Last night, the G'Day USA Australia Ball was held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, concluding Australia Week festivities. But the week held sadness, after Australian actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his Soho apartment on Tuesday. At the ball, Australian Counsel-General John Olsen read an unexpected letter from Ledger's father Kim:
"Heath is, and always will be, an Australian.more ›
We caught Pete and J earlier this year at the Living Room and their sound fit and filled the space perfectly. They put their own twist on folk rock that you can check out this Saturday when they play the venue again. But first, get to know your friendly neighborhood troubadours...
Coffee Shop was closed for a few days when the Department of Health tallied up 102 points of violations - 28 or more requires a closure - at the restaurant, finding "Cooked or prepared food is cross-contaminated" and issues with plumbing among the concerns. The Union Square eatery posted a snippy sign explaining the closing, and owner Charles Milite went to the NY Times and said Coffee Shop was "caught in the cross hairs of this unfortunate Taco Bell Situation," since Coffee Shop had operated for 17 years without incident. And he promised the restaurant would reopen yesterday.
7:06PM First thoughts: Gael Garcia Bernal is so cute. Ryan Seacrest is an idiot, as are Joan and Melissa Rivers. But we want to know what Jennifer Lopez is wearing! (It turns out to be Marchesa.)
JC: ALL RIGHT! I just took extra Vitamin C - I'm waiting for some food delivery.
The obvious 800-pound, 2000-pound or even 20-ton gorilla in the room is anyway. Just brave the crowds and get it over with already.
The big budget spectacle, King Kong, will open in two weeks, and while most of the trailers seem to play up a fight with Godzilla and lots of jungle scenes (Naomi Watts - hot and sweaty!), part of the story does more to New York. Now, director Peter Jackson decided not to film in NYC because finding 1933 New York in today's New York is difficult. (Gothamist sorta buys that, but we actually believe that once you've created Middle Earth, then you've got a god complex.) The NY Post reports at what the King Kong New York, part model, part computer generated, includes:
Depression-era big town, Model T Fords roll through intersections of red and green streetlights (no yellow), blasting that wheezy dying-duck horn and narrowly missing a swarm of jaywalkers.more ›
The first trailer for Peter Jackson’s King Kong finally hit the internet, featuring Adrien Brody, a digital King Kong and Naomi Watts as his love interest, a few Jurassic Park leftovers, and Jack Black (who is so hard to take seriously). We’re quite optimistic LOTR’s Jackson can pull off an updated version of Hollywood classic and so far, Jackson insists he's refrained from reinventing the storyline: “Our story follows the same structure. It starts in New York, goes to Skull Island, and there are dinosaurs on the island. Then it comes back to New York and there's the Empire State Building and the biplanes and the whole thing."
, you can almost hear Hollywood shouting for joy at their windfall. Take a tried and true foreign project, add pretty white stars, shake gently and voila! Box office gold. Which is why the rule of thumb going forward should always be, seek out the foreign original and leave the remakes to the chumps.
The Hollywood Reporter is running a series of articles about how great New York is for film and TV production. One of them, Location report: New York, gives us some interesting information: "The original "L&O" has contributed more than $650 million to the city during 672 weeks of regular production spanning nearly 15 years." Wow! And that's just ONE of the Law & Order shows. Katherine Oliver, the Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Commissioner, says that L&O is a "repeat customer" coming into for permits "every single day." Commissioner Oliver will also help out films that are shooting entirely in the city: "[Stay, an Ewan MacGregor-Naomi Watts film] was a $50 million-budgeted film, and they shot the entire film in New York City," New York film commissioner Katherine Oliver says. "We diverted Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge for 10 nights; this is not something easy to do, but the message was that if you're going to spend that kind of money, do the entire project here and employ New Yorkers, we will give you the Brooklyn Bridge." There are you go: You get the Brooklyn Bridge for 10 nights, at a cost of $50 million.
Also, doesn't it feel like Barbara Walters is scraping the bottom of the barrel with this year's special? Matt LeBlanc, Diane Keaton, Billy Crystal? Gothamist can read about Matt, who is the LEAST controversial of all Friends with Lisa Kudrow (where's the Percoset addiction? Pregnancy woes? Marriage to Brad Pitt?), in People and US and In Touch. Diane Keaton, she's cool, but we knows she's walks to the beat of her own drummer with wacky fashion sense. And Billy Crystal...wouldn't it have been more apropos to interview him while he was pimping 61*?
Yay for surprises. The announcement of the 76th Academy Awards nominations were not the snoozefest we thought they would be, thanks to some shockers. Some thoughts on the categories:
In the television category, kudos to our favorite cops and lawyers for getting an ensemble acting nomination. Also, Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order SVU was nominated for lead actress in a drama. And while snubbed for a Golden Globe, our friend Justin Kirk was nominated for best actor in a TV movie for his amazing work in Angels America; Al Pacino, Jeffrey Wright, Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker, and Emma Thompson were also nominated for their roles in Angels. To bring it full circle, Ben Shenkman, who also starred in Angels, played the defendant's lawyer on Law & Order last night.
The bright lights and craft services tables have worn out their welcome in DUMBO. The Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting have put a moratorium on production in the neighborhood. Current productions are allowed to finish. Driven by its "gritty urban realism, old factory buildings and sweeping views of Manhattan and the East River," DUMBO has been the go-to NY location for many production companies, but its popularity brings the conundrum of simultaneously wanting Hollywood money injected into NYC's economy but not wanting the quality of life to diminish with street detours, cranky PAs (who are very nice about letting Gothamist know what's filming), and mobs of people. One crazy instance of DUMBO filming is a car commercial that transformed a street into the desert, but against the Manhattan skyline, needing tons of sand. Gotta love art directors and the clients that buy off on the ideas.
If it's fall, it must be time for the New York Film Festival. This year, the opening night film is Mystic River, the ensemble drama directed by Clint Eastwood. The cast is ridiculously loaded with great actors: Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laurence Fishburne. The story is dark, eliciting comparisons to Eastwood's tour de force western, Unforgiven, but its present day setting makes it more wrenching. Sean Penn also stands a good chance of being nominated come Oscar time, based on the buzz of his performance as a father whose daughter is murdered.
From Chick Lit to Chick Movie
Gothamist and its readers try to cast The Parker Grey Show.
