "soft," best adapted to the treatment of the dyes. The origin of these industries is lost in the haze of mythology, but they never cease to command the best markets of the Empire, and of the world, in an ever-increasing degree. Kyoto has a proverb that there are two places which never know what "hard times" mean -- the pleasure quarter of Gion and the Nishijin weaving district.

After the silk goods come the porcelain, lacquer, bamboo wares, dolls, fans, damascene, cloisonné, etc. For all of these there are special stores and factories which will be only too glad to let visitors enter so that they may view the process of making, as well as the finished goods on show. It is a liberal education in art industry to make an inspection trip among the shops and factories of these beauty wares.

Kyoto: City of Temples

2009-04-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

If you study, or begin to study Kyoto as the headquarters of Japanese Buddhism, you may devote months, even years, and yet find it difficult to master all the points of interest it yields. Buddhism came to Japan from India, via China and Korea, in 552 A.D., in the reign of Kinmei Tenno, and in the Nara period ( 710-784 A.D.) was already an established national religion. It made converts of the highest personages in the land--Emperors and Empresses and their sons and daughters. It was at the height of glory at the end of the 11th century, when even the Mikados found it impossible to curb its authority. The priests became the rulers not only of things spiritual but of things temporal.

Their prestige declined only in the second half of the 16th century with the decadence of the Ashikaga Shōgunate. It was then that Nobunaga, incensed at their arrogance, burned the Enryakuji, the stronghold of the Tendai priests, on Mount Hiei, destroying thousands of them, and at the same time gave liberal patronage to the Jesuit missionaries who arrived about this time. This temporary setback, however, was repaired during the Tokugawa régime. At the present time there are, at a rough estimate, 72,000 Buddhist temples in Japan with 52,000 priests, representing 14 main sects with their various branches of over 70. Altogether 42,000,000 believers are claimed. Remember that most of these sects have their headquarters in Kyoto, and as you "do" your sights, you will not be slow to recall what a cynic once said about Kyoto being a city of Buddhist temples.

To start with, you must see the two giant temples of Hongwanji, popularly called Higashi (East) and Nishi (West) Hongwanji. The Higashi embodies the largest wooden building in the world; the first sight of it will fairly take your breath away, its gigantic bulk and its wondrous symmetry of line and curb. It is the head temple of the Shinshū Sect, whose founder was the famous Shinran of the Ōtani branch. The West Hongwanji, much older in history, is the headquarters of the Honpa (orthodox) branch of the same sect. Most of the edifices of this temple are "national treasures," its main hall being regarded as the best of its kind of the Momoyama period. The Hiunkaku, another "national treasure" in the grounds of Nishi Hongwanji, is a bijou palace, first built by Hideyoshi in 1587 for his private abode, and transferred to its present site in 1615. These edifices are decorated with, or keep in custody, innumerable works of art -- paintings and sculptures, picture scrolls, rare manuscripts and priceless calligraphic specimens, sutras, and documents, etc. -- many of which you may see by special permit.

But the most famous Buddhist temple in Kyoto, and probably of the largest area and of the proudest memory, is the Chion-in, headquarters of the Jōdo Sect, founded in 1175 by the great Hōnen Shōnin. It occupies the northern part of Maruyama Park, which itself is one of the scenic attractions of the city. The temple must be studied from outside and inside. It cannot fail to hold spectators spell-bound for hours by reason of the rare and precious objects it offers to the view.
The Enryakuji on Mount Hiei represents the fountainhead of the Tendai Sect founded in the 7th year of Enryaku (788) by the priest Saichō, or Denkyō Daishi -- one of the oldest and most powerful Buddhist sects in Japan. The other great sects are the contemplative Zen, Shingon of Kōbō Daishi and Hokke of Nichiren with their sub-sects, each boasting of several millions of followers; and these are well represented in Kyoto both by temples and works of art, all of which are identified with the various periods in which they flourished. In short, Kyoto is one of the greatest Buddhist centers of the world-the Mecca of lovers of Buddhist art and culture, as well as of those believing in the religion of the lotus.

The history of Japan from 794 to 1868 is the history of Kyoto

2009-04-05T14:10:00.001-07:00

The history of Japan from 794 to 1868 is the history of Kyoto. Scattered over the city are monuments of every epoch since the beginning of the Heian period (794-1192) when the great Emperor, Kwanmu Tenno, forsook Nara and established his Hei-an-gū (the Palace of Peace and Comfort) at Kyoto. The earlier part of this period marked the rise of the Fujiwara family which had soon gained the extraordinary and enviable monopoly of providing Imperial consorts. In the days of Fujiwara Michi-naga ( 1026-1088) they reached the zenith of power and thence began to decline. The civil wars of Tenkei era (938-946) including the major uprisings of Masakado and Sumitomo perhaps prepared the way for the rise of the Samurai class. Out of the mêlée among numerous warriors contending for supremacy emerged the two great fighting clans of Taira and Minamoto.

First Taira and then Minamoto ruled in the names of the Emperors until the Minamoto clan founded a feudal régime with their Bakufu (camp government) at Kamakura, of which Yoritomo (1144-1199) was the Shōgun. His dynasty lasted for three brief generations, when the power was stolen by the socalled HōJō regency which exercised actual power under the cloak of ruling in the name of the Minamoto Shōgunate. The Hōjō's sun rose to its height and then sank. A brief interval of direct Imperial régime followed in the reign of Godaigo Tenno (1319-1339), an Emperor remarkable for his misfortunes, whose failure resulted in the so-called double-court régime during which two Emperors reigned, one legitimate in Yoshino, and the other, supported by the Ashikaga usurpers, in Kyoto.

Thus came into being the Ashikaga dynasty (1334-1573) whose founder Takauji is treated as the worst scoundrel in history. It was Yoshimitsu, a grandson of Takauji, who did the correct thing by amalgamating the South and North Courts, thereby establishing the legitimate single Court possessed of the three Imperial insignia, and in this way had himself formally appointed Shōgun. He built the Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion) and many splendid palaces and gardens, living the most luxurious life one could imagine. No less pronounced in self-love and luxuriousness was his grandson, Yoshimasa, the builder of the Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion) who has left the posthumous distinction of being the greatest and most charming dilettante of Japan.

The decline and fall of the Ashikagas swiftly followed, as many warring chieftains rose in all parts of Japan. The greatest of them (at the time) was Nobunaga, succeeded by Hideyoshi, "the Napoleon of Japan," who put the greater parts of the Empire under his control. The fruit of this centralization, begun by Nobunaga and completed by Hideyoshi, passed into the hands of Tokugawa Ieyasu, whom some historians call the wisest warrior statesman Japan has produced. Ieyasu laid his political capital at Edo ( Tokyo) and his dynasty lasted for 256 years, until 1868, when the Imperialists of Satsuma and Chōshū, jointly with some court nobles of Kyoto, took the power from the Shōgun and restored it to the Emperor.
Such is a broad outline of the history of Japan from the establishment of the capital at Kyoto in 794 to its removal to Tokyo in 1868. At every stage of development through these years Kyoto or its vicinity was the scene of drama, sometimes of serene peace and abundant prosperity, but more frequently of sanguine warfare, and at times of famine, drought, earthquake or pestilence. This spectacular pageant of events is even now revealed, as you wander through the lanes and streets, or shaded walks of Buddhist fanes, or study the old treasures of temples and palaces. It was upon the top of Hieizan, 2300 feet high, which commands a splendid view of both the city of Kyoto and the wonderful lake scenes of Biwako, that Masakado and Sumitomo stood one day, gazing with envious eye on the Imperial palace far below, and Masakado declared, in the words quoted by the historian San-yō, that he would like nothing better than to become the occupant of such a house.

The Heian Jingū Shrine, one of the first the visitor is supposed to see, was built in imitation of the first great Heiangū Palace which the Emperor Kwanmu caused to be built for his own residence. The two archaic shrines of Shimo (lower) and Kami (upper) Kamo on the river Kamo were those which this Emperor had worshipped from the time he had settled in Kyoto -- the oldest and most venerable shrines extant in Kyoto. The two pavilions of gold and silver, built respectively by Yoshimitsu and Yoshimasa, still stand as evidence of the Solomonlike splendor in which they lived. Despots of the deepest dye, both, however, contributed much to the progress of arts and crafts, especially Yoshimasa, who was a lavish patron of the tea ceremony, and many other æsthetic arts.

Kyoto and its environs have many districts with warlike associations. The word "Nishijin" which includes all that is lovely in silk weaving, from magnificent brocades to plain kerchiefs, means "Western Camp" where Yamana Sōzen encamped his forces against those of Hosokawa Kazumoto in the bloody warfare of the Ōnin era ( 1467-1468). Out in the suburbs, the river Uji, now so lovely and peaceful, was the stage of many a fierce battle between attackers of Kyoto and its defenders. Later in the warring period Nobunaga burned thousands of priests on Hieizan, and there is a trace of the original Honnōji, now barely recognizable amid the din and color of city life, where Nobunaga, attacked at last by his own vassal, Mitsuhide, committed suicide. Hideyoshi's dazzling Momoyama Palace, first built at Momoyama where Emperor Meiji's Mausoleum lies, was pulled down by Ieyasu to make the Nijō Palace which every privileged person may see today. It gives a glimpse into the temper of the man Hideyoshi--his bold genius and originality, his vaulting ambition and luxuriousness, limited only by his reverence for the Throne. This Nijō Palace, the lodging-house for the Shōgun on occasions of his visit to Kyoto, surpassed the Imperial Palace in golden luxury and splendor. The latter was, if you will but closely observe, a sort of palatial monastery in which the succeeding Emperors lived as in a grand but comfortless hermitage, venerated as living gods, but allowed little scope for personal liberty. Their manner of living was characterized by utmost simplicity, which the various apartments and their intricate corridors and ceremonial appointments indicate, as the guide will explain, while passing from one hall to another.

One cannot but see a sort of poetic justice in the very dramatic fact that a little previous to the Restoration these two great palaces witnessed fateful conferences--that in the simple Kogosho of the Imperial Palace met the chief Imperialists with the young Emperor in the chair (or on the dais behind the screen) to make the last heroic resolve to take the reins of government, which had for centuries been held by the Shōgunal regents, while at the gaudy Nijō Palace was being held the tragic parley, as an outcome of which the Shōgun decided to sur. render his power in favor of the Emperor.

Thus all the palaces and buildings of note, as well as the treasures they hold, are so many landmarks of national history besides being "national treasures" -- constant sources of wonder to artists and archaeologists.

Osaka: Osakanization Japan

2009-04-05T13:51:00.001-07:00

These places of pleasure are all run with an eye to business, or on strictly business principles. You will probably say that in no part of the world is to be found even a single house, catering for pleasure, run deliberately with an eye to loss. What we mean is that in this city of ineradicable business instincts they believe everything good is worth money, and that more of it is worth more money. Money is therefore the standard by which all is judged. You are more likely to get your money's worth in Osaka than in any other commercial town, because they know what money is worth. Sen to Sen and Yen to Yen, you stand a better chance in this city to receive exactly in proportion to what you give. Diplomacy and shrewdness count certainly, and so does politeness. Yet after all, money is money. In Osaka there can be no bluffing where money is concerned, as there can be, and is, in Tokyo, Kyoto and other cities where value is often represented by prestige, title, heraldry, as well as by money. Osaka men are almost all plebeians, mechanics and merchants, or those working for money, and they are not ashamed of it. If you buy so many yen's worth of pleasure, you get that much worth of pleasure; you are treated for what you are worth or for what you are willing to pay. It is no use paying a yen and trying to get 10 yen's worth of pleasure in Osaka.

All this will make it axiomatic that if you go in for pleasure-seeking at all, you had better do so in Osaka, for there you will be more certain than anywhere else to get what you pay for. The caterers go about their business in a conscientious manner and look after your wants with the efficiency of a sales-manager. The Osaka style and Osaka fashion are fast spreading over all the pleasure-resorts in Japan. Tokyo is almost annexed. The best cafés on the Ginza are managed by Osaka men, and the so-called Tokyo cuisine of most Tokyo restaurants is being fast "Osakanized" in its flavors. At this rate of "Osakanization" in Japan, it is feared that Tokyo may soon become a second Nara with leisurely deer sauntering about Hibiya and browsing along the Ginza. Such is a psychological pen picture of Osaka, as it is today, and will probably be tomorrow. Yes, it is a "must" city, which one can ignore only at one's own risk.

Brian White stars as Evan Hailey in Fighting

2009-04-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Born and raised near Boston, BRIAN WHITE (Evan Hailey) attended Dartmouth, where he studied political science, psychology and theater arts. After graduation, he was signed to play football by the New England Patriots (NFL) and lacrosse by the Boston Blazers (NLL). When his athletic career was cut short by an injury, he turned to a career as a professional stockbroker and eventually found a career in modeling and acting. This led to his co-founding of the Phunk Phenomenon Urban Dance Theater Company, whose mission has been “to use the art of dance as a catalyst for youth outreach.” The company has grown far beyond White’s expectations, to encompass national collaborations with the likes of MTV, the NFL, the NBA, Run-DMC, Alvin Ailey and Radio Disney.

White has appeared in more than a dozen feature films, including Brick, Redemption, Mr. 3000, DOA: Dead or Alive, The Family Stone, Daddy’s Little Girls, Stomp the Yard and The Game Plan, and was last seen in 12 Rounds. On television, he has appeared in the movie specials Something to Sing About, Nancy Drew, RPM and The Lone Ranger. He was also a series regular on Spyder Games, Moesha, Second Time Around, Football Wives and Moonlight, and starred as Detective Tavon Garris on the Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated The Shield.

In January 2010, he will appear in a series-regular role alongside television veterans Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula in the new TNT drama series Men of a Certain Age.

Actress Zulay Henao stars in Fighting Movie

2009-04-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

Actress ZULAY HENAO (Zulay) is “on the rise” is what entertainment industry insiders are saying about this talented and gorgeous Medellín, Colombia, native who brings a naturally luminous presence to her performances. She is a rising talent who has drawn Hollywood’s attention, making her one of the entertainment industry’s hottest young stars. Most recently, Henao wrapped a lead role in S. Darko, the continuation of Donnie Darko, directed by Chris Fisher. In the film, she plays a recluse named Baelyn. The film also stars Ed Westwick, Matt Davis and Elizabeth Berkley and is slated for release in 2009.

Born in Medellín, Colombia, and raised in New Jersey, Henao knew from a very early age that she wanted to act. As a youngster, she was always very in tune with her feelings and always related well to others and their pain or emotions. She felt that acting was a natural progression on that innate connection. However, this gorgeous lady didn’t follow the normal route and enrolled in the army. There, she found time to attend Methodist College while she was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After serving for three years, she went back home and enrolled in the Acting School for Film and Television in New York City, which she attended for the next three years. It was during this time that her big break came (or what she thought was her big break): she landed her first paying acting job in an indie movie called Saturday Morning, which paid her a whopping $200! Henao didn’t care, as she was hooked and she realized that acting her calling.

Henao’s past credits include a guest-starring role in the Mark Gordon- (Grey’s Anatomy) produced original Lifetime series Army Wives, and subsequently made her television debut in said episode on July 23, 2007. In June of that year, she filmed a guest-starring role on the long-running NBC hit television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and in August, she wrapped filming a lead role in the Charles Dutton- (Roc) directed Lifetime movie Racing for Time. Earlier in the year, she completed filming the female lead role in Stephen Leeds’ highly anticipated feature film Doorman. In October 2006, she completed filming a lead role in the Belle Avery- (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) produced independent film Grizzly Park. Before commencing Grizzly Park, she filmed a beautiful and stylized SAG short film, opposite Jamie Harding (United 93), titled The Heart Is a Hidden Camera. Prior to that, she filmed Universal Pictures’ crime drama Illegal Tender, starring opposite Manny Perez, produced by John Singleton and directed by Franc. Reyes. Concurrently, in May 2006, she also filmed the female lead role in the Columbia Pictures feature film Feel the Noise, produced by Simon Fields, Sofia Sondervan and Jennifer Lopez, in which Henao starred opposite Omarion Grandberry (of B2K).
Paper magazine featured and profiled Henao in the October 2006 issue of in their annual “Un-Hollywood” issue, noticing that she would truly make her presence felt on both the small and big screens.

Henao currently divides her time between Los Angeles and New Jersey.

Luis Guzman stars as Martinez in Fighting

2009-04-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

LUIS GUZMÁN (Martinez) will be seen next alongside Denzel Washington and John Travolta in Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.

Guzmán’s recent feature releases include Nothing Like the Holidays, with Freddy Rodríguez, Alfred Molina and John Leguizamo; Yes Man, with Jim Carrey; He’s Just Not That Into You, with Drew Barrymore and Scarlett Johansson; Cleaner, starring opposite Samuel L. Jackson and directed by Renny Harlin; and Maldeamores, produced by Benicio Del Toro .

Guzmán has also played substantial roles in War, with Jason Statham and Jet Li; Todd Phillips’ School for Scoundrels; Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation; Waiting…, with Anna Faris and Ryan Reynolds; Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, with Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning; Carlito’s Way, with Al Pacino and Sean Penn; Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power, with Mario Van Peebles and Sean Combs; Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, with Jim Carrey; Anger Management, with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson; and Confidence, with Ed Burns and Dustin Hoffman, directed by James Foley. Guzmán also starred in Punch-Drunk Love, with Adam Sandler, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and Welcome to Collinwood, with George Clooney.

The former social worker has become a well-known leading and character actor, having appeared in more than 60 feature films. Born in Puerto Rico, Guzmán grew up in Manhattan. After he graduated from City College of New York, he worked as a youth counselor at the Henry Street Settlement while performing in street theater and independent films. Guzmán’s first big break was a guest appearance on the NBC series Miami Vice.

Guzman has appeared in three films for Sidney Lumet, two films for Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes and the original Carlito’s Way) and three films for Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love). He also appeared in three films for Steven Soderbergh: Traffic, The Limey (for which Guzmán received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor) and Out of Sight.

Guzman’s other films include Anthony Minghella’s Mr. Wonderful; Ridley Scott’s Black Rain; The Hard Way; Cadillac Man; True Believer; and The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Kevin Reynolds.

For television, Guzmán recently played a lead role in the HBO series John From Cincinnati.

Early in his career, Guzmán made guest appearances on many television shows, including ABC’s NYPD Blue, NBC’s Law & Order and HBO’s Oz.

Terrence Howard stars as Harvey Boarden in Fighting

2009-04-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Academy Award® nominee TERRENCE HOWARD (Harvey Boarden) exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 2005 after delivering powerful performances in a number of film and television productions. Howard has garnered multiple nominations including Academy Award® and Golden Globe nominations, as well as awards for Breakthrough Actor by the National Board of Review, Movieline and the Gotham Awards. Crowned as the “Indie Film King” by Entertainment Weekly, he has also received the Rising Star Award from the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Renaissance Artist Award from the Diversity Awards and the Career Achievement Award from the Chicago International Film Festival.

For his leading role in producer John Singleton’s Hustle & Flow, Howard received nominations for an Academy Award®, a Golden Globe, an Image Award and an Independent Spirit Award and won the Satellite Award for Best Actor. The song that he performs in the film received a Critics’ Choice Award and became the second rap song ever to receive an Academy Award®. The cast also received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

For the Oscar®-winning Best Picture Crash, Howard and the all-star cast, including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon, received a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The film was also nominated for a Gotham Award.

Keeping a powerful presence on the small screen as well, Howard was seen in the HBO film Lackawanna Blues, directed by George C. Wolfe and based on Tony Award-winning Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s autobiographical play. The cast, which includes Jeffrey Wright and S. Epatha Merkerson, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In 2006, Howard took on a new role as host of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens, a showcase for independent filmmakers that introduces a new drama or documentary in each episode.

Howard’s love for acting came naturally through summers spent with his New York stage actress grandmother, Minnie Gentry. He later began his acting career on The Cosby Show after being discovered on a New York City street by a casting director. The chance encounter helped Howard break into feature films and he was soon cast in such films as Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Howard’s memorable performances are of scene-stealing characters, including Cowboy in the Hughes brothers film Dead Presidents and Quentin in Malcolm D. Lee’s film The Best Man. The latter film earned him an NAACP Image Award, an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a Chicago Film Critics Association Award nomination.

His other film credits include Pride, starring opposite Bernie Mac, in which he played swim coach Jim Ellis, who started a swim team for troubled teens at the Philadelphia Department of Recreation; the crime drama Angel Eyes; Hart’s War; Four Brothers; Idlewild; and Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Howard was most recently seen starring in Paramount Pictures’ Iron Man, opposite Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges, which is based on the famed comic-book series. He also recently starred in the Warner Bros. thriller The Brave One, with Jodie Foster; The Hunting Party, with Richard Gere; August Rush, with Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers; and The Weinstein Company’s Awake, with Jessica Alba and Hayden Christensen.

This past winter, Howard made his Broadway and stage debut in the revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring opposite Phylicia Rashad, James Earl Jones and Anika Noni Rose, directed by Debbie Allen.

A self-taught musician, Howard plays both the piano and the guitar. His musical talents were first seen on the big screen, opposite Jamie Foxx, in 2004’s Ray, for which they each earned a SAG Award nomination. In 2008, Howard released his debut album, “Shine a Light,” with Columbia Records, on which he performed, wrote and produced.

Howard is also an involved philanthropist. He partnered with The Daimler Chrysler Foundation in 2007 and helped to garner a donation of $35,000 for the Kaleidoscope program at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. He also recently became an ambassador for the EIF National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance and was recently announced as the Mentor Foundation’s 2009 Global Ambassador for the promotion of health and well-being of children around the world.

Channing Tatum stars as Shawn MacArthur in Fighting

2009-04-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

With his first few films, CHANNING TATUM (Shawn MacArthur) has already captured the attention of critics and audiences alike. With his upcoming roles in 2009, he will establish his place among Hollywood’s next generation of leading men.

Tatum has recently wrapped production on the adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks (“The Notebook”) bestseller “Dear John,” starring opposite Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia!). He plays a soldier on leave from the army who meets and falls in love with a young woman (Seyfried). Lasse Hallström (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) directs the adapted script by Jamie Linden.

Tatum will also star as the lead of the highly anticipated Paramount Pictures G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, directed by Stephen Sommers. Tatum will star as Duke, the lead member of an elite military unit comprised of special operatives known as “G.I. Joe.” Others in the cast include Sienna Miller, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dennis Quaid and Rachel Nichols. The film is slated for release on August 7, 2009.

In 2006, Tatum received Film Independent’s Spirit Award and Gotham Award nominations for his powerful role in the independent film A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which won the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Performance, as well as the dramatic directing award for Dito Montiel, at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was written and directed by Montiel and was based on Montiel’s 2003 memoir of the same title. This powerful coming-of-age drama takes place in 1980s Astoria, New York, and follows Montiel’s impoverished and violent life from his youth (portrayed by Shia LaBeouf) to adulthood (portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr.). Chazz Palminteri portrays his father and Tatum plays the role of Antonio, Montiel’s best friend.

Newsday called his performance “charismatic,” with Daily Variety going on to say, “Tatum creates a powerful study of a self-destructive street guy trapped with no good options.” Rolling Stone stated, “Keep your eyes on newcomer Channing Tatum as Dito’s loose-cannon friend Antonio. Shirtless and oozing physical and sexual threat, Tatum stalks his turf like Brando in Streetcar.” The Boston Herald referred to his performance as “Robert De Niro-esque,” and a journalist from The New York Times stated, “Mr. Tatum, who has the bullish physicality of a young Brando, is an electrifying actor, and I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of him after this breakout performance.”

In March 2006, Tatum starred opposite Amanda Bynes in the DreamWorks film She’s the Man. The film was directed by Andy Fickman and produced by Lauren Shuler Donner. Inspired by the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night, the film starred Amanda Bynes as a boarding school student, Viola, who, disguised as her twin brother, enrolls in the school and falls in love with her handsome roommate Duke, played by Tatum. Again Tatum drew exceptional reviews, including one from Daily Variety that referred to the film as having a “bright and enthusiastic cast, centered on the swarthy and magnetic Channing Tatum as Duke.”

In August 2006, Tatum starred in the box-office hit Step Up, directed by Anne Fletcher and produced by Adam Shankman. The film centers on Tyler Gage (Tatum), a street-smart juvenile delinquent who gets sentenced to community service at a high school for the performing arts.

Tatum’s other credits include Stop-Loss, Coach Carter, Havoc and Supercross.

Tatum was born in Alabama and grew up in Florida. He began modeling at age 21 and, at age 23, he starred in an international Pepsi commercial directed by Tarsem Singh, and two highly popular national Mountain Dew commercials directed by Kinka Usher. His natural charisma and athleticism in these commercials brought him to the attention of both extreme-sports fans and Hollywood industry executives. He was then signed by a talent agency, started taking acting classes with Harold Guskin and studied at the Deena Levy Theatre Studio.

Tatum currently resides in Los Angeles.

Channing Tatum Movies: Step Up

Bob Marley Smoking Poster - 3 Faces

2009-04-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

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James Dean Walking in Rain Poster

2009-04-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

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Gandhi Pop Art Poster Live and Learn

2009-03-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

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Klimt the Kiss Poster - Gustav Klimt Posters Le Baiser

2009-03-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

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What is Hannah Montana The Movie about? Miley Cyrus Interview

2009-03-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Question: What is “Hannah Montana: The Movie” about?

“Hannah Montana: the Movie” is basically about Miley Stewart going back to Tennessee to her roots and to become the normal girl she was. Not necessarily give up Hannah Montana, but give up just a little bit more of the rock star life and become a normal girl again.

Question: How does the soundtrack tell the story of Hannah Montana?

The soundtrack is all about getting back to your roots. We have songs like “Back To Tennessee” by my dad (Billy Ray Cyrus) and “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home,” which is a new Hannah Montana song. There are songs that really bring it back to Nashville and especially “Butterfly Fly Away.” It’s a country song. Even “The Climb” is more country.

Question: What was it like for you to record the soundtrack for Hannah Montana?

Recording the soundtrack was fun because you go a little out of order. I started recording even before we went into production for the movie and then finished recording after acting in the movie. It’s easier recording once you’ve seen the movie. But I liked kind of getting a feel for the movie before I went into production. So that was cool, being able to hear the music to get a gist of what the film was going to be like before we even got started.

Question: How was recording a soundtrack different?

Being in the studio for a movie is a little different, because the songs are definitely a little more animated because they’re trying to tell a story along with the script. They have to compliment each other. It made it fun and also a little more of a challenge.

Question: What does the music mean to you?

The music means a lot to me because “The Climb” is something that is so inspirational. I think that’s really cool. I think it really describes the movie. “Butterfly Fly Away” is probably my favorite song on the album because it’s me and my dad once again. I think that’s really cool to put that on the big screen.

Question: Talk about “The Climb”

“The Climb” is really cool because I think it isn’t only for fans that are necessarily fans of the movie or fans of the show. But it is for anyone around the world at any age. They can all relate to this song because it really is true. It’s not just about the destination. It’s about the journey. It’s about the getting there. It’s about the work you put into what you love.

Question: What’s the emotion in the song “The Climb”?

The emotion of “The Climb” definitely shows a lot of inspiration, courage and strength. I think that’s really cool. Definitely it shows more of the inner strength and how you have to push yourself. Because there’s always going to be challenges, but it’s all up to you to make it happen.

Question: How does the song relate to you?

“The Climb” relates to my real life because I still have more to work up to. I definitely want to keep going and doing more things. It really just shows that you’re never at the top. You’ve always got more places to go.

Question: What do you want people to get from the soundtrack?

With the soundtrack, I want people that haven’t seen the movie to listen to the soundtrack and go - Oh my gosh! I really want to see the movie now because the soundtrack tells the story a little bit. People that are fans of the music get just a little bit of the story but they’ll want to keep getting more and more. They want to see more. They want to see what happens.

Question: What about the people who’ve seen the movie, then listen to the soundtrack?

I think it’ll be cool because you’ll see the movie and you’ll have more of the visual picture when you’re listening to the song. I think that’ll be fun. When you turn the music on, you don’t only see how it inspires you or how you like a song but you get to see different scenes. You get to hear them throughout the movie and get introduced to the songs.

Question: How’d you come up with all the songs on the CD?

I wrote one song on the soundtrack. I wasn’t a huge part of the writing because I was filming and I was just so busy. But we did get a really good collection of songs together. I’m really proud of it and it is definitely fun to listen to. They all reminded me so much of the movie and were very inspiring to me and made me want to work harder for the movie. So that’s why we picked the ones we did.

Question: Talk about the song “Let’s Get Crazy”

“Let’s get Crazy” is basically just about wanting to have a good time and being able to dance with your friends and have fun. I think it’s more of a party song than anything else.

Question: What do the lyrics of the song mean?

“Let’s Get Crazy” is a song that is in the scene where Lilly’s having her Sweet 16 party. It’s mostly just about having a good time with your friends. At one part its like get up and dance! It’s dance and sing and do whatever makes you have a good time so I think that’s cool.

Question: So how does the boardwalk scene go?

The boardwalk scene is Lilly’s Sweet 16 party so it fits in well because everyone is dancing. There’s also a lot of chaos going on because Hannah Montana shows up to Lilly’s Sweet 16 Party. So I think that’s perfect because everyone is going crazy seeing this pop star at just their normal friend’s party. She wants people to have fun at her party but it wasn’t supposed to be about Hannah Montana. It’s supposed to be about Lilly Trescott.

Question: Talk about the “Hoedown Throwdown”

“The Hoedown Throwdown” is cool because there’s definitely a lot of dancing songs in this movie but it’s still not a musical. We’re not always dancing and singing at the same time. This scene is the one time we actually get to do a little of a musical. We don’t necessarily have everyone dancing all of the time. So this is where you get to see the entire cast and even some of the crew dance. We finally get to have a part that shows all of us really come together through a song. It makes the town and Miley a little closer. She starts to feel more at home. I think that’s really cool the way it bonds the community.

Question: Did you help come up with the dance moves?

Jamal Simms is my choreographer.. We know each other pretty well. There were parts we thought we could make it funkier and more of a hip-hop vibe and still catch a country base. We had fun creating the dances but he’s still the master. He’s the mastermind behind it all.

Question: What is it like getting to see other people doing the dance?

It is cool because I have all these kids at different events say I know the “Hoedown Throwdown” now! That’s really cool that they can get to dance to it and then in the theaters, hopefully they’ll get to dance to it too!

Question: What’s the remix of “Best of Both Worlds?”

The remix of “Best of Both Worlds” has different drums and different guitars. It’s pretty much the same song. It’s just more of a fun poppier version. I’ve been singing that song for 3 years now so I think it was time we updated it and made it more fun and crazier. It’s a little dancier too.

Question: Where does this song go in the movie?

The “Best of Both Worlds” is in the beginning of the film. It’s where you get to see where the Hannah glamour all starts out. Dancing to “Best of Both Worlds” then it turns into a music video.

Question: Where does “The Climb” fall into the film?

“The Climb” is mentioned in the film a couple times. It originally starts with Lucas Till who plays Travis. I ask if all he wants to do is work on a farm. He’s says it’s about where I am right now, it’s about the climb, it’s about getting to the top. I’ll be there someday. Another time, Emily asks me if I’m ready to go and she’s asking was this hard work, what you did? Because I put together a chicken coop! I’m like it’s just about the climb.

Question: What was it like to make the music video?

The music video was really cool. It wasn’t like any music video I’ve ever done before, because I was on the green screen. Its nuts to be able to work like that. Then see the end you’re like oh my gosh I was just on a green screen and look how beautiful it turned out! I was in the middle of the Grand Canyon .

Question: What’s so special about the Hannah Montana the Movie soundtrack?

The Hannah Montana the Movie soundtrack is cool because it really does tell the story of the movie. I think that’s fun to really understand where all the inspiration for the movie came from. “The Climb” is a really cool song and the only way you can get it is off the soundtrack, so that makes it really special.

Question: What do you want your fans to get out of the soundtrack?

When fans listen to the soundtrack I hope they are more inspired by the movie and that they relate to me and to the character a little better.

Question: How does the movie relate to you?

The movie relates to me because my character goes back to Nashville and it’s really nice to go back home. There are songs like “Back to Tennessee ” and “You’ll Always Find your Way Back Home.” They’re all about Nashville and that’s where I’m from and that is my roots. I think Nashville is a lot of the reason why I am who I am.

Hannah Montana The Movie Fun Facts

2009-03-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Extras were hired to play paparazzi during one scene in which Hannah Montana is making a music video in Santa Monica. Meanwhile, off screen real paparazzi were trying to capture the moment.

Star Lucas Till’s four-legged co-star, Seabiscuit, was the horse that played the title character in the 2003 film “Seabiscuit,” a true story about a Depression-era race horse that beat the odds.

Director Peter Chelsom was an actor for 15 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Hannah Montana’s concert, which opens the film, was shot at the Forum in Inglewood , California , the former home of the Los Angeles Lakers and L.A. Kings as well as the location of hundreds of concerts. During the concert, Miley Cyrus performed a couple of her revamped biggest hits for the 1,000 extras on hand.

Filming in Tennessee returned the Cyruses to their own home near Nashville .

The shoe fight sequence between Hannah Montana and Tyra Banks was filmed in two locations. The exterior was filmed on the very posh Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills , while the interior was shot in a department store in Tennessee .

At a fundraiser in the film, Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) gets up on stage and teaches the audience the dance steps to the show-stopping “Hoedown Throwdown,” a hip-hop country fusion number in which the song’s lyrics are the dance instructions. The filmmakers nicknamed the number “Miley’s Macarena.”

Miley/Hannah performs classic crowd favorites such as “Rockstar” and “Best of Both Worlds” in addition to unveiling 10 brand new songs including “The Climb,” “Hoedown Throwdown,” “Let’s Get Crazy,” “Butterfly Fly Away” and “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home.” Also performing in the film are hit musical acts Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts.

Che Guevara Cuban Flag Poster

2009-03-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

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Che Guevara Pop Art Print

2009-03-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

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2009-03-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

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Che Pop Art Poster Che Guevara Quote Poster

2009-03-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

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Change Obama Poster Print

2009-03-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

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Albert Einstein Tongue Poster Print

2009-03-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

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Black Pride in Olympics Poster 1968 Mexico City

2009-03-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

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Tiananmen Protests Poster Tank Man Tiananmen Square 1989

2009-03-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

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Albert Einstein Wisdom Poster Black & White

2009-03-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

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Hannah Montana Door Posters

2009-03-26T17:38:00.000-07:00

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Taylor Swift Framed CDs - album sales exceeding 4 million copies

2009-03-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

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With album sales exceeding 4 million copies in 2008, 19-year-old TAYLOR SWIFT was the best-selling artist across all genres of music last year. Her sophomore release, “Fearless,” reached double platinum in just four weeks and was the year’s biggest debut for any female artist and the fourth highest debut of 2008 overall. Taylor, who is signed to Big Machine Records, currently holds the Billboard all-genre record for most Top 20 debuts in a calendar year.

Among her many awards, Taylor was named 2008’s Favorite Female Country Artist at the American Music Awards and Top New Female Vocalist by the Academy of Country Music. She also won the 2008 Teen Choice Award for Choice Breakout Artist and 2008 CMT Music Awards for Video of the Year and Female Video of the Year. She was also named the 2008 Superstar of Tomorrow at the 10th Annual Young Hollywood Awards, making her the first musician to ever receive this prestigious award. In 2007 she won the CMA Horizon Award as well as the Nashville Songwriters Association International’s Songwriter/Artist of the Year, and she received a Grammy® nomination for best new artist. Taylor has been featured on the covers of Rolling Stone, Billboard, Seventeen and numerous other magazines.

Hannah Montana Wall Decal Fathead

2009-03-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

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Hannah Montana Wall Decal - Fathead

Hannah Montana The Movie Poster Print

2009-03-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

Hannah Montana Poster Print
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Jason Earles movies: National Treasure, American Pie: Band Camp, Special Ed

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JASON EARLES (Jackson Stewart) portrays the older but not exactly wiser brother of Miley Stewart on the Disney Channel show and in the film. Earles has appeared in numerous television series and films, including the movies “National Treasure,” “American Pie: Band Camp,” “Special Ed,” “Gordon Glass” and “Space Buddies.”

He has also starred in Disney Channel’s original TV movie “Dadnapped” opposite Emily Osment; guest starred on the television series “Aaron Stone,” “Boston Legal,” “The Shield,” “One on One” and “Still Standing”; and was a recurring character on “Phil of the Future.”

American Pie Print
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Tyra Banks - America’s Next Top Model, The Tyra Banks Show

2009-03-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

TYRA BANKS first came to the public’s attention as a groundbreaking international supermodel before moving into entertainment. Banks created Bankable Productions in 2003 to handle her burgeoning television development and production activities; and in 2007 founded Bankable Enterprises to anchor her expansion into business ventures outside of filmed entertainment.

Banks became a true pioneer in reality TV as the creator, executive producer and host of the tremendously successful “America’s Next Top Model,” which appears in over 100 countries, with an additional 20 countries adapting their own version. Banks is also the executive producer and host of her own daytime talk show, the Emmy Award®-winning “The Tyra Banks Show.” Banks introduced another hit reality show in January 2009 with “True Beauty,” a primetime series airing on ABC, which she executive produced alongside Ashton Kutcher.

Hannah Montana The Movie shooting in Tennessee, Beverly Hills, Paradise Cove, the Santa Monica

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After 10 weeks of shooting in Tennessee, cast and crew moved to Los Angeles in July 2008 to film exterior scenes in Beverly Hills, Paradise Cove, the Santa Monica Pier and the Forum stadium.

Paradise Cove, a private beach at the northern end of Malibu, served as the backdrop for filming a music video and dream sequence within the film. Hanania and costume designer Christopher Lawrence created a playful retro look in the sequences, filling them with colorful vintage swimsuits and surfboards, a classic woodie surf wagon and a chiseled lifeguard surveying the beach party from his lifeguard perch.
In another example of reality blurring fiction in the film, while Los Angeles-based paparazzi clamored at the perimeter to get shots of Miley, dressed as Hannah Montana, a group of extras, pretending to be paparazzi, chased and shot the pop star for the scene.

In Beverly Hills, cast and crew literally stopped traffic when Miley and Vanessa Williams walked down Rodeo Drive to film the exterior location for the film’s shoe-fight sequence with Tyra Banks (the interior of the store, where the fight ensues, was shot previously in a department store in Tennessee). Stopping traffic in Beverly Hills was nothing when compared to the anticipated challenges of filming on the Santa Monica Pier. Filmmakers admit it was the location they were most concerned about in terms of media and crowds. The pier was also challenging because there was a lot to be filmed in a short period of time, including a skateboard stunt sequence with Lilly, a special effects-rigged exploding birthday cake, Miley’s late entrance dressed as Hannah, several live musical numbers and coverage of all the main cast. However, when the days actually arrived, filming went very well and the crowds of fans and onlookers presented no problems.

Production on the film concluded with several days of shooting at the Forum in Inglewood, California, the former home of the Los Angeles Lakers and L.A. Kings as well as the location of hundreds of concerts. There, the movie’s opening concert sequence was filmed with Hannah Montana performing a couple of her revamped biggest hits for the 1,000 extras on hand. It was also the site for Miley and Lilly’s mad dash on a golf cart, with security guard in pursuit, when Hannah Montana is almost late for her own concert.

In conclusion, Millar says: “Fans who see the movie will know that Hannah is growing up, her music is growing up. This is not the same girl who began on the TV show. Like her character, Miley is a girl from a small town who gets to follow her dream and make it happen. In this film, you’ll see how she’s matured and how she’s growing up, much like her fans.”

Hannah Montana The Movie shoots in the Nashville and Los Angeles

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The production was divided into shoots in the Nashville and Los Angeles areas. Near Nashville, they created the fictional Crowley Corners, an idyllic small American town. In Los Angeles, they wanted to show off the California dream—the beaches of Malibu and Santa Monica, the glitz of Beverly Hills, a stadium concert at the Forum.

“We wanted to have some beautiful photography in this movie and really let the locations set the action up,” says Chelsom. “In the first act, it rushes, rushes, rushes, there’s no chance to stop and breathe because that’s the nature of Miley’s life as Hannah and Miley Stewart in L.A. It is frenetic, crazy. Then you get to Tennessee and the pulse completely changes, the style of photography changes and you have this expanse. You can see the horizon, the sky and the landscape. It all opens up.”

For the cast members, taking the characters out of the studio and on to location made all the difference in terms of getting into their roles and understanding the story.

“This movie takes ‘Hannah Montana’ to another level, a different scale,” says Jason Earles, who co-stars as Miley’s brother in the film and the TV show. “Obviously us being out in the real world in beautiful locations with thousands of extras is not something that you can accomplish on a sound stage when you’re shooting a sitcom. The film is grand in scope, but it all comes back to this real place: family and friendships and relationships we’ve created and stayed true to.”

Numerous locations in and around Nashville were used in the film, including the Hermitage Hotel, Maury Airport, Franklin High School, Vanderbilt University, Rutledge Falls, Smiley Hollow, Leiper’s Fork and the Belks Department Store in Cool Springs.

One of the main locations, Grandma Ruby’s farm, was on a 200-acre ranch south of Nashville, just a few miles from the Cyrus family farm. When filmmakers first scouted the location that became Ruby’s farm, the main house was empty and in disrepair, needing both construction and decor. Production designer Caroline Hanania transformed the nearly 100-year-old house into a warm, inviting home in the beautiful Tennessee countryside. Margo Martindale, who plays Ruby, said the details inspired and informed her performance.

“When I first saw this house it was empty and Caroline had just put up some vintage wallpaper,” says Martindale. “When I arrive days later to film, stepping into Ruby’s house was like stepping into my grandmother’s house. Beautifully done, every little detail, even the cabinets the camera never sees. There’s a sewing room all set up, a room where I pot plants. All I had to do was walk around this house and I knew everything about my character.”

Cast and crew also shot in the nearby town of Columbia, Tennessee, where the Stewart’s fictional hometown of Crowley Corners was re-created on the city’s historic town square. With Columbia’s courthouse serving as Crowley Corners’ town hall, one of the film’s most elaborate slapstick sequences takes place as Miley dashes between her dinner with the mayor, dressed as Hannah Montana, and a date she has with Lucas, dressed as Miley, in a romantic Italian restaurant down the street.
Columbia’s town square also serves as a backdrop to the sequence where Miley and her grandmother travel to town to sell Ruby’s watermelons, squashes and jams at the farmer’s market. When Miley spots Oswald, the British reporter she last saw in Los Angeles, and realizes he’s followed her to Crowley Corners, she decides to sabotage him. The extensive stunt-and-effects sequence that follows involves some devilish hot sauce, a 3-D architectural model, 700 pounds of cascading walnuts and an Irish jig.

Another key location in Tennessee was Smiley Hollow, a rustic corporate retreat and working farm located north of downtown Nashville. Nestled in the rolling hills of Goodlettsville, Smiley Hollow provided the perfect location to create the film’s exterior concert sequences as well as the supper club musical performances and dance numbers. Production designer Hanania and her crew worked for weeks to transform the retreat’s two key locations for the film. This included the retreat’s wooden meeting hall to serve as the Meadows Hall supper club where Robby Ray, Miley and Taylor Swift perform during an open mic fundraiser to save Crowley Meadows from a developer (Barry Bostwick).

Outside the Meadows Hall location was the tree-lined expanse of fields where Hanania and her team created the Crowley Meadows farm and site of the “Save the Meadows” fundraiser. Her team constructed a barn, waterwheel, concert stage, carnival booths and rides. More than 2,000 extras filled the Smiley Hollow location, where both Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart perform several of the film’s musical numbers, including “Rock Star,” “The Climb” and “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home.”

The farthest location in Tennessee was Rutledge Falls. After a two-hour drive, cast and crew then hiked to the remote waterfalls where Miley and Travis go for a picnic and swim. “There were a lot of unhappy faces on the crew when they realized how far they had to climb down the rocks with the equipment to get to the bottom where we were filming,” says Chelsom. “But when you look at the scene, I think they’d agree it was so worth it. It’s spectacularly gorgeous.”

In the film, Miley experiences her first serious romance with a former childhood friend, Travis

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In the film, Miley experiences her first serious romance with a former childhood friend, Travis (Lucas Till). Insecure and attracted to the blond-haired, blue-eyed cowboy, Miley drops Hannah Montana’s name thinking Travis will be impressed and possibly be more interested in her. After trying to hide her dual personas from Travis, Miley learns that he actually prefers her—not Hannah—and he feels betrayed when he discovers that she’s been fooling him.

Filmmakers say the role of Travis was the hardest one to cast. Once again, they passed on the idea of stunt or star casting in favor of finding the most real actor for the role of a young southern kid on his way to becoming a man.

“We were basically looking for that young Brad Pitt from ‘Thelma & Louise,’ and lo and behold, in from Atlanta, Georgia, on this tape comes Lucas Till. When we brought him in to screen test with Miley, they clicked, and we knew we had our guy,” says Gough.

Till says: “There are a lot of similarities between me and Travis, which really attracted me to this role. Like a lot of southern guys, he’s reserved, and I’m from the South, and I’m a reserved guy. I don’t really like to show my emotions too much, and Travis kind of holds his feelings back. He loves riding horses, and I found out I really love riding horses. So Travis and I, we have a lot in common.”

In creating a romance for Miley/Hannah, the filmmakers wanted to explore the excitement and innocence of a teenage girl’s first serious case of infatuation. “This wasn’t about riding off into the sunset together and everything is happy and done,” says Chelsom. “In this instance, we wanted the two halves of the interest to move in a certain direction and affect each other, particularly Miley. The character of Travis is not just a hunk. It’s about what he represents and how he brings her down to earth.”

For his role as Travis, Till took guitar and piano lessons and began horseback riding a couple of hours a day for a few weeks before shooting began. Till, who had never ridden a horse before beginning rehearsals on the movie, was hooked. “It felt so good and natural, I should have been on a horse my entire life,” Till says. “I fell in love with riding. It’s an awesome, awesome experience to be able to learn that as part of my job.”

His four-legged co-star, Seabiscuit, was the horse that played the title character in the 2003 film “Seabiscuit,” a true story about a Depression-era race horse that beat the odds.

Hannah Montana The Movie - line between fiction and reality

2009-03-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

While characters returning home to find themselves again are a staple in classic storytelling, “Hannah Montana The Movie” transcends the line between fiction and reality. In taking Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana back to Crowley Corners, Tennessee, the film transported Miley Cyrus, her father and co-stars back to the Cyruses’ real-life hometown, Nashville, giving the young actress a chance to be home again following her meteoric two-year rise to stardom.

“It’s super important to stay true to yourself and your family and stay in touch with who you are,” says Miley. “When audiences walk away from the movie, I hope they feel like they’ve been to my home. I hope they feel like they understand Nashville because Nashville is my everything. Nashville is who I am.”

With Tennessee being so much a part of the Hannah Montana story—and the Cyrus’ family roots—filming on location there became essential. In fact, Tennessee, like Los Angeles, soon became a character in the film, representing Miley and Hannah’s both real and fictional roots.

For Billy Ray, having the chance to return to Tennessee to shoot the film and be at the family’s farm, where Miley lived until age 13, was truly having the best of both worlds. “In the evenings, after work, she’s out climbing trees, riding horses, she’s that little girl again. She’s Miley,” he says.

Watching and working with his talented daughter is a remarkable experience for Billy Ray. “I’m so proud of her, not only as a daddy in her personal life, but as a musician to see the kinds of songs she writes,” he says. “Then, as an actress to see her evolve from a Lucille Ball-inspired comedienne to a role with some real depth is amazing. I think she brings inspiration to a lot of kids out there to follow your dreams, to pursue what you love and never give up.”

For all the confidence she inspires in others, Miley admits she was nervous about the film role and grateful she’d had the opportunity to develop these characters over time on a series.

“What’s been really cool in making the movie is to already understand the characters because of the television show. I was scared out of my mind for half the movie. Making a film is like learning the ropes all over again,” says Miley. “Director Peter Chelsom would say, ‘OK, I believed that,’ and I thought, ‘What does that mean?’ Soon, I understood. Our television show can be a little more unrealistic because it’s supposed to be crazy and fun, that’s part of a kid sitcom. But a movie is different. Peter was always saying, ‘Make it small, very little, you don’t have to do much at all.’”

Hannah Montana Miley Hannah performs 12 new songs in the film

2009-03-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

While “Hannah Montana” has always had music, the film takes the music to another level. As the Stewarts travel from Los Angeles to Tennessee, the audience discovers how deeply the family’s lives are rooted in music.

“Peter Chelsom describes the Stewart family as a bilingual family whose second language is music, and that’s very true in this movie,” says Gough.

Chelsom says the film’s numerous songs are tightly woven into the fabric of the story and the characters, which is why he believes the film will feel like a musical without being one. “We continuously dance very close to the convention of a musical but are more integrated. Songs are going to sit within the film, not apart from the film. At times, you won’t notice the music is happening; it’ll just move the story along.”

An example is the song “The Climb.” After troubles with Lilly, her brother, her father, her grandmother and Travis, Miley begins to realize how much her secret impacts the relationships with the people whom she loves. Confused and contrite, she ends up expressing her emotions by writing a song, “The Climb.”

“The song is her journey, the lessons she’s learned in the movie,” says Gough. “It’s an epic song, written by a Nashville songwriter named Jesse Alexander with her partner, John Mabe. It’s a power ballad that encapsulates Miley’s journey and the message of the film.”

In total, Miley/Hannah performs 12 new songs in the film, including “Let’s Get Crazy,” “Butterfly Fly Away” and “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home.”
The innovative mix of music in the film includes pop, rock, country, hip hop and even a familiar Hawaiian-themed melody. “We realized this was an opportunity to move forward with the music, to update it and make it more sophisticated, to move with Miley’s age,” says Chelsom. “I’ve never had a better musical experience on any film.”

Another musical highpoint comes when Billy Ray Cyrus (as Robby Ray Stewart) performs “Back to Tennessee”—the title song of his latest album—at a fundraiser to save Crowley Meadows from developers. Written by Cyrus, Tamara Dunn and Matthew Wilder, it has as its inspiration Billy Ray’s longing to return to his roots and breathe the sweet southern air of his home state.

Hit singer-songwriter Taylor Swift became involved when the filmmakers approached her about using her music in the film. Swift not only said the filmmakers could use her music, but she’d be happy to perform a song in the movie.

“When I got an email from Disney saying they wanted a song that was perfect to fall in love to and sort of a country waltz, I sent them ‘Crazier’ and they loved it,” Swift says.

Swift also co-wrote the film’s closing musical number, “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home.”

Another song sure to inspire dancing is the “Hoedown Throwdown,” nicknamed “Miley’s Macarena” by the filmmakers, a hip-hop country fusion number in which Miley Stewart gets up on stage and teaches the dance steps to the audience with the song’s lyrics.

“We called it ‘The Project’ for the longest time,” says Chelsom. “I wanted a song that taught a dance in the lyrics of the song like the ‘Macarena’ or the ‘Funky Chicken.’ I wanted to maximize Miley’s real silliness physically. She’s physically funny and has great abandon, and I wanted to capture all of that.”

Because the dance steps are the song and the song is the dance steps, creating the musical number became an ongoing collaboration among the songwriters, the choreographer (Jamal Sims), Miley and the filmmakers. Chelsom’s determination to combine Miley Stewart’s L.A. hip-hop/pop style with her country roots in a seemingly improvised dance number eventually produced the show-stopping “Hoedown Throwdown.”

Telling a feature-film-length “Hannah Montana” story

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In telling a feature-film-length “Hannah Montana” story, the producers wanted to find a director who would knock down the confines of the sitcom walls and bring Miley/Hannah’s world to a big-screen reality. Producers Millar and Gough needed a performance-oriented director with the breadth of experience to take the film’s wide range of music, comedy and drama and craft a simple, genuine story of a teenage girl searching for her true self.

“If you look at Peter Chelsom’s films, all the ingredients for this movie are in those movies—comedy, family, melody and emotion. Peter covers the gamut in his films,” says Gough. “Peter always gets the performance, it always comes first, and we needed a director to take most of these kids through their first film, especially Miley. Peter was an actor for 10 years working with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal National Theatre and in TV and film, so to have a director who can actually speak to the actors and bring a range of vision and an experienced hand is exactly what we wanted.”

In addition to his strengths as a visualist and performance-oriented director, Chelsom also brought a couple of other highly desirable attributes, including a complete lack of knowledge about the secret pop-star sensation.

“He had never heard of Hannah Montana, which made it even better because we wanted fresh eyes on the material,” says Millar. “We wanted the script to work without knowledge of the show or the characters, and it did. After Peter became involved, of course, he became completely engrossed in watching all the episodes and became a Hannah expert.”

“This film reminded me of the Disney films of the ’60s that felt like real five-course meals the whole family could go and enjoy,” says Chelsom. “Disney let me make the film I wanted. Now a film about Hannah Montana is going to have certain elements—shopping, partying, music—but we really worked hard to incorporate a lot of substance in it, to make it genuinely a family movie with range, with a richness and beauty that reminds people of those classic Disney family films.”

Hannah Montana - great dance numbers, phenomenal music

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When the idea for a feature film based on the series was discussed, returning Miley and her father to Tennessee seemed an ideal and natural extension of the characters’ storylines to the big screen.

“We wanted to open it up, get it outside and let it breathe,” says Gough about the “Hannah Montana” story. “As we developed the screenplay, we had a couple of rules up front. One was we were not going to use any of the sets on the television show. And secondly, we wanted it to be filmed in real places, actual locations: Nashville, Malibu, the Santa Monica Pier, Beverly Hills.”

Gough’s producing partner Millar adds: “Our goal as the producers was always to make a movie that would surprise people. I think people have an expectation based on the sitcom of a goofy, very broad comedy. But we wanted this movie to have incredible heart, vistas, landscapes, beautiful photography, great dance numbers, phenomenal music and a big scope. And this movie is all of that.”

Another change from the ensemble sitcom format was the film’s focus on Miley rather than on a group adventure or road movie with her series co-stars. Screenwriter Berendsen says: “One of the things that sets this movie apart from the show is that in a good part of the film Miley is on her own. This is about her character, it’s her adventure. It’s something she and her father have to go through together.”
As the film opens, Miley Stewart’s life is out of balance. Taken under the wing of a gung-ho and glamorous publicist, Vita (Vanessa Williams), Miley’s letting Hannah begin to dominate her life. When she keeps choosing Hannah over her commitments to family members—to say goodbye to Jackson as he leaves for college, to attend Lilly’s long-anticipated sweet-16 party or her grandmother’s birthday celebration—it is clear Miley’s beginning to forget why the Hannah Montana secret was created in the first place.

When Hannah Montana ends up in a paparazzi-captured fight with Tyra Banks over a pair of designer shoes, Miley’s father quietly takes control. Having attempted to reason with her to no avail, Robby Ray tricks Miley into thinking she’s going to New York as Hannah to perform when he’s really taking her from Los Angeles back home to Crowley Corners, Tennessee.

Miley’s double life becomes even more complicated when she returns to Crowley Corners. She discovers that a reporter (Peter Gunn) has somehow managed to track Hannah Montana to her hometown and is asking lots of questions of the locals. She also meets up with an old childhood friend, Travis Brody (Lucas Till), and soon finds herself in her first serious romance. When Miley tries to impress Travis by telling him about her friend Hannah Montana, she suddenly finds her alter ego enlisted in a concert fundraiser to help save her hometown’s pristine Crowley Meadows from developers. Once again, having taken on more than she can handle, Miley has to call on her best friend, Lilly, and ask her for help. When Lilly finally arrives in Crowley Corners pretending to be Hannah Montana, events really spin out of control.

The series “Hannah Montana” has become a pop culture phenomenon

2009-03-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

Since its 2006 debut, the series “Hannah Montana” has become a pop culture phenomenon, garnering Emmy® nominations, No. 1 ratings and an ever-expanding, loyal fan base. The idea of a young pop star who wants to live an ordinary life unaffected by her stardom found wide appeal with family audiences and placed the series at the No. 1 spot for series among children 6-14 on U.S. cable television during its first two years on the air.

“With ‘Hannah Montana,’ the character is the concept, so it easily translates to film,” says producer Gough. “It’s basically a superhero movie for girls. She’s a normal high school student by day and pop star by night. So, she’s dealing with identity issues, family issues, relationship issues. Most kids and adolescents who deal with the same issues feel as if they don’t have any power, so the idea of putting on a wig and a costume and being a powerful superhero is teen wish fulfillment.”

The Disney Channel and “Hannah Montana” series creators and executive producers, Michael Poryes and Steve Peterman, structured a strong ensemble cast around the charismatic star and lead character, played by a then-13-year-old unknown named Miley Cyrus, grounding her character in family and friendships while exploring the adventures of her secret double life. This included an easy-going but wise widower father (Billy Ray Cyrus), an older, but not exactly wiser brother, Jackson (Jason Earles), and a trusted and true best friend, Lilly (Emily Osment).

Once Miley and Billy Ray were cast, Poryes and Peterman took the basic premise and tweaked it to fit the realities of the Cyrus father-daughter relationship. So the father and daughter now come from a small town in Tennessee and have recently moved to Los Angeles. The characters are both singer-songwriters, and their homespun conversations are filled with southern sayings and recollections. With their exceptional chemistry, the father-daughter dynamic easily translated into an accessible blend of music and comedy. Miley and Billy Ray and Miley and Robby Ray had become inspiredly intertwined.

“It’s pretty much art imitating life imitating art,” says Billy Ray Cyrus about their onscreen counterparts. “We never planned it, but once it happened, Miley and I worked hard to make it and keep it real.”

Hannah Montana The Movie stars Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Mitchel Musso, Moises Arias and Billy Ray Cyrus

2009-03-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

Walt Disney Pictures takes the Disney Channel phenom to the big screen in the feature film extravaganza HANNAH MONTANA THE MOVIE. Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) struggles to juggle school, friends and her secret pop-star persona; when Hannah Montana’s soaring popularity threatens to take over her life—she just might let it. So her father (Billy Ray Cyrus) takes the teen home to Crowley Corners, Tennessee, for a dose of reality, kicking off an adventure filled with the kind of fun, laughter and romance even Hannah Montana couldn’t imagine.

Filmed entirely on location in and around Nashville, Tennessee, and Los Angeles, California, “Hannah Montana The Movie” stars Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Mitchel Musso, Moises Arias and Billy Ray Cyrus. Also starring are Melora Hardin, Margo Martindale, Barry Bostwick, Peter Gunn, Lucas Till and Vanessa Williams. Guest stars include Tyra Banks, Taylor Swift and country music trio Rascal Flatts.

Walt Disney Pictures presents “Hannah Montana The Movie,” directed by Peter Chelsom (“Serendipity,” “Shall We Dance?”) and written by Dan Berendsen (“Twitches,” “The Initiation of Sarah”) based on characters created by Michael Poryes and Rich Correll & Barry O’Brien. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, whose film screenwriting credits include “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” “Spider-Man 2” and “Shanghai Noon,” are producing the film, marking the duo’s first feature under their Walt Disney-based production company, Millar/Gough Ink. The film is executive produced by David Blocker (“Into the Wild,” “Don King: Only in America”) and the team of Michael Poryes and Steve Peterman (“Hannah Montana”).

Director of photography is David Hennings (“Blue Crush”), and the production designer is Caroline Hanania (“Serendipity,” “Shall We Dance?”). The editor is David Moritz (“P.S. I Love You,” “Town & Country”), and the costume designer is Christopher Lawrence (“Cellular,” “The Alibi”). The music is by John Debney (“Meet Dave,” “The Passion of the Christ”), and the choreographer is Jamal Sims (“Hairspray,” “Step Up,” “Step Up 2: The Streets”).

Miley Cyrus’ top-rated Emmy®-nominated television series, “Hannah Montana,” sold-out 70-city concert tour and third consecutive top-selling album (“Breakout”) in less than two years have propelled the young actress-singer-songwriter to international stardom. Following the series’ sensational debut in March 2006 (5.4 million viewed its premiere), Cyrus became an immediate hit with audiences, and her own exploding popularity has mirrored those of her increasingly famous television alter egos, Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart.

“Miley is one of those rare, incredible talents. She can sing, she can dance, she can act—and she’s funny,” says the film’s producer Al Gough. “To be natural on film is the hardest thing in the world, and she does it without any effort, her instincts are so good. To watch her grow as an actor over the course of making this film has been amazing.”

Bringing “Hannah Montana” to the big screen was a natural step in the evolution of Cyrus’ multiple talents and the audience’s rabid desire to know more about their beloved heroines, Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana.

In the movie, Miley sings, dances and performs 13 songs and musical numbers, many as Hannah Montana, some as Miley Stewart. It’s when her Hannah Montana persona begins to take over the responsibilities and commitments of Miley Stewart’s life that her father, Robby Ray, decides to intervene and try to set things right.

“As the film starts in Los Angeles, the pressure is building on Miley with the demands of being Hannah Montana,” says Billy Ray Cyrus, who portrays Miley/Hannah’s father, Robby Ray Stewart, and is Miley’s real-life father. “She’s kind of lost herself, the little girl from Tennessee. Robby Ray decides the best medicine would be to go home. In real life, my dad always says it is important to be aware of your surroundings and where you’re at. Always be looking forward and know where you want to go but, most importantly, never forget where you come from. That’s what this story is about.”

Miley says: “The story shows how you need to be able to take the time to realize who you are and where you’ve come from. I know I have to do that in my life sometimes. It feels great to come home to Nashville and be comfortable with who I am. Where you’re from reflects a lot of who you are and who you’ll become as you get older. Like what happens in the movie, you have to take it back down to the real world.”

When Miley returns home for her Grandma Ruby’s (Margo Martindale) birthday party, she’s not just returning to Tennessee after a long absence, she’s also rediscovering how much her family, friends and home mean to her after her emerging success as a pop star. In “Hannah Montana The Movie” the audience gets to travel back home with Miley Stewart and see where it all began and how she became Hannah Montana.
“On the TV show, you never got to see the origins,” screenwriter Dan Berendsen says. “This movie takes you full circle to how she became Hannah Montana without being a flashback.”

As Miley Stewart finds in the course of the movie, you can go home again.

Tessin canton in Switzerland - influence of Italy

2009-03-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

The Tessin is the canton in Switzerland where the influence of Italy is most strongly felt. The climate is warm and sunny. The lakes, surrounded by palms and oleanders, offer endless opportunities for swimming, fishing and sailing. The hardworking peasants live in crude, grey stone huts, hung with festoons of bright yellow corn. The Tessin is the canton where everyone goes to relax. And here is to be found a more Bohemian life than anywhere else in Switzerland.

The canton of Tessin extends from the St. Gotthard Pass to the plain of Lombardy, an area of 1069 square miles. With the exception of three valleys in the Grisons, it is the only place in Switzerland where Italian is spoken. After the dominion of the Romans who counted this district as part of Gallia Cisalpina, the Tessin belonged successively to the Goths, Lombards and Franks. From the begin, ning of the 12th century until 1403, because of its importance as a key to the Alpine passes, it was jealously guarded by the nobles of Como and Milan and finally monopolized by the Visconti. Then the Val Leventina went over to Uri and Obwalden, which led to endless quarrels between the Milanese and the Confederation. In 1798 the Tessin gained complete independence, but only joined the Swiss Confederation permanently in 1803. The population, although predominantly of Italian origin, has been strongly influenced by a steady migration from the cantons of inner Switzerland. This blending of German and Italian stock has produced a race of sturdy mountain people, courageous and independent, typically Tessiner in character, but Swiss in feeling. Although the Alps in the Tessin are greatly inferior in height and importance of their glaciers to those of the rest of Switzerland, this canton is one of the most interesting from the point of view of art. Churches, paintings, frescos, sculptures and buildings of real merit and beauty are to be found in the most out of the way places. Tessiner artists, artisans and architects were active in all parts of Europe at the time of the Renais, sance. Among the most important were Domenico Fontana, who worked on the buildings of the Vatican, Carlo Maderno, who built the façade of St. Peter's, Baldassare Longhena, the architect of the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, Domenico Trezzini, one of the principal architects to draw up plans for St. Petersburg and Pietro Solari, who built part of the Kremlin.

With so much native talent, it is not surprising that the Tessin possesses gems of architectural loveliness hidden away in deep valleys. These architectural treasures combined with its incomparable scenery, go far towards making the Tessin one of the most unusual, beautiful and picturesque cantons in Switzerland.

The traveller, upon leaving Goeschenen and the wild gorges of the Reuss river, will be struck at the exit of the Gotthard tunnel by the contrast in climate and landscape between this countryside and that of Central Switzerland. As the train slowly descends southward, the scraggy shrubs and woods in the almost and northern part of the canton give way to the gorgeous and luxuriantly tropical vegetation around the lakes of Lugano and Maggiore.

Berne, the capital of Switzerland

2009-03-24T19:22:00.000-07:00

Berne, with its arcades and fountains, is the capital of Switzerland and the seat of the Federal Government. It is situated in the heart of a rich farming district with the magnificent Bernese Alps as a background. The Bernese them. selves are a slow and easy. going people, but supposedly somewhat clumsy, like the bears which have been the symbol of the city since its foundation.

Berne, the capital of Switzerland and seat of the government since 1848, is, of all important Swiss cities, the one which has most successfully preserved its old world charm.

Built on a promontory above the River Aare, it has a magnificent view of the Bernese Alps. And even in modern times nothing mars the architectural unity of the city. The old town is marked off by perfectly clear boundaries -- the river Aare Berne on three sides, the line of the last walls, retained in the name of the Äusseres Bollwerk, on the fourth. Berne can be described in terms of the quaint or picturesque, but only at the cost of a radical misapprehension of her character. The town was not built to be picturesque, but to fulfil a very practical function. And Berne has something far deeper than mere picturesqueness to reveal. What is unique and imposing in this city is the harmony of form and color in which the spirit of a community has incorporated itself in stone. Other towns have beautiful monuments. Berne, as it has been so aptly said, itself is a monument. The single building in Berne is astonishingly unpretentious. There are no overwhelming façades nor single beautiful houses on which endless time, thought and money were lavished. This has always been so, and travellers tales tell us how the character of Berne has withstood all the changes of time, taste and traffic.

Practically the whole town was rebuilt in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but the arcades were rebuilt with it. No façade projected to break the even flight on either side of the streets, and only details -- the composition of the house front with its central accent, the ornamental sculptures and iron work -- show that Berne is a town of the eighteenth century.

That is what is great in Berne. It is not only that the Bernese on principle dislike useless trimmings. It would have been possible for them to have created a completely new town for they had the money -- and piety towards things of the past is only a modern feeling. Moreover, as the view from the Kirchenfeld Bridge shows, they could create eighteenth century façades as well as anyone else, and the public buildings of the epoch are fully expressed in its terms. But along the streets of the old town, the expression of the individual was quite naturally absorbed in the expression of the community.

Along the main street, which is called successively Spitalgasse, Marktgasse, Kramgasse and Gerechtigkeitsgasse, are a series of handsome fountains dating mostly from the 16th century. The most famous one, the Kindlifresser, shows a ferocious ogre devouring a child while several other infants are held in readiness in his pockets. Owing to the fact that the ogre wears a Jew's cap, it has been said that this fountain is a public reminder of the awful practices attributed to the Jews in olden days. Another story has it that so many children had fallen into the town moat that this figure was set up to frighten them away. Other famous fountains are the Zähringerbrunnen showing a bear fully armed with a little bear at his feet calmly eating grapes; the Samsonbrunnen, the fountain of the guild of butchers, with whom Samson was always a favorite figure; and the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen, the fountain of Justice, showing Justice with an upright sword moving between Emperor, Sultan, Pope and Magistrate.

Olympos and the Fires of Chimaera

2009-03-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

The ancient site of Olympos dates back to Hellenistic times when it was an important Lycian city and became famous as a place of worship honouring Hephaestos or Vulcan, the God of Fire. Located on a beautiful sandy bay, the ruins are spread out on either side of the Ulupinar River and include a Byzantine bathhouse with mosaic floors, a marble temple entrance, a theatre, and some excavated tombs. The shoreline is also a major protected nesting site for sea turtles.

On the rocky slopes above the ancient city are a series of eternal flames issuing from cracks in the rock, caused by the combustion of natural gas seeping out of the mountain. It is possible to extinguish them briefly, but they will always re-ignite and are most impressive in the dark when at their most visible. The fire that comes out of the ground is said to be coming from the mouth of Chimaera, a mythical fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and a snake’s tail, who was slain by the Lydian hero, Bellerophon on his winged horse, Pegasus.

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Quebec Precipitation, Winds and Weather

2009-03-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

Precipitation

The distribution of rainfall, so important for vegetation and animal life, is fairly uniform in Southern Quebec where the mean annual precipitation ranges between 35 and 40 inches. It decreases to 30 inches westward and to 20 and even 15 inches in Northern Quebec. In the Laurentide Park, the summits receive as much as 55 inches, but are closely surrounded by isohyets of 50 and 45 inches; the latter one expands far south of the massif, and joins the Appalachian heights in the Eastern Townships. Away from this centre precipitation decreases in two opposite directions: eastward the shores of the Estuary and the Gulf are below 35 inches from Rivière du Loup and Tadoussac to Gaspé; westward, the upper Ottawa Valley is even below 30 inches. On one hand cold waters seldom produce rain while on the other the decrease towards the interior is to be explained by the more continental type of weather. The heavier precipitation between is produced not only by higher altitudes north of Quebec City, but by the fact that in summer the warm air masses from the south collide here with the colder masses of the north.

Quebec has the heaviest snowfall in Eastern Canada. At 19 stations out of 49 where the snowfall is recorded and published, 1 the depth of the snow is over 100 inches. Montreal and Quebec have 112 and 123 respectively. Few stations have less than 80 inches. The many ways in which the snow cover is beneficial to the land are well-known. Snow is not only welcomed by sportsmen but by foresters and farmers. It protects the roots of the plants and affords easier ways of transport even for truck driving in the bush. Water from the melting snow also adds moisture to the soil in springtime.

A further idea of climatic conditions is obtained when we consider the number of precipitation days and the hours of sunshine. Montreal and Quebec are only 160 miles apart and they both have about 40 inches of precipitation. But, for a period of ten years, Montreal averaged 164 days per year with measurable precipitation while Quebec had 174 days. Montreal had 1803 hours of sunshine while Quebec had 1745 hours per year. Continental climates are characterized by short periods of precipitation, even though it may be relatively abundant. On the other hand, Maritime climates have fine persistent rain even though the total amount is less. In this respect then, Montreal has a more continental climate than Quebec.

Winds and Weather

In the St. Lawrence Valley prevailing winds are from the northwest in Winter and from the southwest in Summer. They are usually accompanied by fine weather. In the Gulf and the Estuary northeast winds bring bad weather in Summer. Winter winds from the south and southeast are likely to raise the temperature, but they often bring snow storms followed by thawing. In any case, Southern Quebec enjoys the kind of weather to which it is entitled by latitude.

Climatic Subdivisions

Based upon consistent differences in the average climatic statistics, nine climatic subdivisions may be recognized in Southern Quebec. They are: the Appalachians, the Gaspé Uplands, the St. Lawrence Lowlands, the Estuary of the St. Lawrence, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Laurentians, the Lake St. John Area, Western Quebec and Eastern Quebec. The large cold area of Northern Quebec may be regarded as a tenth climatic subdivision.

Particularly noticeable is the variation in precipitation regimes. Precipitation is adequately distributed over the year at all southern stations but in the north there is a tendency for the early spring to have less and the late summer months to have more moisture than the average.

Historic Indians, the Illinois Confederacy was first in importance

2009-03-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

Of the historic Indians, the Illinois Confederacy was first in importance and one of the oldest. It was of Algonquian linguistic stock, and consisted of six tribes--the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, Peoria, and Tamoroa. Once the Illinois Confederacy occupied most of the Illinois country, but the early Jesuits found that there had been vast movements of all the tribes of the region due to wars with the Iroquois. Closely related to them, if not at one time actually apart of the Confederacy, were the Miami, who dwelt for a time in the region south of Chicago.

The Indians in the Confederacy called themselves Iliniwek (superior men), and indeed were physically well-built, especially the men. They were friendly and talkative, but most of the early explorers reported them rather shiftless and treacherous. In war they were excellent archers; they also used a war club and a kind of lance with dexterity; but their proud title of "superior men" was not earned in war, for they were often defeated by the Iroquois and the northern lake tribes, sometimes by smaller numbers than their own.

Father Allouez first met a party of Illinois at La Pointe, Wisconsin, in 1667, when they came to trade at that post. Three years later he found a number of them at the Mascouten village on the upper Fox River, from which point they were setting out to join their tribes then living on the west side of the Mississippi. It was also on the Iowa side of the river that Father Marquette first encountered the Kaskaskia tribe which proved so friendly; on his return he met the same band at its ancestral village of seventy-four cabins on the Illinois River near Peoria. The estimates of the number of the Illinois vary. Father Hennepin estimated that they numbered 6,500 in 1680; Father Sebastian Rasles gave an estimate of 9,000 in 1692. The Kaskaskia village on the Illinois near Lake Peoria was an important gathering place for all the tribes. When La Salle visited the town in 1680, it had 460 lodges, each housing several families. He reported that the annual assemblies of the tribes were attended by 6,000 to 8,000.

The lodges of this town topped the banks of the Illinois for more than a mile. Corn, beans, and pumpkins matted the adjacent meadows, and maize, planted in the spring, was given special attention by the squaws. When the maize crop was gathered, it was usually stored in pits, often under the houses. Pumpkins were sliced into discs and dried. When the work of harvesting was over, the tribes began to file westward for the serious task of obtaining enough meat to last through the winter and early spring. The men stalked and killed the game; the women dried the meat and carried it back to the village. The Indians' diet was further supplemented by wild fowl, nuts, roots, berries, and fish, which they speared in the lakes and streams.

The usual totems of the Illinois tribes were the crane, beaver, white hind, and tortoise, although the Kaskaskia sometimes used the feather of an arrow, or two arrows fitted like a St. Andrew's cross. Each village had several leaders, each of whom controlled from thirty to fifty young men. A reed mat with the feathers of various birds wrapped in it was carried on the warpath by the leader. The De Gannes Memoir, the most accurate description of the Illinois, probably written by the Sieur Deliette, nephew of Tonti, notes that though women and children captives were spared as slaves, the male captives were tortured by fire, their bodies cut open, and their hearts eaten raw. Mothers then hastened to dip the feet of their male children in the blood of the thoracic cavity.

The Illinois, according to one account, did not immediately bury their dead; bodies were wrapped in skins, and attached by the foot and head to a tree. After the flesh had rotted away, the bones were gathered up and buried in rude sepulchres. The De Gannes Memoir, however, declares that the Illinois buried their dead in shallow trenches lined with planks. Both kinds of graves have been found in Illinois. Grave gifts for the deceased, to accompany him on his journey to the "land beyond the milky way," consisted of an earthen pot, his bow and arrows, a handful of corn and tobacco, and often a calumet pipe.

The De Gannes Memoir further states that men frequently had several wives. As all persons in the village addressed one another in terms of kinship, the sisters, aunts, and nieces of a man's wife were nirimoua, and they in turn called him by the same name; if a brave were a successful hunter, he could marry all the women thus related to him. When a man died, his wife was prohibited from marrying for a year; the penalty for breaking this tribal law was death, after which the offender's scalp was raised over the lodge of her husband's family. Many shamans, or medicine men, lived among the tribes, and attempted to cure illnesses by chants and ceremonies which they professed to have learned through visions; once a year they held a colorful dance at which they gave a preview of their nostrums and powers. In their leisure time, the warriors played a brutal form of lacrosse, or gambled at a game of matching odd and even with sticks. So earnestly did the players engage in the latter that they often gambled away their female relatives.

According to the De Gannes Memoir and the reports of Father Hennepin, the Illinois built their cabins like long arbors, and covered them with a double mat of reeds, which the women gathered from the rivers and wove into rectangles sometimes 60 feet long. Each house had four or five fires and accommodated eight to ten families. Some of the villages were enclosed within palisades; others were set in the open with a good view of the surrounding country.

About 1680 the Iroquois descended upon the Illinois tribes, wiped out the principal villages, and pursued some of the conquered bands down the Illinois River to the Mississippi. There they attacked the Tamoroa, and took 700 of their women and children prisoners. In 1682 La Salle built Fort St. Louis at Starved Rock and gathered about it 3,000 warriors of the various Algonquian tribes in a confederation against the Iroquois; 1,200 Of these were Illinois. Twenty years later, we find the Illinois dispersed again; Peoria, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia were centers for the tribes of those names; the Tamoroa were associated now with the Kaskaskia, and the Michigamea lived near Fort de Chartres on the Mississippi. In 1729 Illinois warriors helped the French subdue the Natchez, and later fought in the Chickasaw War. Though they became involved in the Conspiracy of Pontiac at the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, they had by then taken over many vices of the white man and had lost much of their vigor. When Pontiac was killed by a Peoria Indian near Cahokia in 1769, his tribes--the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi--descended from the north and east upon the Illinois and almost annihilated them. A widespread but unauthenticated legend relates that a band of fugitives took refuge on Starved Rock, where they were besieged by the Potawatomi. Their provisions failed; the cords of buckets they dropped to the river for water were cut by the enemy; finally, decimated by thirst and hunger, they were attacked and killed.

In 1778 the Kaskaskia numbered 310 and lived in a small village three miles north of Kaskaskia. The Peoria and Michigamea lived a few miles farther up the river and together numbered 170. By this time all had become worthless and demoralized through the use of liquor. In 1800 there were only 150 Illinois surviving. In 1833 they sold their holdings in Illinois and moved west of the Mississippi; by 1855 the consolidated Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, and Piankashaw, living on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, numbered 149, with much admixture of white blood.

In the seventeenth century, enemies other than the Iroquois came to make war on the Illinois and settle on their land. The Sauk and Fox moved down from Wisconsin to the northwestern part of the State and claimed all the territory between the Mississippi and the Rock Rivers. Originally they had lived along the St. Lawrence; subsequently, harassed by the Iroquois, they moved to Wisconsin. Father Allouez set up a mission among them at Green Bay in 1669. After defeating the Mascoutens near the mouth of the Iowa River, they formed an alliance with the Potawatomi and forced the Illinois to move southward. Their defeat during the Black Hawk War in 1832, when they resisted the encroachments of the white men, caused their ultimate removal from the State.

By the time the French explorers came, the Winnebago sometimes drifted down from Wisconsin into northern Illinois, the Kickapoo had moved into the area at the foot of Lake Michigan, and the Mascouten, friendly to the Illinois, lived in the great grassy plains east of the Mississippi. Along the Wabash dwelt the Piankashaw, and around the southern and western shores of Lake Michigan stretched the hunting grounds of the Potawatomi, a particularly warlike tribe, who, in the Conspiracy of Pontiac, annihilated the garrison at St. Joseph, and in 1812 committed the Fort Dearborn massacre. Associated with the Potawatomi were the Chippewa and Ottawa, among the most energetic and powerful tribes of the Northwest; they lived on both sides of the Wabash. At one time the Shawnee dwelt in the southeastern part of the State.

The Discovery of Tahiti

2009-03-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

An English naval captain happened on the island, and thought himself the first
white man there, though the Spanish claim its discovery. The Englishman called it King George Island, after the noted Tory monarch of his day; but a Frenchman, a captain and poet, the very next spring named it the New Cytherea, esteeming its fascinations like the fabled island of ancient Greek lore. It remained for Captain James Cook, who, before steam had killed the wonder of distance and the telegraph made daily bread of adventure and discovery, was the hero of many a fireside
tale, to bring Tahiti vividly before the mind of the English world. That hardy mariner's entrancing diary fixed Tahiti firmly in the thoughts of the British and
Americans. Bougainville painted such an ecstatic picture that all France would emigrate. Cook set down that Otaheite was the most beautiful of all spots on the
surface of the globe. He praised the people as the handsomest and most lovable of humans, and said they wept when he sailed. That was to him of inestimable
value in appraising them.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century the first English missionaries in the South Seas thanked God for a safe passage from their homes to Tahiti, and for a virgin soil and an affrightingly wicked people to labor with. The English, however, did not seize the island, but left it for the French to do that, who first declared it a protectorate, and made it a colony of
France, in the unjust way of the mighty, before the
last king died. They had come ten thousand miles to
do a wretched act that never profited them, but had
killed a people.

In
the eighteenth century, for decades the return to nature had been the rallying cry of those who attacked the artificial and degraded state of society. The published and oral statements of the adventurers in Tahiti, their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty of the verdure, of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the men and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless health and simple happiness in which they dwelt, the climate, the limpid streams, the diving, swimming, games, and rarest food--all these had stirred the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical and more material people. The world still had its vision of perfection.

Tahiti was the living Utopia of More, the belle île of Rousseau, the Eden with no serpent or hurtful apple, the garden of the Hesperides, in harmony with nature, in freedom from the galling bonds of government and church, of convention and clothing. The reports of the English missionaries of the nakedness and ungodliness of the Tahitians created intense interest and swelled the chorus of applause for their utter difference from the weary Europeans. Had there been ships to take them, thousands would have fled to Tahiti to be relieved of the chains and tedium of their existence, though they could not know that Victorianism and machines were to fetter and vulgarize them even more.

Afterward, when sailors mutinied and abandoned their ships or killed their officers to be able to remain in Tahiti and its sister islands, there grew up in England a literature of wanderers, runagates, and beach-combers, of darkish women who knew no reserve or modesty, of treasure-trove, of wrecks and desperate deeds, piracy and blackbirding, which made flame the imagination of the youth of seventy years ago. Tahiti had ever been pictured as a refuge from a world of suffering, from cold, hunger, and the necessity of labor, and most of all from the morals of pseudo-Christianity, and the hypocrisies and buffets attending their constant secret infringement.

Christian architecture in Rome

2009-03-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

Christian architecture in Rome not being called upon to attempt any such heavy constructions as were required by the use of vaulting on a large scale, and not needing heavy walls for its wooden-roofed churches, did not patronize concrete construction. Stone was used but seldom, in the regular courses of the opus quadratum, in such works of engineering as the bridges of Gratian and Valentinian and in the restoration of such monuments as the Coliseum and the theatres. But
even this was abandoned after the Gothic wars: its latest use being possibly in the bridge by Narses over the Anio.

In religious architecture brickwork was the rule in the body of the structure, for the walls were not heavy enough to allow of a brick facing and a concrete core. The quality of the brickwork varied at different periods. As long as the government factories continued the manufacture of bricks, up to the time of the Gothic wars, they were of excellent quality, the main change between the brick of the Antonines (second century) and those of the fifth century being a diminution in size, a change which is found early in the fourth century, though there were also variations in color and texture.

Mediaeval brickwork was less perfect during the middle period. Heavy beds of mortar and careless laying, which we find as early as the fifth century, with an interlude of excellent work under Theodoric, became the rule between the seventh and eleventh centuries. But in the course of the twelfth century there was a return to better brick-making, more careful laying and thinner bedding, which helped to give
a similar effect to that of the age of Constantine.

In classic architecture it had not usually been permissible to let the brickwork be seen except in works of pure utility; with Christian architecture the treatment was different. The exteriors were carelessly treated, for they were spiritually of no interest; and their brickwork was covered only sporadically, as by a mosaic on the facade. The trimmings of doorways and porches were also of stonework. It was only in the interiors that the brickwork was as absolutely concealed as in classic buildings either by facings of thin marble veneering slabs or by mosaic work.

Two other methods were occasionally used: the opus mixtum and the opus saracinescum or a tufelli. The former consisted of alternate layers of small stone blocks, usually tufa, and brickwork, there being at times two rows of the bricks to one course of stone. This method became popular in the time of Constantine and during the rest of the period before the Gothic war, and again came into vogue during the tenth century. The opus saracinescum was a "petit appareil" of small tufa blocks which is found as early as the seventh and remained popular until the eleventh century.

It was only outside of the city that local stone was substituted for brick, and here the stone was often used in so plain a fashion as to lose its natural advantages over brick, as in the basilica of S. Eli at Nepi, or the tower of S. Scholastica at Subiaco.

Watchmen Transforming the Masks

2009-02-21T04:52:00.000-08:00

Nevertheless, Rorschach has one of the most striking attributes of all the costumed superheroes: his mask of shifting inkblots. “The evolution of Rorschach’s mask was a long and complex one,” remarks Wilkinson. “We developed a printing process onto a fantastic four-way Lycra that enabled us to create a rough, canvas-like texture but also had a stretchy quality, so we could achieve that smooth, egg-like silhouette. And then the digital effects team created these beautiful moving inkblots on top of the fabric. It was a great collaboration between costumes and visual effects.”
In order to complete the effect of the perpetually morphing inkblot mask—which Rorschach calls his “face”—the lycra was embedded with motion capture markers. “It was covered in tracking dots, except for my eyes,” describes Haley, who dubbed his mask “the sock.” “Even though Rorschach’s eyes aren’t visible under the mask, I was able to see what I was doing. So, the material and the blots move; it’s just absolutely awesome.”

“It was fascinating how Jackie was able to communicate so much emotion through this medium,” comments Deborah Snyder. “The patterns were designed as a reflection of his performance, and it was amazing how much complexity Jackie brought to Rorschach through his voice and body…how the mask became part of him.”

The visual effects team, under the supervision of John “DJ” DesJardin, animated the transitions between the inkblot patterns at different speeds, according to what Snyder wanted for the given scene. “We tried to model his expressions after the ones Dave Gibbons drew for the graphic novel,” DesJardin reveals. “The inkblots are not just black and white; the edges are grey and animated in a way that makes it look like the ink is coming out of the cloth and sinking back in again.”

Snyder and DesJardin engendered a natural collaboration in ensuring the tone of the visual effects would align with the vision the director was creating on the live sets. “The visual effects are a partner in the movie,” says Snyder. “Whether it was extending practical sets or inserting floating blimps in the skyline, or rendering Rorschach’s mask or Dr. Manhattan’s body—those are all things that have to go into the pipeline. And DJ did an amazing job of keeping this massive endeavor down to a very personal, shot-by-shot approach to the movie.”

Beyond visual effects, the embodiment of Dr. Manhattan hinged primarily on the actor playing him. “Dr. Manhattan was the biggest challenge for us,” says Deborah Snyder, “because we had to figure out how to create this god on earth that glows blue light, who can be 100-feet-tall, then shrink down to human size. At the same time, there was a real person playing Dr. Manhattan, through the medium of performance capture. It takes a really disciplined actor to pull that off, and Billy did such a great job.”

Billy Crudup’s performance would provide both the physical and the emotional anchor for the superbeing. Notes Levin, “Manhattan is an amazing, fascinating character, yet I never made the kind of emotional connection to the character in the book as I did watching Billy play him. It was deeply moving. There are so many moments in the film where the material coupled with the cast’s performances resulted in the kind of alchemy that only great actors are able to conjure when bringing a character to life.”

In addition to his physical embodiment, Manhattan has an effect on the environment around him: a blue glow that emanates from his body. “When I read the graphic novel, Manhattan was the only element that made me think, ‘How do we do this?’” recalls cinematographer Larry Fong.

Together, DesJardin and Fong found a creative solution. “We ultimately made a suit that had all the tracking markers we needed for motion capture but also thousands of LEDs that put out this nice, diffuse, blue light,” DesJardin explains. “Zack’s idea was that when Jon Osterman pulled himself back together, he made this ideal male form for him to embody. So, while keeping Billy’s face and remaining accurate to his performance, we created a CG character with a powerful, ultra-ripped, perfected body.”

Other cast members, however, could not rely on digital effects to alter their physical appearance or to prepare them for the intense action sequences in the film. Instead, they each undertook an individualized training program under the guidance of veteran stunt coordinator Damon Caro and his team.

“We looked at the characters specifically to determine what would be needed for each of their fight scenes, and all of the actors brought so much energy and enthusiasm to the table” says Caro, who had also worked with Snyder on “300.”

Malin Akerman had never done any kind of fight work so, Caro relates, “We pieced together a series of drills for her and she was so game to learn everything.” The actress also worked closely with her stunt double, Bridgett Riley, whose background is in women’s kickboxing and boxing.

“Bridgett trained me so hard, but I loved it,” Akerman states, admitting, “After the first week of training, I was thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?’ But then it got easier and it was such an amazing experience to learn the fight choreography. It brought out a whole different side of me that I didn’t know was there,” she smiles, “and definitely helped me get more into the character.”

For Rorschach, whose stature belies his strength, Caro offers, “Going in we figured that since Rorschach wears a mask, it would be easiest just to double him. But it turned out that Jackie was so psyched to do it. I looked at his movement and martial arts ability, and it was awesome. We ended up using him a lot.”

Haley adds, “I’ve been working out for a long time, doing different things to stay in shape. When I got this part, I started a new regimen to increase muscle mass and I also started to look at the proper way to eat. It was all about core training, and I started getting results that were off the hook.”

Unlike his partner, Patrick Wilson, as Dan Dreiberg, aka Night Owl II, had to appear alternately mild-mannered and threatening. The actor actually put on a fair amount of weight to reflect the contradiction between his alter egos. “I was in a different place from the other guys because I needed to be in shape to do all this fighting, but I had to gain 25 pounds or so to do the role; there was always an issue of Dan’s weight. I’m a runner but I had to stop doing any sort of cardio. Instead I did weights and more strength training because I needed Dan to be big but a little soft.”
Executive producer Herb Gains remarks, “We put the actors through physical training; aging makeup; wigs; prosthetics; bulky, uncomfortable suits… Everybody had a tremendous amount of pressure put on them and everybody delivered.”

Apart from the cast, the combination of intense action sequences and digital effects, done in such a stylized way, put specific demands on Larry Fong and editor William Hoy. “I tried to get my cues from how Zack wanted to apply his visual style to the film, from the complicated title sequence onward,” says Fong. “The shots he wanted were very precisely designed; they’re very specific, if you look at the storyboards.”

“The whole idea of symmetry plays a big role in the graphic novel, and Zack took that approach in composing shots,” comments Deborah Snyder. “The best way to do that was with a single camera. There’s not a lot of SteadiCam. The action plays out within the shots almost like the frames of a comic panel. It was something we all gave a lot of thought to and worked closely together to achieve.”

Every shot was highly controlled. “There were certain iconic frames that we wanted to stay true to that relate back to the graphic novel,” says Hoy. “These are the images you want to just burn into the viewer’s mind, but not to encroach on what’s happening emotionally among the characters.”

In addition to the characters who are so well known to Watchmen aficionados, the film has glimpses of some famous people of the day. A team of special make-up designers, led by Greg Cannom, created facial prosthetics to bring to life the many historical and celebrity figures that were integral to their respective eras, including Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and younger versions of Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Annie Leibowitz, and The Village People.

Music also plays a major role in establishing the timeline of the story. Snyder affirms, “Music is really important to me because not only does it set us in a place in time, it has the ability to evoke a flood of images and emotions.”

“Watchmen” features a collection of classic songs from such legendary artists as Nat “King” Cole, Billie Holiday, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. In addition, the group My Chemical Romance performs a reinterpretation of the Bob Dylan song “Desolation Row.” The film’s musical score is by composer Tyler Bates.
Snyder asserts, “It’s a history with similarities to the one we all know. The big events—the sounds and sights—are largely the same. It’s the details that are different.”

“All of the different elements of the film made it hugely complex logistically and a colossal endeavor overall. I have to commend Zack, who took the whole thing on his shoulders and never seemed to break a sweat,” says producer Lloyd Levin. “He knows how important Watchmen is to so many people. But he embraced it fully and completely, without any fear.”

Producer Lawrence Gordon agrees, adding, “Perhaps equally as impressive as his exciting vision for the movie was Zack’s ability to remain a nice guy throughout the making of it. And now that the film is finished, I can say it was well worth the wait.”

Deborah Snyder states that everyone involved brought unparalleled passion and commitment to their work in bringing Watchmen to the screen. “Watchmen is not only significant to the comic book community; it has so much significance as a piece of literature. Our hope is that whoever sees the film discovers or rediscovers the graphic novel because there’s so much more than we can possibly get on the screen.” Zack Snyder reflects, “Watchmen is such a milestone; it was a privilege to direct this film. Deborah and I had so much fun working alongside everyone involved to finally make it happen. For me, the ‘why’ of this movie is all the small moral questions that lead to a giant moral question, and that question has no real answer. The end of the movie is meant to spark debate. I hope people come out of it thinking about which side of the question they might fall on. The graphic novel makes you question who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, and I hope the movie does the same thing.

“What is it that someone does that makes him a hero, even in real world terms? Those questions aren’t always as cut and dried, or as easy, as they are in movies. I think in the end ‘Watchmen’ wants to make that really difficult for you. And I think that’s how it should be.”

Watchmen Fabricating the Masks

2009-02-21T04:49:00.000-08:00

FABRICATING THE MASKS

The use of the graphic novel’s color palette extended to costume design as well. “We wanted to be very respectful to the source material, so that affected a lot of our color choices,” notes costume designer Michael Wilkinson. “We used a lot of greens, purples, oranges and browns…the murky secondary colors that darken as the story progresses.”

With the novel spanning several decades—from 1938 to 1985—and with much cutting back and forth between eras, it was essential to choose clothing that was appropriate for each period to make it clear where in the timeline a scene is taking place. The design team settled on “archetypal pieces that really summed up each decade and gave a sense of period authenticity to the movie,” says Wilkinson. While that sounds straightforward, the task was anything but, especially considering there were, at times, more than 300 extras in a scene. “There is a myriad of uniforms in the film—everything from World War II soldiers and sailors, to 1938 NYPD, to Vietnam War uniforms from both sides—and each one had to be meticulously well-researched. Adding to that, we had diner waitresses, prison cooks, security guards, flower children protesting in the 1960s, Soviet soldiers, astronauts and much more. I estimate there must have been about 150,000 pieces in our costume stock. We had a 600-page manifest, down to every last earring, and that’s a lot to wrap your brain around.”

The costumes for the key cast, like their environments, would need to be intimately designed, particularly their crime-fighting outfits. Wilkinson worked with the specialty costume company Quantum FX to create full body casts of all the major characters, upon which they then sculpted the details of each costume in clay. “We could then take those molds and render them in foam latex so you get a stylized physique—wrinkle-free and with beautiful, sculpted details, while being flexible and breathable for the actors,” he says.

For Dreiberg’s Owl costume, Wilkinson and his team researched 1970s aerospace technology to mimic Dan’s knowledge of birds and aerodynamics. “We looked at interesting NASA-style technology, things like exposed zippers, and air vents that might help him move through the air in a smoother way,” the costume designer offers. “At the same time, Zack wanted Nite Owl to be a little fear-inspiring; it’s important that putting on his costume has a very empowering quality. It helps Dan access a side of his personality that’s different from his very shy, retiring daytime character.”

The juxtaposition of daytime personality against the masked vigilante is also quite dynamic in the character of Silk Spectre. Sally Jupiter had created a sexy costume for her teenage daughter, a yellow and black mini-dress only marginally more modest than Sally’s costume had been. Wilkinson updated Laurie’s costume to be a form-fitting latex suit. “We wanted to keep the spirit of the graphic novel intact; Silk Spectre is in the same colors and has the same graphic silhouette as her costume in the book,” Wilkinson explains. “But we rendered it in latex because we liked the idea of that extreme, hyper-sexualized version of her character. It juxtaposes so beautifully with Laurie’s day-to-day look, which is very stitched together, tailored and precise, wanting to be taken seriously. We enjoyed exploring the two different sides of her personality.”

In contrast to the characteristically extreme costumes of the majority of the Masks is the almost non-descript costume of Rorschach: a simple trench coat. “When you read about the character in the graphic novel, he has a very bleak outlook on life,” Wilkinson observes. “He’s very misanthropic. He just wants to bring a little bit of justice in the world. In terms of his costume, there is the sense that he gave up caring about his appearance a long time ago. He just wears this outfit, not to make a particular impression, just because it’s what he wears. He keeps it in a dumpster. It has years of layers of grime and other encrusted crud on it. The whole litany of his past can be read through his trench coat.”

Patrick Wilson - Watchmen - Dan Dreiberg Nite Owl II

2009-02-21T04:46:00.000-08:00

PATRICK WILSON (Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II) is an award-winning theatre actor who has also become well-known for his work on the screen. He next stars in the title role of the independent comedy “Barry Munday,” due out later this year. In 2008, Wilson starred in three very different films: Neil LaBute’s thriller “Lakeview Terrace,” with Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington; the mystery drama “Passengers,” opposite Anne Hathaway; and the independent film “Life in Flight,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Wilson previously received praise for his work in the critically acclaimed drama “Little Children,” in which he starred with Kate Winslet and Jackie Earle Haley under the direction of Todd Field. His motion picture work also includes the indie films “Evening,” with Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Claire Danes and Vanessa Redgrave; “Purple Violets,” directed by Edward Burns; “Running with Scissors”; and “Hard Candy,” opposite Ellen Page. He also starred as Raoul in Joel Schumacher’s big-screen adaptation of “The Phantom of the Opera,” showcasing his musical talents.

On the small screen, Wilson received Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations for his portrayal of the morally conflicted Joe Pitt in the HBO miniseries “Angels in America,” the much-honored 2003 adaptation of Tony Kushner’s award-winning plays “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.”

Wilson has been honored with two consecutive Tony Award nominations for Best Actor in a Musical, the most recent coming for his performance as Curly in the successful 2002 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!,” for which he also received a Drama Desk Award nomination. He earned his first Tony nomination for his work in the 2001 Broadway hit “The Full Monty,” for which he also garnered Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award nominations and won a Drama League Award.

In 2006, Wilson returned to Broadway to star in the revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Barefoot in the Park,” opposite Amanda Peet. He most recently starred in the 2008/09 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” with John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes.

Born in Virginia and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, Wilson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Starting his career on the stage, he earned applause in the national tours of “Miss Saigon” and “Carousel.” In 1999, he starred off-Broadway in “Bright Lights, Big City,” winning a Drama League Award and receiving a Drama Desk Award nomination. That same year, he made his Broadway debut in “Gershwin’s Fascinating Rhythm,” for which he won another Drama League Award.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan - Watchmen - Edward Blake The Comedian

2009-02-21T04:43:00.000-08:00

JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN (Edward Blake/The Comedian) has, in just the past few years, emerged as one of the industry’s most sought-after leading men. “Watchmen” is only the first of four very different motion pictures in which the busy actor stars this year. He next plays a detective who becomes emotionally involved in the case of a missing woman in the murder mystery drama “All Good Things,” directed by Andrew Jarecki and also starring Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling and Frank Langella. In August, Morgan stars opposite Emile Hirsch in “Taking Woodstock,” a story surrounding the seminal 1969 music festival, directed by Ang Lee. The following month, he stars in the World War II period drama “Shanghai,” with John Cusack and Ken Watanabe under the direction of Mikael Hafstrom.

Morgan is about to start work on the suspense thriller “The Resident,” in which he stars as a seemingly charming landlord who develops a dangerous obsession with his newest tenant, played by Hilary Swank.

The new film reunites Morgan with Swank, with whom he worked when he played her prospective love interest in the romantic drama “P.S. I Love You,” under the direction of Richard LaGravenese. His film credits also include a cameo role in the holiday comedy "Fred Claus," and the independent comedy "Kabluey," with Lisa Kudrow.
Morgan first gained the attention of television audiences with a recurring role in ABC’s smash hit series “Grey’s Anatomy.” His dramatic arc as heart patient Denny Duquette, who wins the heart of Katherine Heigl’s Izzie Stevens in a star-crossed romance, made him a universal fan favorite. In addition, he has also had recurring roles on the hit CW series “Supernatural” and on the award-winning Showtime series “Weeds.”

Jackie Earle Haley - Watchmen - Walter Kovacs Rorschach

2009-02-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

JACKIE EARLE HALEY (Walter Kovacs/Rorschach) has the rare distinction of being a successful child actor who, after virtually disappearing from Hollywood for 15 years, made an almost unprecedented comeback in back-to-back feature films: Steven Zaillian’s “All the King’s Men” and Todd Field’s controversial drama “Little Children.” Haley’s courageous performance in the latter brought him numerous accolades, including an Academy Award® nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was also honored with a Screen Actors Guild Award® nomination and won Best Supporting Actor awards from several critics groups, including the New York Film Critics Circle and the Chicago Film Critics Association.

He more recently appeared in the Will Ferrell basketball comedy “Semi-Pro.” This fall, Haley will be seen in the thriller “Shutter Island,” in which he co-stars with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley under the direction of Martin Scorsese.
Haley first came to fame in the mid-1970s with his scene-stealing performance as Kelly Leak, the cigarette-smoking, motorcycle-riding hellion, in Michael Ritchie’s comedy hit “The Bad News Bears,” reprising his role in two sequels. Haley again won praise from critics and audiences for his role as the romantic but short-tempered Moocher in Peter Yates’ Oscar®-winning 1979 sleeper hit “Breaking Away.” In 1983, Haley played the sex-obsessed Dave in Curtis Hanson’s “Losin’ It,” with Tom Cruise. That same year, he made his Broadway debut, starring in John Byrne’s play “Slab Boys,” with Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Val Kilmer.

Despite his early prominence, however, Haley found it difficult to successfully transition to more adult roles and turned his focus to directing. After years of struggling to make ends meet, he began directing industrial videos, which eventually led to commercial directing.

He had been off the screen for more than a decade when, in October of 2004, Steven Zaillian tracked Haley down—on his honeymoon in France—and asked him to audition for the role of Sugar Boy in “All the King’s Men.” Haley sent in a tape and won the part. Following that film, he landed the role of Ronnie McGorvey in Todd Field’s “Little Children,” resulting in his first Oscar® nomination and what has been the resurgence of his acting career.

Today, Haley divides his time between acting and directing.

Carla Gugino - Watchmen - Sally Jupiter Silk Spectre

2009-02-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

CARLA GUGINO (Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre), a favorite of film and television audiences, next stars in Andy Fickman’s family adventure “Race to Witch Mountain,” opposite Dwayne Johnson. The follow-up to the classic “Escape to Witch Mountain,” the film is set to open on March 13. Her upcoming films also include the indie features “Every Day,” and “Electra Luxx,” in which she plays the title role.

Last year, Gugino shared in a Screen Actors Guild Award® nomination as a member of the cast of Ridley Scott’s acclaimed 2007 drama “American Gangster,” with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. In 2006, she starred in the smash hit comedy “Night at the Museum,” opposite Ben Stiller. Her recent film credits also include Jon Avnet’s “Righteous Kill,” starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, and Scott Frank’s “The Lookout.” In addition, she starred opposite Antonio Banderas in the hugely successful “Spy Kids” film trilogy, all written and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez also directed Gugino in the action thriller “Sin City.”

For television, Gugino recently had a recurring role on the hit HBO series “Entourage,” playing uber-agent Amanda, who proves a formidable nemesis to Jeremy Piven’s character, Ari Gold. Among her earlier television credits are regular roles on the sci-fi series “Threshold”; “Karen Sisco,” as the title character; the hospital drama “Chicago Hope”; and the sitcom “Spin City,” opposite Michael J. Fox.

On the stage, Gugino is currently starring in the role of the alluring and headstrong Abbie in the Eugene O’Neil play “Desire Under the Elms,” which runs from January 17 to February 22 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. She made her Broadway debut as Maggie in the 2004 revival of Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” earning an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination and a Theatre World Award for her performance. In 2006, she starred in the off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” opposite Blythe Danner.

Gugino began her career while still in her teens, making her feature film debut in the comedy “Troop Beverly Hills.” She went on to appear in such films as “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael”; the drama “This Boy’s Life,” with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio; and the comedy “Son in Law.” Her additional film credits include “Miami Rhapsody,” with Sarah Jessica Parker; Nora Ephron’s “Michael,” starring John Travolta; “Snake Eyes,” opposite Nicolas Cage under the direction of Brian De Palma; and “The Singing Detective,” with Robert Downey Jr.

Stephen Colbert - Monsters vs. Aliens

2009-02-20T23:37:00.000-08:00

STEPHEN COLBERT (The President) is the host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated series on Comedy Central “The Colbert Report.” Touted by The New York Times as “one of the best television shows of the year” and praised as “a must watch show” by Entertainment Weekly, “The Colbert Report” has garnered ratings and critical success as one of the top shows on television.

Colbert’s personality, insight and overall rightness led to his half-hour nightly platform, which takes on issues of the day and, more importantly, tells you why everyone else’s take is just plain wrong. In just three seasons, “The Colbert Report” has received 12 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program and Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series. In 2008, “The Colbert Report” won its first Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program. In addition, “The Colbert Report” has also been honored with a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in the 67th Annual Peabody Awards.

Colbert recently completed his first Christmas special, “A Colbert Christmas! The Greatest Gift of All,” with appearances by Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, John Legend, Toby Keith, Feist and Jon Stewart. Colbert describes his special as “strangely sincere, but also sincerely strange.”

In 2007, Colbert published his first book, I AM AMERICA (And So Can You!), which debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller List. In the book, he voices his opinions on all things American as loudly in print as he does on air.

Since 1997, Colbert was the longest-tenured and most diverse correspondent on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” He helped the show to win numerous Emmy and Peabody Awards as an on-air personality and show writer for the news satire. He contributed to AMERICA (THE BOOK): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction (Warner Books), which immediately topped The New York Times Best Seller List for 15 consecutive weeks. He also co-authored the critically acclaimed book Wigfield (Hyperion), which Publisher’s Weekly called “uproariously funny, painfully sharp and unlike anything the genre of humorous fiction has seen before.”

Born and raised near Charleston, South Carolina, Colbert graduated from Northwestern University and quickly made a name for himself as a member of Chicago’s famed Second City improv troupe, where he met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. The threesome moved to New York City, where they created and starred in “Exit 57,” a half-hour sketch comedy series that ran for three seasons on Comedy Central. “Exit 57” received five CableACE nominations for Best Writing, Performing and Comedy Series. Colbert reunited with Sedaris and Dinello to create Comedy Central’s first ever live-action narrative series, the cult hit “Strangers with Candy.”

Colbert’s other on-camera appearances are numerous. He starred opposite Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman in Columbia Pictures’ “Bewitched”; made memorable guest appearances on shows like HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and NBC’s “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”; was a cast member and writer on ABC’s “The Dana Carvey Show”; wrote for “Saturday Night Live” and was the voice of Ace on the SNL animated series “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”; and appeared in a long-running commercial campaign for General Motors/Mr. Goodwrench.

Colbert, his wife Evelyn, and their three children reside in the New York area.